THAT SELF-PUBLISHING MIGHT NOT BE A MISSTEP
on The Tattletales, my father and brother, genre vs literary as a divide, the âaffliction of creativityâ in writing
THAT SELF-PUBLISHING MIGHT NOT BE A MISSTEP
This is not a flex and not a brag, but a fact, as that annoying New York Times film critic said about her god given abilities recently. The fact: I have a lot of book projects and ideas. Not saying theyâre all good. But Iâm drowning in them. Accordingly, I feel like I can let at least one go and self-publish it under the Prism Thread Books banner. I want to go the traditional route and publish books with more established publishers and possibly get an agent and do all the magical gestures youâre supposed to do as a writer. I donât really know what Iâm doing publishing my own book and Iâm sure there will be bumps in the road and obstacles. I wrote the novel The Tattletales for several reasons but one major reason for trying to expedite its publication under my own power is because I wrote the crime novel for my brother and my father. And my father as all men are, is mortal. I want to dedicate this book to him while heâs alive. Hence some of the urgency.
The book, which is kind of a western-tinged noir crime novel with some spicy dialogue, is touched with something that I hope comes across: my brotherâs and my fatherâs humor. My brother Andy is the funniest person Iâve ever met and nothing could touch his comedic timing or his instincts to go for a phrase designed to wreck everyone around the dinner table at holidays. My father is funny too, but he is also more of a born storyteller who gifted the family with all kinds of lore about growing up in the 50s and 60s in a dairy farming family in upstate New York. Which is surprisingly deep. My father went from being a kid to being in the Air Force to going to work for a place called Cooperative Extension which always sounded to me as a kid like some kind of secret mystical faceless government organization but itâs really just an initiative put together by Cornell University and the Department of Agriculture to help bring best practices and business ideas to farmers, in particular around Central New York seen in the map above, the Finger Lakes Region. Actually Iâm still not 100% sure what Cornell Cooperative Extension does. For a while it seemed to me as a kid that they always shook hands and drank and had conferences all over the USA where they dragged their kids to look at corn and soybean fields. My father is a kind of lifeline to a certain way of expressing oneâs self that came from rural America in the early 20th century and telling stories that the teller may not even be aware is a story per se. Itâs just what happened reflected through the lens of the amused, shrewd agricultural male wary of being taken in by sophisticated city people who can spend a fortune taking on all the feathering and coloration of upstate rural life but will never get there. And the males in my family for generations have sat back and acted like everybody who comes upstate wants to be them. Itâs an aspect of the âattitude of the place.â So thereâs an element of self-trickery involved too.
My grandfather and my father (like I said) were also in the military so some of the experiences and storytelling came from that great leveling tradition too.
My brother Andy wasnât much of a reader that I was aware of except he told me once he read all of Raymond Chandler. He said he liked Philip Marloweâs tough guy similes and attitude and humor. And the quick way he could describe other people and destroy them with a narrated sentence appealed to my brother I think: that storeroom of American insults and verbal challenges that inform film noir, hard boiled fiction, classic Hollywood. Andy also seemed to have a major in comedy and a minor in raunchy language. Something about his group of adolescent male friends must have spurred them to try to top each other with outrageous, disgusting jokes. I absorbed that humor in the usual way that a little brother will absorb the comedic stylings of a genius older brother: by being the target of them. He was also tapped into something historical and conservative from my grandfather Alec Hilson who milked cows and ran the general store and the feed store in my town, where I now live, which has moved on from the 20th century. If you look at pictures of my grandfather as a younger man they look just like my brother.
With a few exceptions, I seem to be a genre writer. In poetry I might do something different but in fiction Iâm operating within certain genre boundaries. Iâve fantasized about writing at least one novel in each of the major genres: crime, murder mystery (to me theyâre two different genres), fantasy, horror, sci-fi, romance, western. Just to show I can do it. Iâve been infected, or have infected myself, with a strong course of the âshow-offâs disease.â I think that came from some competitive strain of my family too. But more on that later. Back to the genre thing. I like genre because genre has a chip on its shoulder about being accepted by literary types. Iâm not afraid of âthe formula.â I sometimes think that in fiction so far, the formula is where I exist.
I feel like Iâll write more literary things when I get older, fingers crossed. In the meantime I want to write imaginary things thatâll entertain people. They donât need to be earnest and true like a lot of literary fiction or whatever you call it nowadays strives to be. I want to make mind-movies that will get people going. If genre could be infused with something literary, almost as a secret, that would be the best angle.
The dichotomy of literary vs genre is probably a false one, as we all kind of privately sense it is, I believe. Or if not false, sort of soft and blurry. Iâm too tired to think of examples of books that straddle the line but I know theyâre out there. Thereâs also terrible genre crap out there, no doubt. Lakes of it. Itâs too much to sort out.
Thereâs some anecdote or quote from William Burroughs, I think, and I wonât get it 100% right, where he said when he sits down to write a book he intends to write a straight spy novel but it just keeps ending up like the wild, experimental books he is notorious for. He canât help it. Not putting myself in the same category at all, but I can kind of relate on some vague level. I sit down to write a book, and Iâve written a handful of them so far, and they turn out to be thrillers or mysteries or that kind of thing. Itâs just where I seem to be. Thereâs all kinds of different writers. The excitement is seeing what kind you others turn out to be. What form the affliction takes with you in the epidemiology of creativity. Thatâs part of the reviewing books thing.
One last note: being in a genre has an unfortunate unspoken requirement of meaning you have to kowtow in some cases to other people whoâve been in the genre longer and thereâs a âclubhouseâ vibe I donât like. Literary fiction novelists or writers have different social niceties they might have to observe but maybe thereâs a tad more freedom. Weâre all free of course but the genre thing can lock you down and be a subtle hegemony of conformity. Iâve talked in tweets about the feeling in 2021 that people in the twitter indie crime lit community had to pick sides along political and other divides. Which would have been one dilemma if Iâd been there long and made friends and contacts already and could navigate the waters with some confidence, but being new to it and strangers with pretty much everybody it was disillusioning. And certain people and cults of personality rubbed me the wrong way. Then I slipped into the Misery Tourism milieu and Expat Press and started listening to Alt Write and making friends with more laid back rootless people who seemed more congenial. But I still write crime novels. Itâs weird, and even weirder to self-publish a crime novel after having abandoned the society of crime writers, all but ensuring that almost nobody will read The Tattletales, but like I said my motivations were mainly to get the book out and dedicated to my father and brother. Who might not care. They probably wonât. But as a reason to write a book it is as nebulous and meaningless as any other. Itâs not quite the impulse that I felt to help Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag get born but itâs some force in me thatâs pushing it to happen.
"I want to make mind-movies that will get people going." is a relatable ethos for me. I definitely get the desire you mention about infusing genre with meaning that comes from outside of it, as a secret or "easter egg". For me, it's not that it "elevates" the work or whatever (and I agree that literary-vs-genre is a false, usually unhelpful dichotomy), but I think that splicing of disparate elementsâdifferent traditions, mental touchstones, whateverâcreates something interesting in almost all cases.
Also, my dad worked for Cornell Cooperative Extension in the 1990s and the name always struck me the way you mentioned here. I still don't know what he did there, lol.