Winning Against Depression.

He'll be back.

Louis Shalako

When I was about fourteen, my parents got all worried about me. I had been a good student, and I didn’t want to go to school. I was sleeping all day, skipping school. I wouldn’t participate in family activities, such as going roller skating together or to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving, all stuff I had once enjoyed. I was up all night reading books, refusing to help out around the house unless I was paid for it, hanging out with all kinds of kids they hadn’t seen before, you know—Mom’s bottle of London Dry Gin began to mysteriously fall in the level and no one could really say what was going on.

They took me to a doctor who asked me if I was on drugs.

(I wasn’t.) As I recall, that one caused a little resentment.

What a bunch of idiots, I remember thinking.

At some point they determined that I was anemic—low blood pressure, low count on the red blood cells, low iron, and all that sort of thing.

And I ended up getting vitamin B-12 complex injections once a week for quite some time. So what was all this about?

My parents were getting separated. They were certainly talking about it, and they did so shortly thereafter.

And in some ways mood, atmosphere, it’s a little bit contagious. It’s not like I didn’t know something was wrong in our family, because it sure was wrong.

But it was a whole lot of things coming together.

I had grown two or three inches that year—it was the early stages of puberty, when the hormones are all over the map, teenagers get gawky, and introspective in my case, they get pimples and weird long curly black hairs popping up all over the place. You’ve got all sorts of opinions and deep inside you know you’re still a kid.

More than anything, you would like to be thought of as an adult. Of course you’re not, really.

***

It’s too easy to look back and state that I ‘suffered from depression since I was a kid.’

The fact of the matter is, all seventeen year-olds think they are going to be alone for the rest of their lives. 

They think their life is the pits, and that their parents don’t treat them well. The world can be a cold dark place when it seems like everyone else is having fun and adults have all sorts of special powers.

Kids are impatient. They can’t wait for childhood to end so they can have a bit of power over their own lives.

They can go places, do things, buy things, and decide how their own life is going to be run.

A kid of a certain age is dependent, when all about him look like fools.

I do not want to let depression define me. The truth is, I was deliriously happy from about age 18 to age 25. 

And yet even then, there were those days. I can’t deny it, and certainly there were no secrets between my girlfriend and I back then.

She knew. There was no denying it. Those days happened. Even then, it was a big mystery.

What in the hell was wrong with me?

The answer seemed pretty clear, years later: Why, I must have been suffering from depression.

I was suicidal at age 26. That was a bad day. I had the gun loaded and up to the side of my head.

A lot of shitty thoughts went through my head that day. I guess maybe I got a real good look at myself that day—and I wasn’t much.

I didn’t have much going for me, and I knew it. But there was something that stopped me. Call it ego, or something.

It took that much to realize that what I wanted was not to die. What I wanted, was to live—and for some reason it really didn’t feel like I was living.

I think a lot of suicides just want to end the suffering.

That was a long time ago, and the actual circumstances of the story are pointless.

That one didn’t last for long. Somehow, the real danger zone didn’t last too long, and although the aftermath, the so-called recovery, took two or three years, and two or three cities. The fact is, that I went through times when things were all right. Sure, I got down once in awhile, but who doesn’t? Everyone has a bad day, when things seem pretty black and it seems like all the shit will never end.

Whatever the hell was going on back then, when I had work, when I had money, and friends, and things to do and places to go, things went fine. Not that I didn’t have my days, my little outbursts of anger, my sudden little snaps of aggression. All of which are entirely normal within the daily parameters of human existence.

They are also symptoms of depression. Was I any different from any other person? 

I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

It's pretty easy to buy into the notion that you are different, and that there really is something wrong with you.

The question is, how do you deal with it?

Blaming depression or saying that something triggered it was an easy answer.

I went through another real bad time in my life. That one lasted for years. Literally, years, in fact from late 2004 until early in 2006, during a period of about a year and a half, I thought of suicide every stinking day. 

And I won’t say there was nothing wrong in my life, because there was.

The problem was that I couldn’t deal with it. That was the real struggle. I couldn’t get everything I wanted, not even what I needed.

Something really got to me.

Again, the actual circumstances are pointless. Because it’s all relative. It’s all very subjective—some other person, if I told the story, would say, “Well, that doesn’t seem all that bad. It’s sure not worth killing yourself over.”

Yeah, and they’d be right, too.

And the truth is that it wasn’t all that bad. I just couldn’t deal with it, for whatever reason. Looking back, it’s over now.

I got through it, somehow. No matter how bad it felt, or how long it took…it’s over.

It was real enough at the time, to me if no one else.

The first thought that went through my head in the morning was, “I have to kill myself.”

The last thought that went through my head at night was the same: “I have to kill myself.”

With that sort of shit going through your head you really have to wonder what stopped me.

How in the fucking hell did I ever survive that?

***

I got to a point where I dreaded winter. Winter is long, cold and dark, poverty sucks, my few friends were all the same kind of loser and yet there could still be moments when I was happy, or at the very least not suffering.

It was a question of putting in the time and getting through life.

A strange attitude, looking back. That attitude resulted in a lot of wasted years. Every day was a quest for diversion, and not much more.

All I wanted was not to suffer. I avoided anything I couldn’t deal with.

***

My old man got sick. After some years we had to sell his house, get rid of his stuff, put him in an old age home, and ultimately watch him die.

That was a very dark time. And winters are still the worst in some ways, because of all that cold and darkness.

The sheer, unremitting boredom, the loneliness, the isolation, the lack of hope for any real changes…the list is a long one.

And yet, looking back, this had been my best winter since about 19-fucking-99.

Seriously. By any way I care to measure it.

I keep as busy as I can. I work my ass off on something that is important to me.

I have skills, and some mighty good ones.

I have my own place. I have a car, I pay my bills and I have a few books and stories out there in the world.

Nobody really messes with me any more—not for long, anyways.

(It’s just not worth it, right.)

And I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.

Today, yeah. Not my best day.

It could be worse—and I damned well know it.

The thing with depression is to survive the battles, and in the end, maybe, somehow, win the war.

It didn’t stop me from writing this story, did it?

END

The Tailgater.

The balls to tailgate and not one iota more.

by Louis Shalako

It was always the way, wasn’t it?

Earl Gardiner had pulled out of the doughnut shop onto London Line, a hot medium double-double in the drink holder in the centre console, and a thin black cheroot sticking out of the pack on the seat beside him. His lighter was keeping warm in his right jacket pocket.

Earl loved driving at night, it was like a game of golf to some other guy. He couldn’t really explain it. A moonlit, winter night-drive, one with good visibility and plenty of snow on the ground was a special thing. It didn’t happen all that often.

He was just lighting up, and congratulating himself on how open the road ahead was, when he saw the headlights coming up from behind in the distance.

All he really wanted was to relax, listen to the radio and get away from his small apartment for a while. He had no place in particular to go. He just felt like a drive. He didn’t much like being hurried, not in anything. 

Not at his stage in life.

Glancing at the speedometer, he increased the throttle a bit but it was no good. He could just tell. They were coming up fairly fast, and it seemed pretty inevitable, but he was already going ten kilometres over the limit…

And here they were; after a while. Of course, the person driving, didn’t back off until the last minute. It was always the way. You literally wondered sometimes if they were going to hit you.

Earl speeded up a little, as nothing bugged him more than someone ten feet behind his bumper when they had the whole road open to them.

“We already know you can go fast…” He had all kinds of thoughts about such drivers.

Of course such folks would never pass. They had enough balls to tailgate you and not one iota more. This was their great failing as human beings. He could accept that.

This one showed no signs of passing. There was a good possibility they had been drinking. They were following his tail-lights, like blind mice or something. Maybe they lived just up ahead, and yet there was still no call for it. Driving so close just put all parties in danger.

Earl speeded up, starting to get a little hot under the collar now as the danged vehicle behind him stayed right where it was, dropping back to no more than fifteen or twenty feet. That’s what it seemed like to him, in fact this guy was unusually tenacious.

Surely not the most relaxing way to get home after a night of pounding back the boilermakers and pinching pudgy, middle-aged waitress’ bottoms.

Earl muttered a few things unprintable.

He looked at the speedometer.

A hundred and four kilometres an hour in an eighty kilometre per hour zone. Predictably, they didn’t turn off at the exit for the four lane divided highway, neither did they make a right and go south. No, of course not.

It was like a fucking conspiracy or something.

Grrr.

They stayed right on him.

Earl slowed right down to eighty for a while. His skin crawled, but he put his head down, adjusted the mirror and hung in there. The road ahead was clear and he thought they would pass. Never happened, they just stayed there. The guy couldn’t be more than eight feet from his rear bumper.

After a while he just couldn’t take it, and straightened up again.

Earl put some more gas to it. He gently eased it up, one or two kilometres at a time until the other guy looked to be about forty feet back there…Earl kept up the pressure, as the speedometer slowly wound its way up the scale.

…a hundred and five kilometres an hour…a hundred and eleven kilometres an hour…still hanging in there.

Earl had tried this once before. These creeps would tailgate you at a hundred and eighty. It was a personality type. He wondered how they were to walk on the same street with, would they be stepping on your heels? 

Probably, he decided.

It was almost too much to watch the road properly, the bugger was still right on him. The funny thing was, they might be totally unconscious of how irritating it was.

They might be so innocent—I didn’t know, mister. Sorry.

He could imagine the look on their face if he pulled them over and beat them to death by the side of the road.

They would be so shocked—so mystified by it.

Didn’t mean nothing by it. I never realized.

Earl took it up to one-thirty, the front wheels shaking a bit and the pull to the left of the old car becoming much more pronounced. He had to clamp on, using both fists, his biceps taut to hold it steady through the turns, of which there were one or two along here…dark as sin out there, with the yellow lines faded from wear and no lights, no houses nearby.

He had it at one-thirty-five, and the vehicle was still back there, its headlights bathing everything inside his own car in white glare and dark shadows that shook and darted about with every bump.

Argh.

Earl pushed it straight to the floor and tried to keep an eye on the road ahead.

Sure enough, if a cop saw this he’d probably nail Earl for speeding, let the other car go free as a bird and claim not to have noticed anything funny about how close that guy was following…he knew exactly what they would say.

“If someone is following too close, then pull over.”

But you couldn’t do that every time, could you? It was always like this. Always.

Earl had it up to a hundred and forty-five kilometres an hour and it was all he could do just to hold the thing on the road, but the bastard was still back there.

“Son of a bitch!”

***

“Let me know when you want me to hit the lights.” Constable Sharon Owens looked over at the sergeant with a sardonic grin.

“Naw. That’s okay. I’m just fucking with his head.”

Sergeant Hal Winchester looked at the speed good old Earl was going and shook his head in amazement.

“Still got it, old boy! Whoo-whee, and good for you, too.” He slapped the dashboard with his open right hand, in sheer cussed good humour and at last backed off on the throttle.

The wind noise fell away and the speed slid down the scale. The radar readout showed the old piece of junk was now going a hundred and fifty-three kilometres per hour and accelerating steadily.

He looked over at Sharon as if suddenly recalling her presence.

“Hungry?”

She nodded, watching Earl’s tail-lights disappearing up the road at a formidable rate of speed.

“Sure. I could eat.” Her words were carefully neutral.

Something weird had just happened there and she wasn’t quite sure what.

END

The Hyper-Writing Learning Curve.

Savoia-Marchetti S-55, 1933. This example flew with Aeroflot in the Soviet Union. (Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

I’ve been fooling around with semi-scientific non-fiction, and so I am making an illustrated ebook hypertext. 

The first time I loaded it up, the text looked fine but the pictures didn't render, and so I inquired further.

I didn’t panic, and I didn’t get upset, I didn’t even really get all that irritated. I sort of expected problems going in.

It’s a learning process, it involves experimentation and research into the basic techniques.

It requires things like making pictures smaller than 127 kb, and I also learned Kindle doesn't support > right/left html tags, etc., for photos. Pain in the butt ensues.

It might not even be a very good book. However, without some kind of book, there is no way to learn the process, and until I learn the process, I don't know what kind of book I and the system are capable of producing.

So that's day one of the New Year--we learned something, and sooner or later there will be an illustrated hypertext with my name on it.

As of January 2, it looks like the thing is ready to go. We’ll see what happens in the Kindle previewer, and take it from there, one logical step at a time until it’s complete. Having compressed the file below 5 MB, it can now be uploaded to Smashwords, Kobo, etc, wherever I want it to go.

There are other possibilities, all opened up by this one experiment. An experiment may be defined as a learning experience, or even one step in “a learning curve” as Dr. Evil would say, making his characteristic air quotes as he did so.

An illustrated ebook without a lot of links out is also very feasible. In that case, normal footnotes would apply, and yet I can’t seem to put cut-lines or photo captions in the ebook format. In that case, a POD paperback or hardcover still works in the usual fashion. Simply put, I can make illustrated books now, however unskilled the first few might eventually turn out to be, looking back from my deathbed.

Now, what that does, is to open up the possibility of writing non-fiction, with graphs, charts, cartoons, photos and illustrations, all nicely laid out and formatted on the page—and a hard copy doesn’t suffer from the same limitations in terms of rendering photos. The layout in a POD could be really nice compared to the ebook version.

Before I ever heard of ebooks, I dreamed of writing a coffee-table book, in a couple of different genres, but then I owned a couple of big books that I read from cover to cover and still treasure.

(He likes big books, and he cannot lie. – ed.)

I still keep them books around. I trashed all my notes at some point, but starting the research off from scratch might not be a bad thing, and now my research would be online—no going to the library and writing old-fashioned paper and envelope-style letters looking for things like archival photo clearances. This dream has been around a while!

Whatever the dream turns out to be—a book on Italian WW I seaplanes or whatever, is made a little more possible by acquiring the basic skills on a project of less importance. This is only part-way along a particular learning curve, one that began four years ago, Jan. 1/2010 when I decided to publish a book if it killed me.

(So far it hasn’t)

All that posting and reading, all those photo-searches for my blog have paid off in terms of knowledge. 

Theoretically, I am capable of putting together an online magazine, although it’s never been a high priority, and I think if that’s your dream, fine—but it has never been my dream.

That’s not to say I am unaware of the potential, another side effect of learning new things.

We learn new things and therefore we can see new possibilities—possibilities that didn’t exist in our own little universe before.

And if you want to pay for colour in the production of the book, you can even have colour, print-quality pictures in your POD. That affects the price of the product. But that’s all it affects, it doesn’t affect the ability to actually create the product.

So all this learning curve for one thing goes to support the learning curve for something else.

It all goes to experience and creating a database of simple skills that transfer from one genre or format to another.

Someone once said, “To keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results is insanity.”

In the four years I’ve been doing this, I have done plenty of things differently from the established way, and learned a few things.

However, doing a few things the same way as the established way might help to get different results, so we’ll put some thought into that along the way.

The thing there (maybe for the next little while) is to model ourselves after someone successful in the marketing department—how a successful author formats a book, (or most likely ships it out to someone else to format) is a question of lesser importance than how in the hell they manage to sell so many short stories, or how the hell they manage to license their works in so many ways.

Whether they write in the morning or evening, whether they like coffee or tea is irrelevant to my needs.

I need to learn how to attract readers, generate revenue from selling short stories, maybe put a little more thought into this and that, and so that’s what we’ll be studying, assuming that’s what we (or the reader) want to do.

Note: I ended up contacting Amazon support. The reason my file was not uploading correctly is because I needed to save it to a zip file, which you can do by highlighting it on your desktop and then right-clicking. Now click on 'send to' and select > zip folder.

That's what you upload to Kindle--not the ordinary html file.

The book, Love, Money, Sex and Death, Questions for the 21st Century, retails for $3.99 and will be available on Kindle tomorrow.

END

It was all so innocent in the beginning: I just wanted to publish a book if it killed me.

Here’s what that mistaken idea has mushroomed into.

Writing a Mystery Series, Themes.

In this post, author Jonathan Gunson talks about why series are more successful than single stand-alone titles.

One point the writer makes is that the protagonist and the antagonist must somehow keep meeting up in each subsequent book in order to be successful with readers. That may be true in some genres. The writer goes on to give examples, and in the comments some exceptions may be noted.

It holds true for writing a mystery series in the sense that Thomas Harris’s cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter character came back over the course of more than one book and the Clarice Starling character was in at least two of them. Those books are more in the crime thriller genre because we generally know who the bad guy is. Interestingly, Hannibal flip-flops ‘morally,’ during the course of the series. He goes from antagonist to protagonist, (hopefully I’ve got that right) and there are of course contradictions because he’s still a serial killer.

The character adapts, the moral themes are completely opposite!

A mystery is a tighter genre in that the readers have some expectations, one of which is that they don’t know who committed the crime, from page one, all through the book. They want a mystery, a puzzle to solve. A whole lot of moral ambiguities might not be what they’re looking for.

In a series of murder mysteries, its standard practice to bring back the much-loved detective, whether it’s P.D. James’ Adam Dalgleish character, or Agatha Christie’s  Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

It’s difficult for me to see how the antagonist could return for book after book unless our protagonist is the worst detective in the world and the bad guy keeps getting away with murder.

Anything we do that is formulaic in any established genre could be said to be derivative.

"It's all derivative, my good Doctor Watson."

In the case of murder mysteries, a series of them, the place of a recurring antagonist might be taken by recurring themes. Good versus evil is a no-brainer, right?

Murder is evil, and living peacefully with your fellow humans is good. We are all individuals, and we all cope with varying levels of success within the social setting. Not all situations and all reactions are the same.

When someone murders someone, something in the ‘social system’ has gone terribly wrong. The individual book, as well as the overall series can be described as speaking about right versus wrong, within the social system of France, in the twenties and thirties. And yet certain moral truths are believed to hold true over long periods of time.

Obviously our detective hero symbolizes right, and the killer symbolizes wrong. A thousand years from now, this will still be some kind of moral truth.

Writing a mystery series offers some opportunities. The overall theme of the series is one thing, and it can be a real mixed bag of many themes, fairly complex to describe. The number of themes will grow with each new book or story.

But each individual title will almost inevitably exhibit themes that are separate and distinct from the books that go before and after.

The theme of The Handbag’s Tale, my first crime novella, was respectability.

The theme of Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery was the cycle of failure and redemption.

The theme of The Art of Murder would be simple greed.

The theme of my new mystery, Blessed Are the Humble is just exactly that. Blessed are the humble—a nice theme if you can carry it off with some panache.

Over the course of the series there will be recurring themes, of love and loss, anger and pity, contempt and respect, all the basic contradictions of the human soul will be presented faithfully and authentically. At least as far the author is capable, in some detail, and there is plenty of scope for all kinds of statements within the overall work of art that a series is, or can be.

The writer can talk about the culture of France in the twenties and thirties, he can make reference to the thoughts and attitudes of the day, comment on social, economic and political issues and events, and hopefully, in some coherent manner make sense of the whole, make it entertaining, and make some kind of a credible moral statement.

One of the contradictions of the murder mystery genre is that we write about it for fun, and the readers read it for fun. But that is part of the human condition, that is to say contradiction is everywhere, and no more so than inside us, each and every one of us. See—another darned theme has just reared its ugly head.

There are contradictions within my own life, and my own make-up. I have no doubt that writing such a series would be a wonderful growth experience for any writer—for it forces us to define our terms, something philosophers talk about quite a bit.

Here’s a wonderful theme: crime doesn’t pay.

Here’s a contradiction: writing about crime might actually pay pretty well. And it’s all nice and legal, too.

And there’s really only one way to find out, which would be a recurring theme in my work if you’ve been following along for any length of time.

The really great thing about writing a mystery series is that it’s all experimental. This is one of the great privileges of art as opposed to mere industry.

I guess you could that I plan on having a little fun with it—which ain’t exactly humble, but then humble people don’t write too many books.

END

Comments are always welcome. Thanks for stopping by.

Writing With Confidence.

Add caption

A few successful experiments in writing breeds confidence.

Over the course of time, that confidence becomes unshakeable.

I’m just in the process of finishing up the first draft of my twelfth novel. It’s at 56,000 words and I’m shooting for 60,000+.

It’s an interesting feeling, one preggers with hope and satisfaction. At the same time, I still need a cover for the book. It will be gone through a few times, as I check for errors of time and place, making sure all the names are correct, fleshing out room descriptions, character descriptions, decribing more fully the exterior places, and all that sort of thing.

It is a process.

There is this feeling of accomplishment. I totally controlled this book from start to finish, and it will end up at the exact length I projected. It’s more linear, smoother than the first two, (certainly the first one) and it pays more attention to tropes and conventions of the genre.

My last half dozen books have been like that, in that they all had a certain pace and came in where I wanted in terms of word count.

Lately I’ve been writing clean copy. It flows well enough, with some nice cadences in places. The Maintenon mystery series books do have a unique feel and voice to them. They are different in tone from much of what is out there and available to readers, as written in English by native English speakers. I had fun writing them, and it really is a kind of parody.

Set in 1931, this particular mystery involves the murder of an old woman, not rich but well-off, and as a writer there is the pleasure of learning about the era. The research into another time and place can be fascinating and educational. I am becoming comfortable writing about it, bearing in mind no personal knowledge of France, or Paris, or anything else. I know little of police work and have never investigated a murder.

In some weird sense, to set out to write a certain kind of novel is an adventure. No adventure would be complete without some effort, some sacrifice, one where you dig down deep inside and scrape the bottom of the barrel, just to keep going sometimes. This book required some stretch on the part of the author, if only in the discipline—writing day in and day out and keeping the project alive and moving forwards is half the battle.

There is that feeling that one has overcome all obstacles, and in that sense writing a book is a character-building experience in more ways than one. Writers are creative, resilient people, with a rich stock of personal attributes, including persistence and a willingness to take a few risks.

Otherwise we could never even finish writing a book.

To me, I think, the story is everything—and throwing aside all mundane considerations of a professional, or business type nature, there is such a thing as the art of storytelling. To master than art, in the form of the written word, well, that is my goal.

To look back, is to see progress, and to look forward, is to see infinite possibilities, although time is precious.

***

For the Maintenon series, bearing in mind my ongoing program of upgrading the marketing images, now would be a good time to get new pictures for the three books and the original novella. This will cost a few bucks and I can only put it on my credit card.

One thing I know for sure, I don’t really want a skull on the cover of a series that might go to twenty books or more, assuming I live that long and one new mystery a year.

This one needs formatting, ISBN number, and all of that. New covers take time to design. Barring unforeseen computer explosions, the book will be published in a couple of weeks.

“There’s many a slip ‘tween the crouch and the leap,” as my old sabre instructor used to say; which you can find in some old George Macdonald Fraser novel.

As for Maintenon Mystery # 3, I don’t even have a title yet.

Now that’s just sad, ladies and gentlemen!

For the Maintenon # 3 book I wrote 28,869 words in thirteen days, Sept 1-13, and then set it aside while I did other things. I upgraded numerous marketing images, put together three short story collections, published a few short stories, kept up submissions and blog posts.

There is the artistic, creative side, and then there is the business side. The business side can be creative as well, it’s a matter of seeing certain opportunities and then doing the work.

An example: with my new browser showing me things I couldn’t see before, and doing things I couldn’t do before, what are the odds that now I can complete the Canadian tax information on the Omnilit book publishing platform? As an independent author, I want to be on as many platforms and in as many stores as possible. Kind of a no-brainer.

It’s like there’s never enough time in the day, and yet day by day, and in every way, we just keep getting better and better.

I suppose I have an unfair advantage. I don’t have a spouse and three kids, I’m not dragging them off to grandma’s for Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving. I’m not taking them to Mexico or Florida for a week in the winter and I don’t have to worry about summer vacation. I don’t have a big fancy house and lots of landscaping to look after, nor do I have two cars, a trailer, motorcycles, a boat and scuba or fishing equipment to look after or just move out of the way when I want something.

To those who say we are not in competition, I say, you know yourselves best. You know your own circumstances, and your own potential better than I ever could.

All of our circumstances are different, and to be jealous of someone else is a waste of my time.

To be spiteful towards them is to reveal our innermost insecurities.

Que sera, sera.

To those who say you can’t write a good novel in a weekend, I suspect you are right, but then neither one of us has ever tried.

This is why I really don’t have much of an opinion on traditional publishing: because I’ve never done it.

How could I possibly speak intelligently on the subject?

It doesn’t seem very likely, does it?

And anything they have to say about me is irrelevant, and most likely fatuous in the extreme.