Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--In addition to being Miami Bureau Chief of YU News Service, the parody news and disinformation syndicate, Art Brew was a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic who drove around Florida's Co-Opted Coasts interviewing people and writing free-lance pieces he would send to regional magazines, local newspapers, or post at his web site, roman-feuilleton.com, if they turned out to be unsuitable or inappropriate for a family publication, as they often did. Brew couldn't even write about attending potluck suppers at a church without it sounding like he was advocating the legalization of marijuana.

Straight mimetic realism wasn't Brew's forte. Pronounced fort, and related to strength. You often heard it pronounced forté, after the musical direction, loud.

Surely a man could be strong without being noisy. In fact, the louder a man was the more he was overcompensating. Protesting too much.

Brew didn't need to. Real men not only eat quiche, they cook it. They are connoisseurs, or konwa-surs, as Ernest says. Know what I mean, Vern?

Suede-o intellectuals. If reality is surreal, surrealism is realism, and Brew's books were magical realism, at best. A hard sell in today's tight fiction market. You should see the selection criteria for Barnes & Noble acceptance. How big is your publisher's promotion budget?

Brew drove over to Panacea, to Gulf Specimen Lab, to interview Jack Rudloe.

Rudloe had a new book out, from Out Your Backdoor Press, Potluck, about a shrimp boat captain smuggling marijuana because he couldn't make ends meet, shrimping.

You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Part of the suspense was wondering whether the pirates he was dealing with-dope dealers, arms smugglers, who double-crossed people as a matter of course-would honor their commitment or screw him out of the new boat they had promised him. He had no leverage over them if they decided to screw him.

Rudloe makes a plausible case that they are businessmen, who must treat boat captains fairly, or the word will get out, and no other boat captain will deal with them. Reputations are based on trust, in the underworld as elsewhere. The crooks may even be more honest than some bankers, fishhouse owners, and so forth, ashore. In his book they were, and it didn't ring false.

Warning: There may be some spoilers here, so if story is important to you, read the book before you read the craft interview.

Disclosure: Brew had read all of Rudloe's books, and Rudloe had read all of his, that were published, and some that weren't, in manuscript. If Out Your Backdoor Press published a book of Brew's, the publisher might ask Rudloe for a cover blurb. So Brew didn't want to piss the more established writer off.

Also, a southerner, Brew was innately courteous. Courtly, almost. He had the manners of a Shelby Foote.

A peckerwood with delusions of grandeur. As Susan Orlean wrote about John Laroche in The Orchid Thief.

Brew asked Rudloe about his work habits. Did he write before work, or after work, or was he able to write during work hours, at work?

Rudloe said he got up early and wrote before work, when he was fresh, and might take a short nap, before going to work. He didn't write at work, he was too busy running a marine biology lab, taking orders, collecting specimens, packing and shipping them to customers, handling complaints. In addition, some research was done at the lab, and he took students on field trips, several days a week. His education outreach was an important mission of the lab.

He spoke publicly, and attended meetings that affected the business climate he operated in, and dealt with the regulations required of him to do business. Fisheries are managed, and that means red tape, pencil-pushing bureaucrats, and an enforcement arm that looks more like Storm Troopers every year, with sidearms, jackboots, military haircuts, musculature exhibiting steroid use, short tempers concomitant with steroid use, high voices, shifty eyes, palpitating upper lip--you could practically visualize the atrophied testicles, little empty sacs. In his book, Rudloe shows the transition between the old wildlife officers, who were members of the community they policed, and the new regime, amoral careerists who were transferred with promotion and belonged only to a community of like-minded careerists.

That's why in 35 years Rudloe only published seven books, and the last one was in the works for decades, before an independent press brought it out. He was overworked.

Brew knew a little about Rudloe's publishing history. Each book had had a different publisher, they all went out of print, the last publisher he had, Pineapple Press, couldn't put any promotion muscle behind the book, and it didn't get any important reviews, an editor at a large house was interested in his novel, but he changed jobs, and his replacement didn't want it.

Every mid-list writer has stories like this to tell. It's why it's getting harder and harder to place a book that isn't a formula bestseller, a blockbuster, your track record, if modest, begins to work against you, as the computers at the big chain bookstores predict how many copies your next book will sell, always fewer copies than your last one, unless you are red hot, and if the numbers are too low the bookstore won't buy it and if the bookstore won't buy it the publisher won't publish it.

As simple as applying for a loan. If you don't need one, you can get one, but if you do, you can't.

Barnes & Noble, for example, wouldn't buy Potluck from Out Your Backdoor Press because the book didn't meet their acceptance criteria. So just because you found a publisher didn't mean you were over the hump, if it was the wrong publisher. Too small, too independent, too quirky. It was as bad as the stigma of self-publication, which would doom a book before it had a chance to find its legs.

And Brew wasn't even a mid-list writer. He was a shit-list writer. He was on New York's shit-list.

Well, good. It was like being on Nixon's enemies list. He'd have been insulted if left off. Where had he failed, he would have wondered. What demon possessed him, that he behaved so well. As Thoreau asked about his good behavior, in Walden, which he said was the only thing he repented of.

Not that you could compare Brew's books to Walden.

Rudloe broke off the interview and he and Brew drove out to a piece of land Rudloe had bought on the edge of a state forest, or a wildlife refuge, which had both a cypress swamp and a pond with lily pads. The property was full of snakes, bugs, it looked like Wakulla County used to look, ought to look, Brew knew because he had spent two summers surveying Indian sites when he was a student, surface-collecting at famous sites, and digging the burial mound complex at Snow Beach out on Mashes Island.

Brew and Rudloe talked until they discovered mutual acquaintances, like two Australian aborigines reckoning kin until they find a common ancestor, and then don't have to kill each other.

Rudloe knew Brew's professors in the Anthropology Department at FSU, and Brew had corresponded with Tom Morrill, with whom Rudloe sued Ed Ball about a fence across the Wakulla River.

They laughed about how the new guys were worse than Ed Ball, which is saying something.

It used to be, before voting on a piece of legislation the pork chop legislators would look up in the balcony to see how the man from St. Joe Paper Company, Ed Ball's man, had his thumb raised, up or down, but now the men from Florida's Great Northwest, Inc. wrote the legislation. The lobbyists are running the legislature, like the inmates taking over the asylum. All the legislators do is rubber-stamp it.

It's like Slim McElderry says, on his CD, The Black Hole. If you smoke marijuana, or steal something to eat, they'll put you in jail, but if you steal the election, they put you in the White House, or Black House, as he called it.

McElderry lives next door to Gulf Specimen Lab, in an Army surplus barracks from Camp Gordon Johnston, in Carrabelle.
Brew would interview him next, about The Black Hole.

Soon, he would have a collection of interviews. Interviews he couldn't do anything with, except shoot out into the void like the Cow Chip of Doom, out into cyberspace, black hole indeed.

Brew shot them out there like paint can lids, tarpaper shingles, floppy disks.

Odd Job's hat. Here, Julius-hold this.