Storytellersunplugged

— David Niall Wilson

Throughout my life I’ve heard the term “reading between the lines” used to infer that a person has grasped some deeper, hidden secret buried in words someone else has written, or an untold story being ignored and glossed over with a less-than-truthful or fabricated façade. As an author, I’m often amazed when readers point out such things in my own writing. I used to ignore them, as a matter of fact, and tell myself they were full of crap – that the words were just the words, and that’s it. Robert Frost once told a University audience this same thing when asked about the poem “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.” He said that it’s just a poem about snow, and the woods, and that this is enough. I have come to learn, even if the author believes this to be true, it can be deceiving. Reading and writing are interactive pursuits, and what a person puts into a work is not necessarily the guideline for what others will get back out of it.

Everything we do in life reflects who we are, what we think, where we’ve been, and where we are going. It’s been said repeatedly by many voices here at storytellers unplugged that you have to leak yourself into your fiction if you want it to ring true. Sometimes, if you aren’t careful, the leaks don’t get plugged so efficiently, and you end up revealing more than you intended – or realized. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had your own private Dutch Boy to block that sort of leak, or at least a Lois Lane to your Superman who could report on what you’ve done so you can be aware of it BEFORE you get broadsided on a panel at a convention, or by an interviewer, asking just what you meant? The flip side of this leakage is that you can’t predict how reading the words will interact with the lives of others, or what new leaks this might cause – so when someone tells you about their experience, it’s wise to listen.

When I was in the US Navy and had just completed the novel “This Is My Blood,” I considered it to be several things. I knew it was a unique take on vampirism. I knew that it was a jab at organized religion, using a character – Mary Magdalene – who knew absolutely that what Jesus said was true as a point of comparison to show the weakness of men and their faith – especially those men held in such reverence for their part as priests and apostles. What I didn’t expect, and came to understand, was that there were more words between those lines, and that people would find them.

I let several of my fellow sailors read the manuscript when it was completed. At the time I was immersed in writing other things, and was waiting for the new publisher who’d picked up the novel to get it into print. It wasn’t foremost on my mind. I was in charge of the mess decks on the ship, “Mess Decks Master-at-Arms”, and had to be in to work at 4:30 AM. One of the younger sailors working for me came to me soon after we arrived at work one day and plopped the manuscript back in front of me. He stared at me for a while, and finally I couldn’t stand it any more. I asked what he thought.

He started to tell me, and that was when I noticed. This guy was standing in front of me in a dirty uniform, ready to make iced tea for the masses and scrub the tables, and he was crying. Not sobbing, or anything like that, but steadily flowing tears. He explained it to me very slowly, that he’d found the message in my novel to be very powerful. He said that reading the gospel through the eyes of a fallen angel — seeing Judas as a man, not a symbol, and the way I handled each character’s battle with the supernatural and their own faith to be a reaffirmation of his own. He said a lot of other things that sort of faded out, but the thing he said that stuck with me longest was very simple. He said “thank you.”

First off, it had never occurred to me (beyond my arrogant assumption that I am a gift to the world) that what I was doing was important to others in the same ways that it was to me. I had also not been aware, until he pointed it out, what I’d done with the characters – how I’d built a message into this book that was never my intention. In other words, right up until then I’d have said it was mostly an intriguing story with some of the dissatisfaction I harbored toward organized religion at its core. After that? I thought about it for a long time, and I came to the conclusion that, if you read the book with an open mind and didn’t think too hard about the dark fantasy elements, he was right. The book could have been sold in religious bookstores if people had more open minded attitudes. It was a personal revelation.

Since then, I’ve paid more attention, after the fact, to what I’ve written. Excessive leaks of personality into plot aren’t necessarily bad, but they are something an author must remain acutely aware of. If you use your words to work through something that is currently eating at you, you run the risk of sabotaging your work. You can become obsessed with a particular plot line, insistent that it go the way you want it to go, and suddenly you have a new problem. Instead of leaking “truth” into your fiction, you begin trying to manipulate that truth, and the plot suffers. In the case of This Is My Blood, this worked to my advantage, I believe, but it could easily have gotten out of control.

The point of all of this is a simple one. Just because you wrote the story, that doesn’t mean you control it. Just because you plotted something carefully to infer one thing doesn’t mean that readers will not find something hidden in the shadows, or that they will even see your original point for their own trees. If you run into such a reader, one who has “read between your lines,” and are fortunate enough to have the chance to discuss your work with them – listen. See if you don’t learn something about yourself in the process – and see if your work doesn’t grow stronger for the effort.

— David Niall Wilson

Art imitates life. Sometimes life imitates art, too, and the lines between who you are and what you do get blurry.

 
So it’s ten PM on a Saturday night and I’m up on top of a mountain. Mount Pisgah, to be exact – a slithering hunk of rock that stretches across western North Carolina, bridled with a slice of the Blue Ridge Parkway and capped with a lone hotel named The Pisgah Inn. That’s where I am, tucked into room 217 with a glass of scotch (Glengoyne 21, if you must know – there are some things I just don’t fool around with) in my hand and various and sundry male types seated around me. In nine hours, I’m due to get married out back of the Inn, looking down on a wooded valley toward Waynesville. In the meantime, I’m drinking scotch with my best man, a couple of relatives from either side, and the nice young man who’s going to marry my fiancee’s niece.

And as we’re sitting there, sipping the single malt and engaging in various acts of manly bullshitting, my now-nephew Michael sticks his head out the door onto the room’s porch and says, “Hey, look at this! There’s a cloud rolling up the mountain.” Before any of us can get up, he’s a liar – the cloud has finished tumbling all the way up the slope and has poked a tendril into the room through the still open door. Someone opens the front door and the stream of fog pours through, a ghost train running non-stop from one side of the inn to the other.

From the next room, I can hear one of my sisters say, very loudly, “You know, this looks like something out of one of your books.” There’s a pause. “It’s kind of creepy.”

 
Sunday morning rolls around faster than sleep does. At 3 AM, I stick my head out the back door to see if there’s been any clearing in the weather. No dice: we’re still socked in with fog. I turn on the outside light and make shadow puppets into the cloud in hopes of embarrassing it sufficiently to dissipate. But there’s no such luck, so I kill the light and throw myself back into bed. An hour later, I check again, and the weather’s the same. In bed, I hear the howling of the wind coming from every which way, while the foglight seeps in around the door and through the shades. Something out there is feeling energetic, but every time I check the conditions, it’s the same.

The wedding, needless to say, is supposed to take place outdoors, in the bright sunshine that the weatherman had promised. Around 5 in the morning, I start getting nervous, as the fog hasn’t moved, and the wind has picked up. We’re doing a Humanist Jewish ceremony (most of the tradition, but no God to offend anyone’s sensibilities), which means that four of the male guests will be standing out there hanging onto the ceremonial canopy, or chuppah. A chuppah, for those of you who don’t know, is a tent held up by four poles. It represents the home that the bride and groom will make together. It also tends to catch an awful lot of air, and the drop behind the spot where we’re having the ceremony is pretty much a thousand feet straight down. I write a note to myself to warn the chuppah-bearers that if they start to get lift.

At quarter after five, the alarm goes off. My best man wakes up with a noise like a donkey in a blast furnace – sunrise weddings take a certain kind of dedication, after all, as well as a great deal of restraint when there’s a bottle of Glengoyne 21 about – and asks what the weather’s like.

“Miserable,” I tell him. “We’re still wrapped in fog.”

“How can you tell?” he asks me. “It’s freaking dark.”

I open the door, and once again the cloud sticks its nose in. “That’s how,” I say.

He sits up and starts mucking about with his suit. “Maybe the sun will burn it off.”

“I hope so.” I don’t sound very confident.

He turns to look at me. “You know, this is actually kind of appropriate for you, all things considered.”

 
Seven AM. We’re supposed to be getting ready for the pictures, which simply isn’t happening. Shapes loom up out of the mist and resolve themselves into siblings, in-laws, even my deeply worried two-year old nephew. I bounce back and forth between the site and my room, trying to convince the musicians that it will be all right to play outside and keep everything else on the rails. The best man is an absolute machine, organizing people and running messages back and forth.

People walk past me in the fog. Every so often, one stops and says, “You know, this would be great stuff for one of your books.”  Then they disappear into the mist again.

 
Quarter after eight, and we’re going to give it a go. The musicians have been strategically positioned out of the wind, a hotel staffer standing beside them with an umbrella to ward off any stray moisture off the trees. The rabbi is there, waiting under the wind-whipped chuppah as the four pole-bearers hang on for dear life. The mountain is wrapped in cloud, with visibility of maybe twenty feet. Beyond the hitching post that marks the edge of the area where we’ve set up, there’s nothing but soft grey and occasional silhouettes of trees. The guests are in place, and I’m under the chuppah with the best man, waiting. The maid of honor is there as well, looking back toward where the bride is waiting. Slowly, she emerges from the fog, the wind whipping her wrap around her so that she looks like she’s part of the mist, no way to tell where it leaves off and she begins.

I’m transfixed. She looks absolutely beautiful. My heart is in my throat.

And one of the guys holding up the chuppah leans forward and says, “You know, you ought to write a book about this."
 

I don’t know. Maybe I should write a book about it, or featuring it, or distilling it into something else. We all take our daily lives, the high points and the low ones and the stuff that drives us absolutely batty, and transform it into the stuff we put on the page. But the stuff on the page can pop up and inform what we do beyond the words, can have day-to-day life viewed through the prism of what we’ve written. It’s inevitable, and it’s appropriate. We are what we write just as much as we write what we are.

Maybe the wedding was like something out of one of my stories. Maybe it was like something I should write a book about. And if I do that, the lines get blurred once and for all between what’s inspiration and what’s observation, what’s art and what’s life and which imitates which. Not that it matters, though. In the end, they just might be one and the same.

——–
Richard E. Dansky
Writer, Game Designer, and Cad
(Not necessarily in that order)

by Janet Berliner

The words “Ich bin Blau” in German, directly translated, mean “I am blue.” But try saying that in passing to someone on the streets of Berlin and see what happens. A lot of laughter, or at the least giggling is what happens because, colloquially, “Ich bin Blau” means “I am drunk.”

What, you ask, does that have to do with writing?

First and most significantly, it speaks to the importance of word choice. Translating scenes, emotions, plots and stories into words that convey exactly what we want them to. It’s not possible to succeed 100% of the time, of course, since words convey different shades of meaning to different people, depending on their experience–and eyesight, for that matter.

I may see ticks on a dog, for example, and approach with care; someone whose glasses have been ground under the heel of the bad guy might miss that, and end up a corpse with tick fever. The trusty detective, knowing that, could come to a conclusion not obvious to everyone: The corpse has ticks. There are no ticks in the vicinity, so chances are the person was killed elsewhere.

But wait. I digress. What I really want to talk about is the art and craft of translation, be it from a flesh and blood happening put onto the page, a novel to film, or one language to another.

I looked up ‘translation’ in my trusty Roget’s Thesaurus. The most prominent equivalent was translation=mutation. I find that shocking.

It happens that, as the child of an immigrant family, raised in a bilingual country, I grew up speaking five languages. In ‘75, I translated a German engineering textbook into English. Mutation was the very last thing my lords of the (large) checkbook wanted from me. My mandate was to translate it exactly, warts and all. If I saw better ways to say things, I was to ignore them. The voice had to be that of the dry scientist who wrote the book. Four or five engineers had tried to do the job and failed. I succeeded because I understood the instruction. Mutation was the last thing they wanted.

As I look back at the work I’ve done, I find particular satisfaction in seeing copies in other languages. I don’t recognize my name in the Greek edition of David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible and I only understand the photos in the Chinese edition, which opens with a photo of David levitating me. But to know that the levitation was also done as a life-size cut-out standing in bookstores all over Beijing and noticing that the Czechs add -ova to the end of my name is fun.

Seeing how the British translated the cover of SNAPSHOTS: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction is a kick. (Look at the cover description below, punsters.) The US edition has a wonderful old sepia photograph of three generations, a street snapshot of my grandmother, my mother, and me at three. The British edition has a little girl wearing her mother’s very-much-too-large shoes. The way the graphics are done on the latter, you’re almost bound to think of the soft core series, Red Shoe Diary. What is the book? It’s a collection/selection of some of the best Mother-Daughter fiction you could ever read. Classic stories, which Joyce Carol Oates and I chose with great care, and a few originals. It’s still selling well over there, so I guess the image on the cover, though mutated, didn’t turn out to be a problem.

Because I can, I enjoy reading originals and translations side-by-side. More often than not, they are awful; sometimes they are excellent. Strangely, I think the two most accurate translations I’ve read are the works of Günter Grass (Dog Years and his poetry in particular) and Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Two opposite ends of the spectrum. Then there are the cases where translation doesn’t go quite as smoothly.

One friend of mine, Rick Steinberg, recently showed me the Dutch cover of his book Nobody’s Safe. The title was translated as Brandkluis, which my Dutch son-in-law tells me means fire vault. Apparently, they thought that the apostrophe s was possessive, and the book was about a safe with no owner, rather than secret government conspiracies at Area 51.

In the case of my own recently released Spanish edition, Los Hijos Del Crepusculo (Children of the Dusk for those who don’t know their Spanish), the cover is of a little girl in a nightgown holding her teddy bear while she watches the sun set over the ocean. Very pretty, and a little ominous, but what it has to do with a Nazi concentration camp on an island near Madagascar or a man possessed by a dybbuk is anybody’s guess.

Not that I’m complaining. I love having the book available to as many people as possible.

So, why not get the translation and cover proofs prepublication and have them read by someone you trust?

Sounds good in theory, but I wish you joy of it. Contracts and pleas notwithstanding, much if not most of the time you’ll be lucky to see a copy of your foreign edition post-publication. The best you can hope for is that your foreign publisher simply uses the cover from the American edition, or the British edition, or you’re lucky and get one of the foreign covers that’s actually better (it does happen, but it’s not as funny).

I guess what I’m saying is, get used to it. The fantasy of foreign sales sometimes does become reality, but there are also times when that reality becomes horrific–no matter what the genre. The best you can do is laugh.

Voodoo Magic

This month I have a real problem. Because I’m going through a Hellish patch of writer’s block, how can I write about writing if I can’t write? I’ve been told to either just wait it out, do something else, or force myself to sit in front of the computer until my irises are ready to melt. I have to admit, the latter remedy has produced dribs and dribbles. I’m working on a second novel, and every few days I add a few more paragraphs. But for someone who used to be able to sit down and write non-stop for hours, this is complete torture. Lately, I find myself nostalgically perusing my collection of short stories and plays, wondering: did I really write this stuff? It doesn’t seem possible. Especially since I’m now convinced my brain has become as smooth and wrinkle-free as a blob of silly putty. Perhaps I’d never really written anything at all, but instead had been possessed by the spirit of a dead writer. All I know is that even as I’m writing this, I can feel my eyes growing heavier. The air-conditioner is buzzing in the background, in tandem with the buzzing in my head, and the only time I feel enlivened is when I think about the possibility of food. And I’m not even hungry.
So, either my muse is trying to tell me it’s time to shift over to writing cook books, or something else is going on. You know that Warner Brothers cartoon where either Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny (I can’t remember which) find a frog who can sing and dance better than Gene Kelly but once they put the frog up on a stage in front of a live audience, all the frog will emit is a ‘Ribbit’? Well, I think that’s me. Although I’ve had short stories published and plays produced, I think that perhaps because my work has never been out in the public in any large way, I could basically stay anonymous. After all, how many people read small literary journals, or go to off-off (okay, throw in another off) Broadway shows? I could legitimately say I was a writer, but not have to deal with the expectations that successful writers have from not only their publishers and loyal readers, but even more importantly, themselves. Writing for me had always been an escape, a secure place where I could play my inner demons off each other, but now that it’s become a product — something that’s success is based on how many copies are sold — it kind of feels like just another job, and I already one of those.
Anyway, whether or not I’m suffering from stage fright or Alzheimers, I plan to hedge my bets on Thursday when I’m scheduled to have a reading with a Voodoo Priestess. Although I usually don’t go in for such things, (she’s a friend of a friend, and has lost everything in Hurricane Katrina), I’m hoping she can channel that creative spirit that used to inhabit me, or drive away the evil one that is tying my storytelling tongue up in knots. But even if she doesn’t, I figure at least I’ll have some material for when/if the urge to tell a story ever strikes me again.
P.S. If you’d like to support a survivor of the hurricane, you can book a reading with Sallie Ann Glassman by logging onto her website www.feyvodou.com.

by Jeffrey Thomas

When it comes to brother acts, for me film-makers come to mind more readily than authors. There are Larry and Andy Wachowski (the MATRIX movies), Peter and Bobby Farrelly (DUMB AND DUMBER and the hilarious STUCK ON YOU, about conjoined brothers), the Polish Brothers (TWIN FALLS IDAHO, also about conjoined twins, and the surreally haunting NORTHFORK), the Brothers Quay (brilliant stop motion animators), Joel and Ethan Coen (BLOOD SIMPLE, FARGO), Kerry and Kevin Conran (SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW) and Paul and Leonard Schrader (BLUE COLLLAR, THE YAKUZA).

But my brother Scott and I can still relate to these collaborative brother teams (we’ve always been especially fond of the Schraders, Paul having written our favorite film, TAXI DRIVER). We understand what it must be like for them to work together – conjoining their brains, so to speak. They say twins sometimes develop a secret language that no one else can understand. When that kind of bond takes place between two human beings with creative impulses, a kind of magic can happen. But what shapes the particular directions taken by any human persona? One can’t help but wonder if it’s a genetic predisposition behind the leanings of creative siblings, or if it’s an issue of environment. There are plenty of fine collaborators who are not related by blood. They can still share a secret language…based on films they both grew up with, books and music they were both exposed to. Maybe being brothers just gives two people a shortcut to such a relationship.

(I’ll leave it to someone else to write about the creative bond between sisters, or even parents and their children…except to boastfully relate that my father, mother, sister and brother Craig are all published writers as well.)

Right now I’m proofreading the book PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY, for its imminent release. The futuristic and nightmarish city of Punktown is my own invention, but as early as I conceived of it I was inviting my brother Scott to write Punktown-based stories, too. So while he hasn’t spent as much time in that dark metropolis as I have, he has been acquainted with it for just as long. (An example of his Punktown stories can already be found in PUNKTOWN: THIRD EYE, an anthology for which I also invited a lot of non-Thomases to set stories in Punktown.) Proofing SHADES OF GREY – and I adapted that subheading from one of Scott’s tales – has again made me reflect on that rewarding brother/fellow writer relationship.

Rereading Scott’s stories for this book has been a thrill almost as strong as reading them for the first time. Sometimes I think Scott evokes Punktown more effectively than I do myself; at least, I too often catch myself saying, with envy, why didn’t I think of that? For many years, everything we wrote was done so with the other in mind as our particular audience. After all, we weren’t published yet – we were our only assured audience! But also, I think it has to do with the way a singer might single out one face in a crowd that he can more directly perform for. Trying to ever impress each other, and in an amicable way ever outdo each other, I’m sure helped Scott and I to up the ante and better our skills. And there were the added bonuses in this sharing of each other’s work, like writing a humorous page of a particular story and sneaking it in with the rest, so that it would start out innocently enough before it dissolved into nonsense and gave itself away as one of those prank booby-traps. We have consciously and sometimes less consciously cribbed each other’s ideas. We’ve had long, animated conversations about each other’s current novel-in-progress. When particularly animated, we used to take to pacing the floor as we spoke, back and forth in opposite directions or around and around each other if the room was large enough, as if our foot motions helped generate our thoughts, like twin hamsters running in twin wheels to power some bizarre machine. This is a trait I gave to two brothers whom I made the protagonists of my most recently completed novel, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM DEALERS – and only Scott would have recognized that characteristic, had I not just shared it with you now.

The odd thing is, we have only once collaborated on a story in the literal sense; that is to say, putting both our bylines on a single story. That was the story ORANGES AND APPLES, which was a bonus feature for a lettered edition book entitled NETHER: IMPROPER BEDTIME STORIES. NETHER combined my erotic horror collection HONEY IS SWEETER THAN BLOOD with Scott’s erotic horror collection SHADOWS OF FLESH. The way we approached this story was for one to write a few pages, then email it to the other for his few pages, and then back again, improvising the plot as we went along. I still had another few pages to go when I felt that Scott had brought the story to a point that was hard to go beyond, so I decided to end it there and then. But recently, when we were invited to contribute a story to Brian Keene’s anthology IN DELIRIUM, we changed the title of the story to APPLES AND ORANGES and I managed to balance the story out with a final section of my own after all. It was a fun experience, but direct collaboration has never been something either of us has been fond of, so it may never be repeated. As into each other’s work as we are, ultimately we are too into our own work to invite the hand of another, however much that hand might share genetic material. But Scott is welcome to visit Punktown again, whether I am currently staying in the city or not, any time he desires. He’s a citizen there, too. His very disturbing story PULSE (itself a conscious homage to TAXI DRIVER) makes buying PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY worthwhile all by itself, in my opinion.

Down the road, another book of ours called THE SEA OF FLESH AND ASH will be released. This one found its origins in the notion of both of us writing a novella inspired by the same piece of art, in this case a digital painting created by the talented Travis Anthony Soumis (who did the cover for PUNKTOWN: THIRD EYE and the cover and interiors for PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY). But besides this image figuring into both of our stories, there are other little similarities however wildly different the novellas are. Both stories focus a lot on their New England settings, and both involve extradimensional travel, things we didn’t realize until we had finished and read the other’s story. We both put a lot of our own personalities, our tastes and interests, our own experiences, into our work…and of course we better than any friend or fan can distinguish between what is real and what is invented, when reading each other’s stuff. Though Scott lives in Maine now and I in Massachusetts, and we see each other and speak on the phone very seldom, the effect we’ve had on each other’s art is ongoing. If I have any talent at all, again it’s because I was trying to give him a good story to read. Or make a better story than the last one of his I had read!

Now, Scott and I have very different visions, don’t get me wrong. I lean more toward horror with SF influences, or SF with horrific elements, whereas he favors dark fantasy, horror often set in the Victorian area or thereabouts. His style is unlike mine; more blatantly poetic and idiosyncratic. We have our own distinct identities. But we find it hard to stop rubbing elbows, even when we’re doing our own thing. Scott and I have often appeared in anthologies together, such as LEVIATHAN THREE, OCTOBERLAND, STRANGEWOOD TALES, DEATHREALMS, THE DEAD INN, and THE YEAR’S BEST HORROR STORIES XXII. I’m too lazy to go look through my stacks of magazines; we’ve been in plenty of those together, too. I hope the trend continues. I like to think that coming upon an anthology in which we both appear, Scott’s fans will check out my work, and vice versa.

Getting back to movies and brother partnerships…back in the 80’s, primarily, Scott and I used to make our own video movies together. We’d get very passionate about them, and there were certainly brotherly spats (I was amused when watching a featurette on SKY CAPTAIN to hear how the Conran brothers would fight on the set…though presumably not with the violence of the group Oasis’ obnoxious Gallagher brothers). I think making those home movies, inventing props and settings on the spot, creating our own fantastical makeup effects on fantastically nonexistent budgets, and playing 90% of the roles ourselves, was the most fun I’ve ever known creatively. Sure, these home videos are so raw they’re probably unwatchable to anyone but ourselves, even though several take place in Punktown, so the Coens need not worry about the competition. But we came up with ideas that later on I would work into some of my written Punktown excursions. And mainly, we cemented a bond…and celebrated a process…and played in the sandbox of creativity together.

We’ve worked hard, in the years since we were each other’s only fan, to get our books out there, to win readers who wanted to read us again. But to this day, I’m sure, nobody looks forward to a new book by one of the Thomas Brothers more than the other brother does. In a way, no matter whom I actually dedicate a book to, each one is dedicated to him.

(A final note: check out Scott Thomas’s latest collection, WESTERMEAD, from Raw Dog Screaming Press. It will make you shiver, and cry, and laugh, and make you wish you had a brother if you don’t already.)

Last go-around, I spoke about different ways of promoting oneself and their work–more untraditional ways of getting into the public’s eye. As discussed, I’d taken a huge long shot in trying to land a spot on the reality TV show Survivor. I’d made a tape, filled out the lengthy application from CBS.com and sent it all in. After a month of waiting, I’d received an e-mail from an assistant to a casting director at CBS asking if I’d be interested in trying out for Big Brother instead. I’d said yes, and after a month wait, got another e-mail asking me to download the application at CBS.com, and come down to a public casting call.

The casting call took place in NYC on a Sunday morning. Armed with my 30-page application (which took me about 4 days to complete), two photos of myself, copies of DEEP IN THE DARKNESS, and THE DEMONOLOGIST, along with some another personal items such as my birth certificate, etc, I headed off into Manhattan to audition for Big Brother. Now, mind you, I’m a big Survivor fan, and had originally applied for this show. After finding out that BB had some interest in me, I’d learned as much about the show as possible, and realized it was pretty much like Survivor, only with comforts, like food, beds, showers, beer, etc.

So, I arrive an hour early, expecting to see a line around the building. Instead, I find only about 15 people hanging around, waiting in the lobby of a small studio. It was cold and rainy that day, and I was grateful not to be outside. By the time 11:00 rolled around, there were perhaps 100 people there—not a lot. I later found out that this was an invite only audition, so I felt honored to be there amongst all the actor-wannabes with their suave headshots and spiked hair. Finally, they begin bringing groups of ten upstairs. They put us in a small gymnasium where the casting director, a bald biker-looking dude with lots of tattoos and earrings, tells us we have three minutes to impress: “Tell me why I should pick YOU for the show.”

Okay—after days and days of memorizing what I was gonna say, I had about five minutes to come up with something fresh and exciting…and completely different.

So, folks start filing into a small closed-door office…and after five minutes, filing out. I’ve got my application in hand, and soon enough, I get called.

I’m led into a small room. There’s a camera, and an ‘X’ on the ground. The bald biker dude is there, and tells me to stand on the ‘X’. There’s also a couple of young kids, interns or assistants I’d assumed. He tells me to state my name, my age, and my hometown. Then he asks the question: “What would make you a good contestant for Big Brother?”

So I begin to bullshit: Well, I’m an extremely confident person. I know I can win. I also possess all of the traits that in my opinion makes an interesting BB player. On the outside, I am a sweet, charming, suave, soft-spoken gentleman. On the inside, I’m really working everyone. As a horror fiction writer, it’s my job to get into people’s heads, to figure what makes them tick, what their likes and dislike are, and then to write about it. So, I’ll make mental notes about everyone, and believe me, in 24 hours I’ll know more about every person in that house than everyone else will ever know about me. It’s all about character development, applying my writing techniques to the real world. I do it all the time.

I am a very determined, creative person. Ten years ago, I’d never written a single word in my life. Now, I’ve published four novels. It’s the creative instinct in me that will make me one of the best players BB has ever seen. I’m the guy that reads princess stories to his two daughters, tucks them in, then goes downstairs to write about organ-hungry zombies and serial killers with power tools. Many people, when they meet me at first, see this smiling, charming, sophisticated Italian boy. After they read my books, they’re second guessing me. Everyone asks me: what’s going on in that head of yours? Well, the other houseguests will be thinking the same thing, and they’ll hesitate voting me off because, one, they like having me around, and two, they’ll be determined to find out what makes me tick as well.

From that point on, the casting director starts asking me tons of questions about my writing. I give him copies of my books, and before I leave (fifteen minutes later), he asks me to sign them for him. Cool. I say good-bye, and go home and wait. And wait.

And wait.

I figure nothing is going to come of it, when my cell phone rings. I’m at the gym. I look at the number and do not recognize it. Hrmm. When I pick up, a man asks for me. He introduces himself as a casting director from LA, and says, “Congratulations Michael, you’ve made the BB semi-finals.”

Wow.

Now, this is where the fun (or anxiety) really kicks in. I had to download a 70-page (that’s right, 70) application. I am told to bring it, completely filled out, along with my birth certificate, to a midtown Manhattan hotel the following week. I am given a time, and am told not to show up more than five minutes early. I am told what type of clothing to wear, and when I arrive, am told not to lie about anything, or I’ll get thrown out. So I pretty much stress out for a week. I think about having to make the trip to LA and spend three months in a house with complete strangers, all vying for a half-million dollars. And all I keep telling myself is: This oughtta sell a TON of books.

A week passes by. The day of my interview has finally arrived. I take an extended lunch hour, and walk to Times Square to the hotel where my semi-final interview is located. I ride up to the sixth floor, and find a suite where there are a few people lounging about. Here is where they take my monstrous application, and then ask me to sign a waiver that states I cannot divulge any aspect of the forthcoming interview with anyone, including my family. In the event that they discover I am on the internet blogging about every detail, they will sue me for 5 million dollar.

Hrmm…might be a good way to sell books.

Anyway, for reasons explained, I really can’t tell you the details, but I will say that it was intense. It lasted about 45 minutes, and I was in a dark room with bright lights in my eyes the whole time. I was grilled bigtime, and then was sent on my way.

But, before leaving, I made certain the CBS casting director from LA got copies of my books.

I walked out of there, feeling that I wasn’t going to be picked, and I wasn’t, obviously. But next year, I’ll know what to expect. And, hopefully, I’ll be away all summer with a chance of pocketing a half-million dollars, and the reality of selling a ton of books.

First day of autumn.

That means, among other things, that it’s almost time to buy firewood for the winter. And I hate to do that, because it requires going back to the wood lot, and I never want to go back to the wood lot again. It’s just too scary.

Many people think that Arizona is just hot and dry all the time, and they’re wrong. Arizona is a huge state containing every ecosystem you’d find traveling from Mexico to Canada. The Flying M Ranch is a little over 4,000 feet in elevation, and in winter it gets cold. We have two woodstoves to supplement the central heating, and have at least one of them burning most nights in late fall and winter.

But there’s only one “wood guy” in our area, old Joe. The first time I called Joe last year, I asked if he had a half-cord of 16-inch logs. He told me that he did, so I got in the truck and drove over, about 20 minutes from home.

When I got there, his wife came out and said no, they didn’t have any 16s. Joe had been sick, she said, so he hadn’t been out of bed much and didn’t know that they’d sold out. But another load was expected soon, so I should check back.

Which I did. When I called a little more than a week later, Joe said he had a half-cord of 16-inchers left that I could buy. I made the drive again, hoping that he wasn’t still thinking about the one that had been sold before. But no, this time he met me at the door and volunteered to walk me out to where it was in the lot—even though, he told me, he’d had pneumonia and complications and had mostly spent the past six months in bed.

So we walked. Or I walked. I’m not sure what you call what he did. His paces were about an inch long, and his feet barely left the ground. Joe is not a small man to begin with, and six months in bed doesn’t count as an exercise regime. So I tried to not leave him too far behind, since I didn’t know where we were going, and he took these tiny steps, about as vigorous and sure-footed as an infant letting go of dad’s knees for the first time.

As we walked, the family’s dogs barked and growled at us, which they tend to do, although they didn’t approach us. I had waited too late in the season and the day was cold, leaden skied, with gusts of bitter winds.

The wood lot is less than an acre, to the east of the house. Cords of wood in 16 or 18-inch lengths, stacked between posts, scattered over bare earth. Most of the area is covered in grass and brush, but the land of the wood lot feels blighted, nothing growing there but a few scraggly weeds. Maybe the dogs knew something we didn’t, because they wouldn’t follow us in.

A little more than halfway to my half-cord, I stepped over a tiny corner of chicken wire fence laying on the ground. You know how thick chicken wire tends to be, right? Maybe 1/50th of an inch, if that?

But when Joe reached those minute strands of wire, in my wake, he couldn’t get his foot over them. Somehow that tiny big of fence tripped big Joe, and he toppled like a redwood. Face down, not even putting his hands out to stop himself as you or I would likely do. He landed with his hands still at his sides, breaking his fall with his protruding gut and his face.

I rushed to his side and helped him back to his feet. His forehead was bleeding and he was winded from the fall. Holding his arm to help keep him balanced, I assisted him to the half-cord I was looking for, and he leaned on a nearby stack of logs while I fetched my truck and started loading. Joe apologized for not helping me load, but I didn’t want to see him have a heart attack or anything, so I was happy to do it myself.

As I loaded, his wife and daughters came into the driveway in their truck, having just made a delivery. The dogs took time off from yapping at us to run and yap around the wheels of the truck, and one of them ran right into the front left tire as the truck pulled to a stop.

The dog yelped once and then fell over into the dust, twitching, trying to regain its footing.

At which point the rest of the dogs, five or six of them, turned at once into a savage pack and tore viciously into the injured animal. They snarled, snapped, bit, until the injured dog was dead and blood spattered the dusty driveway. Once he was dead, they lost interest, and wandered away.

Joe and I watched the whole thing happen, too far away to do anything even if there had been anything we could have done.

When it was over, Joe turned to me. “That one was my dog,” he said. “The rest of those are her dogs, but that one was mine. Well, I’ve got one other, that gray one.” He pointed to a dog tied near the house, unable to join the pack. “But he’s mean, and I’ve got to put him down.”

I loaded the rest of my wood as quickly as possible. When I drove away, the dead dog still lay in the dust of the driveway.

And people wonder where horror writers get our ideas….

Jeff Mariotte

http://www.jeffmariotte.com
http://jeff_mariotte.typepad.com/my_weblog/

by Brian Keene

“At the very bottom of (a writer’s) motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon…”

George Orwell

Write what you know. How many times have you, as a writer, been told that, or told somebody else that? As far as advice for writers goes, ‘write what you know’ ranks alongside ‘write every day’ and ‘read every day’.

Write what you know is sound advice. It’s also very good therapy.

Here’s something we’re not supposed to tell you guys: horror writers are fucked up individuals. It’s true. Yes, horror writers have the best sense of humor, but we’ve also got more issues than anyone—-even more than the romance writers. We are fucked up. Consider. Robert E. Howard killed himself in a fit of depression. Poe died a drunk; face down in the gutter. Bierce became so disillusioned with his life that he vanished (and the circumstances surrounding his death remain a mystery). Lovecraft—-I don’t have to tell you how fucked up he was. Read his letters and see for yourself.

This isn’t to suggest that other people aren’t just as fucked up, because they are. Human beings, in general, all have issues. But we deal with them in different ways. A regular, every day person might disappear into a bottle, or try to solve their problems with the needle’s sting. Or they go to therapy, where they pay a lot of money to somebody with a degree, and talk about their troubles. Or they find religion. Or money. Or death.

But creative types generally deal with their problems in a different way. Stand-up comedians like Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, and Sam Kinison laughed at their troubles, and made us laugh in the process. Axl Rose, Johnny Cash, Morrissey, and Trent Reznor put it to music, and make us cry at the familiarity of feelings. The same holds true for filmmakers, poets, actors, and painters.

And then there’s us, the writers. And since this Blog is for horror writers, let’s focus on that particular microcosm. Just like everyone else, horror writers are driven by demons. Perhaps that’s why we write about demons.

It’s certainly why I do.

Everything an author writes is, to some extent, autobiographical. If a writer denies this then they are full of shit, and tell them Brian Keene said so. All fiction contains an ounce of truth. Characters share the same traits as those around us—-and often our self. Situations mirror things we’ve gone through in real life. The names may have been changed to protect the guilty, but it’s there. Sometimes, this is a conscious decision. Other times, we aren’t even aware we were doing it until the work is finished. But it is always there, the truth.

This is called writing what you know.

I’ve got a friend whose father passed away when he was very young. My friend has grown into a fine man, but those demons of childhood loss pop up in his fiction—-and his stories are richer and better because of it. I’ve got another friend who loved and lost—-and lost HARD. He’s never made peace with it, never gotten over it, and you can see this every time you read one of his stories. They drip with emotion; loss and despair and a simmering anger. And they are hands down the most powerful things he’s ever written.

I’ve got issues, too. Yeah, I know. You’re really surprised. But it’s true. I’ve been to therapy and tried religion and the bottle and pills. I didn’t find peace in any of those things. I found peace with words. So I deal with my problems by writing about them.

When I was young, I did something incredibly stupid. I married a girl just to piss another girl off. On Brian Keene’s List of Top Ten Stupidest Things I’ve Ever Done, this takes number one with a fucking bullet. But despite this incredible lapse of common sense, something good came out of it. I had a son, whom I loved very much.

Then we got divorced. For years, I had a good relationship with my son. I paid my child support on time, and was involved with every aspect of his life. Saw him on weekends, summers, and holidays. Talked to him on the phone. Then, my ex-wife got re-married and found religion, and suddenly, I wasn’t allowed to see my son anymore. I fought it, of course, but the battle was a long and arduous process and it left me drained. Left me angry. Left me a scarred and fucked up individual.

So I wrote about it. I sliced my wrists open and bled all over the page. The Rising was the result. A lot of people think The Rising is this massive zombie-reinvention novel, but it isn’t. All that The Rising ever was, for me, was a way to work out the issues I had going on in my life. It’s a story about a father separated from his son, and how he’ll do anything to be reunited with him again. The zombies were merely window dressing.

If you didn’t know me, or if I hadn’t just told you that, you would have never guessed. I’ve gotten a lot of emails and letters from readers in the three years since that book first came out, and do you know what most of them say? “I really liked the father looking for his son. It seemed real to me.”

Yeah, it did. Because I lived that shit. And though I’m not one to walk around wearing my heart on my sleeve, I was willing to let those emotions bleed out all over the page. I did it again for City of the Dead. Same thing happened with Terminal. I had some deep issues with God, felt he owed me an answer, and when I didn’t get one, I cut my other wrist and bled out again. I do it with the majority of my fiction, especially short stories. The stories in Fear of Gravity are like snapshots from my life. Each one is a wound that would not heal, a scar that would not vanish, until I re-opened those wounds and bled. You don’t know that, because you don’t really know me. But in a way, you do.

Because when I write, I’m asking you to bleed with me.

Everybody has issues. Sometimes we share the same ghosts, the same demons. But despite that, our lives are unique. We are not interchangeable. We each have our own stories to tell, things that happened in our lives that define us, make us who we are. I am convinced that you cannot truly become a good writer until you have experienced these things for yourself. All of it, good and bad, is fodder for the muse. You went through it all for a reason, and that reason is what we do. Embrace it. Embrace your destiny. If you want to be a writer, if you want to create realistic characters and situations, then write what you know. Embrace your memories and your fears. Drive your ghosts away. Exorcise your demons.

Cut yourself open, and bleed onto the page.

There’s a ‘horror’ in ‘horror writers.’ We deal in terror. We examine fears. Turn the telescope inward and examine your own. Were you raped? Abused? Bullied as a child? Have you lost a loved one to cancer or Alzheimer’s? Bid goodbye to your sweetheart, knowing that you’ll never see them again? Suffered a miscarriage? Been lied to? Cheated on? Betrayed? Did you lose your faith? Find out everything you ever believed in was a sham? Have you encountered racism or hatred, illness or death? Battled the bottle or the needle or the soft siren’s call of comfortably numbing depression? Name your demons. Who are the ghosts that come back to haunt you when you turn out the light?

It’s all there, in your blood. Bleed with me.

This is your blood, which has been shed for them. Spill it, in remembrance of the things that make you who you are. Spill it for your craft. Spill it for your readers. Spill it for your soul and for your peace of mind and for your muse.

Write what you know. Give your characters a blood transfusion. It takes courage. But they’ll thank you for it. And so will your readers.

And so will you.

Hand me that razor. I’ve got something new to get off my chest.

–Brian Keene

*Thanks to Geoff Cooper for allowing me to swipe his short story title, “Bleed With Me.”

It’s a known fact that deadlines can cause hives, hypertension, hyperventilation, hair loss, and hernias (The latter is a condition inherent to lifting heavy objects (i.e. the computer) with the express intention of tossing said heavy object out the window.)

Of course these symptoms can be associated to stress, but in a writer’s life, I think stress is an altruistic term that’s used to mask the true identity of the culprit determined to weaken us. That culprit is Ms. Muse, an egotistical, sadistic bitch, who fills your head with the promise of something fresh and exciting, then when you rush to the keyboard to make it concrete, she decides to take an extended coffee break, leaving you with a blinking cursor, an antsy editor, and a nervous agent. Add to that life’s simple challenges—the refrigerator that needs restocking, the phone that won’t stop ringing, the dust bunnies that have turned into allergen-infested jackrabbits because you’ve ignored them for so long—and, yeah, I can see where hives might become an issue.

Although I’d been warned by other writers about the effects of Ms. Muse’s antics and the challenge of writing through life’s little issues, it took me a while to catch on. Over time, though, this writer eventually learned to work through Muse’s insubordination, unplug the phone, turn a blind eye to jackrabbits, and pizza delivery continues to be the alternative to an empty fridge.

But no one ever warned me about terrorists and hurricanes.

My soul went numb after Katrina. So many deaths, so much destruction, too close to home. For the first two weeks, I felt like a traitor and an insensitive jerk every time I sat down to write, deadline or no deadline. The words, any words, felt trite and trivial in the face of such a disaster. People had died, more people were dying, and one of the most beloved cities in my state was sitting under six feet of water and sludge. How could anyone write past that? Why would anyone want to? Life’s priorities seemed to do an abrupt realignment, and I was consumed with thanksgiving for the safety of my family, prayers for those still suffering, and the need to help in any way I could. It was the same after 9-11. Disbelief and shock ruptured any pretense to creativity.

It took two months before I could write again after 9-11, and although one would think I’d be frozen for much longer with this catastrophe falling in my own back yard, I’ve found that not to be the case. In fact, the opposite is true. After going through an avalanche of emotions that volleyed between grief and fury, something seemed to click inside of me, and I began to write—and write—and write. I don’t know if it’s because I’m Cajun or because my stories are set in Louisiana, but I became consumed with an overwhelming sense of duty to have these southern voices heard.

Yes, it would have been easier if Ms. Muse, who I’ve come to call ‘Ms. Thing,’ had cooperated some months ago. If she had, I’d be way ahead of schedule. But it doesn’t matter now. Something bigger drives me, and Ms. Thing can either choose to come along for the ride or keep her pretentious ass in hibernation for all I care. I’m a writer dammit, and come hell AND high water these voices will be heard.

–Deborah LeBlanc