Writing

The Evolution of Gentleman Jack

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Recently, I sold my short story “Take It Home” to eFiction Magazine. It was a monumental occasion for me. It’s not the first story I’ve sold, not by a long shot, and it isn’t even the best story I’ve written. “Take It Home” was originally titled “Gentleman Jack,” and I wrote it in the first fiction writing class that I took at Iowa State University. In many ways, it is the story that taught me how to write.

It’s the story of a professional wrestler who disgraces himself, gets fired, and returns home. The problem is that it isn’t really his home anymore. I wrote the story as an homage to professional wrestling, which I have loved since I was a little kid. I had read Pure Dynamite, the auto-biography of The Dynamite Kid. If you are a pro wrestling fan and don’t know the book or the wrestler, do yourself a favor and seek out both. The Dynamite Kid was best known as one of the British Bulldogs in the WWF, but had some amazing matches in Japan, particularly with Tiger Mask. His autobiography is brutal and heart-breaking in many ways. The thing that struck me most was that after he had hurt his back and went home, he found that his wife didn’t really want him around. He was in the way. She had her own life in the 300-plus days that he traveled every year.

The idea that your home could somehow stop being home stuck with me. The name Gentleman Jack came from one of my favorite books when I was a kid. I read Blackstone Mystery Adventures’ The Case of the Gentleman Ghost several times. It provided a link from the days of Encyclopedia Brown and Choose Your Own Adventure to the horror stuff that I would later read.

I’ve re-written the story several times since 2003. It’s changed drastically, lending credence to the idea that a story is really a combination of scenario and the writer. As a writer changes, his stories change with him. Technique improves, sure, but everything else adds in to it. When I wrote the story, I wrote about loss, but hadn’t really experienced it. I wrote about mistakes, but my biggest had been not working hard enough and choosing the wrong major. I wrote in a cynical, nihilistic style, not because I felt that way, but because I had seen Fight Club and thought it was cool.

I re-wrote “Take It Home” for the last time in 2013 as a divorced father with the fear of my son moving across the country fresh in my head. I had ten more years of experience and mistakes, ten years of life really. I’d even had a short-lived attempt at becoming a professional wrestler, training every night and coming home to find my son already in bed. The story changed. It became less about what Gentleman Jack had done, and more about where he was now and where he would go from there. Back then, I was fascinated with people who knew the costs of the mistakes they had made but kept making them anyway. Sort of like a man suffering from a critical wound, putting a band-aid on it, and going back in to the battlefield again. Now, at age 35, I can see how it happens.

In the last re-write, I changed the name of the story to “Take It Home,” an homage to a term in wrestling for finishing a match. I think it is fitting, since I finally had the experience and skill to finish the story that I started as a college junior in 2003. It took a long time to see it in print, and I will always remember the story as a mile-marker in my professional development as a writer.

NaNoWriMo Week 3: The Full-Time Writer

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thumbMy latest blog post about NaNoWriMo and the writing of Very Dangerous People is up at The Confabulator Cafe. Be sure to stop by and see how it is going. This week, I get to pretend to be a full-time writer.

http://www.confabulatorcafe.com/2014/11/nanowrimo-week-3-the-full-time-writer/

The Mercenary Writing of Robin Wayne Bailey

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Last Friday, I attended the Longview Literary Festival in Lee’s Summit. I took part in panels on critique groups and monsters in society. I had a lot of fun and the audience was enthusiastic, though sometimes small thanks to student class schedules. The featured speaker was Robin Wayne Bailey, who gave a lecture about his “rules” for commercial writing, which he admits are a bit mercenary. He credits them to Robert Heinlein. If it worked for Heinlein, then it is worth a shot. Bailey is no slouch himself. For those unfamiliar with his work, Bailey has had a career worth imitating. He’s a prolific writer in both short and long-form fiction and has been very successful in sustaining a long-term writing career.

Bailey’s (or Heinlein’s) rules are three points:

1. Write every day.

2. Finish everything.

3. Submit everything.

These rules are very appealing. They are similar to my approach to writing, and his points are worth examining a bit further. Writing every day is important, particularly if you are hoping to make some a living as a writer. This is a job, though admittedly an odd one. No one is going to pay you for the things that you didn’t write. Some of us work day jobs and don’t rely upon writing as our sole means of financial survival, but if we are going to take a shot at writing as a profession, writing every day is important.

Time is literally money, and if you aren’t going to get paid per hour, then it is vital that you finish things and submit them. Most of us could stand to focus more upon finishing our work. It’s easy to write first drafts. You have all this forward momentum and just spit it out on to the page. You are in love with it. It’s fresh. You are discovering the story as you go. It’s like a new relationship. Rewriting is the long-term relationship. You know the work. You’ve heard all its jokes and its flaws seem to glare at you every day. Being a writer is hard, we always say. But really, it’s the rewriting that makes it that way.

Of course, finishing things on its own is not going to get you paid. The money comes from publication, and in order to get published, you have to submit. One of the things that I have found is that what I may consider strong work can be rejected more often than my weaker stories. It’s not that I am not proud of the stories, but I didn’t consider them my best work. Yet there they are printed in literary magazines for all the world to see. I might think I was a terrible judge of quality, but I know other writers who have told me similar things. You don’t know what will sell and what won’t until you submit it. Write the best story that you can. When you have done all you can with it, throw it at the wall and see if it sticks.

I don’t write anything that I don’t expect to be read. I write for publication. Because of that, the mercenary-style rules of Heinlein and Bailey appeal to me. That being said, there is nothing wrong with writing for yourself, for your family, or even just for distraction. It’s not the way I work, but it’s valid. If you are like me and the even more mercenary writers out there, you might keep those three rules in mind. The first seems self-evident. The other two make more than a few writers a bit uncomfortable. But hey, if you are a certain type of writer, it could be worth a shot.

I, for one, am going to keep Bailey’s rules in mind going forward, and I am thankful to Bailey for sharing them with the crowd at the Longview Literary Festival. His approach re-energized me heading forward in to NaNoWriMo and the first draft of Very Dangerous People.

A Friendly Reminder to Kill Your Darlings

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From http://alex-hurst.com

As far as writing advice goes, “Kill your darlings” (and its variants) is one of the classics. It’s been attributed to Ginsberg, Chekov, Wilde, Faulkner…Stephen King swears by it in On Writing, and according to an article on Slate, it was originated by Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1914 Cambridge lecture. I’ve seen similar quotes attributed to a variety of writers. You hear it in interviews, see it in books, and try to practice it in workshops. It’s never quit that easy, is it?

Every once in awhile, you need a reminder that as brilliant as you think you are, the story decides what is necessary and what is showing off. I just received that reminder.

For pretty much the entire time that I’ve been writing, I’ve been experimenting with a parallel narrative structure. I stage two events, one present and one past, and develop them both with parallel arcs. The idea is that they climax at the same time and shed light upon each other. It’s a technique that works in film. Being that I started my writing career as a screenwriter, I thought it would be a fun structure for fiction.

During my first fiction writing class, I read Tobias Wolfe’s wonderful story “Bullet in the Brain.” WSU has a copy of it here. It mirrored the sort of structure that I wanted to exploit, although truth be told, its much simpler structurally than the montage type structure I wanted to use. The story essentially takes place while a bullet passes through the protagonist’s brain. I’ve written several stories using the technique. Some have worked. Some haven’t.

“A Burial” was one that I thought worked. It appeared at The Confabulator Cafe and people seemed to like it. Then I submitted it to a literary journal. An editor liked the story but didn’t like the fluctuations between present and past. I had my girlfriend, who is a freelance editor, read it. She said, nicely, that the changes made her dizzy. In the name of rewriting, I went back to the keyboard and untangled the narrative into a more traditional straightforward structure. BANG! A bullet went through the brain of my structural darling.

What’s more, the change mean that my first line needed scrapped. I am all about first lines. They are the basis of my stories. The entire thing sits upon their foundation. My first line: brutal, powerful, and provocative in my mind, had to go. BANG! Another bullet. Another casualty. My second darling fell.

One by one the casualties amassed as I dramatically changed the story structure. When the smoke cleared and the losses could be counted, I found that the reaping had made the story better. The final story was purchased and will appear in Page and Spine literary journal on an unknown date.

I’ve preached killing your darlings countless times in workshops. It’s a lesson I should have remembered when rewriting my own story. Sometimes, though, you need that little reminder. The story works much better, my darlings be damned.

One of these days, though, I will make that parallel structure work.

A Confabulator Cafe Review of John Hornor Jacobs’s Fierce as the Grave

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After a bit of a hiatus due to other demands on my time, I have posted a new review at The Confabulator Cafe. This week, I review John Horner Jacobs’s Fierce as the Grave: A Quartet of Horror Stories, a collection  from the author of Southern Gods and This Dark Earth. You can find the review here.

http://www.confabulatorcafe.com/2014/06/john-hornor-jacobss-fierce-grave-book-review/

 

Sound the Retreat!

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fronthouseSara and I have been talking about going to a writer’s retreat for quite awhile now. It would be fun to take a vacation and get some writing done at the same time. Despite the solitary nature of the work, writing is really a social craft. You learn a lot just from being around other writers, and networking is always fun. Surfing the internet, we came across the Haunted Mansion Writer’s Retreat in northern California. It seemed right up our alley. Plus, we have been known to drink wine on occasion, and we will be right around the corner from Napa Valley. We’ve been talking about it for several months. It’s hard to plan things that far out in advance with my schedule the way it is, but the weekend appears to be open, and after months of talking, we’ve finally registered. In 2015, Sara and I will be heading out to northern California for a long weekend of writing with some really quality horror writers, such as the hostess Rain Graves, Mercedes Yardley, S. G. Brown, Rena Mason, and a bunch of others. Around thirty, in total.  At night, we can hunt ghosts with the Ghost Girls investigation team. There have been two retreat anthologies put together in the past. The year two anthology is reviewed this month in Cemetery Dance magazine. You can find the anthologies on Amazon at the links below.

I am extremely excited to get out to the gorgeous setting, write some horror, hunt some ghosts, drink some wine, and come back with a new experience. I can’t wait. Now I just need to make it to a retreat at the Stanley Hotel, which inspired The Shining. I’m working on some re-writes and have been getting short stories out to various publishers. Now that I am wrapping up my Master’s degree it is time get back in the saddle and some more stuff published. It has been too long since I’ve gotten to share publishing news with all of you. As always, thanks for all of your support.

Post-ConQuest Wrap-up

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46Conquestlogo_46Sara and I had a great time at ConQuest last weekend. Sara bought me the Shadows over Innsmouth anthology for my birthday, which is full of stories based on Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” I picked up a Miskatonic University School of Library Science shirt, and we got a bunch of good stuff from the charity auction benefiting AboutSF. I also had good conversations about books and writing with local horror writers Sean Demory and Brett Williams. Make sure to check their stuff out, or catch them at Crypticon this year. Sara and I saw this as potentially being our last  ConQuest solely as fans. Sara’s editing career has officially launched and with my last English class out of the way, I am able to re-focus on writing. Next year may be more about career-building. I’ve had fun analyzing other people’s works. I’ve learned a lot from it, but it is time to see if all the studying pays off in creative dividends. If nothing else, I’ll have a lot to talk about with other book nerds at parties.

I defended my Story in a Bag Championship, taking home the award for best horror story in the professional division. Once again, I was unopposed. Sara actually competed against people and won the amateur division, although with two short story sales, right on the edge of joining the professional ranks. In Story in a Bag, you write a five page short story in one hour using plot devices that you draw out of a bag. I enjoy it as a writing exercise. So much of my writing style is based upon my first line. Story in a Bag takes control of the first line away from me, which forces me in new directions. This year’s story, “Hail to the Bus Driver,” is pretty solid. I’ll be rewriting it, probably for next Monday’s Confabulator Cafe posting.  I’ve had good experiences with the stories I’ve produced during Story in a Bag. Last year’s turned out well and was posted at The Confabulator Cafe. The prior year’s was disqualified, the story took me too deep to finish in an hour, but it created a character whom I plan to use in an occult noir detective novel.

I’ve also decided that I need to write more poetry. I had the inkling to write a poem last week and produced something like a cross between Dr. Seuss and Neil Gaiman. I’ve got a large number of short stories at this point, and have been thinking about collecting them at some point. Some poetry could help break up the pace. I’ve always enjoyed how Gaiman intersperses poetry throughout his collections.

ConQuest is the beginning of the writing fiscal year for me. The con recharges my creative batteries and kicks off summer when I have more time to write. It should be a good year, the year of the re-write. I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’ve written over the last couple of years that I didn’t get a chance to edit, including a novel and a novella. I can’t wait to get back to the grind and see what happens by next year’s ConQuest. The number of horror panels has increased each year at ConQuest. Next year, I’ll be throwing my hat in to the ring as a panelist. I am thinking about pitching a panel about short horror fiction, or how social contexts affect the horror genre. Sara would like to do something about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). It has come up several times in panels, but we haven’t seen any panels specifically about it.

Whatever happens, I’m sure it will be fun. Next year, Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, Nene Thomas, Selina Rosen, and Mark Oshiro are the guests of honor. You don’t want to miss Selina Rosen as toastmistress. You can register here if you are interested.

 

ConQuest approaches!

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ConQuest, the science fiction and fantasy convention, is hitting Kansas City this weekend. Sara and I go every year. It is generally a birthday celebration for me. This year, my birthday lands on Memorial Day–otherwise known as ConQuest recovery day. Every year, it seems that I have more and more friends that I look forward to seeing. It’s great to catch up with what everyone is doing, and I always leave with my creative batteries charged, ready to take on the literary world.

You can see the programming on their website: www.conquestkc.org. As you can imagine, I dig the noir theme this year. There appears to be some good horror programming this year, as well as readings from local KC-area scribes Brett Williams, Sean Demory, Karin Rita Gasterich, Holly Messinger, Sheri Dean, and many others. R. L. Naquin and Kevin Wohler are both in my writer’s group, and will be there. I’ve been reading the Garrett, P.I. series, and am looking forward to the guest of honor Glen Cook. I’ll also be defending my “Story in a Bag” Professional Horror Division title.

It should be a lot of fun, and it might be one of the last ConQuest’s that I can attend more for pleasure than work. I can’t wait to see everyone out there, and I will be sure to share my thoughts after the weekend.

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What the Finale of How I Met Your Mother Can Teach Us about Writing

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How I Met Your Mother’s series finale aired last night, and I have some thoughts up at The Confabulator Cafe about what the finale and how the series developed can teach us about writing organically. Head on over and check it out. **WARNING** There will be spoilers!

http://www.confabulatorcafe.com/2014/04/finale-met-mother-can-teach-us-writing/

Confabulator Review of The Least of My Scars

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least-of-my-scarsThis week at The Confabulator Cafe, I reviewed Stephen Graham Jones’s amazing and disturbing novel The Least of My Scars. You can find my review here. It’s an excellent book, and I hope anyone who is a fan of dark, DARK psychological horror checks it out.

I had a great time at Planet Comicon this weekend. I am always extremely impressed at all of the work the artists put in. It’s got me really looking forward to ConQuest in a couple of months.