The Lesser Hunter

I was reading some writing lessons posted on Facebook by a member of the endangered species of great writer, Joe Lansdale, and as usual I came away excited by his expertise where it concerns being a writer.

Lansdale is pretty much the writer's equivalent of El Santo, a champion of hand-to-hand combat and with a firm grasp on a preternatural world, often at odds with killers, zombies, and beautiful Mexican vampires.

I'm near 41 years old, which is unbelievable to write down, and I've never had a lick of writing earn me a single cent. Lansdale had published his first novel by around age 31, and was one of the most prominent horror and genre writers to be found in nearly every anthology concerning anything to do with Horror in the 1980s. And there was a pig-choking lot of them.

I don't like to make excuses about my lousy publishing history. I could blame a lot of things, external issues, but for the most part I've had plenty of time to finish good work. I've written "novels" if by novel you mean a stack of pages with letters in sentences on them. Publishing has changed, in such a way as to make it impossible for me to understand. The original paperback novel is practically extinct, and that was always my dream you know: I wanted to see a line of paperbacks on a shelf with my name on the spine. Preferably with covers displaying a Lucha Libre fighting a robot.

I've said for quite a while, I'm not interested in writing for myself. I write to sell books, but I'm not a slavering hypist. I want to write for other writers, essentially. I want the adulation of men like Lansdale, who will be inspired by what I just put down just as he inspired me when I was a teenager.

I don't think there's anything more I want, than to impress Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Lansdale, Norman Partridge, the unfortunately-passed Don Westlake, and maybe even a "literati" like Paul Auster, David Mamet and James Ellroy. Funny thing: writers who write about nightmares and spies and professional crooks are happy writers. Ellroy writes vicious novels about real vicious people, and he's a tormented soul. But writers are loners, and we're not looking to be pals who share a six-pack or each other's wife during a literary key party. I just want the respect of my writers, the men who collectively educated me about the world and how a man acts and how a hero should act and how a writer should compose themselves.

I've been paralyzed for well over a year, maybe longer, unable to conceive a story, inert as if poisoned by a giant blue spider's venom in a forgotten jungle. In most senses, I feel like I've landed on a world where language is useless to me. I should be more adept at the spear and the hunt. In Lansdale's view, if you are not inherently instinctual in survival as it pertains to writing, then you must surrender to the law of the jungle.

I understand his meaning, and real writers are constant hunters, driven by blood and the vibration of skull-shattering impact as the tomahawk strikes. I have lost a keen instinct, but I am a writer. Whether I am devoid of kills should not disqualify me from the hunt. At least, that is my hope.