Emerging from the Offline Shadows

This blog has had several lives and a couple of locations. I’m beginning a new phase now and the landscape seems to be so much more different than the other times I came back from blogging breaks. Back in 2004 when I first started blogging, I was one of the middle early bloggers. There were of course the people who had been around since the late 90s, but I was on the early edge of mass blogging. Now, everybody has a blog and I feel a bit out of place and jealous of the attention they receive. At it’s peak, this blog was getting between 100-200 hits a day. A mere drop in the bucket in the larger scheme of the blogosphere, but enough to make me proud and warrant myself some attention.

Now that I’m back to blogging regularly I’m getting 30-40 hits on days when I post and 0-10 on the days I don’t. And no longer is merely posting enough to bring traffic to my site, I need to link in Twitter and Facebook as well. I’m hoping eventually I’ll build back enough of a base where people will check out my blog regularly and I won’t have to pimp every friggin’ post.

But for now, I’m thinking of other ways to make my renewed online presence known. I’m starting to comment more on the blogs I used to frequent and I’m finding my way to a couple new ones to see if I have anything useful to say. I’m going to participate in one of Patti Abbott and Gerald So’s flash fiction challenges, which is something I haven’t done in years. Even those challenges, I’m proud to say, are part of my early history as a blogger through creating the Blog Short Story Project with Dave White. I’m also writing some new short fiction that I want to get out to places like Thuglit and Plots with guns, and maybe even into some of the newer places like A Twist of Noir and PulpPusher. I’m also thinking about hitting up some old and new friends to let me guest blog to help expand my audience.

And the reason for all of this? Well that’s two fold. There’s the narcissistic, self-entertainment purpose of it all. I love looking back through my old blog posts at important times in my life to see what I was thinking and how I was reacting. But there’s also the professional end of it. Much of my success so far has come from the relationships I made early on through blogs and online zines then solidified at Bouchercon and other conferences. I’ve got a new book out in the marketplace that is different than any of the others I’ve written and more in line with the kind of stuff I’ve published on line. I’m also looking to get back the excitement and vibe that comes from being part of the online crime community. It fed me for so long through some tough times and now that I’ve been able to work through some things I needed to away from the blogs, it’s time to rejoin the party if anyone will have me.

Spenser and the Pumpkin Patch

We took the kids out to get pumpkins on Sunday for Halloween. Last year it was more of a photo op than anything else because Spenser was too small to really do anything. But this year he was able to get out and walk around and pick out his own pumpkin. His costume this year is a black sweat suit with skeleton bones on it and Sunday, we dressed him up in the hooded sweatshirt part and his jeans to make it festive. When we get there, Holly was just kind of a gooey sleeping mess in mommy’s arms, but Spenser was very deliberate in his pumpkin selection. He would approach from several directions and then lay his hands on several, but would always quickly pull them away as to not be committed to the wrong pumpkin. Finally, after he went back to the same one a couple different times we picked that one for him and went in to pay.

On the way into the main store area though, we passed by several large buckets of small, baby pumpkins and we thought it would be fun for him to have one of those for himself as well. Again, he was very slow to pick a pumpkin and when Becky tried to hurry him along, he reached around and tried to take the whole bucket. After he picked up the one he liked and held onto it for more then a few seconds, we went in to pay. When I was strapping him into his car seat to get ready to go home, he was still holding the pumpkin and I commented on the astounding fact that he hadn’t tried to chew on the pumpkin yet.

It took us about ten minutes to get home and when I took him out of his car seat, I noticed that he had some orange juice around his mouth. I initially thought it was from the Doritos I fed him earlier at Subway, but when I looked closer I saw that he had eaten almost half of the pumpkin. Some of the spots were gnawed at a shallow level, but other, larger chunks went almost to the core of the pumpkin. The kid is 13 months old, that just ain’t right. Of course he followed it up later that night by trying to eat the bricks on the fire place.

More Process Crap

I’m starting to hitting a rhythm now on the short story I’m writing. It’s mostly been dribbling out a few words here and there since I started on it and for a while I thought it was because I’m tired with the new baby and everything else going on in my life. Then I realized this always happens to me on short stories I see as having potential to be great. I’ll have an idea in my head and when the right things click and I can start seeing it as a story, I think about it and stew about it and the words dribble out. This is always strange because beginning things has never been a problem. But with these certain short stories, I know I have something important and want to make sure I get the most out of it.

So with this story I have four different openings, none of which I used when I started the story for real. I’d write a few words and if I liked how they sounded I’d write a few more. Then I’d think about it for a while, deciding where to go next. I don’t have an ending in mind yet, but I wanted to at least know what was going to happen to the midway point of the story. Now I have that, and, as I’ve said, I’m starting to hit a rhythm. I’m using a lot of the material I gathered from my recent family trip to Las Vegas, plus my early, conflicted feelings about being a father and the kind of things I was shocked I was even capable of considering doing with my kids. My wife is not pleased when I tell her about the story, but I’m working through it anyway.

Now I’ve got a decision to make that I think will be the most important I’ve made for this story. I’ve got things figured out up to the midpoint of the story, but after that I’m conflicted. The opening few scenes are slow burning, quiet, and semi-realistic. But a few ideas have presented themselves to me that I think could be exciting but would change the mood of the story. This gets to the heart of what I think is one of my biggest issues in writing fiction: raising the stakes. I like small stakes, little moments, and epiphanies. I work in a genre that relies heavily on big stakes, life altering choices, and grand spectacle. I don’t have any problems coming up with ideas like this, but I have problems executing them successfully.

One of the reasons I switched away from writing detective novels and moved to more absurd, humorous crime novels, was so that I wouldn’t think some of my ideas were too ridiculous to work. And for the most part I think I was successful. The book is still mostly built on small stakes, and small-scale, choices, but its written in very broad strokes, and is fast-paced, and has a few gun fights. But with this story, I still have to figure out what I want it to be.

I initially thought it was going to be a darker character study of a father and his son, but as I pondered that and thought it out, I realized there was no real crime in it and would fall apart at the end. So I had a couple of cool ideas, a couple of eh ideas, and one tricky idea that somebody else could probably pull off spectacularly…but not me. I’ll probably have to try a few different things, but it will be a nice way to clean my brain out and keep me occupied while I wait back to hear about my novel. If I can get everything to work properly, I think this might be the best story I’ve ever written, if not, well, maybe I can add a donkey to it.

The Short Con

I just bought a copy of the new BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES collection and I’ve been reading through it along with the 2008 collection and LAS VEGAS NOIR collection. I’m enjoying the short form quite a bit, as I’ve been out of reading and writing it for a while. That wasn’t the case for several years though. The book I just finished is the best book I’ve written so far, and one I’ve wanted to write for more than three years. But it wouldn’t have happened without that first copy of BAMS I picked up in 2004 and my subsequent introduction to online crime fiction. I honestly can’t remember if I’ve written about this here or not before, but I suspect most people have the same shitty short term memory as I do and won’t go back through the archives looking to prove me wrong.

So I’d written a few short stories before I attempted my first novel and none of them were good. They were either failed twist ending stories or failed private detective stories. I think I wrote 4 or 5 of them. Then I wrote my first novel. After spending several years on that, I needed a change. I wanted to write something darker, something that was a crime story but really a mystery. Around this time I was going back to grad school for creative writing and trying to have it both ways with literary respect and the wide audience of crime. I banged around for a bit until I came across that first copy of BAMS. I was shocked to find that mixed in among the stories from stalwart crime magazines and anthologies were literary journals like The Gettysburg Review, Zoetrope, Tin House, etc. I was also even more shocked to find a smattering of online fiction. And it was GOOD. I found Scott Wolven, Neil Smith, Tribe, Victor Gischler, Sean Doolittle, and all these guys who were doing great stuff and publishing online.

After immersing myself in all of this for a year or so I felt ready to try my hand. I wrote a story called BREAKFAST ANYTIME and I was off. I spent the next three years focusing almost entirely on short crime stories, publishing almost all of them online. I tried new voices, new tricks, new styles, and gradually moved myself from the light hearted detective stories I’d been writing to something more akin to my own twisted self interest. I used a lot of dark humor, a lot of cartoon violence, and more swearing that Fleet Week and a Biker convention rolled in one. And I loved it. The more I worked at it, the better I got and I started gaining some recognition. People knew my name, liked my stuff, and picked me up for reprint anthologies and started paying me money.

That’s great. But after a while, when I decided to go back to writing novels, I went back to writing the same damn detective novels I was never very good at before. It took two completed, and three abandoned detective novels before I finally pried my head out of my ass enough to see the light and write a novel in the same style I’d been building and promoting online. That book, MURDER BOY, is loosely based on my short story from the Thuglit print anthology HARDCORE HARDBOILED and is probably my most popular story that doesn’t involve donkey sex. I love the book, and writing it made me feel complete as a writer like none of my other books had.

And now that I’ve got that book simmering, I want to return to the short form. While I’ve been gone, a whole new crop of guys like Frank Bill and John Rector and others have been coming up and making some noise. And for God’s sake, Scott Phillips has reemerged on the scene. I’m looking to stretch myself again and hopefully, this time, it won’t take me four more books to spread that knowledge to the long form.

My Life As A Con Man

For several years now, Bouchercon (The Annual World Mystery Convention) has been a nice way to track the progress of my writing career. At my first conference in Toronto, I was fresh off of being shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger and I had just started publishing storied in the online zines. By last year, I was on a panel and signed copies of several anthologies I contributed to. I was also known as a blogger and the editor and publisher of Demolition. But it’s also become an increasingly interesting place to track the progress of my personal life. At my first conference, I was living alone in a rooming house in Ann Arbor and by last year I was married with my first child. This year I had a second child tagging along. Interesting indeed.

As happy as I was to have my whole family there with me, it turned out to be a less than inspired decision. The original plan was for me to go by myself, but the day before I was supposed to leave, I felt guilty for leaving my new little family and wife alone while I went off to have fun. So I managed to talk my wife into thinking it would be a fun little family vacation. And for a majority of the trip it was. We wandered the wonderful mall, ate at the food court, and dined at the Hard Rock Café. But the days bookending it were kind of a mess.

We ended up leaving late Thursday night and by the time we rolled into Indianapolis around 4am, Spenser decided he’d had enough sleep and wasn’t too inclined to go back to sleep. So nobody slept well that night. And then, by late Saturday night, he had a nasty cough and a fever, so we packed up everything and left around 3am. Well, at first it was just Becky packing up and Spenser running around in his diaper and I’m half convinced that if I wouldn’t have woken up they would have left me there.

Like I said though, for most of the time I was happy to have them there with me, but was it really necessary for me to even be there myself? I definitely think so. This business, more than anything else, is about advocates. For any writer to break through the crowd they need to get people on their side pushing for them. Agents who will talk them up, editors who will move their submission to the top of the pile, and authors who will write blurbs and make recommendations to editors and agents, and booksellers who will handsell the book and readers who will seek out the book. And there’s only one place to come into contact with all of those people at once, these conventions. So over conversations about blues music, cat clothes, baseball, and any number of other topics not related to publishing I cultivated advocates for me an my novel. Every good thing that’s happened to me in my writing career so far can be traced back to a conversation or a meeting at a Bouchercon.

So now I’m done with the latest book for a time being, and there’s a couple of things I want to work on. One is right here, reactivating this blog. I’ve missed it, missed working through issues in my life and exposing the minutia of my life to mass consumption. I’m also going to work on short stories which is something I haven’t done in more than a year. I have one dark story I want to write that I think will be a nice way to get my name back out on the zine scene, and then another, more mainstream crime story, I’d like to submit to Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Magazines.

I don’t have the brain capacity for a proper conclusion with witty commentary and larger social links to my life, so I’ll close with a shout out to those who have made my prior conference experiences such a treat, but that weren’t able to come this year: Sarah Weinman, Jennifer Jordan, Dave White, and John Rickards (who damn well better get over here soon).