Been working on a new project ...

I'm doing my best to make this new thing I'm working on mind-blowing. It's not easy. Probably the most complicated plot I've ever written so I keep tripping myself up even as I try to blast through the first draft. I'm almost done though, 80k + words in.

As usual (I hate to say that) my timing seems great. After I started this project a couple of other writers released or announced similar ones. There's more to say but I don't want to jinx it. Talking about what I'm working on always seems to guarantee that I won't work on it for weeks because I'll get stuck and then switch to something else.

So what's this new thing about? Well, it's a novel. It's about fathers and sons, wondering where you came from and what family means. It's about being human, about how grand it can be to do something amazing while at the same time fumbling your way through it and getting eighty percent of it wrong. It's about having the odds stacked against you, to where everyone writes you off before you even get started - and proving all of those people wrong.

Oh yeah - and MANLY ACTION. Swordfights, gunfights, fistfights, whores, rectal bleeding - I'm really aiming to tear the cover off this one.


(Bigger version of the above image since I'm too drunk/lazy to work on making that image a link in Blogger. Image courtesy NASA and smug atheists everywhere.)

What Do I Write?

This is a question I've gotten asked a lot at cons. And unfortunately I don't really know how to respond without sounding like a douche. I was thinking about this the other day and decided it would make a good blog post and maybe even help me figure out what to tell people.

I don't know how other people can handle this question so easily. Well, no, I do, they just say what genre they write in. I guess I wonder how people arrived at that decision. Is it that they just said "I want to write in this genre because I really love it?" Do they never want to write anything else, or are they just unable to? I wish I could ask the writers I know of who, to me, don't really write in specific genres but they don't respond to my Tweets or Facebook posts because I'm a freak or I've probably drunkposted too much. What can I say, most of the time I'm playing with social networking I've just got off a 13-hour shift and crawled into a bottle of Scotch and then I get the urge to socially network with people on the Internet.  Sometimes I think to other people I must seem like the freaky karate sperg from SMOKIN' ACES (which I just watched parts of the other night and seemed like a cool movie).

Maybe people pick a genre because it just makes talking about your writing easier without sounding like you're putting on airs. When you can just fire back "paranormal romance," or "urban fantasy," or whatever trendy neo-genre bandwagon you've jumped onto, it must be a relief. And it's an important question to be able to answer, because if I'm a reader I want to know if I will have any interest at all in your writing. No one wants to meet an author at a con and spend twenty minutes talking with them and get guilted into buying their book before you realize it's an erotic horror novel that's basically SEX AND THE CITY if they chicks were all lesbian vampires and the guy from LAW AND ORDER was an incubus with a dick made out of ivory or some crazy shit like that. Even if you would like a book like that you would probably just want to grab the book right away instead of wasting time you could be spending waiting in line to get Linda Blair's assistant to sell you an autograph or something.

My problem is that I tend to like a lot of different things. Here we go. I'm really not trying to make myself sound more intelligent than other people who are so dumb or limited that they only like one genre or whatever. And I don't tend to have favorite things, mostly. Hell I just decided one day that my favorite color was blue even though I like just about all colors, so that I wouldn't have to spend a half hour thinking about it every time I had to answer the question. Maybe that's why people end up saying that a certain genre or movie or song or band is their favorite, I don't know. I try to tell myself that I'm not too different from other people and that problems I think are my own are really ones other people have too, but then sometimes I find out I'm just a really weird person.

I never set out as a writer thinking how much I wanted to write in one specific genre, even one as broad as "horror" or "scifi" or whatever. I just read great books and wanted to write books like them, and I read lame or mediocre books and thought "I could do better than that".

I've ended up hanging out with the horror crowd just because it seems to be the most popular and also has a lot of room for all different kinds of fiction right now. Which to me makes it not that useful of a label, but there it is. People still seem to react to it and seek it out and that's enough for me. Unfortunately, with HBVK, I think people would look at the cover and the description and think "WTF is this?" and move on to books with covers that had zombies or things bleeding on them. If I had to guess just from observing people as they looked at my books, or talking to people about them, I think ARENA did better with the straight-up horror crowd because it had a scary-looking cover and is generally darker in tone than HBVK. And it had a werewolf in it as the hero, so they knew there would be some dudes getting torn up.

HBVK was a lot of things for me: my reaction to a lot of the lameness of genre fiction and what I thought was the muddleheadeness of people wanting to be vampires and thinking they were cool. I wanted to write a book about why people were awesome because to me a lot of the supernatural fiction tends to not make sense if people are unimportant and it comes off as slash fiction if it's just something like a bunch of vampires that are all chefs (I've actually seen that book, or should I say series of books). HBVK was also my tribute to John Carpenter, which I wish I could've told him but didn't, a lot of the story and characters are homages to BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, which I must've watched about 30 times when I was a kid. Yeah, I was the guy who always had it checked out of the Video Stop, sorry. Actually I could spend all day talking about all the different things I threw into this book, taking what I liked and leaving what I didn't from different genres, books and movies and comics that inspired me. "Like your salad bar." And that's my problem.

I've tried saying "Men's Adventure" because I like the term and I don't hear it used and in a generic way it describes what I like to write. But it doesn't really seem to work as a conversation starter because people don't know what to say to that, I guess it makes people think of Clive Cussler or something. It's really more my philosophy, though, than a specific genre. There was a time when men read books that were not about war or historical events or just non-fiction subjects. I think there are a lot of reasons for that but that's a different post. I'm just trying to do my part by writing books that I would like to read (even if reading my own writing is often painful for me). Since a lot of the tropes of modern fiction piss me off I figure that's a good start.

Labels are important. As much as I'd like to think that I can just write good books and the writing will sell itself, I don't think that works. Especially these days - anyone who says people don't read anymore because of the Internet or TV or whatever is not paying attention and probably just stating their own biases. Every con I've been to, even the tiny ones, I'm just one small fish in a big pond, writers are fucking everywhere and the amount of books that get put out is kind of crazy to me. So when people are looking to entertain themselves with a good book they need help finding something they'll like. And the easiest way to do that is to go by categories. As far as I know Amazon doesn't have an "awesome books" section. Without them you're relying on word of mouth and reviews to drive sales. Hell, even if you do have them.

It figures. Something in me always wants to do things the hard way whether I know an easier path or not. I'm rarely satisfied with what I've accomplished and usually embarrassed by it. I thought when I was able to say that a publisher had liked my book and bought it and printed it and I was selling it that I'd feel proud and elated, and instead I just feel kind of goofy about it and almost sheepish like I don't want people to know about it or it doesn't mean anything. My friends and other people say "wow that's awesome, you wrote a book" and my mother is practically selling my books on the subway and my dad is handing out books in the chow hall of whatever FOB he happens to be on and I just feel like a teenager getting his class picture taken. I would say this makes me your typical overachiever but then I checked out of that rat race when I saw what it did to people, how it chewed them up and made them miserable even as their list of accomplishments got longer and longer.

I've looked at the stuff I've written, either the treatments and story ideas or the finished products, and tried to analyze myself and see what I like to write about. I come up with some general themes but nothing I could really say is a genre. Maybe YA if you took out the cussing, but so help me God I don't ever want to write a YA book. I'm thinking about what would get me to write a book like that and  I can't think of a dollar figure really. That's another post, though, I don't want to get started.

Maybe I'm just a negative person but it would be a lot easier to tell people what I don't write, but that would just set me off on an angry rant that might make people laugh and might piss other people off and I don't know it would really sell books. I have strong opinions about a lot of stuff and to me it's a disservice to fans to just let fly. People only let Harlan Ellison, for example, get away with his shit because he's Harlan "Fucking" Ellison. If he were Harvey Englebert and just starting out I think a lot of people would just say he's an asshole. I think he's great and love his rants, don't get me wrong, but he's put in the work that gives him the credit with people where they pay attention to him and care what he thinks about so that they like to hear him cuss people out and things like that. And hell, people still hate him anyway. So if people ask me what I write and I start out with "I'll tell you what I don't write, mister!" I think people would just smile and nod and back away slowly and hope I don't have a knife on me.

Maybe part of declaring yourself a member of one genre or another is just about being part of a crowd. If that's true it would make sense why I have a problem doing it because I've never felt like I fit in anywhere with anybody at any time. People have told me that maybe I could write crime fiction but I feel too stupid to hang out with those guys because whenever I try to come up with a mystery or something it hurts my brain and I feel like it's obvious from page two who did the deed or whatever, or the ending will seem random and crazy. I don't fit in well with the horror people because things like zombies bore me to death and scary books just scare me and I don't want to read them because they're alternately boring, depressing and scary. A story about a guy who runs around killing people is just not my bag and so many of these stories are like that even if they are really good. I couldn't make it through three chapters of Jack Ketchum's OFF SEASON, even though it was really good, because just goddamn I don't want to ride that rollercoaster, a bunch of crazy kids running around killing the shit out of people. I don't fit in with the scifi people because I generally ask myself "why does this have to be on a spaceship?" and don't really give a shit how the hyperdrive works even though I know you really want to tell me.

Horror does seem to have its misfits, though, people who write books that aren't what you'd call your classic horror books. Jeff Strand is a great example of this, even though the books of his I've read tend to have a lot of splattery gore in them they're still funny and come at stories from different angles. I tried to talk to him at WHC but he just kind of swished his Snapple at me and I went away before I dug myself a hole I couldn't get out of. Anyway my point is that if I can't fit in anywhere I figure I can at least do okay in the horror crowd.

Except every idea I've had and the projects I've been working on lately have been about as far away from horror as you could get.

Chris Morey had me do an interview for the Dark Regions newsletter (I don't know if it appeared or not) and in there I said something like "I want to be Tim Powers when I grow up". There is a guy who can write stories about ghosts, pirates, particle physics, time travel, weird history type stuff and just about every book he writes is something different and it's all great. He usually gets filed under "Fantasy", so maybe I could just say that. But to me if you say "fantasy" people think "oh, it's about elves." NO. FUCK ELVES. See my problem, here? Actually I have always wanted to do a fantasy-type story, I think it would be kind of a Robert Asprin kind of thing, not really a parody but screwing with the genre. But then all the elves and swords and stuff, I never really got into it all that much so it would probably end up way far away from that kind of story.

What about bizzaro? I like a lot of the bizarro I read and they are all cool people. But I don't really come at things from an absurdist direction so I don't know how good of a fit it would be. Really I think I'm not weird enough, but maybe that's just me. And anyway I can't go around telling people I write bizarro, I think, until they jump me in and put the brand on my ass, so I'm going to have to leave that out.

As I get to what I hope is the end of this post ("Thank the Christ!" say the readers), I think part of my problem is I've only written two books so far, and the second one is a novella so really that's only like half a book. Maybe I need to write more to figure things out better, and maybe it doesn't matter so much. It could be that I'm just intensely socially awkward and can't talk to people and people asking me what I write is just more small talk that I don't really understand all that well, the little conversation starters people use when you don't know other people and you're trying to network because you're at a con and if you don't you're wasting your money unless you're just there to party and hopefully see some naked chicks.

So as usual I think it gets back to the actual ass-in-chair writing part of things. Fortunately I'm getting better at that. I really pushed myself this week and I was a little surprised at the results. It used to be that even writing a thousand words was an effort and it often left me physically exhausted, I don't know how that works but there you go. I think part of it was just accepting that I am going to have to cut a lot of stuff when I finish a first draft, instead of feeling like I'm just wasting time writing five thousand words when I know I'm going to cut four thousand of them later. It's like a conversation I'm having with myself, or more like an interrogation where I'm having to drill down to get to what I really want to say and really want on the page, and that means I'm going to leave a lot of rubble and crap behind that will have to be swept away when I want to clean it up and polish it and make it look good.

Of course the other part was, like I said above, there are tons of people churning out thousands and thousands of pages all the time and I don't want to get left behind. This writing thing hasn't been everything I thought it would be, and maybe some of that is in my head, but I want to stick with it. I've had some great times along the way and the more of this life I see the more I like it and see how things, how I could be different, the guy in my head who does the writing instead of the guy who walks around making the money and living his life the rest of the time. That was part of the reason I started writing under a pseudonym. I never really thought the everyday me was all that interesting of a person and I didn't think people would want to read his books. But Jim Gavin, the guy who does the writing, I think he is weird and cool even if he is an asshole a lot of the time. It's the whole duality-of-man thing, I guess, but that's yet another post.

And yeah, I should probably go back through this blog and find all the times I say "that's another post" and write them.

Adventures in Conland - FandomFest thoughts

I would've called this a "postmortem" but I think that implies an exhaustive overview of the experience and not only am I trying to work on writing shorter posts (the idea being that I'll blog more), but I'm a little loopy on pain meds after another instructive and painful session of my Monday Night Fight Club. Since I haven't mentioned it before, it's basically just a chance for me to get some mild exercise, hang out with people I like, and refresh and expand my skills in unarmed self-defense. Mostly it reminds me that the best way to defend yourself is to carry a gun, but you should always have a plan B. Well, make that Plan C, Plan B is to run the fuck away.

Anyway, I'm back from FandomFest and it was a mixed bag. I had some good experiences. One great thing was the Liquor Barn, a giant warehouse of booze the like of which I haven't really seen here in the ATL, though some places come close. They even had a station where you could buy a "growler" - basically a huge-ass jug - and get it filled with fresh, cold beer. That is awesome and probably illegal in Georgia, in fact I'm sure lots of awesome things are illegal in this state. I also hung out with William "Billy" Zabka, who you would remember as Johnny from the Karate Kid - the evil blond guy who Ralph Macchio kicks in the face at the tournament at the end of the movie. I didn't recognize him at first and then I played it cool until he told me who he was. Since we were out back of the hotel smoking I figured let the guy have his down time. I know a little bit about working the table at a con and I can only imagine how much it must suck to have to sit there for 8 to 10 hours signing autographs, even if you get paid for it. He had a lot of great stories about making his short film MOST in Bulgaria and Poland and I hope the new project he's working on makes it to the screen.

In fact I think that if you don't smoke and you're looking to network at a con, you should pick it up. Try cloves or bidis, those are easy to smoke casually. I like these little cigarillos I got a good deal on from the catalog I buy most of my cigars from. They smoke quick and you can throw it away if you need to without feeling too bad about it. Not only did I hang out with Zabka several times (to the point where he recognized me every time he saw me and would call out my name like the party had officially started with my arrival), but I also got to briefly hang out with one of my few living heroes, John Carpenter. I told him how I'd taught a class on his films in college and he said "Why the hell would you want to do that?" I responded that BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA was one of my favorite films and it made me want to learn more about him and he said "You have excellent taste", though from the expression he made I guessed he was also remembering the famously tough road he walked to get that movie made and how underappreciated it was at the time. And that was all in a brief cigarette break. I guess you can just hang around wherever the smokers congregate, but I think it looks a little weird; I wouldn't do it.

I also talked a bit with Jim Kelly of BLACK BELT JONES and ENTER THE DRAGON fame. He was not smoking but was at his table in one of the dealer rooms selling signed photographs. I thought twenty-five bucks was a bit much for that but I figured what the hell. I don't think I'll run into him again and I thought he should've been in more movies back in the day. Plus the picture is really cool - him meeting Muhammad Ali in Chicago in the 70s. That'll look good behind my bar. He seemed a bit lonely - he mentioned that he usually brings his daughter with him to help out but she couldn't make it that weekend. I guess I should've got a picture of us squaring off or something but I didn't have a camera. I never have a camera with me and the one in my phone sucks. I wanted to say "you should've been in BLACK DYNAMITE" but I figured that would be a sore point.

Talking to celebrities is a little weird. You want to tell them how much you've enjoyed their efforts but I feel a little foolish doing it. I know they've heard it all before and maybe even they're bored talking about it. And if they have a new project they want to talk about that. Often times you just end up blurting something out if you're not careful. But they're just people and I know I appreciate compliments even though it feels a little weird, too. My wife saw Curtis Armstrong walking around and just blurted out "I loved you in MOONLIGHTING" and he just said "Oh, okay! Uh, thanks!" In a way it's more about how you as a fan feel than how they do, which is a bit creepy to me.

FandomFest had a lot of problems, though. Seems a lot of people just flaked out and as a result my pal Stephen Zimmer ended up having to shoulder a lot more responsibility than he'd planned. So the fact that things came off at all was an accomplishment (he'd want me to spread the praise around to the other volunteers and the committees and all the rest, so there you go). This year was an impressive grab for the brass ring, as FandomFest, which is your basic small scifi/horror/etc con, was combined with the Fright Night FilmFest, which is why all the celebs were there. The idea, I'd guess, was to essentially move up a weight class or two to get into the same club as cons like, say, DragonCon, or at least closer to that size. An ambitious goal, and as always with things like that, there were some logistical problems.

I liked the hotel, though unfortunately it looked like it was renovated some time in the mid 90s with a lot of kludgey retrofits and quick fixes, so it was the worst of all possible things, a hotel that was run-down without even having a decent vintage style to it. It is actually two hotels that were combined a while back and so unfortunately it was divided up - the film people got one building and the book people got the other. So there wasn't a lot of cross-traffic. And it didn't help that Louisville was smack under the so-called "Heat Dome" that was causing record high temperatures all over the eastern half of the country (weirdly, the ATL was passed over). So the hotel's aircon units couldn't really keep up and the building with the literary/etc tracks wasn't all that easy to cool to begin with. So when I hit the floor Friday evening to hook up with D.A. Adams and see who else was there, it was sweltering. Even I broke out into a sweat, which is saying something. I didn't mind the heat but then I never do, everyone else was miserable.

I had two panels, a signing, and a reading. The panels went okay and I think I was able to make an impression on some people. The signing, as usual, failed - I'm about done with those, I think. Maybe I'd do one after a reading, otherwise no one knows who the hell I am.The reading was one of my better ones and actually attended by people who weren't also reading, so that was good. So other than that I didn't have a lot to do. I spent most of my free time walking around talking with people while they were stuck at their tables - I talked a bit with John Johnson and got to bitch about living in Charlottesville for a stretch, which was good. I also talked with A.Jarrell Hayes, Sean Taylor, Bobby Nash, Nic Brown, Brady Allen , Jeff Chitty and Tammy Jo Eckhart and swapped cards.

I didn't do a lot of partying - there didn't seem to really be many parties. There were two on my floor but that seemed to be it for the whole con. One I didn't get to before they wound down for the night, and the other one I didn't crash because I am me and I am weird about just walking into a hotel room even if the door is open and a party is going on. I feel like I need to be invited even if it's just by a sign or something.

I think in the future I might have to more strictly program myself for these things because I end up just walking around talking to people instead of going to panels or seeing movie screenings or things like that. It didn't help that the schedule wasn't available when I checked in, and there wasn't a good map to show you where things were. The movie screenings didn't have a schedule, either, so a lot of people missed out, I think. I heard a lot of people trying to figure out where and when movies were going to be and walking away confused. You had to hunt down the posters, remember the time and place and then figure out where it was going to be.

The programming was pretty good, it went pretty much wall-to-wall and even ran until Sunday evening. Though I'm still mystified why things get scheduled before 1100 at these things. People are there to have fun and I would've loved to make some of the panels and movies but they were at 0900 or 1000 and unless I'm getting paid that's tough for me to do when I've switched over to a daytime schedule. I know that you end up with less programming if you block off time for people to get out of bed and go to parties, but I think less is more in general. A lot of these cons have the same generic panel topics and I don't know that we need to have them over again.

I didn't think much of Louisville in general. I don't think I had a great meal the whole time I was there, nothing terrible, just not that great. The whole town is a ghetto and the street signs are either non-existent or hard to read. The place was crawling with cops and that made me a little nervous; generally a big police presence is not a good sign. I hit one thrift store that was pretty good, though, and found some cool stuff to bring back with me, including another Hawaiian shirt for my collection.

So what did I walk away with? I didn't regret not having a table, and not just because it would've been like sitting in a sauna. I didn't make any sales but I don't know that having a table would've helped that. Technically I had a table for an hour for my signing and I didn't even get anyone stopping by. I think having a table would be more useful for me if I had someone to work it for me, and I find it more helpful to have my wife with me so that she can remember all the people I meet and remind me about things. Also, bookstands. So many people did not have them and their books kept falling over on the table and distracting everyone. Really, you can get like 5 of them for a dollar at the dollar store. To me it just makes you look more like you have your shit together. I don't want to take anything away from anyone, just calling it like I see it.

So I guess overall this more confirmed for me things I already thought I'd figured out. As always I'm amazed by how much competition I have, how slow a writer I am compared to a lot of other people. But at the same time I felt better about what I've put out. Frankly I saw a lot of crap. I know people buy it but still. It's good to know that when you have a decent publisher who helps you put out quality product, with decent cover art and production values, it sets you apart. Really, if your book cover is made with Poser, or a stock photo with your title pasted onto it with MSPaint or something, you need to try harder. Yes, Virginia, you can pretty much judge a book by it's cover, that's why they have covers.

Will I go back? Hmm, good question. Louisville is not a bad drive for me and it's not stupid expensive to go and stay there for a weekend. And I believe in the people that were working this con and what they were trying to accomplish. I got treated pretty well for what little I asked for, and I got to be a "guest" so that was cool - I liked having a badge where fans just got a little wristband. Small thing but it helped, and the badges looked good too. There were a lot of problems, but I think next year when they start rolling out info for the next one we'll see that it's much improved. And I got to a little different area of the country (Kentucky's not the South, sorry, it's pretty much half Midwestern and half what I'd call Mountain States), so that's good for my exposure. I'll keep an eye on them for next year, leaning towards wanting to go.