Storytellersunplugged

By David Niall Wilson

I’m currently reading one of the most recent novels by Stephen King, Lisey’s Story, which is a twist on the old writer writing a story about a writer plot. The story is about the widow of a writer, and is full of insights from an odd perspective. The perspective, in this case, is that of an author, Stephen King, writing through the mind and eyes of a woman who was married to a horror writer. In other words, it’s a way of writing about the writer without doing it in first person, and with the more objective mindset of someone on the outside looking in. I don’t know, of course, if this is an autobiographical piece, but I have to believe it’s likely. How does one resist an opportunity like that? I mean, we all know deep inside what our failings, shortcomings, bad habits and foibles are, and we believe we know our strengths. Given a chance to present our case before the jury, why not take a stab at it?

Simple answer, of course. It’s terrifying. If you could just write such a thing and walk away from it, that might be therapeutic, but not if the world is going to read it, dissect it, and half of them are going to believe it’s all about you — maybe including the woman you’ve been married to for decades. I mean, the characters and situations might be wholly removed from your own world reality, but that doesn’t mean an insightful reader - one close to your heart - wouldn’t see through the smoke screens and know when it was real.

Anyway, none of this is the point of what I sat down to write. What caught my eye (the first of many things) in this novel was a passing mention that the protagonist, Lisey, makes to “the myth pool.” In the opinion of her late husband, novelist Scott Landon, all readers and writers go to the same place to “drink”. Writers bring a buckets full of themselves, I believe, and readers bring dippers, mugs, jugs and barrels to cart the stuff away in, but that central connection is the same on either side of the fence. Sometimes I feel like I’ve set up a lemonade stand by the pool and everyone has come looking for beer, but that’s beside the point — I think King nailed the experience with his metaphoric pool. Maybe he created it by writing about it. Maybe it called out to him for some cheap advertising - and then to me to get a banner up on the web.

When I’m writing well, and the world slips away, the sensation is one of slippage. The things in the story take on substance and importance that made-up things don’t possess in regular day-to-day life. It’s the same when I’m reading. If the words I’m reading catch my attention, the world shuts down while I’m visiting whatever place, time or dimension the author has presented to me. When I have reached the end of a long writing binge, it sometimes takes days for my brain to really disengage from the story. I worry over details and replay scenes in my mind. When I finish reading an amazing book, it’s the same. I don’t want to come back. I want more information. I want to wake up with the characters one last time. It’s a very strange, very pleasant sensation. It isn’t called escapism for nothing…there is a place you actually go. Since Steve named it first, and I think it’s a fine name that will stick, I’m tacking a sign on the tree next to the stream were I serve my words to the world that reads MYTH POOL in big bold letters so people will see it and stop by more often.

And speaking of words, that brings me back to the other half of my entry. Perspective. A long time ago I wrote the first chapter of what I thought would become a novel. The title is “The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J (Jehosephat) Diggs and the Currently Accepted Habits of Nature.” That isn’t important. What is important is that I wrote the first chapter of this, and I loved it. I then got derailed, distracted, etc. - life took me down another road. Now I’m working on that project again. I wrote a short outline. I started to write chapter two. I hated it. It was like pulling teeth. I ground through it, and finished it, and was absolutely dissatisfied with the outcome. The worst of it was I was absolutely unable to figure out why.

Then I let it go for a day. Yesterday I was driving home, and I started to run through the plot in my head again to figure out what was wrong. I didn’t get any further than the title in my mind before it hit me so hard I nearly pulled off the road. I had started chapter two as if it were a completely new book. The POV shifted, and since this is — at its heart - a mystery, I was giving away things that I should have been keeping in my notes…things I know, but that neither the reader (Nor Cletus) should know in the second chapter. I cheerfully saved it as a spare chapter and started over last night, writing back in the POV of my protagonist, and all is right with the novella. The title was the key. It’s Cletus’ story I’m telling, and it has to be in his own time, and his own way.

The lesson in this case is that no matter how many times I tell people something about their writing, or writing in general, I still have to remind myself. I have to watch tense and POV and keep the timeline straight for all groups of characters involved and make sure that I don’t write about a character’s reactions to things they couldn’t possibly know…

I was told once a long time ago that you can’t write a story in multiple POV. That was, of course, silly. What IS true is that you can’t do it without extreme care, and if you can avoid shifting POV, you almost always should. The characters Cletus will encounter are a hell of a lot creepier revealed in tiny bits and pieces than they ever could have been if I told their story in the beginning. I may make it to chapter three yet. All I have to do is drag them out of that pool, pour them into pewter mugs, bowls, and goblets, and wait for someone to drink…

I wonder if the pool is filled with ink?

Onward!

DNW

R C Jones

In case some of you unpluggers might someday wish to write about a situation involving a shooting, some information about firearm identification might come in handy. First, a bit of basic background. For the sake of brevity, I will limit the discussion to handguns, that is, to revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. Both fire cartridges each of which comprises a casing, within which is held an explosive powder, a bullet held in the forward end of the casing, and a primer disposed at the base, or head, of the casing.

Each type of handgun has at least one chamber within which a cartridge is fired when a spring-driven hammer is released by a trigger and slams a firing pin against the primer. When struck, the primer ignites the powder; and rapidly expanding gases from the burning powder accelerate the bullet through a barrel. Helically shaped riflings within the barrel spin a passing bullet, giving it an improved trajectory.

A major difference between the two types of handguns is that a revolver has a cylinder in which there are usually five or six chambers, and a pistol has but one chamber located at the rear end of its barrel. The cylinder in a revolver serves as a storage area for cartridges and is rotatable so that each chamber can be brought to a position behind and in line with the barrel. One cartridge can be stored in the chamber of a pistol, and others are stored in a magazine, or clip. After a revolver is fired, rotating the cylinder brings a successive cartridge into alignment with the barrel.
Revolvers come in two basic flavors: single action and double action. In a single-action revolver, the hammer is cocked to rotate the cylinder; and a trigger is then pulled to release the hammer and fire a cartridge. In a double-action revolver, pulling the trigger cocks the hammer, rotates the cylinder and releases the hammer to fire a cartridge. In a semi-automatic pistol, when a cartridge is fired, recoil forces are used to recock the hammer, to cause an extractor to yank the empty casing from the chamber and to cause an ejector to expel the casing from the gun. Spring forces are then used to inject a fresh cartridge into the chamber.

Most of us have probably seen movies where crime-scene evidence is analyzed by experts. Among the items popularly eyeballed are, of course, recovered bullets. These are often shown clamped in a pair of optically bridged macroscopes and rotated to compare striations carved into one bullet by barrel rifling with striations carved into another bullet. A crime-scene bullet and sample bullets fired by a suspect gun can be so compared to link the former bullet to the suspect gun. Fired bullets retrieved from different crime sites can be compared to link separate shootings to each other.

I have heard TV and movie experts mention fingerprints left on a gun or cartridges, powder residue, the caliber of bullets and striated marks carved by rifling. They have even mentioned whether the rifling had a right-handed or left-handed twist. I missed it, however, if they ever mentioned the rifling twist rate - the number of inches of rifled barrel needed to twist a bullet completely around once.

In addition to rifling striations, which reflect imperfections in rifling associated with a particular gun, the caliber, weight and shape of a bullet are all clues that help limit the number of guns that could have been involved in a shooting to those made by a certain manufacturer during a certain period. In fact, there are many more things to consider than one might think.

Recovered cartridge casings, colloquially referred to as brass even though they are made from a number of different metals, can be a repository of many additional clues. A chamber itself can have rough portions that scratch a cartridge casing as the casing is loaded and unloaded, even if the cartridge is not fired. Since casings expand within a chamber when fired, they are then even more susceptible to being scratched while being unloaded.

After a firing pin strikes a cartridge primer, the pin might remain slightly imbedded in the primer. If the pistol is one where a barrel drops slightly when a recoil forces an action open, the firing pin might be dragged across the primer as the pin is retracted from the impression, leaving what is known as a firing pin drag mark. As a fired cartridge recoils, its base and primer are forced against a breech face having a hole through which the firing pin struck the primer. A portion of the primer might be forced into the hole. If the barrel drops, the primer can be scratched by an edge of the hole to create what is known as a shear mark. When a recoiling cartridge is forced against a breech face, any imperfections in the face will be imbedded in the primer. Such marks are known as breech marks.

A casing of most cartridges has a circular extractor groove near its base. As previously mentioned, recoil forces cause an extractor to hook into the extractor groove and extract an empty casing from a chamber; and an ejector ejects the casing from the gun. The action of the extractor can leave extractor marks, and that of the ejector, ejector marks, even if the cartridge is not fired. Ejector marks can be in the form of both striations and impressions.

A firing pin, in addition to leaving drag marks, also leaves impressions in primers. The impression size, shape, depth, surface imperfections and strike position are all clues to compare with cartridges fired by a suspect gun. They can also be helpful in determining the type and make of the gun that fired them.

One thing I would like to know is why, on law enforcement shows, do they handle evidence with rubber gloves as if that would not smear any existing fingerprints.

— R. C. Jones

(Since we have not yet replaced the inestimable Dick Hill in the SU lineup, I have this extra essay penned by our own “Alienmotives” Bill Lindblad on hand for just such an occasion. Thanks Bill)

by William Lindblad

Pigeonholing happens. It’s easy for people to make categories and slip individuals into one of the slots or another. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing is arguable, and the answer you’ll get changes depending on the person to whom you’re talking. In my view, as a bookseller and a reader, it’s great. It is easier to find new books by an author you like when you know where in the store they’re going to be.

In the view of an author, though, it can be terrible.

Writers work for a variety of reasons. The two most prominent among them are financial gain and artistic release, and often those two go hand in hand. A new author tends to concentrate on those styles of writing which interest them, and which they can do well, and with luck, effort, and skill they can build a reputation in their chosen fields.

One of the most effective skills an author can perfect is that of writing in multiple genres. It allows for a greater quantity of markets available at any one time, increasing the possibility for sales. It also allows an author to point to a history of sales in a particular genre should they find themselves wishing to escape the pigeonholing a successful career often brings. Lastly, because of the different focuses prevalent in the different genres, it develops the writer’s skills.

A thriller writer needs to know how to evoke a feeling of suspense; a horror writer, how to create dread or fear (or, in some cases, revulsion); a romance writer needs to create sympathetic characters; hard science fiction needs extrapolative thinking; mystery writers need to master the plot twist, historical writers need to learn research skills, playwrights need an ear for dialogue, poets need a comprehensive vocabulary. Invariably, most of the best writers in any of these fields have all of these abilities, even if they are stronger in some aspects than in others.

That won’t prevent someone from getting stamped as a particular type of writer. Harry Turtledove is a Science Fiction and Fantasy writer… so much so, that when he writes non-fantastic historical novels, he goes under a pen name of Turteltaub. Charles de Lint, Gore Vidal, Donald E. Westlake, Ron Goulart and dozens upon dozens of others have used pen names for the books and stories outside what is viewed as their “normal” work. The important thing, however, is that all of them are able to publish that external work, while maintaining their hard-earned reputations in their primary fields.

Even better, some people manage to develop dual reputations. Ed Gorman is highly acclaimed in mystery, westerns, and horror. Fletcher Pratt wrote and co-wrote some of the best fantasy of the pulp era, even while he was becoming known as one of the greatest nonfiction naval history writers of the day. The quantity of people who bounce back and forth between fantasy and science fiction is so great that nearly every bookstore simply combines the two fields into one section.

The longer you wait, however, the harder it becomes to branch out. That’s where the pigeonholing really comes in: publishers and editors don’t want a completely different work, they want the type of story their readers have come to expect from you. At that point, the real conflict comes into play between their own artistic desires and the monetary reward.

That’s not to say it can’t be done, even then. Charlaine Harris is a great recent example of someone who has shifted markets, jumping from a troubled mystery career to a top-level romantic fantasy career. The shift has brought a number of new readers in for her regular mystery work, as well. And one of the potential benefits is that it allows a person who has more or less mastered one aspect of writing to apply it in another; Janet Evanovich made a splash by applying the character-driven appeal of light romances to the mystery field. Shirley Rousseau Murphy used her experience in writing young adult fantasy and articles for cat magazines to produce the Joe Grey mystery series. Just because you’ve been in the business a while doesn’t mean you have to accept being assigned to writing only one type of book, it only means you’re going to have an uphill battle getting other things published.

Watch the markets. If something interests you in a call for Baseball Quarterly, or Ferrets magazine, or anything else, jump at it. The worst thing you’ll face is a rejection, and the best thing is a new pathway opened for your writing career.

— William Lindblad

Sarah Monette

This month, let’s not talk about my book (although it does, btw, look like I’m going to meet my deadline after all). Instead, let’s go all meta and think about the ways we think about writing.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a peculiar species in more ways than one, but one of our most endearing quirks is our ability to think about our own thought processes. We can do something; we can think about doing something; and we can think about thinking about doing something. It’s fantastic!

And since 90%-99% of the writing process takes place in the mind anyway, it’s inevitably something that is both frustrating and intensely rewarding to think about.

One of the first things I learned when I began reading books about creative writing (and even more so when I began hanging out with other writers) is that no two people understand their creativity in the same way. (This goes for other endeavors, too, not just writing; I’m sticking with what I know, but I’m not meaning to imply that writers have a corner on this particular market.) And the second thing I learned was that not all ways of thinking about creativity work for all people.

One person’s muse, in other words, is another person’s poison.

This inconvenient fact does not mean that anyone is “doing it wrong.” The only way to tell if you’re “doing it wrong” is if you’re not writing. It doesn’t matter whose advice you follow or don’t follow, no matter how insistently a given guru may tell you that their way is the only way that will bring success. What matters is whether your creative process is actually, you know, processing. The rest is just bells and whistles.

It can be tremendously helpful, however, to get a feel for which ways of thinking about writing work for you, and which don’t. Natalie Goldberg, for instance, does not work for me. I tried–my creative writing teacher in high school was a true acolyte of Natalie Goldberg and worshipped whole-heartedly at her altar–and I tried, and finally I admitted, This isn’t me. This isn’t how I understand what I do.

The world was conspicuous by its failure to end.

So I thought–over the course of a decade or so, and obviously, I’m still thinking–about how I think about writing. And I’ve learned a lot, both about myself and my writing process. And about how I think about writing.

And the insight has been valuable because there are points in the writing process where you need to be able to pull back to the meta level, to be able to look at what you’re doing, not from inside the maze, where it’s stifling and humid and there are mosquitos the size of sparrows, but from the observation tower in the middle, where you can see how the paths wind and twist, and where the dead-ends are, and how to get to the center from where you are.

As for example, writer’s block.

Writer’s block probably deserves an essay all its own, but my point here is that my success rate in dealing with it went up dramatically when I stopped looking at it from inside the maze, as a boulder sunk immovably in the middle of my way, and looked at it instead from outside the maze, where it resolves quite differently.

For me (and remember, everyone’s creativity works differently, so this may or may not work for you), the key to undoing writer’s block was shifting my focus from the immediate (What happens next? Where are they going? What do they want?) to the meta (Why am I stuck?). Because if I give myself enough time to work out the answer to Why am I stuck? it shows me how to get unstuck, and the answer may or may not have anything to do with the scene I’m currently stuck in. The reasons for my stuckness may be a wrong turn I took five scenes back.

So that’s the first thing I know about how I think about writing. I need the meta level.

The second thing I know is something you will have observed in the preceding paragraphs: I think in metaphors. Lots of writers do. And the important thing here is that you have to choose your own metaphors. You have to go with what works, not with what pleases you. Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, talks about listening to your broccoli as a metaphor for paying attention to your subconscious. I love this metaphor, but it does not work for me. Possibly because I don’t like broccoli. But more because my metaphors tend to be metaphors of struggle–like trying to find my way through a maze. Or getting lost in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Grimpen Mire. I think of the process Lamott describes as “listening to your broccoli” more as a siege. The parts of my mind that are not “I,” that don’t have direct access to language and don’t have the benefits of all this self-reflection, have to beat down the walls to get “me” to listen to them. Sometimes, of course, the besieged is helping the besiegers, trying to pry the boards out of the windows and so on, but still. All my metaphors are metaphors of struggle; many of them are metaphors of violence.

And trying to deny that–trying to scrub my thought processes and tie bows on them so they’re fit to meet the neighbors–results in nothing. The literal kind of nothing, in which no work gets done and my processes stagnate and I become a misery to my husband and cats.

That’s the most important thing in all this thinking about thinking. You have to be honest with yourself.

Because if you don’t, who will?

Wayne Allen Sallee

Brian Knight’s comment about his coworker in his entry of a few days back got me to thinking. No one at my job really brought up the process of how, say, WITH WOUNDS STILL WET, was published when I had paraded copies around. Certainly, I had back-up to my writing credentials, having been interviewed by CHICAGO magazine, the Daily Southtown, and the Chicago Sun-Times–the latter as I stood naked outside my basement shower on Memorial Day, it must’ve been a slow news day–as I learned from Yvonne Navarro how to send out press releases with my name as point of contact beneath my then-agent’s number in Manhattan. Need a quick column to fill, call the local number. Sadly, the reason I was even interviewed by the Southtown, our south suburban paper, was because when I got called at my job downtown, the guy was killing time because everyone else was in Grant Park watching the Bull’s Three-Peat trophy celebration. He was rummaging through open mail on the desk and thought my odd little announcement about my new collection being nominated for a Stoker award might make for a decent article.

Its my family that stretches my brain like, well, my atrophied muscles I sometimes mention, more than anyone I’ve ever worked with. (But I do think that we should all consider putting Brian’s coworker on every mailing list available, from Chick religious tracts to the Ron Jeremy and David Niall Wilson Mutual Fan Club…hell, give me the address and I’ll send the guy a photo of me in my blood-stained clown suit handing out copies of CAT FANCY in a city park that shall remain nameless.)

My daddy’s family all live within thirty miles of Louisville, Kentucky, and most of my cousins grew up expecting to work for General Electric or on the assembly line at Ford, which they do, while others work at Wal-Mart or Moby Dick’s. I have an auntie who was in several television commercials for Dentyne and Coca-Cola in the 70s, other than that, I’m what passes for someone who made it big, someone who is “the writer.” Something that is known but not readily mentioned by my mother’s family, all in the ever growing northern Illinois suburbs, because they are too busy discussing real estate or high-tech hoobajoobs. I’m not one to talk much about writing with either side, unless asked, but its my cousins with the million dollar homes that will just be completely befuddled even after twenty years of knowing what I do. I’m always a horror writer, to them I can’t possibly have written another blessed thing without stigmata appearing on my palms (which might be how my clown suit got stained, you think?). And they can’t seem to get a handle on how I can be in 173 anthologies and not be loaded with dough. When I’m in Kentucky, I’m a writer, pure and simple. That’s all that matters, its not about money. The only time its about money is when EVERYTHING is about money.

There are times that I think one reason that my creative output, at least towards paying markets, has ebbed more than flowed lies in the simple fact that, even though I am living paycheck to paycheck and haven’t had health insurance in almost three years, I’m pretty much content with my day job. I’m not like my relatives here in Illinois, but I can say that I am lucky enough as a writer that I can usually place a story I write to the first place I send it, and that many editors are kind enough to wait on my submission. I don’t know that my relatives who sell security equipment or retirement condos would have their money if they kept the erratic schedule I do.

I worked downtown for twenty years and change, and I wrote every single night as much because I despised the job I had as because it was an outlet for me to forget the job I despised. I needn’t go what I did for a living, but if any of you ever asked just where the eff I came up with jonalgiers as my screen name, I’d have to explain why I answered my phone at work as Jonny Algiers. Or Henry Desmond. Or Tony Mitchum. Depending on which light was blinking. (Brian Hodge won’t spill the beans; I still have the negatives from my Kodak Disk camera).

In my very first entry here at SU, I gave everyone the dilly-o on what I did to eat during my months of unemployment. I have now been with this printing plant just over a year, getting paid ten dollars an hour through a temp agency (with a pre-existing health condition, I’m not ending up on the company payroll; even if they didn’t offer me insurance, I assume their way of thinking is that I’d make a legal thing out of it if I injured myself. They’ve done the same with a guy with a heart condition and another who has pain in his arm similar to like what I have in my back. America, home of the free).

But I love the job. Everyone looks out for each other, things can get tense but nothing boils over, and best of all, I’ve learned to despise the boss and his son as much as everybody else. Several of my coworkers are closet anarchists like myself, others are potential characters in stories. I did actually write a story involving one guy who supervised me the first few months on the job, a true bastard to everyone, and not long after he ended up in jail facing twenty years, sadly, for killing a man in a three car pile-up a few blocks and a few bars from work.

If a new collection comes out, such as Midnight Library’s DOWNWARD SPIRAL, a four-author collection I am in, or my glossary in GETTING LOST, and makes the rounds, its more a novelty to see each person examining the stitching or running their fingertips over the glossy or matte cover. One guy in bindery knew about the article in which I was present at John Wayne Gacy’s execution, and told me how he had worked for the guy back in the day. His mother called him to tell him to turn on the television when the live feed of the body bags were being placed on the snow back in 1979.

And I come home and am not stressed out and write whatever the hell I feel like, be it blog entries, or helpful nudges to new writers, or just lines of a story that has no real direction yet. Several people have been nudging me to write a memoir, of sorts, and I am Martin Mulling that over, just because it can be about only a portion of my life. (Years ago, I thought of a set of self-help books centered around my butt, e.g., IDIOT’S GUIDE TO MY ASS, MY ASS FOR DUMMIES, Oprah MY ASS, with Mr. Hodge delivering the best of all, MARTHA STEWART’S LIVING UP MY ASS). So, no, it would not be self-help. Unless it taught the reader how to NOT ping pong around a Storytellers Unplugged entry like I do. One last paragraph, I promise. Well, two. OK, a few more.

A friend of mine, who I shall call Williams SidneyStone, has mentioned several times that he wished he could discuss several melodramas in the workplace on his own blog. I suggested we do a variation of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, and he gives me incidents to write about on my blog and I do the same for his, such as how every Friday–because I work the late shift– I print up five thousand flyers for a prominent black reverend who tells his flock to boycott white businesses, ours being oh so bright, and how the flyers get picked up by guys in do-rags and gang tats and payment is handed off with sweaty, crumpled bills.

So you see, I’m having more fun in my lab on a Friday night listening to Sandy Nelson’s LET THERE BE DRUMS cd and yapping your ear off than working on my story about gang revenge called “Proactive Contrition,” or trying to come up with an angle for a story title I’ve had floating around for awhile, “Jenna, A Drink Before”.

Yes, I am lucky in that I do not have to write under the stress of being a total unknown, but I also revel in the fact that I no longer wake up every day dreading seeing people who look like they envy the dead staring across the el car at me as it heads northward into the Loop.

Your chattel,
Wayne Allen Sallee
Burbank, Illinois: 28 July 2007

Lyon.

Autumn

Night.

This is the city of ancient sorceries and Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries”, of churches on hills and walls of fire-blackened stone houses huddled in close alongside them. It’s the city of grand avenues and cobblestones, of streetcorner vin chaud in the winter and constant rain in the spring, of a hundred tiny bouchons tucked into even tinier streets where the galumphing American tourists dare not go lest they accidentally eat something strange.

It’s where I was that evening. A brief rain had washed everything clean, made the cobblestones shiny and black. Work in Lyon was tiring, was frustrating, was long and wearying and singularly unproductive on this occasion, and I had it in me to walk. I’d walked to my hotel from the office, of course, a jaunt of a mile or so through new neighborhoods and past signs advertising the great chefs of Lyon; up and over the Pont de Guillotine and into the massive stone architecture of the old city. They’d set up the guillotine there when the Revolution came to power. One man died on it, or so I’d been told, the one who’d brought it to town. Still, the memory lingers.

As I first set foot upon the bridge, a man coming the other way saw me and stopped. Stared as if in recognition. I’d never seen him before, this man wearing a black suit and a brightly colored cloth around his head. I nodded, I didn’t slow down, I kept walking.

And he hissed. Leaned forward, head down like a snake, and he hissed. Three times, his head turning impossibly to follow me. I hurried on as he shouted something after me, something I did not wish to understand.

I hurried on, past the great plaza of Bellecour and to my hotel, as much to get away from the memory of the hiss as to drop off my sadly overstuffed backpack. Evening had fallen by the time I came out again, the streets filling with tourists and revelers and the lost and the curious. I lost myself in the throng, the way I do when I travel. See where the crowd goes, see which streets call my name, see which hills want for climbing – when I can choose my route with confidence and calm, then I know I’ve been someplace too long.

That night, it was up one street, down another. Zig-zag, back and forth. I walked a sawtooth edge, admiring architecture and ignoring restaurants. Thoughts of work popped up, and I squashed them quick as I could. It wasn’t their place, it wasn’t their time.

And suddenly, on a white stone wall ahead of me, a sign.

A stencil, really. On the façade of one of the lovely ancient structures that lined the street I shambled down, there was a black shape. I looked closer, and it resolved itself – a headless skeleton, formally dressed, bearing a cane.

Baron Samedi, perhaps, or someone like unto him.

He didn’t wink, not that I expected him to - him being headless, to say nothing of his being made of spraypaint. Hesitantly, I reached out and touched the figure. It was dry, and cool to the touch. The surrounding stone was warm; the black paint not.

A mystery.

I nodded my head to pay my respects to the Baron – no hat to tip, not that night – and wander off. I saw a thing I did not expect, tasted something odd and magical, and that was what the night needed. All around me, the others walked past. Not one noticed the black shape against white stone. We shared a secret, the Baron and I.

Eventually, I walked off and left the image behind me. There were other places to explore, after all. Other things to see.

A hundred feet on, there was another stencil. This one was on a pillar at the side of a massive wooden door, daring passers-by to see it. One did, one stopped dead in the middle of the street. That would be me. To everyone else, it was just graffiti, if it was anything at all.

I looked around. Up ahead, near the corner – yes, it was another one. And beyond that? I’d just have to see, wouldn’t I?

So I chased the Baron. I found him on the sides of steps, on white walls made in the days of kings whose names I’d long forgotten, on the doorposts of ancient houses and upon their gates. They were never close together, and never did the path split, the line diverge.

I was being led.

In books, in movies, we know what happens at times like this. We holler at the hapless protagonist, soon to be the hapless victim. It’s only a painting, we say. Walk away! Turn around! Don’t be stupid!

But we say that from the comfort of our wingbacks, our stadium-seated movie theaters, our cars and our coffeeshops. Put us in front of the mystery, let it whisper in our ears so that no one else can hear, and suddenly it seems reasonable to follow. Logical.

Appropriate.

So it was with me, so it was with my mystery. Where the images led, I would follow. Where they went, I would go.

That night, they led me to the river and along it to the Pont Napoleon. “Across?” I asked. Ahead of me, I saw a figure stenciled onto the ancient stone of the railing.

Across.

They were closer now, more densely packed. I thought of the Smoot markings on the bridge over the Charles in Cambridge, and dismissed the comparison as inappropriate. Science there, magic here, and never the twain shall meet. Ancient sorceries, or something very much like them.

And in the middle of the bridge, they stop. Two figures together, right up at the edge of the railing. They are barely a finger’s width apart. They are together. Someone has drawn faces for them in black indelible marker, round and hideous and misshapen. One looked angry, one looked sad.

I stood there, paralyzed, convinced somehow that the spray paint and ink was going to gather itself up and fling itself – themselves – into the water below. A tourist boat, all striped awnings and bright lights, cruises on below and I realized I’d been holding my breath. I let it out, slowly, the sound hidden by the drinking and shouting and engines from the ship below.

Drawings. They were, of course, just drawings. I’d had my taste of mystery and would treasure it, would wrap it up and guard it so that I could take it out when needed. So that I’d have a well of mystery and wonder and helpless fascination to reach into when something I was writing called for it.

Maybe it was all the hissing man’s doing. I could take that speculation, too, the fear that it inspired and the wonder at the cause, and save them away as needed. I could wrap up the skepticism – Lord knew there’d be a need for that – and the fear, and the moments when I’d told myself aloud that I was just being silly. There would be a place for all of them. All the wonder and mystery of the night, all the strangeness and magic, would live on. It would be inspiration, imagination, memory – a story, or perhaps more. Bits and pieces of that night would inform so much, or at least I’d hoped they would. Otherwise, they’d come home to roost in my nightmares.

I finished crossing the river, suddenly glad that the trail had ended. I’d find someplace to eat, someplace with bright lights and lots of people and despairing waiters who liked tourist dollars but not the tourists who came with them, and that would be enough. Dinner, and then home, and to bed.

After all, I had seen enough for one night.

I never saw the hissing man again. And in the morning, all the skeletons were gone.

By Janet Berliner

Last night, I reread some of the stories in David Niall Wilson’s short story collection, DEFINING MOMENTS. The stories are written from the inside out. That’s why they’re brilliant. You’re IN the characters, at the place, feeling the pain and the pleasure. The book is a limited edition, so why am I promoting it here by using it as the title of this essay?

As a tribute to Dave, in thanks for the work he’s done keeping Storytellers Unplugged healthy. Thank you, Dave.

Since DEFINING MOMENTS may be hard to get your hands on, I also wanted to make mention of Dave’s next book, ANCIENT EYES, which conveniently comes out in a couple weeks (and sports equally beautiful cover art by Dave’s friend Don Paresi).

I planned to write a long review myself, when Dave’s and my agent pointed out this review from Nate Kenyon that appeared on Horror World last August.

–
Deep in the hills, there are different rules. Things shift, boundaries blur and time warps with the sudden, powerful draw of blood.

Although this sentence opens chapter nine of Wilson’s latest, Ancient Eyes, it could serve as the introduction to this stunningly surreal and deeply poetic work. When Abe Carlson’s nightmares lead to violent outbursts, and the strange phone calls increase in frequency, he knows that something is terribly wrong. Then a cryptic letter arrives from his mother back home in the mountains, and he must return to the place he grew up-and where, many years before, a great battle was staged. With his father’s help, goodness and light triumphed over evil back then; but now Abe fears that evil has returned to the little mountain town, and he is the only one who can protect the family he has left behind, and the place he once called home.

Meanwhile, two powerful spirits have lured Silas Greene and many of his neighbors from the mountain into the deep woods, where they are baptized by fire into the spirits’ service. They work quickly to rebuild one of two old churches in town, the home of many dark and cruel rituals many years before. As Abe arrives to take his place at the head of the second church, the one that his own father built years before, a new battle is already beginning, one as old as the mountain itself. Abe must risk his life and those of everyone he holds dear in a showdown that pits Silas Greene and his followers against those who still believe in goodness, and the ancient rituals that have ruled their lives from the moment their blood ancestors settled the land.

In a return to his horror roots, Wilson is in top form with Ancient Eyes. The story is compelling and the writing is beautiful, rhythmic and hypnotic, building slowly to a breathless end. Wilson has always straddled the line between poetry and prose, and he is known for exploring humankind’s darkest and most complex histories, and this novel is no different. But Ancient Eyes contains a more straightforward horror-style plot than his previous Deep Blue or The Mote in Andrea’s Eye.

In the novel Wilson uses wilderness as character, a constant presence that humankind is barely holding at bay. The very vegetation is alive, vines and weeds snaking around ankles and holding fast, while the mountain looms over all as if ready to pounce at any moment. Even the people who populate the backwoods town are often closer to animal than human. Rage, lust and instinct rule over civilized thought. Whether this kind of behavior is the result of possession is almost beside the point; for the spirit that possesses is really the animal within all of us, the id of human experience.

There is religion here too, but it is not the whitewashed, sterile, hushed-toned modern kind; rather, it is the raw, rough and gritty sort of centuries past, where a love of God was linked to a love of the land, and sex, blood and death was as much a part of life as anything else. Satan is a physical presence, and the threat is as much to life and limb as it is to the spiritual soul.

Ancient Eyes explores the concept that an older way still exists within the modern world. This life is full of the fear of the unknown, and rife with the rituals that evolve to compensate for it. In this world blood is indeed thicker than water; and bloodlines are tied to the mountain, rooted as firmly as the trees in the endless forest.
–

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Check out the Bloodletting Press web site, where you can get a free copy of Dave’s THIS IS MY BLOOD with your copy of ANCIENT EYES for a limited time.

By Stan Ridgley

What books do you choose to read? And which books do you like to read?

Which books are you driven to read?

There are differences, you know.

If the question comes up, most often people ask me what books I like to read.

Now, they ask this question for assorted reasons. Either to shut me up from my latest soliloquy on product differentiation . . . or as a casual pleasantry. What a great conversation-starter! And more revealing of character and taste than the average person might apprehend.

But for this purpose, I accept the question as a genuine request to discover what I think are the kinds of books and stories I find most instructive for my own writing. What do I consider a good story?

Well, first let me confess.

Let me confess to you a problem that I know is shared by many booklovers.

So many books infest my shelves that, when I finally get an hour or so of quiet time, and I can pick and choose to my whim . . . I am paralyzed. So many choices, and the selection of a single book means rejection of all the others, some possibly more worthy of attention. That is the perpetual conundrum.

So I usually nap.

Or I visit the bookstore to purchase several more great books for later reading. For the arrival of that glorious moment when I shall have the time, endless time! Rather like bookworm Burgess Meredith in the classic Twilight Zone episode as he stacks the hundreds of books he’d like to read on the rubble-strewn steps of the public library after a nuclear holocaust. Finally, he has the time.

But here is a minor paradox.

When I do read a good yarn, I find that I will go back to it and reread it. Caress it and wonder at why I thought it so grand to begin with. It is akin to the man who finds a great restaurant and a great menu item and begins to settle in comfortably, as with a comfortable friend. It doesn’t mean an aversion to the new and different . . . it means appreciation of the old and proven.

So I reread old favorites. Even as I know what will happen in the stories I read. I am fascinated at how the story unfolds, at how the author moves events along, striking a balance among all the essential elements of storytelling.

With that as the obligatory throat-clearing, let me share with you two of my old favorites. They differ vastly from each other in important ways that will be obvious, but they also resemble each other in the fundamentals of good storytelling.

The first book is The Spike, a cold war thriller published in 1979. I’ve read it five times in the past 28 years.

Authored by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss, The Spike is considered by some in intelligence circles to be the finest novel in the cold war CIA vs. KGB genre.

For me, it is difficult to define the particular attraction for me of this story, except to note that it has all of the elements of a good novel – a compelling lead character with strong beliefs and who changes dramatically as a result of powerful events, colorfully described. The novel has a supporting cast that is diverse and well-drawn. The stakes are high.

The novel is also obviously political and, on the extreme political left, it was considered “McCarthy-esque disinformation.” Methinks the storyline simply cut too close to home for the progressive tastes of Alexander Cockburn and the folks at the Covert Action Information Bulletin. In fact, having served in Military Intelligence for eight years, I know it cut close to home in certain respects.

But then, what powerful novel doesn’t have an agenda, political or otherwise?

Most stories worth the telling will call out folks who don’t want the story told, whether fictional or not. And The Spike hit a nerve with people who saw themselves limned with what might have been uncomfortable accuracy. As the bad guys.

And so it stirred considerable debate.

There’s an analog in the world of film, although much of the cold war fodder was anti-Washington and against the “Military Industrial Complex” labeled by President Eisenhower and conceptually fleshed out by C. Wright Mills.

Dr. Strangelove, Seven Days in May, Failsafe, Wargames, The Day After, Red Dawn, and The Day After Tomorrow…. Evil and one-dimensional military types, the exaltation of technology over human control, and thinly veiled portrayals of real-life folks.

Good yarns all, and yarns that angered certain constituencies with political proclivities differing substantially from those of the films’ themes. Nuclear Armageddon makes for epic storytelling in the military-industrial-complex-meets-the-disaster-movie genre. [In the aforementioned Twilight Zone episode, no such political theme is discernible . . . simply the despair of a single man and his struggle with the aftermath. An episode I plan to enjoy again.]

All of these films stirred and stir debate on the discrete issues, of course. And that is what The Spike did in its time.

In fact, The Spike performed the same vital function as did the books Failsafe, Seven Days in May and, a decade earlier, Graham Greene’s The Ugly American. Each took a point of view, and you were bound to agree or disagree with it.

Perhaps the edginess of The Spike, then, was its attraction for me, as well as its sweep, its multifarious characters, and the tremendous stakes involved.

But I mentioned two books that I enjoy rereading. The other?

John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.

O’Hara’s is decidedly different.

Appointment’s portrayal of the class structure in 1930s America and the ugly sinewy strength of some class mores is, I think, brilliant. But this has been said by more able writers than I.

For me, the strength in O’Hara is his powerful characterization, particularly of the self-destructive protagonist Julian English. The sense of presence, the sights, the smells, the sounds are all original and compelling. It rivals The Great Gatsby in its capture of an era and the human behavior that is channeled by the quirkiness of a cloistered environment.

O’Hara’s characters are introspective, and yet their introspection sometimes has a hollow and self-deceiving quality . . . as does our own ersatz introspection at times. We recognize ourselves, and this recognition is uncomfortable. I suspect that there are times when we believe we’re being brutally honest with ourselves, and yet we’re truly only trying to convince ourselves of our worth, our good motives, our essential goodness.

Deep thinking can be confused with revelation. Deep thinking can obscure and blind us as well as it can reveal to us. Deep thinking is not necessarily honest thinking.

And this is what O’Hara portrays so well. At least, for me, this is the received wisdom.

Quite obviously, The Spike and Appointment in Samarra are two entirely different books, equally attractive to me for overlapping reasons.

Both share the quality of great story and compelling characters. But one is introspective, involves the fate of those in a small town, and is bound temporally by several weeks… the other is sweeping, event-oriented, involves the fate of nations, and stretches over 15 years.

Both books offer the novice writer magnificent instruction in how to construct scenes, how to transition between scenes, how to handle character description, how to deliver backstory, how to craft crisp and spare dialogue. It’s all there… in both.

In fact, what a method to “learn” how to write, if such a thing is truly possible. Certainly craft is apprehensible, and I find these two books – even in their extremes—valuable in that respect.

Oh if I had the ability to write both types of novel! Failing that, they are books I will re-read.

But not today, and doubtless not tomorrow.

For there is no time.

by Jeffrey Thomas

Whenever I fear I’m imitating myself as a writer, returning too often to territory I’ve worked before, I always remind myself of Monet and his water lilies, a series he painted over the last twenty-seven years of his life. Sometimes I worry that I’m being lazy or unimaginative, not pushing myself far enough or hard enough when I return to old themes and ideas. But Monet wasn’t being lazy; his subject matter was an obsession, a very intentional and intensely focused pursuit of the myriad compositions of form to be isolated in his water garden at Giverny, the countless ways ephemeral light can interrelate with physical matter. One painting could not have expressed all that he needed to capture and convey.

I had read Lovecraft’s story AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (1931) before reading his shorter but still eerily effective THE NAMELESS CITY (1921), which despite its reptilian mummies in place of frozen carrot monsters, still feels a bit like a sketch for that later piece. The same can be said of Nabokov’s THE ENCHANTER (1939), a precursor to the longer and more brilliant LOLITA (1955), but still a worthy work in its own right. In the case of Lovecraft, I think he was merely revisiting a certain kind of atmosphere or environment because he enjoyed his first visit there, the way we might return to a city or museum or theme park that we didn’t entirely cover the first time around. Lovecraft wanted to explore this sort of situation more at length, to descend into its caverns and vaults more extensively to see what else he might mine from them. With Nabokov, I feel it had more to do with him being dissatisfied with the earlier work, needing to tackle it again from the start. Both these reasons for returning to one’s earlier literary stamping grounds seem legitimate enough to me. But I still find I have to justify my own repeat journeys to myself, nevertheless.

Now I’m not talking about Punktown, here. This of course is my long-running series of novels and short stories (among them, DEADSTOCK, PUNKTOWN, MONSTROCITY, EVERYBODY SCREAM! and the forthcoming BLUE WAR from Solaris Books) set in a nightmarish future city called Punktown. Writing a series, whether it be about Harry Potter or Arkady Renko, John Carter’s Mars or the Land of Oz, is another matter. In a connected series, you are not reworking an earlier concept but working further within that same space. Or is it so dissimilar? Why establish a series (besides the consideration of a plump paycheck?) unless, again, there is more you want to map of its world, more of that world’s characters to introduce to your readers – why, unless you are not satisfied with leaving your own water garden behind? I ask myself again and again, “Are you going back to Punktown out of laziness?” But such is Punktown, fortunately, that anything can happen there. I can, and have, written Punktown horror stories, romances, detective stories, social satires, humorous stories, though mostly in combinations of these genres. Punktown’s like our own world that way, but cranked to volume 11. No one’s holding a Darwin .55 loaded with flesh-dissolving plasma rounds to my head, forcing me to only write Punktown stories, but if they did – well, I could live with that. I also set stories in my version of Hell (LETTERS FROM HADES and the upcoming VOICES FROM HADES, etc.) and there are plenty of one-offs…but yeah, okay, don’t shoot. I could do it. I think I could live the rest of my literary life in Punktown and keep it fresh.

When I get even more uncertain, though, is when I return to working within Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. That’s when I feel like Michael Corleone in THE GODFATHER PART 3 (a series that, for the most part, Coppola would have been better off not revisiting that third time around), when he bellows that every time he tries to get out, they pull him…back…IN! I keep swearing that I’ve written my last Lovecraftian story. And then I write DEADSTOCK, which like MONSTROCITY combines both Punktown and the Cthulhu Mythos. Not that I regret this decision at all; I’m proud as hell of DEADSTOCK. But for BLUE WAR, which features the same protagonist, Jeremy Stake (a series within a series!), I stuck by my oath and kept all manner of Lovecraftan beasties out of it. (Oh, there are beasties, but the “benders” and “snipes” are my own babies.) I never would have written so many Mythos-type stories in the past, though (most of the short pieces having been collected in UNHOLY DIMENSIONS), had I not thought I was bringing something at least a little different and idiosyncratic to Lovecraft’s world each time. In DEADSTOCK, for instance, a child’s cute pet turns out to be a larval Cthulhu, whom I hope is one of the novel’s most sympathetic (and at the same time, ominous) characters. But whenever I do allow myself to be slimily sucked back into the world of shoggoths and the Great Old Ones, I always wonder now if I’m relying too much not only on my own past ideas, but even worse, the past ideas of another writer. Sure, Lovecraft encouraged his friends to share in his creations, and everyone from Ramsey Campbell to Stephen King has done so, but maybe now I should really, for real, put away my dog-eared copy of the Necronomicon for good. There are so many other books to read – and to write!

There’s another well I dip into frequently, and that’s love. But cut me some slack here, cuz that’s a damn deep well. And is it a lack of imagination on my part, or an overabundance of imagination, that makes me view romance again and again through a fantasist’s distorting lens, so that the object of love is often otherworldly? Sure, I create the occasional female protagonist who falls for a demon or alien or what have you, but usually it’s a male protagonist, for the obvious reasons. Check it out. MONSTROCITY: man falls in love with a gray-skinned alien woman. EVERYBODY SCREAM!: secondary character loves a woman with a parasitic twin; this also takes place in my short story THE SISTER. LETTERS FROM HADES and BEAUTIFUL HELL: men in love with demons. DEADSTOCK and BLUE WAR: man in love with a blue-skinned alien woman. In the short story I MARRIED A SHOGGOTH, man in love with a shoggoth (!) that takes on the form of women; DUST, man in love with his mom’s ghost as resurrected by an alien force (!!); incestuous tension between man and his dead mom in ADORATION, too. In REFLECTIONS OF GHOSTS, man in love with a cloned, female version of himself (!!!); in PALE FRUIT, man in love with a “tulpa” thought form; in THE SCHISM, man in love with a semi-human extradimensional version of his wife; not to mention the assorted vampiress, and so on. Whew! That’s a whole lotta monster lovin’!

So am I just being redundant, here? And why the heck do I even do it? Does making the object of love other than human heighten the differences between the two characters and hence pump up the drama, make the passion more disorienting and feverish? I’ve wondered if in my personal life I’ve been copying these characters of mine for the past few years (instead of the other way around!), by becoming involved with a Chinese woman, an African woman, and three Vietnamese women (the last of whom I’ve married); hell, even my first wife was of a culture “alien” to mine, being deaf. Is it something in my personality, my need to crank up the exciting differentness between men and women to that volume 11, both in my writing and in real life? It would be only too easy for me to fall in love with a real alien woman. Well, if she had a nice rack. (Humor!) Now, where was I going with this? Again, beyond the fact that as a fantasy writer I view things in a fantastical way – am attracted to the exotic, the excitingly different – there are things I need to examine and express again and again, whether because it’s simply rewarding as a writer or because it helps me digest the reality that lies in my own water garden. It isn’t so much that I feel I didn’t say it well before, but that I want to say it again in a different way. There isn’t only one love song to sing, only one love story to tell, and a gray-skinned alien is not a blue-skinned alien, trust me. In the end, I’m not writing the same story over and over. Some of these characters end up happy, some unhappy; hell, some of them end up dead.

But with BLUE WAR wrapped, again I started making oaths – telling myself that it’s time to cut back on the exotic romantic stuff, maybe on the romantic element in general. Let’s face it, though: that would be like telling me to stop loving my exotic, alien wife, who is the inspiration for that blue-skinned lady (though hers is more on the golden side). Yeah – that would be like telling me not to write at all.

Or telling Monet to knock it off with the lily pads, already!

(P.S. - Brian Knight, enjoyed your post — have experienced similar frustrations — and just wanted you to know I didn’t butt into the 23rd as it appears; posted mine at 7:30 AM on the 24th! Cheers!)

by Brian Knight

This happens to me all the time, so I should be well prepared for it by now, but it still catches me off guard every time. It’s the question everyone seems to pose to me after finding out I’m a writer (that is if they don’t head for the hills when they find out what I write).

This last time it came from an unexpected source, an extremely religious co-worker who couldn’t make it past page 1 of Hacks (I told him it wouldn’t be his cup of tea!), and though I don’t think he meant it that way, it was possibly the most obnoxious way anyone has ever asked The Question.

“So, Brian, when you publish those books of yours, do you have to take out a loan to pay for it?”

For a moment, I didn’t know how to respond. I searched his face for any sign of a smile. I hoped he was only pulling my leg.

He wasn’t. He was dead serious.

My other co-worker (it’s a small office, only three people) must have sensed the tension, because he dropped what he was doing immediately and turned to see what was up.

He was smiling. He knew he was about to get a good show.

When I regained the power of speech, I launched into a five-minute rant about how publishing works. I’m talking real publishing, as opposed to the do-it-yourself-publishers, most of whom don’t want to be bothered with such real world concerns as originality and quality (rant alert – most of the so-called envelope-pushers who self publish their work via Publish America and Lulu like to call their abuse of the rules of grammar Experimental, but leaving the “Speech Tags” out of the dialog in your novel isn’t innovative, it’s just dumb).

By the time I was finished, co-worker #1 looked thoroughly chastised and much more knowledgeable about the weird world of publishing than he ever wanted to be, and co-worker #2 was snickering over his paperwork.

I’ll admit he hit a nerve. Perhaps my reaction was a bit over the top, but it seems like everyone in my life, from family to casual acquaintances, assumes that because I’m not as famous as Dean Koontz, or because I still work a regular day job, I’m something less than professional in my aspirations. They hear Small Press and equate it with Self Publishing. I feel like I’m always having to explain myself to people.
It gets old after a while.

I’m beginning to realize how very few people are actually aware of the small press, and find myself brainstorming ways to fix that problem.

This is what I’ve come up with…

Jeff Strand appears on Oprah to promote his upcoming collection, Thunder from My Backside and Other Stinky Stories.

America’s Funniest Home Videos airs a fan submitted tape of Brian Keene reading rants from Hail Saten, crazy drunk and swigging from a bottle of Knob Creek.
Weston Ochse and Yvonne Navarro make a special appearance on Punk’d and beat the crap out of Ashton Kutcher.

Brian Knight appears on The Howard Stern Show and gets a Brazilian Bikini Wax while reading from his upcoming novella, 1200 AM Live.

Shane Staley appears on a special Delirium edition of The Apprentice, where he cuts random authors from the Delirium Stable.

Sean Wallace appears on a special Wildside Press edition of The Batchelor, where he finally gets some hot action.

These are all great angles, in my opinion, and would certainty turn a few eyes toward the small press. Execution might be a problem though.

Perhaps something a little lower key, and a little easier to execute.
How about a mass donation of small press titles from publishers to university libraries, maybe an effort to book appearances by small press authors to meet with students interested in breaking into publishing.

How about more aggressive marketing campaigns by the authors themselves, with an emphasis on local radio, local cable shows, local papers. The key word here is local. Every small press author should make a greater effort to educate those around them, and to expose their communities to the wider literary world the small press presents.

This is not meant to take anything away from the mass market, but to expose smaller authors to greater audiences, priming them for ascent to the mass market.

Just brainstorming here.

If you can come up with something better, please share. If we can educate potential readers en mass, maybe small press authors and publishers won’t have to explain themselves quite so often.

Brian Knight