Re-Phews…

One of the most rewarding things about being a writer, or I am sure any manner of artsy sort of person, is having your work reach people. Sure, you may do the work for yourself but you intend others to see it or you would keep it all in a journal or a box. You want people to see and, hopefully, to get your work. Ah, but then there are the people who don’t get it, don’t connect to it, don’t want to connect to it, and who want everyone out there to know they didn’t like what you did.

Ah, reviews.

I remember when the first book, Back From Nothing came out and it was up on Amazon and reviews started to come in. Not many reviews, and they were from friends, but they were something. It is always interesting to see how others see your work because they may see things you don’t and may not pick up on things that you thought were quite clear. And then there are those that just don’t get anything out of your work. Of the, I think it si eighteen, reviews on Amazon for BFN there were a couple that were scathing.

SCATHING!

At first I was just stunned because they were not just ‘meh, I don’t like this’ but were just all out assaults. I had never really had success with my writing outside of friends and friends of friends but damn, to get hit so hard by a review was rough. Then another popped up and together they were a tag team of Fail. The reviews were needles that dug deep into me and made me question whether I was just misleading myself about the book. That I had really put together a big crap-pile. One of the reviews pointed out how friends probably had written the reviews there, and that cut deep, though now I can say, well, of course they did. I was a first time author. Who else was gonna review it?

Duh.

I think what gets me about those reviews is you never know what the intent of the person was. Did they want to convey that they didn’t like the book, or that they didn’t like its author? Most of what was said in the reviews almost seems to have come from them reading a different book, not because mine was so amazing but because it felt like they had missed the heart of the whole thing. I mean, I could get that those were rough stories from a very young writer, but damn, the reviews treated the work as if it was nothing more than a series of personal diary entries and not a series of stories.

It was frustrating and it always will be. I think we can all take constructive criticism that helps us grow and better ourselves and our work but when you or something you do are attacked it gets hard to get anything but angry from it. But there’s the rub, it is what it is, and you can’t let what someone else thinks stop you from doing what you do. There is no real right or wrong when it comes to art or writing, just opinions, and the bigger you get the more you will deal with. If you are so worried about what others think then you are screwed. I dunno that you ever get skin thick enough to ignore the slings and arrows but you just have to not give too much creedence to what others think. If you do what you love, and do it as truthfully as possible then that is about all you can ask of yourself.

With the new book I am preparing myself for any negative reviews, because I am sure they will come. Hell, I figure though that you are sorta legit when you get negative reviews.

Right?

Right?

Shit, maybe not. It’s a thought though. I am still curious how people see my writing but anymore, not as curious as I used to be, which may be a good thing.

c

THIS BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS SAMPLE…

Here is a sample from the story I See You… from my book THIS BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS. If you like what you read, check the whole book out for ten bucks. You can find it here -

https://www.createspace.com/3386414

(PS – there’s cursing herein)

The car jerked squealed across the wet black top and came to a sudden stop under a flickering arc sodium light. The rental car was silent a moment as the engine was turned off and began cooling and then it was only the sound of the falling rain that could be heard. Suddenly the driver’s door burst open and a black blur erupted from the small economy car and ran through the rain towards the small, squat building. The black mass pushed through a set of glass double doors and came to a halt once inside. From within the black cowl erupted a small white face and then a whole head, looking as if the blackness had vomited it free. The woman let out a long relieved breath and stamped er feet up and down to shake the rain from her slicker. It had been raining for the entire day and this was her fourth stop to use the bathroom and she was more than a little over what was supposed to have been a short vacation. The woman shook her hair out and stamped once more before she turned to face her options – two doors, one bearing the rudimentary white form of what would seem to be a man, the other door bearing a similar visage that was supposed to be a woman. The woman shook her head back and forth quickly, water loosing itself from her long blonde hair and took a step towards the door bearing the figure of the female but stopped short when she saw the yellow pylon that stood guard in front of the closed door. An Out of Order sign hung cockeyed from the head of the pylon in explanation.

“You are shitting me. Fuck…”

She spun around and saw there was nothing standing in front of the door to the Men’s room. “Of course…” She shook her head slowly and headed for the glass doors again, her hope that there might be an exit with a restaurant or a gas station or something up ahead past Scottstown but she could see nothing through the veil of rain. As soon as her hands hit the door her bladder sounded an alarm and she knew she would never make it that far if there was an exit. This was but one of the many joys of diabetes, she was quickly finding out. She turned around and faced a torn map of Michigan with the usual You Are Here stuck smack in the middle. God she hated rural areas. She shook her head  slowly from side to side and looked from door to door then made her choice and moved towards the Ladies Room and pushed the door open. The whole damned thing couldn’t be out of order for god’s sake. As soon as she was past the pylon and had taken a step into the room she was immediately struck with a sickening, almost solid, wave of stench and had to take a step back after the initial assault. The woman pulled her shirt over her mouth and took a deep breath and held it then looked inside the room and saw that all but one of the lights in the room was out, the remaining one flickering off and on and off more than on. She took another step inside the room and saw dark stains all over the floor farther into the room and imagined a grossly obese woman not quite making it to the bathroom in time. She backed out of the room and began coughing hard and gasped for air as she looked back at her two remaining choices, the glass doors to the outside, and the closed blue door to the Men’s Room.

“Shit.”

Her bladder chose for her and she headed as quickly into the Men’s Rest Room as she was able. The smell was better here but not by much, thankfully though there were no visible stains this time and most of the overhead fluorescent lights were on, though many were flickering and humming as she entered. She squatted down onto her haunches and twisted her head to the side to see under the stalls and saw nothing. Not a foot, not a leg, not a peg-leg, not a tentacle, nothing. She let her breath out, smiled to herself. Her cousin had been warning her about Rest Stops in every call, text message, and email and every one the woman entered now she expected to be filled with perverts and pedophiles. So far she had only met a kid looking to sell some pot and a teenage couple making out in the parking lot. She smiled, relieved and walked to the last stall and pushed it open with her foot but on seeing the shit-covered toilet seat and the likewise covered walls she decided to move to the next stall over, which was locked from the inside, an old gag kids loved to pull, and, down to two choices, she tried the next in line. To her surprise this stall looked immaculate. She let out a laugh that echoed around the room, it was true, there were such things as miracles. She stepped inside the stall and slid the bolt across to lock the door, grabbed a sanitary seat and placed it over the toilet seat, removed her pants and went about her business. She closed her eyes and felt her bladder empty and let out a long sigh of relief. She was far too old to piss her pants, and she hadn’t liked the idea of peeing in the rain of hovering over a nuked toilet so this really was akin to a miracle. After a moment she opened her eyes and looked at the walls, curious to see what the shithouse philosophers had to say for themselves in this part of the world. She smiled as she read the deep and thoughtful insights –

Suck my cock.

(I will, call me at…)

I love to give head.

So does your mother.

Fuck you.

Fuk nigers. Kil thems al

Fuck you racist motherfucker. Learn to spell…

Mary is a slut.

You should know!

And at the bottom of the stall, well below the other scrawls and beneath a small hole someone had carved into the dividing wall, was the last, and to her, a genuinely chilling message –

…I see you…

The woman read it and re-read it and each time she felt a chill run across her skin. It was the same sort of humor as the others, the same sort of gag, but this one got to her. She had seen a hundred such threats at other rest stops or in fast food restaurant bathrooms but none were as simple and disturbing as this. It was made all the worse because of the hastily carved hole, which was just big enough for someone to see through, if they had the notion. She looked up and saw the light overhead flickering on and off, on and off, on and off, and the part of her that would always be ten years old and afraid of the dark waited for it to turn off and stay off. I see you. She couldn’t stop looking at it and each time she thought of how isolated she was out here, and then thought of the Ladies’ Room and wondered who could be hiding in there, or what. She had to get up, she had to get out of there and back on the road. This was stupid and she knew it. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly then stood and pulled her jeans up quickly as she unbolted the door and pushed it open. She stood inside the stall and looked across from her and into the clouded mirror to see if she could see anyone standing in the bathroom with her and let her breath out again as she saw she was alone. The most immediate reaction she had was to laugh, embarrassed by her fear but did not want to laugh at herself and her paranoia just yet. She zipped her coat to the top and pulled her slicker tight around her but just as she was about to leave the stall but there came a deep sigh that echoed throughout the room.

“Oh fuck…”

She pulled back into the stall and closed it as quietly as she could, hands shaking to match the rest of her. She stood still, holding her breath, waiting, waiting and waiting… Nothing happened and she began to wonder if she had just heard a phantom from her own head, or if perhaps the storm had blown the outer doors open. She remembered a present her mother had given her a couple years earlier when she went on a cross country trip by herself to see a boyfriend at the time and she reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled free her keys and the mace that dangled with them. She snapped the top off the mace, took a deep breath,  and pushed the door open again. She stood tense, eyes narrowed, heart thundering within her chest and all around her everything was quiet. Again she looked and saw nothing in the mirror, but god, in her heart she felt it, felt it in her chest, in her legs, there was someone…

“I see you…”

Want more? Read the whole story in the book. https://www.createspace.com/3386414

Two for the Ladies…

As usual, things I plan out never quite seem to work the way I intend. Mr. Blue was meant to be a monster of some manner but as I added what I thought were tentacles I realized they were closer to a mustache and well, he came together from there.

The weird field was meant to be a terribly inappropriate piece I have floating in my head but which I am not sure how to paint. I had been working on the painting, got frustrated with it, and in a crazed arty fit, I painted over the whole thing in red and decided it was meant to be a landscape. I sorta like it, even if it isn’t what I meant to paint.

THIS BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS – for sale now

The new book – This Beautiful Darkness is now for sale via my E-Store (soon to be on Amazon) for ten dollars. This is a short story collection and is pretty rad.

Buy it.

For real.

https://www.createspace.com/3386414

Cranking it out…

It is strange to stand where I am today, on a hill, not a high hill, but a hill just the same, and to look down into the valley where I started writing when I was a teenager. I started with a pencil and pen and paper, writing in those Mead notebooks, writing and writing and not sure what I was writing for or where it was going. I remember reading these wonderful books, these great stories and wanting to do that, wanting to tell those stories. I didn’t want to be those authors, but I wanted to tell those stories. I mentioned it before but I lost the biggest, most ambitious piece I wrote back in those days in an unfortunate accident, but the story lingers in me, and the work was not in vain.

Pen and paper went the way of the whale when I got a word processor as a graduation present. It was a Brother something or other and was an in-between to a computer. It had a monitor and was electronic and it was beautiful. I wrote so much stuff with that. It was simple, it didn’t do a lot, but my god did I love it. I wrote stories, articles and reviews for the ‘zines I did with my friends, and then however many love letters I wrote back then. The hell of the word processor was that I had all this work saved only in that format and when I upgraded to a computer well, a lot of it was lost. And that is hard. It’s hard to let those go, those ghosts, those ex-stories. It’s hard to know that many are lost. Not all, some made it into Back From N othing, heck a lot of them did, but a lot were lost too. But then, losing stories is something I have gotten used to.

A computer was different, and still is. Writing long hand is so intimate, and connects you so much with the story, it becomes part of you in a way. Writing on a computer makes the story fluid, always changing, always moving and evolving. That is good for the story, but it takes the connection away. I love writing on a computer because I can write, edit, and post it or send it from one device. Not bad. The convenience is a hell of a thing, but it does take some of the fun away. I have to admit though that I wouldn’t go back to longhand. I just can’t stand writing and re-writing something. I did that for years. Handwriting the story, or a hunk of it, then going back and typing it and using the original piece as starting point.

I guess it is the same with all arts, all crafts, all passions. You start somewhere and you move from there. I started taking pictures on old simple 35mm cameras, then a simple digital camera, now a prosumer camera. I began painting rough pictures and have gotten better with time and work, experimenting as I go.

It’s always about experimenting and finding what works best but as we evolve our passions we do leave something behind. And that is growth, that is life, but sometimes you need to look back and see where you came from and how you got your start in order to really appreciate where you are.

c

THIS BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS is available for purchase NOW!

The new book is for sale now via my E-Store.

The book is ten dollars and features thirteen dark short stories.

https://www.createspace.com/3386414

Thank You…

Having finished the new book (This Beautiful Darkness), I can honestly say that, for me, the hardest part came at the end, with the thank yous. Sure, it takes some time to write the stories and edit them, but that comes naturally, flowing from me without much effort. Writing is a matter of seeing a path and forging through it, the editing a matter of trimming back the flora to clean things up. Putting the book together was a bear but that was mostly on  the shouldres of my girlfriend, bless her heart. Art, like the writing, just came. I had a title and the art sprung from it. The art was actually far easier than the writing, oddly enough. So through the whole process, it came naturally, as something familar.

Until the thanks.

That was the hard part.

It wasn’t hard because I didn’t know who to thank, because there are SO many people who I owe debts to. It was ten years since Back From Nothing and along the way, over the years, so many people, so many lives have touched my own life that they have all played a part in this book coming together. They are all part of the stories here, and all the stories I have written. There is no way to thank everyone that comes into your life. You just can’t. You can’t because then the list becomes ridiculous, and you start stretching the patience of  your readers. No, you have to choose a few, the few that have stood out and have been there for you the most, and you have to choose them and make the hard decisious. Sure, you leave people off, you forget people, but in the end, you have to make the choices.

And I made them. I can hope, I can only hope that the people who touched me know how much they meant to me, and how much they meant to my writing. That is all I can hope. We have to make hard decisions as writers and, in the end, picking who to thank may be the hardest choice of all.

It was for me at least.

c

This Beautiful Darkness

I am very, very proud to announce the upcoming release of a new short story collection entitled This Beautiful Darkness. It is being proofed right now then will be up for sale on Amazon. The book will be ten dollars and features thirteen stories. All stories, interior pictures, and the cover is by me. The layout was done by my badass girlfriend Amanda.

I am more excited than words can really capture.

Cover and back cover images below. More info to come.

10 years…

In our lives there are always going to be places, people, things, and events that mean more to us than to anyone else. Sure, people will appreciate these things but they will not mean as much as they do to us.

One of those things for me is BACK FROM NOTHING, my book of short stories that was published ten years ago this year. I am celebrating the release of the book with friends tonight and wanted to take a minute to reminisce about the book and the path it’s lead me on.

 To do this justice I have to go back fifteen years, when I was working on a fanzine turned briefly legit with friends. The ‘zine was called Ghoulash and was a dream come true for all of us involved. During that time I was writing a lot and wrote the short story that would form the corner stone that became my novel. It was also the era when I was writing a lot of the work that appeared in the book. For some insane reason I got it into my head to try to publish my stories. I mean, hell, good on me, but what was I thinking?

Well, I was thinking ‘why not’. I had been writing seriously since I was eighteen and in ’94 I was twenty and full of gumption. Oh, gumption, how I miss it. So I took some stories, I cleaned them up, dusted them off, and I sent them on their way. I went about it a little backward in that I tried to get the book first, oops, and lo and behold there were no takers. Writers talk all the time about the plight of rejection and let me tell you, it never gets easy and it never gets funny. So I got a lot of rejection. Letter after letter after letter. Until one day I got a response from a company called University Editions, who were interested in my book. I couldn’t have been happier. The thing was though that UE was a subsidized book publisher, which meant that I paid the fees and cost of doing the book and they produced, promoted, and distributed it. The cost was pretty steep, with two levels and both being pricey, but I was at a dead end, and saw no other route. Years later I can stop and see where I should have just been patient and kept writing and looking for places to submit but, well, I did what I did.

And I don’t regret it at all.

 With the help, a LOT of help, from my folks we went into the process of getting the book published through UE. It was a loooong process. It was a matter of – send in book, wait for it to be typed and set, find errors, fix them, re-submit, get it back, go through it and then there was coming up with the loot. It was a good couple of years of stops and starts before it finally came together, and I remember walking around with my draft as I went through it day by day to fix errors.

 The book was released finally in 1999 and my first signing was at Borders books in Flint, Michigan on June 14 (god, how did I forget the date, I totally had it a month ago, damn!). The signing was ridiculous but fun. I got drilled by a religious couple that happened to thumb to a place in my book where I had portrayed Lucifer, and then I got asked lots of WHERE IS… questions, as if I worked there. After the signing I had a dinner at a local restaurant and celebrated with friends.

 After the signing I sorta waited. I didn’t know what to do and was deathly afraid of reviews, so I waited to see what happened. Fool that I was, I didn’t really go out and promote the book. Within a year of publication I got a letter from UE stating that they were going out of business and that if I wanted my books I needed to pay shipping or just wave goodbye to them. More money spent and now I had to distribute, sell, promote, and do everything else for the book.
Damn.

 It is empowering to do everything yourself but it’s also exhausting because after you write all the indie booksellers, and try to get it reviewed, and try to get people to buy it, what then? Well, you keep doing it. You do conventions, and art shows, and any other damned thing you can do to get the word out there. You talk it up, and you sell it. For me, it’s never been easy to do all that because I try to be modest in what I am doing, and it’s hard to ‘sell’ it. But I try.

 In ten years I have given away far more books than I have sold, far more, but the book is out there, and people have liked it. I am sure people have hated it just as much, but screw them, what do those people know? HAHA. Since BFN came out I have been published four times  – three times in a periodical and once in a magazine and was twice awarded honorary mention in a respected book. I have put together near to ten chapbooks of new material. I wrote a novel. I have put together enough stories for a few more collections. And I still write and do other stuff. And I am still looking to get more books out there.

 It has been a crazy ten years, and despite all the setbacks and disappointments I am still here. Still writing. Still working.

And that says more than I can with any amount of words or time.

 …c…

The Other Sides

It is pretty clear that there are a few sides to my creativity and writing, while the greatest part, is but one of those sides. Art and Photography, both new arts to me, are now integral parts of who I am.

After I did the skull painting I had the notion of a painting of a man flying another man as a kite. I wasn’t quite sure how to show that so I opted to attach the poor fella TO the kite as it flew in the air. I am sure he was fine with it. Sure.

The pictures I took this weekend, and just struck me as interesting.