Ms. Smith Is a Fan of Mine

A long, long time ago, when there were wolves in Wales, and I was very, very young, I took a foolish, foolish job. I was in theater at the time and working in Philadelphia. I acted, directed, did any gig I could get. Philly is close to New York. So close -- a hundred-plus miles -- so that those with bright hope and talent eventually went from Market or South Streets north to Broadway or the Village. Those who stayed behind -- or came back -- were either sad failures or the passionate but utterly uninitiated of us. That was the assumption.

...Okay, Andre Gregory was in Philly, but that's another story...

The well-heeled theater-going public of Philly pretty much ignored local efforts and hopped onto the Jersey Turnpike or Amtrak'd their way up to NYC to ease their showgoing Joneses.

I had just graduated from the theater school of Temple University and was considering my next step. Steps. I was married and had commitments to family, city and friends. That's what we told ourselves, Ernestine and I. Excuses, I fear, for not doing things.

Directing was the only thing I really wanted to do. If not that, then, nothing! Problem was, as an unknown in Philly, you were an actor. That was it. When people got to know you, then you got to direct. An ancillary problem was that anybody who had theater gigs to hand out and who didn't know you assumed you were either one or other of the abovementioned -- sad failure or hopeless naïf.

One could always start a company of course. That meant devoting yourself to fundraising, handshaking, butt-kissing, record keeping, the thankless pointlessness of audience building, and its sister shame, press relations/marketing...all that and more.

I had no urge to start a company. No, no. I was a director, not a businessdude.

Understand: I was not kid. I was young, but was not a child; I was just out of school, but had knocked around in professional and were-professional theater for more than a dozen years on three continents. I had some underdeveloped and largely unrecognized talents and some talents that had already been recognized -- just not so anybody in Philly had recognized.

An old chum from Temple HAD started a company. Fritz was his name, Etage was the company. That’s French for "stage" -- that was Fritz. Fritz was producing and directing a play from a new script by another Temple chum, a guy named Ivan. I was asked by both producer and writer to play the lead in what was to be Etage's first effort, "Terminal."

Fritz lived and worked in a vast, dark, ratty warehouse. The building was probably from the tail end of the 19th century and butted, literally, to the docks and lay in the shadow of the Ben Franklin bridge. The show would be rehearsed, built and performed in what amounted to Fritz's living room, said room being some 150 feet long, about 40 wide and 20 or so tall. It was big, dirty, echoic and open. Not bad, actually, as rough theater spaces went in those days. Brick, nitre and hoarfrost; tiny little feet when the lights went out. All the stuff to keep you honest and not let you get too far above yourself.

Ivan, our writer/money guy, had been around. He had just graduated from Temple, and, like I, he was older and more experienced than most of the students in the department. Ivan, in fact, had quite a few chops as a record producer and rock'n'roll promoter. At this time in his life, however, Ivan was seeking “respectability.” He somehow assumed the mantle of "playwright" would bestow that upon him. Silly fellow.

Toward that end, he had written "Terminal" and was using rock and roll bucks to finance the effort.

Trouble was, "Terminal" sucked. Cavernously.

The first read-through showed the script needed an act III gut rehab, a new act II, and an actual act I -- just to get it all rolling. That was it. Not re-writes. Needed were Acts I, II, and III.

It also needed reason to exist. It was the worst sort of absurdist masturbation: seemingly intellectual and passionate while being neither intelligent nor heartfelt – and it didn’t even give a good tingle at the end!

It did provide opportunities for boy and girl actors to scream, cry, fight, cuss, agonize, head-bash, breast beat (on one’s self and others), it allowed for perversion -- real and imagined -- and offered a full range of options for face-making, funny-walking and gutteralizing the English language.

The cast featured mostly kids, kids just starting at Temple or elsewhere, or street kids who'd learned a few garage band rock and roll licks or had done a couple community theater gigs before becoming disillusioned because their parents actually LIKED the shows they’d been in. Most of us had drifted down to the docks under the big suspension bridge to Camden, to do something real, something meaningful, something that reeked of sweat and tasted of gut, something that explored meaninglessness and showed how tough they were, alone, and in the face of it all.

Like I said: Kids. Like we all were, once.

I was assured. The script would be fixed. This was a starting point. This was a framework. Ivan was there. Fritz and Ivan, with the cast, would take it apart and put it all together. We’d be okay. Really.

Never happened.

I rode through five weeks of rehearsal, sometimes enduring the passion, the sweat, the committed anger of the young and needy actors, sometimes not. All the while I worked against my growing and deeply dismal realization that this play had begun life as a piece of shit, it remained a piece of shit, and would for all time and forever be a reminder -- imbedded in my recollection and in the memories of all who would gauge my work from this monument from this time forth -- that I, too, had shit potential.

To my credit I walked out once.

To my discredit, I came back.

About the play: “Terminal” was set in a deserted and devastated air terminal. Was the devastation because of a war, social upheaval, some apocalyptic event?

I didn't know. Fritz didn't know. Ivan didn't know but was certain it didn't matter.

I was playing "The General." The guy who ran things, the guy who had to keep it all going. I had at my command a sexy blonde babe and her pal, a hunchbacked circus dwarf/baggage handler. The actor playing the dwarf, while short, stood well within "normal" height range. He didn't believe in "faking" anything on stage so his dwarfishness and the huched-back part of his performance would have to come out of his intense "search" for his character in the rehearsal process.

A few other human oddities worked for me in this place. I've forgotten them, now.

As with a lot of Hollywood movies from the 30s, 40s and some early live television that had been cribbed from Hollywood movies of the 30s and 40s, there were also a few travelers that showed up at this strange facility. These were people who suddenly found themselves in this terminal. “They’re waiting, see...?”

“Waiting for what?”

“Well! I don't know...for a plane...a journey someplace, someplace, I don't know where..."

Like that.

“Are they dead...”

“Maybe they're dead!” Ivan told us. “Maybe they're not. Great, huh?”

“Is this sort of...well... Existential?”

“...”

“Like, say, ‘No Exit’ or somthing...?”

“Well...no...”

Anyway. I had a lot of speeches. Long speeches. I got to roam the playing area -- I climbed to the rafters on scaffolding, chasing my dwarf, I crawled the floors like an agonized serpent, or a uniformed Caliban sans-fins. I oozed up through trapdoors -- which were real -- rats and bugs at my heels -- also real. I wandered among the imagined audience-to-be no doubt making people nervous that I was going to make them do something silly (assaulting the audience was big in those days).

I got to deliver one very gentle, very soft speech while standing over our sleek blonde flight attendant, Lisa (heroin-chic before there was a Calvin Klein) -- while slowly slipping both hands down the front of her dress, finishing the thing while kneading her exceptionally chic-to-imaginary breasts...

You had to have been there.

All right? I was embarrassed by almost everything I had to do in this show. I had, however, committed to doing it. Ah well.

Opening night. Of all things, we had a full house. It was packed. Mostly paper, but it was full of Fritz's family, chums, the cast's pals, guys from Temple, former teachers. The range.

I told my wife to wait...wait until it settles in...

Uniquely, I was not nervous. I usually have stage fright that pushes the edge of cardiac infarction. That’s when I care, of course.

About this... Well, I wasn’t nervous. The rest of the cast went through the usual backstage verbal, physical and psychological hoop-jumps, the stuff that makes being backstage early a the run feel like you’re in the waiting room at a vet's office.

Ivan had pulled strings. He'd gotten a whole mob of his rock'n'roll pals and associates to Philly and to this thing. Most disturbing of all, the press was there -- the Daily News, Inquirer, Daily Planet, all the local and out of town papers were covering this little event!

Shit. I was finished.

I did the show stops pulled. Balls out. Hannibal Lector on a buzz trip, bennies, downers, uppers, screamers. Shameless. Shameless.

Somewhere in there, I lost myself. Somewhere in the midst of it all, I dropped off the face of friggin' Philadelphia and into some other place. I don't know if it was Ivan's Terminal, but it wasn't Etage under the Ben Franklin bridge.

Then the thing was over. We took our bows and got ready to party.

I came up for air, changed out of the costume -- my old Air Force officer's uniform (I say it was my old "officer's uniform" because, while I was but a Sergeant in the USAF in Europe, my officially designated work uniform was that of an Air Force Captain. I'll explain that another time) -- shoved my hair back, slipped upstairs from the basement green room and joined the party. Maybe nobody'd notice.

Live band. Lotsa booze. Catered. Good grub. Well-dressed audients and class-act dishes. Mainline slinks and uptown slipperies.

I avoided my fellow Terminalites. By this time, I didn't much like them, and they were, mostly, afraid of me.

I grabbed a dozen 7-oz Rolling Rock ponies, and slipped into the front lobby where it was quiet and dark.

Sulking.

The party was a muffled headache away. I snuggled over by the window that looked over the street, the dirty street by the River, and sucked down a couple Rocks.

Ahhh. Good.

I had no idea she had arrived. I turned and there she was. She was funny looking, bony, angular. She was in a kind of combination hip-hop, shimmy shammy, snuggle-up twitchy state. It seemed focused on me. She stood inches from my face and gushed. Her head wig-wagged back and forth as she oozed about my...my performance....one foot, the other foot. I was really, oh man you gotta know but probably don't know because you were so far in it there, but you really gotta know what you did there and I want to tell you you were just mind-blowing, man, fucking great. Like fucking THAT great.

Her eyes gripped mine, held through all her twitchings, rockings and bobbings. Somehow her eyes...her eyes locked onto mine...her eyes never moved, lidded, sexy, sensual...despite it all...they hung on...she vibrated...here eyes were quiet, waiting...that was it...then she waited with...waited with...waited...with her eyes.

"Thank you," I said. I thought that was appropriate. Thought that was about right. "Uh-huh... thanks. Glad you enjoyed."

No. I didn't think, "enjoyed" was the word, not the kind of thing "Terminal" was about... Enjoyment. No.

Then she slipped away.

I was flattered.

A bit confused. I was taken by this funny person's ability to flow in and out, go with the mood and be gone with the music beating at the walls from inside the theater.

"Well, okay," I said to myself, "how bad could I have been?"

How bad could I have been?
Fluffed with myself, I went back to the party.

When I got back, my dwarf and chic Lisa (who, since the first week of rehearsals seemed to have become joined at the groin), snatched me into a corner. Asked what she had said, what had she said...?

“Who?”

“Patti for Christ-sake.”

“Who Patti? Patti who?”

“Patti Smith, Christ! What had she said?”

“Oh. Uh...she liked it.”

I had no idea. At the time (and to this day deep inside my soul of souls) I consider any music written after1850 to be the spiritual precursor to the fall of civilization, Armageddon's marching tunes.

At this time, Patti Smith was only a step beyond being a proto-punk poet and crypto-neuve-wavo journalist cum Sam Shepard fuckee from deepest New Jork City.

She had, however, just cut a first record. She was a growing legend. Noted and known. And (best of all) known in only the hippest circles. Which, of course, most certainly did not include me.

My "Terminal" colleagues -- in the hippest of circles -- could scarcely believe that I didn't know who she was. Some proclaimed me to be feigning a greater ignorance than that which I possessed.

Terminal got lousy reviews.

I got a few good ones -- of the "one bright-spot-in-this-dark-and-dismal-night" variety.

...and that was that.

I watched Patti Smith with some interest after that. Then I forgot her.

In recent years, I've listened. I've come to appreciate her. I like her work. I like thinking about her. I've seen her, since. Actually gotten her autograph -- been that close. I never said what I wanted to say: "Hi. I'm Larry Santoro. You're a big fan of mine." I'm glad I didn't.

But! I wish her enthusiasm at the time had given me an appreciation of me at the time.

It did not do that.

Alas.
All images of Patti Smith are by Robert Maplethorpe

Pictures

I suppose it's because I'm still in awe of Alan Clark's wonderful painting for "...North of Nowhere" but I've been thinking about illustration lately.

My wife's father, William White, was a wonderful painter and illustrator. We're lucky to have quite a few of his pieces on our walls--what's left of our walls, that is, after book- and dvd-shelves have had their way with our vertical surfaces. One of my favorites is this...



If you look carefully at the bottom of the mirror -- just to the right of the center bulb -- you'll see a man's face staring at you. That's Bill White painting the picture.

Some day this painting will be a story. I'll get it right...I really will!

For obvious reasons, I love this one as well...


See? Every year, Bill painted a portrait of his little girl. This is one from her late 20s. She'd just returned home from Canada and was an unhappy woman... But I love her face in this. I love her hair. I love her...well of course.

Middle American Debris

Middle American Debris by Alan M. Clark
Alan Clark's cover illustration for my first novel, "Just North of Nowhere," due out in late '06 from Annihilation Press.

"Just North of Nowhere" will be Bluffton in print -- finally!

Alan is one of the best in the business and I'm pleased as hell to have his work fronting this book. This is the second piece of mine that Alan has illustrated. Take a look below...the image on top of the entry "Where Did It Come From?" That's his illustration for "So Many Tiny Mouths."

As this place is called "At Home in Bluffton," I suppose you realize that Bluffton has been in my head and heart for a decade or so. Middle American Debris -- Alan's job title for the painting -- is a central image of "The Ninth Goddamned Kid," a key chapter of the book. So there it is! I can see it at last and I can't wait for you to read it!

Hell, I can't wait to read it!

Take a look at Alan's website: http://www.ifdpublishing.com/art/ ...he's got a lot of incredible work there.

Me Descending

Wayne Allen Sallee took this...returning the favor, I guess.

This is me going down the spiral stairway into my back yard. My writer pal Wayne Allen Sallee seems to love taking pictures from above or below, looking up people's noses and the like. By request, I took one of him on this same stairway a few years ago. It looks as though he's descending into a sewer or down a steel rabbit hole. He uses it as the image on his business cards.

The planter and trellis are no longer there. Instead we have fountains and faux inlaid stone. I didn't do it. I don't own the place I just live here. I've lived here, in fact, longer than I've lived anywhere in my life. This is about 100 feet from the spot where the little girl's body was found during the razing of an old three-floor wood frame building. She became "Little Girl Down the Way."

For No Particular Reason

Wayne at his art!


This is my favorite picture of Wayne Allen Sallee. He's reading at Twilight Tales.

Having posted this one of him, It is my hope that he'll return the favor and post one of me reading at the same place.

Wayne!?

Too good to not post!

Too good to pass up...thanks Wayne.

This is m'self and a dude who calls himself "the Ed Wood of the 90s"

The photo was taken at a little film festival in Chicago in 2004 and Mr. Wood-be was still calling himself that. Ah well.

Wayne Allen Sallee took the picture. Later that evening, Wayne found himself in a hot tub with two Hollywood stars!

Little Girl Down the Way, or Maybe you don't want to know this!

My experience has been that when people ask, “Where do your ideas come from?” they really don’t want to know.

For instance: Eight years ago I wrote a story called "Little Girl Down the Way." I submitted it once and it came back. I wasn't surprised or disappointed. "Little Girl..." is a brutal story about the murder of a 7 year old who lived and died -- 40-plus years ago -- just down the way from my apartment in Chicago.

Her passion and death happened decades before I moved into the neighborhood but the Little Girl’s remains weren't unearthed until 9 years ago. The facts of the matter stirred me to write a story in which an unwanted child is hidden in a basement by her mother and, ultimately, is killed by her. The story is seen from the point of view of the little girl who, every day, awakens into the hell of an afterlife and re-lives the nightmare of her life and death. Day after day the years of torment are revisited but never does she give up on the notion that her mother loves her. The story, finally, is a view of how hell and heaven can be the same place in the same time depending on your point of view.

Unpublished, un-circulated, “Little Girl…” was content to live in my trunk. It had lots of company.

A few months ago, "Twilight Tales" asked if I had something they could produce as a podcast for their online magazine. I gave them a choice of one thing or another thing.

They chose the other thing: "Little Girl..." The producer, David Munger, did a great job with a difficult piece. Here's the url...go listen to it, I'll wait for you: http://www.twilighttales.com/podcast/

Okay?

A short time after it was 'cast, I got a letter. A listener who wrote to say that the story disturbed him -- in the good way that horror should disturb you -- and that, as a father, he’d listened to it several times and found himself both moved and trembling each time.

I thanked him for his kindness and for taking time to write. In return, I gave him a few paragraphs on the background to the story -- just a bit more than I gave you above.

A return email said, in essence: Well! I'm sorry I know that, I thought this came out of your head!

He included a little electric *sigh* somewhere in there -- vexation I guess at finding my murdered Little Girl to be a child of the world not entirely of my imagination. The father in him didn’t want to know that such things happen.

Okay, his disappointment was my fault: I volunteered the information. I guess I understand but see, I think people really don't want to know where the ideas come from.

So, if you've listened to "Little Girl..." would you want to know how close to reality that piece was?

Let me know.

Tycelia at Christmas

This is my wife, Tycelia...there's a long, long story about how we finally got together. I'll actually write it sometime!

An evolving novel set in the LOST universe

Four of the LOST: FAITH authors in Chicago: L-R Wayne Allen Sallee, Lawrence Santoro, Roger Dale Trexler, Martin Mundt. Below, the late John Eveson, an author in life, a character in death...killed in the second episode, remembered in the sixth.


This is an unashamed pitch for attention.

During the December/January hiatus of ABC TV's monster hit, LOST, one of the show's websites, "The Tailsection," began posting an evolving novel, LOST: FAITH.

Set on the island, the events of LOST: FAITH take place before the crash of Oceanic 815. According to the creators of the storyline, "The idea was to craft a mythology connected to the show's locale but outside the events of the ABC program."

Here's the kicker:

It is September 11th, 2001. News of the terrorist attacks in the United States reaches the passengers aboard Pacific Blue flight 442 en-route to the US from Thailand. The flight continues as a fissure of fear, rage, and paranoia opens. Soon, the unthinkable happens...

LOST: FAITH is a collaborative project among several writers. Each author is crafting a character and an 'episode' of varying lengths.

I am pleased to be one of those writers.

My character, Maxwell Peter Donnithorne, is a world-class concert flutist who was returning to the United States from a cross-cultural seminar in Bali. Recovering gradually from the shock of the crash and his injuries, Max believes himself to have been a person apart from the mass hysteria onboard flight 442 which precipitated the crash. Gradually, he comes to realize that the island will not let him be alone here -- not even in his own skin.

Veteran horror author Wayne Allen Sallee is one of the creators of the series, a contributor and is acting as story supervisor. Other writers include Roger Trexler, Sidney Williams and Jon Lachonis.

"The Tailsection" is at: http://www.thetailsection.com/

I hope you'll stop by LOST: FAITH and have a read. It's at: http://www.thetailsection.com/lost_faith/downloads.html

WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Some fetchin's

Alan M. Clark's illustration for "So Many Tiny Mouths" Alan's an incredible artist who will be doing the cover illustration for my first novel, "Just North of Nowhere," due out in late 2006 from Annihilation Press. Check out Alan's website at: http://www.ifdpublishing.com/

The post below was an afterword to my damn-near-Stoker-nominated story, "So Many Tiny Mouths" when it was published in Feral Fiction. Here it is:

"So Many Tiny Mouths," has fetchings.

Pennsylvania, 1950-something.

Summers, the parents and I would hop into the old man’s green-over-cream ‘53 Belle-Air and head for pre-Trump Atlantic City. We’d make the Delaware crossing into Jersey on the Chester-Bridgeport Ferry and two hours later our first half-dozen layers of winter skin would be bubbling off as we yanked fillings out of our head with Steel Pier salt water taffy.

Whoa, whoa, whoa... Slow down. Before the shore, we had to get there. After that ferry crossing? Most of my kidhood, I spent those 70 non-air conditioned miles stuck in the back seat meditating on being ground under by Atlantic Ocean rollers or being impaled, barefooted, by my first horseshoe crab tail of summer?

It was only later I noticed that most of the trip was through trees; a corridor of trees.

Later still, I learned the whole of central Jersey was a damn geo-political entity: The Pine Barrens. The Barrens, so-called, was a land of trackless forest inhabited by strange six-fingered native folk who lived in caves in the wild wood, prayed to odd and grubby gods, who made their own gas from pig shit and sometimes ate lost travelers. Pineys, they called themselves.

Much later, I made a now long-gone documentary film about the region called “...Where the Sun Never Shines.” Sadly, while shooting the film I found Pineys to be normal, garden-variety Americans. Use your own personal demons to inform what image that conjures.

The people stay to themselves, they are independent-minded and don’t care to be fussed over. They do a lot for themselves that most of us gave up doing a generation or so ago and they have curious and spooky tales to tell.

The Piney’s world is deep evergreen forest and sand trails no wider than a small sedan; it is small streams and cedar swamps, it smells of sphagnum moss, decay and other forest things. Moving through this world, a stranger navigates by compass, odometer and a U.S. Geodetic Survey map. Chatsworth is real, the ‘Capital of the Pines.’ Ghost and Forgotten towns dot the maps. Places like Ong’s Hat and Hog Wallow do – did -- exist and someday I’ll do justice to the quiet, the sense of the old, the past, the never will-be that stands behind one who stands at one of those five-point crossings in the woods.

There are economic, political and social reasons why this area, despite being at the beating steel- and concrete-heart of the Megalopolis, has remained relatively green, human-free and “unimproved.” These reasons are not part of the tale of this tale’s fetchin’s, however.

Point is, I liked the Pines. I enjoyed meeting the people and managed, actually, to learn a little about them. I set one science fiction story, “Veterans,” there and, later -- on a roll of having sold two original screenplays, bing/bing, like that -- adapted it for film. “Veterans: the Movie” remains unproduced, unsold. Oh well.

The Pines is a hard area to get right. One truly GOOD writer I know of set a story there and I thought he missed it. One of the best episodes of HBO’s “The Sopranos” was called “The Barrens.” Their Jersey Wiseguys were money-on as strangers in a strange land, but not only did they not shoot it in the Pines, they set it in generic woodlands, a place without even a passing similarity to the Pines.

When I was asked to submit to an anthology of tales on a theme of fang and talon, somehow the Pines entered my head -- still bristling about that unproduced film, I guess. I kept thinking I wanted to do another story there. Okay. Two salient features of the Barrens are: pine trees and sand. Trees with talons might be interesting, but I opted to give the sand some teeth.

The anthology didn’t take the story. They were right not to. On the first pass, I focused the tale on the tourists from Philly. I was more comfortable, I guess, writing from the backseat of that ‘53 Chevy.

So, here’s my second Pine Barrens story, re-thought. I pulled off the road and listened to some of the people I half-way knew when I was making that documentary.

By the way, Earl Sooey, the coot through whose eye we watch the world end? He’s based on no one; just a fiction; a coincidence, really.

One Year and a Little More...

One year and a little more since my last post.

Several things: I almost got another Stoker nomination. I didn’t get the nomination but the story, “So Many Tiny Mouths,” did get an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow’s YEAR’S BEST HORROR AND FANTASY anthology. A pretty good little tale, if I do say so: a pleasant little end-of-the-world tale set in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey – one of my favorite places. I spent months there back in the late 60s doing a documentary film. More about that, anon.

The near-Stoker thing got me an invitation to submit a story to an anthology-to-be of zombie stories.

Now, I can’t recall having actually read, much less written, a zombie story. I did have a few friends back in Pennsylvania who’d been living-dead extras in George Romero’s low-budget, albeit groundbreaking original “Night of the Living Dead.” I had actually seen the film -- and, with help, was to pick out some of my pals lurking under the prosthetics and makeup.

Point being: Zombie is a genre I neither know nor embrace.

Oh...right...I’d also seen the re-do of “Night...” which co-starred another friend, Tom Towles, from my Organic Theater days...and, now that I’m on the subject, I do remember having seen “I Walked with a Zombie,” but that hardly counts...

Back on track: I said, “yes.” Of course I did! How often does a previous and near-miss Stoker nominee get asked?

At first I thought I’d set it in Bluffton. I didn’t – more about that at another time!

I didn’t because something buzzed in me. I was on a Sunday afternoon skim of Powell’s Bookstore on 57th, by the University of Chicago, and found an intriguingly titled and arrestingly laid-out book, “Harry's War, Experiences In The 'Suicide Club' In World War One.” “Harry’s War...” was an oblong thing, a facsimile of a diary, with color sketches by the diarist, about life in the trenches. It tweaked something. I flashed on Mr. Boyer’s world history classes at Reading Senior High. The memories prodded research. I dove into World War I history, tunneling and mining strategy, walking tours of the front, pre-Second World War German mysticism. It went on. Norman Boyer would have been proud! A dozen books later, I wrote “Wind Shadows,” a zombie tale utterly without mention of the word!

I’m looking forward to AIM FOR THE HEAD -- should be out in late 2006. Hope you’ll look for it too.

Another thing: One of my vile stories, a trunk tale called “Little Girl Down the Way,” has become a Twilight Tales podcast. It’s at http://www.twilighttales.com/podcast/ That’s not me reading it, but the TT podcast host, David Munger, does a pretty good job with a damn difficult piece. Hope you’ll listen.

This is getting to be too long and meandering but it has been over a year.

I’ll try to do better in 2006.

Kelly Goldberg

Kelly...walking off





I heard a few days ago. Kelly Goldberg died. Known on the page as d.g.k. goldberg, Kelly was the first member of the Horror Writers Association I met at my first national convention. We spent the evening in the bar of the hotel in Providence, RI. We both had other places to go but, for myself, I couldn't tear away! She was funny, smart, self-effacing, witty, bitchy (in the best southern way) and positively adorable! Who could leave?!

I have no idea why she stuck at the table with me, but it was for none of the reasons above. She was drinking pink things, that was part of it. That, according to her, always allowed a southern woman to say anything she damn-well wanted and still remain a lady.

Over the years we became friends, meeting only at conventions across the country, speaking occasional on the phone. We emailed--sometimes obsessively–on politics, personalities, NASCAR racing (about which she knew everything and I knew nothing!), writing. The range was wide and she was, as always, funny, smart, self-effacing, witty and adorably bitchy (in the best southern way).

We (at Feral Fiction) published one of her last stories, “Tea in Kensington Garden,” ironically a ghost story.

Damn. Kelly makes me wish for ghosts, for real ones.

A New Year

Just to let the world know, I've been to Bluffton again. My first visit in about 8 years. The place is different; seems tipped. The outsiders have taken it and shuffled their urban upscale reality with the old town, sprinkled it with nostalgia and tried to fit themselves into the pattern. Don't know if it will work. Maybe, come the day, when we run out of cheap energy... Oh enough of that. Go read Jim Kunstler ("The Geography of Nowhere" for example), then project that onto Bluffton. In any event, I finished the story I started before going. I'm not particularly fond of it. We'll see. The title is "Fatty Borgos and the Eternal Wisdom of the Burma Shave People." I think I haven't gotten to the kernel of the story. It probably needs either to be thrown out, gutted and rebuilt or made to be a story sequence.

Well, Happy New Year world.

Still fussing...

Sorry. World, I'm sorry. I voted the right way. My friends did...all but two. I worked for the right guy. I even went out of state--to one of those teetering on the verge of doing the right thing and slipping into idiotry--and it came through. We came through here at home. The rest of the country, maybe 50 percent of it (after the recounts are in and adjusting for the votes we know were shuffled, tossed, missed, misplaced, stolen or otherwise missappropriated) went the wrong way and thus... Sorry. World, I'm sorry. It's not just for the next four years, its for he next...well, who knows. Maybe forever. We're slipping. Going into the void, folks; slipping into that pit we've seen countries descend into before. This is a little different. This time, I fear, this time it's forever. This time we're going into the permanent hands of the corporations world-wide; we seem to forget that once this country was about an ideal, not just safety.

Oh well.

Sorry world.

Taking time to work on rejections...

My apologies to all who have had to wait for their response from us at Feral Fiction (www.FeralFiction.com). We're just getting around to answering the bulk of the submissions. I'm at that now!

Writing and Professionalism...a discussion with myself

If anyone ever comes to this site, I hope you’ll read and post comments about this.

I’m still working in Bluffton and I wonder why.

Look: I’m a writer who has published a bit here and there; had a bit of success–two Bram Stoker nominations from the Horror Writers Association (one for a Bluffton story, “God Screamed and Screamed Then I Ate Him”)–but not enough that I’ve become a “name.” I’m not A-list, mid-list or even listed as an author. You’ve probably only heard about me on the HWA board, through the Chicago-based Twilight Tales reading series or heard me at a convention or two. I’m not one of those people who can sell anything he writes based on the drawing power of my name.

That’s enough for now on how unknown I am. We’ll come back to it.

Twenty-three of my stories are set in Bluffton, a fictive small town in the bluff-country of the upper Midwest--in the so-called “Driftless Zone.” I’ll explain what that is at another time and point you to some sites where geologists meditate on why glaciers from the last ice age missed this part of North America. Okay?

Okay. All 23 Bluffton stories interconnect...more or less. They share location, characters, story lines. You can read some of them and get a full story, but you really need others to complete and flesh out the picture. One story’s central figure might be a supporting player or an extra in another; a subplot of one tale become central to another. A piece of extraneous conversation, something overheard casually in one tale, puts forth the plot of a subsequent piece. You can’t, for example, appreciate the Ruth Potter stories without reading them in sequence. You can’t read “Lightning Harvest” without also reading “The Eephus Pitch and Hanging High Fly of the Consolidated Catbirds” and “The Ninth Goddamn Kid.” You can! But each is much better when you’ve had the experience of the others!

This makes them a hard sell.

But I keep writing them; keep making those internal connections, building in the links that make each Bluffton story unsalable by itself. I could leave them out, make the tales more desirable as stand-alones. I don’t. I want them in. They are better stories that way.

This is unprofessional of me -- Jesus, am I unprofessional -- and arrogant, too.

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it) I don’t have to depend on fiction writing for my living. I make decent money and get great benefits by being a writer for the City of Chicago. Writing at that job, doesn’t seem to diminish my urge to do the fiction when I get home, in fact, it seems to encourage it.

If I made my living from my fiction, I’d probably have to write what the market wants.

Years ago, when I was in theater, I saw actor friends turn down dream roles in good plays because they conflicted with shooting a commercial or doing a piece-of-crap part in a hack film. They had to. They were professionals.

Nobody made us become directors, actors, writers. Our parents didn’t nudge us into it, society didn’t need us to go forth and write.

We did it because something in the doing captured us. The thought that we could scribble out some pages and our friends would laugh or giggle or shudder or...

...that we could stand on a stage and make people cry or...

Get the idea. We got into theater, writing or whatever...because something in us needed to do that thing!

Become a professional at it, though and, unless you’re at the top of your field and able to choose your next project or sell anything you write, you’re trapped by the market. It’s the quandary in which the non-A-list worker finds him or herself all the working day: Doing what your heart tells you, doing the thing that propelled you into the life in the first place or make your rent. After all, the landlord’s not going to wait for the rent. What? Is he supposed to loose money?

No. No, of course not. No one should have to loose money. Right?

So: is it just my arrogance that keeps me writing the Bluffton stories? Do I do it because I just love the place, love hanging out at the Wheel and watching the weekly punch-up between the Sons of Norway and Lanesboro Grange, love sitting out a thunderstorm under Bunch’s bridge with him and Vinnie the Cop? Do I love slipping into the library and getting Ruth Potter to send me back to a Bluffton that was but never was? Yes. I do. I love being there.

And am I supposed to loose money at it? I guess.

More later...

Disinterest...

I write dark fantasy, a little horror and a lot of near-mainstream fiction. For a living (a few make their living on fantasy, horror and near-mainstream fiction, but I'm not one) I write for the City of Chicago and do some non-fiction free-lance scribbling that keeps me in DVDs and other toys.

As an adjunct to writing fantasy, etc., I am an Active member of an organization called the Horror Writers Association (HWA).

Every year HWA has a banquet and gives out the "Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement in..." well, in various categories. The categories include Novel, First Novel, Long Fiction, Short Fiction, and a passel of others. Among the passel is: Poetry Collection.

The Stoker awards, as I understand the concept, is the HWA membership applauding a few people within the horror-making industry who have done superior work that year. You don’t have to be an HWA member to win, but you do have to be to vote.

There is a current movement afoot within the organization to eliminate some of the award categories. Poetry Collection is among them.

I support maintaining the award category--and all the other categories now being considered for dumping. I’ve written poetry but I'm not a poet. I’ve published a few poems but my support of keeping this category has nothing to do with my support for the writers I’ve published.

Here’s the thing: I cannot imagine an organization of and for writers–whether they write dark and fictive things or not--whose leading lights avow that its membership has ‘shown disinterest at best’ in recognizing the efforts of some of their fellow members who write poetry.

That is the reason most frequently given for eliminating this and other categories: Disinterest.

These Stokers? They’re not the Academy Awards. The world does not await, breathless, to see who will win what Stoker award? Getting a Stoker does not catapult one into an international pantheon of eternals. Having one doesn't mean a huge readership suddenly develops for your work. Editor's do not become weak-kneed when your work swims before their ken. A Stoker doesn’t mean that one’s novel or collection or whatever gains new life in the marketplace; publishers do not campaign for Stokers as producers and distributors do for Oscars or Emmies (I was told a few years ago by a reputable editor/publisher in the field that “Bram Stoker Award Winner” or “Stoker Nominee” on the title page of a book, in fact, produces a drop in sales. No. I won’t document this. You’ll have to trust me. It’s hearsay but true!).

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to win one (I’ve been nominated twice and was happy for the honor) (See? I'm bragging about it!) but my happiness is of the “You LIKE me” sort: a release, the three percent upside to life in an industry that’s ninety-five percent solitary rejection and two percent money. Knowing my peers and friends and, yes, competitors, have said "Pretty good, Larry" that makes me happy to have been nominated, makes me want to have one of those little brown houses (the award looks like a dark haunted house–pretty nice, actually!) on my mantle. IF I could afford a mantle.

We live in a world that’s increasingly about sales. Worse: it’s about being sold to! We live in a country where you don’t simply buy a can of pop, you join a Club of Happy Drinkers. Every product is sold to us as something that will make us part of a group. As though we can't be happy being quirky, unique.

Okay. That rant is part of something else, but it ties in.

The HWA leadership seems to feel it has to sell itself to the world.

As if they could.

They seem to feel that even their personal in-house back-pats have to serve some greater good, some larger agenda.

HWA should be about ‘community?’ Isn’t the award a way to say within that community, “well done!”

See? This isn't about having a Poetry category. It's about NOT having one.

We’re not supporting horror or poetry. HWA members are supposed to be supporting each other. We're about helping each other. We're about growing as artists and as people. Disinterested is what we are in first grade when faced with the complexities of the alphabet as laid against our natural urge to be on the playground. Many of us get over it.

Too many, apparently, do not.

A place to rest...

In case you wondered: Bluffton is a place where I frequently go to rest after having written something I’ve agonized over for a month or more, after I’ve had a rough few days at work, when I’m cranky and feeling sorry for myself. It’s a place where I feel comfortable with the ground and enjoy breathing the air. The people are quirky, creepy, curious and quaint. They’re also magical and powerful and amazingly dumb; they’re loving and hateful and utterly oblivous. And I know them. When they’re too cantankerous, I can punish them; when they’ve been really nice...I can punish them some more! I can also hand out rewards with equal parts willy and nilly.

I’m God in Bluffton but nobody prays to me or begs me for anything and expects me to do anything. I can sit anonymously in the Wagon Wheel and watch the Sons of Norway get pasted at Thursday night darts with the Grangers from Lanesboro. I can eavesdrop on Doc Mouth’s latest maundering from the outskirts. I can go check up on Bunch, up under the old bridge out on County H. I can go see Ruth at the library and, if I’m polite, I can visit a moment in Bluffton’s past–can stay as long as I like, do anything I want without worrying about mucking up the future.

Bluffton is a place where I make things happen and don’t even feel I have to share them. I’ve written 20-some-odd stories set in and around the town and published only a handful. I’ve not even tried to publish most of them. They gather like treasures on the Kiddorf Banks. (The Banks is the place downstream from town where the Rolling makes a hard turn at the old drive-in theater. All manner of stuff that’s been flushed out of the hills gets deposited at this place) Someday maybe I’ll pack them up and send them out as a book.

I don’t know.

Good Morning...

Monday, September 20, 2004. Feral is up! Finally. Just wanted to leave that here and get along to something else.