Chris Barili

With Hell’s Marshal just under a month from its April 14th release date, I thought another teaser might be in order, especially since I haven’t done a blog post lately.

This excerpt is from a scene where Frank and his posse–a dead hooker named Camille, and an equally dead bartender named Spike–have entered the town of Creede, Colorado, a tiny mining town that’s just burned to the ground. That actually happened to Creede in 1892, when this story is set. At the time, the town was run by a man named Jeff “Soapy” Smith, a small-time crook. This is also when Ed O’Kelley shot Robert Ford, the man who’d killed Jesse James. Since Frank is charged with sending Jesse James’ soul back to hell, he wants to question the shooter.

————–

When Camille asked, a passerby directed them to the sheriff’s office, one of the few buildings still standing. Frank and his group approached the front, where a man lounged in a black suit, a matching hat flat on his head. His mouth hid inside a bushy beard, and a six gun rode at his waist. Something about the man seemed off, shifty. This time, when Frank put his hand on his gun, no one stopped him.

“You the sheriff?” Frank asked. He moved his hand away from his gun. They weren’t here for trouble.

The man rose and flashed an oily smile as he descended the wooden steps, extending a hand.

“Jeff Smith,” he said. “Folks call me Soapy. Sheriff Light’s left town, so I’m holding things down until the marshal gets here. I’m the sheriff’s brother-in-law, and boss of this town.”

Anyone who called himself “boss” had to be trouble, and sure enough, the man’s handshake was too tight, like he was trying to outdo Frank.

“Understand you have a murderer named O’Kelley locked up,” Frank said.

“Red? Yep, he’s in there. Damndest thing, him killing Bob. Like he wasn’t himself.”

“We’d be mighty obliged if we could palaver with him a moment or two,” Spike said. A handful of armed men had gathered behind them, while everyone else fled the street. “We don’t want trouble, boss. Just a few questions and we’ll move along.”

Smith gave them a once over and shook his head. “Not armed, you won’t. How do I know you’re not old members of the Ford family, come to get even?”

Frank considered their situation, catching Camille’s slight head shake and Spike’s nervous glance at the men behind them. Batcho trotted over, tongue wagging in the sun, and lifted his leg at the closest thug. The man danced out of the way just before the yellow fluid would have hit his boot.

He turned a bright red and reached for his pistol.

“Steady, Jack,” Smith said. “No need for shooting. Yet.”

————–

One of the toughest, but also most rewarding parts of writing Hell’s Marshal was getting the history right, or as close to right as possible. I used antique insurance maps, history websites, old photos, books, and even Google Earth to get things right in Creede, and the other locations in the story. But in the book’s acknowledgements, you’ll also find a long list of historians who were invaluable in filling in the blanks. All volunteers, these people are always eager to help us remember our history so we don’t doom ourselves to repeating it.

One of these days I need to head out to Creede. Maybe I’ll take some of the printed books with me, signed, for the historians there!

I received another short story rejection yesterday. That’s two this week, dropping my acceptance percentage down to a staggeringly disappointing 2.9 percent. TWO-POINT-NINE PERCENT!

If I succeeded at my day job only 2.9% of the time, I’d be unemployed. A 2.9% success rate at mountain biking would land me in the hospital, and 2.9% success as a dad would mean, well, lots of counseling for my wife and kids.

The truth of the matter is, 2.9% is an abysmal percentage at which to succeed at something, a rate that would cause most sane, rational people to quit and never, ever think about doing that activity again. But for writing, it’s actually not that far from the average. According to Duotrope’s statistics (as of right now, as I write this), overall acceptance rate for fiction (long and short) is 5.078%, and it’s probably lower for short fiction alone.

Short fiction is really hard to sell. The market is flooded and magazines have unbelievably low acceptance rates. When I look down the list of markets I’m submitting to, I see acceptance rates of 0.14%, 1.79%, 0.16%, 1.12%, and so on. Let’s face it, most normal people don’t even TRY to do things where they have a 0.14% chance of success–our egos just don’t like to take that kind of pounding. Even self-published short fiction doesn’t sell well unless your name is Stephen King, Brad Thor, and so on.

The people who are “making it” at writing keep telling us to treat our writing like a business, not a hobby. It’s a job, they say, so treat it as such. Thus, we should be looking at short fiction like a business would look at a product: cost to produce compared to the likelihood it’ll make us money. Do you think if Apple stood only a 0.14% chance of making money on the iPhone, they’d ever have made them? Or if Ford had sold only 1.79% of the cars they produce, would they still be doing it?

Hell no. It’s just not good business. You have to make business decisions with your head, not with your heart, or you’re bound to fail. Making emotion-based decisions at work is almost as spectacularly disastrous as starting a romance in the office or taking the cinnamon challenge.

And yet, for some reason, I continue to write short fiction. Every time I go on a rejection streak–my record is 52 in a row, by the way–I swear I won’t write short fiction again unless I’m asked to do so and know it will sell. But usually within a week I’m at least kicking a short story idea around in my noggin, and eventually I’ll get back to work on an old one, or (ack!) start a new one.

You see, the “treat it like a business” advice is good to a point, but this isn’t day trading or real estate or automotive production. This is writing, an art form, and art comes as much from the heart as it does from the head. In fact, it’s often the heart in a piece that makes readers enjoy it, that little drop of blood the writer dripped onto each page that resonates in the readers (read: customer’s) mind. If that emotional investment isn’t there, the story will fall flat.

So let’s say a writer has a short story they really want to write. One that’s got their heart all wrapped up in its grubby little palms, squeezing the blood out so they’ll drip it onto the page. And let’s say that writer thinks, “Well, I’m not going to write that because short stories are not profitable. They’re lousy business investments.” So they go and work on a novel instead.

For most writers, that short story is not going to relinquish its hold on their emotions. It’s going to sap all their emotional energy, robbing that novel project of its heat, making it lifeless and flat. Some can overcome it, but I know I can’t. I have to write the story that’s begging to be written.

So, despite the miserable 2.9% chance of selling a short story, and the even lower chance of selling it to a pro-paying market, I still write short stories. I write them because sometimes they demand to be written, and because even though most will never find their way into reader’s brains, I enjoy writing them. Writing short stories is, in my opinion, one of the purest forms of storytelling. It gives you a tale fit for telling around a campfire or at bedtime, something readable in one sitting. I love the act of chiseling and whittling and polishing until it’s lean and efficient, aerodynamic and sleek.

And because I’m obstinate as hell. I REALLY want to break into some of those markets, especially the less-than-one-percent-chance ones, because that’s where the readers are. Sure, they’re also where the money is, but they’re the biggest campfires around which to tell my stories. Out of pure stubbornness, I’ll keep sending stories until either I sell to one of these markets or my fingers fall off.

So yeah, short stories aren’t the best decisions business-wise. The chance they’ll see the light of day is miniscule, but if I keep them all bottled up inside me, I’ll end up hurting the other things I need to write. And besides, failing isn’t something I like to live with, so my stubborn Italian side kicks in and makes me keep trying, even though it just isn’t that profitable.

Sometimes, a bad business decision is a good writing one.

I know I’m supposed to make a dramatic scene of this. Do a countdown. Play coy, plant a few red herrings. Make a big all-night thing of  this cover reveal.

But that’s not my style.

So here’s the e-book cover for my forthcoming novella, Hell’s Marshal, Book One in the Hell’s Butcher Series.

This awesomeness (which is at reduced resolution here) is the work of Michelle Johnson at Blue Sky Design, who also did chapter fleurons, bookmarks, Facebook and Twitter covers, and the wrap for the print copies. Look her up on Facebook HERE.

This is also a great time to mention my super editor, Jennifer Wiers Severino at Twitching Pen Editing, without whom Hell’s Marshal would still be held together with bubble gum and duct tape. She actually recommended Michelle to me, and I ended up with a great, great team working on this.

So I guess all that remains is a launch date. I’m targeting mid-April and will announce the actual date once I am sure of it.

Thanks for looking. I hope you’re as excited about this book as I am!

Here’s a little confession: I like American Idol.

This is weird for me, because I dislike–despise, even–most reality TV. I can watch some home improvement shows, but for the most part, reality TV does nothing for me. So why is American Idol different?

For a long time I wasn’t sure. The first fourteen seasons, in fact, I kind of watched it and only talked about it with my family, like it was some sort of addiction I was afraid to admit I had or some personality flaw I kept hidden in polite company.

I don’t watch it for the bloopers/terrible auditions in the opening weeks, either. That’s the part that draws in many watchers, the typical reality TV allure of watching people look stupider than we do. It makes us feel better about ourselves to watch someone on TV prove that our lives really aren’t as bad as we think, even if it means they’ve embarrassed themselves auditioning for a singing competition with a voice that sounds like Phyllis Diller as a zombie from the Walking Dead (which comes back on Sunday…yay!)

I find myself most engrossed in the truly good singers, the ones who have a ton of talent and need to sharpen it or the ones with more modest natural gifts, but who work their asses off to make the top twenty-four, top twelve, or to win the whole damned thing. I get into the struggles of each one, following their development (or degeneration) as an artist, and often end up rooting for one or two like I do my favorite football team (the Buffalo Bills, hold your snickering) on Sundays.

It’s not like I’m a singer, or even a musician. I played trumpet in High School, and sang in a choir for awhile, but my dulcet tones have been known to make dogs howl and babies cry. So for a long time, it was a mystery even to me why I enjoyed Idol.

Then this season–the show’s finale–came along, and one of the contestants said something that rang true to me, that resonated with the writer inside and told me why I love the show.

During an interview, contestant Dalton Rappatoni said, “I just want to entertain America.” That’s it. One simple, six-word sentence that summed up for me why I watch this show.

See, I might not be a musician, but I’m a writer, an artist lust like all the kids appearing on that show. Just like every painter, sculptor, dancer, poet, novelist, guitarist, and so on, we all want the same thing: to entertain America. To have our art move someone. And on a show like American Idol, I get to see a group of young people dedicated to that aim. I get to watch a condensed version of what happens in the writing world, only on AI it takes a few weeks instead of years. People throw themselves into their chosen art form and try to touch as many people as possible. Hopefully enough people that they can make a living of it, dropping the day jobs that pay the bills for most of us, but simultaneously hold us back where our art is concerned.

So I guess I’m living my artist’s life vicariously through the show for now, immersing myself in someone else’s art form and watching them succeed at it. I get to watch young artists grow, and they inevitably do that during the show’s duration, often finding their own style and brand of music in the process. It’s like watching a writer develop, only accelerated and with actual money involved.

I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a reality show called “Great American Novelist.” It’d probably be the most boring show ever produced. Ryan Seacrest’s socially awkward counterpart would give the writers their task for the week and they’d all shuffle off to their tiny writing dens and not come out for days or weeks or however long it took to produce the piece of writing required. Maybe Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, and Nora Roberts could be superstar judges–that might liven up the elimination rounds–but even then, would the audience really want to READ each week’s entry? Or would each contestant do a public reading from their work before the judges shred it and send them back to their keyboards with phrases like, “Sorry, doesn’t really meet our needs” and “Didn’t quite work for me, sorry?”

Writing doesn’t lend itself to that kind of showmanship and drama, at least not the production phase of the process. So we’ll likely never see that reality show. No one wants to see me sitting around in my boxers typing and drinking vodka, anyway. That’s a different kind of reality show.

So I guess when Idol goes off the air, I’ll have to find some other program to through which to watch young artists “make it” in the business. Maybe they’ll come up with “The Sculpt Off” or “Water Color Idol” or some such ridiculousness. They already have dance shows, so maybe I’ll DVR one of those.

Or maybe I’ll just use the spare time to write more. Create my own reality and put it out there to entertain America. Or the world.

I struggled and struggled to find a topic for my first blog post, but in the end, I knew what topic needed to be my initial foray into the world of blogging. I needed to address the elephant in the room.

I’ve been cautioned not to talk too much about this because it could hurt my writing career. A good friend and mentor told me that making this public could cause editors or publishers to see me as less of a long-term investment. True or not, they’ll would worry that I’ll die or become debilitated, unable to keep writing very long. I value this mentor’s opinion greatly, and truth be told, they’re probably right. This is a business, after all, and business investments need to pay off long-term. This would appear, to most people who don’t understand it well, to threaten my long-term viability as a writer. I get that. I do.

Thing is, though: they’re wrong. And I can prove it.

So, here we go: I have Parkinson’s Disease.

Parkinson’s is a degenerative neurological disease that causes movement issues, and sometimes dementia. Who else has it? Actor Michael J. Fox was diagnosed in 1991. Muhammad Ali, diagnosed 1986. Maurice White from Earth, Wind, and Fire, who just passed away this week, was diagnosed in 1992. Johnny Cash, George Wallace, Estelle Getty. Billy Graham. Charles Schultz. Janet Reno. Linda Rondstadt. The list goes on and on, and many of these people continued their careers long after being diagnosed. Some continue today. Oh yeah . . . Pope John Paul had it, too. Didn’t stop him from doing his job…err…calling.

The thing about Parkinson’s is that it’s widely misunderstood. First off, Parkinson’s in and of itself doesn’t kill. In fact, expected lifespan for Parkinson’s patients is not significantly shorter than for people without Parkinson’s. Complications from it–like pneumonia and falls–can kill, but are preventable, especially in younger years.

Second, while it is primarily associated with old age, PD can strike at almost any age. I was diagnosed in 2015, at age 49 (technically “young onset” Parkinson’s), and Michael J. Fox at age 30.

Third, while the infamous Parkinsonian tremor is the most widely known symptom, PD does more than just make you shaky. It can also cause muscle stiffness/rigidity, balance issues, lack of coordination, slow movement, freezing of movement, stooped posture and walk, swallowing difficulties, and speech problems. Later in life, memory issues and dementia may occur. But the thing is, every person suffers differently with PD. Some never have dementia, while others never lose their sense of balance. And while it always degenerates, it does so differently for different people, slow for some, fast for others. For some it stays unilateral, but for others it spreads to both sides of the body. For me, I have tremors, coordination issues, and some stiffness, all on my left side. Other things flare up with stress and fatigue, but nothing that has, so far, prevented me from working or writing. I still work 40 hours a week, AND live my life. Right now, it’s a giant pain in the ass more than anything else. I’m alive and consider myself a healthy fifty-year-old, on-track to growing old.

I take a medication that controls my tremor and gives me back my coordination. When the meds are “on,” I can type like I used to, hammering out 1000 words in 30 minutes on a good day. I wrote my novella “Hell’s Marshal” completely by typing, but wrote half my MFA thesis using dictation software. So even when my meds are “off,” I have a means to keep putting words on paper. As long as I get my sleep and don’t get too stressed out, most people don’t even notice my symptoms.

I am still very active (exercise helps a LOT, by the way, in controlling symptoms). I mountain bike every chance I get, and not just on flat trails–on actual mountains, rocks, and so on. I do Shotokan Karate, lift weights, and occasionally even do some Insanity workouts. And I write. Every day I do something writing related. So far, PD hasn’t stopped me from writing, and if I have a say, it never will.

One of my Anti-Parkinson’s Weapons

Let me put it in perspective: my symptoms started showing up about the time I started my MFA studies in 2013. Since then, I’ve written 330,000 words. That’s two novels, two novellas, a novelette, and dozens of short and flash stories. I’m 6000 words into “Hell’s Sentinel,” another novella, and am in various stages of planning for other stories, too. I am an active, prolific writer, with no plans to stop or slow down for years and years. It’s not like I have a choice, like I can just stop writing and walk away from it. It’s part of me, burned into my DNA. Stopping would be letting part of me die, and that’s not going to happen. Writing is one of the fronts on which I fight this war, one of the defensive lines I will not, CANNOT, surrender. For me, writing is living, and I don’t plan on dying anytime soon.

So if someone out there seriously thinks I’m a poor long-term investment because of my Parkinson’s, they’re not paying attention. Between medications, therapy, exercise, and even a new surgical technique–not to mention tons of new things on the horizon–I plan to fend off this disease for as long as possible, and to keep writing until the day I die. And that’s not going to be anytime soon, damn it.

If you want to learn more about Parkinson’s Disease, check out the links below.

National Parkinson’s Foundation

Michael J. Fox Foundation

Until next time:

“He tests his fate: He lives to write, writes to live.”
— Bernard Malamud, The Tennants