You’ve probably heard about, or seen, the batshit crazy Arizona couple who went on Gordon Ramsay’s show Kitchen Nightmares and were so relentlessly, hopelessly, stupidly terrible, both as restaurateurs and as human beings, that Ramsay, for the first time, wound up simply throwing in the towel and walking away. This was followed by an epic psychotic meltdown by the couple on Facebook.

I’ve never seen this show, as I usually ignore reality shows of any sort, but curiosity got the better of me today and I watched the segment on YouTube. And folks, this is some juicy viewing, I tell ya. Being around people like this in real life would be horrendous; I wouldn’t be surprised if you got ulcers inside of fifteen minutes. I can’t believe Ramsay put up with them as long as he did. But watching them on this show, knowing that they are completely ruining their own business once and for all and reaping what they sow, is schadenfreude of the most delicious sort.

So what does this have to do with the writing life? Two things.

First, if you want to be a writer (or artist of any sort, really), you need to be able to take criticism. It can be tough to put aside your ego and listen to someone saying nit-picky or even awful things about the wonderful work you struggled so hard to birth into the world out of your very essence…but if you can’t do that, you can’t grow, and likely you’ll start shitty and stay shitty. Even if you disagree with the person offering criticism, you should honor their opinion and take it with grace. And unless their points are completely, patently stupid, you owe it to yourself to actually consider them before disregarding them. Nobody is perfect, and armoring yourself in ego or defensiveness will stunt your growth as an artist and a human being, just as we see in the video above.

Second, this video is a perfect example of just one of the many reasons why it’s a bad idea for authors to agree to read unpublished material by folks they don’t know. I’ve written about this before, rather colorfully and more comprehensively, and these folks are just some bloody kitchen knives short of the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. People you don’t know may be good writers or bad writers (odds tilt dramatically toward the latter), but they may also be neurotic, obsessive, crazy, or even violent. You just don’t know. And, as I wrote in the blog post linked above, when a lot of folks ask for you to critique them, what they’re really doing is asking for your praise. They don’t want actual critique. And they may react badly if you give it to them.

That was exactly what happened with Gordon Ramsay and these assholes. They had already damaged their reputation and business, and they invited him not to let him help them fix their restaurant  but to come in and use his show to give them praise so that they could be vindicated by an authority on TV. Then, blindly evil fucks that they are, they reacted horribly to his critique and dug themselves even deeper.

Good for them. Nobody deserves such a fate more than they do, except perhaps current GOP leadership.

For more on this, please do read “Why I Will NOT Read Your Stuff“. I’m pretty pleased with that post, but I’m open to criticism on it.

Okay, the work is done and Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom is on the verge of its rebirth as a much improved, fully illustrated edition. We even have the bar code.

One of the final delays was that we wanted to include an excerpt and the cover from the second book, Doc Wilde and The Mad Skull, in the back of Frogs, so Gary Chaloner actually had to paint the thing. Seems like that takes time. Who knew?

Anyway, though it will get some tweaking between now and its actual  publication, it is effectively done, ready for your eyes…

“If you’re seriously contending that you get a free pass to be an asshole by calling what you write ‘humor,’ or that humorists are under no obligation to have any manners, think again.”

This is a comment from a discussion going on on someone else’s Facebook wall. I’d reply there, but the woman whose wall it is isn’t someone I know and she has already spazzed out about people disagreeing with her public post, which was an attack on the Onion for its story “Heartbroken Chris Brown Always Thought Rihanna Was Woman He’d Beat To Death.”  Her stance — and that of the guy I quoted above — is that satire shouldn’t offend.

Fuck that. If you’re not offending somebody, you’re not doing satire correctly, you’re just being amusing. And you’re not making a point, you’re just making a joke. The last thing a satirist, or a comedian of any stripe, or any goddamned artist of any sort, should be worrying about is whether they’re offending someone with their material, unless being inoffensive is, indeed, one of their goals as a creator. Sure, there are boundaries that you probably shouldn’t cross if you want to be a decent person (publicly attacking a child, for instance), but for the most part, nothing is sacred.

As novelist Tad Williams, who was also involved in this discussion, wrote, “There is no edge. The edge is a movable feast. A good humorist has to go with the gut, and sometimes the audience is in a slightly different place than expected. You can’t have ‘safe’ satire, because that’s not satire, that’s officially sanctioned merriment.”

So yeah, to put it in terms the guy I quoted used, you get a free pass to be an asshole and you’re not under any obligation to have any manners. That may cost you a fan or a friend sometimes, it may cost you a job, it may make you unpopular if you really touch a nerve. That’s why satire, why art, is brave. That’s one of the things that makes it matter. That’s one of the things that makes it real. That’s one of the things that makes it truth.

Sacred cows make the tastiest burgers.

If you are at all curious or concerned about the experience of actual clinical depression, read this:

Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two.

For those following the evolution of publishing and assorted matters, blogger JW Manus has an excellent post, What Does A Self-Publishing Service REALLY Do?, riffing off the previous post by author David Gaughran, “The Author Exploitation Business,” which I shared last week:

In Traditional Publishing, the Chain of Happiness works like this:

• WRITER has to make the EDITOR happy
• EDITOR has to make higher-up editors, the marketing department and the accountants happy
• Higher-up editors have to make MARKETING happy
• The marketing department has to make REVIEWERS and the NEW YORK TIMES book editor happy
• The sales department has to make BOOK STORES happy
• Everybody has to make the PUBLISHER happy
• The PUBLISHER has to make the STOCKHOLDERS and BOARD OF DIRECTORS happy

Contrast that with the indie’s Chain of Happiness:

• WRITER has to make the READERS happy

Notice what’s missing in the first chain of happiness? If you said “readers,” give yourself a gold star. If that list gives you some hints about why traditional publishing is in such disarray and why some self-publishers are succeeding beyond almost everybody’s expectations, give yourself another star.

And yes, I know there are many traditionally published books that make readers very happy. The point I’m making is about focus and priorities. With most publishers, and especially the Big Publishing Houses, reader happiness is a side effect, not a priority.

A compelling idea, and an accurate one.

The rest of her piece is likewise very compelling,and not just about self-publishing services. Read it here.

Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day. It got me thinking about my relationship to comics.

The comic above,  The Amazing Spider-Man # 119, is the first comic I remember buying. I know I had others before it, but perhaps I didn’t actually choose them myself, but had them given to me. Whatever the case, I remember going into the 7-11 and choosing this comic and reading it. The result was an obsession that lasted for years, and a strong love of the medium that I still retain today.

That said, I can’t recall the last single issue of a comic I bought. I still read bound collections here and there, like the recent “Court of Owls” storyline in the Batman comics. There are some things I buy for my library as soon as they appear, like the incredible cloth-bound library editions of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, or the “Absolute” edition of Warren Ellis’s Planetary. But mostly, I just don’t bother with comics these days.

I still love them. But they’re like old friends who’ve drifted away. I keep up with them via gossip. “Oh, Superman is seeing Wonder Woman? Good for him.” “Oh no, Damian Wayne died? That’s terrible, Bruce must be in agony.” “Peter Parker’s dead? Oh my god, that’s…actually really fucking humdrum at this point, unfortunately. Tell me when he’s back.”

It’s not that I’m not interested in reading them, because I am. But the reasons not to are so compelling. They’re too damned expensive, for one thing; for ten bucks, I can get two or three comic books I’ll read in under fifteen minutes. But that same ten bucks will get me two hours of entertainment at the cinema, buy me a book or ten that will give me many hours of enjoyment, get me ten songs I’ll be able to listen to forever, or even pay for a month of Netflix. Comics just don’t offer much bang for the buck when they cost so much.

It’s also a chore to keep up with them. The big companies love crossovers, and to be honest, so do I. But I’m too busy and distracted to have to follow all related series, and read the issues every month in proper order, in order to keep up with a storyline. The latest Batman mega-arc may be incredible, but if I have to hop spastically from title to title, and research the fucking reading order online, to keep up, it’s too much work for too little joy. You can’t just buy a single title, in individual issues or trade collections, and get a coherent storyline.

So, these days, though I miss them, I’m fine following the lives of my favorite comic book characters through hearsay. And, of course, through other media. I’m re-watching The Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon at present, and it’s exceptional. Of course, it lasted just two seasons, and now we have Ultimate Spider-Man, which isn’t. DC’s animated efforts tend to be incredible; we watched the animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns a few weeks ago, and it was great. And, of course, there are the movies. That’s where most people get their comics fix these days, and there, for the most part, the companies are getting it right.

Speaking of which, today we’re going to see the new Iron Man flick. Can. Not. Wait.

I’ve mentioned Penguin’s self-publishing scam before. In this blog post, novelist David Gaughran takes the publisher to task in much more detail. I’d say this is essential and important reading for any writer working in, or wanting to break into, the business these days.

And it’s not just Penguin, either. Many of the beloved traditional publishers, those stalwart protectors of lit’rature, nurturers of authors, are engaging in these practices. Go. Read. Remember.

And spread the word.

The Author Exploitation Business

We’re all Jekyll and Hyde.

We all have our sunny side, our pat-the-kids-on-the-head-with-an-eternal-smile-of-warmth side, our non-controversial I-breathe-oxygen, how-’bout you? side. That’s our Jekyll, our potential human paragon, our angel.

But we all have our Hyde, too, our goddamnit-won’t-those-kids-shut-the-hell-up side, our you’re-a-fuckwit-because-you-don’t-agree-with-me side, our good-lord-I-want-to-fuck-that-stranger-straight-through-till-sunrise-in-all-the-least-photogenic-ways side.

We’re all the whole Magilla Gorilla, a churning stew of human potential and passion and instinct and mind and soul (whatever the hell that is). And that’s not a bad thing, nor are all the qualities we might shove into the Hyde box actually evilwickedbad in and of themselves. Trying to completely squelch Hyde makes you, at best, neurotic, at worst a slavering hypocrite enslaved by the desires you dare not show. How many anti-gay crusaders have gotten caught with somebody’s dick in their mouth at this point? Probably a small fraction of those who will be.

Still, we all like other folks to think well of us, so we at least refrain from mentioning a lot of the things Hyde says in our heads, and hopefully retain rational control over our impulses and emotions and actions.

Online, we get to fine-tune our public persona a bit. We have the time and distance to choose what we want to present, and how (though it’s all too easy to just hit SEND in an emotional moment and let your Hyde out for all to see; writer Hugh Howey had this happen to him recently and brought down a virtual enraged church picnic of self righteous wrath ‘pon his head). Some splash their personalities all over the internet like monkeys with paintbrushes, or even chimpanzees with machine guns. Some are naturally more guarded than others, and some have concerns beyond the simply personal when it comes to what they’re presenting.

Like writers.

I’ve pondered my own online Jekyll/Hyde mix for a few years now. My natural inclination is toward saying whatever the hell I want to say, as clearly or harshly or profanely as I wish. I generally don’t just accept my more animalistic nature, I celebrate it, and consider that a damned healthy way to be. I have my issues, as anyone who’s read this blog a while knows, but even with my struggles and neuroses, I’m very self-aware and self-forgiving and very quick and happy to laugh at myself. Sharing my weakness makes me strong;  I face it and embrace it and don’t have to waste psychic energy on denial. (Plus, every once in a while I get a message from someone thanking me because something on my blog has helped them in their own personal struggle, and that’s nice to hear.)

So my online persona is a fairly accurate representation of my actual self, or at least my personality. It’s good-natured and compassionate and smart and socially responsible, all nice Jekyll qualities. But it’s also at times profane and combative and impudent and irreverent to a fault, all potentially irksome (though fun) Hyde features.

And that’s how I want it.

On the other hand, my Doc Wilde  novels, while not exclusively for kids, certainly are family fare. And even some adult readers, seeking information about me and my books, may be turned off by some of what I write here. Recently, I wrote a post updating everyone on the current progress in releasing Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, and I sent a link to that post to all our Kickstarter supporters. One guy messaged me back that maybe I should be more family friendly on my blog if I was going to use it to promote the series; he’d followed the link to the update and also seen my post about “The Mother Fucking Space Marines.” And he had a point: when you go see a Pixar flick, you don’t expect to see an R-rated red band trailer for the next Quentin Tarantino film play before it.

Traditionally, I’ve erred on the side of free self expression. Actually, that very line could apply to most areas of my life over the years (just ask my ex-Army commander and any boss I ever had). I have gotten pressure from some circles to tailor my online presence entirely toward families and kids, as some writers do, and avoid adult content and controversy. But those people were thinking of a writer’s presence online as a marketing tool, whereas I look at it as just daily conversation and, sometimes, debate. I’m doing some marketing, sure, but mostly I’m just talking to folks and I don’t want to filter myself to a juvenile level of discourse.

I always looked at it this way: when a writer who has been writing adult material for years (say, Clive Barker or Ray Garton or Robert B. Parker) writes some material for young readers, no one expects them to start censoring themselves in accord with their new market. Similarly, just because a writer is known for writing material for young readers, that doesn’t mean they should never write more mature fare (I understand J.K. Rowling’s latest book is quite profane and full of adult material; you go, Jo!). So why should I be expected to communicate on a sixth-grade level just because I am (so far) primarily known for writing material suitable for all ages?

Recently, though, my thinking evolved on the matter. I want to express myself freely, yeah…but does that mean I should make it easy for some twelve-year old fan looking for info on Doc Wilde to stumble across my relationship overshares or jokes about the small Asian nation of Bukkake?

So I’ve made some changes. Whereas I’ve been using this blog as my main platform for both personal communication and professional promotion, I’m now shifting the majority of Doc Wilde-oriented material to the Doc Wilde website (which has its own blog, and is where such stuff really belongs). I’ve established a one-way firewall between my Tim Byrd stuff and my Doc Wilde stuff; there’ll no longer be any more direct links to my blog in Doc Wilde venues. I will, however, freely share in the the opposite direction, sharing Doc Wilde links here.

There’ll be as little replication of content as I can manage. And don’t think that the Doc Wilde blog is just a stream of promotional material; I’ll be communicating on a personal level over there as I do here, but I’ll be expressly talking about Doc Wilde and various things that I find interesting which fans of the books might as well. Both blogs can be subscribed to (as can the Doc Wilde newsletter, which will appear only occasionally and will have its own content).

The same goes for Facebook and Twitter: people interested in the books and in me as an author can follow Doc Wilde, people interested in me as a person can follow Tim Byrd. People interested in my Jekyll and my Hyde can follow both.

Under An Outlaw Moon (my personal blog)

Doc Wilde Adventure Headquarters (the Doc Wilde website; here you’ll find the Doc Wilde blog and newsletter, along with other Wilde content)

Doc Wilde on Facebook

@DocWilde on Twitter

@TimByrd on Twitter

Artist Quinton Hoover has died.

I didn’t know Quinton very well, but he did quite a few cards for us back when I was working on White Wolf’s Rage (best CCG evar):

We got to know each other a bit more on Facebook, and I was actually hoping to possibly recruit him to work on an Outlaw Moon book with me at some point. I’m sad that’ll never happen.

Here’s a posted eulogy from Quinton’s son, Justin:

Today we lost an incredible man. Most only knew him as an artist. A small few knew him as a friend; however only a select few got to know him as a father and husband. My father was an incredible person, even in time of strife. With all of the pride and stubbornness, he fought. He fought for alot of things. Mainly his families lively hood. It brings me great sadness to have lost a man I spent a life time trying to emulate. The last few years had become strenuous, but the little things kept him going. The picture with this eulogy shows that very reasoning. A simple day spent with his friend taking pictures and being outside doing what he loved. Much like the rest of his family, I feel he was taken from us far to early. There was so much he wanted to do, to name a few he wanted to come to my wedding and meet my family for the first time. Unfortunately this was taken away. Out of all this pain and anguish, I know he is finally at peace. My Dad had a lot of hard times, and was in considerable amounts of pain. No more will he have to suffer the things that hurt him the most. Whereever he may be now, I know he will still be fighting for the well being of his family. Truly one of the most selfless people I proudly got to spend 27 years knowing and speaking with. Dad, no matter where you went to, know that myself, my family, and your family have and will always love you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart and soul for everything you gave and tought to me. From shooting my first gun, to the last piece of lead I lay on paper.
He knew I wouldn’t leave him.
He’ll never leave me.
Quinton Hoover was a good man
I Love You

More great art by Quinton after the jump:

Some news on the Doc Wilde blog for fans of pulp action movies in general and 1994′s film version of The Shadow in particular:

Shadowy News

Which reminds me of one of my better Twitter statuses last year:

One day, Punxsutawney Phil won’t see The Shadow. But he will hear his mocking laughter just before he dies.

— Tim Byrd (@TimByrd) February 2, 2012