Thrillers

(And I don't mean of the Michael Jackson variety.)

I finished Eric Van Lustbader's 'Last Snow', a thriller.

EVL is known for his fantasy and thriller series, but also for reviving the Jason Bourne, (of the Bourne identity movies) series on contract from the estate of Ludlum, the creator.

An aside:
Generally literati talk about Plot driven novels, versus character-driven novels.
In the plot driven novel, what happens in the story is of primary importance. The characters seem to be pawns driven around through the novel like chess pieces on a board. In the character-driven novel on the other hand, it seems as if the characters are the masters of their own fate, and the story told unfolds because of the choices they make. I prefer novels that combine the two. The best examples of character driven stories are 'literary fiction'. I've been known to criticize this 'genre' as often the stories are so beautiful and they employ such incredibly powerful imagery, the prose is so lush, but I finish one and say.... so what was the point?

Plot driven stories are quite the opposite. There is a story. But sometimes the plot can be so contrived as to force me to the other side of the 'criterati' and scream at the pages; "That would never happen. Protagonist would never act that way!" (Most genre fiction has conventions. If a story didn't follow some of the conventions of the genre for instance, it wouldn't be labeled, right?) Of all the contemporary genre fiction, Thrillers are far and away the most plot-driven of them all. And this was very evident in Lustbader's novel.

Okay, back to my post.
In short it was a story of Jack McClure, ATF agent, hero, Presidents friend on special assignment where he breaks a 27 year marriage off with his wife, sleeps with an FSB (old soviet KGB) agent, foils high crimes, saves people, has shoot outs, survives arsenic poisoning...okay, get the picture? The political thriller is always an over the top plot-driven romp. It was well plotted, carried the story along and sold millions of copies. It will probably be a movie. But, I really didn't enjoy it and had to resist skimming to the finish. (I try never to do that. Elmore Leonard said his novels move along well because he never writes the parts people skip. So when I am tempted to skim, I ask myself why exactly I have that impulse.)

I think the biggest problem is that the author doesn't have a firm enough grasp of current Russian/Eurasian geopolitics and energy policy. News paper level, but there were too many instances where he tried to make the Russia of today be the Soviet Union of the 80's (the peak of coldwarspynovelthrillerdom). Then there were the instances where an event would happen but it wouldn't impact the rest of the flow of the novel. For instance, main character kills two assassins sitting in the car on the street below his apartment. Main character goes off to bordelo for top level meeting with bad guy. Main character returns to apartment and has dinner with hot widow next door. Okay. So why was the front of his apartment, where presumably there is a car full of dead guys, gone? No crime scene? I don't know, call me crazy, but I would expect such an event to have repercussions. And yes, I know it's a story. And it never really happened. And yes, I know that such a criticism from someone who writes stories about monsters seems a tad ironic. But still, help me suspend my disbelief a little bit longer.

Gone but not forgotten

It would appear that Atom Jack online magazine has closed up shop. It's been happening alot lately, small presses start with a burst of energy, flourish and then life catches up with the publishers and they fall by the wayside. Adicus Garton bought my first short story, "Outsourcing Blues", for the May 2007 issue (Issue Seven). It was nice little mag, with good taste...I mean he bought my first story, right?

It would appear that the publishers are trying their hand at spec fic anthologies, you can check them out here.

Jaw Bones

I recently finished two books in rapid order, first 206 Bones by Kathy Reichs and second, Jaws by Peter Benchley. It was an osteologically-themed reading week.

Kathy Reichs holds a PhD in forensic anthropology and writes genre mystery fiction with a bit of a police procedural feel. Her character, Temperance Brennan, is the inspiration for the TV show 'Bones'. I picked this up thinking this was the book that the series was based upon, not realizing that it was in fact the twelfth book in the series...

It was pretty good. I'm a science geek, so the preachey asides which bordered on direct address of the reader, weren't so bad.
A common technique in old-fashioned literature, is referred to by contemporary literati as 'Breaking the fourth wall', but I assure you dear reader, this is much frowned upon in contemporary writing circles. Unless of course you are going for a pastiche of some sort, which Kathy Reichs was not doing. Anyway, her asides took time to explain very technical aspects of anthropology, forensics, etc and worked pretty well. The preachy references to the need for a 'board-certified-forensic-anthropologist' was a thinly disguised professional rant against the unprofessional use of 'mere pathologist who lack forensic anthropological training or board certification' at the end though.

Anyway, you can read the wikipedia review for the plot; different than the tv show, not bad on its own, better than some I've read, realistic, but not as terribly gritty as I expected from a crime novel about someone dealing with bodies.

The second book I devoured was Jaws. Ha!

Like most children of the 70's, my first summer blockbuster was the movie Jaws. I had the Jaws poster. I had Jaws T-shirts. I saw all of the sequels over the next 10 years. But I never read the book.

I picked it up from the library a few weeks ago....
... da-dum
With that same scantily clad swimmer..
... da-dum
With a torpedo-like shark with a grinning mouth-full of teeth beneath...
... da-dum

...And I was expecting pure camp.

(Don't get me wrong, I love camp. I love pulp. I like old Dr Who -The Tom Baker version, Dr #4, for max camp and minimum special effects budget.
Conan the Barbarian is one of my top ten favorite films of all time for crying out loud.)

But you know what? Jaws was actually a great read. I not only enjoyed it, I thought it was pretty good. The characters seemed extremely dated, but real. A little over the top with the frustrated housewife and the 'old mystery man of the sea' Quint. The children were props. But still I was pleasantly surprised. The tension held up well even though I knew what was going to happen, but I could see how the screen writers took scenes that were slower, more drawn-out but real and jazzed them up a bit to increase the tension and give the scenes more 'pop'.

It was a classic, but was much quicker at getting to the point than Ayn Rand...

Oh Lazarus

I recently finished,and enjoyed, the Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon.

Friends know that my tastes are eclectic, reading is no different. Even though I am a wide-ranging reader, I don't think I would have picked up this book had it not been a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. I mentioned previously that the center of a writer's life is reading. So I read, a lot. I read pulp, I read Pulitzer winners, I read Newberry award winners, I read genre fiction by the box full(except romance- I tried...I just couldn't do it). I try to read things I enjoy, and things that will instruct (both in general terms and with regards to the craft of writing)and LP hit both marks.

The book is a story of a modern day Bosnian immigrant like the author who is conducting research for a book (about a Jewish immigrant killed in Chicago in 1908) and while tracing the path of the Jewish immigrant his companion (also a Bosnian, but one who had lived through the siege of Sarajevo) relays his story of the war. So really 3 stories in one.

Overall I thought it was well done and worth a read. But there were many instances where I experienced problems with the text that some of my critiquers have pointed out from time to time in my work.

First, the novice writer is told that the writer should be invisible to the reader. By that I mean that when you notice the writing you are knocked out of the story. Hemon's prose was overall very good, but he often used descriptive language (in particular adjectives) that seemed a bit incongruously and awkwardly wedged into the text. Maybe it's just me, but these instances brought me out of the story to wonder if these were really the right words to use.

Next problem for me was the reuse of vivid imagery. In particular 'vines of hair up the back of his neck'. First time you use it it's cool. Second time it is not only not cool it's awkward. Didn't happen often, but enough that I said to myself, 'Self, that's what that critter was talking about'.

Recycling is great, but not if it's really obvious in your story. The author recycled the same names, the same descriptions of people etc. I think the point was that there are echoes in history, but when it's really apparent that the author is doing it I think of it as 'cutesy' and I didn't really like it.

The last thing that tripped me up was not giving me enough information up front to have a clear image of the characters. If your character wears glasses and these will be important later then you need to tell me about them up front, otherwise I'll ask the blank pages 'where did those glasses come from?'.

It may sound as if I'm nitpicking, and I am. But I did enjoy the book, and would recommend it, even though it was a tad too literary (and postmodernist even) and just sort of...

-ended-

Dougie's Hand

My short story, 'Dougie's Hand', has been accepted for the Spring issue of Rose and Thorn by Kathryn Magendie.

The story goes live 15 April 2010.

There are many different ways to go about constructing a story. (I think the only universal method these days has something to do with a word processor...some imagination..and I'm not always sure about the imagination). I still read a great number of 'how to do it', or preferably 'how I do it' writing advice articles. Some authors plot extensively, write notes, draw diagrams of story arcs and character interactions, maps of the place where the story takes place, etc. I did this for GOB-the short story and BEKs (see below)and I have to do it for my novels or it they turn to unintelligible goo in my hands.

Other people just start writing and see where the story takes them. You can try for a certain 'mood' or a 'voice' or just write. In short stories I can get away with this to some extant. But I still need to do some plotting of where I want to go. I have heard the writing of a story like planning for a road trip (an old school road-trip, no Garmins or Tom-Toms allowed here). You know where you will start, you've looked at the map, made some notes of where you want to go, but you reserve the right to deviate a bit if you see a Shoney's or a sign for one of those road-side museums (some of the best are along I10- the prehistoric alien in Arizona, the alligator farms in Louisiana, the Crocket county museum in Ozona Texas...ah, memories!). But every once in a while even OC road-trip planners like me just get in the car and see where they go. That was Dougie's hand for me.

I started with a voice. I knew what the main character sounded like. He was a millenial slacker in college. He was self-deluded and superficial. And he was FUN. So with that premise, I started typing away.

Dougie's hand is a story, really a 2200 word vignette, of a young man suffering from Anarchic or Alien hand syndrome (also called Dr. Strangelove hand). This is the conflict, because without conflict for the main character to overcome or deal with there's nothing happening in the story. Stories without conflict are usually called 'literary fiction'. Sounds great, but what was the point again?

After voice and conflict There was also a quality that I wanted the story to have, and this came in the rewrite, because even though I just got in and drove doesn't mean that I couldn't go back over and over and over...

So, the quality I wanted was one in which the narrator was so convicted in his obviously erroneous belief that the reader took a minute to doubt his/her own convictions. It's hard to explain exactly what I wanted, but the best example is from the movie
Neverwas . Maybe not your cup of tea, but I loved it. In it there are a few instances where Gabriel Finch is so convicted, and there is evidence to support his delusion, that the audience asks...could it be that he isn't a nut?

Well, you judge for yourself on 15 April how well I did to capture this with Dougie's Hand.

The story itself was a joy to write. My critique group provided valuable feedback. I submitted it and it sat in second and then third and then fourth round review with first ASIM (Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine) for a year. Then it was bought by Arkham Tales, where it waited to be published until the magazine folded. And then...Rose and Thorn had at it.

Atlas shrugged and so did I

This is meant to be a blog about my writing life. Almost every 'how to write' book, article or interview by an author advises that the novice author read voraciously. For this reason (voracious reading is part of my writing life) it seems appropriate to include those experiences here.

My inaugural post-reading post is Ayn Rand's Atlas shrugged.

It's been long in coming.
It was a long time in the reading.
And I'm left with an "..eh.."

As with most famous works, I was familiar with it before I read it. In fact, before reading the book I had read more about Ayn Rand's objectivism than I had ever read of Rand directly. I think as a work meant to pontificate a world view, in it's time it was probably great. But for me...yawn...it just took long to do it. The characters were either one of three people; 'looter', 'noble industrial egoist' or one of the masses with his/her hand out. No middle ground, they all sounded the same. They all gave one or the other monologue. For a long time. Didn't really care for the characters, couldn't buy into the dystopian world. I tried, honest.

The parts I really did enjoy were the datedness. The hunt for a long-distance phone connection (as I flick open my black berry), the obsession with cigarettes, the very 1950's ish-ness. That for me was fun (though I don't suspect this was the author's intent).

Glad I read it, because I have felt like a phoney all these years for reading about it, but not reading it. It will be a while before I dig into the vault of great tomes, I paid my dues for the near-term.

The Gift of the Bouda- the short story

Even though it was the first short story I ever wrote with the intent of publishing, 'The Gift of the Bouda' was actually the fifth short story published. So that implies two stories behind the story, right? Right you are. Let's start with the what motivated me to write for publication and then we'll get to the how.

I wrote GOB because of the war in Iraq.

Sounds weighty, doesn't it?
Well, for me it was. And here's the short version.

I am a life-long Army Reserve officer. I enlisted in the California National Guard when I was nineteen, with the intent of flying helicopters. Which I did. I attended OCS and then went on to fly Cobra helicopters (as well as Hueys) while I was in college. Neat part-time gig, let me tell you.

After I finished my PhD I went to Texas for a postdoc and also transferred to the Reserves, where I flew the venerable AH-64 Apache. Really cool. I was eventually promoted out of flying, but volunteered to go back (should they need me) when the War in Afghanistan kicked off. One thing led to another and we started this thing in Iraq (you've probably seen something about it in the news) and I ended up there as an Operations officer for an Aviation Task Force. In order to go though, I had to leave my civilian job at a the world's leading non-profit provider of cell lines (in Manassas, Virginia) where I had a lab. The war blew, but I did my part. My civilian employer, though, really didn't. When I returned from a year away, serving my country, separated from my loved ones, risking my life, after all of that, my lab, my staff, my equipment and my projects had been parted out. Gone was the lab for which I had worked so hard. To shorten the long story, I ended up finding a new gig. But I didn't seem to be able to scratch that creative itch that I was able to scratch in the lab. Most people don't think of science as creative, but it really is. Especially cell biology where there is as much 'craft' as pure science.

I wondered if creative writing might be able to scratch that creative itch. 'Creative' is in the title, right. So I gave it a shot, and the story turned out okay. Two months of futzing, but it wasn't bad.

I shopped GOB around a bit and it received some good feedback. They always tell you that receiving personal feedback (as opposed to a form letter) is a good response. My first rejection was from George Scithers at Weird Tales, and yes it was hand-written and rather encouraging. So I incorporated his suggestions and then I sent it to a proposed anthology at Graveside tales. It took around 6 months to be accepted and another 6 or so to be published. It was quite worth it. Matt Hults was the editor and I think he did a great job -he also did the cover. I had the added bonus of sharing the TOC with Mike Stone who I had met through my critique group as well as some other great authors. It was fun and I was asked for an author interview (http://gravesidetales.com/forum/index.php?topic=1343.0). If anyone at Graveside is reading this, I'm still on hold with my story for Beast Within II...and waiting...and waiting...

So I told you about the what and the how. How about the why?

Gift of the Bouda is the story of a soldier who is attacked by a were-hyena (the Bouda) while on a mission. He is infected with the lycanthropic curse and returns to the 'real world' of mundane America.

A place he isn't needed.

A place that doesn't understand what he's been through.

See where I'm going with this?

Yes, the story was a bit cathartic. The lycanthropy of the story represents PTSD. Not something I suffered but I can have empathy for those that do and John Rogers (the main character) is an homage of sorts. And yes, in this light the challenges I faced after being kicked the curb by the system were so much less traumatic than those faced by others. John also has the opportunity to deal with the Pre-Shinseki VA. Oh joy. I hear it's getting better.

The lycanthropy made for a great vehicle for post traumatic stress. I employed the Bouda as I wanted something that was appropriate to the folk lore of the region, as opposed to another haunted moor...with a cursed gothic manor, werewolf story. I was thinking blackhawk down with monsters. Or the movie dog-soldiers. Military horror. Fast-paced. It seems to have worked.

I really liked this character and after I finished STG-the novel, I wrote Gift of the Bouda- the novel. Again, another year. It currently sits with a few agents, so we'll see how it goes.

Party Favors

My fourth story was Party Favors, purchased by Todd Robinson of Thuglit (http://www.thuglit.com/home.html), a nice ezine with a penchant for hard-boiled crime.

Party Favors began life as 'Being Sullivan Brown'. Almost everyone that critiqued this one at critters.org thought that was an incredibly lame name. I guess that they all saw "Being John Malcovich" or something. Anyway, it was meant to be a fairly straight forward hitchhiker-killer-with-a-twist story. And that's how it came out. I had the added bonus of getting a cover for the mag with my second favorite iconic handgun; the colt python with the 4 inch barrel. I don't know who the tongue belongs to...

BEKs

My third short story sale was a story titled BEKs (for Black Eyed Kids). I shopped this story around for a bit before Tim Deal at Shroud publications bought it. Tim's a great guy and is putting out a nice magazine (http://www.shroudmagazine.com/).

I had thought that the magazine was what I was being considered for, only to find that instead Tim wanted to place it in his new print anthology 'Abominations'. One of Tim's other anthologies had made the Stoker short list, so that was fine by me. It's doing pretty well in the low five-figures in sales rank on Amazon (ISBN 098018701X).

BEKs was inspired by a Texas urban legend about preteen boys that seek assistance from strangers, who are in turn never seen again. I took these creatures and placed them into a crack-house in Baltimore. Then I sent in a DEA agent and a special forces support team to route them out. The story was meant as a military-horror short, with the war on drugs taking a slightly different tack.

Succumbing to Gravity- the short story

I thought it might be interesting to those of you new to writing, or who enjoy reading, to have some insight into how a story comes about. The second story I sold, after OB, was Succumbing to Gravity (STG). It had been sitting with an anthology called holy horrors for some time before it was released (and then HH was actually was never published).

I queried Nossa Morte. which was at the time new (and I thought a bit vulnerable to a new author like me). They liked it, but requested a rewrite. I liked their suggestions, made the adjustments and viola, STG made it into the Feb 2008 issue (http://nossamorte.com/magazine/2010/01/february-2008-issue/) . Melissa et al were a joy to work with and I am glad to see the magazine continues to put out great stories.

So, the inspiration for STG? Well I had read 'The Year of War' by Steph Swainston (ISBN 0060753870- I recommend it, except for chapter 22, what was that?). In it the main character, Jant, is a winged drug addict. I thought how very much like a tragic sort of fallen angel he was. And that idea went to work somewhere in the back of my brain...maybe anterior thalamic nuclei.. I'm not sure, but there was nuclei fermentation. Then I was doing some light reading through the Apocryphal book of Enoch and thought those poor angels, what would it be like to live in the grace of God and then be cast out?

Could you help but despair?

Could you find solace...in drugs?

And that's how Greg was born. A fallen angel, walking the earth, avoiding responsibilities of any kind and trying to find solace in drugs. More to come on this one as I liked Greg so much I spent a year writing the rest of his story. Nihilism, drug addiction, demon combat and redemption (of a sort), STG is now a novel-length tale that recently sold to Reliquary Press and should be available summer of 2010.

But the story of that story is a different story. One to be saved for later.