New book - The Tar Pit


Wolf DeVoon

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Hi,

A few words about my latest, the second in my series with Chris and Peachy, a modern Nick and Nora Charles.

Sometimes authors use images to help them see the characters, or waste time while facing another blank page. 200 blank pages is sort of a big deal, though not as big a deal as The Fountainhead, right? The mind boggles what Rand might have looked at. The Tar Pit is 80% less sex and 100% more crime mystery by popular demand.

Anyway, meet Chris Cable

Chris.jpg

It would be swell to have a review on Lulu or Amazon. The cheapest is Lulu, if you'd like to buy a paperback.

 

 

 

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5 hours ago, wolfdevoon said:

Hi,

A few words about my latest, the second in my series with Chris and Peachy, a modern Nick and Nora Charles.

Sometimes authors use images to help them see the characters, or waste time while facing another blank page. 200 blank pages is sort of a big deal, though not as big a deal as The Fountainhead, right? The mind boggles what Rand might have looked at. The Tar Pit is 80% less sex and 100% more crime mystery by popular demand.

Anyway, meet Chris Cable

Chris.jpg

It would be swell to have a review on Lulu or Amazon. The cheapest is Lulu, if you'd like to buy a paperback.

 

 

 

Wouldn't it be cheaper just buying a tablet of  writing paper.  Good paper should not cost more than a half cent a standard page. 

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19 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Wouldn't it be cheaper just buying a tablet of  writing paper.  Good paper should not cost more than a half cent a standard page. 

Good laugh.

My wife stopped talking to me over a year ago. I'm sleeping in an unheated tin barn with a little electric space heater, sleeping in my clothes with a knit hat to keep my head warm.  My laptop sits on a tiny folding table, just big enough to park a cup of coffee if I push the laptop catty corner part way off the edge. My credit cards have been shredded. I have $25 in my wallet and a couple bucks in loose change on a cluttered tool bench.

I live on cold cuts, Ritz crackers, peanut butter and jelly, and Jimmy Dean sausage biscuits -- none of which seems guaranteed next week. Maybe I'll sell my car. It's worth $1000, if I can find a buyer. Today, I used it to drive to town and drained my last drip of credit to pay for car insurance and the Post Office box, so I can drive back on Friday and get 3 copies of my new novel to attempt some sales promotion by bugging friends to help spread the word. Normal people have a flock of buds and pals. My email list is small, less than a dozen people around the world who think I'm a writer. Print-on-demand is a bad joke. Sales are nonexistent. A word of advice: Ingram Spark and PW ads are no better than Lulu or CreateSpace.

On the other hand, Google seems to think I'm a public person. I've written a dozen books. My latest was completed and sent to market self-published yesterday. A very nice man in Alaska interviewed me in January, reached dozens of radio listeners in Fairbanks, sold no books but that didn't matter. For three hours on a neighbor's landline, I spoke about liberty and the rule of law, topics I'm supposedly famous for, calmly in favor of both. My book on government is dedicated to the men and women of law enforcement and national defense. All of my novels feature cops and private eyes, twin brothers in arms who pay a steep price to defend us from bad guys. Most of them are ex-military. I made zero dollars and zero cents honoring them.

So -- why do such a thing? -- spend years in isolation, burn job opportunities, credit, family, and my health and welfare for unwanted literary product?  I don't know. Convinced that I've done something stupid, occasionally I re-read my work, and I find it to be undeniably good. Far better to have written crap. Then I could quit. Have a good laugh -- jeez, what a dope! -- and maybe get a job at Walmart pushing carts from the parking lot, or another factory job, although the last time I quit writing and deleted my Facebook page, it didn't turn out well. Lasted only 8 days on graveyard shift, had to drive 50 miles each night, got hurt on the job, and discovered that I couldn't keep up with a noisy conveyor belt of cast iron widgets.

It is a profound privilege to be an author, no matter what it costs. Other better writers can do both, hold a job and create very successful work. I'm unable to do either of them. Yet, when I die there will be a legacy left by Wolf DeVoon, one of the silliest pen names ever chosen, an anarchist who defends the rule of law and can't seem to write action-adventure without sex scenes, the worst possible eroticism! -- straight hetero fireworks shared by married people, one white guy and one white babe who adore each other. Silly, huh?

This is what bad authors do, after a wonderful new unwanted novel is completed. We blather about any old thing, unable to start another book. A blank future -- like the blank pages that novels always are, challenging me to create something no one else can, one word at a time.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/wolf-devoon/the-tar-pit/paperback/product-23100837.html

 

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3 hours ago, wolfdevoon said:

Good laugh.

My wife stopped talking to me over a year ago. I'm sleeping in an unheated tin barn with a little electric space heater, sleeping in my clothes with a knit hat to keep my head warm.  My laptop sits on a tiny folding table, just big enough to park a cup of coffee if I push the laptop catty corner part way off the edge. My credit cards have been shredded. I have $25 in my wallet and a couple bucks in loose change on a cluttered tool bench.

I live on cold cuts, Ritz crackers, peanut butter and jelly, and Jimmy Dean sausage biscuits -- none of which seems guaranteed next week. Maybe I'll sell my car. It's worth $1000, if I can find a buyer. Today, I used it to drive to town and drained my last drip of credit to pay for car insurance and the Post Office box, so I can drive back on Friday and get 3 copies of my new novel to attempt some sales promotion by bugging friends to help spread the word. Normal people have a flock of buds and pals. My email list is small, less than a dozen people around the world who think I'm a writer. Print-on-demand is a bad joke. Sales are nonexistent. A word of advice: Ingram Spark and PW ads are no better than Lulu or CreateSpace.

On the other hand, Google seems to think I'm a public person. I've written a dozen books. My latest was completed and sent to market self-published yesterday. A very nice man in Alaska interviewed me in January, reached dozens of radio listeners in Fairbanks, sold no books but that didn't matter. For three hours on a neighbor's landline, I spoke about liberty and the rule of law, topics I'm supposedly famous for, calmly in favor of both. My book on government is dedicated to the men and women of law enforcement and national defense. All of my novels feature cops and private eyes, twin brothers in arms who pay a steep price to defend us from bad guys. Most of them are ex-military. I made zero dollars and zero cents honoring them.

So -- why do such a thing? -- spend years in isolation, burn job opportunities, credit, family, and my health and welfare for unwanted literary product?  I don't know. Convinced that I've done something stupid, occasionally I re-read my work, and I find it to be undeniably good. Far better to have written crap. Then I could quit. Have a good laugh -- jeez, what a dope! -- and maybe get a job at Walmart pushing carts from the parking lot, or another factory job, although the last time I quit writing and deleted my Facebook page, it didn't turn out well. Lasted only 8 days on graveyard shift, had to drive 50 miles each night, got hurt on the job, and discovered that I couldn't keep up with a noisy conveyor belt of cast iron widgets.

It is a profound privilege to be an author, no matter what it costs. Other better writers can do both, hold a job and create very successful work. I'm unable to do either of them. Yet, when I die there will be a legacy left by Wolf DeVoon, one of the silliest pen names ever chosen, an anarchist who defends the rule of law and can't seem to write action-adventure without sex scenes, the worst possible eroticism! -- straight hetero fireworks shared by married people, one white guy and one white babe who adore each other. Silly, huh?

This is what bad authors do, after a wonderful new unwanted novel is completed. We blather about any old thing, unable to start another book. A blank future -- like the blank pages that novels always are, challenging me to create something no one else can, one word at a time.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/wolf-devoon/the-tar-pit/paperback/product-23100837.html

 

I am glad you got a laugh. Now could you explain why what I said was funny?

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  • 4 months later...

Just as an aside but I find it interesting that some authors, like Clive Cussler, of "Raise the Titanic??" who I am currently reading, have co-writers now. And some authors like the deceased Robert B. Parker have writers carry on their characters, like Spencer, in the newest books. I have a hunch Cussler comes up with the outlines and lets others do the filling in part.

When you have to explain humor it is no longer funny, Ba'al. So, once humor is "explained" whatever was said is no longer funny even if a person reading it for the first time has never seen the explanation. I swear. It's all part of the Groucho Marx theorem called The Conservation of Humor. 

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