Kristin McTiernan is a U.S. Marine veteran as well as a veteran writer and editor with 15+ years of experience. In addition to her YouTube channel (Nonsense-Free Kristin), she’s also the editor-at-large for Black Market Fiction magazine.

MAN’S WORLD’s C.B. Huckabee sat down with her to discuss everything from the state of modern mainstream fiction, why men don’t fit into it anymore, and the purpose of stories themselves.

C.B. Huckabee: I’ve watched your channel for some months now, following being recommended one of your videos in particular that hit me hard. I believe it was called THE DEATH OF MEN’S FICTION. It was really good, but it left me thinking “What in the hell inspired her to fall down that particular rabbit hole?”

Kristin McTiernan: It was a personal favor to Rian Stone, the author of Softbone. He had just written The Dog Walker and didn’t know how to classify the book. He asked if I would give his ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) a read and maybe blurb it. I agreed to read it and see what I thought. When I read it, I thought, I haven’t seen anything like this on the shelves in so long. And I could hear him so clearly.

It filled me with nostalgia for my time in the military, and it got me thinking, why don’t we get these stories—because the world is full of veterans with funny, amazing stories just like these, and they’d be very similar but also unique. What did you learn from your stripper incident in North Carolina? Because we all have one of those. Why aren’t they being published? I know they’re there. Why? When was the last time we heard from a veteran in major publishing? Fucking Jarhead. What was it, 2005, when that came out?

I started looking into it and thought, wow, there’s nothing. It’s all chick stuff. Why is that? I’d seen some stuff on social media, other videos, but it was all—I don’t want to be mean here—but a lot of times when people complain loudly that they’re not getting signed… it’s because their stuff isn’t even really that good or they didn’t query the right people. They’re being lazy about it.

But as I looked into it, I said, “No, no, no, no. That’s not the problem.” The problem is the publishers, they’re willfully excluding men. Why are they doing that? Because women like men’s stuff, but men don’t like chick stuff. So why are you cutting off not just half your audience, but really three-quarters of your audience? Why? Ideology.

That’s kind of what got me. I thought, OK, instead of just doing a straightforward review of Rian’s book, I guess I’m going to talk about this—because it’s kind of important.

C.B. Huckabee: Now, the one exception we might be able to make is Jack Carr, but I think the only reason that hit enough escape velocity to break through the publishing industry is likely because he had an early buy-in from celebrity actors. I don’t think there’s any way in hell it would have made it through—though, it’s a great series.

Kristin McTiernan: Exactly. Yeah, anytime you see a “man’s-man” author, either they’ve been around since the 90s, or they’ve had a BIG push from somebody famous and they’re the exception to the rule.

C.B. Huckabee: You said something in that video that was interesting. You said that, at first, whenever all of this was going around (that men don’t read), what you found was that most adult men have a tendency just to go back and stay in the loop of the stories we love and—maybe—trust. You said that you were kind of disheartened to find that younger men, and specifically teenage boys, are by and large not reading at all.

Kristin McTiernan: Or if they are, it’s manga. Which is—I was educated—not a genre. I guess it’s more of a medium. It’s akin to a graphic novel and is the only type of stories that seem to be made explicitly with young men in mind. In particular, young men are really being underserved.

And then people say, “Well, young men don’t read. That’s why we don’t create.” It’s a sort of self-perpetuating cycle. I’m confident they would read if there was something directed at them instead of, here, read this so you can become less toxically male. It’s terrible.

C.B. Huckabee: So, what type of stories should be directed toward men?

Kristin McTiernan: From what I can see, it’s a story of heroism—but not necessarily world-saving heroism. It’s a chance to show people your strength and show people who you are. It’s not necessarily about not needing help, but more about overcoming yourself and overcoming external forces—as opposed to navel-gazing. It’s not, “I’m sad, I can’t get over this and then someone comes to rescue me.” No, they don’t want to be rescued. They want to find the resources themselves.

I was turned on to prepper fiction—which is a subset of post-apocalyptic fiction—but it’s very list-oriented. It’s like fiction for autists. It’s like, here’s exactly how many bullets I have and this is the caliber of bullets I have, and this is how long these are gonna last if we’re under siege. It’s fairly intricate. That would be something that young men would like. It’s kind of like a level-up thing, but on steroids.

C.B. Huckabee: I remember reading Devon’s book prior to the interview. I’m a fairly mechanical guy—I was an underwater welder. Before that, I was a concrete finisher for several years before joining the military and I love that kind of stuff. But at a certain point during reading his book, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I was like, Devon really likes fixing things. He’s in it. He loves it, and I liked that it was there.

I think I told him whenever I interviewed him, I said, “Your passion for problem solving in the material world is evident very early on. And more importantly, it’s enjoyable.” I think there’s something to what you just said.

Hoe Math and I were talking about stories—the importance of stories. And he brought up a good trope that maybe you’re alluding to, which is: you go on an adventure willingly or unwillingly and you’re not enough at first to overcome the necessary obstacles. You have to become something formidable enough to surmount those things. Eventually, you do some version of fighting the dragon, getting the gold, and bringing it back to the village. That’s the more heroic and classical shape. But one of the more modern story shapes is that, once you get there, you realize that you don’t need to become anything else—because you’ve always been enough. The power was inside you the whole time. Is that what you’re saying doesn’t work for men?

Kristin McTiernan: Yeah, that’s not even storytelling. “It was always inside you,” was fine for Dorothy—but literally no one else. Even for girls. When I go to watch a romantic comedy, for instance—I used to like those when they made them and when they were good. It was always Sandra Bullock or someone similar. Eventually, she realizes, OK, I was overreacting and if only I would just stop overreacting, then I could be happy with Hugh Grant.

They don’t even do that anymore.

Now it’s, “I’m just perfect and I need to discard this perfectly good man and find a new one who will recognize my perfection.” Even chicks don’t like that. Ostensibly, the target audience, we don’t like that. Because it’s not how humans are wired.

We are wired for story. We are wired to overcome challenge. Now, the way that we like to overcome those challenges differs wildly by sex, which is why we have different products marketed to us. But we still want to overcome it. So this whole thing, you’re just fine the way you are. That’s a really sinister thing. And it’s not at all what anybody actually wants.

C.B. Huckabee: How do you think the whole boxing out of men and telling stories that no one wants happened to the publishing industry?

Kristin McTiernan: There’s a very militant lib, but I love her because she’s really “out there.” She describes it as the lipstick-lesbian-trust-fund-baby takeover of publishing—where these wealthy white women who went to Sarah Lawrence and who got fat and so started dating women (they’re not actually lesbians, they just couldn’t be bothered to meet men’s standards). Anyways, they were gifted internships at publishing and slowly over the course of years, they started taking over because the old guard wouldn’t tell them to sit down, shut up, and learn how it’s done.

So these spoiled bitches who were never told no kept getting narrower and narrower requirements based on what made them personally feel good. “Well, I don’t like this because it praises slender bodies and I don’t have one of those” and I don’t want to do the work for it. So I’m gonna push that to the side. “That’s ableism.” I’m gonna push that to the side and I’m gonna go with this one instead, which asks nothing of the protagonist but just grants her what she deserves for existing.

And then they couch it in a bunch of post-Marxist excuses. It’s an excuse for, at best, mediocrity, at worst, just abject failure. And they know that they suck. And they’re propping up fiction that justifies their suckitude—I don’t know if suckitude is a word, but it is now.

C.B. Huckabee: Do you think that’s getting any better?

Kristin McTiernan: In some ways. I wrote a piece on Substack not that long ago where I had a hopeful thought for Hollywood, at least. Not necessarily the book publishers, but for Hollywood. It seems to me that the money men are back in charge. They had this little 10-year-experiment with these horrible audience-lecturing stories with unattractive leads and really bad storytelling. It went very poorly.

Eventually, that investor money and that Black Rock money will dwindle. Nothing new is coming in and the movies are getting more and more expensive—not less. I think Hollywood has understood that the audience has clearly spoken in a unified voice and they’re saying, “Okay, we are going to emphasize story now.” In part because the age of the movie star, for better or for worse, is kind of over. Tom Cruise is our last “movie star.” They tried to give Glenn Powell a push. We love him, but he’s not a movie star.

It’s gonna have to be a story-led industry again. So, they’re going to have to get rid of these fat 25-year-old women out of the writer’s room, go and find the 64-year-old Jews, bring them back with back pay if you can and make good stories again. So Hollywood’s gotten the message.

Now, big publishing—I don’t think it’ll go that way because of how the big publishing houses work. They live mostly off of authors who’ve been around for a long time. They make all their money on the latest Stephen King book. They make all their money on the next Mel Robbins self-help book. I just joined an IRL girl group, because it’s hard to make friends as an adult. They love this shit. They buy multiple copies of the hardbacks and gift them to their friends for Christmas. So, for that girl self-help schlock, these books make money and it keeps the houses afloat.

As far as fiction goes, they have their backlog of all the legacy authors. I don’t know… I think it’s going to take a long time. I think that there’s a wide open door for indies—if only they can get the marketing in order. If only they can pivot when they need to. I don’t think, at least with fiction, that the legacy houses have a lot of motivation to change. So, that leaves the mission for indies.

C.B. Huckabee: Why do you think the legacy houses are so slow or resistant to change?

Kristin McTiernan: It’s ideology and it’s good old-fashioned snobbishness. It’s, “Okay, well, we are the good people. We are the classy people. We know what quality is. And you plebs, I’m sorry, but you don’t meet our standards. So even if this work that you have created would make us some money, you’re icky. We don’t wanna take pictures with you.”

The New York Literati are the Ivy League educated people. And they’re not changing because they don’t want to be associated with us. They just think they’re better and they’re happy in their little walled garden and they don’t want us to be a part of it—even if it means they lose money.

C.B. Huckabee: One of the things that bothered me early on regarding the woke-ification of kids shows, and fiction in general, was the insistence that a story is somehow “just a story.” At the moment, when I heard people say things like, “Why do you care so much? It’s just a story,” it made my skin crawl. It took me months to figure out why and part of it had to do with what a story is. I’d be curious about your thoughts on what a story is and why they’re important.

Kristin McTiernan: There’s always a lesson. The reason that I call my newsletter Fictional Influence because I believe that the fiction we consume has infinitely more influence on our behavior, the way we think, the way we react than the way you were raised—or where you went to church or school.

The lessons that I absorbed and implemented in my own behavior—sure, I heard some of them from my family or from my church or my teachers. But they weren’t real to me. They were just “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” from adults and old people. Even when they turned out to be true. The implementation came from fiction. So, a story is never just a story. A story is always, in one form or another, a lesson. Now what is that lesson? If we’re talking about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the lesson is you’re fucked, so enjoy the ride. So, it was not a great lesson, but there it is. Goodnight.

C.B. Huckabee: There was an area of fiction that Devon and I diverged on. I think I understand exactly what he’s saying. However, I refuse to accept it as the truth. His thought is that short fiction is dead and not something that can be revived. What do you think about that?

Kristin McTiernan: Standalone short stories? Maybe. I think that there is a place for short stories if they’re packaged. Otherwise, when people are like, “Okay, I’m gonna spend money. Why would I spend money on this short story of 5,000 words when I can spend 2.99 and get a complete novel?” It’s a value proposition and sometimes buyers won’t do that.

But maybe there’s a compilation. In that case, you get a short story about this and you get an essay about that shirtless online Manosphere guy who you hate and you want to read a hate piece on him. So, you get all of that together. Here you go. I don’t think it’s dead, but I think the packaging of it needs to change. That’s why I’m doing the magazine.

C.B. Huckabee: What made you want to start the magazine, Black Market Fiction? By the way, I saw the most recent cover design and it’s a banger aesthetic.

Kristin McTiernan: Mostly, it was me throwing spaghetti at the wall, honestly. The media landscape is fractured. There’s no monoculture anymore. What if I created something that people were happy to see? Because everybody’s got a sub-stack now and everybody’s got an email list. Are you happy to see so-and-so’s author newsletter pop up in your email inbox? No, nobody is. What would it take to make you happy to see that email? It’s like, well, the January issue is now available.

It’s a tale as old as time. I am trying to sell you something. What would make you happy to part with your money? And it’s not just another book. Okay, well, what could it be? A good story that you have time to read. You can read it right now. You got it in your email inbox, and you can read this right now while you’re waiting for that stupid-bullshit-meeting that you don’t want to go to anyway.

The stories are good enough to engage you—to hold your interest. You don’t have to improve your attention span. This was made for the attention span that you have. So that’s kind of what I’m going for with the magazine.

And that’s why I’m doing, okay, you can subscribe to it if you know you’re going to read it every month, or you can wait till the end of January and just buy a standalone issue because we’re also at peak subscription. People are sick of subscriptions. Cool. Let me give you a one-off if that’s what you want.

C.B. Huckabee: So, what does it look like for the spaghetti to stick?

Kristin McTiernan: We’ll see. Maybe that’s enough good readers, check it out.

C.B. Huckabee: I’ll make sure to send out audience to it, partly because I want short fiction that isn’t anti-man to find its heartbeat again. Thanks for the conversation, Kristin. Last question I always ask: Does society need men?

Kristin McTiernan: The answer is more than yes—the answer is that there is no society unless men build it, decide on the rules and mission, and enforce both. Camille Paglia was right in that, if there were no men, women would be living among the trees. We build nothing. We improve and organize what men have built for us. But as we’ve seen in multiple studies, in regular single-sex environments (like the military or prison), men are the drivers of society.

C.B. Huckabee: Excellent. It’s been a pleasure.

Readers of Man’s World can read or submit to Black Market Fiction at https://www.blackmarketfiction.com.