The Fuel for the Fire

A few of the books that made me want to do this madness

John Stamp has a podcast called “Deep Cut Books,” where he looks at unheralded, lesser-known books that impacted him while growing up and made him want to do what he did. John’s a personable guy, a former cop and federal agent, and a good writer. (Admittedly, I have not read his books yet, but they’re on the TBR pile.)

While listening to John’s podcast, I’ve added several names and books to my ever-expanding “want to read” pile, and for the most part, they’re authors I’ve never heard of and books I’ve never seen before.

I, who reads more books than almost everyone I know…
I, who haunts bookshops on the regular just for fun just to peruse shelves…
I, who subscribes to, like, thirty book mailing lists…
…am still learning about established authors, books, and literary heroes I’ve never heard about before.

This just goes to show how MASSIVE the world’s book catalog is, and why it’s perfectly understandable that it’s so damned difficult to make a living at this game. There are just too many of us trying to do this.

Half a million books are going to be released this year. A half-million last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. Another half-million will hit the digital shelves next year, too. That is 2.5 million books in four years, and we’ll never read them all.

My romance-writer buddy Dana Storino often laments that she feels as if no one’s reading her stuff, and I fully sympathize. A lot of the time, it feels like we’re shouting into the void.

Romance, in particular, feels like a genre that’s got a whole cliquey, mean-girl, members-only vibe about it. Not to mention, romance novels have about thirty subgenres, and people tend to read hyper-specific niches within that genre. If you want a story where a pretty lady hooks up with a minotaur in graphic detail, that book already exists. Several of them, in fact. Go read about hot, sweaty minotaur humping until your heart’s content. No judgment here.

Writing feels awfully quixotic at times, and it’s difficult to be seen, so let’s take a look at a couple of lesser-known books that made me want to do what I do.

I don’t really remember how I got into paranormal stuff, but it was early. My clearest memories of being into ghosts and cryptids came in first grade, when our little library at Mount Horeb Elementary had a couple of shelves with (allegedly) non-fiction ghost stories. I remember checking all of them out at one point or another when I was a kid.

I was in first grade in 1981, the same year Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was released. That book has had a massive reach and remains popular to this day. It’s not exactly a deep cut, but I remember how much the illustrations in that thing chilled the bones. I check it out as frequently as I could.

Yeah…let’s let a bunch of first graders stare at this thing all night. What harm could it do?

Our elementary school librarian was a little woman named Mrs. Wittenwyler. (Still a great name. I want to put it in a novel someday.) She knew I was into weird things, and slipped Marian T. Place’s The Boy Who Saw Bigfoot into my hands.

I probably read that book a hundred times in first and second grade. A young boy gets adopted by a couple who live in the deep woods of Washington State. The husband was a long-haul trucker and was gone frequently, so the couple wanted an older boy for company and help around the house for the wife. Enter this orphaned kid who goes out to the sticks to live with them. On a hike with his new adoptive mother one day, they have a Bigfoot encounter.

As a burgeoning paranormal-loving kid who lived in the sticks and had a forest near his home, I both adored and feared Bigfoot. I wanted to see one in the worst way, but never when I was galumphing around the woods by myself.

The Boy Who Saw Bigfoot is a simple story, and while I didn’t know I wanted to write books until second grade, it was definitely one of the books that laid the groundwork in my brain for the path I’m on now.

My dad was a Wambaugh fan. He got the hard copy of Joseph Wambaugh’s The Glitter Dome¹ when I was in fourth grade. This picture doesn’t do it justice. The title was done in blue glitter, and for some reason, I found it captivating.

The book sat in a bookshelf in the hallway on the second floor of our little National-style farmhouse in the sticks near Daleyville, Wisconsin. I don’t think I read it until the summer between fourth and fifth grade, though. I remember lying on the carpet in the upstairs hallway and reading it. At the time, it wasn’t the thickest book I’d ever read, but it felt like it. It was a grown-up book, after all.

Wambaugh wasn’t known for pulling punches in his work. I was too young to be reading it. The title of the story references a bar where the four pairs of police detectives in the book hang out after work. The main focus of the story is the murder of a Hollywood film mogul. Strangely, I don’t remember a ton about this book other than reading it. Perhaps it’s because my 10-year-old brain didn’t understand half of what I was reading.

But I knew it was cool.

I read this when I was in eighth grade. What 13-year-old, red-blooded, American boy is turning down a novel with a woman’s chest on the cover?

It seems strange to think of Colin Dexter as “unheralded.” I mean, the TV series Inspector Morse made 33 episodes over eight seasons, and then spun off into a second series, Lewis, that followed Morse’s partner, Robbie Lewis. And then it got made into a prequel series, Endeavour, that ran for nine years on its own.

Clearly, Dexter is a giant in the world of crime writers, able to stand on his own against the likes of Christie and Doyle. But he wasn’t all that well-known in America, and he definitely wasn’t all that well-known to 13-year-old boys in America.

I stumbled across Last Bus to Woodstock in a Friends of the Library book sale, paid a dime for it, and read it cover-to-cover in a couple of days. I admired Dexter’s prose, and his solutions for his crimes were always like a game of Mousetrap, where one thing led to another thing, and if it wasn’t for Morse’s observational skills and puzzle-obsessed mind, the killer would have gotten away with it.

While I am trying my damnedest to be a crime writer for adults now, my heart and true reading origins lie in fantasy. From the mega-popular Dragonlance series, Anne McCaffery, and everything after that, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool swords ‘n’ dragons nerd at heart.

I started writing as a kid because I had D&D character sheets with no one to play the actual game with (again, being a country kid meant no friends), and I started trying to write the adventures I had in my head for these characters I was making up.

Strangely enough, I’ve learned that this is how a helluva lot of us writing nerds began.

Thanks, TSR.

Robert Aspirin wrote the Thieves’ World novels, but he also wrote a lesser-known, but still mildly popular Myth series, a dozen novels following the misadventures of magician’s apprentice and wanna-be thief Skeeve, from the dimension of Klah (where its denizens are known as Klahds—“clods”). Skeeve’s master, Garkin, summons a demon to show him the power of being a wizard. At the same time, an assassin breaks in intent on killing Garkin. The master mage and assassin kill each other, and Skeeve is left alone with the demon, a polite and intelligent creature called Aahz (from the dimension of Perv. He is a Pervect, not a Pervert, thankyouverymuch.) Because Skeeve doesn’t have the power to send Aahz back to Perv, Aahz volunteers to become Skeeve’s new mentor, and much silliness occurs.

Over the course of the dozen novels, Skeeve and Aahz meet trolls, demons, gangsters, and a destructive baby dragon called Gleep.

And I loved it all.

So many stupid jokes. So many little bits of silliness. Destruction. Magic. Fart jokes. Not to mention smokin’ hot trollops. (In the series, male trolls are what you think of when you think of trolls…but trollops, the female trolls, are the chick on the left side of the cover—straight outta Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Special, baby!)

Truly, everything an adolescent boy could want.

Anyhow, that’s enough for today.

As usual, STRANGE ANGELS exists. It needs readers. As does WELCOME TO MESKOUSING, Abe & Duff’s brand of offbeat crime novels, and WE STILL REMAIN.

Abe and Duff’s fifth book, Bring the Heat, is still on track to be released this summer (hopefully before I go to Bouchercon in September).

I’m working on the sequel to STRANGE ANGELS and a new book, a gritty, noir mystery. But that’s all I’ll say of those for now.

I’ve also been working on my website and a new site for Spilled Inc. Press. Any upcoming appearances I might have can be found on my website. And I’m working on rolling out something about my editing services in a more concrete form.

I’ve been doing freelance editing for years (since 1996!), but never really bothered with a formal declaration. But given that I’ve kind of hit the wall with job-hunting (no one is hiring 50-year-old dudes with bad knees²), and I’m relying more on piecemeal and part-time work to stay afloat, I think I might need to make the jump to more formal freelancing.

A big thank you, also, to everyone who reached out after our poor little Eddy dog had to cross the Rainbow Bridge. It means a lot to me.

We’re still not okay. I will randomly tear up over it, yet. Doesn’t matter where I am. In the house. At work. Driving. I’ll just think of that stupid little face, and my eyes will start stinging.

Even the cats are mourning. Our little chubster Potato used to sleep on a cat mat in the office during the day with me while Eddy was on the bed in the other room. Now, Potato has taken to sleeping in the spot where Eddy used to spend the days.

Like they say, you don’t get over a death, you just come to terms with the new normal.

I’ll forever miss that weirdo. She made life 1000% better.

1. SIDE NOTE: Don’t you love how everyone harps on how you have to have a high-quality, eye-catching cover nowadays? And books from the ‘80s were literally just splashy fonts on solid colored backgrounds. No graphic design. Nothing eye-catching. Just a big ol’ HERE’S THE TITLE, YA MORON! Robert Ludlum, John Irving—a bunch of writers from the ‘80s, that was the whole thing: BIG NAME, BIG TITLE, and maybe something mildly related to the book like a bullet casing or a seashell. No major graphic design needed, and they all did just fine.

2. If you have the hookup for a remote job or a good job in the Madison area, let me know. It’s brutal out there. I have twenty years of experience in education, ten years of experience in journalism, and three college degrees—none of which are doing me any favors.