Fear and Lothian: The Return to Scotland

Sorry about the lack of updates. I've been scrambling to hit my deadlines to make sure the decks were clear for a return trip to Edinburgh... this time, with the Bride and Brood. (Last year I flew solo.) We leave today.

This isn't a work trip; it's a proper vacation, a sorely-needed chance to recharge my batteries after many months of non-stop work. Besides, a writer can't live in his/her basement. You have to go out and experience the world to have something to write about. (I'm dying to write a horror novel set in Edinburgh one of these days. Which I may or may not call MacCannibal.)

We'll be staying in close proximity to Allan Guthrie, whose new novel Slammer is just out in the UK (and will be out here in the US this fall), so you can expect some of his insanity to show up here on the blog. You remember what happened last time, don't you? And the time he lost his memory in Philadelphia?

The two of us will be doing a drop-in stock signing at Waterstones on Princes Street this coming Tuesday afternoon (March 24), so if you're anywhere in the Edinburgh area and want to say "yo" to this Philly boy, come on down.

Okay, so maybe this is kind of a work trip. Writers can't help it; life tends to be one massive research session for the next book/comic/screenplay. And the next one. And the one after that...

(Above photo from my last trip to Edinburgh. Not its best side, but I like it because it reminds me of Philadelphia.)

The Clown

People often ask me why I write such dark/weird stuff. And I've never had a really good answer... until now. Just stumbled across this photo of myself, at what? Maybe a year old, if that? I'm in my bedroom at 4738 Darrah Street, which was the middle room. And on the wall behind me is the clown my father painted.

This was no ordinary clown. If you click on the photo to see a bigger version, you might notice the shelf the clown is holding with arms that come right out of the fucking wall. Arms that could conceivably drop the shelf and reach down for that innocent toddler sitting there with a dazed expression on his face.

People, I grew up thinking those arms were going to come out of the fucking wall and grab me.

Look at me. I'm so scared, I don't even realize that I have some kind of wrapped gift in my hands. I'm not thinking about gifts or toys; I'm thinking about the clown. That the moment I turn my head even a few inches to the left is the moment it's going to come out of the fucking wall and grab me.

And check out the clown's face. This is no jolly entertainer. This is a crazy man on a drug/booze bender who decided to slap on some facepaint and scare the living crap out of whomever he encountered.

I know my Dad meant well. Instead of buying some lame kiddie furnishings, he took the time to create this one-of-a-kind image on the wall of his first-born son's bedroom. Maybe he thought it would be funny. Maybe he thought the clown would become my imaginary playmate. Or, maybe he dropped one too many tabs of LSD in Vietnam.

Still, I suppose I do owe my career to my Dad and that clown. Because at the heart of everything I write, beneath the plot and characters and dialogue and rest of that fancy nonsense, down at the most primal level, there is only this:

There are clowns.

And they have arms that can come out of the fucking walls and grab you.

A Quantum of Free Time

Over a week without a post? Lame, I know. But I've been hit with a couple of deadlines at the same time, and most days, the thought of slapping a few extra words into this little white rectangle seemed about as appealing as crawling across a few extra inches of broken glass. I mean, it's no big deal, I'm already bleeding... but there's no pressing need, either.

Ever since I became a full-time freelance comic book writer/novelist/whatever, I've tried to hit a daily goal, and it is this: five comic script pages and at least one thousand words of a novel/fiction. The daily emails, proofreading, corrections, edits, Q&As... that's all extra. At the core of my writing day are those five script pages, and those thousand words (which is about four pages of double-spaced typed text).

I figured if I could keep that up, I'd be on fire. Five script pages x four days = twenty pages, which is just two pages shy of a full comic script. And one thousand words a day x 30 days x 2 months = first draft of a decent-sized short novel (60,000 words).

So do I hit my daily goal? Well...

I've found that my fancy "daily goal" plan doesn't factor in what I call the "recharging my batteries" factor. When on deadline, I can write like a demon for a few days, back to back. I might crank out as many as 10 script pages, or 2 or 3,000 words of fiction. But if I try to push it that an extra day, my brain refuses to give me anything useable.

And that's the problem: I'm still a creature of deadlines. I do work ahead, and I do manage to hit my daily more often than not. But my brain really doesn't kick into high gear until the clock is ticking. Which works... until I experience something like the last two weeks, when there were several clocks ticking all at once -- each slightly out of phase with each other -- and the noise made me want to leap from a church bell tower. Scripts aren't due a week at a time; sometimes, I need to produce two in a given week. When this happens, there is no time for recharging batteries. There is no try; there is only do.

All I can say is: thank God I love the doing.

Still Secret, Still Dead

Hey, look at that. A new header for this blog, which is only about... oh, three years overdue. Truth is, I had no idea you could load your own jpeg image onto a blogger blog until last week. So here we go. Me experimenting.

The photo is from the early 1970s. Shown is my childhood home in Philly; 4738 Darrah Street to be exact. Parked out front is my mother's black Dodge. I don't remember the exact year or make. Maybe someone out there can identify it by sight? I just remember sitting in the backseat, tumbling around without a booster or even a seat belt. It was the early 1970s. That's how we rolled.

This is where I lived from birth (1972) until the fall of 1989, when I moved to La Salle University's campus. Sure, I came back summers, and then for a few months after graduation, but I always count September '89 as the time I left home. My parents finally sold this house in 2002. A short while later, 4738 Darrah was occupied by drug dealers, who were the target of a statewide heroin bust (which I've blogged about before).

Somehow, it seemed appropriate as a header photo. That's where it all began, for better or worse.

Still more blog changes to come, but nothing radical. I promise.

"You've Really Gotta Pulverize That Thing"

Frank Bascombe has a cool Q&A with Richard Price over at Ain't It Cool News. Price talks about Lush Life, his screenplays, adaptations, and this little interesting bit about autobiographical details in fiction:

I feel like whatever you write is autobiographical, even if every character is a different race or speaks a different language- it’s all you. Because every time your character hits a crossroads, they make a choice that you’re making for them. And that is predicated on your values and what you’ve experienced in life.

Drowning in My Own Blood, or: Where I've Been This Past Week

Surgery's never fun.

But hey, when it's your time, it's your time. Last Wednesday, the day after our 10th anniversary, the Bride and I found ourselves getting up at the ungodly hour of 4:30 a.m. so we could make a 6:00 a.m. appointment so I could be shot full of narcotics and mauled with a blade and other cutting tools for an hour or so.

They call it "minor surgery."

And in the grand scheme of things, it really is. I'm lucky. My ailment was something laughably minor. Non life-threatening.

But I'd also argue that no surgery is minor. It really has a way of screwing with you for a while.

Take the first day. I got home, tucked into a reclining chair, and thought: You know, not so bad. I mean, it felt like my face was hit with a tire iron, right after I decided to snort a pile of cocaine cut with pool chlorine. But I felt a lot better than I thought I would be. Heck, I didn't even need to take all of the nice little prescription painkillers they sent home with me. Who wants to get hooked on that junk, right?

The next day, the residual anesthesia must have worn off, because that's when I really started to feel serious pain.

I wanted the painkillers.

I WANTED THE PAINKILLERS NOW.

FUCKING NOW

But the painkillers turned me more or less into a member of the walking dead. The Bride would ask a simple question, such as, Would you like more Vitamin Water? and I'd act like she just asked me to describe how nuclear fission worked, showing my math.

Another fun part of my post-surgical world has been my inability to read. For days, I couldn't drag my eyes across more than a sentence. Thank God for my iPod, and the loads of Behind the Black Mask, Out of the Past, and The Future is Bleak podcasts I had saved up. (Ben LeRoy's voice, in particular, is especially soothing for the post-operative individual.)

Today's the first day I've been able to sit in front of the computer and do some writing. So far, so good. Working on the next novel and the plot for a new comic book.

But of course, every so often I have to pause to go flush away the blood clots.

Like I said: surgery's never fun.

Not to Put Too Fine a Point On It...

... but someday when I'm dead, this is what I want made from my cremated remains. The average body, according to artist Nadine Jarvis, yields about 240 pencils. First come, first served, everybody!

(Via BoingBoing.net.)

Me Again

It's been a crazy run for interviews hasn't it? Okay, I promise, here's the last one for a while. Today I'm a guest at Writer Unboxed, a cool group blog that studies the craft of genre fiction. Part One is up now; Kathleen Bolton has promised to unleash Part Two next Friday. Enjoy, and while you're there, check out the rich pool of interview subjects past, including Jason Starr and P.J. Tracy.

(I'm very happy Kathleen used the photo I supplied, instead of fishing one off the interwebs that makes me look like a serial killer who just watched his Airedale get creamed by a speeding Lexus. Ahem.)

Update: Part two is now online!

Required Reading, Vol. 2: Life As We Know It

This isn't new--in fact, I'm fairly sure it's been on the web for quite a few years. But I recently stumbled across author Lewis Shiner's online autobiography, and if it isn't the best online essay on the ups and downs of being a novelist, then you need to show me what is. I first read Shiner's work in a collection of his detective stories, along with some co-written by Joe Lansdale, called Private Eye Action As You Like It. (And I just picked up a used paperback copy of his second novel, Deserted Cities of the Heart, originally released in 1988.) And like his fiction, this essay, titled "Life As We Know It," Shiner doesn't pull any punches, revealing a relentless cycle of dashed dreams and newfound hope:

There were times when the frustrations were overwhelming—insulting rejection letters, manuscripts lost, manuscripts left at the bottom of a slush pile and sent back unread when the market closed, manuscripts mutilated by the post office or stained with spilled coffee. Once a magazine returned a story—after it had been completely copy-edited for publication in green-felt tip pen—with a form rejection slip saying it "duplicates material already in our files" and no other explanation.

Yet at the same time I was slowly dragging myself up by my bootstraps, first wearing my influences like coats of bright red paint, then gradually internalizing them, then finally making my first tentative steps toward originality. I remember getting a tax refund and shelling out two hundred dollars for a reconditioned IBM Selectric. It was a profound and nearly religious experience for me to suddenly be able to produce such physically beautiful manuscripts. I loved the sound of the print ball, the smell of the ribbons, the wide "o" of the Courier font. I was determined to write something worthy of the typewriter and began a story called "Kings of the Afternoon."

If you're a writer, aspiring or otherwise, you really should read this.