My first book (1991) sold 10,000 copies. I was hired to write video scripts in London. Then two prominent weekly webzines separately and independently published me above the fold, an audience of 40,000 unique page views per month. A couple years later, I won 25,000 followers at Seeking Alpha who were notified when I wrote a new financial article. My weekly columns for Alrroya were published in English and Arabic. I appeared opposite Krugman.
Consequently, I acquired the idea that I could write. Whether I could write fiction was a coin toss. Some readers said nice things about Mars, others had technical complaints, and literary agents declined it. Very few "print on demand" copies sold. There was equal disinterest in a paperback pairing a hot female cop and a handsome plutocrat. The work of creating Harry and Laura, followed by Janet and Archie, distilled and precipitated a commitment to romance as the overwhelmingly dominant factor in psychological life, especially during our 30s and 40s when careers are made or ruined, risky gambles taken, passionate love and electrifying eros the result of sudden thermonuclear chemistry. No one expects romance to happen.
Romance in the wider sense is a heightened adventure that presents difficult and dangerous choices, horsewhipped in my longform debut Mars Shall Thunder, more comically but equally grim in The Good Walk Alone. Life and health are risked universally a thousand times a day, in traffic, at a fast food restaurant or school cafeteria, at a gay nightclub or at home. It happens to everyone. We age and die. Vital young adults in their 30s are eager and beautiful, at the summit of physical strength. Murderous conspiracies challenged Harry and Laura on Mars and likewise Janet and Archie in Atlantis to respond, wielding official government powers.
The next thing to do as a novelist was to delete official government powers, make it private wildcat power, totally anarchist and indifferent to money, an independent Chris and Peachy. They kept me busy two years. I had some nice reviews, enough to persuade me that I was on the right track and should continue writing fiction. That's easier said than done. After a major project involving characters I care about, I always had to detach and bang out some nonfiction gumph, a quart of creative Drano. Readers avoided my nonfiction without fail, and reviewers deigned to throw spitballs. Unfortunately, in the course of not writing novels, I hit a couple home runs in the philosophy of law, important work that needs to be seen and studied.
I'm unable to do anything to promote readership, and I've stopped writing. Book sales have flatlined after single digits last year. I'm satisfied that 'Partners' was a masterwork (the whole extent to which I possess any talent) and 'Executive Branch' sharpened matters. I'm done.
Why I'm shunned and ignored, I dunno. Nothing I can do about it. It might be a social disease. The political conspiracy against Trump is congruent with a boycott of action adventure stories involving a powerful white guy and an equally courageous white superbabe. I assert that such people exist in reality. I've met them. Chris and Peachy are a little more active, a little sexier than most, but not so different than hard combat vets and the hot females who want them.
Let's be honest about it. A straight white hero, armed and dangerous? And worse than that, indifferent to people of color and liberal government, a blur in the rear view mirror. Chris and Peachy were pampered sprigs of wealthy clans in control of institutional power -- a pair of ruling class black sheep. What they do as often as possible is to celebrate a red hot sexual attraction that can't be delegated or saved. It ought to be obvious. There is a cohort of white male warriors, ex-Marine Corps "devil dogs" with superior fighting skills. If threatened, they attack. Their women are likewise armed, dangerous, devoted, and unafraid.
Chris and Peachy -- an irresistible, unending, permanent romantic union. Polygamy doesn't change anything. They were bonded by physical and mental chemistry that no complication can bend or distort, destined to cleave closer in four wild action adventure novels.
Whether it was a long, lonely multi-year folly or a milestone reached and won, the intimate saga of Chris and Peachy freed me to show and tell what I knew about life. 'Partners' was a personal retrospective of how life used to be in the simpler 1970s, when ordinary men and women needed and defended each other and accepted the truth of life on life's terms.
Baffles me how anyone can believe the absurdity of immaculate conception and virgin birth, resurrection of a dead man, and retail immortality bestowed by faith. It also troubles me that I outlived Paul Tweeten. I think Paul gave up. It's a heavy burden to fail as a filmmaker.
Tough that I, too, failed as a film director, but it escapes me why I've been blackballed as an novelist. Straight white people don't read any more? There's been a flood of self-published indie authors, a vast clutter of dsyfunctional chick lit, vampires, and LGBT fantasies.
A handful of positive reviews kept me going.
"A master of sly observations, of the truths hidden in words, echoes to the time when men were men, and writers weren't afraid to tell stories."
"The combination of courage, tenderness, integrity, brains and raw sensuality is way out of the ordinary. Alternately growls, whimpers and seduces."
"The truth is often dark and brilliant at once. DeVoon is great with description."
"Gripping, marvellously portrayed."
Hmph. Flowers that bloomed a few days like dogwood. Easily the prettiest tree in the forest, a spectacular herald of Spring, bare again in a blink. Puzzles me that my intellectual work was quoted by a constitutional scholar in Kathmandu, totally ignored in America.
I recorded a series of videos, put up a web page to archive my stuff for posterity. I expect to be erased from Google, banned by Amazon, and buried in an unmarked grave, no obiturary. The future belongs to legislators, school teachers, Jews, and people of color. I'm not angry about it, but it worries me that inertia should squash everything else, zero interest in liberty or private heroism, hand on heart fealty to religion and a show of hands, fascist government by morons and ugly manipulators incapable of producing or preserving anything of value.
As a pauper, it's a struggle to find 1000 calories a day. Prices matter. I ate ultracheap canned mackerel imported from China, until I noticed the label warning about cadmium and lead. If this is my last year, always a threat, it was worth every hardship that I endured as a creative explorer, and I have no regrets. Embarrassment wasn't much of a deterrent or penalty.
www.wolfdevoon.net
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