Meet the One-Eyed Monster

(Lily's shelter mug shot)

This summer I mentioned we got a cat. Apparently my prior comments on cats made this news surprising. So here's the scoop (and the litter box is over there! Badda-BING!).

I've gone on record many places as saying I hate cats. The last cat I lived with introduced herself by launching claws-first at my crotch (I was jingling change in my pocket at the time) and peeing on my leather jacket whenever possible. I adore dogs, want a dog, wish I had a dog. But instead I have a cat.

And the worst part is, I picked her.

We decided the boys needed a pet for the new house, so we went to the Shelter from the Storm adoption fair. I had every intention of taking home a dog, but clicked with none of the ones available. The cats, meanwhile, were displayed in a vast row along the outside wall of PetSmart, two and three cages high in places. Most had kittens or playful adolescent cats in them, and the cries of delighted children filled the air. Whoopee, I thought. As someone once said, "If you have a cat in your house, you also have a box of shit in your house."

And then, at one end, in a big cage all by herself, sat Lily.

She was fat. She was old. She had one eye. And no one was paying any attention to her. I saw a kindred spirit.

"We're taking that one," I said.

My family was so startled that I even wanted a cat that they gave me very little argument. We picked her up the same day we moved into the new house.

The decision has been eminently justified. She is sweet-tempered, quiet, affectionate and serene. She never lashes out at the kids for being too rough with her, even when the C-in-C poked her in her empty eye socket (yes, we took her to the vet, and no, there was no damage). She's still overweight, but we're working on that (having her litter box on the second floor helps). She's not a kitten, so I don't know how long she'll be around (her papers say she's seven years old), but she's settled into the family in a way I never expected.

I still hate cats, don't get me wrong. But every rule has an exception.


Lily sharing her bed with the Squirrel Boy. Oh, wait, it's the other way around....

If it'd been an Ellison, it woulda bit me

There's an old bit of wisdom that says, roughly paraphrased, if you pick up a snake and it bites you, it's not the snake's fault.

My wife is an avid science fiction reader, but she's never been to an SF convention. When her favorite SF author Harlan Ellison was announced as the guest of honor for local convention MadCon, she decided to make that her first convention experience. We signed up for the con, including the guest of honor banquet and speech.

The banquet was scheduled for 7-9, including Mr. Ellison's after-dinner speech. To allow enough leeway, we told the sitter we'd be back by 10:30. We were lucky enough to sit with Onion writer John Krewson, which made the evening even more entertaining.

Now, for those of you who don't know about Ellison, he's legendary for both his writing and his cantankerousness (see this recent interview). I'd never met him before, but the stories that preceded him made him sound a lot like the devil, in the sense that you were better off if he didn't know you existed. Just the day before the banquet, at a local bookstore signing, he snatched a cell phone from a fan who had been filming him and stomped on it. He's that sort of extreme personality.

Mr. Ellison did not begin his remarks until about 9. Keep in mind he's both legendary and elderly, and wasn't even sure earlier in the week that he'd be able to show up. I certainly don't begrudge him taking his time and enjoying what he says will be his last convention. Hell, I got a backpat from him for being the only person in the room* who knew the source of his "Phlegm Snopes" joke. But he rambled, went off on tangents, and abused people at will (usually to their delight) until we realized he wasn't going to finish before we had to leave. Still, this was Harlan Ellison, my wife's favorite author; it seemed impossibly rude to just get up and walk out in the middle of his speech.

Then he made it easy for us.

He abruptly stopped, pointed at my wife and said "You. You're making me nervous." He added (I'm paraphrasing) that he could read body language, could tell she need to leave and that she should just go ahead and do so. She told him it was due to the babysitter, and he joked that we should bring the kids the next day so he could make them cry. Left with no other graceful choice, we departed as quickly as possible. The crowd applauded and sang us out with "Aloha ʻOe," which I suppose is better than the chorus of "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye."

We laughed about this on the way home. After all, if this truly is his last convention, we may be the last people he chases from a room. It certainly gave us a great story. Still, when she asked how I'd feel if Bruce Springsteen (one of my heroes) had done the same thing, I got a glimpse of how she really felt.

I don't talk about my wife much online, but she's a very intelligent woman, at least 20% smarter than me. She's also a person of immense dignity. I certainly don't think I should've made a scene, or engaged Mr. Ellison in any way, since the evening was all about him, not us. But I'm sad for her. She has a vast collection of Ellison books, and knows his work intimately. I can only imagine how it feels to be publicly dismissed by him.

This is not an indictment of Mr. Ellison. He is who he is, and that persona is well known. We bought the tickets; in effect, we picked up the snake. That it bit us is unfortunate, but not really the snake's fault.

Addendum

I want to give a special-shout out to the fan (I'm sorry I don't recall your name) who said how disappointed she was to learn I wasn't on any panels at the con. I was disappointed, too (being on panels is why I go to these things), but she made up for it. Fans, if you ever doubt a kind word to someone whose work you admire matters, let me assure you, it does.

Well...it does to most of us.

*It was a room full of scholars and writers, too. Come on, people, no matter what genre you work in, you should know Faulkner. I'm just sayin'.

"The process is its own reward" *

"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." --W. Edwards Deming

I get asked about my writing process a fair bit, so I thought I'd share an example of how I work, from initial draft to final revision. I'm not making any claims that this is the only way, or even the best way. It's just, as Elvis and Sinatra would say, my way.

Here, then, are the opening lines from Dark Jenny, the third Eddie LaCrosse novel due out in spring 2011.

This is how it read when I first wrote it:

Gary Bunson, Neceda’s slightly-honest-but-mostly-not magistrate, came into Angelina’s tavern accompanied by a blast of snow-laden winter air. An irate chorus demanded he close the door at once, some with pithier language that implied carnal relations with livestock.

Gary was used to that sort of response. He kicked the door shut, shook snow off his long coat and looked around until he spotted me. “LaCrosse,” he said. “There’s somebody outside looking for you.”

Things I like: the initial description of Gary Bunson.
Things I don't like: everything else.

This does describe the scene as I saw it in my mind. But the writing doesn't have any rhythm. It leaves a lot unclear, and the humor doesn't work at all.

So here's the same passage, revised:

Gary Bunson, Neceda’s slightly-honest-but-mostly-not magistrate, came into Angelina’s Tavern accompanied by a blast of winter air. An irate chorus erupted at once, some with language that implied Gary had carnal relations with livestock. Gary was used to that sort of response, and it stopped when he closed the door behind him. He shook snow from his long coat and looked around until he spotted me sitting with my girlfriend Liz at the bar.

“LaCrosse,” he said. “There’s somebody outside looking for you.”

Specific changes:
Moved the paragraph break to the beginning of the dialogue.
Removed the overkill phrase "snow laden" as a modifier for "winter air."
Changed "demanded" to "erupted" to make it clear that the tavern's patrons were particularly put out.
Removed the word "pithier," because that was clear in context.
Changed "he shook snow off his long coat" to "he shook snow from his long coat," because it just sounded better (sometimes that's the only reason you have for making a change, and it's perfectly legitimate).
Clarified where Eddie was while this was happening: seated at the bar with his girlfriend Liz.

This is definitely better, but it still jars in places. So, third and final revision (and how the text will appear in the book):

Gary Bunson, Neceda’s slightly-honest-but-mostly-not magistrate, came into Angelina’s Tavern accompanied by a blast of winter air. Immediately an irate chorus erupted, some with language that implied Gary had carnal relations with livestock. Gary was used to that sort of response so he paid it no mind, and it stopped when he closed the door behind him. He shook snow from his long coat and looked around until he spotted me sitting with Liz at the bar.

“LaCrosse,” he said. “There’s somebody outside looking for you.”

This time the revisions are minor, but no less important. They include:
Changed "An irate chorus erupted at once..." to "Immediately an irate chorus erupted..."
Added a phrase to the third sentence so it now reads, "Gary was used to that sort of response so he paid it no mind..." It both clarifies the character's reaction and establishes his attitude.
And finally, removed the words that identified Liz as "my girlfriend." I want my books to be wide open, so that even if this third one is the first a reader picks up, he or she can easily follow the story. But "my girlfriend" felt awkward, and the relationship is established within the next few pages anyway.

Not every passage gets three revisions. Some get none, some get a dozen. And there's no way to tell until you start working on them. One trick that never fails to show me problem spots is to read the text aloud to myself. Not in my head; out loud, using my voice. I recommend that to anyone.

So, writers out there: how does this compare to your process?

*Amelia Earhart

Working titles (and titles that don't. Work, that is.)

My most recent novel, The Girls with Games of Blood, was the first one to hit shelves with my title on it.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Titles are funny things, and they have to be balanced between appropriateness, marketability and simple comprehension. But I thought I'd describe the titling process as I've experienced it, since I've just settled on a working title (The Two Eddies) for my fourth Eddie LaCrosse novel. Keep in mind, though, that the whole point of this post is that the book may very well come out under a different (and hopefully better) title in 2012.

My first novel, The Sword-Edged Blonde, spent two decades under the simple title, Rhiannon. Yes, after the Fleetwood Mac song. And the Welsh legend which provided the original inspiration, and survives in the story if you dig deep enough. But my editor at Night Shade Books requested a different title because he felt the original one was too Fleetwood Mac-y. Since it was my first novel sale and I wasn't about to do anything to jeopardize it, I agreed and began listing alternate titles that combined pulp noir sensibilities with something recognizably high-fantasy (like the book itself). Between my editor and agent, I narrowed it down until we all agreed on The Sword-Edged Blonde. It catches the tone, and to me symbolizes the character of Rhiannon in the story (she is blonde and she does have two sides, or edges, to her personality).

My next novel, Blood Groove, started with the working title Oceans of Time. At that stage I hadn't settled on a 70s setting. When I did, I chose a phrase from Parliament/Funkadelic as the new title: Sadistic Groovalistic. Yeah, I know. Cooler heads, notably my agent, gently suggested a different title, something that didn't sound like a twelve-year-old made it up (that's my evaluation, not hers). Again various alternatives were considered, until she said, "I'm going to shop this under the title Blood Groove." To this day I prefer the title Blood Funky, but I can't argue with her wisdom, since the book got out there under her title.

The second Eddie LaCrosse book, Burn Me Deadly, was originally titled Lumina, after one of its characters. After the first novel established its precedent, it was a snap to come up with a new title for book two, tweaked from Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly. Everyone liked it, including me.

But I think I've gotten better at it. As I said, The Girls with Games of Blood was entirely mine, and the third Eddie LaCrosse novel, Dark Jenny, never had a different title. If there's a third vampire book, my title is Blood Will Rise (or Blood Will Rise Again, perhaps). I don't know if The Two Eddies will end up on the cover of Eddie LaCrosse's fourth adventure, or if the manuscript will even leave my desk with that title. But I have to call it something other than Eddie 4.

That is, unless I can figure out a way for him to fight Ivan Drago....

I walked into a bar...and he saw the end

Recently I read a novel that annoyed me no end with its capricious disregard of its own genre rules. And I worry that in it, I saw the end of the current boom of fantasy/paranormal novels crossed with the hardboiled detective form, which depresses me because hey, I write that kind of book.

The novel (unidentified here because it's symptomatic of something larger) is told in first person by a detective figure who battles unseen paranormal creatures all around us. He's tough, world-weary and driven, with a core of decency but a sense that he's the only just man in an unjust world.

There are two reasons authors use first-person for protagonists like this. First, the character puts on a deliberately unappealing and difficult front, and by hearing his inner voice we see the sympathetic hero behind the bluster. Otherwise, we'd be spending 400 pages in the company of a jackass. The other is that, as a detective, he pieces together the clues as they're discovered, and allows the reader to share his insights and discoveries is a big part of the fun.

You mess with this fundamental dynamic at your own peril. For example, Thomas Pynchon's recent Inherent Vice tries to mock this convention by telling the story in a weird third person singular voice that keeps tricking the reader into thinking it's first person when it's not. The result is a novel almost impenetrable in its tone, and certainly no fun to read.

Occasionally a writer will use multiple first-person points of view, to convey differing perspectives or information that one narrator wouldn't know. That's a valid technique, and the result depends on both the writer's skill and the structural support for these switches. Most common, though (and endemic to the book I just read) is the lazy approach of starting a novel in first person, but when a plot point becomes too tricky to convey that way, simply switching to third person for a chapter or two.

This sort of arbitrary voice change completely negates the reason for choosing first person in...well, in the first place. And it puts the author's limitations front and center, when the goal should be to hide those as much as possible. I'm not saying these sorts of literary tricks should never be used, just that they should never be used simply because the author doesn't want to take the trouble to think a little harder about how to make his or her point. Or, and I suspect this is often the case, the author uses a first person voice because he or she thinks it's a genre requirement without understanding its actual function.

Genre conventions are definitions, and when they lose their meanings, so do the genres. And one big way they lose their meanings is by being used without being understood. Western films lost their power when Europeans began mimicking all the accoutrements without understanding their relevance; pure science fiction fell apart when George Lucas mixed in fantasy elements with the hardware. The self-narrating hardboiled detective, already too ironic to ever be successfully post-modern, is a very specific creature that can change backgrounds but must retain its inherent justification for its existence. Without it, it's just a pose, entertaining but empty.

So what do you think? Am I seeing a true sign of the genre apoclaypse, or am I just another doomsday prophet whining about the end of this minor literary world?

Survival of the Dead and how to keep a series interesting

Some background on me and George Romero's zombies:

I saw Night of the Living Dead one Saturday afternoon when I was in high school. The Memphis TV station, apparently thinking it was some innocuous old B&W horror movie, did not edit it. Forget the graphic intestine-eating: I'd never before seen a movie where the hero died such a pointless death. Later, when I got to college, I discovered there was a small community of people who'd watched that exact same broadcast and been similarly marked by it.

I saw Dawn of the Dead at the Cabana Theater in Jackson, TN. When the famous shotgun-to-the-head effect came up, a woman in a nurse's uniform got up and proclaimed to her date, "I see this shit in the ER all day, I ain't paying to see it now!" She stomped out. Her date stayed.

I saw Day of the Dead on videotape, alone in my college apartment. When the heroes were herded into the zombie enclosure, I had to stand up and pace around my chair for the remainder of the film. That's one way I handle suspense when I'm alone.

I saw Land of the Dead at a packed preview showing in Madison, WI. Cheers greeted Tom Savini's momentary cameo. Bigger cheers greeted the zombie biting out a girl's navel ring.

I saw Diary of the Dead at the late Westgate Art Cinema in Madison, with six other patrons (which explains why it's "late," I suppose). I stayed all the way through the credits to see if there was a stinger. There wasn't.

And now, Survival of the Dead, on blu ray in my living room, once again all alone.

You can find synopses of the film online, so I won't bore you with one here. What I will say is that Romero once again subverts expectations by giving us a zombie movie that's almost a western, with wide-screen photography, galloping horses and lots of gunplay. It's also the first true sequel in his series, featuring a character introduced in Diary of the Dead. At the same time you get the expected tropes: an isolated setting (in this case an island), survivors enmeshed in petty squabbles while missing the big picture, plenty of gore (most of it CG enhanced to the point of [deliberate] ridiculousness), and zombies doing things they've never done before.

Is this as good as Dawn of the Dead? No. You don't hit that sort of pinnacle more than once. John Ford made a lot of westerns, many of them great, but he only made one The Searchers. At the same time, it's impressive how Romero, working in such a narrowly defined form, continues to find new ways to present his zombies. A lot of web critics dismiss his newer films as lacking the chops of his earlier work, but that's missing the point.

After you revolutionize the genre with your first two horror films, it's impossible to keep repeating the trick. The fact that Romero doesn't simply rehash the same old thing is both admirable and exciting. As a novelist who writes a series, I see this as an example of how to do it right: name another series where the individual films are so hugely different from each other,and yet (to me at least) still give the people what they want.

Return of the Verdilak

Lately I've been reading multiple books at once, a chapter here andc there of completely unrelated things: the second Denton novel by Kenneth Cameron, No-Man's Lands by Scott Huler (about retracing the journeys of Odysseus), an unbelievably detailed book on the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a novel for which I've been asked to do a cover blurb. Usually I'll get into one of these at the expense of the others and read it through to the end before returning to the pile, but in this case I got pulled off-track by something I unexpectedly found in a local used book store: the 1996 graphic novel Verdilak, by Bo Hamtpon and Mark Kneece.



The title, one of the many European terms for "vampire" (specifically one who preys only on loved ones) caught my eye first. I first learned the word from the middle section of Mario Bava's 1963 anthology film Black Sabbath; when I opened the book, the artwork clearly referenced the Bava film, so at first I thought it was an adaptation.

But it was actually something more subtle. It uses the Bava film as metatext, taking its visual clues not just from I Wurdelak but from other Bava films such as Black Sunday. It covers some of the same narrative ground, but with a far different beginning and resolution. And ultimately it becomes an epic, unlike the Bava film's intimate familial horror.

In the film, a young aristocrat stumbles on a family in the process of being consumed by the curse of vampirism. He tries to save the beautiful daughter, but it doesn't go well. In the graphic novel, this simple tale is backstoried with an account of Ramash, a deformed dwarf who takes in a beautiful peasant girl (the other daughter of the doomed family), showers her with affection only to have her run off with the first handsome man who comes along. And at the end, Ramash's father (Satan) shows up to aid his son in his revenge. It's a simple story, carrying the weight and atmosphere of folklore, and it broadens and deepens Bava's original by providing motivations and explanations the film never really needed.



But for me, what makes it special is the watercolor artwork by Bo Hampton. He recreates Bava's imagery without pandering to it, making it work in a different medium. He also adds enough of his own touches that it feels original, not merely a recreation. His most crucial change is rethinking the image of the family patriarch. In the film Boris Karloff's kindly eyes provided an eerie contrast to his actions. Here the character bears a greater resemblence to Josef Stalin, which is appropriate given the revised context.

I asked Hampton, who also co-wrote the text, what inspired him to undertake such a project. He said, "I love Mario Bava and his version in the movie trilogy Black Sabbath had a huge influence on me. I wasn't happy with the logic of some events and went back to the A.K. Tolstoi source, and after translation to English it wasn't much more help. So I came up with an idea [and brought in] co-writer Mark Kneece to flesh it out."

Verdilak is out of print, but worth the effort to find. It's a powerful introduction to the concept of the adult fairy tale, and lacks the annoying tendency to blatantly "meta" its source; in fact, it's "meta" only if you already know the source. If you don't, it's a sincere, irony-free horror story with the kind of moral basis found in real fairy tales, the ones that stick in your memory long past childhood.