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Decatur Clary

What am I doing here?

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Okay, so I wrote these books, three of them. What am I going to do with them? Publish them my wife says. Easier said than done, it turns out.

I have an English degree from a good university, but still can’t spell for spit (see?). If I had stuck to writing out of college, I would have paid my dues writing crap I hated and built up a portfolio of work and achievements. That would have been the easy way, but I never could see past today.

Instead, I went to work to feed my family, owning my own business for twenty years before walking away from it with my sanity intact and little else. For reference, I had just finished the first draft of ‘No Free Air’. It took almost nine years to get back to it.

I told myself I would not publish anything until I had completed three novels, to prove to myself that I was serious about another career change. For seven years now I have shut myself away for an hour or two every night and four to six hours every weekend and worked on my books. Why? Hell if I know.

Writing is like an illness with me, a subconscious itch that grows and builds inside my mind until it festers, unless released. The people in my stories are as real to me as the ones I have to work with every day, more real in some cases, because I know more about my characters. The stories have become memories from the repetition of rewriting. I have sat here, staring at a single sentence for minutes while I try to get it to sound right or I have typed as fast as my fingers would move to keep up with the flow of words coming from my brain. It has been the best of times and the worst of times, the agony and the ecstasy, and my struggle, with apologies to Charles Dickens, Irving Stone and Adolf Hitler.

Once I had written three novels, mostly (because you never really stop rewriting a book), I faced the dilemma of: what to do with them now? The Internet is filled with warnings and horror stories of the trouble that awaits the inexperienced writer, along with list upon list of agents, publishers and clearing houses. I found people making money off authors, not just vanity publishing, but contests, classes and volumes of advice for sale or rent. W.T.F.? I don’t have time for this.

E-publishing was the answer. Decatur Clary books are now proudly available at Smashwords: Decatur Clary, a literary sampler (Free E-book), No Free Air , The Lady Lu , and 7 Crows, A Secret .

When you buy a Decatur Clary book, you know you are getting the finest product, hand crafted and fermented over years to bring out the full flavor of the words. Meticulously edited by the lovely Mary Clary, who also took time out from her restoration of Civil War photographs to create the covers. I think they’re beautiful, but I acknowledge a prejudice.

Please take time to read the samples at Smashwords and tell your friends about Decatur Clary’s work. Every purchase is deeply appreciated and feeds the dream.

Who knows, I might find more time to write this blog if I didn’t have the 8-5 taking up so much of my life. I would definitely put more time into my next novel, ‘Black Veil’. I’ll tell you more about that soon.

pets

R.I.P. Deets

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deets croppedR.I.P. Deets

I buried Deets this evening.

He was 13 last July 4th and had been in failing health for the last week. He kept to his regular routine: dry kibble breakfast before going outside, morning spent on the back porch, afternoon spent in the center flowerbed of the front yard and then coming in for wet supper at night, only he stopped eating. He tried, but it was just too much. Finally, sometime this morning, he lay down beside the gas grill and passed over.

I am sad, and I will miss him, but 13 is an old age for a cat, and he never did anything he didn’t want to do, with the exception of getting his nuts cut, and he never went hungry, except when he disappeared for three weeks before miraculously reappearing. We could have taken him to a vet and maybe extended his life another year or two, but he would have hated the car ride and the vet would have terrified him. So I coaxed him to eat, and rubbed his head and told him that I loved him.

I remembered my uncle, a crusty old farmer, down on all fours with a can of store bought dog food trying to coax his old blue tick hound, Dixie, into eating. I thought it odd at the time, but I did the same thing when my first old dog died.

Why do we do it? Why do we entwine our live with creatures that have an even shorter life span than our own measly allotment? When I look at a puppy or a kitten now, I see a foreshadowing of their inevitable ending. The joy of a new pet is now weighed against the future pain of their passing. It hurts and it sucks.

Someone once said that we surround ourselves with creatures that have a shorter lifespan than our own to remind us of how short life really is and how we need to treasure every moment, but I don’t think that truly measures what pets bring to us.

Mark Twain said that time spent petting a cat was never wasted and I agree but would add that time spent playing with a dog is a childhood revisited. Every purr and every lick tells me that I am loved without condition and that is something we all need as much of as we can get. Pets are our children that never grow up until they grow old. They become part of our family, always happy to see us and sensing when we are upset. The small cost of their upkeep is far outweighed by pleasure of their company. And when the end does come, it teaches us valuable lessons that prepare us for the greater losses living inevitably brings.

So we shouldn’t think about the ending and we should concentrate on enjoying right now as much as possible. I still have Deeter’s brother, Kirby. I think I’ll go rub his punkin head.

Rest in Peace, Deeter cat, King of the Whole Front Yard.

Decatur Clary, Florida Panhandle, Northwest Florida, Writing

Decatur Clary – a simple man in complicated times.

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Born into a family of storytellers, I learned early that the first liar doesn’t stand a chance and an entertaining fabrication was sometimes sufficient to distract an adult long enough for them to forget how mad they are.

I started writing at a young age, the alphabet mostly. Gradually, I learned to assemble words and form sentences, … somewhat. Imagine my joy upon discovering I could write my stories down! Consistent creative re-imaging was within my grasp.

I was toiling my life away, providing for my family and myself, until one day my wife asked me if I was ever going to do anything with all of my scribblings. I had never considered actually doing anything with them; outside of pleasuring myself and making her read them. Why don’t you publish some of them, she asked. D’ya think? I said. Yep, she said. So I did, and here we are. What do you think?

My stories are mostly about Florida, the way it probably never was, but the way I remember it. The characters are composites of people I have known or heard about, and the settings are familiar places in the Panhandle of Florida, the armpit of the South. Any truth is accidental and I disclaim any liability.

In my youth we traveled a lot, but we always came back to the Forgotten Coast. The tourism bureau doesn’t like to talk about it much, because of the heat, humidity and hurricanes that swirl up from the Gulf of Mexico and the mosquitoes, biting flies and gnats that swarm out of the swamps, across the sandy soil that supports scrub oak and pine forests and damned little else. If the truth were to be told, most of us prefer it that way, forgotten.

I like to listen to the small voices of everyday people because  there I find the common humanity that binds us together, no matter how strongly social loyalties pull us apart. This common humanity interests me because i have seen it appear in the most unexpected places and it always reminds me of how much alike we are.

I hope that you will find some enjoyment in my stories. I hope that someday soon I can quit my day job and write all the time. Wouldn’t it be a lovely world then? I think so.

-RDC