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.

 

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A million words

872,000 in publication, the rest of my output archived by the Wayback Machine and shelved at public libraries, or destroyed by WGA. Screenplays had to be renewed every 10 years or they were shredded. Doesn't include my letters, emails, forum posts, published magazine articles, a couple hundred pages that I typed in a tack room by 6V lantern light, and a couple hundred more filed in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. I've written in a penthouse overlooking Sunset Boulevard, deluxe rental houses in Holland, Costa Rica, and Australia, an unheated garret in Hilversum, a basement in London, a cheap Beverly Blvd motel, maybe three dozen offices, apartments, and prison cells, capped by five years in a sheet metal Ozarks dairy barn. A million words became a difficult 40-year project.

 

Was any of it any good? Maybe about half. Do other people write a million words? Sure. Kipling did. The execrable Dickens and Faulkner. Respectable Churchill, Rand, and Hugo. I declined to compete with Beat Generation giants or biographers or fat ladies who cranked out formula romance. Chandler authored a million words, half of which were excellent. I'd like to burn every rotten syllable penned by King and his spiritual ancestor Poe. I don't think RLS or Hammett wrote a million words. Clueless Zane Grey did.

 

I'm not certain that young people read or write. I know two men who collected every Tom Clancy book. We don't have a lot to discuss. A neighbor lady collected every cookbook and diet book in hardcover, plus twenty shelves jammed full of mystical junk. Another gal inquired if I had any dragons in my latest, which I did, although he only survived a single page. The best thing to do with dragons is to slay 'em.

 

The literary enterprise is like a dragon, or it was for me, and it was for Fitzgerald and O. Henry, a hoary, insatiable, insistent, non-negotiable life taker. When a man writes (not applicable to the fair sex, who write more than men do) the business of writing is to pit your wit and wisdom against every other man in human history. No reason to attempt that, unless you have new weapons.

 

http://www.wolfdevoon.net

 

Happy 20th Anniversary

Twenty years ago, Lt. Janet DiMarco and her partner Sgt. Cynthia Rice debuted in The Good Walk Alone. They kicked ass and shot armed men if they had to. They bent the law and made life hell for Capt. Audrey Russell and Chief Forensic Scientist Julie Levine. City Police LLC was staffed exclusively by women, checked by skeptical female judges and a plutocratic female Supreme Court. I argued intellectually for female justice and law enforcement in a series of essays and videos. The Freeman's Constitution provides for female jurors in family law.

I'm having a celebratory cup of coffee. Janet DiMarco falls in love with the Chief Executive, a Cary Grant type with vast resources and enough courage for five or six men rolled together as hereditary monarch ordered by the Supreme Court to pick a woman, marry her, and produce a prince. He picked DiMarco. Romantic comedy ensues. Heroic men are not naturally willing to be completely docile or honest, sharing every micron of their privacy and power. I tried to illustrate male responsibility and discretion in a dozen novels. We naturally out-rank women in multiple respects. If it weren't for strong men, women would never experience love and willingly agree to create children by irresistible heart-pounding intimacy.

For fun, it's also 33rd anniversary of my first fictional female cop, Lt. Laura Oak, awarded the Medal of Valor on Mars in 2157. She falls in love with an Earthman sent to do justice. Mars Shall Thunder was my first longform action adventure novel, to be topped decades later by a husband and wife team of private eye wildcats, Chris Cable and Mary Blount, Ph.D. It doesn't matter what other people write, or created in the long history of literature. I write about men and women, indestructibly bonded couples who form families and raise their children, tens of millions of moms and dads like my parents were, some of them uniquely tasked in life as heroes. Peaceful civilian life cannot exist without heroism by an elite minority of lovers. All the real life heroes I encountered were married men and women. Criminals were single and unlovable. It ain't rocket science. Strong, courageous folks are drawn to love and marriage.

We never do this perfectly. It's not perfection that men and women want from each other. If the standard of romance was perfection, it would never happen. Heroic people make more mistakes and face infinitely worse challenges than ordinary couples. That's the whole point of literature as I see it, to test the limits of what people can do in difficult circumstances. It was a specific failing of the noir genre, always a lonely p.i., destined to push away the babes, unable to love anyone, which I endeavored to fix. There's no drama without a loved one.

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