There Was A Crooked Man: Book I : In The Bag, No Thanks To...

Why is it that the best and worst things always happen butted up back to back?

The Crooked Man series has just found a home at Mercury Retrograde Press,

Stoked as hell about this, don't get me wrong. Wanted to announce it immediately.

Now that the dust has settled on a whirlwind that my balky precognition saw coming Just Soon Enough to Not Know What Was Wrong, I can say that I just vetted and signed a nine-book deal on a series that I started when I was eleven.

Eleven. A year I had a very odd paranormal experience I've never really shared with anyone because I don't fully understand it. Pierre L'Enfant and Jane Lindskold might. Maybe a few more. It was in DC, in 1987. For precedent, the closest thing I can recommend is the birthday party scene in Dante Alighieri's 'La Vita Nuova'. Ya had to be there.

But that germ of a dream, and several that came after it, as we scribes and visionaries came up and came together in the wilderness, all of us mutant oracles with hitchhiker's thumbs and head wounds and alcohol-induced telepathy...

I got it all. I photographed it. As I just told an old friend from Altoona, this series needed to be written for three hundred years. I only did it in 22.

I've been through Hell and out the back upside down to tell this thing, and I can't tell you what a relief it is to craft the final versions of each cartridge in this little atomic-powered Giger babymachine.

Can't say enough about this series fast enough, not like I haven't tried before. I just lost what looked like a plum gig, writing a publisher's memoirs. I should be very sad right now.

However, now that the dust has settled, all I can feel is liberation and relief. My soul is not worth what that skinflint paid, whether I am wearing a guard uniform or an ugly black polyester bouncer shirt, or even working at home for a megalomaniac who fucked up his kids.

I don't know how they find me. Word to the wise, you writers: If you go free-lance as an editor, and some old fart shows up on your doorstep with a box of journals and a One Right Way to make them into The Great American Memoir...

Like I said, this has happened twice, so I can say with some authority:

As soon as he makes his pitch, look the old bastard in the eye. Pick up the claw hammer you have sitting on the coffee table. Whack yourself in the head with it several times. Then run screaming in the opposite direction.

While this may look like a circuitous route, and a painful one, it will be much less so in both cases than any continued negotiation with this species of Closet Human. (tm) Fooled me once, shame on you.

Fooled me twice... and I just hooked two new clients, sold my African-Atlantaean mermaid yarn 'By The Rivers Of Babylon', and found that the latter-day Medici Prince I was working for was the one thing I didn't need to keep going at this.


We let people get the better of us. You do it too. All the time. We let some bullying asshole figure out enough about how we work that they can use their animal cunning to whip your back bloody and push you into total breakdown just to get maximum output.

As Chaucer tells us, therefore behooveth him a very long spoon who shall eat with a fiend. Fire your boss, kiddies, no matter what kind of pleasing face they put on. It's a mask, and underneath the face is always the same.

My dear Serena Blossom ( whom this schmuck disrespected in my own house, in the most vulgar terms he could) told me that I was ranting in my sleep, once, about everyone doing what they wanted to do... and then society would have to change.

Doing what you Want... not what you think you want... sometimes includes abandoning what looks like the Easier Softer Way if you can keep a single shred of dignity, or at least enough to recognize what a carny hyp looks like when someone's blowing it up your ass.

Weird week last week. Maybe this one will be better. We have nothing to lose but our megalomaniacs. I am 144 pages into Crooked Man 2: Birth Of A Nation. The hits just keep on comin'...