04/26/2007: "STUCK IN A RUT?"

Hi All,

I thought I'd address something that feels important to me to address. Nothing earthshattering, no big revelation, not a hermaphrodite or anything ... well, okay, so I'm a hermaphrodite but that's not really the point. Okay, so I'm not a hermaphrodite I just like writing that word.

Hermaphrodite.

Hermaphrodite: one having both male and female sexual characteristics and organs; at birth an unambiguous assignment of male or female cannot be made. -Websters dictionary.

Hey, when I looked up "hermaphrodite" online, the first few results all alluded to the rumor that Jamie Lee Curtis is/was one. I had no idea. She cannot be. Well, I mean, maybe, not that it's any of my beeswax anyway, but really? Jamie Lee? The comely Laurie Strode from HALLOWEEN---and the slightly older but nonetheless comely Laurie Strode from HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION? Well, I don't buy it. Remember that scene in TRADING PLACES when she played comely hooker Ophelia, humping some randy john in a bathtub full of ermine coats, moaning and emoting to beat the ole band, then, just when you think she's really into it, she gives her wristwatch a totally bored and dispassionate glance? In my experience, only a woman---a woman in FULL---could give such a glance. Then again, maybe that has more to do with my boudoir mannerisms than anything else.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with the emails I get from readers. I don't get a lot. 4-5 a week, ranging from kudos to razzes to requests to send books to autograph (all of which I honor, if anyone wants to send theirs on), to other questions about this or that, all of which I answer to the best of my abilities.

Lately I've gotten a few to the effect of:

Dear Craig (some say Mr. Davidson, which is very respectful but I'm not really the sort of person you should be respecting. Save that for the Dali Lama. Some say 'Hey, Douchebag,' which I prefer),

I've read your books [these are emails from either ardent fans or liars; I give them the benefit of the doubt and massage my own ego by choosing the former] and while I like your writing a fair bit, you write about the same stuff all the time. [a few paragraphs of fawning sycophantry, which I edit out because I'm sure you're all consumed all day with thoughts of my awesomeness, so it would just be a lot of repetition] So, yeah, if you could write some different stuff, stretch yourself a little, that would be great.

Yours,
Emile Pulsifier.

Okay, so nobody named Emile ever wrote me. But I have gotten emails to this effect and, looking back over my recent output, I cannot say as I blame them.

In my defense: if you'd been reading my output since the Patrick Lestewka days, you would be saying I write too much about zombies and slimy membranous bat creatures and the Vietnam war. But if you've been reading my output circa RUST AND BONE, THE FIGHTER, the stories and articles that have surrounded those publications, you'd think, and rightfully so, I am obsessed with masculinity, fighting, dogfighting, tempestuous freaky sex, the weak-chinned sissified men of our current epoch, and, I don't know, things of that nature. You also might think I've been ripping off Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Thom Jones, and any number of other, better, more established writers than myself. None of which I could or would fault you for in the slightest, as the doubts you harbor---wether they be about my abilities, my close adherence to a select variety of subject matters, my unappealing body odor, what have you---all of these doubts I have myself harbored, and much more keenly than I should hope you ever will. If I know anything at all about myself, it is my flaws. And they are Legion.

I have no excuse for this.

Please find following my excuses.

There are only two. Please excuse the fact I cannot tender any more than that.

Excuse #1: publishers like to be able to fit writers into cubbies. If you like Stephen King, try Clive Barker. If you like Dan Brown, try more Dan Brown. If you like so-and-so, try Craig Davidson. Some writers scream and fuss about the boxes they've been set into or have settled into, but really, it's the way of the publishing world. Boxes are nice safe places and many writers make a very good living for themselves in these boxes, so much so that a few of the lucky ones manage to get the financial wherewithal and reader support to tell their publishers, "To hell with you and your box, I'm branching out!" And when they branch out and their branch breaks and they fall and break one of more of their extremities they crawl back into their boxes, heal, and go about their business as usual. The point is, they made the leap. And some, it must be said, do very well on their new branch. And some, with an ease that fills the rest of us with mouth-frothing envy, flit from branch to branch while us box-sitters endeavor to smear grease on their next branch and toss rocks hoping to knock them down. No, no, we box-sitters don't do that; the bulk of our time is taken up trying to keep our boxes, fighting off any number of would-be box-sitters who keep trying to crawl in and fling us out. In fact, I may be one of those would-be box-sitters. I don't really have my own box; I have, like, a paper lunchsack with a wet bottom.
That last sentence may be confusing; I mean to say my metaphorical lunchsack has a wet bottom, not me PERSONALLY has a wet bottom. I mean, I DO have a wet bottom, it's just that it's not germane to the discussion at hand.
So, anyway, my point is that sometimes, even if you'd like to write something different, the dynamics of your box dictate you keep writing what you're writing. That's what the people, your editors, want. I know a fellow, a very good writer, who wrote a very good, well-received zombie book. Now all people ever really want of him is zombie books. It's not that he can't write very good non-zombie books, but everyone's sort of, "Well, this is all well and good, but where are the zombies?" His editors and publishers: have you considered, ooooh, I don't know...zombies? And he can write zombies, there's a familiarity and a proven track record, so that's what he writes. I don't know if he twists his bedsheets into knots about it, crying out into the night, "Why can't I write about a slime blob once in awhile?" bawling himself into a zombie-plagued slumber, but that's the way of it.
Now me, it's not like I've had a particularly successful book that everyone's clamoring for more of the same. Maybe if I'd written a book about a zombie boxer, or two vampire dogs that fought each other then fell in love, or, y'know, a teenaged Mennonite girl with plenty of chutzpah, or whatever the Mennonite word for chutzpah is, who, oooh I don't know, battles some Ancient Evil out in a Manitoban wheat field, then maybe, maybe people would be saying, "Hey, Davidson, more of that plucky Mennonite!"
More or less this is all to say that we have cubbies and I had mine. None of my publishers forced it upon me; it was, in the parlance of the corporate synergists and those who bedeck themselves in hemp clothing, an "organic" sort of a thing. And I'm sure they're hoping, based on the performance of my first few books, that I attempt to find another box, or lunchsack, because the one I'm in is taking on a lot of water. Mainly from my bottom.

Excuse #2: I'm a hugely obsessive person. HUGELY. Not sure that comes through in my books, on this blog, or in any other way, but if you talk to anyone who knows me I would imagine they might say, "Yeah, that Davidson's one obsessive cat." (that is, if you were talking to anyone who knew me who was at that time impersonating a 70's era pimp). So lately, I'll admit it, and there's no way I can deny it looking at my output, I've been obsessed with those themes that have been present in my writing as it stands over the past few years. But I chew through my obsessions, particle-ize and mineralize and ingest them, and then I'm done and move on. As I said, if you were reading my Patrick Lestewka stuff (2-3 years before RUST AND BONE) then you would see my obsessions as totally different.

Douglas Coupland said that readings are like taxidermy. I understand what he means, because by the time you're up there reading from a book, often six months, a year, longer, has passed since you had anything to do with that book. It'd been written, edited, proofed, all of that long ago and when you're up there reading it it's like you're reading Sanscrit, Esperanto, something you have little affinity to in an odd way, as if it were written by someone else. That's how it feels for me; if and when I read from THE FIGHTER this summer, it will be difficult because the writing of it, that world, is so far away (I hope that doesn't sound writer-y or goofy; I don't mind sounding goofy in general, but there are certain breeds of goofiness I try to avoid).

It'll feel that way because I'm on chapter 36 of my next novel, some 250 single-spaced pages, longer and more complex than anything I've ever attempted, different topic, a totally different cast of characters, a story that's been in the front of my mind, plaguing me, obsessing me, for 13 months now. I started writing it not long after I handed in my final draft of THE FIGHTER, which was long long ago.

So I guess what I am saying, to those people who have emailed me (and those people who haven't but feel the same as those who did): I am clambering out on a new branch. It's a tricky branch, it feels like some other meanspirited box-sitter has greased it, my legs are wobbly but still, I'm doing it. I can't and won't say what the book is about, keeping everything close to my chest, but I can tell you what it WILL NOT include:

* NO BOXING
* NO STEROID ABUSE
* NO PROSTITUTES
* NO FREAKY SEX (okay, one scene. But that may come out in an edit, should anyone publish it)
* MINIMAL CUSSWORDS

It will include a cute, sentient, fully mobile bath-toy I've named "Suds" who embarks on a series of madcap adventures in the margins of the actual novel.

Okay, that's a lie, but it's not such a bad idea. I might throw that in on a future edit.

So the fear, as I imagine as it would be with most writers, is that you're going to turn off the readers you've got by going in a different direction. I would like to think that's not going to happen, not only because if I offered $100 to all my devoted readers to keep them as readers I'd only be down five hunny or so. No, the reason is I think there is a point as a writer where you are what you are, and I am what I am so with this book I'm not trying to reinvent myself. I think the aim for most writers is to keep what works and concentrate on what doesn't—diversify, try new things, and still be who and what you are that got you wherever you are now.

But most importantly: I've found a new obsession. I've been obsessed about it for over a year now. I've gotten into arguments in crowded restaurants about it. We hermaphrodites are obsessive folk.

And still taped to my computer, the same place it's been since I tapped the first keystroke, the mantra:

MAKE SOMEONE WANT TO SHOOT YOU FOR WRITING THIS.

I don't know. Will I? Someone's got to publish the damn thing first. After that I promise to do my level best to take a slug or two.

Again, thanks to everyone who does write, who does read my books, this blog, I very much appreciate it. I can see how it must look that I'm trudging the same old terrain, but please believe me when I say it's been all new, unmapped (by me, anyway) terrain the past year.

All best, Craig.