As a rule, one shouldn’t expect anything much from cold-callers and cold-emailers. They’re playing a numbers game, like the Frenchman on the corner who propositions every woman who walks by. Certainly, most will walk away – a few will beat him with a bumbershoot – but the percentage that smile and agree to go with him are all that he can properly service. So they keep cold-calling and mass-emailing, in hope of making a living out of the one percent or so that agree to work with them. This is most certainly the case for self-styled promoters of the fiction of indie novelists.
But now and then, one proves to be hungry enough to be willing to invest a little time and effort in landing the sale. I encountered one recently. I actually got her to read one of my novels from cover to cover. Despite the speculative nature of such an expense, I’m toying with the idea of engaging her. (Psst! Don’t tell the C.S.O.)
But that’s prefatory. Granted, it’s made me contemplate loosening the purse strings, but it’s still just a foreword to what’s really on my mind.
Fairly recently, a new contributor joined the stable over at PJ Media: Jamie K. Wilson, the head honcho at Conservatarian Press. Miss Wilson is quite serious about her mission:
Stories matter. They shape cultures, preserve traditions, and pass truth from one generation to the next.
At Conservatarian Press, we’re here for one simple reason: to publish the kind of stories the mainstream industry is leaving behind — the ones chosen on merit, not on checkboxes.
I’ve loved stories since I was a child, curled up with Tolkien, Carroll, Lewis, MacDonald, and Shakespeare. Yes, I treasure Jane Austen too, but let’s be honest: most of the Western literary canon was written by men now dismissed as “out of fashion.” Their works still inspire, still endure — and so should today’s writers, no matter who they are.
That’s why we promise one thing: we will never choose a story based on sex, ethnicity, orientation, or any other label. We publish good stories, period. In fact, the list of what’s considered “unpublishable” by the mainstream seems to grow every day — which only makes our mission more urgent, and more joyful.
Upon perusing the offerings at Conservatarian Press, I found several of high quality, including Marina Fontaine’s excellent novella Chasing Freedom. So it’s a publisher indie writers of a conservative or libertarian bent might want to consider. But what’s really impressed me about Miss Wilson is the depth of her insight into what’s wrong with contemporary fiction generally. This essay is particularly impressive:
After the Second World War, evil had a face. The swastika left no doubt. The men who stormed Normandy were good; the men who filled the camps of the Axis were not. Kamikaze pilots slaughtered thousands of brave young men on ships in the Pacific. Stories reflected that certainty of a clear good and evil: High Noon, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke. Courage meant something because sin was real.
Then came the postmodernists.
Deconstructionism swept universities and publishing houses. Theorists denied that stories carried truth at all. The hero became a construct of power; every righteous act was secretly oppressive. Virtue could exist only with irony. Writers who once sought truth began dismantling it.
And ideas never stay on paper. In those years, the literary avant-garde of New York and the television studios of Los Angeles were the same world. Harlan Ellison, Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal: all men who wrote for The Atlantic one week and CBS the next. Their post-moral philosophy, nurtured in the best universities and writing programs, moved straight onto the screen. The cowboy and the sheriff became relics of an oppressive age.
Please read it all.
I’m not going to recapitulate the whole of Miss Wilson’s excellent essay. Instead I’d like to ask two questions: one that historians have traditionally asked, and one that virtually no one but atavistic recluses obsessed with understanding human nature and human societies ever raise:
- Why did X happen?
- Why did it happen when and where it did?
The second question is the more important of the two.
The intellectual-moral disease Miss Wilson fingers in the snippet I cut from her essay has always existed. What caused it to rise to dominate the cultural life of the United States? What were the necessary preconditions? What provided the propulsion it required? Why didn’t the healthy part of American society, which has always been larger and stronger than the sick part, react against it as it should have done?
It was a highly unusual development, one that no historian of prewar America has successfully grappled with.
I have a couple of ideas, but they’re as yet unbacked by adequate study. I’ll be looking into the matter, while I contemplate spending my stepdaughters’ inheritance on the services of a promotion-and-marketing expert. But I’ll set the key idea down here for my Gentle Readers to ponder:
Just after World War II arrived the technologies that produced mass media capable of blanketing the entire nation.
In keeping with Gramscian “long march through the institutions” theory, the destroyers of American culture made seizing control of those media their highest priority.
They particularly targeted fiction, both in print and electronic dissemination.
For stories matter critically! They express and reinforce our values, particularly our moral and ethical values, by the most powerful of methods: by embedding them in the motivational structures of believable characters the reader can admire or detest. That’s why one novel from Ayn Rand has advanced the love of freedom and enduring values more effectively than all the works of all the theorists taken together.
And as I haven’t said for a while now: More anon.
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