Frank Cavallo

The Endless Fascination with Vampires

2008-12-07T18:29:00.003-05:00

Geek that I am, I've been playing this game called "Vampire Wars" on facebook for the last few weeks. The game itself is not that great, really. I don't know why the hell I keep coming back to it. It's kind of a bare-bones role playing game. All text-based, like old time D&D games. You earn skill points and strength points and all those other things RPG types are familiar with.

The thing appears to be wildly popular. Facebook (which I spend way too much time on, by the way) offers a lot of these type of games, but the Vampire application really seems to have a following.

This got me to thinking. As a writer, I've always resisted entering the vampire genre, but there really does seem to be a built-in audience for anything undead. My feeling was always that the vampire tale had been "done to death" so to speak, and done quite well. From Bram Stoker to Anne Rice, what more could there be to say?

Now I'm beginning to re-think that. Maybe the vampire mythos enjoys such an enduring place in the human imagination for a reason.

On the one hand, they are a romantic monster. Elegant, sophisticated and beautiful -- sexy even, in the hands of many authors. But for all their power and allure, they are the most tragic of all mythical creatures. They have what we all wish we could have, immunity from death and suffering, but it is this very quality that renders them hopeless and alone. They embody the things we wish we could have, and yet suffer from the same fundamental problems that we do.

So if they are "us", then there's always more to be said.

Whatever works, I guess

2008-11-11T16:46:00.002-05:00

I'm back. At least my ability to put words together on a page is back, for now.

I have no idea how this works. Last month, I couldn't string a sentence together. I'd just stare at the page, coming up with nothing. Nothing. Now, for no apparent reason, the old gray matter is ready to work again.

In the last month or so I've taken a minor break from writing. It seems to have helped. Part of it was involuntary, of course, I couldn't do it even when I wanted to. The other part was just circumstance. I took a few road trips.

Early in October I drove over to Pittsburgh to meet up with an old buddy from NJ, and to watch the Devils edge out the Penguins -- behind enemy lines. I'd been to Pittsburgh before. It's a lot like my adopted hometown of Cleveland, for as much as residents of both cities like to act as if one or the other is somehow far superior to their rival. I guess that's how people from the rest of the country look at my precious Boston-New York rivalry. Without a dog in the fight, it probably looks like two groups of very similar people, from very similar places who just love to act like they hate each other.

A few weeks later, I ventured further east, to Virginia. With a bunch of fellow attorneys and amateur Civil War buffs, we toured two battlefields, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. I love doing that. some of those places are so pristine, it's like taking a vacation in the 19th century, albeit with a nice hotel suite to go back to at the end of the day.

Funny story, we got lost in the woods, near a thick forest area they called "The Wilderness" during the war. At some point, we did consider resorting to cannibalism if our barely-remembered Cub Scout training proved unable to find us a way out. Luckily we weren't lost for that long, but I'm wondering if I can turn that into some kind of a horror story.

So now, like magic, I come home and find that I'm able to write again. Maybe it was just the R&R that hit the "reset" button on my current manuscript. Then again, there's nothing quite like a real-life discussion of human sacrifice to get the creative juices flowing.

The Dreaded Block

2008-10-19T16:01:00.002-04:00

It's happening again. Writer's block.

It's no myth. No fantasy. It's very real. And it's got me stuck.

I was cruising along, too. I'm approximately halfway through a new manuscript, I had all the major characters established, the plot was moving just as it should and then -- boom. Nothing. Every time I've sat down to write for the last few weeks, I haven't been able to muster a word. Not a thing.

The worst part of it is that it's largely self-inflicted. When I do think about writing at the moment, I'm thinking about sales figures, about distribution, about reviews -- or the lack of them, about getting a deal for my most recent finished manuscript, and even obsessing over the details of my first one -- why it didn't sell as many as I'd hoped, why it didn't get in more stores.

This is supposed to be about the process. The writing itself. Doing it for its own sake. Not for money (God knows I haven't really made any). Not for recognition (no problem there, either). Not for the business.

But for some reason, that's all I can think about right now.

A New Day

2008-10-01T19:50:00.002-04:00

I haven't updated this blog since July. Not that I haven't been working, I just haven't had much to put up here.

The other day my agent asked me to put up a "blurb" on her website (agentR.com) for the manuscript that I've been working on this summer. It's not done. I'm barely halfway through it, in fact. While I usually don't like to do this -- I don't even let anyone read what I'm writing until it's done -- in this case I'll make an exception. This project is all outlined already, which is another thing I don't usually do, but it means that I know pretty much how it's going to look when I finish it.

If you've read this blog at all, then you might recall that about a year ago (after several trips to the desert Southwest) I started musing about the idea of a horror-fantasy set in the Old West. The blurb that follows is the result of those ideas rattling around my head for a while.

The other manuscript I posted about a while back, "The Prometheus Gate" is still out there in the ether, so keep checking back for updates on that one.

Anyway, here's the teaser for the new one, working title "The Hand of Osiris":

The year is 1879. Bounty hunter Jacob Hatcher has pursued the outlaw Jedediah Sykes from the Texas prairie to the deserts of the Arizona Territory. On the verge of capture, Sykes escapes into a valley that Hatcher’s Apache guides refuse to enter, warning that the lands are cursed by an ancient, nameless evil. The trail leads him to a town that appears on no maps, a dark paradise of sin and vice called Gehenna. Though gambling and gunfights rule the day, no one in Gehenna ever dies. Unless everyone in Gehenna is already dead. Hatcher and Sykes soon find themselves entangled in the mysteries of Gehenna’s peculiar denizens – a pale dandy, a fire & brimstone Jesuit preaching to a city of lost souls, and a shadowy figure who rules over the town like a living god. When one of them makes a choice that threatens to damn them all, the rest must work together, confronting not only their own demons, but the hidden horrors of Gehenna itself, to find a stolen key that can unlock the domain of the dead. The Hand of Osiris.

Opinions May Vary

2008-07-15T17:23:00.003-04:00

I got a kick out of this.

Every so often I google "The Lucifer Messiah." I used to do it a lot, during the first six months after it came out. Not nearly as much lately. The great thing about all this "inter-connectivity" these days is that you can find out all kinds of things you never could have known before: who's reading your book, what they think about it, even where they got it.

You can also get a great, and sometimes humorous, sense of how people think your work ranks compared to other authors.

That's what I found today.

I googled the book and a site popped up that I had never visited before. A reader had posted a whole long list of books that he'd read recently. He categorized them into those that he considered "Good" "Okay" and "Awful."

I already knew my book was on the list somewhere, but I didn't know where. So I scrolled through it.

The good news?

My book is in the same category with novels by Kurt Vonnegut, William Peter Blatty of "The Exorcist," Thomas Harris of "Silence of the Lambs," "Red Dragon" and "Hannibal,"C.S. Lewis and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Fine literary company, indeed, wouldn't you say?

Well, here's the rub. According to this particular blogger, all of us wrote books that fell into the "OKAY" category.

Oh well, you can't please everyone, right?

I suppose I 'd rather be considered "Okay" alongside Kurt Vonnegut than be considered "Good" alongside Terry Brooks and that Christopher Paolini kid. Don't even get me started on that.

Gettysburg, Shelby Foote and the 4th

2008-07-04T22:42:00.006-04:00

I just read Shelby Foote's "Stars in Their Courses." That's not actually a complete book. It's a very small segment of the middle volume of a three volume history of the American Civil War. I hope someday to read the entire thing.

This has become something of a minor obsession for me lately. A few weekends ago I visited Gettysburg for the first time. It's an amazing place. Nowhere that I've been to is quite like it. I could go on for pages and pages about why Gettysburg is so important, why it's so meaningful, why the place is so affecting. But other, better writers have already done that, and if you care at all about the subject, you'd do well to read any of them.

Shelby Foote, would be a good first choice.

He was a gifted writer. His words do what every writer attempts, and what few ever achieve. They do not merely describe, they evoke. Both transcedent beauty and horrific suffering, and every shade in between. He weaves an epic tale, all the more touching because it is no tale, as he reminds the reader every few pages by digressing -- never for long and never without good reason -- with personal stories about the men who fought and died all those years ago.

As the Fourth of July draws to a rainy close here in North Jersey, Shelby Foote has me thinking. That's what we should have been talking about today. That's the point. But all day, while HBO ran a "John Adams" marathon and one of the other cable channels ran all the episodes of "The American Revolution" series back-to-back, I didn't see a single mention of the Civil War, let alone Gettysburg, which was fought on the first 3 days of July.

That's a shame, because an understanding of the Civil War is essential to an understanding of the United States. The freedoms that were won during the Revolution, the freedoms proclaimed by Jefferson and the men in Philadelphia on this date 232 years ago, marked only the beginning of the story. In many important ways, the ultimate success of that revolution wasn't realized until the Civil War, and no one moment better encapsulates the Civil War than the Battle of Gettysburg itself.

Shelby Foote summed it up so well, with one statement that everyone should know about the U.S.

Before the Civil War people would typically say "The United States are..." After the war however, and ever since, people say "The Unites States is..." And that's what the war meant at it's most basic level. That's what all the blood spilled and the suffering endured at places like Gettysburg achieved. Foote says, as only he could: "the war made us an is."

The Fourth of July marks the date when a group of sovereign states came together to end their collective rule from London. But it was only many years later that those several states truly became what we are now, one single nation.

My First Ever "Fan" Call

2008-05-07T19:34:00.002-04:00

This is a new one.

As a writer, I don't really get fan mail. When The Lucifer Messiah came out in 2006, I got a few emails from people who had read the book. Mostly they were just dropping a line to say a nice thing or two.

That died down quickly. Then I went to Fan Expo Canada last year, where Medallion Press and I gave out a few hundred signed copies. That generated a handful of nice comments from folks who attended and liked the book.

But today I got something new. A fan phone call.

When I got home from work today there was a message on my landline phone (I rely almost exclusively on my cell these days, so my landline is kind of a vestige of the old days.) It was from a woman who very nicely reported that she had just read my book and wanted to let me know that she liked it. She didn't leave a number, and the caller ID on my phone registered "private call" so I don't know who she is or where she called from. But it was nice to hear.

Unusual, but nice.

Steal This Book (not really…)

2008-04-20T15:30:00.001-04:00

I just learned something strange. People have stolen The Lucifer Messiah from the Library.

The Cuyahoga County Library system here in Ohio has 10 copies of it listed at their various locations. That’s a high number for a one-book author with no real following. In part this is because folks here generally make an effort to support their own, whether it be in music, art, sports or anything else.

Even though I’m not technically one of their own, since I’m not a native Clevelander (I can’t even bring myself to call soda “pop”) I have lived here since the late 90s – and even transplants get support around these parts.

Apparently, of the 10 copies (five of which are currently checked out – amazingly) two of them have been checked out and never returned. They’re so overdue in fact that they’re now listed as “billed” which I assume means that the library has simply given up on getting them back and charged the customer.

I don’t advocate theft. I can’t, as an officer of the court and simply as a matter of principle. So I’ll say for the record, please don’t steal my book. I know it’s not on the shelf at the local Borders. But it’s available on Amazon, and Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million, as well as Chapters/Indigo in Canada and about 30 independent booksellers accessible through Google. A few brick and mortar stores still carry it too, mostly used bookstores or non-chain places.

On the other hand, I think it’s kind of a bizarre compliment. Either a number of very lazy people are borrowing my book, or some of the people who are reading it have decided to just keep the damn thing for themselves.

Or maybe it means nothing.

The Email Book Club

2008-04-05T13:14:00.002-04:00

I'd like to take a moment to thank the folks at the Email Book Club and Dear Reader dot com. The Lucifer Messiah was their featured selection in the Horror category over these past two weeks. Other recent selections include novels by Bentley Little, Scott Nicholson and Tim Lebbon, so I was quite honestly thrilled to have my strange little book included in their company.

It didn't hurt sales either, as I noticed a spike in amazon.com purchases over the last fourteen days for my now-almost-two-year-old novel. Since a book by an otherwise unknown author on the market for that length of time is almost impossible to find on store shelves at this point, I'm assuming almost anyone who wants a copy checks amazon sooner or later.

The idea of the email book club is that they send readers the first few chapters of a novel over the course of a week or two so they can decide if they want to buy it after having read enough to make an informed choice -- and without spending anything on it until they have some idea if they're going to enjoy it.

Happily, it would seem that at least some of the people who read the first few chapters of The Lucifer Messiah thought enough of it to plunk down a few bucks on the thing. If anyone reading this now falls into that category, I'd like to thank you as well. I hope the rest of the book, weird and odd as it is, was to your liking.

And if it was, keep your eyes peeled for my new one, hopefully coming soon.

The (minor) Genius of Tombstone

2008-03-08T10:51:00.003-05:00

I love the movie Tombstone. Good thing too, because it seems like it’s on just about every week. Between the Encore Western Channel, the Action Channel, TNT or any of the HBO’s, you sometimes feel like it has its own network.

At this point, I must have seen all or part of this film a few dozen times (including last night) and after many repeated viewings, I have some thoughts about why it’s so good. Why it worked so well originally and why it’s held up so well over the last fifteen years. (plus, I'm house-bound in a blizzard and I'm looking for things to write about)

If you recall, Tombstone is one of two Wyatt Earp bio-pics that were made in the early nineties. The other one you might remember was actually called Wyatt Earp. It was one of a string of Kevin Costner post-Dances with Wolves epics. Today that version of the Wyatt Earp story is almost forgotten, although I have heard that it is used in some hospitals to anesthetize patients who have allergies to traditional sedatives. It’s a sprawling three-plus hours long, and if I remember right, Costner really was striving for, and probably achieved, a high degree of historical authenticity with it. It covered Wyatt Earp's formative years, following him all the way to the famous showdown at the O.K. Corral. It just doesn't work though.

Tombstone, on the other hand, is blatantly and rather unapologetically inaccurate. I say that because it not only plays fast and loose with the facts of Wyatt Earp’s life (and the lives of his friends and family) it even goes so far as to begin the film with faked-up black and white newsreel footage. An accompanying Robert Mitchum voice-over informs us that the movie takes place in 1879. You don’t need a degree in film studies to know that showing newsreels from the 1870s is about as accurate as depicting Teddy Roosevelt debating the use of an atomic bomb.

And that’s just the beginning. The entire movie is a fantasy-version of Wyatt Earp’s life. The film omits members of his family, alters the timelines of significant events and treats actual historical figures as almost fictional characters. Two quick examples: the town Marshall Fred White killed by Curly Bill Brocius is played by an elderly man. The actual Marshall White was in his early thirties. John Ringo is portrayed (brilliantly, by the way) as a well-educated sociopath regarded as the fastest gun since Wild Bill. In truth he was probably something of a coward who was no better educated than anyone else, who might not have killed anyone and who didn’t die in a gun-battle with Doc Holliday, but probably committed suicide.

So why is it so damn good?

For one, because it isn’t tethered to the facts. Where Costner’s version tried to show a complete picture of the man Wyatt Earp, Tombstone may as well be a work of complete fiction. It has little regard for the actual chronology of all but a few iron-clad details. Rather than being a negative though, that's actually one the things that I think elevates it. Life doesn’t really work like the movies. It’s messy and illogical and doesn’t always make sense. By abandoning the real events to some degree then, Tombstone is free to tell an entertaining, if not totally true, story.

If you watch it closely, it actually works kind of like a stage play on film. The Cowboy Gang is introduced in a fast sequence right after the opening that establishes their brutality in about 30 seconds. Then, in short order, we meet Wyatt and his whole family at a train station where Wyatt rebukes a man for whipping a horse, showing his good-nature in even less time. A few minutes later we find ourselves in Tombstone itself, where Wyatt meets up with: Doc Holliday, the Sheriff, the Marshall, two of the men who will eventually join Wyatt’s “gang” and the entire acting troupe from which Wyatt’s love interest is drawn – all in one street scene.

Now, there’s no way all of those people would have met like that in “real life.” And we know enough about the real people that we can say for sure that it didn’t happen that way at all. But it doesn’t matter, because it works. We meet every major character and learn one or two key things about them in the time it takes to get the cellophane wrapper off of your box of Snow Caps.

A scene a few minutes later puts Curly Bill and Ringo face-to-face with Wyatt and Doc in the Earps’ casino, where Bill and Wyatt size each other up across the Faro table, as Doc and Ringo do the same in a clever display of Latin proverbs and hand-eye-coordination. Another great scene that is at once completely unrealistic and yet totally effective. From there, only a half hour into the film, every major conflict is not only well established, but is already well underway.

I could go on.

Most of the rest of the film plays out just like that. Every scene has a purpose and every scene moves the story along. Not like real life at all, and almost certainly not the way the real lives of the real Earps happened. But that’s fine. It's better that way.

The performances are excellent too. Tombstone is one of those movies where every actor is on his or her game, no matter how relatively minor their role might be.

Michael Biehn as the previously mentioned Johnny Ringo is my personal favorite. He plays the steely-eyed villain as an almost tragic figure, a lost soul whose background suggests wealth and refinement, but who somehow lost his humanity en route to becoming a feared gunfighter. So what if it isn’t true? The acting is brilliant and the character feels authentic.

Val Kilmer puts on a show of his own as Doc Holliday, in some ways the inverse of Ringo -- a refined gentleman who is also a ruthless killer, but who, is somehow a more benevolent scoundrel, and while suffering from tuberculosis, is somewhat tragic himself.

Kurt Russell in the Wyatt Earp role plays him as the reluctant lawman, drawn into a conflict despite doing everything to remain neutral. He’s the classic hero, slow to anger, but fearsome and bold when called upon. A less demanding role than some others, but Russell holds his own with just the right mix of intensity and warmth.

Again, whether Wyatt Earp was actually like that hardly seems to matter, because this isn’t a movie about the real Wyatt Earp. It’s a story about gunfighters and cowboys in a fictionalized Old West. It’s about a group of fully-realized characters who have the same names as people who were once real. It isn’t an attempt to re-create real people that results in a bunch of poorly realized characters.

And that’s why it works so well. Real events don’t tell stories. They just happen. We sometimes tell stories about real events, but those stories are easier to follow and more entertaining to watch if they follow a few basic rules of drama, of fiction in other words – set up the characters, lay out a conflict for them, let them try to figure their way out and see what resolution they arrive at.

That’s what Tombstone does, and what Wyatt Earp the film didn’t really do. That’s why it works, and why it’ll probably be on again soon.

Defending The Godfather

2008-03-07T17:39:00.002-05:00

This might be unnecessary. The Godfather is widely recognized as one of the greatest American films. Perhaps even one the greatest films -- period. It certainly doesn't need me, a little-known fantasy author with a limited blog readership, to rise to its defense. But I'm going to anyway.

I was reading the newspaper the other day and I came across one of those human interest stories that runs from time to time. You know the kind I mean, it isn't really news, and much of the time it isn't all that interesting, either. It always goes something like this : "local boy/girl rises above adversity to accomplish something you don't actually care about but we need to fill space in the Arts and Life section."

That's written, by the way, as someone who was once the subject of just such an article when my first novel was published. Not sure too many folks in Cleveland really cared about it, but it was nice that the Plain Dealer ran a story.

Anyway, the one I read this week involved an NBA ref from New Jersey (which is probably why I read it in the first place) who at one time worked as an undercover agent infiltrating the mob in my home state. His undercover name was actually something like John Covert. Seems like an absurd name, I know, but he claims in the story that the word "covert" wasn't widely known in the 1970s. I'll take that on faith. Other than perhaps Meyer Lansky, mobsters aren't generally known for their intelligence.

At some point in the interview, the guy was asked how realistic mob portrayals are in the movies, based on his first-hand experience. This is a question that gets asked of everyone who's been on the inside, like Joe Pistone and Henry Hill. And they all say the same thing. Goodfellas is pretty much right on, and this NBA/Covert guy said The Departed was pretty close too. Then they always go on to say that The Godfather was total Hollywood nonsense. Every time. Everyone wants to take a shot at Vito and the Corleones.

By all accounts, there's no argument to be had on that point, of course. I grew up in New Jersey, and I heard the stories here and there. So and so owed the wrong people money and ended up taking a vacation -- permanently. Or someone else's Dad is "connected." Or we can't eat at that restaurant because it's "mobbed up." There's even a family story about my great-grandfather's bar in New York that was supposedly a hang-out for the local goombahs in the late teens and early twenties. Apparently they felt so comfortable there they used it to do some business (which ended up with some poor soul getting killed) and my great-grandfather sold the place the next day.

Nothing about noble sacrifices and honorable deaths, or even dramatic betrayals and family squabbles. Nothing like what you see in The Godfather.

And my point is this: So what?

The Godfather is not highly regarded because of its purported accuracy. It isn't renowed as a faithful depiction of the mafia, a word that famously isn't even used in the movie itself. The reason The Godfather is so respected has nothing to do with its authenticity -- or lack thereof. The Godfather is epic tragedy. It is to America what King Lear is to England. Or what Oedipus Rex was to Athens.

It's American Shakespeare, American Sophocles. It's the tragedy of power destroying those who wield it, even those who do so with the best of intentions. And just like the Elizabethans or the Greeks, it's about the way power is held and lost at the highest levels -- among kings and princes.

Does it matter that real mobsters didn't behave like Vito Corleone or Michael Corleone?

About as much as it matters whether or not a Greek king ever actually married his mother and killed his father.

Were any Greek kings driven to ruin by their pride and arrogance? Probably, but that isn't the point. Oedipus Rex isn't an attempt to chronicle the way actual Greek kings ruled their city-states. It's a morality tale about the dangers of those behaviors; and what bigger canvas could that lesson be painted on than the world of kings?

That's why I think that criticism of the Godfather for being unrealistic is almost superfluous. Sure, Goodfellas and The Departed more accurately represent how actual mobsters lived, but in a very real way, The Godfather isn't about the mob, at least not any more than Oedipus Rex is about Greek aristocracy. They're both about people, about us.

The Godfather is about the way a good but flawed man goes wrong by trying to do right. The way a man loses his soul by attempting to protect the things he cares about and the ideas he believes in, the way a good man becomes a bad man without realizing it. It's human tragedy of the oldest kind. It happens to be set among the mob because that world is possibly the nearest thing that 20th century America could have offered to compare with the bygone days of hereditary kings, loyal knights and court intrigue -- most of which was probably not as honorable or noble as the stories depict it anyway.

So The Godfather isn't realistic. Big deal. I suspect Hamlet isn't a particularly accurate depiction of ancient Danish princes either.

And it doesn't matter in the least.

Tolkien Lite

2008-03-04T18:13:00.006-05:00

When I was a junior in high school I was very much into traditional fantasy fiction. I was in the middle of working my way through Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and in between reading the actual tales I lived on steady diet of Conan and Kull comic books. I was only vaguely aware of Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft at that point, but I was already quite familiar with the Lord of Rings, first from the Ralph Bakshi animated film and then through the books themselves. Also around this time, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons PC-based games like Pool of Radiance.

One of my best friends at the time, a fellow geek and fantasy fan, was VERY much into the Dragonlance book series, and he repeatedly tried to sell me on it. He not only read the books, he bought up every ancillary publication that TSR sold, The Art of Dragonlance, The Atlas of Krynn, etc. We used to pour over these things studying the character designs, marvelling at the artwork and using it to build our own fantasy stories and art, as both of us considered ourselves budding artists/writers.

I was kind of a snob about it though, and we would often clash over whose fantasy was the "real thing" or whose was the best. I argued over and over for Robert E. Howard & Tolkien as the true fantasy, denigrating Dragonlance as a pale imitation. He argued that what I was reading was old and tired and that Dragonlance was new and fresh. I don't think I ever convinced him to read Conan or Kull (although I remember he gave more respect to Tolkien) but I did eventually attempt to read the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

I hated it. I couldn't finish it and the experience only hardened my resolve that what Weiss and Hickman had done was to raid Tolkien's work, coming away with a bunch of transparent, poorly imagined copies masquerading as characters. Eventually my friend and I agreed to disagree and put the subject to rest. I put the book aside and never touched it again.

As I continued reading other fantasy over the years, Dragonlance never left my mind though. I always held that up as the standard bearer for everything that was wrong with the genre. In my opinion, fantasy fiction by the 1990s was a dying art. All sense of innovation and creativity had been beaten out of it by a legion of writers hacking away about enchanted swords, dragons, rangers, knights and mages; plumbing the depths of imaginary inter-racial politics between arrogant elves, hot-tempered dwarves, impossibly noble/impossibly evil humans and code-word-disguised versions of hobbits.

These books are still being written (and still being purchased in large numbers, for some reason) but since then a new breed of genre-bending, genre-blending authors have started to do things with fantasy that are finally making it exciting again. I've already mentioned on this blog my admiration for the UK's China Mieville, but there are also people like K.J. Bishop, Jeff Vandermeer and even R. Scott Bakker, among others, who are pushing the envelope of fantasy fiction into new and interesting areas.

There is new life in the varied realms of fantasy. But old habits die hard, I suppose. This week I was browsing my local Hollywood Video and I discovered that my old friend Dragonlance did not go away gently into that good night, after all. Apparently someone made an animated version of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, with no less a voice than Kiefer Sutherland lending his talents to the role of Raistlin Majere.

I had no choice. I had to rent it, just to see it. To see if it was as derivative and weak as I remembered.

I wasn't disappointed. Perhaps because I could only stomach part of the novel the first time around (in 1988 or so) the story was almost completely new to me this time. I remembered only a few details. And yet the details were somehow VERY familiar to me.

See if this sounds familiar: A conflicted ranger with ties to both the human and elf world leads a group of companions on a quest, included in his party are a good-natured old wizard, a dwarf, a half-sized creature and a human knight. In their travels, always on guard against the growing evil of a deity who has returned from a long-ago defeat, the good-companions pass through a haunted forest, a ruined city and enter a beautiful Elvish city where the residents are in the process of leaving, possibly forever. That's Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

Or how about this? Aragorn leading Gandalf, Gimli, Frodo and Boromir, among others, traveling through the ruined Mines of Moria on their way to see Galadriel, after passing through the realm of Elrond, which will soon be evacuated as the Elves journey across the sea. Always on guard against the likes of a re-energized Sauron and his minions, back from ages of slumber.

I think a guy named Peter Jackson did something with that storyline a few years ago, didn't he?

So please accept my apology John, if by some chance you're reading this. I know we put aside our little argument about Dragonlance almost 20 years ago. But after watching this pale imitation, Jack Bauer's efforts notwithstanding, I had to take one last shot.

And We're Back...

2008-03-02T18:38:00.007-05:00

I took a little break from this blog last month. No particular reason. There just wasn't anything going on. At least not in the writing department.

Which is not to say that I haven't been occupied -- busy even.

Writing isn't really my job, it's more like a hobby that I occasionally get paid a little to do (very occasionally and very little.) Most days I wake up earlier than I'd like, after sleeping less than I'd like. I put on clothes that I'd rather not wear (after swearing when I was in high school that I would never wear a suit and tie everyday) and I drive to a place where most of the people I deal with are unhappy and/or insane.

That's not a slight against my office, although I suspect that most of the people I actually work with would probably agree that we all fit that description to varying degrees.

I'm a public defender. That means that I spend most of the day dealing with alleged criminals, bailiffs, prosecutors and judges. Last week I worked on a trial with another attorney defending a man who introduced himself to the jury as "The Prophet..." and who was so disruptive that the judge had him removed from the courtroom during part of the trial.

That was fun.

I also had the opportunity, since I live in the Tim Russert-dubbed "battleground" state of Ohio, to see Barack Obama speak at a rally here in Cleveland a week ago. Very interesting. Even if you disagree with him, you have to give the guy credit for bringing some new life to the national political stage. I've never seen people so genuinely enthusiastic about a candidate for any office, much less President. It was worth it to see him in person just to have the chance to experience that energy first hand. Plus anyone who knows me knows that I never really liked Hillary all that much anyway.

This blog is not for political posturing. It only exists because I write horror/fantasy novels, and I don't expect anyone to care one iota for my opinions on anything else (at least not on this forum.) But I will say this: love him or hate him (and I have friends on both sides of that divide) Barack Obama is a cultural phenomenon.

Moving right along, since the last post The Prometheus Gate has been reviewed by Kerry Estevez, the Acquistions Editor at Medallion Press and is working its way through the review process. I'm sure that will take a while. It's a 500-something page monster, and although I submitted a 5 page synopsis with it, the thing will take some time to digest.

Now I find myself a little bit lost. I have three things I've been working on sort of piecemeal while Prometheus was in progress. I can put that aside for a while, but I have to decide what else to concentrate on. At the moment I don't really know.

I was just in Arizona last month, so I'm leaning towards the idea I floated here a few months back about a western-horror, but that's the least developed of my current projects. The other two are a short vampire piece that I have to get out of my system and a steampunk-type novel about an alternate history version of New York City. I've been chipping away at the last one for several years here and there, and although I have about 30,000 words written, I'm stalled on it.

Sooner or later, I'll make a decision. Until then I'll just keep going into work, chatting with crack dealers, crack addicts, thieves, burglars and the occasional sex offender. Eventually I'll come up with something.

Frustrations and surprises

2008-01-31T22:16:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling a little frustrated lately. If you follow this blog at all, even occasionally, you'll know that I finished working on a manuscript near the end of last year. That's a great feeling, a sense of accomplishment. And then comes the waiting.

The publishing industry is glacially slow. Right now my manuscript is being reviewed, and that takes time. We're only at stage 1. After this initial review, many more people will read it, changes will no doubt be requested, submitted and re-reviewed -- and if all of that goes well, the art department, the copy editor, the typesetter and several other people have to do their thing.

The thought that this process could, and probably will, last for the next year or so is a hard pill to swallow. In the meantime I'm working on a new idea, but the serious delay between finishing the manuscript and actually seeing it become a book can get you down.

On the upside, people appear to still be buying Lucifer, which is nice. I've been told repeatedly that the amazon rankings are not supposed to be used as a gauge for your overall sales, but it's all I've got. Today it "shot up" into the 65,000 range, which it hasn't seen in about a year. Not quite a best seller, I know, but any sales are good, especially for a no-name author with a year and a half old book.

The Ban Sidhe Part III

2008-01-22T18:02:00.000-05:00

The conclusion of Ciarin and the Death Maiden:

All the magical creatures of the realm, filled with grief for the sufferings of the world, came across the northern seas to the cloud tops where the Ban Sidhe reposed.

Great-armed Goibniu, master smith of Faerie implored her to loose her ghastly shriek. Ogma the sun-faced pleaded the same. In Dagda, the wise and ancient All Father, flew with urgency to the refuge of the rebel spirit. The deceit of the Fear Dearg himself lapsed, and the red trickster joined in the beseeching.

The calls went unheeded.

In time even the Morrigan made her way to the frigid abode. Feared and hated no less than the Ban Sidhe herself, it was to her, finally that the others turned for a final plea.

She came upon her dark chariot, drawn by twin ravens with breath of fire, and though a horrific sight, the Morrigan was surprised to find the Ban Sidhe pleased at her arrival.

"Long has it been," the Morrigan began.

"Yes, not since the glorious slaughter at Aran. Many brave men followed my call to the darkness that day," the Ban Sidhe answered.

The ghost of Ciarin sat beside her upon the cloud, a phantom consort to a spectral queen.

"Even greater agony now menaces,” the Morrigan said. “Lugh's anger ravages the isles, and legions of the dead walk among the living. Druids invoke our aid, but we are left helpless. Even I am rendered useless, forced to ignore the prayers of those men upon the fields who battle without end.

"I implore you, as all our kind have done before me, surrender the soul of this man. Quiet the fury of maddened Lugh!"

The Ban Sidhe remained unmoved. She clung ever harder to the wraith that had been Ciarin mac Ruaidhri.

"Lugh has heard me. I hold sway over the gates of the dead. He may rage for all time, but only I can open them.

"Long have I served him with never a waver in my devotion. Yet now, that I wish one soul spared, he curses the world? No, Queen of War, I shall not lead a single soul to the abyss."

Fire-eyed Morrigan could find no words to reply. A deep voice spoke instead. It was Ciarin himself.

"Queen of Battle, many times I invoked your aid," the ghost said. He raised his phantom hand as the Morrigan turned to hear him. "Now my beloved Ban Sidhe gives me refuge from death itself. Yet the world suffers for my stay, as all the gods of Faerie have here attested.

"Perhaps I should go. Perhaps I should fade into the dim, else there be no world for us to remain in."

For a moment, silence reigned. The wicked War-Goddess and the Herald of Death reflected upon his words. Finally, the Ban Sidhe answered.

"Perhaps you are correct Ciarin. Lugh will only be satisfied when I open the way to the darkness. So I will do so."

The dawn of the day following was nothing so much as a herald of horror.

Fractured sunbeams fell across a tormented Erin. The stench of rotting flesh pervaded the wind, even spreading through the mist of Faerie, though Lugh Samildanach remained unmoved.
The Morrigan returned from the north seas with only the cryptic word of the death maiden. She called upon the lords of the mist to gather, the Morrigan told them, upon the Ulster field where Ciarin had fallen many months before. There, the Ban Sidhe would appear.

The rising of the sun soon came and passed, and the gods began to grow restless.
Then, a shriek split the morning like thunder. It quaked the hills with frightful echoes. Beneath them, the gods watched a black chasm tear open the field. Above them, the screeching form of the Ban Sidhe hurled out of the clouds.

"Lugh Samildanach, Lord of Faerie! By my scream the gates to the abyss have opened, and here Ciarin, son of the Red King stands ready to enter," the Ban Sidhe proclaimed.

Her voice grated upon even Lugh's own ears. He was a moment before answering.

"Well and good that you have come to realize my authority," the red-bearded god said.

Ciarin did stand ready at the dark gates, jaws of sundered stone and mud gaping before him. But as he began to step toward the chasm, the Ban Sidhe remained beside him. Arm-in-arm.

Brigit gasped. The Morrigan cried out.

"She means to enter with him!" the Leanan exclaimed.

Lugh sneered.

“Cease this folly! None may ever return from the land of the dead, mortal or otherwise!" he roared.

The Ban Sidhe and her companion wraith ignored him. They continued to edge closer to the caverns of Hell.

"If you call it folly then my efforts have indeed been in vain, for you still fail to understand what I asked of you," the Ban Sidhe said.

She spoke amid a swirl of wind, the screams of the dead churning all around her as she moved closer to the darkness. The summoned immortals watched one of their own reach out for the place of all gloom.

Finally, Lugh sighed, and the red beard’s breath brought pause to all things.

"You would do this just to be with Ciarin, son of the Red King?" he asked.

The Ban Sidhe stared him down.

"I will enter and close the gates behind me. I will have Ciarin mac Ruaidhri in the land of the dead if not in the land of the living," she replied.

Ciarin's own spear rested in her hands.

Again, Lugh frowned and did not speak. His all-seeing eyes turned to the face of ageless Brigit, whose counsel now echoed in his heart.

"Perhaps I have been wrong," he said. "Perhaps you are so perfect in the love of death that you would bring the world to its knees by your devotion. Perhaps I have been blind."

The Ban Sidhe and Ciarin halted, poised at the precipice of the smoldering maw.

"Noble sentiment Lugh, but words do me little good. Ciarin remains a ghost."

Again, Lugh met the gaze of Queen Brigit, and the eyes of heaven now looked upon him.

"Very well. Ciarin, son of the Red King is dead, and I did slay him. For that I do regret, though after such time has passed I cannot restore him. Yet your struggle has been brave, and for that I offer a concession."

As the host of Faerie watched, Lugh Samildanach came down to the world. He laid his hands upon Ciarin.

"Ciarin mac Ruaidhri, so loved by the spirit of death, I raise you up to the skies, and free you from mortal bonds. Join with your Ban Sidhe, not as a ghost, but as a true immortal. May you both herald the dead."

The Ban Sidhe smiled her ghastly grin, and Ciarin joined her in eerie mirth. Away they took then from the other gods and spirits, to ply their lethal trade for ever after.

So it was from that day onward, that the people of old Ireland came to know a second voice from the darkness, the twin callings of death from the Ban Sidhe and her eternal love.

The Ban Sidhe Part II

2008-01-21T11:02:00.000-05:00

Chapter II of the tale of Ciarin the Son of the Red King and the Death Faerie:

The thanes of Dun Daigh split the enemy host. Amid the routed Bruatta horde, fair-haired Ciarin, the son of the Red King, cut his path. Hacking and chopping, he carved a swath through the wall of iron and muscle and blood, warrior after warrior brought down by the stroke of his spear.

A feast of carnage spread out in such savage glory that the Ban Sidhe fell still at first sight. Perched among the sharp cliffs, girded with dawn-fog, the death Faerie held her voice at bay. She watched the killing field. She felt the stench thicken, rising about her in a shroud of screams.
It softened her stare.

Deep amidst the swirl of iron and entrails, Ciarin drew her gaze. She knew him. He had seized the chieftain’s mantle while still a teen, and in the twenty years since he had written his reputation in blood across the fields of Ireland.

It was a body of work the death maiden admired.

Brutality. Cruelty. The relish he took from ending life etched a mark of respect through the faerie’s empty soul. This was not the first time she had paused to marvel at his butchery.

The habit had not gone unnoticed.

Beyond the veil of mist, behind the reflections of the world of men, Lugh Samildanach saw her pause. The silence echoed in the great god’s ears. There was no scream. No killer howl. The lord of Tuatha De Dannan was not pleased by the interest his ghost-lady had taken in the affairs of men.

On that morning, as the strife stained black the green of spring, Lugh brought his interminable gaze from the realms of faerie. Across the valley Othma he looked long and hard, seeing through the smoke of crumpled chariots and the eddies of dying groans. He drank in the clamor of Ciarin’s rage and the stirring scent of dead men rotting in the mud.

A frown twisted his red beard.

"There sits my Ban Sidhe. She wilts after the doings of Ciarin while the Gates of Death stand closed. A dove upon the clouds."

Brigit, most ancient of the faerie listened to him ponder. She was not as dismayed. She drifted toward him through the magical shadows, sparkling with phantom shards of light.

"What trouble is that?" she asked. "Why shouldn’t the spirit of death be moved by such ferocity?"

"She has no heart," Lugh answered. “No feelings.”

Brigit sighed. A sea of clouds danced around her like fair maidens. She did not reply.

Another voice sounded through the dolmens. It was the Leanan Sidhe, soul of muses.

"Mortals love those who speak to their desires and their minds, as do we. Cannot a Faerie then, even one so baneful as the Ban Sidhe, come to such affection?"

Lugh did not consider the Leanan's words.

"The Ban Sidhe has but one purpose. That is all she has ever done, and all that I intend for her," he said.

Leanan was bade travel to the fields of Ulster, as messenger of the Gods of Faerie. She came upon the death maiden at the approach of noon, seated still where Lugh had seen her, enthroned among the low clouds.

So smitten was she that the Ban Sidhe failed to note the Leanan’s approach, though she came carried upon a torrent of leaves and straw grass. Before the spirit spoke, she gazed for a space upon the ghost-queen, her name a bane to both Faerie and Gael. The glare of her red eyes seemed to follow the blood-trailing figure of Ciarin.

Lugh had not been mistaken.

The Ban Sidhe was taken with him.

"Ban Sidhe! I come at the behest Lugh Samildanach. He demands that you issue your call. Many men have fallen this day, yet your scream has sounded but once."

The Ban Sidhe did not turn. She shifted her gaze from the struggle. The Leanan shuddered. Her stare was ghastly. Echoes of horror danced in her eyes.

"I serve Lugh. Never have I failed him," the killer-faerie said.

Her voice slithered in vile fragments of sound. It echoed within itself a thousand dreadful times, as though spoken in a cavern.

"After age upon age, ere these times since the days of the lost Fomori, what complaint could he have?"

The Leanan looked away. She faded in and out of sight with each gust of the sea-wind. "I speak only the words I have been given. Lugh commands you to carry out your calling."

She now wished nothing more than to flee the hideous gaze.

"I shall do my work," the Ban Sidhe said, shifting her translucent form. "In my own time. Tell Lugh Samildanach. And be gone from here.”

The Leanan Sidhe grimaced. The ghost-faerie pointed her away.

“Now leave me," she hissed.

Upon the wind the Leanan returned to the misty mounds of wandering spirits. She feared the words she carried, knowing the anger they would rouse in the Lord of Faerie.

"In her own time!" he thundered. "She dictates her duty to me?"

Brigit slipped through the shadows, summoned by the rage of the Ever-Seeing.

"Take some pause, Lugh. Never before has the Ban Sidhe refused you. Perhaps she deserves deference. Would you not allow any of us as much? For the sake of love?" she said.

"Love?” he replied. “We speak of the Ban Sidhe. She exists only to herald the descent of the dead. That is her only use, and she is perfect in that creation!"

Brigit passed through the mist trails in Lugh’s wake. Her aspect splintered into a dozen reflections. She came together as she answered.

"Perfect yes, perhaps too perfect. So enamored of death that she has come to love the man who so often brings it to his foes," she said.

"Fine,” Lugh replied. “If the Ban Sidhe so loves death, then let her herald his own."

Lugh’s decree sounded up from the darkness. It made the megaliths tremble. The Burren wept. As the Ban Sidhe watched Ciarin, raising his blade upon a foe, he was struck down. A bronze club smashed his skull.

He collapsed, his crown shattered. Gray matter mixed with mud and pointed flecks of bone.

Finally, the scream came.

The phantasm streaked down from the clouds. While her voice commanded death upon mortals, she held no power to restore life. Now her calling was stronger, for her next announcement would mark the death of the man she most admired.

She did not have tears. The death faerie nurtured no such human traits. Yet as she raised up the ruined corpse of Ciarin, shepherding his spirit out of the broken flesh, a fire seethed inside her. The eyes of the warlord stared even in death. He met the Ban Sidhe’s vacant gaze as few men ever had.

"Ciarin the slayer, long have I admired your spear. Your blood lust has brought me pleasure. No one has caused so much death as you. I will not be rid of you.

"Lugh! I refuse your task. I shall not herald the march of the fallen, lest you restore Ciarin to his beautiful form!"

Her cry shrieked across the green isles. It chilled the blood of thanes and sliced a path to the gods. But it shepherded no spirit up from the plain.

The clouds shivered, shrinking from the death scream. The seas raged. Waves battered the cliffs. Lugh heard the tortured lament of his domain, squeals of deer and shrieks of birds.
Eire trembled.

"Let her scream!” he said. “She serves my wishes. She will suffer my wrath.”

The words of Faerie were not spoken lightly. The tone of Lugh’s angry boast rolled down from the mist and the hidden reaches. It brought his spite to the fields of men in hammer-strokes.

Misery descended. Crops failed overnight, fields withered to dust in the hours of darkness. Grain stores rotted in their sheds just as quickly. The double shadow spread across the land, plague and famine invaded every village and hut.

They ignited a flame of anguish, fanned by the wails of the starving and the cries of suffering children. The thanes of Daigh Tuatha, men of the clans of Ciarin, already saddened by the falling of their leader succumbed with ease.

In the shrouded mounds of the hidden hills, Lugh Samildanach watched the grieving, the wilting of the fields and the dying of the forests. The isles faltered under his wrath, days long and dark as none could recall. Yet among all the long times of grief, as spring wore to summer and then summer into fall, there grew up a sign more ominous than all the gloomy tidings.

The Druid priests were at first loathe to dwell upon it, though as the affliction grew worse it soon demanded redress. For all the despair, and in all the cold months of dread, there had not been a single death across the lands of Eire.

Not in Ulster, or in Munster or Connacht.

Not on Innish More, or at Dun Guarie or Tara.

Where sickness once felled men, they breathed still. Riddled with pain that would have no respite, they watched their bodies rot and putrefy.

But they did not die.

Hobbled husks of men, little more than walking skeletons wandered the countryside. Warriors hacked their blades into the flesh of their enemies from light of dawn until deep into the moonless night.

But they did not die.

Druids assembled. They argued under sacred dolmens. They drank blood and divined the innards of birds and beasts. They sought answers in the black shadows of their Clochans.

They could find no other answer.

Eire had been forsaken.

The Ban Sidhe

2008-01-20T10:14:00.000-05:00

I'm going to try something different for the next few posts. I've been going through my old files over the last couple of days, pulling out things I wrote years ago and hadn't looked at in a long time. I posted a few things from the bad old days, and now I'd like to post something else I've been sitting on for years. A story.

About ten years ago, forlorn about my lack of success getting any of my early work published, I got the idea in my head that one of the ways to make my manuscripts more attractive to publishers was by racking up "credits." I thought that if I was published elsewhere, in magazines or some other small publications, it would look better when I sent a novel-length manuscript out. Many of my idols, Lovecraft, Smith and Howard to name a few, all wrote short stories. In fact most of them wrote stories as their main outlet, not novels.

My luck wasn't so good. I wrote a number of stories, sent them off and earned myself a stack of rejection letters. The stack wasn't too big, but only because people don't really read short fiction the way they used to. There are magazines, but these days the short story is kind of a dying art form. Novels are where the money's at for fiction (or so I'm told.)

In any case, other than an entry in an online story contest (that I lost) I haven't done much with any of my short fiction. Now that I have this little forum though, why not use it for that? Air out some of the old material. If you hate it, just skip over it and come back later. If you like it, let me know and I'll post a few more.

So here we go, a totally free short story for your reading pleasure, in three parts:

THE BAN SIDHE

Dawn bled through the storm clouds. The Ulster fields bathed in crimson.

Morning scents lingered. Rain was in the air. Winds tumbled up from the sea-cliffs, swaying the saplings and the green highland grass. Cold streams whistled through broken crags.

Other noises intruded.

There was a clank. Then a howl. The deep cries of men were not long behind.

They marched out from the shadows of the high rocks, a riot of shouts and prayers. A yawning, wet plain opened to their approach.

It was a brutal throng, a rabble spawned from sunless reaches. Bloodstained saffron cloaks rustled about them, affixed by silver brooches over scaled bronze plate. Spears and swords struck wide shields in deliberate hammering, fueled by invocations to the spirits of war and chaos.

Woad stained their faces nightmare shades of purple and blue. The slather stank.

They loved the odor. It swelled about them as they cheered, mixing with the heat of their breath and their trickling sweat.

Wild hair like the full manes of horses danced across their shoulders, screaming shades of orange and blonde in a rage of Celtic hues.

Two men led the horde. One was silent. The other was singing.

Feargus’ tune was ancient, a sacred song as old as the hills. The assembled knew every verse. They chanted with the Druid. Their voices rose and fell by the motions of his crooked staff.

His pale skin was bare, and though untouched by the etchings of war paint, it was not unspoiled. Human blood streaked down his face and across his chest.

A severed head, the slashed throat still wet and festering, dangled at his side. It was tied to his waist by its own knotted hair. He swung the totem to the lyrics of his battle-dirge, splattering those beside him with drops of congealed blood.

Beside the mystic in his coarse black robes, Ciarin Mac Ruaidhri walked in stark silence. The warrior-king made no calls. He sang no songs.

His eyes focused across the plain, where sparkles of silver-white burned like cold fire in the distance. The matted hair that swept across his face did not faze him, nor did the savage cries around him.

His beard was like the fur of a hound. Across his breast, held fast like a talisman, he clutched a wooden shaft. It was hewn by hand, polished to a sheen, and crowned with a wide blade.
He stopped at the edge of a brook. His men did the same. He turned to face them. He roared.

“Men of Daigh Tuatha! Today we spill blood! Today we take many heads!”

A rally cry echoed through his horde. Arrayed across the far edge of the field, born out of the silver-sparkles in the red-gray light, their enemies gathered on the muddy banks of the River Lhiannan.

There was no pause. No attempt at entreaty.

Ciarin charged. And his men charged behind him. They screamed that the gods of Faerie would smile on his blade.

Against their rush, their foes did the same. In moments, the Ri Tuath and his men swept down against a sea of spears.

Ciarin's sword cut first. It heaved in an arc, splitting the shield of a Bruatta thane, cleaving his chest and his throat. Flesh and bone splinters spat into his face. Steam surged from the wound.
The reek enlivened his arms for a second slash.

Death-stink spilled out beneath the hills of Erin.

The odor crawled over green dales, and through old forests. Every blow, every rotten scream of misery spawned an ill wind. It fouled the air with a cruel stench. Birds choked, chased from the sky. Woodland creatures fled.

But there was one for whom the odor was not vile, and it was she who arose from the mist, called by the gale she was ever-seeking.

It roused her from slumber, filled her with delicious wailing. Every whimper gave her strength. Every lovely hint of anguish. She savored the carnage.

The Ban Sidhe screamed.

You Have to Start Somewhere Part IV

2008-01-19T17:30:00.000-05:00

The last post was supposed to be the end of this thread, but after I read the first draft of the first chapter of "The Lucifer Messiah" -- and remembered how less-than-good it was, I thought maybe I should come up with a concluding post.

So what follows are the actual first few lines of my first published novel, as they appear in the book itself. Combined with the last three posts, this forms a rough chart of my progression as a writer, from what I was scribbling up in 1987, to what I was doing in 1995 or so, to what I was writing by 2000 and finally, what got published in 2006.

********************

Sean staggered.

A stench crawled into his nostrils. Garbage. Rotten food. Shit. Even the shadows stank.

They were still out there. Somewhere. Stalking him.

He forced himself to move, creeping through the filth and the darkness. His gut ached. He felt the blood drooling out of him. It trickled into his pants, ran down his leg. It was sticky, and wet.
He had to keep going.

He recognized the street ahead. 9th Avenue and the corner of West 36th Street. The edge of Hell’s Kitchen.

Street lamps buzzed overhead; an electric swarm of pale, flickering light. Across the way, the minute hand of an old gothic clock moved one click. That made it 1:13 a.m.

Sean didn’t care.

Steam exhaled from a sewer vent. Sulfurous ghosts washed over him. For a moment he welcomed the warmth. But he couldn’t linger. He only bathed in the hot odor for a moment.

He fell, toppling a half-filled trashcan. Noise was the last thing he needed. He didn’t get up, not right away. First he grabbed his dented felt hat from a puddle. His overcoat was already ruined, but that hat meant a lot to him—sweat stains and mildew notwithstanding.

A sedan turned from around the far corner. Headlights skimmed the street. Tires squeaked on blacktop.

Sean scrambled to his feet. He stumbled backward, hoping to reach the safety of the reeking dark.

********************

Honestly, reading that over now, for the first time in more than a year, I feel like I want to get back to editing it again. I want to make some changes and "fix" a few things. But that never changes. and I've got new things to work on anyway.

You Have to Start Somewhere Part III

2008-01-18T17:58:00.001-05:00

In keeping with the theme of the last few posts, I scoured the hard drive of my old computer for one more example of my earlier writing. Unlike the last two snippets from my failed high school and college novels, which were selected more or less at random from the old files, I went looking for today's clip. It took a while, but eventually I found it.

What follows here are the first few lines of the very first draft of what became "The Lucifer Messiah" -- in other words, the first draft of the first book I was able to get someone to pay me for. It was written while I was in law school, maybe 1999 or 2000.

In my humble opinion, it was better than the stuff I put up here in the previous two posts (you can judge that for yourself.) But it still wasn't good. The following clip went through literally dozens of revisions before I settled on the opening lines of the book, sometime in 2005.

**************************

Flickering pools of light washed across the alley; rude, but momentary intrusions upon the shadows that were strewn like rubbish across the urban filth. For an instant, the hairless tail of a rodent slithered into view, and then just as quickly it slipped back into the rotting debris, and the gloom. A dented tin can similarly rattled along the slime, its path briefly revealed before it too clattered back into the stinking dim.

Just above the gutter level, though not more than a few feet higher than the rats and the rubbish, the milky, shifting lights crossed over a cloud of steam. The warm vapor glistened in the cold light, but only for a silent, aborted second. A rustle followed, rough cloth against concrete, the muted sound of a movement that was meant to have been concealed.

The shuffle of worn-out soles came next, and then the heavy noise of a man's breathing mixed with the crashing sound of a toppled trashcan.

The street-lamps cast their aura more evenly at the mouth of the alleyway, and it was there, for a moment, that a man fell quite accidentally into their harsh gleam. His face was hidden by a felt hat, sodden with sweat or perhaps something more foul, and his body was likewise obscured by the tattered folds of what could once have been an expensive overcoat.

Hardly a moment passed before he scrambled to his feet, and leaped back into the darkness.

*****************************

I hope that these three posts show that writing takes time, and that it takes time to become a writer (a published writer, at least.) It doesn't happen overnight, and Christopher Paolini notwithstanding, it usually doesn't happen when you're in your teens, or (China Mieville notwithstanding) even your twenties. Becoming good at it is a process that takes years. It's frustrating. It's slow and it can seem like a futile effort. Very few people can pick it up right off the bat. The rest of us have to work at it.

So why do it? Not for the money, because I haven't made much of that, and my prospects for future earnings aren't much brighter. You do it because you have to, because you can't quite imagine what life would be like, how your day would be structured, if you didn't do it. Because you really don't understand how the rest of the world goes through their day without doing it, and you probably never will. That's what kept me going from that first, atrocious book when I was 15 to the first book deal when I was 33. Just keep at it.

You Have to Start Somewhere Part II

2008-01-17T19:32:00.000-05:00

The last post contained a snippet from the first novel I ever tried to write. It's probably one of the best passages in that atrocious mess, but it's still pretty bad. I wrote it when I was about 15 years old. In those days I was working on pure exuberance. Some grammar school English composition classes and a year or so of high school represented the sum total of my formal study in the art of writing. Needless to say, I was unpolished. I was wordy, undisciplined and convinced that the best writing was overflowing with adjectives and adverbs. I was also reading a fair amount of pulp fiction and comic books, which only reinforced all of those wrong ideas and bad habits.

Once I got to college, as a journalism major at first, my wrong-headed ideas suffered a serious smack-down at that hands of one professor after another. My ego took a beating, but my writing got better. After a while, I realized that my first attempt at a novel was so bad that it simply couldn't be saved. It had to be abandoned.

It wasn't long though, before I dusted myself off and tried again. The result was something I called "The Curse of the Warlock." It was still an attempt at a Lord of the Rings-style epic, and was still heavily influenced by Kull of Atlantis and Conan the Barbarian, only now blended with H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker.

And it was still pretty bad. Better than what I wrote when I was in high school, but still not publishable -- although I tried, over and over again until I eventually came to the realization that my second novel was also destined for the scrap heap.

So here is my second "clip" -- a fragment of a chapter that I wrote sometime around the mid-90s, just after I graduated from college.

*******************************************************

Slick condensation slowly dripped from the top of the cold granite window frame, carried away in the cool breeze. Gray-white haze hovered like a lingering spectre over the royal port city of Thudaal as the faint lapping of waves on the nearby shoreline soothed the city to sleep.

The icy glow of the double crescent moons cast little light upon the slumbering metropolis as the faint sound of beating wings became barely audible. Through the thick haze, roaming atop the marble towers, a dark, solitary figure floated menacingly. A silent predator hunted for his kill....

...Then, swooping again like a bat from the shadow, Kha'Ralost plunged his sharp nails into two of the guards, heaving them across the room. Their larynxes dropped to the sticky wet floor as the Warlock turned his hell-red eyes to another. The blade landed hard on Kha's iron gauntlet and a spear deflected harmlessly away from his chest. The wielders of the weapons were quickly dispatched by the ferocious Wraith, his fangs tearing mercilessly into a crushed skull.

******************************************************

As I pointed out the other day, even Ed Wood recognized that the trick with writing is to just keep plugging away. You might not be good at it when you start (and it's probably better for you if you don't realize just how bad you really are at that point, but that's another story) but if you keep it up, you will get better.

The snippet above is better than what I wrote when I was 15, but even then, at about 22 or 23, it was still far from good. But I wasn't about to quit.

You Have to Start Somewhere

2008-01-15T23:43:00.001-05:00

I was organizing some files today and I found a bunch of old floppy disks that I hadn't touched in years. After I hooked up a portable floppy drive to my laptop I popped a few of them in. Oh, the memories. These things are upwards of seventeen years old, and contain things I wrote when I was in college.

Most of them are school-related, term papers and scripts for short films and things like that. They're all awful. Reading them now I wonder how I ever passed anything in college. But those aren't even the worst things I discovered. There are other, older files on some of the disks. Files I remember writing, but I didn't actually remember. These are the chapters of the first book I ever tried to write. It was an attempt at a fantasy novel in the Lord of the Rings style, heavily influenced by Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. The documents were last saved on the disks I found in mid 1990, probably around the time I moved to Boston, but they were written years before that, beginning around 1987.

So what was my writing like 21 years ago?

Pretty freaking terrible.

What follows here is a pretty random selection. None of it is any better, and some of what I read was -- to my horror -- much, much worse. So why post it? To prove a point. It doesn't really matter if you're any good at it. If you want to write, just write. And keep writing. Even if you're awful, don't quit. Keep it up. Eventually you will get better. I promise.

So here it is, a never-before seen (and never to be seen again) excerpt from my truly awful first novel, The War of the Empires (a title I stole, by the way, from an episode of the British Sci-fi series The Tomorrow People):

The inside of the throne room was a beautiful polished ivory-white walled chamber similar to the stairs outside, it was decorated with sparkling jewels of immense size from all over Arulai many of them dating back to the time of Polarian. At the huge wall directly opposite from the huge double wooden doors that led into the room there sat an old wrinkled man with long snow white hair that glistened in the golden sunlight and a beard that stretched all the way down to his lap. He was clothed in elaborate jewelry and expensive white robes with a ruby studded golden crown that bore the emblem of a golden Phytor, a majestic bird twenty times the size of a man which lived in flocks in the forest lands of the far off Penninsula of Sithrica. The phytor had it's wings spread as if it was in flight while its scarlet ruby eyes gleamed like twin crimson stars amid a sky of gold.

Ed Wood, one of the worst and one of the most memorable writer/directors of all time once wrote "...just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."

Poor old Ed didn't get much right, but he nailed that one.

Dear Reader

2008-01-13T17:29:00.000-05:00

I just found out yesterday that "The Lucifer Messiah" has been selected for the Dear Reader Online Book Club. If you're unfamiliar with it (as I was) Dearreader.com is a new idea in book clubs (at least to me.)

It's actually a number of clubs, Romance, Science Fiction, Horror, etc. One book is selected every two weeks, and during that time the club emails members with short snippets of the book, maybe a few pages at a time. Over the course of a week or so, the daily emails usually add up to the first few chapters. At that point, if the reader decides that he or she is enjoying what they've read, they can go out and buy the book or click on a link to amazon to have it delivered to them. If they don't like it, they can just quit there.

It sounds like a good idea to me, and I'm thrilled that after a year and a half people are still reading the thing. Hopefully at least some of the folks who get these emails will run out and pick up the book, and maybe pop in here for a visit.

Serpico

2008-01-09T22:53:00.000-05:00

The Sidney Lumet film "Serpico" has been making the cable rounds lately. Until this week I hadn't seen it for several years. Over the last few days or so, I kept picking it up on HBO somewhere in the middle, before I finally happened to catch it at the beginning.

If you're like me, and you saw it years ago, or maybe read the Peter Maas book, it's worth watching again.

Frank Serpico would be one of my favorite film characters of all time -- a hippie, non-conformist cop, a civil libertarian law enforcement officer, a man of refined tastes in art and music who made his living for years working in the gutters of NYC -- the sort of man who seems to embody contradiction and yet seems so perfectly adjusted. He would be one of my favorite characters except for the fact that he's very real.

Every time I watch this movie, I feel a little ashamed. How he managed to stand on principle, for as long as he did, taking the kinds of risks that he did, is just amazing to me. Especially because I'm pretty sure that if I were put in his shoes, I wouldn't be able to do it myself.

Apparently Al Pacino asked him once, when he was preparing to play him, just exactly why Serpico did what he did. Why did he risk everything, literally risk his life, to preserve his integrity?

His answer?

"Well, Al, I don't know. I guess I would have to say it would be because ... if I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?"

Clark Ashton Smith

2007-12-26T14:00:00.000-05:00

This year Santa (apparently in partnership with amazon.com) brought me a gift that I will probably keep for the rest of my days --a pristine, 2006 hardcover edition of The End of the Story, volume 1 of the collected short fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger.

I have several other small collections of Smith's work, all of which I found by hunting through the discount racks of used bookstores over the last ten years. Those paperback volumes are all older than me. Some are water-damaged; most show their age on their yellowed pages, broken spines and brittle brown edges. I love every one of them. I re-read them often and I never tire of them.

If you're not familiar with Clark Ashton Smith, you're not alone. Sadly, he is all-but forgotten these days, except by a core of dedicated fans who continue to keep a taper lit in his memory, and in memorium of his unique brand of bizarre horror-fantasy. To attempt to describe the kind of strange fiction Smith crafted, and put on display across the pulp pages of Weird Tales and other magazines of the thirties and forties would be to insult his work. There is nothing else quite like it. It cannot be explained. It cannot be suggested. It must be experienced.

Smith is at once an inspiration, a marvel and an enigma.

Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he began his career as an acclaimed young poet while still in his twenties, despite having had only five years of formal schooling. It seems he was one of these individuals afflicted with both poor physical health and uncommon genius. He is said to have taught himself all manner of things, not the least of which was a rare mastery of this language.

His writing bubbles over with obscure words and phrases that were probably falling out of use even when he wrote them, seventy years ago -- many of which are almost as forgotten as the man himself today. In Smith's conception, one did not wear old, rusty armor, one was fully caparisoned in verdigrised chain-mail. In Smith's dark and terrible world you find fallen gods frowned in rotting psammite and evil-looking fungi with stems of leprous pallor. It is a feast of sights and sounds and smells and ancient horrors.

That he wrote as he did continues to inspire, that he wrote as much as he did -- cranking out dozens upon dozens of stories during his period of greatest production betwen the late thirties and mid-forties -- is stunning.

But Smith puzzles as much as he inspires. Just as he was at the zenith of his work, he quit writing almost altogether. He seems to have retired to his preferred pursuit, sculpture, for the remainder of his days. Much like his contemporaries, H.P Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith appears to have been something of a social misfit, although it would seem he eventually did do a little better with the ladies than either of his two Weird Tales comrades. He married sometime after the mid-forties, which I suppose would have put him somewhere in his fifties at the time, and he passed away quietly in 1964.

When you read anything that I write, you are reading echoes of Clark Ashton Smith.

It's Labatt Blue Time!

2007-12-16T18:41:00.000-05:00

I'm having a beer. I'm celebrating, even though my fantasy football team is in the process of losing this week -- against my ex-girlfriend's team, no less.

I should be enraged. I should be throwing things and cursing myself for playing Travis Henry instead of Laurence Maroney, but I don't care. Because I just finished The Prometheus Gate, and I'm kicking back.

I didn't expect this. I was actually having a less-than-good day. We're kind of snowed-in here in Cleveland, and I don't really want to be here anyway. I have a bunch of cases next week that I don't want to do, and I used to enjoy fantasy football, which is now impossible. All signs were pointing to a bad Sunday.

Then I turned off the games and started writing -- and a few thousand words just spilled out. In the end, it turns out that the end pretty much wrote itself.

I had a minor breakthrough a few weeks ago. Up until then I had been pretty well stalled for several months. I had the end in sight, but it just wasn't coming together. Then I realized something. I hated one of the characters. He was passive and weak and he wasn't really doing anything for the story.

Characters are everything. The plot rises and falls on what they do, and what they do has to be authentic. It has to come out of who they are, and nothing was coming out of this guy.

Until I made one little change.

I made him a jerk. A miserable, misanthropic s.o.b. who never got over his wife leaving him, and still hates her years after their divorce. A guy who used to care about things, about his job and about other people, who is now just a bitter, sarcastic a**hole. He's only looking out for himself. He gave up caring about other people and other things when he decided that no one else cared about him.

And it all flowed from there. I re-wrote all of his scenes, and suddenly he meshed with the rest of the book perfectly (at least as far as I can tell.) It was liberating, too.

So now I'm done -- pending revisions and re-writes from my editor and the publisher, I guess, but at the moment IT'S DONE.

Time for a drink.

One postscript - thanks to any of you who just bought a copy of Lucifer. It's been selling better than usual lately on Amazon, maybe because of the holidays. I love the fact that anyone thinks it's a good idea to buy a book called The Lucifer Messiah for Christmas. Warms my little atheist heart.

Second postscript - turns out my fantasy opponent this week had an even worse game than I did, despite doing her best to beat me, going so far as to pick up one of Tom Brady's favorite receivers as a free agent the day before the game to try to run up the score. So now I'm really happy. I don't even care if I win in the championship next week.

Neil Gaiman's Beowulf

2007-11-18T15:59:00.000-05:00

I really don’t want to do this.

I don’t want to criticize Neil Gaiman. I don’t want to criticize someone who I hold up as something of an idol. A writer whose career is something I aspire to, whose achievements I look to for inspiration. But I will.

Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) co-wrote the screenplay for the new Roger Zemeckis version of Beowulf. And the word “version” could not be more apt. Because this film isn’t exactly Beowulf. It’s not what you read in high school. In fact, a better title for this film would be “Neil Gaiman’s Beowulf” or “A Roger Zemeckis interpretation of Beowulf” or even “Half Beowulf/Half Something Sort-Of Inspired by Things We Think We Found Reading Between the Lines of Beowulf”

I might have let this go. I was almost willing to, actually. Because this is not a bad film. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good film. The motion-capture technique Zemeckis uses to create a quasi-animated picture is still far-from perfect (although much improved from The Polar Express a few years ago). It’s not yet photo-realistic, and it may never be, but it holds promise for the future of fantasy and sci-fi moviemaking. But this blog is about writing, and so this review is going to focus on the writing.

The story of Beowulf, as most of us know from sleep-inducing classes in our teens, is the oldest epic poem written in English. Not quite our English though. If you read it in the original, or listen to it read in the original (as I was forced to do by a high school teacher who was very impressed with his own ability to pronounce dead languages) you’ll find it sounds something like German. It dates from a time before English became the chaotic mish-mash of Anglo-Saxon, Church Latin and Norman French that regularly boggles the minds of non-native speakers these days.

It’s old.

And that’s where I have a problem with this new version. The earliest Beowulf manuscript we have dates from around the 10th century, but the poem itself was probably composed much earlier, sometime in the 7th century or so, detailing events alleged to have taken place in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. In other words, the story hasn’t changed in about a thousand years, and it has existed in some form for maybe five hundred more. Not quite The Iliad or The Aeneid, but well-qualified to claim that it has “stood the test of time.”

Enter: Gaiman, Avary and Zemeckis, stage left.

Their version begins by following the basic storyline of the poem. The hideous monster Grendel is terrorizing the Danish lands of King Hrothgar, who sends out a call for aid. He is answered by a contingent of Geatish thanes, led by the boastful, but fearsome warrior of the title. Beowulf does battle with the beast, only to learn that Grendel’s Mother poses an even greater threat than her bestial son.

In between, a lot of mead is consumed and lot of absurd, self-aggrandizing stories are told, all of which are essentially true to the poem and to the culture of that pre-Christian age. Fine so far.

But then, just as the film should be building to a crescendo, as it does in the original poem, it deviates so far as to have almost no regard for the source material.

I won’t say any more about the plot, because that would spoil it, which is kind of preposterous when you think about it. How could anyone be concerned with posting a spoiler about a story that is older than the language this is written in?

And that’s the problem. When did it become OK to take time-honored tales and “improve” them for modern audiences? Who got the idea in their head that they were a better storyteller than Homer? That they could do a better job of relating the events of the Trojan War with Brad Pitt as a “more human” Achilles?

But “Troy” is only one of a series of recent Hollywood disgraces. How about “300?” There you have a true story so compelling that people have been telling it for millennia, a story of men giving their lives for their nation, fighting against impossible odds and doing so knowing they face certain doom, a story that has betrayal, drama and genuine sacrifice. Instead the movie version has the Persians depicted as Tolkien-esque monsters, and the Spartans as only barely more human—a group of almost robotic super-soldiers.

And we’re not even going to discuss “Alexander.”

With this Beowulf adaptation, it seems Gaiman and Avary were trying to clear up some of what they perceived to be “motivation” problems in the original. They seem to have felt that there were some holes in the story that they could fill in with a few minor leaps of imagination. In short, Neil Gaiman thought he could improve Beowulf. Maybe he did, maybe his version makes more sense, and makes Beowulf more human. Maybe he explains Grendel a little better, gives him a good reason to terrorize the Danes, so the audience can understand his character better.

All of those things are exactly what you’d ordinarily praise in a story, and they’re things that Gaiman excels at in his own stories. But this is the wrong place to do it. Beowulf has stood on its own for so long, not because it does (or does not) comport with modern rules of drama. Beowulf is a tale for the ages. It’s a time capsule of how our distant ancestors saw the world. It tells us what they valued, how they approached life, and death. Beowulf isn’t for us. It was for them. It’s their story, and the reason we keep telling it is to understand who they were, because that’s who we once were.

It doesn’t really need to be improved, just told.

What are you working on?

2007-11-12T15:07:00.000-05:00

This is something people have been asking me quite a bit lately. And I don't really have a great answer. Try to sum up a five hundred page book in a few lines, off the top of your head. Then try it with one that you're still in the middle of writing.

But since it is almost done, and I'm reasonably certain of the basics of the story, I've scribbled up a preliminary "cover blurb" to answer the questions. Something like this would end up on the back flap of the book when it's published, subject to revision by several other people, of course.

Here it is, for the first time anywhere:

The Prometheus Gate

November 1966

Al Grimsby walks into the Third District Police Station in Cleveland, Ohio—carrying the body of a boy he has just killed. He turns himself in, and confesses to twenty-five more child murders.

February 2007

After serving more than 40 years of a life sentence, Al Grimsby escapes from a maximum security prison. And the killing begins again.

Christina Falcone, the FBI’s top behavioral analyst, is assigned to profile and apprehend him. Skeptical from the start, her investigation leads her into a maze of conflicting clues—secret government experiments, legends of lost gods and an archaeologist named Carter McAlester, who works for a shadowy organization with their own agenda—a desperate search for a legendary Sumerian tablet, an artifact that may predate civilization itself, and which may hold the key to an unspeakable power.

A power that Al Grimsby may already possess, and which may have driven him mad.

While Carter pursues the artifact from the streets of Berlin to the dusty ruins of Babylon, watched by his own mysterious masters, Falcone finds that she is the one being hunted. Plagued by nightmares and dark visions, she races to discover the truth before she too descends into madness, and before Grimsby can finish the bloody work he began four decades before.

Before the Prometheus Gate can be opened.

Ghost Hunters

2007-11-09T22:50:00.000-05:00

Maybe I'm aiming at a soft target, but this has been bothering me for a while. If you don't know about it, Ghost Hunters is a series on the Sci-Fi Channel, with new episodes currently airing on Wednesday nights. It centers on a group of likeable New England blue-collar fellas, plumbers by day, who spend their off-hours poking around in supposedly haunted places, looking for evidence of ghosts. What began as a hobby has now blossomed into a fairly well-organized group they call TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society). It's at least as much a reality show as a supernatural show, since the episodes are often more entertaining for the interactions between the team members as they are for any actual paranormal activity.

A caveat before I proceed.

I'm an atheist. Not because I dislike religion (although I do) but for the simple reason that I won't assert a belief in anything for which sufficient evidence cannot be produced. Richard Dawkins is fond of pointing out what he call the "teapot atheist" idea. Essentially it says that no one believes, as an article of faith at least, that there is a ceramic English teapot in orbit around the planet. There might be one. Science doesn't rule it out. But no reasonable person would proclaim their belief in such a thing absent some evidence that it's actually there.

As a person with no religious beliefs, therefore, I have no notion of an afterlife. There might be one. It might actually turn out to be very nice, but without some evidence that something of us survives after death, I'm not going to say I believe in that particular teapot.

Now, back to Ghost Hunters.

The TAPS crew appears to be a dedicated, sincere bunch. They travel just about anywhere that people claim to have seen a ghost and they use all sorts of equipment to study the places they visit--including devices that measure electromagnetic radiation, infrared scanners, and both digital video and audio recording devices. And they're not flaky. They're basically the kind of guys I grew up with in Jersey, beer & a shot guys who get their hands dirty at work. They don't employ creepy-looking "psychics" who claim that the dead "speak" to them, and who do little more than spout meaningful-sounding vagaries seasoned with a few period-authentic details (like some other ghost-chasing shows that aren't even worth a mention).

In fact, the TAPS guys actually spend more time debunking the potential hauntings they investigate than uncovering evidence of ghosts. Which is good, because the vast majority of the time their investigations produce nothing of note. I'm not being critical though. That's a good thing, in my opinion.

But I am critical of TAPS in other areas. And I'm astounded that no one else seems to be.

My first gripe: every time TAPS investigates a haunted house, the very first thing they do (after setting up their equipment) is to go "lights out." Yes, they turn out all the lights in the building and walk around for several hours in the dark, looking for ghosts.

What's wrong with that?

For one, can we all agree that if there are actual disembodied spirits who have managed to transcend physical death and are now somehow clinging to the Earthly plane, their primary concern simply cannot be a fear of indoor lighting. How seriously can you really claim to possess a mind geared toward skeptical, science-based inquiry if you insist (for no good reason, as far as I can tell) that ghosts only come out in the dark?

The premise itself is the worst kind of foolishness. And no one, either connected to the show or beyond, ever seems to point this out.

But the "lights out" thing is troubling for another reason, and this is a much more serious charge. Doing something like that undermines both TAPS' scientific bona fides, and it severely limits what they can actually uncover.

All the information any human can ever obtain about the world has to come to us through one of our five senses. Everything. That's all there is. You're reading this, which means you're seeing it. We can construct devices to expand our perceptions, to "hear" ultrasonic frequencies and "see" infrared light, but none of these things are actually accessible to us unless we translate the information into something we can actually see or hear. And here's the rub with Ghost Hunters.

Plunging the house you're investigating into almost total darkness deprives you of the most important of all the senses, and the one that (for most of us) provides the lion's share of the information that you can obtain. Sure, you can scan the place with heat sensors and EMF detectors, that's great. But the bottom line is this: if ghosts can be seen, then they either radiate their own light (and therefore produce energy of some sort--which is a physics problem that I've never seen a decent solution to) or, like us and everything else we see, they reflect light. If they actually do generate their own light then it probably doesn't matter (to them or us) whether the living room light is on, but if they simply reflect light, then turning everything off makes them just as invisible as all the other things TAPS members regularly bump into in dark houses.

The kind of investigation TAPS conducts is essentially an attempt to observe as much about a given location as possible. How can you claim to be serious about investigating anything when you insist on hobbling your powers of observation?

A final note on the "lights out" thing before we move on. A lot of what TAPS "discovers" as part of their investigations involves team members hearing "strange noises" and catching sight of "something moving in the shadows." This is nonsense, and is a direct result of walking around in the dark. Turn on the cameras, leave the lights on and see if anything happens. Then, if you hear footsteps where you think no one is walking, try to at least get a look at what might be making the noise.

Second issue: duration.

Despite the self-imposed problems I just outlined, TAPS has come across some really tantalizing pieces of evidence. I've seen some things on this show that have either been rigged by the producers (and I'm going to dismiss that notion for now, and assume that everything is on the up & up) or might very well suggest something unexplained. In other words, they do occasionally find something.

And then they leave.

This is also bad science. Scientific inquiry means making observations, formulating a hypothesis and then testing it. It means that even when you achieve a result that appears to prove your theory, you repeat the process, you repeat the observations, over and over and over until you've either ruled out your idea or you're convinced that it's probably a correct explanation of what you're seeing. Then you tell other people, and they try to replicate the same result, and the process goes on. Something isn't considered proven until the result it describes can be reproduced consistently, wherever it's attempted under the same conditions. Then you have something.

But TAPS never does that. They hang around for a few hours, gather some data and then leave. Even when they find something, they just throw up their hands and say "Gee, maybe the place really is haunted."

No.

Go back. Stop wasting your time with every Tom, Dick and Harry in Red Sox Nation whose kids don't want to sleep in their bedroom because they think a ghost lives in their dresser. If you find something like the apparition in the prison, or the black shadow slinking around in the pool hall basement, or the child's toys that appear to answer your questions on their own, or the closet door opening and closing by itself in the hotel room--with a glass breaking by itself, for Christ's sake! -- then take your fancy equipment, set it up and leave it there. For weeks. Or months. And then see what you have.

I would rather see one single, solid piece of evidence supported by hours upon hours of repeated observation and testing of every conceivable sort than a thousand pieces of possible somethings with little or no follow-up. TAPS has gone back for follow-up to several locations, I know, but not the way I'm suggesting.

Finding something that established conclusively that human life does not always end when the heart stops beating, that some kind of intelligence survives death, would rank as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of human history. Instead it's the premise of a reality television show that sometimes does as much to frustrate legitimate inquiry as it does to further it.

It doesn't have to be that way. It can be good TV and serious science at the same time. Maybe TAPS can start by taking a page out of the Motel Six handbook -- next time, leave the light on for them.

1408

2007-11-08T18:10:00.000-05:00

I rented 1408 last night. If you haven't seen it (or heard of it) it's based on a short story by Stephen King. A jaded author (John Cusack) who makes his living staying at supposedly haunted places and then writing about them, spends the night in a REALLY spooky place -- Rm. 1408 at the fictional Dolphin Hotel in NYC.

Just as an aside, that description pretty accurately sums up my ideal job. Travel all over, stay in very spooky places and get paid to write about what you see (or don't see). Kind of like Ghost Hunters, but with just a laptop.

Of course, all sorts of terrible things happen in Rm. 1408. It's not a bad film. I rented the director's cut, and having read up on the differences between it and the theatrical version, I think I might have made the wrong call. The ending of the director's cut was not to my liking, and while the theatrical version sounds a little forced, I think I'd prefer it.

Anyway, worth a rental.

Best part of the film for me: Samuel L. Jackson as the hotel manager, offering John Cusack a drink before he spends the night in the infamous room.

Jackson: "You do drink, don't you?"

Cusack: "Of course, I just said I was a writer."

Oh, you're a writer too?

2007-11-04T12:46:00.000-05:00

Someday I'm going to compile a list of things that no one ever tells you before you have a novel published.

And when I do, this is going to be the first thing: the moment people find out you wrote a novel they're going to tell you one of three things, a.) they wrote one too and just haven't been able to get it published (yet) or b.) they've always wanted to write one, or c.) they have a ton of great ideas and they definitely plan on sitting down one day to write them all out.

I get this all the time. I'm still not sure whether to be bothered by it, or just amused. Usually I alternate between the two, and I'll explain why.

The first example (I wrote one but haven't gotten it published) hardly bothers me at all. Those people are a lot like me, no more than two years ago. The main difference usually though, is that people who tell you that have generally written one manuscript, and sometimes not even to full novel-length. When I got lucky enough to receive my first contract offer for a book, it wasn't for my first book. Depending on how you count them, it was something like my fifth book that finally snagged me a publisher.

My actual first book (or first attempt) was part 1 of an intended fantasy trilogy I started when I was in the ninth grade. I worked on it all through high school and into my first year of college, when I began to realize that it was never going to be any good. After that I wrote several short screenplays, half a dozen short stories, three full length screenplays and three more novels, all of which were rejected by every professional outlet to which I sent them.

The end result though, was that by the time I finished my fifth one, I was a much better writer than I had been when I finished my first. And this isn't an unusual scenario. You get better by practicing something, and there's no other way to practice writing than to just do it.

So for those folks who tell me that they wrote "a novel" and just want to get it published, I smile and wish them, with all sincerity, the best of luck. Maybe they really are just that good. Maybe they have a story so compelling that people will want to read it, and maybe they managed to get all the little things right the first time out of the gate: believable characters, developed over an entire book, an interesting plot, a good balance between narrative and dialogue, a sound ear for how people actually speak, and the subtle differences between one character's cadence and another's, and a thousand other tiny things.

It wasn't so easy for me. I needed to work at it. Still, those folks are generally well-meaning and actually took the time to do it at least once, and for that they have my respect.

The other bunch of people, the "I've always wanted to write" and "I have lots of ideas" crowd -- I have a little less patience for them.

For one, having never even attempted to write anything, much less a four or five hundred page manuscript, they have no idea what it involves, and to me, they kind of demean the process (even if only unintentionally). It's almost as if they're saying, "well, it's great what you do, but I don't see any reason why I couldn't do it too."

But most of them can't. And never will. They'll just go on thinking they can without ever really trying, the way the guy on the corner stool at your local bar watches Alex Rodriguez strike out and yells at the TV -- he knows he could hit a fastball when he was 12, and somewhere in the back of his head, he still thinks he could have played for the Yanks if things had gone a little differently.

Years ago a professor of mine taught me a phrase -- "the habit of art." It applies to anything artistic, playing music, painting, sculpting and writing. You simply do it or you don't. It's part of how you live. You don't make an effort to do it, you don't make time to sit down and do it, you don't think about someday planning to possibly sit down to do it.

You either write or you don't. If you do, there's no stopping you, it's a part of who you are. And if you don't, then I suppose you could acquire the habit, but there's no substitute for actually doing it.

So please, don't tell me what you're planning to write, or what great stories you want to tell. Get to writing them. And plan on doing it for a long, long time before you ever see anything even resembling success, if at all. Of course, if that doesn't sound like something that appeals to you, then you were never going to be much of writer anyway.

Prolonged Absence

2007-10-23T22:36:00.000-04:00

I just looked at the last post and realized that I haven't written anything for most of October.

Obviously I'm a little depressed. Not only did the Yankees collapse in the first round of the playoffs--AGAIN. But it ultimately cost Joe Torre his job. I remember the time before Joe Torre took the reins at Yankee Stadium. It can be summed up in one word: CHAOS. I'm not looking forward to next season.

Plus, the Indians, the team from my new hometown, also blew it. They couldn't get any quality innings from their top two starters and their DH turned into a human wind-making machine.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the Red Sox are going to the World Series. Again.

Oh yeah, and I turned 35 a few days ago.

Also, my last few weeks and almost my entire last weekend were consumed with preparing for a trial (in my regular life as a criminal defense attorney). Without going into too much detail, my client was facing an indictment with 40 counts of rape and 10 lesser sex offenses, which all added up to something like 850 years of prison time. The facts were against us, the evidence was against us and both my co-counsel and I felt that just about any jury would be against us.

Today the guy took a plea on the day of trial and agreed to 10 years, but it was a pretty taxing case. Emotionally draining.

And did I mention that the girl I thought I was crazy about broke up with me last month? In the car. After pretending she was tired and just "wanted to go home early." She thinks I'm "really a great guy," though, so that softens the blow.

Anyway it's been a sub-par last month or so.

I think Orson Welles said that the worst thing for an artist to be is comfortable. I'm not calling myself any kind of artist. I write fantasy books. But at the moment, I'm anything but comfortable. Now we'll have to see if I can finish this damn book.

Good Guys 2 - Other Good Guys 1

2007-10-08T13:10:00.000-04:00

This has been a tough weekend for me. Not quite my dog just died or my girlfriend just broke up with me tough, but hard in its own way. Cleveland vs. New York. That's a hard series for me.

It wasn't always this way. I moved to the Cleveland area in the summer of 1998, originally just for law school. In those days the Yankees were in the middle of their best run in decades, only one World Series win into a four-out-of-five-year stretch. Then, I had no qualms about rooting against the Indians, and mercilessly taunting their fans when they inevitably choked. I had no loyalty to the Tribe or to its supporters, and quite frankly I was still a little miffed at the way they said things like "pop" instead of "soda" and pronounced the word "have" as though it were spelled "haeve" (and let's not even start on the fact that in Ohio, "merry, Mary and marry" are all pronounced the same).

I should pause to remind any Yankee-haters out there (and I know there are many of you) that in the mid 90s, unlike today, the Yankees were not quite the monster they've been since. For one, they'd only won a single World Series since the glory days of the late 70s, and they did that as underdogs against a heavily favored Atlanta team. The year before that, if anyone cares to remember, they dropped a 5 game series to the Mariners in the ALDS -- a Seattle team that was beaten by Cleveland in the next round that year.

From my perspective then, in the summer of '98, I had suffered through some very lean years in the 80s when Don Mattingly's individual stats (and eventually the length of his hair--long story) were the only things worth rooting for in the Bronx. After that, I lived through four years in Boston, when the Sox were by far a better team than the Bombers.

To me, the Yankees were not the Evil Empire. They were the team that taught me to love baseball, the team that I watched with my grandfather and my uncle and my Dad on hot summer days in the Bronx when I was too young to understand why the fans appeared to be booing whenever Lou Piniella came up to bat.

Yes, they had some great teams in those days. The Reggie years. But I didn't really watch in the 70s. The first year of baseball that I actually remember was 1981, when I was 9 and the Yankees lost the Series to the Dodgers. After that, they didn't even make the playoffs until I was a year out of college. The point? When I moved to Cleveland there was no "Yankee guilt" like there is today -- with $200 million-something payrolls and all that. My experience as a Yankee fan had been mostly on the losing end of things, and it was only just beginning to turn around.

Fast forward to this weekend. Now I've lived through four Yankee World Series victories, one over the Mets, which was sweeter than all the chocolate in Hershey, PA. Plus, I've seen them go to the Fall Classic two other times, both of which were enjoyable for their own reasons, even though they ultimately lost. The first was in 2001 when NYC was literally still smoldering, and the other was against the Marlins, which quite honestly felt like an afterthought following Aaron f**kin' Boone's homerun against the bean-eaters. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the heart get cut out of Red Sox Nation with a dull knife. That will never get old.

Anyway, over that same time-frame I've also seen the Indians go from a perenniel contender to a farm team for actual contenders. After feeding the rest of the league with talent like Bartolo Colon, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome and Richie Sexson, among others, they completely collapsed into a classic small-market team. Coming from NYC I was stunned that the Tribe front office promised their fans, a number of seasons back, that they would contend in a few years, and asked them if they could extend a little patience their way while they tried to rebuild the entire franchise.

And you know what? The fans did it. Oh sure, they complained, they stopped selling out the Jake every night, and they complained some more (who wouldn't?), but when push came to shove, they were always there for their team. They were loyal.

These are the same fans, you have to remember, who saw their beloved football team stolen from them in the 90s, who waited patiently for a replacement and have now supported the new pseudo-Browns with rabid devotion despite the fact that they've proven themselves to be quite happy to act as the NFL's unofficial doormat every year.

These are loyal people. These are good fans. And genuinely nice folks, too.

I love New York, but no one in Cleveland ever threw a battery at an opposing player. At least not that I know of. Yes, they threw beer bottles on the field a few years ago, and they once forfeited a game because of five cent beer night (or was it ten cents?). But they haven't won a World Series since 1948, and the city hasn't won anything (other than indoor soccer) since the early sixties. I'd be questioning their passion if they weren't throwing a thing or two at the field every now and then.

Bottom line? I respect the Cleveland fans, I respect the Indians as a team and I want to see them win. In fact, I've actually gotten used to rooting for them. And how could you not? This current team is going out there with a $67 million payroll and taking on everyone. How can you root against Travis Hafner? Any guy who wears an "I may not be smart but I can lift heavy things" T-shirt is ok in my book.

So, the Yankees taught me to love baseball, and I still say "forest" and "orange" as if they were "far-est" and "AR-inge" (and I still say "soda", damn it) but I consider myself an unofficial Clevelander. I just CAN'T root against Cleveland. Of course, I'll never root against the Yankees either. And there is the rub.

When the Indians were in control during game one I wanted the Yanks to come back. Last night, when the Yankees finally woke up, I wanted the Tribe to come back. And let's just agree not to discuss game two. No professional sporting event should be decided by the intervention of insects. Shame on you Bruce Froemming. The game deserved better than that. The teams deserved better and so did the fans. 'Nuff said.

Game Four is tonight. One of these teams has to lose, and either way I'll be disappointed. But there is a silver lining. Whichever team wins will have my full and fanatical support against the Red Sox.

Last note: Obviously this post had nothing whatsoever to do with writing or dark fiction. But there are two things that will put a hold on my writing. One of them I mentioned in the very first paragraph of this post, and hopefully that interruption has now passed, the second is baseball, and that isn't going away any time soon.

The Final Push

2007-10-05T22:57:00.000-04:00

The battle of the adverbs has come to a close. I think.

I went through the latest draft last night, after the Indians destroyed the Yankees in Game 1 of the ALDS, and I took another look through it after the Tribe squeaked out a second victory in a game that, quite frankly, the Yankees didn't deserve to win anyway.

At this point, I think I've excised every adverb that doesn't need to be in the book. Now I have one final task ahead.

I have to finish the damn thing.

I've been stalled on the last two chapters for some time now, since the end of the summer, in fact. Getting hung up on some particular spot in the story is not unusual for me, and I suspect it isn't uncommon for most writers. At one time or another over the last year and a half, I've hit snags of all kinds in writing this book.

What I've found is that when I get to a spot where I just can't write, where the story just seems to stop on me, it usually means one thing. I took a wrong turn somewhere. And I think this current roadblock might have its root there.

I don't really know how other people write. I've met quite a few other authors since my first book came out, but I've never asked, and no one has ever told me how they do it. There's a book by Stephen King called "On Writing" which gives some insight into how he works through a story, and there was a movie a few years ago with Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson about a writer dictating his novel that kind of explored how the author thought his way through the process.

I recognized things in both, but neither one was dead-on, at least from my perspective.

If anyone is interested, here's what I do: I wing it.

I don't outline a thing. Ever. Instead, I start with some kind of idea, a premise or a group of one or two characters that I think might be interesting for some reason (they're self-loathing, ageless changelings, for example). Then I try to figure out what those characters might do, where'd they go from day to day, how they'd see the world, and what their problems might be. Some kind of a story usually comes out of that, and I go from there.

Most of the time, I write the whole first section of a book with absolutely no idea how it's going to end. Every so often, I stop and look at where I am, where the characters are, and try to figure out what they'd do next. I like to think they tell me, but I know that sounds kind of flaky. It does feel like that, though. They kind of dictate where the story goes, and I fill in the details.

Anyway, for the current manuscript, I've got all the characters in the final scene, about to make the decision that will define the ending of the book -- and they won't do it. Or, at least, I can't quite figure out what they do next. I know what I think they're going to do, and where I think that will ultimately take the story, but I'm not at all sure how to get them there.

So that means that I have to spend the weekend back-tracking. I have to back up about 100 pages, read a little and try to figure out where I went off course. Or, where I left out something that needs to be there to make the ending come together.

I have some ideas. For example, one of the main characters is in an ill-advised romantic relationship with a co-worker that was probably doomed from the start, although only one of them realizes it -- until it's too late, and that's the point where I need to focus.

As luck would have it, I have recently gathered a bit of real-world experience in exactly that department, so I just might get this thing done pretty soon, after all.

Progress, I think

2007-10-02T23:24:00.000-04:00

I got back to editing my manuscript this weekend -- after a very unscheduled "break" that lasted about two weeks. As I noted in an earlier post, my greatest foe in this process is the adverb. I used to think of these words as friendly little helpers. Schoolhouse Rock is probably to blame for that. "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly get your adverbs here" was always one of my favorites. I can still see Father, Son and Lolly selling adverbs, asking people to "bring in their old, worn out adjectives" so that they could be fitted with Lolly's "special -ly attachment" to convert them into brand new adverbs.

Turns out, far from making a sentence better, they tend to weaken a statement.

I still hold to my previous statement that there is still a place for them, though. I won't get rid of every adverb in my book. Problem is, I'm not at all sure which ones to keep.

After a weekend of combing through 500 pages of text, deleting most of the little modifiers as I came across them, I took a look at the final product.

They were still there.

Thing is, I can't help myself. Looking at them one-at-a-time, I got rid of as many as I thought I could, but I kept quite a few, too. Not that many, I figured, just the ones that needed to be there. Really needed to be there.

Then I go back and check, thinking I must have left in seven or eight in the entire manuscript -- at most. And what did I find? Well, let's just say I stopped counting after 20. Now I have to start the process all over again, and this time I have to be merciless.

In other news, I broke my own vow yesterday. I went out and bought a copy of "Swann's Way" -- the first volume of Marcel Proust's giant master-work -- approximately 5 years and two weeks ahead of schedule. Of course, the damn thing is so long I'll probably be working on it well past my 40th birthday anyway, so I'm just getting an early start.

Little Miss Sunshine

2007-09-29T19:27:00.000-04:00

I saw this movie in the theater when it came out last year. Big Steve Carell fan. He plays "America's Leading Marcel Proust Scholar" (or maybe America's #2 Proust scholar). I have not read more than a few pages of Proust, and only in English at that, so I know very little about him or his work.

Christopher Hitchens, who is kind of a mini-idol to me, once wrote that Proust should not be attempted until one is at least forty. His reasoning being that "The Search for Lost Time" is a book that can only be truly appreciated after you've experienced life -- the ups and the downs and everything in between. Based on that recommendation alone, I have both held off reading any more of Proust, and also resolved to make a date with him on October 17th, 2012.

Back to "Little Miss Sunshine." It's funny how you see things in a movie the second time that you missed on the first viewing. I watched this on HBO today and this time it was the scene on the pier outside the hotel that stuck with me.

Steve Carell's character is talking to his nephew about Proust. Here's a bit of the exchange:

Frank: "Y'ever hear of Marcel Proust?"
Dwayne: "He's the guy you teach?"
Frank: "Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love
affairs. Gay. Spent twenty years writing a book almost no one reads. But he
was also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he gets down
to the end of his life, he looks back and he decides that all the years he suffered
-- those were the best years of his life. Because they made him who he was.
They forced him to think and grow, and to feel very deeply. And the years he
was happy? Total waste. Didn't learn anything."

Small comfort maybe, when things don't seem to be going your way. But it does sound essentially ... right.

“...and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.”
-Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

My Enemy, the Adverb

2007-09-13T22:45:00.000-04:00

I'm in the process of working through revisions on my current manuscript. Mostly this means that my agent (who is generally the first person who sees anything I write) goes through the entire thing and sends me back suggestions on how to improve it. I don't imagine any writer enjoys this, and I'm no exception. It needs to be done, but it's possibly the worst part of writing a book.

I hate almost everything I write anyway. Most of it is, I generally suspect, utter crap. The best rule of thumb I've ever heard is this: four-fifths of everything you write will be shit. Complete, unredeemable excrement. But if you have any skill at all, that last twenty percent will make the whole process worthwhile.

That's what I keep hoping, anyway.

Knowing that, the task of editing is rendered only slightly less painful than the average root canal. Essentially it means combing through every line of the manuscript to expose every possible flaw, every poor choice of words or awkward turn of phrase, and every typo or mistake that Spellcheck doesn't pick up. For someone who is already suspicious that almost everything he writes may turn out to be garbage, this process seems designed to do nothing more than confirm just that.

Fortunately it hasn't been all that awful -- so far. Except for one thing. My tireless grammatical nemesis: the adverb. I used to have several of these personal demons. My struggle to conquer the run-on-sentence, for example, lasted from third grade until late into high school. My love affairs with the multiple adjective description and the dependent clause were long and turbulent. The dissolution of those dysfunctional relationships was not easy. But I overcame them. I'm no Hemingway, I do still lapse into my own florid and occasionally turgid, prose. But the years of struggling to keep those monsters at bay has turned into a kind of habit. I can usually write with no fear of them popping up.

Not so my most resilient and nefarious foe, the mighty modifier, the old -ly.

I hate them. But for some damn reason I keep using them. A lot.

Now, my agent and I differ somewhat on just how evil these little buggers actually are. She sees almost no use for them whatsoever, and I think she would be happy if they were excised from the English language once and for all. Not me. I think the judicious use of one of these little fellas can be appropriate.

I agree that they weaken the narrative. Almost anything can be stated better without them. They're lazy and they really don't convey much, for the most part. My manuscript is almost always better for having removed them.

That having been said, my use of them is never anything close to judicious. And so I find myself flipping through hundreds of pages of text, trying to figure out ways to say what I want to say without resorting to the use of the adverb.

Other than that though, the editing process is going well, for the moment.

Review: The Devil's Rose

2007-09-12T15:17:00.000-04:00

I finished Brom's book the other night. "Always leave them wanting more" is the saying that comes to mind, which is both good and bad.

On the down side, The Devil's Rose is just too short. Calling it a novel is even a bit of a stretch. Much of the book feels like a sketch of a much longer story, and one that should have been told. Reading it I came away with the feeling that the story had been written for the art, and not the other way around. This may not have been the case, but the impression bothered me. All of the characters could have been fleshed out more, only the main character, Cole the undead Texas Ranger, had any real motivation. The others were there to give him something to do. The "bad guy" a quasi-villian named Rath came across as a fascinating idea -- a lesser god once worshipped and now forgotten -- but an idea that the story just wasn't long enough, or deep enough to explore in any real detail.

Also, the story ends without any real conclusion. That may be in order to leave it open for future installments, which would be fine. I'd pay $25 for another one of these, despite the prior paragraph. Nonetheless, the story seems to end just as it should be picking up, so that was frustrating.

As I said, I wanted more.

Which brings me to the "up" side of that saying.

Everything in this book (as much of it as there is) is fantastic. The art is creepy and slightly surreal, and perfectly in keeping with the story. And there's a lot of it. This isn't a novel with the occasional picture here and there. This is more like a story told in pictures with some text to fill in the gaps.

The writing is crisp and concise, but effective. None of the self-indulgent descriptions and florid prose that you find in a lot of fantasy literature. I just wish there was more of all of it. More art, more writing, more everything.

All in all though, I recommend "The Devil's Rose". It's a tad pricey for a 110-something page book, but the art makes up for it.

Problem Solved....sort of

2007-09-04T18:09:00.000-04:00

I'm fairly undisciplined. I know the Greeks said "everything in moderation" but I've never been able to really practice that. I frequently eat too much, sometimes drink too much (less than I used to, but still more than I should). I spend more than I should, show up late for almost everything and the one thing I never seem to get tired of doing is sleeping, which I do whenever and wherever I get the chance.

Apologies to Gary Frank then, (and no slight to his excellent book) because I couldn't let "The Devil's Rose" sit on my desk and not read at least some of it. I was too damn curious. Had I not just come back from the desert, and if I weren't so intrigued by the idea of undead things skulking about the sun-baked wilderness, I might have held off. But I didn't.

I only got through about half the book last night. It's actually more of a novella with pictures. I think it runs around 115 pages. This Brom guy really did pull it off. The thing's a great, quick read and the illustrations, which range from full-blown paintings to pencil sketches, are fantastic.

Also, having read a fair piece of it now, I feel a little less conflicted about my own plans for this kind of story. Since Arizona, I've been toying with a few ideas for a western-horror/fantasy. Brom's book, I was happy to discover, is set not in the Old West, but in a nightmare version of present day Texas. I'm reasonably confident that I can write what I want to write now without appearing to imitate his work. What I'm interested in trying to do is different.

The fact is, I hope that's the case, because once I get an idea in my head, there isn't much chance that I'll write anything else for a while. When I write I have to have some kind of personal connection to what I'm doing. Much of the setting for The Lucifer Messiah, as an example, was the result of walking to work every day in Hell's Kitchen, stepping over junkies curled up on the 9th Ave. sidewalk in half-dried pools of their own urine. Then spending the rest of the day listening to old union guys trying to either impress or scare (or both) the college boy from Jersey with stories about the neighborhood. After taking in all those tales about the Westies and the old time gangsters and severed hands kept in a freezer to place decoy fingerprints on murder weapons (I later found out that was in a book about the Westies, so I'm not sure if they told me that because they knew it already or if they read it too), I couldn't not write about the neighborhood. It was stuck in my head.

Same thing with the rest of the locations in Lucifer. I wish I could tell you that I set a scene in Venice because the story demanded it, or that I set another scene in Leningrad for the same reason. But I didn't. I wrote those scenes the way I did because I had to, because I loved being in those places, and because I couldn't really write without writing about them.

The book I just finished is no exception. Over the last year and a half I've been in Washington DC, Cleveland, New Orleans and New York. And it's set in all of those places.

So there it is, demons and ghouls in the Old West. My mind's made up.

Assuming I don't suddenly make enough money on this writing thing to quit being a lawyer any time in the next few years, and further assuming that I manage to write something decent, and even further assuming that the publishing industry continues to move at a glacial speed, you can probably expect to see this project in your local bookstore sometime after 2011 or so.

One last thing.

I'm getting a fair amount of international traffic on the site lately. I'm kind of curious, do any of you folks out there in France or New Zealand or Brazil or the UK actually have The Lucifer Messiah? If so, I'd love to hear where you got it. I'm always curious about how the book makes its way to different places once it's out there. Drop me a comment if you have a second and let me know. I love having visitors from all over.

Weird Coincidences and Distant Visitors

2007-09-03T16:28:00.000-04:00

This is strange.

Today is my first day back from an extended "vacation" of sorts. If you've read any of the recent posts here you'll know that I was in Toronto last weekend promoting The Lucifer Messiah at FanExpoCanada. From there I hopped on a plane for the desert southwest where I spent the rest of the week roasting in the Arizona sun. No book promotion there, just spending time with la famiglia, doing a lot of eating, as my family always does when we're together.

Yesterday, killing time at Sky Harbor, I mused about the idea of writing a western-themed horror novel. My bald head still scorched-red and only just beginning to peel, and the rest of my body exhausted from a week's worth of hot, dry desert air, I couldn't help but imagine the bygone days of Tombstone and the OK Corral. Of Geronimo and his band of Apache appearing like a mirage from the red-rock desert, striking at the white invaders and then disappearing back into the wilderness.

Of course, that isn't exactly what I write. In my world, those Apache warriors would probably be walking beyond the grave, or those unfortunate cavalry they massacred would be saved from death by a pact with some desert spirit, older than the Sedona hills and thirsty for human souls.

I think Neil Gaiman once said that he didn't set out with the intention of writing about angels, but every time he sat down to write, they just seemed to show up. That's kind of how I am with this monster/undead/weird mayhem thing. I don't necessarily want to be that kind of writer, but it seems to be the only thing that ends up on my screen when I open my laptop.

Which brings me back to the first line of this post. Strangeness.

Today I made my weekly trek out to Westlake to the nearest fake-downtown/open air shopping mall. I should mention that I hate myself for patronizing places like this, I think they represent everything that's soulless and empty about suburban living, but it's where the bookstores are, so I bite my tongue and go. All the time.

Anyway, after checking out what Borders had by Anthony Bourdain, whose audio-book version of Kitchen Confidential kept me company to and from Canada last week (and taught me never to order fish on Monday), I made my usual pass through the fantasy and horror sections. And what did I find?

A western-horror book. With pictures, no less.

The Devil's Rose, by Brom. I bought it, but I haven't started reading it yet. I'm still working my way through Gary Frank's maze of madness and mystery called Forever Will You Suffer -- which is a wild ride, by the way.

This Brom guy I've "read" before. I put that in quotes because I have several books of his, but not novels. They're all art. I love them. Whenever someone tells me my book is too weird or too odd, I tell them to look at Brom's work. He makes my sordid imaginings of bestial fornication and quasi-human sacrifice look tame. Apparently he's not just a fantastic painter though, now he writes too. That's kind of annoying. He does what I do (and sells much better, I'd bet) AND he illustrates his own work.

Oh well, I'm assuming he wouldn't know when to file a Motion in Limine under Evidence Rule 807, so there is still at least one thing I can do that he can't. All in all though, I think I'd probably trade my knowledge of Article VIII of the Ohio Rules of Evidence for the talent to paint like he does.

I'm looking forward to reading it. I'm a little conflicted though. I really want to write something set in the old west. And I want to get to it while I can still taste the desert air. But the last thing I want to do is crank out a pale imitation or a cheap retread of something that's already been done, and done quite well, from the look of things.

I'll have to mull it over.

Finally, I'd like to extend a little welcome mat to the international (from my perspective) visitors who have been checking this blog out over the last few weeks. Recently I've gotten hits from Malaysia and Brazil, and quite a few from Canada since FanExpo. Don't worry, you're not being tracked. I know nothing about you other than where on the planet people who visit my site come from.

Anyway, welcome.

One final, totally random note to all my Canadian visitors: I would like to thank each and every one of you both personally and as a collective nation, for the existence of Martin Brodeur. Without him New Jersey would be a crowded, toxic-waste dump and landfill state where the Gambinos used to send people on a permanent vacation. With him, my home state is still all of those things, but with three Stanley Cup banners to hang over all of it.

Now THAT'S Hot

2007-09-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Arizona. I've been here for about a week. I left Toronto and got right on a plane for the desert. I've been here several times before. Half of my family has migrated out here over the last several years. But I have never been here in the summer. This is really something.

The heat here is intense. It's been above 110 all week (low to mid forties for the rest of the planet). I can't help wondering, maybe marveling, at how anyone moved out here in the nineteenth century. Or, for that matter, how any of the Native Americans lived here for millenia. I sweated through my shirt playing a quick 18 holes on a putting course yesterday. How the hell did anyone ride out here on a horse?

If not for SPF 30, lots of bottled water with ice and air conditioning in the cars and buildings this vacation would have been a sweltering nightmare.

A friend of mine claims she hiked Camelback Mountain in August last year. I'd like to believe her, but I can't even imagine being outside here for more than a few minutes at a time (unless in very close proximity to a pool).

This has me thinking. Cactus, scrub brush, red dirt baking in the summer sun, scorpions and rattlesnakes. This had to have been an extreme environment back in the old days. Makes me want to write a western. Maybe a western/horror or a western/fantasy. Maybe both.

Fan Expo Canada

2007-08-27T22:10:00.001-04:00

Well, that was an experience.

I just got back from FanExpoCanada, in Toronto. It was so much more than the Festival of Fear that I wrote about in two earlier posts. There was a section for gamers, comic book lovers, manga-philes, horror fanatics, Star Wars geeks (I count myself among the last group) and collectors.

I witnessed a guy in complete stormtrooper armor playing guitar hero. I didn't see that one coming.

As usual, Medallion Press did a great job of setting up their booth and their display. They took out a full page ad on the back cover of the program touting my signing and the two other authors appearing there and gave away 1200 t-shirts with our faces on them. So there was a decent amount of buzz.

Of course, it helped that we were literally giving the books away. That guaranteed a steady flow of traffic to the booth.

"Free books, signed by the author! Free books!"

Adam and Jim and the woman in the book next to us did a fantastic job of driving traffic to the table, so I could just sit there like a prima donna and act like I was above it.

A few observations:

There were a lot more female convention-goers than I expected. Some were just as dedicated and elaborately costumed as their male counterparts. So I guess the stereotype is wrong, these things aren't necessarily dominated by guys who resemble the Simpsons comic shop owner, single dudes in their twenties and thirties who live with their parents and worship Mark Hamill or Leonard Nimoy. They were there, don't get me wrong, but the gender demographics surprised me.

The people were great. Both the people in Toronto in general, and the folks who came up to the booth. There was only one notable exception (and if the smartass who goofed on me for asking how to spell his "girlfriend's" name ever wants to try making that kind of comment to my face in any other situation, I'd be happy to introduce your face to the nearest wall).

Other than that though, everyone was extraordinarily friendly. I signed a book for the Riddler (the spirit of Frank Gorshin lives), Catwoman, a girl in a corset who tried to sell me on the advantages of wearing one, two guys named the Reaper--one in a skull mask and someone called the Cellar Rat.

I finally got to meet two other Medallion authors, Gary Frank and Joe Laudati. I had already read Joe's book "In Darkness it Dwells". I'm a longtime fan of the Lovecraft mythos, and Joe's book is very "Lovecraftian". Our signing times didn't allow us to chat as much as I would have liked, but I got him to sign a copy for me, which was cool.

I had been following Gary's career since before "Forever" came out but I hadn't read the book yet. He also autographed one for me, and I'm reading it now. What I can say so far is this: the Jersey boy's got balls. I'm only a few chapters in, but it looks like he's written an entire book in the first person, present tense. And I thought I was unconventional. The guy earned my complete respect for even trying that.

All in all it was a great experience. I want to thank everyone who came up to the booth, and if any of you are reading this, feel free to drop me a line some time.

Reviews Part II

2007-08-03T13:52:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'll admit it. I check up on how the book is doing on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com at least once a day. I've been told not to do that, that the rankings they post aren't a good indicator of the book's actual sales.

I do it anyway. Plus, as I put in an earlier post, both of those sites post reader reviews, which are not really "reviews" in the traditional sense. But they are (occasionally) fun to read. For the most part, they're just little blurbs by people who read the book and want to say what they thought. Sometimes good, sometimes really bad and sometimes in between.

So here's the funny part. About three weeks ago I got the absolute worst review of my nascent publishing career. Someone on B&N.com savaged the book. They were so brutal in fact, that some of my frustration contributed to the writing of the previous post.

Now, as luck would have it, I check B&N today (with the intention of re-reading the awful review for the two-hundreth time in three weeks) and what do I find? An even newer review, this time by somebody who did like the book (and who actually seems to have "gotten it").

I guess this is how it happens sometimes. No one reviews the damn thing for almost a year, and then I get two in as many months. At least people are still reading it.

Reviews

2007-07-28T21:02:00.000-04:00

This is probably something you’re not supposed to do. Verboten, as the Germans say. One of those unwritten rules that everyone seems to know, and everyone appears to respect. Probably for good reason, too. But I’m breaking it.

I’m going to comment on some of the reviews The Lucifer Messiah has gotten. I’m not going to name names, or point fingers, and I’m not trying to “shoot back” at anyone. But this post has been dying to get out of me for over a year now, and if I don’t write it now, well…

My first gripe, and by far the biggest thing that bothers me about reviews is this: at least read the damn book. And I mean read it. Don’t skim it or speed-read it. Of course, feel free to do those things if you want to, I’m not telling anyone how to read, but if you are going to scan the book then don’t write a review purporting to have actually read it.

Case in point. One of the first reviews Lucifer got made me want to pull my hair out (luckily I have very little). I was astounded when I read it. It’s one thing to not like a book (although oddly enough, this person actually did) but it’s quite another to make it obvious from your review that you didn’t even really read it.

This particular reviewer’s attempt to summarize the plot actually invented scenes that aren’t in the book, and the details that he/she did get right only led to further misstatements of the story. I was within a few moments of emailing the reviewer to list my complaints. Ultimately, my agent and my editor both talked me down. Their logic was respectable – it’s a 5 star review and you’re a first-time novelist, let’s not rock the boat. Take the good press and ignore the mistakes.

And I did. Until just now.

Second point. I said it then, and I’ll repeat it now. I’d rather someone dislike my book for the right reasons than praise it for the wrong ones.

And there’s a good reason for saying that.

One of the things that bothered me for a while after the book came out was that I didn’t actually get any bad reviews. That’s not boasting, there’s an explanation in order. Most of the reviews that popped up on the web were from people I know. Many of my friends and family did their best to support me by writing a little blurb on Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s site. Which is great. But I wanted real market penetration. I wanted the book to get into the hands of people who have no idea who I am and who couldn’t care less about my delicate feelings. Now it has. And I have the bad reviews to prove it.

On balance, I’d say the reviews have been generally positive. The Cleveland Plain Dealer gave me a nice write up (and Karen Long is no pushover from what I can tell). A couple of others said it was a good, quick read and had positive things to say about the writing itself. One mentioned it in the same breath as Clive Barker and another even called it “visionary”. So I feel okay about the reception it got. I’m not winning any awards or selling hundreds of thousands of copies, but I’m a first-timer with an independent publisher, so I have to be pleased.

But what about those bad reviews?

There’s one on Amazon, a three star gem that I’ve probably read over a hundred times, and another on Barnes & Noble, which is, at this moment, the one and only 1 star review the book has gotten. That person couldn’t even finish it. My apologies. Sorry to have wasted your time.

In all seriousness, here’s how I look at it.

I spent the first fifteen years of my writing “career” cranking out fantasy that adhered pretty closely to genre conventions – Conan and Tolkien and Moorcock-inspired invented-worlds tripe. None of it was all that good, and none of it saw the light of day. With Lucifer I tried to do something a little different. I tried to blend some genres and do some things I hadn’t seen done before, and I tried to push the limits of what I had seen.

Maybe I didn’t succeed. Hell, maybe it was presumptuous of me to try to push the envelope of what giants like Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman had already done. Clearly some people didn’t like it. But that’s the point. The reason I’ve read the three star Amazon review so many times isn’t because I hate it. I think it proves that I may have done what I set out to do. (And I stress MAY.) Some of what the reviewer writes is dead wrong. The timescale is supposed to be convoluted, to a degree. There was no mysterious change in the editing process as he seems to think he’s uncovered.

The rest of what he writes I actually like though, in a backwards sort of way. Yes, the characters are largely inhuman, and yes the title isn’t reflective of what most people would expect. Those are entirely deliberate acts. I wanted to subvert the reader’s expectations. I wanted to tell a story through the eyes of the “bad guys” -- the monsters themselves. And most of all, I wanted to tell a story that took the Christian concept of Lucifer and turned it on its head, a story that not only made Lucifer the “hero” but actually operated on the premise that everything you think you know about Lucifer is wrong: that he’s not the devil, that he’s nothing more than a pagan myth that the Church quite consciously demonized -- so long ago that no one questions the truth of it anymore.

You may not like what I tried to do, and maybe I didn’t do it all that well, but at least some people seem to have “gotten it” -- one way or another. The bottom line for me is that if you want to do something interesting, something different, then you have to take some risks. And when you try to do that, some people either aren’t going to get it or aren’t going to like it. Or both. But I guess it beats being a hack.

The Doctor of Demise...?

2007-07-26T15:37:00.000-04:00

I just got a package in the mail from Medallion Press. It contained two T-shirts. They had my face on them.

Or a version of my face, a stylized artistic representation, you might say.

The shirts look cool. They’re solid black with a bloody handprint on the front that holds a Medallion Press logo. The back promotes my signings as well as the two other authors appearing at The Festival of Fear, Gary Frank and Joseph Laudati.

It is a weird thing though, to see your face on a shirt. I’m told that Medallion has had banners made up to hang in the convention center, one of which has me dubbed “The Doctor of Demise” -- which is also a little surreal.

There's a picture of the back of the T-shirt on the bottom of this blog page. It bills the three of us as Masters of the Macabre.

Festival of Fear, Part II

2007-07-26T15:01:00.000-04:00

My last post discussed The Festival of Fear next month in Toronto, but I realize that I didn’t mention where or when that’s happening.

The details (and some cool promotional artwork from Medallion Press) are up on my main site, but I’ll put it down here too.

Rue Morgue’s Festival of Fear will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from Friday August 24th to Sunday August 26th. The Convention Centre is located at 225 Front St., right by the CN Tower and the stadium that I think is now called the Rogers Centre, but Rue Morgue’s website still has it as the Skydome.

I'm scheduled to sign copies of The Lucifer Messiah on Friday from 5-6, Saturday from 1-3 and Sunday from 12-1.

Also appearing at the Festival are George Romero of The Dawn of the Dead fame, Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange and Sean Astin -- Samwise Gamgee from the The Lord of the Rings.

The Festival of Fear

2007-07-25T19:49:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure if anyone is reading this. In fact, I'm reasonably certain at this point that no one is reading this blog.

But it's only been up for three days, and you have to start somewhere.

I'm scheduled to appear at something called "The Festival of Fear" in Toronto next month. Medallion Press has arranged for me and a few other of their horror authors to sign books during the convention. I don't really like book signings, for reasons I'll get into in a future post. But I did a few at BookExpo America in DC last year, which was (I think) a similar setting to this thing in Toronto. The Medallion reps did a fantastic job of driving foot traffic to the booth in DC. So good in fact, that it actually began to appear as though I had fans -- for a few minutes. Then I looked over and saw that I was signing books during the same time slot as Newt Gingrich and the Born-Again Christian Baldwin brother, both of whom had much longer lines than I did.

I don't think either of them will be at The Festival of Fear though.

In any case, as I understand it, this festival is put on by Rue Morgue, a Canadian horror magazine. I read a few issues when Medallion put some ads in there for Lucifer last year. The content was good. Lots of gore and some really sick stuff that beats the hell out of anything I've written. So I'm hopeful that they'll be putting on a good convention.

This will be a first for me. I've never been to any kind of fan convention. I'm not quite a Trekkie (I won't even use the "correct" term Trekker) although I do love the show. Any inkling I might ever have had to attend a Trek convention though was stamped out about two decades ago by the infamous William Shatner SNL episode. I have never even considered going to anything similar since.

Will it still be lots of guys who live in their parents' basements, only walking around wearing Jason goalie masks instead of Spock ears?

I'm curious to see. If they want to read one of my books, I don't really care what they're wearing anyway.

New Weird

2007-07-22T14:00:00.000-04:00

What kind of book is it?

That’s a question I get asked fairly often. Is it Horror? Is it a Thriller?

My publisher classifies “The Lucifer Messiah” as Paranormal/Supernatural under their Horror banner. Originally they called it Dark Fantasy, before they changed their genre classifications this year. I think Barnes & Noble’s website had it ranked as an Urban Fantasy at one time. One bookstore I visited had it shelved in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section, and another had it in the Horror section.

One reviewer plainly referred to me as a “horror novelist” while another one claimed to be disappointed in the book as a fantasy writer himself (or herself, I’m not sure).

So what is it?

Horror, fantasy, dark fantasy, urban fantasy, urban dark fantasy, supernatural, sci-fi/fantasy, or just plain old fantasy?

My answer? None of the above. And all of the above. And maybe something else, too.

It’s not a cop out. I’ll try to explain.

“The Lucifer Messiah” has elements of all of those genres. There’s blood and gore, a staple of horror fiction. There’s sword fighting and pagan mythology, both fantasy mainstays. The setting is almost entirely urban and much of the plot involves supernatural creatures, for which something like a pseudo-scientific explanation is suggested.

That covers everything right?

But at the same time, it’s not scary, so it can’t really be called horror. There are no elves, fairies, dwarves, wizards or anything else you expect in post-Tolkien fantasy. The supposedly supernatural elements explicitly reject any connection to actual gods or religions, and the sci-fi bit is just that, no more than an oblique reference.

So it isn’t any of those genres. Right? In that case, what the heck did I write?

This is why I have a hard time breaking it down into a few words when people ask me about it in casual conversation. For the record then, here’s my attempt at an explanation.

Weird Fiction. Or maybe New Weird, if that’s possible.

Neither of those are my creation, so let me give credit where it’s due. Weird Fiction, in my mind, conjures up the work of Clark Ashton Smith, a woefully under-read guy these days. I think it also covers a lot of the work of Robert E. Howard (even some of the Conan stuff, which is pretty much the standard-bearer for Sword & Sorcery these days) and H.P. Lovecraft, whose work would probably be classified as straight horror in many cases.

These folks all had their heydays during the pulp fiction years of the thirties and forties. Smith especially wrote a lot of what we would now consider cross-genre stories. Almost all of them involved some kind of ancient, lost magic and some sort of horrific monster or a vaguely-evil wizard summoning dark, forbidden things in a dying, creepy old city.

I am not in Smith’s league. But if I could put my stuff in any “category” of fiction, I’d want it grouped in some way with that “genre.”

Another possibility is what some people have taken to calling “New Weird” which already has its own wikipedia entry, so it must be real. (What did Michael Scott say about that -- “anyone can write in, so you know it must be true?”)

The writer most closely identified with New Weird is a British guy named China Mieville, who for my money is the most talented fantasy/sci-fi/horror/cross-genre writer working today. If you haven’t read King Rat or Perdido Street Station then you’re missing one of the most interesting voices out there.

New Weird, if it is a real thing at all, is a conscious merging of all of the above-mentioned categories into something that includes elements from all of them; a genre that rejects familiar genre conventions, you might say.

If I ever become half the writer Mieville was five years ago (when he was in his early-thirties!!) I’ll be more than pleased, so I’m not going to nominate myself for inclusion in the same category as his work. It’s something to strive for.

So what is “The Lucifer Messiah”?

You’ve just read my best guess. But I’m open to other suggestions.

Blog

2007-07-22T11:29:00.000-04:00

I said I wouldn't do this.

Blog.

Is that a verb now, too? To blog?

I remember when it meant something else, and if you grew up in the 80s around a certain dead-end street in North Jersey (or know someone who did) then you know what I'm talking about.

Back to the point. There are thousands of "writer's blogs" out there. I read a few of them occasionally. It's a lot of the same stuff -- here's how I got published, and here's what you should do if you want to get published too or here's an utterly self-involved rendition of everything I'm doing, and don't you just find it fascinating?

Within the publishing community it's already become a cliche. Another writer's blog. And that's pretty much what this is.

Welcome.