Wolf DeVoon

I know you're trying to help me, and that it seems reasonable to learn, grow, flower again. When a woman gives birth she is "settled." I'm like that, settled.

You were exceedingly kind to me in reviewing Constitution of Galt's Gulch. I understand my fiction is peculiar, as you say rightly, archaic, done better by others. The reason I write that way is a simple mind doing what it can do, sketching an ideal man and an ideal woman, such as I understand what that might be. It's a love story. The next book in the series is more of a traditional mystery involving a serial killer, and the third novel was a cryptocurrency adventure, same main characters. ------------------ p.s. to all concerned, I have Jonathan set to Ignore for cause.

First off, this sounds like gibberish. Present tense observation, witness to events, is not story. It's life in the real world. Fire, ouch, and so forth. I don't think it's fruitful to debate whether normative abstractions are acquired mostly in youth or adulthood. It is conceivable that a new appreciation of something can be conveyed by story, but I don't think Aesop or Ayn Rand achieved that. Notably, Rand exited story in Galt's 50-page speech, to give a lecture in logic. It's absurd to say that attending a lecture on calculus is somehow story hour, with good guys and bad guys fighting over exponents. Second, original stories differ from stock answers and normative anything. That's why they're interesting and surprising, the opposite of Salinger's kitchen sink slice of life crap, instantly recognizable. For the juvenile reader of a certain age, Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is barrels of fun because it revels in pleasant comedy, nothing to do with awkward reality. Heller's Catch 22 achieved the same thing by slanderous conundrum, exempting readers from making any effort to think twice or think further. In Vonnegut's world everything is deuces wild, and Irving wants to sell you a stick of soapy butter camouflaged in painfully tedious neighborhoods that are recognizable as the folks next door. There was and still is big business in evil, of course, particularly in Hollywood product after Capra and DeMille. Truman Capote was the poster boy for evil literature, Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino the bastard cousins of Wes Craven and Sam Peckinpaw. Good old evil, whatever would we do without it? USC would have to shut its doors if Hitchcock was seen exactly for what he was, a purveyor of pain, Spielberg's great mentor. Is evil original as a story? -- never. It's as tawdry and commonplace as a walking tour of Compton, South Chicago, or Detroit. I don't think normative abstractions play a significant role in my stories. My characters are people (as opposed to dogs or doorknobs) but unlike other people. They are reality oriented, no fun and games. The villains are bit players, ordinary in many ways, highly recognizable. My hero and heroine are not templates for better homes and gardens of spiritual enlightenment. You couldn't follow them if you wanted to try, and often they themselves question life on life's terms, understanding little, risking much, gambling for a sense of passionate pride that is normatively incorrect with a capital i in the world today. That's why I've been blackballed.

This thread doesn't make any sense to me. I've been through a lot of difficult stuff, prison, failed projects, enormous stupidity more than a hundred times, arguably still worse off than most people today, credit cards gone, no cash, awful diet, frequently cold. What of it? I count each day as a whole new life, quantity limited, savor every keystroke.

I feel the same way, a firm friendship, much admire the time and effort required to build and operate OL -- ten years of investment, all of it positive and cheerful. I don't regret anything I've done to publicize my work recently, spent many thousands of dollars, did radio interviews, social media, pitched a long list of agents and publishers. What I have is unwanted. Brant read Valor and panned it, wanted to slap my hero, said he was disappointed with the story. The Good Walk Alone, serialized above the fold at LFC Times, generated a flood of angry complaints every week. I'm accustomed to rejection, silence, zero sales. Curiously, it only affects me at night when, like now, I hope to tempt someone to buy a book. There's a $4 anthology at Smashwords, three complete novels that will likely be scraped and pirated. Tomorrow morning like all other mornings I'll walk down the hill with my dog and put my key in the door of my writing office, rested and eager to start coffee and go forward on a project that I don't think has a precedent in literature, the same adventure related twice, his story (40,000 words) and hers (another 40,000) two completely different experiences. I don't actually care whether it's read, not this book. I'll archive it at CreateSpace and Kindle, because I can't rely on my laptop to live forever. Roark didn't care what people thought -- just saying. It did not matter to the work.

Imagine how that makes me feel, everyone else gets dust jackets and shelf space, talked about.

Effing brill, refreshingly original

Okay, I got it. I reacted to what kind of sex and violence were popular.

Naw. It's mostly triggered by memory, some from kidhood, some from lies we tell ourselves. Those who don't aren't "emotional" as such.

No, not necessarily. The stuff I write is cisgendered white alpha male and passionately wanton white females, a no-no.

I'm aware of him, 300+ reviews on Amazon, master salesman, shitty author (personal opinion). Last night I was distraught and couldn't sleep, perfectly aware of my situation, zero sales, I mean absolutely zero on a dozen titles. Amazon has everything backwards, the book I promoted most vigorously buried on page 2. Spent serious money for IngramSpark distribution and a PW review, got totally shafted on Portrait of Valor. However. Today was another day of writing, as all of my days are. That's the only way to write a book, and I'm an extremely slow writer. About 2 pm today something good happened. This is what I posted on FB a few minutes ago:

Apparently, the handsome living angle has eluded me.

Whoa, completely wrong. The "slicks" (Saturday Evening Post, Collier's) each sold a million copies a week, paid huge sums for short stories. That's how Fitzgerald made a living, certainly not from book royalties. During his lifetime, he received $50 for his masterwork, Tender Is The Night. No market at all for short stories today. Zilch.

I usually think in terms of motive. Reacting also to MSK's comment above, I read the people I meet in person. The clever ones are good actors, harder to read, but a little chat reveals plenty. Very difficult for me to see worry and hardship in their sad eyes, the brusque intensity of a predator, and vacancy in a child.

A little plug for my Smashwords anthology, 3 complete novels, The Case Files of Cable & Blount, less than $4

Roscoe Pound, the legal scholar. Fitzgerald for superlative style, especially Tender. Chandler and Hammett for inspiration. O. Henry for humor. RLS for pleasure.

I'm glad the conversation turned just so. I find it difficult to read other authors, except a few I admire. The simple truth is that I write what I can.

Yep, you got me there. Brown, Rowling, and King certainly sold a lot of books.

Re pulling strings, emotional roller coasters, and catharsis That is not my way of approaching a story. There is a man. His problems are many but they don't amount to much, quite commonplace. Losing his teaching job, confronting a gangster, losing his license as a private investigator, closing his office are pretty much par. Life on life's terms. But when his wife goes missing and all he gets is a garbled text message THAT is an inciting incident and the next 35,000 words are devoted to finding where she went and why. He does it as unemotionally as possible, and I should be very surprised if my readers feel any "emotional roller coaster." They ought to conclude this guy is an overwrought geriatric, makes idiotic mistakes, drinks too much, spends every penny in his pocket, has no plausible Plan B, gets lucky too often, and hikes up a desolate volcanic mountain in Central Java, penniless and alone, persona non grata, chasing a lead that doesn't make any sense -- but it's the only lead he's got. You should read Ray Chandler and consider what he said about plot ("Believability is a matter of style.") Well, maybe not. I dislike competition

Hmm. Y'all realize it's a comedy, right? -- on a par with A Diamond As Big As The Ritz, and Head And Shoulders.

Um, not her thing at all. Symbolism yes (Your days are numbered). Textual metaphor none that I recall, except perhaps the kid on a bike looking at Monadnock. Well, maybe the description of Roark on the cliff, naked. I dunno. Shut up, Wolf.

Carrots and peas, Beans on their knees, Pigs in the seas, Lucky fellows! Oysters and rocks, Sawdust and socks, Who could make clocks out of cellos?

I'm beginning to believe that you know the canon quite well. I picked a line from the article you cited, nicely composed. You said: ...the spirit of collectivism is ubiquitous, and almost everyone is caught up in some form of it. That made me think instantly of family -- the primary and most powerful institution of collectivism, almost always anti-individualist, featured many times in Rand's work in the nagging of Mrs. Keating, Toohey's ridicule of Katie, Wynand and Roark as orphans, Jim Taggart heir to a family fortune, Dagny's and Francisco's valiant ancestors, conspiracy of Whitfield father and daughter in Night of January 16th, the entire landscape of Kira's circumstances in We The Living, doomed cousin Irina the artist.

Forgive me for quoting so little of your excellent in-depth post, all of which I found persuasive. I have no doubt that you can write.

People say nice things, smile at children, turn on the porch light on Halloween. She was being nice, conventional, good ol' American individualism, freedom of religion and free markets, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, er, survival. "You're a profoundly religious man, Mr. Roark, I can see that in your buildings," Stoddard was coached to say with a knowing smile. "I'm going to make him famous," Toohey foreshadowed. On the Monadnock project, Mallory frets that it's another Stoddard Temple. At every turn his genius is shunned and punished, his survival as an artist choked, his love for Dominique dashed, not just wasted years, wasted decades and then the threat of prison for dynamiting a public housing project. Shall we be honest? Acquittal 12-0 by jury nullification was preposterous. Rand gave Dominique a cookie for stabbing Wynand in the heart, after killing Keating. Howard Roark the benevolent moron wanted to save both of them. I don't wish to contradict Rand on core principles, like A is A and evil requires the sanction of the victim, both of which are implicit in The Fountainhead. But let's agree that she paid a heavy price for being Ayn Rand, genius or not. She was mocked, rejected, lost every battle she undertook to fight. Her legacy was looted and turned into bloody cinematic toilet paper, the fatal dagger held by David Kelley in celebration of fiction that he could not have created and without which he would have had nothing. Every one of Rand's inner circle survived nicely, prospered, became famous public figures like Alan Greenspan. The next generation of secondhanders achieved great things as well, like Paul Ryan. Listen carefully. There was no new fiction produced by any of them.