Today is the day

My new novel The Shitbird is officially out in the world

At long, long last — a year and a half after Jeff at Stanchion Books accepted the manuscript, and several years after I finished writing it — my novel The Shitbird is finally out. Of course, that’s only a technicality, as pre-orders were arriving in mailboxes as early as the beginning of last week, so actually it’s been “out there” for at least a few days now.

Set on a Coast Guard cutter in the early 1990s, the book explores what happens when one Colin McAllister, a low-ranking enlisted sailor with a locker full of weed, a smart mouth, and a bad attitude discovers the body of a much more popular and respected shipmate while the crew is enjoying a few hours of R&R on a minuscule Caribbean island. It’s a dark comedy, a coming-of-age novel, a workplace satire, a noir at sea.

One of the questions authors get a lot is “how long did it take you to write this book?”, which is usually impossible to answer accurately because of how the writing process works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be). I guess I started writing this one thirty-some years ago, when I was serving aboard the cutter Campbell and we stopped at a tiny Caribbean island, barely even a dot on a chart, just like the one described in the book. The opening scene just revealed itself to me there at the top of the dune, clear as you like, but then steadfastly refused to give me any more for a very long time.

(Or maybe it didn’t happen like that. Honestly, it’s been so long, and I’ve had this story in my mind for almost the entire time, that I can’t remember if I actually visited an island like this or if I made it all up. It sure as hell seems like a real experience, but that’s the thing about memory, isn’t it? Given enough time, you can take almost any imagined moment and convince yourself it’s a real memory, all without even trying.)

I tried to force it, of course, because the imagery of that opening scene felt too good to ignore. Since it was basically a dead guy on a deserted beach, I naturally assumed it would turn out to be a mystery novel. But as it turns out, while I do enjoy reading good mystery novels, the idea of trying to write one is deeply unappealing to me. I don’t know why, exactly, but I suspect it has something to do with the way those kinds of books can feel like competitions between the author and the reader. And I’m not really interested in competing with my readers. So it’s not a mystery.

I started writing scenes and chapters that didn’t have any immediate relationship to each other beyond the fact that they were set on the same Coast Guard ship, and that many of them had roots in my own experiences and observations of that life. I kept doing that for years, until I thought it might be time to try to get them to all play together nicely.

The first full draft was a lot different than the finished work. It read more like a linked story collection, with three distinct narrative threads propelling things along (or so I hoped, anyway). But it wasn’t working for me, and I couldn’t figure out why until I showed it to Joshua Mohr and asked for his help. He suggested I pick one storyline and build it out. He was right, of course. That was what it needed. Focus. So thanks, Josh!

(Of course, that left me with a whole lot of good material and no place for it to go. I published one chapter / story as “No Good Deed” over at BULL a couple years ago, and I may publish more here over the next couple of weeks. I might also try to build a novella out of it. Who can say.)

Anyway, all that to say that this book took me a long time to write, is very personal for me, and would not have been possible without assistance from a whole bunch of people, most of whom are listed on the Acknowledgments page — including one person who I know does not actually like the book, haha. Well, too bad for you, generous unnamed friend. Your name is now forever linked with my novel.

If you pre-ordered the book, thank you. Thank you so much for your faith in me to deliver a novel worth your time and attention and money. I hope I didn’t fail you.

If you didn’t pre-order it, no worries! You can order it directly from the publisher, Stanchion Books, here. (It still says pre-order on the button, but you can ignore that.) This is the best way to get a copy. However, you can, if you must, also get it on that one site that sells everything and destroys independent and community bookstores, but I’m not gonna link that one. I’m sure you can find it.

And either way, if you read The Shitbird and enjoyed it, please post reviews to Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever else one does that sort of thing. And ask your local library to order it! That does a lot more for authors than you might think.

Thanks again, and I hope you dig the book.