Daddy Dearest

I think I’m getting into a nice rhythm on blogging again. The stats are trending upward. People are starting to click more on the links to my stories and to my friends on the sidebar. I’m starting to get referred by the search engines for strange and slightly inflammatory subject matter. And I’m starting to see more and more things that I think would be interesting to post about and, more importantly, I’m getting to the keyboard to post more. There have been a few times where I’ve wanted to let the blog lag, but didn’t and I was happier for it. This is of course all well and good while I’m in down time between novel projects. We’ll see how I feel about all of this once I start back into long form again.

For now though, I’m in it to win it, er, something like that. Another anecdote from the weekend: We were all standing around singing and drinking in the Jordan’s hallway, and during a brief bit of downtime, Laura Lippman was asking people what their best moment of the year was. When it came to me, first answer off the top of my head—as I tend to answer every question—was finishing the MURDER BOY book because I’d wanted to write it for so long and it really got me over a hump that was making me feel miserable, etc. Then somebody reminded me that I had a child in that same timeframe, wasn’t I more excited about that?

Oh. Well. About that…

I’m sure at times here I come off as a dick of a father. I spent a good chunk of time complaining about how much I thought Spenser was going to change my life for the worst and it was mostly rooted in selfishness. My feeling about kids are still rotted in selfishness. Before I go any further, though, let me state right here that I absolutely love my kids. I would die for them and I love spending time with them and I only want the best for them.

But.

That doesn’t mean I live in this little fantasy land where kids are nothing but a wonder and I frolic through life without a care in the world. Wrong. Sometimes—moreso with Spenser than Holly—I want to leave them on the porch of a church somewhere and move myself somewhere I won’t ever see them again. And I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. I’d never do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think about it. That’s why I get so pissed at people who don’t have kids, or who got kids later in life, etc. spouting off about how they think other people should raise kids. It’s different with every kid and it’s different with every parent.

You’ve got to understand that mentally, I’m still closer to a high schooler who got his girlfriend pregnant and is contemplating how all of my dreams and plans are going to have to change. I know down the road my kids are going to make a better person. I know that if given the choice I wouldn’t do anything different because I’m happy my kids are in the world. But day to day, I still have a selfish streak I’m dealing with. It’s not good or bad. It just is. So judge me for my selfishness, or applaud me for my brutal honesty, but none of it is going to change how I feel and how I work through this.

One thing that did hit me that I know is a weakness of mine and is something I have been consciously working on is my time on the computer. This was particularly striking as I was watching 2012 over the weekend. John Cusack plays a writer—as he always seems to do these days—who’s wife and kids left him because he spent too much time on the computer working on his books then being with them. While I don’t see that happening, there is one scene where he’s camping with his kids and their getting ready for bed in the tent while he’s out by the fire on his computer. His daughter begs him to come in and my heart was crushed because, unchecked, I could see that happening. So while Spenser is up at night when I get home from work, I keep the computer off and play with him. And while I’m not in the middle of a book project, I don’t turn it on much after he goes to bed either so I can spend time with Becky and Holly. So see, I am aware of my failings and try to correct some of them.

Plotting, Movement 2, in d Minor

Yesterday’s post worked out better than I thought it would. I spent the rest of the day plotting out a few things and felt comfortable with both of them (both re-workings of the last two books I finished) so I’m certainly not ready to jump off a cliff or anything. What I really need to do is probably work on some more short stories and clear my head further, but I’m really feeling the novel itch so we’ll see which ultimately wins out. But the comments on the previous post got me thinking about some other things, namely my unique contribution to literature.

This is one of the things that came up in a few questions on a panel I moderated at Mayhem and Murder in Muskego. The authors repeatedly talked about putting their own spin or their own take on what ultimately boils down to just a few stories in the world. And if you’re going to get started and succeed in this business, you have to be unique, but not too unique and I guess that’s what the bigger overarching theme to all of my posts is. What is my unique contribution to literature? Laura alluded to a comment I made over the weekend that my TBR stack is split almost evenly between dark, violent crime books, and frillier romantic books with pink covers. That’s not totally true though, I also have quite a bit of small character, coming of age “literary” novels as well. My influences are quite broad.

The question is, should I try to combine all of these influences into a unique genre or maybe I should be writing in multiple genres under pen names. In MURDER BOY I think I tried to combine as many of them as I could, because there’s some romance, some coming of age of a writer, and a lot of violence at the hands of a bounty hunter/PI character. But I wonder if instead of coming up with a unique contribution I’ve instead watered down a bunch of influences into a messy stew. I can take solace in the fact that I’m not alone in this struggle. Victor Gischler wrote recently about how he’s trying to decide what novel project to work on next and his option seem even more across the board than mine. Check it out.

Right now, I’m going back through MURDER BOY and trying to sharpen it up and make the plot a little more coherent. I still think this book is the best use of my talent right now, but I can’t help but think I’m shirking away from a challenge regarding the other novel: a big, monster of a PI novel that deals with issues of fame, corruption, fatherhood, families, and the history and future of Detroit. So it’s not a question of writing what I want (I want to write it all), or writing to the market or away from the market, it’s a matter of what, right now, is the best use of my skill and will provide me the most success. I don’t have an easy answer, and I’m sure what I feel now will change tomorrow and then again. But I’m more hopeful than I was the last time I had this discussion with myself and that’s all I can really ask right now. And really, look at this pitch of MURDER BOY I sent out and tell me it doesn’t sound like fun to work on:

MURDER BOY is a charming tale of larcenous creative writing students, vengeful bounty hunters, cultish baseball fans, and romantically obsessed cops set against the backdrop of a city with nothing but bars, strip clubs, and abandoned buildings to keep them occupied.

Plotting My Demise

I’m hesitant to write what I’m thinking about today because a whole series of posts about this same topic (sort of) is ultimately what led me shut down the blog last time. But I think with a little time away, and some deep soul searching I may be able to work through it this time.

I’m having trouble picking what novel to work on next.

You may remember that I went through about two years of hell the last time I thought about this and it nearly drove me insane. At the time, I thought it was a struggle between what I wanted to write and what I thought, marketing-wise, what I should write. So finally I just shut the hell up and wrote the book I thought I wanted to write at the time, a first person PI mystery. I finished it, but wasn’t happy with it and gave up on it early on in rewrites. Then I got really excited about working on a fast-paced, darkly funny crime novel that I’d wanted to write for years. I finished that one and was briefly happy with it and even sent it off to an agent after some rewriting. Then I got away from books for a bit and wrote a short story that I really liked. After a month or so, I started thinking about that book again and went back and read it. I hated it. There are some good parts to it, but mostly it was ridiculous and confusing and messy. So I started thinking about what else I might write and this is where the trouble began.

After thinking about why I was shooting down all of these ideas, I realized that there are actually two things going on in my head. The first, minor thing, is a contemplation of what would be the most marketable. With a family now, I’m thinking that if I’m spending all of this time away from them it should amount to something. And there’s always the voice in the back of my head reminding me I want to be a full-time writer and all of that fantasy BS. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that I’m absolutely terrified to plot another novel.

Plot has always been my weakness and I’ve tried to find ways around it, but as I’m looking to my future it’s smacking me full on in the face. Again, there are several things going on with my plotting fears. The first is how boring, or ridiculous, most plot elements seem to me. I realize I work in a formula driven genre and that should encourage me, or provide me with some sort of security blanket. But I don’t want to write about serial killers, I don’t want to write a lot of action scenes (I’m bad at them and I always skip over them anyway in books), and every time I think about raising the stakes it just seems so stupid to me. I have a problem suspending my own disbelief in fiction.

I’m torn between my natural skills (breezy prose, funny dialogue, quirky characters), which tend to lend themselves more toward over the top, potboiler writing, and my natural instincts which seem more toward the realism, simple, small stakes, type story. I don’t think I have the skill to pull off the small stakes “literary” thriller if you will, but I don’t seem to be able to let myself go completely free and off the hinge to do more Victor Gischler or Tim Dorsey type stuff.

In a perfect world, I would like to write a Spenser-type PI series with a continuing character, lots of dialogue, fun characters, and little or no extended action scenes. So when it comes to that, I believe it is a commercial decision because I don’t think that would fly in today’s marketplace. And if that’s the case, I should write it anyway because I should care about commercial concerns. So it appears I’ve worked through it. For now. I’ll write my first person PI novel, again, and will continue doing it until I make my dialogue so strong, and my characters so awesome, and my prose so engaging that I can get away with a less than steller plot. Maybe eventually I can even get my plots to a decent level. I have seen over the four books I’ve written a marked improvement so it’s probably just a case of sticking to it.

Mayhemishness

I’m off to Milwaukee for the weekend for Murder and Mayhem in Muskego and it couldn’t come at a better time. The other day I started thinking beyond the short stories I want to work on and to the next book and I started getting that paralyzed feeling again. I started reading through the book I completed last month and was not pleased with the results. So do I write another one like that and try better, or do I go back to the PI novel I finished before this last book that now seems like it’s pretty good? I’m still terrified of detective novel plotting so I think maybe I’ll do another longish PI short story and see if I can get it right.

Anyway, this is good time to get away and immerse myself in writers.

A Couple More Bricks in The Wall

I figure maybe I should have something new to share here for those of you coming over from my guest blog stint at Do Some Damage (Thanks Dave!). Over at Laura Lippman’s blog a bit ago she had a discussion going about some of her best and worst teachers and it got me thinking. I’ve had some amazing teachers in my high school and college careers, the sort of life-changing, Dead Poet’s Society inspiring teachers, but I’ve never had a really bad teacher. I’ve had teachers I didn’t like—mostly because they wanted me to try harder or expand my horizons or complete my homework or whatever—but I’ve never had a teacher I hated or who set out to discourage me.

The first good teacher I can remember was Mrs. Hill in 5th grade. She encouraged me in the writing of my first short story about super hero candy bars. The next major influence was my high school choir teacher Mrs. Bomeli. She brought my out of the shell I’d crawled into after several years of junior high hell at a private school. She helped me hone my musical talent and encouraged my other artistic endeavors. She bought me my first copy of Syd Field’s Screenplay which was instrumental in helping me finish my first novel.

When we get to college, I had the bulk of my great teachers at The University of Michigan-Flint. The duo of Bob Barnett and Jacob Blumner encouraged and challenged me in my non-fiction writing. They helped guide my teaching career and what I thought was going to be my academic career. On the creative side, Danny Rendleman accepted the crime fiction I wrote, but also encouraged me to stretch myself and helped me write the first two stories I ever had published. Cathy Akers-Jordan was my first really encouraging beta reader of crime short stories and was the first person I met who shared the same passion for crime fiction as me.

Now that I’m out of college, I miss that relationship with teachers. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to do some more teaching of my own and maybe pass along the karma. Or maybe I’ll end up one of those bitter, alcohol and cigarette stained failed writers with a hundred unpublished novels in the drawer determined to take every young writer out of this world with me.

Explicit Content

I had one blog post in mind this morning, but I spent the rest of the day working on my short story. I went back and forth with the content and a couple of readers offered their valuable suggestions. When I started the story I envisioned it as a nasty little piece of Las Vegas noir with a twisted premise (man goes to Vegas to dump kid after wife dies) and ple nty of sex, violence, and swearing. But as I thought about it and worked it out I realized there was more going on thematically and it had the potential to be one of my best stories.

When it was finished, I sent it to one friend who had been reading it as I was writing it and she thought I should send it to Ellery Queen for their Black Mask section. I thought maybe that was agood idea, I like the idea of being published in one of the major crime magazines and the money seemed nice. But as I read through the story, and read through the comments from another friend who had a story in EQ/BM I realized that to clean it up enough for EQ I would kill the spirit I had when I was writing it and I wasn’t willing to do it. So I put back in all of the swearing and car sex and felt much better about the story and sent it off to PLOTS WITH GUNS.

This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on EQ or AH. I have the first 2k written of a caper story about a computer repo guy that I think would be a good fit for either place. To inspire me, I found a couple of Dave Zeltserman’s stories from AH and EQ that he’s giving away for free at his website. I’m also in the process of hunting down Joe Gores’s short story collection of DKA Associates caper stories.

Then I have a flash story to write for Patti Abbott’s challenge and a superhero vigilante story I want to write. After that I suspect I’ll begin a new novel. But it feels good to have short stuff in the pipeline again.

I’m like that girl with the rack on Mad Men

I’ve bitched enough here about the jobs I’ve hated so I should probably take time to talk about how much I enjoy my job. I’m approaching my second year here which is really quite amazing. I’ve had a varied career history and most of the time I ended up leaving most jobs before I even made it a year. There are a couple of things I find interesting about my current job. The first is that it doesn’t have anything to do with what I went to college for.

My initial plan was to do something in the arts or find some way to write professionally. I remember being a senior in high school and finding out you could major in English instead of math or science or auto repair. I spent the next eight years bouncing from college to college studying literature, creative writing, and finally rhetoric and composition. After a brief experience substitute teaching, I knew I had no interest in being a high school English teacher so my next goal was to be a college professor. That never materialized, but along the way I was able to experience several other careers I thought were dream careers. I was a cops and courts newspaper reporter, I was a New York City publishing editor, and I even taught college writing. I quickly realized there were two ugly similarities between all of the jobs: They all paid shit and the all sapped my creative writing energy. After working in a creative field all day, the last thing I wanted to do at night was write some more. My productivity suffered. So now I’m in a job that’s not creative and my productivity is jolly.

The second thing about my job is that I’ve been training for it all along without even realizing it. I first came to the clerical field in 1996 as a community college student. I was looking for summer employment that wouldn’t bore me silly and Kelly Services was there recruiting. I had never really considered the clerical field before, but they had the cutest recruiter so I went on over and talked to her. She signed me up for an interview the next day at their office. I showed up wearing my nicest suit, resume in hand, and found them short staffed. To help out, I started answering the phones and they were impressed with how quickly I took to the job. So for the next six months I worked right there in the Kelly office getting a crash course in the secretarial arts. I had good computer skills which seem to be required of the more modern clerical workers and soon found myself training other temps on office software systems. Eventually though they found me a more permanent job with General Motors.

I’ve only come to realize in the last few years what a great opportunity that was and wish I hadn’t given it up. But I also realize that if I had stuck with it, I would have been let go like most of the other GM employees. For that summer though, I continued my crash course in the clerical field. I worked with some mid level managers and when their bosses saw what I could do I started supporting them as well. I was making good money, and had good hours. Being the stupid kid I was though, I didn’t want to be trapped as a secretary and wanted to go back to school to play on the newspaper and in the writing center. The next summer though, faced with the prospect of working at the grocery store I’d started off at 16, I went back to Kelly and they found me something. This pattern continued for the next many years. Kelly would find me a decent temp job, I’d do a good job at it, they’d hire me on permanently and then I’d quit right around my year anniversary.

Then I grew the hell up. I was about to get married and was sick of being poor and sick of being a nomad. I’d bailed on the soul sucking technical support job that Kelly started me off with, but was able to talk them into giving me one last shot. Now, two years later I realize what a blessing this job is. It started off as a routine secretary job doing a lot of typing and filing and copying. But by the time they hired me on permanently I’d made the job my own. Now I do a little grant work, some research support, and quite a bit of work with department financials. It’s challenging enough to keep me from being bored and my work is actually helping people. Every once in a while I think about maybe working on a Masters Degree in Health Policy or something to become a manager, but I’m not quite that responsible yet. I like my job, and I like writing when I get home for now. This is the first job I’ve had where I wouldn’t immediately quit the day I get a book deal. I can see the two coexisting nicely well into my future.

Emerging from the Offline Shadows

This blog has had several lives and a couple of locations. I’m beginning a new phase now and the landscape seems to be so much more different than the other times I came back from blogging breaks. Back in 2004 when I first started blogging, I was one of the middle early bloggers. There were of course the people who had been around since the late 90s, but I was on the early edge of mass blogging. Now, everybody has a blog and I feel a bit out of place and jealous of the attention they receive. At it’s peak, this blog was getting between 100-200 hits a day. A mere drop in the bucket in the larger scheme of the blogosphere, but enough to make me proud and warrant myself some attention.

Now that I’m back to blogging regularly I’m getting 30-40 hits on days when I post and 0-10 on the days I don’t. And no longer is merely posting enough to bring traffic to my site, I need to link in Twitter and Facebook as well. I’m hoping eventually I’ll build back enough of a base where people will check out my blog regularly and I won’t have to pimp every friggin’ post.

But for now, I’m thinking of other ways to make my renewed online presence known. I’m starting to comment more on the blogs I used to frequent and I’m finding my way to a couple new ones to see if I have anything useful to say. I’m going to participate in one of Patti Abbott and Gerald So’s flash fiction challenges, which is something I haven’t done in years. Even those challenges, I’m proud to say, are part of my early history as a blogger through creating the Blog Short Story Project with Dave White. I’m also writing some new short fiction that I want to get out to places like Thuglit and Plots with guns, and maybe even into some of the newer places like A Twist of Noir and PulpPusher. I’m also thinking about hitting up some old and new friends to let me guest blog to help expand my audience.

And the reason for all of this? Well that’s two fold. There’s the narcissistic, self-entertainment purpose of it all. I love looking back through my old blog posts at important times in my life to see what I was thinking and how I was reacting. But there’s also the professional end of it. Much of my success so far has come from the relationships I made early on through blogs and online zines then solidified at Bouchercon and other conferences. I’ve got a new book out in the marketplace that is different than any of the others I’ve written and more in line with the kind of stuff I’ve published on line. I’m also looking to get back the excitement and vibe that comes from being part of the online crime community. It fed me for so long through some tough times and now that I’ve been able to work through some things I needed to away from the blogs, it’s time to rejoin the party if anyone will have me.

Spenser and the Pumpkin Patch

We took the kids out to get pumpkins on Sunday for Halloween. Last year it was more of a photo op than anything else because Spenser was too small to really do anything. But this year he was able to get out and walk around and pick out his own pumpkin. His costume this year is a black sweat suit with skeleton bones on it and Sunday, we dressed him up in the hooded sweatshirt part and his jeans to make it festive. When we get there, Holly was just kind of a gooey sleeping mess in mommy’s arms, but Spenser was very deliberate in his pumpkin selection. He would approach from several directions and then lay his hands on several, but would always quickly pull them away as to not be committed to the wrong pumpkin. Finally, after he went back to the same one a couple different times we picked that one for him and went in to pay.

On the way into the main store area though, we passed by several large buckets of small, baby pumpkins and we thought it would be fun for him to have one of those for himself as well. Again, he was very slow to pick a pumpkin and when Becky tried to hurry him along, he reached around and tried to take the whole bucket. After he picked up the one he liked and held onto it for more then a few seconds, we went in to pay. When I was strapping him into his car seat to get ready to go home, he was still holding the pumpkin and I commented on the astounding fact that he hadn’t tried to chew on the pumpkin yet.

It took us about ten minutes to get home and when I took him out of his car seat, I noticed that he had some orange juice around his mouth. I initially thought it was from the Doritos I fed him earlier at Subway, but when I looked closer I saw that he had eaten almost half of the pumpkin. Some of the spots were gnawed at a shallow level, but other, larger chunks went almost to the core of the pumpkin. The kid is 13 months old, that just ain’t right. Of course he followed it up later that night by trying to eat the bricks on the fire place.

More Process Crap

I’m starting to hitting a rhythm now on the short story I’m writing. It’s mostly been dribbling out a few words here and there since I started on it and for a while I thought it was because I’m tired with the new baby and everything else going on in my life. Then I realized this always happens to me on short stories I see as having potential to be great. I’ll have an idea in my head and when the right things click and I can start seeing it as a story, I think about it and stew about it and the words dribble out. This is always strange because beginning things has never been a problem. But with these certain short stories, I know I have something important and want to make sure I get the most out of it.

So with this story I have four different openings, none of which I used when I started the story for real. I’d write a few words and if I liked how they sounded I’d write a few more. Then I’d think about it for a while, deciding where to go next. I don’t have an ending in mind yet, but I wanted to at least know what was going to happen to the midway point of the story. Now I have that, and, as I’ve said, I’m starting to hit a rhythm. I’m using a lot of the material I gathered from my recent family trip to Las Vegas, plus my early, conflicted feelings about being a father and the kind of things I was shocked I was even capable of considering doing with my kids. My wife is not pleased when I tell her about the story, but I’m working through it anyway.

Now I’ve got a decision to make that I think will be the most important I’ve made for this story. I’ve got things figured out up to the midpoint of the story, but after that I’m conflicted. The opening few scenes are slow burning, quiet, and semi-realistic. But a few ideas have presented themselves to me that I think could be exciting but would change the mood of the story. This gets to the heart of what I think is one of my biggest issues in writing fiction: raising the stakes. I like small stakes, little moments, and epiphanies. I work in a genre that relies heavily on big stakes, life altering choices, and grand spectacle. I don’t have any problems coming up with ideas like this, but I have problems executing them successfully.

One of the reasons I switched away from writing detective novels and moved to more absurd, humorous crime novels, was so that I wouldn’t think some of my ideas were too ridiculous to work. And for the most part I think I was successful. The book is still mostly built on small stakes, and small-scale, choices, but its written in very broad strokes, and is fast-paced, and has a few gun fights. But with this story, I still have to figure out what I want it to be.

I initially thought it was going to be a darker character study of a father and his son, but as I pondered that and thought it out, I realized there was no real crime in it and would fall apart at the end. So I had a couple of cool ideas, a couple of eh ideas, and one tricky idea that somebody else could probably pull off spectacularly…but not me. I’ll probably have to try a few different things, but it will be a nice way to clean my brain out and keep me occupied while I wait back to hear about my novel. If I can get everything to work properly, I think this might be the best story I’ve ever written, if not, well, maybe I can add a donkey to it.