The End of Eternity

                Hundreds of millions of people have ideas for novels.  Millions make an attempt at writing one, and tens of thousands finish it every year.  By most industry estimates, about 1 in 200 completed and actively marketed novels make it into print with a mass-market publisher.  Some larger percentage are “self-published.”

                My first novel, Axis of Eternity, failed to make the cut.  The last reasonable prospect of publication died this week.  This brought an end to a 25-month process that included six full-draft revisions and over a dozen smaller iterations of the book, including a full switch from first to third person, 120 individually-researched queries to small publishers and literary agents, participation in four online twitter pitch events, and the creation of the author site you’re now reading.  It was a long and arduous journey that taught me a lot about what it means to be an author; specifically, it taught me that being an author in this era is a very different proposition than being a writer.

                                                                      ***

                I’ve discussed some of the marketing successes and failures of the book here before.  The final numbers bear out that I’m better at writing than I am at selling my writing.  Query letters are a weird beast.  The writer is expected to hook the agent/publisher in a quick pitch, which is essentially what would be on the back of the book jacket; on the basis of this and a couple of sample chapters, the agent or publisher either asks to see more, sends a polite form rejection, or pretends not to have read it (the industry standard is “no response means no”).  My 120 queries ended up producing 10 requests to read the full text.  This is a poor request rate by any standard, though it improved in the later stages of the process as I improved in the art of the query.  I recognize that the publishing industry needs gatekeepers, but I can’t say I enjoyed singing for my supper in this manner; it's a weird little game in which every agent wants something slightly different and pitched to their own personal quirks.  My recent forays into short fiction revealed that selling a short story is a far more direct process in which a universal standard predominates; it felt more professional.

                Ten industry professionals read either all or a substantial portion of Axis before rejecting it.  With the exception one highly respected agent who asked to see the whole thing and then never wrote back, everyone was a big fan of my line-by-line writing skills.  The virtually unanimous sentiment, however, was that the plot of the book was not sufficiently engaging, especially in the early chapters, to hold the readers' interest.  That’s a problem, and the consensus was too broad for me to dismiss it out of hand.  My book might be boring.

Even loving my work as I do, I think I can understand the complaint.  I’ve created an unusually complicated narrative in which the protagonist is effectively an amnesiac who’s searching for his identity, which can make him hard for readers to relate to.  The rules the book establishes for life and death in a postmortal world are complex and have to be established in detail in order for the plot to make sense, so the early chapters are heavy on world-building.  I struggled for a long time to create a character with whom female readers could identify, and even the much-improved Emily of my latest drafts doesn’t provide the romantic hook that’s become ubiquitous in modern teen fiction—her relationship with the (not terribly attractive) male lead is more of a study in how teen relationships fail than an escapist fantasy about how they might succeed.

                Axis of Eternity is a book that’s intended to make teen readers uncomfortable instead of comfortable, and it’s a book that takes the intelligence of its audience very seriously.  It is a book that rewards reflection and patience.  If a reader were to call it boring, I couldn’t say they were objectively wrong—and that’s a risk a YA author can’t run if they want to get published.  Make no mistake, I don’t find it boring.  15-year-old me would have loved it.  But 15-year-old me was a weird little dude, and I can’t fault publishers and agents for thinking there weren’t enough kids like him around to make this a project worth taking on.

                The closest I came to getting over the hump was an extended interaction with a small Texas publisher who’ve published some of my shorter work.  They offered two revise and resubmit requests with a number of specific tweaks, some of which greatly improved the novel and some of which I think it’s better off without.  I recrafted to their specifications in every instance.  Ultimately they couldn’t offer a contract because they feared a backlash by conservative Christians, whom they felt would find the book’s reformulation of Judeo-Christian mythology disconcerting.  This, they feared, would jeopardize the school outreach which was their principal sales vector.  I have to say that this is a rejection I was proud to read.  I don’t think any serious Christian is going to have much of a problem with the book, but if unserious Christians—which is to say, people who haven’t put some work into intellectual justification of their faith--find it challenges their dogma, then the book is doing what I want it to do.  I was pleased to work with this publisher, even if I couldn’t seal the deal, and I’m glad our relations remain cordial.

                                                                     ***

            So what did I learn from these two years of Eternity? 

I learned how much the hook matters—that being a good writer is not enough, that there’s got to be something in the first few pages that’s utterly extraordinary, something that makes teenagers feel compelled to take the plunge. 

I learned that it’s best to subvert only one trope at a time—that the reader will follow you to some strange places, but only if there’s a lifeline back to the familiar. 

I love complexity, but I learned that I need to use it sparingly, the way a cook uses spices, rather than to make it the main ingredient.

I learned that there’s a lot of difference in quality and professionalism among literary agents, and that the ones with the best reputations and client lists are not always the ones with whom a new author would want to work.  I learned that some of the best agents out there are the ones on their way up, and I suspect an up-and-coming writer would do well to hitch himself to one of their stars.

I learned that most successful literary agents treat online pitch events as a dumpster dive.  But I also learned that not every good agent is successful, and that there’s some quality stuff in dumpsters if you’re willing to dig for it.  I’m not above being part of that scene, not by a long shot.

I learned that I’m much more effective when my work is able to speak for itself—as is the case with my short stories--than when I’m trying to sell it by describing it.  I don’t suspect I’ll ever be a good enough marketer to be a really successful novelist.  A good novelist STARTS with a salable premise; I didn’t, and one never emerged.  I write out of passion for an idea.  My passions are different from those of the mass market.  That’s a problem.  Finding my niche will take some doing.

I learned to put the action up front in YA.  And in the middle as well.  And at the end.  And in the spaces in between.  More kissing and more impalements next time.

I learned just how thick a guy’s skin has to be to get anywhere as a writer.  I have never experienced serial rejection at this level before.

I learned that my talent is not incandescent—that I might be good, but I’m certainly not good enough to make it as a writer without outworking an awful lot of other people.  A writer has to be both lucky and good; I have to work to be good enough that when I become lucky, I can make it matter.

I learned a great deal about the manufacture of crossbows.

And I learned that failure can be fun.  I didn’t do as well with this novel as I thought I would, but I did have an exceedingly productive and enjoyable midlife crisis.  The hours (and hours and hours) that I poured into this escapade could have been (and would have been) spent on less worthwhile pursuits.  And I came away with some nice consolation prizes, including a number of published short stories and more in the works.  I’ve got a framework to work from should I decide to try again.  It could well be that next summer I’ll be putting you through all of this again with Silvertongue:  A Tale of Voluntary Human Extinction.

***

As for Axis of Eternity, well…I’ve put all of you through way too much blather about it not to let you read it at this point.  If you’ve been patient enough to bear with me through all of this, I’m certain you’re patient enough to handle the book itself.

So here’s how this will work.  This Sunday, I’ll post the first five chapters of Axis of Eternity.  Every Sunday following, I’ll add an installment, a chapter or two at a time.  If you like what you’re reading, tell a friend.  Preferably a young adult friend.  If you don’t like what you’re reading, tell a friend about something else.  We'll see what happens.  One way or another, the book will exist in a form that kids can read it.  One might even call it "published," for a given value of the word.

It’s THE BOOK THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ!  Soon, you’ll be able to decide for yourself whether you share their judgment.

          I am at peace with the outcome.  Because Axis of Eternity's major lesson was always that death, like life, is what you make of it.

         Sing it, Leonard.

I, SJW

I want to talk briefly about the acronym “SJW”, or “Social Justice Warrior”.  It’s a pejorative that’s now commonly applied in online discussions to a specific type of political progressive.  I wish it wasn’t.

We’ll start by discussing what social justice is.  The Platonic definition of justice is “…to give every man his due.”  Social justice is the application of that principle in social settings.  That’s what it is.  That’s ALL it is.

Social justice requires, at a basic level, that a person’s circumstances be the result of their own merit, or lack thereof.  If a person’s actions are meritorious but factors unrelated to those actions result in that individual suffering a bad outcome, that is unjust:  for instance, a person who is qualified for an opportunity but who is denied it based on skin color or gender.   If a person’s actions are objectively bad but factors unrelated to those actions result in that individual achieving a good outcome, that too is unjust:  for instance, a person who breaks the law but obtains immunity from legal consequences due to wealth, social status, or for some other reason.

Again:  that’s ALL social justice is, at least at an objective, definitional level.  It seems to me that the basic principles of social justice are uncontroversial.  I don’t know that there are many people on the American political spectrum who would disagree with the statements above.

Of course, the term “social justice” has been appropriated by specific religious and political traditions. It has become one of those words like, “discrimination” or “Puritanical,” the denotative meaning of which has been completely eclipsed by the connotative.  Social justice does not, in and of itself, require that all people be guaranteed a specific outcome or minimal lifestyle.  Social justice does not, in and of itself, require mechanisms such as income redistribution or affirmative action.  These are matters that are legitimately debatable by people of good will who share social justice as a goal.  But let us be honest:  those individuals who oppose social engineering have largely absented themselves from discussions concerning “social justice.”  As the right has generally appropriated terms like “family values” and “patriotism” for itself, the left has appropriated “social justice.”  It is now thought of as shorthand for a specific set of progressive policy interventions.

Now cometh the Internet, its atmosphere of anonymity and insulation from consequence polluting everything it touches.  There has arisen a tradition of describing a specific breed of left-wing discussant a Social Justice Warrior, or SJW.  As best I can tell, the SJW is alleged to have six specific characteristics:

1.  An exclusive concern for the welfare of members of a specific subset of disadvantaged groups, including women, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ individuals, and members of ethnic and religious minorities; and an absence of concern with abuses of power perpetrated by members of those groups on those occasions when such power is acquired

2.  An eagerness to police the language of other commentators

3.  A general belief that those who disagree do so through either through willful ignorance or as the result of a hidden agenda, which the individual in question may either be aware of but deliberately concealing, or which the individual may be blind to due to cultural conditioning; in either case this is viewed as sufficient reason to dismiss the opponent’s arguments, even without refuting them.

4.  A sort of college-sophomore preening in which dogma substitutes for argument and in which familiarity with postmodern buzzwords substitutes for intelligence, often accompanied by demands that an opponent "educate yourself!"

5.  A general tone of moral superiority, which the commenter acquires through ideological fidelity rather than through concrete actions in the real world; a general elevation of ideology over action

6.  False modesty and fake self-criticism, for instance:  A white person entitling a post “here’s what’s wrong with white people” while describing a set of behaviors or ideological characteristics that don’t apply to the commentator or members of his/her in-group.  This is discussed in some detail in what I still consider to be one of the greatest things ever to be published on the internet.

Do SJWs exist?  Suffice it to say that I read that list and I find myself thinking of a few particular names.  Political sites have discovered that the Outrage Economy is a primary driver of ad revenue, and articles of that sort draw SJWs and their deadly enemies like flies to a manure pile.  Of particular interest are left-wing and feminist fora in which these sorts of commentators predominate; deprived of right-wing targets of opportunity, they turn on one another, seeking increasingly fine distinctions about which to rip out one another’s throats.  There’s nothing like the cacophony that occurs when people scream in an echo chamber.  Of course, that’s not a problem that’s exclusive to the left; I direct your attention to the Republican Presidential primaries, or to more or less any meeting of more than two libertarians that lasts for more than fifteen minutes.

Look:  I get it.  I understand the complaint.  I recognize the stereotype and that it is not without a basis.  But I don’t think that people who start slinging the term “SJW” around whenever they hear a perspective they don’t care for are doing themselves any favors.  And at the risk of being guilty of SJW trait #2 above, I’d like to propose that we abandon the term entirely.

For starters, the SJW stereotype falls afoul of the same problem all stereotypes do:  it’s intellectually lazy.  It assumes that a person who possesses one characteristic must possess a whole range of associated characteristics, which is untrue.  There are progressives who concern themselves exclusively with misbehavior by socially “dominant” groups who nonetheless believe that their opponents are arguing from sincere premises.  There are language cops who thoroughly understand the arguments behind reshaping discourse instead of relying on dogma.  It’s unwise to make assumptions about your argumentative adversaries based on categories you put them in; they’ll wrong-foot you and you’ll look stupid.  And if you happen to be one of those rare unicorns of the internet—a person who engages in discussion in the hope of achieving common understanding, rather than to wave your dick around—then making false assumptions about other discussants will ruin any hope you have of making progress.  Trait #3 of the SJW is their belief that they can read your mind; if you dislike that, you probably shouldn’t presume you can read theirs.

Moreover, let’s be frank:  the sins of the SJW are by no means confined to progressives.  Parroting the phrase “white privilege” or “cultural appropriation” is not a substitute for an argument, but “pre-9-11 mindset” or “nanny state” don’t qualify as superior.  Loving God, or America, or liberty, don’t grant you any more of a sanction to fluff your moral feathers than tweeting #BlackLivesMatter; until you act meaningfully on your convictions (and no, internet discussions DO NOT QUALIFY) you’re still as much of a slacktivist as the worst SJW you know.  “America Doomed” is no more sincere or honorable a form of self-abasement than “White Men Suck”.

As an educator, I deal regularly with the new obsession over “bullying”.  Whenever the term is discussed, people are willing to talk about things they’ve SEEN.  Utterly absent from the discussion is people talking about what they’ve DONE.  Everyone agrees that bullying is bad—and because it’s bad, bad people do it.  I am not a bad person, ergo what I do cannot be bullying.  It is easy to criticize people, because when we point the finger at someone else, it absolves us.  It is harder to criticize behaviors, because when we do that, we have to hold ourselves to account for our own actions.  Each of the six characteristics of the SJW which I list above is richly worthy of rejection.  But we will always have more control over our own behavior than that of other people, so it will always be more constructive to police ourselves than to criticize others.  When your own ideology comes under fire, do you act like an SJW?  What will you do to change that?

But I think the best reason to leave the term SJW behind is that it concedes SJ to the Ws.  It implies, in some subliminal way, that to go to war for the principle of social justice is a bad thing.  I find this unfathomable and unnecessary.  Arguments about the nature of social justice should not and cannot be the exclusive domain of political progressives.  If social justice means that we give every person what he or she is due, then justice must by definition be individualized, that it must stem from the behaviors of a single human person.  This, in turn, means that justice cannot be applied in categorical terms to groups of people.  Black people collectively deserve nothing.  White people collectively deserve nothing.  Black individuals and white individuals are due justice, pleasant or unpleasant, according to the nature of their actions and the content of their character.  To wish positive consequences on an individual because people like him have been historically oppressed, or to wish negative consequences on a person because people like her have been historically dominant, is to fail the principle of social justice.  This strikes me as a fundamentally conservative argument.  It seems to me that it might suit conservatives to actually, you know, make it, as opposed to spouting an acronym.

There are wars worth fighting.  The war for social justice is among them.  There are tactics that are out of bounds in any war; that, too, is worth recognizing.  So let’s make this a fight about the tactics, not about the term.

The Road Goes Ever On And On...

I've been away for a while, so it's time for a project update!

As I've recently noted, and as the "Published Works" column off there on the right side indicates, THUMP DUMPS A CHUMP, my foray into blaxploitation fiction, dropped in the July issue of Fabula Argentea.  "Thump" has always been my "wild child," but early indications are that my professional concerns were misplaced.  The story has been very well received (and, judging by the hit count, reasonably widely read); those who've disliked it have maintained a decorous silence, and I haven't been fired yet.  Welcome aboard, by the way, to those of you who are reading this blog due to the editors' redirect at the conclusion of that story; where this blog is concerned, you may expect infrequent updates, preposterous narcissism, and way too many semicolons.  "Thump" is by a fair margin the edgiest thing I've written or will write for some time.  I enjoyed putting it together and remain astonished that anyone was willing to pay me for it.

THE COMMANDER, a short story about a Congolese child soldier, will be published in A Thousand Words For War, a young adult anthology from CBAY books.  The tentative date of publication is April 2016, and you can certainly expect me to be on hype duty for the book as the deadline approaches, both on this blog and elsewhere in social media.  "The Commander" is my "good" child, a very mainstream and accessible piece of work that's heavy on voice and featuring a twist that Yann Martel fans may find familiar.  Of all my work, it wins for "most likely to work as a prose piece in high school forensics."  Those of you who feel that what the literary world really needed was another white guy's take on what it means to be African should watch this space in the months ahead.

DON is my weird kid and probably has the most upside of any of the bunch.  It's best described as a Lovecraftian take on Don Quixote (the windmills shot first!).  There's a fair amount of detail regarding climate science and renewable energy technology involved, so it might pass for hard sci-fi under the right lighting.  The story's biggest problem, in my opinion, is that the source material isn't universally known; it reads MUCH better for people who've read Don Quixote (or who have at minimum seen "Man of La Mancha") than for those who haven't, and I don't know that hard SF is full of those folks.  Be that as it may, I've aimed very high market-wise; "Don" is making the rounds of submissions to cutting-edge periodicals with wide print circulations and which produce Hugo and Nebula nominees.  The downside of that approach is that there's a lot of waiting involved; almost all journals in that echelon demand exclusive submission and some of them take up to four months to review work.  We'll see what happens.

AXIS OF ETERNITY is of course my firstborn and the reason this blog was invented, a 90,000 word young adult sci-fi novel that takes place in a strange and complicated afterlife full of historical figures, hidden agendas, and bizarre soul-harvesting technology.  Bringing Axis to market has been an experience.  It's been through six full drafts, each of them involving multiple sub-iterations; the title has changed, as has the narrative perspective.  The love interest went from being a Mary Sue to a co-protagonist and arguably the most complicated and formidable character in the book.  I've sent out over a hundred query letters and have been alternatively praised, rejected, and ignored by many of the most respected agents in the business--some of whom I've gained a new appreciation for and some of whom I've lost all professional respect for.  I've taken it to Twitter pitchfests and writing conferences and rammed it down the throats of over a dozen preliminary reviewers, willing and unwilling, who've called it everything from "legitimately great" to "sounds like the name of an off-brand cologne".

Axis has been thrashing around in the slush pile for far longer than I'd ever imagined it would.  Every time I think it's dead, some new literary agent or publisher emerges with a manuscript request.  One way or another, though, we are approaching the end of the line with this project; I am literally running out of agents and publishers.  The brightest hopes for the book at present are:

1.  one of the most experienced and respected agents in the business is reviewing the full manuscript; he's someone I didn't submit to earlier for no better reason than that I didn't think there was ANY possibility he'd be interested, and

2.  the book is on its third set of spec revisions with a small publisher whom I have a lot of respect for.

And, of course, there's still a smattering of unresolved queries out there; any day I could get a new man request out of them.  But, as I said, we're nearing the end of the line here.

After some consideration, I have decided that I will not self-publish Axis.  I recognize and respect the new legitimacy of self-publishing operations and I have heard the success stories, but to be honest, that market is just too crowded and it tends to reward skilled marketers (which I'm not) over skilled writers (which I am).  One also needs, by all accounts, a nearly insane work ethic to push a novel to the front of the queue via the self-publishing market, and while I'm a very good worker, I'm also a full-time high school teacher in the highly time-intensive discipline of policy debate.  And I'm PARTICULARLY not looking forward to having to find a cover artist, failing, and winding up with some godawful photoshopped THING as the public face of the book.

So if Axis should fail to make it to market via an agent's representation or via the independent publisher mentioned above, I'm going to release it here, on this blog, in installments--one chapter a week, every Sunday, for most of a year.  You who've had to listen to me jabber about this book endlessly, for two full years, have a right to read it for yourselves and make up your own minds about whether the publishing industry was right to run screaming from it.  Besides, all I've REALLY wanted to do is to give people something they can read.  If you wind up reading it here and liking it, tell your friends.  Tell your kids.  We'll see if word spreads.  To be clear, however, we're still months away from going down that road; even after all this time, there's still several different paths to publication open, and I intend to walk them all.

My Foot in the Crosshairs

Funny thing.  I work my butt off towards a goal for months and years―and with the finish line in sight, I’m not sure I want it anymore.

I began my quest to see my work in print in the summer of 2012 with my attempt to win the Norman Mailer Award for Teachers*.  I’ve come a long way as a writer since then; I’ve learned a good deal about writing and a GREAT deal about marketing, certainly enough to know that, of the two, I prefer writing.  I’ve put together a very fine YA novel (which is still dangling out there in front of publishers and agents of various types) and a collection of short stories of varying types, genres, and qualities.

And now:  success.  Within the space of three days came purchase offers on two short stories.  The simpler call was the offer on “The Commander,” a sort of child soldier’s Life of Pi, which will be published this fall in an anthology by a small press operation I respect.  “The Commander” is entertaining and voice-heavy, a little bit derivative perhaps, but not a story anyone’s likely to regret having read and certainly not a story that’s likely to offend anyone.  A perfectly cromulent high school prose piece.

“Thump Dumps A Chump” is, well, another story.  I’ve written about it before.  It’s rollicking, very funny (in my opinion), entirely original, and borderline racist at times.  It came from a place that’s very close to the core of me, but it’s not necessarily a part that people who don’t know me are likely to fully appreciate or respect.  Certainly it is not in any sense a safe piece of fiction, and I won’t be promoting it to my students or to other underage readers.

The journal whose offer on “Thump” I ultimately accepted was one I hadn’t expected a favorable response from; on first review, it didn't strike me as an edgy purveyor of word-chaos, but a very pleasant and mainstream site with tastes that often run towards the cute and clever, work written from the perspective of paper-cutters and the like.  The principal editor, an older gentleman, was surpassingly nice in offering me an initial revise-and-resubmit on the grounds that, while he liked the sheer chutzpah of the piece, he couldn’t quite bring his wife around on it, and the two of them publish nothing except by mutual consent.  He offered insightful ideas as to how the story’s opening might be made punchier and how Thump's motives might be made more clear**, and offered nary a complaint about the dozens and dozens of f-bombs, nor the references to “feces-eating anarchy” and the like.  I doubt that “Thump” will be the best or most popular thing they’ve ever published, but it will very likely be the cussingest.

And so now, with one of the best things I’ve ever written about to go before the public in three months’ time, I find myself consumed with the peculiar terror that people will actually read it.

I knew from the start that if this story were to obtain a wide readership, I would be courting backlash―and not just from professional holders of ideological grudges or people who live to be offended.  This is not a short story that, for instance, the sort of sincere Catholic who sends their kid to private schools is likely to appreciate.  I can honor that by not pressing it on their kids, by drawing a bright line between my work and my hobbies, but there do exist people who, if they knew about this story, would use it to go after my job.  Including some of the people who employ me.

And yet I can’t NOT put it out there, either.  Because it’s good.  That’s the bottom line.  I created something good, and I want people to read it, because I think they’ll enjoy it.

As an adolescent and young adult, I was a disaster on the romantic front.  I developed crushes, and was afraid to pursue them due to the prospect of embarrassment and humiliation:  fear of failure.  I was pursued by perfectly wonderful partners, and I ran away due to the possible downsides of romantic entanglement:  fear of success.  And when the chaser/chase-ee strands happened to intersect, through blind luck, something in me made me ruin things.  I would inevitably show too much of my personality too quickly―hello, attractive first date, check out this collection of ugly ties I’ve duct-taped to the wall of my dorm room―in what I now recognize were acts of blatant self-sabotage.  And that sort of thing continued and intensified until, at the age of 42, I find myself alone.

And, at the end of the day, I think I'm tired of being that guy.  The guy who shoots himself in the foot for fear of what success might mean.  I have resolved to take the risk and put my writing, however sketchy, out there in front of the public.  I’m gonna do it!  I’m gonna commit to this!

Unless…what’s really going on is that publishing the story is the real act of foot-shooting.  Unless I’m actually terrified of the long-term commitment I’ve made to my school, and putting “Thump Dumps a Chump” into print is actually an attempt to escape that commitment by getting myself fired.

I don’t know.  I’m 42 years old and I have no real idea what's going on in my brain.  I don’t know why “Thump Dumps A Chump” was inside me, or what’s motivating me to show it to the world.  In any case, the die is cast at this point, and starting in July, we shall see what we shall see.  Perhaps the best-case scenario is the most likely one:  that nobody will actually read the thing, and I’ll have to go looking for even uglier corners of my soul to put on public display.







*Spoiler alert:  I didn't win.

**Spoiler alert:  He wants to dump chumps.

The Year of Living Self-Promotionally

THE DREAM

Despite a happy childhood, reading for me has often served as a means of escape.  As an adolescent, when things got rough, I would frequently walk down to the local bookseller (a stationary store, actually), crossing the Shunga-Nunga creek via stepping-stones en route.  I’d pick up a paperback-- Choose Your Own Adventure, or Madeleine L’Engle, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, or some trashy video game adaptation, it really didn’t matter what.  And then I would sit on the bank of the creek, crack open the book, and the world would go away for a while.

My objective in taking up writing was, in part, to pay forward the debt I owe to those authors who made the world go away for me.  I had in mind that I might be the source of the material by which some other adolescent by some other creek might find a means of temporary escape.  That’s dream #1.

There is, of course, another dream to which writers aspire, and that’s the one in which you’re discovered by the industry, a diamond in the rough, and you arise Cinderella-like to international acclaim and vast prosperity, and you tour before adoring crowds and step out of a limo at the premiere of the movie based on your book and then you go live in a castle like JK Rowling.  That’s the dream you get glimpses of when you knock off a chapter that’s really, really good.  That’s dream #2.

I wrote my novel last year and entered into this, my year of living self-promotionally, with the mindset that dream #2 was the means by which you achieved dream #1.  With this in mind, I did the research as to how one “breaks into the industry,” and followed the instructions of the best minds.  I worked on developing a platform in the social media from which I could promote my work, including an author site (you’re reading it).  I started building my brand.  And I went through the process of seeking a literary agent to represent my work.  And I began to learn about how the modern mass-market publishing industry works, and about what it means to be a modern novelist.

THE REALITY

I’ll start with a definition, which is going to be kind of important going forward.  When I refer to “the publishing industry”, I am talking specifically about five New York-based mass-market publishers who produce by far the majority of new stuff that you find in stores.  As of twenty-four months ago there were six of them.  As of ten years ago there were considerably more.  That tells you something about the publishing industry and the market pressures in which it operates.

It is borderline impossible to make a living as a full-time professional writer of fiction unless you are regularly producing content for these five companies.  These are the people with the marketing budgets.  These are the companies who are willing to arrange consignment sales with major retailers and who have the means to agree to buy back books that go unsold.  There are an AWFUL LOT of people—hundreds of thousands--who would like to write full-time, and who therefore want to get their feet in the door of one of these companies.  This writer-y horde cranks out hundreds of thousands of what might reasonably pass for novels every year.  Divide hundreds of thousands by five, and you will gain some insight into the amount of work with which editors are swamped.

Or…WOULD BE swamped, in a previous era in which editors took submissions directly from writers.  As a matter of basic survival, the editors have largely outsourced the job of combing through the glaciers of bad writing to literary agents, a strange subspecies of homo publishus whose job is to sort through the slushpiles while authors scream publish us you homo!

There are a LOT of literary agents.  Here are the qualifications necessary to identify yourself publicly as a literary agent:





That’s the full list.  I was going to include “You have to have a pulse,” but I do have direct experience submitting my work to an agent who turned out to be dead (hopefully not as a direct result of reading my work).  And so, of the 20 million people living in the New York metropolitan area, approximately all of them are agents.   There are a lot of very intelligent people with long track records of guiding great writing to the market who call themselves literary agents, and a fair few people who haven’t been able to get their work to market any other way but who are looking for a new angle to approach the industry who ALSO call themselves literary agents, and there are some baboons in suits calling themselves literary agents and there are some outright overt con artists calling themselves literary agents.  Online communities of writers exist which do a reasonable job of sorting the wheat from the horsesh*t.  But you never know for sure, so it’s wisest to submit your novel to ALL of them.

The idea is that the agents serves both as the gatekeeper for the industry and the advocate for the author.  The agents is the dude (more often the lady, actually) with the connections to get your stuff looked at by somebody who’ll pay you for it; she’ll also be the one who intercedes when the publisher tries to put clip art on your book cover or when the editor advises you that you ought to rewrite your draft to make it “more like the Hunger Games, but with vampires.”  All this in exchange for fifteen percent of your take.

That’s the idea.  The reality, of course, is that the publishers have all the money and hold all the cards, and with FIVE of them around at this point, woe betide the agent who burns her bridges with a publisher in pursuit of an author’s interests.  That’s not an indictment of the profession by any stretch; that’s just a reality that has to be faced, and borne in mind when reading an endless series of articles on the internet about all of the heroic efforts which your agent will be making for you, the valued client.  There are a million more potential clients just like you out there.  There are five (5) big-money publishers.



THE PROBLEM

Here is an experience which demonstrates the point.  I was a recent participant in a Twitter pitch event, the idea of which is that authors crank out a 140-character summary of their work under the appropriate hashtag, and interested parties (generally agents or small publishing houses) favorite your tweet if they’d like you to submit a full query proposal.  I spent the first several hours of the event reviewing the pitches of my fellow writers.  It’s an experience which gives you a real sense of what agents have to go through on a daily basis.  There were some very interesting and original ideas, yes; there was also a lot of really, really, REALLY derivative stuff; and maybe a third of what was presented was just plain incoherent.  Now, I’ve written some bad, bad pitches in my time, and I know how frustrating it is to go through one of these all-day events without a single “favorite” to show for it.  So I published a message of general support and sympathy for my fellow authors under the event hashtag:  “So many fresh and original ideas!  So many publishers who only want micro-variations on the same novel.”

Okay, yeah, I know.  Dumb move.  You don’t talk smack, even obliquely, on the people who you want to be the ultimate buyers of your work.  The vehemence and immediacy of the backlash from the agents themselves, however, surprised me.  “REMEMBER THAT TWEETS ARE PUBLIC!”  “Won’t EVER solicit a manuscript from an author who doesn’t respect the business.”  “Your twitter feed is a professional resource…BE PROFESSIONAL.”  And so on.  The upside, I suppose, is that skilled agents were taking notice of my writing, though it wasn't the sort of notice I'd hoped for.

Again:  I understand.  Completely unwise on my part.  I fully comprehend why literary agents would wish to protect their meal ticket.  And with full recognition of my error, and recognizing that I won’t be making the same mistake again, here is my question:  was what I said true or false?

Was it, in fact, even ARGUABLY false?

The publishing industry seeks to make money, the same way the rest of the entertainment industry does.  And when somebody in the entertainment industry finds a winning formula, that formula gets cloned.  Was last year’s surprise TV hit a crime procedural?  The next season will feature a dozen new crime procedurals.  Did a comic book movie make money?  The next summer will feature eight more.  Are kids reading Harry Potter?  The shelves will fill up with swords and sorcery.  Hunger Games?  Here come six thousand dystopian thrillers.

I get it.  I understand.  I am recognizing, not condemning.  But I was also speaking a very obvious truth, and freaking out when unpleasant realities are mentioned won’t make them go away.  These are, demonstrably, rough times for the publishing industry.  And when I review the general state of the public communications of major publishers and those who depend upon them—literary agents VERY MUCH included—the impression I get is that the whole industry has gone into a protective crouch.  People make oblique references to “challenges”, the exact nature of which nobody wants to discuss.  The public and professional channels overflow with tirades about the evils of Amazon’s alleged attempt to leverage individual publishers; the actual discussion of improved practices within the industry is barely a whisper by comparison.

The true challenge to the mass-market publishing model is the rise, via online marketing and distribution, of micropublishing and self-publishing enterprises.  And the implications that these options have for the mass distribution model are something you DO NOT MENTION in the presence of people who make money through the big five.

Except that sometimes you do.  And when you do, some really weird arguments come out.  For instance:  Publishers base their decision to buy on how your previous books have sold; if you self-publish or go small-scale, you’ll crash your sales average and make yourself unappealing to big publishers.  I mean, that might be true, I guess, but…really?  The people making the decisions are so sclerotic that they will reject clearly salable work if unrelated work by the same author, sold in a different venue, didn’t make the NYT list?  I can’t believe that they’re that dumb, but if they were, why would I even want my work in their hands?  And there are some of them who choose to treat it as a simple issue of us-vs-them:  if you have ever self-published or micro-published a book, I will not consider your work for representation, ever.

These are the people whose entire livelihood depends on the public perception that the gate they’re keeping is the only route to publishing success.  That constant stream of query letters, that sifting through crap in search of a diamond to sell, is the way they make their living.  If the writing public were ever to collectively give up on dream number two, the river of queries would dry up, and the bulk of agents would become redundant—and shortly thereafter, they would need to become something else.

Let me be very clear.  There are a lot of very talented literary agents with whom I’d love to work.  And there are a lot of hardworking literary agents who can clearly make a difference in a new author’s career.  And there are certainly a lot of very smart and capable people in mass-market publishing, a few of whom were even once students in my classroom.  But the general attitude of the mass-market publishing industry towards itself, its audience, and its potential authors does not inspire confidence.   There is a whiff of panic about the whole thing.  Conflation of criticism of the industry’s practices, or even skepticism about the industry’s practices, with “unprofessionalism,” is not the mark of a healthy enterprise.  I see wide smiles on their faces and terror in their eyes.

I think they may fear the same thing about themselves that I fear about myself.  I think they fear their skill set may not make them necessary.

I am sure that literary agents experience the same joy I do in discovering talent and helping it develop.  But they are attempting to evaluate a large number of writers on a very limited sample of their work.  And the rise of online publishing is starting to expose, for the first time ever, just how often they flat-out miss talent.  Just how often they get it absolutely and incontrovertibly wrong.

JK Rowling’s story is instructive.  She shopped Philosopher’s Stone to every big house in London and was turned away from every door.  She went to the agents and got repeatedly slammed.  Opinion was unanimous even among those who bothered to read it:  too long.  Kids don’t have the patience.

Rowling was tireless, and she eventually got her break.  Here is how it allegedly happened:  one of the agents to whom she submitted a paper copy left it lying around the house.  And the guy’s eight-year-old happened by, and spotted a drawing of Harry and Ron and Hermione on the page to which the copy happened to be open.  And she made daddy read it to her, and asked him to read her more.

Daddy had evidently been in the process of writing Rowling a rejection notice at the time.  If JK Rowling were a slightly worse sketch artist, or if she had submitted her query electronically as is now standard practice, the world would probably never have known about Harry Potter.

How many other Harry Potters did we never meet?  How many A Confederation of Dunces went unpublished because the deceased author didn’t have a monomaniacal mom to push the thing via tactics that verged on active stalking?  How many Madeleine L’Engles bailed on how many A Wrinkle In Times after the fortieth rejection notice?  How many Louis L’Amours gave up after rejection number one hundred?

The people whose job it is to know the market know it, at best, imperfectly.  And online publishing is exposing that.  We’re starting to see more and more work like Fifty Shades of Grey, which started online and was broadly scorned by the industry until it was finally picked up, because it had become apparent that whoever put it in print was going to be collecting free money.  But it’s never been more apparent that talent is slipping through the cracks.  And it’s starting to look more like a flood than a trickle.

THE PLAN

So.  That's the world in which I have spent the last year.  Where do I stand?

I’ve learned a great deal in the last year.  I knew at the start that I was no undiscovered genius, and I know more about my flaws as a writer than I did before.  In truth, I haven’t grown all THAT much as a writer, because the bulk of my time has been spent trying to market myself as a writer.  But I’ve learned about the importance of self-marketing to a writer, particularly one who is vying for mass-market acceptance.  And I've learned what I'm good at, and what I'm not.

First:  the status of the novel.

My preliminary research produced a list of 74 agents who appeared both competent and good matches for the book.  I carefully crafted a query letter to the individual preferences expressed by each agent, starting at the top with the single best agent for the book.  This was a serious mistake; my initial queries were full of what I now know were rookie mistakes and I probably cost myself a longer look by some very good agents.  But the queries got better as I worked my way down the list.

Thirty-eight agents or agencies didn’t respond in any way, which is industry code for “thanks but no thanks”.  One additional agent turned out to be dead.  I received thirty form rejections or minor variations on form rejections to the initial query.  Two agents, both highly respected, crafted what were clearly individualized rejections based on the writing sample, and both went out of their way to identify specific aspects of the writing that intrigued them and specific things that kept them from asking for more.  When these two said, “It’s good, it’s just not for me,” I believe they actually meant it.  I can’t imagine how much time it must take to do that for 100+ submissions a day.  These two will be high on my list if I go mass-market again.  Three agents asked to see the full manuscript; one rejected it shortly thereafter for reasons that strongly suggest that she didn’t actually read it.  The other two―again, both highly respected―still have the book in front of them.

I probably don’t need to tell you that a sub five percent manuscript request rate is poor by any standard.  But I’ve come to believe that the problem is the marketing rather than the book itself.  First, as mentioned, it took me a while to develop the right skills to write even an adequate query letter.  Second, although I wasn’t aware of it, the very concept of a novel pitched in the afterlife is an immediate reject for most sci-fi agents; the vast majority of work produced under this banner winds up as thinly veiled Christian fiction.  And thirdly, the requests have one specific thing in common:  their query standards all ask for substantially more sample pages than is standard in the industry.  In other words, the more professionals read of the book, the more they tend to like it.

I am not the great writer I’d hoped I might be.  Not yet, anyway.  But the evidence suggests that I am a good one, with occasional flashes of greatness.  Tough peer reviewers with a history of saying things I don’t want to hear have all ranked the book as good to great, with reviews of the revised drafts skewing to the high side.  But that appears not to matter where dream #2  is concerned, because there is a much bigger problem.  I am not a good marketer.  Not at all.  I do not market myself well, and more importantly, I do not craft work that is easily marketable.  People who read my book like it, but people do not seek to read it based on the pitch.  And that is absolutely fatal in a marketplace where the majority of books are bought based on the dust jacket blurb, cover art, and word of mouth.  Agents know what sells big, and they see my book and turn away.

It's frustrating to realize that, where the larger market is concerned, my book may have been doomed at its conception.  I did not take up writing with the idea that I would only write unchallenging books on topics that were guaranteed to sell.  We already have James Patterson for that.  But in a world where people (understandably) print books for the purpose of selling them, my problem is not a fixable one.

But agents and big publishers are not the only game in town anymore.  And there’s a couple of parties to whom the book was pitched whom I have yet to mention.

The online pitch events in which I have participated are not exclusively the haunts of literary agents.  Because, you see, there ARE people who want to publish books who aren’t part of the Big Five.  They’re a motley band, these small presses, and there are some sketchy characters among them.  But there are also some people who are interested in doing business the old fashioned way―in finding good work, in working directly with the author to make it the best it can be, and in selling as much of it as they can manage.  That’s how THEY make their living.  And beyond them lie the operations which will get your book into print and onto the key online retailers and reader review sites, and let you take responsibility for making sales.  A short step up from the vanity presses of the past?  Maybe. But less so for some than for others.  And as mentioned, this is where the Fifty Shades of Greys of the world emerge from.  How much do you believe in your work?

In addition to the agents who’ve taken an interest, I’ve had more than a few solicitations from small presses.  With the majority, a quick google search was enough to reveal them as best avoided.  With others, a quick website visit was enough to demonstrate that I’d found an unreliable partner.  And with others, which passed muster, there was the manuscript submission and the eventual rejection―but not without what was clearly a thorough read, and accompanied by a series of constructive suggestions that will help going forward.

And then there was that other one.  The one with the consistently positive feedback at Publisher’s Marketplace and others from a list of previous writers.  The one which does actual by-God press runs of new books and puts them in actual brick-and-mortar stores.  The one which hypes its authors’ signing parties and appearances, small-scale as they may be, because every book that’s sold is money in their pocket and they’re after more of it.  The one which said, “Great concept, good skills; here’s what you’re doing wrong; fix it and resubmit to us when you think it’s ready.”  Yeah.  That one.

The one that’ll never get me rich.  The one that’ll expect me to work hard to promote my own stuff.  The one that’ll kill dream #2 dead in its tracks. 

Also the one with a visible sense of humor about itself.  The one that won’t ever ask me to behave like a cultist before the altar of mass-market publishing, and keep my treasonous opinions to myself.  The ones that can live with an author website and twitter feed that keeps veering from self-promotion into sports fandom and weird social commentary.  The one that’ll work with me to get my work a little bit closer to the greatness I seek.  The one that gives every appearance of taking its young readers seriously.   The one that, by God, seems to believe in dream #1 as seriously as I do.

There might be worse fates in the world than being a small-time novelist.

There might be a place for Will, Emily and Jason.  And also for Connor and Amit.  And for the Duchess and her menagerie.  A place for all those weirdos banging away at the inside of my skull, demanding to be let out.   Hell, who knows?  There might even be room for a toned-down Thump at the party.

There might, someday soon, be a happy kid sitting alongside a creek somewhere.  Escaping.  Making the world go away for a while.

Abolish football.

Sorry, but it's time.

We've "found out" a lot about the NFL this year.  I put the phrase in quotes because we are mostly discovering things that we've suspected for quite a while--that violence perpetrated by players is epidemic, that the concussive and subconcussive impacts incurred as an inevitable result of playing the game produce inevitable lifelong trauma, the only question of which is how severe each individual case will be.  And we also know that the NFL management absolutely could not give two hot sh*ts about any of the above except to the extent that it impacts upon the financial bottom line.  This year in the NFL has been an absolute carnival of transparent greed and utter shamelessness, as management lurches uncontrollably from one crisis to another, imposing consequence after consequence that its own rules in no way justify, all while ignoring the real problems and attempting to buy its way out of the consequences of its lies about the health risks to players on the most laughable and despicable terms imaginable.

And let's be clear:  the NFL, which I just described, is the part of football that ought to be PRESERVED.  Because whatever else may be said of it, everyone who entered into that environment was a full adult, compensated for his efforts, and with some knowledge that he was trading lifelong comfort for momentary glory.  It's a modern day gladiatorial game, no doubt of it, but the libertarian in me tells me that people should be allowed to be gladiators if they really want; there is a case to be made for a short and merry life over a long and dull one, and the athletic spectacle that results is indeed glorious (ISWYDT, Odell Beckham), and God save me, but I do enjoy watching it.

I no longer believe that there is a persuasive case to be made for football at any other level.  Much has been made of the meatgrinder that services, for instance, professional soccer; the tens of thousands of teenagers in virtually every country who are pulled from schools in favor of soccer development academies run by professional franchises, who receive a laughable joke of an education as they become in effect full time laborers.  The system spits out a precious few world-class players on the other end along with thousands upon thousands of young adults with no meaningful skills and no prospects.  That's soccer.  AMERICAN football is different, of course, because we don't make the franchises themselves turn the handle of the meatgrinder; we have publicly subsidized universities do the job for them.  The cases of public universities subverting their educational mission in pursuit of gridiron glory are too many to list here.  A few of them, the very top niche, do make a profit in the process, the bulk of which is plowed back into the program itself.  Which is to say:  the best argument IN FAVOR OF college football is that as many thousands of young men, largely from impoverished backgrounds, are brought in to provide uncompensated labor, and then spit out the other end with college "degrees" of questionable credibility (or in many cases no degree at all) and also with injuries that will cripple their earnings potential and their quality of life, there are A FEW universities that make a profit off of this labor, meaning that the underclass has served its purpose of entertaining the middle and upper classes and subsidizing their educations.  That's the case IN FAVOR, and a sad and shabby case it is.  The case AGAINST is to be found in less glorious locales, such as the Columbus, Ohio dumpster in which an Ohio State Buckeyes player was found dead this week, having shot himself to bring an end to the concussive trauma and self-perception of failure from which he was suffering.  Or in the utterly sick priorities of the millions who cheered lustily this week at the courage of the (uncompensated) quarterback for Clemson, who was permitted by his (compensated) team trainer and his (very well compensated indeed) head coach to play the entire game against archrival Clemson on a torn ACL.

Then there is high school football, the new passion at my own institution of learning, involving young men from all walks of life, subjecting themselves to the same concussive and subconcussive impacts daily, with the permission and indeed the urging of their school community, in pursuit of collective glory and maybe, just maybe, the chance to do it for free for four years more.  No question, those young men enjoy it.  As do we, watching them.  There are many things that young men enjoy doing which maybe we ought not to encourage them to do, particularly if we are, for instance, professional educators.  No doubt the young men in question learn many lessons about teamwork and commitment and leadership from the experience.  One wonders if there might not be an activity in which they might not learn many of those same lessons, and even catch some whiff of glory besides, that does not involve repeated head trauma.  What needs to be screamed to the heavens about this phenomenon is that THESE. ARE. KIDS.  These are not even eighteen year old men, legally permitted to make the dumb, dumb, stupid, stupid, dumb, stupid, dumb decisions that young men make.  THESE ARE KIDS, in our care, and we are encouraging them to slam their heads into one another repeatedly because it's fun for them and us.  Every generation has moral blind spots; slavery was once thought inevitable, for instance, as was Jim Crow later on, and our own grandparents by and large thought the wartime incarceration of Asian-American civilians was just.  Blind spots are by definition unidentifiable to those of us who are experiencing them.  Even so, I feel comfortable assuming that future generations will look back at us, at our collective and almost universal celebration of high school football, and ask, "What the HELL were they thinking???"

My school loves its football team, and they're very good at what they do, and they bring in resources that we wouldn't have otherwise, and I love seeing them succeed, and I hate myself and all the rest of us for how proud we all are of what we're all doing.

It all needs to end, at my school and everywhere else.  Not because the coaches and the participants are bad people, but because they are good people, by and large; intelligent and capable men, young and old.  Moral, vigorously competitive men, with valuable lessons to teach and to learn, and there has to be some better use to which our society can put them than to make them all grist for the NFL's mill, feedstock for a machine that grinds them up in order to churn out, at the other end, Ray Rice, Aaron Hernandez, and Roger Goodell's new yacht.

My own favorite non-NFL football team is that of the University of Kansas.  It's a hot mess of a program that has won, I think, three conference games in the last six years, and has fired three different coaches in that time, one for among other things calling his players "gang-bangers" and the other two of whom are still drawing salary from the school because they had to be canned at the front end of long-term contracts.  KU doesn't pretend to make money off of football and the student body by and large doesn't pretend to care about it; nobody is choosing to attend KU because they wanna watch football and anybody who'd leave because they're bad at it left a long time ago.  Anyway, they just fired another coach this year en route to a 3-9 season, and there has been a whole lot of speculation in the press as to who they might hire to replace him, and here is who I think KU should hire as its new football coach: no one. They should take this opportunity to shut the program down. They should then use the money saved to endow 85 full ride scholarships for minority men, the initial recipients of which would be the former athletes. In doing so, they would demonstrate that the institution thinks young black men are worthwhile as something other than as entertainment for the rest of us.

Trumping the Dump

While covering the McGovern presidential campaign in 1972, Hunter S. Thompson discussed a fake news item (at least I hope it was fake) in which a Florida voter was arrested for throwing bowling balls off of a pier “because he thought they were nigger eggs”.  It was a different time.  It was also Hunter Thompson; attempting to rein in Hunter Thompson’s writing in order to avoid giving offense would have defeated the purpose of there being a Hunter Thompson.

Working for my college newspaper as a senior, a friend and I designed a feature graphic which we called “The Burning Crossword”, the concept of which was that it was an item stolen from the jumbles page of the KKK newsletter.  I will not attempt to duplicate the joke here; I will merely note that it was 1. Funny as hell and 2. Absolutely unpublishable.

Racism is funny.  The consequences of racism are not funny.  Racism as experienced by its victims is not funny.  But the actual phenomenon of racism—the belief that the content of a person’s brain is determined by the color of their skin—is damned funny, because human folly and failure is one of the primary sources of humor.  The irrational is funny, and the contradictions and confusion sparked by a racist outlook create wonderful absurdities—witness Eddie Murphy’s White Like Me or Dave Chappelle’s famous sketch involving a KKK leader, blind from birth, who’s unaware that he’s black.  There are, however, several problems that arise from the use of racism as a source of humor.  For one thing, there is a very fuzzy line between laughing at the foolishness of racist stereotyping and laughing at the stereotypes themselves.  There are times when humor about racism becomes racist humor.  And there are a whole lot of people who derive enjoyment from humor about racism for entirely the wrong reasons.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will be abundantly aware that my current project is a short story entitled “Thump Dumps A Chump”.  At its most basic level, the story is a concept parody of the black exploitation movies of the 1970s such as Shaft and Superfly, a sort of literary equivalent of the Damon Wayans movie I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.  I don’t know how well those movies have aged.  They’ve always sort of served simultaneous roles as black empowerment fantasies and as opportunities for white people to lack at exaggerated black stereotypes.  The best that can be said of them is that they caused non-African American audiences to envision black people in the role of the hero; the worst that can be said is that they reified the sorts of assumptions about black people that made heroism necessary.  Probably on the whole the world is a more interesting place for them having been made, but whether it’s a better place is a debatable question.

It is probably also fair to say that 1970s black exploitation cinema is not a large enough part of the current cultural zeitgeist that a parody of it is really necessary at this point.  It may not have really been necessary in 1988, either, when Damon Wayans did it.  So why write the story?  Well, for the same reason I write everything else I write.  Because it was clawing at the inside of my skull wanting to get out.  And because, once I started dumping it out onto the page, I saw it as having the potential to be great.

Here’s what I think:  At this stage, “Thump Dumps A Chump” is probably closer to being great than anything else I’ve ever written.  Axis of Eternity is a good first novel with sporadic moments of greatness that seems, from the professional response, to be hovering at the cusp of publishability.  I’m proud of it.  But “Thump” is in a whole different category.  When I gave it to an acquaintance, a very skilled writer, for review, he reported that he’d had to walk away from it for half an hour because he was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.  It’s a story the humor of which is lost in description; you kind of have to read it.  But the people who’ve read it now generally greet me by yelling lines from it at me.  That’s a damned good sign.

In addition to being very funny, it is also pretty racist.  I do not say that out of white guilt or self-abasement or as an apology for the work, but as an accurate description of its style and content.  It is written in a semi-articulate patois that doesn’t accurately represent black English, and which is mined for humor via the insertion of obscenities and of uncharacteristic vocabulary.  The title character and titular hero is almost completely nonverbal and is celebrated exclusively for his capacity for violence.  One of the supporting characters is a Johnny Cochrane-style attorney whose courtroom demeanor is more or less the modern equivalent of a minstrel show.  There’s never any explicit identification of the characters as belonging to any particular racial group, but nor is it in any way ambiguous that the heroes are black, the villains are white, and everybody’s behavior is an amplification of various racial stereotypes.

At the end of the day, the difference between this story and Thompson’s (and also the Burning Crossword, and Murphy’s work, and Chappelle’s) is pretty straightforward.  Those stories were laughing at the expense of racists.  This story is laughing at the expense of the victims of racism.  I do not acknowledge, at all, that that makes this story unfunny.  Funny is funny.  But I do acknowledge that it makes this story not OK.

And this puts me in a weird position.  Because I’m not at all ashamed of having written the story, or of what having written it says about the contents of my mind.  I’m dealing with the same baggage as everybody else, and I don’t recognize that pouring it out onto a piece of paper is a less healthy way of dealing with it than repressing it and attempting to police my own (and everyone else’s) language and behavior for fear of waking the sleeping beast.  Hell, I’m proud, DAMNED proud, to have created the thing.  Good writing impacts readers at a fundamental level; good writing is quotable; good writing is not easily forgotten; this story qualifies on all counts.

But I can’t attempt to publish it.  Not now and probably not ever.  And not just because I would be immediately fired (and I absolutely would) if it ever made it into print under my name.  But also because it will give too much comfort to too many people for too many of the wrong reasons.  It is, at the end of the day, the sort of entertainment which Damon Wayans or Dave Chappelle could probably acceptably produce, but which a middle-aged white guy really just can’t.  To tell myself otherwise is to lie.  Where we’re at right now, as a society, funny is good, but racism is trumps.

So this one will be going into the drawer, and will be distributed only upon request and only to those who know what they’re getting.  Every writer wants to be celebrated for his creativity, but sometimes, the price of public acclaim is just too high.  Helluva thing.



EDIT, 4/2015:
It took an awful lot of editing, and an awful lot of reflection, to get this story to its final stage.  At the end of the day, I'm STILL not 100% comfortable with it.  There's some cultural appropriation in play here, which is unsurprising given the material I'm working from.  But I do think that, post-revision, the piece makes clear with whom my sympathies lie, and that the joke winds up being on the chumps, not on their victims.  Post-revision, I think the self-criticisms above are no longer accurate, and the laughs are, on the whole, earned for the right reasons.  Although the piece does, in the words of Thump's friend, "ride mighty close to the line" at times.

Following the process of revision, I ended up marketing the story to a variety of small literary journals.  Well, and the New Yorker.  The New Yorker didn't say yes, but others did.  So this weird little belch of a story will wind up being the first writing for which I am paid.

Readers will make their own judgments as to whether what I wrote here was acceptable.  I won't shy away from that debate, should it occur.  I'm leaving this post up as an acknowledgement of where this story came from and of what factors ultimately led me to put it before the public.

We all have conversations with ourselves about race.  "Thump Dumps A Chump" is part of mine.  Perhaps, after reading it, you'll hear echoes of your own conversation as well.