Archives (page 382 of 467)

September 12, 2012 / 69 Comments

Pitch, Promo, Publicize, And Pimp For Others Right Here, Right Now

Once again, the Circus of Pimpage is open.

Here’s the deal, though —

You can’t pimp yourself.

At all.

So put that out of your fool head.

You should try to convince us to check out something by someone else. A book, a film, a YouTube video, a comic, a transmedia sex experience, an undead pterodactyl ride through Satan’s Palace, whatever.

You should pimp one thing, and one thing only.

It can be by a friend or someone you’ve never met.

Long as it’s not you pimping your own thing.

To be clear, you pimping your own thing will summon the Comment Deletion Robots, who will laser your face off. Or, at least, your comment. Because they’re mean like that. Hey, I didn’t program them.

THEY PROGRAMMED THEMSELVES.

Anyway.

I’ll pimp something right here, right now —

I’m reading Seven Wonders, by my pal Adam Christopher.

It’s a comic book in novel form — it is both an homage to early-age comic books and a subversion of them at the same time (many of the “heroes” are kinda dicks).

Ever read the comic book Astro City?

Think that, but in novel form.

You can read more about the book at Adam’s site. And, of course, procure it.

Now, the rest of you — get thee to the pimpery.

September 11, 2012 / 71 Comments

25 Of My Personal Rules For Writing And Telling Stories

Okay, what follows are really just mottos or sayings or made-up platitudes that I happen to live by, and for all I know I’ll only live by them for a couple weeks until I realize they comprise a fetid heap of horseshit.

But, I thought I’d like to write them down just the same.

Some of this is “greatest hits” stuff, no doubt — you’ve heard a good bit of this before. But a lot of it is also an evolution of my thoughts on writing and storytelling (and one’s thoughts in this domain should ever be shifting, squirming, changing). This seems like a doubly good time to lay this foundation coming into the stretch before NaNoWriMo strikes like a typhoon.

You don’t need to live by these. You do as you like, little penmonkey.

Warning: long-ass post ahead.

Put on your swimmy caps and arm-floaters. Let’s dive into dark waters!

1. Don’t Write What You Know; Know What You Write

Saying write what you know limits us from the outset — we only “know” a limited number of things, after all. I know the smell of honeysuckle on a summer’s day. I know what it’s like to have a toddler, to be a terrible bowler, to slurp up gin from my rat’s nest of a beard so as not to waste its herbal booziness. We should certainly write to our experiences, but we cannot limit ourselves only to that. We should be encouraged then to have new experiences. To know and learn — gasp! — new things. Write with authority and authenticity. Marry experience with imagination in a ceremony upon the story’s page.

2. Bleed On The Page

Don’t write purely to escape pain and fear. Mine it. Extract those wretched little nuggets of hard black hate-coal and use them to fuel the writing of a scene, a chapter, maybe the whole goddamn book. Cut yourself open. Color the words with your heartsblood. I am an advocate of finding the things you fear and opening old wounds to let them splash onto the characters and inform the tale at hand. We’ll know. We’ll feel it, too. This is where your experience matters — it’s not necessarily in the nitty-gritty of mechanical experience but rather in the authenticity of your emotional life. And this is true for the opposite, as well — write about the things that thrill you, that stir hope, that deliver unto you paroxysms of tingly exultation. Be true to yourself and we’ll all grok your lingo, Daddy-O.

3. Write The Song That Sings To Your Heart

Brands are for corn chips and car commercials. Trends are great for pop music and night-clubs. But you? Write the book you want to write. It’s not like being a writer is a fast track to a dumpster full of cash — so, why waste time writing stories that don’t speak to you in some way? Besides, the books that you wrench free from your own heart and mind will be far greater and far more meaningful than anything delivered to you from the expectations of others. Find the story in you. And find yourself in your story.

4. Show Now, Tell Later

Show, Don’t Tell is another one of those ‘false dichotomy’ nuggets of advice — anytime a piece of forbidding advice exists, you can nearly always produce a corollary example where X, Y and Z stories utterly violate that precept with great heaping helpings of success. It seems to be fairly well-regarded that a lot of the time it’s best to default to show, but sometimes, hey, tell is good, too. Only problem: when? Here’s a good guideline: never tell in the beginning. Always show first. You don’t want to begin the story with an expositional lecture. You read the cereal box as you eat the cereal, not before — you gotta get that first spoonful of Honey Boo-Boo Bombs on your tongue before you’re ready to settle in and read an ingredients list, yeah? Order of operations is key. Dessert first. Veggies later. Show now. Put off telling long as you can.

5. Aim Big, Write Small

Writers need goals. I don’t mean one goal. I mean a nearly endless and evolving series of goals — you don’t just say, “I’m going to write a novel.” Because, duh. That’s bare minimum shit. You want to have a career planned out. This isn’t a short game. It’s a long con. Look as far down the line as you can — to retirement, to cremation, to the time when nano-bots resurrect you to write one more bestselling holo-vid. That way, you can always course correct to try to move yourself further toward those goals. But — but! — whereas your career is a long-con, each story really is the short game. You want to keep your head in that story. You want to treat it like it’s everything, like everything hangs on this one project. (In part because it may.) To put it differently, have the larger path plotted out — but focus on each step upon that path as if it is your last.

6. Character Is Everything

Here’s how you know that character is the most important component of storytelling — when you remove it, the story dies. It’s like yanking the walker out of an old dude’s hands. You can remove the plot, and characters will still make one. Setting? Story can work without one. Hell, no setting is a setting. Theme? Someone will add their own. Mood? You can steer the mood but you can’t control it — mood, like art and profanity, is in the many eyes of the monstrous D&D beholder. Character is why we show up. It’s why we watch movies and read books. Character is the lynchpin of story. To unpack that a little more…

7. Audience Is The Monkey On The Character’s Back

See, here’s the deal. We’re all humans. (Well, except you over there, YOU ROBOT ASSHOLE. No, no, don’t talk to me. I shall not abide your bleeps and blorps and murderous metal intent.) Humans tell stories and when we do, we tell them about other humans. And here you say, “Wait, that’s not right, we tell stories about unicorns and intelligent spaceships and mole-men,” and yes, technically true. But those are always stand-ins for people. We view all characters through the lens of our own humanity. (It’s the same reason trees only read magazines about trees. Printed on the flesh of humans. The circle of life!) Character is how the audience gets through your story. Character is the vehicle.

8. Plot Is Soylent Green

Said it before but let me codify it now: plot is not externally-driven. I mean, it can be, fine, yes. You can create a laundry list of external events that occur where characters are dropped into the proceedings like a pukey four-year-old forced to ride a roller coaster. But that’s not the strongest — nor the most organic — way to approach plot. Plot is Soylent Green. Plot is made of people. Characters create, drive, and modify plot. They’re not strapped into the ride. They’re building the fucking roller coaster as it barrels forward. They change the story with every bad decision, every punch thrown, every intense desire and madcap fear. Too many storytellers force events — they shove the plot around like a schoolyard bully. Let the characters handle it. Let it be on them. The simplest plot is: Your Characters Do Things; Other Characters Respond.

9. Conflict Is The Food That Feeds The Reader

Characters exist in a flat line until we challenge them — sometimes they challenge themselves, sometimes they’re challenged by other people, by nature, by robots, or by fungal infections in and around one’s nether-country. Stories need conflict across the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual spectra. Accidents, betrayals, cataclysm, desperation, excess — these are the letters in the alphabet of conflict.

10. Fuck Trust

We think we want trustworthy storytellers. Trust is a positive trait and why would we want anything different in a storyteller? The audience thinks it knows what it wants: happy endings, triumphant protagonists, defeated villains, a book that dispenses Chicken McNuggets at the end of every chapter as a reward. But getting what we want, what we expect, is *poop noise* SNOOZETACULAR. Trust in a storyteller is overrated. Safety is meaningless. The storyteller has to do what the storyteller has to do. Which is, hurt the character. And by proxy, the audience. The storyteller is like an evil dungeon master or a tricksy dominatrix — what the audience really wants is to acquiesce to the tale told. They want to be surprised by a particularly inventive dungeon trap or shocked when someone closes alligator clamps on your wriggly bits. We want to trust our storytellers only so far as to say, “I trust that I cannot trust you.”

11. The Dual Function Of Story

Good story serves two functions: one, it makes coffee, and two, it shoots lasers. Wait, that can’t be right. *checks notes* Oh, see, sorry, wrong page. Those are the two things I want my cybernetic arm to do. WHATEVS. Story! Yes. Story. Good story does two things: one, it makes us feel; two, it makes us think. It engages us emotionally and intellectually. Some authors misunderstand the story’s purpose and spend too long mired in action and entertainment and forget that we actually have to care about the characters, about the outcome, that it’s essential we come out of the book having both a visceral reaction and a reaction that makes us want to sit down with friends over pie and whiskey to talk about what we just read. Making someone think and feel is not “entertaining” in the strictest sense — but it’s why stories matter.

12. Embrace The “Holy Shit” Moment

I want to punch you in the stomach. With my words! With my words. Relax. Put down the restraining order already. When you read my work, the ideal thing for me is to provide you with at least one moment where you gasp. Where your eyes go wide and your jaw hangs loose like a broken porch swing. Where you let out three, maybe four drops of pee because the story caused you to lose your bearing for just that moment. It’s key as a storyteller to try to orchestrate those moments where you violate expectation and drop a bunker buster on the characters — be careful, though. The trick to the holy shit moment is that it needs to feel organic. So that, after the smoke has cleared and the trauma is worn thin, the events that transpired seem in retrospect like the only way it could’ve ever happened.

13. Here Is How Description Works

A persistent question in terms of writing is, what, and how much, do I describe? Lovecraft describes every lamp and carpet fiber with intimate, bewildering detail. (Which he could get away with and you most likely cannot.) Here’s how you know what to describe. Ready? Is your mind quivering like the dumpy haunches of an overweight pony? Describe those things that break the status quo. That defy expectation. We know what a chair looks like — so, you don’t need to describe it. Unless it’s got a broken leg. Or is of some unusual art period. Or has blood on it, or is made of mouse bones and rat whiskers, or sings showtunes. The things that need description are the things that, to risk redundancy, the audience needs described. If they cannot escape this chapter without knowing how This Thing smells, then you’d talk up that stench posthaste.

14. The Rule Of Threes

When in doubt, the rule of threes is a rule that plays well with all of storytelling. When describing a thing? No more than three details. A character’s arc? Three beats. A story? Three acts. An act? Three sequences. A plot point culminating in a mystery of a twist? At least three mentions throughout the tale. This is an old rule, and a good one. It’s not universal — but it’s a good place to start.

15. Every Story Is An Argument

Every story is you saying something. That’s theme. Maybe it’s the theme that the audience discovers, maybe it isn’t — but just the same, every story is you making a case for something. It’s a thesis you’re trying to prove. You’re trying to say that love is everything. Or love is hopeless. Or that nature will defeat man. Or man will defeat himself. Or bees will defeat bears. Or robots are fucking awesome. I DUNNO MAN, I’M NOT YOU. Have a point of view. Have a perspective. Let your fiction state a case and argue that shit till it’s blue in the face. It’s not about being right or being wrong. It’s about saying something.

16. Metaphor Is What Elevates Us Above The Chimpanzees

I’m just going to leave this here, wink a couple times, maybe nudge you, and walk away.

17. Stories Are Like People: They Need Oxygen

All aspects of a story need time to breathe. Your story isn’t one of those amusement park rides that shoots you 100 feet straight up into the air — a story isn’t a race to the end. (Plus, that kind of thing will surely cause you to void your bowels upon whatever meth-scarred carny is operating that so-called “amusement” ride, a ride that hasn’t been serviced since 1972 and still has the blood of the teenage girl who died on it greasing all its diabolical gears.) Let the tale have peaks and valleys — peaks of action, tension, violence. Then valleys of reflection, emotion, fear, desire. The oxygen is thin at the peaks, thick in the valleys. The peaks get taller as the story goes, and the valleys grow deeper. To go back to the show-versus-tell thing, it’s better to show at the peaks, and tell only in the valleys.

18. Care Less

This is a recent revelation for me but one I’m keeping close for the near-future — sure, it seems an odd thing to suggest that we should care less than we already do. It seems dismissive. Disrespectful, even. But authors care too much, in my experience. We care well-beyond the gates of rationality. We let The Perfect sit in its impossible-to-reach treehouse pelting us with sticks and stones and pieces of old GI Joe figures when really we should be happy aiming firmly for The Good. Caring less frees you. It frees you to write a bad draft and fix it later. It frees you from feeling stung by every not-five-star review. It frees you from the fear of the editor’s slashing pen. It frees you from the paralysis of rejection. IT FREES YOU FROM ESCAPED RUSSIAN CIRCUS BEARS WHO WANT TO SEX YOU UP WITH THEIR URSINE — whoa, wait, no, actually, I’m still afraid of that. Um. Where was I? Ah. Yes. Care less. Note that the lesson here isn’t don’t care. You should care. But you should also calm the fuck down a little, is all I’m saying.

19. Realize Your Reach

You can only control so much. You can’t control agents. Or publishers. Or the audience (unless you’re some kind of Pied Piper Svengali, which actually explains how some tremendously poopy books gets such rabid fan-throttling). You can control your story. You control characters, plot, the words on the page, rhythm, pacing. You control the quality of the work. So: control that. Write the best book you can possibly write. Everything else is a leaf on the river — you can maybe puff out your cheeks and blow it (heh, blow it) this way or that, but so much is left to the vagaries of fate. Control what you can control. Abide the rest.

20. Harden The Fuck Up, Care Bear

The writer’s back is studded with arrows, blow-darts, quills, one-star-reviews, red pens, rejection letters rolled up into tight little tubes and shellacked with editor spit so as to form the equivalent of prison shivs — it’s hard out there for a wandering penmonkey. We don’t have the equivalent of a hobo code, with chalk marks on the sidewalk indicating Dangerous Vanity Press Lives Here or Deluded Self-Publisher Blog High On His Own Ego Incoming or Thatta Way Lurks A Mean Old Editor-Face. So: cultivate calluses. Secrete enzymes to build your own authorial exoskeleton. Learn to take a punch. No glass-jaws in writing, pal.

21. Completo El Poopo

Finishing a story will separate you from most of the other writers — er, sorry, “writers” — out there in Authorland. Finish your work, space-case. Here, let me put it to you this way: finishing the worst piece of shit story you’ve ever written will feel a thousand times better than not finishing the most brilliant tale you’ve even spun. ACHIEVE NARRATIVE ORGASM. Ngggh. Yes.

22. Read Your Work Out Loud

Don’t give me that look. Read your work aloud. Don’t argue. Don’t fight. It will help. I promise. I promise. I guarantee it. If you find it didn’t help you, lemme know. I will let you Taser me in the face. And by “me,” I mean, some other guy who will be my stand-in. Probably some real estate agent or tollbooth attendant.

23. Haters Gonna Hate

Fuck ’em. They’re part of the ecosystem. Drink the hate like it’s a Kahlua-and-cream. Inspiring love and hate is better than inspiring a middle-of-the-road mushy moderate shrug. I’d rather have, “YOUR STORY MADE ME MAIM THE MAILMAN JUST FOR DELIVERING IT TO ME” than a quavering “meh.”

24. On The Nature Of Writing Advice

Writing advice is neither good nor bad. It just is. It either works for you or it doesn’t. No one piece of advice is truly golden (with the exception of maybe Finish your shit and Don’t be a dick) — it’s all just that. Advice. It’s no better or worse than someone telling you what route to take to get to the zoo or what shirt to wear to that trailer park wedding. Like with every tool, pick it up, test its heft, give it a whirl. It works? Keep it. It fails? Fucking ditch it. Give writing advice no more importance than it is due.

25. Write Like The End Is Nigh

Best advice I can give right now: write like you have no time left. Write like you’ve got a slow-mo bullet tumbling toward your head and you can’t get out of the way. Write like the end times are here, like the Mayans were right and in a few short months we’re all going to die in a tidal wave / earthquake / pyroclastic shit-fit / bird attack. Think about that: let’s say you had two years left on your clock. What book would you write? What story inside you struggles to get to the front of the line, screaming and yelping and waving its arms like a drowning man? Write that story. It doesn’t have to be the only thing you write. You can take paycheck jobs. But make time for that kind of writing. Writing isn’t just about giving the audience something. It isn’t just entertainment. It’s about giving to yourself, too. Because, bad news: maybe you have two years left, maybe you have twenty, or forty, or sixty, but we’re all gonna end up under the Grim Reaper’s riding mower. So get busy writing what you want to write, or get busy sucking exhaust.

Want another hot tasty dose of dubious writing advice aimed at your facemeats?

500 WAYS TO TELL A BETTER STORY: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING: $0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY: $4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

September 10, 2012 / 5 Comments

News, Things, Stuff And Other Items Of (Un)Import

OH SO VERY MUCH GOING ON.

So much that the above sentence demanded caps lock.

First: I was at Worldcon. I did a recap. I’m told my books sold out there. YAY PANCAKES AND LIQUOR.

Second: Holy crapstacks! I’m rocking the cover of Foursquare Magazine this month?!

Then: Hey! Look! Mary Robinette Kowal was kind enough to host a silly doof like me over at her site where I discuss My Favorite Bit of Mockingbird. (Hint: it’s about how authors scare themselves.)

And: I was the featured author at LitStack! In this interview, I talk about things like: sperm! angels! bears riding panthers! death! minions! time travel! Also: learn the truth about Hiram’s Fibertangle!

Also: Tor.com calls Mockingbird a “shocking, twisting beast of a book!”

And: Waiting for Fairies calls it a “twisty mind-fuck of a tale!”

Leah Rhyne says of the book: “Wendig offers a master class in writing suspense and horror.”

The Eloquent Page says: “I think we may have to start collectively fearing this author. I mean, I can only assume that Mr. Wendig has made some sort of Faustian deal with the Dark Gods. Perhaps his books, and their addictive crack-like quality, are only the first step in some far more diabolical scheme? It appears that the dark side doesn’t only offer cookies, they also have Chuck Wendig. Mockingbird is a darker-than-dark adult flavored urban fantasy that will mess with your head in the best of ways.”

Notes from the Belfry adds: “A sequel that’s as good as the first, possibly better, Mockingbird also significantly ups both character development and the creep-factor, with Miriam facing a truly insidious and deeply disturbing adversary.” And then they kindly slap it with a five out of five.

Of Blackbirds, the Murder by the Book blog says: “Miriam Black is the most troubled, sexiest, spookiest clarivoyant you’d ever hope to meet in a novel.” Also: “This author can flat out write.” Woo!

Oh, and finally:

THE FAN-ART CONTEST!

We’ve had an ocarina.

We had kick-ass art (and art, and art, and art)

We had a rad photo (and photoset).

And also, an image of a crow CARRYING AWAY MY SEVERED HEAD.

But, for a winner, I gotta go with:

JD SAVAGE! (AKA Jeff Davis?)

Because this image tickles my nethers:

Thanks, JD! You nailed the “batshit highway witch” aspect nicely.

Email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com.

And thanks to all the rest of you: Amber Love, Ashley Neuhaus, David Grigg, Alan Smithee, Angie Mansfield, Tonia Brown, LeeAnna Holt, and, uhh, anybody my Swiss Cheese brain is forgetting.

September 10, 2012 / 53 Comments

Readers Are The Victims Of Bad Author Behavior

We’re all familiar with the recent spate of bad behavior by authors, right? Writers paying for false five-star reviews. Authors creating fake sock-puppet accounts (or “dick-puppets” as Blackmoore calls ’em) which they then use to pump up their own work, denigrate the work of others, and act as fake mouthpieces online. Then you have the response, where authors see that bad behavior and respond with their own, leaving one-star reviews as some kind of “Internet country justice.” We’re all clued in, I’m sure, by now.

My initial reaction to all of this was that it’s a bit inside baseball. It’s authors being dicky and tap-dancing on dubious ethical ground and waggling their penmonkey genitals about in an unpleasant display.

Except then I was online at Amazon (which already is notoriously assy in terms of filter and discoverability) and I was reading reviews and was suddenly struck by the horrifying notion —

I don’t know if these are real.

Suddenly I’m reading reviews with the same level of doubt and suspicion I reserve for reality television (we all realize that ‘House Hunters’ is a big lie, right?). It’s the same vibe I get when I go looking for reviews of restaurants. Locally we had a restaurant where the owner was caught leaving good reviews for himself, bad ones for his competition, and was also getting on forums as a sock-puppet and shouting down folks who said his food had dropped in quality (as it used to be great and isn’t anymore). Shitty behavior, right?

I read reviews for a toaster, my cynical mind flares up like a hot rash: “I’m sure the positive reviews are all left by employees of Big Toaster, and all the negative ones are left by proponents of some Anti-Toaster Coalition.” Casts all reviews in these areas as suspect. Which makes them beyond useless.

Now I’m feeling that way about books.

Maybe I should’ve been all along. Maybe I was naive.

It doesn’t change the fact that this isn’t good for anybody.

I once thought that the bad author behavior displayed here was bad for authors. And it is. Bad for authors, publishers, Amazon, B&N, etc. But, now I’m thinking they’re not the real victims here.

The real victims are the readers.

Readers, who want honest feedback. And who want to give honest feedback amongst equal honesty.

Readers, who love books, and who don’t want to get caught in bullshit author headgames.

Readers, who want to trust their authors outside the story (as you should never trust the author inside the story) and who are now confronted with the idea that the fiction that should’ve been contained to the books themselves has bled out of the pages and infected the relative purity of the author-reader contract.

So, let’s be clear here — if you’re buying up a bunch of bullshit reviews, if you’re out there putting on a series of Halloween masks and pretending you’re Joe Dicknose from Topeka and Betty Lou Buttplug from Albany just so you can boost your own reviews while hurting the reviews of others, you’re not only a scat-gobbling poop-fingered liar-face, you’re also actively punishing readers. You know, readers? The people who want to read all our books? The people who help us pay our mortgages? Readers, the ones who matter more than the authors because they’re the ones who allow us to be who we are?

Dicking around with the livelihood of other authors is dirty pool and you should be crotch-punched.

Dicking around with readers is like you dumping medical waste in the watering hole. We all drink from that water. You’re poisoning the relationship. You’re harming readers.

And that sucks, big-time.

So, stop doing it. Come clean or don’t.

But embrace shame and just stop.

You human canker sores, you.

September 7, 2012 / 100 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: A Game Of Aspects

Last week’s challenge: Sci-Fi/ Fantasy Open Swim.

A couple days ago I said something hasty and insane about “killing genre,” and in there I hit on something I really quite liked — giving fiction aspects or elements instead of genres. So, instead of searching for “epic fantasy,” you can search for stories that have “fantasy” and “politics” together. Or “jetpacks.” Or “detective / mythology / death in the family.” Whatever.

So, that’s (er, kinda) what I’m doing here, today.

I’m going to give you three columns.

You have to pick one from each column.

And from that, write a 1000-word story.

In addition, I’ll pick three random winners from this pile of participants and give away some free e-books. I don’t know what, yet, so let’s just say it’ll be a surprise. Kay? Kay.

As always, the details remain the same. You’ve got one week (due by noon EST, Friday the 14th). Post at your blog, and link back here so we can all swing by and have a look-see.

(If you really want to get crazy, roll a d10 or pick random number between 1 and 10 from this Random Number Generator. In other words, let fate pick your choices in each category!)

The three columns (pick one from each) are:

One (Subgenre)

Noir

Erotica

Dystopian

Steampunk

Mythology

Detective

Sword & Sorcery

“Weird”

Body Horror

Romantic Comedy

Two (Element To Include)

Dinosaurs

Serial Killer

Gladiators

Insects

Climate Change

Hotel Bar

Geology

Graveyard

Surgery

Terrorism

Three (Theme / Motif / Conflict)

Love Triangle

Revenge

Divorce

Childbirth

On The Run

Fated To Die

Man Versus Himself

Addiction

Imprisoned

Ticking Clock

September 6, 2012 / 9 Comments

“Pillar Of Fire,” By Dan O’Shea

Greetings Terriblemindites. Or is it Terribleminders? Just Wendigos? I dunno. Chuck, you wanna help me out on the salutation here? No, huh? Own my own I guess.

Anyway, I got this book deal from Exhibit A. That’s the crime imprint at Angry Robot, the folks who delivered your pal Chucky’s Blackbirds and Mockingbirds bloody and screaming into an unsuspecting world, so you know they have impeccable taste. They’ll be publishing my first two novels, Penance and Mammon. Penance is set to hit in April of 2013, Mammon a year or so later.

Both thrillers are set in Chicago, and both draw on its politics, history and culture of corruption, but with a national, sometimes even international, flavor. You can learn more at the Penance page on my blog, or at my author or book page over at Exhibit A.

As devoted Terribleminds readers, you all know that writers have to do more than write. We have to be part storyteller, part carnival barker, part pimp, part shameless whore. Books ain’t gonna sell themselves, and the halcyon days when publishers loaded authors onto chartered jets full of free booze and book groupies for well-oiled national tours, those days are deader than Strom Thurmond’s nutsack. (It’s a requirement for any Terribleminds guest blogger to use at least one previously unpublished profanity. Sorry, that’s the best I could do.)

So, to gin up a little interest in my forthcoming debut, I’ve written a series of short stories delving into the earlier lives of the characters from my novels. See, most of these guys, they ain’t kids. They’ve been around some funny-shaped blocks, most of them in questionable neighborhoods. Penance may be my first novel, but it’s not their first or only story. I figure I’ll salt the interwebs with these stories and, if folks like them, well then maybe they’ll pony up come book time. (There are a couple stories out there already – The Old Rules, in Shots Crime & Thriller e-zine over across the pond, and A Wonderful Country at Shotgun Honey, right here in the good old US of A.)

That’s the plan, anyway.

So here you go, your very own Penance preview story. Hope you like it. And if you have any questions, comments, whatever, I’ll be checking Chuckie’s comment box and I’ll be sure to chime in.

Thanks for reading.

* * *

Pillar of Fire

A Lynch family story from the world of Penance

By Dan O’Shea

April 5, 1968, The Austin neighborhood, Chicago, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Chicago was in flames.

“All this over some nigger trouble maker who got what he deserved,” eight-year-old John Lynch said at dinner, just him and his mother, his Dad out, Lynch trying to sound tough, trying to sound like the man of the house, the man his father had charged him to be.

Nigger trouble maker who got what he deserved. That’s what he’d heard from Mrs. Carney that afternoon when he’d gone across the hall to play with Mike, the Carney’s being the only place his mom would let him go right now, wouldn’t let him leave the building. Mr. Carney was a fireman. He was out, too. Something soothing in Mrs. Carney’s anger, in her dismissive contempt, a sense that the evil had been identified, contained, that everyone knew what had to be done.

Lynch’s father was a cop. He’d been out since the trouble began, home only once that morning for less than an hour, just time to shower and change, not even eating, just taking a sandwich with him. Lynch had run to hug him when he walked in the door. His father had smelled of smoke and his face and clothes were smudged with soot. He had blood on his shirt. He coughed, spit a blackened wad into the kitchen sink, ran the water, washed it down the drain, took Lynch by the shoulders. “You take care of your mother, Johnny. I need a man in the house.” Then a weak smile as he stripped off his suit coat, the shirt almost black underneath. His father disappeared into the bathroom.

When John Lynch spoke, his mother’s head shuddered, she blinked, looked up from her plate, her eyes angry, then her right hand flashed out, slapping Lynch hard across the cheek.

“Do we say nigger in this house?”

“No,” Lynch said, rubbing his face, almost tearing up, holding that back. “But Mrs. Carney said – ”

“Is that who you want to be? A parrot for someone else’s tongue, somebody with no backbone, with no right or wrong in you?”

“No.”

“What about Lucy? Are you going to call her a nigger?”

Lucy was the colored lady who helped with the cleaning once a week. Miss Lucy to Lynch. She always smiled, would sing sometimes while she scrubbed floors. But she always seemed sad somehow, sad and thin and tired.

“No.” Lynch scared a little. His dad would go upside his head, but his mom never did.

She let out a long sigh, then she reached out, rubbed Lynch’s cheek where she had struck him.

“I’m sorry, Johnny. I shouldn’t have done that. But I can’t bear to hear my own son talk like that, not in my house, not right now, not with all this going on, with your father out there because of it.” She started to cry, stopped, standing, putting her hands to her face, her head shaking back and forth, and excused herself, locking the bathroom door.

Through the door, Lynch could hear her sobs.

Detective Sergeant Declan Lynch, wiped absently at his shirt, and then shook his head at the futility of it. What wasn’t black was gray, and none of it would ever be white again. The suit, too, he was sure, was ruined, soaked though with smoke and sweat and filth. Wondered about the chances he could put in for the cost of the suit.

Everybody was out, the uniforms with their usual teams, detectives getting assigned what was left. They’d given Lynch a mess of kids just out of the academy, half of them ready to piss themselves, the other half itching to shoot anything that moved. Heard more glass breaking from up around the corner.

“Anderson, Miller and O’Leary, head up around the corner. Got anybody up there, chase them into the alley. You other two, come with me, we’ll block the back. And Miller?”

Miller was holding his .38 along his leg.

“Yeah Sarge?”

“Keep your gun in your fuckin’ holster unless somebody starts shooting.”

“You want me to go easy on these niggers?”

Sure, Lynch thought to himself, that attitude, that’s going to help. “I don’t want you shooting down any alleys that I’m standing at the other end of, dickhead.”

Miller holstered the revolver.

Lynch and two of the newbies rounded the back of the building to where the alley let out just as the first of four Negro kids, this one running full tilt, approached, the kid juking right, then trying to cut left between Lynch and the wall. Lynch dropped his shoulder and drove off his toes, tackling the kid into the brick wall, the kid dropping, rolling on the ground, holding his left arm.

Two of the other kids pulled up, stopping, but the fourth kid shot past one of the rookies, fast little bastard, angling across the parking lot across the street. Miller stepped up next to Lynch, his gun out again, raising it to take a shot. Lynch jerked Miller’s arm down, yanked the .38 out of his hand, jabbed Miller hard in the guy with a finger.

“What I tell you about your damn gun?” Lynch growled.

“He’s getting away!”

“Yeah, and you’re gonna shoot him why exactly?”

“Fleeing, resisting –”

“What you see him doing that gave you cause to stop him, besides running down the alley?”

“We got looters all over the place out here.”

“You see him looting? See any of these guys carrying anything? That guy you’re gonna shoot, think he’s making that kind of time carrying a TV or something?”

“Hey, you heard the mayor. Shoot to kill, shoot to maim.”

Lynch shook his head. “I got news for you, Miller, big mess like this, once we get the genie back in the bottle, we’re gonna have lawyers crawling all over everything. Gonna have reporters looking for stories. And it won’t be Hurley’s slug they dig out of that kid’s back. Won’t be Hurley up on charges. It’ll be you. Every civil rights type on earth screaming for your neck. Riots’ll be all calmed down, Hurley not needing to be a hard ass anymore, so he’ll start in on how Chicago police are held to the highest standards. How, if there’s a bad apple, then we gotta have it out. And you’ll find your ass down in Joliet, doin’ a nice stretch with some of the same guys we’re locking up this week.”

“Hey,” Miller puffing up, “they’re breaking the curfew.”

Lynch grabbed the front of Miller’s uniform shirt, pulling him close. “Listen, asshole. You end up downstate showing your ass to every brother in the joint, I don’t give a shit. But you’re under my command right now, you little fuck. I tell you to do something, that’s a goddamn order. Disobey another one, I’m going to hurt you bad. We clear?”

Miller swallowed. “We’re clear Sarge.”

Another one of the rookies, kid named Starshak, was squatted down next to the kid Lynch had bounced off the wall, checking on him. Starshak helped the kid to his feet, the kid holding his left arm tight to his side. Shoulder probably, might have separated that.

“You make it home with the arm?” Lynch said to the kid. The kid nodded. Lynch turned to the other two. “You dumb fucks get your friend home. I see you hanging around again, I’ll shoot you myself.” The three kids took off at a trot, best they could manage with the one guy holding is arm to his side.

Lynch felt a little burn on his left hand, looked down. He’d ripped the knuckles open on his left hand taking the kid into the wall. He wiped the hand absently across the front of his shirt, leaving a smear of blood in the ash and soot.

It was getting dark. The streetlights were out, all the power in the area out now, the only light coming from the fire gutting the building across Madison at the north end of the alley. The firelight guttered across the soot-streaked white faces of the five young cops, making them look like savages.

A gunshot to the east, maybe a block away. Lynch handed the revolver back to Miller.

“I have to take that away from you again, I’m gonna crack your skull with it.”

Miller just nodded.

“OK, we’re heading up to the north end of the alley, gonna take a peek, see what the shooting is. Probably one of ours, so keep your pants zipped. Stick close to the walls, stay out of the light. I’ve got point.”

Lynch got in front, led the cops up the alley. Walking point, Jesus. Hadn’t walked point since he crossed the Rhine in ’45.

This was going to get worse before it got better.

He was not in danger. John Lynch clung to the thought like an article of faith as he peered out his bedroom window, looking east toward the lake.

The fires seemed to burn all the way to the horizon, the flames throbbing out of the shattered walls and broken windows of a hundred buildings, two hundred buildings, the fire lighting the bottoms of the low clouds, like both the earth and sky were on fire, like they would burn forever. Pulsing blue and red and white lights from fire trucks and police cars strobed in every street, sometimes bright and clear, sometimes flashing inside a bank of smoke like neon lightning inside a cloud. Even through the window, Lynch could smell soot, ash. Even through the window, he could hear the sirens, hundreds of sirens, could hear gunshots, even hear shouts sometimes. It was horror beyond young Lynch’s imagining.

Monsignor Connor, when he got worked up during a sermon, would warn about the lake of fire, and now it seemed like the lake of fire was lapping at Lynch’s doorstep, like hell had broken its bounds and flooded the earth and heaven had lost all dominion.

Lynch knew his father was out there. Out among the flames and the sirens and the gunshots.

Lynch was safe because his father was out there, that he could believe the way he believed that the dry wafer he received on his tongue every Sunday was truly the body of his savior. Believe because he was told to believe, had always been told to believe, and because he had never questioned.

But he could not believe his father was safe, no matter what his mother said. He knew the cost of the flesh in the wafer, knew that salvation was always paid for with innocent blood.

He heard voices from the living room of the apartment, heard a man’s voice, his father’s voice.

Lynch bolted from his bed, ran down the hall, stopped dead in the archway that lead into the living room. Not his father, his Uncle Rusty.

“There he is, the man of the house himself,” the big man said, brushing a wave of red hair from his forehead. “I was just telling your mother it’s been too long since we had a proper visit. So grab some things quick. I’m gonna take you up to my place for a couple days.”

Lynch looking to his mother, his mother nodding, smiling, her face different in a way Lynch had never seen. He had seen her worried, seen her angry. But never this. Never false and fragile and hollow.

“Mom, are you coming too?”

She smiled wider, but there was no smile wide enough to hide this lie. His mother didn’t even like Rusty, didn’t like his foul language, his drinking, his varied lady friends. “You men don’t need a woman around spoiling your fun.”

“But I have school.”

Rusty let out a low laugh. “The sisters can get by without you for a day or two.”

So they had closed the schools. No way his mother would let him skip school. That made the fires seem even more sinister, like they were a force of nature, like the blizzard last January that dumped two feet of snow on the city, the only other time the nuns had closed the school. First ice, now fire.

“Your father will need a good meal when he gets home,” his mother said. “You go on with Uncle Rusty. Have a holiday.”

A holiday.

“But I want to see Dad.”

Uncle Rusty rubbed his head roughly, taking his shoulder to turn him toward his room, to get his things.

“And you will soon enough boy. Soon enough.”

“I’m trying to scare you, Johnny, and I hope you’re old enough, but I want you to see this. I want you to remember this.” Two days later, Lynch’s father, driving a blue-and-white Chicago police cruiser east down Roosevelt, cutting over to Madison, driving away from their apartment and toward downtown, through the haze of smoke that was finally thinning after hanging black and angry on the horizon for the last three days.

Everything Lynch remembered about the neighborhood was gone. Building after building burned out, some scorched to empty shells, some just charred rubble. The signs were torn off most of the buildings, the windows where the names of each establishment had been carefully stenciled all broken out, but Lynch could tell where they were by looking at the stuff spilling out of the shattered doors. Where the cardboard box was broken open on the curb, the red and white cans of soup spilling out – that used to be Walt’s Grocery. A plaid jacket, still on its hanger, dangling upside down, caught on a piece of metal jutting from a torn-out window frame – that was Schwartz’s Menswear, where his mother would take him every August to buy the navy pants he had to wear for school. The shell of a TV, shards of glass ringing the void of its ruined picture tube like the teeth of a hungry thing, smashed on the sidewalk outside Austin Electronics. Lynch and his friends used to stop there after school on May afternoons, September afternoons, stand on the sidewalk, watch through the window, watch the Cubs on WGN on the big console set that was always on display, see what the score was before they headed home. Two blocks ahead, a fire truck angled into the street, hoses out, the fireman pouring water onto a lot filled with smoldering rubble.

At every intersection, soldiers milled around Jeeps with machine guns mounted on the backs. His Dad’s cruiser was the only car moving on Madison. Besides cops and soldiers and fireman, there were hardly any people around. Lynch saw a colored lady holding a small girl by the hand walking one way, and then stopping, and then walking the other, like she didn’t know where to go anymore.

“Seen some places looked like this in Europe, during the war,” his Dad said. “Towns we’d go through where there’d been fighting. I never thought I see it again. Sure as hell never thought I see it here.”

His father seeming to talk to himself, his voice different, saying hell in front of his son, something he’d never done before.

“Are those soldiers?” Lynch asked, pointing toward one of the jeeps.

“National Guard,” said his Dad. “They’re soldiers that can help us out sometimes.”

Lynch thought of his Dad, and the other cops he’d seen, all giants to him, unafraid, ready for anything. And he tried to imagine a world where they needed help.

“But it’s over, right?” Lynch said.

“Yeah, mostly over.”

“And they’ll fix everything?”

A pause from his father, Lynch hanging on it suspended. He knew his Dad talked different around Uncle Rusty, around the other cops, knew he watched his language around the house, around Lynch, around his mother. But he wasn’t a man to measure his words. What he had to say, he said. Finally this.

“I dunno, Johnny. I really don’t.”

They drove another few blocks.

“But the people that did this, they were bad, right, right Dad?”

“Some of them were. Some of them were just angry. Some of them just got caught up in it. The race thing, it’s an old evil Johnny, coming to the end of its time. Evil never gives up easy. Evil always dies ugly.”

In June, they moved to the northwest side, as close to the edge of the city as they could get. It was fifteen years before Lynch set foot in the old neighborhood again. They hadn’t fixed everything. They’d barely fixed anything. The fires had long burned out, but heaven had not regained dominion.

Lynch seeing it the same way he had the last time, through the windows of a Chicago PD cruiser, his father long dead now, Lynch behind the wheel.