13th Anniversary Blog Part I: Writing

Nothing Focuses the Mind Like a Hanging

I’m going to split this blog into two pieces: Writing and Fishing. Each piece is shockingly long (when I sat down I didn’t think I had anything to tell you). And, I assume each piece has a separate audience. I know it’s a bit of an effort to comment on WordPress, but I would love it if you did. Trust me, now that they have moronized the editor, it’s no fun to write here, either.

Another anniversary blog post where I make excuses for what didn’t happen. If you follow me, and thank you for that, you can see that I got off to a good start, jumpstarted by the Traver awards. And then I got hit by something that should’ve given me all the time in the world to write, but had the opposite effect. After working for 15 years to get to the top of my career, I got laid off. In the last eight months I applied to 1500 jobs. I spend more time at my computer than when I had a job, and anything not related to job searching is something I don’t have time, or energy for.

Transform!

However, this spring I realized I wasn’t going to get a job by sending resumes out, so I returned to a project I’ve been fiddling with for a while, a book based upon my job, which I decided long ago is too boring for this site, so I won’t go into or post here. It’s called Transform! I  have been serializing it on LinkedIn (where I have 3x the audience I do here). This used to be all I had to do to get a job, but not so much now. I’ll get 2500 hits on a post, but no job offers. Just two years ago, one article would spawn multiple job offers, each one of which I’m now chagrinned that I turned down. So, the hanging here is running out of money.
I just made a post about one of the main points in the book and got 3500 impressions in less than 24 hours! The only time this blog ever did that what when Gink and Gasoline linked here.

Traver Award

At the moment, I’m actually taking a break from my latest Traver piece, an extremely boring exercise in applying Hemmingway’s “Snowflake” technique. The Snowflake technique is where you write a story that has nothing to do with what the story is about. The “true” story is all in subtext. Papa’s most famous version of this is “Big Two-Hearted River” and although I am a huge Hemmingway fan, I have never liked this story. A very good question, posed to me by a man who used to publish the Traver winning story, is why do I enter the Traver awards if I have to write stories I don’t like?

Well, the primary reason is the same reason for why I write for anthologies which have nothing to do with my canon (e.g. Hellcats Vol I and Vol II, and Hellhounds): I think being able to “write to market” is a skill a writer should have, and at least it is a good exercise. The Traver winners are primarily literary fiction, where as I write pulp noir. So it is a real stretch of my skills to write like that. It is work. The stories do not just flow out, and having to think about them when other, more fun, stories keep poking me in the brain is not fun.

The secondary reason is that this last year I have been collecting and editing my shorts into an omnibus edition, for which I am launching a Kickstarter and a new website (rollickinggoodtales.com, nothing there yet). Those take a lot of infrastructure energy and time. For the Kickstarter, I’m putting two of my novellas on Amazon to be lower tiers. Destroying Angel (a Nero Wolfe tribute), and Michael Kilkenny’s Wake (an Irish farce bundled with Poached Not Once But Twice). Sure, you can read them here for free or on Hatchmag.com or in the Fly Fish Journal, but if you did and you enjoyed them, I hope you will purchase them on AZ, and at least forward the Kickstarter post that I put up here. This may become, finally, my primary source of income. Winning the Traver award would simply be great free advertising, like when I won the OWAA award for Troutaholics.

And this brings me to the final reason: I am becoming, as Phil Monahan said, the Susan Lucci of the Travers, taking second place twice. Frankly, that just pisses me off. So once a year, I dust off all of my story ideas I’ve yet to write and pick one for the Traver. Generally I write at least three stories, so it adds to the canon. For a month, it definitely focuses the mind.

You can read all of the stories I remember entering into the Traver here. 

Hatchmag

Hatchmag.com published my Traver entry, Crossing the Blue Ceiling  and serialized one of my oldest stories, Heromaker. I finally got to meet and have dinner with Chad and the rest of the crew when they came into town for the Bellevue Fly Fishing Show. It’s time to start harassing them to post more pieces. Suggestions? I’m always trying to get them to take a piece, and they are talking about starting their own press. For which, by the way, I have a killer series idea. (Follow up: I pitched the book idea and have a meeting with them next week.)

Spokane Fly Fishing Club

I did get what I consider to be a great acknowledgement, perhaps one of the greatest of my writing career. The Spokane Fly Fishing Club invited me to read and paid me all expenses and took me fishing. This too is market research. I was reading regularly for the Bellevue club until I trotted out I Shot Muldowney to a stunned and unhappy audience. (People at Writers on the Fly would’ve eaten it up.) Here it’s not what I like, it’s what the audience, mostly older white guys and the occasional wife, will enjoy. On reading that story just now, I must’ve read it in a fit of hubris. As I often say, I’m slow smart. One thing I learned at Spokane was excerpts from longer pieces don’t work well, either. Honing my craft, one mistake at a  time.

I did get one great compliment at the club. I was taking questions and one guy raised his hand. He said “I’ve spent the last week on Jon’s site, and he has a lot of really good stuff besides the fly fishing. You should read it.” Honestly, I had no idea anybody ever went to those posts and haven’t really kept the haven’t kept the navigation for them up-to-date. These stories go back 40 years! Some of them are under the You Didn’t Know Me Then navigation on the top navigation bar. I’ll probably clean it up when I move it to the new site.

One story that I note in particular that is missing is a story where I did not write to market, but I tried to mimic the voice of another of my favorite authors (and when I’m compared to him, it will be a good day), Bradbury. This is a natural sequel to one of his stories, The Swan. My story is Old-Fashioned Lime-Vanilla Ice, and I quite like it. If you read it, and love or hate it, please leave a comment. Amber was quite smitten with it and helped me a lot on it. It was, in fact, written for and about her. Hey, maybe I’ve been using the Snowflake method all along!

Fly Fishing Russia: The Far East

In counterpoint to my reception in Spokane, I had a shocking experience when I visited Emerald Water Anglers to read from Mikhail’s book Fly Fishing Russia: The Far East, which I spent 15 years editing, designing, and publishing. The store was badgered about having the book on the shelves, Instagram posts took a lot of heat, and the reading was all but picketed by angry people. From the left. Naively, I was shocked to learn of liberal censorship, despite being decided left of center on most everything myself. And clearly by people who had entirely judged the book, not by its cover, but by its title. Because if they had merely read the back of the book, they would not have inserted their heads so deeply into their nether regions.

To put this in context, Mikhail lives as far from Moscow as Honolulu is from New York. Eight time zones. Most people in the region, like Hawaii, are not even white, but of Asian descent. Like Hawaii or Alaska, the Far East is basically occupied territory, only part of Russia because the old USSR built infrastructure to get access to its natural resources. A really good counterpoint to his book is The Tiger, A True Story of Adventure and Survival, which goes into the sociological, historic, and psychological aspects of the region. He has been working on this book for 40 years, through every major Russian regime in my lifetime. It would be like boycotting American Gods because it has “America” in the title and you didn’t like tRump’s policies. It is the most nonsensical thing I have been involved in since leaving corporate America.

Whereas I usually get 50 people at a reading, this one had eight. Including a Ukrainian. I talked to him about the politics of the protestors and how he felt about that. He was clearly able to separate out the book from the horrors of the war. (Complete transparency, I have friends in Ukraine and was on my way there when Covid shut down the airports, so I am well aware of the proxy war they are fighting for us.) One guy spent the meeting texting his incensed buddy who was boycotting the reading, telling him he learned more about salmon and steelhead fishing in 45 min then he had in 45 years. So, a small group of brave individuals showed up, and every one of them bought books. The texter bought two, one to give to his idiot friend.

I ran into the same issue when I took a copy to the Bellevue Fly Fishing show. There was a fly fishing book store there, and I asked if they wanted to carry the book. It turns out, somebody had already gotten them to carry it, but they “forgot to put it out.” I think I shamed them into unpacking the books and putting them on the shelf. Next year, I will try to read from the book at the show, and maybe take up a collection for Ukraine to see if people will put their money where they claim their sympathies are.

Censorship is censorship and clearly most often practiced by people who have never read what they are censoring. Whereas I’ve always wanted the cache of writing a banned book, I never imagined it would happen with a non-fiction book!

Speaking of the Bellevue show, I did meet Tom Bie, editor of Drake magazine, a publication I have not “cracked” yet and pitched him a story Patagonia has been sitting on for 5 years. He said he would take it sight unseen.

Baker Dam Project

Another thing that I wrapped up and am looking for a publisher for is my piece on the Baker Dam project, which I started before Covid. The folks from Puget Sound Energy have been running a non-rip and strip hatchery for over 70 years, to great effect, but it is still the only one in the world, despite other hatcheries being ecological disasters. More on this in the Fishing section to come.

Speaking of the Bellevue show, I did meet Tom Bie, editor of Drake magazine, a publication I have not “cracked” yet and pitched him this story. He said he would take it sight unseen.

Writing on Writing

My blog has over 75 drafts. Before the job search interceded, I was going through and tightening up a number of these. One that I have been working on for the last three or so years goes into my Storycrafting series. This blog is about Truth in Fiction. And after writing around it for a while, I finally have a handle on it. These entries are how I work out problems in my own fiction. . I write to better understand things I feel. I mostly share them on writing sites where they have been helpful.

Omnibus Competition

Did I mention that one of the tiers on my Kickstarter is going to be that I will run a competition and the winner, if any, will get a spot in the omnibus? All entries will get a dev edit and comments on the piece, so tell your friends.

More Lore from the Mythos

And finally, my publisher is doing a Kickstarter for a best of More Lore from the Mythos, the H.P. Lovecraft anthology. Shockingly, because horror is not in my wheel house, I made the cut. This is going to be by all accounts a fantastic publication, which I am sure to post about here.

And now, back to the Traver story! Part two of this blog will come out in a couple of days. 

Stats

I almost forgot my stats. In the last year, I’ve had almost 9000 views. Not bad for so few posts. I seem to have hit some kind of critical mass. 

 

Tagged: book-review, books, Fiction, writer, Writing

Posted in: Fiction, Traver Award, Writing, You Didn't Know Me Then