more about Escape

 

Certainly the best story I've written so far. Gadant loses his equilibrium, dazed and confused by a sad desire to have a wife, a romantic partner for him only, an equal in spirit to have and to hold, a deeply personal reward for preserving and strengthening his moral character. We attain fitness for love by unrelenting effort to advance in life, not in terms of privilege but rationality, courage, self respect, and honorable ambition. He wants to pilot the Shuttle, no matter how improbable that is for Gadant as a lowly mechanic. To a 29-year-old, the future is a limitless potential, like finding a single, intelligent girl his own age or thereabouts, someone to cherish and defend.

 

Wham! —a stowaway captures his heart, and it makes him miserable because she's taken prisoner by grim security goons. Zero chance of finding her or freeing her, until Jimmy relates that he was held at gunpoint and questioned in the dogleg corridor near a medical storage room on C Deck.

 

Enter Hansje and Cantwell. Still makes me smile. Nicely done.

 

Everything sails smoothly and necessarily and at times outrageously. I allow myself to depict what men and women do with each other in hot blooded greed. Greed is good in this context because it results in pregnancy and propagation of life. Love and lust are joined for a purpose.

 

There are others who fall in love, always harder to do if you have grave responsibilities. Cantwell is an important figure. She befriends Jimmy, mentors the bright young stallion. She loves Springer, embraces him as he fades from life in a hospital bed. She thinks Pedley is an idiot, which Pedley certainly is.

 

I have trouble rereading the final chapter, titled The End. It scares me, and I love Hansje to bits. Absolute hell to see little Hansje so badly abused and threatened with death. Gadant hopes to save her, but that doesn't change the moral context. War is war.

 

Nice book. I don't think anything was extraneous. Escape was completed about a year ago. A first edition appeared on Lulu in June 2021. I fussed with typos and cover art finalized in November, six months ago. I haven't sold a single copy, as far as I know. I bought two copies, sent one to billionaire Peter Thiel and handed the other copy to a troubled drug addict covered in prison tattoos, a guy who helped me move mountains, dig utility ditches and postholes, grade everything smooth, and shake bobcat loads of 2" rock to harden a driveway. I doubt he read the book I gave him. Thiel didn't either. Real men don't read.

 

Sorry, Erik. I don't mean to imply that you're unreal. You're a saint, wise enough to celebrate whatever the world throws at us. I'm not a saint. I chain smoke cheap cigarettes and fret.

 

A very odd thing happened when I wrote a previous blog post about Escape. A hostile commenter said that I was a rat, but maybe he would read Escape. A large number of confused people believe that I had something to do with Bitcoin mining — which I never did, know nothing about it. When Laissez Faire City collapsed, I spent the next 15 years thumb wrestling with bureaucrats and oil companies. We took the net proceeds and built a little house seven years ago, a gated modern forested hilltop home that's 90% tornado proof. When my wife quit smoking cigarettes I got thrown out and moved to a tin barn on the property. From time to time it puzzles me that I ended up in an old tin barn, but I can't complain. I wrote The Case Files of Cable & Blount, Partners, Escape, and several other books cloistered in a dumpy room decorated with tarps and a laptop. It gets cold in the winter and hot in summer. No internet. No phone. There's a radio and a high gain antenna to monitor what's happening in the civilized world. The world is in serious trouble. We did the right thing, bugging out to a sparsely populated section of the Heartland where people raise cattle and crack homespun jokes around a potbelly stove at the general store.

 

I accept that my work will never make any money. Victor Hugo said that if he merely wrote for his own time, he would break his pen and throw it away. Fitzgerald received a total of $50 in book royalties for his masterpiece Tender Is The Night. Herman Melville died a pauper. Ayn Rand needed Social Security and charity medical care near the end of her life. RLS was sickly as a child and died young. I have nothing to complain about, free to write and years remaining to honor it. Escape was a big stride forward.

 

Swell. A big step forward for what? To die in obscurity. I've always been extremely willful. Unsalable as an author. No natural constituency that I could ever find, and I spent a lifetime looking for it. More than once I sold a film or TV project that meshed with the odd motives of a commercially successful, bored grifter who saw something fun to do and little risk, because I worked my butt off to put a co-production deal or cash presale on the table. I have a long history of frustration dealing with financially successful show business grifters milking pop talent and pocketbooks infinitely greater than mine. They perceived that I was rational, had a good resume and a willingness to play ball, accommodate suggestions.

 

That's what book publishers are supposed to do, perceive some merit in my work and make suggestions, but I won't play ball in New York again. Once was enough, and anyone with sense is fleeing New York. I don't want to attempt to do All Things Considered again. I'm a very poor public speaker. Book signings were painful. I did two of them, decades ago, to push a nonfiction novelty book that sold 15,000 copies. An indie publisher liked it, did a good job handling design and promotion, made some money.

 

Escape is not a novelty book with amusing graphics on every page. It's a novel. My tenth or twentieth if you count all the shorter novelettes and original scripts and adaptations, a huge pile of fiction that was self published on Amazon, Kindle, Lulu, and Ingram. Friends said nice things and supported me. I made an effort to reach higher, invested every day and every year to win more readers with better stories.

 

It may or may not be possible to author a true magnum, which I have in rough outline, take one, two, or three years (or never) to complete, an appropriate challenge for an old soul. I'm satisfied in the literary achievement of Escape, a work of world building and simple blue collar heartache and courage, about six months to draft plus a couple more months to polish. It was an intense project, plenty of sleepless nights. I don't want to do that ever again. Steam Punk will be leisurely, a long gentle narrative.

 

That makes Escape a high water mark in my canon of action adventure, hard men and hot women, lives on the line every page. I stretch suspension of disbelief. There are numerous characters. It builds slowly and inexorably to a slam bang finish, the whole weight of story shouldered by a modest hero.

 

I have a strong sense of finality with Escape.