Adventures

The first adventure book I read as a little kid was Tom Swift And His Electric Flying Machine, about which I remember very little, except that it was exciting, part of a series written in the 1930s, collected on a small town library shelf. Later on, I discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, read and reread Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and his lesser works. It was a disappointment to discover that Ian Fleming was a klutzy author, compared to the excitement of 007 movies. I read some vile thriller bestsellers, steered clear of the entire category. Then the glory of Raymond Chandler, goofy plots and splendid first person resolve in pursuit of a solution that made sense. His mature work had humor, romance, and tired professional investigation. I liked the screen version of The Maltese Falcon more than Hammett's cynical fiction.

 

It's important to consider that Ayn Rand was a novelist who penned exciting stories, especially that of an independent, un-socialized architectural innovator in The Fountainhead. Atlas Shrugged threw me in the path of numerous real life adventures that took several decades to digest. Her ideas became the basis of intellectual work that I felt I had to contribute as a cure to the filthy sewage of constitutional law. In my spare time I made TV product and pitched screenplays. When my career as a showman died in a Disney cubicle, I decided to write a first novel. Flash forward to today. I just completed an adventure novel that I regard as a mature masterpiece. I don't care what others think about it. I'm accustomed to obscurity, ridicule, and hardship. Escape! was worth every hour, day, week, and month of intense dedication.

 

Bottom line, life is an adventure. We learn by exploration, gambling, wading through consequences that test men's souls. If you can retain and cherish a sense of ambition no matter what, good things happen.

 

.

Plenty of other books

No one has to read me. Millions of books in libraries, no joke, no exaggeration. My wife and daughter have at least three hundred at home, and we abandoned a couple hundred more in Costa Rica. I can't guess how many they've read over the years. Perhaps a thousand or two. I visited big public libraries in Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, and London. Every day of the week, NPR and Fox monotonously plug more Jewish and black authors. There could be 100,000 self published goyim on Amazon, a million preachers, dreamers, and woo-woo mystics in America. I can't estimate how many keystrokes and cat videos were posted on Facebook. Lawyers and legislators dump trillions of words on paper. Every year, there's a library book sale in upscale Jefferson County, Colorado, tens of thousands of old encyclopedias, novels, children's books, mysteries, and dusty nonfiction retired from a dozen suburban county branch libraries to make room on their shelves for new socially correct rubbish. In 1980, I was offered a job at Lucasfilm to write Star Wars paperbacks. God knows how many westerns and romance novels were sold in the past, certainly thousands of titles. Every TV show has writers, every movie, every newscast, every commercial. In 1965, I tore bulletins from a teletype to be broadcast on a 250-watt AM radio station to retirees and housewives. We read a weekly newspaper full of gossip, school lunch menus, high school sports, death notices, and smiling VFW fish fry eaters. People subscribed to Time, Good Housekeeping, National Geographic, Reader's Digest, and Sports Illustrated.

 

The world does not need me. It may be illegal nowadays to read or discuss my signature style of straight white obscenities and preposterous adventures. I've invested more decades than I can remember, to be completely ignored. I deeply appreciate the half dozen friends who encouraged me to continue. Without them I would have quit long ago. Maybe I improved over the years. Perhaps Escape! is my finest work to date. I don't know. Certainly my most stridently idiosyncratic, full of frankly adult content. That's how I understand the truth of life past, present, and future. Boy meets girls.

 

My friend Tom has been posting splendid videos on early American history. In the space of a mere 70 years, colonial population increased tenfold, about a third of which resulted from additional migration from Europe. Where did the other 2/3 of colonists come from? They fucked a lot. That's also why there are 200 million Nigerians, all Bible thumping, bandits, and crime notwithstanding, fucking day and night. The same thing happened in China and India. Three billion people didn't suddenly appear by magic. Communists and Hindus fucked all day and night, young and old, rich and poor. It's sort of a lost art in woke America, but it persists in our country music, classic rock, and motels from coast to coast.

 

I estimate that I successfully wooed 75 babes. Your mileage may vary.

 

Of course, there's more to life than sexuality. Literature, science, medicine, politics, crime, corrections, salesmanship, mining, manufacturing, farming, food service, cartoons, and clog dancing. I would include banking and finance, but they don't exist anymore except as camp followers of government, pushing paper assets to paper over unpayable public debt. Ask yourself how much fun would it be to date a black female Morgan Stanley manager or a mentally challenged public servant like AOC? I had several interesting experiences with black girls, but you couldn't pay me enough to bed an angry diversity hire or horse faced Occasional Cortex, unless it involved handcuffs and a horsewhip. Call me picky.

 

I admit to reading other people's books, everything written by Rand, Kipling, C.S. Forester, Ray Chandler, James Madison, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, RLS, Aristotle, and Machiavelli. I've read more Gene Rhodes than most people have and all five of Hammett's novels. I regret reading some authors, particularly Hemingway and Chesterton. Sort of ambivalent about Victor Hugo. Too many bad guys and helpless victims. Salinger was contemptible, Vonnegut, Heller, and Adams idiotic. I was amused by Gurdjieff and O. Henry, bored by Jules Verne, and infuriated by Wall Street Journal editorials. Joyce, Kafka, and Lawrence are unreadable trash. I much admire and respect Erik's short stories.

 

The other day at the country store, there were a dozen strangers on the front porch, sitting and standing in an array of paraplegic gear, severely disabled Iraq War vets. I went outside to chat with them, always glad to meet brave men. They have courageous tales to tell, plenty of grisly war stories in hardcover.

 

No reason to read my novels. "Old fashioned," Cass remarked.

 

I'll be honest with you. The final chapter of Escape! is so daunting that I doubt any other living author could wrangle it with penetrating truths, sizzling tension, and suspension of disbelief. Victor Hugo achieved it in Notre Dame de Paris, a very thick medieval French tragedy. I'm 1/4 French. I don't care about ancestry or a melodrama of fake marriage in the Court of Miracles to save a nitwit. I'm not Victor Hugo, nor a cog in his shadow. I'm individual, marginalized, and about to be canceled by a horde of savages who despise white men. That doesn't matter. I have to fashion an alchemy no one else would attempt — challenging Hugo with dueling pixels point blank, one of us to be slain and forgotten.

 

This post never seems finished. I'm dragging my feet, letting hours and days escape, no pun intended. Don't want to write anything written before by anyone on earth. The outline is set. Outlines are not writing. The crisis is simple. Literature is not simple. I would rather lose this laptop to barn rot, rather than draft and mess around with the climax. People talk about editing and emending. I've done it with See Spot Run situations and dialogue typed too rapidly. Not now. The ending is not negotiable.

 

One last thing to append. You should definitely boycott my books, all of them. I'm not to be trusted. In the past, I've lost my temper hundreds of times, destroyed a heavy Selectric typewriter by upending a table, physically ripped a 25-pair office telephone from the wall in anger (not easy to do) and tore up several marriages by firing wives who make life difficult. What the fuck did they expect from a writer? I've walked off numerous jobs, snorted at coworkers, and been fired more times than I can count. I am not a reasonable person. My life was a lost struggle for recognition.

 

Older now, isolated and impoverished, I yell at the dog to get out of my line of sight when I write. The work I do is impossibly difficult. I fight with wasps, ticks, broiling summer heat and icy winter. None of that stops me. Either I'll write the final chapter of Escape! or choke to death in the war of words. My future is canceled. Escape! will be self-published and die, like Partners did, another masterpiece of war and death. I'm too worn and ugly for a new girlfriend, however much I crave feminine caress.

 

Somehow, it was all worth it, every blunder, every crime, every cigarette, every obscenity, every folly, temper tantrum, and broken promise. I blew through millions of dollars belonging to others. I suffered the most pitiful disasters, always my own fault. And worse — I wrote about it, as if my misery was worth discussing in detail, a completely foolish enterprise in the name of transparency. Salinger was far more clever. He never made a public statement, kept quiet, became mysterious. Familiarity breeds contempt and ridicule. I should change my middle name to Chump. Nothing but ridicule, coast to coast and in five foreign countries, humiliated by judges and juries in every profession I assaulted.

 

Hell is worth it, if I can pen the last chapter and climax of Escape!

If I had to go to prison again to achieve it, I'd pay that price.

 

. 

Ooo ... the end

I have before me prospectively the final chapter of Escape!

 

The context and spiritual action is what it must be, settled long ago when I began the book. I don't care if it takes another year to write the ending. Amusing, that it comes down to a few pages, maybe 15 or 20 at most. Also amusing that I'm the one who has to write it, talented or not. There's no novel without it.

 

I'm happy with the story, 243 pages that introduced a small cast of characters who we came to admire and understand (sort of) and to erstwhile pray that they will survive and thrive, no matter how badly they are threatened or assaulted. Especially the lovers, Hansje and Gadant, Cantwell and her knight in shining armor, Commander Malik and a devoted warrior who would die to defend him if necessary.

 

Everything balanced on a knife edge and we sensed it from page one. Lefler might not make it. I haven't decided yet. Jimmy is young and idealistic. The good die young. So do villains, human and robot, every honorable mind closed against cruelty. I don't want to spoil anything for readers. All I've said is there's a final chapter that I have to indent slowly and carefully and creatively and cinematically. No rush to get started. I'll spend a few days weed whacking. There are oak rounds to split by hand.

 

LATER —Tired from weed whacking. My daughter came by to return a couple empty plastic containers that were full of nice crunchy stuff that I didn't have enough teeth to eat. I told her that I was worried whether the girls paid property taxes, something I used to do years ago before my wife took over. That's all that troubled me, and I was glad to get rid of it with a mention. So. Here we jolly well are, no desire to attack the final chapter, for which I should be praised. Listening to the Cardinals game. Generally, the Cardinals stink, a 14-3 loss in Los Angeles yesterday, but I like baseball calls and the Cards announcers are extremely nice clever guys, a pleasure to hear. Excellence is always a joy, don't you think?

 

Not ready to do the last chapter. A good loud storm would be nice.

 

UPDATE — Like Partners, I had to outline the final chapter of Escape! My second draft looks like this. Still a long way to go before it's locked and loaded, every heartbeat rehearsed and ready to shoot.

 

. 

Hammered

The cupboard is bare, a pack of ham, stupid fake cheese slices, fake cherry cranberry juice, a third of a loaf of bread, and a mostly empty jar of peanut butter. It looks laughably dumb in a 6 ft tall Frigidaire,  retired in working order and hauled to my writing office by a neighbor who bought of a new fridge that probably cost $2000. He and his wife are guardian angels, weekly delivery of water bottles, frozen Meals On Wheels, home cooking leftovers, and a thousand other blessings. Both they and Don gave me little bags of pot. Rocking and rolling on the laptop.

 

It is incredibly painful to write. I hate gambling, and yet there's nothing for it, has to be done whether I like it or not. If I do something right it's terrible. I mean it. Breaking down like a baby, nose running, loud tears of gratitude and wonder, a triumph of real drama that throws open a sunlit vista of opportunities, every character whole and uniquely alive to life.

 

Oh, god, a new blank page, another twist of the ratchet, something to top everything that came before, climbing straight up a featureless rock face through the clouds. Shit. No way down, because I would fall to my death as an author. Everything else I wrote years ago is rotted and weak, utterly irrelevant.

 

It's a familiar gulf between this hour and all the rest of my time on Earth, a rich history that does not matter. Thousands of grievous mistakes and blunders, high crimes and misdemeanors, a broad river of personal and professional shame that doesn't matter now.

 

I'm writing a blockbuster. I don't exist, except to face the blank page and climb higher. The dog gets walked and fed without stopping the work, every moment, every breath.

 

Nothing for it. Light 'em up. Roll 'em!

 

.

Bleeding for the company

Tradesmen know what I'm talking about. I got off easy, just a skinned knuckle repairing the horse barn gate. Make a note, do not build gates. Two tanks of fuel to whack the truck path back there, about 12 x 150 ft of tall grass and weeds, tossing aside windfall. Plenty more to pick up when I feel like doing a burn pile. Somewhat stunned. Another couple acres to whack. I need another gallon of gas. Plenty of string, which I pilfered from Carol. All my hand tools are at her house, haven't seen her for months. She'll show up and ask me to crawl on her roof, stretch 100 ft of shade cloth over her greenhouse windows, move big tubs of stupid plants outside with a hand truck.

 

The good news is page 238, another 30 or 40 to go maybe. I'm in the third act. I told the last good joke, foreshadowed hell, and it all goes downhill from now on, except a twist at the end. Those of you who know my methods will not be surprised that it took a while to find the right music for the next chapter. Music first, then write — "Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring, a slow dark strut. I'm tempted to write the next chapter in quatrain, hammer hammer hammer nail.

 

I worked in Holland a long time, two stints of two years, plenty of great Dutch rock, including Golden Earring, of course, but guitarist Ferdie Lancie, lunatic keyboardist Thys van Leer, and wonderful Herman Brood, last of the true rock and roll / heart and soul junkies. I got spoiled working with Dutch rockers. Made Bowie and Queen sound like Top 40 trollops.

 

My day started with hauling firewood, unloading and stacking it, then trimming the dog. If you trim a shihtzu's paws and flanks with a scissors, it's an exercise in interspecies diplomacy and you end up with enough hair on the floor to make another dog. No writing today. I'm out of pot and dead tired. The good news is that I'll live to see Escape! completed and launched, one of my worst and best novels, tons of sex and humor and heartache. I told Tom that my theme was individualism, which is superficially true, a politically correct gloss.

 

The hard nut is courage, love, and loyalty in a difficult world.

 

.

5 a.m.

I started writing late last night around 1 a.m., had an idea, and being tired and stupid, I was fairly certain that I was writing rubbish. When I looked at the computer clock, it said 5 a.m. and I was trembling from too much pot, too much sugar, and far too many cigarettes. I got into bed fully dressed, cold and shaky, coughing feebly.

 

I woke up at 11 or so, still gasping for air, had to spit and cough. Old, badly behaved men are fragile. Then I read it. Oh my fucking god. And I knew how to end it, so I did that. Read it for typos, mystified, couldn't hardly believe it, broke into tears of triumph, had to use tissues. A wonderful turning point for my favorite character, a big leap of courage, transformation, and fulfillment. Neatly unanticipated and highly convincing. It could have happened that way.

 

There should be five main characters in a novel or a movie (I have trouble telling them apart because I write cinematically, see the scenes play, try to capture it in literature that's good enough to read and realize what I saw.) Anyway, five main characters. There can be another dozen supporting roles, named characters who we know quite a bit about and care about, plus a couple of villains because men are not angels, and some are less angelic than most. The very worst are demagogues on a mission to convince everyone to march in lockstep or to kneel in supplication.

 

Five main characters. If one of them changes, it tilts the pinball of destiny.

 

.