The other day, while I was searching for a word, I eavesdropped on two older women chatting over their chicken sandwiches and fries, and one was telling the other about her recent trip to San Diego. It sounded like she had a good time. The beach. The weather. The shopping! The zoo with the grandkids. And then, “Chuck found a website that listed all the locations featured on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, and we ate at six different places that we’d seen on the show.”

“Oh, I want to do that!” said the woman who had not gone to San Diego. “I wish we had neat places like that to eat at around here.”

Now, at this point, I wanted to interject, but I didn’t. I just shook my head and turned my attention back to the trusty laptop and continued pretending to be an author. It bothered me, though. I think people get so accustomed to their habits that they don’t often think about the wider world beyond the five to ten places they tend to frequent unless they’re traveling.

I’m as guilty as the next person for that. It’s easy to get into routines. It’s a default setting that doesn’t tax our brain. It doesn’t require extra effort. It’s comforting. We do well with routines.

When I was in college, I worked at a pizza restaurant. A family came in every Tuesday, right around 5:00 PM. When I say they came in every Tuesday, I mean exactly that. Like clockwork. In my four years working in the restaurant, they may have missed Tuesday pizza night five times.

They were a nice family. Dad was tall and thin, glasses, a bad haircut, a little goony. Mom was a typical, slightly chubby Midwestern mom archetype. Round, Nordic face and rosy cheeks. She favored skirts over jeans. They had two boys. The older one was in third or fourth grade when I started working there. The younger was a couple of years behind him.

They were creatures of habit. They ordered the EXACT same thing for four years, every Tuesday: A jumbo pepperoni, breadsticks, and a dessert pizza. We had a meal deal for that order, and they always got it. (Given this was the mid-90s, you’ll all be saddened to note that this order was $17.99 back then.) They added three sodas and a water. (Mom always drank water.) The same order. Every. Single. Time.

The funny part was that they always came in and spent five minutes staring at the menu board, talking to each other like they were going to get something different.

“Oh, they have that combo with the mushrooms. That looks good.”

“They have a new special with spicy peppers.”

“They have a special with two medium pizzas.”

They murmured to themselves for a while, then ordered the same thing they always ordered. I rang up the order the second I saw them walking in because I knew they’d never change it.

Creatures of habit.

We’re all guilty of that, though.

We tend to read the same types of things. We watch the same kinds of programs. We hang out with the same people. We drive the same roads to and from work. We shop at the same stores. We like what we like. Habits are helpful.

But I feel bad if Guy Fieri is your north star for finding funky food.

I don’t hate Guy Fieri, by the way. I’m not one of those people who senselessly knock him because of his bowling shirts and platinum spike hair straight out of a ‘90s punk video. I actually think Shane Torres’s take on him was probably correct.

Fieri’s glad-handing with Trump at a UFC match wasn’t an ideal optic. But it’s not like he’s out campaigning for the guy. Fieri’s a good dad who loves spending time with his sons. He’s a dedicated family man. He ministers LGBTQ weddings. He donates to schools. He helped a lot of mom-and-pop restaurants over the last 25 years.

Granted, about 20-25% of the restaurants featured on that show have closed because they weren’t prepared to handle the sudden influx of people, but that’s part of the restaurant business. Those places probably would have closed anyhow somewhere down the line.

The two women at Culver’s were lamenting a lack of creative, interesting places to eat around my area, but I look around and see a ton of them. I think those women take these sorts of places for granted because if you see them every day, if you drive past them constantly, they stop feeling like something exotic and become just a part of the tapestry of your life.

Exotic, funky places aren’t part of your everyday life, is what I’m saying. Those are places that only appear when you’re on vacation, right?

You also have to work to find places that are a little different. Small restaurants, especially those that had to bootstrap themselves to open their doors, don’t spend a ton of money on advertising. They rely on word of mouth. They rely heavily on the kindness of their regulars to spread the word.

In my small-ish town1 alone, I can think of a half-dozen places that all would fit well on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. But they’re not always easy to find for people who aren’t seeking out the new and unusual.

Take Meze, for instance. Since it opened in 2018, Meze has been serving some of the best Turkish/Mediterranean food in the area. The cigar borek is divine. The doner kebab is outstanding. The whole place has a funky little vibe, but you might not see it when you drive past. It tries its best to stand out, but this building doesn’t really scream “authentic Turkish food,” does it?

Or, if you indulge my own bias, I’m a big fan of Primal ‘Cue, and not just because I’ve been working there for two years, because the job market is a minefield of disaster and sadness.2

It’s a southern-style barbecue place attached to a hockey rink.

Guy Fieri would absolutely camp out at a place like that.

Bootstrapped three years ago by Andrew Bajakian, a culinary school grad and former Army helicopter mechanic who got tired of not finding barbecue he liked in the area, Primal ‘Cue is the real deal. It’s exactly the sort of place that would be perfect on Triple-D.

Bajakian has two massive propane tanks that were converted into real wood-fired barbecue grills, and he’s smoking pork, chicken wings, turkey, and beef daily. Not to mention running creative specials weekly, including a burger special every Friday. They sell a ground brisket burger on the regular menu, which for my money is one of the best burgers in town, and they also do a pulled pork smashburger. (Yes, you read that correctly. Go get one.) On Saturdays, they play yacht rock all day and have one of the TVs in the bar tuned to “The Ocho” on ESPN News all day.

Primal ‘Cue was nominated 19 times for different categories in the Best of Sun Prairie 2026 voting, and finished as runner-up 9 times. No first-place results this year.

Despite all this, new customers walk in every single day and say, “We didn’t know you were here.”

It’s hard for places that would be featured on Triple-D to get their names out there. Some of the places Guy Fieri has featured over the years have been in existence for years, but were still flying under the radar because not enough people were going there.

Yet, McDonald’s is still full.

Speaking of which, in the Best of Sun Prairie voting, McDonald’s won for “Best French Fries.”

McDonald’s.

For best fries.

I don’t know if I can shake my head enough at that result.

Salvatore’s Tomato Pies, a fabulous pizza place that would also fit in well on Triple-D, was started in Sun Prairie by New Jersey transplant Patrick DePula. They do everything from scratch, with menus that change with the seasons, and head chefs who try to use local product as much as possible, including hitting all the local farmers’ markets for produce and making specials based on what they can find.

Chef Brian at Sal’s in Sun Prairie kicked out this dish the other day:

Spiced french fries, citrus-braised pork, salsa verde, a house-made sauce, local parmesan cheese, pickled cherry-bomb peppers, and scallions.

But this is the runner-up to the corporate overlord McDonald’s.

Because it’s easier for the masses to vote for what they know than to go out of their way to find something more interesting and flavorful.

I bring up all this nonsense because the same goes for books, indie film, and tons of other things.

You may have noticed in my “note” posts on Substack that I often try to review movies I’ve seen lately, or occasionally TV shows I’ve enjoyed, or books I’ve been reading. Specifically, I do a lot of movies because I will put one on while I’m writing, and that lets me kill two birds with one stone. I often spend many minutes scanning Tubi’s menus to look for small-budget, indie productions I’ve never heard of, because I’ve learned that you have to work to find art that isn’t mainstream.

And I’ve found some gems on there, too. Absolute banger films that were made well outside of the control of the mainstream media. But they are probably destined to dwell for eternity in near anonymity because it’s so hard to get the word out.

It’s all too easy to sit back and let corporate radio tell us what thirty songs we should like at the moment, or have CBS force-feed us a steady stream of police procedurals and Taylor Sheridan’s shows, or let Barnes & Noble choose our books for us. In this way, we don’t have to work or think. The overlords will choose for us.

And don’t get me wrong—some of those books are truly worthy of their lofty position. Harlan Coben is a good dude and a good writer. He has earned everything he’s gotten. I’m always glad when a longtime writer like Nevada Barr finally gets her work made into a TV show (I reviewed Anna Pigeon the other day on Substack.) But so many more writers deserve your time and mental space.

Beau Johnson is out there grinding the hell out of his social media account, doing some of the cleverest sketches I’ve had the pleasure of watching to sell his Bishop Rider books. Lawrence Allen’s Jimmy Cooper mysteries have been one of my new favorite series, a very Los Angeles vibe on every page. Tracey S. Phillips just kicked out a new grimdark murder mystery set in southern Wisconsin. Curtis Ippolito just put out an amazing new crime novel called Waves of Burden, and it’s highly deserving of all the praise and awards it can muster, but it is so hard to compete against the massive marketing machine behind the largest publishers.

The machine is going to make sure you get fed what they want you to know, and only that.

You have to put in the work to find the interesting things.3

I enjoyed the hell out of the reboot season, and I’m looking forward to more of the same when it returns next month.

Although for all the glory of Scrubs, I’m man enough to admit that the ill-fated Season 9 was not up to par. It didn’t feel like the same show because it wasn’t. They brought in new med students. They turned over the JD voice-overs to the delightful Kerry Bishé, but after eight outstanding seasons, the gimmick was tired, and we were all ready for a change.

It’s not to say that the ninth season wasn’t without merit. There are some good jokes in it. It helped launch Eliza Coupe’s career, and she’s an underrated powerhouse of an actor who can do no wrong in my eyes. Dave Franco was good. In fact, if it hadn’t been a show called Scrubs and was something entirely new and unrelated to Scrubs, it probably would have done all right.

To be fair, series creator and television goldmine Bill Lawrence2 tried to launch a new show with a new title, but the ABC marketing department said, “No. It’s Scrubs. People know the name. We don’t have to spend money.”

And to his credit, Bill Lawrence says he has zero regrets about doing the ninth season. The world of television is transient. People aren’t guaranteed jobs after a show ends, and a lot of the people who make up the unseen part of the show—carpenters, electricians, writers, set designers, etc.—need to pay bills, feed themselves, and have health insurance. Lawrence even said something to that effect on his social media back then. Season 9 was largely written and filmed during the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009. America was in a pretty brutal recession at that junction. (Thanks, Wall Street Douchebags!)

However, the fact that the final season of the show wasn’t as terrible as people say is secondary to the fact that it wasn’t as good as the original Scrubs. Season 8 ended with an amazing montage of JD walking out of the hospital. He sees a promenade of old patients, both living and dead. He then sees a montage of his life on a projected screen while Peter Gabriel delivers a soulful song.3 It was touching and heart-wrenching. It was one of the few shows that stuck the landing. And Bill Lawrence himself made a cameo as the janitor who tears down the screen. It was perfect.

Anything after that was going to be letdown. Unless we’ve had twenty years to miss those characters and wish we could know what they were doing now.

Not everything needs a reboot, though. And if you’re going to do a reboot, you should at least change it enough to make it interesting.

One of the best examples is the hit show Trapper John, MD. Showrunners Don Brinkley and Frank Glicksman took a beloved character from a sitcom (Trapper John McIntyre from MASH), and planted him in the present day (which, for this show, was 1979-1986), showing what his character would be like with age and time, almost a quarter-century after we last saw him. The new show was a medical drama, not a sitcom. Pernell Roberts played the titular character (Wayne Rogers did another sitcom called House Calls from 1979-1982, and then retired from acting in 1988 to be a financial genius). While the show embodied some of Trapper’s character traits from MASH, it was an entirely different show, and that’s sort of what helped it succeed.

I bring all this up because we are now three episodes deep on the new season of Ted Lasso.

I loved the first three seasons of Ted Lasso. I think the first season was a perfect sitcom season. No flaws. The writing was sharp. The jokes were good. I embraced the characters immediately. I bought into the concept hook, line, and sinker.

The second season, nearly as good as the first.

Then the third—a little lacking compared to the first two, but still worthy.

And now, we have season four.

And I have to admit, it’s not hooking me in like it did before.

However, I have to question why. Has not enough time gone by to make me miss the characters? The Scrubs reboot was a breath of fresh air, and it felt like it was still hammering the same beats. But there were also almost 20 years between the original run and the reboot. The gap between Ted #3 and Ted #4 is only three years.

With Ted #4, they are floundering to get us to care.

And I have to wonder—is that perhaps by design? Do the showrunners have their reasons? Are they building to something? Can I be critical of a work after seeing only three installments?

There have been jokes that made me laugh. There have been emotional moments, a hallmark of the world Bill Lawrence and Jason Sudeikis have built for this show. What more could I ask for?

Criticism is one of those things that is an imperfect art. It’s been around forever. I’m pretty sure the first creature on the planet to engage in any form of storytelling was met with a mild “Ehh…” from whatever creature was listening.

Criticism is one of those things we do involuntarily. It just happens. We have our likes and dislikes, and who knows where those come from? Most often, our criticism comes in the form of judging others.

If I see a pretty woman, I’m intrigued, but if she has a pierced septum, I’m immediately turned off because my OCD wants to pluck that thing from her nose. I get that people do what they want because they want, and more power to her for getting whatever piercing she felt like getting. At the same time, I can’t help but have an initial reaction. It’s involuntary.

Much like, I’m sure, when any woman sees my big, dumb, bald, unattractive self galumphing down the sidewalk, I’m sure her first reaction is, “Uncle Fester with Resting Bitch Face? No thanks.”

We all criticize and critique. We all do it. It’s part of human nature. It has nothing to do with being right or wrong. I have plenty of friends with septum piercings. It has nothing to do with whether a person is good or not. My own instinct on them stems from a personal dislike, and that’s it. Nothing more. My own personal feelings toward that particular body modification are meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Evolution would tell us that criticism rose out of a survival instinct. Good fruit or bad fruit? Good creature or bad creature? Good human or bad human? It was something that helped us make decisions that kept us alive.

Now, it’s something that we not only do with reckless abandon, but it’s something that some people have managed to turn into lucrative careers.

I remember watching Siskel and Ebert weekly, letting them tell me if a movie I was on the bubble about watching was good or not.

Siskel and Ebert made their careers writing the same sort of mindless entertainment criticism I frequently engage in on this platform. However, they were just two dudes. They were sometimes right. Often, they were wrong. Gene Siskel hated The Big Lebowski and Unforgiven. Roger Ebert hated Die Hard and Apocalypse Now. They both hated Jim Carrey early in his career, and had to issue a big retraction later on when they finally understood what he was doing.

The internet has issued us all a license to criticize wherever and whenever we see fit. We can use that power for good or evil. We can rail against politicians and actors. We can hate on bands and their new albums. We can write scathing takedowns of celebrities. We can eviscerate books and writers.

But to what end?

Criticism is, at best, an imperfect art form, and while I enjoy rambling about my opinions on things like movies, TV shows, and music albums, I try to keep most of my opinions on the positive side, and I try to be fair in my criticism.

I try to avoid reading reviews of my own books. I have a friend who occasionally goes on Amazon and Goodreads for me and clips good reviews so I can use them for marketing, because I know that I don’t believe good reviews about my work, and the bad reviews will eat away at my soul forever.

I still remember two bad reviews I happened to see.

The first one, for my book Strange Angels, made me laugh. The reviewer gave the book a bad grade because she didn’t like the way the crew bullied each other.

First of all, I’d say what they were doing was busting each other’s balls (including Natalie “Quick” Huffman, who arguably has bigger balls than Nathan Pageant or Crispy), and secondly—I worry that the woman who wrote that review has never had real friends in her life. Some of the worst things ever said about me to my face have been from people I would gladly take a bullet for.

The other bad review that sticks in my head was for my book We Still Remain. The reviewer gave the book one star because the characters didn’t do exactly what the reader thought they should do.

That review really sticks in my craw. Why would you give a book a bad review because the characters behaved like people other than yourself? Why would you give a bad review because some teenage characters made some rash and impractical decisions—as teenagers are often wont to do—instead of behaving like someone with a level head on their shoulders?

Here’s a thought: if people in a book do what you think they should do, that’s probably not a great book.

We are all entitled to our opinions, but the old adage about opinions and assholes still rings true. Criticism is, at best, a written explanation of our feelings toward something. At worst, it’s a wicked weapon used to attempt to deny others joy.

I’ve been seeing a lot of negative criticism directed toward this new season of Ted Lasso. I’ve seen a lot of positives, too—for instance, it’s drawing record viewing numbers for Apple TV every week. But much of the online criticism, both from the so-called professional critics in the major news and content outlets, and the personal criticisms in forums like Reddit or Facebook comment sections, has been largely aggressive and trying to bring down this thing that so many people like.

That said, criticism doesn’t really matter in the big picture, does it? If enough people watch, it will keep running. If they don’t, it will end and go away.

Overwhelming criticism of certain books hasn’t stopped them from selling. In fact, protesting books often causes them to surge in sales.

(Side note: my books all contain whatever you hate most. Feel free to ask for them to be banned. I could use the sales boost.)

And part of me wonders if the slow start to Ted #4 is part of the design. The show is focusing on women’s athletics, which have almost always been a target of criticism and derision from many vocal authorities. For some reason, the US Women’s National Soccer Team still manages to take a backseat to the men’s team, even though the men get bounced from major tourneys on the regular while the USWNT has four World Cup wins and a slew of other trophies.

We’re already seeing hints of some of the struggles female athletes face that male athletes are almost never shown facing in the media, such as childcare, pregnancy, and having to make do with being ignored and belittled by the majority of the public.

Either way, as much as I want to criticize Ted Lasso’s lackluster start to the much-anticipated season, I think I have to refrain from that and wait until they show me more. They’re laying the foundation. They’re building toward something. Maybe when all the pieces are revealed, there will be legitimate complaints to be had.4

But until then, I have to remind myself that criticism is often an involuntary reaction, and sometimes taking time to enjoy something takes effort.

In other news, Wide Open Empty still exists. Some people who have read it told me they liked it, which is always nice to hear. But it could always use more readers.

Thanks for reading.

Also, Substack has new AI detection features.

I refuse to kowtow to AI. Writing is my hobby. It’s how I have fun. Why would I let a computer do it for me?

I could pull two kings on a Blackjack table, split them and get two more kings, and that dealer will pull five low cards and hit 21. If I’m playing slots, I’ll burn through a stack of bills faster than a coyote devours a convenience store burrito. The only place I can make any sort of gain at a casino is at the all-you-can-eat buffet. If they’re dumb enough to put out crab legs, I’m at least going to break even.

I’ve never entered a drawing or raffle with the expectation of winning. I donate my cash to whatever the cause is, and I know it will vanish. The ticket in my hand is worthless the second they hand it to me.

When I participate in my fantasy football league every fall, it’s almost a guarantee that whoever my first three picks are, they’ll end up injured by Week 3, and suddenly my entire season is dependent on how well Tyler Shough can play because he was my backup QB.

Because I’ve gone through a lot of job interviews in the last few years (the market is a joke…), I have gotten down to being one the last five candidates plenty of times. At that point, they know all five of us are qualified and can do the job, and the interviewers are just looking for someone the people at the place will vibe with. I know I’m awkward and unlucky enough not to be picked.

My bad luck is legendary.

A few years back, one of those magical things that almost never happens happened to me: a Hollywood producer was perusing Amazon, happened to see The Single Twin, took a chance on reading it, and then contacted me to see about acquiring rights to make a TV series about Abe & Duff. And this wasn’t a small-time producer, either. This was a notable production company with several big hits to their credit.1

I signed the contract for that deal on March 9, 2020.

On March 12, 2020, Hollywood shut down for a year due to COVID-19. The potential Abe & Duff streaming series died on the vine before it even had a chance. It made it into a couple of pitch meetings, the producer guy told me, but there were no bites and no interest.

It’s hard enough to sell TV shows from big-name writers. It’s impossible when you’re a nobody from nowhere.

I have learned to embrace my lousy luck over the years. I know nothing good is coming down the pipe for me. I’ve had 51 years of bad beats and poor timing to back up my hypothesis.

At the same time, I always allow myself the smallest piece of my brain to linger in the utterly stupid fantasy that I might win the lottery.

My sister and I have long had a pact: if either of us wins the lottery, we split it. The other day, she texted me to remind me that the Powerball was up to some ridiculous number, and that I should buy tickets. I dutifully did as commanded, picking up a few chances at a payout before heading to work. I stuffed the slip with the numbers in my wallet, and promptly forgot about them.

I don’t even check them anymore. I wait until the news tells me where and when the winning ticket was purchased. If they ever say Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, then I’ll pull the last slip out of my wallet and see if it was me. I know it won’t be, but I still throw $10 at the chance every so often. You can’t win if you don’t play, right?

It bothers me that when I get that stupid slip of paper, knowing probability and statistics are so far against the odds of winning,2 I will still indulge myself in the fantasy of thinking, Maybe this is the one…

Someone eventually wins the Powerball. At some point, someone somewhere ends up with the matching numbers. Why not me?

But then I quickly tamp down that hopeful delusion, remind myself of who I am, and I go to work.

It’s this same level of delusion that infects me every time I launch a new book.

I’ve written 18+ novels so far in my trying-to-be-a-professional career. (I don’t remember the actual number anymore, because some were for limited audiences, some weren’t that good, and I’m always moving forward—on to the next project). Each time I throw a new work into the world, for the briefest moments of time before I allow reality to set me straight, I think to myself, Maybe this is the one…

Inevitably, it’s not the one. After a few pre-orders, the book will disappear into Amazon’s massive vortex of written words, vanishing from the public consciousness almost entirely.

That’s where Wide Open Empty is now. A month after release, it’s only sold a few copies. It’s only had a handful of Kindle Unlimited pages read. It’s only garnered a few reviews. And it’s already mostly forgotten by everyone, whether they read it or not.

The reality of bookselling is depressing. It’s not a business for the weak.3 Especially when you aren’t doing it with any sort of help. I know that traditional publishing houses don’t really market books anymore, unless they know that book is going to be viral, be an automatic bestseller, or was written by someone with a huge backlist. And even then, it’s going to be dependent on the writer and their audience. But even the smallest traditional houses have social media, and they help hit a few new people with every post. There’s always a chance.

I’m never going to be a social media maven. I have a face for radio and a hairline for an Addams Family Audition.

No one is buying books from this guy. Maybe lightbulbs. But not books. I have a full-time job that takes up a lot of my week, and much of the rest of my week is either spent tending to tendonitis in my feet, which is a direct result of all the hours I’m required to be on my feet at my job, or I’m in front of my computer writing. I’m not spending a lot of time making and editing videos for TikTok so I can get an extra sale here or there.

I take a very laissez-faire approach to book sales. For some of my books, I have done no marketing. For others, I have done a lot of marketing. I saw no difference in the sales figures after comparing both approaches. I’m fully convinced luck has more to do with sales than anything else.

Take this July’s sales, for example.

My best year ever as a writer, income-wise, was 2024. I made more than I have ever made by a lot.

Early in 2025, Amazon changed its algorithm and Kindle Unlimited payouts to punish indie authors yet again. These changes resulted in an immediate 50 percent decline in sales and pages read. My already meager monthly income from my writing was literally cut in half by a $640 billion company so that they could become a $775 billion company.4 Being a good cog in the machine, I resigned myself to this change and suffered.

However, this July, I realized I was back up to the sort of income level I was getting in 2024. I thought, Maybe it’s because of the new book…

But when I logged into the system to check the sales (something I almost never do…because it feels like it’s a waste of time), I quickly realized I was earning money through a spike in sales from Australians finding and reading The Survivor Journals.5 Wide Open Empty, Abe & Duff, Strange Angels, and Welcome to Meskousing were all inert and lifeless. No real sales or Kindle Unlimited pages to speak of. They aren’t being found. They aren’t being read. It’s a little frustrating.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m beyond thrilled that people are still finding, reading, and enjoying a decade-old series that I wrote. (Approaching 100,000 ebook copies sold in the last ten years!)6 Enough people still engage with me over those books on a monthly basis that I thought it was worth updating their eBook layouts last year for a tenth anniversary celebration. But I’m not the same writer I was when I wrote those. That’s not where my focus is anymore. It’s not the books I wish were selling. My style has changed. My attitude has changed. I’m not that guy anymore.

One thing that writing books of various genres has taught me: readers tend to be more genre-loyal than author loyal. The post-apocalyptic genre readership especially—they love those books specifically. They aren’t interested in crime fiction. They’re not down for sci-fi or paranormal mystery fiction. They are intensely loyal to that genre. I get it; I do. I loved Margaret Weis when I was younger. Back then, though, I was a fantasy novel fanatic. I remember in the early ‘90s when she came out with the Star of the Guardians series, a sci-fi/fantasy crossover. It wasn’t my cup of tea.

The lack of sales and notoriety for the new book has dipped me into a bit of a funk over the last month. I indulged this depression by watching a lot of movies, playing a lot of video games, and generally ignoring writing. I would force myself to hack out paragraphs at a time, reminding myself that writing is a job. It’s not art. You can make yourself write. It isn’t reliant on a muse or divine inspiration. Sit the hell down. Type the damn words. But man, it’s not fun to write when you’re throwing yourself a pity party of epic proportions.

I think writers put a lot of pressure on themselves to make something of themselves, to make something of those silly books we write. A novel takes hundreds of hours of work. That work often forces us to be isolated away from family and friends at times. We choose to be in a room away from spouses, kids, friends, etc. We often have to choose between writing and taking care of things around the house. For me, I know I experience a lot of guilt over my books because I would make far more money and be far more useful if I took the hours I spent in front of my computer monitor and just got a part-time gig at Subway making sandwiches. I think we put the pressure on ourselves because if we can prove that writing the book was somehow worth it, then all will be forgiven by everyone, and life will suddenly burst into rainbows, sparkles, and unicorn farts.7

I think that’s where the general malaise of the post-book launch comes in for indie writers. I’ve talked to enough other small-time people like myself to know that most of us suffer from this period of unproductive downtime between the book launch and when we decide to pick up on the next book in earnest. It’s a bit of a hangover. We allowed ourselves the audacity to hope for a brief moment, even though we all know that hope is kind of a double-edged sword. The hope exists to make us believe in ourselves again, even for a moment, because if we didn’t, we might really stop writing forever.

Anyhow, that’s enough rambling for this week. I’ve got a new book to work on.

Thanks for reading.

My favorite piece of Jonah Hill’s canon comes from when he hosted Saturday Night Live. When Hill is on as a host, it’s clear that he has enough talent to be a regular cast member. He hammers lines. He commits to character. He would have been a great Not Ready for Primetime Player.

The best sketch he has done, though, is a filmed piece called “The Champ.”

While it is an extremely funny bit, I find myself cringing my way through it, because I often feel exactly like Jonah Hill’s character in that piece when it comes to writing.

The sketch is brilliant in its premise and simplicity. Hill plays “Nate,” a young man who defeated an undefeated opponent in a wrestling match earlier in the evening.

He starts off as a hero, and there’s a sentimental vibe to the sketch. Nate’s the hero. He accomplished greatness. He did it. It has a very teen-movie feel, a familiar beat we’ve seen many times before.

And then he watches the evening news with his dad, and he finds out that the guy he pinned actually took a dive to make Nate feel good for one night because he’s apparently the biggest loser in the county. And everyone feels bad for him. And he smells.

And it gets worse from there, descending into crass humor and Eric McCormick from Will & Grace committing a murder that got knocked into a second-tier story because the story about Nate the Loser getting the mercy pin was the headline.

I realized a while back that this sketch is the perfect metaphor for how many writers feel about their work.

And it’s terrifying.

What if everyone is pretending?

What if it’s not good, and everyone is just being nice?

What if everything I’ve ever written is actually unreadable, and I’ve just been fooling myself this whole time?

I think that’s why writers tend to believe the negative reviews and ignore the positive ones. Maybe the negative reviews are the ones that are telling the truth, and they’re the ones being honest.

I think this feeling is probably related to Imposter Syndrome and has something to do with the stunning inferiority complex so many writers suffer from, as well as the writerly penchant toward self-loathing.

I think it comes back to the idea that writing is some sort of meritocracy, that the cream will rise to the top—despite all evidence to the contrary. As I (and so many others) have pointed out, in publishing (and entertainment in general), luck has far more to do with success than anything else.

If I’ve done well, then where is the proof?

The problem arises when you adopt a mindset in which no proof is considered factual and only the negative is perceived as truth.

Thus, we are at a psychological impasse, stuck forever in a loop where we will never believe the positive, but cling to the negative, and this is why therapists drive expensive cars.

Wide Open Empty has been out for a couple of weeks now. Some people have read it and written to let me know they liked it.

Which is always nice.

But, man—why do I have such a hard time accepting praise?

I think part of the problem is that Amazon has rankings and lists that tell you exactly how few copies of the book you’re moving in comparison to everything else on the digital shelves.

It’s hard to fathom that you’re making a dent in the market when Amazon politely provides you with hard evidence that you haven’t moved the needle.

In an era where so much is constantly at our fingertips—entertainment, information, connection, data, etc. It is becoming increasingly difficult to accept that life is a marathon, not a sprint.1

Publishing feels like even more of a marathon. You have a lot of ground to cover, and you can’t always get in front of the person in front of you. It becomes more about attrition, doesn’t it? You have to simply forget about the sales and just keep going, especially when you’re a nobody from nowhere going it alone with no marketing budget, no PR, and a sea of worthy competition.

I try not to get discouraged because I know there’s a long way to go.

But it’s hard sometimes; discouragement is easy.

Staying positive is difficult.

Try to stay positive.

Some Suggestions

The Sheep Detectives was delightful. A well-made cozy mystery with a heckuva cast. It delivered on all fronts.

It’s streaming now on Amazon Prime as part of the regular catalog.

I’ve heard many, many good things about Lawrence Block for years, but have never read his work. I finally got the audiobook of The Sins of the Fathers (1976) and it delivers. He’s great. Matthew Scudder is great. Just a wonderful crime novel.

However, since it was written in 1976, I laughed out loud when they mentioned a $400/month apartment in the East Village being a high-end luxury apartment.

For $400 a month, you can’t even sleep in a garbage skip behind a derelict White Castle nowadays.

I miss the pricing of 1970s…

David Heska Wanbli Weiden finally released the second book in the Virgil Wounded Horse series. It’s very good. It’s not a traditional crime novel, but somehow bridges a strange cross-genre between crime and literary fiction.

Virgil Wounded Horse is a compelling character. The Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota is a compelling setting. And Weiden’s prose is largely simple and accessible, but he can become very poetic when it needs to be.

There’s a passage in this book that was a series of perfect paragraphs cascading one after the other, culminating in such a gut-punch of beauty and emotion that it made me put the book down for a bit and stare into the trees beyond my yard.

Beau Johnson’s Particular Breed of Madness

If you’re not following Beau Johnson’s social media feeds, you’re missing out.

Beau is a Canadian writer whose books center around an antihero named Bishop Rider. Rider is a bad guy who does horrible things…but only to people that truly deserve it.

However, Beau’s gift to the world is his social media feed, where he (in full Rider regalia as evidenced by the mustache) somehow hacks himself up in crazy little self-filmed sketches in order to promote his books.

They never fail to delight.

Beau—I don’t know if there’s a cure for what’s wrong with you, but if there is, I hope you never take it.

One Thing to Avoid

I don’t like to trash things—and I’d never give a poor review to someone’s book, but this is big Hollywood, so they can suffer my malaise and disappointment.

I so wanted to like this.

If you know me, you know that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books are the entire reason I started writing. I still read them all at least once a year. The Long Winter is a perfect children’s book, a masterpiece of youth literature.

I was a boy when the original Little House on the Prairie series aired, and I watched it here and there, especially when it fell into syndicated reruns.

I was excited when I heard that Netflix was rebooting the series, but the polished, glossy version of Little House they delivered just rings hollow and false to me. It feels like some slick Hollywood execs sat back and said, “What if Little House looked like all the crap Taylor Sheridan has been throwing at the screen lately, but run through a squeaky-clean Hallmark Channel filter?”

In the end, I finished watching all eight episodes, but by episode six, I was over it. I just wanted the series to be done. I found it weak and tiresome. I started to resent it.

Netflix has already committed to a second season, so there will be at least another eight episodes.

Seems there are fans of the series out there, so I guess it will pay off for Netflix, but I was wholly disappointed by this show.

But, as I remind myself frequently, not everything is made for me.

And this is one of those things that wasn’t.

Finish on a Positive Note

I love it when something that was made for pennies actually works.

We’ve seen something of a revolution in the film industry this year. Obsession, Iron Lung, and Backrooms, made on shoestring budgets by young directors who cut their teeth on YouTube videos, have all done extremely well at the box office.

Meanwhile, the traditional blockbuster tentpole movies like Supergirl and Masters of the Universe—not so much.

Given that I teach classes on how to publish books for minimal costs, I like seeing something cheap that actually delivers.

This brings me to The Battery (2013), now streaming on Amazon Prime.

The Battery is about as independent as an independent film can get. Written, directed, starring, and produced by Jeremy Gardner, this film is about two former teammates of a minor-league baseball team who end up stuck in rural Connecticut after a zombie apocalypse.

The movie is lackadaisical. It sort of reminded me of the great indie western, Rancho Deluxe in some ways. It meanders. It’s not about jump scares. It’s about the existential horror of living without purpose. It’s about the struggle to stay alive when everything else is dead.

If you’ve read my book After Everyone Died, this movie has a similar vibe. It’s the sort of zombie movie I’d probably make if I had that chance.

Not only that, but this movie was made for $ 6,000.

Hollywood considered Backrooms as a “shoestring budget,” and it still cost $10 million.

Gardner got the money together by asking ten friends for $600 each, told them he’d make them producers.

This is a real shoestring budget.

But dammit, it works. It works well. I enjoyed it.

For a couple of guys with a camera doing guerilla-style filmmaking, this was better than it deserved to be.

Anyhow, that’s enough rambling for today.

I’ve got other books to write.

Thanks for reading.

By the time it comes out, I’m ready for the next challenge. I already have several of the next challenges in the works, and I’d rather devote time and energy to them rather than to the thing that is already completed.

I don’t think it helps that I haven’t been able to line up any speaking engagements or presentations for it, and at this point, I’ve stopped trying. Onward to the next thing.

I really admire authors who can keep marketing their books for weeks and months after the release. Some people are relentless about it. They’re constantly posting on social media. They’re writing things for other authors’ blogs. They’re doing pictures. They’re finagling podcast interviews. They’re really trying.

I just don’t have that in me. I hate tooting my own horn. I hate patting myself on the back. I’m not good at it. In this modern world of self-promotion, perhaps I just wasn’t meant to be a writer, given all that being a writer now entails beyond writing.

Anyhow, Wide Open Empty is out in the world. The sales have been about what you’d expect for an unknown, unheralded product. The reviews are much the same. (Or so I have been told. I try not to read them.)

As with every book I’ve written, this is my last book.

That’s the thing about nobody writers: every book is your final book. There are no contracts. There are no future expectations. There are no agents or publishers waiting for the next thing. If you’re truly lucky, you might have a handful of readers who would be sad if you never wrote again. Aside from that, you will be quickly swallowed and forgotten by the vast sea of available literature.

I have other books I’m working on, but there are no timelines, no deadlines, and no pressure to finish them other than my own impetus to see them through. So, for now, Wide Open Empty is the final thing I will have written until proven otherwise.

It’s always a strange feeling to teeter on that brink.

I’ve quit writing many times before, but I always come back to it because it’s literally all I’ve ever done, all I’ve ever wanted to do. I don’t know what else I’d do if I couldn’t write.

I think that’s why Collin Croy, the main character of Wide Open Empty, marched out of my brain. He’s the kind of character I like to write and read about—the guys who aren’t the biggest and the strongest, the guys who aren’t the best at what they do, but they somehow make it work for them.

Croy is a failed NFL quarterback. He was the best player his high school had ever seen. He was an above-average player at the collegiate level, possibly one of the best quarterbacks New Mexico State had ever seen, but when he reached the professional level, he just couldn’t get the job done. He tried his best, and his best wasn’t good enough, so he returned to his tiny, dying southeastern Colorado town to figure out what comes next.

I think that’s the sort of character that resonates with a lot of us. I never truly wanted to be in education. That was just what happened when I couldn’t become a sports radio play-by-play guy. I never wanted to work in a restaurant, either. It’s just what has happened because of a lousy job market.

In the NFL, in any given season, there are only spots for 2200 players. That’s 1,696 active-roster players plus 16 practice-squad players per team.

Currently, the NCAA and NAIA have over 81,000 players competing on the football gridiron every season.1 Of that number, roughly 25,000 players will graduate or declare for the draft every year.

Only 257 players get drafted.

A handful of undrafted players sign try-out contracts and try to make a team. Sometimes, it works out for them. Kurt Warner is probably the best example of this happening, going from an undrafted nobody to the Hall of Fame. Warren Moon had to play several seasons in Canada, winning five Grey Cups, before the NFL gave him a fair shot. Most of them, though—they won’t make the team. They will be a “camp body” and be cut.

It’s not because they didn’t work hard enough. It’s not because they didn’t want it enough. It’s not because they didn’t impress the coaches. At the end of the day, there is something intangible that separates the tiny percentage of people who have played in the NFL from those with the dream of playing in it.

It’s just that difficult to do.

Not impossible odds…but nearly impossible.

It really puts into perspective the guys like Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Aaron Rodgers who can not only play, but play at such a high level.

Writing isn’t the NFL, but the same principles apply. There are many great writers who will never break through the traditional publishing ceiling. It’s not because they’re not good enough. It has far more to do with intangibles than tangibles. Sometimes, you just lack enough luck.2

As much as I like reading about the success stories of guys like Emmitt Smith or Jerry Rice, I personally find the stories of failure more compelling, and even more than that, I find the never-was guys even more compelling. Tony Mandarich3 is a good failure story, but he brought a lot of that upon himself. I think of all the guys who got near the brass ring, but just never got a chance to grab it. I think it’s because it’s easier to identify with failure than success. Let’s face it—we’re far more likely to experience many failures in our lives.4

And even more than failure, we’re far more likely to just experience nothing. We’re far more likely to just go through our day-to-day life with no major success and no major failure. We’re just going to maintain the status quo and hope to do something fun on the weekend.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Most of us would be lucky to just maintain a decent status quo. The slings and arrows of life are far crueler than that, and we’re bound to experience heartache along the way.

But most of us aren’t going to see those high points. We’re going to maintain a middling grade, no matter how hard we work, and we’re going to accept it, because there’s literally nothing else we can do.

One of my favorite books of all time, The Fat Lady’s Low, Sad Song, a small-publisher gem by Brian Kaufman, is one of the best examples of this.

In the book, Parker Westfall is a failed ball player looking for one last season in the sun before he has to figure out life after baseball. He gets a chance to play in a small-time independent league, Double-A ball somewhere in baseball hell.

Beats working for a living, right?

On the team are a whole bunch of nobodies who will never get that call. They’re just trying to live their dream at whatever level that dream can be lived.

Baseball is possibly the most romantic of all sports. That’s why so many great stories and movies have evolved out of it. It’s compelling. That’s why videos of guys getting called up to the Bigs are always heartwarming.

@marinersGetting pulled from a game... to find out you’re headed to the Show. The moment a dream comes true for Cole Young. #mariners #mlb #baseball #sports #hopecore #wholesome

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But sports are also heartbreaking. Only one team gets to be the champion every year, and the rest of them get to try again next year. Only so many players get to be in the top league of the profession. The rest of them have to get day jobs.5

Same with publishing. There are only so many books that get to be best-sellers. The rest of us will have to suffer with whatever we can pick up on sales, like remoras trailing sharks, and try again with the next book.

I’m off to try again with the next book.

Because what good is a dream if you give up on it?

On a Related Note: Good Luck to My Cousin

My cousin, Brian Duker, has recently achieved a major life dream: he is the new Defensive Coordinator for the New York Jets.

Now, he and I are, unfortunately, not close. This is more a matter of age and distance than anything else. I would have liked to know him better, but those opportunities never arose.

Brian and I have not been in the same room since he was an infant. I think I was already a freshman in high school when he was born. Chances are, we could pass each other on the street and not know it. However, his mother, Sally, is my dad’s sister and my godmother, and his father, my Uncle Steve, is an awesome guy, so I’m rooting for Brian to do well.6

The NFL coaching ranks are notoriously rough, but he has been single-minded in his pursuit of a football coaching career since high school, so it’s nice to see someone I know (even if we don’t know each other well) doing well in life.

Brian—hook me up with some tickets the next time the Jets come to Lambeau. I’ll buy you a Spotted Cow, and we can say hello.

It started in earnest in second grade, when my parents bought an Apple IIc computer with the first word-processing program I ever used, Apple Writer II (on a 5.5” floppy disk, even). There were no instructions with the program, but I remember spending hours figuring it out, and then hacking out stories just to fill the chroma-green CRT with line after line of text until the entire monitor was filled with my words and I could look upon it with pride and think, I did that.

By fifth grade, I was trying to write novels, struggling with the minutiae like chapter length and formatting, trying like hell to make it look like a real book, even if it didn’t read like a real book.

In the second semester of my junior year of high school, through a miracle (or failure) of scheduling, I ended up with study halls during 5th, 6th, and 7th hour. Because I couldn’t leave campus, I just got myself assigned to the computer lab for those three hours, and I spent that whole semester hacking out a weird fantasy novel.

I recently found that novel, printed on the lab’s laser printer and shoved into a three-ring binder in the spring of 1992, and while it wasn’t entirely terrible, it was mostly terrible, but now, as someone who has taught writing for 25 years, I can look back on that early attempt and see that I was developing the building blocks. The rough materials were evident.

Nowadays, I like to pretend that I know how to put words in the correct order and build the story in the right way (whether this is true or not is debatable, I suppose…). I’ve come a long way since trying to write Dungeons & Dragons-inspired short stories in second grade.

But now, as I am poised on the precipice of not only putting a new book into the world, but a brand-new IP, something unrelated to anything else I’ve ever written, I am remembering the very first writing conference I ever attended.

Unfortunately, because I am now old and my head is full of useless information like random quotes from 30 Rock (“Stop eating people's old french fries, pigeon! Have some self-respect. Don't you know you can fly?”), I can no longer remember who said it the first time I heard it, but it’s a sentiment I’ve heard repeated often enough by other people to know he wasn’t coming up with something original.

Strangely enough, his advice is also good advice for talking anyone out of joining an MLM scam:

When you are trying to be a writer and aiming for that level of people who, if they can’t make a living off their writing, can at least count it as a nice side income, you absolutely must be able to have complete strangers buy your books and like them.

Therein lies the rub.

I’ve been exceptionally lucky so far in my writing career. John Green said that success in writing is based more on luck than anything else, and that is something I’ve seen hold true time after time. Yes, talent and ability account for a lot—but nothing beats having the right book be seen at the right time by the right pair of eyes.

The Abe & Duff Mystery Series got a slim (almost non-existent) chance at becoming a TV series because the right guy happened to see The Single Twin while browsing Amazon.

The Survivor Journals trilogy has sold more eBook copies in Australia than it has in America. I have no idea why. I cannot account for this in any way, shape, or form other than attributing it to pure luck. Of the many tens of thousands of copies those three books have sold over the eleven years since the first one was released, somehow people DownUnda keep finding it, and keep reading it. I do no marketing in Australia. I don’t know how it happened. But it’s always astonishing to me to receive emails from people who live in places like Tanunda, South Australia or Tyalgum, New South Wales, who tell me they liked something I’ve written.1

True, self-publishing has gotten ridiculously simple with both print-on-demand and ebooks. The ability to sell a book globally with a couple of clicks on Amazon is amazing. It didn’t used to be that way.

Robert Pirsig initially self-published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, shelling out large sums of his own money to buy pallets of the book at a time, and then spent weekends at flea markets and craft fairs selling it out of the trunk of his car. It was rejected by publishers 121 times until someone took a chance on it, and it sold 50,000 copies in its first three months on shelves, going on to sell more than 5,000,000 copies since then.

In 1931, Irma Rombauer, a widow from St. Louis, dropped her entire life savings to print her cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, because publishers said there were enough cookbooks and that it wouldn’t sell. Almost 100 years later, it’s still in print, with millions of copies sold, and Joy was named to the list of the 150 most influential books of the 20th Century.

Nowadays, publishing is dead simple compared to how it used to be. Between eBooks and print-on-demand, there is a way for everyone to write and publish their books. A few clicks of a mouse can easily get your book published, and the line between traditionally published books and indie books is becoming more blurred every day.

However, it’s the same ease of publishing that has turned it into a nightmare of frustration for those of us trying to sell novels.

There are simply too many books, too many writers, too much competition, and too much frustration. Now, we’re not only competing with every book that’s ever been written, but the Artificial Information scammers have joined the fray, with some estimates saying that 66% of all books being published on any given day are products of AI. (And Amazon isn’t doing diddly-squat to stop it.)

Which brings me to Don Quixote.

I was first introduced to Miguel de Cervantes’s early 17th-century story about the elderly knight-errant and his faithful squire in college. One of my World Lit professors made us read sections of it. I have since read the entire thing, and while it can be a challenging journey (depending on the quality of the translation you read), it is an immensely rewarding 1000+ page ride.2

The Spaniards have a saying:

I think this kind of sentiment might be true about many things in life. When we experience them as young people, we take them at face value. When we get a little older, we consider those things more carefully. And when we reach a certain age, those things that we used to find amusing can devastate us because we realize either how we have valued inconsequential things, or we have spurned things that might have been important. Our values change. Our scope of the world changes. Our needs change. Our sense of our own humanity changes.

One of the best things to come out of Don Quixote is the word “quixotic.”

It’s one of my favorite words, right up there with “petrichor” and “terlet.”3

Something is deemed quixotic when it is exceedingly idealistic, unrealistic, and impractical to the point of being foolish.

Can anything better describe publishing in today’s market?

In the book, Don Quixote de la Mancha starts out as a low-ranking nobody called Alonso Quijano. Quijano reads so many over-the-top books about medieval chivalry that he decides to revive the tradition of chivalry and serve his nation as a knight-errant—a man who wanders his nation doing good deeds. He recruits a farm laborer, Sancho Panza, to serve as his squire. Panza agrees to go because he’s greedy, lazy, and a little curious.

When they start, Quixote sees the world as it would look in an idealized, fevered dream, with many dangers and giants lurking in dark corners. It’s the world a wanna-be hero would envision, a place where he can do good and create positive change. The far more pragmatic Panza sees the world as it really is, for all its ugliness and splendor.

As they go through their journeys, life beats Quixote down, and he loses the hopes and ideals he once held, becoming a more realistic, practical man somewhat defeated by the world. Panza, however, evolves, absorbing some of his master’s dreams and hopes, and learning that a simple, honorable life is the best life.

Quixote, while he never abandons his idealistic chivalry, serves as a lesson for the reader: failing to evolve and adapt, living by an idealistic code or an obscure set of self-imposed values, can often result in a man falling victim to his own foolishness.

Trying to do anything in the world of entertainment (regardless of genre or medium), you have to be willing to tilt quixotically at windmills, knowing full well that the windmills are going to win, and you’re going to get hurt.

We small-time, going-it-alone writers, we who take up the knight-errant guise and try to bring our stories to the masses, we’re driven by some idealistic fantasy in the back of our heads that we are doing something honorable, noble, and good, and no amount of reckoning with the reality of the current state of publishing will stop that.

If the shortcomings of the publishing world deter you from publishing, maybe you weren’t meant to be there in the first place.4

I think, for many of us, it’s those few success stories that come out of the world of going it alone that keep us going. Andy Weir, Matt Dinniman, Colleen Hoover, Amanda Hocking, Freida McFadden, Hugh Howey—those select few whose dreams became reality because the right people saw them at the right time, and magic happened.

It’s the dream, right? We are dreaming impossible dreams, just like Quixote.

At this point, after writing so many books, after playing this game for so many years, I no longer harbor the dream. Life has effectively beaten the idealism out of me, and I lie beaten and bloodied, like a grim, battered Quixote who lost the fight with the windmill. But still, I continue forward.

Because what else is there to do?

For me, I think I do this more out of spite than anything else. I know what it’s like to be excluded. I am all too familiar with the feeling of being blocked from something because I don’t have the right look, or the right amount of money, or the right connections. Or the right amount of luck.

I think you have to have a healthy sense of To Hell With You to be an indie writer and publisher. If you don’t want my book, to hell with you; I’m going to do it anyway. And I’m going to do it my way. And if that isn’t good enough for you, at least I still did it, and no one can take that away.

Besides that, I honestly don’t know what I’d do with myself if I wasn’t pursuing this writing life.

As Harlen Coben said in an interview with The Telegraph, “I have no life, no interests or hobbies, other than writing.”

Same, Harlan, same.

This is all I’ve done since I was seven. I might not be the greatest at it, but I’m even worse at everything else.

It’s the only way I know how to exist at this point.

Wide Open Empty officially comes out on June 30, 2026. It will be released on Kindle at midnight on that day. Paperbacks are already getting out there. The global paperback distribution got hung up again, but that’s pretty typical. It’ll get there eventually.

My dad liked it. So I got that going for me. He hasn’t liked everything I’ve written, and he’s the first to really criticize me when I swing and miss.

I hope you will take a chance on it, and maybe even enjoy it. If that happens, maybe you’ll recommend it to a friend or two. Or thirty.

And who knows? If enough people do that, maybe someday I’ll actually slay the giants like in my dreams.

I tilt at the windmill once more.

The paperbacks have been mailed to everyone who pre-ordered a copy, and I’ve received a couple of very complimentary messages from those who have been reading it. Those messages are greatly appreciated, even if I can’t take them entirely to heart.

I spent my Father’s Day running around to various bookstores that carry my books and dropping off copies of Wide Open Empty for their shelves. I have to do a lot of this stuff myself, and I don’t mind the windshield time. I have always liked driving, particularly when it gives me time to listen to audiobooks.1

My last stop of the day yesterday was at Mystery to Me, and the lovely Hilary Burg, one of the owners, was at the counter when I arrived. She congratulated me on the new book and asked, “How does it feel?”

This isn’t a question I get asked too often. I didn’t have a ready answer. My brain skittered for a moment before I recovered and huffed, “Crippling imposter syndrome?”

It was the best I could come up with on the spot, and more importantly, it is true.

I’ve written about imposter syndrome in the past on this newsletter/blog/Substack (whatever the hell it is). It’s one of those things that I’m not sure you ever grow out of because the goalposts keep moving. It’s nice to write, it’s better to have written, but lord save me from having my writing judged by others.

This is the strange, conflicted hell in which many writers live. We want readers, but we also don’t want readers. We want people to enjoy what we have created, but we also don’t want to think about people reading what we have done. We want the limelight, but we’re also introverts at heart who got into writing novels specifically because it’s a solo mission, a thing we can do while we’re ensconced in our little, private bubbles safely away from the horrors of society and all the ills and inconveniences of dealing with others.

You can’t have one without the other, though.

You write because you want to be read. You put things into the world because you want others to partake.

It doesn’t mean your brain will be kind to you about it, though.

Imposter Syndrome is just a side effect of feeling like you are not supposed to be doing what you’re doing because you haven’t earned it. You are doing the same sort of thing as everyone else in your field, but for some reason, you feel like your accomplishments are unworthy of being held to the same regard as those of your peers.

For me, it’s the lack of recognition from traditional publishing. Despite the myriad flaws in the traditional publishing system, because I haven’t been able to gain a foothold in that world, I’ve been stuck going solo for my entire career.

Sure, I’ve sold a lot of eBooks on Amazon—who cares? I’ve gotten some nice reviews from Kirkus. So what? I had two different TV production companies interested in turning Abe & Duff into a series. Big deal.

I lack the one thing that my brain decided separates what I’m doing from “real authors,” and nothing I can tell myself will change that. So, the terror and frustration are real. I’m permanently stuck feeling like a tag-along, like someone’s little brother who wants to play baseball with the guys on the block, despite being too small to be any good.

“Me too, right guys? I play too!”

The thing about writing books is that you start doing it for personal reasons, but the second you slap a UPC code on the back, you’re doing it for external validation. It’s your little, impish ego standing up and waving flags, demanding that people see you as some sort of clever genius.

And admitting that outwardly is where the imposter syndrome starts—especially if you are not about being a tall poppy.

So, yeah.

New book.

Terror.

Feelings of unworthiness.

Crippling self-doubt and inferiority.

Anyhow, it comes out in a week.

I’ll be over here in the corner quietly twitching.

Reviews

Michael Connelly dropped the second book in his Detective Sergeant Stilwell series, and like the first one, it’s both traditional Connelly stuff…and yet, not.

I think, for me, the setting has failed to engender me to Stilwell. Catalina Island, while a unique setting for an LA County cop, is just a strange place I have no real frame of reference for, other than the fact that rich people live there.

The illustrious Western novelist Zane Grey lived there, for instance. He was one of the first authors to become a millionaire from his work.2 The Wrigley family established a stronghold there, so much so that the Cubs used to have Spring Training on the island back in the day.

Connelly’s other works (Bosch, Ballard, Haller, McEvoy) have all been more or less set in the gritty, sun-drenched noir of Los Angeles. It feels more relatable. We’ve all watched enough movies and seen enough TV shows to know what Los Angeles feels and looks like…but Catalina? Not so much.

Stilwell is also not in the same realm as Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. He’s a little less compelling. He’s more of a name than anything else. I get no sense of the man beyond the cliché hero tropes Connelly used to establish him. He’s a good enough guy, but there doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of meat on the bones when it comes to character depth.

I think Connelly knows this as well. While Stilwell went solo for his first book, Connelly brought in Rene Ballard from his Bosch series to do some heavy lifting in this one, and Bosch gets name-checked to let us know that Connelly’s magical LA world is all interconnected.

Still, Connelly is arguably the best there is in his chosen genre, and the mystery flows well enough to be entertaining. A third book will probably come down the pipe at some point, and I’ll probably read it, too.

Backrooms is a psychological horror film directed by a 20-year-old film wunderkind based on a photo taken in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and brought to life through the collective imaginations of people on Reddit.

Despite this somewhat questionable origin story, Backrooms was an excellent film for something made on a shoestring budget, directed by someone who was a fetus when my own daughter was born.

Kane Parsons, the director, secured the job after he made a viral web series on his YouTube channel.

The original image got paired with a now-legendary text:

I loved this premise the first time I saw it years ago. The idea that we can suddenly find ourselves in an existing, parallel reality adjacent to our own by accident is fascinating.

For those who don’t play video games: “noclip” is a classic cheat or bug wherein the walls of a video game become intangible, and thus you can leave the boundaries of the game and go to places where the graphics were not meant for players to see.

The film’s story involves two very unhappy people: Clark is a forty-something alcoholic furniture salesman going through a divorce and seeking therapy for his feelings of frustration and helplessness, and Mary Kline, Clark’s therapist, who is dealing with her own trauma from a childhood with a schizophrenic mother and feelings of inadequacy from her career.

Clark accidentally discovers a wall in his furniture store that “noclips” reality, leading him into a strange, surreal world of endless hallways and rooms, each more troubling than the last, and he becomes entrenched in it.

Mary, trying to help Clark, follows him into this world and discovers its terrors.

This is exactly the sort of horror film I love: no jump scares, slow building, and more reliant on the prickly terror of the idea than cheap gimmicks.

Kane Parsons’s direction was excellent, and the script is decent enough to make a compelling story out of something that started as a simple idea.

Like so many A24 products, Backrooms was given a shoestring budget ($10 million), and it grossed double that on its opening weekend, surging to over $280 million worldwide so far.

This is how movies need to be made. Masters of the Universe had a $200 million budget, and I’m sorry, people are not flocking to films like they used to. You’re going to lose money on a $200 million movie. However, Amazon Studios was behind MotU, and Crazy Uncle Jeff has lost touch with the reality of money.

The best thing I can say about Backrooms is that it lingered with me for much of the next week. There was a lot of psychology in it, and some of the themes and images were striking enough to stay in my brain.

I liked it a lot.

I wasn’t expecting much.

I mean, c’mon. He-Man was hokey when it was a cartoon. It was literally a cartoon made solely to sell toys and merch (like so many cartoons of the ‘80s). Still, I was a kid when He-Man came out (I was a GI Joe kid, though—I liked the cartoon, but never had the toys). I watched the cartoon. The trailer made it look compelling enough that I thought I’d be entertained for two hours.

And I was.

This movie ended up being far better than I hoped, and it did several things right: It was funny. It got the costumes and sets correct. It subverted itself. It didn’t take itself seriously.

For anyone who watched the cartoon in the ‘80s, this is exactly what you wanted it to be.

It leaned into the hokey homoeroticism at points. Jared Leto’s Skeletor was humorous but still managed to be menacing. There were Easter Eggs aplenty.

It might have flopped at the box office, but Amazon has already announced a sequel, and this is a film that I’m sure will do well on streaming.

It was definitely worth watching once, but I doubt I’ll watch it again, and I’m on the fence about seeing the sequel.

Still—just for the nostalgia, it was worth the price of admission.

I got to read my pal Tracey’s new book, Deepest Secrets, which, coincidentally, launches on the same day as Wide Open Empty, June 30, 2026.

In the second book of her Morgan Jewell series, Tracey takes us to the gritty noir of rural Wisconsin, where drugs are a problem, and she puts us on the case of a missing informant.

The thing about good, gritty noir is that nobody’s going to have clean hands. You’re looking for squeaky-clean heroes who do the right thing? Maybe look elsewhere.

Detective Morgan Jewell is carrying a lot of scars, physical and mental. Going undercover in rural Wisconsin on a missing persons case, Jewell has to get dirty by embedding with the local drug scene to identify the missing man’s associates and figure out if he was killed, fled the state, or is still alive and hiding.

On top of that, Jewell is still hauling around the trauma of seeing her best friend murdered and being unable to help.

Tracey S. Phillips gives us a novel with a hard, well-honed edge, in which the small-town bars, overgrown back roads, and rundown apartments of rural Wisconsin vividly burst into life as the setting for an unflinching mystery that forces you to constantly question whether the suspects are victims, villains, or both.

Nothing is going to be easy in this novel, and the twists are surprising.

This is the sort of crime novel that digs beyond the brutality of crime to uncover the human tragedy beneath.

The World Cup

I’ve enjoyed watching soccer for years, and the World Cup is always a fun event, despite the rampant corruption of FIFA.

There is no drama like sport, and this year, Cape Verde’s story is amazing.

The Republic of Cabo Verde, a tiny island nation off the west coast of Africa, is home to about 491,233 people. To put that in perspective, the county where I live, Dane County, Wisconsin, has a population of 500,000.

Cape Verde managed to field enough football players to not only qualify for the World Cup for the first time in its history (becoming the third-smallest country to ever qualify), but they drew the reigning European Champion, Spain, in the first round of pool play and HELD THEM TO A NIL-NIL DRAW.

For those who don’t know soccer, this is a crazy, almost unbelievable stat. Someone said it was like a D2 college football team coming in and beating the reigning Super Bowl Champs. It was like App State beating Michigan.

Spain is currently ranked #2 in the world. Cape Verde is #67.

Things like this just don’t happen all that often in sports.

Spain controlled the ball for 75% of the game and completed 400 PASSES in Cape Verde’s third of the field. They were on the attack the whole time, and Cape Verde’s defense did not break.

The 40-year-old Cape Verde goalkeeper, Josimar José Évora Dias (better known as Vozinha), secured seven saves, while the Cape Verde defense parked the bus and frustrated Spain all game. The post-game celebration for the island nation’s first World Cup point was amazing. Holding Spain scoreless was a statement that could only have been overshadowed by a win against them. By preventing Spain from scoring despite the overwhelming difference in chances and time of possession, Cape Verde effectively defeated the giant and became the team to watch in the World Cup.

After a stunning 2-2 game against Uruguay in their second round of pool play, Cape Verde has managed to collect its second World Cup point, and moves into the final round of pool play against Saudi Arabia on Friday, June 26, with a chance to defeat the Saudis and secure a potential advancement to the knockout rounds. A win will secure them a spot in the knockout stage.

All right, enough of my nonsense for now.

Wide Open Empty comes out next week.

Pre-orders are available on Kindle or in paperback.

Ask your libraries to get copies. Order them through your local bookstore.

If you read it and enjoy it, please review it on Amazon, BookBub, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere else you can post reviews.

Thanks for reading.

Hell, at this point, I don’t even know if it’s even good.

It felt strange to write a new book while I already had at least three series started. My Abe & Duff Mystery Series already has five books, and I’m working on book six. The Shelby Ree series has only one book, but I have a second one started. And, I have the follow-up to Strange Angels in motion, too.

I have three perfectly good book series, each with sequels in various stages of writing, but I took time out of my life to write something new.

Why is that?

Well, it’s because selling books is hard.

I love writing Abe & Duff, but each book in a series tends to sell worse than the ones before it. The people who don’t like it will bail at the first book they don’t like, which whittles down the base for each successive book in the series.

Now, when you get to that mythical, best-seller status where guys like Craig Johnson, CJ Box, Brad Thor, et al. reside, it doesn’t matter. They have a massive fanbase who will buy whatever book comes out next, and they’re in a constant state of picking up new readers just as others jump ship.

Craig Johnson is on tour for his new book, The Brothers McKay, and it’s standing-room only every night.

When CJ Box dropped The Crossroads earlier this year, over 400 people came out to the opening tour stop.

Brad Thor’s long-running Scot Harvath series is finally being adapted for television, and that will, no doubt, cause all his books to spike in sales again.

When you’re pulling down those sorts of numbers, you can afford a drop in sales here and there. What you lose on the swings, you’ll make up on the roundabouts.

Meanwhile, when you’re an unknown chump from nowhere without a traditional publisher, an agent, a slick website, a PR team, social media handlers, and any sort of marketing skill or will to do all of the above, sales are a trickle, at best.

If my sales were water, my Amazon pages would already be receiving FEMA money.

What I’m trying to say is that my books are not selling well. While I think the Abe & Duff series has only gotten stronger as it has gone on, the fifth book, Bring the Heat, has been the worst seller of the group. I haven’t done the math, but judging from the paltry 25 reviews it’s received on Amazon over the past year, it hasn’t been selling a ton.

Welcome to Meskousing is selling the least out of all my books. Looking back, I think I screwed up with the title of that one. No one knows what Meskousing is, although if you read the book, that becomes evident. I thought I was being clever and witty, but like so many of my jokes, it fell flat and failed to find an audience. I will endeavor to name the sequel something catchier, but until then, I will have to mourn what might have been.

Strange Angels is also struggling with sales. It’s been out for over 17 months now, and it has only 40 Amazon reviews.

While the vast majority of my reviews are good (if not great, I’m told—I don’t read them), they come slowly. When I go to Amazon’s page and check the sales, far and away, the Survivor Journals is carrying most of my monthly writing income (which, let’s face it, isn’t much). The rest just aren’t selling. Not in physical copies, not in eBook. They’re doing okay in pages read on Kindle Unlimited, but those fractions of a penny per page read that Amazon chips at me are not much.

So, why do something new, then?

Like so many struggling nobody authors, I’m trying to do better than I currently am. If I can hit with a new book, then maybe people will take a chance on the books that already exist.

It’s just another chance to throw something at a wall and hope it sticks. Given that Wide Open Empty is a new genre and new style of book unrelated to my other work, maybe it will farm a new audience. Maybe some TV producer will see it and like it. (It has happened to me before!) Maybe a literary agent will catch sight of the cover and reach out. I don’t know. Anything is possible, right? But you won’t know until you try.

So, I’m just trying.

At the same time, I’m proud of this book. It’s the sort of book I like to read myself. It’s the sort of book my dad seeks out in bookstores. It’s a good Father’s Day gift, is what I’m saying.

It will be released the week after Father’s Day, however. My timing is impeccable as always.

In the meantime, while I work on the other three series books I’ve already started, I continue to generate more ideas and more ideas. I have a lot of avenues I want to explore. I have a superhero noir mystery in the works, a buddy-comedy fantasy novel already started, a weird action thriller, and I recently came up with a new mystery novel concept featuring an original amateur sleuth.

Plus, I still have to work the requisite 40+ hours a week, clean the house, mow the yard, do laundry, and occasionally watch a movie and read other books.

I have too many ideas and not enough time.

Anyhow, I hope you will forgive me for starting something new.

Wide Open Empty is written as a standalone novel, although the series potential is there. We’ll see how it does in the sales arena, and maybe that will determine whether I bother with a sequel.

In the meantime, I have other books to write.

Thanks for reading.

Personalized paperbacks are shipping now.

Order here: https://seanpatricklittle.weebly.com/personalized-books.html

Reviews

Deepest Secrets

I was lucky enough to be allotted an ARC of my pal Tracey S. Phillips’s forthcoming book, Deepest Secrets.

The thing about good, gritty noir is that nobody’s going to have clean hands. You’re looking for squeaky-clean heroes who do the right thing? Maybe look elsewhere.

Detective Morgan Jewell is carrying a lot of scars, physical and mental. Going undercover in rural Wisconsin on a missing persons case, Jewell has to get dirty by embedding with the local drug scene to identify the missing man’s associates and figure out if he was killed, fled the state, or is still alive and hiding.

On top of that, Jewell is still hauling around the trauma of seeing her best friend murdered and being unable to help.

Tracey S. Phillips gives us a novel with a hard, well-honed edge, in which the small-town bars, overgrown back roads, and rundown apartments of rural Wisconsin vividly burst into life as the setting for an unflinching mystery that forces you to constantly question whether the suspects are victims, villains, or both.

Nothing is going to be easy in this novel, and the twists are surprising.

This is the sort of crime novel that digs beyond the brutality of crime to uncover the human tragedy beneath.

Deepest Secrets releases the same day as Wide Open Empty, so do yourself a favor and make a two-book Tuesday!

Marshland (La Isla Minima)

Watched Marshland (La Isla Minima) on Tubi last night, a 2014 Spanish crime film. It was one of the most decorated Spanish films of all time, winning ten Goya Awards (the Spanish version of the Oscar) and a slew of other awards. The critically acclaimed picture lived up to the hype.

Set in the turmoil of post-Franco Spain in 1980, it follows two mismatched detectives who are trying to find out who murdered two young women on a remote island. While everyone has their secrets on the island, one of the detectives might be harboring a secret of his own.

The whole movie gave off severe True Detective vibes, down to the hints of the supernatural. Excellent performances from the two leads, Raúl Arévalo and Javier Gutiérrez.

While some aspects felt rough around the edges because I’m used to the slicker, more highly polished American-style filmmaking, this one was definitely worth checking out.

It currently sits at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Suspect Zero

Another Tubi gem I found was the underrated Suspect Zero (2004) starring Aaron Eckhart, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Sir Ben Kingsley.

While not a perfect movie, it definitely deserved better than it got.

It’s a stylish noir piece that feels a little like it was trying to mimic Fincher’s Seven in a way, with Eckhart and Moss as reluctant FBI partners chasing a serial killer. The catch? In a very Dexter fashion, Kingsley plays the killer—a former FBI agent himself whose psychic powers gave him insight into killers, so he’s a serial killer of serial killers.

If that’s not a batshit crazy-enough premise for you, I don’t know what to tell you.

It’s not going to be your favorite movie. Hell, it won’t even make your top 25 favorite films (if it does, we need to talk…), but it’s a great time on a slow Monday afternoon.

The Brothers McKay

The Brothers McKay follows Craig Johnson’s tried-and-true formula of putting Absaroka County’s finest into a strange mystery, letting them fling jokes at each other through banter as sharp as a razor edge, and adding a bit of Wyoming’s natural hostility.

Add to this a mystery straight out of Dostoevsky, a wise mule, a Russian hitman trying to make amends (and to be learning of the English), and the usual silliness that life in Wyoming can bring, and this is another winner.

My favorite passage:

“He was killed with a rock. A baseball-sized rock, most likely. Maybe it was thrown.”

“So, you’re saying he was killed by Bob Gibson?”

“I think he’s dead.”

“I’ll take him off the list.”

But could you imagine Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon doing social media marketing? I can’t.

My favorite McCarthy story comes from his second wife, Anne DeLisle, who told of them living in a dairy barn in 1969. McCarthy was turning the barn into a house, doing all the stonework himself. They were destitute. They had no money. They were bathing in a lake on the property because they had no running water. DeLisle said,

"Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

Nearly 90-year-old Thomas Pynchon is so anti-publicity that there hasn’t been an actual picture of him taken since he was a young man.

Pynchon even satirized himself, lending his voice to the episode of The Simpsons where Marge wrote a book, appearing on the show with a paper bag over his head to hide his anonymity, while making fun of his ability to avoid the spotlight.

When Paul Thomas Anderson adapted Pynchon’s book Inherent Vice for the screen in 2014, Josh Brolin started a rumor that Pynchon was in the movie—but did not specify where or when. PTA has never confirmed this rumor, and it is believed that Brolin fabricated it for publicity, but it doesn’t stop people from hunting for the reclusive writer among the background extras.

While a select few people have achieved a level of renown that allows them to avoid marketing altogether, most writers have not. Most of us are scratching and clawing for scraps, and the platform freedom social media offers is one of the best ways people have been able to market their work.

The big problem comes in that good marketing DOES NOT mean good writing, and good writing DOES NOT mean good marketing.

Herein lies the disconnect.

There are many people online who are great at marketing. The romantasy genre seems to be the best example of this, where some writers have designed carefully curated social media accounts with all the right swagger, sin, and sexy images offered in just the right amounts to entice hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of followers to indulge in the $40 cover price for one of their elaborate sprayed-edge hardbacks.

And many of those same people who are great at marketing are absolutely terrible writers.

They lean wildly on tricks learned in high school creative writing classes, pepper their prose with adjectives, and sprinkle their dialogue liberally with em dashes and ellipses, thinking that the melodramatic delivery will heighten the sexual tension and deliver the reader into ecstasy. They bust out of the thesaurus for alternate terminology for the male sexual apparatus, and use anything but said for dialogue tags because their work is far too sophisticated for such basics.

But god, they’re good at marketing.

And thus, they can create a following, and publishers realize that from that following, they will generate enough sales to make publishing their dreck worth it.

Publishers don’t care whether a book is good; they only care whether it will sell.1

And most modern readers don’t seem to have a discerning palate when it comes to prose, either. They don’t care about the quality of the work, only if it’s titillating enough or hyped enough. You don’t see many of these influencers who review romantasy books talking about the quality of prose or diction in the work. They talk about the sex scenes and occasionally the characterization. But much of the talk is solely about the book's physical presentation: does it look good on a shelf?2

I cannot imagine how Pynchon or McCormac would fare in today’s market.

I cannot imagine a stone-faced McCormac staring into his iPhone3, hitting record, and saying, “The road went on through the ash and the silence. The sky was the color of old bone. Somewhere ahead a thin light lingered against the dark. The boy asked if there would be anything left when they got there. The man looked down the empty highway. At the trees blackened by fire. At the world holding its breath. There is still the carrying of the fire, he said.”

And then McCormac would stop the recording, add some orchestral music to play in the background, add an Instagram link to his Amazon page, and painstakingly caption the damned video with hashtags: #TheRoad #PostApocalyptic #Literature #CarryTheFire.

Somehow, the idea of Cormac McCarthy navigating social media to sell his books delights the hell out of me.

The very idea brings to mind the genius Tumblr page: Yelping with Cormac McCarthy. If you have not read this, please do. The Taco Bell trilogy alone is worth clicking the link.

Social media marketing also has a problem: much of it is based on appearance. Many women who are cute, petite, and attractive have managed to generate a sizable following through their appearance alone.

As my dad says, “Never underestimate the power of well-placed cleavage.”

Remember the story about the former Aussie rugby player who started reviewing smutty romantasy books in his tractor? Luke Bateman managed to cultivate a sizable following on TikTok thanks to a square jaw, farmer’s muscles, an agreeable personality, and an Australian accent. This led Atria Books to offer him a two-book contract despite the fact that Bateman HAD NEVER WRITTEN ANYTHING!!!4

When you bear a passing resemblance to Maurice Tillet5, marketing becomes that much more difficult.

I remember an interview on MTV years ago, at the height of Blues Traveler’s popularity, back during the Runaround and Hook era, when someone asked John Popper what he attributed to Blues Traveler’s success.

Popper, who was morbidly obese at the time, said that the songs had to be good because—and Popper stood, turned around, and presented his sizable, unsightly, jeans-clad backside to the camera— “This is not an ass that sells records.”

Some of us don’t show up well on film and video.

I’m one of those types. I’m a big fat guy. My head is a bit lopsided. My nose has been broken and is slightly off-center. I’m told I have nice eyes, and I do have long, luxuriant eyelashes which many women envy, but I also have permanent Homer Simpson-level five o’clock shadow, hair growing in places I’d rather it didn’t, and I’m bald, with a big, stony, pasty, white Irish dome that reflects light like a mirror. No woman has ever hit on me because of my looks.

At no point will a picture or video of me help sell a book.

I can be witty in a public venue where I’m given time to speak and do the proper dog-and-pony show, like a bookstore or a library, because I’ve had to learn to be mildly glib and funny to overcome my lack of attractiveness. But in the world of doomscrolling and ten-second clips, I don’t stand a chance. Marketing will never be my forte.

So, you’ll just have to put up with a couple of Substack posts instead of some fun TikToks where I dance or do some clever video cuts to make it look like I suddenly went from wearing cargo shorts and a Marillion t-shirt to a tuxedo6.

The Terror of Waiting

Next to marketing, waiting is its own special hell, as well. It seems like so much of modern life is instant: I can watch just about any movie I want in seconds thanks to streaming. I can listen to just about any song I want. I can read just about any book I want thanks to eReaders. You want to see a picture of the Taj Mahal? It’s as close as your phone. Bam! We are inundated with instant gratification.

I think that’s why waiting for things has become even more difficult.

As an overqualified 51-year-old struggling with job-hunting in this farkakte economy, let me tell you—waiting is the worst.

You apply for the job. It’ll be 4-6 weeks before they even start looking at resumes. Then, they’ll schedule you for a first-round interview. If you pass that, then you’ll do a Zoom interview. Then, if you pass that, you’ll do an in-person interview. And if you pass that, maybe a fourth or fifth-round interview, too! All for a job that pays $20 for data entry. From the day you apply to the day they finally reject you, it can take 2-4 months. Sometimes longer!

—Side note: applying for jobs is another venue where being attractive helps. When you are built like Shrek, you’re not getting through to the final round most of the time, regardless of qualifications. I get it, though: If it’s a choice between my Shrek-looking ass and a cute blond, I’m picking the cute blond, too.

Waiting for a book release is its own tragic torture.

My next book, Wide Open Empty, officially releases on June 30, 2026. While this might seem sudden to some of you, believe me—this thing has been in the works for a long time.

I’ve been thinking about the story involved for years. The writing process took me almost a year. The editing process took several months. I queried this one with agents (talk about a quixotic process…), which meant more waiting. From the day I typed the first word of this book to the day it hits the market, it’s been about 21 months.

My pal Maggie Ginsberg7 recently announced her new book, Daisy Chain. However, since she’s talented enough to go the traditional route, this book won’t be out until October of 2027. The book is written, but Maggie will still have several rounds of editing and what-have-you before it is finally published. The waiting will be an exquisite torture for her, I’m sure.

Once you’ve locked the book for publication, you hit an odd limbo where you just want the damned thing to be out so you can move on. It feels like everything hinges on the release of the book, so you just sort of cease functioning in your normal capacity because you’re holding your breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

You hope people will like it.

You hope it will be well-received.

You hope you’ll get some good reviews, which will attract more readers and more reviews.

You have pie-in-the-sky hopes, but you have to constantly temper them by reminding yourself that you’re a nobody, the market is oversaturated, and your book will launch to no fanfare, disappear quickly, and never hit the heights you dream for it. All but like 0.00000125% of the world will never even know it exists.

Not to mention, you get a lot of good ideas for what you should have written instead of what you did write after you’ve locked the book and marched it toward publication.8

There is a terror in waiting, as well. Your brain throws a lot of worst-case scenarios at you. At least mine does. Given that this book is different from most of the other books I’ve written, I’ve started questioning whether I should have written it in the first place.

Ah, well—if nothing else, my dad will like it.9

Wide Open Empty is a modern western noir crime novel set in the bleak, desert-like prairie of southeastern Colorado. I really hope you’ll read it. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Kindle link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0H3G8KV3P

Personalized signed paperback: https://seanpatricklittle.weebly.com/personalized-books.html

(People who are pre-ordering the paperback—copies are being mailed now!)

Wisconsin Pride

I wrote this Substack post at my local McDonald’s, not too long after it opened on Monday morning.

While I was working on it, an older gentleman came in and ordered breakfast. After the nice McDonald’s crew member brought it to him. This man waited until she left, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a bottle of Miller Lite.

Mickey D’s Big Breakfast and Beer.

I try to tell people about Wisconsin’s drinking culture. If anything, the stories and legends of the Sconnie ability to pound brews are undersold.

I’m actually surprised more of us aren’t alcoholics.

All righty then—that’s enough of my nonsense for now. I have more books to write.

Thanks for reading.

As I listened to the podcast, I found myself exploring my own writing in my head, as one does when listening to other writers talk about their writing.

I never wanted to write “serious” books. I just wanted to entertain people. I never consider big picture ideas like theme or meaning. I’m just out there telling stories. If I can add a joke in here or there, all the better.

However, with introspection, I realized I might be the antithesis of Maggie Ginsberg. I’m much more interested in isolation and loneliness.

Maybe this is a side effect of growing up out in the sticks of rural Wisconsin. While I always appreciated summer break—because it meant no school—it had the side effect of trapping me in the boonies with little to do.

My mother used to take my sister and me to the Mount Horeb Public Library on Monday mornings. We were required to gather several books to check out and subsequently read. Most of the time, I’d have them read well before the following Monday.

Outside of that, there were always chores to do. The chores on a farm are never-ending. We had a huge lawn, and it seemed to be in constant need of mowing. Every time there was a storm, all the trees around the lawn would shed dead branches, and those had to be picked up and taken to the woods for disposal. And when I got a little older, my parents got me a 15-speed touring bicycle for my birthday one year, and I started riding long distances when I could. Anything to get out of the house.

Looking back with the wisdom of age and the clarity of distance, I miss those days. I envy those days now, and I wish I could go back. As a child of the ‘80s, I clearly remember what it was like to walk out of the house and just…not be in the house for several hours without my parents thinking it was a problem. There were no cell phones to tether you to people. There were no obligations to answer text messages. There was no doomscrolling the news to see the next round of blatantly criminal activities our government was perpetrating, with no one stopping them. It was a simpler time.

Not to mention, being out in the sticks as I was, other than the occasional car passing the house, we could go a whole day without seeing other people. That’s the real appeal.

But growing up that way, you spent a lot of time alone, probably more than most kids. You were trapped in your head a lot of the time.

I think that’s why so much of my writing and thinking is about isolation.

The Survivor Journals came about because I desperately wanted to get home one night after a terrible day at work. I made the turn from the Interstate onto Highway 151 to get back to Sun Prairie, and found out that some numpty had done something stupid, caused an accident, and backed up traffic for miles. I was less than four miles from my house, but it took me over half an hour to get there, thanks to someone’s incompetence behind the wheel. I was seething. I remember wishing that I had Carrie White-levels of telekinesis so I could just start mentally hucking cars to the side of the road so I could just get home…and then my brain gave me the image of the empty highway, and I thought about how wild it would be to never have to deal with traffic again…and suddenly, I had the seed for a post-apocalyptic survival novel.

Through three long books, I explored ideas of loneliness. It gets to you, man. It eats away at you.

Abe and Duff are two lonely guys. Abe, dealing with the fallout of his recent divorce and feelings of inferiority, and Duff, with his broken past and Sherlockian monasticism—they are strange little men who live a strange little existence.

They are both utterly lonely while trapped in the middle of Chicago, a city of almost 3 million people, in the heart of a greater metro area of almost 10 million people.

I think the loneliness that comes from feeling isolated in the midst of so many people fascinates me. It’s loneliness due to a lack of human connection, not location. I think many of us feel that at times. We’re adrift in a sea of humanity, but still stuck on islands of our own making. In the internet age, we can reach out and connect with complete strangers, yet we still don’t know some of our neighbors’ names.1

In Welcome to Meskousing, Shelby Ree is an outsider to a community that typically shuns outsiders. However, since Shelby is the sheriff and of the bloodline that swore to protect the county, they accept her immediately. But since Shelby has the gifts that come with being the protector of the county, there’s still a sense of isolation that comes with having the weight of duty on her shoulders.

Shelby is also a leader, in charge of an odd assortment of deputies who are loyal to the county, and to her by extension, but as a leader, there is still a sense of separation from the underlings.

Strange Angels is the ultimate tale of being alone. It’s literally a single ship with a misfit crew against the most powerful corporation at the edge of space. The crew might serve as an ersatz family unit, but they are one entity against the universe.

Not to mention, they’re all dealing with isolation and loneliness in their own ways: Nathan Pageant never got over his relationship with Sunny Yeong. Crispy, afflicted with achondroplasia, has always felt different. And Quick Huffman, the cyborg merc, is not-quite-human and carrying the burden of how many people she has killed. Add in the mystery of Anne Medea, and you have four separate individuals trapped in their own little worlds, despite being on board a near-derelict transport ship in the middle of space.

Loneliness and isolation seem to be a recurrent theme in my writing, so why should we bother changing now?

Without further ado, Spilled Inc. Press is proud to present:

Wide Open Empty

Out at the end of June 2026, Wide Open Empty is a modern western noir crime novel, and probably the most traditional crime novel I’ve yet written.

From the back cover:

Set on the vast expanse of prairie country in southeastern Colorado, Wide Open Empty is a book that’s been in the back of my noggin since March of 2004, when I was offered a chance to interview for a job in Manzanola, Colorado. After seeing the town of 1100 people, and realizing how far out in the middle of nowhere, in the center of nothing, the town was (not to mention the pay was atrocious), I politely declined the offer and drove back to Wisconsin.

On the drive back, I ended up on Hwy 50, heading east. I drove through Rocky Ford, La Junta, Las Animas, and Fort Lyon before passing through Lamar, Colorado, just before I crossed the Kansas border.

I was struck by two things on that drive: the isolation and the relentlessly flat ground.

I remember driving for twenty to thirty minutes at a stretch, during which I saw no other cars. The road was empty in front of me and behind me, a long ribbon of flat black stretching to a point on the horizon. I found it utterly fascinating.2

Life cannot be easy, so far removed from civilization. While the small towns might offer some of the amenities of big city life, they couldn’t offer them all. When I saw a movie theater, it was one screen, maybe two. And it was showing a second-run picture that had already been out for weeks. The grocery stores were not much bigger than the Kwik Trip down the road from my house.3 The larger towns had populations ranging from 3,000-7,500 people (Lamar has 7610 as of the 2020 census), and between those towns were these strange blips on the map where a couple hundred—or sometimes fewer—people would gather in tiny, hardscrabble communities.

It’s not the sort of life for everyone, but I found it to be such a change from everything I knew growing up that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

After Google Maps introduced StreetView, I found myself heading to that part of Colorado and dropping the little PegMan character on random roads just to see what it looked like, to see if my memories of that place had changed much over the years. To no one’s surprise, they have not changed much in the twenty years since I was last out there.

Many of those communities are dying slow, miserable deaths. The populations of many of them are in decline. Some of those tiny blips on the map are nothing but houses in sore need of repair, without much life left to them. The prairie will claim them as soon as they are abandoned, swallowing them under the stunted scrub brush and Blue Grama.

Combining my fascination with such a place and my love for modern western mysteries like the Walt Longmire and Joe Pickett novels, I wanted to craft my own version of a modern western crime story.

Thus, we have Connor Croy, a former high school football star who led his hometown’s high school football team to their only state championship, had a mildly successful college career at NMSU (Go Aggies!), and eventually failed to make it as a professional—despite stints in every league offering a paycheck, including the Italian Football League.4

With nothing else going for him, Connor returns home to find his father dead from an apparent suicide, which Connor refuses to accept. His search to prove his father didn’t die from suicide uncovers some revelations about his father that Connor never expected, and it forces him to make some decisions about his own life.

Wide Open Empty is the most traditional crime novel I’ve written yet. There are a couple of funny lines, but I wouldn’t say it’s a funny book. It’s actually fairly dark, much closer to the work of S.A. Cosby than Craig Johnson.

It will be out on Kindle (and Kindle Unlimited) at the end of June, with paperbacks appearing around the same time. (But due to shipping and logistics, nailing down an exact date for paperbacks is more difficult.)

There is already a pre-order link on my website for personalized copies, which will come with other goodies like bookmarks and stickers.

Being a nobody author with no promotional abilities and no marketing skills in this social media age, I’ll probably not be doing an onslaught of things like podcasts, blogs, etc…

This will be another one of those throw-it-out-there-and-hope-for-the-best things where I’ll rely on pure luck and happenstance to market the book for me.

Wide Open Empty was written as a standalone novel, but could become a series if people actually like it. So, fingers crossed.

This is one of those books I needed to exorcise from my brain. I have wanted to write something like this for years, so I finally did.

I hope you don’t hate it.

Thanks for reading.

At this point, I’m really tired of this book. I’m very proud of it, but after months of writing, rewriting, editing, revising, paring down chapters only to add more paragraphs, and finally going through the final proof copy checkpoints, I’m ready to move on from this novel, at least for a while, and work on something entirely different.

I’m to the point where I have read this book so many times, I’m almost numb to it. But stay tuned for further developments on this one. They will be coming soon.

One thing I will let drop about this next book is that I deliberately set the book in the mid-1990s.

There has been a lot of nostalgia about the mid-90s lately. Jonah Hill’s screenwriting and directorial debut was a pretty solid little coming-of-age movie called mid90s, where Sunny Suljic played Stevie, a kid growing up in Los Angeles in the mid-90s who falls in with a pack of skaters.

Not to mention, those of us who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s have been losing a lot of our heroes lately.

Ozzy Osbourne, James Van Der Beek, Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees, Rob Base, soul singer D’Angelo, and Matthew Perry top the list of people who were heroes to Gen X (to one degree or another) who have checked out recently.

Not to mention all the ‘90s artists who checked out long before recently: Scott Weiland, Chris Cornell, Chester Benington, Layne Staley, Shannon Hoon, River Phoenix, Chris Farley, and of course, Kurt Cobain. The list goes on and on.

Point is, a whole slew of people who those of us from Gen X liked a lot are gone now.

In the Acknowledgements section of the new book, you can find out my specific reasons for writing a book set in 1996, but that’s an issue for another day.

Today, I’d like to share a few songs and bands that helped shape who I was in the ‘90s, and maybe trigger a little nostalgia for 30 years ago.1

Confession time: Nirvana is overrated. So is Pearl Jam.

Actually, most of the guys from the Seattle scene I could take or leave. I liked Nevermind and Ten, but I was much more of a Smashing Pumpkins guy. While I gave the Seattle sounds the requisite listens that being a teen/early 20s guy in the 1990s demanded, my heart was far more in the Smashing Pumpkins camp than anything else.

I think it was the Chicago roots. I had far more in common with Billy Corgan than with Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain, simply because of our regionality. Billy is still a Midwest guy. He grew up listening to Rush, as I did. We both liked pro-wrestling. I always felt more kinship with Corgan. I can’t explain it.

There was something about the fuzzy, crunchy guitar sound of the Pumpkins, too. Jimmy Chamberlain’s drums were tight, and D’Arcy Wretzky’s bass was fine, but the wall of sound Billy and James Iha produced was addictive. Not to mention, the trio of Gish, Siamese Dream, and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is one of the best first three albums of any band of all time. After the double album, nothing the Pumpkins have done since has landed with me. I’m still a fan—but I never bothered to buy any of their albums after Mellon Collie.

Siamese Dream gave us what is probably my favorite power ballad of any grunge-era band, “Rocket.” The slow build to the joyous chorus, “I shall be free.” It always gets me, despite the darker tone of the rest of the lyrics.

If I had to give any Seattle band props, it would have to be Alice in Chains. Between Layne Staley’s vocals and Jerry Cantrell’s guitar work, they put out some amazing records.

My favorite A-i-C record is the 1994 EP Jar of Flies. It was the first EP to debut at #1 on the Billboard Charts. It was also self-produced, with the band fronting costs for recording and mixing. It earned them two Grammy nominations, as well.

“I Stay Away” is a beautiful song, roaming the dark and howling vocals Staley was known for, with a jangly guitar sound that reminds me of Concrete Blonde’s James Mankey.

I have a lot of good memories of this album. When I was in college, I worked at a Godfather’s Pizza with my buddy Matt Malecha. There was a jukebox in the restaurant, and most nights when he and I were closing the store, we would crank the volume on that thing and splurge on a few quarters for some tunes.

Jar of Flies was always in rotation when we were there.

If I had to pick one punk/grunge band out of the whole of the ‘90s that I would call my “favorite” of that era, it’d be House of Large Sizes, hands down.

From the mean streets of Cedar Falls, Iowa, Dave Deibler and his wife, Barb Schilf, created a power trio that played in-your-face power punkpop. Dave was the engine that drove the band, wrestling his Gibson SG in a perpetual MMA match with the thing, while Barb would bounce along on the stage opposite, Wednesday Addams braids flying.

Because they were from Iowa, they played in Minnesota a lot, and my buddies and I would pile into a car and go see them whenever they were nearby. Which was a lot. The shows were always great. I miss those days.

Dave and Barb run Octopus now, a bar in Cedar Falls, alongside their vintage consignment/retail shop, Mohair Pair. Dave is still dedicated to bringing live, local music into his place to play. In 2023, House of Large Sizes was inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A well-deserved honor.

Their first drummer, Dave Berg, was replaced by a drummer named Mark Munn, who—strangely enough—now lives in my area. I know he lived in Sun Prairie for a little while, and he still plays in some local bands. You can see him with the ‘80s cover band The Empty Vees whenever they play in Madison. I occasionally run into Mark. He’s a good dude. Does landscaping when he’s not drumming.

Another underrated ‘90s band, Material Issue was one of the vanguards of that mid-90s power punkpop scene. Lead singer and guitarist Jim Ellison played nothing but tight, catchy hooks and sang quirky love songs, as evidenced by Kim the Waitress.

MI’s drummer, Mike Zelenko, was even immortalized in a song by Wesley Willis.

Material Issue was one of those bands that were poised to become huge—and just before they did, Jim Ellison lost his battle with depression and took himself out of this life.

As Martin Short said recently after his daughter, Kate, committed suicide, “The understanding [is] that mental health and cancer, like my wife’s, are both diseases, and sometimes with diseases they are terminal.”

Chixdiggit should have been huge. They had two knocks against them, though: they were too weird and funny, and they were Canadian.

Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, this powerpop bar band of Canuks put on one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. The most fun I have ever had at any concert was in the Seventh Street Entry in Minneapolis, watching The Groovie Ghoulies open for Chixidiggit.

Each band played for about an hour, and neither band had a single song that was more than three minutes long. Everything was tight, riffy, crunchy, and fun. They didn’t take themselves seriously. They were there to entertain.

Chixdiggit has put only five albums, most recently 2007’s Chixdiggit II, which has such hits as “Dolphins Love Kids,” and “Henry Rollins is No Fun.”

They’ve put out two EPs since that album, too: Safeway Here We Come in 2011, and the gimmick EP 2012 in 2016—which is a single, 24-minute track of nineteen individual songs the band wrote about each town they played in during a Canadian tour.

They’re still playing, too. They have gone through some lineup changes, but lead singer KJ Jansen is still out there playing solo, or sometimes with the guys that now make up whatever form of Chixdiggit is still together. Part of me hopes they’ll be doing a show near the convention site when I’m in Calgary this October for Bouchercon. I’d definitely kick out to hear them rock their way through another eclectic setlist.

Not all the bands I listened to in the ‘90s were punk bands. Obviously, I was playing more than my fair share of progressive rock, and of course that would mean some Rush and Marillion.

Rush’s Roll the Bones came out during my sophomore year of high school. It was the album that got me into them, and pretty much turned me into a Rush fan for life. While the album is, admittedly, not the strongest record of their discography, it remains my favorite of their records, because there’s just something about your first album.

Fun fact: Roll the Bones is the first album I ever bought on compact disc. I still have that one, and still spin it regularly.

Physical media for life.

Marillion put out their final record from their run with EMI in 1995. Afraid of Sunlight remains one of my favorite albums of their whole discography, second only to their masterpiece, 1987’s Clutching at Straws (their final album with original lead singer Fish).

My favorite tracks from Afraid of Sunlight are the title track and the not-played-live-enough sister track, “Afraid of Sunrise.” However, the final track on the album, “King,” is a big, bold sonic warhammer of a song that runs the gamut from quiet ballad to in-your-face aural assault.

It always delivers, particularly when the boys from Aylesbury are in fine fettle in front of an audience of Marillion fans.

That’s enough reminiscing for today. This is enough of a playlist for a beautiful Sunday evening in May. Summer is coming—most of these tunes demand to be played at loud volumes, so feel free to shock your neighbors.

New book is coming. Stay tuned for that.

Here’s a preview:

That’s all you get for now.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of success because it has no concrete definition. Success is abstract by nature, and it lives on a broad, wide, sliding scale that differs from person to person and era to era.

What we define as “routine” or “average” nowadays would most certainly qualify as success to someone from 1902. What someone from 1902 believed was average would have blown the mind of someone in Europe in 1245 AD.

My current idea of success would make Taylor Swift break down, cry, vomit, and quit music because she couldn’t afford the pay cut or lack of adulation.

I have always known I wanted to write books, but I never really thought about what success as a writer meant until I was in college. I had a writing professor at Winona State (Go Warriors) who asked us, “What do you want to do as a writer?”

What the heck did that even mean? I had no clue. I had never considered the question. I wanted to write. I wanted to write books.

None of us in the class had the bravado or audacity to raise our hands and proclaim, “I want to be a rich and famous writer.” If I recall, none of us in the cohort even answered. We looked at each other stupidly for a few moments, and then the prof said, “Anyone?”

So, me being the big doofus I am, I raised my hand and said, “I’d like to make a living as a writer.”

The prof said, “What does that entail?”

I shrugged and said, “Bills paid. A house in the ‘burbs. Maybe two cars? I don’t know.”

To his credit, this professor said, “That ain’t gonna happen.”

He was a realist.

He didn’t sugarcoat things.

This was the first time someone made me think about what success as a writer would even look like. I hadn’t thought about it before that moment. I was pragmatic enough to think I’d never be Stephen J. Cannell, Stephen King, or Michael Crichton…but I was also stupid enough to think maybe I could get something.

At that age—I think I was 23 or 24 when I took that class—I had a picture of success in my head. It involved a house, a car, and health insurance.1 Since that class, my scale of success has had to adjust accordingly as my age and range of knowledge and experience have progressed.

Now, I’m wise enough to have a minimalist definition of success.

And I’m also wise enough to know I haven’t achieved my own, very small, very realistic definition of success. This is probably because my own insecurities and inferiority complex keep pushing what I believe to be “success” further down the sliding scale.

When I first published, just having a book available for people to purchase made me feel successful. At least for a few minutes. It gave me a sense of accomplishment. There was a physical trophy for my efforts. I made a thing.

After a while, just having that trophy wasn’t good enough. Now, I look back on that first book I made, and I loathe it. It wasn’t good enough. My standards rose. I learned more about the industry. I learned more about myself. I developed my own true voice, whereas in that first book I was just really trying hard to be Neil Gaiman.2

I needed another trophy. A better trophy. And I needed sales. And reviews.

I eventually made more trophies. Better trophies. And I got some sales. And I got some reviews. I remember when After Everyone Died broke the 50-review barrier; I was pretty amazed. And then it got to 100 reviews, and I thought I was finally a success.

And then it got to 500 reviews, and I knew it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. And the sales weren’t enough. I needed more.

I’ve now sold more copies of The Survivor Journals trilogy than most nobody authors will sell of all their books over the entire lifespan of their books…and it’s still not enough.

Success is slippery. It goes away so fast…

The other thing about success is that there are no hard-and-fast rules about it. Everyone’s definition will be different. And most of us will never know if we get there or not. How do you even know if you’re successful or not?

One of the reasons I know I’m not entirely successful: I don’t get asked to do things too often.

I look at some people, and they’re going to this conference to speak, or that conference to lead a panel, or they’re going to this festival or that festival. Or maybe they’re an artist-in-residence for a week. Or they’re on podcasts. Or they’re going to awards ceremonies. Or they’re writing articles for publications or industry newsletters.

I’m not doing any of that.

I’m at home killing time before I have to go to work, cracking forth on a new work-in-progress, and hovering in that terrible limbo between sending out query letters and waiting for the inevitable rejections from agents who are seeking anything but the stuff I’m putting out into the world.

If I’m not at the job I work to pay the bills (because my writing is paying for about a Big Mac Value Meal per month3), then I’m in front of the computer either working on a new WIP, trying to get the stuff together to publish a new WIP (a once a year thing, to be fair…), or I’m writing promotional stuff like this Substack post. And if I’m not doing any of that, I’m reading or watching TV. Sometimes, I might go out for Mexican food. (Gloria’s in Sun Prairie—try the Burrito Loco with chorizo. Thank me later.)

That’s about it.

I’m honestly one of the most boring human beings you’ll ever meet.

I’ve been asked to do a couple of podcasts. I was once asked to be interviewed for someone else’s blog post. On rare occasions, a library might have me in to teach a writing class or self-publishing class, but it’s been a while since I’ve done that. I think the last one I did, people were still masking because it was freshly post-COVID.

The point is, I’m home a lot.

Now, some people would say that I have to put myself out there to land those kinds of events—but I’d argue that I am already out there. I’m not hiding. If you Google my name, I’m the first thing that pops up.

This is actually a major victory because, for the longest time, if you Googled me, Sean Patrick Flannery would show up before me.

Damn you, Flannery!

My pal Dana Storino is a firm believer in the power of social media marketing, and she spends a considerable amount of time making great videos to share her books and personality with the public. She is adamant that I should be doing the same.

@dana_storino_authorSometimes writing characters is like...

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I’m hesitant to bother doing it because no one needs my bald, Shrek-looking head filling up their social media, and social media is already full of people doing the exact same thing. To me, it feels no different than publishing or podcasting. It’s all people screaming into the void. Do I really need to add my voice to the cacophony? Or should I just say what I need to say on the page?

Dana’s really good at the social media stuff, though. I’m pretty sure if I tried to make videos, it’d mostly be close-ups of my big, potato-looking head staring blankly into the camera, then muttering, “Uh…buy my book, hey?” before fumbling for the switch to stop recording.

No one needs that.

It’s just too hard to get known as a writer in this day and age. It was never easy, but it’s even harder now. There are too many books, too many writers, and not enough bandwidth in the galaxy for everyone to achieve the levels of success they would all like to achieve, so some of us have to fall on swords and just be content with the meager drippings that we can lap up in the wake of the success of others.

With the advent of the blasphemy of AI profit-seekers, they have TRIPLED the number of books published daily. Two-thirds of all books hitting the market on any given day are AI “authors”—and I use that term loosely and with great contempt.4

And by authors, I mean scammers from China or India or some other country who are using AI to churn out vomitous scripts and publish them on Amazon, hoping that suckers will buy them.5

I saw one fake author today who has published 507 novels THIS YEAR ALONE.

It’s so bad that my next book will bear this insignia that I created on the indicia page:

As I have recently hit my 20th year in struggling in the choppy sea of the indie publishing world, I’d like to think I’ve gotten better at it. I’ve definitely learned a lot over two decades. I’ve met some people, made some inroads, but still haven’t gotten to where I want to be.

I like to think my sliding scale of success has gotten a little more achievable, but we all know that’s not true.

Success will forever be just beyond my grasp, always unattainable.

I could sell as many books as Michael Connelly, have my characters in hit shows like Bosch and Ballard, and I’d probably still be looking at Stephen King and thinking, There’s the definition of success—that guy over there.

Film Suggestion of the Day

Genius (2016)

A slow-burning, but well-acted film about the great editor, Max Perkins (who worked at Scribner’s and discovered Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald), and his friendship with the troubled Thomas Wolfe as they work to publish his first book, Look Homeward, Angel, and the sequel, Of Time and the River.

I’ve probably watched this movie a half-dozen times now. Just watched it again last night after work.

Colin Firth is solid as a brick in everything he does (even his sketchy singing in Mama Mia), and Jude Law’s kinetic, fractured performance as Wolfe is riveting.

This is streaming for free on Tubi right now. (Click the hyperlink above to start watching.)

That’s enough of my rambling for this installment.

Tell me your definition of success, and how you will know when you get there.

Thanks for reading.

Remember when December took an eternity?

When you were a little kid, the weather would get cold. Snow would start to fly. And suddenly, you’d be in the middle of December. The tree was up. Maybe that one aunt who was always jumping the gun to get things done early would have already mailed presents to your house, and now you’ve got a wrapped box with your name on it under the tree, and the anticipation of being able to open the damned thing was agonizing.

And you’d still have at least a full week before Christmas Break started. After a long fall of slogging it out through second-grade activities, you were really looking forward to that break. You knew it would be two full weeks of fun, new toys, Christmas movies, food, sledding, snow forts, relatives, and no school.

But first, you had to get to Christmas. The wait was always agonizing, wasn’t it?

The final week of school before the holiday would take forever. Seconds felt like months.

And then suddenly, it was the last day before break! You’d have some sort of holiday party in your classroom for the last activity of the day. You were oblivious to the exhaustion in your teacher’s eyes, but believe me—it was there. Teachers look forward to breaks more than students.

The day would end, but if you were me, you would still be subjected to an hour-and-change bus ride home before the holiday could officially begin. But it was usually only December 22 or 23 when the break would start. You would still have the eternity of December 24 to suffer through, and that day could be longer than the rest of the month put together.

Now, it feels strange to remember those days because everything seems accelerated. We’re already into May! Who saw that coming? It was January like yesterday. My weeks are speedy, tumbling from event to event, work schedule to work schedule, with hardly any time to think between them. I need more hours in the day because so much of life is flying past.

My daughter is just about to finish her junior year of college. She’ll be a senior already. It’s been over a year since my beloved dog, Eddy, passed. Where did that time go? My silly little kitten, Clive, is a year old now—larger than the other two cats, and well muscled. What happened to the happy little idiot I could hold in the palm of my hand? I registered for Bouchercon 2026 in September of last year, and the eleven-month wait felt like it would take forever. Now we’re already less than six months from Calgary. Spring has arrived in force in Wisconsin, and it will be a quectosecond1 until summer is here.

Time is a blink. It’s a blip. It’s to the point where it almost has no meaning anymore. Weeks blend into weeks, months into months. In some ways, I kind of feel like I’m looking at my watch impatiently and thinking, “Shouldn’t I be dead already?”

And this is true for almost everything…

…except the query trenches.

I finished a new book a couple of months back. I’ve been editing the hell out of it, and since it’s a brand new IP, and since I’m a glutton for punishment, I waded back into the query trenches, which I always swear I’ll never do, but then I say, “Aw, to hell with it…let’s see what happens.”

I wrote and refined a pretty decent query letter and winged it out to about thirty or thirty-five agents who claimed they were looking for crime novels. I used QueryTracker for some of them, and good ol’ email for others.

And now, we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Time is still flying by, but waiting for literary agents to respond to your query can be the most agonizing thing. How can weeks blend into weeks at the rate they do for normal life, but waiting for replies from potential agents takes upwards of 363 Gigaseconds.2

A few agents are kind enough to wing out a form letter rejection within a few days. I get it. They’re busy people. The average agent receives 100-300 queries PER DAY. Must be nice to have work come to you like that. However, I can imagine the quandary it presents when their email inbox is just clogged with hopeful writers begging for a chance to be published.

However, most of the agents I’ve queried attached a rider to their manuscript wishlist and query instructions that says something like “Due to the volume of queries I receive, I cannot reply to everyone individually. If you don’t hear from me after X weeks, please assume that I am not interested in representing your work.”

Fair enough. Busy people. Too busy to send form letters. I get it. No harm, no foul.

But that still means I have to wait…and wait…and wait.

Meanwhile, civilizations are rising and falling. Whole species are evolving and going extinct. The statue of Ozymandias has fallen and turned to sand, save for his shattered visage, despite the fact that I looked on his works and despaired.

And then, out of the blue, on the same day, two agents had the audacity to email me and say, “Hey, I like what you’re doing here. Send me the whole manuscript, would you?”

And that, my friends, is why Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest part.

The odds of either of these agents actually agreeing to represent the book are still astronomical; I realize that. I’m trying to remain apathetic to the process because I know how long and grueling it can be. Anything can happen between now and anything good, and I’m well aware of just how difficult a road it is.

Back when I wrote After Everyone Died, I queried a slew of agents, and several requested a full manuscript. All of them dragged me along for a month or three before saying something like, “I really like this. The voice is great. But I don’t think the market will support post-apocalypse YA stuff.”

And those months of waiting for a response after a full query were like waiting for Christmas when you’re seven years old times a Gigasecond.

Still, when I queried The Single Twin, I think only one agent actually asked for a full manuscript; they liked the story but politely turned it down.

It’s nice to be seen…but waiting is hard.

Because I am a pessimist, a pragmatist, and a realist3, I will continue to refine and edit the novel on my own. I’ll work up the cover and do all the things I need to publish this bad boy through Spilled Inc. Press as I have done for all my other projects.

But I will hold off on any announcements about this project…for now.

Just in case.

Think good thoughts for me.

Some Things I’ve Read Recently That You May or May Not Enjoy

I think the first time I heard about this book was at Maggie Ginsberg’s appearance on the BookPop Podcast at Lake City Books. I don’t think they’re doing that podcast anymore, which is a shame because I really enjoyed it.

Several people raved about it, so I opened up the little Notes app on my phone and wrote the title down. I didn’t want to pay hardcover prices, so I waited…and waited. And finally, after many, many months of waiting4, the Libby app delivered it to me.

I read it on my Kindle, and I have to say—did not care for it.

Chris Whitaker is clearly a good writer. He knows how to make the sentences work. He had a good idea, and the story's premise was gold. I enjoyed many aspects of this work, but in the end, I found it more annoying and unsatisfying than good. I’m aware this might just be a “me” issue.

I found his prose was overwritten and needlessly melodramatic. It works if you sprinkle the melodrama like a fine spice, but when you bury the text in it, like your Aunt Marjorie making mayo salad with a hint of tuna, it becomes annoying.

I found the characters frustrating. I found several plot holes that bothered me. And in the end, a lot of this book relies on coincidences that border on fey-level magic.

I get why people liked it. I get why it got all the positive reviews. I get why it sold a bajillion copies. I get why it got a movie deal.

It just wasn’t for me.

A novel that bends genres, moving between traditional crime thriller and superhero noir, While The City Never Sleeps is a hallmark book for Alex Bledsoe’s already storied career.

Bledose had been on record as saying this novel was inspired by an indie comic from the ‘80s called Night Streets, and it feels like it. It moves quickly, with scenes like comic panels, rapid dialogue, and little wasted movement.

It has the pace and heart of a superhero movie but also makes some social commentary on policing, journalism, and crime.

While this novel was super fun and a great ride, I can’t help but feel like this book would be better served as a multi-issue graphic novel, and I really hope that venue opens up for this somewhere down the road.

This one is definitely worth a read.

I bought this book the same year Will Trent started on ABC. I meant to read it, but it got shuffled to the TBR pile for a long time. Now, as Will Trent is finishing up its fourth season, it took an Instagram post from Bishop Rider author Beau Johnson to finally kick me in the butt and make me read it.

The review: Stellar.

I will often pick up books and halfway through think, “I can write better than this. Why haven’t I gotten a traditional deal?”

With Karin Slaughter’s first book in the Will Trent canon, it was clear from the jump: This woman is way smarter than I am and a far better writer. It was one of those books that bordered on literary mystery, with the quality of the prose, but the grittiness and humanity kept it humble and accessible.

It’s graphic at times. Brutally graphic.

It’s also one of those books you can’t put down.

This one jumped to the top of my recommendation pile. Just stellar work.

I’m almost done with the fifth book in the Mike Bowditch series, The Bone Orchard, at the moment. Because I have OCD, I hate to pick up books in the middle of a series. Let me start at number one and go from there.

Paul Doiron has crafted a great series that feels familiar to the likes of CJ Box and Craig Johnson, while doing its own thing in the deep woods of rural Maine.

Like CJ Box’s Joe Pickett, Mike Bowditch is a game warden. All game wardens are law enforcement officers. They have to go through the same cop training as all police, then attend a specialized school to learn about the fish and game management issues a game warden needs to know.

The first book starts Mike off as a rookie, and each novel expands his world from there.

Bowditch is more affable than Joe Pickett. Not once has he warned people that things might get western, as Joe likes to say. He’s not as easygoing as Walt Longmire, though. Bowditch is wound a little tighter than Craig Johnson’s lauded sheriff. Bowditch is prone to rash decisions and a bit of an attitude. It makes him more human, more approachable. He’s also not as good with the ladies, and that only serves to make you root for him a bit more.

I’m greatly enjoying riding with Mike Bowditch through Maine. The Mainers have their own ways of speaking and reacting. The region Bowditch patrols is populated with poverty and stress. It’s a pressure-cooker of a place, despite the pristine beauty.

It’s a good series of novels, neither too macho nor too soft. Like Maine itself, I think these might be a little underrated.

Anyhow—that’s enough nonsense for this installment.

Thanks for reading.

At the time, the Coens were still relatively underground. They had made three movies before Fink, and had a relative success with Raising Arizona, and while Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing are widely heralded now, they hadn’t yet hit upon the success that Fargo would bring them.

At the time, I hadn’t seen Blood Simple or Miller’s Crossing, and I’d only watched Raising Arizona once. While I appreciated it, particularly for Nic Cage’s performance as the bumbling H.I. McDunnough (“He explained to us that Edwina’s insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”), I hadn’t connected the writers of that movie to Fink.

All I knew was that Barton Fink was about a writer, and I wanted to be a writer, so I figured I needed to watch it.

I rented it from the theater and video store in Northfield, Minnesota (a place whose name escapes me now1) on a dark and cold winter night. I remember watching it, not quite understanding it, and being largely confused.

I have grown to like it as a film, but I’ll not be the first to say it’s not the Coens’ best work.

However, one of the things that always stuck with me is near the end.

Fink has been assigned to write a “wrestling picture” by his boss, Jack Lipnick. Fink has no idea how to write a wrestling picture. After a near miss with a serial killer, Fink finds a plot for the film, and in a workaholic fever, he writes the entire script in a single sitting. Then, he goes out dancing. While dancing wildly, a number of sailors who are shipping out in the morning are crowding the dance hall.

A sailor tries to cut in on Fink and the girl he’s dancing with, and this infuriates Fink. He turns to the sailor and seethes, “I’m a writer! Celebrating the completion of something GOOD! Do you understand that, sailor? I’m a WRITER!”

To this day, that scene, that moment, has stuck in my head as clearly as anything else in my muddled mind. Not for the absurdity of the film, or the performance of John Turturro, nor the audacity of his lack of self-awareness in the moment.

I remember wondering: How does he know?

How does he know he wrote something good?

I don’t know if any writers know when they've written something good. When Melville finished Moby Dick, did he scrawl The End on the last page with a triumphant flourish, thump his fist on the pile of parchment, and then say, “Awww, hells yeah, bitches! Look at this fresh beast!”

Did Steinbeck know he wrote something that would inspire and frustrate high school juniors for years when he finished The Grapes of Wrath?

Did Harlan Ellison know he touched the face of the Almighty when he finished the script for the Star Trek episode, City on the Edge of Forever?

—Actually, Ellison probably did. He was kind of a dick.2

But I digress.

I have written dozens and dozens of books over the years. I wrote a couple in high school (all terrible), a few more in college (terrible, but with a wanna-be literary-academic vibe), and then I scrawled madly for years before I completed something I actually believed other people might want to read, too.

Turns out, they didn’t. But that’s okay.

The consistent theme between all the books I’ve written is that I have no idea if they are good or not.

And how does one even define good in this day and age?

Good is such a subjective term. So many books are written each year, with most of them being “good” in some way, shape, or form. A lot of objectively bad books are written, too. But where does the line get drawn between good and bad? How does a writer know something is good or bad?

I’m of the mindset that writers don’t know if their own work is good or bad, initially. Good and bad are more in the domain of the public, the critics, and whether or not something will stand the test of time. The Scarlet Letter has obviously held up to the test of time for Nathaniel Hawthorne…but his first work, Fanshawe—not so much.

All a writer knows about their book is whether they like it or not. By the time a writer finishes the alpha draft of a new book, they’ve been thinking about it for months, maybe years. They’ve probably read through it a few times, all told. Maybe not start to finish, but they’ve reread paragraphs, chapters, sections, etc. The writer is well aware of what the pages contain.

Or at least they should be.

So, let’s talk about process today, how I actually do what I do.

For whatever it’s worth to you.3

The Alpha Draft

The Idea

I don’t know where ideas come from. Sometimes they’re just something that sparks in your brain. They might come from a strange situation or moment in time. They might come from a character that pops into your head. They might come from a place you saw once and thought, That’d make a great setting for a book.

I have a list of ideas in my Google Drive of books I will probably never write, and some are just as simple as a phrase that popped into my head out of the blue. I have a file titled “Potential Fantasy Novel?” and the only thing in the Google Doc is the phrase, “The prefect of Aquitaine.”

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know anything about the prefect, or what or where Aquitaine is… but that file is there. It was an idea, something about it tickled my brain, and I saved it. It might never turn into anything, but it exists, regardless. Can’t turn into something until it’s on a page, right?

Once I have an idea, I start writing. Simple as that. Dyed-in-the-wool Pantser over here (because the Pantser/Plotter debate will rage forever in the writing community). The problem with flying by the seat of your pants as a Pantser does is that sometimes the book stalls out. I will get a spot in the draft and then have no idea what is supposed to happen next or where the narrative is going.

When this happens, I put the book on a back burner and go back to working on something else. As long as you keep moving forward on something, eventually, something will be completed.

Eventually, I hit a spot where I “crack” the book. I figure out what the book is, what it should be, and how it will get to the end. I might not have all the puzzle pieces, but I have enough that I know what the final picture will be, and then it’s off to the races on that one.

After I hit that point where I crack it, I might even indulge in a rough outline to make sure the timeline will work, and I have the necessary parts. It’s nowhere near the plot grids that some people make out for their work, but it’s something.

The Drafting Process

My first drafts are always typed. I can’t write longhand anymore. Between arthritis and a lack of patience, me and pen-and-ink no longer speak. Typing is more practical. The pieces I come up with will be in a workable form, ready to be shortened, lengthened, moved around, or cut as needed. I’m not taking the time to transfer a longhand draft into a computer. More credit to the authors who still do that.

I like a good mechanical keyboard. I use a cheap Havit clacky keyboard—the sound of the keys makes you feel like a writer. It sounds like a newsroom in an ‘80s movie—when all the big newspapers moved from typewriters to those big-ass IBM Model M noisy clackers.

I work almost exclusively in Scrivener. I have tried many software programs over the years. My first books (back when I was a kid), I worked in WordPerfect or QuarkXPress. I moved to MS Word and Google Docs. I’ve tried Final Draft, Celtx, Novlr, and other author-focused word processing programs.

Scrivener is practical. It has a ton of options, most of which I don’t even use, and it has a one-time payment of $49. I absolutely loathe the fact that we have become a subscription-based world. I don’t want to give something $5 a month for the rest of my life. Here’s a one-time fee, now give me the software. End of transaction.

I use Scrivener in a method where each file in the binder is a chapter, and each chapter contains as many sections as it needs. I save each section as a backup in Google Docs, so I don’t lose it in the event of a computer crash. Every three to five chapters, I’ll back up my Google Doc file onto a flash drive, just for extra safety. And every so often, I’ll email myself a copy of the manuscript as it stands, downloaded from Scrivener.

Can’t be too safe, can we?

I read somewhere that Marc Cameron (Arliss Cutter series, Jericho Quinn series) just emails himself his Word document at the end of every writing session, then opens the email the next day to start writing again. Repeat until the book is finished. He has other backups, too. He once lost 30,000 words in a computer crash, so he gets a little crazy about file safety. Can’t blame him.

While I write, I’m constantly refining. If I hit a point where the ideas are getting constipated and I’m starting to lose the plot, I’ll go back to the beginning, reread, and start tightening sentences, paragraphs, and phrasing. By the time I write The End on the last page, I’ve probably already revised chapters 1-6 more than a dozen times, chapters 7-12 at least a dozen times, and chapters 12-20 at least two or three times—sometimes more.

Point is—my first draft is far from a “rough” draft, which is why I like the term alpha draft more.

After I type The End, I usually spend the rest of the day doing anything but writing. Then, over the next week, I go back and do a “tighten” of the whole work. Does it work? Does it look good? Does it do what I want it to do? If so, then the alpha draft is considered completed.

The Resting

After I finish an alpha draft, I set it aside. It has to rest.

Like a Thanksgiving turkey.

I need to get some time and space from the draft. I need to clear it from my head for a while. I go and work on something other than the alpha draft. It helps me to forget all the jumbled thoughts I’ve had of the book over the last several months.

During the resting time, I will send the alpha draft to a couple of friends who are readers and whom I trust will tell me if it sucks, and I will let them see if it works. Any feedback they give will be taken into consideration during the beta draft.

Because I’m a self-contained operation, I also use this time to work on other parts of the process, like cover design, and I start thinking about marketing ideas and how to make the world aware that the project exists.

I will design up about twenty or thirty different cover ideas, experimenting with different colors, fonts, and images. I’ll start working on the back cover copy.

As time goes on, I’ll figure out which design idea is stronger than the others, and I’ll go with it. By this point, I’ve often had a title for the book, but on a few occasions, I haven’t, and this is the time when I’ll start trying to come up with a decent title.

However, the most important thing is that I don’t think about the book for a few weeks.

The Beta Draft

After I give myself some time away from the book, I’ll go back in and start the beta draft. Because the draft has already been tightened, I know the grammar and such are in really good shape.

The beta draft is primarily about the story and the sound of the sentences. I use MS Word's Immersive Reader to read the book aloud through my computer. It’s not a perfect reader, but it works, and I’m already paying for MS365, so I might as well use it. I’ve tried other online readers like Text-to-Speech, but most either cost too much or don't fit enough text in the available space. I can’t work with something that only allows 1000 characters at a time, or something that only gives you 500 words before charging you.

Being an indie outfit like Spilled Inc. Press, it’s all about doing things as cheaply as possible.

The Immersive Reader is a little robotic at times, but it gets the job done. I can hear the sentences. I’m able to discern what works and what doesn’t. If I hear a crazy long sentence, my brain goes, That doesn’t work!, and then I’m able to pare it down.

While I’m listening to sentences, I’m highlighting what needs to be changed, tightened, fixed, etc.

Now the real work begins. I can only edit a chapter or two per day. It’s a slow-going grind. It requires a lot of focus and time. If I push more than a few thousand words at a time, I get burned out, and my work gets sloppy.

The hardest part of this process is forcing myself to slow down and take the time.

After the beta draft is complete, I have to find people who want to read it and give me feedback. Sometimes I get volunteers. Sometimes I pay for this service. A few times, I know I have gone without this step because I couldn’t find any people willing to help. After Everyone Died is one of those books that no one wanted to read.

This takes a few more weeks.

During this time, I finalize the cover. I start to prepare the layout. I line up all the interior pieces I’ll need. I get the ISBN and UPC.

I will get feedback, tweak some more, and eventually come up with a final draft that I feel comfortable sending out into the world.

More or less.

I’ll complete the layout, prepare the files for the printers, and get the first real look at the book as it will exist. I’ll also do all the layout for the eBook.

All this is a few months of using most (if not all) of my free time to complete the book and get it to the release date.

Indie publishing is not for the weak.

Why Bring All This Up?

I have something new coming down the pipeline. It’s an entirely new IP, something I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. It’s more traditional than Abe & Duff or Shelby Ree. It’s not set in the Midwest. It’s not set in the current world, either—this one takes place in the mid-’90s, before cell phones and the internet poisoned everything.

It’s still too early in the editing process to discuss details, but be forewarned. Something new is coming.

If all goes well, it will be out this summer. I’ll have copies at Bouchercon in Calgary.

But all will be revealed in time.

The only problem: I don’t know if it’s any good.

I mean, I hope it’s good. I want it to be good. I wrote the book I wanted to write. I’ve read it dozens of times, and I like it…but good is subjective, and I won’t know if it’s good until everyone else in the world gets a chance to read it.

Which brings me back to my original point: How the hell did Barton Fink know?

Thanks for reading.

What I have been doing is working survival jobs for most of the last decade while I tried to find a place where I belonged again. Most recently, I’ve found myself back in the world of food service.

I’m no stranger to this world. My first job was working at a McDonald’s. I slung Big Macs and McNuggets with the best of ‘em. I worked at a pizza restaurant for four years, doing everything from delivery to management. I helped run a food stand at some county fairs. I even worked as a short-order cook for a little while.

Now I’m in the world of barbecue, and I’m enjoying it, for the most part. The wages that come with food service work leave much to be desired, of course. In the current economy, everything is more expensive. There seems to be no end in sight to the rising costs of everything. So, I’m getting by as best I can, but I wouldn’t turn down a winning lottery ticket at the moment.

The other big problem with food service is the lack of 401 (k) plans and paid vacation. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid.

There’s also the matter of schedules.

Weekends? Nah, you’re done with those, son. Weekends are when people need to eat. Prepare to give up your weekends.

Restaurant life is second shift, too (unless you do breakfasts… which we don’t). You’re going to be busy from the early afternoon until the very late evening. Those prime time TV shows will have to be Hulu’d the following day. You won’t be watching them when they air. Also, most of your friends with “normal” jobs will no longer be on the same schedule as you. They are working when you’re not. You’re working when they’re not. The social life will take a hit.1

You’re also on your feet all day. There was a time in my life when I could do that. I used to work 8- to 12-hour shifts on my feet, on concrete, without thinking about it. Not a problem. Let’s go.

Now, my feet are in full rebellion against this lifestyle. We used to have a desk job, they whine. We got a master’s degree so we wouldn’t have to stand all day, they remind me.

Full-on plantar fasciitis and extensor tendonitis in both feet are their payback. Getting around the house after a shift is tough some days. Most of my time from one shift to the next is spent just getting my feet ready to suffer through the next day.

As I frequently say: my dogs are barkin’, y’all.

Anyhow, since Substack requires content, and the adage about writing what you know is in effect, I figured I’d take a few minutes and jot down a few things about restaurants, people, and things I’ve noted over the last two years.

Most People Are Terrible Judges of Quality

The retail magnate Harry Selfridge (born in Ripon, Wisconsin, by the way!) is often credited with the expression, “The customer is always right in matters of taste.” There is some debate whether he was the first to say it, or whether or not he tacked on the “in matters of taste” part. The expression was meant to say that you don’t argue with a paying customer over personal taste.

When I worked for Sherwin-Williams, I helped countless people choose colors for their homes. It was always easy to suggest the most popular off-whites or beiges, but every so often, you’d get some eccentric who wanted to paint their kitchen neon lime green. Hey, not my thing—but I don’t live there. If you want neon lime green, let’s find one that works for you.

In the restaurant industry, you can’t argue about taste. If someone doesn’t like something, they don’t like it. That’s just personal preference. But many people confuse personal preference with quality, as if whatever they like is good and whatever they don’t like is bad, regardless of how many other people like it. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else, by the way. Especially when it comes to music, books, television, or film.

Preference is not a dictator of quality. It is only a matter of taste.

However, there is an epidemic of people who think they know everything about food, particularly barbecue, and who like to espouse their beliefs at length. Whatever they think is best—that’s the only way to do it. They cannot empirically assess food (or books or movies2). They cannot remove their opinion to look at the whole product or the whole process. There is only their opinion, and their opinion is all.

Don’t be that guy.

I can look at what Taylor Swift is doing and know that she is very talented and has carved out a large niche for herself. I can understand why people like her music—but it ain’t for me. I can think her music is mindless poppy pablum for the masses, but I still understand why people like it.

I can also look at something I like a lot—like, say, ELP’s Tarkus album—and fully understand why most people would not sit through it if you paid them. It takes a strange brain to fully appreciate the genius of Tarkus, and most of the world has not had that sort of head injury, so they probably won’t enjoy it as much as I do.

I know it’s probably music snob thinking, but nothing will dissuade me from thinking girly lonely hearts pop music < power trio classical progressive rock operas.

Not everyone will be on that with me, though. I understand. Both have quality to them. Both have their fans. Both can exist in the same world.

One doesn’t negate the other, and too many people in restaurants think that because they don’t like something, then no one else should like it, either.

Table Manners, and Manners in General, Vary Widely From Family to Family

My parents were very big on table manners. They also demanded proper use of flatware. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things in civilized society, and they both would have nothing less than proper etiquette at the table. If you put an elbow next to your plate, it would get knocked off the table by a backhand swipe. If you didn’t hold your fork correctly, it would be called out. They did this so my sister and I would not make asses of ourselves when eating in polite company.

Luckily, my sister and I have both learned to make asses of ourselves in other ways to make up for our rigid adherence to proper table manners.

I find William Hanson, a British etiquette expert, to be a fascinating human to watch on social media. In short, but very proper explanations, Hanson explains the proper way to do things for maximum effect and with all grace and manners. The reason being, we are judged by our appearance, our posture, our effect on others, etc… People judge constantly, so he gives out tips that make you look educated and civil.

In the restaurant business, I have learned quickly that not everyone has had the privilege of this sort of training, and sometimes it is hard to watch.

People grip cutlery with all manner of holds, from the American way of holding a knife and fork to the Continental way to the cavemanish central grip. I have seen a grown man hold a knife like a dagger and stab meat with it like it was Janet Leigh in the shower at the Bates Motel. I have seen people properly bring the fork to their mouths. I have seen people bring their face to the fork. I have seen people lift plates to their faces to suck bits of food off the plate. Spend a month working in a restaurant, and you will see the entire gamut of behaviors and peccadillos.

It never fails to amaze me how many families are lax on something as culturally necessary as manners. It makes me glad I insisted my child learn that people are judging her in public, whether they should or not.

I also notice that many parents have no problem letting their children run around like feral dogs without consequences. When I was a kid, my mother would threaten my life before we went into a public arena. You will behave, or I will kill you. Many parents are so busy drinking and chatting at the bar that they fail to rein in their children. I’m not the proprietor of the restaurant where I work, but I’m fifty, and I raised a child. I get that sometimes you need to be a parent, even if you don’t want to. Sometimes being a parent means settling your child down. Too many parents won’t do that.

Not Everyone Has Worked in Retail or Food Service

I have spent my fair share of time in both restaurants and retail environments. I sold computers for Office Depot and paint for Sherwin-Williams. I have slung burgers, pizza, and barbecue. None of these jobs were things I necessarily wanted to do, but I somehow ended up doing them.3

However, I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunities in these fields because both made me a better, more caring, more empathetic human being. When you work retail, you learn how to handle customers and be a human being, because you serve a lot of people who act like they are incapable of civility. When you work in food service, you often get to see the worst side of humanity.

When I was seventeen, working at McDonald’s, I was stationed at the counter one night. During the supper rush, a large man came storming in from the drive-thru lane with a McChicken in his hand. He was red-faced and screaming, walked right up to me, and threw the sandwich in my face. I got hit with a burst of mayo and lettuce. It was humiliating, and looking back, I probably should have quit that day.

Turns out, the man asked for no mayo on his sandwich. There was a simple mix-up, and instead of behaving like a human being, he flipped out because he was a classless moron. Now, as a kid working the register, I didn’t make his sandwich. I had nothing to do with his transaction, but he took his unnecessary anger out on me because I was there. Instead of telling the guy off, the manager capitulated, apologized, and gave him coupons for free food.

She told me to go get cleaned up in the bathroom, and then complained when she thought I took longer than necessary.

Yeah—I should have quit.

This was not an isolated incident at McDonald’s, by the way. This was a weekly thing. It’s one of the worst parts about working in fast food. High volume, high speed, kids working the counter, people who can barely speak coherent sentences are placing orders—errors will happen. We never did it on purpose. Some people feel more than entitled to treat you poorly because you are wearing a hat with a big yellow M on it, as if your only worth to society is to willingly accept abuse from the masses.

Seeing this so often taught me to be a better person. I don’t get mad at fast food workers. There is nothing anyone at McDonald’s could do to enrage me now. I won’t complain about wait times. If my order is wrong, it’s not a big deal. Those people don’t get paid enough to be treated poorly, so I will only treat them with kindness.

Same with retail workers. If I know a store is closing in 30 minutes or less, I don’t go in. I know the last 30 minutes at any retail location are when employees start their closing tasks, so they don’t have to be in the store for an extra hour after the day ends. Most of them have worked a full shift. They want to leave. They want to go home, eat, sleep, live their life—whatever. If I show up 15 minutes before closing, I am interrupting that process. I won’t do it. It is my fault for not getting the item earlier that day. I can hold off, or I will go find a 24-hour store. I’m not going to screw up the closing crew’s night for all the tea in India.

Not everyone understands this. It never failed to amaze me how many people would jet into a friggin’ Office Depot at 10 minutes to 9:00 PM. For nothing. Not once did I see people who did this get a life-or-death item. They wanted to shop. To stroll around. Where were they an hour ago?

Same at the restaurants I’ve worked at over the years. I’ve seen people, most often large groups, who feel that they can linger well past close just because they’re enjoying their conversations. They’re not buying anything. They’re just sitting and talking. The closing crew has worked a full day. They want to get out. But they can’t because that eight-top in the dining room just won’t leave.

In the restaurant industry, most places have at least an hour of work to do before they can leave for the night, and that timer usually doesn’t start until the last group leaves.

It’s pretty obvious who has worked retail and food service, and who hasn’t, when it comes to closing times and how they treat food service workers.

My father always believed that you shouldn’t be allowed to graduate from high school without at least three months of employment in the food service industry (a sentiment echoed by many others). You learn things in food service that you can’t learn anywhere else, and it teaches you to treat those people with kindness.4

Restaurant Margins Are Razor Thin

Most restaurants do 95% of their business between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM. If you go in for dinner at 6:00 PM, and it’s busy, that doesn’t mean the restaurant is making money hand over fist. You just showed up at the busy time.

Chances are, that restaurant opened at 4:00 PM, did nothing for the first 90 minutes, and then got hit with a wave of dinner-seeking customers. By 7:30 PM, that restaurant will be empty again, serving a table or two of stragglers for the remainder of the night.

It’s a little better in the big cities where there are more people choosing to eat late, but in a small, suburban city like the one where I live and work, most people are home by 7:00 PM to make sure the kids do their homework, get ready for bed, and go to sleep on time because the grind starts all over again the next day.

The restaurant industry requires hours of preparation before opening and hours of cleanup and resetting after closing. This means they rely on getting as many customers through the door as possible during their open hours, and many nights those customers don’t always show up. And I get it—people can’t afford to eat out all the time, especially with soaring costs hitting everyone equally.

Restaurants have to accommodate rent and utilities, food costs, labor dollars, supplies, disposables, and all the other minutiae that come with running a business. If you’re lucky, maybe you find a spare buck or two for advertising, merch, and goodwill. You aren’t making Bobby Flay money if you run a local restaurant. You’re lucky if you’re not having to apply for food stamps yourself.

On top of that, you aren’t competing on an even playing field. It’s not too different from the indie vs. traditional publishing debate. The big guys (in the restaurant game, it’s Culver’s, McDonald’s, et al.) have all the money. They can pay for exposure and advertising. They can afford the rent at the best locations. They have all the time and power. The little guys (indie publishers, Mom ‘n’ Pop restaurants, etc…) have nothing but the hope that people will say nice things about them to their friends.

On top of that, because you’ve heard of the big guys, you’re more inclined to shop their product. Meanwhile, the local place on the edge of town is deserted. The food at the fast food giants isn’t better than the indie place. The indie place is giving you real food. It is being run by your friends and neighbors. But they’re not as flashy. They don’t have apps to give you rewards. Their food costs will be higher because they aren’t buying for thousands of restaurants to secure the deepest discounts. And even despite that, they’re still competitive with the big guys.

Those little restaurants need all the help they can get, and sometimes a good week and a bad week is the difference of a couple of meals.

Bad Reviews Suck, But People Love Leaving Them

All things considered, I’ve had far worse jobs than working in a restaurant. (Let me tell you about the month I spent working in a customer call center for a mail-order hardware company once…holy friggin’ jeeeezus…)

There’s something wonderful about feeding people, especially when it’s really good food. There’s a joy in direct customer service in the food industry. They come hungry. They leave sated. You have a hand in that.

However, because this is America, and people are gonna be people, you cannot please everyone all the time. You will have detractors no matter what you do.

A bad review for a small local restaurant is like a wrecking ball on the social media algorithms. Because small restaurants don’t get a lot of reviews, a single bad review can seriously damage their standing in the complex world of internet rankings.

When I taught high school, I used to tell students that handing in SOMETHING was better than handing in NOTHING. If you have 3 A’s and a D, it’s still better than 3 A’s and an F. That F will average your grade to a 3.0 (B+), while the D will average your grade to 3.25 (A-). That’s kind of how it works in the reviews for local restaurants, too. They can have a whole bunch of 5-star reviews, but one 1-star review will knock them down in search results.

Here’s the thing about doing good things: people are not inclined to leave positive reviews, but they will go out of their way to leave negative reviews.5 If a place has a ton of positive reviews and a couple of bad reviews, know that the restaurant is doing everything right. If only a couple of people were angry enough to sit down and talk trash about a place, then that place is amazing.

Same thing with book reviews. If a book has a thousand reviews, you can safely assume that probably 100 times that number of people have actually read it. Only a few readers out of a hundred will take the time to review a book. If the book’s reviews are overwhelmingly positive, then you can safely assume that the book is pretty damn good.6

But people LOVE to slag on a book they didn’t like. They’ll DNF a book and still slag on it. Contempt is easy to plant. Loyalty and good reviews are incredibly difficult to farm up. If a restaurant has a few one-star reviews but a host of five-star reviews, assume the one-star reviews are just grumpy people who don’t understand quality. (See the first part of this post…)

As a writer, I go out of my way not to read my own reviews. I see how many reviews there are when I’m futzing with stuff on Amazon, but I really try not to read them. I don’t believe the good ones, and I never forget the bad ones.

However, on the rare occasion that I do receive a bad review, I will always go read one-star reviews for the best-selling authors to remind myself that the majority of people leaving one-star reviews are just grinding personal axes. The one-star reviews for Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, or Larry McMurtry are particularly amusing.

My favorite one-star review was for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where someone on Amazon just wrote, “DON’T KILL WHALES!”

In summation, restaurant work isn’t for everyone. It’s a grind. It’s about consistency. It’s about getting up and deciding that you want to be in that place, serving that food, and greeting those customers on a daily basis. It can wear on you, but you have to enjoy doing it.

It does have its rewards, though.

On Saturday, a fellow walked in right as we opened. He was from Stevens Point (90 minutes away). He and his wife had happened on the restaurant a few weeks ago when they were down to watch their grandkids play in a hockey tournament. When the guy’s wife heard he had to run to Madison for an errand, she made him take an Igloo cooler with him so he could stop at the restaurant and bring home a rack of ribs and some sides.

It’s a good feeling to know that something you’re doing made people plan ahead just to get more of it.

We’ve had people drive to the restaurant from LaCrosse, Black River Falls, or even Rockford, Illinois, just to have lunch because they heard good things.

When you have a truly busy day, and you finally get a chance to stop, breathe, and wipe the sweat from your face, there’s something grand about looking out and seeing a full restaurant of people eating all the things that you took so many hours to prepare.

It’s not an easy business, though. Most restaurants fail within the first year. Even now, the greatest challenge we have at the restaurant where I work is getting people in the door. The food is good. The service is great. The ambiance is pristine—especially once summer hits and we can have the patio open for outdoor dining. But that doesn’t always translate to a full parking lot of people seeking barbecue.

If you’re hungry and in the southern Wisconsin area, come out to Primal ‘Cue for some grub. There’s a better-than-average chance I’ll be there. (I’m the big ugly guy who looks like Uncle Fester.) If not, the owner, Andrew Bajakian, will be there. He’s 6’6” and hard to miss. He stands out in a crowd.

Also, coming to Paoli, Wisconsin, late this year: The Sugar River Fire & Smoke BBQ Festival!

Hosted by Top Chef: Wisconsin fan favorite Michelle Wallace, this festival aims to bring two days of big-name barbecue to the tiny town of Paoli, Wisconsin, including the legendary Rodney Scott himself.

Primal ‘Cue will be there on September 19, doing what we do best along with several other local places. On the 20th, some big names from the world of barbecue will be out there doing what they do best.

Music. Beer. Food. Wisconsin.

All in all, it should be a pretty good time.

Given that it’s already almost April, I hate to say that September will be here in a flash, but it probably will.

Time flies.

Occasionally, I will go to Tubi, Amazon Prime, or some other weird streaming site to fish for oddities. Most of the time, I strike out. Sometimes, I do find the rare bit of unheralded gold.

Just like in the world of books, there are thousands of movies being made every year, and most of them are going straight to some streaming service or another, and no one is talking about them, and they just become menu fodder, the forgettable boxes in the “suggested for you” column that no one ever really watches.

And, just like in the world of books, if a movie’s premise sounds good, I’ll give it a chance. If I don’t like it, I’ll move to the next one, just like I do with books. There are plenty of movies I’ve quit on, both indie and major studio, just like there are plenty of books I’ve DNF’d, both indie and traditional.

So, in keeping with my finding joy theme, here are a few movies that gave me joy (or at least I greatly enjoyed) that probably haven’t been on your radar. If you’re bored some afternoon and looking for something new to watch, give them a shot.

Maybe you’ll like them.

Maybe you won’t.

It won’t hurt my feelings if they’re not your cup of tea.

A Dark Place/Steel Country

Two titles. Same movie. It was called A Dark Place in America, but Steel Country overseas. Either way—it’s worth checking out.

Andrew Scott, a wonderful actor and probably best known for his portrayal of Moriarty in the Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman Sherlock series, or for his star-making turn as the priest/love interest in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s amazing series Fleabag, is the star of this dark, slow-burning noir mystery.

He plays Donald Devlin, a man with high-functioning autism who works as a sanitation worker in a small Rust Belt town. He’s a great character, the sort of acting challenge any highly trained thespian would like to try. Donald has a mother in a wheelchair and a teenage daughter from an ill-fated one-night stand with a friend of his, whom he’s trying to get to know better. He’s a lonely, strange man, but thoughtful.

When a local boy turns up dead in the river, the local sheriff is quick to rule it an accidental drowning. Donald doesn’t believe it and begins to investigate on his own. He finds a plausible killer, and that killer is friends with the sheriff.

It gets darker and more difficult from there.

Scott’s performance is really the reason to watch this movie. At times, the pacing falls off, and the dialogue probably could have been better, but Scott doesn’t phone anything in, and he’s infinitely watchable.

The ending is worth the few rocky moments in the film’s pace, and it left me wishing I knew what came next.

This is one I’ve watched three times now. It’s not an Academy Award winner, but for a movie that’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime, it’s a good way to spend an afternoon.

Chained

This is a very low-budget, independent film that flew under my radar for a long time. It wasn’t until I found it streaming on Tubi that I decided to give it a chance, and I’m very glad I did.

The movie starts quite darkly. A young boy and his mother get into a cab. The cab driver, Bob, blows past the turn to their house, and the mother starts to protest. The cab driver doesn’t respond. Instead, he drives her out to the middle of nowhere, drags her from the car, and kills her.

The young boy, the cab driver brings back to his home. There, he gives the boy very extreme rules. The boy’s new name is “Rabbit.” The boy is to sleep on a cot in the kitchen. He is to clean. He is to prepare meals. He only eats AFTER the cabbie, and he only eats what the cabbie leaves him.

After one failed escape attempt, the cabbie chains him to his bed. His entire world is dictated by the length of the chain on his ankle.

The boy grows into adulthood, witnessing the horrors the cabbie perpetrates.

This is a dark story. There are no feel-good moments. It’s a stark, brutal tale from beginning to end, yet riveting. Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance as Bob, the cabbie/serial killer, is bare and brutal, and Eamon Farren brings a profound sense of empathy to his performance as Rabbit.

The movie also makes a stirring commentary on child abuse, as both Rabbit and Bob are products of abuse.

Director Jennifer Lynch shot this movie near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, over 15 days, a breakneck pace for a film.

It’s not a perfect movie. There are a few minor issues with it, and that’s what probably kept it from becoming a much more well-known film, but given D’Onofrio’s star power, this one is worth checking out.

Not for those with an aversion to darkness, though.

Tigerland

This was another Tubi discovery. I was scanning war movies one day and saw Colin Farrell on the cover art and Joel Schumacher’s name in the director's credit.

Schumacher, despite two lackluster Batman movies, remains one of my favorite directors. He made some absolutely great movies, including Falling Down, A Time to Kill, Flatliners, The Client, and the early ‘80s cable classic, D.C. Cab, starring one of America’s greatest thespians, Laurence Tureaud.2

How the hell did I miss a Joel Schumacher movie with Colin Farrell in it? And a war movie at that? I was gobsmacked. Not only had I not seen it, but I’d also never even heard of it. How is that even possible?

Tigerland came out in October 2000. In August of that same year, I started an accelerated master’s program at St. Mary’s University, which kept me busier than I would have liked, and I was also holding down a part-time job selling computers for Office Depot in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

Between work, homework, and studying, I didn’t see much in 2000/2001.

So, with Tigerland being completely under my radar, I figured it was worth checking out a 25-year-old war film about recruits being trained at the famed Tigerland Advanced Infantry Training Center located at Fort Polk, Louisiana. The hot, sweaty, swampy terrain at Fort Polk was meant to simulate conditions in Vietnam's tropical jungles and prepare troops for that war.

The story is set in 1971. The United States is losing the Vietnam War. There’s no end in sight for the conflict. The soldiers being drafted into the Army are largely against the war.

Farrell plays Roland Bozz, a draftee who opposes the war, has no respect for the Army brass, and plays by his own rules. In one scene, a young Michael Shannon plays a sergeant who teaches the soldiers how to torture an enemy with a car battery to get information. Bozz walks away from the training, stating that he wouldn’t ever want to do that to another human being.

Matthew Davis plays Jim Paxton, an aspiring writer who befriends Bozz and records the day-to-day experiences of Tigerland in his journal. Paxton volunteered for Vietnam, unlike Bozz.

Bozz has a strange “X-ray vision for loopholes,” and he uses it to teach other recruits to get out of the Army. His personality and charisma eventually get him promoted to platoon guide, but his disrespect for the Army earns him some hatred from a few of the brass and one of the other recruits. Private Wilson, a bigot and general prick of a human, is the main one. Wilson tells Bozz that he will kill him, no matter what it takes.

The movie is dark. The pace isn’t typical for a war film. It’s slower. It’s brooding. It is meant to reflect that time in America’s history.

Tigerland was a box-office bomb, earning only $150K against a $10 million budget. Despite that, it was critically acclaimed, earning praise for story, direction, screenplay, emotional weight, and Farrell’s performance. It’s also one of Schumacher’s best-reviewed films in his filmography.

Definitely worth checking out.

Bottle Shock

As the other three movies have been a little on the dark side, I’ll finish this post with two movies on the lighter side.

Bottle Shock started off as a movie that I watched one afternoon because it had Alan Rickman in it, and it’s become a comfort movie, one I’ve returned to many times because it has heart, even if it’s not a perfect film.

The movie is a fictionalized account of the 1976 “Judgement of Paris” wine competition, in which French wine experts, in a blind tasting, selected several California wines over French wines, leading to Napa Valley becoming a legitimate contender in the world wine market.

Rickman has a supporting role in this film, starring as Steven Spurrier, a British expatriate in France who owns a wine shop. Spurrier cannot gain headway against the snobbishness of the French, who insist that their wines are the only good wines.

…oh, you wacky French…

Spurrier concocts a plan to pit French wines against wines from around the world in order to break the stranglehold of the French wine market.

Spurrier travels to California, to the not-yet-famous Napa Valley region, and meets struggling vintner Jim Barrett (played by the great Bill Pullman) of Chateau Montelena. Spurrier wants Barrett’s wines for the contest, but Barrett refuses, thinking the California wines are being set up for humiliation. Barrett’s son, Beau (played by Chris Pine in one of the worst wigs since William Shatner), sneaks bottles to Spurrier, knowing the contest could be a marketing opportunity.

The movie has some subplots worth checking out and a great ensemble cast that includes Rachael Taylor, Freddy Rodriguez, Eliza Dushku, Dennis Farina, and Bradley Whitford.

In the end, it’s an inspiring, feel-good movie with a great climax and some wonderful shots of the beautiful Napa Valley. The camera filters give it a dusty, golden 1970s feel, and the soundtrack is era-appropriate.

It’s a tremendous underdog story that never fails to get me a little bit misty, just because I like to see people achieve their dreams.

Cue this one up with all due haste. Streaming now on Tubi.

A Midwinter’s Tale

For the final movie in this post, I’d like to introduce you to one of my all-time favorite movies, A Midwinter’s Tale (also called In the Bleak Midwinter in some countries).

Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed this low-budget dramedy about a struggling actor who needs a win, and the ragtag group of rejects and weirdos who come together to perform a stunning production of Hamlet. It’s the first film Branagh wrote in which he did not appear.

Joe Harper (Michael Maloney) is in a slow decline into crippling depression. He pours his heart out to his agent (Joan Collins), and tells her that he wants to try to help save his sister’s church from land developers by putting on a production of Hamlet.

His agent is not agog at this idea, and tries to tell him that he still might get the part for which he was just rejected—playing the alien villain in a new big-budget sci-fi movie. Joe believes he NEEDS to do this production to save his sanity.

However, the production has almost no budget, no pay for the actors, and it will be performed at Christmastime. This leads Joe to amass a small cadre of never-weres and broken actors with very different personas, including Nina Raymond (Julia Sawalha), who has never acted before.

Joe’s sister, Molly (Hetta Charnley), becomes the stage manager, and the weirdly new-age artist Fadge (Celia Imrie) becomes the costumer and set designer.

The rehearsals are a disaster from the jump. The actors all have their own issues and baggage, which leads to conflict among them. For example, stodgy old Henry Wakefield (Richard Briers) is cast as Claudius, and he’s a typical old Brit of his era —grumpy and cynical, with a comprehensive list of prejudices, including a dislike of homosexuals. A flamboyant gay man, Terry DuBois (John Sessions), is cast to play Queen Gertrude, and must room with Wakefield during rehearsals.

Despite the initial friction, as the rehearsals progress, the cast comes together in various ways, forming that tight-knit group of performers that all theatre kids know well.

For example, with the Wakefield/DuBois pairing—despite their inherent differences, when DuBois’s own baggage comes out—he has a son from the only time he had sex with a woman, and he’s never had a relationship with his child—Wakefield is the one to help him come to terms with it.

The interplay between the cast and the ticking clock of the opening-night performance keeps this smooth machine running. The performances are perfect. The writing is crisp. The banter and dialogue are delivered at a high clip, and the characters, while over-the-top at first, have humanity and heart.

This is the sort of movie that you will unabashedly adore if you were a theater nerd at any point in your life.

If you weren’t, some of it might get by you, but it’s still a wonderful and uplifting film.

It’s one of my favorites. It’s a comfort movie at heart. And it can be considered a Christmas movie, as the same ideals about goodwill toward men, belief in something, and the power of hope are present.

While it’s not streaming free anywhere I can locate, it’s available for cheap rental or purchase on several different streaming platforms.

That’s enough of this nonsense for tonight.

I’ve got a work-in-progress that I’m procrastinating on adding to. (More on that in the future…)

I hope you’ll check out one, a few, or all of these suggestions if you haven’t seen them. If you do, please let me know what you thought.

If you have a favorite under-the-radar movie that you think no one else has heard of or seen, please let me know. I’m always on the lookout for the low-budget, indie gems.

Thanks for reading.

Always have.

Ever since I can remember, television has been a constant fixture in my life.

When I was small, it delivered hokey Batman episodes, The Dukes of Hazzard, and plenty of cartoons on Saturday mornings. PBS taught me science and writing. I was held in rapt attention while the Reverend Dr. Syn fought the British press gangs in the Romney Marsh.

When I was a teen, it was where the Milwaukee Brewers played, the Green Bay Packers chased gridiron glory, and the Wisconsin Badgers battled for pucks.

It delivered me Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Brother Cadfael. It showed me MASH, Cheers, and Bob Newhart. I watched Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, and Hunter. I watched Friday Night Videos because I didn’t have cable, and that was the only way I could stay current on popular music. I watched Saturday Night Live, and it shaped my sense of humor and honed my understanding of what satire is.

During college, I was always in front of a TV on Monday nights. I’d watch WCW Monday Nitro on TNT, then flip over to USA to watch WWE Monday Night Raw, comparing and contrasting the programs back when professional wrestling was at its most golden era. I learned a lot about heroes and villains from those shows, and a little about storytelling. Mostly, it was mindless entertainment.

I watched a lot of meaningless melodrama, too. Silk Stalkings was a favorite in my college days—Mitzi Kapture (great name…) and Rob Estes solving sexually driven crimes of passion in the high-society of Palm Beach. Pacific Blue, La Femme Nikita, Sweating Bullets, and The Big Easy. I also loved Duckman, which was waaay ahead of its time. It was a precursor to things like Bojack Horseman and other odd animated features that walked a fine line between comedy and pathos.

Even my undergrad senior project was TV-related. I wrote, storyboarded, and set a production schedule for a pilot TV show. That pilot script idea was later brought out of cold storage, combined with the spirit of Joss Whedon’s Firefly, and became Strange Angels.1

During the last semester of my senior year at UW-Whitewater, one of my professors (rest in peace, Dr. Conover) told me how to apply for a writing job on a talk show. He told me to write a few pages of topical jokes and submit a packet of sketches. I took a couple of weeks and came up with a few pages of one-liners and some oddball sketches that I mailed to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, addressed to Conan O’Brien, in hopes of procuring a job in his writer’s room. No one ever responded to it.

Probably for good reason. Some of those sketches were out there.

Television gave me stories that made me dream. It showed me interesting and inspiring people. For a kid growing up deep in the middle of the sticks of southern Wisconsin, it was a lifeline to the outside world.

I was never an outdoors kid. I had to be chased away from the television and forced to go get some sunshine.

Even now, television is what keeps me going a lot of the time. On Sundays, I look forward to episodes of Tracker and Watson. Tuesdays are when Will Trent solves murders for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Despite streaming providing easy access to just about anything the day after it airs, I still try to catch a lot of shows in the “old” way—by sitting in front of the TV when it airs in real-time, just like I had to as a kid.

I remember one of the worst feelings in the age of VCRs was getting home from a school event to watch something we taped at 7:00 pm, only to find out that the VCR had cut off the final minute of the show. Or, when we were actually home and ready to watch something good, some tragedy happened, and Tom Brokaw would jump onto the set with his serious face, and there goes the whole night.

My undergrad degree was in sports journalism. If I had to do it all over again, I think I would have focused on screenwriting, moved to California after graduation, and really given writing and/or performing a go. I have wanted to be involved in television for my whole life, just to be a part of that big storytelling machine.

TV is a source of comfort and entertainment.

So, for this installment of Finding Joy, I’d like to present a few perfect episodes of television.

19-2, “School,” S02E01

If you’re not familiar with 19-2, it is my favorite cop drama of all-time. Only forty episodes over four seasons, but it delivered with each and every episode.

Set in Montreal, Quebec, 19-2 was the daily goings-on of a police precinct and the tortured and conflicted lives of the officers who worked there. The cast was led by Adrian Holmes and Jared Keeso (who would later rocket to larger fame in Letterkenny and Shoresy), who played unwilling partners. In 2015, Keeso would win a Gemini Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role, and in 2017, Holmes would pick one for himself, as well. The show was a critical success.

Every episode of 19-2 is great, but one stands out above all others. In the first episode of Season 2, the Station responds to an active shooter at a local high school. When they arrive, they find bodies and hear shots being fired, and the entire episode is a tense, sweaty, and claustrophobic search for the gunman.

It is, hands down, the single best episode of television I have ever watched.

The situation is riveting, especially if you have invested yourself in caring about the characters over the course of the first season. The direction, the editing, the performances—all perfect. The director, Daniel Grou2, who uses the name “Podz,” won the 2016 Gemini Award for directing that episode, and the show itself took the 2016 Gemini for Best Dramatic Series that year, largely due to this episode.

Given the nature of the show, it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s gritty. It doesn’t hold back. Seeing wounded children in the hallways does something to a person, and if you’re not mentally prepared for it, this is an episode that can wreck you. I don’t blame you if you avoid it.

However, it’s rare to find an hour of television that delivers as much as “School” does.

10/10. No notes.

It should be noted that school shootings are not exclusive to America. Long before Columbine in 1999, way back in 1975, Michael Slobodian, a 16-year-old student at Brampton Centennial Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario, left a note for his parents stating, "I am going to eliminate certain people from this world. Those people are: Mrs. Wright, Mr. Bronson, and any other sucker who gets in my way. I am then going to kill myself so as not to be imprisoned."

Slobodian then went to Brampton Centennial with two rifles in a guitar case and 70 rounds of ammunition. He prepared the weapons in a restroom. He then shot seven rounds, killing student John Slinger and wounding another with a .22-calibre Ruger semi-automatic rifle.

Slobodian switched to a Marlin .44 and fired into a classroom, wounding two more students. He shot indiscriminately down two hallways, wounding four students with shrapnel down one, and another student down the other. He proceeded to an art classroom, killed English teacher Margaret Wright (who was six months pregnant at the time), shooting her in the back as she tried to flee, and wounded two more students.

Slobodian then returned to the hallway, put the rifle barrel to his chin, and ended his rampage. Three dead (including Slobodian). Thirteen wounded.

One of the witnesses to the attack was a future member of The Kids in the Hall, Scott Thompson. Thompson had been one of Slobodian’s classmates in Mrs. Wright’s English class.

Firefly, “Out of Gas,” S01E08

While I could probably have made a case for just about any of the episodes of the tragically short single-season of Firefly, “Out of Gas” stands out above the others.

The show differs stylistically from the other episodes of the series, taking place in the past and the present, with vignettes to the distant past, showing how the crew of the intrepid ship Serenity came to find each other, the odd little dysfunctional space family that they are. In the pilot episode, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, first officer Zoe Allyne-Washburne, pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne, passenger Inara Serra, mercenary Jayne Cobb, and ship’s mechanic Kaylee Frye were already onboard the ship. In the pilot, we got to see how Doctor Simon Tam and his sister, River, joined the ship’s crew, and we saw how the wandering Shepherd Derrial Book joined…but everyone else was just a crew until “Out of Gas” showed us how they came together.

Written by the great Tim Minear, “Out of Gas” is a lesson in storytelling. It starts by giving us the stakes: the ship Serenity is adrift and silent. Cut to the interior. Captain Malcolm Reynolds is lying on the floor of the cargo bay, face down, struggling, weakened, sweaty. Something is wrong.

Someone’s voice, a ghost of the past, says, “A real beauty, ain’t she? I tell you what—you buy this ship, treat her properly, and she’ll be with you the rest of your life.”

From there, we cut to the distant past. Reynolds brings his second-in-command on board Serenity for the first time. Zoe is unimpressed. He tells her about his vision of the good life, outrunning the Alliance and taking jobs as they come. Living “like real people.”

He even tells her he’s got a name all picked out.

From there, Minear guides us back-and-forth through time in the narrative. We learn that Serenity has suffered a catastrophic engine failure, and no magic in the ‘Verse can get her running again. They are adrift, and heat and oxygen are running low.

We learn how the crew members came together as we jump into Reynolds’s memories as he struggles to get the ship running again after the rest of them departed on shuttles, a fool’s errand to find help because at least the shuttles have heat and oxygen.

We get the happy ending we deserve, and in the final moments, we cut back to the opening lines: “A real beauty, ain’t she? I tell you what—you buy this ship, treat her properly, and she’ll be with you the rest of your life.”

Reynolds is at a shipyard, and a salesman is showing him an impressive vessel, tall and mighty—but it ain’t Serenity.

Reynolds doesn’t hear him. He’s not looking at the ship he’s being shown. He’s looking into the distance, a curious expression on his face, longing in his eyes. He is staring at a piece of rusted scrap on the sand at the edge of the shipyard, a distinctive-looking Firefly-class vessel with its horsehead prow and bulbous rear engine.

It’s Serenity.

And you realize the whole episode is a love story—the love of a man and his ship, and the love the crew feels for each other. It’s the tale of a broken man finding a broken ship, and making her whole again.

It never fails to choke me up.

Firefly never should have been cancelled.

MASH, “Welcome to Korea, Pts. 1 & 2,” S04E01 & S04E02

Season four was a big shakeup for MASH. It was on the verge of being the ratings juggernaut that we all know it to be now (forgetting that it struggled a bit out of the gates), and the show had just lost two of its biggest stars as MacLean Stevenson bowed out as Lt. Colonel Henry Blake to star in a sitcom that failed3, and Wayne Rogers left to become a money-marketing genius4.

However, MASH would continue to find success, running for another eight seasons, and the first two episodes of Season Four showed that the showrunners knew what they were doing. They replaced Trapper John with the affable BJ Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), and brought on Harry Morgan to fill the CO’s spot with the wonderful character of Colonel Sherman T. Potter.

In “Welcome to Korea,” Hawkeye returned from R&R to find that his best friend, Trapper John, had received orders while Hawk was in Japan resting and recreating, and had departed the Four-Oh-Double-Natural for Kenpo Airbase in Seoul. Hawkeye runs to say his goodbyes, but just barely misses Trapper.

Instead, he and Radar bring back 4077’s new surgeon, Hunnicutt. There is a gentle feeling-out of personalities as Hunnicutt deals with Hawkeye’s mood swings over missing Trapper, and eventually, they return to camp. They run across a platoon and are ambushed alongside them, being Johnny-on-the-spot for treating the wounded. Poor BJ gets his first taste of combat medicience, and it’s not pretty. They stop at Rosie’s bar to solidify their friendship over too much beer and sake. This ruins Frank Burns’s plans to mold Hunnicutt in his own image, and we know that BJ is going to be on Hawkeye’s side when he gets out of the jeep, salutes, and drunkenly slurs, “What say you, Ferret-face?”

The episode ends with the arrival of Col. Potter, and we’re left to wonder if the new CO is going to be a good guy or not. We learn more about him in the next episode, “Change of Command.”

This episode strikes the tone of comedy and drama that MASH did so well, showing the horrors of war and then giving us a reason to laugh. It was written by the power trio of Everett Greenbaum, Jim Fritzell, and Larry Gelbart. Gelbart was called a “Mozart of Sitcoms.”

Those guys made a lot of television in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Scrubs, “My Philosophy,” S02E13

I could have pulled any number of Scrubs episodes. Not only is it one of the best sitcoms of all time, but it also has a ton of amazing episodes. Most critics and fans point to “My Screw-Up” (S03E14), in which Brendan Fraser returns as Ben Sullivan and dies of leukemia. Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) is stellar as he blames JD for this and overcompensates, while being haunted by Ben’s ghost until they hit the finale and Cox is forced to confront the death of his best friend, brought to reality by JD’s haunting line, “Where do you think we are?” and the reveal of the cemetery and Ben’s funeral. It’s considered one of the best episodes of television ever and has received all the laurels and accolades it needs.

So, why beat a dead horse? Scrubs has a ton of great episodes that will make you laugh and cry in the same 22 minutes, and not many shows have done it as well or as poignantly.

In “My Philosophy,” which landed as a mid-season finale in season two, most of the beloved members of Sacred Heart are at an impasse, giving us high stakes to dwell upon over the long holiday break.

There are several storylines running through the episode:

• Chris Turk has bought a ring and is ready to propose to Carla, but the young patient Ralphie swallows it, so Turk makes Ralphie eat six bran muffins in order to retrieve it.

• Elliot and Ted conspire to get the women of Sacred Heart a women’s locker room instead of the co-ed dressing room they’ve used for years—and this requires Elliot to stand up to Doctor Kelso.

• Cox and JD have a pregnant patient with heart issues, and when she crashes, her husband has to make a decision over a delicate procedure to save his wife, which puts the baby’s life at risk, knowing that his wife asked him to save the baby regardless of anything else.

• One of JD’s favorite patients, Elaine, is back in the hospital, still waiting on a heart transplant. They have a frank discussion about death, and Elaine says she hopes it’s like a Broadway musical, with costumes and singing.

As the show progresses, all these storylines boil over:

• Turk proposes to Carla, but she can’t give him an answer because of issues with her family, leaving him in a confused, heartbroken limbo.

• Elliot and Ted get the locker room.

• The pregnant patient survives the procedure that could have killed her, and they are able to save both her and the baby.

• Elaine crashes and cannot be revived. In JD’s imagination, we see her go out singing Colin Hay’s powerful song “Waiting for My Real Life” to begin while being joined by the cast, Broadway-style. When they pronounce her dead, Cox asks JD if he’s okay, and JD can only whisper, “Yeah.”

Because life and death are just part of the cycle of the hospital.

For a mid-season finale, it makes your heart swell. It’s a tear-jerker, and it gives most of the characters real stakes in their lives. Just a magnificent episode in a series that has more magnificent episodes than just about every series ever written.

Happy Endings, “Dave of the Dead,” S01E07

Happy Endings is a show that doesn’t get nearly enough credit. While being in the same vein of the “Pretty People Just Hanging Out” variety that we’ve seen in Friends, The New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Rules of Engagement, and dozens more failed attempts of shows just like Friends, it was far more wacky than the rest of them, driven predominantly by Casey Wilson’s larger-than-life, over-the-top character Penny Hartz.

While the whole cast is excessive in personality, Penny is clearly the top dog of this pile of crazy.5

My favorite Penny moment is in the first episode when she’s sweating on a machine in the gym, and a tiny, little waif with a perfect stomach and petite body comes over and asks, “Ma’am, are you done with this machine?”

Penny, in her extremes, is horrified. She climbs off the machine and says, “Ma’am? I’m going to go bawl my eyes out, and then I will be back to physically fight you.”

In “Dave of the Dead,” we are given the traditional three-storyline plot that Happy Endings was famous for. In each episode of the series, the six members of the core group are usually split into 2-2-2, 3-2-1, or 3-3 groups, and they navigate two or three separate storylines that somehow converge in the third act. It’s great writing.

In this episode:

• Penny is dating a hipster and trying to keep up with him and his group of friends, and their need for excessive irony in all things is killing her.

• Dave wants to quit his office job and start his restaurant, so he buys a food truck.

• Max and Jane compete in a series of challenges to see who would best survive a zombie apocalypse.

The episode's main focus is on Penny and the hipsters. Like most hipsters, they are exhausting. Penny, who unironically truly does like things like ABBA, musicals, and cute sweatshirts with kitties on them, is having trouble keeping up with their negativity and thrift-store clothes.

Dave is trying to get his restaurant off the ground, and, given that he has no money, has to do it with a food truck, which he is initially embarrassed about and tries to hide from the rest of them.

Max and Jane are busy with their antics about the zombie apocalypse.

In the end, the three stories magically converge after Penny has erupted at the hipsters and needs to flee. The hipsters chase the group, not unlike a horde of zombies, and they all escape on Dave’s food truck to live another day.

If this sounds bizarre, it is.

It’s also why Happy Endings was highly underrated and never got the fan support it deserved.

There you go: Five perfect episodes of television. Great in all aspects. If any of this gives you something new to watch—enjoy.

Can you tell that I’m procrastinating on the current work-in-progress, by the way?

It’s true what they say about writers and procrastination—we’ll do anything to keep from actually having to work on the new book.

Hopefully more about that thing in the near future.

Also, I know I’m old because I bought a new pocket knife, and that’s kind of exciting for me. It’s not quite as small or as thin as I would have liked, but I’ll adapt.

If you have an episode of a television program that you believe to be perfect in all aspects—acting, writing, direction, etc… Please let me know about it in the comments. I’m always up for good TV.

Until next time, true believers.

How long had it been since she set foot in the ol’ hometown? Five years? Longer? Felt like an eternity.

Strange, isn’t it? You spend all of high school desperate to get out of your hometown, but after a few years away, you only want to get back. There’s just something about coming home.

Ideally, Amanda hoped she could return to Mount Horeb as a success. She hoped she’d have money, a car that turned heads, maybe even a house. She hoped people would see her name on IMDb and think, Amanda did it! She became a star. It was all she had ever wanted when she haunted the stage for four years in the high school theater.

That never manifested for her. She wished she knew why. Luck, probably. Everything was based on luck in the end, wasn’t it? You could work as hard as you want, do all the right things, and so much would depend on being in the right place at the right time.

Amanda paced her bedroom. All the trophies from high school track were still on her dresser. Her posters were still on the walls. Everything had a layer of dust on it, but her mother was never a great housekeeper, so she wasn’t surprised. It was nice of her parents to save her room for her. They were the best part about returning home.

Amanda called out to see if either of them was home. It was the middle of the morning, so she doubted it. Both of them still worked. Her mother was a nurse in Madison. Her father was a Realtor. Capital R. It was a registered trademark, and it was what separated regular licensed real estate professionals from people who knew their shit, he always said.

Amanda looked out the window at the blue skies of that summer morning. Birds filled the trees, and they were in full-throated song. The sun was hazy and warm. That smell of the day, the rich loamy smell of a humid day after a rainstorm, was in full effect. It was intoxicating. It crept through the screens on the second floor of her parents’ home, beckoning her outside to take in more.

A walk was just the thing. Her mother wouldn’t be home until at least 3:00 PM, and her father’s hours were never concrete. She would have to entertain herself for a little while, and a walk was a great distraction, a great way to reconnect with the town.

Walks reminded Amanda of her childhood. Somewhere around third or fourth grade, her parents were satisfied that Amanda knew the town and was a safe and capable bike rider. They also knew that in a town of barely five-thousand people, there weren’t too many people they didn’t know in some way, shape, or form. Amanda’s father had sold many of them houses. They knew all the families in their neighborhood. Half the town was distantly related to each other. It was as safe a Middle America dream location as it could possibly be. Life in the little town was like something from a Jean Shepherd essay, so Amanda’s parents granted her all the freedom her legs and bike could provide. The entire town was at her disposal.

Walk to the diner for a milkshake? Go for it.

Walking to and from school? Absolutely.

Walking over to her friend’s house, the one who lived near the elementary school, which was across town, over a mile away? Go nuts, kid.

Just be home for dinner.

And be careful crossing the street.

* * * * *

The downtown was not what she remembered. The old yarn and craft shop was gone, replaced by a yoga studio. The diner had been gutted and turned into an upscale eatery with dim lights and overpriced drinks. The homey, kitschy shops were gone. It didn’t feel like home anymore. The exteriors of the buildings were the same, but the interiors were all different. Everything looked like she remembered it was supposed to look, but it wasn’t right. Amanda didn’t like it. Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again.

There had been a time when Amanda would have seen someone she knew, either on the sidewalk or in a car rolling down the main drag. She might have been stopped by old Mr. Hauge, who would have asked her how her parents were doing and how her grandmother was. Amanda always wondered if Mr. Hauge had been sweet on her grandmother at one point, but time and tide conspired to keep them apart; forever friends, never lovers.

Now, though, the sidewalks were empty. People did not walk as much as they used to, and when she did pass someone, they were strangers. They were cold and aloof. No one even returned the head nod of acknowledgement Amanda gave them, a little symbolic greeting, a simple dip of the chin that said, I see you there.

As she walked down Garfield Street, one of several streets in town named for presidents, Amanda passed a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. The baby waved, smiling oddly at her in that way that toddlers do as they learn to process the world around them. The woman, though—nothing. Cold, dead eyes purposely looked past Amanda as though civil politeness was no longer expected or necessary.

This was not the small-town Wisconsin Amanda knew. The political climate had changed so much over the last few years, but in her heart, she hoped that people would still want to at least act friendly to their neighbors, even if they didn’t mean it. People sharing a sidewalk should at least be able to exchange a smile and a nod.

Even the dog in the yard of the house nearby was not the sort of friendly, happy-go-lucky animal Amanda remembered from childhood. The dogs, especially. Everyone had a dog when she was a kid, and they were always happy to see you. Tails wagged a million beats a minute, excited tongues lapped at you. They were thrilled to see a friend or a stranger alike. Just another person who might give them some belly scratches.

The dog in the next yard barked at Amanda in a territorial manner. He paced the lawn nervously, preparing to defend the house and family if Amanda proved herself a danger. When Amanda moved closer, the dog retreated. It moved closer to the house. The barks diminished into concerned, throaty growling and punctuated with squelchy yelps.

Amanda tried to hold out a hand to show that she was no threat. The dog retreated further. She stepped closer, and the dog pulled at its leash. A nervous whine. Thrashing. Did it want to fight or run?

Amanda backed off. “Easy, boy. I’m a friend.”

The owner came out of the house, summoned by the dog’s noises.

Amanda held up her hand and kept walking. “Sorry. My fault. I thought he wanted to play.”

The owner unclipped the dog from the yard leash and ushered it inside without a word.

This wasn’t the same small town she’d left, no matter how many progressive political signs people put up. That was the way of the small towns, though. Talk a big game when it comes to social issues, but when it comes to your fellow humans, it is all about staying off lawns and not rocking the boat.

Had it changed, though? Or was it clouded by time’s rosy tint? Children perceived the world differently from adults. When she was a kid, she remembered people being friendlier. Was that because she was a kid, and people were generally nicer to children? Or was it because she was older now, and time had changed how she saw the world? Where once people were smiling, were they now scowling? It was a philosophical question she would have to ponder.

* * * * *

The library loomed large ahead of her. She had walked for some time, more than a mile, but it had not felt like it took too much time. Minutes, maybe? She couldn’t tell. The sun was high overhead, and the traffic was light. The town was still in the sleepy part of the morning.

Did the sleepy part ever stop in the summer?

Amanda walked into the library through a door that a woman was holding open for her toddler. The toddler gawped at Amanda with large, wide eyes. The baby clutched a stuffed elephant. She held the toy tighter to her chest when Amanda passed.

“Don’t worry, kiddo. I’m not going to take your elephant.”

The baby watched Amanda pass, but the child’s mother clucked her tongue and called to the child, urging her to keep walking.

Amanda walked into the familiar library, a place she’d spent so much time as a child. She liked the big windows that overlooked the golf course. She liked the shelves of books. She liked that the libraries never minded when she sat in the plush chairs for hours reading books.

Amanda saw the reference section and saw the stacks of old yearbooks from the high school. She hadn’t seen a yearbook in ages. Where was her senior yearbook? Probably in a box somewhere. Probably in the basement.

Amanda drifted to the reference section. Her eyes scanned the stack until she saw the year of her graduation. The book had been black that year, with gold lettering. Most of the others were red and white, the school colors, but that year was different. She didn’t know why. Probably a Jostens thing. Maybe they were cheaper to print that way.

She pulled the book off the shelf and sat on the floor with it, hidden from the eyes of the librarians and other patrons. She was in her own little world.

Amanda flipped idly through the pages. She stopped on the choir photo. She looked at her friends’ faces. No matter how old they got, they would always look like this in Amanda’s mind. Vainly, she searched for her own face, but didn’t see it. Had she been sick the day they took the photo? Must have been. That would be her luck, wouldn’t it? She almost never got sick, but it would be just her luck that the one day she stayed home to sip Sprite and watch The Price is Right, they’d do the important club photos at school.

Why didn’t she remember she wasn’t in the choir photo, though? Seems like something she would have remembered. Someone would have called her to ask where she had been that day, and Amanda would have had a minor fit, knowing she was excluded from the photograph. Did she have a fit and forget about it? That’s not like her.

She flipped a few more pages. Surely she would be in the softball photo. She remembered her uniform. She remembered playing. But she was not in the softball team photo, either.

Chewing on her lower lip, Amanda flipped forward several more pages. Somewhere, the senior photos would start. She would be in that section, for sure. Why did she not remember her senior photo, though? Odd.

Amanda found the pages with the glossy color photos of the senior class, the only color photos in the whole yearbook. That’s what made senior year special. The rest of the photos were black-and-white, even the grids of the underclassmen. She saw Tim Applewhite, Brenda Beecher, and the rest of her friends. She flipped forward two pages to Cara Finch, Cassidy Hansen, and Marcus Johnston. Two more pages brought her to Orion Nelson, Parker Ott, and Rachel Pruitt.

She flipped the next page, and her chest got tight. She wasn’t there.

For years, she had been sandwiched between Bobby Rainer and Wilson Small. Her class had never been large, and Saberhagen had always preceded Small. She should have been right there, leading off the charge of surnames that started with S, but she wasn’t.

Amanda got angry. She would have said something if she had gotten her yearbook and found she had been omitted. What?

She flipped to the page before and the page after. It had to be a mistake, right?

She wasn’t there.

Amanda flipped to prom. She remembered prom. She would be in the prom photos. She scanned through the pictures. She wasn’t in any of them, not even the ones with Kim Harrison and Ollie Wynn. They were her best friends. If they were in a photo, she should have been right there. She would have been right there with them. Why did she remember prom if she wasn’t in the photos?

Or did she remember prom?

Amanda sought the memories in her mind and realized she couldn’t remember prom. At all. There was not a single solid memory of prom in her head. She froze in frustration and confusion. She had to remember prom. Of course she went to prom. Why would she miss prom?

But she had no conscious memory of anything about prom. She couldn’t recall her dress. She couldn’t recall who asked her to the prom. She couldn’t…

Panicking, Amanda flipped to the graduation photos. She wasn’t there, either.

What in the hell was going on?

Amanda let the pages fall past her fingers, past the final pages, the candids, and to the last few pages of ads. She went to the appendix at the end and searched for her name. She found it. With a single listing: page 208.

Frantically, she flipped to that page. It was the last page in the book, past the ads, past the appendix, too. On the final page before the blank inserts for autographs, there she was. Her senior photo stood alone in all its glory, in full, vivid color under the words In Memoriam.

What?

Amanda dropped the book and scrambled backwards as though the thing might bite. She kicked it with her heel. The book spun across the industrial carpet and banged off a shelf, making a hollow thump.

Practical joke. It had to be. Someone did this. She was on camera, wasn’t she?

Amanda looked for the cameras. She looked for someone to confirm she wasn’t dead. Then, with terror gripping her chest, she rushed to the librarians at the main desk. She clapped her hands. “I’m not dead, am I? You can see me, right?”

They didn’t flinch. They didn’t look up. Amanda pounded her fist on the desk. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

They said nothing. They continued to work.

A wave of memory crashed through Amanda’s mind. She saw bits and pieces. Flashes. A twisted splash of sound and light. A car. The crosswalk—the same one her parents warned her to be careful at when she crossed Main Street. A driver distracted. Texting, maybe? The radio? She wasn’t looking at the road.

Amanda, headphones in her ears, equally distracted. She trusted the light. Didn’t look to the right. She stepped off the curb. The car was going too fast. The driver didn’t see her until—

Amanda felt the car hit her hip, so much steel, so much power. She felt the impact of windshield glass on her face. She fell backward, the car dragging her on the pavement until...

…until she was dead.

She remembered now.

But she couldn’t be dead.

She was right there. She was alive. She had been in her bedroom that morning. She had…

What did she have?

Fragments.

Shards of memories.

Was she real? Was the library real? What was going on?

Amanda’s chest hurt. She gasped for breath. If she were dead, then why did she have trouble breathing? She couldn’t be dead, she simply couldn’t be!

She fled the library, crashing through the glass doors, desperate to be in the sun, desperate to find someone who could see her. Certainly, someone would see her in the light. They would have to see her.

Wouldn’t they?

* * * * *

One of the librarians looked up from the computer she was working on. She was new. “The door just slammed open by itself.”

The other librarian shrugged and jabbed a thumb at the clock on the wall. “Happens every couple of days about this time. We don’t know why.”

“Weird.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Must be a ghost.”

The second librarian adjusted her glasses and went back to sorting books. “Probably.”

Neither said anything further about it.

* * * * *

Amanda stared out at the town beyond her bedroom window.

How long had it been since she set foot in the ol’ hometown? Five years? Longer? Felt like an eternity.

Strange, isn’t it? You spend all of high school desperate to get out of your hometown, but after a few years away, you only want to get back. There’s just something about coming home.

Ideally, Amanda hoped she could return to Mount Horeb as a success.

I had my first decent job interview in years for a position aligned with my education and experience, and not only that, I had friends on the inside of the company talking me up.

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ll know that the job market is brutal, the struggle is real, and I haven’t been able to find a position complementary to what I want to do (other than write books) in some years.

Since I lost the one job I truly loved to the school's closure, I’ve bounced from one survival job to another, trying to find whatever comes next in my life. Thus far, it’s been a lot of underemployment for low wages.

After that first interview, I was extremely optimistic about getting a second interview. But on Wednesday, I received an email from the man I spoke with at the company. They decided to cancel the position I was interviewing for rather than fill it. They just nixed it from their organizational charts.

This is, not surprisingly, the first time this has happened ot me in the last decade. As companies restructure to maximize profit for the Haves at the expense of the HaveNots, I’ve seen this many times.

Needless to say, I’ve been throwing myself a little pity party and struggling to get the urge to go back to job hunting, since it feels like such a painfully fruitless endeavor.

Job hunting is tough under the best of circumstances. Doing while overeducated, overqualified, bald, fat, and fifty is doing it on hard mode. Most days, it just feels like the universe has spoken, and that my place is to forever be a nobody writer who works at a barbecue restaurant.

I’m hoping that’s not the case—both in job and publishing. But I’m not holding my breath.

So, as I seek to find content for my Substack ramblings, I figured I’d start a recurring post titled “Finding Joy.” To which, this is the first installment.

I have no set posting schedule for this concept, but we’ll start with this one, see how it goes, and play it by ear from there.

The idea of finding joy in small amounts has long been something I’ve worked to do, but it gets increasingly difficult as you feel the weight of the world, the pressures of life, and you feel that Sword of Damocles that is mortality hanging over you constantly.

O. Henry, in his wonderful short story, The Gift of the Magi, wrote the brilliant line:

Sobs, sniffles, and smiles—with sniffles predominating.

What the wise Mr. Porter1 was telling us with this line is that the status quo of life is not joy or sorrow—it’s a plain, basic sadness. The high points and low points exist, but life’s main return is the underwhelming blandness that keeps us hovering just below the line between happy and sad.

We were not meant to punch a clock five days a week, do laundry on the weekends, and eat fast food in our cars as we hustle on errands. Humans were meant to explore and adventure, to take in the world, to relax and enjoy what little time we have on this stupid rock before it ends—but the necessities of life and capitalism intervened and keep us running in front of the big wheel, lest it crush us.

Sorrow hits us occasionally, and it always hits hard, often overstaying its welcome. Grief is a cruel tyrant that never quite lets go of us. Joy is a sparrow—twitchy and fleeting. It spends but a moment in front of you, and then it vanishes in a fluff of feathers and chirps.

The everyday cadence of life is depression, or “sniffles” as O. Henry said. It’s the side effect of the struggle, of trying to meet everyone else’s demands instead of our own. The problem with this level of existence is that it’s not enough to hamper us. It doesn’t stop us from getting up, going to work, and going to bed only to do it all over the next day. It just wears us down over time, reminding us that we aren’t truly free. We’re all in the same mess. But there’s nothing we can do about it except put on a smiling face and go back to work, hoping tomorrow brings a taste of some joy that we didn’t expect to get.

That’s the real testament to the human spirit. It’s not winning gold in the Olympics; it’s the fact that the wide and vast majority of us will never approximate anything even close to winning gold, but we persevere and keep going, knowing that tomorrow will probably not bring improvement.

When the sniffles of life get a little too heavy, I try to escape with some moments of joy in different ways, and that will be what these posts focus on—things that bring me tiny bits of joy. I put this out into the digital ether for you, in the hopes that when you’re currently going through the grinder, you might find some joy in them, too.

Underrated Live Albums

If you’ve read the nonsense I throw onto Substack periodically, you’ll know that I’m a rabid music snob with eclectic tastes in bands.

However, I don’t believe I’ve spoken too much about how I tend to prefer live albums over studio recordings.

Great bands are great live. That’s all there is to it. Really great bands have live albums that capture the heart and soul of who they are, along with the joy and surge of the crowd.

Not every band has great live albums.

One of the two bands I consider my favorite group of all-time, Rush (the other being Marillion, of course), does not have any great live albums. I like their live albums, and I’ll listen to them, but they basically play the song almost studio perfect, and the only real change from the live show to the studio recording is that Geddy’s vocals are never as clean as they are in the studio.

So, let’s talk about a couple of underrated live records that I go back to constantly because they bring me joy.

Let’s start the list with this underrated little gem from the boys from Aylesbury, shall we?

While on tour supporting their 1997 release, This Strange Engine, Marillion recorded Piston Broke for their Racket Club releases. These were live albums the band self-recorded and marketed directly to their fans, sometimes as physical releases (like this one) and sometimes as digital downloads.

The track listing is solid—maybe not their best live set ever, but a mix of great songs from This Strange Engine, Afraid of Sunlight, and Brave. AoS and TSE are two of my favorite records of the Hogarth-era, and they play the title track to AoS, which is arguably my favorite song on the album, and easily in my top five favorite Marillion tracks.

However, the real joy of this record comes when they play the title track from This Strange Engine, which starts with an extended bass solo from Marillion’s highly underrated bassist, Pete Trewavas.

When this album came out, I was just starting to learn to play guitar (which I still do very, very poorly…), but hearing Pete’s solo made me want to learn to play bass, too. I bought a bass and learned to play it. And I’m proud to say I’m equally poor as a bassist as I am a guitarist.

Honestly, I have no musical ability at all. Everything I learned how to play is out of sheer will, not talent.

The bass solo, the crowd response before Pete starts up, and the extravagant, soaring opus of This Strange Engine all combine to make this one of my favorite live recordings from my favorite band.

Side note: When people list the great bassists of all time, you inevitably see guys like Geddy Lee, Victor Wooten, Jaco Pastorius, John Entwistle, and Cliff Burton near the top. Pete deserves to be in that conversation, too. The bass arrangements he’s developed for Marillion’s work for more than 40 years are a wonderful testament to his musicality and playing ability. The man is highly underrated as a player.

Big Head Todd and the Monsters are a true journeyman band. They have been hard at it since 1986, the core trio of Todd Park Mohr, Brian Nevin, and Rob Squires remaining unchanged. They are a solid bluesy rock outfit that isn’t doing anything overly special or overly original—but they are great at writing songs and playing live. Every year, BHT&tM head out on tour, hit a bunch of stops, and entertain the crowds.

You almost never hear them on the radio anymore, not that you ever did when they were at their peak in the mid-90s, although their major label debut, Sister Sweetly, landed them a trio of classic rock radio hits: Broken Hearted Savior, Bittersweet, and Circle.

The core BHT&tM experience is their live show. They have played festivals and headlined their own tours for years. They play the famous Red Rocks in their native Colorado every year, and always sell it out.

This is a working-class band. This is a band that doesn’t get nearly enough credit. This is three guys living their dream, doing what they love, and playing music that fits into the soundtrack of a lot of lives. All credit to them.

Their first live album remains my favorite, although any of their live works is worth seeking out. The Live Monsters recording was released in 1999 on Giant/Reprise records, and opens with the blistering “Bittersweet,” which is worth listening to just for the bridge, in which Mohr slow-burns a few notes and chords into a blistering guitar attack that lays down the challenge for the remainder of the record.

While the guitar solo at their 2008 Red Rocks show isn’t nearly as clean or as intense as the rendition on Live Monsters, it still cooks, and it’s still worth listening to. Check the whole track, or jump ahead to about the 3:50 mark to get to meat of the solo—the guitar part drops just after the 4:00 minute mark.

If you don’t own a Big Head Todd & the Monsters record, I’d strongly encourage you to add two or three of them. You won’t be sorry.

John Wetton, best known for his work with the progressive rock supergroup Asia (“Heat of the Moment”) and his work with King Crimson, also had a noteworthy solo career, and the hard-to-find Sub Rosa: Live in Milan is an amazing little live record that is highly worth seeking out if you’re into miracles of audio engineering.

This record was recorded in the medieval castle of Vigevano, on the outskirts of Milan. The stone structure, which could be an acoustic nightmare if improperly recorded, makes for one of the brightest, most alive-sounding live recordings I’ve ever heard.

Backed by Martin Orford (notably of prog rock journeyman group IQ) and journeyman guitarist David Kilminster, this performance is one worth hearing at least once, just for the electricity put into the acoustic guitars they play.

If you enjoy the work on this record, Wetton’s Akoustica: Live in America CD is worth hearing, as well.

Angela Maria Difranco, better known as Ani Difranco, is an innovative guitarist, singer, and songwriter who has taken the DIY work ethic and spirit of the 90s musicians to a whole ‘nother level, and Living in Clip is a testament to her ability to decimate a crowd with an acoustic guitar and her voice.

At the age of 19, in 1989, Difranco started her own record label, Righteous Babe Records, and began recording her own music. Since then, she has kicked out an impressive list of more than twenty studio records and equal that of live records, including an “official bootleg series” where she distributes soundboard recordings of her shows through her website.2

As a struggling publisher with his own imprint, seeing what Difranco was able to do on her own, without major label support, is a big influence on what I hope for with every book I put out. When you control everything from the get-go, including story, cover, etc…there’s a lot riding on your shoulders. But it’s profit or peril, win or lose. Few bands have done the solo world as well as Ms. D has.

As she approaches four decades in music, Difranco is now a wife and mother. She’s raising children in upstate New York (although her oldest is almost 20), but still cranking out records and touring when she can. I don’t know if there’s quit in the woman, and good for her.

I have nothing but respect for Ani Difranco.

So much so that my daughter, Annika, has been called “Ani” as a nickname her whole life.

Or Midgey. I call her Midgey more often than Ani, but she is still known by most as Ani.

Anyhow, check out Difranco’s scathing takedown of the record industry in her song “Napoleon” from Living in Clip.

Final Thoughts

There you go. Four pieces of joy in this world, where joy is often hard to come by.

I’m going to go work on the current work-in-progress (more on that in the future…), and continue rewatching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in preparation for the season finale tonight. Given the numbers AKotSK has been pulling, season two is inevitable, and I’ll be very much looking forward to seeing more of Dunk & Egg as soon as possible.

As far as I’m concerned, Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell are locks for Emmys. I can’t think of a show that has been better cast than this one. Every actor has fit his or her part perfectly, and it feels like they’ve walked straight out of the book.

In the meantime, if you could do me a favor and nominate my buddy Andrew’s restaurant for the Best of Madison Awards, that’d be great.

Go there. Enter “Primal Cue” for best restaurant and best barbecue, and any others if you feel like.

There’s a space where you can nominate Best Local Author/Writer, too. There is no way I’m ever winning any sort of popularity contest, so don’t waste a vote on me, but I’d encourage you to go nominate Alex Bledsoe, Cayce Osborne, Maddy Hunter, Kathleen Ernst, Christine DeSmet, Annelise Ryan, or any of three or four dozen other great Madison-area writers for the award.

Until next time. Thanks for reading.

When Stephen King wrote about his alcoholism in On Writing, he said the point of drinking is to get drunk, and I’m kind of on board with him there. I’d rather have a Coke than a beer. I’d rather have a Diet Mountain Dew than a cocktail. I don’t drink because my metabolism, weight, and heritage make it extremely difficult for me to feel anything from alcohol, so I figure, what’s the point? Bring on the root beer float, please.

However, I live in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is in a different world when it comes to drinking. Wisconsin college students, famously, have been barred from participating in drinking contests at various spring break locales. Wisconsin football fans went to Provo, Utah, and emptied the entire town's liquor supply. Watch out, Mormons…here comes Wisconsin.

Recently, a clip went viral of some Brits talking about how British drinking culture is superior to American drinking culture, and they were confident that the Brits would outdrink Americans. This clip was stitched repeatedly with people warning England that the US would only send over college students from Wisconsin, and the UK would take the L. Or, as one of the stitchers responded, “You’ve never heard of Wisconsin, then. I don’t know if I can explain this the correct way. They’re built different!”

@drinkwisconsinblyHow do we make this happen?#BuiltDifferent #Wisconsin #DrinkWisconsinbly 🏆

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Someone pointed out that when the Packers played that game in London a few years ago, every bar around Wembley was emptied of booze. That doesn’t happen when Tottenham Hotspur play there. You need the Wisconsin mojo to really know what drinking in bulk is like.

It is a different level here, and having been a bartender now for more than a year and a half, I’ve been privy to a front-row seat to Wisconsin’s interconnectedness with alcohol, and it’s clear that we have issues with alcohol.

I see people walk into the restaurant, and I can tell who the problem drinkers are immediately. They’re the ones whose eyes dart to the bar and light up. They see the eight taps and start thinking about which one they’ll have. The beer is more important to them than the food.

The bar I’ve been working at is attached to a hockey arena that hosts numerous games and tournaments each year. Hockey parents drink like they’re trying to relive their collegiate glory days. They start with Bloody Marys as soon as the doors open, transition to beers by lunch, and shift to harder stuff after dinner. These are people who are there with their 10- or 12-year-old children. These are people who spend enormous amounts of money to put their children in these tournaments, and some of them (not many, thankfully) actually would rather sit at the bar and pound cans of Busch Light than watch their kids skate.

The true problem drinkers are the ones who yank the doors before we’re open, the metal locks banging against the metal door frames. When we look to see what the commotion is, they point to the bar and then to their watches. What time? How long until I can get in there and buy liquor?

Buddy, you need a 12-step program, not a drink.

When I start getting really down about seeing the parade of sadness that is problem drinkers, I try to remind myself that I’m not the fun police, that I’m not there to judge. People are allowed to be adults and conduct themselves as they see fit.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

But working in a bar has made me really rethink my relationship with alcohol, even though it wasn’t that much to begin with, and really made me reevaluate my state’s penchant for drinking.

When you see maps about the drunkest counties in America, I’m not sure having Wisconsin being bright red is all that much of a good thing anymore.

A Few Reviews

Since I don’t want to get completely preachy about boozing, let’s end this post with a couple of shout-outs for things I’ve enjoyed lately.

Season Four of The Lincoln Lawyer was a delight, easily the best of the series so far. It ends with a nice tease toward Season Five, so I’m looking forward to having Mickey and Company back in action as soon as possible.

Speaking of Season Fours—the first episode of Season Four of Dark Winds will be out on February 15, and the acclaimed show has already gotten a renewal for Season Five. Bring on more Zahn McClarnon—one of the most underrated actors on TV. Give him all the Emmys.

If you’re not watching Shoresy (or its brilliant predecessor, Letterkenny), you’re missing out.

If you liked Ted Lasso and its hopeful, positive vibe… well, Shoresy is a gruff, Canadian, drunken-uncle equivalent of that series.

Whereas Ted will bolster you and inspire you to be the best version of yourself that you can be, Shoresy will verbally destroy you, tell you to give your balls a tug, infer that he’s banging your mom, and still inspire you to be the best version of yourself that you can be.

For a show that runs six episodes a season about a bunch of guys playing Senior-A “whale shit” hockey in a half-busted level of the most minor league hockey there is, there is something magical about the characters, the passion, and the heart this show brings.

It has become one of my go-to, watch-anytime, comfort shows. The dialogue, the jokes—everything works.

Shoresy was just renewed for season six—probably coming out this December. Until then, you’ve got 30 episodes to watch on Hulu.

Yes, b’ys. Stays where yer at, and I’ll come where yer to.

The first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has been a delight, as well. Peter Claffey is wonderful as George RR Martin’s loveable Ser Duncan the Tall, and Dexter Sol Ansell is pitch perfect as Egg.

I have often said that the three Dunk & Egg novellas are what I believe to be GRRM’s best work. I wish he had written more than three. There is an inherent sense of goodness and what is right and pure in Dunk. He is a man who believes in the oath all knights swear, to protect the innocent and be a good man, above all else. He is young and full of idealism, incorruptible to the darkness that runs so deep in the Seven Kingdoms. He is the ultimate Boy Scout—the closest thing Westeros has to Superman.

Give me more, HBO. This is perfection.

While the City Never Sleeps by Alex Bledsoe

The esteemed Mr. Bledsoe, whose Tufa novels remain one of my favorite fantasy series of all-time, up there with Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles and the Fitz and the Fool books from Robin Hobb, has turned his hand to a wild ride of a crime novel, full of comic book-level villains and the hardscrabble cops who have to go against them.

Bledsoe’s inspiration for this book comes from an ‘80s indie comic called Night Streets, a world of noir crime where a seven-foot cat runs the mob.

The book moves as a roller-coaster clip, with tight dialogue, wild turns, and memorable characters. Another stellar effort from a guy who doesn’t miss.

Highly recommend.

Pendergast: The Beginning by Lincoln & Child

I have read every book that these two gents have written, both as a team and solo. For the most part, they deliver a pretty decent thriller. There tends to be a crazy turn toward the end that gets ironed out in the denouement, but nothing overly wild.

The AXL Pendergast books have been my favorite of their works, partially because in enigmatic Agent Pendergast, they have created one of those great literary characters—up there with Holmes, Poirot, and Sam Spade.

However, as series that run into 20+ books tend to do, they started to beat a dead horse and lose the plot. The last two Pendergast books, for example, involved time travel…and not theoretical time travel, either. It got weird. They started to flag. It wasn’t good.

Pendergast: The Beginning takes us back to Pendergast’s rookie year in the FBI, and gives us a sense of what the agent was like as a younger man, before he was more of a lone wolf, before he was such a loose cannon. They also returned him to his native New Orleans.

In reining him in, they have revitalized the series. This is again a series worth reading.

Good job, boys.

The Serial Killer’s Wife by Robert Swartwood

I have always found the aftermath of a crisis to be more interesting than the crisis itself, and Swartwood hones that idea to a razor-fine edge with this one.

The premise is that the main character’s husband was arrested five years ago for being a serial killer. She has retreated to a tiny Midwestern town with her son and a new identity.

However, her idyllic new life is interrupted when a man calling himself Cain kidnaps her son and tells her that in order to get the boy back, Elizabeth must collect her husband’s trophies—the fingers he cut off of his victims. She has 100 hours to gather them.

Start the roller-coaster.

Swartwood writes a brisk, capable book, and this was a helluva ride.

Enough for Now

That’s probably enough for now. I’ve got a work-in-progress to finish, books to read for a contest I’m judging, and Diet Cherry Cokes to drink.

Thanks for reading.