Chapter 1

MARCH 10, 2007 3:58 A.M.

Rick rubbed his eyes wearily and reached for the Marlboro reds, soft pack, on the kitchen table beside him. He ran his thumb along the cellophane wrapper. He liked to feel them in there before he lit up. It was comforting. His own band of silent soldiers, ready for battle. Stephanie’s pack of menthols sat neatly on the small, battered table beside the sofa bed where she lay sleeping. She preferred her cigarettes in a box. They looked, to him, like a coffin.

He set his lighter down hard, hoping the noise would wake her up. It did. She sat up quickly and croaked, “What time is it?”

“Four,” he said, then took a long drag from his cigarette. He blew it out with, “A.M.”

She nodded and lit a cigarette of her own. She was only twenty-three and still looked it, but he gave her another five years, tops, before the smoking and booze caught up with her face. The almost-white blonde she used to color her hair wouldn’t improve matters any. Not that it mattered to him. In five years she’d be long gone, probably with a couple of snotty noses to wipe. And none of the noses would look like his.

“Rick…you’re sure you’re ready for this?”

“Yeah. Everything’s packed.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She regarded him for a moment, but didn’t give voice to her fears. She didn’t need to. Instead she chuckled and pointed to his head. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.”

He ran his hand over the stubbles where his hair had been. She’d shaved it off for him the afternoon before. “You won’t have to get used to it.” He crushed his cigarette out, half-smoked, then noticed her hurt expression. He managed a kind smile. “I mean, it’s gonna grow back.”

She smiled back, relieved. “Oh.”

He waited until she finished her smoke before he walked over, flopped down beside her and pulled her on top of him.

“Rick, you know we don’t have time for that.”

“Sure we do,” he said, slipping off her night shirt.

“Rick—”

“Steph, just…come on. I need it this morning.”

He really did. He was already starting to hear Wendy’s voice, as early as it was, as relatively sober as he was. He had a feeling she was going to be with him all day and he wasn’t sure, yet, if that was a good thing.

She gave in, of course, just like she always did. Just like they all had. But even as she took him inside of her, he knew. They were marking time. He gave her a month, probably less than that, before she was gone. And he didn’t care. She was just another body, just another face, just another cunt. Just like all of them had been. All except for one.

So he held her close, buried his head between her breasts, and dreamt of dark, soft, chocolate-colored eyes.

~~~~~~~~　

6:03 A.M.

Rick shivered, then flipped the collar of his jacket up against the biting wind as he stepped outside. He didn’t look around him, just followed Steph’s boots. The high wooden heels clink-clonked against the cold asphalt as they crossed the street toward the liquor store. Neither of them spoke until they reached the door. He tilted his head down, away from the security camera, as he asked, “Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

She didn’t sound it. “It’ll be fine, Steph. Just like we talked about.”

“Okay.”

He pulled the door open and followed her inside.

The place was empty—it was a Saturday morning and most of the regular customers were still sleeping off last night’s revels—except for the store’s owner, Shannon Kinney. She was standing behind the counter, arms crossed, scowling, waiting for them. She was lean and tough, in her early-forties. Her hair reminded Rick of old pennies. She studied his face for a long moment. Then she moved on to Stephanie’s and shook her head.

“Look, doll,” she said. “My cameras don’t pick up any sound, and they aren’t exactly state-of-the-art. But if you look scared—like you do right now—instead of pissed, they’re sure as hell gonna pick up on that.”

Steph sputtered something unintelligible, then looked to Rick for reassurance. She was always looking to him for reassurance, for approval. It’s what he was counting on. He nodded and said, “She’s right.”

Shannon snickered. “Come on. Don’t tell me you’ve never been pissed off at him before. You can play off that.”

The truth was, she’d never been more than mildly irritated with him. Or at least not that she’d ever shown. He sighed and put his hand on the back of her neck, rubbed it gently. It was something he knew she hated. She shuddered at his touch and flung it off.

“That’s more like it,” he said. He replaced his hand, squeezed a little harder this time, and turned his attention back to Shannon. “I need a pint of Senator’s Club. And a pint of Allen’s for my girl here.”

Steph’s shoulders tensed up at his words, and his stomach gave a brief, sickening roll, but he kept his eyes focused firmly on Shannon’s. He noticed, not for the first time, that they were more grey than green. He wondered if there had ever been a time when they’d been happy. He couldn’t imagine it.

She bagged up the whiskey and coffee brandy, then turned her attention once more to Steph. “When you run out of here—hey! Don’t look at me. Look at him. Remember? You’re mad at him right now. Okay, that’s better. You’ll be on camera until you’re about halfway across the street. But keep acting like you’re pissed anyway. Even after you get to your car.”

She nodded up at him almost imperceptibly. “And remember,” he told her, “when you drive off, you need to keep on going until you hit the apartment house two doors down from the intersection. The empty yellow one. Pull over there and wait for me.”

“I know. You told me a hundred times already and—”

“Steph, come on. You gotta do better than that.”

She gave him a good scowl. “Well you shouldn’t have woke me up so early. I’m still a little hung over from last night and now I’m tired, too, and—”

Shannon laughed loudly. “He got you up early to fuck you, didn’t he?”

Steph started to turn toward her, but Rick grabbed her by the arms and said, “No! Look at me. At me.”

“You know he wasn’t thinking about you when he was doing it, don’t you? He was thinking about her. About his wife. At least that’s who he was always thinking about when he was fucking me.”

She was enjoying this, he could tell. Even without looking over at her he knew it. “Shannon,” he said, without turning away from Steph. She was staring up at him with pale, hurt eyes. “I think that’s enough.”

“You fucked her?”

“Steph, no, I—”

But Shannon wasn’t going to let him get away with the lie. “He ever call Wendy’s name out loud while he’s coming?”

She’d pushed the right button. Because, of course, he had. Steph wriggled away from him and let out something that was almost a screech. Then she slapped him hard across the face.

“Jesus Christ!” He rubbed his cheek, surprised. That hadn’t been part of the plan.

“That’s a good girl,” Shannon said. “Now get the hell out of here.”

She did, without another word. Rick watched out the window as she ran across the street and fell into her car. The tires squealed as she took off down the road. It was possible, he knew, that she’d just keep on going, and then what would he do?

“You know something, Shannon? You’re a real bitch.”

“Yes I am. But I’m gonna keep your ass out of jail, aren’t I?”

“Yes. You are.”

Probably.

“And she wasn’t doing her job. She needed to cause a scene for the camera, and I got her to do it. A girlfriend who’s pissed at you is a much more reliable alibi witness than one who isn’t.”

“And a girlfriend who’s too pissed off to lie for me won’t do me any good at all.”

“She’ll be fine, Rick. She isn’t going anywhere. Right now she’s sitting right where you told her to go and she’s gonna tell the cops exactly what you tell her to say. She’s got it for you too bad, poor thing.”

He sighed and handed her a twenty, then grabbed another ten from his wallet. “Throw in two packs of cigarettes while you’re at it. One of mine and one of hers.”

“Already taken care of. There’s a bag in the back seat of her car. Cigarettes, a fifth of cinnamon whiskey and a couple packs of cinnamon gum.” He stared at her blankly, so she continued. “I put it in there last night.”

“What?”

“You know won’t be able to make it there and back without something strong inside you. The cinnamon will hide the smell of the whiskey if you get pulled over. Just pop a few pieces of the gum in your mouth and—”

“How did you—”

“This stuff—” she slid the bag across the counter at him “—needs to make it back your apartment if this alibi is gonna work. They’ll need to find the empty bottles. So don’t forget to drink it or dump it by tomorrow morning. And for God’s sake, don’t forget about it and leave it in her car. Or in that other woman’s truck.”

“Fuck off. I’m not an idiot. Now, how did you get into her car?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re kidding…right?”

That got a quiet chuckle out of him. She gave him a hint of a smile. It had been awhile since he’d been with her. Maybe a year? More than that? He could only remember that it was a week after her daughter died. She just showed up at his door, unannounced. They spent the weekend drinking and fucking. Then she left. She didn’t talk about it the next time he came into the store, which was just fine with him. And she hadn’t been back. That was good, too. But he could tell she was thinking about it. And he wondered if there was a chance…

“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Especially not now. You know you have to stay with that girl after this is over. At least until she decides to bail. You can’t be the one to send her packing. Not this time.”

He only nodded. He knew that much. And he didn’t think it would take her long to leave. She was already getting weary of him. There was a guy at the diner where she worked who wanted her. If he could start gently pushing her in that direction in another month or so, he might not have anything to worry about. Her guilt for leaving him could keep her quiet about what was going to happen today.

“And you’ve got the gun.”

“Yes.”

“Just drop it in the—”

“I know where to drop it, Shannon. It’s my goddamn plan. Remember?”

“Yeah. I just want to make sure you do.”

“Well, I do. And I really gotta go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. Can’t open till nine.”

“But I’ll show up at six. Just for the camera.”

She nodded and watched him silently as he picked the bag up off the counter. She waited till he was almost to the door before saying, “Rick…”

He had to clench his jaw to keep the irritation out of the “What is it?” he threw back at her.

“Make sure you get this asshole. Okay? And I mean get him good. None of this shooting-him-in-the-head bullshit. ”

He nearly dropped the bag at the words, but managed to grab hold of the bottom in time. He didn’t turn back to look at her, though. He couldn’t. The queasiness was back. Even his head was swimming with it. And for the first time he wondered if he’d actually be able to go through with it.

“I want him to suffer, Rick. I want him to suffer. Do you hear me?”

But he said nothing. He just walked out the door. Out into the cold. Out to face the day.

and

The trajectory of underground comics is somewhat similar to that of self-publishing - something that no one took seriously, and now is given art exhibitions. From an interview with Dan Clowes:

Early in your career, did you find that people had a difficult time labeling you? The type of work you produced wasn’t your typical style of comic.

They still have a difficult time. I’ve been called everything from a “graphic novelist” to a “comic-strip novelist” to just a “cartoonist.” I’ve always preferred “cartoonist,” because that seems the least obnoxious.

I used to tell people I was a “comic-book artist,” but they’d look at me as if I’d just stepped in dog shit and walked across their Oriental rug. I never knew what to call myself, but I was always opposed to the whole “graphic novelist” label. To me, it just seemed like a scam. I always felt that people would say, “Wait a minute! This is just a comic book!” But now, I’ve given up. Call me whatever you want.

At what point did you notice that people were beginning to understand what a “graphic novel” actually meant?

For me, there was a sea change by 2001 or 2002, around the time the Ghost World movie was released. Average citizens like my parents’ neighbors started to say things like, “Oh, you do graphic novels! I love [Art Spiegelman's] Maus!” A few years earlier, they would have thought of me as the lowest pornographer.

In the past, telling someone you self-published was often met with embarrassment. Now, people are interested.

From an interview with Philip K. Dick:

SFR: Why do you think your books have sold so well in foreign countries, and not as well in America?

DICK: Well, the first answer that comes to mind is “Damned if I know.” Perhaps it’s the general attitude towards science fiction in European countries, accepting it as a legitimate form of literature, instead of relegating it to the ghetto, with the genre, and regarding it as sub-standard. The prejudice is not there in France, Holland, England, and Germany, and Poland that we have in this country against science fiction. The field is accepted, and it doesn’t have anything to do particularly with the quality of my writing, it has to do with the acceptance of the field of science fiction as a legitimate field.

Interesting - I’m in America so I don’t really know if the stigma issue with self-publishing is the same as it is in the States. Philip K. Dick once had to beg for attention, now his books are put out by the Library of America.

All that self-publishing needs to legitimize it is two geniuses on the level of Dan Clowes and Philip K. Dick. That’s all.

But there’s a similarity too between comics, science fiction, and self-publishing, in that self-publishing allows writers to create without constraint - they don’t have to worry about what editors currently think is marketable, so it doesn’t limit the imagination. Any critics of self-publishing should consider this - it’s an amazing advantage. Something, really, to be encouraged. Yes, there’s a difference between a genre and a printing method, but the reaction to each has been similarly condescending. As self-publishing becomes more a part of the culture, it may take on the respectability of graphic novels or science fiction - two mediums that were virtually ignored, even mocked, for decades and are now part of the respectable mainstream.

And the post has gotten much traction.  Stephen Elliot at The Rumpus calls it “excellent.”  The Atlantic doesn’t make much of a criticism either way - her pov, the mainstream view of self-publishing, is left standing.  Basically, it’s a snob’s point of view (and this is coming from, basically, a snob) that what oh what do we do when the peons are publishing and bad writing is flooding the airwaves.  Answer: that’s already happening.  It’s called publishing.  Now there’s just more of it.  The truly ridiculously awful books will be as forgotten as a truly, ridiculously awful blog, mp3, or Youtube video.  At some point, people are going to start seeing that there’s no difference between books and other media.

Here’s what I wrote at SPR:

The article makes the age-old severe generalization that self-publishing is full of “inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters — not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés.”  The better point it makes is, “if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job will soon be yours…this possible future doesn’t eliminate gatekeepers: It just sets up new ones, equally human and no doubt equally flawed. How long before the authors neglected by the new breed of tastemaker begin to accuse them of being out-of-touch, biased dinosaurs?”

That’s true, but I prefer the democratization of many, many bloggers and readers making the decision about a book’s success via consensus, rather than that power being put into the hands of a dwindling number of editors.  She’s absolutely right that this system will still reward a certain type of book – mainstream-style books will always be successful, even if the books are published independently.  Independent doesn’t always mean cutting edge.

Where this post misses the mark is that it’s coming at self-publishing from a literary fiction standpoint – i.e. “good” writing.  I’ve given into the fact that the success of self-publishing rests on commercial fiction becoming successful via the self-publishing route.

The fact is when it comes to “inept prose,” many readers don’t care. Inept prose is very frequently extraordinarily popular.  Setting aside Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer – who are monstrously successful – there’s a much larger wing of midlist authors that are doing very well regardless of the quality of their prose. Saying “quality” is subjective is too easy – it’s very obvious when something is more plot-based than character-based. And more often than not, plot-based fiction is not as caught up in sentence structure.  So: self-publishing is on the map for the express reason that “low quality” prose (by Salon.com’s standards) is successful.  One person’s slush is another person’s beach read.

Yes, there is true slush – something that misspells words in the first sentence.  But this type of book will largely be forgotten.  It’ll get limited traction, so most readers won’t have to take the time to wade through it.  A reader should be able to tell a book’s quality from the types of reviews and an excerpt.  Sure, this is more work for a reader, but it also gives more power to both the reader and the writer, as they’ll be making the decisions about a book’s future – not an editor who may be selecting books based on dubious criteria.

All in all, articles like this fault self-publishing for not being perfect.  Flooding the market with bad writing is a side effect of this democratization – just as someone who’s elected might not be the “best” person for the job, it’s still a good system of government.  In the old system of publishing, it’s like only a handful of people selecting who should be in office. That’s just not a fair system.  If “slush fatigue” is the worst side effect of self-publishing being a viable option, this is a fair trade off for good books not being released at all.

And so it is for an award - which, as a self-publisher, is probably the closest thing to being accepted by an editor.  It’s also helped sell the book.  If nothing else, it’s helped the book get a lot of downloads.  I just put the book up on Feedbooks, and I’ve had 2000 downloads in a couple of weeks - in part, I think, because it says “Winner of…”

That’s not the only thing, though.  An award or a publishing house is also a buffer against certain kinds of criticism. A person going into a book by an unknown author might just give up if it doesn’t move them.  An award or a publisher tells a reader that someone believed in this book, I won’t give up.  Or: I won’t write some scathing review saying something like, “Of course this was self-published.”   If you spend any amount of time online, you find that people are mean.  Comment sections are like a collection of playground bullies.  A book could get ripped apart.  A gatekeeper can be a kind of armor.

So gatekeepers are useful.  They help sell books.  It’s just that in the new era of publishing, the term gatekeeper has to be expanded to a much wider degree of sources than just agent or publisher.  Awards, reviews, and word of mouth are all also valid forms of gatekeeping.  Consensus is the best form of gatekeeping - in fact way better than one editor’s stamp of approval.  Why should that one editor’s opinion override the opinions of 100 other readers?  It shouldn’t, and so the definition of gatekeeper needs to change.

The Future of Gatekeeping

Nathan Bransford has a good post about the future of agenting/publishing in the digital world. As someone under 40 (I’m guessing) the bulk of his career as an agent is going to be in the age of ebooks, so he’s more progressive about how the agent process is going to be restructured. About digital publishing, he has this very good point:

No one sits around thinking, “You know what the problem with the Internet is? Too many web pages.” Would you even notice if suddenly there were a million more sites on the Internet? How would you even know? We all benefit from the seemingly infinite scope of the Internet and we’ve devised a means of navigating the greatest concentration of information and knowledge the world has ever seen.

So what’s the big deal if a few hundred thousand more books hit the digital stores every year? We will find a way to find the books we want to read, just as surely as we’re able to find the restaurants we eat at and the movies we want to see and the shoes we want to buy out of the many, many available options.

My response was:

There’s a major difference though: the internet is free. If you come upon a god-awful blog, you can just move on. If you buy a god-awful book, that’s money you’ve lost. There’s only so much money people can spend.

So that’s what gets people annoyed – the loss of a possible sale. No way around this really. People will just have to get used to it, and readers will have to get more savvy about knowing what something is before they shell out $.

Someone else also counters:

No one sits around thinking, “You know what the problem with the Internet is? Too many web pages.”

I say:

Quite the contrary. I think about that A LOT. It’s precisely the problem indicated by phrases such as “drinking from a firehose”, “Finding a needle in a needlestack”. “everybody will be famous to 15 people”, etc.

I call it the problem of finite human bandwidth. Think also signal to noise ratio. The bigger the Internet, the more places for the good stuff to hide.

The thing that people don’t seem to get is that change isn’t always for the better. I’m a self-publishing advocate and I can see the problem with hoards of unreadable books cluttering up the system. That’s the side effect of something that is, on balance, very positive – the lack of a barrier for getting words out into the world. Digital publishing has problems, but those problems don’t outweigh the benefits. With self-publishing people tend to have the knee-jerk reaction that the bad implications outweigh the good. Do you think blogs are, on balance, a good thing, even if most blogs are terrible? I do. Self-publishing is no different, even if there’s money changing hands – the basic purpose is the same: giving people new tools for writing.

Other arguments there are about how gatekeepers ensure quality and people will release books before they’re ready. If writers do that, they’re probably not very good writers. As for the former, there are a lot of other of gatekeepers – namely, readers themselves. They can read an excerpt, read reviews from fellow readers, and weigh whether or not a book is worth reading. With book samples and increasing review sources (despite the complaints that review sections in newspapers are being cut, book reviews are actually growing), readers have a number of ways to make a decision to buy a book. They don’t need someone else to tell them what they’ll enjoy.

In short, self-publishing doesn’t just increase power to the writer, it increases power to the reader.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about ebooks, the death of the print book, etc., and after reading yet another such article (on my computer, ironically) I immediately posted this facebook status:

[I]will not give up on print. Say what you will about the unstoppable advancement of technology – the experience of reading a book v. the experience of reading an ebook cannot be compared to anything else but newspaper articles, and articles take an average of maybe 10 minutes to read. I simply don’t see people giving up their books, or the book experience.

[My actual entry goes on, but it isn't interesting enough to include here. For the full, and very enlightening, thread of replies, visit the discussion here.]

Most of the responses were illuminating. Educational. Helpful. A couple were Kindle-defensive, even though I’d said nothing negative about e-readers. My books are available on Kindle and Smashwords – how could I possibly have anything bad to say about devices that allow people to read them, and so inexpensively (minus the cost of the e-reader itself)? I couldn’t. I don’t.

image belongs to www.pmptoday.com

I understand the appeal of Kindles, iPads, Nooks, Sony Readers, and whatever else is out there. I’m certainly not anti-technology.The friendly Kindle readers who responded to my post on the Kindle boards let me know e-readers have many things to offer. You can apparently:

1. highlight passages

2. bookmark pages

3. change font sizes (I have to admit I like this one)

4. carry your whole library in one light container and choose from among hundreds of books while waiting for a bus, say, rather than having to keep reading the one you’re carrying in your bag – and you hate the one in your bag

5. buy individual books very, very, very inexpensively (particularly if they’re released by indie authors; otherwise, the Kindle edition is likely to cost just a bit less than – and sometimes more than – the paperback. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, for example, costs $9.60 for the Kindle edition, and $9.99 for the mass market paperback)

6. discover several new (usually indie) authors easily due to their e-books’ low prices and e-vailability (versus their nonexistence in most big-time – or small-time – bookstores)

7. move (the household, that is) from place to place without having boxes of books to lug with you (which is somewhat, but not entirely, similar to #4)

8. look up words and references within the very “book” you’re reading by touching the screen (pretty cool, I have to admit)

9. hold them comfortably, as they’re light and thin (and not unwieldy and awkward like hardcovers or thick paperbacks – think The Executioner’s Song or Harlot’s Ghost – or any other fat Mailer novel)

10. read without getting ink on your fingers (okay, this is not an “apparently” – this is obviously hard fact)

And all of that sounds great.

Seriously.

However, I know I won’t be dumping out my change jar and rolling dimes and quarters to buy a Sony Reader, a Nook,  a Kindle, or a whatever-else-comes-next.

I like the idea of the immediacy, the volume, the ease. The “Ooh – gadget!” factor and the touch-pad screen.

But I don’t want it, because I’m like everyone else. If I have this new excuse to move away from the long list of  things that have lost their meaningful place in our everydays–the VHS tapes, the record albums, and even the CDs–I will.

And I don’t want to be tempted.

When I was a teenager, we were still buying records. I only had five, but I had them. My dad had them, too. Lined up side-by-side on the shelf under his turntable, the band and singer-songwriter names in small font on the edges. When I wanted to listen to something, I would sit on the floor and flip through the covers until I found something I liked. When I was a little bit older and CDs were mainstream but records hadn’t yet been completely phased out, I flipped through the corner-worn record jackets stuffed tight in the wall-cubby of my new boyfriend’s apartment. What did he like? Who did he listen to? Who was he?

We do the same with books. We walk into the home of a new friend, a new lover, and one of the first things we scan is the bookshelf. What are you reading? Who do you like? Who are you?

The only thing we might notice before that is the art on the walls, but wall-art is intentional. It’s selected carefully, matched to our walls or rugs or living room furniture or personality – because it will be there, hanging at eye-level and on immediate display, for years.

We don’t put the same kind of thought into bringing home books. We walk into a bookstore, pick up a pretty cover, read the back, and buy it. When we’re finished with it, we slide it onto the shelf between a book on houseplants and a collection of short stories we picked up at another store some years ago.

And we take for granted – more often than not – the utter richness of the experience of reading a book. The simplest of activities, yes, but one that appeals to every one of our senses, even if only subtly, peripherally. The art of the cover draws us first, and its connection to the time of its publication is as telling as the subject matter, the details, of the words inside. Living history, it changes with each new printing and offers us, when we’re lucky enough to find a decades-old copy in a used book store, a tangible bit of the past we can take home with us. We open the cover and are intrigued by who may have owned it before and run a finger over the name written in cursive on the inside cover, then wonder what might have happened to her. Who she was, this woman who for some reason included the year beside her name, and where she lived, how her book found its way to the store.

When we fold back the paperback cover, it is slick and stiff with newness or soft and worn like old, time-rubbed money. The pages are white or they’re tanned by dust and years, flat and thin or grainy, bumpy, and thick – almost cringe-inducing, as when tracing a finger along an oxidized car hood – and the pages’ edges are the color of dandelion smear.

We bookmark our places with old business cards, Christmas ribbons, envelopes, or shopping receipts, and  years after reading, we may find a memory tucked between pages 7 and 8. We curl down corners marking sex-hot scenes and glide ballpoint lines under passages we want to recall. We slide our fingers over the words we love, tear out the pages that piss us off, and hurl incomprehensible narrative across the room. Books are our face-umbrellas in bright sunlight, fans in the heat, levelers of uneven tables, and warm decoration in an otherwise nondescript room. They are our age, they are our parents’ age, they are our grandparents’ age. When we turn the pages, we’re touching time.

I don’t want to be tempted away.

Enjoy.

http://blog.moxiemezcal.com/2010/06/eddie-wright-is-not-nothing-explosive.html

When I started writing The Summer Son more than a year ago, I began with a first-person point of view. The idea for the story came from a personal place, and I found that I wanted to steer the protagonist, Mitch Quillen, from inside his own head.

My resolve didn’t last. Fairly deep in the story, I started to lose my way and began casting about for a way back to the proper path.

Here’s a snippet of an instant-messenger conversation I had with my friend Jim Thomsen as I contemplated a switch in POV. By the way, some not-so-benign language coming; the sausage-making isn’t always pretty:

Me: Why I hate my brain: I’ve just about talked myself into two big changes to my novel in progress: a story layer that will require some rewriting at the front and, more time-consuming, a change from first person to third. Fuck.

Jim: That’s me, times 20. What prompted the switch in voice? Or IS prompting it?

Me: Well, here’s the thing: Every time I was tempted to not do either thing, I asked myself: “Craig, will it improve the story?” The answer is yes. So, really, I have no choice.

Jim: You gotta trust that still small voice.

Me: I’m 52,000 words in, and I just feel like I’m not “seeing” it well enough as the person. I need the step back. I’ll probably lose a little something in the switch, but I think what I’ll gain in descriptive powers and in not making the character quite so navel-gazing will be well worth it.

Jim: That’s my issue with first-person. I don’t have the discipline to keep from getting lost in my own bullshit.

Me: Well, I need this guy to be reflective. But it sounds whiny in his voice. I think that layer: “Mitch thought back to what his mother said all those years ago” vs. “I thought back to what Mom said all those years ago” will help that tremendously.

Back when this exchange took place, in early June 2009, Mitch was whiny to the point of being unappealing as a lead character. What I was proposing was switching to third-person omniscient, a point of view where there is an all-knowing narrator who reveals that knowledge in the service of the story. My hope was that I could find a way to communicate Mitch’s angst without putting all of the revelatory burden on him.

Unfortunately — or, I should say, fortunately — that resolve didn’t last long. As I went back to the beginning of the manuscript and started retrofitting the POV, I discovered that I was being carried too far away from the emotional action. Some powerful moments early in the story lost their punch when I stepped back. The flaws I sensed — which were all too real — didn’t lie in POV but in how I was operating within the constraints of first person. Being well on my way to a completed first draft, I put my head down and finished it.

Jim diagnosed some of the problems when he read the first draft. From an e-mail he sent me:

I know you feel contented with your choice of writing in the first person, but here’s one reason to maybe reconsider that: I think that a first-person style essentially enables your need to let too much of the story take place in Mitch’s head instead of to him and around him. It makes it too easy to let Mitch talk at us about what’s happening in lieu of you showing us what’s happening … and I think this happens because you’re at times too autobiographically close to elements of the characters and the story to be able to get the necessary distance and detachment … Writing in the third person, I feel, helps force that necessary distance and detachment on you — and allows you to keep the majority of the story on the ground and moving, which is just where and how it belongs.

Jim Thomsen, story consigliere.

By compelling me to think about this suggestion, Jim led me, indirectly, to my solution. The problem wasn’t point of view; it was, simply, that I was too lazy with the story on the first draft. In the absence of revelatory action, I wrote lengthy, story-stultifying expositions. By not giving Mitch enough to react to and deal with, I opened the field to his endless ruminations on his lot in life. I needed to find a way to make readers care about him and his story without begging for it.

In short, I had to discover what the book was about. I had nearly 80,000 words, but I didn’t have that.

So, you may be wondering, what is the book about? I have an answer: Beyond the plot points, the book is about truth. Not absolute truth (two plus two equals four), but the truth that we deduce from the way we see the world. It’s a unique view, one that belongs only to us. The Summer Son is what Mitch sees, in his memories of a violent summer nearly 30 years in his past and in the aging, distant father he confronts in the here and now. Mitch has good reason for seeing things the way he does, but the limitation of our unique point of view is that we don’t always see things as others see them. There’s another story, one that runs concurrent to Mitch’s assessment of his past and present with his father, and as that story is revealed, Mitch’s life absorbs seismic shifts.

I had to find that story. It took at least three major drafts and untold numbers of refinements (and the loss of about 10,000 words). Beta readers whom I trust to be straight with me helped uncover pieces of the story that completed the picture, and to them, I am eternally grateful.

The question now, one that won’t be answered until the book emerges and begins to be read, is this: Did I succeed?

I look forward to hearing your answer.

In the piece, he talks about releasing an independent film in this new climate:

In the new model that is still emerging, the creative energy of the filmmakers no longer ends with the completion of the film, but continues to be drawn upon for the entire life cycle of the project. The distribution and marketing of the film become a direct extension of the process of making it, and the creativity extends to every aspect of promoting, marketing, packaging, distributing, and showing it. On one side, this means that the artist can no longer be naive about business, or distanced from it, and hope to survive.

While artists have to become business savvy, on the other side, the business people have to become more like artists, sorting through all sorts of radical possibilities that didn’t even exist a few years ago. In the film world and other cultural areas, business is becoming more like art, and art is becoming more inseparable from business. Art purists may feel this is a bad thing; although it is a bit exhausting for the creative person who might like to retreat to his studio, I like these new developments and find them promising as well as exciting. We are in a new kind of Renaissance - a creative entrepreneurial gold rush….

We see the new landscape, in which the creative innovator can now reach directly to a huge audience without need of a corporate intermediary, in those Youtube phenomena where an unknown puts out a series of comedy sketches or conspiracy theory videos and suddenly attracts an audience in the tens of millions, or more. Not just videos but new forms of social media and interactive technologies can rapidly explode.

Nevermind the problems with distribution or advances, the attraction to self-publishing for me is the philosophy of self-publishing - the dissemination of ideas. Without the outlet of self-publishing, so much information wouldn’t see the light of day, and as they say, “Information is power.” Of course, a boatload of crap is released by this system, but no system is perfect.

It’s what makes self-publishing detractors like Pimp My Book or the post linked here seem so staid. What exactly are they protesting against? Certainly self-publishing can be difficult, and certainly people get ripped off, but the fundamental premise behind self-publishing is a good one and should really be celebrated. It’s why more and more the detractors don’t get under my skin as they once did. It’s hard to get offended by people who are looking backwards.