The Goal of My Writing

Ayn Rand wrote an article so titled in 1963, which I discovered ten years later in the dusty upper stacks of the Milwaukee County Public Library at 3 a.m., illegally camped there to study bound volumes of her Objectivist essays. Too little too late to improve my moral stature, because I was well along the path to perdition as a 16mm filmmaker, headed to prison. Objectivists don't go to prison, neither in reality nor in fiction. Young morons often do both. Historical note: Victor Hugo routinely threw his main characters into dungeons. In the early 70s, Tom and I tossed our FM radio personas in jail many times and ended our comedy LP fictionally incarcerated for decades. I was okay with most of our goofy studio courtroom charges (disobeying Father, disobeying Mother, disrespecting women, etc) but I took exception to the accusation of fraud. America was littered with frauds — Federal, state, local, and cultural.

 

Be that as it may, I should discuss the goal of my writing. I make an effort to remain rational at all times, although comedy and psychedelic sex scenes sometimes make themselves embarrassingly brazen with Technicolor impudence. You can take the boy out of Hollywood, but you can't take Hollywood out of the boy. One of the pictures that inspired me was transsexual 'Performance' starring young lascivious Mick Jaggar. It had two pioneering music clips, Memo To Turner sung by Jaggar accompanied by Ry Cooder, and an Afro American poet chanting a ballad in an airport concourse with bongos, a hardnosed call for liberation in the far freer world of the early 70s. We ended the Vietnam War by insurrection. Ayn Rand said we were dirty savages. True enough. War was messy. We had a lot of casualties.

 

My initial purpose in writing was war. After I flopped as a film director, I wrote a sci-fi novel, determined to write my way past the gates at Paramount. In retrospect, it made no sense to invest the next 20 years attempting to gain traction in Tinsel Town. The crossroads of Sodom and Gomorrah relocated from boy meets girl to full blown intersectionality. Blacks, gays, and grievance merchants have a hammerlock on publishing and filmed entertainment today. My heroes and heroines are straight white wildcats.

 

I don't know where stories come from. I've authored 16 novels and novelettes containing 98% fiction. Sometimes I reference personal knowledge of places in the world and dramas I experienced. Truths are good things to have in a story. My heroes are better men than I am. They are stronger, taller, smarter, and far more courageous than yours truly. My heroines are awesome creatures, as many women in fact are. I've encountered real life heroines. I've also had memorable experiences with colorful people on all six continents. Russians are Russian to the bone. I like Chinese people, although they share as little of themselves as possible. I worked with blacks in Hollywood and London. I made every conceivable social mistake privately and professionally. We learn by doing. I learned to stand my ground. I'm an author.

 

All this bubbles and brews while I'm not writing. As previously mentioned, I don't know where stories come from, except an iron rule to never repeat myself, neither in story nor language.

I learned from long experience as an obscure author that making money is not the goal of my writing. What happens is that a story emerges in sufficient clarity to write it. The first word is a hurdle, then a sentence. It goes on like that 10 or 12 hours a day for innumerable weeks and months that don't matter. What matters is to write the whole story, beginning, middle, end. It has to make sense, read easily, and hold the reader spellbound with vivid scenery and compelling characters.

 

For a long time, I regarded Partners as a capstone masterpiece, never to be "topped." I amused myself with lighthearted comedy and satire for a while (Chiseltown, Heaven, A Better World) until Erik prodded me about writing a serious adventure novel, which I had stupidly discussed. At the time, my extent of story development was two and a half words — a space colony. It became a literary tour de force.

 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/wolf-devoon/escape/paperback/product-974wyy.html

 

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Plenty of other books

No one has to read me. Millions of books in libraries, no joke, no exaggeration. My wife and daughter have at least three hundred at home, and we abandoned a couple hundred more in Costa Rica. I can't guess how many they've read over the years. Perhaps a thousand or two. I visited big public libraries in Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, and London. Every day of the week, NPR and Fox monotonously plug more Jewish and black authors. There could be 100,000 self published goyim on Amazon, a million preachers, dreamers, and woo-woo mystics in America. I can't estimate how many keystrokes and cat videos were posted on Facebook. Lawyers and legislators dump trillions of words on paper. Every year, there's a library book sale in upscale Jefferson County, Colorado, tens of thousands of old encyclopedias, novels, children's books, mysteries, and dusty nonfiction retired from a dozen suburban county branch libraries to make room on their shelves for new socially correct rubbish. In 1980, I was offered a job at Lucasfilm to write Star Wars paperbacks. God knows how many westerns and romance novels were sold in the past, certainly thousands of titles. Every TV show has writers, every movie, every newscast, every commercial. In 1965, I tore bulletins from a teletype to be broadcast on a 250-watt AM radio station to retirees and housewives. We read a weekly newspaper full of gossip, school lunch menus, high school sports, death notices, and smiling VFW fish fry eaters. People subscribed to Time, Good Housekeeping, National Geographic, Reader's Digest, and Sports Illustrated.

 

The world does not need me. It may be illegal nowadays to read or discuss my signature style of straight white obscenities and preposterous adventures. I've invested more decades than I can remember, to be completely ignored. I deeply appreciate the half dozen friends who encouraged me to continue. Without them I would have quit long ago. Maybe I improved over the years. Perhaps Escape! is my finest work to date. I don't know. Certainly my most stridently idiosyncratic, full of frankly adult content. That's how I understand the truth of life past, present, and future. Boy meets girls.

 

My friend Tom has been posting splendid videos on early American history. In the space of a mere 70 years, colonial population increased tenfold, about a third of which resulted from additional migration from Europe. Where did the other 2/3 of colonists come from? They fucked a lot. That's also why there are 200 million Nigerians, all Bible thumping, bandits, and crime notwithstanding, fucking day and night. The same thing happened in China and India. Three billion people didn't suddenly appear by magic. Communists and Hindus fucked all day and night, young and old, rich and poor. It's sort of a lost art in woke America, but it persists in our country music, classic rock, and motels from coast to coast.

 

I estimate that I successfully wooed 75 babes. Your mileage may vary.

 

Of course, there's more to life than sexuality. Literature, science, medicine, politics, crime, corrections, salesmanship, mining, manufacturing, farming, food service, cartoons, and clog dancing. I would include banking and finance, but they don't exist anymore except as camp followers of government, pushing paper assets to paper over unpayable public debt. Ask yourself how much fun would it be to date a black female Morgan Stanley manager or a mentally challenged public servant like AOC? I had several interesting experiences with black girls, but you couldn't pay me enough to bed an angry diversity hire or horse faced Occasional Cortex, unless it involved handcuffs and a horsewhip. Call me picky.

 

I admit to reading other people's books, everything written by Rand, Kipling, C.S. Forester, Ray Chandler, James Madison, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, RLS, Aristotle, and Machiavelli. I've read more Gene Rhodes than most people have and all five of Hammett's novels. I regret reading some authors, particularly Hemingway and Chesterton. Sort of ambivalent about Victor Hugo. Too many bad guys and helpless victims. Salinger was contemptible, Vonnegut, Heller, and Adams idiotic. I was amused by Gurdjieff and O. Henry, bored by Jules Verne, and infuriated by Wall Street Journal editorials. Joyce, Kafka, and Lawrence are unreadable trash. I much admire and respect Erik's short stories.

 

The other day at the country store, there were a dozen strangers on the front porch, sitting and standing in an array of paraplegic gear, severely disabled Iraq War vets. I went outside to chat with them, always glad to meet brave men. They have courageous tales to tell, plenty of grisly war stories in hardcover.

 

No reason to read my novels. "Old fashioned," Cass remarked.

 

I'll be honest with you. The final chapter of Escape! is so daunting that I doubt any other living author could wrangle it with penetrating truths, sizzling tension, and suspension of disbelief. Victor Hugo achieved it in Notre Dame de Paris, a very thick medieval French tragedy. I'm 1/4 French. I don't care about ancestry or a melodrama of fake marriage in the Court of Miracles to save a nitwit. I'm not Victor Hugo, nor a cog in his shadow. I'm individual, marginalized, and about to be canceled by a horde of savages who despise white men. That doesn't matter. I have to fashion an alchemy no one else would attempt — challenging Hugo with dueling pixels point blank, one of us to be slain and forgotten.

 

This post never seems finished. I'm dragging my feet, letting hours and days escape, no pun intended. Don't want to write anything written before by anyone on earth. The outline is set. Outlines are not writing. The crisis is simple. Literature is not simple. I would rather lose this laptop to barn rot, rather than draft and mess around with the climax. People talk about editing and emending. I've done it with See Spot Run situations and dialogue typed too rapidly. Not now. The ending is not negotiable.

 

One last thing to append. You should definitely boycott my books, all of them. I'm not to be trusted. In the past, I've lost my temper hundreds of times, destroyed a heavy Selectric typewriter by upending a table, physically ripped a 25-pair office telephone from the wall in anger (not easy to do) and tore up several marriages by firing wives who make life difficult. What the fuck did they expect from a writer? I've walked off numerous jobs, snorted at coworkers, and been fired more times than I can count. I am not a reasonable person. My life was a lost struggle for recognition.

 

Older now, isolated and impoverished, I yell at the dog to get out of my line of sight when I write. The work I do is impossibly difficult. I fight with wasps, ticks, broiling summer heat and icy winter. None of that stops me. Either I'll write the final chapter of Escape! or choke to death in the war of words. My future is canceled. Escape! will be self-published and die, like Partners did, another masterpiece of war and death. I'm too worn and ugly for a new girlfriend, however much I crave feminine caress.

 

Somehow, it was all worth it, every blunder, every crime, every cigarette, every obscenity, every folly, temper tantrum, and broken promise. I blew through millions of dollars belonging to others. I suffered the most pitiful disasters, always my own fault. And worse — I wrote about it, as if my misery was worth discussing in detail, a completely foolish enterprise in the name of transparency. Salinger was far more clever. He never made a public statement, kept quiet, became mysterious. Familiarity breeds contempt and ridicule. I should change my middle name to Chump. Nothing but ridicule, coast to coast and in five foreign countries, humiliated by judges and juries in every profession I assaulted.

 

Hell is worth it, if I can pen the last chapter and climax of Escape!

If I had to go to prison again to achieve it, I'd pay that price.

 

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Ooo ... the end

I have before me prospectively the final chapter of Escape!

 

The context and spiritual action is what it must be, settled long ago when I began the book. I don't care if it takes another year to write the ending. Amusing, that it comes down to a few pages, maybe 15 or 20 at most. Also amusing that I'm the one who has to write it, talented or not. There's no novel without it.

 

I'm happy with the story, 243 pages that introduced a small cast of characters who we came to admire and understand (sort of) and to erstwhile pray that they will survive and thrive, no matter how badly they are threatened or assaulted. Especially the lovers, Hansje and Gadant, Cantwell and her knight in shining armor, Commander Malik and a devoted warrior who would die to defend him if necessary.

 

Everything balanced on a knife edge and we sensed it from page one. Lefler might not make it. I haven't decided yet. Jimmy is young and idealistic. The good die young. So do villains, human and robot, every honorable mind closed against cruelty. I don't want to spoil anything for readers. All I've said is there's a final chapter that I have to indent slowly and carefully and creatively and cinematically. No rush to get started. I'll spend a few days weed whacking. There are oak rounds to split by hand.

 

LATER —Tired from weed whacking. My daughter came by to return a couple empty plastic containers that were full of nice crunchy stuff that I didn't have enough teeth to eat. I told her that I was worried whether the girls paid property taxes, something I used to do years ago before my wife took over. That's all that troubled me, and I was glad to get rid of it with a mention. So. Here we jolly well are, no desire to attack the final chapter, for which I should be praised. Listening to the Cardinals game. Generally, the Cardinals stink, a 14-3 loss in Los Angeles yesterday, but I like baseball calls and the Cards announcers are extremely nice clever guys, a pleasure to hear. Excellence is always a joy, don't you think?

 

Not ready to do the last chapter. A good loud storm would be nice.

 

UPDATE — Like Partners, I had to outline the final chapter of Escape! My second draft looks like this. Still a long way to go before it's locked and loaded, every heartbeat rehearsed and ready to shoot.

 

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Hammered

The cupboard is bare, a pack of ham, stupid fake cheese slices, fake cherry cranberry juice, a third of a loaf of bread, and a mostly empty jar of peanut butter. It looks laughably dumb in a 6 ft tall Frigidaire,  retired in working order and hauled to my writing office by a neighbor who bought of a new fridge that probably cost $2000. He and his wife are guardian angels, weekly delivery of water bottles, frozen Meals On Wheels, home cooking leftovers, and a thousand other blessings. Both they and Don gave me little bags of pot. Rocking and rolling on the laptop.

 

It is incredibly painful to write. I hate gambling, and yet there's nothing for it, has to be done whether I like it or not. If I do something right it's terrible. I mean it. Breaking down like a baby, nose running, loud tears of gratitude and wonder, a triumph of real drama that throws open a sunlit vista of opportunities, every character whole and uniquely alive to life.

 

Oh, god, a new blank page, another twist of the ratchet, something to top everything that came before, climbing straight up a featureless rock face through the clouds. Shit. No way down, because I would fall to my death as an author. Everything else I wrote years ago is rotted and weak, utterly irrelevant.

 

It's a familiar gulf between this hour and all the rest of my time on Earth, a rich history that does not matter. Thousands of grievous mistakes and blunders, high crimes and misdemeanors, a broad river of personal and professional shame that doesn't matter now.

 

I'm writing a blockbuster. I don't exist, except to face the blank page and climb higher. The dog gets walked and fed without stopping the work, every moment, every breath.

 

Nothing for it. Light 'em up. Roll 'em!

 

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Bleeding for the company

Tradesmen know what I'm talking about. I got off easy, just a skinned knuckle repairing the horse barn gate. Make a note, do not build gates. Two tanks of fuel to whack the truck path back there, about 12 x 150 ft of tall grass and weeds, tossing aside windfall. Plenty more to pick up when I feel like doing a burn pile. Somewhat stunned. Another couple acres to whack. I need another gallon of gas. Plenty of string, which I pilfered from Carol. All my hand tools are at her house, haven't seen her for months. She'll show up and ask me to crawl on her roof, stretch 100 ft of shade cloth over her greenhouse windows, move big tubs of stupid plants outside with a hand truck.

 

The good news is page 238, another 30 or 40 to go maybe. I'm in the third act. I told the last good joke, foreshadowed hell, and it all goes downhill from now on, except a twist at the end. Those of you who know my methods will not be surprised that it took a while to find the right music for the next chapter. Music first, then write — "Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring, a slow dark strut. I'm tempted to write the next chapter in quatrain, hammer hammer hammer nail.

 

I worked in Holland a long time, two stints of two years, plenty of great Dutch rock, including Golden Earring, of course, but guitarist Ferdie Lancie, lunatic keyboardist Thys van Leer, and wonderful Herman Brood, last of the true rock and roll / heart and soul junkies. I got spoiled working with Dutch rockers. Made Bowie and Queen sound like Top 40 trollops.

 

My day started with hauling firewood, unloading and stacking it, then trimming the dog. If you trim a shihtzu's paws and flanks with a scissors, it's an exercise in interspecies diplomacy and you end up with enough hair on the floor to make another dog. No writing today. I'm out of pot and dead tired. The good news is that I'll live to see Escape! completed and launched, one of my worst and best novels, tons of sex and humor and heartache. I told Tom that my theme was individualism, which is superficially true, a politically correct gloss.

 

The hard nut is courage, love, and loyalty in a difficult world.

 

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5 a.m.

I started writing late last night around 1 a.m., had an idea, and being tired and stupid, I was fairly certain that I was writing rubbish. When I looked at the computer clock, it said 5 a.m. and I was trembling from too much pot, too much sugar, and far too many cigarettes. I got into bed fully dressed, cold and shaky, coughing feebly.

 

I woke up at 11 or so, still gasping for air, had to spit and cough. Old, badly behaved men are fragile. Then I read it. Oh my fucking god. And I knew how to end it, so I did that. Read it for typos, mystified, couldn't hardly believe it, broke into tears of triumph, had to use tissues. A wonderful turning point for my favorite character, a big leap of courage, transformation, and fulfillment. Neatly unanticipated and highly convincing. It could have happened that way.

 

There should be five main characters in a novel or a movie (I have trouble telling them apart because I write cinematically, see the scenes play, try to capture it in literature that's good enough to read and realize what I saw.) Anyway, five main characters. There can be another dozen supporting roles, named characters who we know quite a bit about and care about, plus a couple of villains because men are not angels, and some are less angelic than most. The very worst are demagogues on a mission to convince everyone to march in lockstep or to kneel in supplication.

 

Five main characters. If one of them changes, it tilts the pinball of destiny.

 

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Stuck

 

Trimmed the dog, weed whacked (always more to do), walked to the store, no writing for several days. A pivotal scene on deck. No pot. No willingness to write. Hunting a fast housefly. Smoking too many cigarettes. Listening to a baseball game. Put too much creamer in my coffee cup. Had to pour it back in the carafe to dilute it. Now I have a whole pot of tan coffee, drinkable after fixing my error. Reminds me of Aristotle making a little mistake that screwed up all of Western philosophy, explaining the difference in loaves of bread (white, wheat, rye, fresh, stale) as "accidents" that didn't change the "essence" of bread in all examples of bread. In epistemology, it's called The Problem of Universals. Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle's theory to explain how bread could be transmuted into the body of Jesus when a priest said magic words. God allegedly changed the "essence" without altering the "accidental" appearance and taste of bread. Terrible theology, disastrous epistemology. Aristotle made a tiny little mistake.

 

Back to the story I'm working on, middle of the second act.

 

Here's the situation. Hansje had a crack-up, blamed herself for a little design error that very nearly killed the man she loves and severely injured the boss who risked his life to save the hero. Whether the boss will recover is a toss-up. He lost a hand and forearm, a candidate for terminal cancer. Cosmic rays go through lead, and a lot of people who live in space die from cancer. Whether the boss dies or not is unimportant. He might make it. Hansje's design error wasn't detected, everything tested good, and it was easily fixed. The boss foreshadowed it, impossible to build a new space vehicle from the ground up without some trial and error. Splendid teamwork and heroism to rescue her main squeeze, who forgave her instantly. The injured boss forgave her, no problem. The second flight of her machine was perfect, a splendid achievement, made it possible to repair a meteor strike that punctured the colony.

 

The question is whether Hansje was changed? A little lamb by nature, given to grumpy complaints and technically brilliant, romantically and sexually vulnerable, a perfect mate for the hero and crucial to the climax (for reasons that don't matter right now) how does Hansje handle hostile, somewhat natural bureaucratic opposition in another department, all by herself? She can't fold under pressure. Too small to bully anybody.

 

Good place to be stuck. She needs to exemplify thematic elements of courage, trust, and loyalty. Not something that I want to approach without being stoned. I can author See Spot Run scenes sober and straight, but not transformational ones. This is Hansje's moment to cross an emotional rubicon. If she can't do it or ducks it, the ending won't make any sense. So I know it has to happen.

 

Writing it is something else. Need dope to see souls.

A bigger hammer

Writing Escape! is kicking my ass big time. A few pages more is debilitating, each and every one of them. If I get three a day, it's a big deal, breaking down in tears when I nail it. Endless revisions for grammar, elegance, surprise, humor (probably too much of that) and sex scenes that make sense and teach people how it's supposed to be, when you're so unimaginative and simple that it becomes beautiful. That's the human condition in a nutshell among the folks who do highly skilled professional work —except Red, of course, a public menace, tall, strong, and buxom. I should be ashamed of Red.

 

I don't think shame matters any more. In any case, the story is so gigantic that I will be happy to see it finished someday in the distant future. I'll need a bigger hammer to do that. Pull out all the stops, glad to go forward, willing to swing hard, bounce it to pdf, see a clinker and thread the needle more closely. Rand was decidedly unhelpful. "A theme is the summation of the novel's abstract meaning. The theme of a novel defines its purpose." (The Romantic Manifesto)

 

I'm all alone, 300 years in the future, in a space colony far from Earth, orbiting the Sun in a big frisbee with characters I like and respect. A little conspiracy to wonder about, a murder or two, intersecting a love affair that went too far too fast, which happens if the chemistry is ideal. Temptation everywhere. The physical reality of space, deadly meteor showers, and collision course with an asteroid big enough to crush the colony and kill everyone.

 

Unfortunately, adventures aren't shit in terms of fine literature. Adolescent action adventure was appropriate for Chris and Peachy, because my theme for them was "the emotional life of a warrior." Close enough for government work, and I wouldn't change a diphthong. But the theme of Escape! is kicking my ass. I used Prager as a devil's advocate, an evil to defeat. "The heart is deceitful, not to be trusted," he says with a satanic grin, happy to destroy love.

 

Be that as it may, the grim truth is that pages do not write themselves. Sometimes it's war to focus a single line, an adjective, fighting for a moment in a character's inner life with the ring of truth. If I use the same word twice in a paragraph it's a disaster. Chandler said that style determined if a story was believable. Thanks a bunch, Ray.

 

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Very peculiar

I've been looking back at 30 something years of literary work, more than half of it nonfiction, which troubles me. I don't like it, that I had the burden of exploring the obvious. Among my too few novels, five of them were set in the future, projecting ideas into fictional lives and loves and clashes with jealous, hamhanded evil.

Five more were the sequential saga of Chris and Peachy, from first kiss to crippled elderhood. I didn't want to show them at the end of life, but it happened in Who Killed John Galt. I find it hard to re-read The Case Files of Cable & Blount, not dissatified with what was achieved, but detached and sad because I know every word.

Partners was a masterpiece, far too tragic to re-read beyond page four or five. It beckons as flawless storytelling, magnetic and terrifying and tender, the unrelenting first person song of a young man's destiny that might easily have been mine. It surprised me to write this novel. In a just world, it would be celebrated as uniquely hard-boiled hippie fiction.

That leaves two minor works written after I had resigned as a serious author. It gives me easy pleasure to savor the goofball comedy of Chiseltown and the impossible farce of Heaven, a parting salute to those I loved. On some stormy night, I'll revisit the dry romance of Cocktail and steel myself to the unlikely emptiness of living too long.

It's impossible to write more, a mixed blessing. There are no more ideas to pioneer, no more stories to conceive in a world that no longer exists. Lovers cannot wear masks and gloves.

News flash: shuttered restaurants broken into, liquor looted. No sci-fi novelist could have projected how cloddish and hostile to liberty our government has become. Private property is a thing of the past. November elections will be an exercise in lies and ballot stuffing. Oh. Wait a minute. That sounds a lot like Mars Shall Thunder. It didn't end well for most people. The hero and two women escaped in the nick of time, before Mars was destroyed.

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Greatest Hits Vol.3

Flibbet
(written a long time ago, in Scotland, I think?
reprinted in Rock And Roll Rest Home, 2016)


It was approximately 2:38 pm Thursday when suspicion began to swirl innocently, like a wisp of lazy gray stink from an old fire. Then it exploded suddenly and shook the streets of Poughkeepsie with determination because CBS News had been deceived. You can get away with a lot of stuff nowadays, including murder and self-mutilation, but you can't lie to CBS.

The unlikely eye of this storm was a shy man named Mollusk P. Molever, whose life (until Thursday) was so ordinary and predictable that neighboring Poughkeepseans were never in doubt as to the dependable progress of Thursdays, Fridays and alternate Tuesdays when Molever parked his car at the 3rd Street Municipal Garage, put 50 cents in the parking meter, looked both ways before crossing Ormand Lejun Exit and walked to a canopied entrance to join a regular foursome for dribbles and snorks upstairs at the old Oki-Doke. Molever told himself that he enjoyed snorks and rolled a fairly firm dribble. Alternatively, he supposed that these were sociable games that helped to advance his visibility in Greater Poughkeepsie Chamber and were good for business in the long run. The Oak-Dawn Hotel was a passable backdrop for this latter supposition, although its brick and marble lobby had seen happier days and fatter calves three decades ago and was currently in violation of several fire regulations. No matter. The men who played snorks and shouted too loudly upstairs in the Main Parlour gave no thought to their personal safety. When men dribble, something in our primitive hunter-gatherer DNA impels us to scoff at municipal building codes.

In truth, Molever was neither snork shark nor chamber whore. These thrice-weekly outings were an ill-conceived, shameful sacrifice, all the more corrupt because Molever’s intended victim was primarily himself. For an hour and a half every Thursday, Friday and alternate Tuesday afternoons, he led a double life of misery and deceit, trading his dignity for crumbs of false affection because Molever’s pals had been led to believe that his name was Bertram something. “Hi, Bert!” they chimed in unison upon his arrival and “See ya, Bert!” echoed across the carpeted lobby of the Oki-Doke when it was time to go home.

During their first match, nearly three years ago, Litton mistakenly got the idea that his new partner’s name was Bert. He used it in its formal entirety whenever Molever muffed a simple dribble. “Good God, Bertram!” Litton would shout on such occasions, because his partner should play better than that, for heaven’s sake. A child could have slid that shot! -- and by an eternal tradition of male hierarchy there was no way to change partners. Molever and Litton were bonded irrevocably by virtue of Adolph Potmer’s heart attack in 1992, and in Litton’s mind an inexcusably weak dribble was reprehensible no matter who replaced whom. Their evil opponents Thummwugger and Klack merely sniggered, thinking Bert What’s His Name tragic and laughing at Litton’s exasperated discomfiture, an imagined laurel of greatness shunning his dribble puck for the millionth time thanks to Bert.

Of course, Molever always burned with shame, loathing his poor play and loss of dignity. “Sorry, Neville...” he would mutter, unconsciously accomplishing a nickel’s worth of justice, because Litton’s christian name was almost certainly Newell.

At home, Molever lied to his wife and said that he dribbled well. “Oh, fine, fine...” Molever fibbed, no matter how closely she inquired. “It’s only a game, dear,” he certified. But at the dinner table his food went cold from inattention, so busily was Molever’s brain bubbling and gurgling over the problem of snorks. He used to be a fairly good dribbler, for heaven’s sake. What on earth happened? And behind his white plaster facade of wondering, there was the unspeakable treason of pretending to be Bertram Something.

“Are you all right, Mollie --?” his wife asked, shaking Molever from chronic puzzlement at dinner, which sometimes intruded a little too forcefully on her razor-sharp intuition: “-- or is my cooking just boring? We can always go back to eating microwave popcorn and sliced peaches, you know.”

So close to being found out, so vulnerable to snorkers and loved ones, Molever’s world shrank and darkened a little more each day. Little lies turned into bigger ones and soon he felt as if there was no one he could trust to hear the truth. As recently as 1997, he answered the phone with enthusiasm: “Good morning, Mollusk Molever speaking!” -- but now he was fast becoming the spent shell of a kakistocratic experiment in self-government, grunting fewer and terser monosyllables, incapable of enjoying cellular telephony. Cut from the sticky web of human agreement, Molever drifted tragically to violent crime.

An elderly neighbor lady later told CBS News: “I knew it all along. He was too normal.”

The initial flash of anger was ominous indeed. On the morning of Molever’s semi-annual sales management assessment at Mostly Modern Paper, he was irresistibly drawn to the food displayed in Deloon’s big front window -- a row of fat silver flounders and even fatter, silverer salmon, whole, giant, healthy (albeit murdered by asphixiation and disemboweled) fresh fish proudly marching on a field of crushed white ice. Call it fate. Irresistible impulse. Molever dashed inside and purchased the biggest, fattest flounder of them all. “$13.75,” the clerk warned him from the scale. “I’ll take it!” Mollie blurt with delight and, without waiting to have the muscular sea varmint wrapped more than twice, dashed upstairs to a plain brown hallway that ended at a frosted door which completely concealed the showrooms of Mostly Modern Paper, A Fortunate 500 Forward-Looking Firm.

“You’re late,” Mr. Nubbles observed.

"Yes, sir, I’m sorry, I really am, but I saw this flounder,” Molever explained, excitedly opening his package to share the wonder of God’s bounty with his District Sales Manager, because Nubbles was an enthusiastic eater (he weighed almost 400 lbs) and Molever knew for a fact that Modern Paper men as a rule were nuts about fresh fish, the fresher the better. It was the perfect way to begin a semi-annual assessment, with male bonding visual aids, since no one sang the company song any more. And a fine song it was, Molever thought: “Mostly Modern Uber Alles, Weyerhauser Eat Our Dust! Cotton Rag or Duplex Coated, Mostly Modern Won’t Go Bust! O-ooo-oh, Never Charge Deliv’ry, O-ooo-oh, Open Box No Problem. Mostly Modern Your Good Buddy! Ty-y-y-vek Gussets Only Ten Percent!”

Big Gene Nubbles frowned and scratched the side of his flabby neck, uninterested in whatever threatened to emerge from Molever’s shopping bag. “Siddown, Mollie, the fish’d better wait,” Big Gene foreshadowed.

You can guess the rest. Molever’s semi-annual assessment did not go well at all, partly because Mollie hadn’t actually sold anything for five months and partly because their parent company, Fortunate 500, elected to restructure Mostly Modern by closing its Poughkeepsie branch office. Accordingly, young Molever’s draw was being -- er -- downsized, to zero.

“WHAT ??” Mollie screamed.

“Now, now,” the boss flubbled helpfully, “I know how you feel.”

And it was too easy, too natural in the heat of anger, released like the explosion of a volcano, just grab the nearest thing and lash out. Seconds later, Nubbles was unconscious and dotted with triangular gray and silver scales, flailed by a flounder, flank after flank, until there was nothing but slippery shame in Molever’s right hand, where once he cherished an oversized blue Mont Blimp that swam proudly in a Mostly Modern order book and gaily proclaimed Molever’s life was synonymous with paper. Nevermore. All Mollusk had to show for nine and a half years of smiles and shoeleather was a stinging gash across his palm.

“Fins leave a mark!” the most senior and grumpiest detective observed at Boilerton General. But the dazed victim couldn’t remember what happened. Nubbles had been heavily sedated. A team of doctors and dieticians were working feverishly to descale and hopefully save the top of his head. It was starting to smell bad and once something smells like fish, it just never goes away, does it?

“Don’t worry, pal,” said the dour chief dick, patting Big Gene’s belly in snuffly consolation. “We’ll find the bastard who did this. He won’t get far with flounder cuts.”

* * *

Only the bold succeed. Yuck. Lateral thinking, it pays to use it. Sure. Let’s take care of our customers or somebody else will. True but trite, so -- plop -- in it went, or tried to went, but slipped from a Matterhorn of last month’s Mostly Modern motivational mailshot and sailed to the floor, landing slightly to the left of Attitude makes the difference.

Cretin Molever was cleaning, her weekly effort to bring order and reason to Mollie’s desk area in the garage. Like most intergenderal kindnesses, it was usually repaid with scorn and humiliation, because her husband was unable to find anything after she “straightened up.” But it was best for everybody in the long run. After an hour of yelling, Mollie forgot that his domain had been invaded and Cretin achieved her strategic objective of fire safety. Glossy six-color rotogravure stock was a dangerous combustible, Mollie told her nine and a half years ago when they were newlyweds, an ironic zany quip that Cretin had misunderstood as a specific warning of danger in Mollie’s line of work. She often thought of him heroically risking his life in the commercial paper trade, going in and out of deathtrap print shops to put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads. “God bless him,” Cretin whispered as she threw her weight behind a galvanized shovel and pushed another ton of promotional Post-It pads and nudie calendars to the furnace, praying for Mollie’s occupational safety.

So that it always seems unkind and unfair that chance picks on the pure of heart when they least deserve it. Just as Cretin kicked shut the iron grate and heard a gratifying wump of ignition emanate from their Flame Hog Deluxe Compact Home Incinerator, at that precise moment her husband who was not expected to arrive until 6 p.m. some three hours later entered the garage like a beaten dog dragging his tail between his legs, mumbling a sound which Cretin did not hear because it was completely masked by the emphatic rush of gases through the stack of the aforementioned domestic crematory. Her husband therefore materialized at her shoulder out of thin air and Cretin greeted him by leaping four and a half feet vertically in apoplectic terror.

“A-A-J-!” she screamed at the incredible phantasm who had no business being there and suddenly materialized without warning, causing Cretin's resting heart rate to attempt an impromptu Olympic record for acceleration. Although they had never actually trained for competition, Cretin Molever was particularly disposed to afternoon reveries and, given the frequency and severity of being scared half to death by her husband suddenly popping into existential reality, if there were such a sport no doubt Mollie’s noiseless tread and Cretin’s hair-trigger startle reflex could have trumped the Mixed Doubles Meditation Zen Calamity Biathlon.

“MOLLIE !” she screamed at him angrily, “How many times have I told you?!”

“I said ‘ding’ -- honest!” he pleaded pathetically.

“Well, I didn’t hear you!” she shouted at him, hands clasped over her heaving breast, head dizzy with high blood pressure, elbow flopped against the Flame Hog for support, telling herself for the thousandth time it’s all right, relax, just breathe, one of these days he’s going to give me a heart attack, sneaking up on me like that!

In the first month of their marriage, upon perceiving Cretin’s susceptibility to self-hypnosis, Mollusk resolved to say “ding” every time he entered a room like a cat wearing a bell to warn an unsuspecting mouse, in case Cretin was lost in thought, thereby minimizing the risk of scaring the shit out of her. Among all husbands throughout all of History engaged in the recitation of ding, Mollusk was extremely diligent every hour, day and night, whether Cretin was actually in the room he entered or not. Better safe than sorry, he presumed. So that a quiet evening at the Molever residence normally consisted of Cretin watching TV in her bedroom, while Mollusk sauntered in and out of the kitchen, bathroom, living room and garage mumbling ding everywhere. The fault in this arrangement was tragically typical of best laid plans. Mollie had exceptionally sharp hearing and was softspoken as a consequence. His wife was a little deaf and never once heard him say “ding” during nine years of dinging.

“I’m sorry, Cretin. Are you okay?” he worried.

“What are you doing home? You’re supposed to be at work!” Cretin barked indignantly. “And what’s the matter with your hand? Don’t tell me ‘nothing,’ Mollusk Molever -- show me that hand this minute. Oh, my God! What the hell did you do to your hand?”

“Uh...” he waffled.

But Cretin knew. She saw jagged edges and dark red bolts of dry blood. “It’s a paper cut, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me, Mollie. You’ve been handling paper again!” she accused.


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Heavenly

Loneliness

Self inflicted and -- fixable?

I could join a church, read the Bible.
I could memorize who's who in sports.
I could triangulate a market, use another pen name.
I could worry about global warming.
I could plead for forgiveness.
In short, learn to lie.

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I look at this stuff with a combination of pride and boredom. My experience of working for others was uniformly grim. Nothing was right except wandering  alone, however myopic, stupid, immoral, and penalized. The worst penalty of all is boredom, unable to savor a story written yesterday or 20 years ago that exploded in a volatile cloud of creative fuel. That's why I pushed forward, seeking another horizon to be attacked. Like all military conquests, it was necessary to kill people and break things. I killed my life, invested every dime that crossed my palm, burned credit cards, ignored flak from friends and family, subsisted on cold coffee, cigarettes and terrible food I despised, like a renegade, a filthy revolutionary in rags.

I bitched about it, far too often. I lost faith routinely, empty and beaten. The big wide world of prosperity and comfort mocked me. Decades stole my youth. Poverty is a badge of shame. No book sales. No movie sales. Crushing isolation.

I did, however, tell the truth. This is me.

"A third rate Romanticist has nothing." -- Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto
Go the hell away and bother somebody else. You're dead!

Actually, less lonely than I was a month ago. Neighbors stopped by often. They been extremely kind to me, took time to talk, helped me through a rough patch. Nice people.

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Four Best Books by Wolf DeVoon

These four books are certainly representative, three novels and a volume of short stories, written during the past few years. There are many more that I care about, but these four in particular were mature and deliberate, as if each might be the last.

Chiseltown is my most recent, the story of a fictional filmmaker and a feature film. There's quite a lot of humor, some mildly adult intimacy, and an accessible narrative of how a "low budget" movie is created and completed, almost always a question of Who Knows Who.

Charity was part of a series (The Case Files of Cable & Blount) told in first person, a parable of privilege, discovery, black ops, and a cryptocurrency caper that destabilizes global banking. I like it because it deals with an important truth, that love is unchosen destiny.

Partners is set in 1975, an icy Wisconsin winter, an intimate struggle of triangles and tragedy. Men are killed. The stakes are as high as humanly imaginable in a war of innocent romance and steely determination.

Four Strange Stories is a collection of dreams, truths, seduction, and a complex portrait of a free society in the future, the widest possible mirror of what I think and feel as a man.

It cost quite a lot to create those works, plus twenty other self-published books, a half dozen screenplays, and thirty or forty miles of film and video. I started as a teenage filmmaker, learned to write along the way. My first job in Hollywood was an original screenplay. The last one was a cubicle at Disney, spending six figures of Mickey's money. I felt it was time to quit the "fillum" business. There are a couple recent video lectures, if you care to see what I look and sound like at age 69.

It stuns me when I apprehend that there's another story to tell, doubting my ability to write another full length novel -- however I am certain of this much: I cannot disown my literary legacy, nor the ideas that I endeavored to communicate, right wrong or purple. Like Popeye the Sailor, I am what I am and that's all what I am.

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The paradox of achievement

Do you know the story of Thomas Alvah Edison? Uneducated, impoverished, got a job tossing bags in an express car, taught himself Morse Code and worked as a night operator. An idea occurred to him. Duplex telegraphy would double the traffic on a circuit. Then he showed bankers how to speed up stock tickers. Then voice recording, evolved into a wax dictaphone. Then practical electric light and the fixtures required for illumination. We still call modern lamp bases "Edison" sockets. Then a motion picture camera, one of the first in history. Edison was a terrible husband and neglectful father, went on road trips with Firestone and Ford.

No comparison of stature intended, but that's how I lived my life. I was kicked out of school at age 14. I worked in a shoe factory. I learned to smoke cigarettes, pot, and opium in cheap nightclubs and hippie crash pads. Then I discovered 16mm and began a lifelong romance with making films. Thousands of feet rushed through the gate, ran through projectors. I pioneered a burst-frame technique, cutting in the camera, multimedia shows, trick handheld shots.

All this would have been fine, except that I read Atlas Shrugged at age 22. Two years later, I defended myself in Federal Court, appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and went to prison. The experience damaged my moral character profoundly, which was never glued on very well in the first place as a libertine hippie, inflamed by the ideals of Objectivism. To make matters worse, I moved to Hollywood, determined to succeed as a filmmaker, a far more ambitious plunge into vanity and temptation. There were loves, losses, seductions, music clips, and movies as a brash young film director who wrecked everything he touched. At age 40, I had one last shot at success in London. Good show, an A-List cast and crew. No sales. It doesn't matter how the next ten years played out. There was a misfire at Columbia Tri-Star and little video projects, exile on a ranch, a year at Disney pushing paper, a nightclub in Nevada, and another assault on New York. I lived in Holland a couple years and Scotland a couple years, unable to earn a living no matter what I did. And then a funny thing happened. I started to write. My essays caught the attention of an editor.

Remember Edison? -- uneducated and impoverished, ultimately a successful inventor. I was similarly situated, with the additional handicap of radical Objectivism. A stint of publicity and privilege in Costa Rica challenged and freed me. I hit upon an idea, then another. Years flew by, probing the depths of a new career, convinced that I could succeed intellectually.

Cut to the present. Grinding poverty, real hardship, at all points of the human compass a life of constant humiliation, including colossal failure as a husband and father, unread and zero expectation of being noticed. When one is self-published, it kills any hope of being agented or published or selling film rights. Worse, my books are politically verboten, a neanderthal sense of life, irredeemably white male. At age 69, it's doubtful that I can continue. My life is ebbing away, and it's easy to conclude that I failed in every conceivable way. I will be buried in a pauper's grave, no one to mourn my death, no Wikipedia page.

And yet, the body of literary work is immense and original. Some of the fiction is excellent, and the ideas I propounded will survive and triumph. The paradox of achievement is strange indeed. If I had a conventional path, higher ed, and a prosperous career, I would have never conceived The Freeman's Constitution or defacto anarchy. Feeling the approach of a final season or two, I recorded a series of videos. Whenever I doubt my success as an inventor, I replay 'Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon: Part One, Part Two' and rejoice at its clarity, complexity, scholarship, and dignity. It was a life well spent.

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The goal of my writing

Hat tip to Rand, who inspired me to do something similar, no comparison of stature implied. I began reading her works in the early 1970s, kept at it until I found every syllable. I was luckier than most, because the University of Wisconsin and city libraries had collected quite a lot. In Philadelphia, I found LP recordings of her speeches and videos of her TV interviews. I was obliquely involved in multiple attempts to bring Atlas to the big screen during her lifetime, so I was privy to considerable gossip. Publication of her Journals and web chatter completed my appraisal of who she was. Others had personal encounters. I did not. Nor did I have any interest in or respect for The Collective, the Brandens, Peikoff, the Society, TOC, Sciabarra, or anyone else, however intelligent and industrious they were. I studied her fiction and drama. It seemed particularly contemptible that others made a career of restating her ethical ideas, which I deemed the least important aspect of her legacy. Not asking you to agree, speaking only for myself as an individual, a former filmmaker, screenwriter, legal theorist, and author of several novels and a pile of nonfiction books and essays.

I was ill-prepared to write anything, sketchily self-educated with little formal schooling. All schools infuriated me, especially higher ed. So, I read authors I liked -- RLS, Balzac, Fitzgerald, Gene Rhodes, Ray Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, with as much depth and passion that I devoted to Ayn Rand. It was a little tedious to study Grotius and Aquinas, but it paid off, gave me a good grounding in classical logic. I became aware in great detail that legal philosophy was beset with tiny errors that grew to fallacies writ large in constitutional law. Few men saw the genius of Paine's mature thought or the obvious truths argued by Otis and Lincoln.

Please forgive the digression. It was never my goal to be a legal scholar. I got pushed into it. One wonders -- however briefly -- why law students are exempted from studying Madison's Debates In The Federal Convention and Henry Steele Commager's Documents of American History. Our forefathers faced fundamental questions and flunked the test. It fell to me, an idiot in many ways, to repair the damage by writing a new constitution, another task that I got pushed into. One cannot build a free nation, unless it is secured by due process of law and an independent apolitical judiciary. Laissez Faire City died for want of common law courts. My work is often shunned without debate, because it asks men to think. LFC liked my soap opera serial The Good Walk Alone and published several of my essays on government, but drew the line at taking practical steps to transition from arbitrary dictatorship to civilian due process.

Dictators and their henchmen were durable antagonists in my fiction, beginning with a first novel set in the distant future on Mars. It's an enormous challenge to write a first novel, and it required several revisions over the years to straighten out and simplify the story of a brave man and a brave woman who changed the course of plausible fictional history. That's typical Wolf DeVoon, boy meets girl and they fall in love, defend each other and defy the threat of lethal force wielded by loveless hardened autocrats. It might be the whole of human history, a never ending passion of private action in defense of liberty and justice.

It's not my purpose to plug my work. I'm not difficult to find, if you care to read something I wrote. Recent work found an appreciative core of friendly reviewers. I'll speak about my last novel because it's the last one I will write. I'm old and sickly, and I don't want to repeat the death bed karma of RLS, proudly telling his wife that Katriona, sequel to Kidnapped, was the best story he had ever written. It wasn't. It's important to sense when it's time to quit, while the quitting is good. The very last story I attempted, a novellete, offended and disgusted an old friend. I tore it up. It's time to quit. Scott Fitzgerald died with unfinished work ("The Last Tycoon"). Chandler died with unfinished work ("Poodle Springs"). I shouldn't compare myself with Fitzgerald or Chandler, far better authors than I was. However, I'll say a few words about "Partners," a much admired swan song that was completed while I had the vision and power and momentum to conceive and execute a thrilling full-length novel.

I think it's fairly clear that most novelists are best if they write about themselves. Melville's seafaring tales, for instance. Hemingway's adventures in Spain and Cuba. Vonnegut's war experience. "Partners" is set in 1975 in Milwaukee, the locality and era of my hard youth. I remember it in sharp focus, and the main character is a slightly taller, better me. I knew the love interest, slightly brighter and braver than the girl who loved me. It's a story of triangles. There is a glamorous ex, maddeningly stupid. There is a professional killer who the main character is drawn to partner and understudy, pulling him away from the love interest who holds the key to his happiness. The background is another personal flashback, Cosa Nostra, hippies, and corrupt police. Drugs were cheap. Sometimes, life was cheap.

If someone had told me 20 years ago that all my ignorance, aspirations, global adventures, and years of experimentation as a novelist would result in the bittersweet tale of love and loss in "Partners," I would not have believed it. It was not on my radar. I poured everything I had into a four-part series, The Case Files of Cable & Blount, loved every word of it, adored Chris and Peachy, two years of writing full time, 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. The final volume of that series is a marvelous adventure in stereo, separated and searching for each other. But when it was finished, it had to be finished. I didn't want to repeat the mistake that Forester made, taking Hornblower into elderly decline. I had to leave Chris and Peachy in their active maturity, early 60s. I had no plan to write anything else. Suddenly, clear as a bell, the city I grew up in. A guy age 31, sitting at a cheap lunch counter, reading classified ads to find a job that he didn't want to do, because all jobs were the same. Not enough money, not enough challenge, every day exactly the same as every other. Fifty bucks in his pocket with rent due on an empty single apartment in a crummy neighborhood. A gust of fate taps his shoulder and sweeps away his long hair and mustache, puts a chrome .357 on his hip in icy winter.

The goal of my writing was unexpectedly fulfilled in a masterwork. Nice, but it's extremely odd that I quit writing, incapable of starting another novel, unable to conceive or execute a good short story. A switch has been turned off by illness and infirmity.

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Shunned, ignored, or stupid?

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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Poop

Well, it had to end some time, right? Long illness left me dry. I can neither read nor write. My body of work became uninteresting and inert. It used to be a sparky adventure, always eager to stand taller and straighter, better magic to gamble and triumph again.

 All gone. Whatever I achieved, so be it.

If it matters, or if anyone cares, the Playboy centerfold twins were real. The vacation house in Holland and the snowbound Belgian chateau were real. Assaulting the Dept of Energy and the rest of First Feature were real events. The Last Book was real, and Dreamland was 7/8 factual. I carried a gun and fired it. When Chris Cable went to prison I was writing from experience.

Obviously, I never went to Mars, but the characters were real people I encountered. Cocktail happens in the real world, people and places I knew, and it addressed an uncomfortable fact of life. Sexuality trumps everything else. Private actors do what government cannot do. They can't be stopped by religion or laws or common sense or physical danger if they fall in love.

It's hard to name the story I liked best, but Charity was closest to the truth of life, Partners my finest saga of raw courage, and The Executive Branch a fair guess of what's likely to happen in reality when things fall apart.

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Weak and very ill

I wish there was more to say. Let me look. There may be something in the files.

I guess it was 1990. The managing director had arranged an afternoon seminar for the sales people, and he wanted me to say a few words about what writers did. Not being innately clever, I said what I knew about it: "Writers go naked in public." Got a big laugh.

There are other consequences, of course. Wrecked marriages, credit card debt, inability to hold a job, paying assholes to write terrible 3-star reviews, and being ignored and dissed for decades are relatively small potatoes. Truly awful consequences are in the work itself. For instance, once glimpsed a story must be told convincingly in its entirety. The language has to be original. It has to sing and frighten and dazzle in believable grit and grandeur. Events in the third act have to be foreshadowed on Page One.

Hours and weeks and months fly by. In the old days, there were piles of balled paper and spent typewriter ribbons on the floor of an office that doubled as a bedroom, back rent due. Nowadays computers hide how many ideas and sentences get junked. I miss physical paper, never had to worry about software crashes or lightning strikes. I use a USB drive for back-up when I get close to the end of a chapter, a frantic procedure when I'm nearing a complete final draft, re-reading the whole thing six or seven times to fix a single comma, or alarmed at repetitive use of a word, an emergency to conceive a substitute. Professional writers use a thesaurus. I think it's cheating. I did it once in 1997 and regretted it. Felt phony.

Worse, finished work is finished work. It would be treason not to publish it. After a while the business of life recedes in importance, can't matter and doesn't matter. I could be taken any second, and it wouldn't matter. Stories matter. Nothing else.

40 something years

Well, nearly fifty. My radio series scripts were written in 1970. I used manual typewriters in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Allenwood, San Francisco, Sydney, Mill Valley and Cazadero, most of them little portables, a couple of Selectrics and IBM Executives on occasion. More than once, I had to use pencil and paper. Photocopiers were terrible back then, thin slick thermal paper that faded to nothing in a few weeks. Carbon paper was more durable, but you had to really bang the typewriter keys and mistakes were a tedious mess to correct with a hard ink eraser and a stiff little brush. I bought a lot of Liquid Paper. A fresh bottle was good for about a week and then it got thick and stringy, no matter how quickly you screwed the cap shut.

Useful personal computers came along in the mid-80s. Some of my best stuff at the time was written on an 8086 laptop that used floppies, no fonts, no bold, no italics. I wrote a show for IBM that was composed on an Osborne, had a dinky screen that you had to scroll left and right to see a whole line of text. The Amiga was considered a breakthrough. You could feed video through it, do captions and titles, draw stuff, animate it (sort of), and use it like a typewriter with a line printer, endless folds of perforated paper fed by a tractor. Floppies were smaller and slightly more durable, had hard shells. Still no internet. There was a tug of war between Betamax and VHS in America, plus a Philips cassette in Europe that you could turn over and record on both sides. Pro video was a chaos of 3/4" and three incompatible 1" open reel "C" formats. Studios in Australia were still using 2" quad tape. All audio was analog. I mention it because I was doing more film and video production than creative writing at the time.

Then I found myself sitting in a cubicle at Disney, spending Mickey's money to master home video product on D1 and D2, and I realized that my career in Hollywood was kaput. My movie scripts made it as far as the Development Committee at Columbia and got voted down 4-3 , vetoed by bosses at PSO, Kingman, and DeLaurentiis. Lyle Alzedo got sick and died, so my star vehicle for Lyle died, too. No matter what I pitched, the answer was always no. I decided to write books. The first one was written on an old portable Underwood by gaslight on a ranch that had no electric power. Oddly enough, it was published and did fairly well, a reference book with a humorous take on concepts and doctrines that ended in "ism." Decades later, I found a copy in a Colorado library, opened it and hung my head in dismay, wished that I had done a much better job. Writers mature slowly. My first novel took a long time to get right, twenty years from first draft to a third revision that actually makes sense, flows better.

As I became a better author, the market shrank. Book publishers consolidated or went out of business. Worse, as I gained control of my literary vision and a signature style, the world went bezerk with Political Correctness. Chicks, gays, and "people of color" were celebrated, straight white guys blackballed. I stretched my brain to grasp print on demand. My first few books covers were terrible, and I was completely baffled when it came to promotion. I sold no books. I gave up, segued to financial writing for Seeking Alpha and a business magazine in Abu Dhabi, did some writing for hire in the oil patch, helped new screenwriters at Zoetrope, self published a couple of nonfiction titles and wasted money at Kirkus and O Desk, shipped review copies hither and yon, and plugged my work on internet forums, all for naught.

Four years ago, I found a small plot of forest and pasture in the Ozarks, cleared a site at the top of a hill and built a house that my wife designed. When it was finished, I set up a little writing office in an old tin barn and began to write again, egged on by a talented novelist in New Mexico and an equally talented short story author in California, people I admired. The result was five new novels and five nonfiction titles, self published and handled with more confidence at Lulu, CreateSpace, Smashwords, and KDP. Books sales were slow, but I had forged an authorial voice that was natural to me. Fifty years of writing paid off in the sense that I could not be mistaken for anyone else, a unique storyteller, ruthless and expressive, unafraid to show and tell what happens between hard men and the women who love them. It doesn't matter, can't matter what other people write, whether I'm ignored or reviled. I'm too old to care, nearing the end of life. Fifty years of cigarette smoking has a price.

There is no undoing it. Not after such a gruelling uphill climb to a summit of my own, over a million words that had to be hammered like pitons on a sheer stone wall, no one to catch me if I fell.

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The price of things

Shocking how much it cost. Forget the thousands and tens of thousands. Lots of things are expensive. But writing has mountains of constitutional and moral expense. Writers go naked in public, confess all, obvious in their ideas, in narrative, every word and glance exchanged by fictional characters. Writing careers are measured in long lonely decades of effort. I began to write over thirty years ago. It was never cheap or easy.

The fourth volume of Chris & Peachy was extremely costly in every respect. I sold my car to write The Tar Pit, destroyed my remaining credit to write Charity. But Finding Flopsie was worst of all. I gambled and lost. I liked the story well enough, but I failed to conceptually sew together a believable portrait of Peachy and her sister Kelly. Flopsie was a weepy soap opera, preposterous and overly ambitious. Chandler had similar trouble with Farewell My Lovely, one of his best, and Hammett choked with an unwieldly Dane Curse saga.

It happens. Writers reach too high. They get confused about how brilliant they are. I should not have tried to write from inside a female character's head. Men can always get away with depicting how women react and behave, but not their internal experience.

I can't say that I regret writing Flopsie, win lose or draw. Without Flopsie and everything that it cost financially and spiritually, there would have been no Kyle, no Karen, no Partners, and worse, no Executive Branch. As bizarre as it sounds, my entire life was lived to write a short story about Alaska. I'm famous in Fairbanks, and it finally sunk in that Alaska is an uniquely free and independent arctic continent, totally unlike the Lower 49. It wouldn't take much to push Alaska into secession when the Lower 49 go economically kablooey, which is already baked into the political mudpie, purely a matter of time, maybe sooner than we know.

A huge expenditure, when you think of it. 68 years of life, eight novels, an enormous trail of ambition and wreckage, high water marks and penury, all the fullness of life as a confused youngster, a charismatic playboy and a serious intellectual voice, every day of it a qualifying precondition to conceive a story about Alaskan independence, a future worth winning.

Fair price, I guess.

There's a terrible truth about entertainment. You're only as good as your last show. It's an impersonal fact of nature. Same thing is true of medical practice, engineering, government, and family life. Screw up once and your career is over. That never deterred me from going forward, endeavoring to get it right at least once. The Executive Branch was a final wager at the table of history. I bet my reputation as a soothsayer and storyteller, winner take all.

People don't do that for light and transient causes.

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