For everyone who knows love, those who seek it, and especially for that dark-haired woman I jump continents for…
“All Just To Get To You” by Joe Ely
Author Archives: Tim Byrd
New FROGS OF DOOM Review: “Tim Byrd is one heckuva author!”
A wonderful new reader review of Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom is up on Amazon:
For the uninitiated, the book is a fast-paced, cliffhanger-packed, pulp-style adventure story suitable for all ages. It’s also on sale in honor of Valentine’s Day through Sunday for only $3.99 (usual price: $6.99).
Ermahgerd! Electricity! (ABC Wednesday, 2/12/14)
Recently, Jesus gave Zeus the finger. Or, rather, Zeus took it.
There was a huge lightning storm over Rio de Janeiro and a bolt blasted the statue of Christ which looks over the city, knocking off one of His fingers. While you’d think that Jesus could protect Himself from such an attack, it’s probably not our place as mere mortals to adjudicate the MMA matches of the gods.
Lightning is a scary thing, electricity in its most feral state. Crackling death from above. Surprisingly, though, only about 10% of people who have intimate encounters with it don’t survive. Some that do are scarred with fractal maps in their skin, branching networks of sizzling branchwork like tattoos of evergreen fronds or ivy.
I’ve had a special relationship with lightning for years, starting, I guess, when I was struck by lightning when I was a teenager. I survived. I had no visible scars. I wasn’t even hurt, as far as anyone could tell.
It happened one stormy day. A friend and I were cavorting in the rain, chasing each other, jumping at the crashes of thunder, laughing our asses off. Ultimately, soaked and getting cold, we headed for his house. We splashed in, drenched, and his mother informed us that there was a tornado warning. Later, we found out one had touched down less than a mile away. She insisted we dry off, so we headed to the bathroom, and as we entered, a bolt of lightning crashed through the window (open, as his mother had forgotten to close it for the rain, so I think the lightning was riding the breeze as lightning can do). It went through my friend and me, knocking us off our feet, and scorched the floor under our feet.
We were incredibly lucky. Neither of us was hurt, though we were scared shitless and our ears were ringing. This amount of luck in a lightning strike is rare but not unheard of; most burn damage resulting from a strike is from superheated objects (like change in someone’s pocket, for example), and most deaths result from cardiac arrest. We were both young and fit, so if our hearts were spooked by the blast, we didn’t know it. We didn’t even go to the ER.
Of course, not all damage is visible. Brain damage is a common effect of lightning strikes and can lead to memory impairment, irritability, terrible headaches, even personality change. And, unsurprisingly, depression. And, as regular readers of this blog know, I have depression big time.
Through therapy, I’ve learned that much of my struggle is attributable to loss of my mother as a baby and familial abuse throughout my formative years. But it’s possible the strike contributed.
But electricity in the brain has also proven helpful in my fight. I’ve had two rounds of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy, aka shock treatment) in the past few years, the second as recently as last November and December. My depression is a stubborn, mean mother fucker and was highly resistant to everything we were throwing at it until we decided to sing the brain electric. Afterward, my short term memory is sort of crap (though it already was, as depression itself is hell on the memory), but my focus and motivation are remarkably improved. This strategic use of electricity blasted straight into my brain has been literally life-changing. The fact that you’re reading this now, and that I’m blogging again in general, is directly attributable to it.
So, thank you, Zeus, thank you Thor, thank you spirits of thunder and lightning. Thank you for not killing me years ago, and thank you for saving my life now.
E
I’ll return next Wednesday with the letter F. I hope you’ll stop by. I’m a writer and I post about a wide variety of non-alphabet-specific topics. Feel free to comment under my posts. If you want to subscribe to the blog, there’s a button in the sidebar.
Also, my adventure novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom is currently on sale to celebrate Valentine’s Day…
For another fun ABC Wednesday post, visit the Carioca Witch here: Bringing Up Salamanders.
Find many more posts by others, and more info on ABC Wednesday, here: 
Reading the Detectives (Song of the Week, 2/7/14)
I’ve been reading to Nydia since last year (we began with Robert Devereaux’s excellent Santa Steps Out, which has been mentioned a few times before on this blog), and lately I’ve focused on introducing her to one of my favorite writers, the late great Robert B. Parker (whose strong impact on my life I wrote about here). The trend began with a viewing of Appaloosa, Ed Harris’s awesome film of one of Parker’s Hitch & Cole westerns (both of which I reviewed here), a nearly perfect movie but for a painful, hideous, off-key performance by Renee Zellweger, though everyone else is wonderful and I think the flick has Viggo Mortensen’s best performance. Then I read the sequel, Resolution, out loud to Nyd (it benefitted from exactly no Zellweger).
This naturally led to discussions of Parker’s most famous character, Spenser, who was, of course, a lot better on the page than he was on TV (Robert Urich did a pretty good job with him, but GOOD GOD Joe Mantegna was miscast like a Zellweger in the last telefilms made of Parker’s books). So I read to her the Edgar Award winning Promised Land, the fourth book but the novel in which the key elements that people tend to associate with Spenser (especially his relationship with Susan Silverman and the presence of the menacing-yet-honorable mob enforcer Hawk) really clicked into place. (This was also the book originally adapted for the Spenser: For Hire pilot, I’m sure for the same reasons). She loved it, and I really enjoyed rereading the book many years after I originally read it.
So, in celebration of our Parkerish season, today’s Song of the Week is an unusual choice: the cool sax intro of the show Spenser: For Hire. If you were also a fan of Spenser, Jesse Stone, Hitch & Cole, or any other Parker creations, feel free to comment below.
Doin’ Dialogue (ABC Wednesday, 2/5/14)
How to write dialogue like Aaron Sorkin, the writer/creator of The West Wing, Sports Night, and The Newsroom:
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong!”
“Is something bothering you?”
“No, nothing’s bothering me.”
“Something is bothering you.”
“Nothing is bothering me!”
“Okay, okay….what’s up?”
“Something’s bothering me.”
Sigh. “What’s bothering you?”
“What’s bothering me?”
“Yes. What’s bothering you?”
“What’s bothering me is the way this country, this country that I love and revere, is, more and more, embracing the irrational, and it is tearing us to pieces. What’s bothering me is that people are coming to think that hard science is just another opinion, and not a very good one. What’s bothering me is that diseases which should be going permanently extinct are making a comeback and killing kids because a fringe of idiots out there won’t get their children vaccinated. What’s bothering me is that a growing segment of our population believes our laws should be based on their mostly uneducated notions of what it says in the Bible. What’s bothering me is that so many of our fellow citizens look to jackasses like Ted Nugent, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, not to mention nearly the entire cast of that subpar sitcom known as Fox News, for guidance. What bothers me is that our country, which should be a powerhouse of productivity and enlightenment, is slipping into third world status when it comes to our industry and our ability to take care of our people. And you know what? Those are only some of the damned things that are bothering me, and it’s time we started doing a hell of a lot better, before it is absolutely, irrevocably, too late.”
D
I’ll return next Wednesday with the letter E. I hope you’ll stop by. I’m a writer and I post about a wide variety of non-alphabet-specific topics. Feel free to comment under my posts. If you want to subscribe to the blog, there’s a button in the sidebar.
Also, my adventure novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom is currently on sale to celebrate Valentine’s Day…
For another fun ABC Wednesday post, visit the Carioca Witch here: Bringing Up Salamanders.
Find many more posts by others, and more info on ABC Wednesday, here:
Valentine’s Sale: DOC WILDE AND THE FROGS OF DOOM $3.99! (Three Bucks Off!)
I love readers. I particularly love my readers, and I love getting more of them. So, in celebration of the upcoming Valentine’s holiday, a day dedicated to love, I am putting the digital version of my novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom on sale through Valentine’s weekend, ending February 16 at midnight Eastern Time.
The sale price is just $3.99. Usual price is $6.99.
The book is an old-fashioned pulp adventure told through a modern lens, written for all ages; I hear from kids as young as eight, and grown-ups up into their eighties. It is fully illustrated by Australian comics whiz Gary Chaloner, and when I say fully illustrated, I mean it. There are a lot of cool pictures in this book. It is a labor of love, a celebration of pulp fiction, families, literature, and battles against armies of man-frogs out to destroy the world.
The sale price is in effect at Amazon (Kindle) and at DriveThru Fiction (epub, mobi, and PDF).
Please share this post as widely as you are willing to your friends on Facebook and Google+ and Twitter and Pinterest etc. And if you enjoy Frogs of Doom and really want to help out this dashing author who’s desperately trying to make ends meet, please consider writing up an honest review. It can be just a few lines, but all reviews are helpful, even the not-so-great ones. On your blog or Goodreads or B&N or anywhere is good, but the most helpful in reaching a lot of people is, at this point, Amazon.
Thanks for reading, and stay Wilde!
Toward a Sociedade Alternativa (Alternative Society) (Song of the Week, 1/31/14)
Last September, Bruce Springsteen played here in Brazil for the first time in twenty-five years (!), opening his shows with a cover of Brazilian star Raul Seixas’s song “Sociedade Alternativa,” a paean to progressivism, freedom, and the counter-culture. To celebrate my own Brazilian experience, that’s our Song of the Week. If you’re curious to see an English translation of the lyrics, go here; if you want to hear Bruce’s full two hours and forty-three minute show from Rock in Rio 2013 (an awesome set in which, among other things, Bruce and the E Streeters play the entirety of the Born in the USA album from start to finish), go here.
HIRING ARTIST TESS FOWLER: GOOD IDEA OR BAD?
Hmm. Interesting.
For those who have been following the unfortunate tale of my wasting a thousand bucks on artist Tess Fowler and getting absolutely nothing but grief in return, there is some new information. This may be of particular interest to anyone who may consider hiring Tess for similar work.
I have been very open about my experience with Tess, how Ms. Fowler and I had a falling out and I lost a lot of cash. But I’d assumed that I was at least partially at fault, that even with her reactions to my criticisms and her hostility and refusal to negotiate and get back to work (or refund any of the money), that if I had somehow found the right words, perhaps we would have reconciled, and perhaps Tess Fowler would have then finished the job like a professional.
However, since posting my fully documented account of that experience, I have heard from not one, not two, but several others who have all started their messages with essentially the same statement:
It’s not you, it’s her.
Apparently, Tess Fowler is starting to be known for this sort of thing. While she promotes herself as a professional artist who is too cool for school to work for big companies, she is apparently leaving a chain of broken promises and unearned payments in her wake. It’s not my place to make public the specifics of what I’ve been told by the folks who’ve contacted me (though I wish they’d go public as I have, for the benefit of all the folks who may yet suffer as we have), but apparently Tess has a tendency to make big promises then react very, very badly at the first sign of disagreement or tough critique. She disavows even the tiniest bit of responsibility and turns very nasty very quickly, accusing her former collaborators of being horrible people of some sort (in my case, I was mentally unbalanced and potentially dangerous), and refusing to deal with them at all thereafter.
(Tess also publicly accused me of “stalking” her when I posted my full account of our disastrous collaboration. Apparently, if you hire someone, pay them a lot of money, then send them a few messages and try to call them to see if they’re going to do the job they hired on to do, that’s stalking.)
As I said, I have heard this from several independent sources over the past few weeks, and I’ve even been privy to the exact communications that passed between some of these folks and Tess. I am naturally interested in hearing from any others; I’ll keep your secrets, though I do encourage you to post a public, objective account of what happened. And my blog is available as a forum for all of you: feel free to comment below any of my posts on the matter, and if you need a place to post your full account, you can do it here with my blessing.
For the record: I am only passing on what I have been told here, and in some cases what I have seen in shared documentation. But that documentation was very convincing, and having been through what I went through hiring Tess Fowler as an artist, I’m convinced that it’s true.
UPDATE: Another victim has come forward and agreed to share his story. You can read about it here.
UPDATE: Tess victimizes the creator of the comic Rat Queens and his wife. Read it here.
The Creature from the Blog Lagoon (ABC Wednesday, 1/29/14)
We all know the creature.
The monster. The dangerous thing, stalking, creeping, hunting in the silence of the night. Hairy, clawed, savage. Less than human…or is it?
For me, and many others who grew up with Universal monster movies, the word creature evokes the Creature From The Black Lagoon. Who, when you get down to it, is clawed and savage, but not so hairy. The Creature stalks and kidnaps the gorgeous Julie Adams, mesmerized by her preternatural beauty, no doubt with thoughts of ichthyological rape and scaly little spawn cavorting in the lagoon’s dark waters. The movie he’s in is undeniably a “monster movie,” but is he a monster? No. But he is, obviously, a beast, an animal, an inhuman thing. A creature. He operates on instinct more than thought, and in his case, because he comes into conflict with anti-instinctual man, it proves his undoing. Had he stayed hidden, not tried to woo, in his way, the beauty (a common failing among beasts), he would never have been harpooned, brought to man’s world, had his gills sliced off (a clumsy attempt to make a man of him), and ultimately killed.
Stories often warn us that this is what will happen if we let our creature side out. Our instinct. Our wild. Our Id. We aren’t animals, right? Never mind the blood and bile, our often maddening emotional lives, our wonderfully messy means of procreation. The fangs in our mouths, the hair on our pelts.
I’ve always been fascinated with werewolves, and themes of transformation often manifest in my writing. Often the transfiguration is into a wilder state, like the werewolf, rather than an “ascended” state. But is it therefore a devolution? Or is it an imperfect call toward wholeness? I believe we are at our best when we are comfortable with both sides of our nature, the primal and the thoughtful, the rational and the passionate. Be a creature and be a man. Be a creature and be a woman. Be complete.
Evolution isn’t a paved road away from the creature, it’s a forest path toward a better creature.
C
I’ll return next Wednesday with the letter D. I hope you’ll stop by. I’m a writer and I post about a wide variety of non-alphabet-specific topics. Feel free to comment under my posts. If you want to subscribe to the blog, there’s a button in the sidebar.
For another fun ABC Wednesday post, visit the Carioca Witch here: Bringing Up Salamanders.
Find many more posts by others, and more info on ABC Wednesday, here:
10(ish) Books
It’s one of those memes spreading across Facebook, but one that actually has some merit (to my mind) in that it is designed to engage folks in conversations about books they love:
Rules: In your status line, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes and don’t think too hard – they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you.
I like that. I like that it specifies “books that have stayed with you in some way” rather than your all-time favorites. “Ones that have touched you.” I wouldn’t even start trying to list my favorite ten books of all time, but I’m happy to list a few favorites that moved me and now come to mind.
I also like the exercise well enough to share it here, for posterity, rather than as just a mote of data washing by in the social media stream. And I won’t simply list the books, I’ll tell you something about them, and about what they mean to me. (This also fits in with my recent pledge to get back to regularly reviewing books I read).
And I’ll do it now. Here they are, in no particular order:
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury — This one would be on my list of all-time favorites if I ever made it. A tale of two small town boys, friends, born on opposite sides of midnight Halloween night, facing the surreal and terrifying threats of a dark circus that comes to town one chill night. This is a book about childhood and magic and dreams and libraries and laughter and books. Ray Bradbury was the writer who inspired me to officially decide I was going to be a writer, and this is his very best. It also makes me think of my best friend of many years, Rusty, the Will Halloway to my Jim Nightshade in the dyad of our youth.
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin — Another wonderful book, an epic tale of fantasy and magic realism which explores New York City and life from all sorts of whimsical and tragic directions. I don’t know much about Mark Helprin as a person (I do know he supported and wrote speeches for Bob Dole, which deeply disappointed me at the time but seems a nearly insignificant fault in light of the monstrous Republicans who replaced Dole on the national scene), but he’s a brilliant writer. This book made me laugh out loud (there’s a brilliantly cartoonish gang of ne’er-do-wells in its pages), fall in love, and cry. It’s an overflowing treasure chest of literary wonder. (Apparently it’s now a movie, but I guarantee you should read the book before, or instead of, seeing it.)
Looking For Rachel Wallace by Robert B. Parker — Many of you will know the private detective Spenser from the old Robert Urich TV show Spenser: For Hire, which, as such adaptations go, was pretty good; Urich was personable, growing into the character over time, and his costar Avery Brooks was the definitive Hawk. I wanted to have a Spenser book here because Spenser — and his creator — have been great personal and professional influences on me for years. But there are a lot of Spenser novels, so the question was, which to feature? I decided to go with the very first I read, in which Spenser, manly man with a poet’s soul, is hired to bodyguard a rabidly feminist lesbian writer who most definitely doesn’t like having a seeming brute like him around. The interplay between the two as they intelligently argue sexual politics, along with Spenser’s relationship with his beloved Susan Silverman and the easy action of the tale, hooked me for life. Spenser is the thinking man’s gumshoe, big and brawny but just as quick with a Yeats quote as he is with his fists, and Parker rarely fails to deliver the goods. Continue reading
When The Fates Are Kind (Song of the Week, 1/24/14)
Setbacks. Betrayal. Depression. Entropy….
This year is already a hell of a lot better. I’m feeling good. I’m in Brazil with my sweetheart. I’m writing. I’m on some antidepressants that seem to actually be working.
For the first time in ages, every week there seems to be something to celebrate.
So, this week, I (and Polly Jean Harvey) are going to share the “Good Fortune”….
I’m Batman (ABC Wednesday, 1/22/14)
I’m Batman.
That may seem a cocky statement. I am not the world’s greatest detective. I am not the most accomplished hand-to-hand combatant on the planet. I am not a scientist/inventor with an unending inventory of cool gadgetry to rival that of Doc Savage. I don’t battle the forces of evil night after night wearing an incredibly cool batsuit.
But there’s a deeper truth here. It’s not that I’m projecting some Mary Sue wish onto this comic book character, or that I’m patterning my life in any way after the life of Bruce Wayne (though his money would certainly be welcome). Rather, there are a set of resonances in the character of Batman which, you might say, send me a signal. This has been so since I was a little kid, watching Adam West on television, even though I despised that show, just because nothing else was on. I wanted Batman like he was in the comics. Dark, agile, clever. Drawn by Neal Adams with no laugh track. Not cheesy as hell. And haunted…as I was haunted.
I didn’t consciously realize that last bit then, and not for many years. But Batman and I share something besides blue eyes and square jaws: loss. Terrible, heart-rupturing loss.
Everyone knows about Bruce Wayne’s loss: the gunshots in the alley, the clatter of falling pearls, the bodies on the ground. Fewer know the less operatic tale of my loss: a teenaged mother, riding home from her restaurant job to see her baby, her life crushed out in a high velocity encounter with a careless driver.
Loss drives us like a poisonous fuel.
For years, I thought I’d recovered from whatever trauma I’d suffered when my mother died. I had been so young, I couldn’t remember her. She was just an ancestor, if a recent one, no more a part of my life, of me, than a great grandmother I’d never known. But that was naive. Over the years, as depression kept me from the life I wanted, I realized that many of the traumas I brought into my life were refractions of the loss. Somewhere deep inside me was that small child, screaming over my mother’s body. Is it any wonder I found it easy to identify with Batman?
I had no Alfred in my life to raise me, to look after me. My father was a half-step away from cotton mill white trash, and a mean ass drunk. Over the years, he brought in two stepmothers, both cruel. He and they weren’t my family, they were my rogues gallery, the sideshow villains who plotted my destruction in nefariously neurotic ways. Batman’s villains are archetypal, each reflecting something within. The Joker is his mania, his enjoyment of the pain he brings to bear. The Riddler is his compulsion for mental challenge, Bane and Killer Croc his drive for physical dominance. The Scarecrow is his fear and despair. And Catwoman is his playfulness and his libido, trying to break into (or, rather, out of) the adamantine safe that is his heart.
Batman — Bruce Wayne — is the sort of man I strive to be: a successful man, a productive man, a noble man. A man who helps. A man who uses his anger and pain and loss not to hide or lash out at the world, but to fight the darkness (within and without) and keep it at bay. You may really love the Dark Knight, and thrill to his adventures, as millions do. But I’ve lived his dark night, I’ve fought its overwhelming darkness.
Because I’m Batman.
B
I’ll return next Wednesday with the letter C. I hope you’ll stop by. I’m a writer and I post about a wide variety of non-alphabet-specific topics. Feel free to comment under my posts. If you want to subscribe to the blog, there’s a button in the sidebar.
For another fun ABC Wednesday post, visit the Carioca Witch here: Bringing Up Salamanders.
Find many more posts by others, and more info on ABC Wednesday, here:
Which Simpsons/Game of Thrones/Dr. Who/LotR/Breaking Bad/etc. Character Are You?
None of them.
I Love Bookstores. But Do They Love Me?
We hear a lot about how authors, and everyone else, should favor local, indie bookstores over Amazon and big chains. I love bookstores, especially cool little ones, and I even link to IndieBound on my site above Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, and other larger vendors.
Well, I recently tested the waters at the two most prominent indies in my town to see if they’d sell my book, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom. (I should have done this months ago, but what with the crushing depression and electroshock therapy I just didn’t get around to it.)
The first I won’t name because I’m not looking to be personally contentious with them as they are very nice folks who run a great shop. It happens to be the very store where I debuted the novel in 2009, when I was with Putnam. I had a very successful signing with them, came in to sign books when they needed me to, and had what seemed to be a friendly relationship with the main folks there. I love this store. I showed it off to Nydia when she was visiting in the summer. I recommend it to folks all the time. I even used to link to their website from the Doc Wilde site, until I left Putnam and my book was temporarily out of print.
I walked in their door, an author who already ran the gantlet of traditional publishing, landing a multi-book contract with one of the largest publishers in the world, now carrying an improved, new, beautifully illustrated edition of my first book. A book with three pages of raves in the front from sources like Daniel Pinkwater, Kirkus Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly, and the screenwriter of Thor and X-Men First Class. A book, incidentally, with a 4.5 star rating from readers on Amazon. While I was waiting to speak to someone, I even helped a customer, selling her Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men (which is awesome and hilarious). Continue reading
The Return of the Electric, Eccentric, Eclectic Song of the Week
As I mentioned in a post earlier this week (“The Legend of Bloggy Creek, or How I Return With Much Fanfare“), I am re-starting my old (and traditionally sporadic) “Song of the Week” tradition. I tend to use this feature to share my eclectic taste in tunage, as well as to use the songs to comment on something going on currently in my life or the world at large, and this time around I intend to keep it as weekly as possible. I also add the videos to my “Dancing Under An Outlaw Moon” playlist on YouTube.
Our opening entry for this year is a song I’m fairly certain I’ve shared before, but I’m in Brazil with my hot tropical sweetheart and it just seems right…
In touch with the ground, I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Smell like I sound, I’m lost in a crowd
And I’m hungry like the wolf…
Straddle the line, in discord and rhyme
I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Mouth is alive with juices like wine
And I’m hungry like the wolf…
Duran Duran — “Hungry Like the Wolf”
Action! Horror! Kung Fu! Intrigue! Gunslingers! Fantasy! -14 Books By Noted Writers, Choose Your Price, Support Charities
Choose your price! Support charities!
Allen Varney is a really smart man who has put together a cool system in which he sells “bundles” of books and games to folks at the price they choose to pay (with a small minimum price established for a smaller set of the books offered)), the proceeds going not only to the authors involved but to specified charities. You may have seen other such bundles, and they’re a great idea. Last summer, I participated in one of his earlier fiction-oriented bundles and it was a great experience. Allen has since honed his system by running many more bundles, and more folks have gotten interested in them, so he is temporarily resurrecting some of the earlier ones to satisfy the requests of those who missed them. The one I was part of is one of them, but will only be available for a very short time (just 48 hours, and the countdown has already begun!).
The charities to benefit from this bundle are fighting for literacy and freedom of expression all over the planet:
PEN International and The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Just think, you can get my own very well-reviewed, fully-illustrated adventure for all ages, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, along with a bunch of other high quality genre tales for just $4.95 or a bit more (Frogs of Doom is retail price $6.99 all by itself), and you’ll be contributing to the literary well-being of all of human kind.
Below are the details from the Bundle of Holding site; grab this adventurous deal while you can (as I type this line, the countdown is at 1 DAY, 22 HOURS, 49 MINUTES, 56 SECONDS!) Continue reading
Authority: You’re Not The Boss Of Me (ABC Wednesday, 1/15/14)
Let me tell you about this stupid thing I do.
When I’m driving at night, if a car coming from the opposite direction has its brights on, I stare intensely into that bright light, destroying my night vision even more than the light already was. Unless I remind myself that this is stupid, I glare into those rude fucking high beams until they’re past.
I used to do this without really being conscious of it, but some time in my twenties, I realized what I was doing. I was fighting the cars for dominance, staring into their eyes, refusing to look away and show weakness.
Of course, the cars — and their drivers — neither knew nor cared that I was clearly the alpha in the situation, and I was only hurting myself. I still catch myself doing this sometimes and it usually cracks me up.
An old friend of mine used to call me on the phone (an endeavor which, historically, already has a statistically insignificant chance of success), and when he reached the answering machine — which I did monitor — he would loudly bark “Tim, pick up!” And my gut response, even if I was standing right by the phone, even if I wanted or needed to talk to him, was NO. Sometimes I would push that reaction away and answer the call. Sometimes I wouldn’t.
Again, I ultimately realized what I was doing, and I told my friend to change his approach, that he had a much better chance of reaching me with a calm “Tim, are you there?” than with a brisk command.
I don’t like being told what to do. I have what is often called “issues with authority.” Though I am willing to humbly and gracefully follow the guidance of someone trying to teach me something or guide me in doing a job, it’s my natural tendency to see us both as equals. I’ll honor hierarchy as much as I need to for practical reasons and no more. If you’re in a position of authority over me, I respect you no more than I do someone in a position under me. I respect you both, until someone earns my disrespect. Once that happens, it’s tough to get back on my good side.
I respect the authority of someone who knows things that I do not. I respect the authority of someone in a leadership position who is ostensibly the boss of me as long as they treat me with respect and make decisions that serve our shared goals.
Years ago, my commander in the Army told me pointblank that I had to respect him because of the bars on his collar. I told him that wasn’t going to happen, that the respect I showed him would be entirely based on the actions of the man inside the uniform.
My First Sergeant, who liked and respected me (and wound up running interference between me and the commander), once said, “Byrd, you’re a damn good soldier except for one thing. When you’re given an order, you think about it, which you’re not supposed to do. And even worse, if you don’t like the order, you ignore it.”
“You’re not the boss of me” could go on my coat of arms as a personal motto. I even used a variation on a bumper sticker I had custom-made to put on my truck when G.W. Bush was [allegedly] president: “You’re not the president of me.”
All of this comes from an essential, primal, animal place in me. I’m mostly self-guided, and I don’t have much will to power. It’s not that I want to be Alpha, it’s that I refuse to be Beta. Sometimes, in gracelessly-run organizations, this can lead to me being Omega, and even banished from the pack.
This is why I tend to run alone.
Α
I’ll return next Wednesday with the letter B. I hope you’ll stop by. I’m a writer and I post about a wide variety of non-alphabet-specific topics. Feel free to comment under my posts. If you want to subscribe to the blog, there’s a button in the sidebar.
For another fun ABC Wednesday post, visit the Carioca Witch here: Bringing Up Salamanders.
Find many more posts by others, and more info on ABC Wednesday, here:
The Legend of Bloggy Creek, or How I Return With Much Fanfare
In my last post, I wrote about last year’s ups and (more often) downs. As I struggled through the morass that was 2013, one of the things that fell to the wayside was this blog. Now I’m gonna fix that.
One of the big lessons of last year was that I need to write. I need to write a lot. I need to continue to build the Doc Wilde series to the high standards artist Gary Chaloner and I established, but I also need to work on some projects that don’t rely as much on other people to finish. Art takes time.
And I’ll be here, blogging my little heart out. I’ll write about whatever I feel like writing about, books, movies, humans, politics, nature, music, games, sex, religions, my favorite trees, whatever. And you’re invited to engage me, to talk back, to agree or not, to discuss, in the comments sections of the posts.
My “Song of the Week” will be returning. It didn’t always manage to be weekly, and I’m not sure many people paid it any attention, but I enjoyed doing it and think I share a nice, eclectic mix of tunes, often with some personal commentary. The videos I share also wind up on my YouTube playlist “Dancing Under An Outlaw Moon,” at least until YouTube fucks the list over by removing things without telling me. (I’ll make a point of at least mentioning the names of the song and the performer so you can seek it out even if YouTube attacks, and if someone lets me know when they see that one of the videos has gone missing, I’ll try to find a replacement.)
I’m also going to participate in a fun little exercise called “ABC Wednesdays.” Every week, I (and a horde of other bloggers) will post a blog piece, working through the alphabet from start to finish. Each blogger writes a post based on a word they choose beginning with that week’s letter. This week, I’m jumping on board as the cycle starts over again at A. I haven’t decided what my A word is going to be yet, but it’ll probably be cool, and most likely it’ll start with the letter A.
I hope you’ll stop by. You can also subscribe to the blog so you get the posts fresh from the oven.
See you soon. And more often.
Counting The Clock That Tells The Time
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night…
As far as I’m concerned, that’s William Shakespeare describing my 2013. For me, the year was a dark shawl of despair, laced with tiny threads of joy.
On the bright side of the equation, Gary Chaloner and I finally managed to release our deluxe, expanded, fully-illustrated edition of my adventure novel Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom. If you’re new to our tale, I was originally contracted for three Doc Wilde books by Penguin/Putnam, with plans for the series to continue after those. They published Frogs in hardback in 2009, but I was disappointed in various ways with the book and the publication process which produced it. During that time, I was watching the developments in self publishing with great interest, and I decided to regain the rights to my books and go indie. With the much appreciated help of a company of Kickstarter heroes, Gary and I started a process that was tougher and took more time than anticipated, but finally paid off with a gorgeous new book (written for all ages, available in both trade paperback and ebook; the hardback edition is still out there, mostly in used copies, but remember it’s nowhere near as nice a book as the new version).
Finally holding the deluxe Frogs of Doom was a relief and a delight. But dark times were coming for Doc Wilde, much more harrowing than any fight with world-threatening amphibians could ever be.
First, Gary Chaloner made the tough decision to resign as artist for the series. Working on Frogs had proved a hardship for him schedule-wise and he recognized that things were only going to get worse as he tried to balance his workload of other projects. To his incredible credit, and my even greater appreciation as both a fellow professional and a friend, he had finished the first book as he’d promised and, you might say, sort of spoiled me. As I hired a new artist for the second book, I expected a similar level of professionalism, and I paid what is for me some big bucks in advance to get it. Alas, I did not.
Hiring artist Tess Fowler was an enormous mistake. (The full craptastic tale can be read at this blog post).
Waiting for art that was just delayed and delayed and delayed only contributed to the weight of the depression I suffer, which was already rolling in like a tsunami on a night without stars, and the ultimate conflict with Tess Fowler when she produced nothing for the money she’d taken as a professional artist deepened my despair. I made repeated attempts to allow Tess to get back to work and live up to her promises, and she ignored every one of them. Continue reading
TESS FOWLER: Why She Is No Longer The Artist For Doc Wilde
I’d hoped this post would be very different.
I’d hoped to tell all of you that Tess Fowler had returned to work on Doc Wilde and The Mad Skull. That she and I had revisited the conflict between us and, like thoughtful, reasonable adults, had reconciled and gotten back to work.
Toward that end, I emailed and called her several times, with humility, ready to eat more than my fair share of crow in order to make peace, in order to allow her to make good on her promises. I did this not only because I’d paid her a great deal of money which was as good as flushed if she didn’t complete the job, but even more because I love her work and still think she might have produced a beautiful book. And that’s still my goal.
She simply ignored me.
Now, I already wrote a post about all this, a post full of anger and bile, and I’m sure some of you saw it. But I took it down soon after because that wasn’t how I wanted to be. I didn’t want to present myself that way. I didn’t want to talk about Tess that way. She’s a fellow creator, and I don’t want to tear her down or hurt her.
But, because I wrote that post, I sort of feel the need to re-address the matter in a calmer, more objective way. I also feel a certain accountability to all the Kickstarter supporters who put their money toward the dream of these books, a lump of which I just lost. I’m deeply sorry this happened; it has set progress way back, but you will still get the books you were promised.
Below is a full account of Tess’s time on this job, and the unpleasantness that followed. It’s long, but I think it’s only fair to show our work relationship in detail to fully and accurately represent what happened. It is, at least, a good case study in how choosing the wrong person to work on a project can go very badly. For those unwilling to read the whole thing, here’s the short version:
I hired Tess Fowler in mid-May to do the cover, 20 pieces of interior art, and layout for a Doc Wilde book to be released by Christmas. She took a $1,000 advance from me.
I patiently worked around her scheduling needs, including an enforced break due to carpal tunnel syndrome. I repeatedly tried to get her to read the text and engage personally with the material, to find the things in it that excited her and contribute creatively rather than just drawing what I told her to. She refused. She did say, several times, she enjoyed working with me and liked that I gave her detailed notes on her work.
Tess did not devote much of her time to the project, working on it just a day or two per week, even after losing the weeks to her carpal tunnel injury. Most of her time went to other personal projects.
By late October, less than two months before the book’s release had been planned, Tess had produced just a handful of rough character sketches. She had also done a layout sketch for the cover that I liked a great deal, and had been trying to paint it, but it was turning out so badly that in a fit of frustration she literally ripped it to shreds without ever showing it to me.
She then accused me of being hard to please and denied the very terms she’d agreed to months earlier. She also insisted she was only supposed to do five illustrations, rather than twenty, and that she had never agreed to do layout “since that’s not even in my list of skills.” But the terms of the agreement are in the email I sent her, as very clear bullet points, and her agreement to those terms is just as clear (and enthusiastic) in her immediate reply.
While we were debating this, and our relationship was collapsing, she started trying to use my depression (which I’m very open about and have written of quite a bit on this blog) as a weapon against me, trying to portray me as irrational in order to make it appear our problems were all my fault.
Now, Tess Fowler has cut off all contact, despite my repeated efforts at reconciliation and to give her another chance, and refused to refund the advance, even though it is now past Christmas, the book is not out, and I have received not a single thing she’d agreed to provide for that money.
Now, the full story… Continue reading
Under An Outlaw Moon 