Blog Takeover: End of the Line

    Before I get into it, I want to give a huge thanks to Jessi and The Book Cove for allowing me to take over the blog this week.  I had a blast.  This is a great website and blog and I feel some remorse for ruining it for seven days.  I was once told to always leave things the way you found them, but I just remembered that a minute ago and now it's too late.
    I put on my website's bio page that I live in the mountains and fight bears, but really that's just because I have no interest in writing an actual bio. While I do fight bears, I actually live near Chicago, am a special educator, and have two pre-school aged daughters. (I know every single word to Ariel's Part of Your World.)
    My writing is highly influenced by writers liked John Swartzwelder and Richard Stark.  I read a great deal and I try to read a bit of everything.  My all-time favorite books include, in no particular order, The Forever War, The Art of Fielding, Catcher in the Rye, A Visit From The Good Squad, What I'd Say to the Martians: And Other Veiled Threats, and The Long Walk.   I've recently enjoyed The Good Luck of Right Now as well as some very good indie books, such as Ralph and the Purple Fly, Megan by Steven Novak and Angeli: The Pirate, the Angel, and the Irishman by the really talented Amy Van Sant.
    My illustrating is highly influenced by the drawings of second graders, and it would be very clear if you ever saw it.
    My wardrobe is influenced by a loose interpretation of the word 'clean'.
    My diet is influenced by a fictional dietician I created named Yums Tasty who talks about how eating a bunch of crap will lead to good health somehow.

    As I mentioned back in the first post, I've finished two books as part of a series that will be ongoing. I'm currently working on the third. The humor is basically the same style as what I wrote in the blog this week..... basically dumb, goofy and a little dark.  The main character is kind of a poor man's poor man who runs into a cast of weirdos and gets into seemingly unescapable situations.  The only two rules I really follow are avoiding cultural references and not swearing.  Not that I don't find filthy humor funny, but I need to be able to hand the book to my girls someday without entire pages ripped out.
    The tough thing about writing humor is how subjective it is.  I get positive feedback from people I don't know personally and I appreciate it and eat it up, and I negative feedback and I can't argue with that either.  You don't think it's funny?  That makes perfect sense.  That's why in the end I have to write what makes me laugh. That's the not so tough thing about writing humor.

    Whether humor or any other genre, what I love about a story or a book is a great character. I've always liked William Faulkner's quote, "It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does."  My favorite stories are generally following this principle and are not chasing the plot.
    I love a character that I'm rooting for without really understanding why. The best characters do that for me.  They lose, they lose some more, and they make me question them, but then they offer up a chance of redemption and when they get it,  I'm right there with them.  
    At the end of the line I feel like more often than not we want books, even unrealistic ones, to offer us what the world can't regularly give us, and that's the line between good and bad.  If the line is faint, all the better, but when the dust clears, the bad guys get what's coming to them, and the good guys go home, maybe a little worse for wear.

Thanks for reading this week.


--Nick Tory is the author of the Johnny Book series.  Visit http://www.johnnybooks.com or follow him on Facebook or on Twitter @nick_tory.