Rejection(s)

Let me be clear about this – rejections suck.  I don’t handle them well, going moody for at least a day.  In fact, I can remember most non-writing rejections I’ve had in my life:

- Mrs. W in high school who said I wasn’t mature enough for a job I applied for in the school’s radio program. (In retrospect, she was probably right about that one).

- Denise C. in college who, when I poured my heart out to her, said we’d be better off as friends. (I’d have been better off if she’d stabbed me in the throat with a nail file.)

- Not making the freshmen baseball team.  (This was no surprise though.  When I showed up to the first day of tryouts ((in purple sweatpants that belonged to my mom, of course)) I knew I was a goner.)

-  Not getting the department chair position two years ago.  (And thank god for minor miracles that didn’t happen.)

- Two women I hit on shortly after my divorce who shot me right out of the water and proved that dating had changed a lot in nine years.

- And others I probably can’t remember right now.

I took all of these rejections personally (okay, not the baseball one) and that’s carried over to writing rejections as well.  I know I shouldn’t take writing rejections personally, but I struggle to compartmentalize business and personal rejections.  So 15 rejections in less than a month  has had me pretty damn moody, much to my family’s annoyance.

On Friday, my wife and I had a conversation about my recent moodiness and how I’ve handled (‘mishandled’ is probably the better word for it) the rejections.  Being totally honest, I’m a worrier.  And I tend to create things to worry about when really I have little to be concerned with in my life – my kids are healthy, financially we’re okay, my wife and I have secure jobs, my parents are doing good.  So really, I just need to relax a bit.  No, relax a lot.  Maybe this novel gets published, maybe it doesn’t.  It’s important to me, yes, but not to where I need to get angry everytime I recieve a standard form rejection.  Everything’s going to be fine.    And really, isn’t “I can’t find an agent for my novel” pretty much the perfect example of a First World Problem?

So that’s where I am.  I’ve actually done well with this over the last few days, even as one rejection came in that had the phrase “do not despair” in it, something that annoyed me for some reason.

The real test will come tomorrow as I’m expecting news on the novel that could make things really interesting, really fast.  We’ll see.

But until then, I guess I’m rejecting rejection.  Or rejecting my taking those rejections personally.  Writing-ones, that is.  Babysteps and all.

A Conversation with Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory is the author of three (fantastic) novels, a collection of short stories, and a couple of comic series.  I suppose his novels would be characterized as fantasy, but that’s not entirely accurate, as we’ll discuss below.  I first met Daryl Gregory at ReaderCon in Boston back in…2009?  2008?  Honestly, my years all blend together.  I have mostly crummy memories from that trip, but meeting Daryl was a high point.  At the time I’d read his first novel Pandemonium, and pretty much went all fanboy at a ‘meet the author’ type of thing.  We struck up a friendship, and he’s been a good friend and mentor to me over the years.  He’s a hell of a nice guy, an infuriatingly excellent writer, and always offers good advice and a sane perspective on writing and publishing.  What follows is an email conversation we’ve had over the course of last couple of days.

Me:  Let’s start with this – When most people think fantasy novels – and by ”most people” I mean me – they (I) immediately think of talking raccoons with swords.  (Unfair, but true.)  Obviously the genre encompasses a lot more than that, as your work proves.  But why fantasy?  What about the genre appeals to you more than others?  (That’s right, defend your genre!)

Daryl: Yeah, Tolkien casts a big shadow, doesn’t he? I’m of the generation where if you said capital F Fantasy, people were most likely to think of swords and dragons. But these days, most of the people who are reading fantasy are not reading epic fantasy, and they’re calling it something else. “Vampire novels.” “Manga.” Or just “cool books I like.” Harry Potter is casting a bigger shadow than anyone.

But despite growing up on Tolkien, I’ve never written epic quest fantasy, or high fantasy, or sword and sorcery. (Though I love Glen Cook’s Black Company series, and I’d like to take a crack at gritty S&S some day.) I like to write stuff that crosses genres. I write both fantasy and science fiction and some stuff that is both. Most of my short stories are SF, one of my novels is SF but constructed like a fantasy novel, and the books that are supposedly fantasy have a lot of elements that make them feel like science fiction. (Scientists and doctors always show up in my books to argue about why the weird stuff is happening, even if they fail to find an explanation.)

I guess what I’m attracted to is weirdness. I was an English major, and read a lot of the canon, but I was always attracted to the stories that had an odd bent to them, a little bit of the fantastic. When I sit down to write, it’s the weird stuff that I’m always attracted to.

What about you? When you started writing, did you start with SF or fantasy stories?

Me:  See, when I started writing, I defaulted to horror simply because I’d grown up on my brother’s Stephen King novels.  So when I had to write short story in a writing class, I wrote a King knockoff.  That line between fantasy and horror is so blurred though.  Your novel Raising Stoney Mayhall could be classified as horror because the main character is a zombie, but I see it more as fantasy.  Maybe that’s because when most people hear ”horror” they picture blood and guts and screaming coeds.  In a way, I’m probably still guilty of that.  Heck, I’ve sold stories to horror publications that could easily be classified as fantasy stories, but are dark enough to sell.  Again, that line is really blurry, a lot like how your fantasy stories could be labeled SF.

Ultimately, like you, I like weirdness, too.  But it has to be grounded in reality.  My favorite TV shows - Twin Peaks, Lost, The X-Files - gained their audience by being ”weird”, but were always realistic.  The characters always came off like real people living in the real world, but had fantastic things happening to them.  Your books have all done this really well, and maybe that’s why I like them.  Even Pandemonium has a sense of everyday reality to it, even though it takes place in a world where demon possession is a recognized fact of life.  When you’re drafting a novel like that or any of the others, how do you manage to contain the fantasy elements in order to keep the book’s world recognizable?  Is there ever a point where you think, “No, I’d lose the reader if I went in that direction”?

Daryl: I have a whole speech on what I call “anti-horror,” which is what I often write. Take some of the tropes of horror, like zombies or demons, and re-cast them in such a way that the arc of the story isn’t about revulsion and rejection of the monster, but acceptance and understanding. But I digress…

Your question was about reining in the fantasy. I think about this a lot in the planning stages. I look for a premise that will let me stay grounded in a world pretty much like ours. I usually change only one fundamental thing, then write whatever follows logically from that premise. And it’s usually an event that has happened in the past — it’s a condition of the world, so if the reader’s not going to buy it, they can get out early.

In Raising Stony Mayhall, the Romero-esque zombie uprising has already happened, and the ghouls have been defeated. The story is about the few living dead who have survived. In Pandemonium, those demonic possessions you mentioned have been happening for decades. And in Devil’s Alphabet, but the big epidemic that transformed the protagonist’s hometown happened ten years before.

At some point I realized that I was really interested in what happens _after_ the big climax. The body of the novel is about living in the wake of some catastrophe. Of course, then I get to build to my own big climax. By that point in the book, I’m no longer caring if the changes in the world are too extreme, because the base world we started with is solid enough. If readers have followed me that far, I figure they’ll go to the end. By the conclusion of each of my books, either the protagonist is irrevocably changed, or the world has been.  I like that effect, but it makes sequels almost impossible.

So far I haven’t written a “second world” fantasy, in which I have to create from scratch an entire environment, history, economic system, magical framework, etcetera. I’d need to spend a year just making notes.

I think short stories are very difficult, because you have to establish the world so quickly. But on the other hand, readers are willing to put up with much more weirdness and ambiguity. Not everything has to be spelled out. Since Stephen King was an early model for you, you’ve probably tried that out in your stories. Start with a mundane world (say, a town in Maine), escalate the weirdness, then at the end drop the mike and walk away. Or maybe not.

Me:  I think I may start writing my stories that way, with escalating weirdness, but usually all fantastical elements get edited out of my stories in later drafts.  I’m a logical thinker and highly skeptical, so I like to keep my weirdness real.  The stories I’ve written with monsters or unexplained phenomena are my least favorites.  The stories of mine that I like the most are all realistic in that they could happen – people freezing off body parts to feel included, students trying to drive their teacher insane,  a kid using a huckster to help heal his father’s grief.  Those things could happen, but likely never would.  Whenever I come up with a “What if” scenario for a story or novel, I always look for a rational explanation, a characteristic that tends to cripple my creativity.  But the way you create these worlds – where the change has already occurred, maybe explained, maybe not – is really appealing to me.  It could almost be a way to trick my brain around needing to understand the logic of it.

You mentioned the lack of sequel possibilities and not having written a second world fantasy novel. (Although I still say you could write a hundred short stories based on Stony Mayhall’s world). However, it seems that nowadays those are the types of books that sell, especially in fantasy and SF.  When you sit down to a new project, how much do you consider how commercially viable the end product will be?  Or do you follow the “write what you would want to read” approach?

Daryl: The market definitely is an influence. If short stories paid as well per page as novels, I sure as hell would be writing more short stories, because I love them. And one of the things I love about them is that the range of what’s allowed is much broader — you can do just about anything you want to do, and if you execute it with skill, you can sell it and find readers. Whereas with novels, there are some books that will never sell to a major SF publishers, no matter how well written. How many Dhalgren‘s will never see print, because they can’t be marketed? We have small press and epublishing, but it’s depressing how narrow the categories are for the Big Six publishers.

So, my strategy for novels is to figure out what ideas will work with the main market, and what ideas I will have to reserve for some other venue. So far, I haven’t had to _change_ my ideas to match the market. No editor, once they buy, has tried to push me somewhere that wasn’t good for the book, or something I didn’t want to do. And often you get a chance to subvert from within. You do things in the book that perhaps the publisher didn’t know they were buying. But if you make it work, you win.

Every writer’s going to have to come to terms with the fact that there are some ideas that he or she loves that publishers won’t want to touch. But the thing you can never do– never never never — is write something you don’t like, just to please the market.

Okay, I lied. If they pay you a shit-ton of money, by all means, write that awful thing.

But otherwise, no. What’s the point? I take it as an article of faith that success only comes when you double-down on what you believe in, and that you write what you want to read. Chasing the market when you’re a new writer is damn near impossible (and nearly as hard when you’ve got all the publishing contacts in the world), and will lead you to all kinds of dead ends and dark alleys.

Kurt, you and I have talked about this some before. It can be very discouraging to find out that the market doesn’t want what you’ve created. But what choice do we have? Writing is not for the weak.

Whew! I got all ranty and preachy. That was fun.

So where are you in this process now?

Me: I’m at the start of the process – with a finished book and looking for an agent.  It’s frustrating because like you mentioned, the Big Six have very narrow categories, and most agents selling YA are selling a very specific type of novel – ones with a fantasy slant aimed towards teenage girls.  I wrote my book without really considering the market or an audience, a mistake I won’t make again, hopefully.  But I do believe that you can still write what you want to read, and please the market, as well.  Maybe.  Still, it’s early, and it could just be that the stack of growing rejections is fueling my creeping pessimism.  It’s all made me have to define what success in regards to writing would be for me.  So for you, after three novels, a short story collection, and a few comics under your belt – Are you happy with where you are as a writer?  Do you feel you’ve achieved your writing goals?

Daryl: As Gardner Dozois told me, It’s all ladders.  There was a time (and it doesn’t feel all that long ago) in which all I wanted in my career was to sell one story to one good magazine. But as soon as I sold that story, I wanted to sell just one more to that magazine, to prove it wasn’t a fluke. And then I wanted to sell a story to a different magazine. And then I wanted to sell just one novel…

You see where this is going. No where good.

The Daryl from a few years ago would kick my ass for saying this, but of course I’m not content. I want to keep writing books. I want to sell enough books that the publishing powers that be will buy future books. Career-wise, I’d like to feel more secure.

That’s the business side talking. From the “art” side, I have to remind myself that I’ve written four books that I can stand behind. There’s nothing I’ve written that I’m ashamed of, or that I phone in. And nothing pleases me more when a writer I respect reads something of mine and says, “That was pretty good.”

Because look — I started a sentence with “Gardner Dozois once told me…” I know Gardner Dozois, damn it! I’ve been in his year’s best collections! I know that I’m a lucky man.

But I’m still not satisfied. Perhaps I would be if I were a better person. If there’s anybody reading this who’s thinking about becoming a writer, see if the feeling passes. Try something else first. Because some day, sooner or later, the business will break your heart.

I will say this, though. The days when you write a few good sentences, those are pretty great.

—-
See?  He’s great, right?  Do yourself a favor and buy one of Daryl’s books.  Not only is he one of the good guys, but his books are great.  His latest, a collection entitled Unpossible, can be found here.  (But if you want my opinion – and who doesn’t? – start with Raising Stony Mayhall – a complete deconstruction of the zombie genre that’ll make you weepy.)

Where I Am

Writing Update:
So, about a month and a half ago I finished the sixth (and hopefully final) draft of Lucky Town, my 74K YA novel about a boy whose father inadvertently starts a cult.  I sent 40 or so query letters out to possible agents, a process that has been simultaneously humbling, aggravating, and infuriating.  Four have requested the entire manuscript (fingers crossed!) and a whole bunch have sent the form-lettered “this isn’t for me” response.  But that’s the process, I’m told.  So here’s to hoping.

What’s been difficult – besides the waiting – has been the shift to the next novel.  After spending three years on the project, characters, and world, it’s been hard to start new again.  I wallowed for a couple of weeks, then gave myself three days to come up with my next project and commit to it.  That worked.  Lucky Town was written as a page turner for teenagers, but I realize it’s not standard YA fare – not a teen with magical powers or love triangle anywhere to be seen – and so am deliberately working to make my next novel as marketable as possible.  (That whole “write the book you’d want to read” thing?  Yeah, I’m not sure how much I believe that right now).

My goal from here on out is a book a year.  I’m well aware it may take me four or six books before I sell one or even get an agent.  It’s a reality I’m slowly coming to terms with, and although I don’t fully believe what I’m about to say, that reality is okay.  Onward and upward, as John Barth says.  (And if you get that reference without using a search engine, you have my full respect).

Recent Reads:
Been on a bit of a slog lately.  Most of the books I’ve been reading have been mostly ‘meh’.  However, there are a couple of good ones worth noting:

The Gospel According to Larry by Janet Tashjian.
A kid running an online blog ends up gathering thousands of followers and sets out to change the world.  A YA book actually about something.  Great stuff, and darn, darn fast.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
Most people know this book since it won the National Book Award.  And deservedly so.  Bacigalupi shows just how to write YA Fantasy and not be derivative.  Great world building in this one.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Another popular novel, and a good one.  I’m not a big literary fiction guy – I like things to happen, sorry – but this novel about baseball and romance and finding your place is just fantastic. 

Bossypants by Tina Fey
Listened to this on CD.  Fey is hilarious, honest, and self-depricating in the best ways possible.  Just a fun, good time.  Sue me, I like to laugh.

I Love YA…but

Let me get this out from the start, I love Young Adult.  In fact, the best books I read each year are usually YA.  Go read Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me or Chris Crutcher’s Deadline and tell me they’re not great.  Heck, the novel I just finished writing and the one I’m working on now are both YA, so I’m a YA fan, got it?

But, a few things bug me, and they show up so regularly nowadays that I have comment:

1. Commonness.
Most YA these days is geared toward teenage girls, is fantasy-based, and follows a pretty common plot -
A girl who:  A. discovers she has a magical power, B.  realizes her ancestors weren’t fully human, C.  is sent to some weird place where weird things happen, D. must fight: i. supernatural or mythical creatures, ii. against a clique who is out to get her, iii. some stalker dude, E. must solve a mystery following clues ala The DaVinci Code.
That’s about it.  Most of it’s fantasy, and I’m hoping there’s a shift soon.  I definitely see a place for this, and some of it I love, but the YA shelves are saturated with these novels, and I’m hoping to see more variety.

2. The use of the manic pixie dream girl.
I LOVE this term,  coined by film critic Nathan Rabin, of female characters who are overly full of life, eccentric, sexy, and odd.  (Think Zoe Deschanel in everything she’s in.)  They listen to music no one listens to, do spontaneously crazy things no one would ever do, and boys easily fall under their spell, leading them to doing strange and crazy things themselves.  The manic pixie dream girl is always written by men in YA, and my theory is that it’s the author writing the girl he wishes he knew.  It’s the dream girl of every once-high school nerd.  Hell, they’re the girl I wish I’d known.  But of course they don’t exist.  They’re a nerd ideal.

3.  The use of past generational music.
Pull out ten YA novels that reference music, and I’ll guarantee you that 80% of them don’t reference any band of the current generation.  In fact, the music referenced will be in direct correlation to the year the author was in high school.  If the author graduated in the 80′s, you’ll get a main character who loves “retro 80′s music”.  If the author grew up in the late 70′s, you’re going to get Springsteen references.  (Crime novelists are the most guilty of the Springsteen reference, and believe me, I get it.  Springsteen is the greatest songwriter of the last 35 years – argue with me if you want, but you’ll lose – and he’s the one real vice I have when it comes to spending outrageously high amounts of money for great seats at his shows, BUT man, do all detectives need to drive around listening to “Jungleland”?)  I understand why this happens – any lost any real hold I had on ‘good’ music once I graduated from college – but if you’re going to write YA, wouldn’t you at least want to be up on what music is good to them now?

(And I completely forgot, the novel I just finished writing, I named it after a Springsteen song, so I’m guilty, too)

((And an additional note – most of the music today that kids listen to is terrible.  And that opinion proves that I am officially old.))

4.  Ideal dialogue.
Look, kids are smart, I get that.  I teach 15-18 year olds 180 days a year.  And they’re damn funny and perceptive, too.  (Sometimes).  But do YA authors have to have them speak like they’re all self-actualized?  Because here’s the thing – they’re not.  Give me a classroom of 30 kids, and I might get one kid who really talks like a character from Dawson’s Creek.  (Like that past generational reference?)  Again, though, it’s like the author’s are writing ideals, not reality.  I’m not looking for common dialogue, but at least show some understanding of how kids really speak and think rather than how you wish you’d spoken back in high school.  (Maybe this is all John Hughes’ fault.  I’ll have to  give that some thought.)

Still, I love YA.  If you’re looking for some good places to start, and are looking for novels that don’t fall victim to what I’ve described above, here are some really great (or at least very good) novels I’ve read in the last couple of years that aren’t the usual YA fare:

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Gospel According to Larry by Janet Tashjian
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The Schwa Was Here by Neal Shusterman
Marcello in the Real World  by Francisco X. Stork
Deadline by Chris Crutcher
Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott
My Abandonment by Peter Rock
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The Colour Out of Glitter: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Canadian Horror’s First Boy Band

The Colour out of Glitter: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Canadian Horror’s First Boy Band

An expose by Laird Barron, Kurt Dinan, John Langan, and Paul Tremblay

The winds of change do not blow from random places; they blow mightily from Toronto, Canada.

In July of 2009, when there were only dark whispers and rumblings of a sleeping giant, one poised to take the pop music world by storm, three seemingly unassuming young men from up there in Canadia, somehow made it to Readercon, the conference of imaginative literature in Burlington, MA. Richard Gavin, Ian Rogers, and Simon Strantzas made an impression on the attendees as thoughtful enthusiasts of horror fiction and passionate fans of the musical oeuvre of NSYNC and Backstreet Boys. Two weeks after their very low key but important penetration of the American border, their hurriedly pressed EP Tundra: Three Canadian Chillers was released. The hit “Omens” took the music world by surprise. While the synthetic beats and Splenda-sweet melodies were not ground breaking, it was the moody, gothic lyric “the darkly splendid realm” sung in a delicious falsetto by Richard Gavin that enchanted listeners. Their unexpected overnight success took an early toll on Gavin in particular, as he turned to religion to cope with the newfound stress and expectations. Reportedly, Gavin attempted to meld aspects of Kabala, Pentacostalism (mainly the rattlesnake handling), Norwegian Death Metal, and Howard Philip Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos into his own concoction he termed Strantzasism. Rogers and Strantzas had difficulty with Gavin’s newfound and scattershot fervor. Heedless of the warning signs of the problems that would germinate from beneath the surface, The Colour Out of Glitter (or CO0G) began to work on their smash follow-up, A Very Canadian Boxing Day.

A Very Canadian Boxing Day proved a wild success in Canada, dominating the local college radio airwaves for sixteen weeks and achieving a measure of popularity in the United States, cementing the band’s status as pop godlings in the making. But it was this very international stardom that would prove the undoing of COoG. The trouble began innocently enough, as these things often do. Simon Strantzas was energized by the rabid support of COoG’s two fans from the US, Paul Tremblay and John Langan, both of whom sent countless fan letters. Strantzas, dedicated champion of the people as he was, insisted upon personally answering each and every letter, which numbered in the scores weekly. Ian Rogers knew something was amiss when he noted that Strantzas licked each and every return envelope and stamp despite the fact they were of the self-adhesive variety. Strantzas was addicted to more than love — his passion for adhesives would soon spiral out of control and led to grave consequences that would threaten to rip the band apart. Bad as matters were, however, the worst was yet to come.

Strantzas’s increasing battle with adhesive-addiction, coupled with Gavin’s sudden decision to spend three months pursuing a therapeutic cleansing via bran and pig’s blood at a monastery in the Carpathian Mountains, led to Ian Rogers being thrust into leadership of the band. Before Strantzas and Gavin had departed for the Betty Ford Center and Romania, respectively, each had laid down rough vocal tracks for what was to be the band’s next album, a collection of covers of classic love songs whose working title was Valentine’s Day Three Ways. When Rogers had seen each of his bandmates off at the airport, he had reassured them that he would not, as he put it, “bollocks things up.” Left to his own devices, however, Rogers decided to abandon this project in favor of something far more complex, a Valentine’s Day concept album which would tell the story of Felix Renn; a lonely private investigator’s quest for love in a city filled with monsters and bacon. Rogers blended Stranzas’s moving cover of Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” (which he oddly renamed “Cold to the Touch“) with Gavin’s tender homage to Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla,” adding his own, polka-inspired take on The Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” to the mix and setting it all to a sampling of Donna Summer’s Greatest Hits. The resulting album, Johnson for Hire, would consist of this thirty-eight and a half minute song, whose title, “Everything I Do” (Love Theme from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), would lead to a fist-fight between Rogers and Bryan Adams when the two bumped into one another at that year’s Canadian Music Awards, held at the downtown Toronto Sizzler. And though Rogers would claim his title had nothing to do with Adams’ mega-hit, and that the copies of the album with Adams’s face on the cover were the result of a mix-up he had nothing to do with, it was clear that, in his hands, what had been Canadia’s latest entry into the world of pre-fab post-adolescent pop was in jeopardy.

Newly-released from his stay at Betty Ford, Simon Strantzas launched an ambitious plan to restore the fortunes of the band that, as he had put it, had allowed him to move into a house with a solid-gold toilet bowl. Together with Richard Gavin, rejuvenated by three months of relentless bran, he set up and booked a tour whose focus on the group’s earlier, more audience-friendly catalogue would re-establish their bond with the two groups of fans who had made them what they were: lonely, middle-aged men whose pretensions to literary grandeur had long ago been ground to dust by a cruel and indifferent marketplace, and soccer moms. Although initially sluggish, ticket sales for the “The Colour Out of Glitter: It’s the U That Makes Us Canadian (And Not British. Really.)” tour picked up dramatically after the group’s surprise performance at Mr. Sub’s “Buy One, Get One Half-Price” promotion. Ian Rogers, though, was not happy with the new-old course the band was following, and once again, his taste for violence would get the better of him. When he overheard veteran Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot questioning the band’s prospects while waiting for takeout at the Friendly Thai restaurant, Rogers leapt on the man with his full measure of fury. And though Rogers would subsequently receive almost half a dozen get well cards from his mother during his recovery at Toronto General Hospital, the delay his broken jaw, dislocated shoulders, ruptured spleen, and shattered knees threatened the tour with forced Strantzas and Gavin to a stern response. They publicly suspended Rogers from the band, replacing him with Corey Hart for the remainder of the tour. To make matters worse for Rogers, he was the subject of a lawsuit by the Friendly Thai restaurant, which claimed that his actions had made their name a lie and forced them to change it “The Mostly Friendly Thai Restaurant.” Together with the reggae-inflected cover of “Sunglasses at Night” Strantzas and Gavin recorded with Hart, which scored unexpected success on the elevator-music circuit, it was looking as if The Colour Out of Glitter might have lost its R.

It was during this time that Rogers had a meeting that would change his life, and ultimately, bring the original The Colour Out of Glitter roaring back to life. While picking up a jalapeno and pineapple crepe at Crepes a Gogo, Rogers felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see the grizzled face of Laird Barron smiling at him. Having heard of his old acolyte’s troubles, Barron had leashed a team of half-rabid coyotes to an old bed frame and lashed them all the way to Canadia to deliver to Rogers a message that would steer him away from the cliff he was speeding towards: “Ian: cool it.” Newly-empowered and -inspired by Barron’s trenchant advice, Rogers steered his two-wheel segway out into the August snow and set off in search of the two men with whom he’d once shared such intimacy. As it turned out, Strantzas and Gavin were ready for his return: while initially happy for any measure of publicity, Corey Hart had become increasingly demanding, insisting that, for their next album, the group should release an album of German bratwurst songs. When Strantzas and Gavin saw Rogers reappear in the doorway of Strantzas’s mother’s basement, tears in his eyes, all was forgiven, and Hart was tossed out into the night, without his sunglasses.

So now, with a new lease on musical life The Colour Out of Glitter is back, headlining Buger King’s “The King Isn’t THAT Creepy” tour, working on their next album, It’s Still the Eighties in Canadia, and ready for whatever life has in store for them.

This is Where the Road Ends

As I’ve no doubt mentioned, the writing group I’m a part of, Snutch Labs, has a book coming out soon entitled Tales from the Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station.  With pre-ordering ending in a little over a week ($6 off if you pre-order), I thought I’d share some thoughts on one of the stories and give you an excerpt.

What you’ll find below is the opening section of John Mantooth’s entry, “This Is Where the Road Ends.”  I know a lot of writers by now, but only a couple of them have real voice.  John is one of them (and I hate him for it).  It also plays a large part in why John’s about to have his first collection of stories, Shoebox Train Wreck,  coming out with ChiZine Publications soon.   I mean, just read that second paragraph and try not to get jealous.  I’m not going to “tie the [story] to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it” as Billy Collins says, and attempt  to explain to you why I love John’s writing so much.  Just read an example of it below (that second paragraph is a real beaut).  You’ll understand.

And when you’re finished and want more, head here to buy Tales from the Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station.  You’ll get the rest of this story, and six other fine stories as well.

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“This is Where the Road Ends” by John Mantooth

Jonas hit the kid on a warm fall afternoon, the sun flattening out over the horizon in a spectacular crush of gold. Sometimes, especially late at night when the house was quiet and he’d gone out to look at the stars, he almost convinced himself it was that sun, not the seven beers he’d had over lunch with Bryant Keith that had caused the accident.

The worst part was that Jonas had been expecting him, bracing for him even. How many times had he made the turn by the Mitchell farm and seen the fat little kid trudging home from his bus stop? Dozens, at least. Probably more. The kid had always had the common sense to stay on the left, out of harm’s way because even a fat little kid knew the turn was as blind as Stevie Wonder. Sometimes, he’d even wave, but most days he’d just huff and puff his way on past, like the little kid that could, trying to make it home from his bus stop in time for a glass of milk and a bagful of cookies before the reruns on channel eleven started at four. Once Jonas saw him on his knees, investigating a dog carcass. It was the only time he didn’t look comical, like the little fat kid you see in the movies that doesn’t run because he waddles, the kid that got all the bad genes and all the bad luck. But even then, poised above the dead dog like a prayerful Buddha, he had been on the left side of the road.

The day Jonas hit him, he was on the right.

Jonas tried to brake, but all that did was give the kid time to look up from watching his feet. Their eyes locked for a long second and then there was a sound like you hear when somebody sits on your hood and the sheet metal pops. Then the kid was airborne, and somehow one of the boy’s feet got snagged on Jonas’s side mirror, and his body twisted violently before the foot was wrenched free. Jonas felt his seatbelt lock as the car came to a hard, tread-burning stop.

What followed was silence. This was the moment that could still make Jonas a blubbering idiot. He could think about all of it now, all of it except that one moment when he had to actually make himself get out of the car. Make himself see what was left of the kid.

When he did get out, he was blank. Can the mind ever be completely blank? At that moment, climbing out of the car, his was. It was as if his brain was in the process of rebooting itself, of clearing the old memory, deleting programs that would no longer be relevant, and getting ready to adapt to a new operating system, one that came with viruses and malware, and an impossibly steep learning curve.

After the blankness, when his mind started working again, the only thing he could think was it isn’t real. There is not dead boy on the road. There is not an impending 911 call.

He was lying just off the side of the road, a lump of breathing flesh. His sweatshirt had gotten twisted around his neck and his bare belly was exposed. Jonas watched it heaving for a full twenty seconds before he realized what this meant.

I’m Alive, Really

Been away awhile.  I suck at this blogging thing.  In better news though, the (novel) writing is going well, so there’s that.

Some news:
There’s a site up for my writing group’s first collective project – Tales from the Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station - to be published by Sideshow Press in the next month or so.  Not an anthology, really, more like, as Kim Despin’s put it, “a story orgy.”  Or, more professionally, a “story mosaic”, as John Langan called it.  Basically, the individual stories weave together to tell a larger story.  Full of shady characters, regret, and sudden violence.  My story “The Darkness Game” closes the book, and is about the lengths a girl will go to reinvent herself before she enters college.  It’s also the only story I ever seriously considered using a pseudonym on.  One of those “this makes me want to take a shower to rid myself of this filthy feeling” type of stories.  So I’ve got that going for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Erik Williams’ first novel, Demon, is now available for preorder HERE.  His blog has a lot more information on the book, blurbs, etc.  Go there when you finish basking in the glow of the brilliance of this blog.  Oh, and here’s the cover art.  Very cool, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sam W. Anderson’s The Unusual Events of a Saturday Afternoon at Big K’s Truck Stop and Fine Dining Emporium – A Money Run Tale is  now up for order at Sideshow Press.  Available in limited hardcover, softcover, digital, etc.  You have no excuses.  Another Money Run story?  Yes, please!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And me…beyond the story in Tales from the Yellow Rose, I have my story “Plink” coming out in Post Scripts at some point in the near future.  Nowadays, it’s all novel, all the time.  Finished a readable draft, and now have to make big decisions.  To be honest, I’m paralyzed with which way to go.  Either I ditch 50% of the book and focus on the one part of the novel everyone is in agreement works really well, or I try to overhaul the parts that don’t work.  There’s no middle ground, really.  But last night I had a revelation – time to stop waiting for the light of the universe to shine down on me and show me the path, and instead take out my hatchet and clear my own way, universe be damned.  Basically, time to stop wallowing and bitching and get back to work.

Some Reviews:
Raising Stony Mayhall – by Daryl Gregory
Best book I’ve read all year.  They can stop writing zombie books now.  Somehow, Gregory has written an entirely human book with a zombie main character.  Remember when Clint Eastwood put out The Unforgiven and the response was, “Well, that’s pretty much the last word on westerns for awhile, thank God.”  Well, Gregory has done this with Stony Mayhall.  My first reaction when I heard Gregory had a new book was, “He wrote a zombie novel?  Seriously?  Oh crap.”  But man, he nailed it.  Smart, well-written, and heartfelt.  And yeah, it’s about zombies.   Just read it.  Trust me.

Ready Player One – by Ernest Cline
I was really looking forward to reading this.   Loved the set-up – a virtual world contest set in 2044 but based on 80’s pop culture – it was all right in my wheelhouse.  And I loved the pop culture nostalgia it filled me with and the subtle references to the movies and music and games I filled my (nerdy) life with as a teenager, but by the end of the novel, I just felt a bit too empty.  It became more a novel written by someone hoping it would become a movie rather than a novel about characters.  The novel didn’t start that way, but that’s what it became, unfortunately.  Still, I go thumbs up for the reasons above – and it is a really fun story – but it’s a sort of disappointed thumbs up.  (Extra bonus points for Cline’s use of “Setec Astronomy” as one of the passwords Wade uses.  Loved the movie it’s a reference to ((although, technically, not an 80’s film)). Underrated, in my opinion.  In fact, all of Cline’s passwords are fun references to song lyrics and movie lines.)

Southern Gods – by John Honor Jacobs
When you’re a writer, reading novels by other writers you know personally (or biblically, be that the case) can be a tough situation.  If the book is terrible, how do you tell them?  Or if the book is great, is it possibly only great because you consider them a friend?  I’ve learned to be objective, but that only goes so far with me.  I have a hard time detaching the reader from the work.  So as I read Southern Gods by JHJ (who I don’t know biblically, in case you’re wondering, but do know personally) I had to keep asking myself, do I like this because I know and like the writer, or because it’s a good book?  Now that I’ve put some distance between myself and the book – I finished it about a month ago, right after it came out – I can honestly say that, “Yeah, this is a good book.”  On one level, some might say this is a pretty straightforward detective story – “find this missing guy who may be involved with or a victim of something sinister” – but the devil is in the details and the reason this novel works.  The setting, the musical history, and the world building JHJ does all raise this above standard horror/crime fare.  For me though, it’s the mood and tone of this novel that really make it effective.  I felt unsettled as I read this, and that’s difficult to achieve.  The novel does have its ‘first novel’ moments – the dialogue reads stilted to me in some places, the action scenes go on a bit long for my tastes – but it’s obvious JHJ has a bright career ahead of him. 

Sixkill –by Robert B. Parker
This is the last Spenser novel Parker wrote before he died.  I listened to this on cd (Joe Mantegna does a great Spenser, by the way) and really enjoyed it.  Parker was (likely) setting up a new character, Zebulon Sixkill, for a series, and he is introduced here and plays a major role in the plot.  As with a lot of the last few Spenser books, the plot is a bit thin, but I just never really cared.  I’m incredibly forgiving of Parker’s flaws (his books are all pretty much the same, really) because I love the characters and the dialogue.  It makes me sad to know there won’t be any more Spenser novels, but this was a solid finish, I thought.  What’s regrettable is that Hawk wasn’t in the book at all, “off doing some work in Asia” we’re told.  Too bad.  But if you’ve read the other Spenser novels, you know that’s somehow fitting, Hawk being as he is.