Pictures in your Wallet

When I was going through highschool, it was a badge of honor to have a picture of your girlfriend in your wallet. (Dude, you’ve got a chick who actually talks to you? Well done!) 

When my daughter was born, it was the duty of a father to carry pictures of your kid with you everywhere you went – generally, in your wallet. (Dude, your kid is no where near as ugly as you. Well done!)

A friend of mine recently had a baby, and when I asked to see pictures he hauled out his phone.

My, how the world has changed.

In the world’s natural evolution, it seems that carrying things around has become archaic. Glossy pictures of your kids have been replaced by images on your phone. Hand-written letters from friends have been replaced by emails. Tattered, well loved, paperback books have been replaced by e-readers.

Of the above the thing that I find the most depressing is the loss of actual posted letters. When I was going through Depot (RCMP training academy) an old friend of mine sent me a letter in the mail, as a gag, complete with a picture of herself, and a healthy dose of perfume. It brought me a laugh and gave me a bit of peace in a fairly stressful stretch of time.

All of the paper things that used to mean so much to us have gone by the way-side. And one of the reasons I think they are a loss is because they no longer represent a tactile, human connect to the source from whence they came – the letters, especially.

The convenience of electronics has usurped the connection of paper, but I have to ask myself if this is a bad thing.

While I dearly love the feel, sentiment and connection behind a hand-written letter, they are not exactly convenient. My hand-writing looks like a drunken caterpillar danced across the page, stamps are expensive, and going to the post office is a pain in the ass. Emails on the other hand, are easy; I can type about 75 words a minute, so I can get a lot of thoughts down – a lot of love to my friends – in the space of about 5 minutes, and then have the message before them instantly. It makes it a lot easier to communicate with people, and ease of use means frequency of use. Frequency of use means a little more love and well-wishes to make your day a little better. This is a good thing.

I am a book purist; I don’t own a dedicated e-reader, and I won’t get one. I spend a large quantity of my life staring at words on a computer screen, and when I come home and sit down to read I prefer the soft light of a good lamp, and the feel of a book in my hand. That does not mean that I hate e-readers, in fact quite the opposite.

Being with a small publishing house, the print runs for the books are small and the books cost money to have them printed, so they have to be sold for a minimum amount of money so my publisher doesn’t have to feed her family dog food. But the e-books are inexpensive to publish, and equally inexpensive to sell – that means they get into the hands of more readers. This is a good thing.

There will always be space, and necessity, for the hardcopy, paper things in life, but I don’t think we should bemoan the progress of the electronic form.

Does the message in an email become invalid because it’s electronic instead of paper? I don’t think so.

Is a story less vivid because it’s read on a kindle instead of between two hard covers? No, don’t be silly. A story that scares the shit out of you or makes you laugh your ass off is still made up of the same words, no matter what medium you use to experience it.

Does a picture look duller because it’s on a phone instead of out of your wallet? Actually, it probably looks better.

The world is in a pretty deep state of flux, and no one really knows – especially with the publishing industry – what this is going to mean. But that doesn’t mean your letters shouldn’t be sent, or your story shouldn’t be written. It’s gonna be loved by someone, so you need to put it (them) out there.

Now, get busy. Some kid just got an e-reader for his birthday and needs a good story to teach him something.

As always, thanks for reading.

“Stop Molesting Twitter; It Never Did Anything to You.”

The hardest part of writing a story, beyond the actual craft of it, is trying to get it into the hands of an audience. Being published with a small house, and having no budget for advertising, I can appreciate this as well as anyone.

Social media is one of the best ways to self-advertise, especially since it’s free. But, you can overdo a good thing. Or, in the case of some people, you can flog the bejesus out of it until you infuriate everyone you come in contact with, motivating them to pray for your untimely death.

When it comes to self promotion, there is a fine line between being informative, and being annoying. No, that’s a lie; the line is huge, pulsating and obvious. If you’re throwing out the release of a new novel, or perhaps an appearance or reading to people who know you, like you, follow you, or might want to read your stuff, that is cool. I dig it when authors I like announce the release date of their new work so I can go and pick up a copy.

On the other hand, if you stalk people on twitter, like a half-starving stray dog, and bombard them with messages about how awesome your latest book is, you will probably be thought a little annoying.

In fact, I’m annoyed right now. Can you tell?

A friend of mine, kc dyer, recently solicited opinions on twitter of what people wanted to see in posts. My answer was simple: I want to be entertained, inspired or educated. I’ve always found that if someone engages my interest through either making me think, making me want to write, or making me laugh my ass off, I will be motivated to move beyond their twitter feed, facebook page, or blog posts and spend my money on their published work.

Alternately, if someone posts the same review of their bloody book thirty-seven times in the space of three hours I actually begin fantasizing about learning their home address and leaving a burning bag of dog shit on their porch. Why? Because that is what they are doing to my twitter feed: covering it in shit, lighting it on fire, and making it stink.

There is nothing that will alienate people – your potential readers – faster than pissing them off. And nothing pisses people off more than being eye-raped by stupid posts saying “OH MY GOD, BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK!!! WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?!?!”

As one of my friends used to tell me growing up: Desperation is a stinky cologne.

So, please, tell me about your story, cause it might be awesome, and I might want to read it. But, please, for the suffering love of anything holy, stop molesting twitter; it didn’t do anything to you.

It Depends

I am a man who likes concrete answers. I like to know exactly what I am supposed to do in any given situation.

I have found, lately, that every answer can shift and every rule has an exception.

This past week I was fortunate enough to be on a two day search warrant course. The syllabus was fairly open, leaving a lot of time for discussion – which really means, time for me to pester the bejesus out of the instructors, all of whom are friends of mine.

I’ve been doing this job for nearly 10 years, so I know that every law is open to interpretation, and it was made even more apparent during the discussion time in this course. Every time I would try and pin the instructors down to an answer, they would slip out from beneath it and say “it depends.” Over the two days it became such a comical game, that the instructors would give an answer of “it depends” just to see me lose my shit.

At the end of the course my friend, Erica, who worked with me as a baby constable, what seems like a thousand years ago, asked me, “Are you going to go write a blog post called ‘it depends’?”

At the time, I laughed it off. But as the last few days have gone by, I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot.

Writing a story, I’ve been thinking, is a lot like interpreting the law: There are a lot of hard and fast rules, things that have been sacrosanct for eons, but there is always an exception.

When I first started really working on this craft, Jack Whyte said in a class at the Surrey Writer’s conference, “You have to learn the rules of writing, and then you have to learn to break them.” The further I have gone along, the more I have discovered this is true.

People will tell you that no one wants to read a book about a teenage wizard, until J.K. Rowling sells a ga-gillion copies. Agents and Editors will tell you not to write a book about vampires, until Stephanie Meyers did it and became a household name (hated in some households, for certain). Hell, people will insist you use proper punctuation in your dialogue, and then Cormac McCarthy (whose real name is Charles) wrote “The Road”, with not a quotation mark to be seen.

Every standard expecation has an exception, and every rule can be broken. It becomes a matter of craft, a sign of your growth and experience, that you can work with those hard and fast rules until they become soft and malleable in your hands, and easily bent to your will.

This isn’t going to happen overnight, or even over the next year. I’ve been working my ass off at this craft for the last 7 years, and I’ve still got a fuck of a long way to go. But as you move forward you’re going to get better. You’ll be able to see for yourself that your writing has improved, and the ability to break those rules will come.

You just cannot give up.

Thanks for reading, and keep writing.

 

Blood On My Boots

I have seen a large quantity of unpleasant things in ten years of being a street cop, and it seems each year gets just a little bit worse. Some things, I find, roll off you with no more effect than rain on a window, while other incidents ride around in your head for the rest of your life, no matter how hard you try and forget.

I’ve spent a long, cold night guarding a burned up body, chasing away the rats that kept trying to eat it with my flashlight. I have pulled bloated, reeking bodies from the river, trying not to pop them as I worked extremely hard to breath through my mouth and not my nose. I have seen people murdered, maimed, shot, stabbed, beaten, stomped, run over by cars and stuck in wood chippers. I’ve lost count of how many uniform shirts I have had to throw away, and how many times I’ve scrubbed blood off my boots.

This past week was not my worst, but it was as bad as I’ve had in a year or more. There was a lot of blood, and a lot of grief.

And I think it’s the grief that affects me most.

The most troubling experience I’ve ever had involved a mother gripping my face and screaming, begging me for vengeance after I brought her news that her child had been murdered. I can tell you that is an old ghost that has ridden my shoulder and will not be banished.

While policing is my profession, storytelling is my craft, and whenever I do the former I am thinking about the latter.

What can I do with all these experiences, I ask myself? Can I make something constructive out of all this pain? Can I use my craft to make something out of the void that is left by all this suffering?

The answer? I think I might have it a little backwards.  I think it might not be so much that my job feeds my craft, but more likely that my craft allows me to be better at my job.

I had a good day today; I spent a large quantity of it with my wife, saw some of my dearest friends, and was able to stand in the clean air with the sun of my face. In the peaceful moments I was thinking on my writing path; where it is going, but also where it has been. And in thinking about this blog, I see that I’ve used it many, many times to shrug some weight off my shoulders. If it wasn’t for my ability to write, to dump emotions, and hopes, and fears, and worries out of my head and onto the page, I think I might be a bit of a raving lunatic by now.

I think for storytellers, writing is the most effective form of therapy. It helps us process the things we’ve seen, and impart to other people the lessons we’ve had to learn the hard way. It gives us a venue to live out dreams we might never acheive in our waking lives, and bring a little bit of happiness to people we would never otherwise meet. It allows me to hope that the things I’ve seen, the brains I’ve scraped off the bottom of my boot with a stick and the severed heads I’ve pulled out of the back seats of cars, will be transformed through one of my stories to touch someone else in a positive way.

Writing is a conduit: it allows us to change violence into joy, and hate into love.

So, as you go through your writing life, remember that the bad things you encounter might wind up as something powerful and effective in one of your stories. And the power of that tale might pull someone out of a bad place and set them right.

I’ve used this quote a dozen times, and I am unlikely to stop any time soon: “Your story might not matter to everyone, but it will matter, very much, to someone.” – Robert J. Sawyer

Try not to worry too much over the shit that rains down on you. You have the ability to turn it into something that doesn’t smell quite so bad.

Thanks for reading, and keep writing.

A Writer in a Savage Land – Or, Very Small Victories

I recently had a very interesting experience; the folks at my publisher, Dark Dragon Publishing, were able to wrangle me a table for the weekend at Fan Expo Vancouver. Though there were some really cool things, I find myself still feeling a little disheveled, like a cat that has been rubbed backwards by an exuberant four-year-old.

On the first day a young man, wearing an extremely tight, shiny Green Lantern costume walked up to my table and picked up a copy of my book.

“What’s this?” he asked, frowning down at my novel.

“It’s a story about Mounties fighting evil in a small coastal town,” I said, happy that someone was actually talking to me.

“No,” he said, sneering at me like I was an idiot. “I mean, is this a book?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, starting to feel this conversation was not going to go well.

“I don’t read books,” he said with an exaggerated sniff while he tossed my story back on the table like it was a half-eaten twinkie. “They’re too archaic.”

It was at that moment that I learned two very important lessons: there is an extreme disconnect between me and the youth of today, and just because a costume zips up, doesn’t mean it fits.

Latex body suits are a privilege, not a right.

Let me continue by saying that I met some fantastic people while I was there. Frank, from Aspen Comics, (www.aspencomics.com), who started out as a small enterprise and has turned into a significant player in the comic book industry, took some time to give me a little advice on self-promotion and perseverance in the face of abysmal disappointment. Brad Middleton, author of “Undead TV”, was forced to sit beside me and put up with me and my horrible jokes for 2 days, and successfully refrained from beating me to death with a plastic chair. I also have to extend a huge thanks to the organizers of the event for letting an uneducated, unknown, uncouth goon into their midst to sling books for 2 days.

I also had some cool experiences while I was there; I saw some really cool costumes, had a couple of conversations with aspiring writers, and got close enough to Stan Lee to smell his cologne (I think it was Old Spice). But I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be about going to another comic book convention.

An event like this is a difficult venue for trying to pitch a novel. The folk who attended were there because they were hardcore fans of comic books – I mean, you’d have to be to line up for 3 hours to pay sixty dollars to get your picture taken with Stan Lee, or Spike from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

There was very little interest in a full length novel. For the 16 hours I was there, and the fifty-thousand-some-odd people that walked through the convention center, I sold 8 books. The guy sitting next to me sold 2. The poor bastard who was two rows over sold absolutely nothing – Not a Thing – the whole time he was there, and that seemed to be a fairly common theme among the other authors in attendance. I’m not pointing fingers here; it’s not the fault of the organizers or of the attendees. At the end of the day, it just wasn’t the right venue for an author.

I’ve heard that other such events have several panels and discussions for authors/storytellers. There wasn’t a place for that at Fan Expo Vancouver, and it seemed more geared towards giving comic book fans access to their favorite celebrities, or for comic book vendors to sell their wares.

My interest is more directed at the craft of storytelling, regardless of how many books I sell, and there wasn’t much opportunity for that. I did have one awesome conversation with a poet named Sher, who was looking for some pointers on writing horror fiction, but that was the total extent of the craft that was discussed.

As I sit writing this, I guess I really do have to count the event as a win. I reached 8 new readers, who are going to take a ride through my story and hopefully draw something from it. I got to help out a fledgling storyteller (even more fledgling than I am, which is saying something), and hopefully give her a little encouragement as she starts her own journey towards finding her voice as a writer.

The more I think about it, the more positive I grow. No, it was not a huge success, but this writing life is about tiny steps and small victories. It’s about finishing one story, selling one book, reaching one person. There aren’t huge leaps and bounds, but there is definite movement, and as long I’m writing, it’ll movement in the right direction.

Now, let’s carry on. There are lost young men, in latex Green Lantern outfits, that desperately need our help.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

It’s Only Escapism

“Pfft, it’s only mindless escapism,” is a phrase most often heard uttered from the bearded chins of stuffy men in tweed jackets with elbow patches, or perhaps by young men sitting in large chain coffee shops, wearing horn rimmed glasses while they clack away at an old manual type writer, claiming to be “indie” while they grip a Starbucks cup and text their ironic friends on an iPhone.

This is also a phrase that fills me with an overwhelming urge to push someone – someone possibly wearing horn-rimmed glasses – down the nearest set of stairs.

The term “escapism” is often tossed about, in a deeply negative connotation, in reference to most genre fiction. The reference seems to be intended to make anyone who reads genre fiction feel stupid, as it is not high-brow “literary fiction”.

The thing I find so utterly stupid about comments like this is that any story, no matter what genre it’s in, is supposed to draw you in, make you feel the character, cause you to experience their lives. So every story, if it’s any good, is a form of escapism.

Are literary fiction aficionados saying that you cannot get drawn into one of their stories? That sounds to me like an admission their stories suck.

Truth be told, I find most “literary fiction” boring as hell and I’m completely baffled that anyone reads that shit – which is exactly what some people say about my novel, because we all know that men in tweed jackets don’t like stories about Mounties fighting Demons.

One of the best books I’ve read in the last year is “A Place Called Armageddon”, by CC Humphreys, who writes primarily historical fiction. When reading his story the characters were so clear to me, and the scenery so vivid, that I felt as though I stopped reading the story and started seeing it. Is this escapism? Damn right! You wanna know what else it is? A damned fine story, and one hell of a good time.

The wonderful thing about a good story is that there are no borders and no limits. There is no form that a story is required to fit, no dimensions that it cannot exceed, no stupid little box that it has to be crammed in. The storyteller can make his tale into anything he wants, and the reader is free to dive into it and interpret it any way that makes him happy.

I think providing your reader with a bit of escapism while they read your work is something you should aspire to, not be afraid to be judged for.

Now, tell me a story and take me for a good ride, it’s been a shitty week.

Thanks for reading.

Good Men in a Bad Time

Most young men are pricks. Swaggering, angry, ill-tempered, ill-mannered, rude little pricks.

As a young man (well, young-ish) I feel entitled to make this statement.

As I was leaving the locker-room of my gym yesterday I overheard two young men (younger than me by more than a few years) having a boisterous conversation about the muffins they stole from the school cafeteria, the weed they smoked that got them “dude…high as fuck!”, and what they would do to the girl at the front counter of the gym if they were able to get her alone for 5 minutes. I introduced myself, told them thievery, drug trafficking and possible sexual assault were not appropriate topics of conversation for a public venue (especially while standing in front of a cop), and left them a little pale, and a little worried.

When I was young I, too, was boisterous, filled with bravado, and walked around with my chest puffed out a little more than was wise. But if my old man had caught me talking like that in any place, public or private, he’d have waited until I was asleep (since I was bigger than him by the time I was 16), and then beat me with a pillowcase filled with bricks. I learned at a young age not to swear at people, to hold the door open for old ladies, and to stop and lend a hand when you saw someone with a flat tire. People don’t do that anymore.

I have to ask myself, where do these young men get the impression that what they are doing is acceptable? Who has taught them to act like this?

As I look around I find myself in a world where there are plenty of role models, all slapped up on billboards, television, the internet and any other medium that popular media can cram a picture onto. But all these role models are bad. The people most glorified are the ones who make the biggest asses of themselves, and win fame through behaving at their absolute worst.

I’ve ranted before about reality television, but it seems even the fictional characters are bad. There has been a lot of discussion in the literary world recently about the “Grim-dark” genre of fantasy, where the world is basically an awful place and everyone, even if they’re good, has to be just as awful to survive.

Television is filled with Grim-Dark characters; Shows like “Breaking Bad”, “The Sopranos”, “Sons of Anarchy”, “Mad Men” and several other titles make heroes of people who are often sneaks, cheats, drunks, drug dealers and ruthless killers – even if they are killing for the “Right Reasons”. As entertaining as all these shows are, and I watch them just as much as anyone, I have to ask if there is anything positive to be gained from them?

And, as I think about it, I must say yes, yes there is.

One thing we know, from sales statistics and surveys, is that the majority of books are purchased and consumed by female readers, and I’m not just talking about titles like “50 Shades of Grey” and “Twilight”, I mean everything. 

As I’ve said before, I think it is through story that our life lessons are imparted upon us. It is through our individual processing of the stories we are told, read and watch that we build the foundation of the people we want to be.

So, what is the benefit of stories about horrible people doing things, you ask me? There are two main positives for Grim-Dark stories.

First: they draw the attention of these young men, which causes them to actually read a book, or more often to pay attention to something that isn’t “Jersey Shore”. This, I think, is vitally important. Young people, and young men especially, don’t read enough. If you ask the average high school student to read something out loud to you you’re likely to get a lot of stuttering and the sounding out of any words that contain more than one syllable. If stories that involve a lot of stabbing and several graphic sex scenes are what it takes to get a kid to start reading, then by the fuck bring ‘em on!

Second: Because Grim-Dark stories are so bleak, any altruistic act of goodness, or even simple kindness, really stands out. It is a big deal to the reader because the author makes it a big deal in the context of the story. If a good deed is such an attention getter in a dark story, then hopefully the person reading it will learn a bit of a lesson.

A fairly significant quantity of the stories I read when I was a kid, and even what I read now, involved good for good’s sake. The protagonist is on a quest to set the world right, because that is what he ought to do; it is not a simple matter of survival, but something he feels compelled to do because of his innate nature. These are the stories I like to read, and they’re also the kind of stories I like to write.

Is this kind of behaviour unrealistic? Well it certainly seems to be in the world we live in now.

During the course of my “day job” I see constant examples of how the world is going for an absolute shit, but I was warned by my best friend’s old man when I joined the Force 10 years ago: “The only time good people need the police is when something bad happens to them”, and truer words were never spoken. So, perhaps because of my work experience my view is a little skewed, but I really worry about future generations, and how absolutely awful some people can be. Or, perhaps even worse, how much people don’t care about anything but themselves.

Can the answer to the world’s problems all be solved with a few good stories? While I would like to think so, I’m a little doubtful. But it seems like there is nothing to guide young people, young men specifically, when it comes to the way they ought to behave, and if one good story can steer one young man in the right direction, then I say it’s worth writing no matter what genre it’s in.

Where ever you are reading this, I hope you’re surrounded by people who don’t suck.

Let me know if you have any ideas, and thanks for reading.