In Search of the Readers

This morning I put the finishing touches on Dust‘s second draft. Looking over it, I find the work still a ways from where I want it, certainly from where I originally envisioned it, but more experienced writers tell me that’s how every work will prove to be. Still, it’s a vast improvment over the first draft and, as debuts go, I’m exceedingly proud of it.

Publication is, I firmly believe, in this novel’s future, but one last, critical step remains: it must be read. So I’m looking for readers.

Over the course of writing Dust I have had many people who kindly read and proofed excerpts, and an ample helping of those generous folks’ suggestions have already been incorporated. This is the first time I will be offering the full, more or less complete text. The analysis and editorial help I receive here will be the final stage before publication.

So here’s the skinny. Dust is a big novel. Just under 170,000 words, clocking it at 540 manuscript pages. Now that’s not a true monster, nor even close to the largest most of you have read, but it’s no breeze-through-on-a-lazy-afternoon either. Size wise that’s around The Fellowship of the Ring, and quite a bit larger than both The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. 

I’m eager for editorial help from those who have the time and inclination, and how you want to do that is entirely up to you: you could directly mark up the Word file, I could set up an editable Google Doc for you, or you can even take a red pen to a printout, high school teacher style. You don’t even have to get all editorial, just reading it and giving me your thoughts on the entire work if you’d prefer, in whatever manner is most comfortable for you.

I ask only two things. Firstly, that readers have the time and willingness to read and get back to me in a relatively timely manner, preferebly a month, let’s say two on the outside. I’ll also be whipping up a list of questions related to some of my chief concerns about the current state of the novel, but whether you want to actually answer them will be up to you.

My second request, and this is the more important of the two, please be honest with your criticism. I need to know what is working and what isn’t, and by sparing my feelings in regard to something you don’t care for you’ll be doing me no favors.

So, if you want to read what I think is a pretty good story, and get your own copy when it’s published down the line, just contact me here on WordPress or Facebook, or email me directly at wesharpsmith@gmail.com.

Updates

Between work and moving into a house–not to mention the million little unanticpated tasks those both bring–I haven’t been a prolific poster. I have managed at  least to remain an overall prolific writer, at least, and for an up and coming aspiring professional that is no small thing.

So then, what’s been occupying my schedule? In my brand new house is a brand new office, and from that wonderfully isolated work space I have nearly completed draft 2 of Dust. Ten chapters, or about 20% of the manuscript remains to be finished, and work is coming along nicely. After that I’ll need to recruit two or three readers to go over it (wonderful as my wife is, she can’t do everything), give it that last layer of polish, and than it’s off to be published. Easy peasy.

Heh heh; we’ll see. I’m very confident in it as debut though, no question on that. If you haven’t already, you can read the first chapter here.

I’ve also been working quite a lot on my second novel, Citadel. Despite the likewise single word title it’s not related in any way to Dust. In fact, where Dust is a sort of post-apocalyptic literary Western, Citadel is my take on the fantasy novels of my youth. An extremely low fantasy–as in no magic at all–it features multiple POV characters in a tight third person, as compared to Dust‘s entirely first person narrative. With all the characters, setting, and plotting, this one is much larger beast to plan out than Dust, but that work is going extremely smoothly. 

I’ve actually written roughly five chapters of Citadel so far, the second of which I submitted to the Spring 2015 Meacham’s Writer’s Conference for review. Well, I must be doing something right with this, because in it’s nascent form that chapter was enough to earn me the 2015 Ken Smith award for prose. I’ll give it another layer of polish before I throw it up for you, my darling readers, to peruse.

So that’s me, still trying to figure out how to balance the past few month’s productivity with keeping this site up to date. To be honest, self-promotion has never been a strength of mine. I have a difficult time envisioining Harlan Ellison, or Hemingway, or any of my inspirations having anything but contempt for the idea of promoting yourself, rather than letting your work do it for you, but hey; all those folks are dead or old, so eff ’em.

I’ve given some thought to a regular feature, maybe something a little lighter than the usual literary talk, to keep me engaged with you. I’d love to hear any suggestions you may have. Of course, nothing succeeds in America like success, so getting the novel finished and published must remain the priority.

Take care until next time and, as always, remember: words matter.

A Novel Approach

I’ve been a writer of some variety or another for most of my life. In school English and everything in its orbit came easily to me, and I was that annoying kid who on the first day of a new grade had read everything required by the summer reading list and then some. Never a good student generally, but I could pop out an essay or ace a word question (plague of most math students, but my panaceas) nearly without effort.

Studying English in college brought the first simmering bubbles of a thought to perhaps pursue writing professionally, but it would be quite a while yet before that urge came to a rolling boil. It was the publication of a short story in early 2012 that crystallized the real possibility of being a professional writer. Concurrently with that realization, I began work on my first novel.

It actually began as a novella, predicated on three ideas, one conceptual, one egocentric, and one that seemed at the time rational and measured, but now looks hopelessly naive. The concept: the post-apocalypse’s first novelist. The ego: most male writers are weak at writing female characters, but I was going to have a female protagonist. The naive: this was going to be easy.

Well the concept came easily enough, even expanding with far less effort than I expected (more on that at the end of this paragraph). The ego, I say in all humility, was actually right, because if you asked me now to pick my premiere novel’s greatest strength I wouldn’t hesitate in choosing my protagonist and her voice. But that third, shifting little shit of an assumption? I don’t need to tell any of you fellow novelists–at whatever stage of your own work you might be–that it was very, very wrong. In fact, the very first blow to the assumption came in light of the concept, as it became clear very quickly that there was no way this story would be told in the under 50,000 words of a novella.

Ah, but naivety was not done with me yet. “Oh,” it said, “well it’s not as if a novel will be that much harder than a novella.”

Wrong. Writing a novel can be easy, in the moment. But it’s not when writing’s easy for you that it matters, it’s when it’s hard. When you don’t want to write is when you must, otherwise you move at a sluggard’s pace, which feeds doubt in your capability to tackle the whole monumental enterprise, which in turn fuels procrastination, which slows you down, which feeds… you get the idea.

My first idea, the concept which had seemed so strong and supportive initially, now seemed at times to have grown fangs and turned on me. Every time I sat down to write it seemed like there were more ideas, and the length just kept increasing, which made the whole thing feel ever more insurmountable. It sometimes seemed as if the finish line receded further and further the faster I went. At times I flagged. There were stumbles, days when I set my laptop down with my coffee cup still half-full and warm. There were probably more hundred word days than there were two-thousand ones.  More than once I paused for weeks at a stretch, my characters stuck in a moment while my creative fields lay fallow.

Looking back on it now, though, I see how I was growing as a writer. What I took as a receding finish line was, in fact, my capabilities growing ever so gradually towards my ambition. My talent and my craft moved in tandem with my novel.

It took me a shade under three years to finish Dust. In the moment that seemed an arduous, stagnant swamp of time. With a little research I see now that it’s about average for a debut novel; one that actually gets finished, anyway.

I wrote some short stories even as I worked on the novel, including most of those featured on harpsmith.net. Yet as I went on I wrote more on Dust and less on anything else (including this blog). By the last few months all of my efforts were on the first novel, excepting those times I was slacking off to work on concept for the second one. More on that in a bit.

A while back I wrote a post here about the emotional highs and lows of writing as an artistic endeavor. What I realized as I wrote, even when I lay fallow, was that Dust had taken on a new dimension from that wonder drug sort of aspect: it had become the physical–well, electronic, but you know what I mean–embodiment of my desire to be a professional writer. When I worked hard on it it was because I had the passion, the drive it would take to make way in this notoriously tough field. When I wasn’t it was because I was weak and worthless. Most of the time I was somewhere in between, and I suspect that is, in fact, precisely where the majority of work on the majority of novels has gotten done.

Dust, this novel I have at last finished, might not be great literature. It’s certainly not bad, but I doubt it’s great. What I do know is that the next will be better. And the third? Well, that one might actually be good enough for the old noodle.

I encourage you to check out the first chapter, already posted here.. In the weeks ahead I intend to post a nice, tidy list of what I’ve learned from this first novel, and how that has affected Citadel, the upcoming second. Suffice to say, progress on that one is coming a whole lot faster and in a far more organized fashion; I’ll have a preface chapter up before you know it.

As always I’d love to hear your thoughts, and remember: words matter.

Dust – Chapter 1

The first draft of my first novel, Dust, is very nearly done, clocking in at a hand aching 175,000-ish words. Yeah, this puppy is going to need some serious paring down. It’s been a hell of a learning experience though, and I’m already eager to get to work on the next one with all the strengths I’ve gained as a writer.

I recently went back to revise the first chapter for workshopping. What a difference two years makes! What I once though was an excellent introduction looked hopelessly stilted when I went back to begin revising. It’s humbling to think what this, the more or less final form of chapter one, will seem like two years from now.

In any case, I’m posting it here for your perusal. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

American Gilgamesh: Shoots with his Right, Heart on his Left.

http://imgur.com/9wNuJiy

Have you ever read Preacher? It’s one of those transcendent comics that ran for a few years in the mid-90s. They came in just ahead of the renaissance that brought to the fore the graphic novel, a format, in retrospect, far more natural for these odd ducks. Because they are novels, with all the literary power and capability to impel reflection that word implies; they just happen to have accompanying pictures.

Preacher is a brutal, beautiful, love letter to America, written by an Irishman and drawn by an Englishman. It’s all blood and sinew, the absolute most horrific violence and degradation a very creative pair of minds could conjure, paired without a hint of whiplash to moments so funny you’ll literally have to put the book down. Sometimes they’re even one and the same, and you’ll find yourself in that “I really shouldn’t be laughing at this but DAMN” mode. The characters are that perfect mix of mythic archetypes and detailed characterization that comics are so suited to. The villains are hate-able, the heroes stand tall, but no one is simple, and there’s some sympathy to be found in even the most hateful pieces of excrement (Of which there are plenty.)

More than any of that, though, Preacher is a meditation on America and on being an American. The hero and titular character is named Jesse Custer, a hard-drinking, hard fighting, Southern-born outlaw turned preacher turned outlaw (of a sort) again. Jesse is Clint Eastwood’s frame and laid back, predatory attitude combined with the unwavering justness of Atticus Finch. He’s that sort of violent that we would call psychopathic, if it wasn’t so unerringly directed at people who really–conveniently–deserve it. Jesse is every Western hero stereotype from Odysseus to Shane, rolled into one. He swears a lot, he’s a bit more than arrogant, and he’s always chivalrous to women, if a tad old-fashioned. His very literal Jiminy Cricket is even a spectral John Wayne.

I could spill gallons of virtual ink deconstructing Jesse Custer, or anyone else in the comic’s large, well written cast. What I want to talk about more broadly, however, is Jesse’s role as the dead center, bulls-eye ideal of the American hero. What a beautiful, contradictory, and completely unattainable idea that is.

Grocery Bar: A Monument to Man’s Arrogance.

This is a local interest piece I wrote for a local paper that didn’t get picked up. I’m sharing it here as a rare example of my capability for brevity.

The relevant business can be found here.

—

“Nothing gold can stay,” said Robert Frost, but with all respect due, sometimes it does stay; it just turns to silver in doing so. If it stays long enough, we might even start whining about it.

Let’s be clear; Grocery Bar is absolutely awesome, and our city is lucky to have it. The hot bars are delicious and varied, with great selections for carnivores and vegetable dishes an insecure male doesn’t have to be self conscious about nabbing. Moreover the staff is as helpful and attentive as Enzo’s ever was. The new additions don’t stand out from the old guard, and the same justly renowned smiling meat guys are still plying their trade behind the butcher’s counter. Even as I write this I’m munching on some of Grocery Bar’s cranberry pumpkin seed trail mix and it tastes like my own hypocrisy; also delicious.

But was any of it necessary?

Walk in the front door of the Grocery Bar and you’re greeted by a stack of artfully arranged artisanal watermelons ahead of you and a cornucopia of mid to high priced cheeses on your left. “Don’t worry,” it all seems to say, “Enzo’s lives on; your paleo friendly pasta sauce and gluten free muffins await within, just as before.”

Then you see those bars. Arranged laterally with your entrance, in contrast to Enzo’s perpendicular setup, they are four massive altars, afforded pride of place in the new layout, with space enough for entire platoons of customers to comfortably mill about them. The arrangement is as much mission statement as it is practicality, and a marked contrast to the melon and cheese supplication of moments before. “This. Is. GROCERY BAR!” it bellows, before kicking you into a pit with your stupid muffins and marinara.

Perhaps if those bars would cede some space, the souls of Enzo and Grocery Bar could comfortably share a body. But as of now they don’t, and that leaves us with a paltry selection of produce, a much reduced butcher counter (though you might not notice, with those familiar butchers flashing their movie star smiles), a decent enough dairy case, and ONE AISLE of dry grocery.

This ain’t Enzo’s. It isn’t even a grocery store. Grocery Bar is a well-stocked delicatessen.

Whether it wished to be or not, Enzo’s was as much political statement as it was neighborhood grocer. In the middle of the food desert that was the south side, Enzo’s was an oasis that precluded a long pilgrimage to St. Elmo or the North Shore. It was an alternative to the inoffensive, corporate blandness of your Bi-Los and your Wal-Marts. It was Whole Foods without the pretension (and with better lighting), and in serving a multicultural stew of locals and tourists alike it was incarnate the liberal dream that Whole Foods’ Obamacare hating founder draped around his company like a cloak made of opinion polls.

Why was it necessary? That’s the question I keep coming back to. Enzo’s gave a densely packed swath of Chattanooga an opportunity to taste something generally reserved for the SUV and soccer practice set. Now what do they have? Another place to get a ten dollar lunch in an area that doesn’t lack for quality dining?

Truthfully, it’s embarrassing to even be able to complain about this. Grocery Bar kicks ass. If it was in any other city, or had replaced any other business, I suspect I’d be embracing Grocery Bar as something new, bold, and wonderful. But this is Chattanooga, best culinary city in the South, and it is Enzo’s sign that came down mere weeks ago.

Check out the /r/chattanooga subreddit; this isn’t just me. We may not have much right to whine about it, but damned if we won’t. File it under #FirstWorldProblems.

I don’t know. I want to think Grocery Bar is something more than just a vanity project that has yanked something so briefly, beautifully, unique as Enzo’s from our community. Maybe Daniel Lindley has some spectacular future in mind that will quell my doubts. At the very least, maybe more actual groceries are on the way, to join the bars. I hope so.

There’s certainly enough space to add them.

The Perfect Drug

When I write, I feel good. When I don’t, I feel bad. Seemingly simple calculus. But it gets complex, doesn’t it? Because those moments when we decide to write or not aren’t simple ones. We’re talking big picture stuff.

My experience, then; a good writing session of a few thousand words can keep me optimistic and forward facing for two days, easily. More than that, it feeds on itself; write more, feel good; feel good, write more. It doesn’t simply feed on itself, it compounds. A torrent of artistic outpouring, the type where the thoughts seem to be coming faster than your fingers can follow and every moment spent eating/sleeping/showering becomes an agonizing void of lost moments, comes on like a hurricane, one breeze building on another on another on another until suddenly, rather than being short one major city, you’ve built one. A city that still needs windows in the skyscrapers and trees planted in the parks, to be sure, but a fully constructed, proud accomplishment all the same.

It’s not usually that close to the Platonic idea of a perfect creative outpouring, of course, but hopefully somewhere near it, coming in breezes and gusts that eventually get at least to tropical storm levels.

The converse?

Franz Kafka said that “the non-writing writer courts madness”. Delve deeply enough into the craft and you’ll discover that’s not a metaphor; it is a madness of naval gazing self doubt, questions of worth rooted so deeply in the mire you begin to see, in a very real way, where others lost themselves. Writing is a drug, to be an artist to be a quivering, gibbering addict, forever chasing the next hit. But where a desperate addict might be denied his hit by a grinning middleman, an artist’s drug is denied only by the artist himself.

Doubt is not simply the consequence of not writing; it becomes its cause, a drug of its own, albeit posessing far worse a hangover. The most sadistic lunatic of a god could not devise a more perfectly calibrated feedback loop of misery.

Reoccurring cycles of both these, accomplishment and doubt, mark the work of every writer I can think of worth the mentioning, and certainly all those I know personally. Ask them, and they’ll tell you something akin to this. Read them, and they’ll tell it to you with far more clarity. You can see it in the seemingly depthless artistic obsession with duality, and in the markedly increased tendency towards manic-depression in creative field across the spectrum.

If I’m rambling, or spilling what seems like an excessive amount of virtual ink on the subject, it’s only because it strikes so very close. A quick glance at the counters show it’s been a fair bit since my last post here, and though those months haven’t been entirely fallow as far as my overall writing output is concerned, neither have they been sufficient for an aspiring professional.

Why, then? It’s not as if I forgotten the warm bliss of my “perfect drug”, the feeling I have even now, as I near the finish of this post. Nor have I been discouraged by lackluster response to my work; indeed, it was the none too patient wonderings of multiple readers that finally got my ample posterior moving on finishing up and posting this nearly month old draft (a little inside baseball aside; from first word to last, you’ve probably never read more than six thousand or so that were written within a week of one another. I’ve always found the illusion of continuity in art to be fascinating).

There’s the always reliable canards: work has been crazy, personal issues have dominated my time, I’ve had other projects. They’re all even true, to one degree or another. But a canard is not an excuse, not a good one at least,
and the best any of these can provide is a satisfaction at their completion — certainly nothing to compare to the hurricane turned warm sunny day feeling of the writer who writes, a feeling that, as previously mentioned, can last days.

Maybe even looking for a reason is a fool’s errand. To have one certainly might help to know in the future why I might fall into these periods of low output, even prevent them. But what if I don’t find a reason at all? What if it’s just… me?

That’s even worse.

I think I’ll leave it there then, with my warm feeling of success and its accompanying certainty that more is to come. Write more, feel good; feel good, write more. To do anything else courts madness.

Motivation? The drug will have to do.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments or, as many of you have been, by email. As always, thank you for reading, and remember: words matter.

Progress report

Have to admit it looks as if not been very prolific lately. The short story section is a tad bare, and it’s been over a week since I darkened the feed here. The funny thing is I’ve actually been quite active in the word department, it’s just that my efforts have been focused on my first novel, tentatively titled “Dust”. It represents just over a year of effort, interspersed as it was with other work, but as I near the conclusion I’m picking up speed. Crossing the 150,000 word mark seemed a good time to come up for some air!

I anticipate being done with that first draft this summer. While my proof readers give it the once (Or twice) over, I’ll be reapplying myself towards shorter form work. As I’ve gotten better as a writer I’m definitely getting faster, and the short stories should come rapid and furious soon enough. I also have quite a few posts still in draft status for this feed.

In other news, I have the Meacham Writer’s Workshop to attend at the end of this month, where I’ll be getting feedback on my short story “The Divine Relation” from professional writers and fellow aspiring professionals alike.

In other, other news, thanks to the success of a certain once self-published, post-apocalyptic speculative fiction series, I should probably come up with a new name for my novel. For reasons that will become clear when I get a reasonably polished version of the first few thousand words up, I’m considering “Raleigh”.

Thanks for reading, and remember: words matter.

Why Harlan Ellison is America’s greatest living artist

What, the picture isn’t reason enough for you? Alright then. Let’s try the anecdotal thousand words.

Artist as iconoclast is a trope that dates back to probably the first time a caveman took a burned stick to a rock and could devise no answer to the “what is it? question — grunted, obviously —  better than a dismissive sniff. An artist is ultimately an observer —  of people, places, actions, everything — and it’s not a far hop from looking straight on at someone/something to looking down upon it. At best this can result in an early and lonely voice of dissent against some of the worst tendencies of humanity,  from simple cultural and intellectual stagnation to those dangerous points where the “common view” of society morphs into hatred and justifications for atrocity. At worst this capability to for distant observation can become contempt, and itself become the justification for those same worst human traits. It’s not a coincidence that artists were the earliest critics of the Third Reich and composed an inordinate amount of its leadership.

The tolerance for iconoclasm amongst the artistic community in human societies has varied widely with time and place, and despite what many a Facebook philosopher might opine cynicism is not interchangeable with intellectual worth. Philosophers and artists of all stripes have produced timelessly optimistic work that only the foolish hold in contempt. Witness the bright colors and perfectly formed human forms of most Renaissance era art, or the ‘government as capable protector of natural rights’ philosophies of early liberals. Even R.E.M., a band whose output is notoriously minor key, displayed not an ounce of irony in naming one of their early album’s “Life’s Rich Pageant”, and a  later song “Shiny Happy People”. But there’s a counterpoint to all of this, a responsibility by society to recognize and respect the tendency of its artists to wallow in the darkness, and the best capture this in their work. The Renaissance had Caravaggio‘s negative space and tortured forms, and the aforementioned R.E.M. album has the mournful “The Flowers of Guatemala” smack dab in the middle of all the major chords and rapid tempos. Also, “Shiny Happy People” features guest vocals by both female singer’s from the B52’s, whose shrill, contorted vocals shall surely feature prominently in the rise of dread lord C’thulu from the waters of R’lyeh.

Frightening times arise — C’thulu like — when society becomes deaf to the outsider’s perspective, valuing only the bright, the cheery, and the comfortable. We’re living in one of those times now. The world comes to the average American in the form of a personalized stream, a pill of concentrated information hand packed by algorithms who vet it only to insure maximum marketable impact upon the viewer. Perceived negativity is profoundly out of fashion. It’s times like these where the iconoclastic role of the artist is elevated to a duty, to be the doctor explaining to an ungrateful patient that their daily dose of information delivered via a smiley face printed vitamin is in fact a poison pill.

And it is there, in the curmudgeon’s chair I have just laid out for him, where we we find Harlan Ellison, America’s greatest living artist.

Not America’s greatest living writer, a point he himself is quick to make and that I’m more likely to dispute than he is. He is a great writer, to be sure. In a hypothetical hellscape of a world where literary talent is measured entirely in heavy-handed Romeo and Juliet metaphors and how worn the entry for “sparkle” is in an author’s thesaurus, today’s crop of popular authors would still, as a group, display less talent in the breadth of their entire catalogs than Ellison did in a single run on sentence about jelly beans in his short story “”Repent Harlequin!”, said the Ticktockman”, a sentence which it is probably now becoming clear to you I am paying direct homage to. Jelly beans!

In all seriouness, go read that story. It’s short, not even 4500 words. It’s not his best, but it gives a great impression of why he’s great, both as a writer and an artist of the definition I’m using.

I love that story. It’s angry, yet funny; bitter, yet sweet in its way. That’s not a bad definition of the man himself. Ellison is about as old school a writer as American literature has right now, with a career spanning over 60 years, and in that time he has hurled invective in every format you can possibly imagine: long, short, teleplays, essays, fiction, non-fiction, even YouTube videos of late. God help us if he ever decides to bother with Twitter.

Ellison is famous as a profoundly cynical writer. His short story collections bear titles like “Approaching Oblivion”, “The Deadly Streets”, and “Stalking the Nightmare”. Of the millions of words I’ve read by tens of thousands of authors, no one has ever arranged the same twenty-six letters in a way so chilling as he did in his short story, “Knox”. His worlds contain an endless string of fascist government/corporate controllers, antagonists who often emerge victorious, and the sort of dark-souled protagonists more often associated with Southern lit than science fiction.

Many would claim the author is the darkest soul of all. Ellison is well known to be difficult to work with, and he’s litigious as all hell. There’s an informal maxim in the publishing world that “you’re not anybody until Harlan Ellison has sued you.” If he’s a genius — a label I consider irrefutable in no less measure than many find it a nice way of saying ‘asshole’ — than he’s the mad kind, the sort of person so utterly convinced of his gifts that he won’t tolerate in the most minuscule way those who don’t. His ego is massive, his temper legendary, and he’s not shy about wielding his prodigious intellect and vocabulary as twin razors, slicing to tatters those he feels have wronged him.

I love Ellison, along with the majority of his work, though certainly not all of it. Many of his short stories seem to have no real interest in readability, and at his worst he can be practically nonsensical, writing from the perspective of narrators who can, charitably, be called disembodied consciousnesses more than true character. You often get a sense reading Ellison that he’s writing for himself, not an audience. He certainly doesn’t write down. He’s one of those authors who, in the course of a single collection of short stories, can have you saying , “I could do that,” through one story, followed by “How the hell could anyone do that?” with the next.  If all American writers are working in either imitation of or opposition to the sparse, elegant prose of Hemingway, than Ellison gleefully dances between the most extreme poles of both, flipping the rest of us double birds all the while. This is a man who might overwrite one passage, underwrite another, and never seems to give a fig how you feel about it either way.

One of the most difficult skills to learn as a writer — and this is worse the more naturally talented you are — is not to let your skill for observing mankind curdle into contempt. Cynicism is a key component in the artistic toolbox, but try to build a house with only one tool and all you’ll end up with is a whole lot of walls. It’s a balancing act, putting to paper what’s inside of you that’s demanding to come out while simultaneously respecting your audience enough not to make it a screed. Art is about expression, and if the only person we’re expressing to is ourselves then sentences become leaner, nothing more than a shorthand to stir the sense memory of the emotional state we were in at the time we wrote them. That’s called journaling. Writing, real writing, is for an audience, and a good writer is a fool to simply assume that an audience will be able to keep up with him if he’s racing along at full speed, red lining his mental engine from introductory sentence to closing. If he’s a good writer than he is, by definition, exceptional; if his audience shares the full breadth of his gifts, should they not be doing his job?

It can be frustrating for the writer. It can feel as if you’re deliberately slowing yourself. Too easily, it can become resentment.

And that’s why Harlan Ellison is America’s greatest artist. You read his work and, love it or hate it, you get the sense that he is firing on all cylinders the entire time, and whether you keep up or not, he doesn’t much care. He’s breaking some of the hardest rules you had to learn, indulging in naked, oppressive cynicism and using big, thesaurus reaching words to do it, and for whatever reason he’s allowed to do it. 

Why does he get to do it and not I? you might ask yourself, and it’s a worthy question. The best answer, the only real answer, is because he’s Harlan Ellison. He started doing this a hell of a long time before you did and, for whatever reason, he found success at it. Ellison is as predictably curmudgeonly as the monsoon season is wet; the people who publish him, hire him, or consult him, know he’ll be hard to work with, know there’s a fair chance of some kind of litigation. They also know he’ll do the work, and he’ll put his everything into it. They know what they’ll get from Ellison, and there’s a kind of value in that.

Perhaps then it’s Ellison’s role to be the observer of other observers, the guy who pisses us off by doing what he wants and getting paid for it. Maybe he’s there to keep us honest, the last, mad-eyed gunslinger standing between us and the desert of hypocrisy. Maybe he’s just a lucky asshole.

Whatever else he is, he’s a genius; even when he sucks at being a writer, he’s always great at being a genius.

Now maybe I’ll get lucky, and he’ll sue me for slander.

Flip A District!

If you were watching Real Time with Bill Maher last night, and didn’t blink at the wrong moment, you saw me! Bill is planning to throw his considerable resources into flipping a congressional district somewhere in the US considered safe by Republicans to Democratic control. Now, I don’t agree with the Democratic Party on a lot of things, but serving notice to Republicans that they’re not safe anywhere when they get as insane as they have of late is, I think, a higher calling.

Tennessee district 3 is a uniquely suitable candidate for this. Our congressman, Chuck Fleischmann, is exactly the sort of empty suit, indistinct, no account shill we all claim to despise, a safe vote for the national Republican party in whatever foolishness they choose to pursue. Moreover, recent events with our Volkswagen plant provided Fleischmann a unique opportunity to prove himself something more, and stand against his party in its clearly hypocritical interference in the interaction between a private corporation and its employees. He dropped the ball completely.

Yet there’s more! At the center of all the Republican hypocrisy was Tennessee senator Bob Corker. Corker lied — outright, no excuse, clearly and without argument, lied — that Volkswagen would pull a planned SUV line from the Chattanooga plant if those workers voted for the union. Volkswagen immediately contradicted his statement, but it didn’t matter, the damage was done. Corker’s lie clearly influenced the vote, and public sentiment district wide against the union.

Corker is the former mayor of Chattanooga. The cherry on top of the whole sundae of striking back at Republicans for their hypocrisy is that we’ll also be giving Corker a black eye, one that you can be assured will be carried into the senate chamber.

The fact that Bill Maher chose to show my video amongst a dozen or so others of the HUNDREDS he has received means he and his producers are considering TN 3 for the Flip a District effort. We can make this happen guys! Like my video, share it on youtube, and tweet with #flipadistrict your dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.

Better yet, make your own video! Make it a whole lot better than mine! Just be sure to include the #flipadistrict hashtag. You don’t even have to be a resident of TN 3 to do so.

Let’s make a difference.

http://t.co/LtWvxiRgGD