WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?

The most fun thing about writing fiction is the creation of characters, and if they aren't interesting, the book doesn't work for readers.  Character design sometimes comes from prototypes, real life people, but it is most often just pure fiction.  Some of my characters come from people I've known, but they always get a healthy dose of fantasy added to them.  I like the characters who come from nothing but my imagination, but there's a freaky side to that.  What if I create this character and then end up actually meeting him . . . in person?  That has almost happened to me - not quite, but almost.  And what about those places you describe in fictional works?  Wouldn't it be really weird if you wrote about a place that was purely fictitious, and then in your travels you stumble upon it?  That did happen to me.

I started writing stories about contemporary cowboys over 30 years ago.  Most of those stories are found in a series called The Altos Cuentos Trail: The Adventures of Two Old Cowboys.  I've written about 15 novella length stories in that series, and eight of them can be found in The Altos Cuentos Trail, Volumes I and II - four stories in each book.  And I've published two other books that belong in that series.  I do that under the pen name Cletus Duhon, a voice I invented back in the early 1980s.  Here's where it gets strange.  I wrote my first Duhon story, and in doing so had to create a background for Cletus.  I gave him a history and then situated him in the hill country of Texas at a place I'd never seen before.  This was back before Google Earth or even much of an internet, so I did some reading, got out a map, and placed my character near Telegraph, Texas.  I gave him a buddy to share adventures with, created a small ranch (even went into detail about it), and wrote more adventures.

That was the early 80s, and I didn't get a first hand look at my fictitious setting until the year 2000, and that was when I moved to central Texas.  Since it's not far from where I live, I drove down to investigate Telegraph.  It's between Junction and Rocksprings.  My wife went along for the ride. The country along the South Llano River near Telegraph was almost exactly as I had described it.  I had even given directions to the ranch house where my characters lived, and just where I'd described where you turned off the main highway, there was indeed a county road.  I followed it, seeing more country like I'd described in the stories, and found another road, this one unpaved and apparently the entrance to a ranch.  "Well, aren't you going to go and see what's there?" My wife asked.  "No," I said.   "I don't want to know.  This is just too damn weird for me right now."

The towns of Rocksprings and Junction weren't even close to the way I had imagined them, but Telegraph, which is nothing more than an old store and post office, was right on.  How could I have seen that in my mind's eye?  I'm positive I'd never been there, but I had seen it.  Discovery is a strange thing sometimes, like when you stumble upon a place you've written about and find it to be nothing like your fictional account of it.  Doing that screws up mental images and makes it hard to write about the place again.  It's even worse than going back to a place you knew well from 40 years ago, and then you go back and can hardly recognize the place.  I've done that and don't like the feeling I get from it.

Anyway, finding the real place I'd written about messed me up for a while, and it actually scared me a little.  How did I know what it looked like?  That experience left me shaking my head and asking myself, "Where did that come from?"  But it also left me wondering where Cletus Duhon, always a character in the stories, came from.  I had an uncle by marriage who was a Cajun, and I loved him a lot and knew his family.  Being around a bunch of Cajuns can be a fun experience, and so maybe that's where he came from.  But I made a cowboy out of him, and then got him involved in a long time friendship with a Mexican/American (Tex-Mex) named Bubba Espinoza.  I don't know where he came from either. 

Back to Cletus and my partnership with him . . . and yeah, we are partners.  I like being Cletus, and not as an escape device.  I don't need that, don't even want to fool around with that because I'm too much of a reality junkie.  But you can get too involved with your pen name sometimes, especially if you really enjoy being that character for a while.  I wrote a book through Cletus called First Frosts of Fall, and it's my one and only real love story.  Cletus was married as a young man, it didn't work out, and he never married again.  And then in his sixties, he runs across a woman and falls in love with her.  It's a tough story in some ways, tender in others, and that's because it involves the death of the woman he's fallen for.  The story, in part, is about grief and how he dealt with it.  So, I wrote the book, and got depressed for a couple of weeks - not just a little depressed either.  I felt so damn bad for Cletus that it just shut me down for a while.  I didn't expect that, but I learned something, and I didn't have to ask where it came from.

Here's the long and short of it.  I might've made him up to pen stories, but I am Cletus Duhon.  We're one and the same with me being the real deal and him being part of my imagination. I've had a wonderful time hanging out with him because we've been on some great adventures together.  Sometimes I put him in a bind, but I'd never written anything that actually hurt him.  Losing the love of his life almost brought him down.  Ok, so it wasn't real, but think about it for a minute.  Real is what we think it is, and it's a temporary thing because time moves on.  A dream is real to us when we're having it, and so is a story that's just made up . . . when we're living it.  I lived the story with Cletus, and it hurt for a while, and then I came back to what's real.  And we all know where that comes from . . . right?

LET'S EXPORT SOME BS, YONTU?

Texas is known primarily for oil production, but it's too bad there's no market for bullshit.  Or, is there?  I'm not saying that Texas is just a bullshit state because it's way behind some other states I'm familiar with.  We're a long way behind California and maybe even states like New York, Florida, or even Mississippi.  This blog is about BS, for better or worse - meaning it's about the good uses of BS, and the bad uses.  First off, let's tear down the common belief that bullshit is nothing more than a lie.  If someone doesn't believe what you're saying, they'll say, "That's just bullshit!"  That means they're calling you a liar.  The truth about bullshit is that it's often the truth disguised as . . . well, as bullshit.

The truth is sometimes a hard sell, tough to get across in a way people can understand it.  In this sense, Obamacare needs some good old fashioned bullshit.  Most people don't like it because they don't understand it, but lots of laws are that way.  Politicians write laws, therefore the problem.  Lawmakers have a language of their own, and the average person struggles with that.  Apply some bullshit to it, and it can take on a language of its own.  That's a good fit because most Americans think Congress itself is bullshit - bogus, untrustworthy, devious, and even crooked.  They don't understand that politicians themselves don't actually produce laws in an inventive sense; they bend to the pressure of interest groups and occasionally to public opinion . . . and the easiest way to bend a politician is through offering them something.  Ever heard the old expression that money talks and bullshit walks?  That expression is misleading, which makes it bullshit.  Money talks in America, but if you offer it to someone packaged in a thick layer of bullshit, they're more likely to take it.  Bribes are illegal, but donations to elections campaigns aren't, and that's bullshit.

The goal of a good bullshitter is not to lie but rather to mislead, to confuse an issue, or to reflect attention away from something.  A Republican, for instance, when ask a sticky question about social security will talk instead about family values, God, crime in the streets, and the like.  He won't respond directly to the question most of the time, especially when he doesn't have an answer that will win votes.  Ask a liberal about military intervention, and they talk about humanitarianism, the value of peace around the world, that sort of thing . . . and then turn around and vote to send troops to Iraq,
or wherever.  That's bullshit.

I write about this topic fairly often because I'm a proficient bullshitter.  I'm a storyteller, a writer of fiction, and I often tell my stories in a way that makes them sound like just more good old fashioned Texas bullshit.  I even invented a particular voice for writing these stories, and people who read them say they like them.  They're common sense, down to earth, folksy stories, and since they're adventure stories that sometimes border on the fantastic, they're seen as bullshit.  That's fine with me because I like bullshit.  I don't intend to mislead anyone, and I don't want to detract from a specific point . . . but I sure don't mind when someone thinks I'm just pulling their leg.  Bullshit can be invaluable when it comes to humor.  My bullshit voice, by the way, is Cletus Duhon.  Look him up . . . if you want an adventure in bullshit.  He's in the export business.

THE MAN GOD FORGOT

Cletus Duhon Books

He's a cowboy, rancher, adventurer, and storyteller . . . and he's not real.  Oh, he's real in a literary sense because he's the cowboy voice of author Philip Martin Cawlfield.  And there's a story there, too.  Phil had gone on a brief vacation with his then girlfriend, an outing one Easter weekend, and ended up stopping off to visit with a friend in east Texas.  He met a few interesting people and came away with a story, or at least a story line.  Several months later he had written his first Duhon story, The Duck Ranch.  That was just the start of what has turned into a series of novella length stories that are showing up in The Altos Cuentos Trail: The Adventures of Two Old Cowboys.  The first two volumes of that series are out now in paperback, and more will follow.

But back to Cletus Duhon, the focus of this blog.  Although he's just a pen name, Cletus has taken on an identification that makes him more than just part of the stories he writes.  Phil created him as a voice for his cowboy stories, but he has used him extensively as a blogger.  Perhaps that's what did it (give him a personification), but he's now got a history.  I've Googled him several times and find that he's even got a criminal record, or at least you can conduct an internet search for one.  He's got an address, phone number, and even a ranch (that doesn't exist either).  So the question is this:  In this digital age can you create a big as life character like that?  Apparently you can.

I remember reading once about a group of students at a university who created a student.  They got him registered and enrolled in classes.  It took a team of students to work this ruse, but the got him up to being a junior before getting caught.  They'd enroll him in a course, let's say English 101, then have one of the team members attend class and take tests for him.  And they'd pick a team member who was good at that particular subject, and that's how they got caught.  It seems this imaginary student ended up winning an award because his grades were high, and somebody had to show up to receive it.  Professors started talking then, comparisons were made, and the jig was up at that point.  I don't know exactly what point this team of students was trying to make, but they made at least one point.  If you're clever enough, you can make the unreal appear to be real.  And if you can do that, what's real turns out to be what people think it is.

Cletus Duhon seems real to readers because his name is on the books they read, and he's a character in the book.  His narratives are always about what he's involved in, meaning first person or up close and personal . . .and that makes him more personal, more familiar, and more real.  When it gets right down to it, I'm not real either, at least by name.  D. Paz Dalton is also a pen name, with the man behind the pen being the same author who created Cletus - Philip Martin Cawlfield.  I sometimes wonder if this is wise.  Perhaps it would've been better to keep that secret, to just allow people to think we actually exist.  But sooner or later someone would recognize how much alike we all look, that we have the same address and all that.  And as writers, there are differences between us - different voice, different style, and different stories to tell.  And it's fun.  Today I'm D. Paz Dalton, writing about Cletus Duhon.  I'm OK with that, and I'm not crazy . . . yet.