There is No Wheel: I may write smut but I don't write fluff.

I may write smut but I don’t write fluff.

I wrote these words near the end of my essay announcing the release of “There is No Wheel.” I promised a future essay expanding on this thought. Welcome to the future.

Several weeks ago, while attending Mysticon in Roanoke, I went to dinner with Ed Schubert, editor of Intergalactic Medicine Show, and asked him if he’d be willing to write the introduction to There is No Wheel. He’s bought three out of four short stories I’ve sent him, and at cons he frequently uses my stories as an example of the sort of stuff he’d like to see more of in his in-box. I knew he was a fan of my work, but I also knew that the work I submit to IGMS represents only a sliver of what I write. I warned him that the collection would contain stories that would never fit IGMS’s PG13 guidelines, and wound up telling him about “Perhaps the Snail,” a story that should probably be rated PG45. It’s a story I have trouble discussing in public forums because, honestly, any description of the story is pornographic. If I were to list the behaviors engaged in by my young female protagonist, Devi, during the course of a story, it would look like the search tags attached to some dreary hard core web page. It’s the sort of story that I look at and ask, “Why on earth did I write such a thing?” Then, “Why on earth am I including it in my ‘best of’ collection?” And, “Why is it the last story in the collection, getting the final word, leaving this particular tale as the last story they will associate with the name James Maxey before they put the book down?”

The answer is simple. Most anthologies open and close with the stories the editor thinks are the strongest. I follow the same format with my collection. I’ve placed this story at the end because I think it forms a nice bookend with the opening tale, “To the East, a Bright Star.” Both stories break taboos. “To the East, a Bright Star” features illegal drug use in its closing scene that does not result in the drug users living poorer, less fulfilling, sadder lives. In fact, for one of the characters, the drug provides a sort of salvation in a syringe. “Perhaps the Snail” closes with people behaving downright dangerously, pursuing sexual gratification in circumstances that carries a high probability of getting them killed or maimed. The thing that both stories have in common is, only by taking my characters to such extreme environments am I able to have them understand what it is they need to understand. The point of the first story isn’t “drugs are fun!” The point of the first story is that after life has taken from you every last hope that you are the master of your own destiny, after every roll of the dice has come up against you and you have reached a point in life where shared morality and the judgment of others no longer limit your actions, there is still redemption to be found in being kind to someone else. In the last story, I systematically strip Devi of every illusion that she is smart, or wise, or important, of the very notion that her life has meaning. I have her stare into the abyss… and laugh as she understands what a wondrous, beautiful, trivial and fleeting thing that she is in the face of such nothingness. She exits the story young, dumb, fearless, and alive, and the better for it.

Sure, I write smut. But I don’t write fluff. I’m not portraying graphic sex and violence in the hopes that you’ll be amused or shocked or horrified or aroused for five minutes. In “Empire of Dreams and Miracles,” I criticize our present entertainment culture. As humans, we struggled to build a world in which our collective children would be safe, free of the fear of hunger, disease, poverty, even death. Having insulated them from all the great struggles of humanity, we now pour vast resources into keeping our children entertained and stimulated. What, exactly, are the great human values a teenager is supposed to learn playing Halo or whatever the hot game of the moment happens to be? There are people who write books and movies with no higher goal in mind than to cash in on this craving for stimulation. They are pleased to trot out gorier zombie death tides, raunchier were-wolf sex acts, grosser cannibal feasts. They pursue an elevated heart-beat, hoping to amuse you enough that you’ll tell your friends about your cool five minutes of entertainment.

I am not that writer. An average short story takes, what, ten minutes to read? Fifteen? I am not interested in such a trivial time in your skull. My goal is to claim space in your head for the rest of your life. Your fleeting amusement does not concern me. I want you to think. I want you to be awake at three in the morning five years from now, sitting all alone at a truck stop on some lonely highway, working on your third cup of coffee as you stare at your reflection in the window. When the waitress asks if you want another cup, you won’t understand the question at first, because you’ll be far away, thinking about Tony shooting up Esmerelda with the last of the morphine, thinking about Eric gazing into the cooler filled with moonshine and finding the pickled body of a cherub, wondering what really happened to Retaliator when he pulled that trigger. I want you to be thinking about that cab heading down the highway at the end of “Perhaps the Snail,” wondering if anyone ever grabs the wheel.

And I know, I know, I know how arrogant and pretentious it is to think that I, a verbose nerd with an strange affection for circus freaks and cannibals and perverts, dare to ask you, a reader, to let my words stand in the doorway of the mansion of your mind for a even five minutes, let alone have them carry in baggage and ask to stay for five years, or ten, or a lifetime. But, it would be even more insulting to assume that all you want when you start one of my stories is a few minutes of fluff. I work from the assumption that when you open the doors in your head, you’re actually hoping that a story will show up with a few bags, and that some of these bags might hold some answers about life, and even if you found the answers to be wrong, you could still work back to an all consuming question, which you could attempt to devour before it devoured you.

Do I reach this level of engagement on every story? I don’t know. Questions that I might struggle with for decades, others shrug off in an afternoon. But, I can at least promise that, with my Wheel stories, I at least was trying to engage. I may write smut, but I don’t write fluff.