Bentley > Jim

My word-producing silence perturbs me.  This one is weird, too.  

John D. wrote a lot of novels and - depending on the estimator - some 500 short stories, most never collected.  

Steve Scott was doing the Lord's work in a way, digging deep into his JDM resources and sharing the wealth, mostly in detailed synopses of those "lost" JDM shorts.  That it's been a year since his last peep is off-putting in a lot of ways...Honestly, mostly in that a whole effing year has gone by that quickly.  

About as Luddite as you can get (i.e., I'm the only person on the west coast without a cell phone), cloud silence makes sense to me.  I don't know how to wholly eliminate Facebook from my existence so settle for logging out and staying logged out.  

I could "reach out" to Mr. Scott, but I don't do that so well.  Commenting to strangers, I come off sounding in written-form like I sound in the spoken - potential serial killer in training.  

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Exit The Skin Palace isn't exactly shattering download records.  Given my confusion towards self-promotion, not a surprise.  

Mostly, what halts me from putting up links on a lot of ebook sites is the utter conviction that it's not readers that ever look at those sites; it's only poor bastards in my boat, the unwashed hordes jostling for a tap from the fame and fortune stick.  Every now and then I poke around on Awesomegang and happen on some NoNameNudnik out there with a solid dozen works of fiction to their name and no signs of stopping.  It's glorious.  It's inspiring.  It makes me sigh and look at the keyboard like she's no good for me and I'm no good for her but we got nobody else.    

One idea for another novel remains in the infant state, what I keep thinking of as my 'Sylvia Plath' novel.  Another idea popped into my head poking at the ever popular 'what if/revenge' spinny wheel of fun.  We'll see if it attracts enough juice to go forward.  Other than bone-crushing depression another slight impediment to writing concerns hurting my hand.  I tweaked it while opening a door.  Opening.  A.  Fricking.  Door.  If this is a bellwether as to all the joys of incipient old age, I want out of the car. 

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I'm trying to finish off the current roster of Bentley Little novels.  He reminds me a lot of Jim Thompson, not necessarily in a good way, but a familiar way.  

With Thompson, it's a 30/70 split, in other words, 70% of the time, a Jim Thompson novel is just kind of a turd in hand.  Bentley, I'd swing the other way around.  70/30, easy, although out of the six I've sprinted through of late, the gold is a little harder to find and cherish.  At this point, tossing in The Collection and Indignities Of The Flesh, I've read 20+ books by the guy.  Obviously, I likes.  

And true, as far as stinkers by established authors go, Raymond Chandler's Playback can't be topped in the realm of betrayal by trusted wordsmiths.  For my money, Playback's closest pop culture toxic cousin is likely Highlander II: The Quickening. You wonder what Chandler was thinking while writing it.  Probably, "Jesus Eff, I need another drink."