Arguing with G.K. Chesterton on a Sunday Morning

It’s not the smartest thing to do at any time, but I’m not the smartest man. Still, consider the following:

G.K. Chesterton isn’t as well known a Christian apologist as C.S. Lewis, yet he was every bit the approachable and easygoing — yet uncompromising, and supremely knowledgeable — writer and philosopher we wish we all knew and hung out with. I always chuckle to think of these proud, obese slobs from one of my old schools with one or two divorces behind them who want to talk to this old apostate about Jesus like they would know anything about the subject. These blustering fools couldn’t spell Aquinas, let alone tell me who he was. It’s impressive enough if they can name all the books in the Protestant Bible.

With respect to the venerable Mr. Chesterton, the crux of my counter-argument is that no hero is ordinary to begin with. Our protagonist likely isn’t anyone’s idea of a hero at the beginning of the story, but a good writer makes it clear the potential is there. Sometimes our hero-in-waiting will have what German author Hermann Hesse once referred to as the Mark of Cain. That is to say, ordinary people will despise him on sight and treat him badly. If not that, he’s behind the metaphorical 8-ball one way or another.

Your ordinary person is a coward who folds in the face of conflict then goes around finding ways to justify his failure. It’s not uncharacteristic to imagine an ordinary person telling everyone afterward how he put that monster in his place. We live among these people. “Most people are garbage” is a cliche for a reason, because most people are. Of course, Nietzsche would have told you as much, and long since has.

Heroes engage and defeat (most of the time, and certainly not at first) the monster against the pressures of their own terror and feelings of inadequacy, and sometimes even the carping of the “good” ordinary people who wonder aloud why he’s picking on the poor, misunderstood monster. The hero only appears ordinary on the outside. But he’s an outsider from the git-go, and the good ordinary people often never let him forget it. It just takes that One Big Event on top of some smaller ones to tease out the heroism that truly defines him.

Ordinary people serve only two purposes to me. To antagonize my protagonist, and to die horribly when their beat comes ‘round.

Oh, but Chesterton is talking about “the modern psychological novel” versus the classic fairy story here. Do such things as psychological novels still exist? Frankly, I don’t need to know that badly.

But even Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk” fame was cursed for a fool for trading for the magic seeds that set him on his hero’s journey. Hansel and Gretel were special enough to be despised by their step-mother and proved resourceful in their circumstances even before they were captured by the old witch in the woods. I could go on. 

Heroes are outliers, always. Given that a lot of us feel like outsiders where we are (especially if we’re weirdos who actually read and stuff like that), these stories serve to inspire what heroics we may be called upon to do one day. Provided, of course, we’re not merely ordinary. 

There’s only one way to find out.

Random Thoughts on the Second Hottest Day of the Year

Friday was the worst. Let’s see how far I can get today before I have to shut down my computer because the room is too hot and the cooling fans are screaming.

For those scratching their heads at the header, I live in a part of the country where it gets uncomfortably hot for maybe two weeks out of the year. If I had the disposable income, I might install a swamp cooler (which, at our altitude, would work better than a standard air conditioner), but as when I lived in California, and 1,000 feet lower in Colorado Springs, it makes as much sense to open windows, run fans, and then close the windows and draw the curtains by 9 a.m.

Looking at the forecast, and going by my memory of how the seasons work after three years here in the central San Luis Valley, the worst is close to over. Saturday looked as if it were going to be second hottest day, but then a cold front tore through and rendered the day cool and unsettled until clearing by sundown. We won’t get such a break today, but we’re due for a couple of more classic July scorchers before the month is up and the temperatures begin slowly ratcheting down. As uncomfortable as it gets sometimes, I remind myself we’re three, maybe four weeks out from the leaves changing.

The year is slipping away.

Fade to bright yellow, then orange, then red, then black.

On the bright side, I’m getting a lot of writing done because the browser strains the processor in the heat. Word 2010 uses very little resources, even with a 259-page document open. So, no trawling for silly memes in my downtime. Heck, what downtime? I’ve got nothing else to do but write. It’s a beautiful thing.

An Encouragement of Surprises

Notes on stuff, thangs, since the last time it occurred to me to post something.

The days have blurred into weeks since I last posted. No one’s died this time around (thank God, and I’m not being funny), but I did get a surprising e-mail from Severed Press on 20 June. And by surprising, I mean I had to print it out and read it three times with my glasses to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating a notice for a three-digit royalty payment.

In keeping with my tradition of breaking up text with unrelated images, here’s an antique manure spreader on display amid flowers. Okay, so maybe not entirely unrelated....

It was a low three digits, hardly anyone’s idea of a weekly paycheck, let alone a quarterly royalty. Still, it’s the first of such size I’ve gotten in six years of having books for sale. That I’m getting royalties at all from Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead after six years is phenomenal in and of itself. When Severed Press published Bleeding Kansas in July 2013, I read somewhere the average e-book author sold 600 books and was good for maybe six months on the charts. I’ve tried to get stats since then, but, honestly, no one seems to really know.

The main thing is I’m still here. Also, I’ve sold a lot more than 600 books. The money has added up over the years, and if it still seems too little, too late for the countless hours of effort putting into creating both novels over the course of a year each, that’s not my problem. I’m happy to be alive and still in the game. Heck, I’d gone for 50 whole years wondering if I’d ever figure out how to write a novel. And here I am.

Still trying to get that perfect shot of these buttes and mountains. I like the details that reveal themselves when the light is muted just so.

A lot of people suffer from the delusion that the money just rolls in when you publish a book. If you’re of the top dozen or so name-brand authors selling off the racks at the airport, sure. Otherwise, you’d better learn to be happy with a couple of night’s beer money every three months. The big money doesn’t come until someone decides your book would make a fine movie or streaming television series. 

Naturally, this is all the more incentive to finish The Wrong Kind of Dead, the third and final book of my zombie post-apocalypse action-adventure series. For my part, I just want to finish it. I think of Samuel Johnson’s famous decree that “None but a blockhead wrote but for the money,” which I’ve always misinterpreted for the better. Realistically speaking, if you’re writing just for the money, you’re going to be disappointed. You’d better be doing this for the love of putting something together, whether it’s an imaginary world of heroes and villains or monsters or an ordinary political argument. You need to be in love with the craft.

A very blockheaded and cornball thing to say, I know. I also know a guy who got placed with a Big Name House, whose book got optioned for film. Life solved, problems over, right? I forget the precise details, but Big Name House screwed him over regarding publishing the rest of the books in his series. He’s back to shopping novels to indies, and though he’s still doing better than the thousands who throw in with the Great American Writer Sweepstakes every year, he’s not happy.

“My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.” —Bluto Blutarsky, Animal House.

I should also note this guy is also one of the thousands who is absolutely nothing without an editor. You can read any one of his several novels out there and you can tell which ones had someone coming in behind him to clean up his prose and force him to make sense. His general philosophy, like that of too many others, is that if the words are spelled correctly and the grammar more or less works, you’ve got a prose style.

He was in it to make money and get famous. Of course, if making money and getting famous is all you’re about, fine. I’m in no position to make moral judgments here. (That PayPal button is there for reasons.) What I’m saying is, if fame and fortune are your primary reasons for making up stories and selling them, you’ll be lucky to end up like this guy. Not everyone sells to the movies. Not everyone makes as much money as he did.

He did light-years better than most. Make no mistake. But he didn’t get filthy rich. He didn’t get famous. 

After decades of slogging away, he only grew older, and more and more embittered. 

So ends another morality play in...the Twilight Zone. And now the lesson is yours.

One should really take time to stop and smell the...what are those pale purply things, anway? They look like something from another world.

Meanwhile, yes, I’m running late—way, way late—on that third book. I’ve been wondering how to describe the difficulties I’ve encountered in the last five years. After wondering for a minute, I’m back to working through whatever those difficulties are in the novel itself.

Many thanks to everyone who purchased my books. I’m throwing everything I’ve got at the keyboard to make this last book worth the wait.

The Blue Porch Kitty Committee waits also. For kibble.