Spooky

I have reached the point in my literary career where I need to be writing, but it tends not to be some aspirational passion project. I am revising a novel for my Patreon and trying to get back into my wedding book, which I am posting on my author site. (I am posting only the section giving me issues; the rest is all but finished and will only be seen when it is appropriately published).

Most of my writing on a given week is for Grunge, as they pay me. It is not resulting in more attention on my books as far as I can tell. I am getting no more hits on my sites, no more followers on my social media. On the other hand, I have made more this year for my writing than any before. There is a chance that I will make more from my writing this year than I did when I was substitute teaching. Though I am not desperate for the money now, I am presently choosing to see over a thousand dollars a month from my writing as a metric of success in a way that four traditionally published novels and four self-published books evidently were not. Being a working writer and a published novelist are not synonymous. I will take this curve in my career where it takes me, as it is more interesting than the frustration of finding myself undervalued.

It is mercenary. I will be less remembered for articles about serial killers and celebrities, but more people have read any one of them than I have ever read my other work combined. Even if they do not notice my name, they read me. For one of my articles, I make more than I did from five years of direct Double Dragon Publishing sales. It is what I've asked for and is a surer bet to getting my traditionally published again than just writing for my sites and hoping for notice. It is another step in my process. If I saw this as the end of my path, I might feel less comfortable devoting so much of my time to these articles.

I chose a topic for a Grunge article involving the worst serial killers of the 1970s. I listen to podcasts about serial killers -- though not exclusively -- and grew up on Unsolved Mysteries, sitting through stories about human monsters to get at the paranormal ones. Somewhere between the man who raped and murdered 350 young girls -- receiving a staggering 14 years in prison -- and the man who clogged his shared plumbing with the organs of a 4-year-old whom he had, yes, raped and murdered, it all became a little much for me, even for money.

I have a high tolerance for the morbid. I grew up with early involvement in horror movies and have experienced -- is not necessarily enjoyed -- a swath of mondo before I was ten.

Likewise, for nearly a decade, I have held a job where descriptions of horrific child abuse -- committed on and by my students -- are a weekly occurrence. Only two that immediately leaped to mind as affecting me: a boy whose parents brutally murdered his sister in front of him and another who stalked two random girls (not women), tortured them to the extent of cutting out their tongues, then left them hanging upside down in the trees. I am not sure at what point the girls were dead.

Beyond that, I can filter well enough that most things I see and hear don't much register. Once, while on a teleconference with a resident's parent and caseworker, I had to silently explain to a coworker what our resident (a sweet, smart boy) had done to earn his place with us. Without thinking, for expediency's sake, I mimed committing a sex crime on a baby. It was just a few evocating finger wiggles, like the Devil's charades. I wasn't trying to be callous or glib. It was simply the easiest way to explain. No one else at the table, my colleagues, even raised an eyebrow. Only after my coworker nodded that she now understood did it occurred to me how inappropriate that was. I would not have done this in mixed company, but the horror of this -- the miming, not the sex abuse -- did not appropriately impact me.

I have said that I want to avoid writing about serial killers and celebrities, but Grunge goes through periods where that is most of what is offered. I cannot keep pitching paranormal articles at them to keep my brand, such as it is, intact. Then again, I can deal with writing about serial killers without the modern conceit of mythologizing them. Serial killers are not Hannibal Lecter geniuses. Often, they are losers with well below average IQs who got away with it not out of any cunning, but only because they were the beneficiaries of police ineptitude that would be comical if it didn't mean that a hundred more Columbians girls would be raped and murdered. Should I not then take the hit so that it is not written with the flavor of hero worship? If I did not take these topics, it only means someone else will and won't do the job I will on it.

In school, I was so gentle that one of my friends, a kind and religious girl, said that she had never even heard me utter a bad word. How would she feel to know that I grappled with the best phrasing for the police finding a little girl's hands cooking on the stovetop, something infinitely more obscene than any four-letter word?

I have worried that the work I have done for emotionally mutilated students with parents like butchers breaks me. I do not like reading about savagery, but that does not bear on how cruel the world can be. At least I have the skill to phrase it better and more honestly.

The darkness has drawn me in the past because I wanted to understand it to confront it better. I can prattle about the McDonald Triad, the effects of sex abuse, head injury, and adoption on broken men. With my students, I am nonjudgmental while I am on the clock. If I found someone hurting a child, I would do all I could to stop them. Once they are in my class, that switches off since they cannot take another victim within those walls. Their crimes become only another facet of their story.

My students worship criminals. Usually drug dealers and murderers -- in the same company as those who might write these articles with less compassion for the victims -- but sometimes rapists and child molesters for having taken what they wanted. (Or because these people did what my students want to do, as it was done to them.)

Perhaps all the murder and mutilation I witnessed as a child -- most but not all of which was simulated -- prepared me. I knew that my parents loved me, and I had a safe home. No one was going to hit or molest me. I could watch a co-ed by spindled by a ghoul and sleep well at night.

I was spoiled by years of not having real deadlines for my writing, too. I could do -- or not do -- as I pleased without too much worry that I was falling behind a schedule. Now, Grunge's robot emails me when the deadline is getting close.

Though it can be rigorous (perhaps more so that it needs to be given the detail of research I undertake), I do enjoy writing them. I purge the information from my brain after I've written them, but I enjoy the experience. I get to stretch myself writing challenging, weird topics in a variety of voices. (It would not feel proper using the tongue-in-cheek tone of an article about an erratic alien abductee when talking about serial murder or suicides.)

It is better to be read and better still to be paid for it, even if I must learn too much about morally bankrupt killers and financially bankrupt actors in the process.

Soon in Xenology: A new job.

last watched: Sweet Tooth
reading: Radium Girls