I’m really not much good at saying ‘look at me!’ It’s as foreign to my nature and culture as stripping off my clothes at a funeral service.
I am capable of reciting the various disasters I have inflicted on myself, and the intelligent observer can deduce:
1) I lived to tell the tale – so either I am a terrific liar who also is an expert at photo-shop etc. or my guardian angels all have nervous breakdowns and drinking problem, besides a strong desire to slap me around the head while yelling ‘why must you be so damn stupid?’
2)I am either singularly inventive or singly unlucky in the bizarre things I blunder into.
3)Given a choice of two paths, I do not choose the one less travelled. I’m the guy who climbs through the barbed-wire fence between them, into the boggy, brambly thicket, falls and staggers blithely past the “Danger, Mines, Rottweilers, Poets” sign, ignoring them as I do the sound of the guardian angel’s shrill despairing screech as she cracks another bottle of gin.
4)Entropy is eventually bound to catch up. I had better keep running.
And I somehow manage to kid myself that was all a good idea, very rational.
A dispassionate view might well say ‘Well, you haven’t done too badly for a titch that was supposed to die shortly after being born.’ I have been reliably informed that that death didn’t happen, much to several people’s chagrin. I wasn’t responsible for this turn of events – it fell entirely to my mother’s determination. It was pretty touch and go for some years — but weeds don’t die, and what doesn’t kill, fattens.
Which led the sort of bio that leads people to say ‘this Jackass was trying to out-Hemingway Hemingway’ (which, trust me, I am physically and mentally unsuited for) into a profession, where 1)survival, let alone any degree success is mathematically totally unlikely. (I was the author of the 1 book out of 3000 selected from the slush, and it doesn’t get a lot better from there, unless you have some reason to be ‘teacher’s AKA publisher’s pet’) 2) The industry is heavily skewed to support a political narrative where success is very difficult without picking their side. I never was good at picking a side (or even the road less travelled, as I said).
Somehow, I’ve endured. I’m still battling to finish our home, on a small farm overlooking the sea — but even this should have been utterly impossible. It has required a lot of ingenuity (or insanity), paint-it-blue-and-make-it-do, being glad elf-an’-safety aren’t watching one man somehow do what usually takes 6, a lot sheer pig-headedness… and these days, a lot of battle fatigue. But I still keep getting up and fighting on. I write books I would have loved to read, for audiences that I believe in writing for.
It’s been encouraging to finally — some 25 years after I have been trying, to start hearing voices out there saying ‘We need more books for boys.’ Or ‘Books shouldn’t all be woke messaging. They should be fun.’
The best, finally, for me has been to hear: ‘It would be nice to have normal, healthy, happy heterosexual families, who cared about each other, who loved each other, as heroes’. To finally actually hear that said, which I am sorry if you believe otherwise, is pretty fundamental to any kind of future which is not dystopia, is sweet music to my ears.
What has royally peeved me is the number of people who say: “If only someone would write books like that.”
I want to scream at them: “If only you would open your bloody eyes! There are hundreds of us, mostly battling to stay afloat, desperate for support. If only you would stop assuming book-stores, the media, and arts-world, the people who have been trying with every means at their disposal to get rid of books or authors which follow this antithesis to their religion… are going to change this. They’re NOT.”
Only you can save mankind. I still think it is worth it.
But we really need them to realize we exist, and that our work is good.
Indeed some of it is great. It needs to get seen.
So: Look at me. Look at my books. There are more than 27 of them, and they ALL center around those ideas. Boys need to read. Normal families are what works for so many of us, and can be exceptionally good. Loyalty, honor and friendship are important, worth dying for. More important: worth living for! At least the disaster of a life well and fully lived will make them funny and even realistic.
And be hopeful. I’ve been the irritating cockerel that crowed from 4 AM — but the dawn really coming is beyond the cloud.
But there are no horns of Rohan.
Just us.
Nil Carborndum Illigitimi
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “Look at me”
I’m almost certain that you meant “singularly”, and Otto Corrupt disagreed.
Total aside… as a Poet, do I get to keep the Rottweilers? (Doggie!)
Only if you write doggerel 🙂
For a more serious post: I have given my son Storm Dragon. It is good enough he has voluntarily given up computer time to read it. He’s not done yet, but he loves it.
Brilliant. That was what I was wanting to do, and the target I was wanting to reach!
I loved Storm Dragon and recommended it on one of the Heinlein Facebook groups I belong to. I hope you continue to sell buckets of it.
Sorry, you don’t write real books.
Yup! He’s just another Wrongfan having Wrongfun. 😉
Not sure I sent these to you:
Storm Dragon review: Ricochet
Storm Dragon blurb: Epoch Times
I plan to bring the issue of getting more books for boys at the next meeting of my city’s library board tomorrow (I am its chair). Storm Dragon will be mentioned.
Also The Steam Mole and Cuttlefish if you please because those rock. IMO. And I hate to go there but that duology has a female and a “Person of Color” so you get extra points.
Personally I loved both books but you can see the inclusivity.
Remember that there may be rights issues because those came out through a publisher.
All presses complicate the issues of republication
Argh! Forgot that part.
“If only someone would write books like that.”
Yeah.
But, to be fair, no one said it would be easy, battling Moloch and Leviathan and the rest of that crew. You’d have to be a weirdo not to knuckle under and say “But of course Heather has two mommies. What could be more normal?”
Normies are the ones who know to follow the crowd. It takes a weirdo to say “F- that!” and go write his own books his own self, and try to sell them as well.
Good for you Dave.
“But we really need them to realize we exist, and that our work is good.”
Must respectfully disagree, old son. As I was saying over at Sarah’s place, the most reviled and -HATED- visual artist is Thomas Kinkade. They hate him so bad, it is amazing. His crime? Painting nice pictures of happy things that people love.
They’re -never- going to say our work is good. In fact, the better our work is, the more they’ll swear it’s garbage.
One day I hope to be as hated by the critics as you are, Dave. ~:D
Gods’ bless us, there’s damn few like us.
Probably by court order, as a former colleague once murmured after hearing that toast at a party. I couldn’t disagree with him.
OK now that’s some funny shit, I don’t care who you are.
All we can do is keep hitting against the wall of reality 🙂
Well, at least they are marketing them as different books instead of just dolloping in the adult content: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/97771-sourcebooks-repackaging-rewriting-ya-series-for-adult-readers.html