It’s About A Girl

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I’d been wanting to start a novel with the line “It’s about a girl” for a long time. With manicpixiedreamgirl, I could cross that off my list. Because as a teen . . . man, everything was about a girl.

Turns out, this is the most autobiographical of my novels so far. Which is to say, like, five percent autobiographical. It is not a true story in the sense of it being nonfiction. Party and Zero were maybe two or three percent “true,” in terms of things that happened to me personally. But with manicpixiedreamgirl, I went a lot farther (further? Gah, who can keep those straight?) into my high school experience than in my previous novels.

Let’s call it “emotionally autobiographical.”

So, yes, it’s about a girl. I mean, what else is high school supposed to be about if not young/first/thrilling/doomed love?

There are two parts to this novel. There’s the semi-nostalgic, somewhat-regretful, true-ish part, where I got to relive those formative years and inspirations all over again, and that was fun. It stung a little, too, when I took the time to realize that, yeah, I was pretty much an idiot on my best days, and far worse on my worst days.

Still—we had a good time, and everyone pretty much turned out okay. Which is not the same as saying, “No one got hurt.”

Then there’s the grown-up, now-I’m-a-dad, author part. That’s the part that I want people to really take home with this novel. It’s the part that’s not so much about the protagonist, Tyler, but about his “dream girl,” Becky.

There are a lot of Beckys out there.

Guys and girls both who are willing to do pretty much anything to make the pain stop for a minute, or feel like someone at least knows they exist.

If you’ve read Party, you might think of Becky Webb as who Beckett Montgomery could have become had not things gone differently that night in Santa Barbara. Like so many of us, Becky is lost and abandoned and shattered. When we reach that point, no matter what our age, we often start doing things to ourselves not easily taken back or undone.

I’ve been there. Maybe you have, too. If you know what I’m talking about, then let me tell you this, too: Don’t give up. It gets better.

I hope you enjoy the story for the story itself. I hope you laugh at Tyler (and at me) for being such a doofblatt most of the time. (His heart’s in the right place, I think, but he’s also, you know…a boy, so.) I hope that, if you haven’t already, you find your own dreamgirl/dreamboy someday, like I have.

And I really hope that, on those days you feel like these characters, you’ll at the very least remember you’re not alone. ’Kay? Cool.

Take care.

For Teachers, As The Holidays Come To A Close

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THE THIN CHALK LINE

Remember chalk? It was once used by teachers to illustrate things on a blackboard. Some older classrooms still have them, including on the main campus of ASU. I wonder if some teachers still prefer them. Me, I’m equally maladapted for handwriting no matter what the surface or medium.

So let’s imagine an old chalkboard in a class room. One piece of old yellow chalk. Draw a line horizontally across this chalkboard with that piece of chalk. Got it in your head? Cool. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

Over the past seven years, I’ve had the privilege and honor of going to schools where students of various ages — junior high to college — were in attendance to hear me talk about my novels. Here’s a sample of some of the things I’ve heard in that time:

English Teacher at a North Phoenix, upper-middle to upper-class district: “We know that if we built dormitories on this campus, we’d have students begging to be let into them. They’d rather live on campus 24/7 than go back to their homes and deal with the devastation there.”

Same teacher: “I’ve had kids ask if they could sleep overnight on my patio rather than go home. I have kids who come to school not know where they are going to sleep that night.”

Teacher, middle-class district: “You’ll have a lot of kids here after school because they don’t want to go home. They don’t have air conditioning.” (In August, in Phoenix.)

Student: “When did you know you wanted to be a writer…and what did your family think?”

Student: “I wanted to direct a play, but my dad said no.”

Student: “I gave my mom a story I wrote. She read it and told me it sucked.”

I’ve got more. If you’re a teacher, you do too.

In eighth grade (at a private Christian school, mind you) I got my first cigarettes and my first joints. By freshman year, I was getting high as often as possible with people I thought were my friends because they laughed at me when I was high. I also joined the drama department that year. I was a pain in the ass to my drama teacher, Mrs. Ann Tully, who, by the way, will always be “Mrs. Tully” or just “Tully” no matter how old I get. Never “Ann.” And Mrs. Goldsen will always be “Goldie.” Period.

Our drama department put on two full length productions each year. Tully directed the first one, Goldie the second. Tully cast me in the first play that year, and the seniors were all beside themselves, saying, “Freshman don’t get cast in the plays!” I didn’t know that. Nor did I care. I had pot to smoke. But hey, the rehearsals were fun…

Toward the end of the year, I showed up to a speech and drama department meeting high as a kite. I have no idea what I said or did, but I know I laughed a lot. Loudly. Afterward, Tully pulled me aside and said, “I know you won’t remember any of this, but…”  And I don’t know what she said after that, so I guess she was right.

The next day, she showed up at my speech class, pulled me out, escorted me into a little windowless room down the hall, sat me down, shut the door, and sat across from me, so close our knees were practically touching. I looked at her feet the entire time. I know she said some things like “wasting your potential” and “have so much to offer” and “smarter than this” and so on. But what really stuck out was this:

“And if you ever, ever, step foot in this department for a class, a meeting, a rehearsal, anything, in that condition again, you will be out. No plays, no speech tournaments, no classes, no student assistant, nothing. Ever again. Am I clear?”

And I whispered, “Yes.”

It was the second to last time I ever got high, and the last time was terrible. Looking back at the direction I was heading, I have no doubt that had Tully not cast me in her show, and had she not had that little sit-down, there’s no telling where I would have ended up. Certainly not in a place where I’d have nine hardcover novels out at bookstores everywhere. (Years later, when Party came out, Goldie wrote to me and said, “See? I told you to do something with your writing!”)

Senior year, I went into their office, just a few days before graduation. Goldie was somewhere else, but Tully was there. By that point, I had become the department club president, won every possible acting award they had, become a speech team Letterman, ranked high in state speech competitions, attended three out-of-state actor training sessions with Tully at the Utah Shakespeare Festival…I was a drama department lifer. And I told Tully, “Thank you. Thanks for putting up with me, thanks for everything you taught me, thanks for being there.”

Mrs. Tully laughed.

“Don’t thank me,” she said.  “Thank Mrs. Goldsen!”

I said, “I’m going to…she’s just not here right now…”

Tully said, “No no, you don’t understand.  You really need to thank Mrs. Goldsen, because she’s the one who convinced me to cast you in that first play.”

I sat down. Hard. “What?”

Tully nodded.  “You remember the kind of kid you were when you showed up here? There’s no way in hell I was going to put you in one of my shows. Mrs. Goldsen argued with me for more than hour, trying to convince me that you were worth it. The only reason I cast you was because she is my best friend. So thank her for all this. She’s the one who made it happen.”

Remember our chalk board, the one with the horizontal yellow chalk line?

That’s you.

You are the thin chalk line that separates kids like me from what they’re becoming to what they can be.  Junior high and high school teachers in particular are, in my opinion, the last line of defense for our nation’s children. After that, there’s no net, no safeties.

The friends I made in the drama department were also useless little hoods when they arrived. We had a guy with a criminal record for grand theft auto (one of my best friends). A struggling and recovering alcoholic at 16 (another best friend of mine). Too many more to mention. But you know where we are now? One became a combat medic with three combat tours on his sleeve.  Another became an English teacher. One founded a film festival, another joined him not long after.  All of us, at some point, worked together at a theatre company I started in my backyard.

On April 27, 2010, I got to hold my first-ever official book launch at a little indie book shop in Tempe, Arizona, called Changing Hands. We had about 100 people show up, which is incredible. And sitting together in the second row on my right were Tully and Goldie. They have never missed a book launch since then.

When I was 15, I wrote a play, and asked Tully if I could direct it for our annual showcase of one acts. She said I could do it.

She did not say that she “gave me permission.”  Listen closely to the difference: “I give you permission.”  vs. “Yes, you can do it.”  You. Can. Do this.  Fifteen years old.

Teenagers want you to teach them. They want to be driven.  They want to be pushed to excel.

Tully and Goldie expected and got excellence. They gave us authority and responsibility, and demanded not perfection, but our very best effort. And they got it. Every time. They were the thin chalk line.  And so are you.

You have kids in your class and school who aren’t sleeping at home tonight. I met one kid who joined the Marines because the risks of being sent to Afghanistan were better than being at home for one more year. I watched a counselor explain to a teenage girl how her parents’ joint custody of her was going to affect her college plans.

I know you are overworked. Underpaid. That the entire system is broken from the ground up. That our libraries are disappearing, along with our librarians, and good teachers are punished while bad teachers are rewarded. I know. And it’s not fair.

But we need you to hang in there. Don’t give up. You got into this gig, I hope, because you love teaching and you love students. Don’t stop. Fight back. You are all that remains between a generation of hopeless children and a generation that can take us beyond the moon. Raise your voices, be heard. Because in a few years, it’ll be my kids in your classroom. (I’ll do my part. Parents? Will you join me?)

There’s an old ’80s movie called Teachers, starring Nick Nolte and Judd Hirsch, and I hope some of you are old enough to even know who those actors are. The premise of the movie is that a former student is suing the school because he graduated without the ability to read. And I know there are schools in your city who are forcing you to give a kid who doesn’t turn in an assignment 50% instead of zero, and I know how absurd that is. I know middle schools are shoving poorly educated students right through the grade levels, and threatening teachers who don’t think a zero student should move up a grade. I know.

At the end of the film, a kid has pulled a false fire alarm, and the entire school empties out. In the movie, Judd Hirsch plays an administrator to Nick Nolte’s civics teacher. Hirsch has been beaten down by the system. In a tired voice, standing in the parking lot, he tells Nolte, “Half those kids aren’t even coming back after the fire alarm.”

And Nolte says, “But half will. I think they’re worth it. I’m a teacher.”

They are.

And so are you.

Thank you for all you do.

Why is writing endings so difficult?

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Endings are tough on writers and readers alike. For authors of course it’s hard to know if we’ve nailed an ending; and for readers, we can all name at least a few endings that left us a little cold. (I can name one right now that I think I shouted, “WHAT?!” and then shook my head for the last page or two. No, I will not name it here. Ask me at Ace or Phoenix ComiCon.)

On the other hand, we’ve all read endings that really soared too; that left us weeping sadly (not me!!!) or weeping joyfully (also not me!!!). But as an author, how do you take a reader there?

I’ll go into more detail on this in a new project I’m working on, but for today, let’s stick with the following:

1. The protagonist needs to change. This is all but an absolute requirement, and I’d say it’s pretty much a requirement of all genre fiction. It needn’t be the basis of the novel, but do give us some sense that the hero is not who she was at the beginning.

2. The ending needs to be in context of the storyworld. I talk a bit about this in my new book How To Write Your Novel By Watching Movies First, which you should totally get right now, but the short of it is this: If you’ve presented us with a novel set in the real world, then there better not be any aliens showing up at the end (unless that was the inevitable thing we knew about at the start). You opened your book with several promises: this is the genre, this/these are the hero/es, here’s the story problem. Deviating from any of these at the end is not going to endear you to readers.

This brings us to twists and surprise endings, but we’ll come back to those another time. Right now, just know that you’ve established a premise in the novel’s opening pages; the ending should be the payoff.

3. Word choice and cadence or rhythm matter. Remember how Morgan Freeman said, “I hope,” at the end of The Shawshank Redemption movie? It’s the same last words of the novella. Now imagine him saying, “I have hope.”

Ehhh . . . it lacks somehow, doesn’t it? I think it’s because “I hope” is active; it has momentum and breathes on its one. “I have hope,” while not a bad sentence and is still true in the context of the story, sounds like something possessed; something inanimate like a pencil or a phone. “I hope” has a different cadence than “I have hope,” and is by far the stronger choice. So sound out those last few sentences, and make sure you’re writing and punctuating them the way you hear them out loud.

4. What have you liked about other novels? Think of the top three or more books that left you a little breathless or somehow emotional, and study how that author did it. You can’t (usually) rip off an exact ending of course, but ask yourself why a particular ending had the impact on you that it did. Then go back and compare those notes to your novel. You might discover something.

Good luck sticking the landing on those endings! It can be challenge, but it’s a good feeling when you know you’ve got something. Keep writing!

(And if you liked this post, please share it; if you want to learn more, drop me a line!)

 

Questions about RANDOM taken from German students 2 years ago.

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Top questions asked by students while in Germany. Enjoy!

You are a male author, so why did you choose to write the story from a female point of view?

Excellent question. First let me point out that writing from a female perspective is not new for me; I did it in Party, Zero, Shackled, Hellworld, and Violent Ends as well. My adult horror novella Those We Bury Back is not, nor is manicpixiedreamgirl; Sex, Death, God; or Sick. So I’m just about 50/50 in terms of which gender I choose to write from.

I’m going to use a broad generalization here, so please don’t flip out on me: Broadly speaking, boys tend to be physically aggressive in their bullying behavior, and girls tend to be verbal. This makes sense because, broadly speaking, girls have a better vocabulary and speak more frequently than boys do. That’s not a values judgement in either direction, it’s just an American cultural phenomenon. Since the plot of the novel was primarily about words and how they are used to hurt people, it seemed to make more sense to have a female playing the role of the bully (or villain, which Tori is).

Interestingly, in the first draft, the Tori character was male and the Andy character female. So the story did not start out the way it ended up. That happens a lot!

Right away, Andy asks Tori if she believes in God, and Tori says no. Do you believe in God?

Yes, someone actually asked me this. First time ever.

While I don’t think anyone truly cares–except maybe my mother-in-law, oh snap!–I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: That I do not know if God exists, that no one knows for certain whether God exists, but that I hope–deeply, truly hope to the core of my being–that God does exist in some way. I really do hope so.

I stopped there because otherwise we would have been there all night listening to me go on and on about matter spiritual, scientific, and religious. I’ll save it for a nonfiction book. But I am so proud of that kid for having the courage to ask the question!

Who is your favorite character in the novel?

I get asked variations on this question a lot, and I always qualify it by saying, “This is my answer today. Ask me tomorrow, it might be different.” Today, my answer is Andy. He holds all the cards, he has all the inside information, and he has reason enough to really attack Tori, but he doesn’t. I admire that about him. I also enjoyed writing him because, unlike in real life, since he knows the entire story and is leading the conversation, he can say clever or funny things that I could never have come up with on the spur of the moment. He has an agenda, so he gets to choose his words more carefully than we usually get to.

Would you have been friends with Tori in high school?

Probably not. She’s an athlete and I . . . wasn’t. We just would not have run in the same circles. I very well might have been friends with Kevin, though, or Jack. In fact, Jack and I would have had a lot in common. The cystic acne part of his story is something I know a lot about!

Do you like Tori?

I feel for her. I wish other people would, too. She’s very young and very inexperienced, and makes bad choices like all of us do when we’re that age. But she has potential, and the people who love her see that in her. I think she will make better choices after the story ends, and will learn from her bad ones, and will make a positive difference in the world as she gets older. It sometimes feels like a few readers have never committed a “sin of commission or omission” in their lives, the way they talk about her. That hurts, I’ll be honest.

Why not show the trial itself?

There’s a reason the book ends the way it does. It’s because I am not and never was interested in the legal aspects of Tori’s case; I was interested in the social and personal aspects, namely: How does a person who has done what Tori has done justify it? How can a person convince herself she need not take any responsibility for what has happened? The result of asking that question was Random, which is why the protagonist is also the villain.

Sometimes I regret that choice because apparently, for some people, there needed to be a big-ass red warning label on the cover.

 

ICYMI, here’s a short video of one of my readings at the English Theater in Berlin. It was such a cool night!

 

 

 

 

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

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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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Horror: One for the Road, by Stephen King

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“It was quarter past ten and Herb Tooklander was thinking of closing for the night when the man in the fancy overcoat and the white, staring face burst into Tookey’s Bar, which lies in the northern part of Falmouth.” ~ Stephen King, “One For The Road,” from the collection Night Shift.

One of my all-time favorite short stories ever. I’m a fan of the entire canon of ‘Salem’s Lot, which includes this short story, the short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” and of course the novel ‘Salem’s Lot. All are worth a read.

But Road really sticks with me, decades after the first time I read it.  Why?

First off, let’s start with King’s economy. If you’ve taken any of my classes or read any of my writing on writing, I talk about economy quite a bit. It’s not a word often attributed to King’s doorstoppers, but bear with me on this:

Notice how economically he starts the story: Never mind the “white, staring face” for the moment. The man, Lumley, didn’t just walk in, or amble, or prance – he burst in. It’s a small but important word. With one simple, relatively innocuous word, the night is off to an interesting start. Then our narrator, Booth, specifies the man is wearing a “fancy overcoat.” Booth doesn’t notice that he uses this phrase. Why? Because if you regularly wear a fancy overcoat, you don’t point out other people wearing them, which reveals something (or implies it) about Booth: he’s not a man who wears fancy overcoats, and probably has some ideas about people who do. So this one moment is the moment everything changes; there’s a hint of tension socially as well as physically (using the words “fancy” and “burst.”)

And not one word about vampires in that opening sentence. In fact, we won’t hear it until about halfway through the story. That’s economy. And I bet you anything King did not slave over those opening words. (Statistically, at that point in time, he may well have been high or hammered or both at the time, but hey.)

I also love the slow burn. I’m a fan of slow burns, provided the pacing is good — the two are not synonymous. Booth/King drops in phrases like these early on without elucidating:

~ “The lot. Oh my god.”

~ “I’ve got my bible on the shelf. You still wear yor Pope’s medal?”

~ “Everyone in town has something. Crucifix, St. Christopher’s medal…something.”

Long before Booth says anything about “vampires,” we’re sucked in. (HA! Sucked in! Get it? Sorry.) Phrases like these three trip our internal sensors. What’s “the lot?” Why are you talking about Bibles at a bar? Why does everyone in town have a crucifix? Without saying much, Booth/King has told us a lot, and we have to keep reading to find out more. What is not said is as frightening as what is not seen. Booth/King keeps the reader at arm’s length even though it’s first person; he forces us to take the role of Lumley because he won’t give us any details right away. The narrator isn’t unreliable — he just doesn’t say much, in a sense. Although Booth is telling us a story, he also keeps his own counsel about it. We won’t get anything from him until he’s good and ready to say it.

Then there’s setting. On its surface, the setting is trite: it’s a dark and stormy night, for heaven’s sake! But it works here, and it wouldn’t work any other way. It’s cold dread on a cold night. In the snow, we see a slumped form slithering away from the Jeep; a little girl standing on top of the snow instead of sinking into it doesn’t work without . . . well, snow. Lumley’s family must rely on his car heater to stay alive, so there is ample tension and motivation for him to ask these two old locals for help. The dark and stormy night works on a number of plot levels (and King never says “dark and stormy night,” people.)

“One for the Road” partially inspired Hellworld, by the way. The question, as they usually are, was simple: Could a ‘Salem’s Lot-type of place exist today? It was easy to create and maintain such a hamlet in the late ’70s when the story came out; that was before iPhones and Google Earth. Sure, there are places like the forest we see in movies like The Blair Witch Project, but seriously, how hard do you have to try to get eaten by vampires these days? Pretty hard, I think. Not that a cell phone can save you from hungry nosferatu, but are there any surprises out there in the world for us anymore? I’m not sure. So I set out to see if I could find that place. Find it I did: Desert caves. Nothing good happens in there, friends.

“One for the Road” can be found in King’s collection Night Shift, and is also a not-too-bad little short film available on IMDB.com. Check it out!

Liked SICK? Read THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

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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!

 

7 Things Students Can Do Right Now To Make The World A Better Place

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I’m addressing you, students, because you have the strength and will that older people mostly do not. Young people start nations; old people bitch about them. It’s the way of the world. If you’re not happy with your world right now, there are steps you can take today that can tangibly impact your world right this very second.

(And old people, if you want to join in, that’s cool, too.)

1. Listen.

One of the best things any of us can do is listen to other people. Try to avoid rushing to judgement, try to avoid rushing to a “fix.” Just listen. Ask questions. Make eye contact. Those simple things may make all the difference to someone, including you. You don’t have to change your mind about a topic, but you do have to leave room for it to marinate a bit. Let people’s stories impact you.

2. Don’t talk shit.

And on that note, don’t talk shit to or about other people. I talk so much shit, it’s unreal, but only when I’m alone in the car. And you know what? It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make me feel better, it doesn’t change the assholes from being assholes. (Seriously, who lets their dog crap twelve inches away from a free dog-poop-bag dispenser? The same able-bodied shitbags who park in handicapped spots, I bet.)

So, yes, it may feel good for a moment to rag on someone, but it is not helping the world. Especially petty, gossipy bullshit.

There are two people, two very specific people alive in this world today that I hate with the heat of a thousand burning suns. And you know what? That hate has done nothing for me. Not a thing. This year, I will forgive them. Somehow. Maybe with the help of some Metta meditation, maybe by sheer force of will, but I will do it. It’s not hurting them, it’s hurting me.

Furthermore, back-stabbing and shit-talking online has got to stop. Just don’t participate in that bottom-feeder bullshit. You’re better than that. We all are. Being a petty little shit online is for…petty little shits. We need fewer of those, and a lot more of people saying, “Hey, I’m here.”

Remember Random? Remember that that book was based on a true story? (Or, more likely, hundreds of true stories.) If our “hero” had simply spoken up, spoken kindly when she had the chance, a life might have been saved. Again, this was based on a true story. This happens every day in this country, and I’m sick of it, and you should be, too.

Be kind online or don’t even bother logging on. Post pictures of puppies and kittens if you want, but don’t get caught up in the rumor mill or hater spaces. I promise you have much better things to do than that. For example:

3. Ask him/her out.

Just do it! The worst that happens is nothing. You will have a great story to tell a few years from now, no matter the result. And don’t, like, text it or something. Man- or Woman-up and go face to face and say, “Hey, want to go grab some coffee sometime?” or whatever it is you think will work. Don’t be cutesy or clever, just be sincere. Smile. I swear to you, even if you get laughed at (you probably won’t), it will not be the end of the world if he/she says no. How much trouble might Tyler have saved himself if he’d just goddamned talked to Becky that first day? We’ll never know. But a kind smile and some nice words will go a long, long way toward making a friend or a date. Or both.

4. Reduce/eliminate eating meat.

I am not a climate scientist or medical doctor, nor do I claim to be, and I don’t give a shit whether you “believe in” science or not. That’s your issue. My issue is simply this: Reducing or eliminating your meat intake is good for your body, your neighborhood, your state, your country, and your planet. You do not have to go all-out vegan—my family is what I call “veering vegan” without making some kind of blood-oath of fealty to Mother Gaia. But we don’t have meat more than, say, once a month anymore. If everyone pulled back on meat consumption, there are benefits for everyone.

Just consider it, it’s all I ask. Google it. Here, I did it for you: What happens if we stop eating meat?

5. Do that thing you like doing, no matter what anyone says.

You have a thing you love to do. You know what it is. Maybe it’s writing stories or poetry or lyrics, or painting or drawing or sculpting, or golfing or dog walking or yoga or krav maga, or acting or directing or filming or editing….

You get the idea. There’s something you deeply love to do.

Go do that thing. Once a week, minimum, if possible. Once a month will do. You deserve to do that thing. (If it’s not, say, being a homicidal maniac, that is.) This world needs all of us to relentlessly pursue the things we love, the things that make us happy to be here, the things that define us. When we do that, we’re better able to deal with the crap that comes at us. Our stress level goes down, and our relationships improve. I hate the idea of anyone, anywhere, not being able to do at least a little bit of the thing they love. I may never sell another novel in my life, but I will still write several a year because it’s who I am. It’s what I do. It’s one of the things that makes me, me.

So go do your thing.

6. Which reminds me, STAY THE FUCK HERE.

Not kidding. Suicide is fucking bullshit, period, full stop. Ask anyone who’s had to live with someone they love doing it. So, don’t. Ever. Just don’t. Wait. Give it a day or a week or a month or a year, but so help me baby Jesus, things will get better after high school, and even better after college-age. Ask me how I know. But you won’t find out if you don’t STAY HERE. Put the Suicide Prevention Hotline number into your phone right now and you call that thing the very moment it even crosses your mind.

Let’s make 2017 the year we didn’t lose one more kid to suicide.

You being here makes the world a better place. See how easy that is? Just stick around. Someone needs you. I know I do.

National Suicide prevention hotline: 1-800-273-8255

 

7. Watch the sunrise or sunset.

When you get a chance, take just a minute, or five, or ten, and watch the sun come up or set. If nothing else it’s a reminder to take a moment and breathe, clear your head, and put all the craziness of the world in its place. It works for me.

Here’s to 2017. We got this.

 

 

I Hate Me: a #HoldOnToTheLight post

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Because I trained as an actor, this is who I will show you at my events. It is who I wish I was all the time. But it’s not. I hate this guy. Here’s why:

For those of you short on time, here is the pull quote version of what I want to say and my vision for you and the world:

Don’t hurt yourself. Ever. If you do, stop. We need you. Choose today, even if it’s just today, to say, “I’m not going to hurt myself during this particular waking period.” Start there. Then do it again and again and again. Because whatever it is you are hurting yourself for, I know this to be true: it is not your fault.

#WaitOneMinute

I’m gonna tell you something right now that very, very few people have ever been told. But because I believe in the mission of #HoldOnToTheLight, I’m gonna tell you. Okay? I’m trusting you with this. My family—or, rather, the people I am related to by blood—probably aren’t going throw me any parties any time soon for sharing this. They are also unlikely to ever see it.

Okay? You with me? Here we go.

When I was about four or five, my mom rubbed my own shit in my face. A few times. It was supposed to teach me something. It was supposed to teach me how to use the goddamn toilet, in fact. I was having some trouble with that at the time.

Oddly, her approach didn’t work.

So on another occasion, my dad tossed my bare-naked ass into our outdoor chicken coop, where I literally jumped up and down in the air, screaming and terrified that I was either A) going to be left out there all day and all night, or B) the chickens were going to peck me to death, or C) both.

Oddly, that didn’t work, either.

These are two examples of what was considered Good Parenting Of A Preschooler.

Just two. Things that, if I saw someone doing them to my son, no court on Earth would convict me of what I’d do to them.

I didn’t know it was wrong of them to have done this until just a few years ago. Imagine if I’d thought that was normal when my son was born? Who might he become if I hadn’t known this was wrong?

Hold that thought, we’ll come back to it.

Flash forward to the year after high school graduation. Some friends and I got jumped in an apartment building parking lot. Two went to the ER. We didn’t even get a punch in. It wasn’t a big deal, really. Not at the time.

But then a few months later, I was alone in a community college parking lot after dark, and this car full of guys roars into the lot, starts doing donuts around me, and screamed, “WE’RE GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!”

They didn’t. I guess they were “kidding.”

When I got home, I collapsed in my room and couldn’t move. I thought I was going to puke, stroke out, and have a heart attack all at once.

I didn’t. I guess my body was “kidding.”

But I didn’t leave the house after dark for the next three years, either. And for the next several after that, if I did go out at night, it wasn’t without an escape plan. I lost friends. I missed opportunities. I pretended to sleep through my own birthday party so I wouldn’t have to leave the house. I cut lines into my arms to “relieve stress.” For as long as I can remember, I’ve flown into Exorcist-level rages over such slights as the garage door not opening correctly. I beat the almighty fuck out of my head, stomach, and legs. I’ve broken more shit than I can even remember. (Doors used to my favorite target; they were great for roundhouse kicks.)

My friends and readers, I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I never served on a front line and I was never a first responder, so I resisted this diagnosis for  a long time. How could I have PTSD? I’m an author, not a solider, not a cop. I have a friend who was literally blown up in Iraq. (I saw the footage!) He seems to be fine; ergo, I needed to shut up and quit being a fucking wuss.

That’s not how this works.

I developed a panic disorder that night after we got jumped. That was in January 1994. I’ve since gotten pretty much over that, though I still have an escape plan everywhere I go, and I can’t sit in the middle of a row at the movies or other events; always an aisle. So there are lingering effects from that.

The PTSD on the other hand . . . that shit’s still here. I actually have never-before-seen video footage of what the rages look like, and it would be funny, almost, if it wasn’t so fucking creepy. It’s inhuman. I am unrecognizable, even to me.

But it’s getting better, and you want to know why? Because a professional mental health practitioner told me what it was.

That’s the first step. If you cannot get out of bed from crushing sadness, if your only emotional release comes from a blade or a bottle of booze or a bottle of pills, if the slightest surprise noise makes you shrink inside your skin and then blow up with madness (like it does with me)…then something is wrong, and you need—

You deserve to have it checked out.

You don’t have to live like this. You don’t.

People always say “Get help!” What’s that mean? It means finding someone who can tell you what is wrong. Someone who can help you name it. Someone who, like my doctor did for me, can lean forward in her chair, look you in the eye, and say:

“What they did to you was not okay.”

Because eventually, you’ll start to believe it. You’ll start to accept it. And then things start to get better.

Whatever it was that was done to you was not okay.

Go ahead. Say it. Say it out loud to yourself right now. What they did to me was not okay. Because it wasn’t.

Now, I’d been to a whole slew of doctors from a very young age. None of them did much to make me feel better. I’ve done my time in a behavioral health facility over this mess, and that was . . . nice . . . but didn’t stop the rage, didn’t stop the self-hate, didn’t stop the fear.

What did one doctor do that all the others before her couldn’t? Here’s the secret:

I told her the whole story.

See, before that, I kept parts of the hell I’d been through to myself. They didn’t need to know! It was My Fault, obviously. I’d handle it. I’d Been Sick, obviously. My family history had nothing to do with slashing my arms or punching myself all the fuck over.

It sounds silly to write. It might sound silly to read. But that’s the secret. I told her everything, and that allowed her to give me the diagnosis I needed to start the process of feeling better.

My wife, doctor, and I developed a scale of rage from 1 to 10, 1 being “everything’s cool” to 10 being “I am out of control and breaking shit in the house, car, and my body.” It’s been…let’s see…maybe a few months since I had no-holds-barred Level 10 outburst. But I come close every week or two. I probably reach an 8 once every ten days.

But that’s down from a 10 every other week or so.

I hate me more than any ten, a hundred, or a thousand people on earth combined could ever hope to. (Even more than Kirkus and Goodreads reviewers, if such a thing be possible!) That’s my legacy. It’s not my only one, I know, but it’s up there. It is one that I chip away at as best I can. It’s one I will never let my son experience.

I don’t have to live like that. So I try to choose not to. (Try is the operative word. Sometimes it’s all we can do. That’s okay. It counts.)

If your life, or the life of someone you love, has become unmanageable . . . if simple daily tasks feel impossible because of that crushing intangible weight in your heart and mind . . . then today is the day to set up an appointment with someone who can help you name it.

You don’t have to live like this. You don’t.

But you do have to live. I’m here because I know there are people who would miss me if I left. You have those people, too. Don’t let what someone did to you determine the course of your life. They are not worth it. You are better. You are stronger. And hey, there are too many great books yet to read, right?

Stay here. If you can absolutely nothing else today, do that. Stay here. We’ll work on it again tomorrow.

Take care.

+ + +

About the campaign:

#HoldOnToTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by fantasy and science fiction authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Hope for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), To Write Love On Her Arms and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, go to

https://www.facebook.com/groups/276745236033627/

 

 

Author Visits Santa Barbara High School, Inspiration for First Novel

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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.