Happy Holidays 2011

This time of year finds me working hard on The Gravediggers and Cursing the Darkness, anticipating the arrival of "Hide the Weird" in the upcoming Winter 2012 issue of Space and Time Magazine, and waiting to sign a contract for a very short nonfiction piece I just sold a few days ago.  A few other stories are out pounding the internet pavement.  Reading, writing, taking care of the new house and hangin' with my better half.  What's better than that?

I hope this time of year finds you well.  Happy holidays, all, and happy New Year!!!

Red Room and Author's Den

I'm not one for unabashed advertising.  In fact, (right) before I changed the format of this blog, I promised some good folks that I would somehow incorportate their blogs or sites onto mine, in an unabashed show of e-friendship and writerly patriotism.  I've done that for a few, not for all, and I feel sorta bad for it.  I apologize to them again; I promise to do what I can.

But I pause here now to tell all the writers who read this blog that they should consider getting an account on Red Room and/or Author's Den.  There are many reasons for this, all beneficial to a writer:

1.  You'll get noticed.  Already more people have seen my Red Room page--in just a couple of days--then there would be people noticing me here over a longer length of time.

2.  Other professional authors have such accounts and pages.  I'm talkin' Salman Rushdie here.  (I saw his.)

3.  They're considered a professional portfolio addition kind of thing.

4.  You can post your published (or, for many, self-published) titles on there, as well as the webpages you're selling them on.  Very convenient.

5.  You can put your announcements on there, too, which can range from "I just sold a short story," to "I just finished a new novel and it's ready for representation."  Of course, you can put much bigger literary news up there, too.  Like, "I just agreed to a contract with an agency."  If you're going to a convention, or booksigning, or anything else, you can announce that, too.

6.  You can publish previously unpublished works, like I did with "Shadows" here.  Of course, you cannot publish previously published works there, or anywhere else, unless it's been long enough for the rights to come back to you.

7.  You can publish previously unpublished articles, poems, etc. as well.  See disclaimer above.

8.  Red Room gives you a free blog, too.  Author's Den makes you upgrade (reads: pay) for one.

9.  Writers and readers who take writing and reading seriously are on there, not just web-surfers.

10.  The most important reason: My stuff is there!  See my links at the top of this page.  Check 'em out!

Who Do You Write For?

Been gone for a couple of days.  Very, very tired, and a little sick, and overall very blah.  Happy New Year to you, too.

An online friend wrote something to me today that, paraphrased, said: "When you write something inspirational, please let me know..." and so on.  Very nice person, offered to have me on her site as a guest writer, and so on.  But this got me thinking.  Should writers write what they want, what they feel?  Or should they write what they hear will sell?

My writing, for those who've gone to the site to check it out, tends to be a bit dark.  Okay, it's very dark.  Okay, my better half's right--it's straight out depressing and horrifying, if not somewhat interesting.  I am, after all, writing a concentration camp novel, an apocalyptic novel, and the finished novel is about murder and mayhem.  So, okay, no happy/smiley here.  Even my blog, I'm told, could use a touch of the light.

Should I write something happy/smiley?  Or should I write what comes?  Or, maybe more to the point, should what comes be more happy/smiley?  Now were talking personal psyche and psychology.  I'm not that bad, or sad, or horrifying, I assure you.  Stephen King isn't a complete psycho, despite his stories, and a lot of people actually wouldn't be traced back to their characters or stories if they weren't attached by name or fame.

Though it has been pointed out to me (many times) that Brad Foster and I are essentially the same.  I don't have shots of Dewar's at nine a.m., and he doesn't have my job (which WOULD make many people have shots of Dewar's at nine a.m.), but I admit that he and I are alike in...spirit.  Mood.  I am much more pleasant.  And I don't carry a gun.  We both have somewhat the same attitude towards society, though he's darker, and I suppose the dead-end alley effects both of us, though he more than I.  Hmmm...

But I digress.  Not, "What to write?" but, I guess, "What to write like?"  I don't know about everyone else, but my answer to that has always been that I can't write what I don't want to write.  If forced to write something light, fluffy and amusing, I'm not sure I could do it.  Foster is very funny, I'm told (and I agree), but admittedly he's not in a life-of-the-party kind of way.  If you like your dose of reality with a heavy touch of sarcasm and slight exaggeration, he's your guy.  Cursing does end with inspiration, though that's born out of a hole in Hell to begin with.  There was nowhere to go but up, mood-wise.

But what to write like?  This is to be continued, but I also have to point out that the question applies to blog entries themselves.  A couple of rules of thumb for blogs is that the entries should stick to mostly one theme or subject (mine kinda don't) and the entries should be just a few paragraphs, certainly no more than 4 or 5 (many of mine are much longer than that).  The stats bore this out: The longer blogs are read (much) less frequently.  In fact, they tend to be skipped, just like long paragraphs of description.  So one frame of thought is, "Don't do that because your readers don't like it."  And another is: "I'll write what I want, and those who like it enough will read it."  Guess which one I favor?

Bottom line, I suppose, is: Who do you write for?  If I wrote for my readers, I'd write more light and fluffy, and my entries would fall under the same category (and, no, not just mental), and they'd be much shorter.

And so--I write for me.

On the Fire

Photo credit: Olympus Imaging Corp./ Philippe Giabbanelli/ DoctorPete

A few things on the fire right now:

1.  Can you imagine being the one person immune to a disease wiping out your entire family?  Everyone's dying around you, no known cure, lots of wild theories and rumors, and, after everyone dies off and you survive, you walk out of your home--which had been quarantined--only to find that your whole village had been wiped out.  Sound crazy?  Look at this link, about Eyam, Derbyshire, England, a village that suffered for 14 months with the plague in 1665-6 and deliberately quarantined itself.  About 25% of the village survived; entire families were wiped out.  (Look at the pic of the Rose Cottage, about the Thorpe family.)  Some people in the village, like a woman who buried her whole family, and the town gravedigger, survived, though they came in touch with countless of the infected.  Imagine being that woman, who survived as all of her family died around her?  Or being that gravedigger?  What happened to his family?  How did he feel burying all his friends?  Working on this now; setting either in 1665, or present day, I don't know.  Leaning towards present-day.  Novella or novel.

2.  The other short story I'm excited about because it's my first non-genre piece, called "So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season."  It's about a writer coming home from a book tour at Christmas Eve, to a wife he knows is cheating on him and wants to divorce him.  His internal struggles on the plane ride home, in the airport with a fan as his wife approaches, and then on the ride home, when his wife tells him that her parents are already there, and that she's leaving him after the holidays for the guy she's been having the affair with.  Both pieces are ready to ship out.

3.  News, soon, about a short story recently accepted.  TBA.

4.  I have to send out two new short stories, one of them a Brad Foster short, called "Pink Lemonade."  There's another short story of Foster out there right now, knocking on doors, looking for a home.  (Foster is the main character and 1st person narrator of Cursing the Darkness, the prologue of which is below, with Chapter One waiting in the wings at my website.)  A poem is out there, too.

5.  Follow-up to Cursing the Darkness.  Leaning towards a prequel.  Writing decisions are hard.

6.  Finishing "Cribbage," a short story about a father and son (wife/mother has recently died) who bond over a game of cribbage; the boy has an adult-consciousness epiphany at the end.

7.  Novels: The Observer and Apocalypse.

8.  Novella that needs and wants to be a novel: The Gravediggers.  An existentialist/horror/vampire tale.  I began it in the mid- to late-90s, before everyone wrote vampire stuff.

9.  My day job.

10.  Spending less time at the computer.

Epigrams: From Comic Strips to Montaigne

I love epigrams, those often small obtuse statements of forced weight and thematic issues that authors use to introduce their own works.  They are the author's way of hitting their readers over their heads with the literary two by four as they scream: Do ya get it?!?  As an example, for his novel Firestarter, Stephen King uses the first line of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "It was a pleasure to burn."  One of the best opening lines for a novel, I think.  You just know Bradbury used that during his pitch session.  As another example, I shamelessly offer my use of comic strips to introduce my novel, Cursing the Darkness, the epigrams, prologue and first chapter of which you can find here.  Here, if you get what the monk is saying to Hagar the Horrible, you get the essence of Foster's psyche, not too far from Ahab's, in its own way, a fist clenched in hateful rebellion against the skies.

So, in that vein, today's entry starts what I hope will be a continuing series of the occasional epigram, introduced and quickly pondered.  These may or may not be famous snippets of genius; though many are very well-known, others are just favorites of mine, for reasons not always literary, but hopefully always interesting.  For every last stanza of a famous Frost poem, for example, there may be a line from Lorrie Moore, or a quote from Charles Manson.  Whatever floats my boat at the time, don't you know.  What tickles my fancy from my collection of epigrams right now is:

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.--Montaigne

Rather apt for this discussion, wouldn't you say?  Stephen King also grabbed this one for his novel, Misery.  Very fitting for his own work.  A true statement, from what I've seen and studied.  In my masters class right now, it has been often remarked by the professor that 20th Century literature--specifically for this class, the short story--is borne of the writer's innate misery, whether it be loneliness, isolation, parental issues, alcoholism (another form of self-expressed misery), lousy relationships (yet another), or any thousands of other expressions of self-torment.  

We write to connect, I believe, and often that connection is a tenuous arm outstretched to an uncaring (or so it seems) society, parent, or universe.  Maybe that's the most obvious difference between writing and what some, with a bit of elitism, call literature.  Literature is an open hand that says Pull me up, but be careful that I don't instead just grab onto you and pull you down with me.  Writing, like The Da Vinci Code, let's say, is still a connection, but it's an open hand that says I hope you find this as interesting as I do, so we can connect, share a passion, and so you can make me a millionaire.  Both equally worthy, I should say, and point out that I have read the latter and find it maybe the exemplar of its type, the escapist brain candy.  And Montaigne's quote still holds: Dan Brown, one could say, reaches out to connect to his readers, the misery possibly caused by the fact that he couldn't connect his passion for (extreme revisionist) history with his family or loved ones, so he had to write them down into opaque cliffhangers and share them with us.

It's the weight of the shared or implied misery that separates writing from literature.  The ponderous, perhaps profound misery of the writer is the bridge that makes some writing literary.  There's a solid whiff of pretentiousness in that.  But that doesn't make it not so.

Besides: Of all the writers who you know, are any one of them truly happy?