My children have accused me of being a boring person. I like to think I merely give that impression because I listen more than I talk, and I am usually content to be an observer of the world around me. And now I live in a boring place––very rural North Carolina––where nobody seems impressed by authors who didn’t write something practical and useful to their daily lives. For instance my coffee table at this moment has two books sitting on it: a copy of Storey’s Guide To Raising Chickens, and Basic Country Skills. I don’t advertise the fact (to my few neighbors) that I’m an author, because people out here would view making a living writing stories as suspicious behavior. But my new environment is making me a more relaxed, and much more focused, writer.

After fifty-eight years of living in major cities, large or small towns, my wife and I decided we wanted some solitude and more control of our lives. My wife, a proven country girl, and I sold our house in Concord, NC, and moved way out here off a gravel road named for a small clapboard church. It’s a place where most of the roads, that aren’t just numbers, are named for churches or schools they run in front of, or harness shops, or are called things like Shortcut Road.

They knew me in town as a fiction author, while out here at the feed and seed store they know me only as “Blue Toyota Highlander” because that is what they put my feed sacks into after I pay for my order. One of the perks of living several miles from the middle of nowhere is that despite my fish-belly-white, chicken legs, I can go around the community in shorts without anyone making “sunglasses” jokes or caring at all. Sometimes, when it’s cool enough, I wear overalls or jeans with missing knees. And I have been honing my carpentry and necessary 4-H skills.

My writing studio is a converted feed storage shed, a 12X12 room (with a covered porch where my three dogs lounge while I work), which despite new oak floors, large double-pane windows, and sheet-rocked and painted walls still smells of sweet feed. Plus I can shoot my guns at stationary targets from the rear deck without a single complaint from neighbors, as they often shoot from their own decks as well. Most late afternoons I get a cold beer, or perhaps a Martini or a single malt, and my wife and I sit on the deck and watch the chickens milling about the yard in search of bugs and young plants. I have snakes: black rats, hog-nose, rough greens, kings, and corn snakes, which have free run of the place since they eat crickets, rats, mice, and poisonous snakes, and are left more or less alone by my dogs. My field is surrounded by thick woods. We raise and eat organic chickens, we buy grass fed beef from the farm next door. We eat fish I catch, fresh produce from our garden, wild hogs I shoot, venison I shoot, and free-range eggs we grow to counteract the effects of all those years of eating food from the shelves of grocery stores. This morning wild turkeys came to the chicken pen and gobbled at the rooster, that cockadoodledooed back at them. My grandson walked right up to them, and they didn’t run, just watched him. I took a pictures.

You know you’ve arrived in the country when of your neighbors lists his occupation for the IRS as, “working in the woods”. People out here mind their own business, drive pickup trucks because they need to haul more than booming speakers, work hard all day, and enjoy the simpler things in life. I’m doing my part to fit in.

I can sit at my desk, cruise the Internet and watch all manner of wildlife crossing my field or my driveway. But, best of all, I can commute to the office in my boxer shorts without worrying that anyone will come by unexpectedly. I love my friends, but because it’s just too inconvenient for the vast majority of my city dwelling friends to pop in, it allows me fewer interruptions and longer spells at my desk.

I still hear tales of authors in the old days whose work never sold impressively, but were published religiously because their words were deemed by the houses to be important to future readers and gave an author’s work deserved time and effort on their part to eventually build an audience. I don’t have to tell you that those days are, for the most part, long gone and any author’s importance to a publisher is measured strictly in units sold. The exception would be authors with exalted reputations whom a house wants to list as an author of theirs for reasons of status. Like movie studios, publishers seem only interested in books they believe will be blockbusters that will rapidly swell their quarterly numbers for stockholders. We can decry it as a shame, but we all need to understand that the world we write in is about numbers. The good old days, if they ever truly ever existed, are gone, baby gone.

By the way, it isn’t just numbers sold, but also the numbers of returns that publishers tend to go by. If you sell 50,000 copies of a first book, but they figured it would be a hunko seller so they printed 250,000 units because that was what “they” decided to print, you have failed them the worst way imaginable. And chances are that they will make you feel like a child who has disappointed his father––picture a New England Episcopal minister’s son who marries a snake-handling, poison-sipping toothless Holy roller from the mountains of West Tennessee.

Unless you are somehow able to sell a substantial number of books on your own, or if a book builds from word of mouth, the publishers won’t advertise, and if they do they will plant one ad in one spot and wonder why the advertising failed to move books. I was in advertising for many years and I can tell you that (according to some vague research we believed in) any ad has to be seen nine times to make an impression on an individual––and that’s a person who’s open to the product the ad is about. Print ads are a prohibitively expensive way to sell books, and unless you are a major best-selling author you will be lucky to get even one ad anywhere. Best-selling authors need ads only to hold their market share, so you can’t blame the publishers for putting their money where they are most likely to see results on their bottom lines. You can’t blame a business for wishing to make money because that is how everything is measured. It’s disheartening for an author to put a year of their life into a book, work to make sure it’s as good as they can make it and then watch the publisher ship it out to see what happens to it on the shelves. Even if a book wins a major prize, and gets great reviews, unless it hits their expectations, they watch it disappear after a few weeks and that’s it. It isn’t that they don’t care or believe in the book, it’s just a fact of business.

I have a great editor and a publisher I’ve been with since I started writing fiction and I know they care about me personally and want to see my career take off for all concerned. Okay, there’s some enlightened self-interest there, but such makes the world go around. I don’t mind. I am loyal to them, and they have been loyal to me. Each time I write a book I know they are watching and working hard and praying it will break out and I’ll sell enough books to make their sales team smile. I know when I fall below expectations, and I have, they are as disappointed as I am, but perhaps for a shorter time than I spend frustrated about it.

This business is hard, but I think no harder than most others. I see authors as cottage industry manufacturers working alone who make a product for a company that will refine and distribute it the best they know how. Some of us see the publishing company we’ve been with as our extended family, but unfortunately it’s not unconditional love, or life-long commitment. No matter how big your numbers are today, you are only as valuable to a publishing company as your sales sheets say you are. When you are selling big and making the lists, they dote on and pamper you, but when those sales slip, they will go to the next thing. This is true in most businesses. It’s as disheartening as discovering that the person you loved and thought you’d stay with forever has a change of heart, and falls for another, but it’s the reality.

The life of an author is hard. We work alone, are paid by the job, don’t receive insurance benefits from the company, work long hours, have no job security whatsoever, probably have little or no 401 Ks building up, and, if we are lucky manage to make a boom-to-bust living at it. But we do it for our own personal reasons, and if we complain, we know we’re wasting time we could be using to write, and that nobody outside our family really cares.

Recently a student asked me what advice I’d give an aspiring author. I said what I always say, “The writing life has its rewards for sure. Making a living doing what you love is as good as it gets. Despite highs and lows, creating stories from thin air and living with a book as you create and improve it is almost orgasmic. Seeing your books on bookstore shelves is a rush for sure, and hearing from truly appreciative readers is truly a great feeling. But… don’t become a writer if you think you will get rich from doing so. Don’t write for a living if you have a thin skin or can’t take rejection. Don’t become a writer, especially of commercial fiction, if you can’t take direction from editors and hack at your wonderful novel with a meat cleaver when it is necessary. And, if you are lucky enough to sell a book to a publisher, treat the first and each subsequent advance as though it is the last money you’ll ever see from your publisher …because it just might be.”

By John Gilstrap

Language and violence are sensitive topics for fans and critics alike. My first book, Nathan’s Run, which I never considered to be a young adult book but nonetheless won the Alex Award from the American Library Association because of its relevance to teenage readers (the Nathan of the title is 12 years old), was banned by several school systems because of its language and violence. Apparently, there are 109 objectionable words in the book—an incensed mother actually counted. Maybe it was 409. Anyway, the book was banned from school libraries. (Memo to file: If you want to sell a lot of books, get it on a banned list somewhere.)

The whole book-banning thing is a soapbox of its own which likely will be the subject of a future rant, but for this blog entry, I want to focus on violence. As a society, we’re a little weird about it. There’s a whole subgenre of suspense fiction that celebrates vampires, the eroticization of oral exsanguinations, but if you kill a puppy or a kitty cat on the page, you’ll never sell a book in this town again. A few years ago, I was writing a very loose adaptation of Norman McLean’s Young Men and Fire for Warner Brothers, a never-produced flick about smoke jumpers—those wonderfully insane men and women who parachute into forest fires. The producers told me in no uncertain terms as I wrote the script that I should feel free to kill as many firefighters as I needed to serve the story, but that I could under no circumstances show a suffering, dying or dead animal. If I showed an animal in jeopardy, I had to later include a scene where we see that Yogi and Bambi made it out safely. Hey, the rules are the rules, and I signed the contract, so who am I to argue? But still.

In the world of the novels I create, no one tells me what I can and can’t do, and I have to say that the violence thing is something I struggle with. Not to keep flogging my fire service background, but I’ve seen violence up close. Torn, punctured flesh and broken bones are all ugly as hell. The screaming is unnerving, and injured people invariably smell awful. They make wee-wee and doo-doo on themselves, and if they’ve been dead for more than a couple of hours, they’re really unpleasant to be around.

As an author whose job it is to bring readers into the word of my characters, isn’t it my responsibility to make violence and its aftermath as squirmy as it is in real life? Shouldn’t violent actions have terrible consequences on the page as they do in the mean streets and combat zones? Clearly, I think the answer is yes, but truthfully, only to a point. A very fine line separates verisimilitude from a discomfiting violence-as-pornography. Like other forms of pornography, I suppose, it’s hard for me to define, but I know it when I see it.

A couple of weeks ago, John Ramsey Miller posted brilliantly on the importance of keeping scenes real in the reader’s mind. Along those lines, I become infuriated when I’m reading a story and a protagonist takes a bullet in the shoulder (or the thigh or the knee . . .) and keeps going. It’s not possible. The human body just doesn’t have a lot of free space in it. Every joint is a fragile structure. If you shatter a part of the scaffold that gives us structure, it doesn’t matter how tough you are; you’re going to fall down. You’re sure as hell not going to have one more fist fight with the bad guy just because you’re angry. Again, the anatomy and physiology of traumatic injury can be the subject of yet another future blog entry.

So here’s the tacit deal I make with my readers: Even when I take you to unpleasant places, trust me that I don’t do it for prurient reasons, and that I’ll never make you want to throw up because of what you’ve read.

Shake on it?