{"id":12943,"date":"2012-02-23T00:01:42","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T05:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=12943"},"modified":"2012-02-22T18:23:54","modified_gmt":"2012-02-22T23:23:54","slug":"dan-oshea-the-terribleminds-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2012\/02\/23\/dan-oshea-the-terribleminds-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan O’Shea: The Terribleminds Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/strong> — and you need to check it the fuck out. It’s called OLD SCHOOL<\/strong><\/span><\/a> and, I’ll be honest, I wrote the foreword. You can find Dan’s website here — danielboshea.wordpress.com<\/strong><\/span><\/a>— and track him down on Twitter (@dboshea<\/strong><\/span><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n

When you’re done here, check out the other two interviews:<\/em><\/p>\n

Chris Holm<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Hilary Davidson<\/strong><\/span><\/a>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s July in the Summer of Fishing, or that\u2019s 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\u2019d talk to each other, trading insults that would have been fighting words in your world, but they\u2019d just laugh about them, at least the insults you understood. The guys that shook their heads at the rubber worms you\u2019d 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\u2019s can.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s dead now, and even that\u2019s five years back.<\/p>\n

The summer you found that lake.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t Orchard Road yet, just a nameless gravel track. Now, it\u2019s four lanes. Now, the golf course would be across the street. Now, you\u2019d be able to see Home Depot from here. Now, you\u2019re 52. Then, you were 13.<\/p>\n

Your mom made you bring your brother with you, Patrick. He would have been what? Four? Maybe five?\u00a0 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

But these tires weren\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t seem to be looking at you, just sat there.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t using it. He smiled at you.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou boys catching anything?\u201d<\/p>\n

You shook your head. \u201cNot today.\u201d<\/p>\n

He nodded. \u201cToo hot probably.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cProbably.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then he\u2019s sloshing across that narrow gap. Then he\u2019s standing next to you. Patrick\u2019s on the other side of him. The guy just stands there.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you using for bait?\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He snorts. \u201cShit kid, I doubt there\u2019s anything in this ditch big enough to get its lips around that.\u201d\u00a0 And you know he\u2019s 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\u2019t. You cast out into the pond again.<\/p>\n

He finishes the cigarette, flicks the butt out into the water. It hisses, a sunfish rises and pecks at it, spinning it a little.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou got any money?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

And you don\u2019t. Not a cent.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

He touches your ass, running his hand across the back of your pants. Your insides freeze. But he\u2019s just feeling your pockets for a wallet.<\/p>\n

\u201cLeft you wallet home, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n

You just nod, knowing if you speak right now, your voice is going to crack. You don\u2019t want your voice to crack.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWaste of fucking time,\u201d he says and takes the first step back toward the car.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got money,\u201d Patrick says. Little kid\u2019s voice, petulant, defiant. \u201cBut you can\u2019t have it.\u201d Turns out Patrick has a nickel in his pocket.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And the guy turns, the crutch he was carrying already in motion, him holding it down near the footpad, swinging it like an ax.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s skipped a frame, like a projector where the sprocket slipped, and you see that he\u2019s 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\u2019re screaming at Patrick to get into the water, to get behind you and Patrick is saying he\u2019ll get his shoes wet and you scream \u201cGet in the water, goddamn it,\u201d you\u2019re thinking maybe the guy won\u2019t want to come in after you, won\u2019t want to get wet, and even that idea feels stupid, but that light strobing inside your head and it\u2019s the best you\u2019ve 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, \u00a0and 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But he doesn\u2019t. 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cFucking kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

He splashes back across the wasp\u2019s waist to the Impala, and the car spins off in a rooster tail of dust and gravel, heading south back to Galena.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And you realize this. It is all wilderness.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 But, as I read back through it, I find myself absently rubbing the scar on my left shoulder.<\/p>\n

Why do you tell stories?<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That, and the truth is boring.<\/p>\n

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:<\/h3>\n

Always read your stuff out loud.<\/p>\n

Writing is just a system humans dreamed up because the sound of speech was transitory.\u00a0 I have to wonder, if we\u2019d 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?\u00a0 Language was oral first, writing is just a way to make speech permanent.<\/p>\n

When you read something out loud, you catch things with\u00a0 your ears that you don\u2019t with your eyes. All the awkward little constructions that your eyes rolled right over, the word you are repeating too often, the dialog that\u2019s glaringly bad when read out loud \u2013 your ears will catch bullshit that your eyes never will.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s the frustrated actor in me, I don\u2019t know, but I really love to read my stuff. Here, try some.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a reading of Shackleton\u2019s Hootch<\/em> from my collection, Old School<\/em>. It\u2019s appropriate that I run this one, because it was something I wrote in response to one of Chuck\u2019s occasional flash fiction challenges.<\/p>\n

I really do like the whole audio thing \u2013 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\u2019m trying to differentiate my offering from the burgeoning pile of e-books out there.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?<\/h3>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s\u00a0 a hard feeling to top.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 you could make a full-time job out of understanding that whole mess, and none of that appeals to me in the least.\u00a0 It makes a little cloud of despair in my head when I think about it, so I try not to.<\/p>\n

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?<\/h3>\n

Impossible question. You\u2019ve only got one kid right now, so you don\u2019t get it. Somebody asks you who your favorite kid is, that\u2019s easy for you. I\u2019ve got three.\u00a0 But we\u2019re writers. Words are our children, too.<\/p>\n

Comes to words, there isn\u2019t even an exact answer to how many there are in the English language \u2013 200,000 or thereabouts. I\u2019ve read that the average person knows between 12,000 and 20,000 of them. I\u2019d like to think that most writers know more. But a favorite?\u00a0 I can\u2019t say I have one.<\/p>\n

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 \u201clipsticked\u201d 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\u2019d just said an old, rusty Impala. So maybe this morning lipsticked is my favorite word. And it isn\u2019t even a real word.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t know. But he wouldn\u2019t 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 \u201cYou have the prick of a fish.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s pretty good. Curse words alone aren\u2019t all that special. It\u2019s the constructions they\u2019re used in that make them pop.<\/p>\n

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don\u2019t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)<\/h3>\n

I\u2019m a Manhattan guy. I\u2019ll drink a lot of stuff, although not gin, never have liked gin, and I\u2019m kind of meh on vodka, too. In fact, when it comes to rum, I\u2019ll take dark over light every time, so I guess I\u2019m not big on clear liquors. Beer, sure, but something with body and taste \u2013 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\u2019s nothing like whipping up a nice batch of sangria \u2013 I\u2019ve got a couple of favorite recipes for both red and white versions \u2013 and, if it\u2019s a hot week, there\u2019s probably a pitcher of one of them in my fridge. Sangria, by the way, isn\u2019t just wine with fruit juice in it. There\u2019s brandy, or maybe peach schnapps, maybe some triple sec \u2013 there\u2019s something in it to give it a backbone.<\/p>\n

But if I\u2019m going with one drink, it\u2019s the Manhattan. It was my father\u2019s drink, I write at my father\u2019s desk. At the moment, I\u2019m sitting in my father\u2019s chair. Filial loyalty.\u00a0 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s simple, it packs a punch and it makes me think of my dad.<\/p>\n

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!<\/h3>\n

I\u2019m going to go old school on you. The Heart of the Matter<\/em> by Graham Greene. He\u2019s a guy too often overlooked in my book. Pick that up. Hell, anything by him. Saul Bellow\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Funny thing, I guess, because you said great story, and when I think back on the books by either of these two, story isn\u2019t 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\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?<\/h3>\n

Well, if the walkers have already eaten John Hornor Jacobs, I\u2019ll be the guy who still knows about his zombie herding idea. Not going to give it away here, spoil his This Dark Earth<\/em> launch, but it is the key to final victory.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.<\/h3>\n

I\u2019ve always found the last meal thing kind of paradoxical. From the executioner perspective, you\u2019re going to kill the guy because he\u2019s so horrible, so what\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

Again, hard to say. Probably depend on my mood that day. Don\u2019t 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 saut\u00e9ed mushrooms. A side of lobster newburg maybe.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?<\/h3>\n

How the hell should I know? My short fiction collection, OLD SCHOOL, comes today from Snubnose Press. I\u2019ve got two novels out on submission, and a third one will be joining them real soon.\u00a0 I\u2019m writing a horror\/crime thing now.<\/p>\n

One of my novels, ROTTEN AT THE HEART, is my Elizabethan first-person Shakespeare as a private dick thing. I\u2019ve got a couple more ideas for ol\u2019 Will if that ever sells or, who knows, maybe even if it doesn\u2019t. But I\u2019ll work on what I\u2019m working on now, and then I\u2019ll worry about tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof.<\/p>\n

OK, maybe I learned two things in religion class.<\/p>\n

What’s the art of telling a good short story as opposed to something longer form?<\/h3>\n

Funny thing is I\u2019d 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 \u2013 primarily accounting firms as it has turned out. So I\u2019ve spent thirty years writing about the tax code and such. If that won\u2019t make you want to write about killing people, nothing will.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d 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 \u2013 writing\u2019s just a way to pay the bills, I\u2019d tell myself, and I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s something you want to do, you\u2019d best commence to doing it. So I commenced to writing a novel.\u00a0 Found out there\u2019s just as much time for things as you make, and there was time enough for that.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Blame Patti Abbott, a fine writer in her own right who\u2019s collection, Monkey Justice<\/em>, is a must read. I\u2019d never heard of flash fiction, but somebody sent me a link to a challenge she was running on her blog \u2013 write a story, 1,000 words or less, set in or around a Walmart.<\/p>\n

A thousand words, I thought. Impossible. So I had to try it. And the resulting story, Black Friday<\/em>, reinforced for me one of writing\u2019s most valuable lessons \u2013 strip it to the bone.\u00a0 Or, as the Bard once said, \u201cWhen words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019m in the middle of a novel. When I\u2019m writing a novel, I have a tendency to meander, to get a little flabby.<\/p>\n

Meander, you say? You? Surely not. I mean it only took you what, Five or six paragraphs to even start answering Chuck\u2019s question?<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s another lesson, maybe. Good storytelling isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s nothing like a short story to remind me that the flabby writing has to go. \u00a0It reminds me that you can lose a reader any time. With this sentence, or with the next one. Strip it to the bone.<\/p>\n

OLD SCHOOL published by a small e-publisher, Snubnose Press: what’s the value of a small publisher over a larger one?<\/p>\n

Because Snubnose is the only publisher I\u2019ve had to this point, that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The big publishers, they don\u2019t 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\u2019t read Crimes in Southern Indiana<\/em> yet, stop right now and do so. It\u2019s OK, Chuck and I can wait.<\/p>\n

So my choices were pitch it to one of the smaller publishers or self-publish.<\/p>\n

I just don\u2019t want to mess with self publishing. I don\u2019t want to design a cover, format a document, be the only set of eyes proofing or editing something.\u00a0 A man\u2019s got to know his limitations.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A publisher\u2019s 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\u2019s. 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.<\/p>\n

You hear a lot of railing against gatekeepers from the self-publishing crowd \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

How are the stories in OLD SCHOOL emblematic of Dan O’Shea?<\/h3>\n

The collection is entitled Old School<\/em> 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\u2019d think most everybody was some hard bodied twenty- or thirty-something posing through life\u2019s dramas in a Hugo Boss wardrobe.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t write about those people. The protagonists in my stories tend to be middle aged or older. They\u2019ve suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and often have not prevailed against them. But they also aren\u2019t the dispossessed loners that dominate a lot of noir fiction.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s bullshit. Having nothing to lose means you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

No, having something that matters to you, bearing the scars that earning that something cost you, having known life\u2019s 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\u2019ll show you a desperate human being. A dangerous human being. And I\u2019ll write you a story.<\/p>\n

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?<\/h3>\n

The story I started out with, that\u2019s mostly memoir. Some embellishment around the details aside, that happened to me.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t let him join \u2013 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\u2019d find staring blankly over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table some mornings, still wearing the clothes he\u2019d 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\u2019d be there for it. At his wake, person after person came up to me to introduce themselves as \u201cone of your dad\u2019s patients.\u201d I tried to think of a doctor I\u2019ve had whose wake I\u2019d bother to go to. I couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

He was and remains the most decent human being I\u2019ve ever known.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 At some point in the fourth quarter, I\u2019m running off the field after we scored, and I see my old man standing there on the sidelines, soaking wet, he\u2019s pants cuffed with mud, clapping for me. He\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

One my favorite openings to a book is the beginning of Stephen King\u2019s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t always temper that. Some of the stories are just dark, period. But in many of them, there is a note of redemption. Thin Mints <\/em>comes to mind. That\u2019s probably the one story of mine that\u2019s gotten the most traction \u2013 been published in Crimefactory<\/em>, showed up in the Noir at the Bar<\/em> anthology, got nominated for some award last year. In that story, you have an everyday guy who throws away everything \u2013 family, job, self-respect \u2013 in pursuit of his selfish appetites. But in the end, he\u2019s confronted with a hard choice, finds a line he won\u2019t cross, redeems himself.<\/p>\n

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?<\/h3>\n

Chuck, you and I have famously disagreed on the role of planning (I say famously because it happened on your blog \u2013 what happens on my blog happens in obscurity). You like outlines and character bibles and such, I prefer a more organic process \u2013 placing characters I like in situations I find interesting, and then just following them around my head and seeing what they do.\u00a0 Now, having written exactly one piece of historical fiction, I won\u2019t hold myself out as an expert, but here\u2019s what I found. I didn\u2019t need an outline for this one, because history provided it.<\/p>\n

The story is set in the summer of 1596. Henry Carey, the First Baron Hundson, the Lord Chamberlain and the sponsor of Shakespeare\u2019s theater troupe, dies. That actually happened. A couple weeks later, Shakespeare\u2019s 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. \u00a0Marital 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\u2019s designated torturer, plays a key role, as do George Carey, the Second Baron Hundson, some of the Queen\u2019s other ministers and Elizabeth I herself. And those are all real people performing their real offices.<\/p>\n

Outside of historical events and people, there are realities of life in Elizabethan London that inform the story \u2013 the rise of Puritanism and its antipathy to the theater, the banishing of \u201centertainments\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t get in the way of it.\u00a0 In fact, the most improbable part of the book \u2013 maybe the most improbable thing I\u2019ve included in any of my books so far \u2013 is an event from history. \u00a0The famed Globe Theater, the venue most associated with the Bard, really was built in a day. Due to a real estate dispute, Shakespeare\u2019s troupe really did disassemble their theater in Shoreditch and, in a single night, transport the boards and timbers to the Globe\u2019s location in Bankside, where it was raised the next day \u2013 and without power tools.\u00a0 Had that not actually happened, I would never have dared write it, but it did, so I did \u2013 and it plays a central role in the story.\u00a0 Although, historically, that happened a couple years after 1596. I\u2019m no Elizabethan scholar, so I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve made other historical errors, but moving that up a couple of years was the biggest liberty I took knowingly.<\/p>\n

I like to say this: Rotten at the Heart<\/em> didn\u2019t really happen. I don\u2019t think Shakespeare was ever blackmailed into serving as a royal sponsor\u2019s private dick. But it could have happened, because the facts presented in the story and the historical realities that provide the story\u2019s tension and motivations are all, to my knowledge, true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[77],"class_list":{"0":"post-12943","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","7":"tag-interview","9":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-3mL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12943"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12949,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12943\/revisions\/12949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}