Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 7

How did I not know this existed until this very year???

Back in 2018, author Andrew Shaffer wrote a two-book mini-series of mystery novels starring none other than a (then-retired) Joe Biden and his old boss, some guy named Barack.

In the first book, Biden’s favorite Amtrak conductor is murdered, so Joe decides to crack the case!

It’s a fun book, but the second one is even better.

If you like a little humor and a little pathos mixed in with your mysteries — and especially if you like Joe and Barack! — check out these books. I had a great time with them.

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Let’s go back in time to fifteenth century France. Pretty much the richest man in the country at the time was Gilles de Rais, a nobleman and a knight. He lived in a castle. He was considered a hero for a long time. He was pals with the king. He hung out with flippin’ Joan of Arc, OK?

Gilles de Rais was also a sadistic monster who enjoyed raping, torturing, and murdering children.

He didn’t do it once. He didn’t do it twice. He didn’t do it four or ten or twenty times.

He didn’t even do it a hundred times. He did it a hundred and forty times. At least.

When people ask me who my “favorite” serial killer is (by which they usually mean “most interesting”), I always choose deRais. Because he’s the perfect intersection of inhuman cruelty and absolute privilege. The ultimate nightmare: Someone with monstrous appetites and too much money and power to stop.

Learn more about him here.

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Last night, I sat in on the White Dudes for Harris Zoom call, and let me tell you, it was just what I needed.

This essay actually started life a week ago as a call to arms for my fellow white dudes, but then Ross Morales Rocketto and Brad Bauman went ahead and did what I couldn’t do — they rallied the white dudes. (I’m not saying I manifested it, but…I totally manifested it. You’re welcome.)

Why does it matter if white dudes rally for Harris? Let me tell you…

Coincident with her endorsement from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris was the recipient of massive support from the Black community. Particularly from Black women. Within 24 hours, a 40,000-person-strong Zoom meeting (40,000 Black women, to be clear) kicked off an unprecedented fundraising drive that rivaled blockbuster Hollywood release weekends.

Shortly thereafter, Black men stepped up.

And then there was a Latinos for Harris Zoom, too.

And Shannon Watts — of Moms Demand Action fame — has taken on the work of organizing white women to support Kamala Harris in her run against Donald Trump, trying to avoid the patterns of the past, where white women have voted against their own enlightened self-interest.

You see what was missing, of course.

You see what no one was even talking about.

Until last night, white men weren’t even part of the conversation.

Not even brought us up as a joke.

The white male vote is, in the main, considered to be intractably, irretrievably racist and misogynist and therefore not worth pursuing. And it pisses me off because it’s TRUE.

Here’s an example, a map that quantifies the 2016 election if it were held under 1850 voting rules — in other words, what if only white men could vote?

Jesus H. Christ.

So, yeah, I understand why no one was talking about rallying the white male vote. I get it.

Some of this is embedded in one of the core prejudices of our culture: The notion that “white male” is somehow the default, and everything else is a variant of that whiteness and maleness. Therefore, there is no need for “White Men for Harris” because of course the default Kamala voter is a white male. All of these other people are just different iterations on that.

I don’t have to explain how problematic this idea is. Nor how it ironically takes the ubiquity of white men and metamorphoses it into invisibility. If white men do not stand up and be counted for Kamala Harris, then it is as if we have sat this one out.

But last night, the conversation started. More than 150,000 white dudes on a Zoom call, raising more than $4,000,000 to make a woman of color our next president. So this is a clarion call to the white dudes who weren’t on the call, to the white dudes wondering what their place is in this election.

We need to use our voices, our visibility, our inevitability, and — yes — our privilege to support and uplift Kamala Harris and whomever she chooses as her running mate.

I get it: “White Dudes for Harris” sounds…odd. Fraught. Maybe even dangerous, in a way. White men are the target of identity politics, so using the tactics of identity politics feels off. But there is nothing racist or insensitive or problematic about a factual statement like “I am a white man and I support Kamala Harris.”

Men are often accused of mansplaining, of being the “well, actually” guy. I will court controversy here by stating that sometimes it’s really valuable to have someone offer up a reality check or correct the record. But that’s not our role here, guys. Our role is to donate, to vote. But as important, our role is to be visible white male faces enthusiastically on the side of Team Harris.

This isn’t virtue signaling. You’re not doing this so that Black people won’t think you’re racist or so that women will want to bang you. You’re not doing it for them.

You’re doing it for our misguided brothers who think that being white and male is a punched ticket to being anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-progress. So that young white boys and men across the country see the support this woman of color has from people who look like them and come to understand that women and people of color are not “other,” are not threats. If you stand up for Vice-President Harris, others will, too.

Our motto can be, “Well, actually, I’m voting for her.” Put it on a sign.

Because when Harris smacks the living shit out of that rapist, perverted, incestuous, child-molesting creep that you know you wouldn’t let within a hundred yards of your wife or your daughter or your sister, she won’t just be the president of Black women or Indian women.

She’ll be your president, too. And you can be proud of helping to get her there.

If the last few decades of identity politics have taught us anything at all, it’s this: Representation matters. Represent the version of the white man you want to see in the world.

This means when you’re at the sports bar…or the comic book store…or the golf course…or wherever…and you hear someone running down Kamala Harris, you stand up and you say you’re voting for her. And not just voting for her, but doing so happily and with vigor.

None of this “Well, I guess she’s the lesser of two evils…” or “I’d really rather have Gavin Newsome…” Fuck that noise. You are a Kamala Harris voter. You are a white man proudly voting for a woman of color.

Ask yourself this: Do you want the representatives of white maleness in the prevailing national narrative to be Donald Trump and Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino and Elon Musk and Andrew Tate? Or do you want the representatives to be the hundreds of thousands — dare I say millions? — of ordinary white men who believe in progress and equality and a future in which race and gender and creed and sexuality are no mean impediment to advancement, fulfillment, and happiness?

Joe Biden served in a secondary role to a Black man for eight years in the most public way possible. When it was time to step aside, he gave his full-throated endorsement to a woman of color. Joe Biden might just be the most important white male ally in history.

Be like Amtrak Joe. Be humble. Be certain. Be supportive. And give no quarter.

Now, as they said last night on the call, go donate until it feels good. Then donate until it hurts. And then keep going until it feels good again.

And fucking vote.

I adore the piano and so I am here for this video of a guy playing the Top 10 Most Iconic Piano Intros of All Time. (Though I quibble with his order…)Courtesy of Gothamist, this is by turns hilarious and frightening… Things the guys who stole my phone have texted me to try to get me to unlock itIf you loved comics in the 80s, the name Frank Miller looms large in your personal pantheon. Well, Frank has had a rough few years, though he’s fortunately doing much better now. “When Death Came For Frank Miller”A data scientist excoriates the AI hype-train in a piece that just had to be titled “I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”A truly wonderful piece from the L.A. Times in which the author rails against the tendency to deify John Barth for his early work and ignore his later work. As a fan of all eras of Mr. Barth, I heartily endorse this viewpoint!Lastly, as a gigantic Paradise Lost nerd, I was thrilled to see this story: Scholars discover rare 16th-century tome with handwritten notes by John Milton

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“There is a route to salvation that goes right through the clipboard.”

Want to know what that‘s all about it? Check out my sprawling, hour-long conversation with Jennifer Carr on the Connected Conversation podcast. We discussed everything from starting out in publishing to surviving more than a decade to the tech of writing to dealing with rejection… If it touched on writing at all, we got into it, all in an effort to answer the question:

“What does it take to live a creative life?”

You can listen in the podcast player of your choice or use the logos below to check it out on Spotify or in Apple Podcasts…or even watch the video stream on YouTube.

 

 

It’s time for another deep cut from the I Hunt Killers vault!

This is a short bit this time, but I think it’s a good one…

In the very first days of working on I Hunt Killers, I had a dilemma. I envisioned the story as a trilogy, but I knew there was a chance that a publisher would want a single book. So I devoted a tiny bit of time to thinking about what a single book would look like. In fact, in my original proposal, I even wrote this:

The book can end two ways. If itʼs a standalone, then Jazz — with his intimate knowledge of his fatherʼs secrets — catches him before he can get out of town and returns him to jail.

(The second way, obviously, was the trilogy path.)

But hey, guess what? I thought of another option if it was just one book. For a split second, I thought to myself…

Well, first I wrote this bit that would come early in the book. G. William says…

“I still remember your face the day I came and took your daddy away. I swear, there’s days I think he’s safer in prison than at home with you, Jazz. For a while there, I had nightmares you were gonna walk into my office with a satchel and toss it on my desk and your dad’s head would be inside it.”

And then I wrote this bit, which would have been the end of the story if it was just a single, standalone book:

G. William watched as the boy came closer, and quite against his conscious will, he found himself going for his gun.

“You gonna draw on me, G. William?” Jazz asked. “That what youʼre going to do?”

“No.”

But he kept his hand near the holster.

Jazz dropped the duffel bag on G. Williamʼs desk. It made a wet thud, and something in the way it settled made G. William think of the phrase “a sack full of kittens.” But he knew there were no kittens in there. No, siree.

“Iʼve done a bad thing,” Jazz said, and G. William nodded slowly. Sadly. Knowingly.

Now, obviously — obviously! — this runs counter to everything that happens in the trilogy. But for about an hour or so in late 2009/early 2010, I thought to myself, “Hell, if this is one book, maybe I should just go super-dark and break people’s brains.”

Decided not to. The publisher bought the trilogy. The rest is history.

I’m not sure why — maybe it’s that my country is once again at a political inflection point — but I’ve been finding myself listening to Magic by Bruce Springsteen a lot lately. It is, sadly, as relevant now as it was when it first dropped.

I’ve always intended my newsletter to be interactive, so I was happy to get a great question from one reader…

Thank you for your newsletters! I first read Boy Toy in 2010 and it’s one of my favorite books ever! Ironic how society is quick to ban the book but still generally condones and excuses the issues it deals with. I thought about Josh’s experiences with graduation, college, sports, and prom as I went through them too, and even ended up in Maryland as an adult. Any word on a sequel, or the companion book I heard about?

First of all, thank you so much for your kind words! And yes, we live in strange times, when people who lack the capacity to truly understand art somehow get to determine what belongs on a library shelf.

All that aside, let’s get to the meat of your question: the sequel/companion book to Boy Toy.

Let me ramble a little bit… When I was writing Boy Toy, it occurred to me that in order to write it properly, I had to know everything Eve was thinking and doing, even though the story was from Josh’s POV. And as I moved through the story, I realized that I knew what everyone in it was thinking and doing — Rachel, Zik, Mom, Dad… I could write the same story over and over, just from different POVs, uncovering new bits each time.

I became, honestly, a little obsessed. While I was working on the book, I was deep into it, and really became enamored of the idea of telling the same story from six or seven different angles. It would be a massive undertaking.

Truthfully, I still think of it now and then. But the fever mostly broke when I finished writing Boy Toy, though enough madness lingered that I really, really wanted to tell the story of Eve. Boy Toy’s Toy, I would title it, and it would be a savage look into the heart of a child molester.

So…what happened?

Two things happened. First, I was really burnt out when I finished Boy Toy. And second, well, another book came out on the same topic, around the same time as Boy Toy. An adult book, purporting to tell the teacher’s side of the story. And honestly, I didn’t think much of that book. It felt tawdry in a way I strove against in Boy Toy. And I became concerned that if I wrote my companion book, people would think I was ripping off this other book.

Between that concern and the burn-out, my fire for the companion book was snuffed out, and now it lives only as a couple hundred words of a first chapter and then some notes on my hard drive.

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I am enjoying the hell out of this t-shirt I just bought (I got it in gray). If you’ve been following the story of a certain hypocritical right-wing power couple in Florida, you might enjoy it, too. You can buy it here and proceeds benefit the Florida Freedom to Read Project.

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In the earliest days of working on I Hunt Killers, Jazz was originally going to have much more disturbing thoughts. In the final published book, he wrestles with his impulses, but when I was first spitballing and brainstorming, his brain was filled with lurid, grotesque fantasies CONSTANTLY.

That sort of thing works…a little. You can’t keep it up over the course of an entire novel, though — it becomes overwhelming. So I dialed it way back so that I still had room to build.

Anyway, this little blip below is from the very early days, when I was noodling around with exactly how messed up it was to live inside the head of one Jasper Francis Dent…

G. William was a good old boy, but not the stupid redneck type. He wanted people to think he was. It was convenient. But that slow Southern drawl belied the quick and lively intelligence in his eyes. Most people missed it. Not Jazz.

Jazz didn’t miss much of anything.

You couldn’t be a small-time hick cop and do what G. William had done: Catch the most notorious serial killer of the 21st century.

Jazz felt it rise up in him like a fever — the sudden, overwhelming lust, a lust that was so strangely nonsexual. He put a hand out to steady himself against the table.

Stop it! he commanded himself. Fight it!

“You all right, son?” G. William asked.

Son… It was the wrong thing — the perfectly wrong thing — to say when Jazz was in this kind of state. It made him think of his father, of his father and the other bodies that had turned up years ago, the bodies of his childhood.

“Low blood sugar,” Jazz lied smoothly. “I haven’t eaten today. Little dizzy.”

“Hell, whyn’t you say so?” G. William patted his pockets, jiggling his fat under the taut polyester of his sheriff’s uniform—

JAZZ THINKS OF GUTTING HIM, CUTTING OPEN THAT BLUBBER

—before diving into his left breast pocket and coming up with two hard candies, the cellophane wrappers crinkling. “Butterscotch? Little sugar boost.”

“Sure.” Jazz gave him the Thanks Smile.

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