Beckett’s Last Mixtape – Chapter Five

ANTHO

 

Judge Roberts looks like my father. This is not a good thing.

Courtrooms are not what they look like on TV, or at least this one isn’t. It’s mostly off-white, with dark paneling at the judge’s bench and witness stand, and the Seal of the State of Arizona hanging behind him. Despite the fact that the ceiling isn’t two stories tall or that the floor is dark, polished wood does not make the space any less intimidating. My heart squeezes behind my ribs like a hand around a tennis ball.

Judge Roberts has asked me a question and is now waiting for me. So is everyone else.

I better make this good. This ain’t—

This isn’t a speech tournament. Lose there, and you don’t get a plaque. Lose here, and I’ll spend freshman year in the Maricopa County jail.

I clear my throat, wipe my hands on the thighs of my best navy blue dress pants, and stand.

“Yes I do, Your Honor.”

With that, I stride to the podium on my side of the room. I can see my lawyer, Mr. Goldsen, is both nervous and confident. He’s honestly not a lot older than me, by the look of him. My parents have known his parents for a long time. They play golf and tennis together at the club.

Judge Roberts sits back in his chair and appears to rock back and forth, holding a pen between his index fingers. He’s just asked if I have anything to say for myself, as Mr. Goldsen had said he probably would.

I have no note cards, nothing written down. This is extemporaneous speaking at it’s . . . what? Best? Finest? Most important?

Here we go:

“First of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak, Your Honor. I appreciate the consideration being shown me.”

He arches an eyebrow.

“Secondly . . . to be clear, I do accept responsibility for what I’ve done. It was a bad choice, and I do want to extend my apologies to Joe—uh, Mr. Bishop—for the harm I caused. I also want to apologize to my family and friends for putting them through this ordeal.”

The judge either nods, or rocks in his chair.

“I won’t try to excuse what I did, Your Honor, but I do wish to say that when it comes to my family and my friends, I am very protective. I’ve known Ashley Dixon most of my life. She’s like a sister to me. So when it was clear that someone had—by the definition of the law, Your Honor—had sexually assaulted her, I lost my cool and I reacted inappropriately. And while I certainly won’t let that happen again, I need to tell Ashley’s parents right here and now that I will always be there for her, and I will always do my best to protect her. If that protection has consequences, then I accept them.

“But again, Your Honor, if I ever face another situation like this, and I sincerely hope that I will not, then I will behave in a manner commensurate with the situation.”

Judge Roberts drops his pen on the desk and yanks his eyeglasses off. “Did you just say ‘commensurate’?”

“Um . . . yes, Your Honor.”

“And you’re how old again?”

“Almost fifteen, sir.”

He snaps his glasses back into place. “Go on.”

“That’s all I have, sir. Thank you.”

“I have to say, Mr. Lincoln, you are without a doubt the most eloquent and well-spoken fourteen-year-old I’ve ever met in this courthouse. In fact you may be the most eloquent and well-spoken person I’ve ever met in this courthouse.”

There’s a mild chuckle behind me from all the people here. They shut up when the judge shoots them a look.

“I don’t suppose you plan on becoming a lawyer.”

“As a matter of fact, yes, I do, Your Honor.”

He picks up some papers and snaps them with his hand to get them to stand straight on their own. “Straight As in junior high. You just started high school at . . . Camelback?”

“In August, yes sir.”

“Mmm-hmm. What are you taking?”

I struggle to remember my schedule. “Um . . . integrated math, honors English, speech one, business keyboarding, French, and earth science.”

“Speech? Are you competing? National Forensics?”

“Yes, sir, two weeks ago there was an AIA practice tournament.”

“How did you do, Mr. Lincoln?”

It is very hard not to smile. “First place in extemp debate, sir.”

“Well done, Mr. Lincoln.”

I force myself to be cool, and nod my thanks. I’ll start bragging if I open my mouth, and that feels like a poor idea right now.

“What about your extra-curriculars?” he asks.

“Speech and drama club, Your Honor. Masque & Gavel.”

“No athletics?”

“No, sir.”

The judge stares at the papers for a long moment before setting them down and pulling his glasses off again. “Mr. Lincoln, for the record, I want you to acknowledge that I have every right to sentence you to a jail term. Do you understand?”

My heart skips. “Yes, sir.”

“I also intend to make sure a young man of your caliber doesn’t step foot in this building again until you’re trying your first case.”

My heart resumes. Maybe—maybe—I pulled this off.

“I understand, Your Honor.”

“It is the order of this court,” he says, “that you serve one hundred hours of community service and attend not less than twenty hours of anger management classes and counselling. I’m also recommending without enforcement that you find a good sport or two to work out whatever aggression you’ve got to work out. Is that understood?”

Someone behind me lets out a breath like they’ve been holding it. I think it’s Mom. Or Dad. Or maybe Mr. Goldsen.

“Yes, Your Honor!”

“And finally, Mr. Lincoln, make no mistake. If you ever appear before me again for a charge of this nature, I will make it my business to ensure you won’t hurt anyone else for a very long time. Understood?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Very well. I’ll see you in about ten years, defending or prosecuting your first case. Court adjourned.”

He banges his gavel, and that’s that.

I’m not going to jail.

This time.

Book Review: Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee by Mary G. Thompson

Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee may appear at first glance to be a YA thriller along the lines of my own novel, Shackled. That’s certainly what I thought I was getting into when I picked the book up in preparation for the World Fantasy Convention where I was going to meet the author, Mary G. Thompson. Mary is a brilliant woman who holds about eighteen different degrees including a J.D. and an MFA. While I’m sure some of that education played a role in the crafting of Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, there are some aspects of storytelling that are harder to learn than others, some things that just sort of have to come naturally. One of those things is Voice, and that’s an aspect of fiction writing I’m constantly trying to hone in my own novels and in the work of the students I have in various writing classes or critique groups.

Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee is about one girl once named Amy, then named Chelsea, and now trying to reclaim her identity as Amy again after escaping from the kidnapper who took her and her beloved cousin Dee. The kidnapper, a disturbing man with a doll fetish, re-named both girls during their six-year-long incarceration with him in the forests of Oregon. How Amy came to escape is not something I can share without spoilers, but it drives the central plot of the book and explains why, after returning to her old life as a teenager, Amy is now plotting to go back to that scary cabin in the woods.

Overall this is an emotional journey through severe trauma, and I think it has great value for those who are sort of bystander-survivors: those family and friends who did not experience the victim’s trauma personally and therefore may have trouble fully understanding what the victim suffered. There’s great value in the story for that reason alone.

But again, one thing Mary has here in abundance is Voice, and for me that’s really the defining line between great contemporary YA and cheap knock-offs who got into the market when it was hot. Not to name any names, but, you’d recognize them. There is not a lot of external, physical action in the story, although what action Mary does write is handled very well. It’s the internal action that gets the lion’s share of the pages, and that’s good. It works. I start and do not finish a ton of books these days, as my friends at my book club can attest, but I came back to Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee again and again to find out what would happen next. Mary does an outstanding job of capturing inner turmoil and symptoms of what is most likely PTSD, though a diagnosis is never actually given. As someone who still struggles with some of those symptoms, I felt that Mary did an excellent and considerate job of handling Amy’s trauma and recovery.

As it pertains to writers, I recommend this book for the same reason I recommended The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey — there is no predicting what is going to happen. Even after one of the biggest reveals in the book, the story’s not over, and there is just no guessing how things will turn out from page one until the very end. Like The Girl With All The Gifts, it is not fast paced, but it is deliberately paced, and our attachment to the characters is such that we have to find out how all this tragedy is going to resolve. So for you writers, I recommend studying how Mary constructs this novel in such a way that readers can only keep reading to find out the resolution. This is well worth looking into.

So, grab a copy of Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, and then let me know what you thought of it. Did the author keep you guessing? Did you feel for the protagonist? Am I way off base on this one? Let me know on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bookbub, Goodreads…wherever! And be sure to follow Mary G. Thompson for more of her work as well.

 

 

Oh, the horror: Stephen King’s THE MIST; WORLD WAR Z; and more

In honor of the release of HELLWORLD, here’s a quick look at some of my favorite horror out there. Enjoy! (p.s. Yeah, there are some affiliate links scattered about in here. That’s because you have got to read these books.)

The Mist by Stephen King

No discussion of Stephen King’s The Mist would be complete without an aside about the differences between the novella and the movie. I’ve waffled on this one, to some degree. I love the ending to the novel. It’s a theme King has used before, most notably in Shawshank, and it’s the one I most often write about myself.

The 2007 Frank Darabont movie took the original theme and, in my humble opinion, decimated it. Just spread ‘em and took one giant enormous crap on the whole thing, and I was just as pissed when I first saw it as I sound right here. Unforfuckinggiveable. And then I read the King said he wished he’d thought of it! GAHHHHH! Steve, you’re killing me, here!

…Okay. Then I took some time away and gave the movie another look. And I still prefer the novella. But…now I can sort of see where the theme is actually intact, and that Darabont just got there in a different way. I don’t like that way, but I will grant it some grace (because, you know, Stephen King loses sleep over what I think) because Darabont does make the point a bit more…forcefully…than King did.

Having said all that, the movie is otherwise pretty damn faithful, and I appreciate that. But as always, the book is better. Especially when narrated by the spectacular Frank Muller. Any time you can hear a King book narrated by Muller, do it. The man was magical, and taken far too early. (God rest ye, Mr. Muller, and thank you.)

The Mist has influenced a whole, whole lot of my writing–Hellworld is no exception. I have always had a soft spot for stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The movie and novel Fortress by Gabrielle Lord comes to mind, that one about a group of Australian children kidnapped by four men for ransom…and what the kids do after being pushed to the edge. (That should probably be its own post. Also I’ve learned some things about the author’s politics that sort of sour me on the story, but if you can put that aside, Fortress is still amazing.)

This whole idea of “Everything was fine, and then out of nowhere, monsters!” is attractive to me for some reason. I guess because it’s real life writ large: everything was fine, and then out of nowhere, cancer/car accident/she cheated on me/whatever. We all know, and horror writers prey on this fact, that monsters do exist. They just sometimes look like parents, spouses, pastors, children, or the IRS.

One thing I love about The Mist so much is that it reads as though King was sitting there for a handful of days, pounding out the words, asking himself, “I wonder what happens next?” and having no idea until he wrote it. It doesn’t read like a well-planned story; it reads like the diary we will come to realize it is at story’s end. It reads like King put himself in that situation, and just kept asking himself what he’d do if in it.

That’s a very fun way to write.

The Mummy, The Will, and the Crypt by John Bellairs

Before there was such a thing as a Young Adult section in the bookstore, there was Juvenile Fiction, and there was Adult Fiction. That’s it. You had your Judy Blume, and you had your Stephen King, and never the two shall meet. Then you had your awkwardly juvenile like the inimitable Robert Cormier—awkward, because while his characters were teens, his themes and often plots were not. But there was no YA, so he got shelved in Juvenile.

Back in those heady days before Goosebumps—which we will return to in a future blog—if you wanted horror, real supernatural shit, there was one place to go: John Bellairs.

Bellairs (who, I am sad to report, passed away in 1991) was introduced to me via his first juvenile novel, The House With A Clock In Its Walls. Pretty good stuff; atmospheric and very literary (in retrospect. Back then, “literary” just meant “how books were written.” We didn’t have quite the breadth of Voice that readers today enjoy). I enjoyed and have read all of Bellairs’ work multiple times, but when it comes to the creep factor, none of them touches The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt.

I read Mummy at an age when I should not have been watching slasher movies, but did it anyway. By B-horror film standards—think Basket Case, or Tourist Trap—Bellairs’ work was tame; it was for children, after all, and this is in a time before Hunger Games and its explicit violence toward children ever would have made it to an agent’s desk. By today’s standards, Bellairs is working with his hands tied: he needs to be legitimately frightening but not bloody, gory, or even necessarily violent.

With Mummy, he succeeds spectacularly. The plot revolves around young Johnny, who becomes obsessed with finding a lost will of a powerful cereal magnate. There’s a reward for whoever finds it, and Johnny needs the money to pay for an operation for his grandmother. Pretty straightforward. But Bellairs populates his novels with quirky but utterly believable characters: Johnny, a bespectacled little nerd who—and this is brilliant, I think—manages to catch a cold before breaking and entering into the estate of the deceased businessman. It’s a small detail, but Bellairs takes that common experience and lets it work into Johnny’s climactic break-in. Think about it: When you have a bad cold, do you feel like getting off the couch, much less travelling halfway across your home state, at night, in the winter, alone, to break into an abandoned mansion?

Then there’s the Professor. One of the greats in literature, if you ask me; the Professor is an old man, seventies or so, who is as cranky as he is loyal. Bellairs breathes great life into this old guy, and builds a Miyagi-Daniel relationship between he and Johnny long before Karate Kid came on the scene. He also introduces Fergie, a gangly nerd who becomes Johnny’s first real friend; great comic relief and a stalwart ally in Johnny’s insane scheme.

Now what about the horror? Suffice it to say Bellair’s description of a walking, undead mummy influenced Hellworld to the point of outright homage. The book has a nasty witch, an eerie ghost, and the aforementioned mummy.

Bellairs excels in two particular areas: believable characters and authentic, gripping settings. Most, if not all, of his novels all occur in the Eastern U.S. near or during the Second World War; no cell phones, kids! Hell, sometimes not even a landline, depending on the location. But this isn’t just a gimmick, and it is not romanticized. Johnny’s dad in Mummy is a pilot, and all he or we know is that he was recently shot down over the Pacific, and no one seems to know if he’s alive or dead. With that palpable dread setting the scene, Bellairs goes on to give us chilling atmospheric details that captures things like what it might feel like to really, truly see a ghost come floating out of a window in the dead of night.

Grown-ups could read Mummy in an afternoon; it’s about the length of a Judy Blume YA. I think if you’ll give this Bellairs novel a shot, you’ll soon want the others, too.

(One note of caution, though: Because Bellairs passed away at a relatively young age, he left incomplete manuscripts behind, which were summarily finished and released by his publisher. I don’t recommend these; they are too plainly not the real Bellairs. I appreciate the attempt to honor his memory, but those novels fall short in my opinion.)

World War Z by Max Brooks

There are only a handful of books I really, truly, deeply wish I had written. Books that literally make me angry that I did not write them. One of them is World War Z.

I’ve met Max Brooks twice—and  was smart enough to get a picture the second time—and I’ll never forget the look on his face when I told him I thought Z was one of the most intelligent novels I’d ever read. “Wow, really?” he said, or something like it. “Thanks!”

It’s true. The conceit of Z is simple: Instead of being about a zombie apocalypse, it’s in the aftermath…and humanity won. We did it. Brooks has written a horror novel that, no matter how you cut it, is one of optimism and faith. I mean, what an idiot, right? How the hell do you begin a novel by essentially stating, “The good guys win in the end”?

That’s exactly what he does, and that’s exactly why it works. The novel is told as a series of interviews of survivors, people who are now a part of rebuilding civilized society (no Governors or Negans here, thank you). The “interviews” are as authentic as any you’d read about Germany, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. They are full of blood and viscera, terror and fear, as told by those who went through it, losing all they had in the process, barely escaping with their lives.

And in doing so, Brooks is able to insert gentle social commentary along the way. My favorite: Floridians building boats in near-hopeless attempts to sail to Cuba, where they hope to find work as maids and house cleaners. BOOM!  That is awesome.

World War Z cannot be replicated. The movie, without the book, would have been an entertaining little zombie flick; that they did not do exactly what Brooks did with the book is unforgivable. Imagine any number of Hollywood heavyweights—many of whom narrate the audiobook, beautifully—doing Band-of-Brothers-esque interview sequences about the zombie war. Just think about it. Can you see it? Ugh! I hope Brooks is allowed to do something like this in the future.

Anyway. There’s enough gore to keep the horror kids pleased, and zombie fans sated. But World War Z is really a book for just about any reader who enjoys strong, well-written fiction. Again, Brooks’ fundamental optimism about humanity is unrelenting, and that sets it apart from any other horror novel out there. Give it a shot, if you haven’t. Or at try the audio, which is abridged (sadly), but still excellent.

Nice to have met you, Mr. Brooks. Thank you!


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Liked SICK? Read THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

BEST BOOKS BLOG #1

The Girl With All The Gifts

I’ll be posting 10 or so new blogs about books and media that are somehow related to HELLWORLD (which you can pre-order now!). Up first, a wonderfully written novel that should please fans of my novel SICK.

 

Melanie gets strapped to a wheelchair every day in order to go to school with several other young people. They exist in an apocalyptic world where most of humanity has died off…or rather, “died” with air quotes because a lot of folks infected by the disease that wiped humanity out are out there, and they’re hungry. What Melanie doesn’t understand at first is that she and her classmates are being used—that is, dissected—in order to try and find a cure or a way to stop the progression of the disease.

So yes, technically THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is a “zombie” novel. But it’s really so much more, and so much better, than that.

Written by M.R. Carey and now a major motion picture with Glenn Close, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS succeeds on its surface as a horror novel, full of dread, panic, and just enough gore for the gorehounds to enjoy. If that’s all a reader wants to take from it, so be it, but they’d be missing a whole lot.

Carey (https://twitter.com/michaelcarey191) excels at writing three-dimensional characters, people so real you’re sure you know them, and all the more infuriating (in a good way) when they behave as real people actually do (especially real people under mortal stress). If you are a writer in need of a crash course in plotting, this would be great book to study: the main characters are under constant threat, which keeps the energy and pacing high even though Carey’s writing is blocky (big chunky paragraphs rather than the short, zippy grafs I like to use myself). Something else that sets this novel apart from other genre novels: There is no predicting the outcome.

Fans of any genre tend to know where things are going. It doesn’t stop us from reading more in that genre, of course. In fact, there’s a certain comfort to the predictability. Not so with THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS. I can’t recall the last time I read a novel where I thought, with virtually every turn of the page, “What in the hell is going to happen to these people??” That’s not an easy feat, but Carey does it wonderfully.

I took notes in the margins of this novel to refer to later. I’ll leave with my one-word summary, scrawled in black ink at the bottom of the last page:

Wow.

Highly recommended for you fans of SICK! For you writers, head over to hellworld.co for short post on using this novel as a reference!

 

Author Visits Santa Barbara High School, Inspiration for First Novel

Author Visits Santa Barbara High School, Inspiration for First Novel

Driving out of Santa Barbara on the last leg of his honeymoon, then-unpublished writer Tom Leveen suddenly shouted, “Write this down!” His new wife, Joy, already accustomed to such outbursts of inspiration, pulled a pen and notebook out of her bag. Tom dictated a carefully worded paragraph about a girl named Beckett, whose mother had recently passed away. Beckett is certain no one in school even knows her name—unaware of the boy who’s been crushing on her for years, and unaware of the drama and triumph of the night that lays ahead.

That paragraph never made it into Leveen’s debut young adult novel, Party (Random House Children’s Books, 2010) but the character of Beckett did. So did Leveen’s thrall with Santa Barbara. He now returns to the city for a short visit, and his first actual trip to Santa Barbara High School, where he’ll be meeting with students and teaching classes on writing.

“Santa Barbara has this aura that I fell in love with immediately,” Leveen says. “My wife went to college here, and took me to all her favorite hangouts during the time we spent here on our honeymoon: East Beach Grill, the Mission, Coffee Cat, Shoreline Beach, Super Cucas. They all ended up in the novel, which didn’t get published until about five years after I dictated that first paragraph to my wife.”

Party is geared toward high school students, but has enjoyed broad crossover appeal to adults who avidly read YA fiction. Leveen’s novel is only eleven chapters, but each is told entirely by a different character, so the true motivations and stories of each of the eleven protagonists can’t be known until the book’s end.

While the setting is, in fact, a high school graduation party near Shoreline Beach, the themes are anything but celebratory.

“A racially motivated fistfight anchors the main plot,” Leveen says, “but there are subplots that orbit around that. One of the main themes is ‘say words,’ that if these characters had all talked to one another instead of making judgements or assumptions, none of the conflict in the novel would have happened. It turns out that this theme, particularly about race and religion as it appears in the book, has become more important for teens to talk about these days, not less.”

Several aspects of the story are based on real-life events, Leveen says, including the hate-crime murder of a Sikh in his native state of Arizona following 9/11, as well as the story of Pat Tillman, a football player who gave up his shot at the NFL to join the military.

And for those who like a little romance to temper the drama, Leveen promises there is also a very sweet romantic plot about Beckett and her secret admirer.

Leveen will visit Santa Barbara High School on October 13, 2016 for private classes. For more information or to set up a book talk, class, or interview, Tom is on Facebook at /AuthorTomLeveen, and Twitter at @tomleveen.

 

How To Write Awesome Dialogue!

dialogue front cover

Available now from Amazon on Kindle or paperback!

You’ve taken (or wanted to take) Tom’s energetic, unforgettable class on dialogue; now for the first time, here’s one place where all the collected advice, tips, and tricks is found! Bringing 22 years of experience as an actor and director in live theatre to the table, How To Write Awesome Dialogue! walks you through plot, conflict, and character notes to give you a firm foundation upon which to build better and best dialogue for your fiction or scripts. Don’t miss it!

Violent Ends

violentends

Coming September 1, 2015. Pre-order on Amazon now!

In a one-of-a-kind collaboration, seventeen of the most recognizable YA writers — including Tom Leveen, Shaun David Hutchinson, Neal and Brendan Shusterman, and Beth Revis — come together to share the viewpoints of a group of students affected by a school shooting.

It took only twenty-two minutes for Kirby Matheson to exit his car, march onto the school grounds, enter the gymnasium, and open fire, killing six and injuring five others. But this isn’t a story about the shooting itself. This isn’t about recounting that one unforgettable day.

This is about Kirby and how one boy—who had friends, enjoyed reading, playing saxophone in the band, and had never been in trouble before—became a monster capable of entering his school with a loaded gun and firing on his classmates.

Each chapter is told from a different victim’s viewpoint, giving insight into who Kirby was and who he’d become. Some are sweet, some are dark; some are seemingly unrelated, about fights or first kisses or late-night parties. This is a book of perspectives—with one character and one event drawing them all together—from the minds of some of YA’s most recognizable names.

 

 

Z Resurrected

11304536_710698029057817_1650159678_nZ Resurrected is a unique anthology featuring characters from previously published zombie novels, including Sick.

Trapped for hours away from Brian, Kenzie, and the rest of her friends, Laura Fitzgerald struggles to control her panic while still evading – or defeating – the monstrous infected students outside. But her lone ally in this fight for her life doesn’t have much time left…

Coming in October 2015!

 

 

Tuesday, November 12
Phoenix Metro High School
Phoenix, Arizona
5:04 p.m.

Um—

My name is Laura Fitzgerald, I’m seventeen . . . and I really, really want to be eighteen someday.

I don’t know what’s going on, exactly. It feels like the world is ending out there. I’m scared, and there’s no one else in here but me. This is Cody’s phone, not mine. I guess you know that. Whoever you are. Whoever finds this, I mean.

If Cody’s mom or dad hears this, I’m sorry about Cody, I did everything I could. I swear.

God . . .

I don’t know . . . I don’t know how long I can stay in here. I don’t have any food or water. But they’re still out there, I can hear them. Sometimes I hear someone scream out there.

Um . . .

Honestly? I’m kind of surprised I can even talk right now, usually I’d be curled up in a little ball somewhere. That’s what I really want to do. But I can’t. They’ll get me if I do.

Oh, God. God.

No. Okay. Stop. Breathe. I can do this. I can do it.

Uh—

I just, I thought I should explain everything, because maybe it will help? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone will ever find this . . . but, um . . .

Okay.

This is what happened.