Continue reading »]]> We all know the word count has to be met. You’ve got a daily writing goal (if you don’t, you should have), a deadline to make or some other Sword of Damocles hanging over your head. Add in family commitments, a day job and all the loose ends that make up eighty percent of the average person’s typical day and it’s a wonder you have time to breathe. But breathe you must.

When I’m bringing my A-game, it’s hard for me to slow down. I want to keep moving, keep punching the keys, keep turning the pages and go, go, go. Left to my own devices, I’d work twelve hours a day and be thinking about work for another six. I know. I’ve seen me do it.

Few people have ever accused me of being a work-a-holic, but there’s no way of denying it. When I’m not working, I feel like I should be and it doesn’t matter how much I’ve already gotten done that day. If you’re like me or any other writer I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with, you’re in the same boat. Always on or angry with yourself for being off. And I’m here to tell you, you need to chill.

In Major League Baseball, starting pitchers work on a five day rotation. They get one hard day’s work, then sit out the next four games. They’re not sitting idle on the bench by any means, but everything they do over those four days is designed to get them ready for the next outing. They recharge, rebuild lean tissue and plan. This down time is essential in modern baseball, and I think it’s just as essential to a writer.

When do your best ideas come in? When you’re frantically trying to fill a page? When you’re trying to shuttle the kids between their various after-school programs? When you’re trying to fix the leaking sink while keeping one eye on the pot roast?

If you’re like me, your best ideas come during those times when your mind has the luxury of clocking out and doing its own thing. I’m not talking about daydreaming, here. I’m talking about when whatever your doing is so rote, and your mind so relaxed, your attention just can’t help but wander. We’ve all experienced flashes of insight while taking a shower or working out at the gym, but I’m willing to bet almost none of these Aha! moments come while you’re scrambling to get those last few hundred words written before you leave to pick up Aunt Mable at the airport.

When you look at it like that, taking a break might just be the best way to get your work done. In that spirit, let me share with you three ways I use to get myself away from work and worry.

Take a Walk

It’s the time-honored tradition embraced by authors everywhere. Stephen King was half way through writing The Stand when he hit a wall. Months went by without a word written. As the calendar pages turned, he started taking long walks and let his mind just do whatever. And it was during one of these walks that the words began to come to him again.

I try to take a walk every day, not just to give my brain a chance to let its hair down, but also because it’s healthy and I could stand to lose a few pounds. Some of the walks I go on are long, but most are just fifteen or twenty minute skips around the neighborhood. However long works for you, try to get outside and get those feet moving. Your head, and heart, will thank you.

Go to Lunch

Call up a friend and make plans to go out to lunch. Or dinner. Or even just a bagel and a cup of over-priced coffee. The time doesn’t really matter, just go out and grab a bite to eat with a friend. Sometimes we get so involved with our characters we forget there are real people out there. Also, things like believable characters and convincing dialog aren’t often pure creations of our conscious mind. They come, at least in part, from the people and conversations around us.

I do my best to go out once a week, but usually count myself lucky if I can hang out with friends twice a month. When I do, I try not to talk shop, but I don’t always succeed. Either way, it gets me out of the house and away from the computer. Taking even half an hour to leave the writing at home and enjoy the company of others is a great way to recharge the batteries and help me face down the next chapter.

Go Shopping

It’s not just for women, despite what the comedians tell you. Whether it’s a new ball cap or a new pair of manly boots, even guys want to look pretty. No matter what your gender, hitting the mall or the local department store is a good way to get some distance from your work and still feel like you’re accomplishing something. We’ve all got a list of things we need to pick up, from a new pair of jeans to a box of pencils. Swing by the store on your way home from work and take a few minutes to browse the aisles.

Bookstores are my secret hideaway. Even if I can only spare ten minutes on my way from somewhere to somewhere, a quick lap around a book store is almost as good as a cup of coffee. I’m not much for clothes shopping, but a toy store still holds all the wonder for me that it did when I was eight years old. If you can do nothing else on this list, try to let your mind go and take an extra fifteen minutes the next time you’re in the grocery store.

You might be amazed by what you bring home.

Continue reading »]]> I’m sorry about that title, but you knew it had to happen sooner or later. The last couple of days have been downers in the extreme, but today is looking better.

Monday consisted of two appointments surrounded by a sea of fear, anxiety and work. The first was my usual, bi-weekly appointment with my case manager. These kinds of appointments are never very fun because they’re basically me spending forty-five minutes dwelling on how screwed I am.

The second was my noon appointment with the dentist to discuss (and hopefully destroy) the wisdom teeth I’ve unwisely hung onto. If you’re coming to the show late, let me point out that while I think a hospital emergency room might be found among the circles in Hell, I’m convinced Lucifer sits in a dentist’s chair.

In preparation for the horrors of the day, I opted to wake up at six in the morning–three hours ahead of my first appointment–hoping to get some writing done. Despite all the pain and drug-induced stuporing that’s been forced upon me, I had managed to hit my two thousand word writing goal without fail. I didn’t want that to change and giving myself an extra hour or so before heading out into the world seemed like a good way to keep that train a’rollin’.

I wrote about fifteen hundred words then had to leave. When I got back, I took a Vicodin and knocked out the last of the word count before my brain shut down for good. All that was left…was the dentist.

I’ll spare you most of the gory details and hit the highlights. I have an infection, my wisdom teeth need to come out and I need a lengthy (and expensive) procedure in order to get everything else healthy. It seems my staying away from the tenth circle of Hell for so long has turned my mouth into a carnival sideshow.

So, good news and bad news. It’s like the phrase was invented because of my dentist appointment. Also, “Catch-22.” I have a serious problem, but it can be fixed. Ah, but it in order to fix it, I need to confront the very cause of it: my dental anxiety.

Good times!

Yesterday things took a turn for the excessive, though. I woke up with the now-usual tooth pain and a migraine to boot. Even after I had a few cups of coffee in me, I took one look at my novel and realized I was taking the day off whether I wanted to or not. In the end, Tuesday was little more than naps punctuated with Vicodin and a few episodes of Mythbusters that Netflix was kind enough to serve up.

I’m feeling better today, so maybe the infection is starting to turn a corner. I hit my word count goal, managed to get a few other things done and I still don’t feel like taking my painkillers and being dead to the world. As long as I don’t feel worse than I do now, keeping up with my work until Monday shouldn’t be an issue.

Let’s hope the trend continues.

Previously. Previously.

Continue reading »]]> Saturday night I broke down and took a trip to the emergency room. The pain in my tooth and head had cranked itself to eleven again, and the disturbing, swollen patch on the roof of my mouth started whispering terrible things to me. I’m not a fan of doctors, less a fan of hospitals and if there is a Hell, one of the nastier circles is going to look a lot like the E.R.

As I walked through the door of the hospital, a wave of absurdity and shame hit me. “Dude,” I thought, “you’re going to the E.R. for a toothache.”

It sounds ridiculous if you’ve never had one. I prepared for the blank expressions, the looks of condescension. “Oh, poor baby’s widdle tooth hurts!”

Turns out, every nurse and doctor who saw me had a dental horror of their own to share. I saw people touching their jaws unconsciously, remembering the pain of their own experiences. The doctor who saw me pulled open his own mouth with both hands to show me the dental work he’d needed.

“There’s no pain worse and I’ve had three kids,” one nurse told me.

“You just want to die,” said another. ”How did you wait so long?”

The unanimous outpouring of sympathy was unexpected, and would have made me smile in relief if it didn’t hurt to even think about smiling.

After the most careful prodding I’ve ever experienced in a doctor’s care, I learned that yes, I did have an infection. An infection that had made its way into the bone and required a special brand of antibiotics to clear up.

“No oral surgeon is going to remove a tooth until that’s cleared up,” the doctor assured me. He wrote out a scrip for something I’d never heard of and prophesied doom if I didn’t take the whole series. I guess I just radiate that aura which says “I hate pills.”

He also gave me a prescription for Vicodin, since nothing else I’d been taking had managed to give me more than an hour or two of relief. “Once it reaches this point,” he said, “it’s time to break out the big guns.”

I made it out of the E.R., to the drug store and back home in about an hour, which I’m sure is a record for any such trip. Two Vicodin and two hours later, I laid down for the first solid six hours of sleep I’ve had since Wednesday.

My mouth still isn’t perfect, the pills make it hard to think and my stomach is doing cartwheels from the antibiotics, but I’m nowhere near the level of pain I’ve been in all weekend. I have an appointment with the dentist at noon today. With any luck, I’ll leave there with one less tooth, but the infection might have killed my chances for that.

“Soon” is the best I can hope for, but last week would have been better.

Continue reading »]]> Another week, another Six Sentence Sunday. This snippet follows last week’s and continues the conversation between Joshua Rourke and Max. Rourke has revealed he sold a rather disgusting, fake protective potion to a criminal known as much for his volatile temper as he is for his superstitious beliefs.

“I hear the thugs he hires aren’t just for show,” Max said, as though Rourke had somehow forgotten John Martin’s status in the underworld of the city.

“Hey, a little confidence goes a long way. He pays me five grand, rubs some spicy goat juice on his nipples, thinks he’s protected against Delhi’s home-grown hoodoo and everyone goes home happy.”

“Son of a-“

“See you in an hour.” Rourke hung up and tossed the remaining half of his bagel in the trash.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve had a problem tooth for some time. Well, technically more than one. I should have had my wisdom teeth out more than a decade ago, but dentists and I have a…strained relationship. I know a trip to the dentist is on most people’s “Do Not Want” list, but my own dental anxiety is nigh paralyzing. As a result, having a stranger prod the inside of my mouth with a metal hook just hasn’t been a priority for me.

Besides, how bad can something called a “wisdom tooth” be? Wisdom! I don’t want to get these puppies popped out only to learn I’ve become some kind of hairless Samson. Plus, say the words out loud. Roll off the tongue, don’t they? Hell, the phrase could be some kind of Eastern mantra. Wiiiiizzzz-doooooom toooooooooooooth.

As it turns out, they’d be more accurately called “teeth of despairing agony.” It doesn’t roll off the tongue as well, but my proposed term is a lot more descriptive.

The one on the upper left has been giving me fits for a couple of weeks. Nothing severe enough to warrant a trip to Doctor Demented’s House of Diabolical Dentistry, but enough to make me take more aspirin than I’d like, and be more careful about which side of my mouth I chew on.

Then came yesterday.

Oh. My. God.

After coming back from what was supposed to be a leisurely lunch with a friend, I apparently took two steps through the front door and passed out. I say “apparently” because all I can remember before waking up on the carpet was closing the door behind me.

I dislocated my knee back in high school, to the point where my knee cap opted for a rear-facing seat. Back then it was the worst pain I had ever experienced, and it’s held the record for roughly twenty years. As of yesterday? I’d swap agonies in a heart beat. Seriously, that knee bending backward stuff is a cake walk compared to what I’ve got going on now. It hurts to blink. It hurts to think. When I look back over this blog post later, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to make a whole lot of sense, because the words putting into sentence doing difficult is.

So yeah, that’s worth a phone call to the dentist. I called and booked the first appointment they had open. Monday afternoon.

If you’re looking at your calendar and seeing that it’s only Friday and wondering how someone in the kind of pain I’m describing is going to make it three days until seeing the dentist, you’re not the only one. I wondered that too, until the internet taught me whiskey is a time-tested folk-remedy for tooth horrors such as these.

Oh alcohol, is there nothing you can’t do?

Despite the pain, pain-induced insomnia and lack of thought stuff happening, I’ve managed to keep up with my daily writing goal and even read a little. If I really focus, I can get about three hours of clear thought in before my brain begins automatic shut down procedures. I don’t know if that trend will hold through the weekend, but I’m counting myself lucky while it does.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been watching a lot of film noir lately. It started out as research for the novel I’m writing, but has since turned into an obsession all its own.

True, I was raised on healthy doses of black and white movies, films like And Then There Were None, DOA and the like, but I’ve never really sat down and studied the classic Hollywood crime dramas of the forties and fifties.

There’s a bit of a confession to be made here: I’m not really one for film.

I once spoke at length with the owner of a local theater and heard him say something I remember, verbatim, to this day. “I hate films,” he said, “but I love movies.”

Good entertainment, simple stories, things that go boom and plenty of every kind of eye candy. That’s the sort of thing this theater guy liked to see. I’m on the same train, though maybe not in the same car.

I like a good story in any narrative, whether it’s on a page or on a screen, but when I sit down to watch the average “film,” I’m usually handed a story two parts confusing to one part obtuse metaphor.

I had a girlfriend who was into films once, the sort of pictures you can only rent from independent video stores tucked into basements and staffed by film majors. I remember going with her to rent one she’d heard all her film major friends rave about. I couldn’t tell you the name of it, but I can tell you at the end of the movie everyone has sex and self-immolates. I remember there was something about a dog, too, but I think it made it out unscathed.

I don’t know if our different tastes caused the breakup which followed a few months later, but my first clear thought after the relationship tanked was “at least I don’t have to watch another shitty movie with her.”

On the other hand, with a film like Where The Sidewalk Ends, you’ve got a solid story, complex motives and a kind of creeping dread leading up to the conclusion. It’s a classic film noir tale of a dirty cop confronted with the worst of himself and, at least to me, every frame of it works.

I watched that yesterday, right alongside Union Station and The Naked City. All of these films had plots simple enough to follow without a GPS, characters you could relate to whether you liked them or not and every one was fantastic. Earlier this week I watched Bogart in The Big Sleep and followed it up with The Maltese Falcon, ’cause how could you not?

These films all got me in a way few motion pictures have, at least recently. Now, maybe that’s just because I’m watching the movies like a student, but something else got me too.

A lot of these film noir classics were considered lurid trash back in the day. They were Hollywood’s answer to pulp fiction; B-movies about gangsters, corrupt cops and other thugs. Violent, sexual and right at the edge of what society’s censors would tolerate.

In other words, these were movies back in their time. Now, they’re required viewing for anyone who claims to love film.

It sort of makes me wonder what we’ll say about ConAir in fifty years.

Okay, probably not that movie.

Continue reading »]]> I managed to finish out last week on the high note I was looking for and met the beginning of this week with a fistful of energy and a positive attitude. Part of me (that cynical, pessimistic part which whispers in the darkness) is waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I’m doing my best to ignore it.

So far that’s working amazingly well.

The energy, enthusiasm and general “This is it!” feeling I’m experiencing are doing wonders for my work and personal life. Believe me when I say I’m not looking in that gift horse’s mouth too closely.

After all my back and forth, it looks like two thousand words a day is what I can comfortably get down on my novel while still having enough energy to do everything else I need and want to do in the average day. Between that, writing posts here, keeping up with my social networks, reading and trying to have a little fun, I think I lucked out in striking a good balance this quickly. Time will tell, but so far so good.

On the reading front, I’m making my way through a few books I need to devour for research. The novel I’m working on is somewhat outside of the genre I typically write in, so I’ve picked up some classics to read through with a critical eye. Once again, I’m faced with the delightful reality that, while what I’m reading is certainly for work, calling it that leaves me smirking.

I also have a stack of books to read and review; a stack which I’ve ignored for far too long. You’ll have to forgive me there, as trying to get my own life and work on track obviously had to take priority. I’ve gotten some exciting books both on my Kindle and in my mailbox, and I hope to share some of them with you soon. As the song goes, just a little bit longer.

And last, but not least, I have to point out that the weather has become positively wonderful and I’ve been neglecting it more than my pile of books. I don’t know what it says about my goals in general, but this week’s top priority involves a pair of sunglasses and a lot of walking in the fresh air.

Continue reading »]]> It’s been a while since I’ve engaged in the Six Sentence Sunday fun, but it’s a new week, a new month and a new me. Well, the first two are true anyway. This snippet is from an unfinished piece I was toying around with a month or two ago. I mentioned in a previous offering that showing off such things tends to give me The Fear, but what the hell, right?

Joshua Rourke is an expert on the occult–a freelance magician for hire who plays like a two-bit con man even though he has a deep understanding of the truly supernatural. He’s also an asshole.

In this scene, he’s speaking with Max, a young woman who can best be described as Rourke’s unpaid intern. They are discussing the dilemma of local gangster John Martin, a man as violent as he is superstitious. Martin is convinced one of his rivals has put a curse on him and has paid Rourke for protection.

“I’m swinging by the office in an hour or so.”
“You get that guy taken care of?”
“He’s satisfied.” Rourke took another bite of his bagel as he waited at the corner for the light to turn green.
“Tell me you didn’t sell him some flour and honey concoction.”
“Technically goat semen and hot sauce.”

I hope you enjoyed it, and be sure to check out some of the other offerings on the Six Sentence Sunday website.

Continue reading »]]> I recently hung out with a friend of mine at a restaurant, talking about the kinds of stories we enjoy reading in books or watching on the big screen. My friend is the sort of fellow who likes very visual, in-your-face media. Whether it’s a mystery novel or a big budget Hollywood spectacular, he wants nothing left to the imagination by the end. Every question posed during the story must be neatly wrapped up by the end or he feels cheated

Me? Well, if you’ve been reading this blog right along, you’ll know I’m the exact opposite. The stories I like best are the ones where there are as few answers fed to the audience as possible–stories where not every plot point gets neatly resolved. I don’t want to be shown the monster, I want to be allowed to imagine it, to dwell on what it might be.

As my friend and I talked, I realized that horror stories and super hero tales are on opposite sides of the story-telling spectrum. Everything from the characters to the set pieces to the simplest stylistic choices are so completely different that a good horror tale and a good super hero story might as well inhabit separate universes.

It’s probably no coincidence that my friend loves his super heroes while I love a good scary story.

Horror relies on a feeling of dread, anxiety and uneasiness. The events you are witnessing, whether on screen or in a book, must be met by the characters with uncertainty. You cannot take as a given that everyone in the story will be fine by the end; that they’ll walk off into the sunset or otherwise be rewarded with a happy ending. If the characters in the story aren’t vulnerable, that feeling of dread never has a chance to rise.

With super heroes, you are dealing with powerful and resilient characters by definition. They may be challenged by the events unfolding, but few super hero tales feature mortal peril such that the audience is uncertain if the day will be saved. You can find exceptions easily enough, but at a fundamental level any tale of supers is an indestructible hero’s journey wrapped in spandex.

And when it comes to super hero movies, nothing is left to the imagination. In this day of 3D and IMAX, without a particle storm and full-frontal CGI at every turn, a super hero movie would feel flat and (gasp!) low budget. Even the sets must be larger than life, often featuring sweeping, epic views of vast cityscapes where the characters are free to move around and have plenty of room to show off their best moves.

With horror, it’s about the atmosphere, the pacing, the slow and steady build-up of dread within the viewer. For the setting, you’re more likely to find claustrophobic environments than grand vistas, because adding confinement to the mix often makes the Bad Things much more worrisome.

And at the end, the release of that pent up apprehension, if it comes at all, should leave as much room for the viewer as possible. Don’t show the monster, let us imagine it. Whatever a visual effects director thinks the monster should look like won’t be nearly as scary to the audience as whatever nightmare their own minds conjures up.

Now it’s true, some horror movies lean heavily on computer-generated special effects, but in my mind those are the ones that are inevitably bad. Any horror movie you could describe as an “action-packed thrill ride” or a “special effect spectacular” is unlikely to deliver on the dread. Without that, horror just ain’t horror.

Conversations like the one I had with my friend rarely lead to anything concrete, aside from a pleasant hour spent exchanging ideas with someone you enjoy hanging out with. In the case of supers versus horror, though, I think we might have been on to something.

Continue reading »]]> This week has already been a whirlwind of ups and downs. Being only Wednesday, I’m naturally a little worried. Between work, play, mental illness and not a few stress-filled incidents, I’m feeling frayed yet oddly together. I’ve heard of people who’ve survived horrible ordeals, and how there comes a moment for them when they realize that even though what happened to them was hideous, they were still there, still alive and able to move on.

I’d never put myself in the same group as these “survivors,” but I can’t help feeling some small amount of what they must be describing. After a really shitty few days, culminating in a night that will live in infamy (at least in my mind for a while), this morning I’m feeling “still alive” like it’s a theme song.

That is a great name for a song, now that I think about it. Someone should write it.

Anyway, among the more pleasant events of the week, I had a conversation on Monday, during which I realized that of all the ideas for novels I’ve banged around in my head lately, there was really only one I was excited about. Over a year ago, and long before I decided to take my writing seriously, I had an idea which drove me to write around fifty or sixty thousand words. I moved on to other things, naturally, but the idea festered both in my head and on my hard drive.

After that conversation, I decided to set aside the four or five thousand words I had down on my current work in progress, and print out that earlier attempt. I’d take a few notes, get back into it and start writing it from page one.

As it turns out, that WIP never made it over to my new computer. Instead, the file appears to have evaporated into the ether, like a dream upon waking.

Since I’m a silver lining kind of guy, I’m trying to stay positive. “Hey, it’s not so bad. I was going to re-write it anyway and now I can do it with nothing to hold me back or compare it to.”

Of course, there’s also a not-so-little voice in my head screaming at me for not having proper backups.

Despite this setback, I managed to sink my teeth into the story quickly enough to write two thousand words this morning. Getting into those pages felt like getting into a warm bath. The words came easily, I can see everything clearly in my mind, the characters are springing to life again and the whole thing feels like that world has been eagerly awaiting my return this entire time.

It’s the kind of positive thrill I really needed this week and if you’ve never felt something like it, I don’t know that I could explain it to you.