Tag Archives: fiction

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!

Like what you read? Sign up for more!

 

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!

 

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.

 

Lucky 13

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Howdy, friends and neighbors. Here is a quick sample of my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel, Lucky 13. Some of you might recognize a name and a bit of history. Now let’s see if it’s any good! Leave a note below in the Facebook comments box (so that I know the Facebook comments box is working). And if you’d like to comment on the new look and functionality of the site itself, I’d appreciate that, too.

Thank you! Now, I’m pleased to offer you…Chapter One of Lucky 13. Let me know if you’d read more.

Take care, and congrats to all my fellow Nanos. 🙂

~ Tom

P.S. There is some gore and violence, but nothing worse than anything in, say, Sick. FYI.

LUCKY THIRTEEN

Chapter One

 

The first time Tanin Thirteen asked Murphy how old he was, Murphy’s wrinkled face broke into a smile Tanin had only rarely encountered in the village. Then Murphy laughed, which made Tanin follow suit; a strange sound, a foreign sound in her own ears. There was little to laugh at in Base Camp.

Murphy laughed aloud, and at first, it had seemed it would be as short-lived as the little bean sprouts the two of them were collecting that day. When his laugh began to slow and trickle to a stop, Murphy’s gaze happened to land on young Tanin, and the old man started laughing all over again. He laughed so hard he doubled over as if cramped. Soon his knees buckled, and he teetered forward at first, then backward, landing on his bottom.

“What?” Tanin said, her ribs squeezing laughter out of dry lungs.

But Murphy only went on, precious tears dripping from the corners of his eyes. He lifted his knees and wrapped his arms around them, making a basket for his head. His broad shoulders shook so much, Tanin thought his ancient once-black duster coat might split.

Tanin sat down across from him in the dust and watched him, wondering why the question should send the old man into such shudders. As time went on and he didn’t stop, Tanin began to fear she’d driven Murphy insane. If the stories he told were all true, and she had no reason to think they weren’t, perhaps Murphy’s insanity had only been a matter of time.

“What?” she asked again, her own giggles having already petered out.

Murphy looked up from his arms and knees. Tanin realized he had ceased laughing some moments before, and now only wept. Something in her heart lurched to the right; her heart, maybe, but Murphy had taught her that no matter what some of the spiritualists in the village said, the heart was an organ like any other and not some metaphysical thing. It was better, he taught, to not form more than the most cursory emotional attachments. Feelings like loyalty could be prized for their unifying functions, which was crucial in battle. Feelings like love got people eaten.

Murphy wiped his eyes and stared at the girl. “Too old,” he answered. “Way too old, kid.”

Not the most satisfying answer for an adolescent, but Tanin didn’t push. Murphy got to his feet with the combined posture of a man in his seventies and a boy in the prime of his youth.

He extended a calloused hand to her. Tanin took it and let him pull her to her feet.

“I don’t mean to laugh,” he said. “And certainly not at you. It’s just, no one has asked that question in a very long time. They don’t understand, Tanin. They don’t know what it was like.”

She left her hand in his, enjoying the sandpaper texture and strength in his fingers. “What was it like?”

He kept his ancient eyes on hers for a long moment, then moved away. Tanin noticed his hand fall with easy familiarity and not a bit of paranoia to the hilt of his sword.

“Maybe later,” he said, scanning the immediate area for the sick. “Let’s finish with the stills first.”

Tanin nodded, picking up the rusty handle of a little red wagon that she would never understand was once used as a toy, back in a time when children didn’t have to grow up so fast and the world wasn’t dusted in shades of black and white.

She had never seen the sun.

* * *

The man awoke knowing his true purpose.

Even before his eyes opened, he knew. This band of so-called soldiers had shown it to him in no uncertain terms before they died. Most likely, he mused, they hadn’t even known it. No, they’d been so busy bleeding and screaming that the thought that he, their new god, was doing them a courtesy probably never occurred to them. It made sense, then, that they didn’t realize they had shown him, in their dying, the way that he must go. The word that he must spread.

Ah, well, he thought. Live and learn!

So to speak.

He opened his eyes, smiling. His sleep had been long and luxurious, propped up in a sitting position against the rear right-side tire of a small once-red pickup. All colors were “once,” he thought, still smiling. Once-red, once-yellow, once-blue. Color had ceased to have real meaning or value now that the world had been dusted with ash. He saw no reason to mourn the loss. In fact, he decided, one of his first decrees would be that all his subjects must wear only shades of gray. Not a difficult law to follow; who would waste water on washing clothes? They’d only grow dingy again beneath the ashfall.

No, the man thought, better to embrace the world as it was. Gods and devils and angels and demons had no purpose here. The truth mattered. The truth was all that mattered. Humanity mattered.

He pulled himself to his feet and coughed. Gray particles puffed from his lips, making him smile again. He turned to survey the carnage on the truck: Four men, dead, their blood already congealed and no longer flowing. In the bed of their truck, a silver suitcase tried to shine but failed. The case was locked, but he knew he had an eternity to find a way to get it open. Such precious cargo never existed in all the world. He wondered idly how many he might inoculate, how much serum lay within the case; enough for only one? Two? Ten? A hundred?

Well. He’d find out eventually.

“And out came another horse,” he said to the dead men as he pulled their bodies from the vehicle. “And its rider was given permission to take peace from the earth, and he was given a great sword.”

The bodies thunked against the hard-packed ash. It had formed bricks as hard as concrete after so many years of rain and compression. He shut the tailgate and paused, resting his forearms against it.

“I’m gonna need a great sword,” he told them.

One of the men groaned.

The man furrowed his brow and came around the side of the truck. The would-be soldier, dressed in mismatched camouflage, lolled his head to one side, wincing.

“Hey, look at you!” the man said, and walked over to the man. The soldier tried to raise a hand as he beheld the man coming nearer. “You’re still in it to win it, buddy. I like that. You got guts.”

The soldier whined as the man pulled a knife from a sheath on his leg, then screamed as the man plunged it into the soldier’s midsection.

“You do, you got guts. What, you don’t believe me?”

The man tore the knife in a wicked Z-shape through the soldier’s flesh. He held up the blade, which dripped loops of intestine.

“Here they are!”

He smiled as the man’s scream turned to a cry, then a wail, then a squeal. After choking for another minute, the soldier died.

“It’s nothing personal,” the man said. “But I mean, come on, you’re wearing Vietnam-era jungle pattern camo, buddy. Chrissake, that’s not gonna hide you from anything out here. Clearly. Also? Too trusting. That’s gonna cost ya.”

He searched the bodies for food, and was rewarded with a few small plastic sacks of potatoes and assorted trail mixes and rations. They’d do.

The man sat crosslegged beside the bodies and began to eat. It was a habit, not a need, he knew. Eating brought a certain joy even if it wasn’t essential anymore.

“Yep,” he said. “It’s gonna cost all of ya. That is the wages of sin, I’m afraid. But don’t you worry. I’m gonna set things right. You’ll see. Well, ha! Not you personally, of course. But the people you came from. Wherever you called home. You had a mission, and I respect that. Now I’ve got one, too. Thank you. We’ll make things right. Oh, yes. God may have abandoned you, but I won’t. Nope. Not me. I’m in it to win it. Here for the long haul.”

He finished the potatoes and wiped his hands on the shirt of one of the dead men.

“The longest haul the world has ever seen,” he said, and got to his feet.

He surveyed the dim landscape, something out of an apocalypse—miles upon miles of nothing but gray, the sun a dim disc hidden for years above the ash cloud above.

Kind of pretty, in its own special way.

“Take it easy,” he said to them, and hiked into the truck. It started with a cough, and the man wondered how long it could survive in the gray ash choking the air. Probably a ways, he figured; probably they’d put a new filter in the engine, or maybe even figured out a way to jury-rig some kind of new type of filter that would allow cars to go further than before. Between the silver case and risking traversing the ash storm of middle America, they were obviously going somewhere important. Important to them, anyway. Important to someone.

Not to him.

He turned the car around and pointed it in the direction the men had come from, his big frame seated uncomfortably in the small cab.

He was a new kind of prophet for a new kind of age, and that suited him fine.

* * *

Tanin helped Murphy collect water from the solar stills and from dozens of evaporators surrounding Base Camp. The stills were constructed of scraps of wood, plastic, and sheets of glass pirated from any one of a dozen sources. Not particularly graceful, the stills cleaned standing and other filthy water by the simple process of distillation. Clean condensation formed on the tilted underside of the glass, which then ran into a tube or gutter and down again into a collection receptacle—a plastic bottle, a tin can, a canteen . . . anything would do. The process didn’t eliminate every toxin from the water source, but it was better than nothing. Outbreaks of cholera and the like had been drastically reduced since implementing the system. But the stills could only provide so much. Tanin knew without Murphy telling her that sooner or later, Base Camp would become untenable without a source of clean water. The problem was—she knew again without being told—no one had any idea where the next closest supply of clean water might exist. Whether clean water existed anywhere, in fact, was a subject of much debate during the nightly elder meetings she would listen in on.

Murphy rarely spoke at the meetings, despite his place as the oldest immortal among them. He detested the term “immortal,” and told her so on many occasions. No one was immortal, he’d growl as they gathered their distilled water. One solid blow to the head, a fall from some great height, being stabbed in the heart, being torn apart by the sick . . . oh, there were plenty of ways to die, he would say, and none of them pleasant.

The price of semi-eternal life was a painful and gruesome death.

Murphy never said that to Tanin, because Tanin again didn’t need to be told. She’d seen it.

“The walls won’t hold much longer,” Murphy said as they re-set a still with brackish water taken from a puddle near the village. “We’ll need to move soon.”

“What about the woods?” Tanin said. “We could cut down more trees, extend our line of sight.”

Murphy said nothing for a moment as he wiped clean the inside of the still with a rag. Tanin tried to wait patiently for him to reply, but patience did not come easy to her.

“I just mean, it would benefit us both ways,” she said. “Reinforce the walls, plus be able to see further out.”

“I heard you.” Murphy picked up a blue plastic five-gallon bottle, half-full, and slung it over his shoulder. “But it will only delay the inevitable. They’re getting smarter.”

Tanin couldn’t hold back a snort of disbelief, which she regretted immediately. She hated to disrespect him. Others, it didn’t bother her too much.

“I take it you don’t believe me,” Murphy said. He nodded toward the next still and they walked toward it together.

“It’s offensive, it’s an offensive thought,” Tanin said. “They’re animals.”

“Yes. But animals learn from experience. Imagine a day when the sick can work together. Plan attacks. Coordinate.”

“I can’t imagine that,” Tanin said, scowling. “It’s not possible.”

“Very possible,” Murphy said. “And as I said, perhaps even inevitable.”

“If you were right . . . if that happened, then everything would change.”

They reached the next still.

“Yes,” Murphy said. “Such as?”

Another one of his lessons. Tanin almost laughed, but such a sound came only rarely these days and this realization of Murphy’s moment of training didn’t warrant it.

“The walls would stop being useful,” Tanin said. “They could be breached by anything with intelligence.”

“Correct. What else.”

“We’d have to move into the city?”

“No. The infestation is too high. The cities are still untenable.”

Tanin sat in the dirt, sending a small cloud of ash billowing up around her while Murphy tended the still. “Become nomadic?”

Murphy nodded. “That’s one possibility. It’s not one I like. We’d be forced to scavenge instead of raise our crops. Much of the country’s buried in ash. We’d lose people.”

“We’ve already lost people.” Against her better judgment, Tanin spit, hating the ash cloud that puffed up when her saliva hit the ground.

Murphy turned his head, slightly. “Please tell me you’re not going to get into a pissing contest over personal loss.”

“. . . No.”

“No, sir.”

 Tanin grimaced. “No, sir.”

Murphy set down his bottle and hunkered beside the girl. His eyes sought hers, burrowing deep. Tanin sat up.

“I tell you these things because you have a chance,” the old man said. “I don’t meet many people I can say that to. You’re different. I see it. Do you believe me?”

Tanin met her mentor’s gaze with confidence. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

He shoved her over and sprang to his feet. Tanin splashed into the ash with a yelp, and instantly kicked out one booted foot toward Murphy. He skipped backward, dodging the blow.

“Not now,” he warned, though a paternal smile tickled at the corners of his mouth. “We still have—”

A gunshot echoed past them, the deep ka-CHUNK of a shotgun.

The pair of them leaped, running full speed across the naked plain toward Home Base. Murphy pulled his sword as he ran, a battered hunk of metal he claimed had once been used as a stage prop. It had taken a very long conversation with Tanin to explain what a stage show was; that there was a time when people had enough leisure to memorize entire books of words and recite them on a stage in front of people. A truly odd concept for one born into a world where agriculture and combat were the two primary daily activities. Combat had dwindled over time, as the sick were slowly thinned out, but she knew from experience attacks could come and would come at any time.

Like now.

Firing a gun, like leisure time, was a rarity due to scarcity. So much ammunition had been spent by so few during in the early years of the outbreak that what little remained was usually conserved as much as possible. One of many drawbacks to such a policy was that people weren’t afforded the opportunity to practice. Shotguns thus became the favorite of most survivors, as it was more of a point-and-shoot weapon compared to rifles or handguns. Still they remained weapons of last resort; better to rely on hand-to-hand weapons.

And so Tanin and Murphy ran, then ran faster as a second blast went off near Home Base. Whatever they  were facing, it was big and it was bad.

How To Write Awesome Dialogue!

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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

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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.