Frustrations and surprises

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

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

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

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

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

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.


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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

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

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

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

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?"