Clark Ashton Smith

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!

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

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?

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...?

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

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

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

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

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.