With a sawed-off. What was he doing with that? If your business requires you to keep a sawed-off shotgun on the premises, it’s probably not a good idea to draw attention to yourself by using it on lawn and garden equipment
But the best part of the story is what he told the cops when they arrived:
“I can do that. It’s my lawn mower, it’s my yard. I can shoot it if I want.”
I want that on the front of the tee-shirt.
Dude’s pitcher on the back.
Yesterday the second novel came out. Tiny Little Troubles can now be found in bookstores from coast to coast.
Tiny Little Troubles is about what happens when greed meets science. What happens? Bad things happen: ethics, family, friendship all go up in flames. And that’s before the criminals get involved. It has love, sex, death, and money in it, extortion, murder, and robots (albeit very small ones):
I’ve tried to be calm about the book’s appearance, after the all-out frenzy (on my part anyway) of having Vinnie’s Head published. I’ve accomplished this so far mainly by denial.
Now the book is in the world, but so far, except for a couple pre-pub assessments (Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist) unreviewed. At least, as far as I know. I’ve forbidden myself, this time, the endless self-Googling that absorbed so much of my vital energy with Vinnie.
Well, okay, I did a little searching. For a couple hours. But nobody’s reviewed it yet.
I plan to remain ignorant of my Amazon numbers, too. For the most part.
I looked last night, after Troubles had been on sale for almost 12 hours, and saw that the numbers had moved down from the high gazillions into the lowest 100,000’s. This probably means that one person bought the book, and that one person was probably my mom. Silly lady, she should have known I would have given her a better discount than Amazon.
Until those numbers move, I’ll be checking in, keeping an eye on things. Just making sure. Somebody has to do this. If not now, when? If not me, who?
So if you want to save me the anguish and eyestrain of spending the next three months in front of the computer, obsessively monitoring the book’s progress, go out and buy a copy. Buy two or three: they make great gifts. Give one to your mom; she’ll enjoy it.
Give me something to search for, something to find. Then maybe I’ll get tired and go away, maybe even write another book.
You never know until you try
Tiny Little Troubles
by Marc Lecard
St. Martin’s Minotaur
Hardcover: 352 pages
ISBN-10: 0312360223
ISBN-13: 978-0312360221
$24.95
Appearing in stores July 22, 2008
Amazon, because of my previous purchases, thought I might be interested in this:
I’m interested. The title is the basic plot of my new novel, Tiny Little Troubles. Did I mention that it’s coming out this month? Well, it is, on July 22. You can pre-order from Amazon now.
BODY FOUND PACKED IN DRY ICE AT HOTEL
A little weird? What would be really weird?
I also like the way the hotel tries to dissociate itself from the whole thing.
I love this:
There’s a lot to like here, but one of the best is the cop’s theory that the driver of the van might not have known what the wheelchair guy was up to.
In the second week of March Jane and I jumped on the California Zephyr in Oakland (Emeryville, actually) and rolled to Denver Colorado for Left Coast Crime.
I love trains. These days train travel makes an environmental statement, since it is a much more efficient way of moving human beings long distances, and contributes less carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than driving or flying. And I’m glad about that. It can’t hurt to be a little less destructive than usual.
But I do it because I love it.
Train tracks follow the path of least resistance when possible, and often end up tracing the path of older transportation–rivers, wagon trails, mountain passes.
And rails are usually laid in the marginal areas now, back behind the scenes, cutting through rundown neighborhoods, right into the heart of the countryside. There is a strong sense of passing through the country you travel, rather than over it as you do in a jet or even blasting by on a freeway. In a train it’s always backroads travel, and all you have to do is watch.
Most beautiful part of trip: going over the Sierra, long views over wooded mountains, vertiginous glimpses of deep canyons right under us, the long descent past Emigrant Gap, Donner Lake, Truckee and down into the long alkali flats of Nevada.
Equally beautiful part of trip: Nosing into steep narrow canyonlands in Colorado, where past Glenwood Springs the train follows the Colorado River up into Glenwood Canyon. Steep, craggy, rock walls, close enough to reach out and touch. The river always there. And wildlife: literal hundreds of deer, big herds of elk, dozens of bald eagles, one moose.
The rest of the trip was merely fascinating.
Left Coast Crime was fun, smaller than Bouchercon or Thrillerfest, my two previous experiences with crime get-togethers. Perhaps because there were fewer people there, I talked to more of them.
I’ll write more about LCC when I recover from the parting gift Denver gave us–a nasty bout with an evil flu-like illness which after a week of coughing that sounded like the death rattle of a sick elk, and fever, and other ingenious miseries, morphed into a really ugly upper respiratory infection. Over the last two days I’ve noticed that the last-gasp wheezing has finally stopped. So maybe I’m getting better.
The final pages of the new novel arrived last month. They weren’t due back until the end of February, my editor told me–an unusually generous deadline.
So I fucked off for a while, putting off the engagement. Until anxiety outweighed terror and I forced myself to dig into the page pile.
Because proofing the final pages always destroys me. Maybe it’s the finality of it–once you finish this pass, the book is gone, out of your hands. It’s not going to get any better.
And there’s something about the kind of attention you have to pay when proofreading that seems to turn formerly good, readable prose into loose, empty babble, childish and awkward. Bad, bad, bad.
It utterly fills me with despair. My career is over, I think as my head sinks toward the paperstrewn desktop. Why did I ever think I could do this?
And that’s just the first pass, the one where you discover how many truly stupid mistakes have gotten this far and need to be corrected. Typos, okay, I can live with typos, though that I missed them so many times before finally catching them at the last possible moment makes me doubt all judgment and ability.
But it’s the bad writing, the awkward turns of phrase, the unnecessary puffed-out words that really eat into me. The things I’m not supposed to change at this late stage in the process.
But they are unquestionably mistakes, so I change them, as much as I feel I can get away with.
The second pass is less grisly overall, but has its high points of anxiety and indecision. This is the pass I take to decide whether or not to actually make the changes I’d noted down during the first reading. It’s supposed to be just reading the changes, but always ends up as a second word for word proofing. It just does.
But the level of attention is different from a close proofreading, a step back from the pure nuts and bolts of it, and I start to see my own words as somewhat readable again. Maybe it’s not so bad after all. Some parts of it seem kind of well written, if you squint.
Then, finally, the third pass, in which I see if the decisions I’d made in the second pass hold up. Again, for reasons of efficiency, I mean only to read the changes. But always get hooked into reading long sections, basically all of it again, though not necessarily in order.
And a great thing happens. It reads! It seems good to me!
I’m in love again.
Ready to ship.
I usually start my day by contemplating the various catastrophes–global warming, peak oil, systemic financial collapse–that are galloping toward us, and wishing I’d bought that 20 acres in the mountains while I had the chance. Everyone should have a few acres of their own, a place to plant a few potatoes and erect a defensible perimeter.
I find it curiously stimulating and consoling to think that Western Civ might be scraped down to the bare dirt and need to be rebuilt from scratch. I’m a child of the sixties, after all, still Visualizing Industrial Collapse. Peak Oil is the Rapture of the crypto-agrarian left (a political tendency made up of myself and my friend Bob Schildgen [aka "Mr. Green."]). I like feeling all millennial and apocalyptic.
But after terrorizing myself for an hour or two by reading all the bad news on the blogs, I need to restore some mental tone before sitting down to write. I do this by reading poetry, another bad habit of mine.
This morning I found the perfect poem for this time of impending disaster and TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World As We Know It). It’s “The Horses” by Scottish poet Edwin Muir:
The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days’ war that put the world in sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us, into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms,
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
“They’ll moulder away and be like other loam.”
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our father’s land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming: it stopped, went on again
And at the corner, changed to hollow thunder,
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us.
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield;
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited.
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
New Year’s Resolution: I will stop procrastinating so goddamn much.
Also: blog more.
A friend sent me this Vinnie’s Head sighting on an unnamed beach in Hawaii (the Big Island). He swears it is a genuine sighting, and not a set-up shot. The reader is Debbie Halfpenny of Salinas, California. (Full disclosure: I met Debbie several times at this friend’s house. Knowing him as I do, he probably sold her the copy I gave him.)
If you take Vinnie on vacation, or carry it along as something to read in the holding cell as you await resolution of that unfortunate DUI bust, or anywhere at all, send me photographic documentation, and I’ll put it up.
Really. Anywhere at all.
