Storytellersunplugged

By David Niall Wilson

A local reading group recently took up the challenge of my novel, Deep Blue. I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the discussion session, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to share that experience. I don’t have to tell most of you what a thrill it was to sit at a table with a group of people who had actually read my book, or how rare that experience can be.

I’ll admit that going in I was terrified, and there were several reasons for this. First off, all of the readers in this particular group are women. This isn’t particularly frightening in and of itself, but these ladies include my boss, a very intelligent and picky reader, and a group of her friends. I knew none of the others before that night – so I had no idea what their backgrounds might be, in what direction their literary tastes might run, or whether my book was in any way appropriate.

Another problem was that, despite my insistence over time that “Deep Blue” is my best novel, I find that I’ve grown somewhat distant from it. The things I was experiencing when I wrote the novel aren’t as immediate to me as they once were, and taking an analytical approach to the book, I’m not as sure of its quality as I once was. For one thing, the language in the first chapter is pretty coarse, and the overall environment in which the characters exist is fairly depressing. I think that there are some likable characters for readers to identify with, but that they are not necessarily likeable in the early stages of the novel. I’m reminded of some of the books I love by authors like Peter Straub – books where you have to read an inordinate amount of pages before the pace kicks in and you are mesmerized, but knowing the story as I do, I have lost the mesmerized point almost entirely.

Anyway, after getting lost only one time in downtown Edenton, NC, I parked and found Jeanne (my boss) on the sidewalk. We made our way to the restaurant where they meet, got a table, and waited. There was a piano player in the front window of the place, and he was pretty good, though a little loud for conversation. At one point he joined us at the table, as my companions had the notion of fixing him up with yet another of their friends, but this faded as the young man (very talented, I might add) had a girlfriend already, and shared a lot of personality traits with a damp rag. (I’m probably being harsh, but he wasn’t exactly charming…) As I sat nervously, the other ladies trickled in, and I was introduced. My nerves faded slightly as each of them smiled.

We started slowly. They are all close friends, and they have a lot of peripheral things to talk about. These things became part and parcel of the discussion, blending in and out so easily I almost felt like I knew their friends and families before we were done. In any case, I got to sit back, listen, and enjoy being the only guy at a table of beautiful and animated women. Eventually we started talking about Deep Blue, and that’s when it got interesting.

I learned, for instance, why there are birds on the cover of my novel. I used them symbolically in the novel, but hadn’t remembered it. I probably knew this at some point, but the ending of the novel (to me) is about snakes and drumsticks, and I lost the birds in my own pattern. It was noted that I have at least one character I could have done without, that a lot of my characters seem to speak in the same “voice,” and that the action in one particular passage confused all but one of the readers. At least two readers thought that all of my characters were actually dead – or ghosts. Still others thought they were on drugs, or insane. Old Wally, the harmonica playing mentor to my protagonist, Brandt, was not defined well enough. He might have been alive, dead, or somewhere in between, but whatever it was he wasn’t clear enough. There were an inordinate number of passages in the first chapter (the original novelette) involving tears, and the word “pain” was used a great number of times (Maria is a word counter…sorry I forgot the exact number of tear-inducing moments, but it’s a very valid point) All of them approached the book differently, as well as having a different method of preparing for the discussion. I found, for instance, that at least one of them had actually looked up my web site, read my biography and reviews for the book. (Thanks Kate)

None of them disliked the book, though admittedly most if not all of them would not have chosen it from the shelves. They asked a lot of questions about what I was thinking, about my religious background, and about writing. We talked about everything from Nicholas Sparks to Clive Cussler, commented on formulaic fiction and television commercials. For instance, I learned it isn’t just me who finds it ludicrous that an overweight Australian guy who looks a bit like the “PC” from the Mac/PC commercials is the spokesman for a supposedly Mexican food chain (Taco Bell).

Not all of them finished the book – there was one holdout – but I understand this is about as close as any book has ever come, so that made me feel good, as well. The last of them to arrive was close to finishing, but just didn’t make it. It was harder for her – and I had expected that it would be for some readers — because of her strong religious beliefs and the subject matter of the novel. Also, it was the Christmas holiday – not the best time to curl up and relax with a book, if you have a family.

Not once was I asked if I know Stephen King, or where my ideas come from (though the subject was discussed in a different context). They were perceptive enough to guess that a lot of “Dave” is in the characters in Deep Blue, and if you know the novel, you’ll know that they gave me a couple of nervous, sidelong glances while wondering just how much of those characters was me. I explained to them about my childhood with a drunken stepfather. He was the one who listened to endless Hank Williams Senior albums and I was the kid in the basement with a guitar thats “action” was so stiff and strings so far off the fret board it was nearly impossible to play a chord.

We talked about patterns. You can’t talk about Deep Blue without those patterns – the ones that run in and around us all the time, slipping into the conversation. Each of them had a different perception of those, as well, and what I learned was something I knew, but had forgotten. A book is very different for every reader, despite the common ground it can create. The experience of writing a book is a very personal, individual one, and so is the experience of reading it. I suppose that the patterns I see in the world, and the words, are the same – that if I look at a painting by Van Gogh, and another person sees that same painting, our reactions will be entirely different.

I had a lot of fun that evening, and hope to do it again one day. When I revise Deep Blue for inclusion in the series / trilogy I’ve planned, “The Chord at the End of the Rainbow,” I’ll be keeping the notes I made after this discussion close to hand (and will reduce the number of times I use the word pain, as well as drying up some tears…and when I’m done you will KNOW who had the hot soup spilled on them). Until then, my thanks go out to Jeanne, Kate, Kristi, Vicki, and Maria. I’d also like to thank you all for the first line of a future book, or story. “You should never mix trampolines and fireworks.” (I think I got that right…Kristi is the one with the trampoline, so she’d know…)

The ladies of the rectangle table told me that if any other brave author who might be able to journey into the wilds of Edenton North Carolina for the discussion might want their books read by this august gathering, they can make contact through me, and I’ll be happy to make introductions.

Until next month,

ONWARD!

DNW

by Guest Storyteller Jeff Osier

I used to think of myself as a writer. Never mind the details. Started when I was a little kid, went through a new phase every year (at least), started submitting stories to magazines in my mid-twenties, accumulated rejection slips, found some sympathetic editors in the small press, managed to get about thirty short stories published, co-wrote a nonfiction book that actually got published, wrote a couple of novels, one of which I had an agent try to sell. I never did sell one, though. Finally, I ran out of gas. I never ran out of ideas. I never suffered from writer’s block. I just gradually came to realize that I hated the way I wrote, hated everything I’d ever gotten published, and had grown dissatisfied and disillusioned with the whole enterprise. Besides, I was finding that idly drawing cartoons and playing guitar and mandolin brought me infinitely more satisfaction than writing.

See, more than anything else, I’m a shameless dabbler. I’ve spent most of the past few years content to think of myself as an ex-writer, when I’ve thought about it at all.

In September 2005 my wife and I visited my daughter in Austin, TX. She was a senior at the University of Texas at the time, and living in a co-op with about fifteen other people. As a result, we were spending a lot of time around twenty-year-olds who don’t live with their parents. In addition, my wife had brought along some early Elvis Costello, so I found myself listening to a lot of music I’d loved when I was in my own early twenties. Somehow, the conjunction of these two things, over the course of five days and a heat wave during which the daytime temperature never dipped below 100 degrees, triggered something in me. Something trivial, of course.

It got me thinking about… well… going to art school in the ‘70s. Things I used to do. Things I wished I’d done better. People I used to know. People I wished I’d known. And of course, things I wished I’d figured out decades before I did.

I brought a little germ of an idea home from Austin with me. It wasn’t a story idea. No, this was just fodder for what over the next couple of months became a ridiculously potent fantasy exercise: I’m 21 again, only this time I’m making more interesting choices, meeting cooler people, and screwing up in much more impressive and colorful ways. Just something to ponder when I’m too lazy to read or draw or practice the mandolin.

A job. A neighborhood. Art school, of course. Characters defined by a trait or an ambition or a resemblance to someone real. Or, sometimes, the real people I knew at the time. Underground comics and especially their spawn: lowbrow painting. And of course punk and new wave, 1977 style. A band.

Just props in this little scenario I was dreaming up.

Then there was the girl. I mean, what would my utopian art school experience be without the perfect art school girlfriend? Except that, of course, she was far from perfect. I tempered her character with the coolest maladies I could conjure. As fall progressed, I realized that everything else was just the background for the strange, spectacular girl I’d invented.

By early December, I was actually starting to worry about myself. These people were casting shadows.

In January I tried reading Don Quixote. I’m pretty sure I would have enjoyed it too, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d sit there with the book in my lap for two hours at a stretch and read thirty pages… maybe. I was too lost in my own daydreams to even read. Finally, I sat my wife down and told her everything that had been happening over the past three-plus months. Her reaction?

“It sounds like a novel.”

“But it isn’t even a story. It’s just a series of triumphs and ridiculous good luck.”

“Well… start writing it down. At least get it out of your system.”

So, on January 10, 2006, I created a document and churned out several fragments: an introduction to a character, dialog between the two main characters, and another dialog between two other characters. Looking over it afterwards, it didn’t seem like much.

But the next night I created another document and did more of the same, just hopping around in time, introducing new characters or fleshing out the ones already introduced. The writing was no better, but what did that matter?

One month later, I had about ten of these documents. Out of curiosity, I created a new document and called it ‘timeline.’ I went through all of the other documents, copied the material I liked and pasted it into the timeline doc, in chronological order. It came to 110 double-spaced pages. The writing was awful, the characters were changing names and attributes daily, and half the scenes I wrote seemed unusable even as I was copying them into my timeline. But why did it have to be usable?

To focus myself a little better, I picked beginning and end dates and decided to limit myself to events occurring within that time period. There was no plot, just a series of accomplishments. In fact, the whole story could be summed up thus: boy meets girl, boy and girl start writing songs and painting together, boy and girl start a band, and, at the very end, boy and girl decide to start their own comic book. That was it. But since this wasn’t a novel, why did it have to be interesting?

I came up with weird ways of working. Sometimes I would thoroughly work out a scene in my head, write it, and insert it into the timeline. Then, a few weeks later, never having gone back to what I’d written, I would have completely rethought the scene in my head, so I would rewrite it from scratch. Only then would I reread my original version. A slightly modified version of the winner would get to take up residence in the timeline.

In March I started subjecting my main characters to stresses I hadn’t considered before. In fact, the characters themselves were always suggesting disastrous, life-ruining experiences to me. I still didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. They just… insisted on it.

And then I realized what I had to do. It was so simple. Since the bulk of the story took place over a period of exactly a year, I decided that I would make that year the best and the worst that either of the two main characters would ever have. Possibilities were bubbling up constantly and I followed every one of them, just stretching the characters to their breaking points to see what would happen.

Organizing this… stuff… into a novel wasn’t something I set out to do. But now, old habits were asserting themselves. I had no idea who would ever want to read this thing. It would help to have an audience, though, wouldn’t it? Not to motivate me, because I clearly needed no outside motivation. No, if I selected an audience I would feel more of a compulsion to make it interesting. You know… interesting to other people? The real ones, living outside my head? So I picked my wife. She was the one who really had played in bands and had led a genuinely interesting, exciting life. I tried to imagine, if this was a novel by someone other than her husband and she picked it up in a bookstore, what would make it interesting enough for her to want to read it?

On July 19, a little over six months after I started, I had a 754-page first draft. I had written the whole thing in a series of eighty-some individual documents and had alternate versions of many scenes, as well as scenes that never made it into the timeline. So who knows how many pages I really wrote over those six months. Close to a thousand, I imagine. To celebrate, I read the whole thing from beginning to the end (onscreen), rewriting like crazy and – just to make it look more like a novel – took the rash step of dividing it into chapters.

And so I found myself doing whatever I could to make sure that this thing turned out to be everything I swore I didn’t care about when I first started writing it. By the end of October, it was about 560 manuscript pages. My wife had already read a draft of it and made plenty of helpful suggestions, but I wanted other people to read it. I wanted confirmation or refutation of something that was starting to seem very insistent to me.

I was beginning to believe that I’d actually done something pretty good, something I wouldn’t have believed myself capable of: writing a snappy mainstream novel. I pushed my manuscript off onto other people, hungry for feedback. And, almost without thinking about it, I went out and bought a Guide to Literary Agents, and am trying to learn the craft of writing a decent query letter…

I don’t hold out huge hopes. Obviously. But it turned out so well that I can’t help but follow through. I’ve been churning out drawings and stories and playing instruments and writing tunes for most of my life, and I’ve never done anything that was so euphoric to work on and that I was so proud of when it was done. I’m sure that the pride I feel when I reread this manuscript is eighty percent my memory of the emotional state I was in when I wrote it, and that a great deal of what made writing this novel so incredible never really made it to the page – at least not in a form anyone else would catch.

It was never my intention to worry about those kinds of things. But suddenly I have this fast-paced, dialog-driven little novel that resembles nothing I’ve ever done before, and that seems to work better than anything I’ve ever written before. I’d be an idiot not to try to do something with this.

But of course I still think of myself as an ex-writer. Knowing myself as I do, 2006 could easily have been a fluke. I’m still trying to build my repertoire on mandolin, I’ve got some half-written tunes that require me to start playing electric guitar again, while writing a book about oil painters really makes me want to relearn how to oil paint, etc., etc. Who knows which of these things I’ll waste my time on in 2007? The idea that I’d just keep writing – that maybe I was on a roll and ought to try writing another novel while I still have the momentum – sounds like too sensible, too workable a plan for a shameless dabbler such as myself.

On the other hand, these characters resonated so much with me, and so many of them didn’t make it into the novel, I accidentally came up with an idea for a follow-up novel. A month or so ago, I wrote a four-page fragment. Nothing since, except that in my head, I’ve figured out the entire story. Names of characters, the subplots and the points at which they intersect, locations, conversations… all bubbling up in the same way they were a year ago. There is one difference: if I were to sit down today, I could already write a fairly detailed outline of this second book. But I won’t… I think I want it to stay fluid for a while longer. I seem to work better that way.

Wait a minute. Did I just say work?

I don’t know what the hell to do.

I may never finish Don Quixote.

—Jeff Osier

by Dick Hill

I think my good friend Rick Steinberg mentioned in these pages as he covered for me last month that he did so because I was involved in the longest, most challenging narration job of my life, the taping of AGAINST THE DAY, Thomas Pynchon’s latest, longest, long awaited novel, to which information I must add my confession , that in truth I had never read Pynchon before being awarded this job, which, given the buzz about the work, and the huge splash created in literary waters by the controversial prize-winner and his Olympic sized opus, I consider it an honor to have been charged with, particularly in light of the enormous challenges presented by a genius of this sort to any reader, let alone a reader presuming to read the words aloud, for those words issue forth in a variety of styles that range from boy’s adventure novel to science-fiction to humorous song, (not always in English) to noir detective homage, and through half a dozen more styles and enough characters (numbering in the hundreds!) that I created an alphabetized set of index cards to keep their voices straight, though not all of the characters were, straight that is, for a fair number of them were of Cambridge education, though among those were not the anarchists, bombers, private detectives, nor Bela Lugosi or any of the plutocrats or the quaternionists and other mathematical types who spouted formulae that were greek to me and for the most part the western American sorts who brought to mind sometimes the classic literary cowboy sort though they tended more often to have a mining background which accounted for their familiarity with explosives that gave them a connection to other miners and bombers in Europe and Italian submariners and of course the wonderful yet awful mayonnaise drowning scene and the various foreign names and places which posed a challenge which was surpassed only by the master writer’s incredible vocabulary, embracing as it did an awe-inspiring and somewhat depressing number of English words I’d never before heard nor dreamt of and all this in a book of 1085 pages, which came out to a little over 53 hours of recorded audio and the largest check I have ever received, said fact being but one of the marvels about this work, not the least of which was the occasional inclusion of sentences nearly as long as this one, though far more gracefully shaped.

That’s in contrast to something I heard yesterday on NPR, a

snippet in which some sort of challenge was made to sum up an idea, or a life principle, or even, perhaps, a life in only six words. The fellow did so thusly, as an example

“If there’s more, I want it”. Six words. They said a lot.

It appears to me that unless one is truly titanic in terms of talent, (as Mr. Pynchon most certainly is, in my estimation. My director, engineer, lover, wife Susie and I stopped to marvel at some passage of cutting humor, erotic intensity, brilliant philosophical insight, groan-worthy punsmanship or some other masterstroke of literary derring-do a hundred times or more) it might be wise to exercise some judicious restraint when it comes to verbiage, and the six word exercise might be helpful in developing writer’s muscles of that sort . That’s all I have this month. I may be fulla’ shit. Often am. So here I offer my attempt, …….

Cut, cut, then cut some more.

dick hill

And then there’s that old adage about dealing with life’s pressures that goes, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Yep, keeping your eye on the big picture is always vital. Getting bogged down in niggling details is a good way to send your blood pressure skyrocketing, particularly when, in the overall scheme of things, they’re inconsequential. I know a young woman who can spend three hours trying to figure out which pair of earrings goes with a particular outfit. She’s usually very late to any given destination.

However, I find that, in the literary world, small stuff often has value many times the sum of its wee little parts. There’s a difference between meaningful details and trivial verbiage. Sometimes, without the little things, the big picture isn’t quite what it could or should be.

To offer an example, allow me to pick on Rex Miller’s Slob. Now, you may have adored Slob and Miller’s villainous Chaingang in general, and that’s just fine; however, I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t like Slob, and it’s not because the title character is a very wicked large man. In the main, I find that novel to be empty and lifeless, despite prose that is often manic. Its characters are as dull as three-day-old snow, and its setting is meaningless. At least a portion of the book is said to take place in Chicago, but I’ve never found a word in the novel, other than the city’s name, that would identify the setting as the Windy City. You may say, well, that’s not terribly important, given the thrust of the novel. Perhaps my priorities are different from yours, and that’s okay too, but I happen to find this particular shortcoming one that is both common and more significant than it might appear on the surface.

Fiction, the novel in particular, is very much like a tapestry, with many disparate elements coming together to create an image, or series of them, and when the small stuff is out of alignment, the entire thing is caddywhompus. (I’ll go out on a limb and calculate that you don’t really want a caddywhompus tapestry on your wall.) People and places are integral building blocks of a story, and glossing over little details in the interest of “plot” may actually detract from that ever-important bigger picture. If Miller had for one second convinced me that the events of Slob actually were happening in Chicago, I might have been more willing to buy the rest of what was going on. Instead, I found that the lack of local color only continued to spiral farther out of hand, pulling me farther and farther out of the book.

With Chicago having established itself as a setting of note here, I’m going to pick a little bit—in a different way—on Wayne Allen Sallee, whose name may ring a bell with many of you who read a lot of horror fiction in the late 80s and early 90s. Sallee set much of his work in Chicago, and though his plots often necessitated no such specific setting, the fact that he was forever giving us little glimpses of life in that city, of places that actually exist or might exist, brought home the power of his story in ways that ought to have made Mr. Miller drool. Even one of Sallee’s titles—“Dead Things in Barrington Road”—fills me with intrigue (the fact that I’ve actually driven down Barrington Road notwithstanding) because it lets me know that, no matter how fantastic, there’s something real at the heart of this story. Sallee’s characters usually have little quirks or mannerisms that serve to make them truly human, often a result of some affliction. Sallee has been intimately acquainted with pain in his lifetime, and his fiction usually throbs with it. He paints a picture of what it feels like to have slivers of glass embedded in your skin by offering you small but crucial details, not just of the pain, but—by way of contrast—what the character is seeing in the setting; what other characters are saying in the background; what song is playing somewhere within earshot. Sallee is a master of combining storytelling with the minutiae of the moment.

It’s a style I particularly appreciate.

I attribute the mastery of such style to the writer being a master of observation. Most of the best writers I know will tell you that they are forever watching people, listening to them, making notes—mental or otherwise—about little behaviors, manners of speaking, personal quirks…anything that stands out, no matter how minor. I also tend to be fond of works in which the setting plays an important role—in essence, becoming another character. A location, real or imagined, can be as unique and engaging as the human protagonists and antagonists. One recent example that comes to mind is Nate Kenyon’s novel, Bloodstone—his first, by the way—which features a well-rendered setting, with many hues of local color, even though the place is fabricated. (The novel includes a map of the town, another little touch of verisimilitude that I especially appreciate.)

Here are a few examples of “little things” that I’ve worked into various of my tales because, for whatever reason at the time, they struck me as meaningful.

While at a local restaurant, a young fellow at another table ordered a piece of cake, and it was obviously the most wonderful stuff. While everyone else was cutting up and acting rowdy, he became very subdued and with quiet dignity sat there and enjoyed his cake. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so contented—so beatific. I’ve never quite understood why, but in that moment, in that act, I felt something strangely profound—something that made me feel fondness for this fellow I had never met. It was such an unusual feeling that I worked it into a story called “Last Show at Verdi’s Supper Club,” and due to the events that follow, to me, there’s a certain poignancy about the scene, I think, that the story might otherwise lack.

A little detail in a Civil War story that I put before a critique group struck more than one individual as singularly “authentic.” In the scene, a solder is killed by a bayonet—not thrust by an enemy, but hurled as a projectile by a cannon exploding nearby. I had read of this happening in an account of the Battle of Gettysburg, and I thought it noteworthy enough to cannibalize. Was it a strategic plot point? Hardly, but it was one of those unique moments that helped draw readers deeper into the story.

While constructing my novel, Blue Devil Island, over a period of several years, I tracked down all kinds of information about World War II in the Pacific. By way of various combat reports, I learned a lot about the weather in certain areas of the Solomon Islands. If a combat report specified that it was raining over Kahili at 2:30 p.m. on November 3, 1943, then in Blue Devil Island, by God, it’s raining then and there.

Okay, well, that one may be a little extreme perhaps, but hey—I know.

In the end, it’s the mixture of ingredients in a story that determine its success or failure, and details that on the surface seem trivial may add up to a series of hooks that you wouldn’t want to go without. Judicious use of the small stuff may be just the touch of verisimilitude that makes your work more accessible—and more memorable—to your readers.

—Mark Rainey

At the very beginning of the year, I sat down to post a rant on my web site. Why I felt the need to do this is still something of a mystery. For my part, I’d much rather engage in polite, if energetic conversation, but no, no – the rant now appears to be one of the three main forms of acceptable communication between a writer and his or her audience via web site.

(The other two, incidentally, are the “announcement”, in which the author mentions either a new project that is going to be for sale shortly or an appearance at which you can buy said project, and the “excuse”, wherein the author explains why it’s been nine months, fourteen days, six hours and seven minutes since the last web site update. But I digress.)

In any case, at that point I sat down to write the rant, and realized that I was in trouble, in large part due to the fact that I wasn’t feeling particularly cranky about anything, at least nothing that would be an appropriate topic for a post on my site. The pounding hangover may also have had something to do with it, but I prefer to think of its role as secondary, since at no point during the process of composition did anyone actually drive an icepick sideways into my temple.

What I ended up coming up with, then, was that dreaded New Year’s staple, the list of resolutions. It would make perfect sense to plot out a list of my ten or so writing resolutions for the next year, and, by placing them someplace reasonably public where they might be observed by witnesses, force myself to live up to them. Also, writing a “rant” in list format would save me from the necessity of writing anything actually coherent or lengthy, and would positively discourage me from trying to string together a point that required more than three sentences to make. Believe me, in my compositional condition, this was a major plus.

The short version, then, is simple: I wrote it, people read it, some of them actually liked it, and about a month later I felt compelled to write another rant that kicked the list into the “archive” section of my site. There was much more important stuff to rant about, or at least a vague sensation of needing to provide new content every once in a while, so off it went, to serve as a lonely reminder of what I wanted to get done over the seemingly endless span of twelve months.

As they say, oops. Those months seem to be going by faster these days. Now, in the dying days of the year, it strikes me as a good idea to pull the list again, to see how much I did or left undone, and to look towards what might need doing or not doing over the next year. You know, the one that’s tapping its foot impatiently, waiting for the old guy with the hourglass to kick off.

So without further ado, here’s the list, and my note of commentary as to whether I managed to pull it off. I’m surprised at how many I actually accomplished, disappointed in the ones I didn’t, and deeply disturbed that I felt the need to actually put some of these in print.

1-To show my respect for H.P. Lovecraft and his achievements, I will not write any more Cthulhu Mythos stories. I will, however, take every opportunity to remind people that there is a raging and long-standing debate within the Lovecraft academic community as to whether or not the so-called Cthulhu Mythos in fact exists.

Kept, albeit on a technicality, as I did put extensive time into reworking a piece of this ilk at editorial behest. Much credit goes to the editor in question, James Lowder, for guiding me to a much-improved place with that story, and I solemnly swear in keeping with this resolution, it will not have any near brothers or sisters.

At least, not this year.

2-I will write and attempt to sell a vampire cockroach story, just because I can.

Half-kept. Write, yes. Attempt to sell? I’m not brave enough even to try.

3-I will banish Civil War Generals II from my computer, and if you don’t think this is a writing resolution, believe me, it’s more closely related to my word count productivity than just about anything else this side of breathing.

Kept. Civil War Generals II has indeed been vanquished. So have many of its brethren. And when I’m writing, I keep my office door shut and the music turned up, just so I can’t hear the new Wii calling me. At least, not often.

(And if anyone out there has seen my install disk for CWG2, please, let me know.)

4-I will write at least one more Bigfoot story. In theory, I will do this because I acquired an insane amount of research material in order to write “The Road Best Not Taken” and probably ought to use it for something other than office insulation. In reality, it’s because I downloaded some sound files that are supposed to be “sasquatch calls”, and whatever they are, they give me four or five stories’ worth of the heebie-jeebies.

Kept, in large part because I got into a conversation that included the words “Faulknerian Sasquatch”. You really can’t back away from something like that. At least, I can’t.

The sad truth, of course, is that I do find the material fascinating. Edgar Pangborn’s “Longtooth” was one of the first stories I read that truly terrified me, something that serial killers and demonic possession and tentacled beasties never could do. That fear is something I can tap into and transmit when writing, and I have a feeling I’ll be returning to this subject matter again.

5-I will write another Bubbas story, and it will not include France.

Kept, and with nary a mention of France.

6-I will finish, in no particular order, Thunderhead Road, Black Water and Crimson, and at least one other long-standing project. It’s time all the long-standing projects got to sit down, as their legs are probably pretty tired by now.

Not kept, for which I can blame no one but myself. The good news is that the current project is teetering on the edge of that insane slalom run to the finish, a consummation to be devoutly wished.

7-I will never write a rant for the web site in list format ever again.

Hmm. Well, this isn’t my website, so I can claim it doesn’t count. Can we get a ruling from the Russian judge?

8-I will not write about writers, failed writers, blocked writers, writers who had one hit and who are now being pressured to come up with a followup, writers who have moved back to the ancestral manse in East Earbuckle, New Hampshire to discover the unspeakable evil lurking in the long-abandoned dumbwaiter in the servant’s quarters, writers hunting down old friends with mysterious tales in order to uncover the even more mysterious truth, and writers who find when researching their next book that they’ve stumbled into ancient evil which may be unspeakable but certainly can be written about at great length and hopefully with a gratuitous sex scene tossed in for the precocious fourteen year olds who’ve bought this at the local B&N because the nearby Gamestop finally got wise to the underage kids trying to buy copies of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Does it count if I actually sold the story in question? In any case, this one’s passé; I now write about game designers instead. It’s an entirely different sort of thing.

9-As atmospheric as writing by candlelight may be, I will endeavor to find a form of scribblers’ ambience that is less likely to set off the shrieking horror of a smoke alarm at 3 AM.

*coughs softly into his hand* Well, I’m using fewer candles these days. Does that count?

10-I will murder my darlings, relentlessly and without pity or remorse. I will, however, keep a cut file. You know, just in case.

All joking aside, this one I kept, and I am pleased to have done so. I’m painfully aware that I’m still – what’s the right word? Growing? Evolving? Molting? – into a professional writer of fiction, whatever that may be, and I find myself keeping painful track of the steps along the way.

One of them, I suppose, is growing past the need to write lists. But that can be next year’s resolution, or at least one of them. I’d score this year at 6.5 or so kept out of 10, passing but with room for improvement. A resolution to improve doesn’t need to wait for the end of the year, or the company of a list. It just needs to be kept, this year and next year and for as long as people are willing to read what I come up with.

That being said, I’ll still try to keep the vampire Sasquatch stories to a minimum, just on general principle.

Happy New Year.

By Janet Berliner

In November I promised more of STONES. Here it is. Happy Hannumas. –Janet

My half-brother, David, whom I have yet to meet in person, was for some years a member of Ha-Mosad le-Modi’in u-le-Tafkidim Meyuhadim, The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations better known as simply Mosad. Mosad is one of several agencies responsible for intelligence collection, counter-terrorism and covert action in Israel.

My only contribution can be with words.

From Israel, I travelled to Berlin to visit my mother, who was at that time working for Die Mahnung (The Warning), the newspaper arm of the League of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime. Through them, the search for survivors continues, as does the vigilance against anti-semitism. This continuing campaign rests mostly in the hands of an incredible elderly woman, Dr. Rehfeld Waltraud, herself not a Jew but a lifelong fighter against prejudice and racial injustice. In the newspaper’s small offices in a prewar building on Mommsenstrasse, the battle against Who Cares and It Never Happened goes on. A week later, my mother attended a religious service at the rebuilt temple in Oranienburg, near the first of the forced labor camps. While she was at that service, here in the United States where all races should be united against bigotry, Reverend Farrakahn was televised spewing hatred at the Jews.

Then the Wall between East and West Berlin came down and the world celebrated. I wanted to walk the few blocks to the Kuferstendamm and witness the partying, but my mother was adamant. I was to stay in the flat with her, door locked against intruders.

“Ich bin der einzige Jude in diesem GebŠude,” she said, as if I didn’t know she was the only Jew in the building. What I didn’t know was why that was especially significant that evening.

“When the people in the building are angry,” she said,

“they turn on me.”

She was right; I had seen them do it and she was right, too, about their anger. The East Germans were already claiming reparations, pensions, and medical care, all of which would come out of the pockets of the West Berliners. The Westerners were claiming family property in the East, which took up the time of the courts. The cost of freedom for the East Germans was high and elderly West Berliners were the ones who were going to suffer for it.

Soon after returning to America, I received a letter from my brother David who was living in a small town not far from Vienna. He had become an antique dealer, and through his business had come into possession of the collected volumes of circulars (Rundschrieben) sent to banks and bank officers ordering the seizures of Jewish property and money. These circulars include propaganda informing the bank officers how the seizures will ensure that Germany controls the finances of the world and explaining step-by-step how and where to take the money and property and where to send it into hiding. They cover the years 1934-1944 and into April of 1945 with the exception of 1935, 1937, and 1938. According to the chief archivist at the Landesarchiv in Berlin, only a small portion of these documents exist in the German archives.

David had bought these papers with every penny he had plus loans from his bank. His life had been threatened because it was clear he intended to expose them, so it was foolish to make them public over there, on his own. The documents included minute details of the Austrian involvement. He has been in touch with the World Jewish Congress and with the Jerusalem Post, who had said they would help him by making the matter public–after he had–as they put it–the ear of someone in political power.

At that moment, Deputy Treasury Secretary Eizenstat was in Austria to assist in negotiations for reparations from the Austrian government and businesses. While the German government has been very open about its attempts to make restitution for its past, the Austrians have been much less accepting of responsibility.

Acting as my mouthpiece, my dear friend and agent Robert contacted the U.S. Holocaust Information offices and spoke with a Mr. Becker who works with Mr. Bindenagel, the director of the office. Bindenagel reported directly to Deputy Secretary Eizenstat. He promised to have somebody in Eizenstat’s party in Austria contact my brother the following day. Meanwhile, I stayed up practically around the clock translating what I could of the beaurocratic language in what were later to become ‘The Berliner Documents.’

The documents comprised thousands of pages. Here is one small excerpt:

(These papers are) described as documentation of the practices and activities of the National Socialists in Germany and occupied territories, specifically including complete archives of “Rundschreiben der Wirtschaftsgruppe Privates Bankgewerbe” for the years 1934, 1936, 1939-1944, and continuing through April 1945, plus additional documentation yet to be catalogued and described.

Permission to Seize Property

1) Under the Revocation of German Citizenship, the Interior Minister has come to an agreement with the Foreign Minister as published on 13 February, 1941 (German Reich Announcement number 38, 14 Feb. 1941) the laws governing the recall from Naturalization and the revocation of German Citizenship from 14 July, 1933 in combination with the proclamation concerning the revocation of German Citizenship and the recall of the recruitment to German Citizenship on the Eastern border from 11 July 1939, the below named sought after German Citizens and they have permission to lie in the seizure:

“And they have permission to lie in the seizure. “

This is an official order to locate and capture the listed people and seize their belongings and assets, through whatever means necessary.

History knows the Nazi Terror as a racist, nationalistic assault on Jews and Gypsies. The purpose behind the attacks, we are told, was to purify Germany and the world. But was that the sole reason?

Very few people realize the extent of organization in the National Socialist regime. Only those who have been deeply involved in the study of its history realize that the banks were under strict Nazi control, and that they worked in concert with the Siechereitzpolizei (Security Police) to seize and redistribute the fortunes and possessions of Jews and others who were declared non-Germans. The National Socialists regularly sent circulars, Rundschreiben, to the officers of banks in Germany and German controlled territories listing the names, addresses, dates of birth, and other pertinent information about people who had been declared non-German. The banks were ordered to seize and transfer the assets of these people for the good of the Reich, or at least the good of the members of the German Economic Committee.

Until recently, only a small proportion of these documents were known to have survived. The banks were not supposed to save them. However, a cache including the complete archives of these circulars for the years 1934, 1936, and 1939 through April 1945 surfaced. The story these archives tell is not one of racial hatred, but of massive thievery and greed hidden behind the trappings of nationalism. Among other additions to history’s view of the Nazis, the circulars give detailed instructions on how the Hitler Youth leaders should encourage their young members to start savings accounts at the banks, and how the banks should explain to those same children why that money was taken and given to them, i.e., for the greater glory of the Reich.

I did everything I could to raise interest and consciousness, including handing the papers to Geraldo Rivera’s assistant and talking to Geraldo himself about them when he was here in Vegas, doing a poker gig. Nobody gave enough of a damn to want to learn more or help to make them public.

As a last resort, assisted by my Robert and David, I made contact with a Dr. Dettmer of the Landesarchiv. Talk at the time was that Saur Verlag should publish the volumes (+2,000 pages each), then the Landesarchiv acquire the originals. Dr. Juergen Matthaus, a renowned archivist, was sent by the Holocaust Museum in DC to examine the documents.

David’s search for these documents had taken twelve years. By then, I had been involved for two years.

In the end, K.G Saur Verlag put the papers on microfiche and printed a few copies, one for David and another for Yad Vashem, to whom we donated the information on behalf of the Berliner family.

But wait, there’s more.

During the course of his digging, David found a last will and testament recorded by Paul Berliner, one of our father’s brothers. The will left everything he had to be shared equally by his brothers or their progeny. At the time he wrote the will, he owned a large clothing factory in Berlin. In 1939, the Nazis took the factory and everything in it.

Eleven years ago, at this writing, David applied to the German government for reparations. They told him what documentation he needed. No matter what he gave them–my birth certificate, our father’s birth certificate, a lock of my hair–it was never enough.

Last week we were told that probably, in a few months, we would be told what money we would get and when.

Unless we die first.

It boggles the mind to think of how many Jews are being treated in this manner. Now. In the year 2006. As for how much we’ll get, if and when we’ll get it, that’s anybody’s guess.

So to anybody who says, “Things have changed,” I say this: Not all that much.

Not even here, in Las Vegas.

Recently, I (a 5′2″ weakling in a wheelchair) told a 6′2″ truck driver that he would have to stop making racial slurs–in this case against Mexicans–or see me in the parking lot. So what if he beat me to a pulp; the point would have been made.

My challenge stopped the man’s mouth but the incident proved to me again that the battle against the worst of the human spirit is not over. And since that is so, it becomes clear what we must do. While we must not stop talking and writing and making films, we must also be brave enough to make acts of injustice accessible by way of the new mechanics…be it by way of internet and CD-Rom, tours of the Museum of Tolerance….

We must watch and weep.

We must read and learn.

And we must make sure that it never happens again.

Let’s see if we can do that this coming year.

Scribe Scrooge

When asked if the university stifles writers, Flannery O’Conner stated that the university unfortunately doesn’t stifle enough of them.

I paraphrase that quote from our dear friend Rick Steinberg, who has done more to encourage young writers than anyone else I know. Encourage them in the proper way, of course, which he does with great flourish, energy, and skill.

But this isn’t about encouraging.

This is about stifling.

Repression.

My naturally autocratic tendencies, which have held me back in the literary world for years, compel me to cast a pall on the enthusiasms of my young charges.

At this time of year, such endeavor could be considered . . . Scrooge-like.

Accordingly, as a business school professor, I urge my students to dispense with their flights of fancy picked up in undisciplined liberal arts courses.

In class, my audience is 29 students, half from foreign countries. They look at me, expectantly. Yes, we’re there - in class - now:

“You remember those idyllic scenes conjured by your imagination, back when you were young and unjaded? High school seniors . . . or even freshmen? When college still had its sheen?”

I roam the floor, the space in front of the rows of desks with their internet connections. It is my stage.

“Remember those scenes of professors and students out on the lawn under a late summer sun, students sitting cross-legged, perhaps chewing on blades of grass? Your kindly bearded professor, a tam resting upon his head, gesturing grandly while reciting something beautiful? Perhaps a passage from Faukner? Perhaps a trope from Aristotelian philosophy or verse from an angry beat poet?”

One student speaks up.

“I saw a group out there today! Why can’t we do that?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I respond.

Nods around the room. Broad smiles.

“No, it would not be nice,” I say. “That’s not genuine. It’s not authentic. Just actors performing for touring visitors and posing for publicity shots. College isn’t like that. There is no authentic college of your dreams waiting for you to discover. Remember the lesson of Oliver Wendell Douglas.”

“Who?”

“Oliver . . . Wendell . . . Douglas.”

I’m concerned at this lack of essential preparatory knowledge of the modern college student at a major university.

“The star of Green Acres, the greatest television show of all time. Don’t you watch Nickelodeon or TVLand?”

Green Acres. I explain.

It was really an allegory, a metaphor for our time. Mr. Douglas was forever in search of the authentic. He had an idyllic conception of rural life. He abandoned his big city lawyer’s life in a quest for authentic Americana. Instead, he found a bizarre world populated by characters that could have been confected by Rod Serling and Flannery O’Conner.

Hank Kimball.

Mr. Haney.

Sam Drucker.

Eb.

Frank Ziffle.

And everyone was an actor in a drama staged for the benefit of Mr. Douglas’s dreams of the authentic rural life. The unifying theme of the show was Sam Drucker’s general store, where many of the crucial insights were revealed. Rural folk did not use oil lamps, “’cause we all got ’lectricity.” The barrel in Sam Drucker’s general store was filled with plastic pickles.

The store was a magical place for Mr. Douglas, a crossroads for many of the strange characters who annoyed him so naughtily. For the most part, they gave Mr. Douglas exactly what he wanted to see, because in the immortal words of Sam Drucker: “City folks seem to expect it.”

The idyllic outdoor-on-the-grass-communing-with-nature-scene.

Students seem to expect it.

Expectations I am determined to deflate.

“I suppose that no one in this classroom has seen Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan? And if you have, I’m betting you completely missed the theme of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism expressed by Spock throughout the film. Never mind the obvious references to Melville’s Moby Dick.”

“Umm, Professor? Is this class Global Strategic Management?”

Yet again, those naturally autocratic tendencies assert themselves.

“This class is what I want it to be. And it is not going to be about outdoor-on-the-grass-communing-with-nature instruction. It’s going to be . . . authentic.”

I snap my fingers.

“How many people here believe in this . . . this muse?”

There is silence. No movement.

“You know. This writing trope. This muse. Anyone ever heard of this muse? Don’t hide from me. I know you were exposed to this . . . this muse over in that heinous liberal arts college.”

Hands begin to go up. Cautious hands.

More hands than I expect. More hands than are comfortable.

Time to disabuse them, time to explode their fantasies.

“There is no muse.”

A simple declarative sentence, but with the unsentimental power and imperious grandeur of a Thomas Carlyle proclamation.

Puzzled looks. A few of them distraught. Then, anger.

“But there is. There is a muse . . . there is!”

“Humbug! There is no muse! Get that Birkenstock notion out of your callow head.”

“But my English prof said—”

“Your English prof is teaching because she cannot earn a living foisting this muse-myth on folks who live and breathe and work and play in the real world. People who build bridges, crop tobacco, feed hormones to beef, fly you home over holiday break, and who serve you every day at the 7-ll. People who pay taxes and die.”

Gasp.

I smile with satisfaction. Smug satisfaction. Nothing infuriates like smug.

“You must know only one thing.”

My voice drops low, just above a whisper, and I lean forward. Pause.

“You must know only one thing.”

My students sense something profound coming. They won’t be disappointed.

“Yes, there is a muse . . . I am your muse.”

I smile a benevolent smile. I see several people actually taking notes, writing this down.

“I am on your shoulder whispering to you late at night in those moments when you lack inspiration,” I say. “I am your solution to the blank computer screen.”

My voice rises, I lean back and spread my hands wide, just as I have seen evangelicals do when working a crowd.

“I am the muse, the answer to your writer’s block and the source of your inspiration.”

Titters of laughter ripple through the room, and I scowl.

“You think I’m joking . . . that this is a joke?”

I pace like a panther, my hands clasped behind my back. I stalk the room, the entire space in front of the classroom and right in front of the giant PowerPoint projection screen.

I stop and face them, squaring my hips and flexing my jaw.

“I want you to remember that one thing when you’re up at night and time is trickling by, and you have an assignment but no ideas and no hope . . . .”

They are silent and they watch me.

“I will perch on your shoulder, and I will whisper to you just four words. I want you to remember those four words. Just four little words – just five little syllables. They are magic words! An incantation! A mantra to warm you on those cold nights bereft of imagination, as you trek that barren wasteland of words without order, without discipline, without a point.”

I have their attention now. They are rapt.

Will I win them over this time? Can I break through? Can I help them make the leap from soaring idealism to mundane responsibility? Can I put the bridle in their mouths?

“Remember these words: Love … the … Value … Chain!”

Groans. They’ve heard this before. They sound disappointed. Cheated.

So many fail to see the beauty of disaggregating the firm into its functional components. The analytical precision it provides, the world of discovery that it opens up! So many stop short of making that final connection . . . Except this time . . .

“I love the value chain, Professor Ridgley!”

“Really?” I’m skeptical, jaded. I search for signs of sucking up. But detect nothing but enthusiasm. I feel so fatherly. “Which part of the value chain do you feel the most affinity for?”

“Since I’m chronologically oriented, Professor, I’m partial to Inbound Logistics!”

There is a general murmuring and uneasiness in the class. Inbound logistics?

I nod sagely. “That’s fine, Margarite. It’s okay to privilege one segment of the value chain over another, if it provides you the key to identifying competitive advantage!”

A hand shoots up and a voice cries out before I can acknowledge it.

“Operations! That’s the ticket for me.”

And yet another!

“After sale Service!” a voice in the back calls out. “Professor, Customer Relationship Management has a symmetry and logic about it that outstrips anything we touched on in my basic philosophy courses!”

The dam had finally burst, and the classroom was abuzz with talk of core competencies, competitive analysis, environmental scans, core products, strategy formulation process, Five Forces analysis, and comparative advantage!

The Value Chain! Inbound logistics, Operations, Outbound logistics, Sales and Marketing, and Service.

If ever there were a time for sentimentality and outright weeping, this was it!

But then . . .

But then, one of the most staid literary conventions of all time reared its ugly head.

I woke up.

I awoke from a dream.

It was nothing but a sweet dream. Students excited at the prospect of writing a paper on value chain analysis . . . on identifying a company’s core competency and developing a strategic plan to gain sustained comparative advantage based on that competency . . . students who loved the value chain . . . who could see the art and creativity demanded of the accountant and financial manager. Who could see the beauty in efficient operations management. Who would strive for efficiency because it was the right thing to do!

It was all a sweet dream.

A cruel dream.

And I awoke to a cold, winter world where idealistic students still dream and irresponsible students still party and wiseacre students still wisecrack with a tiresome world-weariness. And write with an undisciplined lackadaisical casualness that drives me to distraction.

It is the little things that do this.

For example. “need to.”

Instead of expressing an action in terms of what should or must be done to achieve success, many students I identify a perceived “need” and inevitably use the construct “need to” when describing the proposed action.

The company “needs to” adjust its bottom line.

We “need to” move forward.

Management “needs to” modify its employee rewards policy.

If there is any single action that I “need to” take, it is to advertise this barbarism ad infinitum in my classes. Because, as the Russians say, “Repetition is the Mother of Learning.”

Now, I know that “need to” probably doesn’t qualify as a “barbarism” to most folks, and it may even appear perfectly serviceable.

Innocent.

But for someone who sees this furshlugginer construct far more often than is healthy, it is akin to poking me with a sharp pencil in the rib cage. Repeatedly.

Communication is the first rule for business memos and reports. They “need to” be clear and concise. Actually, they must be clear and concise. They should be clear and concise.

The memo doesn’t need anything.

Anyone sense the venting of a pet peeve? Well, it’s not off-topic, assuming of course that the topic is fairly clear. A bad assumption.

I do my best to convince my classes that strategy and value chain analysis can be an art. I even say positive things about accounting and accountants, observing that there is a bit of art and flair and imagination necessary to produce a product desired by the employer . . . or patron. Think of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel for his patron. Accounting as art.

I close my eyes and maybe . . . perhaps I can recapture a bit of the magic. Recapture my dream.

I look up, startled to find a group of students gathered round my desk after I have dismissed class. They are heading home in the cold for their winter break.

“What’s this?”

“A gift, Dr. Ridgley.”

“Thank you.”

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

I peel the wrap away in a crinkle of coated Christmas paper. It’s a book. A copy of Peter Drucker’s Management.

It’s a first edition. I feel my eyes tearing up.

“We know how much you like Green Acres, Dr. Ridgley. And Drucker’s general store.”

Smiles abound.

Drucker?

“You do know that it wasn’t Peter Drucker’s store? It was Sam Drucker’s general store.”

“Does it really matter, Professor Ridgley?”

Does it really matter?

“In the grand scheme of things, I suppose that it does not. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas!”

Why do I offer a hearty Merry Christmas instead of something ecumenically blasé in accord with the new appropriateness?

Well, because I can. Because I’m authentic. Because I have authoritarian tendencies. Certainly not because I “need to.”

And I heartily accept Chanukah and Kwanzaa and Season’s Greetings from anyone and everyone else who cares to send ’em my way.

Now, let me go read Sam Drucker’s book on Managing a general store in Hooterville.

I’m such an idealist.

- Jeffrey Thomas

This blog entry comes from the Innocent Abroad. Well, at least that’s how I must have come across as I flew from Tokyo to Vietnam to spend Christmas with my wife’s family. As I sat crunched into my little airplane seat resting my eyes, my hands folded primly in my lap, someone (presumably the Vietnamese girl seated opposite me) pointed me out to one of the Japanese stewardesses, who then said, “Yes — innocent!” Hm! Maybe they’d be disappointed to know that I really ain’t no angel!

Disappointment. I guess that’s what I felt during my first-ever stop in Japan on my way to Vietnam (in the past it’s been via Hong Kong or Korea). Because Japan comes across to me as being such a colorful, exciting place — the home of samurais, video games, J-horror! — I guess I expected something more. As it turns out, Nakita Airport was rather drab, lacking in charm or style, compared to the airports in Hong Kong and Korea. (Talk about jaded, I know, but…) Even the landscape, coming in, was lackluster by comparison. Even the sounvenir t-shirts in the scanty gift shops were less impressive than the ones I’ve bought in Hong Kong. I guess I experienced what the Japanese call the “Paris Syndrome.”

This is the tragic affliction being suffered by Japanese tourists who travel to Paris and are not only disillusioned, apparently, to find that the city doesn’t live up to their fanciful expectations, but are psychologically scarred by the fact. (They are also shocked to find that the French are rude; they must really be out of the loop!) About a hundred tourists a year suffer this trauma, with about a dozen requiring treatment for feelings of persecution and suicidal depression. Well, at least I haven’t gotten suicidal over those cheap sumo wrestler t-shirts at the airport, yet!

Judging from the comments at Amazon.com, I think a lot of readers of the new Thomas Harris book, HANNIBAL RISING, are experiencing something akin to this Paris Syndrome. Not that one should take Amazon comments too seriously. In fact, I pray that they don’t discourage people from checking out any book for themselves. (After all, one “review” of my own novel A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM DEALERS refers to the virtual reality oufit in the story as being a “softwear compant.”) Nevertheless, these many negative comments about HANNIBAL RISING are getting a rise out of me.

Instead of trusting the creator of the infamous villain (become hero?) Hannibal Lecter to put the character through his paces as he sees fit, readers are having fits as if Harris has betrayed them somehow. Instead of respecting the author’s artistic direction, they judge the book by their own preconceptions of what it should have been. (Yet if they’re so skilled at plotting, where are their own New York Times bestsellers?) There’s nothing wrong with being disappointed in a book’s direction. I wasn’t too pleased with where Clarice ended up at the end of HANNIBAL (which I otherwise loved). I would have liked to see the next book bring back RED DRAGON’s Will Graham (to me, Harris’ most fascinating character) to hunt down both Hannibal and Clarice! Yes, Hannibal had a rough childhood, but he’s still a bad guy, and as Will Graham himself says, cry for the child they were but stop the killer they are. And as I’m still reading HANNIBAL RISING, I may myself not be too crazy about the book by the time I’ve finished. We’re entitled to our impressions and opinions as readers. But there’s a level of indignation in these Amazon comments that is really out of proportion; it’s as if the readers feel the character belongs to them, instead of Harris. One of these comments sports the heading: “What did Thomas Harris do with Thomas Harris?!” As if to say that this reader not only knows better who Hannibal Lecter is, and what he should be up to, but that they also know who Thomas Harris is better than he knows himself. Another example of this line of thought: “this book had to be written by someone else other than Thomas Harris.” And this says it all: “How odd it is that Harris doesn’t even seem to understand his own characters; that we the readers know Dr. Lecter better than the author does.” Such comments surely merit having one’s impudent tongue bitten out by Francis Dolarhyde!

When Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes, the clamoring of his readers made him bring him back from the dead, and I believe I heard that even Stephen King is begging J. K. Rowling not to kill off Harry Potter down the road (if so, such sentimentality from the guy who let the kiddie croak in CUJO!). People were so upset about the death of Tess in Hardy’s TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES that apparently even a judge protested to Hardy that he wouldn’t have sentenced Tess to death — but Hardy was very much pained by his decision to see her hang. Clive Barker reports that he wept over the decision to kill one character in IMAJICA. The writer is the god who molds these creatures into existence, and should presumably have the right to crush them back into clay or reshape them into a new configuration as they see fit. But still, it is an intriguing question: do readers, after a while, own a character as much as the writer does, or at least own it in a different way?

For my own part I have been enjoying HANNIBAL RISING immensely, and my admitted initial doubts about its direction have been forgotten as I entrust Harris to take me by the hand through the dark labyrinth of Lecter’s early evolution. There is something about his style that pulls me along like no other’s, while maintaining a high level of literary excellence along with the twists of the ice pick. Yes, the tone is different from the clinical feeling of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. HANNIBAL RISING (the only thing I’m not crazy about so far is the title), especially in its earliest chapters, reads like a morbid fairy tale. But after all the RED DRAGON rip-offs in books and movies, do we really want more of the same old, same old FBI versus serial killer thriller? To me, HANNIBAL RISING is not only a look into how a child can be mutated into a vicious madman; it shows us how the scary journey of every person from childhood to adulthood leaves us with both bright gifts and dark curses.

Ahh, who’d have thought that — as in a recent Storytellers essay I wrote about Mark Z. Danielewski’s dizzy ONLY REVOLUTIONS — that I’d need to leap to the defense of an underdog like…Thomas Harris?

Well, I took the long route in arriving at this kernel of thought, but after about twenty-four hours of flying to arrive in Vietnam, I guess that’s where my head is at. Anyway, I extend my holiday greetings and best wishes to all. And based on what I’ve read of HANNIBAL RISING (and every one of Harris’ earlier books, including the still topical BLACK SUNDAY), I encourage you to dive right into the book if you receive it as a Christmas present, or buy it with any Amazon/Borders/Barnes and Noble gift card you may receive. I say, let’s show the master of thrillers that his bold choices are appreciated by his truly loyal fans. Let’s let the writer make up his own mind about what he chooses to write about, or at least, let’s show that we can make up our own minds about what we choose to read. But what do I know? After all, I’m just another reader, arrogantly thrusting his opinion into cyberspace, my essay heading just another oh-so-witty Amazon-style pun. I’m just as guilty as the rest. Told you I weren’t no innocent!

By

Richard Steinberg

“Every word written is a victory against death,” Michel Butor

Why do we fear it so?

What is it about that ending which casts such a shadow, which dominates our conscious or subconscious lives?

For my part, while not seeking it, I think I might welcome it. An end to the fight, to the struggle, to the nearly achieving, to the pain. A cold quiet to replace the cacophonous world that speaks without hearing, shouts without saying anything, and constantly gibbers indecipherably. Peace – or if not peace, then emptiness: a place where nothing is expected, nothing wanted, nothing demanded . . . by others or by your own soul.

Heavy sigh.

. . . by your own soul.

Therein lies the problem. Anima, élan vital, the quintessence of our being. When we die, does our soul die with us or does it then transcend our bodies and move into a nice condo on L.A.’s West Side with a view of the ocean and convenient delis? Or if we have lived an unworthy life, does it go to the back of the line to start over as some believe, or will it be punished for indeterminate periods in Purgatory as others believe? Does it manifest itself as a Bhuta: a Hindi demon doomed to spend eternity revisiting the locales of its inequities; able only to do harm, however much it may not want to?

And not knowing, does that make the willingness to embrace death a foolhardy enterprise most likely doomed to failure and tears?

In part, this so essential question is the reason I’m a writer. In part, my writings are my so essential answer . . . in part.

Beginning in 1975, a program was begun at the Library of Congress called: Alexandria. It was and is shrouded (an appropriate word as you’ll soon see) in many secrets, but the purpose of the program was clear enough. Every book, every magazine, every piece of art or Special Collection would be copied onto a series of gold anodized discs, and these discs placed in the equally aptly named: Federal Repository Crypt, 285 feet below Mount Weather, Virginia.

There, these discs sit, waiting for the day when man or God chooses to annihilate, well . . . man.

Thousands of years ago, Alexander the Great gathered all the great knowledge of the world in one great library in Alexandria, Egypt. But over the centuries, the great library disappeared; vanished like a whisper in a crowd, never to be heard from again.

And with it, untold wisdom, art, beauty and grace.

But one day when the human experiment has run its course, when foolishness combines with hubris and perhaps a dash of inability to admit mistakes, when a bright light is followed by a big boom (or a microbe self-effacingly doesn’t announce itself as it begins to consume us) and mankind – perhaps all kind – disappears, the new Alexandria will still exist. Waiting deep inside the mountain, for time and tide –perhaps Hesperian archeologists – to unearth it. Waiting for our souls to be released, unsuspecting, smack dab into the middle of whoever or whatever comes next.

I have four books on those discs. Four pieces of myself; what I believed when I wrote them, how I felt, what I loved or hated, even how I lived or what I ate (my characters usually eat whatever I happen to be eating at the time I write them) all sitting there waiting for new light. A small, intimate representation of who I was, of who we all were, along with all my partners in anodization heaven:

Fitzgerald . . . Hemingway . . . Bashevis Singer . . . Hawking . . . Berliner . . . Einstein . . . Sullivan . . . Melville . . . Niall Wilson . . . Skipp . . . Bierce . . . Massie . . . Bombeck et al.

I hope to add more of myself to Alexandrian technical immortality in the years to come. A new book next July, hopefully one next Winter as well; and many beyond that. But who knows? That faint flicker of unidentifiable synaptic response which causes my heart to beat, which is the essence of life, could misfire at any moment. This essay could be my final word on words, my final statement to the Universe. And since internet blogs are not (at least I hope not) preserved in the bowels of the mountain, the book in June – already delivered, if probably in need of a rewrite – would be my final word on the subject of who and what I was.

I could live, err . . . excuse me . . . I could die with that.

Because whatever happens after, I’ve said what I believed while I was here. No, that’s not entirely true. I’ve tried to say what I believe while I was here. I’ve got to do better in whatever time I have left.

There’s nothing wrong with writing to entertain, with writing what the readers want, with taking your gift or earned talent and using it to create readily accessible distractions for the masses. Distractions – in the age we live – are sacred gifts to be treasured and lauded. But is there anything in creation that prevents you from saying something about something? To put it another way: In writing the most mass appeal, cross genre, branded, demographically perfect piece in the history of man from cave drawings to e-books, is there no way you can make a comment about your world or your beliefs at the same time?! Come on, you could do it if you tried!

But, of course, most won’t try, will they. Not a typo, I meant the period for the question mark because it is a sad statement of our times.

Few try.

Fewer every day it seems.

This entry marks the beginning of my second year at Storytellers. And as our regular readers know, I’ve railed on throughout the past year on various issues related to enduing soul in our writing. But what I’m talking about here, what I’ll continue to talk about in its various aspects during the coming year, is something different. A thing similarly stained with the essence of our existence as writers, but separate and apart from the soul.

The writer’s being.

In my first essay here, I introduced myself to you with these words:

. . . you will never find happiness as a writer; if you’re lucky, you’ll find occasional exhilaration and some measure of satisfaction . . . hopefully never too much – I continued to become different things at different moments.

The young adult who was certain that man could be saved.

The college grad who was certain that man couldn’t be saved.

After several years of national service, the man who knew beyond doubt that man shouldn’t be saved.

As a fledgling writer who knew he was the most talented novelist in the history of the planet whose words would heal the ill, make the blind see, and elevate the human condition.

As the international and New York Times Best Selling author who didn’t really care about man . . . so long as the checks kept coming and the book store assistant managers were attractive and deeply enamored of touring novelists.

To where I am today, who I am today: a man with a helluva lot more questions than answers, possessing a drive to write truth, to explore truth, to set down what he believes, why he believes it, and maybe make someone who reads it along the way stop to think a little bit about their place and time in the Universe.

And it is to that message that I now return in Year 2. Doing what I can to help you share your essence, your being, with us.

What’s the difference? Simple: my soul burns with cancerous pain at so many unnecessary deaths due to foolishness, pettiness, and bigotry; and it expresses itself in the spirit of what I write. My being, well . . . my being shapes its stories to expose that foolishness, that pettiness, that bigotry in high-contrast, close focus.

“I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment,