2 of My Stories Are Available on KIndle...Again.

 I've decided to reactivate two of my Kindle offerings from 2011. One is my short story/tribute to my mentor Annabelle McIlnay titled, "In Green, Remembered." It was published in the massive tome of an anthology, "Miseria's Chorale" in 2013. Obviously the rights reverted back to me several years ago.

The other one is a short story collection titles, "From the Bridge & Seven Other Short Stories" which features an eclectic mix of story types and styles.

"In Green, Remembered" can be downloaded here for just .99.

"From the Bridge" can be downloaded here for just $1.99.

Judging by my history and disaffection with Kindle, it's best to assume they're available for a limited timE.

From the "Wish I'd Thought of That...Wait, I kinda did" Files.

   

Plot: The zombie apocalypse is over. The humans have won. Life is back to normal. And Rip is bored as hell. It's not much of a life sitting in a call center in the poor town of Spanish Shanty, Florida, answering emails like a drone and listening to customer complaints.

Rip was ruler of a tiny kingdom in the Lazy River waterpark, killing zombies by day and making passionate love at night. He misses the danger, the camaraderie, and the blistering love he once knew. He longs to feel Santana—his trusty machet—in his hand, and Davia—the fiercest woman alive—in his arms once again. He can still picture it—life on the razor's edge—and he would do anything to get that feeling back. But what if Rip could get it back?

 

I am intrigued by the novel pictured and described above, the advertisement for which I received from the SFBC  in an email. I love the idea of a post-POST-Apocalyptic tale where all the so-called "cool stuff" has already taken place. And that call center employee angle? Inspired as all get-out! The very concept swells to bursting with the cynicism of a Christopher Nadeau tale! If only I had thought of something like this!

Oh, wait.

In a now out of print edition of Ghostlight Magazine (Summer 2011 to be precise) my short story "Cubicle Dwellers" was published. The plot concerned a man who had spent the so-called zombie apocalypse in a mental institution, too doped up to realize the world was falling apart outside his room. Once the meds wear off, he awakens to an orderly who is no longer alive but still insists on doing his job...badly, of course. Our hero escapes with his life only to find out the world has changed as the dead have risen and...gone back to work. What else can he do except the same thing? Two guesses who the real zombies are.

I've only written two zombie stories and that was the one that was more open about my disdain for the sub-genre. The other story was a much more serious historical tale that dealt with racism and the self-entitlement of the ruling class. Oh, and cannibalism because why not? Think of it as an homage to the Donner Party, or at least the myth surrounding them.

I'm not saying Adams' novel is like mine beyond the basic idea of the mundane aftermath of a supposedly extraordinary event. What I am saying is I wasn't seeing fiction like this nine years ago when I received rejection after rejection for not writing in a tiny box that was the only thing most magazine and anthology publishers seemed interested in putting out. Now that winking self-awareness is all the rage, books like this are flooding the market.

Don't get me wrong. It's a good thing. Very good. The best. You've never seen a better thing. Someone said to me, "Sir, do you think this good thing is very good?" 

Trumpian self-promotion aside, I am glad to see a long-needed approach to these types of stories appearing. I just want you to know it didn't happen in a vacuum and that some of us were writing them when the close-mindedness of those with the power to say yes or no acted as a barrier.

Now, let's go read "Apocalypse Yesterday" with its admittedly heavy-handed title and in the meantime I'm going to take another look at "Cubicle Dwellers" and think long and hard about what type of retooling it deserves~

 

In my Day, it was Called "Straight Fiction"

 I usually write genre fiction, meaning for those who are unacquainted, stories based around some fantastical element found in science fiction, fantasy, horror and magical realism. Although the latter is often a technique used in literary fiction, it is in actuality thinly disguised genre writing. 

When I took creative writing in college, my instructor's  only hard and fast rule for our first short story was to write what he referred to as "straight fiction." That meant fiction written about the real world sans magic or extrapolated technology and for the love of Faulkner, nothing with monsters in it. It did not mean fiction without gay or bisexual characters. Being the crafty little rebel I am, I naturally wrote a thinly disguised genre piece about the end of the world by changing the cause to an exploded chemical truck and the reality to a matter of perception. I got an "A" and wrote several well-received genre pieces after that.

I have written "straight fiction" over the years but have had no luck getting it published. My sensibilities are just too out there, methinks. So, I don't write it often. 

I started one today, however, because of the death of my high school teacher. I had been searching for him online for years and finally found a death notice on Facebook posted by a relative. It hit me pretty hard. My relationship with him was complicated; I went from utterly despising him to being incredibly fond of him over the space of three years. I really wanted to know how his life was and him to see mine. 

His "sudden" death has made that impossible. 

I haven't seen him in decades and I'm not sure why I am so deeply affected by his passing. Is it because I only found him once he was gone? Is it because he was only twelve years older than me? I don't know. Maybe this piece of "straight fiction" will help me understand and deal with these feelings. It seems to be the only avenue I have available to me. 

Here's an excerpt. Feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section:

Gerry.

The nickname makes me laugh. He never knew we called him that until I was about ready to graduate and when we found out it was his actual nickname, we had the type of giddy fun exclusive to teenage boys. But as I mentioned, that was much later.

My earliest memories of Gerry are vague and corporeal. He was a loud, angry voice in the next classroom over from the one where French class took place. His Billy Badass routine often punctured a hole right through the middle of our own teacher’s rather low-key delivery, causing us to all stop and listen as he berated the younger class for not being compliant while he attempted to teach them about the past.

There were times when even the French teacher joined in the laughter in our classroom as Gerry threatened his class with going to the principal’s office and other ultimately meaningless punishments. At one point, Gerry’s tirades became an expected part of our French class experience, our French teacher having lost the battle for our attention spans weeks prior. Frankly, her French was atrocious anyway. My mother, one of the few highly educated parents, was fluent in the language of half my ancestry and flew into a rage every time I shared with her the teacher’s horrifying pronunciations.

I had seen Gerry, of course. It was a small private school with a mere few hundred students. However, since we were graded sixth through twelfth, some of the teachers didn’t teach tenth and eleventh graders. His day would come though.

Shakespeare and a Drifter Named Carl

 "I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare's philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him." 

- George Bernard Shaw

When I was eight years old, my father befriended a man named Carl who could only be described as a drifter. He had no home to speak of, cohabitating with a much older woman with whom he shared a casual relationship and he often hit the road with no clear destination. My father was always making friends with people like Carl. A man with very little in the way of accomplishments, he had a need to feel superior to whomever would consent to be his friend. However, unlike another drifter who would come along when I was in my teens named Stuart, Carl was far from a pathetic lowlife idiot who probably earned money on the side as a toyboy. In fact, Carl was brilliant, a fact that angered my father to no end.

My mother was a psychologist who eventually earned her PhD. She outshone my dad in every possible way, including being in possession of a charisma that drew people to her without having to really do anything. She was also pretty. So, when she and Carl hit it off thanks to his ability to have intellectual conversations my poor dad could not, you can probably guess the rest. It probably didn't help that I liked Carl, too. I thought he was a nice guy and really cool. He was also younger than my parents, although even eight-year old me could see how attracted to my mom he was. For my dad, this was a kick to the proverbial groin that could not stand. So, he did what emotionally immature people have done since recorded history:

He sabotaged the friendship.

Before the inevitable parting of the ways, however, Carl bequeathed unto me a special gift. One day, possibly on my birthday, he decided to hand me a book of William Shakespeare's plays. Carl felt I was an extremely bright kid with a vivid imagination and that the book would prove invaluable as I grew older. Then one day he was gone and the only time my father mentioned him was to be as disparaging as humanly possible. 

The book remained on my various bookshelves for years to come, its Carl-authored inscription the most special part of my growing collection until recently. I tried reading it a few times, even using it in my fourth grade English class when we learned "Othello." The book synopsized the Bard's plays rather than reprinting them. 

I hadn't thought about that book in years until the other day. One of the libraries where I work has been essentially closed to the public since the Covid 19 pandemic started and has been weeding out books from its collection that haven't circulated in 6-10 years. I'm usually the person who disposes of them. It's often a painful process. Before I was a library employee, I found the very notion of destroying/recycling books repugnant. I get it now but sometimes there are books I have a hard time deleting from the catalog. Books by James Patterson, Dan Brown, Nora Roberts and Danielle Steele are not among them.

This most recent time, I found myself removing tons of older Shakespeare books. Books about him, plays by him, books about how great he was, books kissing his long-dead English ass, and even books praising him as an unrivaled genius. Obviously a ton of varied perspectives. And as I scanned and stamped each book, I remembered Carl the Intellectual Drifter Who Wanted to do my Mom, threw up in my mouth a little, and then started thinking about how much I cannot stand most of Shakespeare's work. This was followed by thoughts of the obnoxious and elitist cult his name and works gave birth to and the unquestioning devotional worship of the man and his plays.

If Carl wasn't killed by someone picking up hitchhikers and he's reading this, let me apologize for my blasphemous mentality. If it comforts him, I do not hate the so-called "Bard's" work any more than I hate Ernest Hemingway's incredibly uninteresting stories while appreciating his contribution to the world o' letters. "Bill," as the hipsters call him, was a talented man who sometimes hit upon a great idea. But in the words of Renaissance scholar Nora J. Williams regarding his plays, "Some of them are good. Some of them are terrible. Most of them are overrated."

Williams mentions the mythology of the man himself as demonstrably false, and that is where my general disdain originated. The more aware of the origins of stories I became, the more the Bard came off like a plagiarist. Yes, I know times were different. Copyrights weren't a thing really and people wiped themselves with leaves...when they bothered to wipe at all. But glaring examples of outright theft like "Macbeth" which is really just an updated "Oedipus Rex" leave me cold.

Any discussion of Shakespeare must, by necessity, include the fact that he is the Great White Hope of storytelling, held above all others because he exemplifies the assumed superiority of the Western European world. To hear many scholars tell it, 450 years ago, one white guy whose world experience was severely limited wrote everything we need to know about the human condition. Not everyone agrees with that assessment, of course. High school English teacher Dana Dusbiber wrote an open letter making the point I made above as well as many others. In her words, "I do not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition."

Freelance journalist Peter Beech in an opinion piece for The Guardian, wrote, "In my experience, reading or watching Shakespeare is, by turns, baffling, tiring, frustrating and downright unpleasant." 

He has a point. The olde English used in the plays is off-putting but even when one deciphers the speech, the tales being spun feel insular and fall flat in modern times. I know Bill's plays were a big draw for the common folks but they didn't have much else to compete with except the often superior work of Marlowe. Yet there is a vested interest, a cottage industry, that grips tightly onto Shakespeare's gonads as if the stability of society will collapse if we start questioning this outdated, overrated supposed man of the people. Curriculums and corporations rely too heavily on his work and perceived genius. As Beech writes, " Our continued creative and moral over-reliance on his plays is, at best, unimaginative and, at worst, dangerous."

I would love to say it's time to move on from Shakespeare but it's been time to do that for hundreds of years. His undeserved deification and dominance have placed a seemingly unbreakable stranglehold on literature that even the ancient Greek tragedies have not managed. He became the preeminent English writer because of politics and it is that same virus that prevents objective discussions about putting him behind us. 

Does Shakespeare deserve to be taught and discussed? Of course. But within reason and without kissing his medieval ass as if he was sent by God to write obnoxious plays and no one else will ever matter as much or even more.

So, if the intent of that gift was to inspire me to think for myself, to question mindless adoration and to form my own opinion then thank you. If it was to instill in me a love for a playwright whose work has always left me wanting, well...Sorry, Carl. I guess that'll learn ya to lust after somebody's mom~

Latest Blog Post and it Isn't Here!

For the first time in over a year, the T&C blog has sprung back to life with a rousing debate on whether or not the Watchmen TV series is worth watching!

Check it out right'cheer!

Getting Over the Need to Please Fanboys in Genre Writing:

 

While the assertions by many genre fiction fans that literary fiction is dead or dying are ridiculous, the fact that genre fiction has attained market dominance is most certainly not.  In fact, a 2014 report issued by the German Book Office (GBO) New York ranked fiction and “Juveniles” in its top two for 2012 and 2013, adding that, “Fiction and Juvenile genres continue to dominate the market, accounting for over 27 percent of new titles and editions in 2013.” That trend has shown no signs of slowing down either, especially considering the enormous popularity of fantasy-based television programming and pop culture monoliths such as the San Diego ComicCon.

  With the popularity of genre fiction has also come the inevitable feeling of exaggerated importance on the part of those who feel responsible for its market dominance; fanboys and fangirls.  In case you don’t know what those terms mean, the Oxford dictionary defines “fanboy” as an informal derogatory regarding, “A male fan, especially one who is obsessive about movies, comic books, or science fiction.”  The definition is incomplete, however, as its compilers overlook the genres of horror and fantasy.

With apologies to Persian Poet Muslih-ud-Din, I lamented that I was a fanboy until I started using social networking.  Yes, I’m a fan of all the genres mentioned above. Yes, I have definite and sometimes emphatic opinions about how others present my favorite characters and storylines.  However, as a writer who prefers to dwell in his own fictional universe, I am forced to bring my adoration to a screeching halt several feet from the border of irrationality so many fanboys (and girls) embrace as their Information Age right.

Simply put, there are some real nutters out there and they’ve got major buying power!

           Let’s be clear: There’s nothing wrong with feeling a sense of ownership when it comes to a series of books and its characters. One thing literary fiction readers will never understand is the sense of community and we’re-in-this-together mentality of genre fiction.  For many years, anything aside from straight-forward fiction was relegated to second-class status, with a smattering of works somehow rising “above” their perceived lower caste.  Deceased authors of speculative fiction often found themselves being “rediscovered” by those of a more literary bent, their work now available in the fiction category. As an author of genre work, I get all that. I really do.  But that doesn’t excuse the behavior so prevalent on message boards and social network sites.

            A great-fanged beast has been uncaged thanks to the perceived “power” on loan from the Web gods, and it is hell-bent on devouring anything before it that dares not agree with its views.  For those of us who seldom agree with them but still like to think of ourselves as fans, that’s rather disheartening.

            We might be a minority—although I suspect we’re actually a silent, cowed majority— but there are those of us who enjoy a good genre film or book and don’t feel the need to run around in costumes or play roleplaying games.  Some of us see it as fun or even enlightening entertainment designed for social commentary as well as thrills, still holding out hope that the stories being told can help humanity grow and learn from its mistakes as well as its accomplishments.  Pleasant diversions aside, the inmates are not merely running the asylum; they’re also running the town outside its walls.

            So, what does all this mean for those of us toiling away to supposedly make a difference and, in our lofty inner worlds, keep things elevated?

            The first and most important thing is to not allow any of that to sway us from our chosen paths.  Much has been made in the creative fields of not “selling out,” and while it’s a cliché, it would be a disservice to writers everywhere to deny its inherent value as a sentiment.  The very fact that you are contemplating the consequences of doing it means there’s some level of integrity others might not share. It also means you should stick to your guns and follow your heart and several other horribly unoriginal sayings I refuse to employ in this sentence.

            The fanboy might seem loyal and committed, but he is often fickle and on the cusp of turning his back.  Last year’s hot premise is this year’s mocked dying fad.  Remember those sparkly vampires?  How many imitators made a significant impact on the publishing industry?

            It simply cannot be said often enough that a writer’s time is better spent developing her own ideas rather than trying to create the next pop culture event based on what’s already popular.  Don’t worry about pleasing the fanboys; if what you’re doing is something they can claim they were into before it was cool, they will find you.

            Remember: They should be following you, not the other way around.

 

Order it and Read it While it's Still Timely...and While There's Still Time!