“James, I like your fiction and Harm City, and they seem to be related. God help me, I even like Poet, and he’d hate me, because I’m white. I am a writer and understand that you are doomed to fringe status writing black Characters. Whites will tend to lack interest and blacks will tend to take offense. What Gives?”

-Ed

I’m glad you like Poet—that makes four readers now! Thank you for the compliments. I have always wanted to be a writer since I was in Special Ed class in third grade and got to read these neato Sea Hunt adventure books for boys. I learned enough to know that every plot possibility had already been done, and well. I decided as a teen that I wanted to write realistic fiction. I did not have the skills or talent. I decided on living as interesting a life as I could manage and listening to the world as I went, in the mean time reading everything I could get my hands on.

I began writing the Harm City stuff as practice: replicating real dialogue, learning how impulsive people lived and acted, studying the working class—the people that only Dickens really wrote about. I noticed that in fiction and nonfiction there were no realistic depictions of blacks other than in the HBO miniseries The Wire. To me a person is a person. About a third of my real life friends have been black, and my cast in the Sunset Saga pretty much falls in line with that.

Black authors particularly misrepresent blacks as lifestyle or martyr archetypes. I understand they are under much social pressure in this direction. Likewise, whites have little understanding of the private life of black folks in America. I thought that the least I could do was pay back some of my black coworkers, fellow fighters, and good Samaritans who have helped me along, by representing black people in fiction as a realistically nuanced people not some fantasy flight or guilt vector.