How To Get Bushwhacked
Updated: Oct 31, 2020
October 8, 2020
Sorry for the foul language but I’m gosh darned pleased to see Bushwacked, the third Jake Lydon mystery, make it to reality. It was a gas to write and here’s hoping that the readers who told me they liked its predecessors, Connecdead and Machete, will feel the same way about the latest installment in the series. By the by, I like that I can legally and officially call it a series.
When you think about it (and I think about shit like this all the time) writing murder mysteries is an odd pursuit. As you start out, you’re absolutely sure of just one thing: you have to kill at least one person. You have to kill him or her plausibly and mysteriously, so you have to come up with a plan and then you have to execute (as it were) that plan.
There’s another odd thing specifically about the Jake Lydon books: the basic incongruity of writing a book that goes for laughs while several murders take place. In my defense, I like to think there’s a kinship to Agatha Christie’s novels with that nudge, nudge, wink, wink English drawing-room humour — only with a lot more swearing and beer. Another similarity with Dame Christie is the low death toll. I’m not a big fan of John Wick-type body counts, either in print or on-screen. Focus shifts from the why of it to the how of it as we “enjoy” the many inventive ways the creators have devised to bump people off.
So Bushwhacked is a fact and now comes the hard part - for me anyway. Self-promotion just ain’t a long suit of mine. As Jake observes: “I couldn’t sell shit to a fly.” Not that long ago, a writer wrote a book, sent it off, and somebody else sold it. Not anymore, buddy boy. It’s a new fucking paradigm, as they say. Being an old curmudgeon who doesn’t own a cellphone and thinks that ATMs are the devil’s cash register, I can pathetically yearn all I want for the good old days but the fact remains I’d like as many people as possible to read Bushwacked, so sell I must.
Trust me, I also understand that these marketing efforts must — initially at least — depend on the goodwill of family and friends. I am enormously grateful for their support. Nobody forced me to be a writer; consequently, anything anybody does — tell friends, buy books for Christmas presents, write an Amazon review — is an extraordinary kindness. In return, all I can, hopefully, offer are some hours of enjoyment between the covers of Bushwacked,.
