Making my escape from common law marriage from Portland to Seattle, James Chosen, master of Toby, the redoubtable, worthless, suburban, American Dog, rolled into “the colon” (Seattle) in Big Red, the “Urban Assault Vehicle,” a 1998 Ford 350! to pick me up. It turned out to be fortuitous for the Chosens that I was around. For grandchildren across the nation called for a visit, and Great Grandma Mary needed a nurse—not me.
The nurse is a nice, expert cook and housekeeper, an avid reader, who raises and trains farm dogs. Her husband is a general contractor who also runs a 25 acre farm in Northern California. Seeing me ditching in the rain just like her old man, made her want to cook me a meal, rather than watch me heat up canned meat. The lady is herself recovering from surgery and a car accident that wrecked her back. So I deal with the firewood and all outside chores. She has to cook sitting. So I bring and take things for her as she works up a delicious elk and beef Salisbury steak and onions meal.
“I hear you are a writer. I see you are such a good guest and a big help that you would be an ideal person to stay in the small cottage on our property. I always fancied it as a writer’s retreat. Jenn says you just finished a book, that you have written hundreds. Since you have written that many books, how are you not famous?
“Because my books don’t sell. I own the hundred worse selling titles on Amazon.”
“Couldn’t you advertise? I have a friend who writes mystery novels and she advertises on facebook, gets up a buzz and does very well when she self-publishes.”
“If I advertised I would have only written a handful of books, like that lady. I advertise nothing, have been blessed with hundreds of avid readers, dozens of readers who invite me to stay with them, and have seen so much of the country I never expected to see that I want to write about these places. If I write advertising, I don’t write but a book or two a year. I know a man who wrote one book [Sam Finlay] and has written for and about selling that book for ten years! I can barely stomach writing a dust cover. I have never been good about promoting anything, gave my cub scout raffle tickets to my brother to sell.”
“I understand, you have a drive to write something new, right?”
“Yes, I am a compulsive writer, a graphomaniac. I am giving the rest of my books away to grandchildren and young people to publish. I can’t even stomach wasting screen time on the publishing process. I just write.”
“That is so nice of you. Now, if someone was willing to advertise for you, do you have a book that you think would sell?”
“No, none.”
“Really, none?”
“I write American history, my best work, I think. But that cannot sell because I write about the facts, the “was,” not the fanciful “should have been.” Americans have been pre-programmed to reject actual, facts about the founding of this country in favor of wild fantasy. I would be the subject of a conservative/liberal witch hunt for promoting my best work. In fact, my Plantation America work, if promoted, might prove a means to heal the Blue & Red rift that divides this country.”
“Do you use swear words in your writing? If you do, remember your grandchildren will be reading it.”
“In nonfiction I quote actual speakers, people I interview. Since half of the American vocabulary consists of a handful of swear words, even though I fail to transcribe all of the bad words, to entirely redact them would be to operate in falsehood, to portray a man who cannot think out loud without the f-word as one who never uses it.”
“What about fiction, do you use bad language in fiction?”
“If I am writing fiction set in our time, about cops or military men who rarely utter a sentence without cussing, then I render the common characters as they are and try and insert a superior type, a cop that does not cuss, for instance, who all other cops will hate.”
“I understand, that seems right, but it will keep your work away from people who don’t like that language.”
“Exactly, young lady, like people that read, mostly women, who like things written as they should be rather than as they are.”
“What about murder mysteries?”
“I don’t like the genre. It is utopian. The killer is always found out, where in real life homicides are rarely closed.”
“You write about what you know then?”
“Yes, like boxing manuals for the least likely people to read anything. Ancient history. 70% of all history books sold in the U.S. Are on WWII, 20% Civil War and 10% the other five thousand years, where I operate, in the desert.”
“You wrote a lot about crime I take it? True crime is very popular on TV.”
“Yes it is. But TV true crime shows, which I have seen hundreds of, are all, all pro-police, always show police in a good light. In my work I have found police to be mostly criminals. So my crime writing, which focuses on urban blight, which is a downer, will be rejected by avid readers of the subject.”
“What book did you just finish?”
“Humanitarian Daily Ration, a science-fiction novel about abandoning the planet.”
“Oh?”
“And the title is too long.”
“So you have to write for men, like my husband.”
“Who probably reads Clancy, Cussler, Koontz and Patterson, maybe Ludlumn?”
“Yes.”
“That is the only genre that men read enough to make a living writing—horror is the only male/female shared genre—which is espionage, intrigue, technological adventure, spy craft, military trouble shooting—the kind of stuff that gets made into movies, which is the real money.”
“Do you write military novels?”
“Oh yes. I am currently beginning a series of seven novels beginning in 336 B.C. and ending in 322 about an obscure tribal military unit known as the Agrianes, who saw more action than any other body of fighting men in human history—and even military history buffs will turn up their nose at it, because the soldiers wear animal skins and throw little spears. You cannot have a war movie without explosions, even of an ancient war.”
She looked at me with sad eyes and I said, “I don’t write to sell, but to duplicate life in words for the good of some boy who is not even born yet, so that he might catch a glimmer of what was, rather than what should have been. In this world world of men, that is a sin.”
She smiled as she mixed her gravy in the iron skillet, “Then you sound like the perfect candidate for a work-to-rent cottage!”
…
The funny thing is, James Chosen, who makes my annual earning in 6 weeks, gets it, knows why I write. He knows what it is like to sell his soul doing good work for evil men so that his family can live outside of the Ring of Crime our masters have designed for us. Dudes with money seem to get me in an instant, the pauper writer. I have had four lawyers, five, buy me meals and patronize me as a kind of avatar of do-what-you-like rather than do-what-you-are-told. It is poor and middling folks that see writing as a one-shot jackpot, or as a career as a leading man of letters. The funny thing is, the pulp writer naturally makes no sense to pulp people.
