Dark Days Book

PROCESS. PRODUCTION. PUBLICATION. This is the official blog for D. Randall Blythe's forthcoming book, Dark Days, a memoir to be published 2015 by Perseus/DaCapo Books in North America, and Random House in the United Kingdom and associated territories.

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This is the final version of the cover of my first book, Dark Days, designed by P. R. Brown of Bau-Da Design Lab, and I am pretty pleased with it. There are several differences between the final version and the working cover that was (and as of this writing still is) up on amazon.com. The working cover was designed by my publishing company’s art department so that there could be a place holder for preorders of the book- as we live in an increasingly visual culture, apparently people need something to look at when they are considering preordering something, even an unfinished book. And the book selling business seems to have gone the way of the record business: preorders are of prime importance in determining how much coverage (and thus placement in retail outlets, leading to increased total sales) the book gets. The working cover was fine as a place holder, but I am pleased my management suggested P.R. Brown as a designer for my final cover; he’s done book covers for Motley Crüe, Marilyn Manson, Nikki Sixx, and my buddy Corey Taylor of Slipknot fame. I dig his aesthetic, and I think he did a good job.

Soon after I had signed a contract with my U.S. publisher, DaCapo books, we began kicking around concepts for cover designs- in the end, I had to bend a bit on a few things, but the people at DaCapo were cool enough to bend on a few things as well. This is how a good relationship works in any sort of creative endeavor where two or more parties are involved in releasing an artistic product; a bit of give and take so that the folks on the business side of things feel comfortable that there will be a return on their investment, and the artist feels that his or her vision isn’t compromised or tarnished. I honestly feel pretty good about the middle ground Da Capo and I have managed to reach; in fact I really feel pretty darn lucky, as I have learned during this process that a lot of writers, including many, many multi-million copy best selling authors, have absolutely zero control of what the cover of their books look like (Anne Rice being just one example). That seems completely insane to me- you spend years of your life working on a book, turn it in to a publisher, then they arbitrarily pick someone who has no emotional attachment to the work at all to sum it up visually. My bandmates and I would never ever ever in a million bazillion years allow that to happen with the album cover of a record we turned into our label, so why would I do that with my book? Well, because (as I found out after doing some research) apparently that’s just the way the cookie crumbles in the book publishing world. The old saying “You can’t judge a book by its cover” makes even more sense to me now, and in a completely literal context. J.D. Salinger himself, one of America’s most revered writers, absolutely loathed the cover of the first paperback edition of his most beloved book, The Catcher in the Rye, and it wasn’t until he switched publishers from New American Library to Bantam Press (seven long Salinger-irritating years after the book was first published), that the iconic plain yellow lettering on a red background that we are all so familiar with came into being.

DaCapo worked with me and what I wanted for my book cover, so overall, I really do feel pretty lucky. But I did bend on some things, and so did DaCapo. What were those things? For this week’s blogpost, we’ll start at the beginning:

#1. My photograph being on the cover of the book. I absolutely did not want the design of my book cover to include a photograph of myself. I’m not the ugliest dude in the world, but I’m certainly not the prettiest, so my good looks alone aren’t going to put Dark Days on the NY Times best seller list. It’s not like any members of the lonely-housewife-romance-novel-reading-demographic would suddenly get heart palpitations and then plunk down their cash after seeing my mug staring up at them from the Barnes and Noble bookshelf. But looks really had nothing to do with it- I could look like Brad Pitt, and I still wouldn’t want my photo on the cover. (Brad Pitt, by the way, is who I always used to say I would want to play me in the movie they are undoubtably going to make about my life one day. Now I want Morgan Freeman, because he’s got the best voice in the world. I realize the whole race and age thing might be slightly problematic for some viewers, but Hollywood is a magical place, and we live in fairly liberal times; so DreamWorks… make it happen!) No, I didn’t want my photo on the cover of the book because I think it will date the book. I tend to think about good book covers the way I think about album covers- they should be timeless.

For example, in twenty years, no one will care about lamb of god, especially not me. Okay, that’s not true- I think a few people will still be listening to lamb of god’s music in twenty years (after all, we have been around twenty-one years already and folks still listen to the old stuff), but I sure as hell won’t be on tour or making new LOG records. I’d rather chew glass than still be doing that band in twenty years. No one wants to see a sixty-four year old Randy creaking and croaking around the stage, but I’m sure some people will still give our old records a spin every now and then. And when they pull that record out, what will they not see on any of our album covers?

A photo of the band.

Band photos used as an album cover immediately date the crap out of that album; just think about how utterly ridiculous some 1980’s hair metal band album covers look. Completely stuck forever in that unfortunate, unfortunate era, never to escape. Frozen androgynously in time by a heavy mist of hairspray and way-too-tight sexually ambiguous clothing. I don’t want my band’s record covers to not hold up twenty years from now. And twenty years from now, just like with my band’s records, I hope that someone will pick up my book at a garage sale or whatever and read that thing. The story will absolutely still hold up twenty years from now, but very few people will remember what I look like. Far in the future, some young turk will look at the cover, see my face, and go “Ewwww… man, they sure did make ‘em ugly back then!” This is also why Dark Days contains virtually no references to any current cultural icons (unless necessary to drive the story, and then I very briefly explain who they are), or mentions of specific current internet technology (like social media site names). In fact, in twenty years, everything that is now popular or even cutting edge will be considered completely archaic, and kids won’t even know what Facebook or twitter or an iPad or any of that stuff is. But prisons will exist, you can bet your sweet ass on that, which is why I wanted the cover simply to be a black and white photograph I took of the prison I was in. The viability of that image will still hold strong in twenty years- hell, the prison itself had lasted 123 years by the time I got locked up.

However, a book publishing company’s marketing department is not concerned with what is going to be happening with a book in twenty years. They are concerned with what is going to be happening with a book when it comes out, and in the case of my book, that’s pretty damn soon- July 14, 2015. Publishing houses are not art charities- they want people to buy their books, not admire the timelessness of their covers. And I am currently best known for being the singer of a fairly high profile metal band, not as an author (yet), so it makes sense to me that some metalhead might look at the cover of my book while they are cruising the bookstore or poking around Amazon.com and go “Oooooh… that’s that crazy drunk dude I saw at Ozzfest ‘04! Damn, I didn’t know he could read and write!”, then decide on a whim to pick up my book. So I caved pretty quickly on that issue- I don’t like having my photo on the cover of Dark Days, but thems the breaks, kids. At least I retained enough artistic control to take the photo myself.

I despise “selfies”. In fact, these days when fans ask me “Can we take a selfie?” I reply “No. No, we cannot take a 'selfie’. We can certainly take a photo though, so hand the phone to your girlfriend and get her to take the picture.” Fuck “selfies”, and fuck the fact that “selfie” was named the Oxford Dictionary International Word of the Year for 2013. It’s an utter embarrassment to literate people everywhere that the most revered repository of our holy English language would stoop to include the word, period; and it says something horrific about the era we live in- vain and self-centered to the extreme. Go fuck yourselfie, how about that? However, there is a world of difference between a decent self-portrait and a….grrrrrrr…..“selfie”.

In order to take the self-portrait you see on the cover of my book, I put my Fujifilm X-E2 on a tripod. I attached a shutter button remote to the camera. I sat down in my office in front of the camera. Then I turned on some far-right wing talk radio and started hitting the button every few seconds.

“Well, Fred, did you know that a few years ago President Barrack Obama took the time to sign into law a bill called the Shark Conservation Act? Apparently the Chinese like to make a soup out of the shark fins. Good 'ol Barrack, instead of being worried about lowering our taxes, fixing up our economy, and making sure we have a strong military, wants to deprive some Chinaman of his favorite dinner? 'Muricah is falling to pieces and he’s gonna waste time on a crusade to save the sharks! Well, pardon me if I don’t feel sorry for a gigantic man-eating cold blooded killer of the seas! Ain’t Barrack ever seen JAWS? Haw haw haw…”

That was, I shit you not, what was playing on the radio as I took about three hundred pictures. Looking at the pictures on my computer, at first the photos are really self-conscious looking, but as I got madder and madder at the baboons on the radio, you can see my face relaxing into a (regrettably) fairly normal state of being: one of complete disgust and disbelief at the idiocy of some people. These bozos may have made me mad (in all fairness, they sounded too stupid to realize that once the top predators of the sea are all gone, then the entire ecosystem of the ocean will be basically destroyed. Once the ocean dies, we die), but at least they helped me get an honestly disturbed look on my face- I was mashing that camera remote button so hard by the end that I’m surprised I didn’t break it. I wanted an unselfconscious photo, and I got one. Then I went surfing to calm down, and I wasn’t worried about sharks either.

The photo of the prison P.R. Brown superimposed my face on was taken by me when I went back there one day during my trial. Maybe one day, if the book stays in print long enough, my face will be removed from the cover and it will be just the prison, the way I originally wanted it to be. But until then, I’m happy enough with the cover as is. I’m a reasonable man (sometimes), and I know that if you give a little, you get a little.

At least I didn’t get the Salinger treatment.

Next post: #2- The Dreaded Papyrus Font

Dark Days will be released July 14, 2015 by Perseus/DaCapo Books in North America, and Random House Books in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. You can preorder it here: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Days-My-Tribulations-Trials/dp/0306823144/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428981491&sr=8-1&keywords=Randy+Blythe

If you want to see the photo of Pankrác Prison without my face on it, stop by my first photography gallery showing, May 2, 2015, in Soho, NYC. Go to www.sacredgallerynyc.com for details.

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Better is better.

Originally I had planned to update this blog on a weekly basis during the writing of my book, Dark Days. My intent had been to provide a glimpse into the mind of a first-time author as he struggled his way through writing a first draft; grinding through the doubt, fear, and just plain old resistance to sitting down and facing the empty page day after day. From reading any of the numerous biographies of authors I have managed to compulsively accumulate over the years (because it’s much easier to read about writers than, you know, actually become one), I knew these difficulties were common place amongst those who write books. Over and over I read that all real writers faced them, and that they could become all-consuming, even crippling. But I am haughty, arrogant, and supremely self-assured much of the time, and I wasn’t worried in the slightest about all that “writerly” stuff. That kind of tortured artist crap was for introverted and socially awkward men and women in black turtle necks who sat around sipping lattes while reading obscure literary journals, not burly-tattooed-no-shit-taking-skateboard-riding-old-school-punk-rock-listening-hundred-thousand-person-festival-crowd-rocking-round-the-world-touring-ultra-gnar dudes such as myself. I was ready for any of the whiney bs I knew I might throw at myself in order to distract me from the job at hand: writing the damn book. And not only would I pop the top on a tall boy can of whoop-ass right in the grill of any and all self-imposed hurdles to completing the book, I would simultaneously blog about how I effortlessly crushed these puny obstacles beneath my size 11 Vans as I stomped my way into literary history.

“Ah, yes- surely these things will come,” I thought, “but I will USE them. I will be the exception to the rule. I already KNOW about the creative process from being in a successful band, I already KNOW about pushing through the uninspired slumps and just making it happen, I already KNOW about the staring down the blank page. Hell, I’ve been busting my ass for twenty years with lamb of god, I’ve been to prison in a foreign country, I even quit drinking cold turkey after a twenty-two year bender- I wrote during all of that, now I’m in a good place with some time to myself, and this book writing thing is gonna be a breeze in comparison. I’ll write this thing and blog about how it’s really no big deal at the same time- I’m gonna show these motherfuckers how it’s done. It’s clobberin’ time.”

Then I sat back, a smug smile plastered across my face, and started day dreaming about the second book deal I would get from this blog. Surely someone (my agent, or maybe even my editor) would read all my no-nonsense, beautifully crafted, astonishingly insightful posts detailing how I smashed the crap out of the stuff that brings most bitch-ass writers to a grinding, weeping, self-loathing halt. They would behold my stentorian yet graceful electronic proclamations with wondrous eyes, thinking “Jesus, why aren’t all the writers I deal with like this dude? All they ever do is complain about how hard it is to write a lousy book. I mean c’mon- how difficult can it be to type a bunch of crap? This guy is practically writing two books at once! We really need to put all these posts together and publish them. Mental note: talk to the boss about getting Blythe a huge advance, like yesterday, before someone else shoves a contract in his hands.” Yes, after I had simultaneously written my book and laid out my writing process on the interwebs during the three or four months it would take me to bang out my first draft, it would only be a matter of time before the offers for speaking engagements at Columbia, Oxford, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop would start pouring in. One or two measly blog posts a week written during downtime from the book would be a piece of cake.

I must have been out of my fucking mind.

As I sat down each day to work on Dark Days, I very swiftly realized that there was no way in hell I was going to be able to do much of anything at all except write my book while I was writing my book. Writing a book is not easy. Not at all. And despite the fact that I am, indeed, intimately familiar with one variety of the creative process after making several records with my band, the process of writing a book is vastly different from getting together with four other dudes to write and record an album. In my experience, writing a book makes writing a record look like a joke in comparison. And if you do it like I did it, with no cowriter or ghostwriter or underwriter or whatever they are called these days, then you do it 100% alone. That means when something sucks, it’s 100% your fault. There’s no chance of pawning off even one shitty sentence in your book on someone else. Unlike an album, where listeners sometimes exercise a great amount of leniency and tolerance for aspects of the music they don’t care for because of the things they do enjoy about the band (ie., “I don’t really care for the singer, but the drummer/guitarist/accordionist/kazooist/whateverist is amazing”), an author has nothing to offer to the audience but his own contribution to the book. A reader isn’t going to recommend your book to anyone else just because it has a few good paragraphs in the first chapter, or they really liked the epilogue. And unlike the collaborative effort that occurs in a band, you as the author can’t blame that particularly sucky self-indulgent part of your book on anyone but yourself. In a band, if a song just sucks (even if it’s your fault), you can always pass the buck and blame someone else: “This would have worked if it wasn’t for that stupid wanking guitar solo at the end,” or “If the drummer would have just played a straight beat like we wanted him to, the middle of this tune wouldn’t sound like he had epileptic fit in the studio,” or “This thing was a ripping jam until that douchebag singer came in and ruined it with his pretentious lyrics and awful screeching.” Then, when the album drops and people hate it, you can just sit back and take a long relaxing soak in a glorious hot tub of self-righteousness: “I tried to tell them, but those boneheads wouldn’t listen. Now look at ‘em.”

When your book drops, and people say it’s the worst thing to happen to the written word since the invention of the letter bomb, then that’s on you, Jack. Suck it up.

As a life-long fan of well-written books, I wanted very badly to produce one of my own. I didn’t want the ecowarriors fire bombing my house because a small forest had been sacrificed on the pulp mill altar to provide paper for my offensively bad memoir. I didn’t want to hold that first galley copy in my hand, thumb through it, and then start looking around for a suitable length of rope to hang myself with after realizing I had produced the written equivalent of the Yugo. I didn’t want to read reviews of my book that said “Like so many before him, D. Randall Blythe has fallen victim to the awful delusion so common amongst musicians these days: that he has something worth saying that can’t fit into a song. He should stick to his rather dubious and obviously singular talent- screaming like a mountain gorilla being castrated.” In short, I didn’t want my book to suck. So I worked very, very hard to make sure it didn’t suck. When I was writing, it felt like was I locked in deadly combat with myself. Nothing could go wrong, and every single word had to count. One little screw up, and my ass was grass. This took up a lot of time; in fact, it took up all of my time. If I wasn’t writing the book (which I did for hours and hours most days), I was thinking about writing the book. Every single morning when I woke up, the anxiety would immediately set in as soon as I realized I hadn’t finished the damn thing yet. The only time I wasn’t writing the book or thinking about writing the book was when I was asleep or surfing (surfing is an amazing way to clear the mind, and as I wrote my book one block from the ocean, I took full advantage of the days when there was decent swell in the Atlantic). Writing the book ate eight months of my life like a slice of pizza. Chomp, chomp- Oh fuck, it’s almost next year already. What just happened?

Contrary to my ridiculously self-assured assumptions, I did not write the book with the greatest of ease. I did not breeze through it with style and grace. I did not just sit down, start typing, and watch the words appear before me like magic. I struggled hard with it, every single step of the way. And not only did I fail abysmally to give the book writing process a Bruce Lee-like Fingers of Fury typing beat down, in very short order I began to manifest every clichéd writerly behavior I had ever read about. Wild mood swings. Long periods of depression. Inexplicable and overwhelming urges to get up from my desk and do housework. A bad case of Ye Olde Imposter Syndrome. Multiple trips to the grocery store in one day for entirely unnecessary single items, things like hot sauce and hummingbird feeder nectar. Lengthy journeys down the cyber-rabbit hole after I stopped writing to look up some historical tidbit pertinent to my book, only to wind up an hour or two later on some ridiculous website dedicated to some grotesque “fitness model” internet celebrity I had never heard of. The only two things I didn’t do that a lot of writers seemed compelled to do were: #1- drink way too much (I mastered that skill a long time ago) and, #2- become “blocked” (actually, I did have a two week period when I couldn’t bring myself to write a single sentence, but a friend very dear to my heart had just died, so I cut myself some slack there).

All that other neurotic “writer” crap took root in my life like crabgrass, though. Yes, I was one of them now. How ridiculous.

So while I did become a real writer (because there is a huge difference between real writers and those who dick around with words sometimes, as I had done before- more on that in a different post), I didn’t write about writing as I had planned. I just worked on my book, surfed when I couldn’t take looking at the screen anymore, and slept about six hours a night. And eventually I got the thing done. To be precise, I typed the last period at exactly 2:09 pm on October 1, 2014. Then I drove to one of the best seafood shacks on the East Coast and treated myself to a well-deserved dinner of locally caught wild shrimp and crispy crab cakes. I sat there by myself, eating steamed shrimp and drinking pink lemonade while Queen’s “We Are the Champions” played over the restaurant’s stereo, and I must admit- I felt pretty damn majestic. Over the next four days I tightened up the last three chapters of my book and the epilogue, and emailed them to my editor one by one as I finished them. After the last of it had been sent off, I printed out the final pages of the book and added them to the thick manuscript I kept in a plain black binder. I picked up my book, straightened all the pages by banging them on the kitchen counter, and just held it for moment. Damn- the thing was heavy. My contract required me to turn in a manuscript of 80,000 to 100,000 words in length; I was pretty sure I had blown past that long before the book was finished, but I decided to do a quick word count just to make sure I was in the clear.

I had written 234,022 words. Holy crap. I called my editor Ben, told him how long the book was, and asked him what happened next.

“Congratulations, man- well done. Now it’s time for some surgery. Amputation, really” he said.

Faulkner is often famously (and erroneously) attributed with saying “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” This means that the writer must remain objective enough to realize that while he may be really, really enamored with the scene he slaved for weeks over in which the large breasted female pirate captain has a huge blow-out with her rough and rugged co-captain pirate boyfriend while on the way to the final battle of the book with Lord Admiral McSnootypants, then impulsively commandeers the dingy and jumps ship with the geeky galley cook and settles down for a weekend of hot pirate mama hanky-panky on a nearby deserted island, that scene just doesn’t work in the book. The writer has to let go of these things while he writes the book, or at least be willing later to let a judicious editor bust out the red pen and start slashing and hacking away at all the long-winded unnecessary stuff; stuff like the awful and awkward run-on sentence preceding this one. But this is just a blog, there is no editor here, and frankly I don’t give a shit whether or not the audience likes that sentence. I had fun writing it— when I’m writing a blog post that I’m going to throw out for free amongst the bazillions and bazillions of other blog posts that are all screeching for attention in amateur world, if I’m not having any fun, then it’s not worth my time.

My book? That’s a whole other ball of earwax. That’s some pro shit, some career shit, some better-do-it-right-because-it-counts shit. I am a pro, and I play by pro rules when the game is for real. So I’m going to let my editor kill a lot of my darlings, because I’m obviously too close to the work to see what is and isn’t working all the time. I’m not looking forward to it, but I’m already used to it from working with producers when I make a record. In lamb of god, we have a saying: “Better is better.” Sometimes it takes a producer to step in and say “Nah, that riff is kinda stale” or “Man, that lyric certainly isn’t the best one you’ve ever come up with.” Sometimes this results in screaming matches, and sometimes the band wins and keeps the part they want. Sometimes, the band even makes a better decision than the producer, who is burnt out and has lost perspective after listening to the same fourteen songs for three months straight. But for the most part, a smart band will let a producer do the job they hired him to do: get the best record possible out of them. Get a different set of ears on those tunes, put the ego aside, and listen to some suggestions.

I’m going to let my editor “produce” this damn monster of a book I’ve written, because better is better.

I am very excited about one aspect of the editing process— the way we are going to do it.

“So, dude— how is this going to go down?” I asked. “I’m guessing you are going to look at the manuscript as a Microsoft Word document, make those redline correction thingies, then email it back to me?”

“Yeah, that’s the way it’s done these days,” he said.

“Well, crap. I guess I gotta buy Microsoft Word then,” I sighed. I wrote my book on an iPad, using Pages, a very simple word processing application. I hate Microsoft Word documents, with their redline corrections to track changes. It’s the standard way things are done in the publishing world now, but it’s complex. And by complex, I mean it might require me to do anything other than just type. I am a computer simpleton. I have zero patience with modern technology, and anytime anything goes wrong with my computer it creates the same rage in me that driving does in others. I just want to smash the thing into a million pieces— this is one reason I am glad I have my wife, who is much smarter than me, isn’t overly frustrated by computers, and has the patience to figure out these sort of things. She understands how to make the infernal machines work.

I understand how to make simpler things work. Things like skateboards. Zippo lighters. Knives. Rocks. These are tools I can use with an acceptable level of competence. A computer program too complex for a three year old to learn in five minutes? I am doomed. I was already getting angry thinking about trying to simply install Word on my computer when Ben said the magic words.

“Oooooor, I could just print the thing out and mail it to you with my handwritten corrections,” he said.

If he had been in front of me, I would have kissed him.

“YES! YES! Pleasepleaseplease can we do it that way?” I begged.

“Sure. Why not? We’ll do it old school, like I did back in the wild 90’s. No problem,” he said.

Soon I will be receiving the first 150 pages of my manuscript in the mail, the real mail, from Ben. The manuscript will be all marked up, by hand, and I will get to keep it for my archives, the old school way. I’m stoked on that, even though it’s time to kill all my darlings. I’m prepared.

Well, maybe not all my darlings. I might have to let a few live.

Or maybe not.

After all, better is better.

PS- more soon about my writing process. (I promise)

[darkdaysbook]

HOW TO GET YOUR FIRST BOOK DEAL (the very hard way)

  As I wrote in my first post, I’m going to explain how I managed to conceptualize and finally sell to a publisher the idea for Dark Days. Today I’ll take you step by step with me on the road to glory, and show you how I finally sealed the deal by methodically employing a brilliant strategy; one I have been developing, refining, and tactically executing bit by bit for the last twenty years. I'm excited to see the culmination of this fool-proof plan: millions of copies sold of my universally acclaimed first book, undoubtably sending me skyrocketing straight upwards in a blazing trajectory terminating in the hallowed halls of the literary elite. Shakespeare. Tolstoy. Hemingway. Woolf. Iceberg Slim. D. Randall Blythe. It’s been hard work, but completely worth it. And now, for the first time ever, you can apply this this strategy to any of your creative endeavors, and I guarantee you’ll succeed or you’ll get your money back! For the full plan, just call the toll-free number at the bottom of this post, and for a measly 100 bucks you’ll get the complete four volume set of Randy’s Rapid Writing Rewards (tm) System! As a free bonus, if you call now, I’ll send you my latest e-manifesto, “How To Get Nominated For Four Grammys By Screaming Like A Giant Four Year Old, Lose Them All, But Still Make Some Pretty Good Scratch”. That’s more than double your money’s worth FOR FREE!

  Actually, that’s not how I got my book deal at all. And by the way, anyone who guarantees you artistic “success” in any discipline if you will just buy the “method” they are selling should be bitch-slapped with a Webster’s Unabridged. It just doesn’t work that way- these people are shysters. Stay away from them. They are generally failed writers/artists who couldn’t get their own stuff published/in galleries, so they whip up a batch of artistic snake oil to sell you. If they are good enough salespeople, if they can distract you with enough bullshit promises and fast-talk (like redundancies similar to “free bonus”, but cloaked in twenty-five cent words that are not so made-for-tv sounding) to cover up what we all already know (which, of course, is that success in any field takes hard work), they will indeed be fiscally successful. You could look at what they’ve done, take a few notes, apply the same methods to your own shady grind, and make your own dirty money. But that’s just the art of hustling, not art. You can learn how to hustle on the street corner for free, if you’ve got the cojones.

  The way I got my first book deal was a whole lot faster than following some twenty year plan I had cooked up; but much, much harder than that, and a great more painful. I can only wish that my first published book was going to be about something else, because although I’m glad my book will come out, and I hope it does well, I’m not at all happy to be writing about what I am. In fact, this book wasn’t even my idea- I had to be convinced to write it.

  Before June 27, 2012, I sure as hell never kicked back and thought “Maybe one day I’ll write a true story about how screwed up and terrifying my life might get if I ever wind up going to prison in a foreign country after being charged with killing a fan of my band”. When the shit hit the fan and I found out a person was dead, I went through a very sad and very scary year. I was arrested, imprisoned, released, stood trial, and was exonerated. After it was all over, I wanted to do just about anything but talk to strangers about the whole ordeal. I refused to do any press (and I still won't do much) because all anyone would want to talk about was prison and the trial, and I had already been through that. I knew that one day I would write the story, in fact I knew that from the second they cuffed me at the airport in Prague. But I sure as hell didn't feel like writing about it anytime soon- maybe in a few years, after I had grown a few more gray hairs and looked a little more author-ish.

  Just thinking about writing it made me uneasy, because I knew how painful it would be for me to dredge it all up again and tell this story, the whole story, for the first time- to sit with it daily and live in it again, filling the blank pages with some of the worst days of my life for hours at a time. To put it mildly, it’s not exactly the most pleasant topic for me to reminisce about. But I’ve come to realize during this process that that’s one of the biggest reasons I need to write it: it’s uncomfortable for me. Even if something goes haywire, I lose my deal, and the book never gets published- I am facing things that scare me yet again, staring down the enemy within that doesn’t want to really look deeply at painful situations, examining what I did right and what I did wrong, and how these things have have affected me in order to figure out how to honestly make the best of a really bad scene. I used to just get drunk if I got uncomfortable with life- I can't do that anymore (not if I want to live), so I have to accept the totality of all the circumstances in my life and try to improve the aspects of it that can. 

  More and more, I’m seeing that writing all this painful stuff down is actually good for me. I hate to use this phrase, because it’s even more trite than some of my more unimaginative lyrics, but getting all this stuff down on paper is, well, cathartic. I need to process some stuff, to engage in some heavy-duty self-examination, and order my thoughts. I need to be still for a moment, catch my breath, and ask myself: “What you’ve just been through- what does it mean in the overall context of your life? What have you learned? What lessons can you take away from this awful tragedy?” Because if I don’t learn anything from this ordeal, I’ve failed myself, and further more, I’ve failed as a human being. Writing is slowly helping me to learn how to think correctly about what I went through, because what happened isn't like a movie, where there are characters introduced, then conflict, we move on to the climax, and finally the resolution. This isn't some episode of Law & Order, this is my goddamned life, and everyday I think about what I went through, and I think about people I met in prison in the Czech Republic, and I think about a dead fan of my band, and it rips me apart. How could it not? I hadn't even finished trial yet at this time last year. Unless I hide completely from society, even if I do manage to not think about the whole deal for a few hours, someone always brings it up. Total strangers will come up to me in the grocery store and tell me they are glad I am free. I am grateful for this, I truly am, but honestly it's like I just got out of prison every single day a lot of the times. My head is a mess- I did the right thing, but now I have to figure out what's the next correct action for me to take in order to grow as a person.

  For me, being on tour is no place for such deep introspection. My head is busy maintaining the brutally myopic state of mind it takes for me to get up there and entertain people by going nuts night after night. Especially after this last year, on tour I had to stay focused on the job at hand, or I would fall apart at the seams on stage. On tour, I don’t have time for “feelings”. Lamb of god fans don’t care about “feelings” after they’ve paid good money to see us do our thing. They expect us to get up there and kick ass, and rightfully so. They dropped cash to see a metal show, not a bunch of grumpy bearded middle aged men who look like they don’t care about what they are doing and would rather be somewhere else. Everyone in every band has a bad gig from time to time (it’s unavoidable- we are only human), but if you call yourself a true professional (and you better believe I do), 99.99999% of the time you better just rub some dirt on it and do work, son. I have no patience for cry babies on tour. Go hard, or home.

After I was acquitted in March of last year, the very last thing I wanted to do was go back out on the road with lamb of god. There was still a forthcoming appeal hearing for the verdict of my case, requested by a very unhappy prosecuting attorney. I still wasn’t quite out of the woods, but the whole trial had been very costly, and the bills were continuing to pile up. My band needed to refill our coffers if we were going to remain fiscally solvent as a business entity, so we went back to work. This was good for me not only financially, but I believe it was beneficial (to a degree) for my psyche. I needed to work to keep the appeal out of my mind as much as possible (since I could do nothing to prepare for it- this was strictly a lawyer’s game). I had to get back on the horse sooner or later, and my band needed to finish the tour cycle we had begun so long ago. So we went back to work, and finished what we started, like real professionals do.

  But towards the end, my deepest desire was to leave lamb of god behind for a bit, to not be the heavy metal singer dude 24/7. Because on tour, that’s the mold you are crammed into, no matter how hard you try to maintain a bit of personal space and identity outside of the band. Unless you are Prince or Led Zepplin or someone like that who can afford to live in their own little bubble of weirdness, there are just too many people around you at all times who will not let you exist as anything other than a band guy. On the road, no matter how may times you say "I'm just a regular dude", you are not treated like one. To expect otherwise is foolish- you're on tour for fuck's sake, not at a spa. But after three years of writing, recording, and touring on the Resolution album (not to mention my legal troubles), it was high time to forget about “us” for a bit and think about “me”. Because “me” needs a little attention from me right now if there is going to continue to be an “us”.

 The last two or so years of my life I have felt a lot like this picture I took the other day at sunset:

Sea foam. Blown through life by the seemingly random winds of chance, born atop violent waves of events terrifying in their nature and possible consequence. I was really scared, and I had no real control over the direction I was heading. I suppose some would say that is nonsense, that I could have refused to return to Prague. I wouldn’t have been extradited, of that I’m certain. I could have made the choice to stay in America, and tried to forget about what I had left behind in Europe like an illegitimate child I had just discovered but still irresponsibly chose to abandon. But just as the sea foam sits momentarily apart from the ocean on the beach, only to be eventually reclaimed by the roaring tide that birthed it, such would have been my fate had I run from this unfortunate situation- this unattended aspect of my life would have come back for me in one way or the other, and I would have been born out to that dark sea of of my lesser self, to drown in fear and shame. It would have been the death of me.

  There is a law of cause and effect in this universe. If you do not do the right thing, it will always, always, always eventually catch up to you. My experience has shown me that this is an infallible truth. Whether or not you see it in effect or believe in it makes no difference. This immutable law of cause and effect is absolute; and while you can run for bit, you can never hide. In plain ol’ English, what comes around, goes around. Or more appropriately: you get what you give. Remember that.

  Although I had done my best to do the right thing, and my course of action had worked out for me for the moment, I didn’t feel much inner peace as we hit the road to finish up our tour cycle. I just wanted to hurry up and get off the road and away from the job I live (because if you’re the real deal, it’s not something you do, it’s something you live), a job that daily reminded me of the last two years. I just wanted to not deal with this thing that hurt so badly inside just for a little bit, to hide away in distraction, family, and friends. I needed a vacation from my life. This is, of course, impossible, but I was ready to give it a try.

  A month or so after my exoneration, but still before the appeals trial, lamb of god’s booking agent, Tim Borror, started hitting me up via email and a voice message or two, telling me he knew a literary agent who wanted to talk to me. I had already had a few initial talks with a wonderful and not-to-small independent press about a concept for a photo essay book I had in mind (and still plan on doing, with the same press if possible), and Tim’s messages could only mean something I wasn't thrilled at all about: any literary agent wanting to talk to me right then would want me to write one thing and one thing only: the story of what happened in Prague. This actually started to make me feel panicky (which is something I almost never feel- I’m not a panicky kind of dude. Panicking gets you dead); the thought of going back through all this stuff, reliving and even recreating the whole experience literally made my heart beat faster. I blew Tim off, and didn’t return his calls. After a while of getting no answer from me, lamb of god’s manager, Larry Mazer, started emailing me “Hey, Randy, Tim is trying to get ahold of you about a literary agent”. Christ. I was getting it from two guys I work with now; two guys I like personally and consider friends. But writing a book about going to prison was the last thing I wanted to do, so (not without a good amount of guilt) I blew Larry off too, until he pulled a classic manager move and actually got me on the phone about something else, then said

  "So are you gonna call Tim Borror back or what? He's been trying to get a hold of you for a while now".

  Crap! Trapped. Managers of rock bands are devious creatures who will trick you into do all sorts of things you have no desire to do if you don't watch them like a hawk.

  "Fine. I'll call him back. But I don't want to write a book about Prague. Fuck that. I need to forget about that stuff for a while." I sighed, then rang Tim up.

  Tim confirmed what I already knew: this agent wanted to talk to me about writing a book about Prague. Tim vouched for him, saying he was the real deal and one of the smartest guys he knew. He seemed to think the agent, Marc Gerald, and I would get along just fine and asked me to just give him a call. Fine, I thought, I'll call this motherfucker, but he's going to be wasting his time. I'm not writing a book about Prague, no way, no how. That day, March 25, 2013, Tim wrote an email introducing Marc and I, and Marc replied almost immediately, saying how he would like to talk to me. Then I blew Marc off for three days, until finally the guilt got to me (I had agreed to talk to him, after all), and we set up a call for the next day.

  To those of you who don't know how the book world runs, an agent, a real, reputable, literary agent, is pretty much a necessity. Yes, you can self-publish on a vanity press; and every year a few of these books eventually get picked up by outside publishers if they are good enough and the author hustles enough to build up a strong grass roots following. But if you want someone to hit the trenches running with your proposal or manuscript, find you a suitable publisher, secure you a half-decent advance, and help you navigate the murky waters of the publishing biz as you attempt to build a sustainable career as an author, you want a literary agent. A real agent with connections in the business- not some bozo you pay a fee to before you see a publishing contract and who works out of their basement when they aren't flipping burgers. You want an agent that the overloaded editors at publishing houses trust enough to at least glance at the submissions they throw their way, because editors have stacks and stacks of manuscripts and proposals to look at and make decisions on. They tend to look at the ones from agents who have delivered a best selling author or two into the publishing world first. This is the type of agent you are gunning for.

  "But how do you get one of these agents?" you might be asking yourself.

  I dunno. There are whole books written on how to obtain a reputable agent in the writing sections of bookstores across the land, but I've never read one. I guess that in my grandiose literary daydreams, I always just figured one would just appear like magic for me one day when I was ready. I had thought plenty about having an agent before, romanticizing the writing life and all its trappings to a ridiculous degree. I would be the hard-drinking, hard-writing, no-bullshit-taking-punk-rock Hemingway of my generation, and somehow an agent would find out about me, beg to represent me, and then go on to sell my nonexistent manuscript for millions. I guess I thought he would come find me at the bar. It was a lot like the bands that sit around pissing and moaning in their home town bars, hoping to get "discovered". That never happens, and it didn't for me; but just like those bands, I managed to get plenty drunk.

  But now, amazingly enough, a real deal agent had just appeared like magic... and I didn't even want to talk to him, especially not about a book I didn't want to write (be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true). There are thousands and thousands of unpublished authors out there who would give their pinky fingers to just get their foot in the door of an established agent's office, and I had been blowing this guy off for weeks. I was truly dreading our talk. The twenty-three year old me would have kicked my teeth in if he could have heard me bitching to my wife about not wanting to call this dude. Then again, the twenty-three year old me hadn't just been through what I had.

  I called Marc, who was an exceedingly pleasant and obviously very intelligent man. I let him know right from the beginning that I had a photography book in the works and I didn't need any help with getting that published. He seemed fine with that, and began to tell me about how he thought the story of what had happened in Prague was fascinating, and how it had the potential to make a great book. He also told me he thought it was an important story, one that needed to be told. I agreed, because I do think it's an important story, and I do think it needs to be told. I don't think it's important because it's my story, I think it's important because if I tell it correctly, I might just be able to help some people. I have fans tell me all the time that the lyrics I have written mean something to them, that my band's music has really helped them through some very tough times.

  I have a dear friend who got very, very sick and lost both of her breasts to cancer. I met her because she came up to me in a bar in Ohio years ago and told me that when she was going through chemo, lamb of god's music helped her keep her chin up, helped her keep fighting when she was sick as a dog and felt like death itself. She is still alive, and she is a tough lady. She is a survivor. 

  This woman had beaten death itself, and she wanted to thank me just for singing a few songs? This was an immensely humbling experience, but from that day on, I slowly began to realize that (just like all the bands that I love so much have done for me), my band's music can actually help people. It's honest. It's real. I have to honor that, and show these peoples' experiences some respect. When I was in prison, I knew I would write about it eventually. Maybe if I didn't screw it up too badly, my story could help a few people one day- who knew? But this was really recent, and it still hurt me. The memories were still really fresh, and I wanted to distance myself from them. I told Marc this, that I didn't think I was ready yet, but that maybe I would be one day.

  "Yes, I understand. But, Randy... your memories will start to fade." he said quietly.

  And that was basically it. That's how a literary agent I tried my best to avoid talking to convinced me to at least be willing to think about writing this book. He was right- they would fade. I kept an extensive, very detailed journal in prison; but even reading old entries now, I can't remember some of the things happening that I wrote about, or I have to sit and really think hard to conjure up the images that go with some the writing I did in Pankrac Prison. Most of it is as clear as day, but some isn't.

  Memories fade. 

  I told Marc I had to come to NYC where he lives soon, to record a few episodes of The Crucible, the radio show I host from time to time on Sirius/XM, and he suggested we meet up and discuss how to put together a book proposal. I agreed to meet up, and we made plans.

  "Thanks Randy, I'm really happy to be working with you," he said, and hung up.

  We're working together now? I thought Oh well- I guess I have a literary agent.

  Less than a month later I had finished writing my book proposal. Marc sent it out to publishers, several of which gave us callbacks, and I had preliminary talks with a bunch of editors. There was a brief auction, and then I had a deal. Less than two months had gone by; from Marc's first email to me, until the day he called me to say

  "Congratulations, you have a publisher."

  Bam.

  Quick, but it didn't come easy, thats for damn sure. I would have rather it not come at all; if not having a book deal or even not ever having my band could change what happened in Prague May 24, 2010. But it can't, so I will do the best I can to try to bring what good I can out of this. I'm a musician, and a photographer, and a writer.

  It's what I do. 

  Plus, once this thing is done, whenever people say "What was it like in prison?" or ask me "Why did you go back?" or "Are you free and clear of all that Prague stuff now?", I can just say...

  Read my book. The answers are all there.

[darkdaysbook]

Welcome to my new blog/nervous breakdown.

Greetings Earthlings.

  Obviously (as the name of this blog will lead the more astute amongst you to deduce), this is the official blog of my upcoming book, Dark Days, scheduled for publication later in this year of our lord, 2014. I even state that fact in greater detail over in the "about the author" section (the little box to the left of this post), just in case there is any confusion about what in the hell is going on here. In that box it also says "PROCESS. PRODUCTION. PUBLICATION." That is because those are the three phases the life of this book will go through, and the three phases in which this blog will be chronologically updated. More on that shortly.

  First, a brief explanation about myself and the basis of my book for those of you who are unfamiliar with me or the recent events that have occurred in my life during the last year and a half or so. My name is D. Randall Blythe, known to most simply as Randy. I make my living singing for the four-time Grammy losing international touring heavy metal act, lamb of god. We've been around for almost twenty years now, have several critically acclaimed albums (well, at least by a few critics at a couple of metal magazines), and have played on every continent on earth except Antarctica. It's a good life.

  I am also a sober alcoholic who hasn't touched a drink or a drug (other than caffeine and nicotine) for well over three years as of this writing. For twenty-two years, I drank herculean amounts of alcohol (and drugged on the side just to make sure I was truly screwing myself up) in an attempt to alter reality to the point where I could deal with it. Surprise, surprise- that strategy did not work. That was NOT a good life, and I barely survived it. I'm much better now.

  Everything was going just hunky-dory until about a year and a half ago. On June 27, 2012 my band flew from Norway to the Czech Republic to play a show. Upon landing in Prague, we were met at the end of the jetway by five masked and heavily armed large men in body armor, along with four plainclothes detectives. To the immense surprise of my bandmates and myself, I was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter concerning the death of a lamb of god fan. We had played Prague two years previously, and unbeknownst to any of us, a young man had sustained an injury to the head during our show, dying a month later. The police said that I was the cause of that injury. I was promptly incarcerated and spent the next thirty-seven days in a 123 year old crumbling prison on the outskirts of Prague. After a long and complex process during which my band had to borrow almost half a million bucks, I was released on bail and returned to the United States. Instead of hiding like a coward in the U.S., safe from extradition (the U.S. government had refused to cooperate with the Czechs after they requested assistance in investigating me immediately after the young man died. My government also did not deem it necessary to inform me that I was a wanted man in a foreign country. Your tax dollars at work.), I returned to Prague in early 2013 to stand trial. I did this for several reasons, first and foremost being I felt the family of this young man deserved some answers, and I was the only one who could provide them. I felt it unethical to hide from my problems while they grieved the loss of their son. As the father of a dead daughter, I understood their pain in a very visceral way. I had tried to hide from my problems for over twenty years by crawling into a bottle. I do not live that way anymore, so to hide from this would have been intolerable for me. I believe it would have lead me back to the drink, and from there, I would have surely died.

  On March 5, 2013, I was found not guilty and acquitted of all charges. I have remained a free man every since. 

  This book will tell that story, the whole story, for the first time ever. I'm the only one who lived it, so I'm the only one capable of telling it. However, the tale of my arrest, incarceration, release, and trial are merely the vehicle I will be using to convey what I feel is an important message in today's fast paced, high tech, self-centered world. I have something to say, and life has presented me with a tragic way to illustrate my point without being preachy or pedantic. I will not moralize or shout from some ludicrous ethical pedestal (I didn't win the Olympics or cure cancer, I went to prison for Pete's sake)- I just want to relate how I got through a very scary time and came out with my head held high. I think there is a lesson of value in the telling of my story, if only for myself. Therefore I will write it, and I hope some of you will read it.

  That's my basic story. What this blog is:

1) Process: I am a voracious reader, and have been since I was child. I love reading books about the people who write books. I love learning about their process. I love seeing pictures of their writing desks. I love hearing about the nervous break downs they had as they toiled in solitude to produce something worth reading. I love a glimpse into their great knotty craniums. That is what the first phase of this blog will attempt to do through writing, photos, video, and maybe even some original music. I have found that through my photography and Instagram account (@drandallblythe) that fans of my band and my photo work enjoy seeing what is going on in my life, as it has taken me to some pretty neat places and lead to some pretty interesting observations. The process phase will allow you a glimpse into what it's like for me to become an author. I will not be taking questions during this phase, as I need to be writing. If you want to observe the train wreck in progress, by all means, hop aboard.

2) Production: In the second phase of the blog, I will be detailing what happens between submitting the manuscript to my publishers and the book hitting the shelves. This will include art work updates (galley covers, etc.), perhaps some advance reviews, book tour dates (I plan on doing a very interesting book tour), and what I learn about the business of publishing as I go along. This is a new area for me, and I hope to share what I learn as I fumble through this new field- who knows, maybe it will help some young aspiring author out! No questions will be taken here either.

3) Publication: Ok, the books out- now what? I guess we shall see! I will be opening up the questions section once the book is released, and we will be entering the publication phase of the blog. If anyone asks me something interesting CONCERNING THE BOOK, I will do my best to answer it. I also will be updating appearances and writing about anything different/funny/weird/hideous/painful/embarrassing that occurs as a result of being a published author. Maybe nothing will happen- who knows? Once again, I guess we shall see. I have a feeling all the above mentioned things will occur though. I am a magnet for wing nuts and bizarre situations. The book will only step that up, I'm sure.

 WHAT THIS BLOG IS NOT:

  A place to write about my band or answer any questions about it. There are other channels for that. I talk about band stuff when I am doing band stuff. Right now, I'm doing book stuff. The band stuff will come later. 

  So that's the concept for this blog. In my next post I will tell the story of how this book deal thing came about; relating how I had to be convinced to write this book in the first place (it was not my idea- in fact, I really didn't want to at first), and what finally made me agree to do it (no, it wasn't money. I already have enough money for what I need. Plus, unless your King or Grisham or one of those folks, the book business is the wrong business to try and get rich in). Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to tell your friends, y'all hear me, now?