Friday, November 24, 2023

Drury's Grouse County is worth a visit

Way back in the summer of 2020, during the height of Covid when reading was at its modern peak, someone hipped me to the author Tom Drury. I can't remember now exactly who should get credit for that. I don't recall if it was a friend, a rando on Twitter, or a blog somewhere. But the gist, as I recall, was that he was one of the best authors I'd never heard of, who created interesting and fun characters.

I started at the start on Drury, with his debut novel, The End of Vandalism, purchased in paperback form via ebay. The most prominent quote on the back was offered up by Annie Dillard, who said, "Brilliant, wonderfully funny ... It's hard to think of any novel--let alone a first novel--in which you can hear the people so well. This is indeed deadpan humor, and Tom Drury is its master."

The edition I received includes an introduction by Paul Winner, who lauded Drury's characters and humor while acknowledging that plot wasn't necessarily the be-all, end-all of the book. "Plot, as I understand it, forms and explains the connection between causes and effects, but Drury looks at plot with what is known to locals of this region as Midwestern Nice: a dismissal, polite and kindly, and worth no more than a tight-lipped nod in its general direction." In other words, the lack of a hard-driving plot here was considered a feature, not a bug.

And despite what most writing teachers, coaches, editors, et cetera, might have you believe, I think I'm not alone as a reader who doesn't necessarily mind that. If I like the characters enough to want to spend some time with them, maybe I don't need the story all wrapped up in a bow every single time. Maybe I just want to ride shotgun and see what happens.

I read The End of Vandalism that summer and I liked it. Well enough. There were parts I thought were hilarious, especially in the first half. The characters lived up to their billing, with a trio taking center stage: Grouse County Sheriff Dan Norman, his love interest Louise Darling, and her ex, Tiny Darling. Tiny is, as Winner puts is, "a petty thief and the county fuckup." And hands down the funniest one in the book. Stupid, yes, but not without interesting thoughts, which he often shares willingly.

Without giving too much away, despite its somewhat meandering nature, the story took a bit of a dark turn toward the end, when Louise takes off from Iowa for Minnesota to have some time away, leaving Dan to wonder exactly where his marriage stands.

I think that put me off just enough at the time that I didn't pursue the rest of Drury's catalog.

And then something struck me this spring when I was working on a new manuscript. Well, an old manuscript that had been set aside and finally resumed. There was just a little bit going on with some of my characters that my mind wandered back to Grouse County. So I logged back onto ebay and hunted down the rest of Drury's books.

What I didn't realize at that time was that two of them were essentially spinoffs from The End of Vandalism: Hunts in Dreams, which focuses on Tiny and his new family, and Pacific, which follows Tiny's son, Micah, and second ex-wife, Joan, to California. Both follow a similar formula to the original, though I didn't find either nearly as humorous as The End of Vandalism. Drury's characters are so realistic at times that what they do can almost seem unremarkable. Pacific was the stronger of the two, but if I had read it first instead of The End of Vandalism, it's possible I would never have gone any further.

Next came The Driftless Area, which is described as neo-noir. It's set in the Midwest, where a young bartender named Pierre Hunter is saved from drowning after falling through the ice one night by a beautiful woman. But it's no coincidence she was there to save him, as the whole thing turns out to be a convoluted setup. Though it can at times dwell on what seems like minutia, it's generally fast-paced and interesting enough to pull you along, and there's definitely no shortage of plot. Some of Pierre's actions and dialogue at times give off a Grouse County feel, which doesn't always fit. There is also more than a hint of supernatural.

And then I read The Black Brook, which thematically aligns closest to The Driftless Area. Again we have a mystery with a main character who is being hunted by baddies, though this time they at least have a reason to target him, as he squealed in the witness box years earlier. After splitting with his wife, who heads back to their safe, new life in Europe, Paul Emmons has the poor sense to return home to New England, where he takes up with a woman he first had feelings for in college. Of course, she's married to their former college roommate (it's complicated). Further exposing himself, he takes a job as a reporter for the small, local paper. And becomes obsessed with the ghost of a woman who once lived in his house. There's art forgery, mob violence and revenge, and a very puzzling side trip to Scotland.

Ultimately, it didn't work for me. It felt all too random at times. There was a plot here, but it was moving in too many directions all at the same time. I appreciate that he was trying to do something different with what chronologically was his followup to The End of Vandalism, but what made his debut work for me just didn't exist here. The characters weren't fun, or even really all that likeable. The story was confusing and at times not even all that believable. I finished mainly because I wanted to complete the set.

So, Drury ... yes, and no. If you are in the great characters can outweigh the lack of a strong central plot camp, I would highly recommend The End of Vandalism (which I think I appreciated more the second time around when I re-read it this summer). And start there, for sure. If you enjoy that, spend a little more time with Tiny and family in Hunts in Dreams and Pacific. Give The Driftless Area a shot if you're into the whole noir thing. And if you want more, well, maybe you'll appreciate something I didn't in The Black Brook.

Apart from the stories themselves, two interesting notes on the books I received. My copy of The Driftless Area appears to have been signed by the author, unless perhaps another Tom D. personalized a gift back at Christmas 2015, which is when it's dated. And my The Black Brook is a hardback version that once belonged to the Oconomowoc Public Library in Oconomowoc, Wisc. It looks to have been checked out only once, in February 1999, according to the card in the pocket affixed to the inside back cover. That little glimpse of its history may be my favorite thing about the book.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Sayanora Twitter, Hello Bluesky

The end game on Twitter has been inevitable for more than a year now. Ever since a certain Elon Musk purchased controlling interest in the company in 2022, it always seemed likely that one of us would have to leave. For as badly as he mismanaged what was once the best (in my humble opinion) social media offering going, he never took the step. So I will.

And I hate it.

I really liked Twitter. I spent way, way too much time on there since creating my account back in June 2011. I totaled 16.8 thousand posts over 12 years, most of which probably fall in the retweet category. I don't think that includes likes, which surely dwarf that number.

I'm not going to go back in and count them for myself. I don't really care to even pop in for a peek anymore. The place has been sullied beyond recognition.

Before Twitter came Facebook. I never caught the MySpace train, so Facebook was my first social media experience. I'll ballpark my debut on the FB around 2007. Give or take. I recall creating an account and being astounded by all the old acquaintances to pop up. All those high school friends. Wait, that's not quite right. Peers? Associates? NPCs (to borrow from a term that wasn't coined until long after I last laid eyes upon any of my fellow schoolmates)?

Yeah, it was fun, briefly, to reconnect. The novelty wore off once they began to share their political viewpoints. The close friends I might genuinely have wanted to touch base with seemed to have had the sense to stay offline. Though there was one guy I seemed to become better friends with on FB than we had back in school. And thanks to the back-and-forths we shared about the Premier League, I can still roughly mark the end of my FB time. Because I didn't become a big Tottenham fan until around 2014, and, with him being a rabid Arsenal follower, we had a lot of entertaining exchanges. So while it always seems like it's been at least 10 years since I ditched Facebook, it's probably closer to seven.

And it wasn't because of him, or any of my other high school connections. It was more the awkward encounters with family members. The cousin with the gun fetish. The relative who took offense when I posted a link about cops abusing civil forfeiture laws. The unfollowing. The unfriending. All the crap you didn't have to deal with on Twitter because everyone in your family tree wasn't on there.

I "met" some great people on Twitter. I used to listen regularly to BBC Wales and play along with their 2:45 Teaser, submitting my answers via Twitter (and hearing my name called out across the ocean when I got them right, "James Bailey, from Rochester, New York, in the USA"). I had conversations with fellow listeners all the way over in Carfiff or Swansea or wherever they were. I talked music with the DJs. I had so much fun.

I talked baseball. I made connections, dating all the way back to when I was still writing book reviews for Baseball America, through the release of The Greatest Show on Dirt in 2012, all the way up through the publication of Major League Debuts this past January.

Those are the things I'm going to miss.

Because I just can't do it anymore. I can't take any joy in signing onto X (and I throw up in my mouth a little just calling it that). Twitter died long before the name change came about. I guess I only kept my account active in hopes that maybe Musk would decide he couldn't continue to lose money on the project and offload it to someone normal. But he's just as terrible of a businessman as he is a human. The value of the company has cratered along with its morals. Most of my old connections stopped posting long ago.

My last post was July 23 of this year, when we were on vacation in Cleveland. (Well, second to last, before tacking up a link to this post.) My last like came four days before that. My interactions dried to a trickle sometime this past spring.

I tried Post over the winter, but it just didn't have enough oomph to it to warrant the time investment. I did post a number of updates to my majorleaguedebuts.com site, with very little interaction to show for it. I got as far a installing the Threads app on my phone this summer, though its 15 minutes ticked away before I progressed to setting up an account. I did create one for Instagram, and have uploaded a handful of photos there to the lukewarm applause of my blood relatives (largely an overlapping segment dating back to my Facebook days).

But the scratch to my itch looks a lot like old Twitter. Bluesky. Brought to us by the same folks who gave us Twitter back in the day, it looks and feels like the real thing. The only issue now is when will it reach critical mass. It's growing slowly, at an invitation-only pace, reportedly topping 2 million users earlier this week. I finally got an invite key last week and set up shop there. Now it's all about getting the band back together. I'm up to 6 followers. I had a whole 621 on Twitter. (Say it with me, "Ooh, Aah, Wow." Super impressive, I know.)

I haven't been on long enough to receive any invite codes of my own yet. When I do, I will pass them along to my former connections on Birdland. One by one, we'll reunite and share our pithy observations on horrible VAR decisions, who truly deserved to finish second in American League Rookie of the Year balloting, and maybe even some theories on the 2:45 Teaser (I hope).

If you're there, look me up. I'm at @jamesbailey.bsky.social. Yes, I got in early enough to get my own name. Jump on it soon and maybe you can as well.

I'll be shutting up shop on Twitter very soon, likely before the end of the month. It was a nice run, but now it feels like driving down your old street and seeing the new owners have repainted and chopped down all the trees you planted. It's time to take another route entirely.

Saturday, November 4, 2023

Avoiding old pitfalls with the new release

With the recent release of This Is Who We Are Now, I find myself pulled back to 2015, trying to remember exactly how things went in the early days for Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed. Flavor-wise, that is my closest comp title, what with all the family drama and dysfunction. In my memory, Sorry got out of the gate quicker, with more Amazon reviews helping pave the way for early sales.

Only it didn't. Memory is a funny thing that way.

As with this one, I made Sorry available to book bloggers and other reviewers via NetGalley. To date, This Is Who We Are Now has seven reviews on Goodreads from NetGalley reviewers, almost all four-star ratings. Unfortunately, only one has made its way to Amazon to this point. And it is unfortunate, because all seven were thoughtful and largely quite positive reviews that would no doubt help sales.

I had a number of nice reviews of Sorry posted on Amazon by NetGalley readers. But digging back through emails now, most of those went up a month or more after the book went live. I can recall being anxious for the total review count to hit double digits, because that was the threshold for a number of the book deal websites to take a title on. If you wanted to knock the Kindle price down to 99 cents for a few days and advertise the discount, you had to have ten reviews with an average of at least four stars. And once I hit that mark, I discounted and racked up quite a few sales in quick order.

It worked so well I did it a number of times over the first year Sorry was out. This was one of the major perks of being enrolled in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program, where subscribers could read your book for free, for which the 'Zon compensated you to the tune of about half a cent a page.

And then, several years later, I realized the tradeoff that came with all that. My Amazon Also Boughts were a mess of bargain-basement books. Cookbooks. Romances. Books about the Holocaust. Books readers scarfed up for a buck--or free even. Books they read through KU, where the only real common tie was that it didn't cost them anything. Books that were zero help to me at all.

It took a bit of time and effort, but I rehabilitated my Also Boughts in 2019-20 by advertising on Amazon, building connections with books I wanted readers to associate mine with. When you have enough common purchases with books by Jonathan Tropper and Matthew Norman and Kevin Wilson, Amazon starts to do some of the heavy lifting for you. Your book shows up on their Also Boughts. Your pay-per-click ads come down in price as Amazon's algorithms calculate the odds of a sale are stronger. It makes a big difference in visible and non-visible ways.

And when you release a new book, you start the process anew.

This Is Who We Are Now enjoys no such ties with the books that Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed developed. We are officially at square one. But this time, I'm taking a different approach. No 99-cent deals. No Kindle Unlimited. The hope is to avoid digging myself into a hole where Fruit Pies: Practical Guide to Homemade Baking shows up in my Also Boughts. I don't need connections like that. Because much like a cover, readers judge a book by the company it keeps. And even more importantly, so do Amazon's algorithms.