Craig Wallwork

Quintessence of Dust: Important Notification!

2012-01-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

Today I awoke to an email from Pablo D'Stair over at KUBOA Press who, altruistically, has cracked the literary whip in order to have the artwork for my new book, Quintessence of Dust, finished well ahead of schedule. As you can see, it's damn pretty. The font echoes the work of Saul Bass and the artwork, abstract in its design, reminded me of some of the early work by Ivon Hitchens. Suffice it to say, two visionaries I'm flattered to reference and draw parallels to in this, my first short story collection. If you like the cover, please add a comment and I'll make sure it gets to the illustrator. I'm sure they'll be please to hear your views.

The reason the cover has been pushed through so early is because I was given a little ad-space in Dark River Press's first in-print magazine soon to be released, details of which I’ll post accordingly. That issue will feature, Night Holds the Scythe, a short story taken from Quintessence of Dust. It is not a cookie cutter horror story, but it is horror, telling the story of a man trying desperately to keep his daughter awake in a world where falling asleep means you never wake up. I believe Livius Nedin of Booked Podcast is writing a better version of this story, so keep your eyes peeled.

If you're interested in buying Quintessence of Dust, and why wouldn't you?, it's a pocketbook sized, mass market paperback, and to preorder it's ONLY $2.95 via this link. I don't even think you can buy a beer that cheap, and to be honest, beer won't be as fun as reading stories like, Anal Twine, 180 Degrees Shy of Heaven, Skin, and Morning Birdsong and the Hell Demons!

Keep checking back if you want a flavour of QoD (it's already been truncated!) to see when Dark River Press release the magazine, which I'm sure will blow you away with the author's attached (it's true, I've seen the line up!)

For now, thanks for reading and for sharing this completely self-centred moment with me.

Bookcases and Braces

2012-01-26T10:22:00.000-08:00

When I was 11 years old I had to wear braces. Like most kids I hated them, but what I hated more was visiting the orthodontist. In the run up to having the brace fitted I had to have four teeth removed, on two different occasions. Back then they put you under with an injection. They’d sit me down in the chair, ask me much I weighed, and then inject me in the hand. I remember that cold feeling as the anaesthetic rushed through my veins, and the intoxicating smell of various dental compounds like Formo-creasol, Metacresylacetate, Eugenol, Acrylic Monomer and just the odour of the drill excavating enamel. Black out. Waking with blood in my mouth, the pain, and the disorientation. Ice-cream. Soup. Usually in that order. Then there was the fitting and the tightening of metal plates, and wire. The aching gums and the mortification that came with smiling, or talking. It was a horrible experience and I hated every minute of it.

However, if I went through that process now, I’m sure the trauma would not appear so bad. I would be awake for the teeth extraction, and the smell of the dental surgery is one I have come to accept as a normal part of my year. The aching gums and indignity of wearing a brace would have lost the gravity it had in my youth because peer pressure and vanity is not paramount to me now. In truth, I have considered having another brace fitted, to finish the job that was started some 29 years ago, but like I said, vanity isn’t high on my agenda at the moment.
I mention this because the act of having a brace instilled a real hate for the dentist for many years. After leaving school I didn’t attend one again for 16 years, and when I did, I needed valium to get me through the experience. Luckily, my dentist was patient with me, talked me through the procedures and explained all the noises I would expect to hear during the treatment. Now, I’m fine. Still can’t say I look forward to visiting the dentist, but I’m not bothered when the little blue card pops through the door. (mental note – find out when you’re next appointment is)

About the time I had the brace fitted, I had joined high school and was thrust into a world where academia became juxtaposed with Chinese burns, dead-arms and being a human spittoon for most of the older kids. Worse than all this was English lit. I hated English. More than writing, I hated reading. My teacher would give us these foxed, dog-eared books and we would all take turn in class reading a paragraph or page. You could literary hear the sweat rolling down our legs. There is a scientific condition that occurs when a person is placed into a moment of panic and the brain shuts off cognitive function making you momentarily blind. It happens a lot to men who are given the task of retrieving a utensil, or any other arbitrary object, from a kitchen drawer, a demand placed upon them by their partner. For some reason, though the object is in plain view, a man will be unable to see it. Same in shopping aisles when instructed to fetch a box of Sugar Puffs or instant mash. This is why, when it came to my turn to read a paragraph, my brain would shutdown and draw a veil of darkness over my eyes. This feeling was one that resonated through my school days. Even if I read to myself at home, I found the words grew small and meaningless. The content of the books were as dull as the pages that had been faded by age and fingering.

Like the dentist, I grew to hate English. I didn’t smile when I entered the class, much the same way the dentist had forced me to never smile while wearing the braces. The Penguin classics, they were as uncomfortable in my mouth as the many wires that traversed by teeth. English taught me to hate English and everything associated with it. I figured so long as I could string a few coherent sentences together, I could get through life and abdicate literature in its many varied form to people in corduroy and leather elbow patches.

The day I bucked up enough courage to visit the dentist was the same year I picked up a book. Both were monumental moments in my life; the first because I was unfettering myself from an adolescent fear that would, eventually if not conquered, see to it I would be toothless and in dentures by my mid-forties. The second was monumental because I willingly chose to read that book out of pleasure and entertainment, not, as before, for educational gain. That book was To Kill a Mockingbird and remains, to this day, one of my favourites. After that, I read another and another. Soon, I was getting through a book a month, then one every couple of weeks. When my wife and I used to spend our Christmas in a lodge in York, I would get through three or four books in a week. I began to enjoy reading.

It’s timing. I posted a link on Twitter today from the Independent newspaper detailing how reading is important, but how some novelists found books to be off-putting when they were forced upon them as children/young adults. It put me off, and had I not picked up To Kill a Mockingbird 29 years later, I would have never have decided to become a writer. To this day I find myself becoming very frustrated with classics (though Amanda Gowin hates that term). The prose does not appeal to me. Just as LOTR does not float my boat, I appreciate that many people do love that kind of fiction. Likewise, many people these days sing the praises of Cormac McCarthy and Bret Easton Ellis, two authors who’s reputation renders me baffled to say the very least. But hey, there are 7 billion people in the world, and to think that each will enjoy the same book is foolish (especially when a large portion of those cannot read due to them being too young or with learning difficulties). Yet, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I did enjoy English at school. Had I gone to a different school, had a teacher that instilled the joy of literature in me, or had peers that were supportive and as passionate about words at the writers they were reading, would I have been the writer I am today? Would I have been better? Would I even be a writer?

Part of writing for me is overcoming the fear of literature, just as I wanted to overcome my fear of the dentist. I needed to face my fear head on and see if it was as scary as my mind had built it up to be.

My daughter is three years old and loves books. She can’t read but as memorised many and so sits on the couch and reads them aloud to both myself and my wife. To witness this bloats my heart. She is what I wanted to be, a person consumed by the magic of literature, of stories and words, who loves to hear them spoken aloud by herself or others. When she reads I want to cry, and I hope with all my heart she continues to love books and does grow scared or indifferent toward them. While I’m sure our tastes will differ in the years to come, I know the power a book can have, and how it can take you from depression to happiness in a single sentence.

Fair-weather Friends

2012-01-26T05:04:00.000-08:00

Driving to work this morning, I noticed something that made me think of a few writers I've lost contact with. My journey from home to work is spent mostly on the motorway. However, from the cottage to the motorway junction, I need to go down an A road that, at 6am in the morning, is like driving through a black hole due to no street lights. A truck was three cars ahead which was slowing us all down to around 40mph in a national speed limit zone. The car in front of me decided to overtake the car in front, and, recklessly, decided to overtake the truck as well, a manoeuvre that had another car been coming down the road on the opposite side would have resulted in a head on crash. Now, most of you would have thought the same thing I did in that moment: "I hope you crash, you knobhead.". Of course, this is just a fleeting thought, which holds little truth. But there is a part of you that would like to see some arseholes get their comeuppance, but obviously not at the cost of injuring the lives of others in the process. Alas, the Gods shine on the brave and stupid and he made the run with just a few seconds to spare before causing a major crash.

So, how does a reckless manoeuvre lead me to old acquaintances? Well, my friends were, in this shit analogy, the writers hanging patiently behind the slow moving vehicle of success, taking their journey at a respectable and safe speed. But for some reason they were overtaken by a prick with an attitude. Suffice it to say, I'm hoping there is some truth to the story of the hare and the tortoise.

So to my old friends, Chris Chester, Graham Bell and Gary Libero, all of whom taught me that good writing isn't just a good command of the English language but the gift of good storytelling, I am beyond the point where gratitude is enough. I miss you all and I hope that one day you reach your destination with integrity and passion intact.

Who the Fuck Does Craig Wallwork Think He is?

2012-01-23T13:07:00.000-08:00

Question: When do you become the authority on a subject? Maybe too broad a question, so let me scale it down. When do you gain enough experience to have the authority to pass it down? I’m sure if you’re a lumberjack, then the process and techniques involved in *felling a tree, I imagine, are quite simple to follow and, with practice, master. Same could be said about riding a horse, shooting heroin, mastering the perfect punch, walking a tightrope, and various other mindless activities and professions. The only two things that can’t be passed down, regardless of how much exposure you’ve had to either, or how good you are at them, are, in no particular order, falling in love and writing. There, I said it; we can’t teach writing. Well, we can, but to be great at [writing] the skill has to be there to begin with. Much like love, you need to really feel it within every part of you. Yes, corny as it sounds, writing has to make you nauseous, cause you to do stupid things, and become obsessed to the point of madness. Even then, you’ll end up getting your heart broken. Writing is, for want of a better term, a sickness, and while many profess to know the secret to assuaging the illness, many do not. What worked for them, will surely not work for you.

The reason. That’s the simple part. We’re all different. I’ve begun to hate this methodology that abiding by a set amount of rules will enable you to write the perfect novel. There are lists and lists out there with the same old crap, crap that I refuse to write here in case someone, anyone, reading this decides to follow. I promise you I will not go down that road. But that is not to say these rules shouldn’t be read, but just as quickly as you’ve digested each, they should be pooped out of the system. Don’t believe anyone who says they know the secret to writing. They don’t. Writers are magicians. They trick you. Slight of hand. They mislead you into believing the impossible is possible. They mystify you with words, deceive you with syntax. They’ll convince you that what they say and do is magic, when really the only magic they posses is the ability to influence you.
I’ve fallen foul of this myself. I’ve believed that adverbs is a mortal sin, that I should never, ever use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". That when in doubt, strike the adjective out. That I mustn’t do anything with the story/novel, unless I revise, revise, revise. It’s occurred to me that I’ve actually broken the promise that I wouldn’t write down any of these writing tips, so please disregard all I’ve said from the line, “I’ve fallen foul of this myself” and pick up again from this point.

Back with me? Okay, let’s move on. I’ve also, at one stage or another, given my own tips on bettering your writing. How pretentious! Me, with only a novel, short story collection, and various publications in anthologies, journals and magazines under my belt, telling you, a complete stranger how to write. Fuck me. No, it’s wrong of me to say such things. I don’t know what will work for you. I don’t know what technique suits your style. I certainly don’t know how best to get what’s in your head out onto the paper, least not without the aid of a gun. Those seeking ways of improving are clearly spending too much time reading about how to be a better writer than writing to be a better writer. That sounds like advice. It’s not. It’s an observation. To veer away from the misunderstanding I maybe giving advice here, be clear that I have no interest in such things, but I will add that a whore makes her money being a great fuck. A lousy whore needs to fuck more or get out the business. I’m sure I could make that more concise and it would be quote worthy, but to be frank, that would be leaning too far toward advice again.

For me, there’s little I can’t learn from reading. Some books inspire me, some depress me, and not in a good way. Some are so depressing it makes me want to write something better. Most are average. I then sit and write. Some days I write crap. Some days I write crap that has potential. Some days I write average. But every now and then, I write something good. It’s not tips or advice that’s done this, it’s me. It’s my brain. It’s all the accumulative hours spent tapping at the keyboard. It’s stealing lines from other books, lyric, dialogue from a movie, rearranging the words, adding my own slant on it, and then re-packaging it. Most of what we do as writers is the equivalent of Mexican food: the content is the same, it’s just the way it’s presented which differs. There’s no real secret about this, and what annoys me is there are many so called “experts” out there making money off other writers under the pretence that being under their wing for five weeks will make them a better a writer. All that will do will give you access to a great editor. I’d recommend investing that $500 in getting a professional editor to look at your novel. Then you’ll realise how good or bad you are. Which leads me finally to the most depressing part of this little blog entry: Most of you cannot write.

Regardless of how much time and energy you put into that project, you’ll never be that good. Whoever said every person has at least one novel in them should be shot. You don’t. At best, you have a decent short story, if you’re lucky, but the majority of writers out there have little to say and even less skill to say it. Sorry. But that’s the truth. Some may class myself in that unsympathetic summary, and maybe they’re right, but at the moment, I’m getting enough interest thrown my way that I’m willing to keep pushing for a little longer. I feel sorry for editors though. I truly do. Having to sift through the stacks of toilet fodder that someone, in a moment of absolute psychosis, believed was worthy of labelling a novel must be soul-destroying. I doff my hat to each and every one of you. I couldn’t do it. So yes, fledging writers of the world unite and give up. Honestly. It’s not worth losing your marriage over or missing out on seeing your kid ride their bicycle without the stabilizers or taking their first steps. Seriously, it’s not. This business is only for the insane, the selfish, the broken and the delusional. Be a good person and make the world a better place. Don’t think your writing will.

Back to the question: I personally have no idea when you’re allowed to say these things. I have no concept of when you’re good enough to be that arrogant you can pass down advice. Unlike their ability to wax lyrical on how to improve your writing, no author teaches you when you keep your mouth shut and when to open it.

Now there’s a course I may sign up for.

*Felling (taken from: http://www.woodlands.co.uk/blog/practical-guides/felling-a-small-tree/)

The first cut is the sink cut (front of tree) which controls the direction of the fall. It’s done in two parts using the bottom of the guide bar. The cuts should not be more than one quarter of the tree’s diameter.

Cut downwards at an angle of 45 degrees (60 degrees if downhill) ensuring the guide bar is at 90 degrees to the intended direction of the fall. This cut may be less than 45 degrees if felling over raised obstructions so that the hinge may break earlier.

The second part of the sink cut is horizontal and must meet the 45 (or 60) degree cut exactly.

Start the felling cut (back of tree) by aligning the guide bar slightly above the bottom of the sink cut, ensuring that you are standing to the side of the tree when making this cut. Stop cutting when there is a parallel strip of uncut timber not less than 1/10th of the diameter of the tree. This is the “hinge”. The tree should now start to fall, so move quickly out of the way to your safe place.

If the tree does not fall, do not cut further into the hinge. Use a felling lever or wedge. To use a felling lever, stand firmly with both hands on the lever, knees bent and back straight, lift upwards using your leg muscles. To use a wedge, insert the wedge into the felling cut opposite to the felling direction and drive it in using a sledge hammer.

Zombie Review

2012-01-20T08:41:00.000-08:00

Because I've not posted for some time due to tweaking this place, here's a little review I found on Amazon for my short story Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eaters:

Revenge of the Zombie [...] Eaters by Craig Wallwork has a censored title, so that Amazon would let post this review intact. The author wastes no time with a set-up, and jumps directly into the gore (nice touch with the tampon detail...eeewwww). BEST. ZOMBIE. TWIST. EVER...title is not an attempt to be shocking, but rather quite literal. Also qualifies as WEIRDEST. STORY. EVER. I will never think of genitals the same way again. This story needs its own genre...for now, I would place it somewhere near bizarro.

You can order the anthology, Midnight Movie Creature Feature by clicking this link. Thank you Ursula K. Raphael.

Underdevelopment

2012-01-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

You may see a few new changes around the website in the next coming weeks. I'm gearing up for the release of my short story collection, Quintessence of Dust, and my novel, To Die Upon a Kiss, so wanted to tidy up this place and give it a facelift. Most of the new features will not be active and the images in the above slideshow will be updated accordingly. Suffice it to say, the whole sight is underdevelopment. But please, keep checking in. The posts and most of the links will still be working an updated.

Thanks for your continued support.

Conjectural Figments #1

2012-01-02T17:40:00.000-08:00

Richard Thomas brought this one to my attention, or perhaps it was Simon West-Bulford...unsure, both are great authors and both keep me reaching within to pull out work as good as their own, so it's understandable I mix them up from time to time. Whomever it was, they put me in the direction of a new zine called, Conjectural Figments, set up by Andrew Post. The first ever edition went live today and centres on the subject of Transhumanism.

You'll find in the magazine an interview with author, Simon Morden. Poetry by Jhon Z. Baker and Dale Herring. And short fiction by Richard Thomas, Simon West-Bulford, and Rommel Luna H. Artwork by Marius Hjelseth and Glenn Porter.

You'll also find in there Factory 37, a short story of mine that tells the story of rat eating an android who thinks he's human. It's a really cool magazine, and it's FREE. So please, download it, have a read, and then spread the word.

Mlaz Neatherlandishes Me

2012-01-01T11:08:00.000-08:00

To celebrate the birth of the New Year, good friend and writer, Mlaz Corbier, has kindly taken one of my stories and translated it into Dutch. The story was originally called, Girth, but given the literal translation in Dutch is "Omvang", which, by all accounts, sounds lame, Mlaz has tweaked it slightly. The title is now, "Enlargement".

Giving great consideration to the fact Mr Corbier can be roguish at times, if anyone from the Netherlands drops in here and reads the story, please alleviate my concerns that he's not just used the opportunity to mock me and make comparisons to myself and Phil Collins by adding a comment.

If you'd like to read more by Mlaz, all of which you can find in English, then drop by his website: Red Puffin Tobacco.

And let me take this opportunity to wish you all a very flourishing New Year.

Verlenging

Origineel Geschreven Door Dhr. craig wallwork

& Geherinterpreteerd In Het Neederlands Door mlaz

Je moet het touw wat laten vieren, zei mijn vriend Jimmy en dat deed ik dan maar.

Toen ik aan het touw trok kwam er een man met hoorns op zijn hoofd en hoeven voor voeten tevoorschijn. Zijn huid was helemaal rood, hij zat onder de blaren en leek het duidelijk niet op prijs te stellen dat hij in het koude daglicht werd getakeld.

Jimmy liet het touw los en vroeg waar hij zich moest inschrijven.

Inschrijven? vroeg de rode man.

Jimmy was zo gek als een deur en bereid zijn ziel van de hand te doen omdat hij altijd al een grotere lul had willen hebben.

Kom op! Je kan mijn ziel krijgen, sprak hij, maar in ruil wil ik twintig centimeter kloppend vlees bij mijn lul aan geplakt hebben.

De rode man begon te lachen en zei dat hij de verkeerde voor zich had. Hij kocht geen zielen meer. Meer en meer mensen hadden de kerk de rug toegekeerd toen ze ontdekten hadden dat er oneindig seks en drugs verkrijgbaar was in Hel en zodoende hoefde de rode man geen enkele moeite meer te doen om zielen te winnen.

Maar hoe moet dat dan met dat lulletje van mij? vroeg Jimmy.

De rode man adviseerde hem een dwerg te trouwen of anders te sparen voor een penisverlenging en sprong terug in het gat waar hij vandaan was gekomen.

Jimmy kon zich zo’n operatie niet veroorloven en trouwde daarop met een dwerg. Zo hebben ze nu een behoorlijk goed bestaan in een klein huisje net buiten de stad. Soms zie ik hem lopen met zijn vrouw en ze zien er gelukkig genoeg uit.

Dan kan ik het niet helpen te denken dat grootte echt geen zak uitmaakt.

To Die Upon a Christmas Kiss

2011-12-24T11:09:00.000-08:00

Tis the eve of Christmas, and I’m a bit tipsy after having a few San Miguel’s in the local. But while my head is light, by heart is full with gratitude to those who have made 2011 very special for me. Big thanks go to Pablo D’Stair who saw some glimmer of importance in Quintessence of Dust, a short collection that features some of my best work, many of which have been published and some that are new. He’ll be pushing this out of KUBOA in the first quarter of 2012.

Equally, I can’t commit to words the appreciation I have to Snubnose Press who will be publishing my first novel, To Die Upon a Kiss in 2012 too. Yes, it finally has a title and it’s quite perfect for the novel. This is a really big deal for me and I’m looking forward to its release. Suffice to Say, this blog will be plagued with that title before the year is out.

Special thanks go to all those who have supported me through the year, be it either a morbid curiosity or an interest that stretched to enjoyment. You know who you are, and well…. Without you I would have fallen and forevermore never found my feet.

Finally, before I’m sick, let me wish you all a very merry Christmas, and whatever you pursue in 2012, I hope it’s a journey full of excitement and satisfaction. Take care, and thank you for making my year one of the most memorable.

Booked's Search of a City

2011-12-04T12:16:00.000-08:00

The good people of Booked are at it again, this time throwing praise at the great writers of Thunderdome's anthology, In Search of a City: Los Angeles in 1,000 Words, and yours truly got a mention. Skewered to the review is an interview with editor and main man of Thunderdome, Michael Paul Gonzalez, who drops by to say hello and talk about the book.

So, stop playing that PS3 game, put down that book, turn off the television and crack open a beer. It's time to pamper your ears with a podcast that will have you champing at the bit to buy, In Search of a City.

Pushcart and the Search for Los Angeles

2011-11-24T09:56:00.000-08:00

This year has been full of surprises. Aside from being published in some great journals, anthologies and magazines, I saw my short story collection, Quintessence of Dust, picked up by KUBOA and recently my novel (title still under negotiation) by Snubnose Press. So what a perfect ending to have one of my stories nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Yes, Menacing Hedge has put forward, Human Tenderloin, my story of a group of cannibals enjoying fine dinning. The story is free to read, so please, if you have the time, go over to Menacing Hedge and digest this gastronomy story.

Added to the excitement is the news that the anthology, In Search of a City: Los Angeles in 1,000 Words, that features my story, El Bordello Alexandra, is now available to buy from Thunderdome and Amazon.

From the editor, Michael Gonzalez: “Los Angeles is whatever you want it to be, and nothing like you think. I gave these photos to a group of authors and asked them for precisely 1,000 words about what they saw. They didn't disappoint. Dreams, drugs, drama. Fame, famine, and fading glory. Few of the authors in this book have stepped foot in L.A., yet the soul of this city is so invasive and pervasive that the collection embodies everything that makes up this sprawling metropolitan mess. There’s everyday life in Los Angeles, from the shiny dreams of the Hills to the hard realities of life in the Valley and out to the Inland Empire, and even more stories that are purely the stuff of dreams and fantasies, the kinds of worlds that exist only behind giant creaking doors on backlots scattered throughout the Southland. Whether you live here or just want to visit for a few moments, you’re in for one hell of a ride.”

The full TOC:

Ryan Wilson – “American Trash”

Stuart Gibbel – “Break on Through”

Craig Clevenger – “Obsolescence”

Nik Korpon - "South of Thirteen"

Dennis Cruz – “Smile Now, Cry Later”

Pela Via – “Bathhouse”

Stephen Conley – "Don't Feed the Animals"

Grigori Black – “This Was Heaven”

Doc O’Donnell – “Your Personal Apocalypse”

Nikki Guerlain – “Sick Ticket”

Patrick Verhagen – “Swim”

Craig Wallwork – “El Bordello Alexandra”

Nicholas Merlin Karpuk – “Ahm’s Bay”

Nik Houser – “Subtitles for a Silent Film”

H.R. Tardiff – “Walls in the Sand”

Richard Thomas – “The Jenny Store”

Bob Pastorella – “Alexandra”

Simon West-Bulford – “Project Asmodeus”

Jay Slayton-Joslin – “The Fantasy of California vs. The Reality of London”

Amanda Gowin – “Gilded Bones”

Chris Deal – “Padre Nuestro”

Boden Steiner – “Here”

Gordon Highland – "Fry Girl"

Edward J Rathke – “All the Dreams You Dreamt Retold”

Michael Paul Gonzalez – “Tidal”

Victor Bengtsson – “Venice, Forever”

A wonderful collection with many exciting and talented writers. It’s been a great year. Who knows, there’s still over a month to go. Maybe something else will happen before 2011 retires to the land of expired times.

E-Publishing: The Future?

2011-11-19T10:38:00.001-08:00

I stumbled on this by accident, but I really believe this is where the future of e-publishing lies.

http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/features/ts-spivet/index.html

To break it down, Reif Larsen, author of The Selective Works of T.S Spivet, created a book about a 12 year old cartographer featuring illustrations, creative footnotes, and little diagrams to bolster selected sections of the narrative. In truth, it's akin to House of leaves in its complexity and twice as pretty.

Larsen worked with Jeff Rabb in creating a app of this book for the iPad. The result is in the above link (check out the videos, especially the Demonstrating Spivet video).

For me, I got very excited watching this. You know when you see something and then the cogs go full steam and your brain is flooded with ideas, well, that's how it got me. At the moment, e-publishing is just about getting the words into a format that can be downloaded to e-readers. If you're lucky, you get an illustrated cover, which, if you're reading it through Kindle, looks really poor. I know interactive books have been around for a while on the iPad. I remember seeing a Winnie the Poo story and Alice in Wonderland version which was very interactive, but Larsen is taking it a little further by bringing in social media.

For me, this would be perfect for Dog Mile; old photographs, maps of the town, illustrations, the shifting landscape, diary entries, etc, they could all be interactive.

Too, with the iPad, you have a vehicle there which can play audio and video, so how cool would it be to select a passage in a book and hear an author's commentary about how they wrote that section, the inspiration behind it, whatever? This is already happening with Blu Ray, whereby we can gain access to more than just the film. I'm sure it's already underway, as Larsen has already shown, but the possibilities are endless. Yes, there's more work involved, but as a writer/reader, to get to see more, hear more, and know more about the book would be perfect. Kindle will get there in terms of colour and touch screen, so it won't be limited, soon, to just iPads.

Too, check out this website: http://tsspivet.com/ too cool.

Snubnose Press

2011-11-10T15:04:00.000-08:00

According to the Mayan long calendar, the end of the world in nigh. Well, December 21 2012 to be exact… probably around tea time. Yep, we’re going to be drowned in apocalyptic floods, walloped by a secret planet, seared by an angry sun, or thrown overboard by speeding continents. At least it beats watching the Christmas special of X Factor. It pleases me that if the purported ancient Mayan prediction is right, then it means I have seen at least one of my dreams come true. Getting my novel published.

Last Friday I had the pleasure of receiving a email from the very cool, Snubnose Press, informing me that they are going to publish my novel (title to be confirmed) midway through 2012. Why have I waited a week to tell you this exciting news? Unsure. Probably because it doesn’t feel real yet, even though I’ve signed the contract.

Hemmingway once said, allegedly, four things one must do to become a man is: plant a tree, fight a bull, write a novel, and father a son. I’ve fathered a daughter, planted a tree, fought a man the size of a bull, and wrote a novel (four to be exact). Maybe in Hemmingway’s eyes I’m not quite the man yet, but when I got that email last Friday, I damn well felt like the luckiest one alive.

Snubnose Press is a powerhouse of a publishing company. It already has among its growing authors, Sandra Ruttan, Keith Rawson, Patti Abbott, and boasts new work by Chad Rohrbacher, Helen Fitzgerald, Nik Korpon and Richard Thomas in 2012. Added to this the illustrator is the annoying talented Boden Steiner, and editor, Brian Lindenmuth, I’m being to feel somewhat of a fraud being there. Nonetheless, they’ve opened their doors, and now I have my size 12s firmly wedged in the gap to stop them from shutting it in my face.

So yes, it’s end of the world next year, but before then I’ll have my short story collection, Quintessence of Dust published by KUBOA Publishing, my novel by Snubnose Press, and a fair few short stories out there too. What better reading can you ask for while you await that final Tsunami?

Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eaters

2011-10-29T16:55:00.000-07:00

May December's Midnight Movie Creature Feature anthology featuring my short story, Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eaters is now available on Kindle.

For those that don't know anything about the story, it recently featured at Booked Podcast as part of their first Zombie Extravaganza Spectacular with guest hosts, Amanda Gowin and Chris Deal, as well as inputs from Gordon Highland and Mlaz Corbier.

The story is about a group of friends that stumble into a micro lesbian zombie apocalypse and features characters named after a lot of people from The Vevet and Write Club: Caleb J Ross, Richard Thomas, Nik Korpon, Boden Stiener, Gordon Highland, Mlaz Corbier, Bob Pastorella, Chris Deal, Edward J Rathke and Pela Via to name a few. Here's the offical burb:

Please step inside the May December Multiplex!

Check out any of our seventeen screens for tales that will titllate, tease, and terrify. Lesbian zombies? We got 'em! Along with vampires, werewolves, swamp creatures and a host of other nasty beasties. Inside, you will find the first B-Movie Horror Story written for geology junkies!* Yes, come in and enjoy the show. And the best part is...your ticket is good for every screen! No need to sneak from one theater to the next...it is ALL included in the price of admission!

Hurry and find your seat, the show will start as soon as you are ready!

*We base this claim on nothing more than our own best guess. It has no basis in fact and may be an outright lie!

This anthology contains A Golem in Ozone Park starring Jim Sylvestry,
The Lure starring Chantal Boudreau,
A Zinger Must Die starring David Perlmuter,
The Pit starring Terry Alexander,
The Spine-Tingling Tale of the Crystal Golem starring Tom Ribas,
Just the Two of Us starring Anthony Bell,
The Fish Boy starring Eric Dimbleby,
And the Dark Growls Back starring Aaron Dries,
Visitor starring Kelley Kombrinck,
Frightening Cliches starring Bennie Newsome,
Dead Planet starring Ryan Hillis,
Hayride starring Joseph A Polega,
Fish Out of Water starring Carl Barker,
From Rebirth to Reburial starring M.W. Williamson,
North starring MJ Wesolowski,
Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eater starring Craig Wallwork, and
Keeping it Together starring DK Mok.

Spread the word!

The Libby Syndrome Live at Bourbon Penn

2011-10-21T23:48:00.000-07:00

I'm proud to announce that my short story, The Libby Syndrome, is now available to read at Bourbon Penn. This is a strange little story about how a photographer's desperate attempts to have a family results in a small town's demise.

This third issue by Bourbon Penn includes new stories by Samantha Henderson, Sam Duda, Michael Johnson, Shamus Maxwell, R.D. Kimball, and David Gould, and cover art by Luis Diaz.

Please help support the journal by buying a print copy. Come on, even if you don't like the stories, you could hang that cover on the wall.

Thanks for reading.

The Choice of Dogs

2011-10-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

With the amount of space Pablo D'Stair has occupied on this Blog in the past few months, I really should consider charging him rent. He's like the friend who came to crash for one night, and yet some three years later he's still here, eating your toilet roll and pissing in your sink. But the thing is, you kind of need those friends around. They fill the void of isolation with words. They allow you to reflect on the world, and yourself. They become more comforting than shadow. Pablo is the room mate I like having around. He's an encyclopedia of cool films, and the feral artist that makes you believe in the impossible. The painful part for me is he's a very good writer too, and only good writers share my space, in one form or another.

The Choice of Dogs is a collection of selected poems Pablo wrote during the last eight years.

The collection is available as a FREE EBOOK for most e-reader formats via Smashwords and there is a print version of the collection for those interested available for $3.95 (plus shipping)–links can be found by clicking the Print/Ebook tab.

You can find The Choice of Books here.

That site contains the full texts of each poem, as well as audio of each piece being read by Pablo.

He also welcomes any and all comments, reactions, harsh critiques, etc. of the pieces, individually or the collection as a whole, and would love to be able to include dialogue with readers on the site. He will respond to any and all correspondence personally and promptly

unburiedcomments@gmail.com

Booked Eats Pussy

2011-10-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

I never make excuses or give apologises for my stories, ever. They are what they are. I don't write them to intentionally shock people, it's just I have learned to let go of the reigns many years ago and write what I want to write about, which is why I'm sure some readers will glance at the title of my new short story, Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eaters, and roll their eyes. For those that do this, please, please, DO NOT read the story. If the title offends you then the content of this story is going to drive you crazy with rage. This is why I really dig it when people take the risk and read my work and actually like it. Two of these intelligent and unprejudiced individuals were Robb Olson and Livius Nedin of Booked Podcast.

Booked is a weekly podcast where two avid readers review and discuss books, conduct author interviews, and make recommendations for good books they’ve read. Booked's goal is to deliver book reviews by everyday readers, for everyday readers.

This week's podcast was Booked's first Zombie Extravaganza Spectacular with guest hosts, Amanda Gowin and Chris Deal, as well as inputs from Gordon Highland and Mlaz Corbier. They were kind enough to review Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eaters and as you will hear, much hilarity ensued.

Those that know me will contest I am very self-effacing when it comes to any words of praise for my stories, which is why this podcast left me both crying with laughter and shivering with gratitude.

Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eaters will appear soon in the Midnight Movie Creature Feature anthology, published by May December Publications, and edited by TW Brown. Once it's available for consumption, I'll post the link. But now, enjoy the first, and probably only, review of the funniest zombie story you'll read this year.

Serge Gainsbourg. La Horse

2011-10-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

Keep getting better.

Zombie Interview #2: Amanda Gowin

2011-10-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

A while back some of you may remember I had a zombie walking around in my garden. In traditional fashion, I didn’t know where he had come from, or indeed how he was walking around, but it turns out it was the corpse of interviewer to the stars, Bill Grundy. Well, he’s back and hungry for another interviewee. He’d already taken a chunk out of my life, so I arranged a Skype conversation with him zombie expert, writer, and Appalachia princess, AMANDA GOWIN. There are few writers around today who have the ability within their writing to make me laugh in one breath and drown me in pathos the next. Amanda’s one of these people. Her prose is like buckshot, and I like to imagine her standing in the isolated foothills of Appalachia loading a shotgun with her words and firing it onto the page. I challenge anyone reading this transcription not to fall in love with Amanda and her stories. But hey, enough from me; it’s time to hand over to the zombie.

Grundy: Uuuuunnnngg?

Gowin: My hometown? I think as a source of complicated and grossly underestimated people, Appalachia has always been overlooked. And there is a wealth of culture here - not just the music or the romanticism of the coal miners. I realize there are rednecks everywhere, and poverty everywhere, and those are the cliché attributes. But there's something a bit magical and inspiring about an entire culture built from rejection and the simple refusal to give up. Which in my eyes, essentially is how Appalachia was born. This isn't going to turn into a history lesson, but when you have migration that happens not in a visionary sense, but in the sense that the people who came here could not find work, blacks and Irish among them, in more settled and 'civilized' areas and kept moving because they had to, that's a completely different basis for how you view your life and the world. There is almost a genetic defensiveness and vulnerability in the people of Appalachia. Add a very basic acceptance of mortality - due to vocation and lifestyle - and you have an amazing cocktail of influences by the time you hit the ground. It is made of interesting people. I didn't always see this, but it has been a huge influence on my writing - love and death, hope and recklessness. I love this place.

Grundy: Mmmmmuuuugggghhhh?

Gowin: Being largely new to this thing you call 'published' - I've been at this submission thing for a little over three years now - I would say The World Was Clocks, even now, mainly for what it represented is my favourite. Some of the other stories - First and Last Scene at Blackheart, Teetotaler at Thunderdome are good examples - can be appreciated on one level as crime fiction, but Tilly and Tabby, what I refer to The World Was Clocks as in my head, was my little misfit story that no one seemed to want or like. And I kept thinking "No, but this is something, I just know it is." The positive feedback for the story since dear, dear Pela placed it in the Warmed and Bound has given me a huge boost as far as my own judgement, it's helped me to trust myself when making decisions on how to shape stories and characters. I mean, to be honest, really the only things I've been scribbling about are love and addiction; I've just begun to stretch my wings into other subject matter.

Grundy: Arrrrrrhhhhhh?

Gowin: I didn't develop a writing style. I just wrote things for years and years and tucked them into folders. That sounds really nice though, I like that, buckshot - I take that as a high compliment from someone who seems to have an almost infuriating knack for putting words in the right place. I've learned to strip away the excess, I think, to trust things to stand on their own without the added footnoting after each sentence - I'm trying, trying still. Learning still.

Grundy: Meeehhhh. Uuuuunnnngg?

Gowin: My novel is a mess. I mean, it's a disassembled monster at this point, full of promising pieces and characters I'm incredibly happy with - the test will be in my skill as Dr. Frankenstein. I won't give up, I have every confidence that I can make it breathe. We'll see how crazy I am when it's done.

Grundy: Hhhhhhnnnnmmmm?

Gowin: You're asking me to analyze YOU? As say, a person or a - oh I see, you're being philosophical. What do I think zombies are... you know that's a clever way to get my defenses down, as now you've made me re-evaluate application of the idea 'in most scenarios braindead.' To be fair, and taking into account your obvious exceptional condition, let me be simple and say one that was dead, and raised from that state unnaturally, and usually - no offense - not retaining most brain functions. A shell, if you will. Almost a blank slate.

Grundy: Hhhhhhaaaahhhuuuuurrrrggggghhhh?

Gowin: Oh, zombie movies. I love them all. But factoring in fear, I don't really find zombies frightening - if I did would I be doing this, talking with you? As far as being entertained, I do prefer a bit of humor - FIDO and Evil Dead over say, Resident Evil. I love Resident Evil, don't get me wrong, but clever comedy and creative gore win over the traditional bang bang storylines for me every time. I like to see the interpretation stretched, to see a bit of the brain bumbling about in the shell.

Grundy: Uuuuuhhhhhh?

Gowin: Hard to say. When I was young the most influential zombie movie for me was, Night of he Living Dead - an enemy that wants what it wants and can't be reasoned with is an exciting enemy. Shawn of the Dead was really the hardest kick to my adult head on how socially relevant a zombie film could be - the whole morning sequence where the differences went unnoticed. Also, it being a comedy, I wasn't expecting that kick. Might be why I prefer the tongue-in-cheek films.

Grundy: Ggrrrrrruuuhhhh?

Gowin: You are a bit egotistical. 'Popular.' Zombies are 'SO popular.' Well, I think it's very simple. The world is living in a perpetual state of disappointment that there was no Apocalypse at the Millenium. And zombies are fluid, as an idea. They can function as vehicles for deeper meanings and platforms, or the ultimate guilt-free moving target. Something for everyone.

Grundy: Uhhhhhhhuuuug?

Gowin: Where do I see the zombie franchise in another ten years? Where zombies are depends on where the world is. Horror and monsters cycle in and out. Werewolves are up and coming, and after their heyday the vamps will be back, then another monster will cycle in. If the world keeps not ending and First World people stay satiated and bored and resentful of themselves and their lack of need, well, the zombie will stay around in its - to me - most interesting parallel of humans yet - The Bored. The Overscheduled. The Understimulated. The Unthinking.

Grundy: Mmmmmnnnnnnuuuhhhhh?

Gowin: No social subtext is necessary in zombie stories - Romero has been a genius, making zombie movies just chockfull of zombies that are about this social issue or that. But really, you just need good, or creative and entertaining effects and good non-zombie characters. I discussed this a little with Craig Wallwork, the key to zombie stories being the skill with which the zombies are used to create a backdrop as opposed to playing key roles - it also applies to the current trend in a lot of zombie films: post-post-Apocalypse. 28 Weeks Later. Resident Evil Afterlife. Zombieland. To be more broad, in the Apocalyptic sense, The Road. The Romero formula doesn't suit my particular way of approaching zombie storytelling. I'm interested in what happens after the exciting part - once things settle down and people stop fighting and have to just, you know, wash dishes and find mates and think past day-to-day all over again.

Grundy: Uuuuunnnngg?

Gowin: I hope you have nothing planned. But if you and your kind - does that sound racist? - invade tomorrow, you had better skip right on over me. I'm from the hills. I can shoot like nobody's business and climb like a monkey. I don't eat much, I can clean a chicken - or a squirrel for that matter - and I don't mind being alone. I'll be fine.

Grundy: Grrrrruuuuhhhhhhh?

Gowin: Oh, if I could pick a zombie film to have been in, I would pick Fido. I would've LOVED to have been in Fido, the costuming was beautiful. Screw playing an extra or part of the scenery, I want to go back in time and play Tammy.

Grundy: AAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHHHHH?!

Gowin: My own work in zombies is muddled - ask Sandy. She's - well, she's just a head. We play dress up, watch movies... let's not talk about Sandy, suffice to say she's around. She'll pop up in my blog soon, she gets restless near Halloween. Let's see, various film clips, minor make-up and effects dabbling, a blog serial, short stories...... and I love Zombies! the board game. But not nearly as much as fake blood.

Grundy: Meeehhhh. Uuuuunnnngg?

Gowin: If I became a zombie, I’d bite the hell out of everyone I could. I'd be all lies and teeth.

Amanda Gowin lives with her husband and son in the foothills of Appalachia. Her work can be found in Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology, the upcoming In Search of a City: Los Angeles In a Thousand Words, Blink Ink, Nefarious Muse, and in various places around the web. Links can be found on her blog: www.lookatmissohio.wordpress.com. She has always written and always will.

Amanda will also be discussing Craig Wallwork's short story, Revenge of the Zombie Pussy Eaters on Booked.

Nigel Bird Reviews Bruised Flesh

2011-10-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

Nigel Bird, author of Dirty Old Town, has been kind enough to drag himself from writing aching viseral stories to review my Warmed and Bound story, Bruised Flesh, in Spinetingler Magazine.

Taken from Amazon, DIRTY OLD TOWN is the debut collection from the prize-winning writer Nigel Bird. His brilliantly observed slices of life allow us to visit places we may not normally choose to enter and to walk a few miles in the shoes of others.

Though his tales have darkness at their core, they are also full of a heart and spirit that one rarely finds in the world or ‘noir’ or ‘crime-writing’.

There are 9 stories here: Drinking Wine (Spo-Dee-Oh-Dee); Dirty Old Town; Sea Minor; Sisterhood; One Hundred And Ten Per Cent; Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight); Three Little Birds; and Silver Street. Each will remain with you for days after you’ve read it. Some will be around for weeks.

In this collection we meet a frustrated housewife who needs to let her hair down; an elderly school janitor who can’t see the wood for the trees; a group of Muslims intent on revenge; a young girl whose father has just left home; a father and son breaking-and-entering partnership; a young man working on a city farm; and a pimp who’s fallen in love. All of them struggle to meet life’s demands and some of them cope better than others.

Five of the stories here have been published by the highly respected editors of The Reader Magazine, A Twist Of Noir, Beat To A Pulp, Title Fights, Static Movement and Dark Valentine. The collection also includes two pieces that are being given their first outing and another that was put together put for the Big Beat From Badsville's Ramones series.

In 2010 Nigel Bird was the winner of the prestigious Watery Grave Invitational competition hosted by the Drowning Machine. Since then he has gone on to win the Things I’d Rather Be Doing fairytale/crime-story competition.

Praise for Nigel Bird and his work includes:

'The stories have well written plots and all have unexpected endings which are not obvious when reading them. I found the stories to be well conceived and ideal to read in ebook format. I hope that Nigel is able to write a full size novel to further develop his writing skills. Some of the short stories here could easily have been the base for a much longer book.' Paul Blackburn (at Euro Crime)

‘This is crime writing at its best. Read this collection, it is a crime not to do so.’
Richard Godwin (Apostle Rising)

'Each story is short and sweet, most with a nice wicked twist at the end. The blurb accompanying the collection says that the stories will stay with you for a while. A couple of them have certainly been rattling round my head for a few days. I did have one complaint, however – I wanted more of them! A nice collection.' Rob Kitchin (View From The Blue Room)

‘I was surprised by every story. These are short, punchy, thoughtful, hard as a punch, but sometimes they dig in and squeeze. It's dirty stuff, done beautifully.Nigel is also responsible for the too-cool "Dancing With Myself" interview series at his blog, Sea Minor.” Anthony Neil Smith (Yellow Medicine, Psychosomatic, Hogdoggin')

‘Taking A Line For A Walk’, included here, was listed among the top 5 stories of 2010 by Bill Hayes and Naomi Johnson over at Death By Killing.

'It won't take long to realise he is also one of the best writers out there on the noir scene' Ian Ayris (Abide With Me)

‘A rare talent.’ Allan Guthrie (Bye Bye Baby, Hard Man, Slammer)

Human Tenderloin

2011-10-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

A while back I wrote a story about a group of people who get together once a month for a fine dining experience. I was interested in the dynamics of those attending, the howbrow conversation and penchant for the what can only be considered exceptional in the world of gastronomy. But I wanted a twist. I wanted to render the lives of these people in the head of the reader as strange, perverse and sick. So I made them cannibals. The result is Human Tenderloin, a story of cannibal cuisine.

After writing it, the bare bones of the story got the shit kicked out of them in my writing workshop. After that happened, I put the story to rest before sending it out a few places. Hit some of the big name but perhaps the subject was too iniquitous for their taste buds. Then I found Menacing Hedge. I loved Human Tenderloin not because it was sick, or shocking a subject, but for the humour. Thankfully, Menacing Hedge saw that too and excepted it after one day.

Now the story is live in their Fall edition. Some great names in there, and i'm very proud to have Human Tenderloin stand beside them. But instead of me reeling the list, here's the offical blurb:

Menacing Hedge Fall 2011 Edition

The fall edition of Menacing Hedge is graced with the work of fifteen brilliant writers, one talented young photographer and the artwork of an acclaimed pop surrealist. Wallwork offers up a mouth-watering story of high society cannibals and their shopping dilemmas. Thompson brings a series of research-based poems shining an unblinking eye on the victims of Ted Bundy followed by the chilling Anonymous poem. Conroy explores the physicality of bodies, the making and unmaking of monsters, and the upkeep of what is one part awful and one part necessary. Poyner takes us to an alternative universe filled with the delightful but somewhat treacherous creatures, the Orikind. Reale's piece, Learn(ed), describes the subtleties of an abusive relationship and its precarious underpinnings. Budden's work, the Jolly Butcher's Lament, enters into the land of magical realism where the chief creature in a painting enters a pub and creates well-deserved mayhem. Doreski's poems explore the power of place, underground houses, haunted spaces, and a village collapsed.

Dickinson presents an interview with the actress Jean Seberg, which manages to span her lifetime – her role as Joan of Arc, her time in Paris, and her Midwest beginnings – with imagery and memories so searing, it feels as if Dickinson is channeling Seberg's very spirit. Altman takes us from the Qing Dynasty and a savvy snuffbox and unwise concubine, to a monstrous man whose actions resonate in modern Chinatowns, and then to the blue gas of God, with images that flex and strain seeking to escape the page. Bashaar transports the reader to uncertain corners of places: love, diners, and poetry readings in restrooms, her voice crashing through everything, like mad birds through glass. Rainwater-Lites embarks into poverty, the concrete minutiæ of everyday life, transcending the mundane to find beauty in its particular painfulness, while also exploring the connectivity between unlikely individuals. Connell's Metropolitan Hotel describes one man's journey from boredom to violent enlightenment, through a series of bizarre encounters with a mysterious woman.

Randall and Shapiro have borrowed old seventies diagrams from the Exploratorium and added their own comments, creating images and words that compel the reader to re-explore formal conventional wisdoms and ideas of human relationships. Dexter's piece, The Nudist Cover-up, takes us from a child's discovery of his teacher's floating corpse to a strange ritualistic covering of the same child's body with sand. Bennett's images are filled with poems and stories, from a shadow on a trailer to chilled red feet over wire. Grindley puts us in the feet of The God of Minor Inconvenience, whose power may be limited but whose repercussions are vast, reminding the reader of how even the smallest of inconveniences can ultimately render devastation. Finally, Scott Musgrove conjures and paints imaginary beasts, which live and breathe and leap from the page, given pulse and breath and blood.

Enjoy!

We Call Upon the Author

2011-09-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

Exactly.

Quintessence of Dust

2011-09-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

There is a saying (oh no, I hear you cry, he’s off again!) that goes along the lines of, write what you want to read. If I may, I’d like to add a caveat to that. Write what you want to read, and read only what you write. Least that’s my mindset at the moment.

I’m not reading anything at the moment but my own work because I’m editing a lot of short stories that I’m putting together for a collection called Quintessence of Dust. This short story collection might get picked up, it might not, but regardless, the exercise has been a, dare I say, enjoyable experience. But here’s the problem. I like what I write because it’s what I want to read, but am I delusion to think that anyone else would want to read it too?

Maybe I’m just impressed with my output because I know my own limitations, and from what I have read, I have surpassed them. However, when measured against another person, is the writing, at best, average? Guess only time will tell, but I am sure if there are no takers for this collection, I will spend many nights sat peacefully beside the fire reading it with great joy swelling my heart.

Chestnuts

2011-09-20T09:50:00.001-07:00

It’s official. Very little happens unless you make it happen. Writers write. I know, they’re all clichés, but I’m a writer too and sometimes you have to fall on a chestnut to realise you’re at the foot of a tree. Okay, that one was made up and very bad, but the point is, don’t think people will find you. They won’t. Maybe they will, but it’s highly unlikely. That saying about staying in one place long enough and you’ll see the world go by, well, the person who did that was found rotting in a cobwebbed chair with cats eating their toes. Nothing comes to you. Nothing wants you. Get and out and make it happen. Enough.

Twist, Turns and Spoilers

2011-09-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

Deconstructing stories lines has taken all the shine off immersion. You probably do it without thinking, but stories, however they’re portrayed, tend to have a formula that requires us to deconstruct it in order to see, or pre-empt the end, twist or turn. Found myself doing this again for Scream 4. Didn’t catch this on the cinema, but then again, I don’t tend to go to the cinema to watch horror movies. I think I’ve seen three at the cinema. The Night of the Living Dead remake, Candyman and the Exorcist. So yes, had enough of sticking fingers in my ear and jumping off the seat like a man sitting on a cattle prod. I wait now until they’re on DVD and then I get them when I have more control over the volume level and I can look foolish only in front of my wife if my drink of hot tea jumps out of hand and scolds my never regions.

So Scream 4 follows the slasher format and then some. I’m sure you know the story, but for those who have had their head in the sand for the past ten or fifteen years (unsure how long it’s been), you have this little town where a killer is going around dressed in a ghost mask slashing kids and, well, anyone else who has a speaking line in the movie. Not a bad franchise. And I think the reason it did well was because it broke the formula. It was the first film of its kind to actually give the audience the formula and the rules of horror. It was a movie within a movie. But here’s the thing. While watching the latest instalment, I was deconstructing the plot based on the makers of Scream’s deconstruction of the archetypal horror plot, seen first in Scream 1, the horror plot which were written by writers many years ago who in turn had spent an age deconstructing the formula of horror literature so that the audience wouldn’t prophesise the end. This makes it very confusing because EVERYONE becomes a suspect in Scream. EVERYONE has a motive. EVERYONE could be the killer. And while doing all this Holmesian analysis, I've become so detached from the story that it becomes more a game of Cluedo than a joy.

It’s the same of jokes, books, adverts, comics, anything that has a story. And what, we’re supposed to now make the plot so convoluted that the audience/reader is left chasing their tail? The last time I really got an “Oh my god, really?” moment was when I watched The Usual Suspects. Maybe Catfish too, but hey, the jury is out on that one, still. And yes, Se7en was interesting, but I enjoyed the attention to detail, the actual act of each sin and the work that when into each rather than the, “what is in the box?”

So is the modern audience/writer too in tune with the writers/directors bid to use subterfuge to carry their vision? Are we too savy to the all the tricks? And if so, does this mean it’s more difficult to write a good story these days with a decent plot that actually has you tearing through the pages, or on the edge of your seat? It’s almost as if the real great twists have spoilt it for the rest. Reminds me of that scene in I.T. Crowd when Roy is invited to Douglas’s house to watch the new Tarantino flick and Douglas spends the entire time annoyingly anticipating the plot twist, ending with, “He died and is a ghost!” (I’m paraphrasing so don’t sue me). So yes, the main character is really dead. It’s all a dream. The gimp is the one killing them all. She’s really crazy and the whole film was in her mind. Tyler Durden didn’t exist. And so one and so on. And all this because I wanted to watch a film without breaking the story down during it. Maybe I need to watch more Ben Stiller movies.

Couldn’t find the scene from the IT Crowd, but I’ve added this one instead.

Sucker Punched

2011-09-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

I don’t have long. I’m not dying, least I hope I’m not, well, no more than I should be dying, which is to say, sluggishly dying. No, I have about ten minutes before my wife and daughter get home and I have to play with my daughter and listen with great interest to my wife’s day at work, all of which has nothing to do with this blog entry, and in the time I’ve written this I could have actually saved myself at least three minutes (I’m a slow typist. Actually, I type fast, but sometimes I type too fast and my brain gets in front of my fingers and I have to do a lot of editing which slows things down). So yes, let’s get on with it:

Sucker Punch. No, I’m not winded as I write this out. More frustrated. Watched the film on Friday night and I say watched but really I caught the first thirty five minutes and fell asleep. Those that know me would tell you that this is normal and bares no reflection on the film. My father suffers from the same condition where you put a film on and fall asleep within the first thirty minutes. Maybe it’s a mild form of narcolepsy but mostly likely it’s due to being tired. But yes, the older I get the more soporific films become. TV shows, I have no trouble staying awake for, but films releax me, maybe too much. As a child I would accompany my father to the locate video shop and stand with him as he picked out Chuck Norris movies like Lone Wolf MCQuade and ask, “Have we seen this one?” and I would nod because we had, and the only reason he couldn't remember the film was because he feel asleep just after the trailers. it would be great if films could be compressed into four minutes or something. Being with my father at the video shop was like being with a person going through the first stages of dementia. And man, I wish I had dementia when I put Sucker Punch on because it was such a bad film. In truth, it wasn’t a film at all, from what I remember, but more a long music video. Lots of slowed down rain and quirky angles, soft focussed being pulled into clarity as the business end of a 45 blasts out a little CGI bullet. And that’s the problem with it. When did movies become so pretty they lost sight of the story?

Okay, I said I would try and veer away from writing, but this is all connected in some way, isn’t it? It’s true of myself, that’s for sure, but like Sucker Punch I have found myself sewing together fine sentences so rich and poetic that after a while there is nothing there, you know, behind it. It just looks pretty, sounds pretty aloud, and is no different than those girls and boys who are crafted by the hands of some gifted artist that resides in the womb of their mothers, a real fucking Caravaggio that must crawl up the woman’s uterus soon after the eggs are fertile. Nine months later, his work is shat out into the world. But what this artist forgets is that behind his masterful strokes and breathtaking landscape of flawless skin and bejewelled eyes, he forgot to put a fucking brain in. Ain’t no Oz here, sorry. So yes, they walk through life lighting up a room whenever they enter because the one behind their eyes has gone out. So, Sucker Punch, it’s like that, a pretty picture, a beautiful person, but man, nothing there at all. And so I have to remind myself that nothing beats a good story. Nothing beats a good story. Tap my ruby slippers and say it again, “Nothing beats a good story” and back home I go, to the laptop to try and crank out something that maybe a little prosaic, or perhaps a little ugly, but bring enough of these words together and the world over they unite and for a moment they can all sing that song by Christina Aguilera and within ugliness something quite beautiful resides. Or maybe not.

Brain Dump

2011-09-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

Realised yesterday I’ve not spent that much time updating my blog. And I think that’s because I’m unsure what to say. The thing is, I talk to people a lot in forums, email, and twitter, and to then think of a subject and begin writing it down as a blog is somewhat exhausting a concept. I’ve done it in the past with this or that, and I guess they have been formulated in advance of sitting before the laptop, but never have I just sat down and wrote something, or wrote so freely like I do in correspondence and posts in forums. So here’s the thing (and perhaps I’m using that term a lot), I might just begin brain dumping here. Have no theme, no real concept, nothing to say but what’s in my head. Stream of consciousness in places, perhaps. And I don’t think it will include books, or writing, which this site has been weighed down by in the past. So yes, that’s the plan. But for now, I need to eat and tuck my daughter into bed. Adios, for now.

Ruben Remus Ain't No Doctor

2011-09-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

Pablo D'Stair (yes, him again) is looking for people (preferably who do not know him) to agree to be early readers of the soon-to-be-released (and publisher-less) book Ruben Remus ain't no doctor. If you are interested, after contacting D'Stair at unburiedcomments@gmail.com a copy will be sent to you. What is being asked is that you write a cogent personal response (not a review, necessarily) of 500-1000 words which will be posted on the books site when it is officially released--and by cogent, he means that even if you hate it, please cogently tear it a new asshole, just do it for the at least 500 words. To give you a taste of what you are in for, the opening section of the book is below. (NOTE: While it might seem like it, the narrator's voice is not neccessarily D'Stair's)

Excerpt (opening section)

Days Inn Motel, Arkansas someplace
February 11th
3:45 a.m.

Two instances (there are others, but I’m in a bad head so kind of blanking) where I misheard Dylan lyrics but my mishearing turned out to be an improvement (this happens with other lyrics by other people, I’m not trying to be a dick to Dylan here or anything) are as follow:

First, from “Born In Time” off of my favorite (I’m not saying its qualitatively “his best” just that it’s my favorite) album Under The Red Sky (brilliant album).

Dylan actually writes:

You were snow, you were rain
You were striped, you were plain

Very beautiful—incredible actually, especially sung, especially sung by Dylan, especially sung in this particular song (“in context,” so to speak) but beautiful nevertheless just there all alone.

What I heard (and think is far superior) is, as in the other instance I am about to relate, very close and goes:

You were stone, you were rain
You were striped, you were plain

Obviously nothing could get better than “you were striped, you were plain” and had I misheard this bit, for example (thought it went “you were striped, you were pain” or “you were shaped, you were plain” or even “your WORE striped, you WORE plain” or whatever) my mishearing would be wrong and the lyric would be the worse for it, I admit that—some things should not be misheard, some things should not be changed.

It’s mostly that, while principally the same expression, it strikes me there is something more longingly true in positing Stone and Rain as opposite—in a sense, both are component of each other, dependent, shape and restrain each other (the rain to the stone, the grooves of the stone then like veins directing the rain, the rain gouging reservoirs, basins, the stone then becoming home, defining to the rain) while Snow and Rain are more like two states of the same thing. Striped and Plain (which they are set next to) are less variants, more dependents (the plainness at once being usurped by the stripes but also giving them bounds and definition) two things necessary to each other yet so distinctly, separately nameable.

And it’s all well and good, it doesn’t matter.

What’s that? Oh, I know you’re thinking it (dismissing me) but I’ve thought of it before, I’m (as I said) not trying to take anything or anyone down a peg—just because something can be improved doesn’t mean there was deficit—go read Inventions of the March Hare, you can see T.S. Eliot’s original Prufrock with Ezra’s blue pen marking it up (sure, Prufrock as it is, as we know it, is perfect, but it is a fool who thinks it wasn’t perfect before the alterations, too—it is two perfect things, and one can still be better than the other without one having to admit to “imperfection”). I’m not saying strike the one from the record, replace it with the other, I’m saying if Dylan were thinking about it, he’d change it (like Eliot did) still adoring (as I imagine Eliot does) the original (the “actual”, even).

Artists give something, but they keep more—that’s the way it is and anyone who is an artist knows it and anyone who doesn’t, isn’t an artist (also not a deficiency, just a fact that they aren’t).

Anyway—admittedly, the set Snow/Rain and the set Striped/Plain could have been the single “set-of-two” Dylan’s unconscious shot up his spine and, in that case, I don’t have a leg to stand on, but I don’t feel inclined to think that—it isn’t two “single things composed of two” i.e. You are this contradictory combination and you are also that contradictory combination, it is four things: (one) opposed to (two) and (three) opposed to (four), not (one and two) together and (three and four) together.

So that’s settled.

On the album Desire, in the song “One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below)” (where did this mini-masterpiece come from, by the way?—the song and the album as a whole?) Dylan actually writes:

And your pleasure knows no limits
And your voice is like a meadowlark
Your heart is like an ocean
Mysterious and dark

Not the bit I’d change, but I will (a pointed aside) say that calling a woman’s heart “an ocean/mysterious and dark” has been unfortunately made cliché by film and television, but it is nonetheless a beautiful and—I have to admit I think so, anyway—true statement (or if it isn’t true, then woman’s hearts should strive to be more like that, it’s something, even in the abstract, anyone with brains in their head and not shit knows is desirable, knows is beautiful).

And the fact he says “an ocean” and not “THE ocean” is sublime—it’s fucking sublime (see, I should be listened to—try to deny that and try to assert you even thought of that, that sublime differentiation)
What I heard was

And your pleasure knows no limit
And your voice is like a metal lock
Your heart is like an ocean
Mysterious and dark

Which, from the get, wins because even just the approximate rhyme of Lock and Dark is painfully gorgeous. Moreover, a woman’s voice literally IS like a metal lock—it might be like a meadowlark, too (and sure I see the unconscious juxtaposition of calm-and-pretty to dark-and-potentially-tumultuous, pleasant to treacherous) but it’s far more true that a woman’s voice is like a metal lock (especially the voice of a woman you are in love with and—debate it if you want to, but you’ll just reveal yourself to be an imbecile—Dylan sings here of a woman a man loves and—let’s face facts—probably a woman that he loves, at the same time) and if you think a woman-you’re-in-love-with’s voice isn’t like that, go listen to her voice, you haven’t been listening.

But, as I say, the point isn’t to chastise Dylan or even (as I try to emphasize and re-emphasize hotly) the lyrics I mention, which are (yes) beautiful—I just get the feeling Dylan didn’t quite hear himself, it happens to everyone and I think it happens to him probably a lot and on a scale and with a poignancy I’m hopeless to do anything but stumble and gum at the bones of (not hero worship, I’m plenty fine an artist myself, thanks).

Still, I wonder what he would make of that simple thing—I heard him sing something and loved it, but I heard something else than what he said, and then when I heard what he said I loved “what he said” less than “what I heard” but still loved “what he said” and the more passionately for the personalization of it, the coming to it instead of having it said and simply nodding at it in assent.

The motel is Arkansas (postscript) is abhorrent—they left two packets of decaffeinated coffee for me instead of one of each (or two caffeinated) and some previous guest’s toothbrush (in a plastic bag) was on top of the television. Outside it’s like a pinhole view of hell except it’s still a motel parking lot and (hell or not) those are something always beautiful.

Embalmed Minds

2011-08-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

There’s been a push recently into literature. And I say push, but really I mean I’m pushing myself with all my weight to motivate myself to sit down and read. This shouldn’t be happening , right? A person who likes to write should also enjoy reading. And I do, enjoy reading. Have done and will continue to do. But when I say that there’s been no drive to sit down and read, I can only think that my passion for the prose is tempered by the need to write prose. Something has to give. Not saying I’m never going to read another story or novel again, but at this moment in time (which is why I’m writing this now) I find my time can be used more productively by committing words to paper rather than absorbing them.

I’ve recently spent a week writing two stories. One was 6K the other was 2K. 8K in a week. Had guilt tapped me on the shoulder during that process and said, “Hey, do you know you’ve not read anything in over a week? If fact, the last thing you read you gave up on half way through. Isn’t it about time you stopped writing and read something?” then I may have surrendered my pen (fingers in this case) and threw myself into a book. But here’s the thing…

I don’t need books to amplify me. I need only my imagination. Inspiration comes to me in many guises. Books play a part, but equally, I can get all fired up watching a film, or listening to a piece of music or walking down the street and seeing a father wiping the blood off his son’s grazed knee. So why read? I read because it’s enjoyable, that books can carry me places beyond the limits of reality. But recently NOTHING is pushing me toward the books. Maybe I’ve had a bad run of it. Or maybe there are no great writers left in the world. I must admit, most that hold my heart tight in their fist died long ago. So, does a writer need books? Do they need them to write better books themselves? I’m sure it helps, but it’s also where you draw inspiration from too.

Pablo D'Stair: VHS

2011-08-24T09:36:00.000-07:00

As those who regularly drop in here, you’ll have noticed that I was recently published in Cannoli Pie. There are some very talented people in that edition, and I have to admit, I feel somewhat of a fraud having my story appear beside them. One of those writers was Pablo D’Stair. Pablo is a writer that no matter how tired you are, or how sick of the words you’ve written, five minutes with him lifts you. His energy is infectious for the prose, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to help promote his new literary endeavour: VHS.

Below is an excerpt from VHS, a literary novel by Pablo D’Stair being released in various e-formats, absolutely free-of-charge (and in limited edition print-editions-by-part through giveaways). Information on the project, including links to what is currently available, can be found at www.vhsbook.wordpress.com.

If you’re unaware of Pablo’s history, Pablo D’Stair is a writer of novels, shorts stories, and essays. Founder of Brown Paper Publishing (which is closing its doors in 2012) and co-founder of KUBOA (an independent press launching July 2011) he also conducts the book-length dialogue series Predicate. His four existential noir novellas (Kaspar Traulhaine, approximate; i poisoned you; twelve ELEVEN thirteen; man standing behind) will be re-issued through KUBOA as individual novella and in the collection they say the owl was a baker’s daughter: four existential noirs.

Now, for your viewing pleasure, VHS. Enjoy, and spread the word.

"Late Fees"

Line of customers three deep, Roscoe in the back probably talking to the sink about something or else reading old job applications we for some reason had in a file cabinet going back eight years, it was dusk outside and though I couldn’t see it the sky felt yellow and like it had the weight of a capsized boat.

I did the first transaction in silence, only mouthing the bits I had to say, yawned a few times, but the second customer, because of how it was clear he’d only just taken off his tie out in the parking lot and it was probably all in a lump on the passenger seat of his car, I said to him “Did you know that I think they make graveyards on purpose the way they do because they know that soil, earth, whatever, just because of what it is, how it operates, that the bodies that are buried will sink over time so that if someone is buried six feet down we’ll just wait awhile and they’ll have sunk a foot deeper so we can bury someone else six feet down, stack them like pancakes. And this is why certain societies were so insistent on mausoleums, to fight that, but then they just started stacking them up and up and up, you know?”

“I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I’m sure it isn’t.”

“It’s true that I think it.”

“Okay.”

“We live in a roil and we get lower and lower with every turn.”

“I don’t know what a roil is.”

“Like a toilet flush.”

“I see.”

“Do you know what makes me sick?”

“What’s that?”

“It makes me feverishly ill sometimes that people always think things go on in every direction forever just because they go on in every direction for a little while, that this is considered a sound logical jump.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Take small things first, alright?”

“Okay.”

“People think they keep going small forever, smaller and smaller with no end. Like there is no smallest thing. Here’s a molecule, here’s an atom, here’s a quark, here’s a bit, a speck—everything can be divided and divided, like there can be no absolute smallest thing without resorting to poetry but then we treat poetry like it is intrinsically incorrect, to begin with.”

He nodded and took a tissue from his pocket, dabbed his nose, put it back in another pocket, patted the pocket.

“And then bigger is even worse, like there’s always something larger, further, forever and ever. People need to remember how there can be limits and it isn’t pseudoscience to think so—why do people have to insist on just because they walked one mile there’s fifty more miles over there.”

“Well, a lot of reasons.”

“I grant you at the scale I just mentioned it’s obvious why one would think that—my irritation, though, to put things more particularly, is when this is applied to the cosmic nature of things.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can dig up on that, maybe in my encyclopedia, but frankly it seems you’re shooting blanks and obviously have other frustrations you just can’t articulate and that’s why you work in a video store and such.”

The customer third in line seemed to be working something out of between two of their teeth by sucking on the teeth, or generally sucking in the direction of the teeth. I empathized with them because I went through most days feeling food or something in my teeth and there’s just no good way to get between teeth, not without tools and a lot of free time.

“There’s a late fee on your account and the last time your wife was in it was with another man and they seemed paly.”

“How much is the fee?”

“Seventeen dollars, but it’s for like eight different movies, each a few days late, so don’t get on me about how that seems like a lot of money.”

“What did the man look like?”

“Incisive and authoritarian, like he knew all about bookbinding and could quote things in other languages without being full of shit and he had cropped brown hair and kept talking about Birkenstocks.”

“That’s her stepbrother.”

“Well, I don’t see why that’s more of a reason to relax, you seem like that relieves you when I’d be twice as worried.”

“Which movies were late?”

“The Conversation, Ben Hur, Little Shop of Horrors, some Eric Clapton concert video, Bottle Rocket, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and Grease part two.”

“I didn’t rent any of those.”

“Oh yes you did.”

He made a gesture like I’d better watch out, then looked around like he was afraid someone had seen—for all I knew, he was involved in a lawsuit and was posturing to the opposing party that he was an even keeled sort, knew they likely had paralegals out doing discovery and this meant he was the one who’d better watch his step, so suddenly he got real calm, like the way suspects do in cop shows after being caught out in some psychological gambit by the detectives, if it was a television show he’d probably chuckle and rub his face, let out a long breath. Made me wish I was a detective, made me wish I was a television detective, but that I actually solved the crimes on the show I was on so I’d get credit and respect from people on both fronts.

Paradise Lost and Cannoli Pie

2011-08-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

I was asked by Caleb J Ross a while back if I’d be interested in writing something for uber cool magazine, Cannoli Pie. As part of his epic Blog Tour promoting his new novel, Stranger Will, Caleb was given the opportunity to be guest editor for the August edition of the magazine. He solicited a few writers he likes, those being:

• Richard Thomas, author of Transubstantiate

• Nik Korpon, author of Stay God

• Brandon Tietz, author of Out of Touch

• Pablo D’Stair, author of Kaspar Traulhaine, approximate, as well editor in chief of Brown Paper Publishing

And of course, me.

I gave up Paradise Lost, a story that is centred around the idea of the Devil inviting God to Christmas dinner, and has been described by Caleb as, “…a universal allegory that blurs the line between faith and fact.”

The idea of humanising deities, that maybe they have a job, and that job is domestic or humdrum, seems absurd enough to appeal to my sense of humour. Yes, the concept of someone, or something, greater that any mortal is reduced to the simplest chore or mundane task also provides me with a sense of empathy too.

Paradise Lost sees the Devil made human and running a set of small holiday rental lodges. It also explores some deeper issues that affects mankind on a whole. Enjoy.

Being Stalked

2011-08-04T06:04:00.000-07:00

Woke up this morning to find a wonderful little article penned by Pela Via, editor of Warmed and Bound.

Humbled is an understatement. For reasons I've spoke of before, I always feel like the writer on the outside looking in, the child new to the school, watching the rest of the cool kids playing sports or whatever it is kids do these days. And then, just when I think no one is reading my work, or my words are not reaching over the clamour of other voices, some little message finds me.

Pela's words were a warm hand in the playground, pulling me into the group once again. thanks, Pela. You can read the article here.

Mr. Wadsworth and the Flea Circus

2011-08-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

If you like Etgar Keret, then you may like my short story, Mr. Wadsworth and the Flea Circus, which is now over at Thunderdome to help promote the wonderful anthology, Warmed & Bound that features the authors, Craig Clevenger, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, Bradley Sands, Matt Bell, Craig Davidson, Blake Butler and Kyle Minor to name a few... oh yeah, and I'm in it too.

If you like Mr. Wadsworth, then please seek out and buy a copy of Warmed & Bound.

Subconscious Truth

2011-07-27T04:21:00.000-07:00

How real are any of your memories?

Ever had one of those moments, when you could have sworn you did something, only to find out that you hadn't? Experienced déjà vu?

I have a memory. It's of my sister, my mom and I, giving our dog a bath. Bingo. I was three months old when we got him. And in my memory, we're not in our house. Not the one I spent most of my life living in, that is. The bathroom looks different. The tub is in a different place.

Yet I know that I'm at 'home'. But, other than traveling and college housing, until the age of 21 I only lived in two houses my entire life in my hometown, and we moved into the home I grew up in when I was 1.

Ask me about the rest of my childhood, and I don't even remember us ever giving Bingo a bath on another occasion. Or Susie, when we had her. Or Bandit or Taco.

I've had other experiences, too. Times I've met people and could have sworn I'd already met them. I sat down to read a book and knew how the whole thing was going to unfold. It wasn't that it was predictable. While I'd had no recollection of reading the book when I looked at it and bought it, when I started to read it the vague memories of traveling in Europe and reading this book came back to me.

When I was young, I loved The Great Brain books, and in one of the books in the series, the protagonist, who is The Great Brain's brother, is thinking about how The Great Brain once told him that if you go to bed thinking about a problem, you'll wake up with a solution.

I believe it. In fact, my subconscious has been so active at times that when I was writing SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES, I used to keep a pen and pad of paper beside the bed and I'd wake up in the middle of the night having an 'a-ha' moment and make some illegible note about how things in the book connected. There were times I felt that my own subconscious was far ahead of my conscious, and when I'd re-read things I'd realize that, without deliberately planning it, I'd paved the way for a subplot or twist that I now wanted to incorporate. The mind is an amazing thing. We can be consciously working towards one conclusion while our subconscious is working us towards an entirely different conclusion.

And it's the mind's amazing ability to split in different directions that also makes the mind susceptible to manipulation and distortion.

What happens in our mind is fluid. Over time memories can become jumbled together. Like that dream I have, about being a child and giving Bingo a bath in a different bathroom? I can see me as a little girl, Thumbelina doll in hand, with clothes on that I wore in a portrait as a child.

But the bathroom from that memory? It looks like a bathroom in the house I used to own. And I did give my dogs, Chinook and Nootka, baths in that tub.

Have I jumbled together a collection of images and memories from different times in my life and somehow created a false memory?

From the time I first started working on HARVEST OF RUINS, the thread of childhood events for one of the characters was important to the story. To me, it provided an anchor for the reader, and I wanted to show how, over time, an emotionally abusive parent distorts the truth and manipulates a child.

The problem was, publishers weren't crazy about different timelines intersecting throughout the story. Maybe it's a genre thing, but these trends do seem to go in cycles. My agent thought that I needed to portray that aspect of the story coming from a different source, and suggested post-death, like THE LOVELY BONES.

That really got me thinking, and what I started to wonder was, why do we assume death is linear? If someone dies, don't they exist out of time?

What if they died, and had the ability to go back to a point, even before they were dead, and influence events?

I was so intrigued by the idea that it became a whole new layer to the story. In the end, it's up to the reader to decide what they believe. Is Hunter piecing things together from her subconscious - things she may have known because of her affair and her role in the criminal investigation that led to the point where she was charged with negligent homicide - and recollecting them in dreams because her subconscious is trying to find a way to get the information to her conscious?

Or is she being haunted by the not-yet dead?

I particularly liked exploring this in the book, because Hunter is a person anchored in reality. She's a person who has a hard time dealing in the abstract, and the thought of literally seeing events through other people's eyes unnerves her. As her life and future hang in the balance while lawyers point fingers and a jury tries to determine if she should be held criminally responsible for the actions that led to the death of her former lover and the father of her child, she has to wrestle with the possibility of ghosts.

I got out of bed today, Swear to God I couldn't see my face
I got out of bed today staring at a ghost
Who forgot to float away, didn't have all that much to say
Wouldn't even tell me his own name
Where'd my body go

Where oh where'd my body go?
Africa or Mexico?
Where or where'd my body go?
Where'd my body go?

Have you seen my ghost?
Staring at the ground?
Have you seen my ghost?

The book is also influenced by music, which is referenced in the song titles used as chapter titles. Check out the book's playlist here

If You Could Read My Mind

If you could read my mind love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old time movie
'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
You know that ghost is me
And I will never be set free
As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see
If I could read your mind love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind that drugstores sell
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again
Because the ending's just too hard to take

I'd walk away like a movie star
Who gets burned in a three way script
Enter number two
A movie queen to play the scene
Of bringing all the good things out in me
But for now love, let's be real
* I never thought I could ACT this way *
And I've got to say that I just don't get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feelin's gone
And I just can't get it back

If you could read my mind love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old time movie
'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
But stories always end
And if you read between the lines
You'll know that I'm just tryin' to understand
The feelin's that you lack
I never thought I could feel this way
And I've got to say that I just don't get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feelin's gone
And I just can't get it back

Read an excerpt of HARVEST OF RUINS here.

Sandra Ruttan - Guest Blogger #3

2011-07-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

Wow... No authors on here for years, and then in a matter of weeks I have three! Yes, bestselling author of SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES, The Nolan, Hart & Tain series (amongst others), and editor of Spinetingler Magazine and Snubnose Press, Sandra Ruttan will be blogging here in the next few days to help promote her new novel HARVEST OF RUINS.

Having short stories published by the likes of the very cool, Crime Factory, Pulp Pusher, Mouth Full of Bullets (which is one of the best titles for a magazine ever), and Crimespree Magazine, as well as interviewing acclaimed authors such as, Ray Banks, Tess Gerritsen, Mark Billingham and Kevin Wignall, Sandra Ruttan knows her stuff.

She's also just edited (with Brian Lindenmuth) Speedloader, a collection of short stories that include a few of my writer friends including, Nik Korpon, Richard Thomas and artwork by the amazing Boden Stiener. This woman is busy, so I'm flattered and excited that she's chosen my blog to help promote her new novel.

If you want to catch up with all of Sandra's novels and short stories, then I suggest popping over to her website. And make sure you keep checking back in here this week to know more about her new novel, HARVEST OF RUINS.

Warmed and Bound Interview

2011-07-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

Jay Slayton-Joslin has kindly hosted a range of interviews from the authors of Warmed and Bound, the anthology I'm part of, which was edited by Pela Via.

To know a little more about my story, Bruised Flesh, read the interview click here. Spread the word.

Warmed & Bound Released!

2011-07-22T12:19:00.001-07:00

Yes, Warmed and Bound has finally been released from its cage and is running wild around Barnes and Noble as we speak, no doubt defecating into the Young Adult section, pissing on the Classics and fornicating with Religion. Right now you can buy the anthology for mere peanuts... well, not peanuts, but $9.74 (instead of $15.95) over and B&N. Still need a little push. Well, let me give you the official TOC, again:

Death Juggler by Axel Taiari

Click-Clack by Caleb J Ross

The World Was Clocks by Amanda Gowin

Mantodea by Matt Bell

All the Acid in the World by Gavin Pate

Crazy Love by Cameron Pierce

Chance the Dick by Paul G Tremblay

Soccer Moms and Pro Wrestler Dads by Bradley Sands

Take Arms Against a Sea by Mark Jaskowski

This Will All End Well by Nik Korpon

Midnight Souls by Christopher J Dwyer

The Tree of Life by Edward J Rathke

The Killer by Brian Evenson

Headshot by Gordon Highland

Inside Out by Sean Ferguson

Laws of Virulence by Jeremy Robert Johnson

Bruised Flesh by Craig Wallwork

Bad, Bad, Bad Bad Men by Craig Davidson

Three Theories on the Murder of John Wily by J David Osborne

The Road Lester Took by Stephen Graham Jones

My German Daughter by Nic Young

What Was There Inside the Child by Blake Butler

Seed by Gayle Towell

They Take You by Kyle Minor

The Redemption of Garvey Flint by Vincent Louis Carrella

Blood Atonement by DeLeon DeMicoli

The Liberation of Edward Kellor by Anthony David Jacques

Act of Contrition by Craig Clevenger

Say Yes to Pleasure by Richard Thomas

The Weight of Consciousness by Tim Beverstock

If You Love Me by Doc O’Donnell

Touch by Pela Via

Love by JR Harlan

Practice by Bob Pastorella

Fading Glory by Brandon Tietz

Little Deaths by Gary Paul Libero

We Sing the Bawdy Electric by Rob Parker

In Exile by Chris Deal

Still need persuading? It was edited by the beautiful and talented Pela Via, and it has a foreword by Steve Erickson!

More?

Well, here's my official blurb:

Reading this anthology is like tying one end of a piece of string around a rotting tooth, and the other around a doorknob; you await an end with mouth agape, and when it comes a small part of you is wrenched away, forever leaving your smile a little less pretty.

Voice

2011-07-18T09:41:00.000-07:00

There’s this big thing in writing called the Voice. For those of you unaware of what the Voice is, it’s when a novice writer unshackles themselves from mimicking their influences and actually develops a distinctive style that is easily recognisable among the wheat, or at the very least sounds different from most other writers out there. The Voice is hard to come by. With some, it remains horse, a whisper, mute even, and takes years and years to develop. Some writers, no matter what they do, always sound like someone else. It’s like visiting Liverpool and asking for directions; no matter who you bump into, they all speak with a Scouse accent. That they’re individual matters not. They sound alike, therefore they are alike. So getting you own Voice is crucial in rising among the clamour of other Voices out there.

But today, when I refer to Voice, I’m not talking about style or genre. Today, I want to talk about the writer’s voice. What does a writer sound like? Okay, maybe that’s too wholly. The issue I have is that my perception of a writer is tainted by watching old black and white interviews, or late night debating session filled with pompous, erudite individuals who use long and obscure words no real person knows without the aid of an Oxford English Dictionary (yes, even I see the irony of using the word erudite in that sentence). Therefore, my preconceived idea of what a writer should sound like is poles apart from what I sound like, which leads me to think that if I’m ever interviewed, I need to pretend to sound like what I think a writer sounds like. If that makes sense?

I’ve discussed this topic in my writer’s workshop with many talented writers, and the general consensus is that no, there is no need to try and be someone you’re not. It was the answer I was looking for. To think that I may, if I’m lucky, end up on a panel, or at a Q&A as part of my promotional book tour, and someone dredges up a word I’m not familiar with, or references a obscure literary classic that I should have read, and I have to answer with such a diverse and witty rejoinder that is perfectly structured and holds a subtext that cackles with dexterity, then I may just shit my pants there and then. Fortunately, it seems, I can be myself. What myself is is another story. In a room full of people who have paid for your book and wanting to peel back your skull to see how you tick, I may become a bumbling fool, or perhaps closed off, or perhaps I may develop a stammer, one lay dormant since birth but due to the pressures of sounding like I actually know what I’m talking about will surface and leave me a little bent with embarrassment. Oh, how wonderful.

But it did make think how many other writers out there suffer the same morbid thoughts as I. Some people do not have any trouble speaking in public. Some even enjoy it… the freaks. And we all know someone who loves to talk about themselves. To them, having a platform to spout all day about how great they are must be a wonderful thought. But to the common person, and fledging writer, the very concept of standing on a stage and reading aloud your work and then taking questions is akin to standing in the dock at the Magistrates Court. For this humble writer, with every dry cough expelled in the auditorium, every laboured sigh and shift of weight on the plastic chairs, every noise that signifies a lull of attention, each will strike me as hard the judge’s gavel.

Least I do not have to sound like a writer. I can scramble for words instead of plucking them like ripe fruit from the tree. I can hesitate instead of pouncing. I can lean on humour instead of adding gravity. In truth, I may never sound like the conventional writer. To some, I may just sound like a man they pulled from the street, who has no clue why he has a microphone in his face and people hanging on his every word. I may, to many people, seem out of place. And that’s fine. At least I can say I was myself.

Plus and Minus

2011-07-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

After my recent blog entry about Facebook, I have decided to join a social networking site, but not FB. Instead, I have opted for Google+. Because it's still in its infancy and being Beta tested, the URL is less than neat, but hopefully you'll be able to find me here: Craig Wallwork.

For those of you unaware of my recent dilemma, here is the FB post in its entirety...

We all know promotion is the bridge that connects anonymity to prominence. That this bridge can scale such a length you feel as if you’re walking to the moon, sometimes on stilts, is a testament to those who have gained recognition from those who have not. If there was an easy answer to gaining fame then I would be a rich man, and famous. But alas, I’m at the opposite of end of the bridge, well, perhaps a few hundred metres into the journey, but still, some time away from reaching its end.

Okay, enough of the bridge analogy already. Today I’m writing this blog entry because I’m in a personal dilemma. For many years now I have resisted, to the best of my abilities, to open a Facebook account. At the beginning the decision was an easy one. In its infancy, Facebook appeared to be a place you used to get in touch with school friends, and perhaps, if you were lonely, assumed the guise of a person who was never alone. I have kept in touch with all the people I wish to know. I like the fact I speak with them on the phone, and occasionally, when I can sneak out the backdoor from the family homestead, meet up with a few and drink beer and talk about the past until the past is all that will remain of our future. Regardless, it is real, and I like it that way. But now, Facebook has become something more. To be without an account is tantamount to you not having a mobile phone (cell phone to all my American counterparts). How the hell do you survive? Easy, I live in ignorance and measure my life not in status, but in heartbeats and footsteps.

But times are a changing, said that croaky old codger with the guitar. I have come to realise that Facebook can allow you, and more importantly, your prose, to reach out to thousands of people. It is the billboard poster. The movie trailer. The full spread advertisement in Vanity Fair. It is the promotional campaign that you’ll never be able to afford. All you need are friends, real or not. In a world where our insecurities are driven back to school days, where we felt accepted within bigger groups, it seems Facebook is the therapy that assuages our egos. So why not just join, sign up, fill in the blank spaces and start recruiting friends? Well, I never liked school. I never liked cliques. I never liked that there was a structure, and that depending on where you slotted within that structure meant the difference between a pat on the back, or a boot in your arse. So I have resisted. I can do without all that crap from my youth being dredged up again like a mouldy old corpse stinking out my laptop.

But now is different. Now I’m beginning to think that I can reach further along that bridge if I only succumb. Would I be selling out my own morals? Yes. Would I feel dirty for doing so? Most probably. But I think I stand a better chance of reaching the end of the bridge with Facebook, rather than without it.

Zombie Interview #1 Craig Wallwork

2011-07-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

It was a nice day yesterday and when I went in my garden I found a dead guy eating a blue tit. That’s a bird for anyone thinking this is going to slip into some sordid tale laden with ribald humour. We've been having a few issues with zombies in this area for a number of weeks now. The police have been doing their best but they don't carry firearms this side of the pond so they've had to try and deal with them more economically. Mostly they're throwing them off the local tor and burning them. In truth, the smell of seared flesh is very strong in the air. The problem with the dead is that no one gives the time of day. They trundle along with very little speed, eating and moaning a lot. If not for the cyanotic skin and lifeless eyes, I think most zombies would easily integrate well in a retirement home where they can be looked after and fed processed meats while watching day time TV. Sadly, the local council didn’t think this idea was beneficial for the elderly occupants. Instead, zombies have been exorcised from society and now live life like fugitives, but with worse breath and decomposing limbs. So, it pleased me greatly when I found one in my garden. His clothes were threadbare, and if I’m being honest, he stunk to high heaven, but as I got nearer I instantly recognised him as Bill Grundy who interviewed The Sex Pistols back in the 70s. Well, not one to let an opportunity slip, I grabbed my microphone and tape recorder, thrust it into his decaying hand and pulled up a seat. The following is a transcription from that interview.

Grundy: “Uuuuunnnngg.”

Wallwork: “Can’t say I have. I heard someplace too much red meat can lead to gout, and excessive fat around the waist, high cholesterol, high blood sugar and high blood pressure. Can’t eating too much red meat and nothing else lead to scurvy too?

Grundy: “Arrrrrrhhhhhh.”

Wallwork: “I think vitamin C does help. Scurvy used to be one of those diseases men would get when holed up on a boat. That’s why the British are referred to as Limeys, because they would eat limes to fight off the infection… or maybe I’m confusing it for German and Krauts after the sauerkraut. No, I’ve mixed that up. The British would eat sauerkraut to fend of scurvy, which is why we should be called Krauts, and not Limeys.”

Grundy: “Mmmmmuuuugggghhhh.”

Wallwork: “Writing didn’t come naturally to me at all. It was something academics did. I loved comics as a child, but my English teacher wouldn’t allow me to read classic literature because they felt it too advanced. They would allow the class to watch the film adaptations instead. I guess that’s why I favour movies more than I do books. Watching Gregory Peck star as Atticus Finch made me fall in love with To Kill a Mockingbird. It was some twenty years after leaving school that I actually got around to reading the book, which led me to wanting to become a writer.”

Grundy: “Meeehhhh. Uuuuunnnngg.”

Wallwork: “I did have designs on being a film director for the reasons you mention. But the problem with directing films, or the film industry in general, is that if you’re lucky enough to work on a movie, it’s all deferred payment, meaning the movie had to make a profit before you got paid. And when every movie you work on is some shoe-string government funded collaboration project between the UK and some far eastern small town in Europe, you’re doing it solely for the experience. Eventually, you need to pay the rent, and unless you’re independently wealthy, or your parents are, then there has to be a point your dreams become compromised by reality.”

Grundy: “Hhhhhhnnnnmmmm.”

Wallwork: “I guess it boils down to storytelling. I was only ever good at one thing at school, and that was art. I would draw little charactertures of my teachers and friends during class, and then put them into scenes which then developed in stories. When I went to Art School, I was given a camcorder to film an installation I had created, and I think I gave the camcorder back some 6 months later. In that time I made these crazy little films with my student friends, mostly embarrassing attempts to mix Monty Python with David Lynch.

Grundy: “Hhhhhhaaaahhhuuuuurrrrggggghhhh.”

Wallwork: “Some exist, but mostly they’ve all been destroyed, or smoked.”

Grundy: “Uuuuuhhhhhh.”

Wallwork: “Like I said, it was all about the storytelling. If I couldn’t do it through cartoons or art, then it had to be film. I wasn’t academically adept to tacking writing at that stage in my life. Once I realised that making movies wasn’t a cost effective solution to appease my habit, then I had to look at another way of telling stories. I learnt the guitar and began writing songs, but the problem with music is that to be great you had to sound different, or be a much better improvement on what was cool at the time. You also had to be able to sing and play an instrument. If it wasn’t for the latter two, I may be sitting on millions right now. Yes, all I had left was writing. Strangely, at the end I ended up at the beginning.”

Grundy: “Ggrrrrrruuuhhhh.”

Wallwork: “From an early age, I would say. I was about 10 years old and my father took me hunting for sticklebacks at Drinkwater Park one Sunday afternoon. I had terrible ear ache so we had to cut the trip short. When we got back home I was given ice cream and we watched Evil Dead on a VHS pirate copy. It was the 80s, video was big business, and my father was getting hold of all these banned movies from his mates at the pub. He would watch them first, and if they didn’t have any gratuitous sex scenes in, he’d let me watch them. I should have been disturbed by some of those movies but I wasn’t. In all fairness to him, he didn’t let me see I Spit On Your Grave, or Driller Killer. It was mostly stuff like Friday the 13th, Evil Dead and zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead, or Zombie Holocaust. In fact, I don’t really remember the storylines. I remember watching all of Evil Dead and Dawn of the Dead, which was my favourite film as a child, but with Friday the 13th, he’d fast forward to the gore. He’d repeat the scene where Jason jumped out of the water over and over. And the bit in Zombie Flesh Eaters when that girl’s eye is splintered. He was definitely more interested in the mechanics of the scene, the visceral reaction it evoked, rather than narrative.

Grundy: “Uuuuunnnngg.”

Wallwork: “That sounds like your first question.”

Grundy: “Uhhhhhhhuuuug.”

Wallwork: “Oh, sorry. I misheard you. If the anatomy of the scene is something I’ve learnt to appreciate from my father, then you could say the storytelling came from my mother. She is one of those people who embellish everything. If recounting an incident, she will act out the other characters involved, you know, mimicking their actions and voices. It’s like listening to a schizophrenic one woman theatre show. She can also talk the hind legs off a donkey. But it’s listening to how she can take a very prosaic moment and turn it into overstated version of itself that stuck with me. Writing is essentially that. It’s aggrandising life to the point where it becomes universally interesting. My mother did that.

Grundy: “Mmmmmnnnnnnuuuhhhhh.”

Wallwork: “You’re hungry? I have a little pork roast in the fridge?”

Grundy: “Grrrrruuuuhhhhhhh.”

Wallwork: “If you went vegetarian, you wouldn’t have these problems. Have you tried Quorn? The sausages are very good.”

Grundy: “AAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHHHHH!”

Wallwork: “Okay, okay! There’s no need to use language like that. If you’re trying to offend me, I think you’ve succeeded. Maybe we should end the interview here.”

Shortly after that I turned off the tape recorder and went back into the house. I spent a little time watching Bill shuffling around the garden, foraging for birds and wild animals. I even caught him stumbling toward the neighbour’s cat. What a strange life it is to be permanently on the threshold of life and death. Can’t say I envy the humble zombie. I think it’s quite sad that in life a person with the proficiency to acquire a well regarded position in society is reduced in death to an incoherent bumbling fool with no self-esteem. I think I’ll leave a steak out tonight for Mr. Grundy. Isn’t that what we do, help those in need?

Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology

2011-06-28T11:53:00.000-07:00

For some crazy reason, I've been allowed to be part of an anthology that is going to tear a hole in the fabric of literature this year. Warmed & Bound is a collection of stories that have bled out and then harvested from some of the best writers writing today. "Sure," I hear you say, "You're bound to say that because you're in it!" And you're probably right. But this REALLY has some the best writers in it. Don't belive me?

Death Juggler by Axel Taiari
Click-Clack by Caleb J Ross
The World Was Clocks by Amanda Gowin
Mantodea by Matt Bell
All the Acid in the World by Gavin Pate
Crazy Love by Cameron Pierce
Chance the Dick by Paul G Tremblay
Soccer Moms and Pro Wrestler Dads by Bradley Sands
Take Arms Against a Sea by Mark Jaskowski
This Will All End Well by Nik Korpon
Midnight Souls by Christopher J Dwyer
The Tree of Life by Edward J Rathke
The Killer by Brian Evenson
Headshot by Gordon Highland
Inside Out by Sean Ferguson
Laws of Virulence by Jeremy Robert Johnson
Bruised Flesh by Craig Wallwork
Bad, Bad, Bad Bad Men by Craig Davidson
Three Theories on the Murder of John Wily by J David Osborne
The Road Lester Took by Stephen Graham Jones
My German Daughter by Nic Young
What Was There Inside the Child by Blake Butler
Seed by Gayle Towell
They Take You by Kyle Minor
The Redemption of Garvey Flint by Vincent Louis Carrella
Blood Atonement by DeLeon DeMicoli
The Liberation of Edward Kellor by Anthony David Jacques
Act of Contrition by Craig Clevenger
Say Yes to Pleasure by Richard Thomas
The Weight of Consciousness by Tim Beverstock
If You Love Me by Doc O’Donnell
Touch by Pela Via
Love by JR Harlan
Practice by Bob Pastorella
Fading Glory by Brandon Tietz
Little Deaths by Gary Paul Libero
We Sing the Bawdy Electric by Rob Parker
In Exile by Chris Deal

This morning I received a sneek peek of the artwork (see above), and...drum roll... the foreword by Steve Erickson! Even better than that, I've been allowed to share it with you good people. Well, the cover art work at least. If I get the nod from the editor, the wonderful Ms. Pela Via, then I'll post it up.

For now, enjoy the cover, and try not to salivate too much.

Never Trust a Rabbit

2011-06-26T02:03:00.000-07:00

Reading Jeremy Dyson’s Never Trust a Rabbit at the moment and enjoying it a lot. The short story collection leans toward the bizarre with underlying elements of dark horror, not surprising when I tell you Dyson was one of the screenwriters involved in The League of Gentleman, the oddly shaped BBC series about a small rural village that masqueraded as subversive comedy, yet really was more a nightmare of epic proportion. I post this today because I’ve been frequenting the boards at the critically acclaimed magazine, Cemetery Dance, who you will find, among their many contributors, names like Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Since joining, the door to horror has been left open, and I’ve been peering in with great anticipation.

It’s not a genre I am comfortable with, having only dipped my toe in with stories like, The Hole and Heart and Soul. But the more I think about it, the more my novel Dog Mile leans toward horror. Not in the traditional sense of blood and guts. Something I’m learning too, is that horror these days needs to be original and capture the imagination more than offend it. Dyson is doing this, and a lot of others writers I have met at Cemetery Dance. It’s an interesting time.

I have included a couple of interviews with Dyson where he talks about the process of writing horror and the success behind the stage production of Ghost Stories.

Before I leave you, I’d like to extend my thanks again to Caleb J Ross who recently acted as my first guest blogger here on his epic Blog Tour promoting his new novel, Stranger Will. When you have the chance, go check out his work. He has the trees worried.

6:27 pm: The Predictability of Me Promoting Myself

2011-06-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Caleb J. Ross

Craig and I belong to shared centers of certain Venn diagrams. Our writing and reading tastes overlap perhaps no place more than The Velvet, a community of people with appreciation for darker, noir fiction (authors Craig Clevenger, Will Christopher Baer, and Stephen Graham Jones provide our focus at The Velvet). One aspect of The Velvet that Craig and I have not shared yet is The Velvet Podcast.

Briefly, The Velvet Podcast is roundtable discussion of reading and writing topics with moderators and panelists pulled from The Velvet forums. I’ve participated in many episodes. Craig has not yet participated. I’ll get him there someday, I promise. The world deserves to hear him.

I have so much fun with The Velvet Podcast that I recently decided to start my own writing podcast, The World’s First Author Podcast. This one is especially self-indulgent, probably quite boring, and definitely less important than The Velvet Podcast. However, I know that I like listening to authors jabber on and on and on, so surely there are others out there as well.

A new episode about author promotion (and this very blog tour) just went live today. Give it a listen.

11:49 am: The Predictability of Children's TV

2011-06-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Caleb J. Ross

I'm home all day today, watching my 2 year-old, watching children's TV. I'm a great parent, I know. He woke up early (and therefore, so did I), so I tried to sneak in a quick nap while the TV kept him busy. Instead, he lined my back with toy cymbals and empty Tupperware containers and played the drums for about 3o minutes. I didn't tell him to stop. See, I'm a great parent.

While pilfering this nap time from what could have been quality bonding time, I was able to listen to the background children's TV program without having to endure the visuals. This sensory separation allowed me to finally see just how simple a job it would be to write children's narrative TV shows. Every show has the same basic formula: 1) child character experiences a moral lesson, 2) that lesson is tested, 3) child engages in "bad" behavior, 3) parent reinforces lesson with stern words and a hug. This formula can spawn variants that place the child against his parents or friends or that teach the child humility (when the child tries too hard for the "holier than thou" role).

Try it sometime. Turn on a child's network channel (Nick Jr. for me) and turn away from the screen. Just listen. The story arcs are predictably and defiantly Aristotelian. I suggest that stories be more intricate, and thus more mentally challenging. Kids can handle more than we give them.

12:02 am: Stranger Will Blog Tour

2011-06-17T21:58:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Caleb J. Ross

Do not adjust your browser. This is still Craig Wallwork’s blog. But for the next 24 hours it will cease to provide the thought-provoking intelligent writing you’ve come to expect and will instead likely reflect a cross between traditional journal-entry stream-of-conscious drivel and occasional commentary on my own writing progress. I’ve been on a blog tour in support of my novel Stranger Will and forthcoming books, I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin and As a Machine and Parts since March. The content of each stop has ranged from reviews of other author’s work and interviews with authors, to and publishing industry insights and book club discussions of my own work.

I don’t know exactly what the next 24-hours will bring. Right now, I lay in bed with a couple books at my side and a computer in my lap. The books: In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy and My Father’s House by Ben Tanzer. Both are excellent so far. I find it important to sandwich fiction with non-fiction. It keeps me grounded.

More to come…

Nick Cave & The Bone Scissors

2011-06-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

A while back I wrote a short story about a guy going through a hard time and leaning on an imaginary friend. That friend was Nick Cave, the musician, author, actor and coolest man on the planet. It was a homage, of sorts. Well, it's now available for your viewing pleasure over at the great journal, The Wrong Tree Review. Click the link to read it: Nick Cave and The Bone Scissors.

You'll also find in this same edition, The Bequest by my good friend and writer, Chris Deal.

Other stories included in issue 3 are:

Raising the Steaks

2011-06-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

Recently there was a discussion started by Roxane Gay over at PANK magazine’s blog that involved the Rejection of a Rejection. This method, which I assume isn’t a regular practice, involved a writer rejecting PANK’s rejection of their story based on the fact the writer believed they were wrong in their decision and actually didn’t know what they wanted from a story. From the editor’s perspective, it provoked within them a need to discuss why certain stories are not accepted, most of which included many factors: quantity of submissions, personal tastes etc. A very long entry/rant was made on the website’s blog and many writers/readers jumped in to provide support, play Devil’s Advocate, or disagree entirely.

From the writer’s perspective, where I’m best placed, I can empathise with any writer who gets a rejection. And for many years, I felt that every email that arrived in my inbox that began with the words, “Dear Craig. Thanks for allowing (insert name of journal) to read (insert title of story), but unfortunately, we’re going to pass...” was a personal insult to me and my work. But, when you’ve been submitting for the number of years I have, you begin to realise that rejection doesn’t mean the story is bad. I know, it’s a bit of a revelation, but it’s true. I’m not saying this is the case for all stories. I’m sure, like those that audition for these celebrity hosted talented shows on TV who are tone deaf but think they can sing like Aretha Franklin, but sound more like the urethra of Aretha Franklin while she took a piss, there are writers out there that shouldn’t be allowed near a word processer. But by in large, a story being rejected shouldn’t reflect on style or the writer’s talent.

This will be one of the hardest things to get into your head as a writer, and I think those that take rejections too personally, or dwell on the impact of the rejection too much, it can end a career before it has time to blossom. There is no suitable analogy for a rejection that I can think of. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that before you submit a story to any journal/magazine ask yourself this: Would you serve steak to a vegetarian?

By submitting a dark and subversive noir story to a magazine that publishes Fantasy, you shouldn't be surprised when the a rejection arrives a month or two later. If you submit your absurdist steampunk vampire chicken zombie story to somewhere like, GlimmerTrain, then yes, chances are it would really fit with them (knowing my luck the next edition of Glimmertrain will feature a story titled: Foul Fangs). And if we stick with the steak analogy for a moment, even if you find a place that likes meat, everyone has their own particular preference on how they want it cooked. Not everyone likes it rare, but instead prefer well done. Some will settle for a little blood, when others hate the sight of blood. In short, get to know your market, and who you’re pitching too. Read their stories. Look at the author list. Does anyone cook a steak like you? And please, don’t feel if your story has been rejected that you’re a lousy cook. Might be the editor is full and couldn’t force down another mouthful, or perhaps the seasoning was too much. Or, it might just be you served up the wrong dish to the wrong person.

Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction

2011-05-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the violent tornadoes which ripped through Alabama on April 27th, 2011, Southern Fried Weirdness Press, headed by T.J. McIntyre, has put together this charity anthology of forty-six pieces of poetry and prose from forty different contributing authors, including me and good friend Richard Thomas.

Spanning multiple genres – from science fiction to fantasy, from magic realism to Southern Gothic, from horror to slice-of-life – this eclectic collection presents a selection of pieces sure to please readers of all tastes. And don't forget - All profits will be donated to The American Red Cross to benefit disaster relief efforts!

Currently available from Smashwords, and Amazon Kindle.

Table of Contents:

I. They Are Not Gone Forever by Stephanie Osborn
II. God in the Sky by An Owomoyela
III. Make Your Bed Downriver by Jens Rushing
IV. Live Bait Works Best by Brian Rosenberger
V. The Music of Bremen Farm by Mike Allen
VI. Out of Natural by Jason Huskey
VII. In The Days When Blocks Were For Tires, And The Dusk Chose A Sideways Approach by Jason Huskey
VIII. In the Ghost Hours by Jason Huskey
IX. The Old Man’s Sweet by Jason Huskey
X. Planting by Mari Ness
XI. Talking Alligator (Blues) by Sara Amis
XII. Sisyphus Explains by Sara Amis
XIII. Lady Glory and the Knave of Spades by Nicole Kornher-Stace
XIV. Meditation on a Deer at Night by Berrien C. Henderson
XV. Navel Gazing by T.J. McIntyre
XVI. Directions by T.J. McIntyre
XVII. Why by T.J. McIntyre
XVIII. The Fisherman’s Tale by T.J. McIntyre
XIX. Swimming in Old Spring by Eric T. Marin
XX. Giant Cicadas and Other Odd Indignities by Dr. Philip Kaldon
XXI. Billy Anne’s Box by Charlotte Jones
XXII. Commander Perry’s Mystic Wonders Show by Jaime Lee Moyer
XXIII. The New Elementals by Marshall Payne
XXIV. Judy and Norman by Darby Harn
XXV. The Moon and the Stars by Marian Carcache
XXVI. Pride and Joy by Gustavo Bondoni
XXVII. Square Hills by H. Courreges LeBlanc
XXVIII. The Wind by Marcia Gerhardt
XXIX. I Keep a Vine Woven Basket by the Front Door by Rae Bryant
XXX. Up Above the Dead Line by F. Brett Cox
XXXI. Annabelle Tree by Carrie Cuinn
XXXII. Who Mourns for Washington by Fabio Fernandes
XXXIII. Suffer the Rains by Craig Wallwork
XXXIV. The Yearning of the Lighthouse Fairies by Brenda Blakey
XXXV. The Groundskeeper’s Tale by Wendy S. Delmater
XXXVI. The White Months by Christopher Woods
XXXVII. Your Enemies Will Devour You by Richard Thomas
XXXVIII. The Moon and the Stars by Marian Carcache
XXXIX. The Sweet Song of Canaries at Midnight by Jude-Marie Green
XL. Nature Story by Walter Giersbach
XLI. Alchemy by Michael Ray
XLII. The Legend of Old Man Joad by Marsheila Rockwell
XLIII. Hanging the Woman in Blue by Monette Chilson
XLIV. Till Death Do Us Part by Kenneth Mark Hoover
XLV. Neopolitician by Shaylen Maxwell
XLVI. Utnapishtim on Friday After Dessert by Danny Adams
XLVII. The Evidence of Things Unseen by Chuck Russell

Please, support this in any way you can. if you don't buy it, then tweet or pass the word via Facebook. It's all for a good cause. Thanks!

Christine Rose

2011-05-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve been hitting Twitter recently… a lot. Having discovered I’m about as successful at flash fiction as I am breathing under water, microblogging seems like a poor medium to express my thoughts. However, I have found it’s been an invaluable source for finding very cool, and talented writers.

One of those is Christine Rose, as her bio reveals, she is an Award-winning author of the Rowan of the Wood YA fantasy series, and also the author of Publishing & Marketing Realities for the Emerging Author: A Guide to Help Authors Effectively Choose A Publishing Path & Plan Marketing Strategies, a book that deals with helping emerging authors feel successful by educating them about the publishing industry and marketing their book. She and her husband have travelled through America promoting their work and talking about writing. That she has more advice about getting published than she has miles on her speedometer, is a testament to her perseverance and skill as a writer. And because it’s the Short Story Month, Christine has dedicated to writing a short story a week, as well as spotlighting emerging authors on her blog.

I would definitely recommend buying, Publishing & Marketing Realities for the Emerging Author: A Guide to Help Authors Effectively Choose A Publishing Path & Plan Marketing Strategies, as well as Christine and her husband’s YA Rowan of the Wood, which won the 2009 Indie Excellence Award for YA fiction.

Oh yeah, Christine also needs copious amounts of dark chocolate, frothy mochas, and loving attention, just in case you’ve got some to give.

Facing the Book

2011-05-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

We all know promotion is the bridge that connects anonymity to prominence. That this bridge can scale such a length you feel as if you’re walking to the moon, sometimes on stilts, is a testament to those who have gained recognition from those who have not. If there was an easy answer to gaining fame then I would be a rich man, and famous. But alas, I’m at the opposite of end of the bridge, well, perhaps a few hundred metres into the journey, but still, some time away from reaching its end.

Okay, enough of the bridge analogy already. Today I’m writing this blog entry because I’m in a personal dilemma. For many years now I have resisted, to the best of my abilities, to open a Facebook account. At the beginning the decision was an easy one. In its infancy, Facebook appeared to be a place you used to get in touch with school friends, and perhaps, if you were lonely, assumed the guise of a person who was never alone. I have kept in touch with all the people I wish to know. I like the fact I speak with them on the phone, and occasionally, when I can sneak out the backdoor from the family homestead, meet up with a few and drink beer and talk about the past until the past is all that will remain of our future. Regardless, it is real, and I like it that way. But now, Facebook has become something more. To be without an account is tantamount to you not having a mobile phone (cell phone to all my American counterparts). How the hell do you survive? Easy, I live in ignorance and measure my life not in status, but in heartbeats and footsteps.

But times are a changing, said that croaky old codger with the guitar. I have come to realise that Facebook can allow you, and more importantly, your prose, to reach out to thousands of people. It is the billboard poster. The movie trailer. The full spread advertisement in Vanity Fair. It is the promotional campaign that you’ll never be able to afford. All you need are friends, real or not. In a world where our insecurities are driven back to school days, where we felt accepted within bigger groups, it seems Facebook is the therapy that assuages our egos. So why not just join, sign up, fill in the blank spaces and start recruiting friends? Well, I never liked school. I never liked cliques. I never liked that there was a structure, and that depending on where you slotted within that structure meant the difference between a pat on the back, or a boot in your arse. So I have resisted. I can do without all that crap from my youth being dredged up again like a mouldy old corpse stinking out my laptop.

But now is different. Now I’m beginning to think that I can reach further along that bridge if I only succumb. Would I be selling out my own morals? Yes. Would I feel dirty for doing so? Most probably. But I think I stand a better chance of reaching the end of the bridge with Facebook, rather than without it.

Should I face the future, or book a trip to loserville?

E-Publishing: More to think about

2011-04-28T06:29:00.000-07:00

I found an old copy of Beat Scene recently which had a special feature on John Fante. Bought it ages ago, and was looking for something and stumbled on it again. Anyway, there is an interview with Bukowski in there, where he talks about Fante. This is something he said:
Quote

Q: Why do you think Fante failed to reach many readers?

Bukowski; “See Mozart, Van Gogh, and so forth. It’s the angle of the action, the people aren’t ready, it’s the weather, it’s the diet, it’s the shoes they wear and most of the people are almost always out of touch with the best and the most real because they never have a chance to know what it is, you know that.”

What struck me here was that, by in large, most people read books that are recommended by others, or that are on the shelf at their local bookstore. If you’re surrounded by people who don’t read, then you’re knowledge of books diminishes. If you’re only buying books that are Airport fiction, or bestsellers, then you’ll never find the truly great voices out there. Part of it is selling yourself, for sure, and I think that maybe people are missing a trick with not self-e-publishing. The problem with this route is that it will be oversaturated soon with poor prose, but what is in its favour is people will always want something for nothing. The average cost of a Kindle book isn’t too far from the physical copy. Therefore, an average reader, one who buys bestsellers only, will only buy Kindle, or e-editions, for convenience, otherwise they’d buy the physical copy instead. I’ve been playing this over in my mind for a few weeks now, and I think the best way to survive the e-publishing game is to make yourself a real pioneer of the genre. Releasing one book, or one short won’t make any dent in the industry, but having a series, or a few books with shorts, might. Too, if those are cheap, and the reader isn’t having to pay a lot of read your work, it will get you a wider audience.

Going back to Fante. If no one has heard the story, I’ll break it down really quick. He wrote Ask the Dust, and it was picked up by Stackpole and Sons the publisher. They did a limited run of first edition, and had quite a bit of money to help run off more and promote the shit out of it. They told Fante he was going to be big, and all Fante wanted to be was a serious author that would be recognised for his contribution to American literature. Before the big promotional campaign kicked in Stackpole and Sons were sued by a German painter called, Adolph Hitler because they had published a copy of mien Kampf without his consent. The court bills wiped them clean and all promises of Fante having a lustrous career as an author went with it. He later sold his soul to Hollywood writing crappy screenplays that paid well. He became embittered with the system, then lost his eyesight and his legs to diabetes. Just before his death in 1983, Bukowski had Black Sparrow Press reissue all of Fante’s books (allegedly he threatened to leave if they didn’t). Fante has finally been recognised for his contribution, and has been compared to the likes of Hemmingway.

Publishers may not be the people who make you. Had it not been for Bukowski, Fante and his family would have never seen the money and accolades he deserved. We all have to push twice as hard in this industry to rise above the clamour of every soulless fuck with a pen. If it means selling my novels for nothing, but having a wider audience, so be it. I’m really open to anything at the moment so long as I’m not paying any money to get my words out there. The real question you have to ask is, in the short term, is money really that important?

Burning Plastic

2011-04-23T03:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve spoken about Israeli writer, Etgar Keret, before. You don’t believe me? Well, go look through the previous posts and you’ll find it. Go on! No? Okay, you’ll have to take my word for it. I’ve been a fan of Keret for a long time now since first reading The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, and then, Gazza Blues. His style of blending the surreal and magical together and having it intersect real life is the blueprint of my own work. So I’m always keen to read new material by the man. To get a flavour of his work, here’s a link to a reading of Shoes he recently did at AWP.

And Black & Blue over at N+1:

But I’m writing about him again today because of what he said in a Q&A over at Ottawa Citizen concerning flash fiction (the full interview can be found here):

Q: How short do you think a story can be?

EK: The Girl on the Fridge actually has my shortest story, called “The Asthma Effect.” It’s under 50 words. It’s about when you have an asthma attack; you have to speak (concisely). You become very conscious of choosing the right words. When during an attack a person says, “I like you,” it is powerful, because he chose those words over “ambulance” or “inhaler” or something that seems more urgent. So this is the shortest story I have ever written and —

Q: Hang on, that’s an excellent insight. How did you come to that?

EK: I’m asthmatic. And I had this experience in 1992. I’d accidentally burned some plastic in my house and inhaled too much smoke and I got to the emergency and they asked me what happened. I started telling them (breathing labouriously) about-the-plastic-and-it-burned-and-it-was-in-my-house-and-and and … The doctor stopped me and said, “You don’t have to say everything, just what is important.” Then they gave me the inhaler and I asked for paper, and I wrote the story in the emergency ward.

Having a hard time trying to write flash fiction for a while now, I think this is the best description I could find that makes sense on how to approach it. Metaphorically burn the plastic and just breathe in. Simples.

Pimp

2011-04-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

It’s not easy being a writer, or a publisher. Sometimes it’s the pits, so it helps when people help spread the word about your work. This entry is exactly about doing that. It’s been a long time coming for some, and my apologies are given for the long wait.

Books

My top 5 Kindles at the moment are (in no particular order):

Victimized – Extended Edition by Richard Thomas.

Some of you will have heard me speak of writer Richard Thomas in the past. This a Kindle friendly short story won’t break the bank, but may break your confidence if you’re a writer.

The Blurb: In the near future, Annabelle lives a fractured life, haunted by the shadows of her past, dark moments of abuse and freedom at the hands of her own kin. She has the opportunity to get into a boxing ring and fight her oppressor, to face the man that altered her, to beat him down with all of her rage. This is the way things are now, society given the chance to take on the murderers, the rapists, those that have tainted their lives, hurt their family, destroyed what was innocent and pure. Preparing to go to battle, Belle taps into her true identity, and changes, a warrior entering battle, unwilling to hesitate, ready to kill.

Stay God a Novel by Nik Korpon.

Having just become a father for the first time, I imagine promoting his work is bottom of his priories at the moment, so to help him out I’ll reiterate that his debut novel is now available to by from Amazon.

Blurb: Damon lives a content life, playing video games and dealing drugs from his second-hand store while his girlfriend, Mary, drops constant hints about marriage. If only he could tell her his name isn’t really Damon. If only he could tell her who he really is. But after he witnesses a friend’s murder, a scarlet woman glides into his life, offering the solution to all of his problems. His carefully constructed existence soon shatters like crystal teardrops and he must determine which ghosts won’t stay buried—and which ones are trying to kill him—if he wants to learn why Mary has disappeared.

Stranger Will a Novel by Caleb J Ross.

Quite sure it’s only a matter of time before we see Caleb, or one of his novels, on Oprah, but until then, don’t be a stranger to his new neo-noir novel and the achingly beautiful writer that is, Caleb J Ross.

The Blurb: To William Lowson, impending fatherhood means an impending stain. His work as a Human Remains Removal Specialist, professionally cleaning the stains left from dead bodies, fuels this belief. His friend and mentor Mrs. Rose, an elementary school principal, nurtures and sympathizes with his cynicism, blaming his dilemma on an imperfect world. But she has a plan around this impediment: a group of strangers—a devout collection of kindred minds who have dedicated their lives to cultivating a unique idea of perfection, and she wants William to join. But once he is in can he get out?

A light to Starve By – A Novella by Axel Taiari.

This vampire love story was my first Kindle purchase, and as inductions into e-publishing go, you can’t get better.

The Blurb: A dark novella, set in near-future Paris, where vampires and werewolves are hunted like rabid dogs and put down just as quickly. Their existence is common knowledge, the army and police patrol the streets looking for them, families barricade themselves at night, and even the Catholic Church has its own task force. The majority of the population has been vaccinated, making their blood highly poisonous. What little remains of the vampire society is now reduced to dealing pure blood like drugs, living in hiding, owning clean human slaves to drink from, and generally living a pathetic life. Amidst the chaos, a clan-less vampire who has been starving for too long does his best to survive, mugging and stealing goods in order to feed himself. His only real link with humanity is a woman he lost years ago. As he checks up on her one night, he finds her missing, and all hell breaks loose.

Major Inversions a Novel by Gordon Highland.

By far one of the funniest people I have known, Gordon Highland can manipulate phrases as easily as one might twist a balloon to make an animal. Though he considers himself more a hobbyist than an author, you’ll be hard pressed to find a full time writer with the skill he has for prose.

The Blurb: Your roommate says you should date more, that all those spandex nights on stage paying tribute to hair metal and banging faceless groupies only amplify your Jekyll/Hyde syndrome. That this quicksand town of floozies, fiends, and filmmakers will survive without your commercial jingles. And your narcotics. That you should turn in your daytime security-guard badge and settle down.
He's got the perfect girl, a cinnamon-scented innocent who will bring that elusive substance to your life despite the familial forces that conspire against your union.
Always lurking in the periphery, the roommate remains buried in his Master's thesis, the parasitic puppeteer behind your reinvention, the search for your birth parents, and your all-too-brief film scoring career. A supporting cast of lecherous directors, deluded bandmates, federal agents, and nostalgic exes obstruct your path to closure and ironic revenge in this "revisionist character study."

And finally… Uber cool non-profit magazine, Annalemma needs your help. It’s not a plea for money, nor sponsorship but instead simple support. As the above clearly shows, there’s a definite upsurge of e-publishing swelling on the horizon, and for print version of magazines, the production costs require purists out there to keep supporting the tangible word. Follow the link to read more.

Flight of the Heron

2011-04-07T13:54:00.000-07:00

Just found out that the previous Publishing Director of Harper Collins, Susan Watt, has now joined inde-publishing house done-good, Quercus, to lead on their new imprint, Heron Books.

For those of you that don’t know Quercus’s back catalogue then you really haven’t been paying attention to fiction or European cinema these past five years. Taken from Quercus's press statement:

“Heron Books will create a small and varied list of both fiction and non-fiction titles and the imprint will take Quercus into new subject areas and genres. The first title for Heron Books, Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening, will be released on the 28th of April.”

All sounds very exciting, and considering the person at the helm of this new venture has been for past twelve years at HarperCollins and before that the Publishing Director of Michael Joseph, as a writer Heron seems like the the bird to catch a flight upon. Notable titles Susan has commissioned in the past while at HC are The Dangerous Book for Boys and Jeremy Paxman’s The English. Susan says of the move,“I am so interested in finding original, even quirky, talent in writing every kind of book, storytelling in both non-fiction and fiction – and of course particularly fascinated in finding books that suit the rapidly expanding group of new middle age, who have the time to read as well as the means to buy.”

Get typing, people!

Better the Devil You Know

2011-03-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

So here’s the thing; Dog Mile, my new novel, has been locked up in its kennel and is awaiting me to finish this TV script before I unlock the door and allow it to run free once more. But I’m being drawn again to elements of the storyline that are interesting, and complex. I assume I’m just trying to figure it all out, that my mind is multitasking between the script and the manuscript. Whatever it is, I got into a debate recently about that Accuser of our Brethren, Abaddon, Apollyon, Belial and Crooked Serpent, or just plain old Devil to you and I. You see, Satan or Little Horn, or whatever his name is, plays a big part in the novel. Yet, it’s his purpose and reason for being in it that has caused me to play through the storyline again. Let me explain. I’m quite rational in my thinking. If a problem presents itself, more than likely I will resolve the issue by looking at every angle, weighing up the different probabilities and outcomes, and then measure those against risk. Whatever wins out is normal the option I go for. Transpose that thinking into religion and you could say I find most of it a little hard to digest. Yet, I am also a great believer in magic, things that cannot be explained, so for the most part, I will except the unreasonable and ludicrous, if only to resolve some fact from what could be considered fiction, which brings me to the Devil.

I’ve read parts of the Bible, mostly the Old Testament and a little of the New. Followed it more through discussion, documentaries and movies/books, so it’s safe to say I have a layman’s view of it all and not a theologists, though their interpretation will be tainted somewhat by faith. What draws me to our Fallen Angel lies in his eviction from Heaven. From what I know, which again is somewhat limited, he was an Archangel, quite a big cheese among the ranks. In the book of Job, he was one of God’s Son, working for him. And then he gets cast out… and for what, being of a bit of a rebel, for being a little jealous of God, for being proud and not following orders? The logical part of my brain kicks in here. Looking back on that very basic précis of the reason, the key things to note are, jealously, self-righteous, nonconformist, insurgent. If these were attributes explored by the Devil, one must surely draw the conclusion they were introduced to him, or implanted during his creation. For example, if I said to my wife, “Okay, I’m a little bored. I think we should spice things up a little by having sex with other people, is that okay with you?” If she agrees and then sleeps with someone I know, how can I go back to her and chastise her actions? I couldn’t. I clearly set the ground work, initiated the conversation, handed over the freedom to act upon any desire she may be harbouring for another man, and gave her free rule to do whatever she pleased with them. For me to pipe up and say it’s wrong, that I don’t think it’s right would be hypocritical. And yet, it appears that God has followed a similar mistake. He created the Devil and gave him these emotions, to be evil, malicious, rebellious, whatever. If he at any given point believed the consequences of his handiwork could lead to the demise of man, then clearly he would have never implemented these beliefs/flaws in the Devil, the influencer that he is. I guess what I’m getting at here is, he got a pretty rough deal considering he was forged from the hand of an all-knowing God. To criticise the Devil is to criticise God’s work and his judgement. Least that’s how the logical part of my brain accesses it all. It would be as simple as a clockmaker arriving late for an appointment and blaming his watch, when within the watch he never placed the cogs that turn the hands. No, that’s a crap analogy; the clockmaker would have to arrive late or early because the mechanics placed in the watch were erratic and did not conform to the constraints of time.

And there is the theory that both are working in unison, that God has sanctioned the Devil to perform certain tricks, and influence man in the malevolent and immoral. I’m not too sure where I heard this, possibly in Constantine the film, or Faust, or some other place because it all gets merged into one, but again, the logical part of me reacts to such a premise and reaches a conjecture where this could be possible. Well, maybe not possible, but reasonable. So, let’s say they are working together, a contract job, perhaps. But why? Why would God, a purveyor of good and the most omnipotent deity to be documented in history want to succumb to drafting the expertise of one so evil? Well, let’s think about it for a moment. Heaven is his kingdom, and all the good and righteous will enter through its gates and spend eternity in harmony, both within and with that around them. Casting aside for the moment Heaven sounds like some kind of hippy commune, it would, if everyone created was good and without sin, a very overpopulated place. Therefore, it stands to reason there would need to be a filtering process implemented.

If we consider each country in the world to be its own perfect Heaven, and that other people in other countries decided that it would be better to migrate from their hovel where there is fighting, genocide, poverty and disease, then you would image the border control of each country where there is free health care and jobs for all having a bad time of it. Of course, this is happening, so the “imagine” part is not too demanding. So there you have it – thousands of people arriving daily in Heaven, banging on the wire fence to allow them asylum. The first million he allows in. It’s a bit quiet there with all the angels, so yes, a few dead mortals will brighten the place up. Then, let’s say another few thousand turn up. Okay. No worries, there is plenty of room. Decades pass, centuries. Soon a thousand years becomes a million. He looks behind him and notices it’s getting a little full. But what about all the good souls! They’ve travelled thousands of miles without the means to return. You have to let them in. Eventually, it gets to the point where Paradise is a subway during rush hour. Sure, God wants to accommodate everyone, because they are all his children. But having someone’s armpit in your face all day has to test the patience of even St Peter. So God devises a test, something he can use to measure whether or not man/woman/child and animal is worthy of taking up space in his home. So he calls upon his most trusted angel, his son, and asks if he’ll do him a favour:

“Go down to earth, my boy. Influence the mortals. Whisper in their ear naughty things. Rude things. Not dirty talk, you understand, I cannot abide dirty talk. Instead, allow temptation to rule their thoughts, greed, lust, and make up a few others. In fact, seven will do. Now go, and those that don’t pass the test can be sent somewhere else. Where do you think?”

The Devil: “Los Angeles?”

God: “Too cruel! I’ve clearly chosen the right person for the job. But no, not Los Angeles. That place can be a half-way house, perhaps. No, dig a hole and stick them down it. Make it hot too. Nothing like heat to make a person understand the severity of their actions. I know, I’ve been to Ecuador in the summer.”

So off the Devil goes, carrying out instructions given to him by his creator. And logically, it is a common sense tactic with dealing with a problem. Without evil, God cannot measure who is worthy of his time and his Kingdom. Without evil, God is merely a landlord cleaning up the mess made by his tenants.

Dog Mile is what happens when the devil becomes bored of influencing and wishes to be mortal, if only to live out a normal existence. I like to think he enjoys the beauty of the world he has been sent to destroy, and over time has mellowed. Having been the instigator of all that is wrong in the world, he now wishes to make a few things better and try to clear his name. From the anarchist antichrist, to the peace loving pacifist. An imperfect Angel made by an imperfect God has many avenues to peruse. It should be an interesting journey. Back to the script!

Radio-head

2011-03-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I'm in the middle of writing a comedy drama. What you might not know is that I have a background in media. When I left Art College, I enrolled in a film school, and then television college. Spent some time too working on various productions and an Anglo German film that was shown at the local cinema before finally taking a job as an editor. So a lot of my writing is me transcribing movies in my head, which is how they present themselves to me. I find inspiration comes in many guises, but mostly it's within the marriage of lyrics and music. I tend to listen to a song and then suddenly images rush my mind, all of which I bayonet to form a basic story/premise. From this, I'll write something down, a line perhaps or a full scene...what I'm getting at here is that music is as much a part of my writing process as any other medium available to me. So when the allotment of my mind is barren, I rain down upon it music, and soon the rhizome of an idea comes into bud. Below you’ll find a few songs I’ve been listening to of late that helped inspire a few scenes for the comedy drama.

Mumford & Sons - White Blank Page:

Kasabian - British Legion:

Plan B - Hard Times:

For Mlaz

2011-03-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

Dog Mile (Stilled Longing): An Excerpt.

And as I remember it, these words were offered to me as a beginning, one concerning life and the other death. I would be asked to imagine pallid roots veining bare walls, a rusted wrought iron bed, and upon it a horsehair mattress saturated with sap and blood. And there, a peasant girl lay weeping in the final moments of her life, tearing the parts of her arm caught in the bed’s slats and thrashing in agony as the stalks that cleaved to her feet and the foot posts finally gave way, freeing her body from that bed she had been rooted to for months. Cecelia Cowlstock, a virgin mother, surrendered to providence on gnarled knees, and to a sodden yard she crawled. More root than bone and flesh, her fingers burrowed and fed from the loam below, flooding her parched innards and bringing life to a stirring child within her. The rains hailed down that October night in 1871, uniting mother with daughter, and under the pain of that little baby’s want for escape a final chilling shrill tore the greyed flesh between Cecelia’s legs until upon the drenched soil Meg arrived, all bloated and blue. I sort confirmation of this story from Meg herself, which, by her account, varied very little in detail. Her birth had culled the relics of human life in her mother. Her first infant cry dominated Cecelia’s final whimper, and as Meg breathed in that damp cold air, satisfying her lungs and heart for the first time, those same organs in her mother hardened into knots. Those of reasonable persuasion will agree that a person cannot transmute into anything that is not made of flesh and blood, which is why I took the journey to Farriery Pass some twenty-two years after Meg arrived that October night and saw with my own eyes Cecelia Cowlstock in tree form. And it appears that, regardless of their composition, two things that are so very different can unite, for every extended bough, every virgin bud and mature leaf spoke to me that day of Meg’s fate.

Submarine

2011-03-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

Having been a fan of Richard Ayoade since Garth Marenghi's Dark Place and The IT Crowd, and though I still can't pronounce his surname, I'm really looking forward to his directorial debut, Submarine, which is about a young teenage boy wanting to lose his virginity. Yes, not venturing into any fantastical concept there, but still, I think the vision, quirkiness and subtle humour should make it a good watch.

Infidelity

2011-03-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve been clearing the decks recently. Tying off loose ends and doing all I can to ensure I have time, focus and the energy to embark on my new project – writing a TV script. Never done this before, and I’m not too sure if the transition from prose to screen will be an easy or arduous task. But that said, it should keep be busy for the best part of the year. So yes, sadly, Dog Mile has been shelved until such time I can fit it in. Maybe the scriptwriting process will allow for lulls, which can be filled in with knitting together more of Dog Mile, or perhaps, the odd random story. Who knows.

I’m not too sure why I’ve even started this project. It feels like infidelity in some respects – that I’m cheating on the grown-up and dexterous partner for the more dumbed-down quirky mistress. Not that I’m saying the script I’m writing is dim-witted in design, but writing for television appears, in theory, less challenging and easer to charm than the manuscript. I’m sure I’ll be proven wrong on that score. So at what stage am I at? The idea has been shaped and a few key scenes formulated. I even have a writing partner. I’ve never collaborated before on a writing project. I always felt it’s a very personal journey that requires isolation and little interference from outside sources, least until you’ve finished the project. But scriptwriting lends itself to abdication. She, whom will remain nameless, is the only person I have met to be as fastidious and pragmatic in organisation and detail than myself, maybe even more so than myself! This means I feel comfortable that there won’t be long periods of time where nothing happens, or I am awaiting feedback, and likewise, she is the type of person to give me a good kick in the arse if I’m dragging my feet. The abdication element has meant that we have taken ownership of three characters each, all of who will form the main cast. There will be a support cast surrounding these characters, and they will be created as and when to help pull the characters along. It’s still in the early stages, but I’m very excited about this. Plus, it won’t do me any harm to experience the differences between writing for the screen, as apposed to writing for the shelves. Wish me luck, and I’ll try my best to keep you updated on the progress throughout.

All that Glitters Does Not Always Shimmer

2011-03-11T07:59:00.000-08:00

It’s been a week, officially, since I checked my email. I have two emails, one I give out to friends, and my professional one for submissions, and well, it’s the latter that I’ve not checked for a week. It’s been liberating. Where before I would login to the ”professional” account to see if any submissions have been accepted or rejected, I have found that with the extra time, and the absence of an all consuming swell of dread, my mood has been a lot better. I haven’t even ventured over to SubMishMash, either. It’s hard to say how long I could have gone on like this because today I finally succumbed to curiosity, and checked my account. That there were only three emails within the inbox, two confirming delivery of my submissions and that they would response accordingly, and the last from Shimmer, was not a great surprise.

Shimmer, yes. It’s been my White Wale for some time. I have submitted in the region of ten stories over the years and save for one, which was bumped up for consideration by the board of editors, they have all been rejected immediately. I have yet to open the email they have sent. And I might not. Some part of me desperately wants to get a story published by them, and another part of me believes that my writing does not suit their tastes. What their tastes are, I think, does not reflect their guidelines most of the time, either that or each editor has a particular leaning, and depending on whom you get, and what tickles their fancy at that time, can mean the token letter of rejection, or not. I have done my best. Move on, screams the voice inside. And while you’re at it, leave the email unopened as a testament to your indifference! Yes, Shimmer. It’s a peculiar place. And this is not just me talking bollocks, or not acknowledging that my writing is substandard or that I’ve blatantly disregarded their guidelines. I am sure there is at least one of those points that is true. I know quite a few writers that have ended up confused, or banging their heads against the keyboard in frustration toward what they want. There is a tendency to go blind into these things, isn’t there? Come on, how many writers just hit Duotrope for places to submit without actually reading the journal they’re submitting to? Lots, I can assure you. But Shimmer, well, I have read one of their editions. Granted, it was a free edition given away some time back, but nevertheless, it was a blueprint to what they required. And while my writing may fall under the “substandard” bracket in their eyes, I felt that most of the submissions I have sent were in keeping with their preference. Not the case. And not the case for the others too. And I’m talking about very talented writers here. So yes, it seems that they are not willing to sully their pages with anything Wallwork related. So be it. The irony to all this might be that the last submission, and when I mean last, I don’t just mean the most recent, but my very last submission to them, might have actually been accepted. Highly unlikely. But wouldn’t that be something to tell the grandchildren.

I have spent this last week tying up some loose ends. I had to do a few re-writes for a story that I mentioned in a previous blog entry, the one for the anthology, and I have given my time and eyes to Edward J Rathke’s novella, Noir: A love Story, which proved a wonderful read. I interviewed Eddy some time ago in the Writers’ Banquet series. He’s a talented writer. I had read a couple of his shorts (though he tends not to believe me when I say I have), and have always been impressed with his style and imagination. Noir proved to cement these feeling. He describes it has a detectiveless detective story, that isn’t noir in genre. Some of the writing in that novella floored me, and I wish him all the success he deserves once it’s published. So yes, read a novella and done a little editing on a short. I have not ventured into any forums I am a member of yet because I didn’t want to get tempted into old ways, and what I mean by this is, I didn’t want to get drawn into submitting to places, or writing shorts for journals, when really, I just wanted a break from the “circus” – but I do appreciate the notes of concern, guys. I think that’s a major problem with me. I have to try to keep up with everyone else. Write a similar quantity, and submit the same. It’s as though I’m desperately trying to prove to myself I am just as prolific, and good, as anyone I meet. It’s not conducive to a internal relationship, where the hand is willing to follow the mind, so long as the mind is not driving the hand by ego alone. I really must work on this. But I’m doing okay, is what I’m saying. I catching my breath. I’m not so weighed down with bitterness or despondency. My shoulders are light and my head clear. It’s a shame it’ll be short-lived.

That's Entertainment?

2011-03-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

It was Sue Perkins, TV presenter and comedian, who brought it to my attention. This weekend has seen the Big Book Giveaway, where millions of copies of famous works will be given out to public free of charge in the hope it’ll get people reading different authors and maybe even get people reading. Ms Perkins (she may be married, but I don’t know so we’ll assume for now she’s a Ms) was one of the presenters connected with this literary extravaganza because, and this is where I get a little hazy on the detail, she was once on the panel of judges for the Booker Prize. How she qualified for this is beyond me, but presumably she’s well read and may be an author too, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything on the shelves. So anyway, there’s Sue, and I’m watching her, and it seems that while she was on the aforementioned list of judges, she had to read quite a few “bookish” books. You know, the ones where you have to extract the subtext from the clever and flowery paragraphs, of which there are many. And it occurred to Ms Perkins that she has never read any, for want of a better term, Airport Fiction. Airport Fiction is the bestsellers in today’s market, consisting of many well known names as Dan Brown and Lee Childs. It is beach reading, fast and easy prose that makes for a good read, but not much else, unless of course you have a table leg that needs chocks to hold it still, and then a good paperback might come in handy. This oversight by Ms Perkins was driven by the fact that she believed, or was at least conditioned to think, that reading was a chore, something that needed to be ruminated over until both your eyes and ears bled out. That there was easy reading available, crafted by the hands of Dick Francis and Co, wasn’t on her literary radar. You had to suffer a novel before you could love it. And this is where Ms Perkins and I see eye to eye, because that is what I have been conditioned to think too. It is almost as though you were not allowed to read a great book and enjoy it. It was not there to be enjoyed, but to be studied and be charmed by its complexes. The bombastic and metaphor-laden reams of paper that bedazzle and befuddle are lessons in the craft, and should never be considered anything but magnificent. And you know, some of those “classics” are hard going, and when people talk about them and derive a third reality from the pages, I always end up questioning my capacity for learning. Is this wrong? Yes it is, shout the scholars!

Lee Child hit on the snobbery of literature quite well when he said that “they” look down on authors like himself because he doesn't use big words. Of course he knows the big words but chooses not to use them, and that he was sure “they” could not build tension in a manner he does, yet he could write literary fiction if he so wished. I’ve not read any of Mr Childs book and his daring maverick anti-hero, Jack someone-or-other, but my wife enjoys them a lot. I would sneer at her while she rapidly flicked the pages of one of these books, while in my hand I held a masterpiece so rich and heavy reading it felt like wading through bramble bushes and thickets. But maybe this is as good as any time to see if the grass is greener on the other side, or at the very least, not so long and dense.

I think these past few days have seen a change in me that might be short-lived, or permanent. At this stage it’s hard to tell, but I no longer feel intimidated by literature. I dare say I’m a little pissed off with it and all the bells and whistles it wears around its fat old neck. So be ware, if you tell me I should read a book because it’s important or a keystone in literature, I may well ask why, and if that conversation hints at words like “important”, “necessity” or “influential”, I will ask one question back, “Yes, but is it entertaining?”

Running with Scissors

2011-03-05T07:51:00.001-08:00

There may be some confusion that may arise in the next few weeks, or even days. The below blog illustrates my frustration with writing, and this is an ongoing conflict and not a recent one. I think it’s important to establish that in case there are those reading this thinking it’s a personal attack on one or many individuals I know or have been in contact with recently, it isn’t. I’m currently going through a few re-writes of one story that may feature in an anthology, and I say “may” because I have a fear the person guiding me through this process with lose heart and pull the story. And why? Well, this person is very talented, a writer too, but as ventured into editing which suits their skill-set. That this person knows me is, I am sure, the only reason her patience has not run out, or that she’d even give so much of her time to me. And I appreciate it, because in this flaky industry, anyone willing to spend a couple of minutes with a writer deserves the George Cross. So what is this? A declaration of my deepest gratitude? Perhaps. I think it’s more an insight. But we know how much you hate yourself and your writing! And we know you have no self-confidence! So why, Craig, why put us through more of your insecurities, why bore the bleeding socks off us with more shyness and self-berating reflections? Because, I have a habit of over explaining myself, being too open, and perhaps I want this one person I admire not to think my correspondence is a personal attack on her judgement, skills and selfish counselling toward a man with fewer talents than a circus monkey.

In the past few years, quite a few years to be exact, I have read a few books, some shit, some even worse than that, and a few that were life-defining. The latter are the only reason this stupid blog exits and why I still pretend to be a writer when the moment suits. I read back on these books, some very simple, some very complex, and I think to myself, “Man, how beautiful it must be to write so freely, and with little forethought of the consequences!” I wonder to myself that the stories are so simple at times, the words so effortlessly structured, if indeed they went through the same burning hoops needed to see their work in print. That they are in print suggests they had to. It is silly to think that they just wrote a book and an editor read and gave little comment, save for maybe placing a comma here, a semi-colon there. We have to re-write, right? We have to change our words to suit the vision of another, right? I mean, what is the purpose of an editor if not to be the million eyes of the reader? So, we trust, and we explain, and we then re-write and re-write some more, and here’s what I’m getting at (finally!) – it’s soul-destroying. Imagine for a moment your wife's/partner's hand is in your own, and they are lay naked on a hospital bed, screaming and panting, and from between their legs this blue and bloated child spills out – scissors please! Cut! Elation, tears, and toast and tea to follow. And what if, after they wipe away the blood and the mucus, and they weigh and they swaddle, some strange man come in and says, “Good job Mr and Mrs Wallwork, but can I make a suggestion? The nose, well, it’s a nice nose, but it seems a little too flat to me, not very strong. I think it would be best, for the baby, that you go away and reconsider surgery. Nothing too drastic, maybe a little bit of padding to make it fuller, more prominent. You wouldn’t want your baby growing up feeling self-conscious, would you? And one more thing, I’ve noticed the baby has no lobes. The ear is perfect in every other way, but I think the very essence of the ear is the lobe, don’t you think? With a little device, we could stretch it out, make it much bigger. Then, when the baby is older, they will have the choice whether or not to wear earrings. Of course, discuss this together, but I think these suggestions will make the baby much prettier and much more appealing.” And then they hand you the baby, and all you can do is just look at it and think, lobes and nose. Lobes and nose! My baby is imperfect! And this is the job of the editor, to make your baby better, to make it perfect and to point out that your seed is tainted, and that you could not produce something flawless. And a lot of this, a hell of a lot of this, is because nothing is perfect, and I think that’s the point, isn’t it? I like the fact my babies are flawed because then they don’t look like all the other babies and that maybe, in this Goddamn world where there’s so much emphasis on getting it right, that sometimes I like getting it wrong, that I don’t want to be thinking in the back of my head while I’m writing what a million other people are going to think of my baby with its flat nose and lobeless ears. But again, this is the industry, and these are the fire-hoops. I hope one day I can write and someone out there will read my work and go, “You know what, it’s a fine read. Its imperfections are endearing, and I loved it.” but I’m galaxies away from that, light years even. And I don’t want to sound like an arse, or that I think all editors are Hitlertarian in their quest for perfection. I’m just wondering to myself what is perfection, and if perfection is only perfect to the individual and not the masses.

But that person, whom I admire, and still do, and who’s guidance I appreciate, even if she thinks my baby is lacking a limb or two, I want that person to know it’s not personal but that sadly I’m a man who feels castration would be the only remedy to his shortcomings. You're right, and i am wrong, and will forevermore be the same.

Writing Sucks

2011-03-05T06:21:00.001-08:00

I was shopping. I’d been through the produce, the baked goods, the breads and the wines and beer. The final aisle was Entertainment. The bookends, were home to DVDs and books, and as I passed the book section, not a very good one at that, I saw people browsing the shelves, and some had a book in their hand, flipping the pages, and I thought to myself, “Writing sucks.” I don’t know why that was, or why I thought it, but yes, something in me found its voice and yelled, WRITING SUCKS. And I guess I’ve always known this, but hey, when you think you can write, you just assume you’ll love the title of Writer, or even enjoy the process, but the truth is, both are cheeks of the same arse. It was probably the book they had in their hands, you know, those reading them in the Entertainment aisle. Couldn’t read the titles, nor would I remember them if I did. But the covers were bright, had faces on them, and were mostly stories of “hot topics”, fighting in the Middle East, coping with having your face burnt off, ways to make meals when you have no time to make meals, old war veterans talking about the War, and stories about buying clothes and falling in love, and history novels and all manner of boring shit that doesn’t appeal to me, doesn’t sing to my soul or reach within. Not that I’ve ever read any of these stories to say that’s true, but I imagine they would. And I don’t need to read them to know this, just as I know a cesspit stinks of shit without actually needing to go near one, or that a hospital has people dying in it, even though I don’t need to venture through its door to make sure. So I’m there, with my shopping trolley filled with over priced food, waiting for my wife and daughter to catch up and it’s all so very uninspiring, and so that little person inside me again steps up and says, “Craig, why do you want to be a writer?” and well, the questions floors me, because I didn’t have an answer. I thought for a moment as I grabbed a maxi-bag of nappies. I thought that it was because being a writer would fill that part of me that’s missing, and I know that’s a cliché, and well, there’s the irony, isn’t it? But yes, I assumed it would make me whole, and all those little stories that seem to form in my mind, I could get them down and read them once in a while. And that’s what I told that little person inside me and they seemed happy enough with this explanation, until that is they asked the question, “So why get frustrated at what other people read?” And I start to think this little person inside me is having a laugh at my expense, but the more I played the question over I began to think it was a question that needed an answer. Most questions do, but this needed urgent attention. But the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t like writing. Least, not all the shit that comes with it. I like stories, and I like writing them down, but that’s about it. The editing, the promotion, the submissions, the rejections, more editing, justifying yourself, justifying your characters, the whoring, the reviewing, the searching, the need for acceptance, the hopes of seeing your work in print, the hopes of making money, the hope of being an author, other writers, editors, agents, books, journals, magazines, genres, tailoring, the doubt (my God! The DOUBT!), the blandness of others, the skills of others, the hate, pain, sweat, tears, agony, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, rejection, the pain in the tips of the fingers, the pallid complexion, the falsity, the waiting, meaningless words, flowery words, pretending to be clever, pretending to be happy, pretending that writing is life and life is art and all kinds of shit that makes you think what you’re writing actually means something, delusion, gratitude, blisters, waiting, waiting, waiting, rejections, reading shit and then reading more shit and all because someone said it wasn’t shit and you were foolish to think they knew what the difference was, and all these things and a hundred more are why I hate writing. It’s so fucking false and no one will ever appreciate that it’s not about the Goddamn book, the journal or the frigging money, it’s about being complete and just when you think that hole is getting filled, along comes this little person who is excavating huge mounds of your soul with stupid questions that make you realise there is bollocks all to look forward to.

Surreal Smut: Tales of Bizarre Erotica

2011-02-05T07:15:00.000-08:00

Medulla Publishing has finally released Surreal Smut: Tales of Bizarre Erotica via Lulu (and Amazon very shortly). It features my contribution; The Whore that Broke the Camel’s Back, a story of a zoophile who discovers that companionship is a reasonable substitute for love when she meets a forlorn gay camel, and that within the hearts of beast and human alike, misery is universal. It’s an erotic version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and like Kafka’s bug, you must look beyond the grotesque to see beneath the varying levels of human emotion playing out. It’s also very funny, and, I’m hoping, moving.

Most writers believe what constitutes a surreal story these days is something dream-like, or non-sequiter. I lean more toward those juxtapositions that transcend logic and habitual thinking to reveal deeper levels of meaning and unconscious associations. I cannot talk about love, or sadness, or some deeper emotional state so directly, I have to submerge it within the fantastical. The Whore that Broke the Camel’s Back is about loneliness, and living in a world where love is not so forthcoming. Please spread the word as for every copy sold, I get 5% of the takings. Thanks for supporting me.

It also features stories by Frances, Terence Kuch, Catherine Leary, Archer Hamilton, Peter Baltensperger, Misti-Rainwater Lites, Robert Mosca, and Sean Ulman.

Exile by Chris Deal

2011-01-04T11:35:00.000-08:00

I spoke recently about The Velvet fundraiser where you donate to their future and receive, in turn, some wonderful, and priceless, offerings ranging from having a story written for you, or even have your manuscript workshopped by published authors!

Never one to miss an opportunity, I asked author of the flawless and blistering collection Cienfeugos, Chris Deal, to write me a 100 word short that included me and the line, “I bet Ghandi never it had it this hard”. The story is called, Exile, and it is, for me, a piece of literature history:

Wallwork crested the hill, eyes hollow, moving over the blasted land. A low current of air brough the carrion's stench from the valley below. A circle of vultures gorged over an unknowable corpse. He moved, foot stumbling over foot, his fury scattering the beasts that gave him a berth as he fell prostrate, forcing himself to ignore the fetor as he sated the need, heaving once but keeping down what meat he could. Finished, Wallwork collapsed beside the meal, a reflection, arms and legs splayed. With a haggard, unpracticed voice he said, 'I bet Gandhi never had it this hard.'

If you enjoyed this, please read my Cat O’Nine Tails interview with Chris I did last year. He’s a great guy, prolific and a rare talent. You can also catch him via his website.

The Velvet Fundraiser

2011-01-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

In 2004 I migrated to a website based on the words of one particular author. I knew little of said author, save for the buzz that was surrounding his novel, Kiss Me, Judas. His name was Will Christopher Baer, and the website was The Velvet. I found the forum, warm and inviting. The people were affable, knowledgeable, kind and above all, they were there for the right reasons, for the love of prose, creativity and to foster talent. At the time, there was another author attached to the site, his debut novel, The Contortionist’s Handbook, having its praises sang by the likes of Chuck Palahniuk. Craig Clevenger brought a new dimension to the site, and snapping at his heals came the prolific and wonderful Stephen Graham Jones. The Holy Trinity was complete, and for years everyone drank from the inspiration they bled into the forums. I learnt so much, and made some very enduring friendships.

Driven by one of its most well-established and imaginative members, Logan Rapp, The Velvet is going through a change. A change that will take the site to the next level. But in order to get there, funds have to be raised. The next few years will see a great time in The Velvet’s history, and you, like me, can be part of it all. The goal is to raise $2,500 for redesigning the site, as well as handling a significant amount of future site operating costs. They hope to do this by February 14th, 2011. How this is done is through the site indigogo. You can simply donate, or collect one of the perks outlines on the site. I recently gave toward the Donor Wall. For this small contribution they promise to place my name and whatever artistic works I’d like to promote on their special section. It goes on that all donors who send more than $5, regardless of what else they receive, will be placed on the Wall. Also, for those who claim this perk, they will receive a story in whatever digital format they require from our members' huge collection. Finally, we will write a brand new hundred word (max) story for you - you just provide the prompt!

The latter I jumped at and asked the wonderfully talented Chris Deal to write a story especially for me, which I will post up once it’s complete.

Logan explains it all better on indigogo’s website. But if you have read any of the aforesaid authors, or know what it’s like to be a small voice in a vast cavern, then please, join The Velvet and be safe in the knowledge your life will be the better for it.

Writers' Banquet - An Interview with Edward J Rathke

2010-12-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

AMUSE BOUCHE

Before leaving Wolverhampton, previous interviewee Mlaz Corbier suggested I contact another writer he knew and admired greatly. I was given the name Edward J Rathke, and an address in Korea. Because my stories have leaning toward Magical Realism, Mlaz thought we might fit considering our styles were of a similar ilk. It was assumption on my part that Mlaz was in regular contact with Rathke, and for this reason he would know the time difference between Korea and the UK. I did not wish to wake him in the middle of the night, nor disturb him during his working day. Mlaz laughed at this and explained that time held no consequence in Rathke ‘s life. “Eddy isn’t bound by the limits of time like everyone else,” he said with an air of mystery. “There is no past or future in Eddy’s world, just fleeting moments of the present. Whatever time you choose to contact him, he will be there for you.” I was intrigued. Similar to Mlaz, the world had only seen a smidgen of Rathke’s work (actually, over twenty short stories and a few poems published at some prestigious and cool places like, Writers’ Bloc, Foundling Review, Red Fez, and Absent Willow Review can’t really be described as a smidgen), but from what I could gather, the mark they had made had stained the fabric of the literary cloth forever. I tracked a few down on-line and felt violently sick with admiration toward his skill and effortlessness in creating stories that were absurd, surreal, whimsical but above all else, glorious in design. In keeping with the Corbier method, I wrote to Edward and asked if he would be willing to do an interview for my blog, my final one of the year. A couple of weeks passed and one night I arrived back home to find an envelope marked with a Korean postage stamp. Edward was currently teaching English but would be happy to be part of the Writers’ Banquet series. He gave me a phone number and told me to ring whenever I wanted. As if bolstering Mlaz’s foretelling of Rathke’s timeless existence, I checked the date of the postal stamp on the envelope and found it marked to the date of 13th of March, 2011. Things were definitely going to be interesting.

HORS D'OEUVRE

CW: In the style of a book blurb, describe yourself to me.

EJR: Edward J Rathke comes from the cold and wanders the world looking for sunshine, adventure, and glory, but spends more time than he should staring at walls, waiting for stories to fall out. He currently lives in South Korea where he is uncontrollably awesome.

MAIN COURSE

CW: What, or who, made you want to be a writer?

EJR: Man, hard to say. Not even sure I'd consider myself a writer or even if I'd ever like to be considered one. As for what, Orsons Scott Card's Ender Series, specifically Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, which just ravished me and never has left my head. Most days, I think Speaker for the Dead is so forever beyond me, but it's the book that made me believe that I could do that. The first stories of my creation were an odd mix of Lord of the Rings and Battle School because logic and reason doesn't matter so much when you write something down for the first time, and matters far less when you're young enough to not care that space travel and lazers doesn't mix with swords and magic. I still tend to think it goes better that way, though.

As for who, Dostoevsky. Didn't run into him for maybe six more years and four more readings of the Ender Series, but he fundamentally changed me in every way possible. When I finished Crime and Punishment for the first time, I was no longer the same sixteen year old I was two days previous when I first held it in my hand, and I ran through that book three more times that year. Never had there been a man more brilliant, in my estimation, and I think that's why, really. I've spent the last seven years chasing his ghost, and, though I write very dissimilarly to him, he's the mark I'm always after and will always be failing to achieve. I call my style Imagistic, which derives maybe too much from obsessions with film and images and Rimbaud.

CW: To those that have never read your work, how best would you describe it?

EJR: Man, these are the things I'm the absolute worst at, being concise and definitive and knowing what I'm doing. Thomas Pynchon said somewhere, There is nothing worse than a sentimental surrealist. I'd say that pretty much sums up my oeuvre: Sentimental Surrealism. I prefer to just call it Magic Realism, which someone else said is just a fancy way to call your work Fantasy, and that's probably just as accurate, too. I write collapsing love stories that are trying desperately to be hopeful in the face of a looming apocalypse.

CW: Where do you draw inspiration from?

EJR: Life. Everything. The way the wind blows, the smiles seen on strangers when I wander their world, kindness, a gentle hand, the smell or touch of a woman, the laugh of a child, but, mostly, from my own delusions and dreams and misremembered moments. Then all other kinds of art, film and music especially, and especially the work of people like Max Richter, Philip Glass, Radiohead, CocoRosie, Olafur Arnalds, Johann Johannsson, Akira Kurosawa, Terrence Malick, Kim Ki-duk, Yimou Zhang, Wong Kar Wai, Carl Dreyer, and this list could go on for pages, so I'll leave it at that. Images are what matter to me and these people create images better than anyone else. For me, life is about moments and that's certainly what I emphasise in my own writing. How a moment can change a life, how an instant can determine life or death, love or loss. I think each life can be summed up in a single sentence and, more than that, can be summed up in a singular moment, that moment kept most private and precious, that moment that made you into the person you are today.

CW: If you could be the understudy of any writer, alive or dead, who would it be and why?

EJR: Steve Erickson. No question about it. In my mind, he's the greatest living American writer and the only American writer who understands Magic Realism and how fundamental it is. He's a rotten sentimentalist, too, which is likely why I'm so drawn to his work. Reading him was similar to when I read Dostoevsky. It lasts and I just could not put any of his books down even long enough to sleep. I would read while I ate, read instead of sleep, read them every chance I got. He's flawless, brilliant. I don't think I write much like him, but, sometimes, I wish I did. Wish I could pull these sentences and storylines together the way he does. Effortless, beautiful, heartbreaking. A year ago, I hadn't even read any of his novels and now I've read some of them twice and they've changed everything. His stories matter in a way that few writers achieve.

CW: What’s the best piece of advice you would give, or you have been given, concerning the process of writing?

EJR: Someone smart said to start as near the end as possible. I always thought that was pretty good advice and it's the one I implement the most, I think. I tend to start after the ending, though, so maybe I'm doing it wrong. Advice I would give about the actual process of writing: Don't worry about it. You'll read about the process of your heroes and all that, and think that maybe they found the secret and that's why all the success. And that surely is part of it, but the real secret is that everyone has their own process. Copying someone else's process will not give you their results. It'll likely just impede your own work. I think understanding the writer that you are is crucial, and it took me a long time to figure out my process, but, now that I have, I'm like a broken dam, flooding pages onto this laptop. Don't be afraid if you haven't written anything in six months. It'll come. Don't be afraid if it takes you all day to write one sentence. You might even be ahead of the game. Don't expect to write your novel in a handful of days. You won't.

CW: What realistic expectations do you have about your future as a writer?

EJR: Well, since September, and by the time this interview goes up, I will completed three novels. So, short term, see if I can find an agent and get my novel NOIR: A LOVE STORY to see the light of day. Long term, maybe get a few more of these novels published, but what I'd really like to do has little to do with writing and everything to do with me holding a camera, but, mostly what I want in the long term is to survive my life and see what's waiting for me out there in the world.

CW: Pretend, for a moment, I’m a publisher. Completed or unfinished, sell me your current project in less than 250 words.

EJR: Man, I've a lot of projects right now and absolutely no idea how to sell anything properly. How about I write a few and you pick one, yeah?

Noir: A Love Story is a detectiveless detective tale sifting through 26 perspectives in order to find the truth behind two deaths, one town that exists nowhere, and what it means to have a dream.

Awaking without a memory in a memoryless world beside a woman who cannot speak who may be a god dreaming all of existence, Echoes recounts the journey of a man through a world of transition, beneath a forever storm falling from no sky, and onto the birth canal of a new world until he reaches the shore connecting one world to its past.

Creation Compositions [title subject to change] centers round the lost films of the great, albeit forgotten, Sebastian Falke. Told in three novellas, Creation Compositions recounts tales of lost love haunted by ghosts that refuse to be forgotten, and so the characters must write it down to bring the ones they love back from the otherside of death.

The Day I Swallowed the Moon is an experimental nightmare about a small town's struggle with a series of murders by a legendary beast existing in the mind of a young man. Told through overheard conversations, journal entries, and interviews, a world falls apart only to find nothing at its center.

All combined, it's under 250 words, which is a bit of an accomplishment, yeah?

CW: Yes, I love the sound of them all. Tell me something about your writing that no one else knows.

EJR: They're all me, I think.

DESSERT

CW: Who would make up the members of your fantasy band?

EJR: Thom Yorke and Bjork singing, Yann Tiersen and Olafur Arnalds on violin, Zoe Keating on cello, Honus Honus [Man Man] on piano, Tom Waits on percussion, Danny Seim on drums, and maybe Eric Judy on bass to kind of attempt to even out the sound, which would surely be a mess.

CW: Is there one moment in your life you would relive?

EJR: If I could, I'd maybe relive my year in Europe. I had a lot of fun there.

CW: What song can’t you currently get out of your head?

EJR: The title's Japanese, so I don't actually know what it's called, but it's on the Norwegian Wood OST and is written by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame. The title looks like this, though: また会いに来るからね. That and Max Richter's From the Art of Mirrors, which, I believe, is the most perfect piece of music every written and it's been stuck with me since I first heard it two years ago.

CW: If you could go back to school and re-study to be something else, what would it be?

EJR: Man, if I could go back in time and tell eighteen me about college, I would. I would've been a biology major. No question about that, and I'd be far more knowledgeable about genetics, which is kind of what I wish I was doing. But, really, the actual answer is that I would've gone to film school, which was always my intention, but I changed plans and decided to get a real degree. But, I mean, there are no jobs anywhere, so most degrees are about as worthless as each other.

CW: What song would you sing in a karaoke bar?

EJR: I'd like to say that I'd be singing something cool like Radiohead or Tom Waits or Elvis Costello or even Queen, but I'm probably up there belting out Lady Gaga or George Michael or maybe Buddy Holly.

CW: If you could spend one night only with Jesus or the Devil, who would you choose and why?

EJR: I've a bit of an obsession with the devil, so I'd likely want to talk most to it, but, man, I'm terrified enough of demons and all that, so maybe I'd spend it with Jesus, unless, of course, he offered me fish, which would be quite rude, Jesus being omniscient and all. But, yeah, I think I'd rather just spend time with Odin.

CW: If you could be at one significant moment in history, what would it be?

EJR: I would've liked to see the Hindenburg go down or seen Rasputin's murder or even any fragments of his life. Maybe Yukio Mishima's death or had Herman Melville stamp my papers at Ellis Island.

CW: If you could have been an extra in any film, what would it have been (bonus points for naming the scene)?

EJR: I would've liked to be an elf at Helm's Deep. Maybe one that dies fantastically.

CW: What’s your proudest achievement?

EJR: Surviving. And, probably, allowing myself to live the life I choose to live. I think that, above anything else, is something worth being proud of.

CW: Can you remember an interesting/unusual fact, and if so, what it is?

EJR: Georges Méliès sold toys after most of his films were made into boot heels for soldiers in WWI or were recycled to be made into new films, so the world has lost nearly 500 films by the first genius of specialeffects.

I kind of mentioned this above, but Herman Melville ended his life in poverty working at Ellis Island.

The Devil doesn't like guitar driven music.

Charles Bukowski became ill late in life and none of the doctors in Beverly Hills could determine what was wrong, so he went back to a free clinic in the slums and was told that he had tuberculosis.

CW: What song lyric, or song title, really resonates with you?

EJR: "I once fell in love with you just because the sky turned from grey into blue," from Good Friday by CocoRosie. That line's stuck with me since I first heard it years and years ago. They've a lot of simple lines like that, though, that, for whatever reason, just sits in me forever. Like this one from a song called By Your Side, "I'd wear your black eyes." These are likely coming to mind at the moment, though, because I'm listening to them. Elliott Smith has too many great lines, too. Tom Waits especially. I like the song title Remember Me as a Time of Day by Explosions in the Sky. They make great titles to songs.

CW: What’s your favourite childhood memory?

EJR: Where to even begin? This kind of question's no fair because it's too big, like asking me why I choose to live. Maybe playing with my first dog. She was a Rottweiler named Ruby and she was an awful dog, but I loved her so. She bit me in the face once, even, but that's not how I remember her. She was great, but got stolen. Or there was a different time when I found a stray Dalmatian that was bigger than I was wandering the streets of Minneapolis and stuck with it all day, playing. I brought it home and my mother sent it back into the street. Or, man, these are all about dogs, but there was a different time when this big dog, can't remember what kind, but it was pretty, was wandering around our alley. I walked right up to him, must've been between five and seven, and reached my hand to touch his face. He snapped his jaws at me but didn't bite me, so I tried again and he let me pet him, so I did for a long time, sitting withhim back behind my house in the alley. And, to round out the dog moments, my current dog, when still a puppy, which counts because I was too, would come to me when I was sad and lie beside me to make sure I was okay. I appreciate that more than I can really express, and it's been that way her whole thirteen years of life.

My life with dogs, yeah?

Edward J Rathke is a foppish dandy of the greatest ilk who lives neither here nor there, but a little everywhere. One day, he'll find his way home, but, for now, he adventures well. More of his words may be found at http://edwardjrathke.wordpress.com/ .

***

I would like to give thanks to all the authors who have given their time and unique perspective in this current series. Before conducting any interviews, there is always the fear that the chosen person might not realise your vision, but I can say with some confidence each any everyone of you exceeded it. For those readers who have actively followed this current set of interviews, I hope you continue to search out and support the authors featured here, and help push them beyond the stratosphere so that we are forever looking up to them. Happy Holidays everyone!

Red Fez and Pancakes

2010-12-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

Too many good writers to mention over at the December issue of Red Fez, so I'll mention my good friend and master of Apocalypse, Chris Deal who has a modest poem called, A Waste of Time and Ink. And there's Jersey Devil regular, Danger_Slater's McUniverse.

And of course the aptly titled, Red Fez and Pancakes by Craig Wallwork (who?). For those of you who liked, Flaps, Red Fez and Pancakes features the same hapless lover who this time falls for a pretty woman with a very strange secret, and may well be the ultimate Cougar!

As per their blurb, Red Fez Publications was founded in 2002 by author Leopold McGinnis (with the vital support of his writing group: David McGinnis, Joan Hoekstra, Rita Simpson & Louisa Sunstrum) out of youthful optimism and a desire to break literature out of the wrinkly, old, death-grippy, status-quo-like hands of a tired and insular literary industry. Over time it has grown into this whacked out place of fabulous poetry, art, comics, fiction, columns, people and madness...wearing a red hat with a yellow tassel. The Fez's primary goals are to make a place for fresh, new, exciting and accessible art and writing in people's bedrooms, their minds, bathrooms and transit stops by publishing new, under-recognized and all around good writers and artists. We harness the dark powers of the internet to provide a more personal way of looking at writing, offering readers numerous ways of finding what they don't know they're looking for.

Writers’ Banquet – An interview with Mlaz Corbier

2010-11-27T10:45:00.000-08:00

AMUSE BOUCHE

By the time I got to interview Mlaz Corbier, he had reached mythical status. For the weeks leading up to the interview, which you’ll find below, I had found myself travelling from West Yorkshire to Wolverhampton, chasing my shadow and the illusive spirit of this new writer. Such an expense and time consuming act is not normally warranted for a fledging author, who, at this stage in his career, has no book out in print. However, Corbier is no normal writer. I first heard about him from a few of the old Cat O’Nine Tails authors. They seemed united, as do all authors, in reading new and exciting prose that shift the landscapes of fiction. Many I had interviewed drew inspiration from the masters of literature, some on more obscure titles. And there were those that sought out any voice rising among the clamour. Mlaz Corbier was one of those voices. I had heard the name Jimmy Viper mentioned sporadically in emails and in many on-line forums, and assumed that Mr Viper was a new writer breaking through the flotsam of aspiring authors. Instead it was a character from a book written by Netherlands author, Mlaz Corbier. The book was called, Jimmy Viper and the Werewoman’s Honeypot. A few pages had leaked out on the Internet, teasers, if you will. Having been compared to Burgess’s, A Clockwork Orange, in terms of its inimitable argot and style, Jimmy Viper certainly whet my appetite. The problem was, no one knew anything about Mlaz Corbier, or which hovel of the globe he dwelled within. I made more enquires, all of which led nowhere and only helped bolster the theory that Corbier was not real, because, as pointed out by one writer, he had died of alcohol poisoning while writing his second novel. Other theories included everything from the plausible presumption of him being a well-renown author writing under a pseudonym, to the more ludicrous, which had Corbier as an eccentric millionaire who lived within one quarter of his mansion among roaming swine and vast volumes of rare first editions. I was intrigued to say the very least. I was fortunate to find one person who knew Corbier from many years ago. He lived in Wolverhampton and agreed to meet me. I was given an address in Groningen and instructions not to pass on the information to anyone. I wrote a letter that day and eight days later received a handwritten reply. Mlaz Corbier was very much alive, and, contrary to his peers, living within modest accommodation. In the letter he appeared quite an affable fellow and spoke affectionately of the aforesaid Jimmy Viper. He agreed to an interview, but seemed adamant to meet in person instead of conducting anything over the phone. It was agreed we would meet at his friends in Wolverhampton, or Wolvo, as Mlaz so endearing refers to it. This is what happened.

HORS D'OEUVRE

CW: In the style of a book blurb, describe yourself to me.

MC: Mlaz Corbier hails from a mysterious little land called the nether-lands. One day he left that non-place behind and went on a quest to alter what most people commonly believe to be Literature. Had it not been for his infamous short attention span, he would have accomplished the feat a long time ago. But now he once more found the gusto and zeal and thus is he again set to cross literary boundaries and shatter literary believes.

MAIN COURSE

CW: What, or who, made you want to be a writer?

MC: When I was only a handful of years old, they sent me to some kind of institution where they forced all kinds of symbols in my head that supposedly bore a meaning (later it turned out they had been deceiving me the entire time as all the meanings were in a now-forgotten language called Dutch). It became evident pretty damn quickly I was a master at remembering these strings of symbols and the meaning that supposedly belonged to them. Craving for more, I started experimenting with making up my own set of strings. Later I discovered those new proper strings was called English. Then, because I didn’t have any noteworthy talents whatsoever but wanted to impress a bird nonetheless, I started jotting down some of the strings that sprouted from the loins of my imagination. The feathers of that to-be-impressed bird have changed a couple of times in the past years, though I’m still writing to impress. And today it’s impressing the lady with eyes like a Spitfire.

CW: To those that have never read your work, how best would you describe it?

MC: Stories of crime featuring odd characters what talk funny.

CW: Where do you draw inspiration from?

MC: I can’t really pinpoint where I get my inspirata for a brilliant line or story from; it’s most everywhere I look, to be honest, but I can give one amusing example of how I got some of my lines: I often listen to the black box and mishear partly (or more often completely) what the bands are actually singing; I really try to focus but my attention span doesn’t allow for such nonsense. I then fill in some of the blanks myself and that new line will stick in my head for a while. I improve it a bit here and a bit there and then I write it down with a diabolical cackle. Afterwards I find out that the original lyrics weren’t anything like what I thought they were, which makes me ponder about why the bands chose mediocre lines instead of awesome ones like mine. It helps when I listen to songs in a language I don’t speak.

CW: If you could be the understudy of any writer, alive or dead, who would it be and why?

MC: Well I’m still studying dead and less dead writers today so it’s a bit of a peculiar question. But people would make me plenty happy if they put Bill Hicks on the curriculum. He was surely the funniest gent in the world but I'd like to delve deeper into his life so to refute the lies surrounding him how he was American and such things.

CW: What’s the best piece of advice you would give, or you have been given, concerning the process of writing?

MC: Enjoy doing it. Writing is a lot like when two strapping blokes put you in a weird-looking coat with long sleeves tied to your back and then throw you in the cooler, isn’t it? You’re on your own every single word you write. So, enjoy the ride. Enjoy putting pen to paper every day; enjoy talking about plot lines and zany characters to everyone willing and unwilling to lend you an ear; enjoy getting rejected again and again and again; enjoy being mocked by musicians who, other than you, do get laid for being creative; enjoy your RSI and failing eyesight; enjoy sleepless nights pondering about how James is going to arrive at Catboy’s mansion; enjoy the frustrations – all of them; enjoy every single bit of the job. Or don’t bother at all.

CW: What realistic expectations do you have about your future as a writer?

MC: I’d be very surprised and mighty disappointed if none of my work will ever be considered for a Nobel Prize. I’m about to change the literary landscape after all. Some pessimists however might find it not all that realistic perhaps. So if I reach and entertain as many people as I can, I’ll be happy as well. If it means no more than a dozen will actually read it, then that’s fine with me. I’ll give those twelve the time of their lives.

CW: Pretend, for a moment, I’m a publisher. Completed or unfinished, sell me your current project in less than 250 words.

MC: To the right honourable Mr Craig Wallwork,

Please consider for publication my novella entitled, Jimmy Viper and The Werewoman's Honeypot. The story’s about revenge and smokes and some blood and maybe a kiss here and there, but, most importantly, it’ll make you smile, if you have any sense of humour in your gulliver, that is. The genius of this work lies in the invented slang, its colourful characters and plots relying on paronomasias. Also, I have attached a bullet to the manuscript; it’s completely untraceable and I want you to know it was born in a very large family.

Sincerely,

Your own Mlaz

(Was that less than 250 words? I’m a writer, not a mathematician for sock’s fake!)

CW: Tell me something about your writing that no one else knows.

MC: It’s secretly really elitist.

DESSERT

CW: Who would make up the members of your fantasy band?

MC: I’d call the band The Mlazzerettes and it would only include pretty birds of course. Something like this: Jo Mangled on guitar and vocals; Kat Spazzy on guitar (and vocals); Ann Artistic on bass and backing vocals; and on drums... well drums is overrated in the first place.

CW: Is there one moment in your life you would relive?

MC: Will DeNiro [Zatopeks frontman] pointed out to us that “it’s dull when you’re dead.” Therefore I want to relive all of my life over and over again.

CW: What song can’t you currently get out of your head?

MC: Song for Nina Simone by Zatopeks. It might very well hold the best and truest line ever:

“We attach so many delusions to love / It doesn’t fall with the rain, it’s not send from above / It’s absence and dreaming and clutching at nothing; it’s loneliness.”

CW: If you could go back to school and re-study to be something else, what would it be?

MC: I’m still going to school for one bizarre reason or other. But I’d love to study cryptozoology. Or Penny Dreadfulogy.

CW: What song would you sing in a karaoke bar?

MC: No, I’m not allowed to. The Board of Decent Behaviour has forbidden me to sing in public ever again because last time I sang, it scared the cats and they didn’t give milk for seven years.

CW: If you could spend one night only with Jesus or the Devil, who would you choose and why?

MC: I’d spend the night with Jesus because it’s pretty obvious I have to spend a fair few nights with the Devil and his pitchfork in a wee bit.

CW: If you could be at one significant moment in history, what would it be?

MC: I already was present at my birth so you probably don’t allow that answer and saying I want to be around when I was conceived is just wrong and it grosses me out even if I were of the likes of Richard Thomas. I think I would’ve liked to be aboard the Beagle with Charles Darwin, maybe.

CW: If you could have been an extra in any film, what would it have been?

MC: Is there any film where an extra gets kissed by Keira Knightley?

CW: No. What’s your proudest achievement

MC: I once made a fit lass stop her crying.

CW: Can you remember an interesting/unusual fact, and if so, what it is?

MC: A koala has a bifurcated willie.

CW: What song lyric, or song title, really resonates with you?

MC: “From up here you all look insignificant / It’s like I’m looking through their eyes.” from the song Bathsheba by 3 ½ Inch Floppy.

CW: What’s your favourite childhood memory?

MC: I don’t think I’ve reached childhood yet.

***

Mlaz Corbier lives in the north of the Nether-lands filling his days with laughing at commoners and carefully documenting the adventures of Jimmy Viper upon that he won't be forgotten. Through the official website of Red Puffin Tobacco he instructs his chosen ones.
(the website is http://www.red-puffin-tobacco.blogspot.com/ )

The Alternative Guide to Writing

2010-11-25T12:09:00.000-08:00

1. Use a thesaurus on every second word. It’ll make you sound really intellectual and worldly wise.

2. Focus on the mundane, especially if this holds no bearing on your character or the plot.

3. Never start mid action.

4. Any story that includes zombies, werewolves and vampires will automatically sell and make you millions.

5. Refrain from learning the correct use of grammar. When you have Microsoft Word, any monkey can write classic literature.

6. Always ask your friends and family to review your work. They will always give you honest feedback.

7. Plot is essential. No matter how well designed and interesting your character, without a plot your novel will never make it to the shelves.

8. Write when drunk or high on recreational drugs. It enhances your prose.

9. Throw a random and ambiguous sex scene into your story whenever you can, and make it as crude as possible. You’ll really grab the publisher’s attention.

10. Readers are dumb. Don’t assume that the content in your dialogue is enough to illustrate the emotion. The best way to counteract this is always finish the “he said”, “she said”, with an adjective and adverb.

11. Adjectives and adverbs are not limited to dialogue, so use as many as you can anywhere else in the story.

12. Don’t take on criticism. It’ll only slow you down (plus, what the hell do other people know about the way you write!).

13. Never address submissions, Dear Editor. Go for the personal touch and call them, buddy, bro, babe, hotty, sexy, love, geezer, or honey.

14. Search Duotrope and submit to random places. Don’t bother reading the magazine because most are not genre specific and will love your blatant disregard toward their submissions policy.

15. Take rejections personally. The standard response is clearly a reflection on the story being awful and your talents as a writer. If you’re rejected once, consider yourself a failure and give up.

16. Develop your “voice” by copying the style of your favourite writer.

17. It’s a myth that all successful writers read. To be a great writer, all you need is imagination.

18. Write for money. Everyone who is published is a millionaire, so as a career choice, being a writer ranks high in the most well-paid professions.

19. Universal subjects that really capture the attention of publishers and readers alike are anal surgery, incest, bestiality, torture, venereal diseases and paedophilia. If you’re stuck for a story/novel, include any of the aforementioned and you’ll be making money in no time.

20. If someone you know gets published before you, make it your sole purpose to denounce their work in public and pour scorn on their character at any given juncture. They clearly hold no respect for you as a friend or a writer.

Nik Korpon and 3AM

2010-11-24T09:21:00.001-08:00

Stay God, Nik Korpon's novel, is due for release very soon. It's an exciting time for him and I wish Nik all the best with the release, but until then, check out his recent interview with Gregory Frye at the very cool 3AM Magazine.

Flash Fiction X 3

2010-11-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

Suicide Workshop

25 metres.
One rule: each death had to make the news. Yesterday, only three of us remained. The first, Roberto, an olive-skinned Italian with cock-cancer; he tried self-crucifixion.
28 metres.
Melinda, the retired HIV whore, she arranged an afternoon with a Shetland pony and a camcorder. I drank three litres of carbonated water, and ate ten tins of baked beans.
29 metres.
If the death made national news, your next of kin would receive an anonymous cheque for 100k. Roberto couldn’t drive that last nail in. Melinda’s pony was shy. It is a fact – a diver cannot pass gas at 33 metres.

My Betty Davis

“Years off empty silences and solitude does wonders for your imagination”, Jenny would say whenever I questioned the validity of her stories.
“Life needs embellishment. We need to decorate it with trinkets made from fibs and forgeries. That way life will always remain fresh, and never grow stale.”
Jenny loved to speak like that, in that way you only see in old movies. I half expect she would have loved to have been Betty Davis. I placed my hand on the thick glass that separated us and asked her, “Tomorrow, same time?”

Dirt Napping

Before remembering the telephone call, I ask him, “Who hasn’t?”
It started with a funeral. And for a long while, the silence that follows. Then the phone rang. “Despite all things,” said the voice on the other end. I told him I was eating my dinner and could I call him back. “Despite all things,” he repeated. I tell him it’s lasagne and it took me the best part of an hour to make, and he says, “Despite all things, I once loved and was loved, and for this reason I have had a wonderful life.” Then the line went dead. They found him, two days later, with a noose around his neck and a bullet in his head. Below him, he had laid out a plastic sheet to gather the blood. He was methodical to the end.
The detective says again, “Do you think your father suffered from depression?” and I realise he never heard me ask the question.