Why I Live in Colorado, for February 2018 Reasons

When the light is just so.

My wife sends me out for coffee. I drive up to the westside supermarket on a blustery midday Thursday, find the coffee, and oh-so-heroically don’t buy anything else but the coffee. (I returned the energy drink to its endcap fridge; another bad habit I’m giving up.) I drive back home—run upstairs, grab my camera, and go right back out. There was a curious clarity to the San Juan foothills and its environs on the western frontier of Monte Vista today. The high, thin strata that haunt the skies this time of year seemed slightly higher and more diffuse, and created an interesting ambient light.

So what does it look like where you go to the store to buy coffee?

This shot and the ones that follow are all due south of the Big R/Top Value Supermarket/ San Luis Valley Federal Bank complex, looking west across the pastures.

Most rural Colorado towns, and even Old Colorado City in west Colorado Springs, have their town blocks bisected by narrow dirt and gravel alleys. This is the one between Morris Street and Chico Camino, looking south from where I came.

A calendar shot if there ever was one.

Imagine you’re here in the days before permanent human settlement, wading through miles of this grass to the forbidding mountains beyond.

I lived alongside the Front Range in Colorado Springs for nine years, and as frustrated I would become with the cultural and infrastructural entropy there, I never got tired looking at Pikes Peak. Never. I had a view from the kitchen window, the living room windows, and the master bedroom window. There’s something about a mountain that never grows old.

It’s the same out here. I look around at these peaks on a range whose name I’ve forgotten (and is harder to Google than you’d think; the available topo maps being abbreviated and unhelpful) coming off the San Juans. I marvel once again how the land out here looks so different from the land three miles east on the opposite side of town. As the song goes, there’s a feeling I get when I look to the west. I can feel all the promise of Utah and Nevada and California right behind it all. Deserts and forests and mountains. Mountains all the way to the sea.

No, I can’t honestly say it “calls” me, or anything like that. I’m happy where I am. I’m happy everything is where it is. As for the east coast where I’m from, that belongs to the past. As a wise old Russian observed, the past is another country, and they do things differently there. I’m somewhere else because it’s better for me here. Nothing personal.

Well, okay, so it is, but no hard feelings. We’re all where we want to be.

The one shot I took of the complex, looking at it towards the northwest. Note the green utility box in the middle of the field. Parcels of land on this field are for sale for those who want to build with a view of the back end of a three-tenant complex to the north, and all those wide open spaces everywhere else.

Zoomed in halfway, the perspective is especially wacky here. The lightboard sign over US 160 W is warning motorists that they will need chains for Wolf Creek Pass half an hour down the road, and that oversized vehicles are prohibited. Don’t like the weather here? Take a drive 40 miles in either direction; you’re bound to run into a change.

The perspective works a little better pulled back here.

This shot just about says it all for west of Monte Vista. You see those strange, conical, teepee-shaped hills and mountains stretching off to the Rio Grande National Forest and the San Juan Mountains, and the traffic on US 160 stretching away another mile or so before it turns northwest towards Del Norte, 15 miles away.

Wide open spaces. They’re not for everyone, thank God.

Oh, and I forgot to mention—these shots were taken at the western edge of the parking lot of the bank.

So how’s the view from your bank’s parking lot?

I feel fortunate to have gotten all these shots, as it was so bright, along with chilly and blustery, I couldn’t see what was on the screen. I squinted at the vague shapes, squeezed the lens-clicky thing, and hoped for the best. Faith was rewarded.

Photos I took towards the beginning of this shoot seemed the most appropriate way to conclude this photo essay. I’m down by the edge of the grassy parcels behind the shopping and banking center, where the road ends...for now. One hopes this place doesn’t fill up with lousy little crackerbox modern construction, but give it a few decades.

For now, I love this barricade, and the empty, grassy spaces behind. I love that Jeep-sized trail leading off around the right edge of that barricade even more. It means something to me. Maybe it’ll mean something to you, too.

Soon.

All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

Blurbity Blurb Blurb, Your Logline So Fine

My D.I.Y. so fly. Or something.

Among the many chores requiring my attention in the run up to the release of The Wrong Kind of Dead and the simultaneous re-release of its companions, Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead, I need to shape up the back cover promo copy and punch up the loglines.

[To clarify: A logline is one sentence, no more than two, that sets the stage for your presentation. The best ones I know come from modern films. “In space, no one can hear you scream.” “Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water.” If you can come up with something like these for your book—and, like it or not, you must—you’re off to the races.]

I find that I’m a lot more critical of my stuff when it’s posted for public consumption. So here’s the back cover copy for the “digitally remastered” editions of my first two books. To clarify, these will not be released until the third book is released. However, the original editions are still available for your post-apocalyptic reading pleasure—and the digital editions should be updated when the Big Release comes. 

For Bleeding Kansas:

Derek Grace leaves his sick wife in Colorado Springs for a job interview in Kansas City. In a few short days, that nuisance of an early summer cold afflicting one-third of the population becomes the deadly Final Flu. As infrastructure falls to absenteeism, Grace finds himself miles from home, trapped between anxious police and National Guard, and all those Final Flu victims arising from their mass graves to attack the living. As he fights his way out, the long-unemployed Grace discovers a new skill set that serves him well in the New Weird Order. It’s a good thing, too, because the risen dead aren’t the only ones in his way. Only the strong will survive BLEEDING KANSAS.

Here’s the original from the 2013 first edition (the 2018 remaster will be the third):

If you have trouble reading the above, it’s probably for the best. I was thrown when my editor first asked me to write my own jacket copy. Like a lot of newbies, I fumed and fussed that I had to do the job the promotions departments of publishers used to do. This is an...unintelligent...thing to do for two reasons: 

1. It is what it is. If you’re an aspiring author, and you’re not well-connected in that upper middle class Real Artists’ Caste that’s always been with us, but in the last 30 years has been dropping the portcullises and raising the drawbridges against us peasants—you’re not getting published. They won’t even look at you. However, expressing anger and bitterness about it serves nothing but the continued amusement of the Big Publishing gatekeepers, while eliciting annoyed grunts and sighs from the rest, so...

2. Instead of being angry, be of good cheer, and especially grateful for this indie publishing revolution that allows us a platform that didn’t exist so many years ago. If it’s a little D.I.Y.-intensive, rejoice! Do you really trust a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears HR hires to promote you and your work with any understanding (let alone sympathy) of who you are and what your work means? These people are, for the most part, your generic common lazy slobs drawing breath and a paycheck. You’re doing your life’s work. Who can do this better?

I remember reading an interview with Gore Vidal around the turn of the century in which he was asked if he found writing fiction or non-fiction more difficult. “Writing is writing for writers,” he replied. “Others, I’m told, have problems.” 

Put more colloquially, “Is you or is you ain’t a writer?” Promo copy and the like should be no more difficult for you than writing the stuff you want to be rich and famous for.

With that rant put to bed (for now), I present the jacket copy for my 2018 digital remaster of Grace Among the Dead:

Returning from his Kansas adventure too late to save his wife and teenage children, Derek Grace loses himself in booze, books, pills, and the occasional killing spree among the undead. But then a stowaway and her fatal secret flush the Dead Silencer from hiding and into a busy post-apocalypse already in progress, where he must decide whether life is worth living when he’s already lost everything that matters. In the heart of darkest horror, you will find GRACE AMONG THE DEAD.

There’s more to the story than is mentioned in that short paragraph, and I bring the best of all that together with a secondary logline, “A Tale of Love, Redemption, the Living Dead and a Monster Truck,” which informs potential readers that the book isn’t going to be all gloom and misery. And having written that out, I realize I should come up with a logline independent of the titles of the other two books. Those loglines make great title banners over the cover copy, as seen in my primitive attempt here:

 
As you can see, there’s not much change from the above cover copy. The layout needs improvement, so I’m changing some words around so they will fit. 

The idea that eyes other than mine might be looking at these things is a great motivator. Given where I am on the learning curve here, I’m grateful I don’t have a huge audience for this blog. Yet.

My third and final book in the SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER series is coming along, and it helps to have good jacket copy over the desk to maintain focus. But is this good jacket copy? I’ll have to look at this again. And then a few more times...I don’t like that I have it sectioned, but this is a bigger, far more complicated book than I have ever written. Like all the jacket copy before, it doesn’t even cover half of what’s going on, just one big narrative thread running through the novel. 

One year has passed since the dead climbed from their graves to feast on the flesh of the living. Having consumed nearly every living thing that walks, creeps, or crawls in the cities, even the mountain to which Derek Grace and his community have retreated becomes a killing floor as millions of walking corpses fan out into the countryside in search of food.

What if, in the midst of escalating chaos, you could go back to the way things were? When all you needed was a job so you could have a place to stay and accumulate stuff, watch TV, surf the Internet? To go about your business without fear of bandits, wannabe warlords, or hordes of cannibal corpses?

The Redoubts, fortified oases of modern civilization in the remotest rural areas of North America, offer all of this and more. As Derek Grace and his family learn, though, there are no safe spaces. Don’t get caught among THE WRONG KIND OF DEAD.

A secondary logline for this—certainly not the logline—goes, “The Numbers Are Against Us.” It’s an apt refutation of the hubris of the Redoubts rulers, but a little too generic. On the other hand, I have no other logline for Bleeding Kansas, either. Nothing is jumping out at me at the moment.

So, let’s close with a few promo images, post this, and check back from time to time for further inspiration.