“Murder. Theatre. Solitaire.” An Overview
As I put the final touches on the formatting for my upcoming novel, (and prepare myself for the possibility that unseen mistakes will still have to be corrected in the coming days), I thought I’d take some time to acquaint you with Murder. Theatre. Solitaire. (No spoilers, of course.) Some of this I’ve mentioned before, but not all in one place, in one appeal.
It began life as a Nanowrimo project a few years ago. I had no intention of publishing it at that time. It was at first merely a challenge to myself. I had up until that point reached the word requirements for Nano multiple times, but I had never completed an entire book during November. I was determined to write an entire novel, beginning to end, within the time period. That’s why I opted to try a mystery. The genre, it seems, lends itself well to the “this happened and then this happened” flow which would be crucial in finishing a whole story so quickly.
Yet only if it wasn’t an in depth procedural. That would have required more research, and besides, Nano or not, I’m not interested in writing one of those. I knew I wanted to focus more on character and less on procedure and bureaucracy and such. Plus, I didn’t want to pursue the story from the perspective of the police. That, to me is a difficult perspective to get correct, and the focus is extra sharp from readers. I felt I would have more freedom to go the “amateur” route.
I won Nano with this idea, but thought no more about it, until months turned into years on my planned second novel, and it became clear that “Novel 2” simply wasn’t going to work. Reboots and all, I just couldn’t make it happen, and the rest of my writing was being delayed because of it. So when I finally iced that, I thought my first ever mystery deserved a chance at life beyond Nano after all. I began the usual editing and revising process on it, and here we are, less than a month from launching it.
I’ve been calling it a “quasi-cozy” mystery. It does have several elements of the “cozies,” amateur sleuth, less gore, unified setting, and so on. Cozies have anywhere from a slightly lighter tone, to a straight up darker-comedy vibe. (Like the movie “Clue.”) Those qualities appealed to me, even when this was just a Nano experiment.
Yet it is not totally a “cozy.” I don’t know if i can give many reasons why it isn’t without giving away plot points, but suffice to say, I bent or even ignored the conventions of the cozy mystery when I felt moved to do so. I started there, but chose to go in the direction the story took me, for the most part.
It’s on the shorter end of the novel spectrum, at about 54 thousand words. The story, though third person, is from the perspective of Milton Crouse, a regional, semi-professional theatre director. Milton has been working too hard lately, and his sister has insisted he take a break from theatre work for a while, so he can collect himself. He reluctantly agrees, and his sister books him for a week in November at a Vermont mansion turned retreat known as Elwood Mansion. He is forbidden to take any theatre related material with him.
He’s allowed to play cards though, which he does frequently wen trying to relax or think. Experienced in almost all versions of solitaire, Milton is rarely without a deck of cards, wherever he goes.
Yet not long after his arrival at the modest but comfortable “mansion,” one of his fellow winter guests turns up dead. A blizzard delays the police from getting in, and him from getting out. While stuck there, Milton begins to use various skills and instincts he’s developed from years in the theatre to determine who the killer may be…and if said killer is still on the property.
As with most of my fiction, I’ve gone to great care with all aspects of this story, but especially into the characters. I’ve often said that if people read my fiction, and enjoy who they have spent time with, (my characters), and find them real and memorable, I’ve done my main job as an author, and can forgive myself for other bumps in a manuscript. That being said, by the nature of the genre, this is one of the more plot-oriented pieces I’ve ever written, and I’m proud of how it turned out.
The audience for this one? Those looking for a shorter, fast-paced read. Those who enjoy character-driven situations and frictions. Mystery readers looking for an entertaining read that hearkens back, (if I’ve done my job) to the smaller literary mysteries of old. It might even make a good beach and/or airport read, though hopefully it will stick with you longer than most books so categorized.
As with Flowers of Dionysus I might post a few brief character overviews between now and the book’s release, it depends on how much time I have. But hopefully this by itself is enough to whet you interest.
I look forward to making it available for purchase next month.
Second Look at the Second Amendment
Do any of you remember that awful day when a murderer rushed into a crowded place with an ax, and within minutes killed 50 people by hacking them to death? How about the time someone stabbed about 30 people to death on a college campus with a Swiss Army knife? Or the horrific moment when an evil person forced his way into an elementary school, and strangled 25 children with his bare hands?
Of course you don’t remember those things, and neither do I. That’s because they didn’t happen. They couldn’t happen, because the time and effort it would take for one person to cause that level of carnage with such legal devices would never be allowed to accumulate; such people in these fantasy scenarios would be stopped, one way or another, before it got to that.
Give each of those fictional assailants a gun, however, and suddenly the carnage is faster, easier, and much more difficult, if not impossible to stop. You don’t have to imagine such scenarios; they happen in the United States every few weeks anymore. All three of my bogus examples at the start of this post are based on actual mass shooting events with which you are all familiar.
The guns vs. ax/knife/noose/poison/bare hands argument is not a new one. It shows up time again in the alleged “gun debate” in this country. But it only shows up so often because it’s obvious, without a true counterargument. It cannot be disputed by rational, brave, civilized societies.
But this is the United States, and increasingly, those adjectives don’t seem to apply to it.
These obvious statements about the danger of guns available in this country are met with opposition statements that are as familiar as they are wrong. You’ve heard them all before too, but let’s list some anyway:
–Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
–If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
–The only defense against tyranny is an armed society.
–The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
–The first thing Hitler did was take away the people’s guns.
–Everyone in Switzerland owns a gun, and they have no violent crime there.
And of course, say it with me:
–The Second Amendment. The Second Amendment. The Second Amendment. The Second Amendment. The Second Amendment. The Second Amendment. The Second Amendment. The Second Amendment….
Pathetic as it may be, the above responses are on the high end of what passes for the intelligence of the modern gun-advocate. You are probably just as likely, if not more likely to run into the lower-level defense offer by wild eyed, possibly drooling gun-nuts who will respond to any talk of changing gun policy with things like, “libtard,” “faggot,” “Obama (or any Democrat in the White House) is going to set up a dictatorship,” “They can have my gun when the pry it from my cold dead hands…”
Macho bullshit from people who have done nothing but exacerbate the situation. The only cold, dead hands we see with any consistency in this country anymore are those of innocent people, babies even, getting their heads blown off by legal weapons. “Good guys with guns,” were too far off and too damn late to do a fucking thing about that. But it’s all right…they will pray for all who died, and maybe throw in a bogus appeal to “mental health issues.” Then they remind the mourning communities, the country and the world of…Second Amendment, Second Amendment, Second Amendment.
Their approach, even in their moments of silence, is ineffective, cowardly, and inhumane. If that wasn’t bad enough, it’s presented, as I’ve said, most often in the coldest, foulest, most insulting and least helpful language possible in the wake of mass casualty events. I don’t want to hear anything about “not all gun owners are like that.” The loudest, richest, most influential and most angry and dangerous members of the “gun enthusiast” community are in fact, and for years and years have been, the sort of callous, heartless, cave people I’ve been talking about here. They’ve been allowed to control the so-called debate, and so they are the ones that get the spotlight, and my response.
And they are the ones that have to be countered now with the same amount of frankness and anger and lack of tact by those who want something done about the guns. Statistics don’t work. Facts don’t work. Intelligent conversation clearly does not work, and neither does shame. The murdered babies of Sandy Hook, and the complete lack of effect on policy that that brought about is proof of that.
It’s time to at least attempt to shut them up, and finally tell these lunatics, whether they be in Washington or down the street just how full of shit they are. It’s time to shout back. It’s time to rise up against a philosophy and approach to society that to the rest of the civilized world is archaic, bizarre, irresponsible and dangerous in the 21st century. It’s time to stop being afraid of considering a change, even if it means a change in the Second Amendment.
You can hear the collective gasp from the gun enthusiasts, can’t you? I’m another libtard pansy that wants to surrender my manhood to a tyrant and destroy the founding document of this great nation. If that’s my attitude, why don’t I just leave the country?
No, Johnny Gun, why don’t you leave the country, so the rest of us who are actually impacted greatly by mass murders in elementary schools and night clubs can get on with attempting real change in our society. Don’t want to leave the country? Fine, stay, but I’m not going to show you and your viewpoint any more calmness and respect than you have shown mine, just because you throw an amendment in my face. The time for polite debate is over.
So, allow me to repeat…as a society we need to take another look at the Second Amendment. Not just talk about it, not cower in the corner in the shadow of the NRA and throw out toothless terms like “common sense gun measures.” In a world where a long, sickening phalanx of disturbed bastards can purchase guns designed for warfare with more ease than I can buy a car, “common sense” is no longer a useful tactic. No, we need to examine the issue, thoroughly, honestly, and without concern for fall out, and being called nasty names by Johnny Gun and the Gun Racks.
Even if I accepted, (which I do not) that the Second Amendment applied to every single citizen, (and not just a “well-regulated” militia, even though those are the exact words in the Constitution), I don’t have to accept that it must forever remain that way. It’s called an amendment for a reason. As a nation we’ve amended the Constitution 27 times, almost always for good reasons.
We came to realize that people of color probably shouldn’t be considered only three-fifths of a human being. Even though our mighty Constitution said otherwise, we came to believe that we can’t own people. We grew up, and we amended the Constitution.
It occurred to us at some point that yes, women deserved the right to vote for their leaders, instead of relying on the men in their lives to do so. The glorious Constitution had to be altered in order for that to happen, though.
We’ve only had the right to elect our own Senators to the United States Senate for about 100 years. That’s because, as written, the Constitution didn’t allow for that. Other people chose our senators for us, until as a country we decided, “this isn’t right. Let’s change this.”
The Constitution can, has, and should be changed to reflect a changing world and an ever more educated and enlightened citizenry. It is not a scripture. It is not a document from the hand of God. It isn’t even a gift of demi-gods. The Founders were humans with an idea. A great idea in many ways, but they were only people trying to get something done over 200 years ago. We can change our minds about what they said.
We do this peacefully, through a prescribed system. It wasn’t through tyranny or violent force that each of those 27 amendments came about, but through a democratic process. Plenty of people on the losing side of that process each time were of course none too happy about it. “Blacks are not people,” a lot of whites continued to say. “Women should be submissive to men, not be allowed to vote on their own.” And so on. Those small minds had their say, the mechanism was put forth, and ultimately, they lost.
Even when the “wrong” side wins in the process of amending the all-too human Constitution, all is not lost. One of the amendments after all exists solely to cancel a previous amendment once the country realized, “we went too far on that one. It’s not working.”
And sometimes the right side loses. The Equal Rights Amendment failed. But it failed after the mechanism was in place.
Race. Gender. Booze. As a nation we’ve had the courage to ask the questions about what it means to be a civilized society. We’ve shown we can and have taken a hard, deep look at what it means to be an American society, and when we have decided, through much consideration that our founding document is steering us the wrong way, we fix it, or at least open ourselves to the possibility of change.
But when it comes to guns? Half the country (and I’m being generous with that fraction) screams that it would be unthinkable. The death of the nation. The destruction of the Constitution. The other “half” meanwhile has for too long said, “Well, um, sir, I don’t want to take your guns away, I just think that maybe if there were some common sense gun reforms…” And that great mechanism of Constitutional change is cut off before it even gets rolling.
Horseshit. If you don’t want the guns, or don’t want as many of them, get ugly about it. The gun lobby certainly has no problem being ugly. Their tone deaf and mostly money-driven response to America’s mass-shooting flavor of the month has established that sad fact already. So let’s at least force them to encounter the same mechanism that bigots and teetotalers had to face and eventually lose.
If ever there were ever a time when once again because of the original wording of the Constitution our society has begun to veer into self-destruction, it would be this borderline masturbatory obsession with guns of all kinds being available, with relative ease to just about everyone.
You love your guns. Wonderful. You love them so much that you need to be able to have whatever kind you want, as many as you want, whenever you want. You’re willing to pay the price of making mass murder of children and unarmed people easier. I understand your position now. What you personally find entertaining and exciting takes priority over even the slightest increase in the safety of your nation. Got it.
What’s that you say? The more guns you have, and the easier they are to purchase, the safer we all are as a society? How many mass shootings have you thwarted, exactly? How many can you name were thwarted by any one that was not a law-enforcement officer? How many of those few did so with a semi-automatic military style assault weapon? You can get back to me on that one; meanwhile I’ll be watching reports on an unarmed group of movie fans getting blown to pieces in a matter of seconds. (Too bad you and your superhuman reflexes weren’t there to stop it. You know, again.)
Arm everyone? So you mean, be like the highly civilized and not at all dangerous world of the Old West? That time of tranquility?
But at least you’ll be safe from the government, right? The AR-15 you insist on being allowed to walk around with at Chucky Cheese in front of my children because “Second Amendment” will serve the dual purpose of stopping a government attempt to arrest you, and compensate for whatever sexual inadequacies or “daddy-don’t-love-me” issues you’re dealing with.
I have news for you, Rambo. If the government comes, it’s coming, and there’s nothing you are going to do to even slow it down. The honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier would likely blow you and your macho friends away without so much as putting a wrinkle in his uniform. You’d be dead before your bodies even hit the skee-ball machine. All of you jackasses put together across the country wouldn’t last an hour against a single division of any of our Armed Forces.
The only thing you’re protecting by walking around in public with your guns is your ego. You like to see people afraid of you. You’re a bully and you’re full of shit. You’ve got nothing intelligent to say, and you deserve to hear nothing intelligent from me. You go ahead and terrify innocent people while you play “army man” with live ammo. I’ll use my kind weapons and point out on my blog what an insufferable and deranged knucklehead you are.
Could the Second Amendment remain as is, while we truly and effectively outlaw weapons that can fire about 13 bullets per second, and kill dozens of people in the blink of an eye? That’s a big “maybe,” but you’d need the right judges and the right attitudes, and neither are in great supply in this “debate.” More and more it is the judicial and political elevation of the Second Amendment into sacrosanct status that is making “common sense reforms” less and less likely to be proposed, let alone survive. To borrow some of Lincoln’s phraseology, if I could decrease mass shootings by keeping the Second Amendment as it is, I would do that. If I could decrease mass shootings by changing some words of the Second Amendment and leaving others alone, I would do that.
Furthermore, if I could decrease mass shootings and the number of guns, and power of same by presenting fact-based intelligent arguments as to why such steps should be taken, I would do that. Australia did it. The United Kingdom did it. Free nations have done it. As I’ve been saying here, though, I believe the time for thoughtfulness in this discussion is over.
Those who want gun control and gun reform need to get louder, angrier, meaner and more arrogant than we are. If so, at least we may provoke a Constitutional discussion that this country desperately needs on the gun issue. Lobbyists are far more powerful today than they were during previous amendment fights, and they wouldn’t play fair. But at least let’s make them spend the money and time in this battle. Let’s stand up and say that doing nothing but shrugging and praying as scores of citizens are mowed down by easily available, legal guns without a chance of defending themselves is immoral, and must come to an end.
Maybe it all starts by more people becoming willing to tell extreme gun enthusiasts to conceal such firearms up their own asses from now on.
Pride vs. Joy in Writing
“Pride and joy” often go together, in descriptions of possessions, accomplishments, even children. It’s wonderful when both go together.
But what if they do not? Must they, in fact, do so? And if one were required to choose between the two, which is the better?
When it comes to writing, I say joy.
In context, I have in fact been proud of most of the things I have written. There are different reasons to be proud. I can be proud of the sheer amount of labor put into something. I can be proud that I overcame something within myself in order to write a work. There is pride in the result, of course, especially when it meets all of my expectations. And of course, pride in the impact one of my creations could have on those that read it. I hear there is even financial pride, when an author makes money from their work, though thus far that’s a mythical concept in my life.
There are, then, many different type of pride, cause by various things. But does pride in and of itself bring joy? It can, of course. but is that inevitable? Not to me.
Though I may be a certain type of proud whenever I finish writing something, it isn’t always a source of joy. Sometimes I have a deadline to meet. I do good work, proof read, insist on quality and I am often proud of the result. But joy? Not in such cases. If something I wrote got syndicated and I made a million from it, that would probably be followed by joy, but the source of joy would come from the result of my writing, not the finished product, or even the process.
There should be joy in your process, and your results as a writer, far more often than there is not. Joy inspires your best writing. Joy keeps you working. Jopy makes it worth the time when almost nobody cares about your final; product. (As has been the case, so far, with my first novel, Flowers of Dionysus which very few people, even among friends, have read.) That continues to sadden and disappoint me. Yet I took joy in writing it for any number of reasons, and I feel joy that it exists.
I’m also proud of that novel, so I suppose it’s fair to ask if joy brings pride. To tell you the truth, I’m not as certain in that direction. But I do know that if you write what gives you joy, you won’t be as concerned with pride as you otherwise might be. I, for example have the ability to write a three volume epic tale set in 1840’s Prague. Such an undertaking would require years of research, years or writing, and rewriting, and, fear of flying aside would probably require at least one trip to Prague. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of words would be produced in that effort, not to mention the “darlings” I would probably have to kill in the process. No doubt such a work would take center stage in my artistic life, possibly to the expense of other things, for ten years at least.
And if I completed it? I’d be damn proud of myself. I would have completed an exhausting, laborious process and survived it. Whether or not anybody would ever read it, I’d be proud that I’d finished it, even as I was depressed over nobody ever caring about it.
And I would feel almost no joy at all during any facet of the process. I think Prague would be an interesting city to visit some day, and I’d probably learn some interesting history in the course of the undertaking, but a three volume epic set in 1840’s Prague does not speak to me. It doesn’t move me. In short, it holds no potential joy. Pursuing it, just to have something to be proud of, (and maybe for some, a chance at fame and awards of some kind) would make me miserable. If I became rich because of it, I would have some joy in the money, but the price would be tens years plus of artistic misery.
And it probably would make no money, because I’m not likely to produce work that will bring great joy to others if I was miserable the whole time while writing it.
Winning contests, awards, acclaim and praise are wonderful things for the artist, no doubt. To that end, I’m not suggesting you should never think about those things. Nor am I suggesting that you will never have to work hard even on manuscripts that bring you joy. But I think joy should always be the fuel that keeps a writer going through the harder times. Pride will come later if joy is first, most of the time. But if you use pride as your compass and the joy never comes, what’s it all been for?
Release Date for “Murder. Theatre. Solitaire.”
It’s July 5th!
Okay, I know that wasn’t the most exciting, memorable release-day announcement. But it’s not necessary to make everything a song and dance number, is it? Besides, I’ll be talking about the date more than once between now and then.
I guess, at least for right now, I have come to realize that the bells and whistles approach is not one of my strengths when it comes to promotion. I’m not suggesting I won’ promote at all, of course I will. I have to. But in the past I’ve tried the bombastic approach that works great for some of my colleagues. In my thus far short self-publishing career, that approach hasn’t yielded what it does for others. So I’ve decided to promote in a style more like me-enthusiastic but calm and straight to the point…most of the time.
Collectors of factoids might notice that my previous two books were released on June 21, the first day of summer. Why not use that date again? To tell you the truth, there is a tiny amount of superstition and quasi-tradition in my thinking, which almost forced me into using that same date again. Repetition and such. Yet not only do I think I could use an extra week or so to get read for publication this year, I’ve also told myself recently that when I can, I should shake up things. I realize that to many of you, picking a date for release of this year’s book that is different from previous year’s doesn’t sound much like a shake up. But to a sometimes overly ritualized guy such as myself, a little change can mean a lot going forward.
And why not July 4th, instead of the 5th? I wouldn’t want to steal the USA’s thunder of course.
I’m looking at starting with a $1.99 price. Might decide on a dollar by the end of the process.
So, the date is out there, and I am accountable to it. And of course I’ll be mentioning things about the book a bit more often now, so prepare for that.
The Other Type of Rejection for Writers
Though its usefulness is questionable, people who declare their intention to be a writer will hear a warning from, well, just about everywhere not long afterward.
Get comfortable with rejection, because you’ll be facing it a lot…from agents, publishers, journals, contests…rejection is part of life as a writer.
Okay, yes, it is. I can’t deny it. But these are all “active rejections” so to speak. You submit to something, and the powers that be choose not to use your work.
But there’s another type of rejection for writers that I don’t think gets mentioned as often, though it occurs as much if not more than rejections like the ones mentioned above; it’s the passive, silent rejection from those who know you best.
Most writers have families. A few even have a friend or two, even though we can be a neurotic bunch. When we’re lucky, one or two people from each group reads our stuff. But if you’re a writer, my guess is you know what it’s like to have your friends and relatives take only a passing interesting in they words you have bled out onto the page.
-You’re wrote a novel? That’s great. Keep me posted on how it goes. Oh, it came out three months ago? Well, I’ve been real crazy busy with this new job, and I hardly check my Facebook feed anymore. But I’m proud of you!
–Yeah, I saw your novel on Amazon, go you! Money’s real tight these days, and I just can’t spare that 99 cents at the moment. But as soon as I can…
–I’m not much of a reader, really. Just magazines and such, and I don’t have an ereader. I used to but I like never used it, I gave it to my cousin. But you wrote a whole novel, that’s impressive!
And so on.
The sad, blunt bottom line is this; most of your friends and family don’t give a shit about reading your stuff. Oh they love/respect you as much as they ever did, and they want good things for you. They really, really hope you become this big huge successful writer…based on other people buying your book. But read it themselves? Not so much.
And please don’t fool yourself into thinking that these same people will respect the disappointment they cause you, and never ask you for anything in the future, because there’s a good chance that as soon as one of them starts making fudge and selling it out of their Elantra door-to-door, you’ll be getting an email asking if you’d like to place one of the first orders.
What’s the reason that the percentage of friends and family that read a writer’s stuff is so low most of the time? Don’t any of them realize that the simple act of downloading an ebook, or even better, leaving a rating or review of it online if they liked it can move mountains in the world of an author? (Particularly an indie author like myself.) They should know it; after all, you’ve told them after each time you publish something.
So why doesn’t it move them? I don’t know. If I knew that, I’d probably already be a world famous author. The only thing I can advise is to remember the lyrics from the old Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tune, Teach Your Children:
If they told you, you would cry, so just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
Ty Unglebower 