{"id":18526,"date":"2013-05-02T00:01:17","date_gmt":"2013-05-02T04:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=18526"},"modified":"2013-05-01T21:22:45","modified_gmt":"2013-05-02T01:22:45","slug":"ten-questions-about-penance-by-dan-oshea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2013\/05\/02\/ten-questions-about-penance-by-dan-oshea\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Questions About Penance, By Dan O’Shea"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ll start with who I\u2019m not. I\u2019m not your usual punk kid debut author. I\u2019m on the wrong side of 50 \u2013 thought the more time I spend over here, the more I think it\u2019s the right side of 50. Been a writer my whole adult life \u2013 business and financial copy mostly, a lot of it about the tax code. And, really, a writer is all I ever wanted to be. But another 5,000 word white paper on transfer pricing, that\u2019s not exactly the dream I had as a kid. I wanted to write stories. Got married young though, had kids, a couple of the kids had some problems. Seemed to me I couldn\u2019t waste time writing stories on spec when there were clients willing to pay me cash on the nail for real work. Writing a novel felt like one of St. Paul\u2019s childish things, one of those dreams you put away when you became a man. I messed at fiction from time to time, but I would go years at a stretch without writing a word I wasn\u2019t getting paid for.<\/p>\n

Pissed on my own dreams, basically.<\/p>\n

Thing is, you get to an age when people start to die. In the space of a few months, my best friend died, my dad died, my aunt died \u2013 and a couple of those deaths weren\u2019t natural. The whole mortality thing went from being an abstraction to being an open wound. It sunk in on more than an intellectual level that there wasn\u2019t going to be a second lap around the track where I finally got to do what I wanted.<\/p>\n

So I got serious about writing fiction. PENANCE is actually the first thing I ever finished.<\/p>\n

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:<\/h2>\n

When the past won\u2019t stay buried you have to kill it again.<\/p>\n

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?<\/h2>\n

I went to a strange high school. A Catholic military academy. The school motto was Crede de Deo, Luctari pro Eo \u2013 to believe in God and to fight for him. Always confused me. I always figured if there was one guy who could handle his own beefs, it was the almighty. Just as the good people of Sodom.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I\u2019m in theology class my junior year and the priest pops this question. Asks us \u201cIf you were going to die unexpectedly, say you were going to be murdered, where and when would you want that to happen?\u201d<\/p>\n

I was leaning toward never and nowhere, but he tells us we should want to be murdered walking out of the confessional because we\u2019d be in a state of grace and would go to heaven. Besides adding to the pile of things that were already souring me on the idea of religion, that nugget rattled around my brain for years as a great jumping off point for a story.<\/p>\n

When I started PENANCE, that was all I had \u2013 a killer with a bizarre religious motivation for murder. The rest of it grew out of that.<\/p>\n

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD\u2019VE WRITTEN?<\/h2>\n

I suppose it\u2019s a story that any fifty-something guy who went to a Catholic military school, who had a Chicago cop for a grandfather and who had nightmares for weeks back in 1968 after watching his grandparent\u2019s neighborhood burn on the news in the riots following the King assassination could have written.<\/p>\n

Religion figures heavily in it, history figures heavily in it, Chicago figures heavily in it. All things I\u2019ve thought a lot about.<\/p>\n

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING PENANCE?<\/h2>\n

Like I said, it\u2019s the first piece of fiction I ever finished, so everything was hard. The biggest challenge was just learning the discipline, just making myself sit down every day, or almost every day at least, and knock out a couple of pages whether I felt like it or not.<\/p>\n

Funny thing is I didn\u2019t really have any more time when I finally got serious and wrote the thing than I did all those years I was telling myself I didn\u2019t have time. I\u2019m just as busy, I still have a day job, my kids still have needs, always will. So I watch a little less TV, maybe spend a little less time reading.<\/p>\n

There is no muse, no magic. There\u2019s you and there\u2019s the keyboard. If you\u2019ve got the chops to do the work then you can always do the work. Easier some days than others, of course, but you can always do the work.<\/p>\n

I guess maybe the hardest thing was learning that, and then believing it.<\/p>\n

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING PENANCE?<\/h2>\n

Here\u2019s one thing: a novel should be somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 words, maybe 110,000 on the high end. OK, everybody knows that now \u2018cause you kids all grew up with Google. Thing is, way back in my late twenties when I had one of my brief, abortive fits of fiction writing, I got about 20K into a story, felt like I was getting traction. But I had no idea where the finish line was. Weren\u2019t no Google yet. The internet was still a gleam in Al Gore\u2019s eye. So I got this bright idea. Grab a book off the shelf, count up the words on a few pages, average those out, multiply by the number of pages and bingo \u2013 you\u2019ll have a target. I don\u2019t know what went wrong. Maybe I counted wrong. Maybe the pages I picked were all narrative and no dialog. Maybe I forgot to consider how many partial pages there are in a finished book. Maybe I grabbed a Steven King novel. But the number I came up with was 300,000 words. I quit on the spot, knew I\u2019d never get that far.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s see, what else? Dialog \u2013 learned that, for me anyway, the sooner in a scene I get my characters talking the better.<\/p>\n

Learned to finish what I started.<\/p>\n

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT PENANCE?<\/h2>\n

The intersection of the city\u2019s real history with the story, I love that. I didn\u2019t grow up in Chicago \u2013 I grew up about 50 miles west. Now, I spent a fair amount of time in the city, even as a kid. We\u2019d visit my grandparents, we\u2019d go in to the museums, Cubs games. Then, as an adult, I commuted in and out of the city every day for decades.<\/p>\n

But I remember watching the news as a kid. It was a pretty volatile time. The King riots, the \u201968 Democratic convention after that, the Fred Hampton murder, Richard Speck, the ongoing civil rights struggles, the battles between the Daley regime and the parade of good government types that were always trying to unseat him, some alderman or county board member always being on trial for something. It was this other place where everything always seemed bigger, bolder, more dangerous \u2013 where none of the normal rules of civilized behavior that governed my immediate experience applied.<\/p>\n

I realize that the Chicago in my book isn\u2019t real exactly \u2013 some of it is, I think the sense of it is. But even when you set a book in a real place, that place is really a sort of parallel universe.<\/p>\n

I like what Chicago is in my book.<\/p>\n

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?<\/h2>\n

Write it when I was thirty. It would have been a different book for sure, probably not as good a book. But I can\u2019t help but think sometimes how my life would be different if I had started my fiction-writing career a couple decades ago.<\/p>\n

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:<\/h2>\n

Little more than a paragraph on account of it\u2019s dialog, but there\u2019s an exchange early in the book set in 1971 between a character named Clarke and Chicago\u2019s mayor, Hurley, where Hurley\u2019s complaining about Chicago\u2019s iconic Picasso statue, which would still have been relatively new at the time, just a couple years old. I like the way this passage gives a sense of both the character and the city. And, like I said, it\u2019s early in the book. It\u2019s something I wrote in the first few weeks when I\u2019d finally decided I was going to finish a novel. It was one of the first passages that, even as I was writing it, I was thinking, \u201cHey, this is some good shit. Maybe I can write a novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFucking statue, still don\u2019t get it,\u201d said Hurley.<\/p>\n

\u201cPardon?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Picasso. Junior\u2019s idea, you know. Public art, he says, so we can be a great city, like New York or Paris. Like we ain\u2019t a great city already. Like I gotta put a fucking steel monkey in the middle of the Loop so we can be a great city.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPicasso is a genius, sir,\u201d said Clarke. \u201cSubjective as individual works may be, to have his work on so prominent a stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, yeah, yeah. Make all the art critics in the world gush about us. Course you could move all the art critics in the world into the same damn place and you wouldn\u2019t have a city, you\u2019d have a village, cause there\u2019s maybe a couple hundred of \u2018em, and the village wouldn\u2019t need an idiot. And then they\u2019d all starve cause they don\u2019t know how to do nothing. What I like about it? The Picasso? I look out on a nice day in the summer, and I see the kids climbing up that slanty part at the bottom and sliding down. Got the parents standing there, trying to figure out is it a baboon or what, and their kids play on it. I like that. Some guy from the Art Institute came to tell me I gotta keep them kids off it, that it was sacrilege or some shit. Scrawny atheist fuck in my office talking about sacrilege. Told him that Picasso might be a drunk and can\u2019t keep his pants zipped, but at least he makes a decent slide.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

WHAT\u2019S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m putting the finishing touches on my second novel, MAMMON, (coming to a book store near you in early 2014 from the good folks at Exhibit A).<\/p>\n

Those who follow my blog or my short fiction career might also know I\u2019m a bit of a Shakespeare fan boy and that I\u2019ve messed around writing some stuff that features the Bard as an unwilling Elizabethan private dick. Not quite ready for a formal announcement on that yet, but let me just say you\u2019ll be seeing more from ol\u2019 Will.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Dan O’Shea: Website<\/span><\/a> \/ Twitter<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Penance: Amazon<\/span><\/a> \/ B&N<\/span><\/a> \/ Indiebound<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan O’Shea is the real fucking deal. He’s a helluva writer and a smart guy and a man I’m proud to call my friend. Further, he’s my Alpha Clone — I’m pretty sure I’m just a watered-down version of him. Regardless, I’m happy as hell to report his first novel has landed on bookshelves and […]<\/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":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-4OO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18526","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=18526"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18537,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18526\/revisions\/18537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}