The Dead of September

What a delightfully ironic title, a beautiful jumping-off point! Quick, while it still seems like a good idea....

And so we enter into that final third of the year I call the Chute. Labor Day is at the top of the slide. New Year’s Day and the gray abyss of January and February are at the bottom. It’s the most happening part of the year, the one we spent the other two-thirds climbing up from. The oppressive heat of summer is easing. School is back in session, and the excitement of high school football beneath the Friday night lights—the only form of America’s best sport worth watching—is in the air. There’s also professional football and college ball if you’re into that. 

Thank God for artist Evelyn Sprouse-Rowe and her tireless attention to the glass surfaces of the San Luis Valley.

Of course, Halloween, and more Halloween, until, finally, it’s Halloween. The memes about pumpkin spice this, that, and the other began showing up on my Facebook timeline as early as three weeks ago. With some effort, you can shoehorn some autumn in between Halloween and Thanksgiving before Christmas overwhelms everything—and then abruptly leaves us alone in the gray, freezing gloom.

Ironically, Old Spice still smells lively and fresh after all these years.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s an old complaint of mine, brought up by my perception of the year having moved way too fast. We’ll lay it to rest here. No, really. This is it. 

So what’s up? Well, it was a busy month with my novel in progress, The Wrong Kind of Dead....

Big weekend in Tater Town. Our spuds were coffee’d up and ready to roll.

I’ve been trying all summer long to describe what I’ve been doing. Frankly, I feared people would freak when they learned I’d stopped forward progress at Chapter 25, page 221, to go back and rewrite Chapters 2 and 5.

What happened was I’d realized my supporting cast had no supporting background to justify any kind of emotional reaction to what I had coming next. My flashback in Chapter 5 describing How Agnes Met Elyssa and Later Went On To Meet Derek was too lightly sketched, and did nothing to promote a proper understanding of their relationships to one another. 

While Agnes is a Frankensteinian creation of pieces of six women I’ve known across the years who somehow came to life one night in my Colorado Springs basement office, Elyssa was her Manic Pixie Dream Teen Sidekick with a Dark Side. This was entertaining enough to get her through that last part of Grace Among the Dead, where she and Agnes appeared midway through to complicate the Dead Silencer’s life. But the fact remained that I somehow had a 19-year-old woman overseeing the affairs of the camp’s women, many of whom were older. Even Brother Christopher, Derek Grace’s taciturn, no-nonsense 20-year-old in charge of the camp’s young men, defers to this slender girl not yet out of her teens. How does that happen?

Elyssa Marie Godwin had to make her bones and the people around her have to know about it. Therein hangs the saga of an older sister and dutiful daughter who didn’t mind taking care of the people in her life, but wished she wasn’t taken for granted. Who was slightly more mature than her peers for what her circumstances forced her into, and took a dim view of the usual teenage tomfoolery, but was tolerant. Perhaps too tolerant. Elyssa used to put up with a lot. This was the world she lived in, these were the people of that world. What else could she do?

Then that world ended in blood and horror and Elyssa was alone. She met a woman 16 years older who still had people she was responsible for, but was alone, all the same—and doing what she could on her terms as best she could in a world always working against her. My 19-year-old semi-outsider who spent her senior year of high school online so she could take care of her injured mother, now had someone to model herself on. 

The New Weird Order is ugly and mean, but she is not taken for granted. Here, she means something to the people who mean something to her. Elyssa hates and fears the living dead to the extent she prefers Agnes and Derek to do the fighting, yet she loves where she’s at what she does in a way she never knew possible in her old life. This love makes her fierce, and earns the reverence of those around her.

My wife made this. If I were to do this over again I’d have Agnes’ hair up and her big, owlish driving glasses on. In all the stories I’ve written over the years I generally avoided even thinking about what my characters looked like. Now I have to know how tall they are, their favored manner of dress, all that jazz, even if I don’t mention it outright in the narrative

Of course, show don’t tell, and all that. So I’m breaking my rule of no chapters over 10-12 pages long five-fold by showing how Elyssa comes into her own. Before one wonders if I’m getting a little too far into The Talking Too Much Dead territory, I remind the reader that the reputation Elyssa makes for herself is during the fall of civilization at the cold dead hands of the risen dead. I have an opportunity to do two things absolutely necessary for a superior zombie post-apocalypse reading experience.

First, I’m taking the opportunity to tell a tale of the fall of civilization before the hordes of the living dead. This was what Fear the Walking Dead was supposed to be about until it went off the rails by the third or fourth episode. It’s a hard fact of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, whether it’s zombies or nukes or an alien invasion, that the most interesting parts of all that are when everything familiar begins falling apart. 

At best, it’s done slowly. You notice little things out of order. Awful things happening all around you getting ignored, then downplayed by the media. The military is moving large amounts of materiel from their bases. Some personnel disappear under new orders, others are left behind, others who had separated from the military are called back into service—for mass burial duty. Which goes wrong.

And then it’s a matter of sitting around waiting for the power to go out. You know it’s going out, and that when it goes out it’s going out for the last time. This is while you’re waiting for whomever shows first, the living dead hungry for your living flesh, or roving gangs of the living seeking that and everything else.

Secondly, I’m establishing characters with history and personality whom we will get upset for should anything happen to them. That’s all.

Imagine all this with no people. Just random dead lying under cars or squatting behind corners looking to grab your ankle and pull it into its mouth. That car coming down the road? Marauders. If you can’t escape or hold them off, be sure to save your last bullets or grenade to take you and your people out, because it will be a most prolonged and painful end for all if you’re captured.

For my part, I’m enjoying writing about women trying to make their way in world that’s become seriously, no-kidding-this-time hostile to their freedoms. This is my chance to show the pinch-faced ideologues how it’s done. As in, “with heart,” which is something such people don’t have, so they won’t understand it. It’ll just be loads of fun watching their heads explode when Agnes and Elyssa emerge as heroes all the more-or-less happy, well-adjusted people of both sexes enjoy, because these ladies aren’t doing anything to prove anything in the name of anything. They’re just getting by the best they can until they reach Abundant Life, and meet Brother Christopher and his crew, and eventually Derek Grace.

Craziest of all for me is writing in third person past tense as opposed to my usual first person present. It’s a sweet shift of gears, although I still don’t understand the problems people have with the most common (because effective) setup for action-adventure stories.

Anyway, I’m almost through this, and doing minimal edits along the way so I can get back to Chapter 25 and start the process towards everyone’s Darkest Hour. Who will survive? I can’t tell you, only that I intend it to hurt when the person that falls, falls.

It’s okay, he’s just looking for...food.

  

The August of Farewells

So many things came to an end in one month, one-half century ago.

It is impossible to overstate how much changed in global popular culture between 9 February 1964 when The Beatles first appeared on U.S. television and 22 August 1969, when that same band, looking like they’d aged ten years instead of five, posed for their last publicity photos. Styles of hair and dress that would have been unthinkable in the U.S. around the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination had become commonplace, and would get even stranger in the succeeding decades.

I would later learn the band was indeed all together in one room the following month holding contentious meetings, from which John Lennon eventually walked away. The exact last day is unknown, only that it was sometime between 15-19 September. The story is here, but for my purposes, I’ll count The Very Last Day of The Beatles as 22 August.

You see it in their faces. They had just put their final album to bed two days before. Few people realized how utterly final Abbey Road was; Let It Be, the “new phase Beatles album” was the salvaging of an aborted project the winter before. When they had crossed the street for its iconic cover on the 8th, recording engineer Geoff Emerick noted that the chosen shot was of them walking away from EMI Studios. They were done.

The world’s first superstar rock band was finished in time for the leaves to start changing, before the new decade brought its numerous fads and fashions of music and dress, from earnest long-haired singer-songwriters to spangly dressed disco divas to spiky-haired punks. More than a mere “dream” was over. It was the end of a five and one-half year-long era that changed nearly everything.

No one seemed to know it at the time, though, not even The Beatles themselves. It’s poignant to note that no one thought to call it over until April 1970 when Paul answered in the negative to a question in a promotional interview for his solo album regarding whether he would consider working with John Lennon again. To be fair, by 22 August 1969, maybe only Ringo could imagine them all together in the studio again. 

It had been a long, intense ride since their days as teenagers taking the bus to wherever they needed to go in Liverpool. Now they were almost 30. It was ending sometime. It may not have ended well, but half a century down the road it’s apparent it ended when it had to.

The last photo of them all together, ever. I’ve noted this before, but it’s interesting that the two now long-deceased ones are the ones looking away at something else.

I smile to think that, as a teenager in the far more creatively and culturally diverse 1970s (thanks to the 1960s, mind you), my two biggest wishes were for The Beatles to get back together and for new episodes of a revived Star Trek. Thank God neither happened. These core bits of what would eventually become worn-out, chewed-over, flavorless franchises ended when they had to. And their endings marked the end of the beginning of whatever it was that’s led us here.

To mash things up a bit. I don’t know who made this, but my hat’s off and my glass is raised.

On what was either 26 August or the day after Labor, the last re-run of the original Star Trek was broadcast on U.S. network television. I haven’t been able to find precise listings for those specific months, but the last month of summer seems a fitting month to consider that all over. I wonder what famously cringe-inducing third season episode repeated that Tuesday night. The struggling sci-fi TV show that would eventually become a huge franchise over ten years later died with a whimpering of embarrassingly awful scripts and dinner theater budgeting amid a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

I note the passage of Star Trek on network TV primarily because it marked the ignoble end of an era of imaginative television that encompassed The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Wild, Wild West, Irwin Allen’s sci-fi shows, et al. Television might get more “sophisticated” in the 1970s with urban sitcoms and Norman Lear’s reworkings of BBC shows, but it would never have the sense of weird, wacky, good-natured fun one got from most television in the 1960s.

James Bama’s 1966 promotional art, featuring
a “pulp” aesthetic impossible to imagine for anything
in the 1970s, save for that movie that came out
in May 1977. Even that original Star Wars was one of a
kind in that regard, and, like Trek, it never replicated
that original excitement. Yes, “inb4 Empire Strikes Back,”
my favorite movie, but you can’t imagine what it was
like seeing that first one after so many dark and
depressing things between 1970 and 1977.

Star Trek is oft praised for its presumably rare optimism about the future, but it was far from the only television show expressing that. The Robinsons may have been Lost in Space, but they were having a good time. Admiral Nelson’s and Captain Crane’s Seaview dealt decisively with whatever rubber-suit strangeness it came against in their Voyage to the Bottom of Sea. Any darkness and back-stabbing intrigue were the work of foreign agents, but the good guys always triumphed. There was none of the cynicism you saw, say, exactly ten years later in the movie Alien. Captain Kirk may have directly disobeyed Starfleet on occasion, but only on very special occasions, because Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets were honorable organizations.

By August 1969, all that, too, had passed. Passing with it was an make-do/can-do aesthetic of filming television sci-fi that required the viewer to meet the set designers and effects people halfway. For all the remakes and rehashes and re-imaginings to come, this particular flavor of magic would never spark again.

It couldn’t. The very environment which had spawned it had changed. The world of August 1969 was markedly different from the world of August 1968, which in turn was markedly different from August 1966. You get the idea.

As with The Beatles one-half century later, it’s impossible to imagine new episodes of original Star Trek sallying on into 1970. Even as the show’s popularity exploded during the show’s syndication in the following decade, those original 79 episodes were all she wrote. There would be no more because there could be no more.

I’d have preferred the standard flyaway shot into the generic void from the original effects but I must admit this final shot made especially for the “Turnabout Intruder” remaster, in honor of the last original Star Trek episode, is nicer.

Somewhere in the middle of all that a thing called Woodstock happened. It was a music festival that the promoters lost all control over (and quite a bit of money) that marked the high-water mark of the hippie scene. The band lineup was a Who’s Who of those whose stars would rise with the next decade as well as those who would soon pass into memory.

Truth be told, there really isn’t much to say about Woodstock except that it was a music festival that marked the beginning of many music festivals to come, much better managed and far more tightly controlled. When Woodstock happened—and for maybe four or five more years, when disco would put that lie to rest—people believed that Music Can Change the World. Oh, the insane, blank-eyed naivete of it all!

The generation everyone loves to hate when they’re not hating on Millennials. Most of it’s well-earned, I’ll grant that.

Looking back, though, it’s easy to see how people came to feel that way. The new pop music, with its new sounds and arrangements, if it aggravated and terrified the oldsters so much, it had to be doing something right. And speaking as an old duffer who remembers those old duffers of the past—I’m here to tell all you New Traditionalists out there who want to revive the old architecture and mores of days gone by, people threw all that good old stuff to the wayside because no one gave them any reasons to hang onto it other than, “‘Cause I’m yer elder, and I done told you so! Now turn that dang noise off and git back to wuck!”

And then our wise elders sent our jobs overseas. The jobs they couldn’t send overseas, they depressed the wages on by bringing people into the U.S. to work. But they got a handle on controlling—and milking—large crowds for music festivals. So there’s that.

And the music, well, whatever you’re into, it’s something to just get you through your day, however that’s going.

Hendrix was one of those you wondered how he would have turned out had he lived. Jim Morrison and The Doors were clearly finished after L.A. Woman, but Hendrix might have made a career clear through the 1970s for his tremendous talent and willingness to explore.

This isn’t so much an exercise in nostalgia as it is noting that, for one narrow window of time within one numerical decade that happened to coincide with The Beatles’ U.S. television debut in 1964 and their dissolution in 1969, a lot came and went. Much was changed forever. Network television went from broadcasting in black-and-white to color, for one. For a fun exercise, consider all the popular television shows that came and went. Some of the best remembered ones, e.g., The Munsters, The Addams Family, Batman, barely lasted two seasons. There was the spy craze, the “camp” fad, all those sci-fi shows. The movies from that time frame are another thread altogether.

Few people seem to remember what a big deal it was for a man to wear his hair any longer than a buzzcut. “Izzat a man or a woman, I cain’t tell! Hyuck!” By 1970, a few brave souls were sporting locks over their ears. I still remember seeing grown men losing their composure at the sound of the most anodyne pop songs on the radio up until 1978.  But everyone else knew at the time these old men were just ridiculous. They were on their way out, thank God, and not a minute too soon.

There was actually a time when the music one listened to and how you wore your hair was a political statement, much like the U.S. flag decals in the curve of the lower left rear windshield that said at once, “I support the war in Vietnam because @#$% communists and you stupid longhair hippies, too.” The sides were squaring off, between the Establishment-worshiping squares and everyone else who was sick of being yelled at by blustering, authoritarian old fools with more skeletons in their closets than clothes.

I’m old enough to remember when wearing an American flag on the butt-pocket of your jeans was an invitation to fight you some PATE-tree-otic Amurricans who didn’t cotton to no disrespect to the ol’ Red, White, and Blue, no sir! Up until about 1974, but that’s just me. And, yes, these same people would be scandalized by the above image. Pornography! On one hand, I could see where they were coming from. On the other, what a sadly skewed sense of priorities. That’s why that attitude died out.

August 1969, as The Beatles wound up their last full-band recording sessions and posed for one last set of publicity shots, as the last of the Star Trek third season reruns broadcast on NBC, as The Who played the entirety of Tommy for their largest audience so far and Jimi Hendrix redefined the “Star Spangled Banner” for a generation defined by electric guitar... fifty years ago was the end of the beginning. 

If people keep coming back to all this, it’s because there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot else as gobsmackingly original since. Most of your all-time greats of anything are one-offs, and these just happened to one-off all at once. 

It’s nobody’s fault, really. Just the way things happened. It is what it was.

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.