Wait. What Month Is It?

Oh. It was just June. Hmph. Had to look that up. Scary. Y'know I'm terrified of getting Alzheimers.

I may already have the disease. I'll tell you, without Duotrope, I couldn't remember any of my sub info.

Here's my round up for June.

Stories written: 6

Story titles: "Running With Scissors", "We're All Mad Here", "Murder is Something That Happens in the World", "Tired of the Couch", "Swallowing Stars", "3. While in the Water, Walk Don't Run".

Out of those 6, stories under 25 words: 2

Total word count for June: 9,450.

Acceptances: 1 to Dogzplot; "Running With Scissors"

Rejections: 4. Bleh.

Stories out on the markets: 5

Least favorite story of June: "3.While in the Water, Walk Don't Run". I'm tired of watching it earn bad ranking after bad ranking at the Editors Unleashed Flash Fiction contest.

Favorite story in June: "Swallowing Stars". It is pure awesome in space.

***

In other news I woke up with a splitting headache this morning with little recollection of the evening's events. My back door was open and the porch was a mess. The instrument of head trauma lie guilty on the porch floor beneath an overturned chair. So I pose this question to all of you:

Who snuck up behind me and hit me over the head with an empty bottle of vodka last night?

Those who have good information regarding my attacker will win their very own Wilderunion Deputy Sheriff's badge.

I'm Not a Horror Writer.

You heard me. I'm not.

I just don't do happy endings. It's not the way I see the world.

When I first realized the guidelines for the Shine anthology, I thought it might be a welcome change for my developing voice. So I did some thinking. The whole point of the anthology is to write some optimistic sci-fi (which I think is a fantastic idea). I can't do that right now. My voice has gone off on a tangent and its a seriously lonely and pessimistic one.

Sorry, Shine. (My loss, I'm sure.)

No can do right now, unless you want a story about a kid with cancer who, in his last days of life, begins to talk to his imaginary friends which turn out to be the ghosts of all the sick children who had died in his room over the years. Is that optimistic? What? Why yes! Yes of course he still dies in the end!!!

Almost every story I've dealt with this year involves the same theme. Each story involves an element of the fantastic. Each story is certainly dark fiction. But its almost never the speculative element that I use to jar the reader awake and mess with his or her psyche. It's what human beings are capable of doing to each other that provides the terror for me. It's how they treat each other in the end that makes the story, while the speculative element makes for an interesting background.

For now, my opinion of what human beings are capable of doing to each other is not very good. I live in Atlanta, where the police are few and far between because the city government is broke, there's at least a five minute wait every time I've had to call 911 in the past year, and crime is rampant.

Optimism for me is getting all those unhappy endings out of my head and onto paper so people can read them and realize how good their life is, and how bad it could all turn out if they don't treat each other right.

But I am not a horror writer. I'm a writer of miserable stories with unhappy endings. And I will be for a while.

Because I like it.

Being thirteen again.

I was thinking today about the first stories I told. The old ones. The beginning ones where I knew both nothing about storytelling and everything about it - what I mean is, I had no practice but I was all heart, and when you put all of your heart into the stories you tell, when they really reveal a small window into what makes you work, they always somehow end up being remembered.

I wrote my first proper story when I was 10 or 11, I think? It was thirty pages long and had to do with most of the stuff I was reading about at the time. Dragons and magic and the like. I do remember this still - 1st draft was tough to finish, 2nd draft was easier, and the final product I despised. Not much has changed. I wrote it, I think, to enter a school writing competition. On the day they announced the winners, they assembled all four hundred or so students in the gymnasium and announced the top three over the microphone from a podium on the basketball court. I had won second place.

Ahhh, my first sweet acceptance. Four hundred entries, three winners. You all know the feeling. I crave it to this day.

I wrote my second story when I was twelve or thirteen and had submersed myself into stories like Hellraiser, Stray Toasters, Sandman, Hellblazer, and Doom Patrol. Little did I know, this story would define in a way what I've brought with me from the beginning, which is the Dark Stuff in life.

The story was about a middle-aged overweight balding man who worked at a boring office and came home to a half empty bug-ridden apartment in one of the worst parts of the city. He's seriously unstable emotionally and mentally, and the many different crimes he is forced to witness on his commute from home to work and back finally snaps his world apart and he decides to fight back by becoming a masked vigilante.

But he does it in his own twisted way, because he's got problems, yknow - he's seriously uncomfortable with his sexuality, he's a wannabe pedophile - anyway, his costume is a pink ballerina's costume that's too small for him, so the sagging folds of his beer gut hang out. He buys a pistol and wanders the streets of his neighborhood at night dressed in a pink tutu, shooting people who he believes are "dirty and guilty."

Those were my formative years, twelve and thirteen. What an idea to come up with. I don't think I showed it to anyone, but I might have showed it to my mom, because she didn't cringe from those sort of things. She knew I had a crazy way of thinking about things and she wanted to encourage the writing and the reading, you know.

After that, there was high school, and lots of stories about boys and girls running away from home. Your typical high school stuff - when you're a teenage, I think its impossible to control all of the emotions raging inside of you, so all that stuff comes out that you find sooo important at the time.

Then in my twenties, nothing but short unfinished drunk rambles and a story I wrote about a boy who lives in a house in the middle of nowhere with a father who beat him and his mother. A murderous creature named Wilson Jinks lives in the mud with the worms underneath the house and ends up becoming the boy's one and only friend, and, by the end of the story, much more. That on was called the Prince and the Goblin.

And last year I turned thirty and started writing again. I've written more in the past year than I probably have in my entire life. And every story I write, I wish I could get back to that place I was when I was thirteen again. That was some messed up s*#t.

Malpractice reviewed at Monsters Next Door

Thanks to Cate Gardner for passing this along.

Monsters Next Door #7 has LB Goddard reviewing Malpractice: An Anthology of Bedside Terror from the folks at Necrotic Tissue magazine. About my story, "Post-Procedural Care on the Bloom Memorial Line", Goddard writes that it was

"... one of the creepiest concepts for me... It pulled me right in from the start, because I kept wondering how two hikers exploring the beauty of nature were going to end up in Bloom Memorial, the most demonic and disturbing hospital in existence."

Read the entire review here.

Buy Malpractice here, with stories by Cate Gardner, Felicity Dowker, others and myself.

Creepy is a good thing.

Take your first trip into the Wilderunion at Fifty-Two Stitches.

"The Ballad of Willy Bragg" should be up at Fifty-Two Stitches in a few hours. Swing by and give it a read if you have the time.

Many of the stories on the site have been very good and very scary and/or horrific. As a forewarning, it should be stated here that mine is neither scary nor horrific. "The Ballad of Willy Bragg" is more of a prelude to my book that used to have the WIP title, "The Railroad Book", and now has come to possess the more formal title, Join the Birdies (Hey, who knew?). The book deals with an alternate America named the Wilderunion, a place that is linked mysteriously to our own world, where he who has control over the railroads is king. The idea is to read "The Ballad of Willy Bragg" today; then in a year, once Join the Birdies is finished and published, read that, get to one of the main plot twists and realize "Wow, so that story I read a year ago, THAT'S what that was about. Wow! The answer has been in front of me the whole time!"

Get it?

Anyway, I hope some people enjoy it a little bit at least. To be honest I'm a little nervous.

Where I Write (Some of the Greats)

So, Kyle Cassidy has this great project where he photographs speculative fiction writers in their favorite writing environments. Check it out here.

It was cool not only to see what Margaret Weis looked like, but where she lives and works. I grew up reading a good bit of her stuff.

In other news, just finished first draft of new story. It comes out at 6000 words. Damn. Needs to be 3000. Time to start cutting.

Good Times With Flash Fiction

Apparently I've been on a flash fiction rampage in the past week. I can barely keep track of what I've written:

Swallowing Stars (500 words)

Tired of the Couch (24 words)

We're All Mad Here (500 words)

3. While in the Water, Walk Don't Run (200 words)

Two points here. Number one, After a long stint of writer's block, micro fiction like this provides you with encouragement as well as a sense of accomplishment. Well done. Next I shall write a 2000 word novel. Then I will be a novelist. (Or Flash Novelist.)

Number Two. Every word counts when writing this stuff. Even if you are not into writing these types of stories, its such good practice to try it out. For instance, I am notorious for starting a story and getting so wrapped up in the details that I always go way over on word count. With these flash fiction stories I just can't do that. And I've learned that its so much more powerful if you can deliver impact with less.

I'm not saying that any of the above stories are great. I've subbed them all, but a few of them could have used quite a bit more work. I am excited, however to try my hands on my longer pieces now. They may end up actually being shorter than I originally expected. And that's great and marketable, considering I'm the guy who has a hard time getting his ideas across in less than 6000 words.