The Joining

I have another creepy little piece of flash fiction out today in the Mardi Gras issue of Danse Macabre. I hope you’ll give it a couple of minutes of your time. I sure had fun writing it.

February 2012 Danse Macabre

See No Evil?

When I was studying traditional harmony in college, I used to wonder if we universally associate minor key sounds with melancholy and dissonant intervals with tension just because our culture has done it that way for so long, or if there’s some wiring in the brain that would make you feel music in the same way even if you were raised by wolves.

I’m thinking along the lines of a Carl Jung/Joseph Campbell Collective Unconscious sort of thing, can you dig it? If similar patterns of myths, monsters and heroes emerge all over the world just because the human head has a tendency to sprout them in the same way that it sprouts hair and tears without having to be taught, then couldn’t we also have an innate orientation toward certain sounds and–I’m wondering lately–certain narrative devices?

I’ve been telling my son bedtime stories since before he could talk, since long before he sat down in front of a TV where most of us probably absorb the bulk of our cultural conditioning, and I noticed early on that if I told him a story in which the villain (used to be something like a tiger or a crocodile, but we’ve graduated to a pantheon of comic book baddies) is roving in the open, chasing the protagonist or laying traps, he was seldom afraid to hear about it. He even invented his own monster at the age of three, and I’ve never been so proud.* But if I kept the bad guy off stage, lurking out of sight… If the hero didn’t know where the threat was hidden… Oh boy, then I’d get fear.

Long before my son had seen suspense done this way in books, TV shows, and movies, he reacted to it in oral stories the way people listening in the dark probably always have. Maybe an evolutionary lesson was inscribed in our brains ages ago: the most dangerous predator is the one you cannot see before it strikes. All I know is when I started hiding bad guys, if he didn’t just get up and leave the room, he would cover his eyes with his hands so as not to see the picture his imagination was forming. Funny that–not seeing makes you fear seeing (and yes, I would back off; I may want to scare the hell out of you, but I’m not a horrible parent).

For me this was a lesson in the primal nature of suspense, a reminder and an illustration of something I’d learned long ago from Tolkien when he kept Sauron off stage, and the Nazgul hidden deep within hooded cloaks. Stoker did the same thing with Dracula for most of his tale, building up a shadowy intimation of evil.

Of course, there’s a time for foreplay and a time to deliver. One of the delights of horror fiction is that we eventually get to pull the curtain back and see what’s been waiting in the wings. And if you’ve built a cool monster, I want to see it.

One glimpse can work dark wonders in memory and imagination, and leave an afterimage that burns in the mind’s eye long after the curtain falls back into place.

Here are some of the coolest monsters I’ve seen lately. This is the Krampus parade that’s held every December in Austria where legend persists of mountain demons who help Santa Claus by spiriting away the naughty children.

 

 

Those Austrians know a thing about horror. They know that unveiling the monsters for just one night a year will do the trick. While American parents are threatening our sugar-injected offspring with, “Santa won’t bring you the Lego Millenium Falcon if you keep it up,” Austrians are marching their kids downtown and introducing them to the hoard of bloodthirsty demons that will abduct and eat them if they don’t cut the shit. Austrians do not fuck around when it comes to monsters.

*My boy’s first monster, verbatim:
Jonkerman drives a black automobile really fast. He has a nose on his belly. He is black, has eyes on his hair and the hair is on his feet, and he has a mouth on his hand. He is one million inches tall.

The Weight of Words

5 pounds of hope it doesn't suck

 

Last year my brother gave me an old laser printer that he had lying around, and today I printed out the first draft of my second book on it.  I love how fast a laser is and how the toner lasts like, forever.  Today I also love how heavy laser paper is because my 324 page ms. looks like The Fucking Stand.  And that’s pretty satisfying for making you feel like you’ve accomplished something when you’re also a bit jittery about discovering the quality of what lies within.

The first printout makes a book feel real in a special way, and after a couple months of letting this one sit, I’m finally ready to spill blue ink all over it.  I’m ready to find out if it’s worth another 6 to 12 months of work… or if it’s irredeemable.

I’m hoping I’ll find that it has the mojo to justify the redrafting and polishing, but if it doesn’t, then I’m free to go back to the wild, wonderful potential of writing the next one in first draft.

When I walked into the kitchen with the Stack o’ Paper, my wife asked, “What’s that about?”

“It’s last year’s harvest: book two,” I said.

She got all excited, and I went into the bathroom and dropped it on the scale.  It’s 5 pounds.  A first draft is like an infant; you get to weigh it, and get all giddy, and it doesn’t matter that it might be a little ugly with disproportionate features and slime all over it.

But the giddy moment passes as soon as you turn the title page over and dig in.  Some say that writing is an act of courage.  Sometimes I agree, and sometimes I think…

Writing can be done by any brazen fool,
But only the brave can read it when it cools.

Do Characters Think for Themselves?

If you read interviews with authors, this comes up sooner or later. A writer will talk about how there is often a point when the characters start saying and doing things that surprise him, things he didn’t intend or anticipate. One can get the impression that writers are people who spend a lot of time in a trance listening to the voices in their heads. Voices that are frighteningly independent. But a writer isn’t exactly a shaman, right? He knows he’s just making these people up out of scraps of imagination. They aren’t really going to do anything he doesn’t want them to, right? Or are writers half crazy?

Of course writers are half crazy—we hope to one day feed our families by telling beautiful and terrrible lies about folks who don’t exist. In our underwear.

I, for one, happen to think that on a good day the line between writer and shaman, between craft and trance, gets blured. But to bring a book into the world you have to write on a lot of days that aren’t so enchanted. A few weeks ago I finished the first draft of my second novel, and here’s what I noticed happening with regard to characters going off the reservation.

I don’t outline, but I do write up a short forecast for each section of a book. Just enough of a map to give me confidence that there are some landmarks on the horizon I’m aiming for.  But then, in the actual writing, I find that, like a weather forecast or a Mapquest printout, things on the ground are different.

I may be planning that a character is going to learn something three chapters from now that will cause her to take a certain action, but in the scene I’m writing today, she figures it out sooner because she’s just smarter than that. If I want to be true to what I know about her, if I want her character to be credible, I can’t go holding her back for the sake of a plot device, and I just have to let things develop differently.

This tends to happen most often when I’m writing dialogue. If there’s one thing that shouldn’t be contrived to serve the plot, it’s dialogue. Dialogue has to serve the characters, and it’s best when the writer is kind of overhearing it, like a spy with a steno pad eavesdropping on two people, each with their own agenda. [Plot is a side effect of characters at odds doing things that make sense to them] If the characters are having honest reactions, they won’t sound like they’re reading a script. And those reactions will sometimes surprise the writer, taking events in a different direction.

The ending of a book is also a fertile place for twists that can surprise the writer. I’ve heard some authors say that while they might not know exactly how they’re going to get to the ending, they do know the ending in advance. I can’t relate. For me, story telling is part problem solving, and I don’t know the sum of the equation until I’ve puzled it out. Every little decision I commit to over the course of a novel narrows the range of possible endings in an organic way. I may know of an event that I hope will fit like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but when I get there and all of the elements are in play, and everything I ‘ve learned about the characters has taken on an irresistible momentum, I just might have to toss that piece and find one that fits true without having to jam it in and fray the edges.

How about you other scribes? Do your characters think for themselves?

 

 

New Short Story and an Update

The September issue of Eclectic Flash magazine is out now, and since it arrived pretty much in October, I’m happy to have a horror story in there.  Check out my piece, A Way With Dogs to get yourself into the Halloween spirit.  There’s a print version for under five bucks, a free e-book version that you can easily read on your mobile device, and even an audio version spoken by yours truly, coming soon on their Voices page.

When you write fiction, it seems like every experience and interest in your life finds a way onto the page sooner or later.  This is a story that plays around with my day job and throws it into the blender of dread just to see what bloody beverage comes out the other side.  At less than 1000 words, I was aiming for something super tight, but there’s a ton of good stuff  in there by other authors to make it worth your while.

At  the other end of the yard stick, I just passed the 70,000 word mark this morning on the first draft of my second novel, which means I have about 20k to go by my reckoning. I know the 1st draft will be a little long, then I’ll cut the fat, add muscle and cut some more, ending up a little shorter than where I started, after six or seven drafts.

For me, this has been a quick one. I started at the end of May, wrote until the first week of July when a request for revisions on the other book sidetracked me for over a month, then got back into it at the end of September.  My deadline is now October 31st, and the book is at that crazy, fun and stressful stage where I have to commit to all kinds of choices, resolve a bunch of mysteries that I was able to blissfully sustain until now,  and decide who lives, and who dies.

It’s also no longer at that delicate stage where I worry the whole thing will collapse if I let a little air out of the valve by blogging about it.

All told, I will have spent a total of three months on this first draft, which is a LOT faster than the years I spent on Echo Lake.  Part of the speed comes from putting down the pen and writing the whole thing on the Alphasmart Dana with daily transfers into Scrivener on the Mac.  But mostly, it’s the pressure I’m putting on myself with daily quotas and deadlines so that the associative engine in my brain is forced to run hot.

The working title is Steel Breeze, and I gotta say, this book is tweaking my head on a daily basis, because when I’m not pressuring myself to produce like a fiend, I’m frontloading with research on lighthearted topics like the details of the Hiroshima bomb, the Japanese American internment camps, and acts of cannibalism committed by the Spirit Warriors in the Pacific Islands during WWII.  That’s what I get for telling my history buff friend that I wanted to write a book about a Samurai serial killer.

In other news, another good friend has been working out a logo I can use as a letterhead and avatar for all of my writing endeavors on the web. Jeff Miller–artist, musician, writer… creative polymath–whipped this up for me.  Check it out.

On the Air

So it’s been a little over a year since I started this blog.  I know it hasn’t been very active lately, but that’s because I’m in the thick of it with the first draft of a new book, and I hate to talk about first drafts while I’m doing them.  Anyway, to celebrate a year of blogging, here are some excerpts from an interview I did in 2010 for the Newburyport local cable show, On the Air with Lynn Kinsella, in which I ramble about music, writing and dogs.

Give Me Your Heart: A Review

I just finished reading this short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates.  If you like horror, real horror with a palpable sense of dread racing at you; if you like to immerse yourself in the frayed minds of characters whose lives are spinning out of control, if you like to be forced to identify with characters who may be monsters, characters you can’t trust, then this book is for you.  I closed the back cover and said aloud, “That was some fucked up shit.  Goddamn, that was fucked up.”  And that’s a high compliment.

Chutes & Ladders

The heat and humidity did one good thing for my family: it got us away from the TV last night and into the air-conditioned bedroom for a game of Chutes & Ladders. I’d never played the game before, and I have to say that it sure does neatly illustrate a fucked up cosmology.

Ladders to heaven, chutes to hell. That much is easy to read into a game where landing on a ladder square shows a positive action a child could take connected to a positive outcome at the top of the ladder, with chutes doing the reverse.

The traditional Indian version in which the snakes outnumber the ladders

I’m down with that whole karma thing big time (turns out the game comes from India with roots in Hinduism), but here’s where it gets disturbing: you spin an arrow to find out how many squares to move. So whether you commit a positive or a negative act is determined only by a spin of the wheel. No active choice. It’s as if the game is telling you that yes, there are consequences for every action, but the actions you will take in life are themselves the result of chaos, random chance, and the haphazard collision of your DNA with the environment.

A terrifying model of the universe that just might be true, neatly packaged as a child’s board game. I bet there’s a story in that.

Odometer

I just crossed the Continental Divide on the work in progress.  The book I started on May 23rd is now at 45,700 words on July 1st, so with a 90k goal for the first draft, and an ever solidifying sense of where it’s going, I’d say I’m standing at the halfway point with a decent view in both directions.

To celebrate, I plan on whacking a character over the holiday weekend!

Games Writers Play

 

Remember Take Your Kid to Work Day?  My Dad was an aerospace engineer, so Take Your Kid to Work Day was really cool.  I got to see a partially built space shuttle wing, and a grabber arm thingy that was also set to go up in the shuttle for grabbing satellites and stuff.  Pretty awesome.  But for most of the time when I was growing up my father couldn’t talk about work, and our phone was probably bugged just to keep him honest while he was busy with  Cold War stuff.

Now I’m a Dad, and I work at home.  I do most of my writing before my son even wakes up in the morning, but this past Monday we played a little game that you could think of as the fiction writer’s version of Take Your Kid to Work Day:  Help Daddy Hide the Murder Weapon.

Now don’t go calling DSS, okay?  Of course I didn’t use those words with my three year old.  I told him it was the Imagination Game, and his job was to help me think of 100 ways that a guy named Desmond could hide something so that a bad guy wouldn’t be able to find it.  Kind of like hide and seek meets storytime.  I’m looking for fresh perspective here because I’m a little stuck. Sure Desmond could throw the thing into the river, but how many times have we seen that?  When you need devious behavior with a splash of originality, it helps to ask WWATD (what would a toddler do)?

Me and the boy only made it to #34 on our list before snack time, but he came up with some interesting ideas while I banged them in on the keyboard.  Here are a few that have potential:

6. Send it to the smelter’s yard (If this doesn’t mean anything to you, you clearly don’t watch enough Thomas and Friends).
8. Sell it on a web site.
12. Give it to the police to keep it safe.
11. Put it in cement (also a Bob the Builder fan)
15. Send it to faraway coconut island (have I been muttering about Pina Coladas again?)
20. Put it in a train furnace.
21. Hide it in a cave.
22. Give it to a crocodile.
23. Hide it in a cabin.
29. Hide it in a mirror
31. Give it to a tiger

This is based on a writer’s block breaking exercise called 100 Bad Ideas.  When you’re stuck, you try to write down 100 crazy bad ideas for what could happen next.  They say that by the time you get to 20, you usually want to drop the list and get back to work because a few of them are actually pretty good.  And I think one of these will work for me if I find a fitting way to interpret it in the context of my story.

I think I like #29.

Anyway, if you’re reading this and you’re a Dad, I hope you have a nice Father’s Day this weekend.  And the next time you’re stuck on how to solve a problem at work, why not ask your kid for help?