What can you get for six bucks? (Or: Boots and Books)

I did a lot of research when deciding on the price point for my novel. Like anything on the internet, you are going to find a wide variance of opinions. As an unknown author (and that is surely what I am), some have suggested to go low, and go for volume – kind of a Walmart approach. Incidentally, I don't shop at Walmart. The place bugs the hell out of me, both for its business practices and the low level crap it sells. Tangentially, one of the ways of choosing to live simply is to buy something of high quality that will last for years, as opposed to a bargain priced item that will most likely fall apart in a few months. Here I am thinking about items like quality shoes or boots (love my Blundstones to death, and yeah they were expensive. But they have lasted for years).

I digress. As usual.

I am not comparing my novel to good quality boots. For one thing, a book won't fall apart on you (though, I could mention some that have - metaphorically, or, um, literally). And for sure an e-book, well those things are pretty much bulletproof – though, I caution taking your Kindle into a gun fight, or even the bathtub.

So here is the thing. I worked very very damn hard on this book - for years actually. This is not something I whipped together to jump on the ebook revolution. This novel had an agent, and was shopped around New York to the big six (and others). It gathered a lot of very postive feedback, some amazing and complimentary things were said (from Mulholland Books for example). But the problem was, as explained by my wonderful agent, it is a great book, but a hard one to place. Is it a literary book? Yes. Is it a mystery/thriller? Yep. And does it have supernatural or slipstream elements? That would also be a yes.

So where the hell do you put the thing?

That is what I imagined editors saying out loud. And I do understand this. I don't write books that fall easily into a slot – and the truth is, publishing is a business. I know very well from my years as an illustrator, that you need to create a product that is both of a high quality and consistent in that style. Art Directors commissioned jobs from me knowing that they would get artwork that looked like my previous work. And even though my style evolved over the years, they still knew what they were going to get.

So I hold absolutely no bitterness toward the editors who didn't want to take a chance on an unknown writer, whose work was not easily categorized. I decided to release an e-book as a bit of an experiment (I continue to query my other novel), and to dip my toe into the waters of self-publishing.

That is where I come back to pricing.

I have always told my illlustration and design students, "Do not undervalue your work." It is bad for the business of illustration, and it is bad for you. There will always be those who will bid lower than you - but you have to ask yourself, what do you really think the work is worth?

I carry this into my publishing venture. I know it will make it a tougher climb - I mean, what, you want me to pay 6 bucks? (5.99, actually) There are a ton of books I can get for .99.

Yes, you can. But not mine... or not this one anyway.

I understand the reason books are released at this price point, and I have other projects that I will release for .99 (and even some for free - like Bent Highway). But I believe Correction Line is worth a bit more - at least half a movie, anyway. Or a package of hot dogs – the good ones, with a bit of actual meat in them.

Finally, I love what a buyer told me when he first picked up Correction Line. He said that he wouldn't spend 10 or 12 bucks on an unknown author - but he was also leery of spending only .99 – I mean, why so cheap? It made him suspicious. And he said, "I've spent 6 bucks on a lot worse things."

Which for me, deserves to be a blurb on the back of the book. So yeah, you could spend 6 bucks on a lot worse things. Several copies of the National Enquirer, two packs of the cheap hot dogs, or about 5 minutes (or less) at a VLT.

So there you go.

Oh, and go buy some Blundstones. You will thank me.

Bent Highway Chapters

If you missed the previous chapters of Bent Highway, you could scroll through Woofreakinhoo, or you could just click below.

New chapters will be posted every Friday.

I hope you are enjoying is so far.

Right now M is pretty damn confused, he knows that his perception is being altered, and that chalk girl and the black sedan have the answers. But in Chapter three, he mainly wonders how is pants went missing (!). Okay, well more than that.

See you next Friday.

Chapter One: Zippo

Chapter Two: Arrow

Chapter Three: Doc

Doc

I awoke staring into a clipboard that hovered above my face. The guy wasn't wearing anything that would identify him as a doctor but I figured he had to be – he had that look of someone that studied your personal areas. A curvy woman with horn rimmed glasses and a rat’s nest of hair stood next to him.

"I said do you often have this loss of conciousness?"

"Sorry?"

He looked at the woman, she grimaced, he said something under his breath.

"I see. You have had another one. Do you remember coming in here? They said you were in a diner." His thick gray mustache danced as he spoke. "You don't seem to have any injuries, except for that nasty cut on your forearm. I thought about stiching it but thought that —"

Three parallel steri-strips were pasted against the partially scabbed over gash. 

"Shit. My knee!" 

I threw back the white sheet, unaware of my nakedness. The woman didn't turn away but lurched forward, her eyes widened.

"You have been having problems with your knee?"

I ran my hands along the smooth, unbroken skin covering my left kneecap. I glanced at my right, just in case I was wrong. Neither of them had a scratch.

The doctor glanced at the clipboard. "Have you had problems with an addictive substance? Previous psychological treatment? Exhibitionist tendencies?" 

The woman smiled at me.

I brought the sheet back to cover myself.

"Who brought me here?"

"You were in your truck," said the still smiling, kind of leering, woman.

"I'm Doctor Little. Don't you recall our previous conversation?" 

I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Her face grew large in my mind.

"The woman, with the really white skin… where is she?"

The looks on their faces told me that if I didn't start making sense, they'd be ordering a full brain scan and psychotic stripdown.

"Really, Mr. Stilton—"

"Who is Mr. Stilton? That's not my name."

"Oh," a quick glance over to Francine,"there was a note, in your pants, we assumed that was you."

"What note?"

"Mr. Stilton, if you have a previous condition it would help us diagnose any…"

“Stop calling me that.”

I threw back the sheet and swung my legs over the bed.

"Where's my pants?"

Francine, taking in another eyeful, turned away when I met her gaze. She went into an adjoing room and came back with my jeans. She laid them on the bed. They were dirty, but bloodstain free.

"Underwear?"

"I'm sorry, we cut those off, we had to see if you had some internal injury that would account for your, uh, condition." The man ran his hand over his mustache and coughed.

"Wait a second, what kind of doctor are you?" I took a quick glance around the room, no tongue depressors, no blood pressure machine, and it had a funny smell. The poster of the hanging kitten clinched it. "You're a vet!"

"Well, of course. The only medical doctor we have comes by every two weeks, unless there's an emergency. We thought of calling her but we couldn't find anything that would warrant her…"

"Am I done here?" I wanted to ask why they hadn't cut off the jeans. Something in Francine's face told me it was her decision to slice the underwear.

"You're free to go anytime. But don't you think you should stay a bit? We could call the other doctor if you wish."

I pulled on my jeans, riding bareback, what the hell. 

"My wallet? Or did you have to cut that too?" I glared at Francine. 

She scurried into the other room and came back with my keys and my wallet. 

"If you wanted to find out who I was why didn't you just—" I stopped as I flipped through several bills and the faded photo I'd been carrying for years. 

"Something missing?" The vet asked.

"Where is it?"

"I assure you, we took nothing. What are you missing?"

"Which one of you swiped my I.D.?"

"We wondered why you didn't have any."

"Until we found the note," Francine reached into her breast pocket and took out a folded yellow square. She handed it to me, her fingertips staying a few extra seconds on my palm.

I read it. We found this man sitting outside his truck on the side of the road. He said his name was Stilton, then passed out. Please help him. We have to leave for a family reunion. It was signed Chris and Kelly. A smiley-face was drawn at the bottom. 

"We were gone at lunch and when we came back there you were in your truck. Out cold. I guess these people drove you and your truck here and then left."

"For a reunion." Francine added.

There was no phone number or address on the note. The letters were hard to read, a pen almost out of ink – under the smiley-face there was another word that I couldn’t make out.

"What does this say?"

"We couldn't figure that out either. Francine has a guess."

"Clarkesville."

"Never heard of that, where?"

Francine gave an awkward smile. "You know, like that old song."

My head had started pounding ever since I gained consciousness. It now threatened to burst and spray brain matter across the vet's office.

“You have any pain killers?”

“Mr. Stilton, we cannot give medication without –”

“Just some damn aspirin.”

Francine fished around in her pocket and brought out a blister pack. Doc gave her look and started to say something. I pushed him aside, grabbed the pills, and jammed the note in my pocket.

"You should stay and get checked out," Francine urged. “People aren’t all that different than dogs.”

“I’ve had all my shots.”

Francine ran her tongue over her lips and I hit the door running. The doc yelled out the door that I should go get checked out by my regular doctor. I spun out of the lot, spitting gravel chunks at the sign with the little dog and cat in doctor outfits.

I pushed the speedometer on the truck as far as it would go, keeping one eye on the temp guage. I popped the pills out of the pack and downed them. I trusted horny Francine that they were actually for pain, not flea and heartworm. The road ahead shimmered – in the distance a pair of buildings looked like splotches of overripe fruit against a sky the exact shade of the empty ice cube holders in my fridge back home. It was a weird thing to remember. I hardly remember what the place looked like. As I whipped by them I spied a thin man on scaffolding, slapping orange paint with a huge brush. I could see the droplets spash and hang in the air before settling on the weathered surface

I urged the pedal down farther – having no idea where I was going, if I'd find the sedan again, what I'd do if I found it. I flipped the switch on my radio and my cab filled with harsh guitar rock and some guy screaming. I turned it up and pushed the speed over 85. The temp guage jerked.

I passed a green pontiac, driven by a redneck with a buzz cut and a tattoo of the queen on his neck. As fast I was going, certain images moved in slow perfect clarity – like some Einstein relativity problem, I perceived moving objects as standing still. But the large grainery in the distance appeared to be moving away from me. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, and tried to refocus. When I opened them again there it was, the black sedan, it popped out of nowhere, less than a quartermile ahead. There were no access roads that I could see – it was like it dropped out of the sky. Somehow, I knew I'd come across it. Just like last time. And maybe some other times that I couldn’t remember. 

I pulled in close behind, following the s-curve of the road, and tried to peer into the back window. The sheen on the glass reflected back light, not like a mirrored surface, but fragmented like from that cheap mactac for bathroom windows.

The grainery pulled in front of us after the curve. That’s what it looked like. Spireton. A handmade sign was drilled into the post underneath the town name – Corn and Bacon Festival, Aug. 3-5. The sedan pulled into the lot of the Spireton Hotel. I followed.

I watched the back door open and a white leg appear. I started to wonder if that Vet had give me some sort of sedative. Movement was still playing tricks on my eyes. Trails of colour swept behind her legs as she approached the truck. I rolled down the window.

"Come on in. You look like you need a drink."

The sedan idled. I cranked my neck and tried to see inside.

"Just the two of us."

Canada (Richard Ford) review

Canada by Richard Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you are looking for a fast paced narrative, full of suspense and robbers on the run (r.o.r. - okay, just made that up), then look elsewhere.
But if you know Ford's elegant, stripped down prose and amazing ability to capture the intricacies of human beings better than any other writer alive (stolen quote form Globe and Mail), and you have the time to immerse yourself in a slow exploration... then this book needs 6 stars, or maybe more.

I know it won't be for everyone - and especially the dismaying amount of readers that want a narrative to drive forward - but this book will ache in my chest long after I have read it. I don't need to give away much in the plot, really there isn't much plot. In 1960, Dell Parson's parents rob a bank, he and his twin sister are set adrift. Berner, his sister, runs to California, Dell is spirited away, pre-911, to cross the border into Canada, and "hide-out" in southwestern Saskatchewan. (Right around where I was born actually). It really isn't a hiding out, but a crossing of a physical border, that parallels the metaphorical border Dell is crossing in his life.

Sure it is a coming of age of sorts - for me it resonates best with Ford's short stories (Rock Springs) and the novella Wildlife, which also has a young person at its centre, and a shares the setting of Great Falls, Montana. It has less in common with the Bascombe books (Independence Day etc., which I have not liked as much.)
But it is much more than a sixteen year old crossing into adulthood. A melancholy pervades the book, at times it's almost too sad to read, as in when the siblings visit their parents in jail. Ford gets inside people, and even if you can't imagine what Dell's life would be like (ie: have never had a parent commit a criminal act and go to jail), you will recognize yourself in there, you will recognize humanity in there.

Dell tells this story as a 66-year old man (though, this only becomes evident in scant ways, and the voice is a teenager's, one wise beyond his years). And I can't help but think Ford is reflecting on his life through this book - he is returning to a setting from early in his career, and he is thinking about the things that led up to his life now (I think he is almost 70). As I've said, this is a sad and quiet book - but in the best sort of Wim Wenders way. I do think it will make the Pulitzer and National Book lists.

If I have one criticism of the book, it is the use of the cliffhanger type endings in some of the chapters. As in, "and he knew he would never see again", or "later when he found the man dead in the room" (these are paraphrase samples, trying not to spoil anything - but hell, right from the beginning line you know there is a robbery and a murder). I wonder if editors told Ford, "You know it's beautiful and all that, but can you crank up the tension, just a bit?" These bits seem out of place. And I want to say, shut up unnamed editor, I am just fine with the pace. I have seen Ford in interviews, including the Colbert Report (!), himself reminding the interviewer that the book is also about robbery and murders, as if to say, "hey, it's not like that literary stuff that people don't read anymore." Again, I say, Richard, shhh. It's fine. It's more than fine.

I know this is a book I will read again. The controlled and elegant prose needs to be studied. The mood is not something I look forward to, but the feelings, and even the truth, that it evokes create something that I find in classic novels: at the end, I am changed.

At this point in my life (49), I think a lot of my Saskatchewan upbringing. Incidentally, my father was a goose hunter, also born right around the setting of the novel, and these sections of the book are crystalline in their imagery. And I think of borders, what it means to cross over them, and to never return.
My favorite quote in the book is the narrator quoting Ruskin,
"Composition is the arrangement of unequal things."

This is what Ford does. He takes these unequal things in our lives, and he puts them into stories that tell us who we are.



View all my reviews

Bent Highway: Chapter Two

Arrow

The half-ton’s engine stalled, but I didn’t turn it over again. I sat in the ditch thinking about those bowed lips. I remembered asking the question.

"What was your name again?”

No response.

I tried again. “Last time I didn’t catch it. We talked in that bar in Yellowburn.”

"I didn't give it," she'd said.

I’d met her more than once. I closed my eyes and pictured a smoldering house trailer, then bursting into fire, her running into the field, me after her, then that big beast toppling over me. Was that where the gash came from?

My skull throbbed like someone had hammered a four inch spike into it. I cranked the engine, pulled out of the ditch with the tires spinning, four-wheel drive my ass, and headed back down the highway.

They say your body remembers a lot, but not in ways that can be put into words. The part of me that slammed on the brakes when I saw the sedan wasn’t sending telegrams to the figuring-shit-out part of me. For now, I trusted my legs more than the swiss-cheese head.

The general weirdness faded as I picked up speed and the road straightened into an arrow. Driving was the one thing that calmed me. Tires humming on the asphalt were a hundred times better than those vibrating loungers at the mall, and there wasn’t a salesman with food court breath next to me in the cab saying how I couldn’t live without one.

Money was running out and I'd probably have to start looking for a job again. I’d eyed a few help wanted signs over the screen door of road diners. The greasy bacon and eggs didn’t change as I drove across the country, but the people did. I'd met some characters.

In Holdfast there was the guy who channelled John the Baptist. He kept telling me to repent, make my ways straight and all that. I didn't think I was that bad of guy – so I challenged him a bit. He was drinking hot water, no tea bag, steam rose from his beard on every sip. 

“No one thinks they're all that bad until the time comes.” 

"Time for what?" I'd asked him.

"Exactly," he said.

Then he started spouting off in what could have been an ancient dialect or just the D.T.’S talking. After I left the diner, I’d passed him in the parking lot and he was crunching on something I hoped wasn't a bug.

Then in Breeston there was that girl at the gas station doing a goofy dance to no music I could hear. She was dressed somewhere between 1970's hippy funk and depression era rags, her ripped jeans hanging dangerously low, threatening to be shaken right off her ass at any moment. I was mesmerized and considered offering her a ride. When I walked up to her, the dance got more intense and her hair started swirling around like she was either having a hell of a time or was on the border of a seizure. I just kept walking.

I’ve seen this country through gas stations, hotel bars perched next to giant graineries, diners that served the same plate of eggs, played the same tinny country twang over the radio next to cash register, and general stores that doubled as liquor vendors in towns that had no reason to still exist. I guess that just like the dancing gas station girl I had a soundtrack, sometimes it came from my truck radio, but a lot of times it was just tunes I carried around in my head. I never sang along, just let the guitar lines pulse through my head as I passed through another empty town.

And then there was the chalk girl. That white skin glowed in my brain. How come I knew where I met the dancing hippie chick, but I couldn’t place her? Maybe it was too recent – names and faces piled up in the corners of my brain like cords of wood and only with distance did one tumble out of the pile for closer inspection. Maybe this is why truckers look a bit dazed at those stops – I'd thought it was tiredness from the road – but maybe something starts to happen to you when you see so many places, so many people, everything starts to blur together like the dotted line that becomes a stream of yellow piss racing underneath your tires. That still doesn't explain the black outs.

I was so lost in the dizziness of my own thoughts, a soundtrack of swamp rock pulsed in my mind, that I almost missed seeing the black sedan. I slowed down, u-turned and pulled into the parking lot. A weathered sign read Riverside Diner. I looked across about a hundred miles of bald prairie and didn’t see even a hairline creek. 

My boots kicked up gravel as I passed the sedan in the lot, making little tings against the gleaming hubcaps. My knees buckled and I dropped to the ground. What the fuck? I braced my hand against the driver’s door and pressed into it – it was like touching dry ice. I tried to pull my hand back but it was stuck to the metal, burning and cold at the same time. I pulled hard and flesh ripped as I fell back, the ground opened up to accept me, and I was swallowed into blackness.

* * *

I woke up staring into cup of coffee with a spiral thread of cream making its way to the edge.

"Are you well?"

Before I looked up, I pictured the colour of her skin, those red lips, a shock of black hair slashed across her forehead.

"What's happening?"

"Are you still blacking out?" Her voice had a reverb to it.

"I don' t understand… why?" Sweat gathered in the crease of my forehead, my hands shook. "Last night… we talked and –"

"It's probably best you're not remembering a lot right now. It'll come back." 

I watched her lift the water glass and drain the contents in one long gulp. I expected to see a lipstick stain on the glass when she placed it back on the table but there was none.

An image flashed in front of me, a crisp blade splitting flesh, my flesh, a heavy shape pinning me against damp ground. And then her voice from across the table, not within the image.

"… time will not follow its usual path once you've slipped across. You’re fighting to keep things linear. That’s what your body is used to, so it’s going to be disorienting for awhile. Caffeine doesn't make it any better." She slid a glass of water in front of me. 

"I'm sorry, I don't understand what's happening I—" I didn't even know what to ask.

"Just drink."

I sipped at the edge of the glass. The ice bumped against my lips and reminded me of the sedan door. Then, as I drank, I closed my eyes and saw the highway, the ditch, the brake lights of the sedan, the Dandy diner, the fan – I watched it all in slow reverse and it led me back to last night. The tall man with the broken nose with the knife that cut across my arm, no… it was my leg, but then the flesh closing around the knife, and the blood going into the wound and then the wolf. It started to pull together – something about time, how they had found a way to get past it, through it, to dive into the stream like a series of rapids and ride along until you spilled out at a different point, a different place on the road. Except it wasn’t an ordinary road.

"I saw you in Breeston." I said. "And before." A final tile slipped into place. "Time – you told me I could escape it if I wanted."

I felt my leg where the knife had gone in and it became crystal. His voice was in my head, gutteral like he had a ton of phlegm he needed to get expel.

"You straddle the line, your body, your blood, needs to be in both places. That’s what he told me.”

“Uh-huh. Drink some more water.”

"Why the wolf?" I asked. 

The chalk girl smiled. She asked the waitress for some more water, and could she have a bit more ice this time? 

"It's falling into place for you. The wolf, as you call it, is needed to keep you here."

"Here? Place or time?" My head still spun.

"A bit of both." She twitched, her elbow jerked out in a brief muscle spasm. "I have to leave."

I stood and pain shot through my knee. I collapsed back into the booth. The waitress heard the noise and rushed over, almost spilling her tray of water.

"Are you okay?" She set down the tray, the ice made soft clinks against the glass. "Whoa, you should probably go see a doctor about that." 

I followed her gaze to my left knee. It was stained deep red and glistened as fresh blood pumped from the cut. The diner went out of focus and I felt myself slide out of the booth and onto the floor. The waitress yelled something but I couldn't make it out.