The Stupid 365 Project, Day 6: Rediscovering Me
October 6th, 2010
A long time ago, two eminent American writers exchanged the following brief notes:
HenryDavid Thoreau: ”Simplify, simplify.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “One ‘simplify’ would have been sufficient.”
I’m reminded of that as I prepare for ebook publication of THE MAN WITH NO TIME, one of the Simeon Grist books I wrote back in the nineties. The first book in the series (there were six in all) was written back in the dim mists of time, in 1989, when some of you were still in diapers and some of the rest of you hadn’t yet returned to them. I hadn’t opened any of the Simeons in fifteen or twenty years, depending on whether the book was early or late in the series. There may be writers who spend their evenings beside the fire, sipping sherry and lovingly re-reading their own work, but I’m not among them.
My impressions of the books, after all these years, were a little on the vague side. In fact, I barely remembered some of them at all. I was a drinking writer then (or a writing drinker) and I started each session with a couple of beers and ended it with my forehead on the keyboard. I stopped drinking while writing the third book, EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL, and essentially had to learn all over again how to write a book. Alcohol, whatever its weensy drawbacks, is great for reducing blank-page paralysis.
But I didn’t really remember the titles I wrote sober, either; they were written a long, long time ago, by someone who seems to be remotely related to me, and what I remembered most were the covers, almost all of which were dreadful.
So when I thought back on the series, I saw the books as hard little objects, devoid of details like plot or character, sort of like stepping stones across a lawn. They were in an inflexible order — the order in which I’d written them — but other than that, my impressions were vague, beyond a certain sense that I had preferred some of them to others. To prolong the stepping-stones metaphor to an unreasonable length, three of the stones seemed to gleam as though they’d been polished, two were sort of drab and inconspicuous, and one was probably a trap-door that would drop anyone foolish enough to step on it into an abyss that would take a long, long time to fall through.
Now that I’ve read most of them, I realize with a great deal of relief that some are better than I remembered them, and some are arguably worse. None of them was as bad as the one I’d thought of as a trap-door; in fact, I had a great time editing it.
But the biggest surprise for me was The Man With No Time, the book that’s coming out in the next few weeks. When I proofed it, I just flat-out loved it. It lacked the patches of overwriting, of trying too hard, that marred some of the earlier books, and the characters totally convinced me. I seem to recall that when I wrote it, I had some doubts about bringing Dexter Smif back, but this wouldn’t be the same book without him. He comes in late, but he’s on his game all the way through, and he brought the Doodys with him. You’ll meet the Doodys when and if you read the book. This seems only fair, since I didn’t meet them myself until Horton Doody suddenly sat down in the dire light of a late-night McDonald’s. One of the delights of writing without a net – with no clear sense of where the story is going – is that you meet some very unusual people.
I overwrote mercilessly in the first few books in the series. I tried wayyyyy too hard. If one joke would have been good, I wrote three. If I had six good adjectives, I used four. Whole pages look like someone sneezed adverbs onto them. I had no idea that — as the exchange above, between Thoreau and Emerson, suggests — simpler is almost always better. Most of the time in these books, I’m visibly standing on tiptoe, probably trying to convince myself that I could actually write a novel, that the three-book contract the first Simeon won for me wasn’t a fluke. It took me years, and some long patches of bad writing, to get me to the point where I realized that I could write the books I could write and that I couldn’t write, say, James Lee Burke’s books. But I could write mine, and if the world didn’t want to buy them, well, then, that was the world’s problem. Maybe its teeth hurt.
I’d write the damn things anyway.
This Kindle project has been a kind of voyage of rediscovery, and the person I’ve rediscovered is someone I’m just as happy not to be any more. But it’s been interesting to watch the workings of the mind of my younger self, all the uncertainty, all the confidence about all the wrong things, all the little sizzles of excitement when someone like the Doodys happened by. I’m glad to have had the excuse to revisit these books. I’m even glad I wrote them.
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12 Responses to “The Stupid 365 Project, Day 6: Rediscovering Me” -
Suzanna Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Really like the cover art on “Man With No Time.” Is it new?
Well, silly me, I loved your Simeon Grist books for precisely one of the reasons you may have thought that you were trying too hard. Your Grist series could have been over the top on the number of jokes but they were tremendously entertaining jokes. While I may not be the best judge of the delicacies of simple prose I really loved these books! I hope your Rafferty readers will treat themselves to this excellent series and read the Grist series as well. Funny and suspenseful — great combo if you ask me.
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EverettK Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 11:18 am
One of the true joys of advancing age: getting to look back at what you’ve done (and not done), and valuing it for what it is (or was). Everything is perfect in its moment, because it allows us to move on and become who we want to be in the next moment.
As a side note, I have some of the same feelings regarding some of my earlier games. After not having really looked at them for some number of years, I’ll fire one up and think, “Good God! I RECOGNIZE this, but it’s almost alien, as if it were something created by someone else entirely.”
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Beth Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Tim, I don’t know how you could have forgotten the Doody brothers. They are truly memorable, especially as Simeon directs their activities.
I read the Simeon series as it was published. I am very glad I decided to do a re-read; I think I find them even funnier now.
Warning about blog promotion:
THE MAN WITH NO TIME was reviewed on Murder By Type on Monday. If interested, go to the home page and scroll down to the third entry. The review doesn’t do justice to the book. I couldn’t mention most of the book because it would spoil the story for those who haven’t will be reading it soon.
The genius in Tim’s writing is the way he slips things in at unexpected moments.
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Phil Hanson Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Despite your frequent mention of the Simeon Grist series, Tim, you haven’t named The Bone Polisher as one of the books in the series. I assume that’s because it’s one of the later books (if not the last book) in the series. I liked that story a lot; so far, it’s my favorite of the series. But then, it kinda has to be, as it’s the only one I’ve read. My promise to you is that given time, I’ll read them all.
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Gary Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
I liked Simeon Grist. OK, so some of the Raymond Chandler one-liners you could see coming half a page away. But they were FUN. And the villains were deliciously villainous, like the Chinese guy in loud suits who got all his English idioms wrong.
Tim, you have a great opportunity to legitimately revisit Simeon. Courtesy of Kindle, God bless it! So many of us fiddle obsessively with our earlier work – My God, did I write THAT? Quick, let me edit it and delete the original – and castigate ourselves for having grown as writers in the interim.
We need to reclaim the freedom, don’t we – not just to be ourselves, but to have been who we were.
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 6:36 pm
Suzanna, the cover art is the work of my 17-year-old graphics guy, Allen Chiu, who has a great career in front of him unless he decides to become a dentist, which is what his father wants him to do. About the books, having just read four of them — THE FOUR LAST THINGS, EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL, SKIN DEEP, and THE MAN WITH NO TIME, I agree that they’re funny. And that they hold up pretty well, and better than pretty well in places. (One of the big surprises for me was SKIN DEEP, which is a hell of a lot better than I thought it would be.) But there are times when I feel myself straining, see myself setting up for a joke that gets a laugh (or not) but doesn’t necessarily contribute to what I really should be trying to do in the scene. In a great book of interviews, Buster Keaton talks about tossing jokes that are just jokes, no matter how funny they are. I was still learning how to make anything work, and I went for the jokes in part because I knew how to write them and, I think, in part because I distrusted my ability to do the other stuff, like plot and character and setting. When in doubt, make a joke, and I was in doubt a lot of the time.
Everett, I’ve sent the first paragraph of your response to half a dozen people. Absolutely on target. And it’s right that our early work should seem to have been created by another person, because essentially it was.
Beth, I’ve forgotten practically everything about the series. I actually forgot I’d brought Dexter back for this one. But you’re right — the Doodys are memorable, although not everyone liked them as much as you and I do. I sent a partial manuscript of the book to my editor at the time and got a panicked phone call, the point of which was that he “did not want to see Horton Doody, or anybody like Horton Doody, take over this book.” I’m pretty sure that’s verbatim. And thanks for your phenomenal review — here’s hoping you’ll put it up on the Kindle page when the book finally becomes available.
Phil, THE BONE POLISHER is the last in the series, and that and INCINERATOR are the only ones I haven’t read again. The silly thing is that I’m just as nervous about dipping into them as I was about reading each of the previous four. I’m glad you liked it, and I hope you read the others, although I seem to remember that you’re not an ebook guy.
Gary — your last sentence ranks with Everett’s first paragraph as material I’ve sent along to others. I’m glad you liked these, and the Chinese gangster, Charlie Wah — whose sherbet-colored suits are made for him by pregnant girls in a Thai nunnery — is in THE MAN WITH NO TIME, and I had a GREAT time rediscovering him. Wish I could bring him back for a Poke book, but it would require a miracle that, according to Christian doctrine, has only happened once in the history of the world.
Great responses, everyone, and thanks.
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Laren Bright Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Okay — I tried entering the comment below and got a message that the reCaptcha was entered wrong. So I typed the comment again, typed in the new words (which were scintillating and titillating at the same time ) and got a message that said my comment looked suspiciously familiar to one already submitted. But my original message did not appear to have been accepted by anyone excepth the guy who comes up withthe bizarre words.
So, since I’m now having a dysfunctional relationship with the reCaptcha writer, I thought, maybe if I type something in addition to my real comment, I can sneak past him. Thus, this long, stupid and pointless discussion to only make my point, to wit:
I broke away from my Sci-Fi addiction many years ago to read the Simeon Grist books. I liked ‘em. I’d do it again.
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fairyhedgehog Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 10:24 pm
I’m kind of envious that you have something to look back at that you created when you were younger. It must be very strange because we do change so much. I remember visiting my Mum’s once and finding the Spirograph kit that I’d spent so much time with when I was a teen – I can’t imagine now what I saw in it.
I’ll give those books a go once I’ve finished Fourth Watcher, which I’m still waiting to be delivered. I really like the characters in the Poke books.
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Suzanna Says:
October 7th, 2010 at 8:00 am
Your current work is a lot more refined than your earlier books, that’s true. And I really like the way the work has evolved.
Are there aspects of your work that get any easier the more you write?
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Cliff Stanford Says:
October 7th, 2010 at 8:32 am
Just finished Skin Deep, the first of the Simeon Grist stories I’ve read.
I very much enjoyed it. It was a good story, tightly told. The descriptions were good enough that I feel like I’ve seen a film at the cinema rather than read a book.
But, if I had to pick out one thing that really worked for me, it was the accents. Each character has his own way of speaking so that when Wyl is reintroduced, you can just hear the campness coming over the phone.
Tim, I hope you sell the film rights for this book. 
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 7th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
I’mmmmm baaaaack!!!!
Laren — Two hints about Captcha. First, block and save your message before you fill in the blanks and push SUBMIT. That way, if something goes wrong, you just out the cursor in the new blank message spot and past it there. Second, if the words are too hard to read, use the little circle of arrows just to the right of “Type the two words” and it will give you a new set of key words. Third (yes, this is a bonus) if you ever get that “already submitted” message, just type a new opening word. And I’m flattered that you turned your back on all those Heinleins and Herberts and Delanys to read old Poke.
FHH — It really is strange to revisit work that’s 20 years old, but it’s been much less dreadful than I thought it would be. By and large, they hold up pretty well. If you haven’t got WATCHER by, say, Tuesday, let me know. It was sent more than a week ago by Priority Mail and I know someone in Canada already received her book.
Suzanna, it’s nice to hear someone say my work has evolved. I always feel for a writer when someone says, “I really like your first book best.” No, nothing gets easier except the first ten pages, which I can now jump into blindly, secure that I’ll land somewhere safe. But everything actually gets more difficult because, as Elmore Leonard said, “We get harder to please.”
Cliff, I like that you saw SKIN DEEP cinematically because I do try hard to supply all the visuals I can without slowing down the story. And thank you SO MUCH for saying that the character voices were all different. That’s praise I’ll accept gladly.
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Jaden Says:
October 10th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
I agree with Everett’s observation that re-reading old work being like discovering something alien, written by someone else entirely. I love that feeling of reading something I wrote long ago and thinking, “My God, that’s actually good. I wrote that?”
On the other hand, I hate it when I think, “My God, that’s terrible. Don’t tell me I wrote that!”
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