Jujitsu for Christ

Author’s Preface

ix author’s preface The Way It First Got Published Fourteen or fifteen years previously, living in southeast Texas, I’d managed sixty pages of manuscript, then stalled. I would peck at the thing from time to time, not really getting anywhere. Now it was 1985. I was an actuarial analyst, had a decent income, was publishing poetry in respectable magazines.August House (my first publisher, which had become a quality regional press) had brought out two collections of poetry and one of short fiction. I had sent the sixty pages to Norton with a query. They had quite reasonably wanted to see the whole thing before they decided, but I had been looking to jumpstart myself. Then Ted Parkhurst told me that August House (which had primarily published poetry so far and would eventually develop a solid reputation in folklore) would like to try a novel next. I thought of Jujitsu for Christ (hereafter JJC).“I’ve got sixty pages and a synopsis ,” I said. They offered a thousand up front and a thousand on completion, which seemed like all the money in the world for a piece of writing. I had severe fits of doubt. I’d called myself getting back into fiction since 1971, having eked out maybe half a dozen short stories in the interim, but the maximum length on those was twenty-five or so hard-won pages. Now here I had gone and committed myelf to a novel? How the hell did you write a novel when just a few pages cost agonies? How could I possibly come up with a couple of hundred pages or more? I was forced to throw caution to the winds, as they say. I wrote without the censor, just let it pour. You have no idea how hard it is to do that. The whole time I was deathly afraid I was missing some essential thing, that they would read it and sniff, All very well, Mr. Butler, but it isn’t, well, a novel, you know. By this time I was working in depreciation at the Arkansas Public Service Commission. We ran depreciation programs on those huge old Star-Trek-type clunkers, but the first personal computers were coming out. Our two-man subdepartment had the use of an IBM clone, a Columbia. A whopping 128k. CLI, x Author’s Preface or Command Line Interface, was all the interface there was. No icons. Must have weighed forty pounds. It was, just barely, portable. To me it was the light of heaven. No more white-out. No more having to retype a whole chapter because you wanted to move one paragraph. So I would go in to work at five and write on that Columbia till work started at eight. (Stored the novel on a couple of floppies.) I had a contract, so now I was motivated. My artistic standards apparently take contracts seriously. I finished in about eight months, which is fast. (The 173 finishing pages of my second novel took twenty desperate days, which I scraped together by combining a Christmas break with vacation. Those are the two fastest spurts I’ve ever had with an extended piece of writing.) When it came out nobody said anything about it not being, you know, a novel, so I decided novels were long stories you could write however you had to and into which you could inject every thought, quandary, or observation you had, so as long as you could somehow bring it all home. That notion seems to me to make even more sense now. Who would have the will and patience to finish a novel if he or she couldn’t somehow use it to deal with his or her own actual life? Which is not to say fiction is necessarily autobiographical. It generally comes from an individual so bears the marks of that individual’s personality, but that isn’t the same thing. All my main characters are invented. I borrow traits, but don’t usually try to“capture” personalities. For one thing, real people in fiction are how you saw those people when you were writing. I change my mind too frequently.You run the risk of freezing yourself into outdated or inadequate perceptions. Defending them, even. I’ve occasionally given the names of real people (including myself) to minor characters , but have regretted doing so a number of times. Now I prefer not to use anyone else’s real name in a...