Ten Questions About Penance, By Dan O’Shea

Dan O’Shea is the real fucking deal. He’s a helluva writer and a smart guy and a man I’m proud to call my friend. Further, he’s my Alpha Clone — I’m pretty sure I’m just a watered-down version of him. Regardless, I’m happy as hell to report his first novel has landed on bookshelves and here he’d like to give you some words of wisdom about PENANCE.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’ll start with who I’m not. I’m not your usual punk kid debut author. I’m on the wrong side of 50 – thought the more time I spend over here, the more I think it’s the right side of 50. Been a writer my whole adult life – business and financial copy mostly, a lot of it about the tax code. And, really, a writer is all I ever wanted to be. But another 5,000 word white paper on transfer pricing, that’s not exactly the dream I had as a kid. I wanted to write stories. Got married young though, had kids, a couple of the kids had some problems. Seemed to me I couldn’t waste time writing stories on spec when there were clients willing to pay me cash on the nail for real work. Writing a novel felt like one of St. Paul’s childish things, one of those dreams you put away when you became a man. I messed at fiction from time to time, but I would go years at a stretch without writing a word I wasn’t getting paid for.

Pissed on my own dreams, basically.

Thing is, you get to an age when people start to die. In the space of a few months, my best friend died, my dad died, my aunt died – and a couple of those deaths weren’t natural. The whole mortality thing went from being an abstraction to being an open wound. It sunk in on more than an intellectual level that there wasn’t going to be a second lap around the track where I finally got to do what I wanted.

So I got serious about writing fiction. PENANCE is actually the first thing I ever finished.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

When the past won’t stay buried you have to kill it again.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I went to a strange high school. A Catholic military academy. The school motto was Crede de Deo, Luctari pro Eo – to believe in God and to fight for him. Always confused me. I always figured if there was one guy who could handle his own beefs, it was the almighty. Just as the good people of Sodom.

Anyway, I’m in theology class my junior year and the priest pops this question. Asks us “If you were going to die unexpectedly, say you were going to be murdered, where and when would you want that to happen?”

I was leaning toward never and nowhere, but he tells us we should want to be murdered walking out of the confessional because we’d be in a state of grace and would go to heaven. Besides adding to the pile of things that were already souring me on the idea of religion, that nugget rattled around my brain for years as a great jumping off point for a story.

When I started PENANCE, that was all I had – a killer with a bizarre religious motivation for murder. The rest of it grew out of that.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

I suppose it’s a story that any fifty-something guy who went to a Catholic military school, who had a Chicago cop for a grandfather and who had nightmares for weeks back in 1968 after watching his grandparent’s neighborhood burn on the news in the riots following the King assassination could have written.

Religion figures heavily in it, history figures heavily in it, Chicago figures heavily in it. All things I’ve thought a lot about.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING PENANCE?

Like I said, it’s the first piece of fiction I ever finished, so everything was hard. The biggest challenge was just learning the discipline, just making myself sit down every day, or almost every day at least, and knock out a couple of pages whether I felt like it or not.

Funny thing is I didn’t really have any more time when I finally got serious and wrote the thing than I did all those years I was telling myself I didn’t have time. I’m just as busy, I still have a day job, my kids still have needs, always will. So I watch a little less TV, maybe spend a little less time reading.

There is no muse, no magic. There’s you and there’s the keyboard. If you’ve got the chops to do the work then you can always do the work. Easier some days than others, of course, but you can always do the work.

I guess maybe the hardest thing was learning that, and then believing it.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING PENANCE?

Here’s one thing: a novel should be somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 words, maybe 110,000 on the high end. OK, everybody knows that now ‘cause you kids all grew up with Google. Thing is, way back in my late twenties when I had one of my brief, abortive fits of fiction writing, I got about 20K into a story, felt like I was getting traction. But I had no idea where the finish line was. Weren’t no Google yet. The internet was still a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. So I got this bright idea. Grab a book off the shelf, count up the words on a few pages, average those out, multiply by the number of pages and bingo – you’ll have a target. I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe I counted wrong. Maybe the pages I picked were all narrative and no dialog. Maybe I forgot to consider how many partial pages there are in a finished book. Maybe I grabbed a Steven King novel. But the number I came up with was 300,000 words. I quit on the spot, knew I’d never get that far.

Let’s see, what else? Dialog – learned that, for me anyway, the sooner in a scene I get my characters talking the better.

Learned to finish what I started.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT PENANCE?

The intersection of the city’s real history with the story, I love that. I didn’t grow up in Chicago – I grew up about 50 miles west. Now, I spent a fair amount of time in the city, even as a kid. We’d visit my grandparents, we’d go in to the museums, Cubs games. Then, as an adult, I commuted in and out of the city every day for decades.

But I remember watching the news as a kid. It was a pretty volatile time. The King riots, the ’68 Democratic convention after that, the Fred Hampton murder, Richard Speck, the ongoing civil rights struggles, the battles between the Daley regime and the parade of good government types that were always trying to unseat him, some alderman or county board member always being on trial for something. It was this other place where everything always seemed bigger, bolder, more dangerous – where none of the normal rules of civilized behavior that governed my immediate experience applied.

I realize that the Chicago in my book isn’t real exactly – some of it is, I think the sense of it is. But even when you set a book in a real place, that place is really a sort of parallel universe.

I like what Chicago is in my book.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Write it when I was thirty. It would have been a different book for sure, probably not as good a book. But I can’t help but think sometimes how my life would be different if I had started my fiction-writing career a couple decades ago.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

Little more than a paragraph on account of it’s dialog, but there’s an exchange early in the book set in 1971 between a character named Clarke and Chicago’s mayor, Hurley, where Hurley’s complaining about Chicago’s iconic Picasso statue, which would still have been relatively new at the time, just a couple years old. I like the way this passage gives a sense of both the character and the city. And, like I said, it’s early in the book. It’s something I wrote in the first few weeks when I’d finally decided I was going to finish a novel. It was one of the first passages that, even as I was writing it, I was thinking, “Hey, this is some good shit. Maybe I can write a novel.”

“Fucking statue, still don’t get it,” said Hurley.

“Pardon?”

“The Picasso. Junior’s idea, you know. Public art, he says, so we can be a great city, like New York or Paris. Like we ain’t a great city already. Like I gotta put a fucking steel monkey in the middle of the Loop so we can be a great city.”

“Picasso is a genius, sir,” said Clarke. “Subjective as individual works may be, to have his work on so prominent a stage.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make all the art critics in the world gush about us. Course you could move all the art critics in the world into the same damn place and you wouldn’t have a city, you’d have a village, cause there’s maybe a couple hundred of ‘em, and the village wouldn’t need an idiot. And then they’d all starve cause they don’t know how to do nothing. What I like about it? The Picasso? I look out on a nice day in the summer, and I see the kids climbing up that slanty part at the bottom and sliding down. Got the parents standing there, trying to figure out is it a baboon or what, and their kids play on it. I like that. Some guy from the Art Institute came to tell me I gotta keep them kids off it, that it was sacrilege or some shit. Scrawny atheist fuck in my office talking about sacrilege. Told him that Picasso might be a drunk and can’t keep his pants zipped, but at least he makes a decent slide.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I’m putting the finishing touches on my second novel, MAMMON, (coming to a book store near you in early 2014 from the good folks at Exhibit A).

Those who follow my blog or my short fiction career might also know I’m a bit of a Shakespeare fan boy and that I’ve messed around writing some stuff that features the Bard as an unwilling Elizabethan private dick. Not quite ready for a formal announcement on that yet, but let me just say you’ll be seeing more from ol’ Will.

* * *

Dan O’Shea: Website / Twitter

Penance: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound