Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Author: terribleminds (page 405 of 464)

WORDMONKEY

February 24, 2012 / 179 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: The 10k Contest

Last week’s “Make Me A Sandwich” challenge went pretty apeshit — closing in on 50 submissions at the time of this writing. Go check it out, won’t you?

*blink blink*

Somehow, I have fooled 10,000 of you into following me on Twitter.

This is insane, and suggests that most of you are spam-flavored sex-bots, sex-flavored spam-bots, or brain-diseased serial killers with a penchant for loudmouthed idiocy in the form of questionable writing advice. Either way, it happened, and there you all are, spambot-or-no. So, I thought I’d thank you by giving away a little something-something, bow-chicka-bow-dow.

But I’m still going to make you work for it.

I want you to tell me a story in five sentences.

(Yes, a complete story.)

No longer than 100 words total. The shorter, the better, in fact.

The permutations of the story beyond length are up to you: I don’t much care about genre or subject matter or any other fiddly bits. All I care about is the brevity and, by proxy, the potency of the tale at hand.

Deposit your storytelling awesomeness direct in the comments below. Do not put it at your blog.

You get one entry. So, write strong and choose wisely.

You have until Monday (2/27/2012) at noon EST to get your entries in. Then, by the following Monday, I will pick my favorite out of the whole big-ass bunch of stories.

The writer of my favorite story gets a prize package. Which is not a euphemism for my penis.

Prize package includes:

(1) hard copy of Double Dead, signed.

(1) hard copy of Human Tales anthology (story in it by me), signed.

(1) digital e-book copy of: all of my writing books (including the newest, 500 More Ways To Be A Better Writer), Shotgun Gravy, Irregular Creatures, and, when it comes out (late April), Blackbirds.

(1) handwritten postcard by moi.

Now, if you’re international, you can still enter — but, you’ll either have to pony up for shipping or just accept the digital e-books (i.e. no Double Dead, Human Tales, or postcard).

So, that’s it.

Five sentences.

Buncha giveaway stuff.

Monday’s the end.

Come on and tell us all a story.

* * *

EDIT:

All right. Time to call a winner and then, for giggles, a back-up winner.

First, let me say — some very good stuff here. Also, some very not-good stuff here. And some puzzlingly improper stuff — stuff that didn’t abide by the rules, stuff that fell prey to very easy-to-fix mistakes.

(Also: a curious thread popping up of dudes killing wives or girlfriends. Entries like that are unlikely to ever win anything, by the by.)

So.

Two winners. First winner wins everything I listed. Second winner wins only e-books of my writing-related books (five books in total).

First (grand) winner: Damien Kelly:

“On hurricane day, Daddy said, “Let’s put on our overcoats, and ride the dying storm.” I was nervous, but I trusted him and put on my coat and my boots. We ran around the yard a few times, and circled the roof, just to be sure we knew how to fly. Then we lifted our coat tails and jumped on the hurricane, bound for all points on the compass.
Impaled on broken branches, in a tall oak tree, staining its bark with my blood, I can see my house from here.”

Second runner-up:

Exi!

“A haiku class? Sure!”

“My boyfriend will meet us there.”

Damn it all to hell.

You guys need to email me at terribleminds [at] gmail.com.

Congrats!

February 23, 2012 / 4 Comments

Chris Holm: The Terribleminds Interview

Today, we’re publishing three — count ’em, three! — interviews here at Jolly Olde Terribleminds. On first pass, I don’t like to crowd up with interviews, and I thought, mmm, maybe I’ll spread these out. But here’s the thing: these interviews talk to three writers who each share a kind of intellectual space. All three are cracking short story writers, all three come out of crime writing, all three have killer novels (two of them published, one on submission), and to boot, all three know each other. So, my thought is, let’s let these interviews feed into one another. Right? Right.

Now, time to talk to fellow Angry Robot author, Chris F. Holm, a talented motherfucker who’s proven that he’s a gifted short story writer — and who now gets to show off his novel, the soul-collector-gone-awry tale known as DEAD HARVEST. (Check out that killer cover, by the way.) That drops next week (2/28), so get ready to grab it. Meanwhile, check out what he has to say below. Track him down at his site — chrisfholm.com — or stalk him on the Twitters (@chrisfholm).

When you’re done here, check out the other two interviews:

Dan O’Shea

Hilary Davidson

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

Okay, I’ve got one. It’s a story about the power of story, and it’s true and false in equal measure. If that don’t fit the question, I don’t know what will.

My Papa Burns was a consummate storyteller with a wicked sense of humor, and there was nothing he loved more than winding up his grandkids, much to my grandmother’s consternation. Their house was on Earl Avenue in Mattydale, New York, and one of Papa’s favorite topics for grandkid-winding was Earl. Earl — according to Papa, and all my aunts and uncles who gleefully corroborated his story — was a gaunt loner of a man who once lived in an apartment above my grandparents’ garage. Earl was apparently quite the amateur photographer, but a horrible accident with his developing chemicals left his face irreparably scarred. Papa always intimated Earl was guilty of perpetrating great and terrible crimes against the children of the neighborhood, though of course he never told us what, precisely, those crimes were. Or, for that matter, how being a gaunt, disfigured loner who does unspeakable things to children leads to having a street named after you. But plot holes matter not to children. Not when presented with so juicy a story as Earl’s.

For you see, as the story goes, no one knows what became of Earl. Some say he died. Some say he was run out of town by the parents of his young victims. But not Papa. Papa was convinced that Earl was still up there, living like an animal in the ruins of his old apartment.

Did it occur to us to ask why Papa, a cop with a loaded sidearm and a litter of grandchildren forever underfoot, would let some creepy feral child killer/molester/photographer/whatever live in the attic of his garage? No, it did not. But it did occur to us to try to find out for ourselves whether Earl was still up there.

There were no stairs up to the garage’s second floor. There was no ladder. Just an empty square of darkness, framed by rotten four-by-fours and cut into the ceiling. The plan was simple: Me and my cousin Joey were going to lace our fingers together and hoist up our cousin Steph — the oldest of us at maybe ten, and therefore the tallest — so she could stick her head through the trap door and take a peek. Steph’s younger sister Sarah was in charge of steadying her so Steph didn’t tip over. And we’d find out once and for all whether Earl was still up there.

We found out, all right. We found out good.

When Steph’s head cleared the trap-door’s frame, she let out a shriek the likes of which I’d never heard. The three of us at ground level panicked, and we dropped her. She didn’t give us so much as a moment to worry if she was okay before sprinting, ghost-white, out of the garage. Instinct kicked in, and we three followed. When we finally regrouped, Steph breathlessly related what she’d seen: the scarred, pitted, anger-twisted face of a madman, just inches from her own. As if he’d known we were coming. As if he’d been waiting for us.

Once our initial fright had passed, me and Joey mocked her something fierce. In the protective light of day, far removed from the gloom of the garage, we were sure she was full of shit. Sarah, the youngest of us, seemed less sure.

But you know what? We never ventured into that garage again. And looking back, even knowing Papa’s stories were so much bunk, I’m half-convinced she saw Earl all the same.

Why do you tell stories?

My answer’s simple: I tell stories because I can’t not. But that ain’t just some glib cliché, because believe me, I’ve tried. I’m from a practical, middle-class family one generation removed from the working class, so I was raised to believe you found a vocation you were good at and then did it: end of story. In grade school, it turned out I was good at science. Which led to advanced classes, which led to acceptance into college, which led to me majoring in biology. Next thing I knew, I was working toward a PhD in infectious disease research, and trying to ignore these insane ideas that kept waking me up at night, begging to be written down. And oh, yeah: I was miserable. So, with encouragement from my amazing wife (seriously, I’d still be on the wrong damn path without her), I dropped out. Started writing. And I can’t imagine ever doing anything else.

Infectious diseases — tell me that’s going to start popping up more and more in your work.

My fascination with infectious diseases has snuck into my fiction a time or two already. I wrote a horror short that appeared in BEAT TO A PULP: ROUND ONE, which explored the real and terrifying concept of a pathogen actually altering the behavior of its host in order to propagate itself. And a major plot point in DEAD HARVEST centers around the early inroads toward a cure for tuberculosis.

That said, I’m sure you’ll see it take on a starring book-length role sometime in the not-too-distant future. There’s a book in my head just dying to be written that tackles the idea of a global-killer pandemic in what I hope is an unexpected way. But the thing’s so damned ambitious, I’m not sure I’m writer enough to tackle it yet.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

I have a tough time giving writing advice, ’cause really, who the hell am I? But one nuts-and-bolts pointer that served me well early on in my career (and continues to do so to this day) is this: enter a scene as late as possible, and leave early. Plenty of folks have already heard that one, I’m sure, but for those who haven’t, I’ll say this: read over your WIP. If there’s a scene you think just grinds the story to a halt, before you go chucking the whole damn thing, try deleting the first and last paragraphs of that scene. I’ll bet you it reads better.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

There’s a ton that’s great about being a writer. Engaging your every flight of fancy. Going down the rabbit-hole of your own half-crazed theories like some schizophrenic detective uncovering a truth no one else has ever seen. Justifying every bit of slackitude you’ve ever indulged in as “research.” Being told even once someone lost sleep because they had to finish what you wrote. Packing away some small kernel of your soul like a Horcrux, so that no matter how awful life gets it can’t taint you completely, because you just know you can make something beautiful out of it.

What sucks? The self-doubt. The days the words are slow in coming. (I don’t believe in writer’s block, but every job has its shit days.) The fact that, to a one, we’re addicted to the validation of utter strangers, and sometimes utter strangers can be douches.

You write from a place where genre has reduced meaning — in other words, you kind of smoosh together genres. What’s the value of genre to both writer and reader? Are there risks in painting outside the lines overmuch?

The value of genre, to reader and writer, is simple. People like organizing things. Labeling them. Arranging them according to predetermined criteria. It’s our way of making sense of a world that resists sense-making. And generally, it’s pretty handy. I’ve been a fan of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror all my life, so I’m more likely to find a book that’s to my liking on shelves labeled “Science Fiction,” “Fantasy,” “Mystery,” or “Horror” than I am in, say, “Biography” or “Inspirational.” It’s just a numbers game.

The problem is, arranging things according to predetermined criteria has a tendency of getting away from us. Of propagating prejudice. And that’s a damn shame. Because there are no doubt titles in “Biography” or “Inspirational” I’d really dig, but that I’ll likely never be exposed to. And I know for damn sure the labels I’ve listed thus far poorly represent my favorite sorts of books, which tend to be “Stories That Are More Than One Kind Of Thing.” I’d shop the hell out of that section, and chances are, most of what I write would be stocked there, too.

That’s the answer to the first half of your question. The answer to the second half is, hell yes there are risks to painting outside genre lines. Every genre’s got its adherents and its detractors, and every genre’s got its giant-air-quotes-implied rules. Which means if you’re writing in two genres at once, you’re twice as likely to turn off a given member of your audience, or twice as likely to fuck up in their eyes. The kneejerk reaction of most crossgenre writers is to say, To hell with them, then. If they don’t get what I’m doing, who needs ’em? And that kneejerk reaction ain’t wrong. But I’ll tell you this: when sending out queries or shopping a novel, your audience is nothing but agents and editors, some of whom are gonna be turned off by work that’s tough to classify. That can sting. But fear not; there are plenty of crossgenre fans out there, and all it takes is winding up in front of the right one of ’em to set you on your path.

Gotta talk about 8 Pounds, an alarmingly good collection of horror and crime stories you self-published: how are those stories ones that only Chris Holm could’ve written?

That’s an excellent question, particularly since one thing I strive to do whenever I sit down to write something new is to tell a story only I could tell. But if I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure every story in 8 POUNDS clears that bar. “A Simple Kindness” is my take on the classic pulp tale of a patsy being played by a femme fatale. “The Well” is a twisted little bit of flash that’s the horror equivalent of a joke, all setup and punchline. I like both stories very much, and stand behind them to this day, but the fact is, I’m not sure someone else couldn’t have cooked them up.

The other stories in that collection, though, come from perhaps a more personal place. “The World Behind” reflects my impressions of Virginia, formed in the two years my wife and I lived there after college. “The Big Score” is my love-letter to Maine, inspired by the ten years I spent at a job with offices that overlooked a working fish pier. “Seven Days of Rain” filters my apparent obsession with lifelong regret (of which I was unaware until I noticed how often it popped up in my work) through my twin loves of Poe and McDowell. “A Better Life” I wrote in response to the mice in the walls of my new home. “Eight Pounds” was borne of a funny bit of dialogue that lodged itself in my head and wouldn’t let go. And “The Toll Collectors” was my first attempt to tell a story that straddled the line of crime and the fantastic.

Whether that means only I could have written them, I couldn’t say. But I do think each represent a snapshot of who I was while I was writing them, and each of them represent a point on my evolution as a writer.

What did 8 Pounds teach you about self-publishing (if anything)?

8 POUNDS taught me that self publishing is damn easy to do, and damn hard to do right. The temptation as a writer to just click a button and upload your unfettered genius for all the world to see is mighty indeed, but holy hell is there a lot of work involved in making it look and read as clean as a traditionally published book. I was lucky enough to have been through a round of professional edits for each of the stories I included, since they’d all initially been published elsewhere, and proofreading alone, I must’ve gone through five rounds of edits. Add to that the formatting quirks of the assorted sundry ebook formats, and any detail-oriented person could drive themselves insane trying to get everything exactly right.

Now, I’m not saying I wouldn’t do it again, or that I wouldn’t recommend that path to others; given the proper circumstances, I’d do both. What I am saying is, anyone who thinks of it as a shortcut is kidding themselves. Successful self-published ebooks have a lot in common with successful traditionally published books: most notably, a buttload of hard work. The only difference is, with self-published books, all that work falls to the author.

Get cocky. Drop your penmonkey testes on the table and demand that all behold them: what makes DEAD HARVEST a mighty motherfucking ass-kicker of a book that everybody should buy in quantities of 12 or more?

Look, I can wave my hands all I want about how I think DEAD HARVEST is, at its core, a deeply romantic novel about a guy condemned to hell for saving the life of the woman he loved, and the thankless task he’s forced to do by way of punishment, but let’s face it: that’s just the spoonful of emotional resonance that makes the asskickery go down. What it all boils down to is an undead, body-swapping protagonist sacking up and going toe to toe (to toe to toe to toe) with a cadre of pissed-off angels, more demons than you could shake a rosary at, the entire NYPD, and a psychotic rival soul collector who thinks he’s a god, all to protect a young girl who may or may not be a mass murderer. And oh, yeah, if he fails, he’ll be responsible for jump-starting the Apocalypse. If that ain’t a heaping helping of badass, I don’t know what is.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

Picking a favorite word is tough. I’m kinda partial to defenestrate. Or mellifluous. Or schadenfreude. Or moiety. Or petrichor. Or interrobang. Or phenomenology. Or kummerspeck, which isn’t English (yet), but German, and means “weight gain due to emotional overeating” or, more literally translated, “grief bacon.”

Picking a favorite curse word is easier. It’s “fuck” in a walk. Sure, there’re sexier curse words out there, or ones with greater shock value, but “fuck” is just so fucking versatile, it’s like the Leatherman of curses. You should carry it with you always, ’cause sooner or later, you’re gonna need it.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

If I had to pick a single drink on which to live out the rest of my liver-abusing days, I suppose I’d choose a big, ass-kicking Paso Robles Zin. But it’d be tough walking away from whiskey. What I love about both wine and whiskey (be it Scotch, Bourbon, rye, or anything in between, the smaller the batch the better) is they tell a story. You can taste the ground from whence they came, the air they breathed, the baking sun or rolling fog under which they grew. As with storytellers, the worst of them never get past that — they’re no better than the sum of their parts. But the best of them transform all those influences into something transcendent. That, to me, is magic. (Oh, and another thing they have in common with storytellers: the best of them wouldn’t be the best of them without the help of a judicious editor, usually the guy with his name on the bottle.)

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

Just one? I guess I’d have to go with LAST CALL, by Tim Powers. It’s a thrilling, sprawling, insanely ambitious novel that blends elements of pulp, fantasy, and history into one of the strangest and most wondrous books you’ll ever have the privilege of reading. I’m not going to do the book the disservice of attempting to summarize it here, but it involves Bugsy Siegel, the Fisher King, the intersection of luck and fate, and a game of poker played with a Tarot deck, where what’s at stake are the players’ souls.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

Well, I grew up in the country, so I can shoot. In my Day Job alter-ego, I’m a scientist, so I could probably MacGyver up a quality booby trap or chemical weapon in a pinch. And there’s always the off-chance the zombies’ weakness will prove to be obscure television references and super-cool dance moves, in which case… yeah, okay, I’m still only one of two.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

Wow. That’s a tough one for a foodie, ’cause I like the whole damn spectrum, from chili dogs to truffles and foie gras (and hell, I’d consider both at once). But if we’re talking last meals, I’ve gotta go a heaping platter of barbecue. I’m talking pulled pork with North Carolina-style vinegar-based sauce. Ribs, both pork and beef. Hot smoked sausage with low-country mustard sauce. And don’t forget the cornbread, slaw, and collard greens. If I’m going out, I’m going out full.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

One of the things I love about this gig is, I have no idea what the future holds. Might be I get to write another five books in the Collector series, and that’d be just fine by me. Might be I move on to something else. Right now, I’m working on a straight-ahead thriller, mostly just to see if I can color within a single genre’s lines just once. Truth is, there ain’t years enough in this life of mine to tell all the stories I want to tell. That thought should bum me out, but really, it just makes me smile. It’s somehow reassuring to know they’re out there, even if I never get to ’em.

February 23, 2012 / 4 Comments

Hilary Davidson: The Terribleminds Interview

Today, we’re publishing three — count ’em, three! — interviews here at Jolly Olde Terribleminds. On first pass, I don’t like to crowd up with interviews, and I thought, mmm, maybe I’ll spread these out. But here’s the thing: these interviews talk to three writers who each share a kind of intellectual space. All three are cracking short story writers, all three come out of crime writing, all three have killer novels (two of them published, one on submission), and to boot, all three know each other. So, my thought is, let’s let these interviews feed into one another. Right? Right.

Now it’s time to check out one wicked weaver of tales — Hilary Davidson, whose novel THE DAMAGE DONE was one of my hands-down favorites of 2010. She’s an incredible writer and knows how to really ratchet up the mystery and suspense like few others do. The next in the series — appropriately, THE NEXT ONE TO FALL — is out now, so go find it. Check out her website (hilarydavidson.com) and go follow her on Twitter (@hilarydavidson).

When you’re done here, check out the other two interviews:

Chris Holm

Dan O’Shea

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

The guard who led me into the detention area was in a jovial mood. “So, did you enjoy your trip to Spain?” he asked.

I nodded, but my mouth was too dry to let out anything but a hesitant, “Sure.”

“That’s good.” He unlocked a door and walked me into a room that, in all the times I’d flown through New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, I’d never seen before. It had a low ceiling and felt dirty, but the overhead lights were too dim for me to be certain of what was shadow and what was grime. There were rows of gray plastic chairs in the center and three uniformed officers seated behind desks on one side. The bodies in the chairs looked as if they were acting out the five stages of grief. Some had their heads swiveling around, clearly in denial about where they were. An angry man in front of me had his fists balled up and banging against his thighs. “This is a mistake,” a woman said to a guard, clearly bargaining. The most common posture, though, was one denoting depression: people slouched in chairs, some bent over with their heads in their hands. The only example of acceptance was a sleeping baby whose mother was still in denial.

“Sit here,” the guard said to me, indicating a space between two men.

“But I…” I don’t belong here, I wanted to scream. Detention was a place for drug mules and criminals and suspected terrorists. Whatever I’d done, I didn’t belong here.

“Sit down. Right there.” His jovial tone was gone. “Don’t get up until you’re called.”

I took the seat.

“Don’t worry,” whispered the man to my left. I glanced at him. He was South Asian and in the low light, his eyeballs looked yellowed like old paper. His hands were folded together in a gesture that seemed almost prayerful.

“There is nothing to worry about, you see. I am not worried,” the man went on, his voice soft. “They do not wish to let me into their country because they think I have leprosy. But, you see, I have been cured.”

Why do you tell stories?

All my life, I’ve had a game of “What If?” going on in my head. I’m curious about people and about where they’ve been. When I can’t find out the truth, my brain will fill in the blanks with stories. Then I’ve got these characters spiraling around my head, and they start to take on a life of their own. When I was a kid, I think this was called daydreaming, but now it’s my job.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice.

Overdescribing things — people, places, physical action, emotions — just slows your story down. You need to describe those things well enough so that readers can picture what you’re talking about in their own minds, but you don’t need to spell out every detail for them. In fact, it’s often better to leave certain details unsaid and let the reader fill them in for themselves. Telling me that a man is five-foot-ten and has black hair and olive skin and green eyes is just a collection of details; you could go on and on, describing what he’s wearing and I’m not going to know anything about him, really. Choose the details you share carefully. Telling me that a character’s eyes are flicking over the room, avoiding the person who’s talking to him, tells me something about that character.

The Damage Done, which is a great novel, has this creepily elegant Hitchcockian vibe to it — how does The Next One To Fall compare in terms of tone, character, and subject matter?

Thanks for the kind words about The Damage Done! Even though their settings are very different, the books have a lot in common. Both are, at heart, about searches for missing women. In The Damage Done, Lily Moore is hunting for her sister, Claudia, so she’s personally invested in the outcome. In The Next One to Fall, the woman who dies at the beginning of the book is a stranger to Lily, but there are things about her that remind Lily of Claudia. When Lily finds out that the dead woman is actually just the latest in a string of dead and missing women who were involved with a wealthy man named Len Wolven, part of her desire to get justice for them is tied to the fact that she feels her sister never got the justice she deserved.

The cast of characters is different in The Next One to Fall — the book is set in Peru, and it brings back Lily and her best friend, Jesse, but not the others (well, there might be a little but of Bruxton… but just a little). But the characters are every bit as multifaceted and murky as the ones in The Damage Done.

You’ll definitely feel the Hitchcockian vibe in the new book, possibly even more strongly than in the first one. I wanted to acknowledge, on the page, one of my biggest influences, so there’s a scene in The Next One to Fall that I hope pays homage to Mr. Hitchcock. I can’t tell you what it is without being all spoilery, but you will know it when you see it.

What’s the trick to writing a good follow-up — whether a sequel or “next book in a series?”

Each book needs to stand on its own, even if it is a sequel. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “Well, I already explained X is the first book, so I don’t need to do it again.” Wrong. Not only do you need to explain X, you need to do it in such a way that you’re not boring the hell out of people who read the previous book. Also, your main characters have the same emotional pressure points they had in the first book, but you need to explore them in different ways. In The Next One to Fall, it was an obvious thing to make Lily sympathetic to the victims, to link them to her sister. But Lily also comes across the sister of one of the victims, who is hunting for her missing sister in Peru. Instead of becoming allies, Lily can’t stand this woman; part of the reason is that this woman acts in a reckless way that is not at all dissimilar from Lily acts in The Damage Done. Lily sees part of herself in the woman, and she doesn’t like it one bit. It’s not a role-reversal, but it explores Lily’s character in a different way.

If there’s a trick, it’s not spoiling the plot of the earlier book. People who pick up The Next One to Fall are going to know one very important thing about how The Damage Done ends, but there’s no information about who is guilty of what. If anything, there’s a tease. At one point in the new book, Lily says, “Two of the guilty were dead. One was in a mental institution. Others who should have been behind bars were walking around free.” But she doesn’t tell you anything else. I didn’t want to spoil the story for anyone who discovers the second book first and then goes back to read the first.

How are your two Lily Moore novels stories only Hilary Davidson could’ve written?

Even though Lily is very much her own person, we have a lot in common. Things, places, and issues that fascinate me also fascinate her, though she sometimes ends up owning them and forcing me to do more work (her knowledge of old movies has forced me to watch a lot of them). My family jokes that Lily is my friend from another universe. We can’t interact directly, but I know her so well. In that universe, Lily may well start writing fiction about a character she will call “Hilary Davidson.” I wouldn’t put it past her.

You broke into writing with a series of impactful noir short stories. What’s the art of writing a killer short story?

You’ve got to be completely ruthless with a short story. The room you get in a novel to build and explore and wander doesn’t exist in a short story. Plenty of people will give a novel a chance even if it doesn’t grab them at first. But a short story? Forget it. It’s the difference between karate and krav maga. With karate, you have an extended match with the elegance of ballet and some exhilarating moments. In krav maga, your fight will last eight seconds and someone will probably lose an eye.

Just what the fuck is “noir,” anyway?

“What is noir?” is a question over which writers get into fistfights at conferences. Well, that’s not quite true — it’s more like they’ll yell at each other online about it a lot.

My take: noir is black. It’s the heart of darkness. It’s a world without redemption.

Noir is where dreams go to die terrible deaths.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Noir is what you are left with when you can no longer turn your gaze away from that abyss.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

I love writing, even when it’s hard. I love editing my own work, and watching a story take shape. Meeting other writers is a huge plus, as is meeting readers. I love going to conferences like Bouchercon and Thrillerfest and Bloody Words. Writing nonfiction has let me travel the world, which is something I’m incredibly grateful for.

The downside: It’s a tough business to break into, and even after you break in, you have to watch some very talented people hit their heads against walls endlessly, trying to break in, too. People in publishing can be very negative. You’re forced to read endless articles about “The End of Books.”

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

I have trouble picking a favorite anything, but the word hellion immediately came to mind. Since I’m obviously in a hellish frame of mind, I’m going with hell for favorite curse word. I love that you can talk about hell and it’s not a curse word, but the minute you say, “Holy hell!” it becomes one.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I love sparkling wine: champagne, cava and prosecco are all divine.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding is a book that made a huge impression on me. I read it for the first time when I was 12. It’s about a group of schoolboys who are evacuated from England during a war, and they end up stranded on an uninhabited island with no adults. The oldest children in the story are 12. The story is so powerful because you’re reading about this microcosm of humanity that goes off the rails, and starts to destroy itself. The fact that Golding is writing about children rather than adults only makes it a better story — it highlights the darker impulses of humanity.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

I have combat skills. My parents started me in karate lessons when I was eight, and I fell in love with martial arts. I’ve also studied krav maga, the martial art of the Israeli army, which is brutal.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

Ah, hell. I’d want dinner from Bistango, my favorite restaurant in New York. I have celiac disease, and they make perfect gluten-free meals: warm bread with garlic-infused oil, roasted Portobello mushroom in balsamic reduction, chicken fusilli with sun-dried tomatoes, red velvet cake with the world’s creamiest frosting. Plenty of champagne. Note to Bistango: please make sure there’s a file in the cake.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

My second novel, THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, came out on Valentine’s Day; it’s a thriller set in Peru. It’s also a sequel to THE DAMAGE DONE, though you don’t need to read the first book to follow it. I just sent the third book in the series to my publisher, Forge; it will come out in the spring of 2013. My next big project is a standalone novel, also for Forge, which will be published in 2014. I also write short fiction. I just sold a novella about a twisted love triangle in Paris to Ellery Queen, and I’ve got a story coming out in the second Beat to a Pulp anthology.

February 23, 2012 / 13 Comments

Dan O’Shea: The Terribleminds Interview

Today, we’re publishing three — count ’em, three! — interviews here at Jolly Olde Terribleminds. On first pass, I don’t like to crowd up with interviews, and I thought, mmm, maybe I’ll spread these out. But here’s the thing: these interviews talk to three writers who each share a kind of intellectual space. All three are cracking short story writers, all three come out of crime writing, all three have killer novels (two of them published, one on submission), and to boot, all three know each other. So, my thought is, let’s let these interviews feed into one another. Right? Right.

First up? My alpha clone, Dan O’Shea. Dan’s a grizzled bad-ass of a writer, but incredibly thoughtful and smart about how and what he writes. His prose astonishes me. This week he’s got his first collection of short stories out — some of which originated here at terribleminds — and you need to check it the fuck out. It’s called OLD SCHOOL and, I’ll be honest, I wrote the foreword. You can find Dan’s website here — danielboshea.wordpress.com— and track him down on Twitter (@dboshea).

When you’re done here, check out the other two interviews:

Chris Holm

Hilary Davidson

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

It’s July in the Summer of Fishing, or that’s how you remember it. The summer you bought that Diawa spinning reel over at Zayre, the summer you got over being afraid of the old black guys that would sit along the bank of Blackberry Creek by the old railroad trestle on the bike trail, drinking whatever it was they drank out of the bottle wrapped in the paper bag, the way they’d talk to each other, trading insults that would have been fighting words in your world, but they’d just laugh about them, at least the insults you understood. The guys that shook their heads at the rubber worms you’d tried to use. The guys that showed you how to catch carp and catfish with wadded up balls of Wonder Bread dipped in some foul smelling crap that they kept in a rusty Folger’s can.

It’s a month or so before you bought the fly fishing rod, before you and Brian tried practice casting with it in the gloaming after dinner and found out you could fly fish for bats. Almost a decade before Brian was the best man at your wedding. Of course, Brian’s dead now, and even that’s five years back.

The summer you found that lake.

You called it a lake, and I guess it was near enough to one in your experience, this part of Illinois not being much stocked with them. Fifteen acres maybe, all in. A pond really, and not a naturally occurring one. You know that now. An irregular pit bulldozed into some old wetlands, developers trying to contain the runoff, keep the water out of the subdivision up the small slope on the east end, back when Orchard Road wasn’t Orchard Road yet, just a nameless gravel track. Now, it’s four lanes. Now, the golf course would be across the street. Now, you’d be able to see Home Depot from here. Now, you’re 52. Then, you were 13.

Your mom made you bring your brother with you, Patrick. He would have been what? Four? Maybe five?  Ruined the spirit of the thing. Because that summer, in spirit you were one man alone on the edge of wilderness, pitted against nature, trying to coax beasts from the deep. But if your mom sent Patrick along, then this wasn’t any wilderness, no danger lurked near. If they let you bring Patrick, you were still just a kid fishing in some neighborhood pond. She dropped you off on the paved road at the edge of the subdivision, east of the pond.

You tried not to look east, because west it was still woods, still marsh, still wilderness. Wilderness to you, though it was really just saplings and scrub reclaiming an abandoned farm field, a field some developer had already bought, one they just hadn’t torn up yet. Wilderness if you ignored the hum of tires to your left, probably a couple hundred cars an hour driving up and down Galena.

But these tires weren’t on Galena. These tires were crunching along the gravel across the pond. An Impala, an old one, mid-sixties, the red paint faded to the color of diluted blood, the wheel wells and quarter panels lipsticked with rust. The car stopped where the pond pinched in, where it narrowed to a wasp’s waist of mud and shallow water, maybe ten yards across, where you could wade from one side to the other without getting your ankles wet. Two guys in front, you could see that. They just sat there a minute, didn’t seem to be looking at you, just sat there.

You knew you should leave. You knew you should take Patrick, walk up that embankment to the paved roads and the houses. You knew it and you cast your line back out into the pond anyway.

The passenger door opened and a guy got out. Twenty maybe, twenty five. Blue jeans, a ratty t-shirt, stringy blond hair to his shoulders, a Winston bobbing in his lips. He was carrying a crutch, but he wasn’t using it. He smiled at you.

“You boys catching anything?”

You shook your head. “Not today.”

He nodded. “Too hot probably.”

“Probably.”

Then he’s sloshing across that narrow gap. Then he’s standing next to you. Patrick’s on the other side of him. The guy just stands there.

“What you using for bait?”

You reel in, hold up the tip of the rod, show him the little plastic minnow with the small treble hook behind the flashing Mepps spinner.

He snorts. “Shit kid, I doubt there’s anything in this ditch big enough to get its lips around that.”  And you know he’s not going to help, not going to tell you about bread balls and stink bait. You know something bad is going to happen, but you keep trying to act like it isn’t. You cast out into the pond again.

He finishes the cigarette, flicks the butt out into the water. It hisses, a sunfish rises and pecks at it, spinning it a little.

“You got any money?” he says.

And you don’t. Not a cent.

“No.”

He touches your ass, running his hand across the back of your pants. Your insides freeze. But he’s just feeling your pockets for a wallet.

“Left you wallet home, huh?”

You just nod, knowing if you speak right now, your voice is going to crack. You don’t want your voice to crack.

The guy bends down, opens your tackle box, dumps it out in the dirt, paws through it, takes a quarter he finds glinting in a gray pile of spilled splitshot.

“Waste of fucking time,” he says and takes the first step back toward the car.

“I’ve got money,” Patrick says. Little kid’s voice, petulant, defiant. “But you can’t have it.” Turns out Patrick has a nickel in his pocket.

The guy stops, steps toward your brother, and all the embarrassment and rage and confusion short circuits you a minute and you whip the rod around, smacking it against the guy, the hook catching in his shirt, tearing it open as it rips away.

And the guy turns, the crutch he was carrying already in motion, him holding it down near the footpad, swinging it like an ax.

You shuffle just enough that it only glances of your head, slamming down onto your shoulder, the screw and the wing nut out sticking out in the middle where the handhold is bolted in bite into your flesh, gouge out a wound, and you backpedal into the water, trying to get some distance as the guy swings the crutch again, like a bat this time, in from the side.

You bunch your shoulder up, taking the first part of the blow on the meat, but the crutch skips up, hits you over the ear, and there’s that moment where time stops, where the force and the feel and the sound of the blow translate into this flash of light inside your head, where any outside sight or sound is cancelled out so that when your sight comes back, it’s skipped a frame, like a projector where the sprocket slipped, and you see that he’s already in mid-swing again, a three-quarter angle this time, from the top and side, and you turn your back, bending, and he blow lands across your scapula, that wing nut biting in again, and you hear a crack and you think for a moment that your bone is broken, but then you hear a splash and most of the crutch is bobbing in the middle of the pond in a riot of fresh ripples, and you turn and the guy is holding maybe six inches of busted wood now, and you’re screaming at Patrick to get into the water, to get behind you and Patrick is saying he’ll get his shoes wet and you scream “Get in the water, goddamn it,” you’re thinking maybe the guy won’t want to come in after you, won’t want to get wet, and even that idea feels stupid, but that light strobing inside your head and it’s the best you’ve got, and your brother gets it finally, the threat, the danger, gets it at the same time the guy does, the guy reaching for Patrick, Patrick running around him,  and he splashes into the water, crying now, and you put your left arm back, holding him behind you, and you remember the filleting knife on your hip, hanging from your belt in its leather sheath, and you remember how sharp that is and you pull that, backing into the pond, the water over your knees now, almost to Patrick’s shoulders, so you stop, holding the knife out in front of you, not sure how far this is going, but knowing that, if the guy comes in after you, you have to start slashing.

But he doesn’t. He kicks your tackle box into the pond, throws your pole in after it. Stands there looking at you a minute, pulls the pack of Winston’s out of the pocket of the t-shirt that hangs on him ripped open, digs a lighter out of his jeans, blows a long stream of smoke out into the air.

“Fucking kids.”

He splashes back across the wasp’s waist to the Impala, and the car spins off in a rooster tail of dust and gravel, heading south back to Galena.

Later, at home, your back and shoulder bandaged, your scapula striped with bruise, the police come and gone, you hear that this Chris kid, a guy that had been two years ahead of you in school, big guy, star of every team, the date of every cheerleader, that guy had gone down to Starved Rock State Park that same day. He was fucking around with some friends and had fallen off a cliff. He was dead.

And you realize this. It is all wilderness.

OK, Chuck, you said a story. You said as true or false as I see it. That story is mostly one, some of the other.  But, as I read back through it, I find myself absently rubbing the scar on my left shoulder.

Why do you tell stories?

Maybe the only useful thing I learned from religion classes through thirteen years of Catholic schools, if you count kindergarten, is the power of parables. People listen to stories. You can convey a message through stories with a power that a lecture will never equal.

That, and the truth is boring.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Always read your stuff out loud.

Writing is just a system humans dreamed up because the sound of speech was transitory.  I have to wonder, if we’d had recording equipment back 5,000 or so years ago when writing first developed, if we even would have invented it. Would there still be documents if we already had a way to make speech permanent, or would everything just be on tape?  Language was oral first, writing is just a way to make speech permanent.

When you read something out loud, you catch things with  your ears that you don’t with your eyes. All the awkward little constructions that your eyes rolled right over, the word you are repeating too often, the dialog that’s glaringly bad when read out loud – your ears will catch bullshit that your eyes never will.

Maybe it’s the frustrated actor in me, I don’t know, but I really love to read my stuff. Here, try some.  Here’s a reading of Shackleton’s Hootch from my collection, Old School. It’s appropriate that I run this one, because it was something I wrote in response to one of Chuck’s occasional flash fiction challenges.

I really do like the whole audio thing – in fact, anybody that buys OLD SCHOOL will find an offer in there to get a free audio book version. Just a little something I’m trying to differentiate my offering from the burgeoning pile of e-books out there.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

That moment when you are in perfect communion with a character, when you are channeling a person of your own creation as if you have tapped into an external psyche, when you completely understand a person you could never, yourself, be, and that person’s world, their words, their being, all of that is spilling out through your fingers as if that character had opened a vein and you were writing with their own blood, that’s  a hard feeling to top.

The business side of it, all of that sucks. This whole do I self-publish thing, all the Amazon crap, all the possible distribution channels and alternative ways to market – you could make a full-time job out of understanding that whole mess, and none of that appeals to me in the least.  It makes a little cloud of despair in my head when I think about it, so I try not to.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

Impossible question. You’ve only got one kid right now, so you don’t get it. Somebody asks you who your favorite kid is, that’s easy for you. I’ve got three.  But we’re writers. Words are our children, too.

Comes to words, there isn’t even an exact answer to how many there are in the English language – 200,000 or thereabouts. I’ve read that the average person knows between 12,000 and 20,000 of them. I’d like to think that most writers know more. But a favorite?  I can’t say I have one.

There are those moments though, as a reader and a writer, where you find the perfect word in the perfect place, usually one used a little off-center, one that jolts the reader into a new mindset. Hell, in the story I just sent you today, I said the rust on the old car was “lipsticked” around the wheel wells. I kinda like that. I think the reader will get that, but will get it in a more exact way than if I’d just said an old, rusty Impala. So maybe this morning lipsticked is my favorite word. And it isn’t even a real word.

As to curse words, when I was in high school, my sophomore football coach was a nutjob guy who was raised in Brazil. He was also the Spanish teacher. There was some foreign phrase he used to scream at us in practice when he got pissed, maybe it was in Portuguese, maybe it was in Spanish, maybe it was some Creole of both, I don’t know. But he wouldn’t tell us what it meant. Years later, I saw the guy and asked him. He smiled, and told me when he got mad at us he would scream “You have the prick of a fish.”  That’s pretty good. Curse words alone aren’t all that special. It’s the constructions they’re used in that make them pop.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I’m a Manhattan guy. I’ll drink a lot of stuff, although not gin, never have liked gin, and I’m kind of meh on vodka, too. In fact, when it comes to rum, I’ll take dark over light every time, so I guess I’m not big on clear liquors. Beer, sure, but something with body and taste – I think the Sam Adams people put out a fine line of products, and I especially like a lot of their seasonal offerings. Wine, yep. Red more than white. In the summer, there’s nothing like whipping up a nice batch of sangria – I’ve got a couple of favorite recipes for both red and white versions – and, if it’s a hot week, there’s probably a pitcher of one of them in my fridge. Sangria, by the way, isn’t just wine with fruit juice in it. There’s brandy, or maybe peach schnapps, maybe some triple sec – there’s something in it to give it a backbone.

But if I’m going with one drink, it’s the Manhattan. It was my father’s drink, I write at my father’s desk. At the moment, I’m sitting in my father’s chair. Filial loyalty.  Two measures of bourbon (rye if you have it), one of sweet vermouth, a splash of bitters (or a couple in my case), gotta have a cherry, and a little splash of the cherry juice from the bottle doesn’t hurt, either. On the rocks in a rocks glass. If I go to a bar and they bring my Manhattan in a martini glass without ice, then I know the place is just too precious for me. So a Manhattan.  It’s simple, it packs a punch and it makes me think of my dad.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

I’m going to go old school on you. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. He’s a guy too often overlooked in my book. Pick that up. Hell, anything by him. Saul Bellow’s another one, a guy who seemed to have a much larger public literary reputation when I was younger, but who now has drifted into that obscurity of only being read in lit classes.

Funny thing, I guess, because you said great story, and when I think back on the books by either of these two, story isn’t the first word that comes to mind. Character does. Atmosphere does. Mood does. Gestalt does. Of course, all of that has to be wrapped around a story of some kind, but story alone isn’t enough.

Story matters more in genre fiction, I think. If I had to pick someone in the crime genre that consistently cooks up a great story, but still bakes in the good stuff, I might go with John Sandford.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

Well, if the walkers have already eaten John Hornor Jacobs, I’ll be the guy who still knows about his zombie herding idea. Not going to give it away here, spoil his This Dark Earth launch, but it is the key to final victory.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

I’ve always found the last meal thing kind of paradoxical. From the executioner perspective, you’re going to kill the guy because he’s so horrible, so what’s with stuffing him with his favorite eats first? From the executionee perspective, how much are you really going to enjoy this meal when the only thing you can taste is the idea of your own death?

Again, hard to say. Probably depend on my mood that day. Don’t have to worry about my heart at that point, I suppose. Maybe a big slab of St. Louis style ribs, maybe a thick porterhouse, medium rare, slathered in minced garlic and sautéed mushrooms. A side of lobster newburg maybe.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

How the hell should I know? My short fiction collection, OLD SCHOOL, comes today from Snubnose Press. I’ve got two novels out on submission, and a third one will be joining them real soon.  I’m writing a horror/crime thing now.

One of my novels, ROTTEN AT THE HEART, is my Elizabethan first-person Shakespeare as a private dick thing. I’ve got a couple more ideas for ol’ Will if that ever sells or, who knows, maybe even if it doesn’t. But I’ll work on what I’m working on now, and then I’ll worry about tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof.

OK, maybe I learned two things in religion class.

What’s the art of telling a good short story as opposed to something longer form?

Funny thing is I’d never written a short story until after I wrote a novel. Before I finished the novel, I was just this guy who always wanted to be a writer, and who then was cursed by finding a way to make a living as one. But my living is writing marketing and educational material for professional services firms – primarily accounting firms as it has turned out. So I’ve spent thirty years writing about the tax code and such. If that won’t make you want to write about killing people, nothing will.

I’d mess around with writing a novel now and then, but that never had a deadline attached, and it sure as hell never had a payday promised to it, so that always got shoved to the back burner. I had a family, responsibilities – writing’s just a way to pay the bills, I’d tell myself, and I’d turned it into a pretty good career. This novel stuff? It started feeling like wanting to play third base for the Cubs. It started feeling like one of those childish things you put aside. And I pretty much did.

My best friend since fourth grade, best man in my wedding, he wanted to be a writer, too. Ended up being a cranberry farmer. We used to talk about the books we were going to write, and we’d both mess around with them. Coming up on five years ago, he crashed his car on Halloween night. I got the call the next day. He was dead. And when his family went up to northern Wisconsin to pack up his stuff, they found his manuscript, all typed up, all finished, in the desk drawer.

He was that friend you make once in your life if you are lucky, the one that is with you all the way from being a boy to being a man and beyond. He taught me a lot. Even in that final act, he taught me something. Taught me we only have so much sand in the glass, and none of us knows how much that is. If there’s something you want to do, you’d best commence to doing it. So I commenced to writing a novel.  Found out there’s just as much time for things as you make, and there was time enough for that.

But this whole online writing community? I knew nothing about it. Bouchercon, the other cons, the Facebooks, the blogs, the tweeting? Never heard of them. (Hard to believe, I know, given my profligate Twitter habit now.) But I wrote a novel, got an agent in about a month, figured I’d be Steven King by the end of the year. I mean hey, this shit seemed pretty easy. Of course, that was three years ago, and my agent is still shopping that novel today. Shows what I know.

But she told me I should think about a blog, maybe get on twitter, all that stuff. I did. And pretty soon I ran into my first flash fiction challenge.

Blame Patti Abbott, a fine writer in her own right who’s collection, Monkey Justice, is a must read. I’d never heard of flash fiction, but somebody sent me a link to a challenge she was running on her blog – write a story, 1,000 words or less, set in or around a Walmart.

A thousand words, I thought. Impossible. So I had to try it. And the resulting story, Black Friday, reinforced for me one of writing’s most valuable lessons – strip it to the bone.  Or, as the Bard once said, “When words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain.”

I was hooked. Short fiction became a major food group in my writing diet. Not just for the stories themselves, but as a kind of training for when I’m in the middle of a novel. When I’m writing a novel, I have a tendency to meander, to get a little flabby.

Meander, you say? You? Surely not. I mean it only took you what, Five or six paragraphs to even start answering Chuck’s question?

Well, that’s another lesson, maybe. Good storytelling isn’t always a frontal assault. Sometimes one story starts out as another. Sometimes the real story kind of sneaks up on you. Sometimes a story is like a river, just a little trickle at first, flowing this was and that, picking up a tributary here and there until it builds its force. Then, it will carve a canyon through a mountain instead of going around it.

But yeah. I spend a fair amount of time on short fiction these days. A few hours back in the short fiction gym puts an end to the flabby shit. Maybe not to some of the meandering, because, like I said, meandering has its place. But there’s nothing like a short story to remind me that the flabby writing has to go.  It reminds me that you can lose a reader any time. With this sentence, or with the next one. Strip it to the bone.

OLD SCHOOL published by a small e-publisher, Snubnose Press: what’s the value of a small publisher over a larger one?

Because Snubnose is the only publisher I’ve had to this point, that’s hard for me to answer. For me, it came down to this. I had a growing collection of short fiction. People seemed to like it. I wanted to pull it together, get it out into the world, see if I could get a broader audience for it.

The big publishers, they don’t put out that much short fiction, especially not from new authors. Frank Bill is the one exception I can think of, and for damn good reason. If you haven’t read Crimes in Southern Indiana yet, stop right now and do so. It’s OK, Chuck and I can wait.

So my choices were pitch it to one of the smaller publishers or self-publish.

I just don’t want to mess with self publishing. I don’t want to design a cover, format a document, be the only set of eyes proofing or editing something.  A man’s got to know his limitations.

And I had another concern. Amazon has opened the floodgates on self-publishing, and the vast majority of that flood has been a stinking river of effluvium. Badly written stories, barely edited, rife with errors, often offered for free or near to it. I think readers are beginning to drown in that cesspool and are looking for some beacon that offers hope that a download might be something other than just another half-dissolved turd bobbing in the piss warm stream of sewage that the self-publishing revolution hath wrought.

A publisher’s name attached to a book offers that hope, even if it is a smaller publisher like Snubnose. It means somebody who cares enough about writing to set up a publishing company has vetted the book, given it their blessing, invested their time in it, attached their reputation to the author’s. Even for a small e-house like Snubnose, the titles that make it through are a tiny fraction of those submitted. For the reader, that means the publisher has strained through the distasteful river of crap to pluck out the occasional tasty bits.

You hear a lot of railing against gatekeepers from the self-publishing crowd – how agents and publishers are artificial arbiters standing between the reading public and this damned up reservoir of genius. And there are some heady drinks of genius to be had from that reservoir. But you have to gulp down a disproportionate amount of foul treacle to find them.

How are the stories in OLD SCHOOL emblematic of Dan O’Shea?

The collection is entitled Old School because the characters in these stories all have some miles on them. TV and movies are the predominate forms of storytelling in popular culture, and if you drew your view of the world from those sources, you’d think most everybody was some hard bodied twenty- or thirty-something posing through life’s dramas in a Hugo Boss wardrobe.

I don’t write about those people. The protagonists in my stories tend to be middle aged or older. They’ve suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and often have not prevailed against them. But they also aren’t the dispossessed loners that dominate a lot of noir fiction.

A popular meme in a lot of crime stories is that old saw that having nothing to lose makes a man dangerous, desperate, a better protagonist. I think that’s bullshit. Having nothing to lose means you’re playing with house money. It means the only ones with anything in the pot are everybody else. Might as well play out that hand, all it has is upside. Having nothing to lose means that all you have ever been is a loser.

No, having something that matters to you, bearing the scars that earning that something cost you, having known life’s successes and its failures, but having shown that you have grit enough, guile enough, to have had some of the former, for me, that makes an interesting character. Show me a man who has worked his whole life for what little he has and now finds that in danger and I’ll show you a desperate human being. A dangerous human being. And I’ll write you a story.

You don’t tend to write happy, fluffy stuff — where’s that darkness come from? How do you temper the grim stuff for readers — or, do you?

The story I started out with, that’s mostly memoir. Some embellishment around the details aside, that happened to me.

Now, as a kid, I lived as charmed a life as this nation offers. Dad was a doctor, and a good one, so we had money, creature comforts, good schools, loving parents, all of that. Dad was the kind of doctor that cared way more about his patients than he did about money. Dad was the doctor who, back in 1965, quit the local country club when the clinic he worked at hired a Jewish doctor and that club wouldn’t let him join – got a lot of the other docs to quit, too. The club changed its policy, but Dad never signed back on. Dad was the doctor that was still making house calls in the 1990s. He was the doctor who kept patients for life, who was treating the grandchildren of the patients he started with by the time he retired. He was the doctor I’d find staring blankly over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table some mornings, still wearing the clothes he’d left in the day before, having been at the hospital all night because one of his patients was dying and, even if there was nothing he could do to stop it, he’d be there for it. At his wake, person after person came up to me to introduce themselves as “one of your dad’s patients.” I tried to think of a doctor I’ve had whose wake I’d bother to go to. I couldn’t.

He was and remains the most decent human being I’ve ever known.

That caring extended to his family. I remember my freshman year in high school, we had a football game in Woodstock, maybe 30 miles from our house, way out in the sticks. Our freshman games were on Monday afternoons, started about 4:00. It was a shitty day, pouring rain, cold.  At some point in the fourth quarter, I’m running off the field after we scored, and I see my old man standing there on the sidelines, soaking wet, he’s pants cuffed with mud, clapping for me. He’d knocked off work early, driven out into the boonies, just so he could stand in the rain and catch the last quarter of my game. He was like that.

So I was raised in the best of circumstance, yet that story I started with? That still happened. I still got mugged, I still had to protect my kid brother at knife point, and the very same day this other kid I knew, a kid who was pretty much a god in my eyes, that kid fell off a cliff and died. A few years ago, my best friend died in a car crash. A week ago, in Naperville, next town east from here, a town that’s always making that list of Best Cities to Live In or Best Places to Raise Your Family, there was a fight in a bar. Not a biker bar, not some roadhouse. An upscale joint, the sort of place where one MBA who met another MBA on match.com might pick for a first drink. Some guys got drunk, got into it, and this twenty-two year old kid tried to play peacemaker, got in the middle of it, tried to break it up. Took a knife to the heart, bled out all over the nice oak floor.

One my favorite openings to a book is the beginning of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Somewhere in the first couple paragraphs there is this line: The world has teeth, and it can bite you with them any time it wants.

We’ve all got some teeth marks on us somewhere, but fiction is usually about amplifying the everyday, so in my stories, life has bit down hard and locked its jaws.

I don’t always temper that. Some of the stories are just dark, period. But in many of them, there is a note of redemption. Thin Mints comes to mind. That’s probably the one story of mine that’s gotten the most traction – been published in Crimefactory, showed up in the Noir at the Bar anthology, got nominated for some award last year. In that story, you have an everyday guy who throws away everything – family, job, self-respect – in pursuit of his selfish appetites. But in the end, he’s confronted with a hard choice, finds a line he won’t cross, redeems himself.

ROTTEN AT THE HEART sees Shakespeare-as-shamus: what’s the trick to writing historical fiction? Do the facts ever get in the way of the fiction?

Chuck, you and I have famously disagreed on the role of planning (I say famously because it happened on your blog – what happens on my blog happens in obscurity). You like outlines and character bibles and such, I prefer a more organic process – placing characters I like in situations I find interesting, and then just following them around my head and seeing what they do.  Now, having written exactly one piece of historical fiction, I won’t hold myself out as an expert, but here’s what I found. I didn’t need an outline for this one, because history provided it.

The story is set in the summer of 1596. Henry Carey, the First Baron Hundson, the Lord Chamberlain and the sponsor of Shakespeare’s theater troupe, dies. That actually happened. A couple weeks later, Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, dies. That actually happened. I refer to the Rising of the North in 1569 and a Spanish raid on the southern English coast in 1595, those actually happened.  Marital tensions that I include between Shakespeare and his wife? They may not be true, but there is substantial speculation of the same nature offered by numerous Shakespearian scholars. A guy named Radcliffe, who was basically the Queen’s designated torturer, plays a key role, as do George Carey, the Second Baron Hundson, some of the Queen’s other ministers and Elizabeth I herself. And those are all real people performing their real offices.

Outside of historical events and people, there are realities of life in Elizabethan London that inform the story – the rise of Puritanism and its antipathy to the theater, the banishing of “entertainments” to districts outside the city proper, the growing power of the Bourse (the birth of what we would now call a stock exchange) and the beginnings of the competition between the power of the crown and the power of private capital.

Taken together, all of that formed a virtual outline for the story, provided a historical skeleton I had only to flesh out. So the facts drove the fiction, they didn’t get in the way of it.  In fact, the most improbable part of the book – maybe the most improbable thing I’ve included in any of my books so far – is an event from history.  The famed Globe Theater, the venue most associated with the Bard, really was built in a day. Due to a real estate dispute, Shakespeare’s troupe really did disassemble their theater in Shoreditch and, in a single night, transport the boards and timbers to the Globe’s location in Bankside, where it was raised the next day – and without power tools.  Had that not actually happened, I would never have dared write it, but it did, so I did – and it plays a central role in the story.  Although, historically, that happened a couple years after 1596. I’m no Elizabethan scholar, so I’m sure I’ve made other historical errors, but moving that up a couple of years was the biggest liberty I took knowingly.

I like to say this: Rotten at the Heart didn’t really happen. I don’t think Shakespeare was ever blackmailed into serving as a royal sponsor’s private dick. But it could have happened, because the facts presented in the story and the historical realities that provide the story’s tension and motivations are all, to my knowledge, true.

February 22, 2012 / 43 Comments

Transmissions From Baby-Town: “Nine Months”

This week, the calendar pages come fluttering off the wall, and Baby B-Dub reaches nine months of age.

Which means he’s been out as long as he was in.

And it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re screwed.

 

* * *

 

He never stops moving.

The boy was always a squirmy one. But he is rarely content to be held. Or to remain in one place for more than, ohhh, 34 seconds. This kid wants to go go go. He wants to crawl. He wants to stand. Give him half a chance, he’ll fling himself over the edge of the bed, the high-chair, the crib wall. He learned how to use the crib bumpers as ladders and climb up over the edge of the Baby Containment Unit. Just this morning I turned my head away from the high chair for two seconds to fetch a spoon and when I turned my head back, half his body was already out, his gooey food-slick face staring at the floor.

Gone are the days of the little lump baby.

Here are the days of Little Baby Daredevil.

 

* * *

 

We hear this saying a lot:

“Oh. He’s one of those babies.”

And then we get sympathetic head nods and shoulder pats.

 

* * *

 

Sweet Jesus, this kid can eat.

He’s like a wood-chipper.

It’s as if his stomach is a molten core, and any food poured into that fiery space is burned away to meager char and ash the moment it touches the walls of his gastrointestinal furnace. You know how some adult human beings can subsist on, say, a small yogurt and a banana for breakfast? Our nine-month son can eat more than that. Just yesterday we had to feed him four meals. You get through one container of pureed food and Baby Jabba over there is suddenly all BOSHUUDA NAY WANNA WONGA BLUEBERRY YOGURT which means it’s time to go seeking a new food source before he starts eating his high-chair.

And you think I’m kidding. He gnaws on his high-chair like a starving badger.

Sometimes I’m forced to wonder, did our son accidentally eat another baby? Is he somehow feasting for two? Ye gods, man, where the hell is all this food going?

OH THAT’S RIGHT.

It goes into the diapers. We went from one diaper every few days to one diaper every seventeen minutes. His diapers get so heavy, I just leave them outside in the wintry cold and let them freeze over. Then, should any of my neighbors grow uppity, I shall launch these frozen turd-bombs at their house with some jury-rigged trebuchet. If only they had the icy-chunk diaper-made cannonballs in the Middle Ages. Siege warfare would’ve been a whole different animal.

 

* * *

 

Diaper changes are different, now. He is not content to just lay there dreamily. He twists and turns and writhes and squirms. Trying to escape our clutches at the worst possible time — when we’re trying to wrestle a wet-nap from the box, when we’re trying to pop the stubborn tabs on the goddamn diaper, when we’ve got poop on our hands. Now diaper-changing time is a full-contact-sport.

And it frequently requires two people.

 

* * *

 

It’s like in all the war movies, eventually one side is forced to recognize: “We are overrun.”

 

* * *

 

Sometimes he stands up.

On his own. This just started happening — he gets his legs under him, reaches out as if he’s going to grab hold of something but then forgets that step and just — voooop — stands up.

He can make it for about three seconds.

Then he falls down. Whump, on his rump.

He’s learned how to fall so that he can learn how to stand.

There’s a lesson in there for all of us, I guess.

 

* * *

 

I pretend it’s a very early, very sluggish game of proto-catch between father and son. There B-Dub sits in his high-chair or in his crib and any toys he can find end up over the edge and onto the floor. Then I go and I pick up the toys and I put them back in and, within 30 seconds, they’re all back on the floor.

But I know the truth. It’s not a game of catch.

It’s a game of fetch.

And I am most assuredly the dog.

But I don’t admit that often. The illusion of reciprocity is key.

 

* * *

 

I know now, when you have a baby, it’s a game of buying your life back in five minute increments. Small things. “Oh, I’d like to go to the bathroom now. If I strap him in his high chair and give him a copy of the latest Field & Stream magazine, will that occupy him long enough for me to go and relieve myself? Will it? Will it?”

No, it won’t.

But you have to try.

 

* * *

 

He shouldn’t be faster than us.

That shouldn’t be possible. He’s tiny.

Oh, but he is. Plop him on the floor and play with him for a while, suddenly he’ll get it in his head to dart off to the farthest-flung and most dangerous corner of the room. Oh, and he’ll always go for the worst possible thing in the room, a thing that no matter how hard you baby-proofed still exists — “How did this Chinese throwing star end up under the couch?” Next thing you know you’re struggling to reach him before he wings the Chinese throwing star at the dog and you’re left dizzy with the notion that somehow this baby, this nine-month-old human who still poops his pants almost out-ran you.

And he can’t even walk yet.

 

* * *

 

He shouldn’t be stronger than us.

But if he gets hold of the spoon while feeding, I have to wrestle with him to get it back. And it’s hard. How is that possible? I’m a fully-grown man. I’ve got bulk. I’m not a weight-lifter or anything, but this kid has the muscle-tone of a bag of marshmallows. How is he beating me? How is this even a competition?

One day science will prove that babies somehow possess secret chimpanzee strength.

One day.

 

* * *

 

He’s very loud.

I’m sorry — maybe you couldn’t hear me —

HE’S VERY LOUD.

It’s not that he’s upset. He’s… talking. Except very, very loudly.

BAH BAH BAH BAH MAH MAH MAH DAD DAD DAD UGGY UGGY OOOOOOOO

 

* * *

 

Here’s one way he’s like his father:

Hates pants. Hates socks.

Gets rid of both at every opportunity.

Eat shit, pants. Go to hell, socks.

*fling*

 

* * *

 

He sleeps with us in our bed. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, you feel it. A presence. Staring you down. And, sure enough, there’s our little shadow-baby, sitting between us and just… watching.

Like a hawk watching a little bunny cross the road.

 

* * *

 

He’s trying to destroy us, physically. No matter how often you cut his nails he’s got talons like an owl. He’ll grab your lower lip and pull downward as if he’s trying to close a garage door. He’ll knock my glasses to the floor and then go for the soft melon-balls that are my eyes. He’ll headbutt. He’ll yank hair. He’ll bite — well, gum — your nose. He’s trying to wear us down. He’s trying to get control.

 

* * *

 

Who the hell am I kidding? He’s already got control.

He’s got it and he’s going to keep it not because he’s the tiny pink-cheeked dictator that rules this house but in spite of that — he is, instead, the pink-cheeked dictator that rules our hearts.

(Cue the audio: “Awwwww.”)

He’s learning how to give kisses. Kisses that don’t always come replete with a headbutt.

He’s learning how to high-five us.

He’s learning when to say Mama, or Daddy, or Doggy.

He’ll try to feed us.

He’s learning how to snuggle up and — almost — give hugs.

He smiles whenever we enter the room.

He laughs like they’re about to make laughing illegal so he better get it all in right now.

His feet are ticklish. He likes to rub noses with you. He’s still got the biggest bluest eyes and now, growing in upon his Charlie Brown head is a snowy white-blonde coat of wispy hair.

Sure, yeah, we’re overrun.

But that’s okay. We like it.

Happy nine months, kiddo.

February 21, 2012 / 475 Comments

25 Things I Want To Say To So-Called “Aspiring” Writers

Seen a lot of folks giving advice to so-called “aspiring” writers these days, so, I figured what the hell? Might as well throw my dubious nuggets of wisdom into the stew. See if any of this tastes right to you.

1. No More Aspiring, Dingbats

Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who does not. If you write: you are a writer. If you do not write: you are not. Aspiring is a meaningless null state that romanticizes Not Writing. It’s as ludicrous as saying, “I aspire to pick up that piece of paper that fell on the floor.” Either pick it up or don’t. I don’t want to hear about how your diaper’s full. Take it off or stop talking about it.

2. Kick Your Lowest Common Denominator In The Kidneys

You can aspire to be a lot of other things within the writing realm, and that’s okay. You can aspire to be a published author. Or a bestselling author. Or a professional freelance writer. Or an author who plagiarizes his memoir and gets struck with a wooden mallet wielded by Oprah live on primetime television. You should aspire to be a better writer. We all should. Nobody is at the top of his game. We can all climb higher.

3. Aspiring Writers, Far As The Eye Can See

Nobody respects writers, yet everybody wants to be one (probably because everybody wants to be one). Point is, you want to be a writer? Good for you. So does that guy. And that girl. And him. And her. And that old dude. And that young broad. And your neighbor. And your mailman. And that chihuahua. And that copy machine. Ahead of you is an ocean of wannabe ink-slaves and word-earners. I don’t say this to daunt you. Or to be dismissive. But you have to differentiate yourself and the way you do that is by doing rather than be pretending. You will climb higher than them on a ladder built from your wordsmithy.

4. We All Booby-Trap The Jungle Behind Us

There exists no one way toward becoming a professional writer. You cannot perfectly walk another’s journey. That’s why writing advice is just that — it’s advice. It’s mere suggestion. Might work. Might not. Lots of good ideas out there, but none of it is gospel. One person will tell you this is the path. Another will point the other way and say that is the path. They’re both right for themselves, and they’re both probably wrong for you. We all chart our own course and burn the map afterward. It’s just how it is. If you want to find the way forward, then stop looking for maps and start walking.

5. The Golden Perfect Path Of The Scrivening Bodhisattvas

Point is, fuck the One True Way. Doesn’t exist. Nobody has answers — all you get are suggestions. Anybody who tells you they have The Answer is gassy with lies. Distrust such certainty and play the role of skeptic.

6. Yes, It Always Feels This Way

You will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your bullshit, realize you’re the literary equivalent of a vagrant painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop. You will have days when the blank page is like being lost in a blizzard. You will sometimes hate what you wrote today, or yesterday, or ten years ago. Bad days are part of the package. You just have to shut them out, swaddle your head in tinfoil, and keep writing anyway.

7. Figure Out How You Write, Then Do That

You learn early on how to write. But for most authors it takes a long time to learn how they in particular write. Certain processes, styles, genres, character types, POVs, tenses, whatever — they will come more naturally to you than they do to others. And some won’t come naturally at all. Maybe you’ll figure this out right out of the gate. But for most, it just takes time — time filled with actual writing — to tease it out.

8. Finish Your Shit

I’m just going to type this out a dozen times so it’s clear: finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit! FINISH YOUR SHIT. Finish. Your. Shit. Fiiiiniiiish yooooour shiiiiit. COMPLETO EL POOPO. Vervollständigen Sie Ihre Fäkalien! Finish your shit.

9. You Need To Learn The Rules. . .

…in order to know when they must be broken.

10. You Need To Break The Rules. . .

… in order to know why they matter.

11. What I Mean By Rules Is–

Writing is a technical skill. A craft. You can argue that storytelling is an art. You can argue that art emerges from good writing the way a dolphin riding a jet-ski emerges the longer you stare at a Magic Eye painting. But don’t get ahead of yourself, hoss. You still need to know how to communicate. You need to learn the laws of this maddening land. I’ve seen too many authors want to jump ahead of the skill and just start telling stories — you ever try to get ahead of your own skill level? I used to imagine pictures in my head and I’d try to paint them in watercolor and they’d end up looking like someone barfed up watery yogurt onto the canvas. I’d rail against this: WHY DON’T THEY LOOK BEAUTIFUL? Uhh, because you don’t know how to actually paint, dumb-fuck. You cannot exert your talent unless you first have the skill to bolster that talent.

12. Oh, The Salad Days Of College!

Why are the days of our youth known as “salad days?” Is “salad” really the image that conjures up the wild and fruitful times of our adolescence? “Fritos,” maybe. Or “Beer keg.” I dunno. What were we talking about? Ah! Yes. College. Do you need it? Do you need a collegiate education, Young Aspirant to the Penmonkey Order? Need, no. To get published nobody gives a flying rat penis whether or not you have a degree. They just care that you can write. Now, college and even post-grad work may help you become a better writer — it did for me! — though, I’d argue that the money you throw into the tank getting there may have been better spent on feeding yourself while you just learn how to write in whatever mousetrap you call a domicile. You can only learn so much from someone teaching you how to write. Eventually you just have to write.

13. Reading Does Not Make You A Writer

That’s the old piece of advice, isn’t it? “All you need to do is read and write to be a writer.” You don’t learn to write through reading anymore than you learn carpentry by sitting on a chair. You learn to write by writing. And, when you do read something, you learn from it by dissecting it — what is the author doing? How are characters and plot drawn together? You must read critically — that is the key.

14. Here Is Your Tin Cup, Your Hobo Bindle, Your Rat-Nest Undies

You’re going to starve for a while, so just get used to that now. Don’t quit your day job. Yet.

15. Commerce Is Not The Enemy Of Art

If you think commerce somehow devalues art, then we’re done talking. I got nothin’ for you. Money doesn’t devalue art any more than art devalues money — commerce can help art, hurt art, or have no effect. The saying isn’t Money is the root of all evil. It’s The love of money is the root of all evil. Commerce only damages art when the purpose of the art is only money. So it is with your writing.

16. Overnight Success Probably Isn’t

Suddenly on your radar screen is a big giant glowing mass like you’d see when a swarm of xenomorphs is closing fast on your position and it’s like, “Hey! This author appeared out of nowhere! Overnight success! Mega-bestseller! Million-dollar deal!” And then you get it in your head: “I can do that, too. I can go from a relative nobody to America’s Favorite Author, and Oprah will keep me in a gilded cage and she’ll feed me rare coffees whose beans were first run through the intestinal tract of a dodo bird.” Yeah, except, those who are “overnight successes,” rarely appear out of nowhere. It’s the same way that an asteroid doesn’t “just appear” before destroying earth and plunging it into a dust-choked dead-sun apocalypse: that fucker took a long time to reach earth, even if we didn’t notice. Overnight successes didn’t win the lottery. They likely toiled away in obscurity for years. The lesson is: work matters.

17. Meet The Universe In The Middle

My theory in life and writing is this — and it’s some deeply profound shit, so here, lower the lights, put on a serious turtleneck with a houndstooth elbow-patched jacket over it, and go ahead and smoke this weird hash I stole from an Afghani cult leader. The theory is this: meet the universe halfway and the universe will meet you in return. Explained more completely: there exist components of any career (but writing in particular) that are well beyond your grasp. You cannot control everything. Some of it is just left to fate. But, you still have to put in the work. You won’t get struck by lightning if you don’t run out the storm. You must maximize your chances. You do this by meeting the universe halfway. You do this by working.

18. Self-Publishing Is Not The Easy Way Out

Self-publishing is a viable path. It is not, however, the easy path. Get shut of this notion. You don’t just do a little ballerina twirl and a book falls out of your vagina. (And if that does happen, please see a doctor. Especially if you’re a dude.) It takes a lot of effort to bring a proper self-published book to life. Divest yourself of the idea that it’s the cheaper, easier, also-ran path. Faster, yes. But that’s all.

19. No, Total Stranger, I Don’t Want To Read Your Stuff

I really don’t. And neither does any other working author. It’s nothing personal. We just don’t know you from any other spam-bot lurking in the wings ready to dump a bucket of dick pills and Nigerian money over our heads. That’s not to say we won’t be friendly or are unwilling to talk to you about your work, but we’re already probably neck deep in the ordure of our own wordsmithy. (Or we’re drunk and confused at a Chuck-E-Cheese somewhere.) We cannot take the time to read the work of total strangers. Be polite if you’re going to ask. And damn sure don’t get mad when we say no.

20. Your Jealousy And Depression Do Not Matter

All writers get down on themselves. It’s in our wheelhouse. We see other writers being successful and at first we’re all like, “Yay, good for that person!” but then ten minutes later we get this sniper’s bullet of envy and this poison feeling shoots through the center of our brain like a railroad spike: BUT WHY NOT ME? And then we go take a bath with a toaster. Fuck that. Those feelings don’t matter. They don’t help you. They may be normal, they may be natural, but they’re not useful and they’re certainly not interesting.

21. Talking About Writing Is Not The Same As Writing

Needs no further comment.

22. Pack Your Echo Chamber With C4 And Blow It Skyward

Aspiring writers lock themselves away in echo chambers filled with other aspiring writers where one of two things often happen: one, everybody gives each other happy handjobs and nobody writes anything bad and everybody likes everything and it’s a big old self-congratulatory testicle-tickling festival; two, it’s loaded for bear by people who don’t know how to give good criticism and the criticism is destructive rather than constructive and it’s just a cloud of bad vibes swirling around your head like a plague of urinating bats. If you find yourself in this kind of echo chamber, blow a hole in the wall and crawl to freedom.

23. Learn To Take A Punch

Agents, editors, reviewers, readers, trolls on the Internet, they’re going to say things you don’t want to hear. A thick skin isn’t enough. You need a leathery carapace. A chitinous exoskeleton. Writing is a hard-knock career where you invite a bevy of slings and arrows into your face and heart. It is what it is.

24. You Can Do Whatever The Fuck You Want

As a writer, the world you create is yours and yours alone. Someone will always be there to tell you what you can’t do, but they’re nearly always wrong. You’re a writer. You can make anything up that you want. It may not be lucrative. It may not pay your mortgage. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about what’s going on between you and the blank page before you. It’s just you and the story. If you love it and you want to write it, then wire your trap shut and write it. And write it well. Expect nothing beyond this — expect no reward, expect no victory parade — but embrace the satisfaction it gives you to do your thing.

25. The One No-Fooling Rule

Is “write.” Write, write, write, motherfucking write. Write better today than you did yesterday and better tomorrow than you did today. Onward, fair penmonkey, onward. If you’re not a writer, something will stop you — your own doubts, hate from haters, a bad review, poor time management, a hungry raccoon that nibbles off your fingers, whatever. If you’re a writer, you’ll write. And you’ll never stop to look back.


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