Triumph

I've had intense bouts of writing before. In the 1980s, I wrote screenplays and spent most of the decade directing film and TV, much of it based on scripts that I created or doctored. It was followed by a very long interval of depression and confusion, adjusting to the fact that I was finished in show business, after two A-list flops. I directed a dozen semi-pro projects in the 1990s, but my heart wasn't in it, and I needed a new creative channel. I began to take writing more seriously, something that I could do without cast, crew, or production equipment.

My narrative literature started in 1987, with a growth spurt ten years later that won weekly publication with enough money and prestige to suggest that writing was a golden goose. My intellectual output of 1999-2003 punched a hallmark in history, eclipsed by the 9/11 division of American thought into two rival camps, neocon and left liberal. A handful of libertarians recognized my work, and Wolf DeVoon was grudgingly added as a footnote to the cavalcade of celebrated dunderheads. I stopped writing. Mars Shall Thunder, The Good Walk Alone, First Feature, and Laissez Faire Law were self-published and sold no books.

Family life occupied most of my attention in the next decade, with part time gigs as a news editor, a market analyst, and a financial columnist. A few articles were noticed, especially a white paper on SEC rule revision in 2009 and a good call on ludicrously overvalued Petrobras. My 2013 staff job as a marketing writer ended in disaster, after smithing high profile lies for corner office people in the oil industry. I was defrocked as a professional whore. My book about screenwriting flopped, despite costly promotion. I was a dead duck.

Then a funny thing happened three years ago. I completed construction of a house in rural Missouri. Isolated in a tin barn that served as material shed and workshop, I began to write again, this time in earnest. I rewrote Mars Shall Thunder as an audio drama and attempted to produce it with a Kickstarter project that failed to garner support. Despairing of any further creative progress, I wrote an autobiography titled The Last Book, which I believed it to be -- until Cass McMain and Erik Svehaug urged me to write fiction.

Idleness and isolation made it possible to create signature work that I do not regret, although it offended every conceivable reader in the English speaking world. We do strange things at the end of life, when little else matters except a legacy, something to be remembered for. I painted myself into a corner of my own, unlike any other voice in literary history. The Case Files of Cable & Blount inspired a series of four novels that I still enjoy, but in the past few months I had a breakthrough. Whatever one means by masterwork this was it. Wolf DeVoon freed himself from Chandler and Hammett, found an entirely unique manner of my own.

The title is Partners, recently self-published in paperback, the capstone of my Ozark period, a three year full-time affirmation of literary ambition, writing every day, understanding that my work is unwanted by agents, publishers, book reviewers, and readers. That didn't matter. Kyle and Jim and Karen came to life in a time and place that no one remembers or cares to consider, when the mafia controlled the city of Milwaukee in 1975 and eliminated rivals with car bombs and murderous gun battles. Partners fulfilled a purpose I sought 20 years ago, to achieve personal work of significant value, whether loved, hated, or ignored by others.

Partners is a tragedy, the first time that I ventured to write such a thing, free to speak of it, that we live and lose, no longer obligated to please with an upbeat ending. The outline for Partners was conventional, but something finally clicked, and now I feel satisfied that my work is finally done, no need to try again. I'm not certain what I'll do next, but it won't be a sequel or another novel from scratch. Partners is all that I hoped and labored to do in life.

No more dragons to slay.