Oh, good

Excellent. I found an error in Partners in addition to a typo. I misspelled Wienermobile, had the i and e transposed. The other error is GIGANTIC and it justifies no sales, all "friendly" reviewers so disgusted that they'll bail out and refuse to read such incompetence, because Kyle lights two cigarettes in the space of three or four minutes. How absurd! How ridiculous! -- despite the fact that I've done it. Marlboros gutter and die in an ashtray if you aren't paying attention. Two cigarettes in four paragraphs is stupid, an error that I failed to catch, like the Wienermobile typo.

Whew! What a relief. Now I can go with the flow. No book sales, no reviews, obviously bum work, two blunders in 68,000 words. Besides which, it's overpriced. Independent novelists can't sell paperbacks. You have to give away your work for pennies on Kindle, 35 cents for a paid download, nothing for Kindle Prime or whatever the hell the scam is called, fractions of groats per pages read, divided by a million other hapless chumps who worked 1000 hours to create something that no one wants to read. I don't know why I try.

I should hire somebody in Bangladesh to write books, pay them $200 for a novel, put it up on Kindle, as stupid as possible, M/M gay bullshit or fantasy vampires (ooo! both! fag vampires!) Makes no sense to write anything myself, takes months, costs a fortune to buy Oscar Meyer cold cuts and bread, splurge on cheese and coffee once in a while, to be humiliated by a typo and an idiotic continuity error that a copy editor would have caught, saved me from slipping on a banana peel in the heat of writing Kyle's first murder.

Shit.

You want to know the truth? The real truth? -- I don't want a copy editor, don't want anyone to touch a word of my work, don't want a publisher, don't want to do any more publicity or book signings or radio interviews. To hell with it. I sell no books, and I refuse to jerk off on Kindle or Smashwords or Ingram again. I don't care whether people read my stories or not. Tom killed my appetite for "feedback." He liked the opening, then farted on the felonies. Two or three chapters were enough to turn him off.

The prospect of writing another novel is forbiddingly immense, like Everest or K2, undefined months or years to top everything I've done before, to sell no books, to die at the keyboard from a stroke or a heart attack. How smart is that? To prove what to who? I already know that I can write. That's not a sufficient reason to waste another year, lose another tooth, freeze in winter and swelter in summer, begging neighbors for day labor to pay for food that I fucking hate, never any whiskey, no restaurant meals, no car, no book royalties, no book reviews.

There's a Facebook group of novelists, allegedly. It's the second group that I've joined and tried to participate in. The first one was chock full of illiterate imbeciles from black Africa and India. The new group is worse, chicks winning hundreds of five-star Kindle reviews for pink cupcakes on their book covers, cute little smiley author photos, Barbie and Ken stories.

I cannot justify it, will not do it, refuse to write another novel. Forget it.

That raises an interesting and important question. What can I do in life? Where would I be welcome? It's certain that I wouldn't be welcome in Los Angeles or New York or Wisconsin or Germany or Costa Rica. No one is welcome without money. There are no foundation grants for bad tempered white filmmakers, no teaching jobs for unlettered old men.

Eeee. The only place I would be welcome is in prison. Obviously, the best thing to do is find an all-white jurisdiction, commit a serious crime, make trouble in court, and have the book thrown at me. Denmark would be ideal. Maybe hitchhike to Alberta.

Pending imprisonment, starting today, a hunger strike. No more Oscar Meyer. I hate the fucking shit.

Immoral

While the rest of the country is goo-goo about Fred Rogers and throwing furniture at Donald Trump, I've been doing something less infantile. I finished a novel that required 1000 hours and $1000 to write. Intellectual investments aren't cheap. During the past three years, I've done that repeatedly, burned every cell of psychic power and every dollar at my disposal to create a literary legacy. Some of the money was mine, some of it was ponied up by friends and credit cards. The total could be measured in cans of coffee, cartons of cigarettes, ounces of pot, hundreds of thousands of words, or dozens of times that I've been dissed and cursed by my wife and daughter. You get what you pay for in life. I threw myself in the furnace of creative work.

Along the way, from time to time, I scratched on the walls like a prisoner. My writing office has a wall of paneling that I installed to seal up bare framing. Three years ago, the new wall was covered with an outline for Mars. Then a list of characters for A Portrait of Valor. About a year ago, I pasted duct tape to spell out a math equation, two feet tall, 2 + 1 = 0. Two years of writing plus one year to build a house had won me nothing. Six months ago I summed up my career as a storyteller, over 20 years of writing. I believe it to be an accurate self assessment, written in grease pencil on the wall, my Sharpie dry, no car or cash to buy another:

1. Retired
2. Exiled
3. Untalented
4. Stupid
5. Immoral

The first four items are excusable. I'm not the only snowflake who made an idiotic decision, believing wrongly that writing books was a good idea. Goodreads lists 50,000 similarly dumb self-published authors. As an experiment in promotion, I joined a Goodreads review group, reciprocal praise for featherweight crap. I got thrown out and banished because I refused to read and review a randomly assigned novel written by an illiterate dolt. Sometimes I think that writing should be a licensed profession.

Perhaps it is. I pitched dozens of agents and publishers, rejected every time. That's one of the reasons why I'm self-published, unread, ignored. Far more important to me personally, my work is archived in digital files at Lulu and Amazon. My laptop has screen cancer, and I didn't trust my heirs to perceive any value in my immoral creative output.

That's what distinguishes Wolf DeVoon from the other fifty thousand nitwits. The stories I write are immoral. My people are loose cannons, indifferent to the general welfare. They fall in love and fuck like minks, graphically told. They are straight white rich people, armed and dangerous, ready to kill or be killed. How immoral or politically incorrect can one be?

In this, I had little choice. The literature I admired was straight and white: Ayn Rand, Robert Louis Stevenson, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene Rhodes, C.S. Forester. All of their heroes were armed and dangerous.

I look at the modern world and feel sorry for my contemporaries. Their heroes are fags and harpies. Guns are too dangerous to touch, votes sacrosanct and supreme. I have friends who are LEOs and Federal agents, hamstrung by cowards, politicians, and community organizers, none of whom has to face life on life's terms, alone in the dead of night, kill or be killed. I like due process as well as the next fellow, but law courts move like molasses, months or years after someone fought for liberty and justice, shot a dangerous thug in the line of duty.

More than anything else, I studied and admired the Sons of Liberty, the Committee of Safety and the Continental Congress. Our nation was founded by straight white people, defended throughout two centuries of American history by men who put their lives on the line. What gays have contributed is obscene and impotent, a conspiracy of postal clerks and twinks. If I'm the last American novelist who celebrates manhood, fine. I'll take opprobrium, poverty, and humiliation gladly.

Forty percent of the Federal workforce is black -- and you wonder why government is inept and corrupt? Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore destroyed by black voters, black city councils. That welfare recipients can vote is insane, generation after generation housed and fed by avowed communists and public service looters masquerading as educators. You're a chump, whitey, hunted like prey by street gangs and tax collectors. Go ahead, vote for sanctuary cities and open borders. You deserve nothing better than MS-13 and Mexican cartels.

It makes me laugh and smile, that Donald Trump is rich, white, and fabulously successful as a straight guy who loves beautiful women, married to elegant Melania. Up yours, Barack and Michelle and Hillary, last gasp of a corrupt "ethical" superstructure that no one needed, an object lesson in civics. The press can wring their hands and wail, but the jig is up. America is white, not colorblind or stupid. Freedom means freedom from government, lower taxes, strong borders, and civilian law enforcement, three quarters of it provided by private guards and the Second Amendment, an American common law right to defend ourselves.

It's the theme of my next project, food and water and health permitting.

Authorless

I'm totally baffled. Where does it come from? Thousands upon thousands of words, each line hammered and polished, each paragraph a composition in song, because it has to sing. Well, fine. A few sentences and graphs, maybe a page or two. I can understand that easily enough, the craft of writing. But where do characters come from? Situations that build from first page to last, whole lives that collide and sizzle.

Chandler said that believability was a matter of style. He didn't speak about how characters come to life, every breath, every sniff as loud as my own. All of them, bit players and extras, a whole city of men and women, no two alike, except for siblings who dislike each other and old married couples who frown at each other and bite their tongues.

I bothers me that I've slipped into first person and can't seem to get out. Chandler tempted me, the rotter. There ought to be a traffic sign on every keyboard, Do Not Enter. Now that I think about it, Robert Louis Stevenson did it, too, first person voice of Davey Balfour, without which Kidnapped would have been a remote dull tale. A lot of respectable writers have used third person omniscient, although many more failed miserably. I used third person in Mars Shall Thunder, my first novel, thought that that's what writing a novel entailed, like Ayn Rand and Scott Fitzgerald and Agatha Cristie. I look back on it now as an empty hollow bucket. First person ruined me as a reader, pushed me into a corner from which there is no escape.

Writing in the flesh and bone of a living man with headaches and laughter and love, a whole inventory of sensitive fingers and crackling mental experience, is the most drect way to tell a story that matters, because it matters to a real person in real time.

Another thing bothers me. I write in vignettes, in scenes that are whole and complete with mechanical transportation and other dull moments excised, unless the experience of travel and perhaps boredom are significant, revealing, a stage set and lit and framed for a reason, the business of thinking. People think all the time. Or my people do. Why would I pour days and nights and months into  a story of mental vacancy?

I use tricks, but few. Men are tempted and women fall in love. Puzzles fascinate, every little remark by a friend that suggests something withheld or an inexplicable blockheadedness. Most people are transparent. Mysteries have to be constructed with focused effort to conceal something, deep waters with a calm surface. Penetrating the truth of people who withhold vital information always seems the most interesting thing to do.

I let my guy tell wry jokes, especially with a humorless pal, a natural foil. I let him weep and go to pieces after he kills a man. His love affair with the right girl is transcendant. She laughs, cries big tears of gratitude, clings to him tightly and won't let go, abandons him because she can't face the prospect of his death.

Silly girl. The main character in a story told first person can't die, else there would be no one to relate what happened.

In Finding Flopsie, the concept required two narrators, two books married in sequence, the way Chris saw it and, separately, how Peachy witnessed many of the same events. Male authors have no business attempting to occupy a woman's POV, her physiology and hormone flux. Perfectly fair and proper for female novelists to write about male psychology. We're simple creatures, almost one dimensional compared to the ordered chaos of a feminine personality. I suppose gays likewise have some depth of complexity, uninteresting to me as a relatively simple straight guy. Seeing women at their best is to honor them passionately. To wrestle with them is exasperating.

My first person main character (and narrator) is always a better man than I am. His limitations are few and natural, can't be in two places at the same time, can't be asleep and wide awake simultaneously. It takes time to scrape the ice off a windshield in harsh Wisconsin winter. If he's nervous, there's mortal danger straight ahead, something that he's never done before. Nothing like me. I've carried a gun, had to jack a round in the chamber and flip the safety off, but I've never killed a man, thank God. I know just enough about life to invest my characters with the irreducible imperatives of combat on a frozen city street at night.

That, however, is not what's bugging me. Where, oh, where do 68,000 words come from? -- every scene alive and real. I don't recall writing a completed story, and it cannot be altered. Very strange, as if the story wrote itself, authorless.

One more thing

I was so shocked by what I had written, that I forgot to explain the structure of 'Partners,' without which I could not have conceived or executed the story. It's a study in triangles.

The romantic triangle of Kyle / Karen / Liz is one of my favorites, though not as tense as Kyle / Jimmy / Karen. The ending could not exist without the triangle of Kyle / Jimmy / Lepsky. To round out the structure, there are five more triangles involving minor characters. In almost every scene, either three people are on stage, or two are emotionally tugging at Kyle's mind and heart in a conflict of divided loyalties that Kyle cannot win. The book is told first-person from his POV and nothing is hidden. Kyle knows he's screwed, no matter what he does.

I think it's interesting that 'Partners' begins and ends in winter, from the first few flakes of late November, to a snowbound Christmas and a February blizzard in Winnebago County, finally a freak March ice storm, an actual event that occurred in 1976 and paralyzed the city of Milwaukee for an entire week. When the ice storm melts, winter is over and the tale ends, four months of Kyle's life. He is utterly transformed by one bad Wisconsin winter.

Milwaukee today is no place for a story of any kind, no winter to speak of. 'Partners' is set in a forgotten era, when men were men and women liked them that way. The Costa Nostra had an iron grip on the city, a vast empire of profitable rackets, eliminated rivals with car bombs. All gone now, of course, but in the winter of 1975-76 it was possible to drink at a downtown strip joint, rent a party girl, drive a muscle car, carry a gun and get a piece of the action, if you knew the right people.

Cold weather worries a lonely young man, reading Help Wanted ads.

Tragedy

I'm somewhat stunned. I wrote a tragedy. Never did such a thing before. I spent my entire career in show business and narrative fiction doing comedy and light entertainment, always a happy ending, smiling faces, gratitude for the blessings of life in general. There were two or three cruel short satires that I thought were funny, but now I see that they floated in deeper waters, my knowledge of tragedy. I saw it in Robin Williams' eyes, a remarkably funny man, drawn to dead poets and death, met him in Los Angeles. Too many comedians suffered and died tragically: Larry Beezer, Fred Asperagus, John Belushi, Andy Kaufman, Lenny Bruce. They specialized in biting satire, symptom of an illness.

Writing a tragic novel does not mean that I'm sick or doomed. Romeo and Juliet followed in sensible, successful fealty to the Greek tragedies, which Aristotle thought were superior to comedies. If well done, a tragic story gives the audience an intense emotional experience of "catharsis," shedding tears for a reflection of one's own grief in life. We love and lose and then we die. It's the basic truth of mortality, life on life's terms.

It gives me great pleasure to see President Trump, spectacular Melania and handsome Barron walking together. I wrote a long chapter in The Last Book that was titled 'The Beautiful.' My artistic choice always tilts to the sunlit realm of love and pride. I'm entitled to do that as a tribute to the benevolent men and women who helped me, either personally or in literature far removed in time, people I met through their creative work. It was no fun meeting Frank Zappa in person, great fun reading comedies by Ray Chandler ('Pearls Are a Nuisance') and Dashiell Hammett ('The Thin Man'). Without their example, I would not have pursued the uphill climb of writing hardboiled adventure novels, all of them with happy endings.

-- until now. 'Partners' is a major work, if not my magnum. It may very well be the last thing I write. On the flyleaf under the title there is a Jim Morrison line: "The future's uncertain and the end is always near." Tough love in a nutshell. We are given the great gift of life. It cannot end well. Think of Ayn Rand, O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, awful karma in a world of lies that robbed them of joy and dignity.

There is entirely too much focus on supernatural evil today, dark burlesque that strips our enjoyment of modesty and comfort, the great pleasure of learning and earning our place in an objectively benevolent world -- until evil curses and medieval metaphysics irrationally strike at random. Reality is far better and far worse than a Stephen King obscenity.

War reduces our expectation of and capacity for love, whether abruptly or over the course of a hard novel that offers hope and ultimately dashes it the end, leaving no one whole or well. Given a choice (?) it is my hope to relegate tragedy to a single leaf on the tree of my work as an author. Frankly, the last page of Partners was so sad that I was disabled for days and it will always haunt me as intensely horrible, that the main character must go on without hope, a worthy young hero doomed to spend the rest of his days searching for a girl he married. The spoiler changes nothing. The novel has a very long story to tell.

I'm writing about it today in honor of them, lovers by right, two children who found in each other's arms the splendor of joy, always natural to be together, always painful to be apart. War does that, pries apart those who love, takes our trusted comrades and happiness. Not difficult to tell that story in small words. I'm good at the obvious. Victor Hugo did it, too. It was obvious in Notre Dame de Paris that he addressed the grim truth of fatality (fate) and in Les Miserables the tragedy of endemic abuse and humiliation. One almost has to shrug off Dovstoevsky, Lawrence, Melville, Dickens, a hundred filthy roaches like Heller and Capote. Tragedy is the only literary canon taught in high schools. In college we are invited to growl and moan with idiots like Arthur Miller and the nonwhite screed of the month.

Tragedy is the lifeblood of journalism. If it bleeds it leads. No one reports millions of bright souls, happy children, successful young people who find romantic love. Their stories dance in my work. Nothing to be shy or embarrassed about. I love life, and no amount of sadness and tawdry sniping can change that. I don't own a television for that reason, and I carefully edit what I listen to on the radio. The wholesomeness of Led Zeppelin and Chrissie Hynde are a blessing. Newscasts get ducked to zero.

It's not that I'm indifferent to current events, at least not historically. I was politically active for a long time, but it has no place in the cloistered temple of creative work. The goal is to take us to another world that exists beyond today's tiresome repetition of political venom. Works of fiction kick open doors and take us into the souls of people we come to love. Their triumph is ours. Their sorrow becomes heartfelt grief, if the novel suceeds.

'Partners' succeeds so well that its weight is a great burden I was not prepared to carry.

The ending

I have an outline for the climax. It's percolating. Meanwhile, I suddenly saw the ending, jumped ahead and hammered it like iron, totally right, a done deal. The last piece of the puzzle remaining now is the ten-page climax. That will take time. Wish me luck with it. Heroes and novelists have to get lucky.

There are five scenes in the climax, diagrammed below. I am very close to beginning to write it, and it's intimidating, grisly work that frightens me. The thin black curve is Kyle's clarity, his psycho-epistemological status. It's always a struggle to obtain full focus, requisite in battle if you want to survive. Kyle has a lot to survive for.

The ending is so intensely sad that it has disabled me with sorrow. It might be many days before I can go back to work, backspace and ride the 10-page climax, an ugly rollercoaster at the gates of hell.

Climax

The climax of a tragedy is the most precious gem in literature. It must be hard and brilliant and shine like a diamond, teleological product of all the heat and pressure that built from Page One. Whatever the story has been reaching for, this is it, every mystery solved, every hero, every villain stage center in mentally sharp light, nothing hidden.

In previous work, that was never necessary. I wrote stories in which the climax was heavily foreshadowed and fairly simple in execution, a dab of surprise and tense excitement as it played out, took life and saved life, and satisfied the needs of a romantic comedy. Perhaps that's a funny way to talk about Chris and Peachy, but let's face it, love stories end well.

'Partners' is something entirely different, a tragedy at its core, cannot end well for Kyle and Jim, two men on the wrong side of the law on purpose, at war with the mob, outnumbered and betrayed by a man they trusted, marked for death from Page One, although neither of them perceived it at the time. 65,000 words later, their fate is sealed and they know it.

The climax, I should mention, is not the end of the story. It is a mountaintop of revelation, face to face with death. One will live and one will die. Many others will live and die, a final judgment upon men and their folly. The climax is an action sequence, yet something far more significant than life and death, physical bookends that no man can escape. A literary climax is and ought to be spiritual discovery, all masks dissolved, all ignorance cornered and killed.

I don't care if it takes a month to write it.

One more remark about this particular project, a parable that has just occurred, after I wrote the previous sentence, saved it, and went outdoors to find the dog. He has predictable ways and means of making travel difficult on the county road, early morning to warm himself dead center in the middle of the gravel, impeding traffic, and late afternoon in a shady spot on the top of a hill, hopefully near the berm. I went up to congratulate him for staying out of traffic, and then I turned and assessed with satisfaction how nice the property looked, after I spent several days weed whacking several acres. There was a group of giant oak logs that need to be sawn by a professional logger. I had hauled off everything smaller. These were pieces of a massive trunk. One of them seemed small enough to wheelbarrow, so I prepared to do that. The damn thing was 150 lbs, at or beyond the limit of what I could lift, and the wheelbarrow squirted away when I attempted to load it, heavy round crashing down, scraping my forearm and a knee. It was impossible. I heaved the giant thing on a berm and took the wheelbarrow back to the barn, shaking my head in amusement, then struck by a sober epiphany.

There is a distinct possibility that my tour de force will fail, if I lack the power to do the heavy lifting of an astounding and unexpected climax.