Explicit Content

I had one blog post in mind this morning, but I spent the rest of the day working on my short story. I went back and forth with the content and a couple of readers offered their valuable suggestions. When I started the story I envisioned it as a nasty little piece of Las Vegas noir with a twisted premise (man goes to Vegas to dump kid after wife dies) and ple nty of sex, violence, and swearing. But as I thought about it and worked it out I realized there was more going on thematically and it had the potential to be one of my best stories.

When it was finished, I sent it to one friend who had been reading it as I was writing it and she thought I should send it to Ellery Queen for their Black Mask section. I thought maybe that was agood idea, I like the idea of being published in one of the major crime magazines and the money seemed nice. But as I read through the story, and read through the comments from another friend who had a story in EQ/BM I realized that to clean it up enough for EQ I would kill the spirit I had when I was writing it and I wasn’t willing to do it. So I put back in all of the swearing and car sex and felt much better about the story and sent it off to PLOTS WITH GUNS.

This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on EQ or AH. I have the first 2k written of a caper story about a computer repo guy that I think would be a good fit for either place. To inspire me, I found a couple of Dave Zeltserman’s stories from AH and EQ that he’s giving away for free at his website. I’m also in the process of hunting down Joe Gores’s short story collection of DKA Associates caper stories.

Then I have a flash story to write for Patti Abbott’s challenge and a superhero vigilante story I want to write. After that I suspect I’ll begin a new novel. But it feels good to have short stuff in the pipeline again.

I’m like that girl with the rack on Mad Men

I’ve bitched enough here about the jobs I’ve hated so I should probably take time to talk about how much I enjoy my job. I’m approaching my second year here which is really quite amazing. I’ve had a varied career history and most of the time I ended up leaving most jobs before I even made it a year. There are a couple of things I find interesting about my current job. The first is that it doesn’t have anything to do with what I went to college for.

My initial plan was to do something in the arts or find some way to write professionally. I remember being a senior in high school and finding out you could major in English instead of math or science or auto repair. I spent the next eight years bouncing from college to college studying literature, creative writing, and finally rhetoric and composition. After a brief experience substitute teaching, I knew I had no interest in being a high school English teacher so my next goal was to be a college professor. That never materialized, but along the way I was able to experience several other careers I thought were dream careers. I was a cops and courts newspaper reporter, I was a New York City publishing editor, and I even taught college writing. I quickly realized there were two ugly similarities between all of the jobs: They all paid shit and the all sapped my creative writing energy. After working in a creative field all day, the last thing I wanted to do at night was write some more. My productivity suffered. So now I’m in a job that’s not creative and my productivity is jolly.

The second thing about my job is that I’ve been training for it all along without even realizing it. I first came to the clerical field in 1996 as a community college student. I was looking for summer employment that wouldn’t bore me silly and Kelly Services was there recruiting. I had never really considered the clerical field before, but they had the cutest recruiter so I went on over and talked to her. She signed me up for an interview the next day at their office. I showed up wearing my nicest suit, resume in hand, and found them short staffed. To help out, I started answering the phones and they were impressed with how quickly I took to the job. So for the next six months I worked right there in the Kelly office getting a crash course in the secretarial arts. I had good computer skills which seem to be required of the more modern clerical workers and soon found myself training other temps on office software systems. Eventually though they found me a more permanent job with General Motors.

I’ve only come to realize in the last few years what a great opportunity that was and wish I hadn’t given it up. But I also realize that if I had stuck with it, I would have been let go like most of the other GM employees. For that summer though, I continued my crash course in the clerical field. I worked with some mid level managers and when their bosses saw what I could do I started supporting them as well. I was making good money, and had good hours. Being the stupid kid I was though, I didn’t want to be trapped as a secretary and wanted to go back to school to play on the newspaper and in the writing center. The next summer though, faced with the prospect of working at the grocery store I’d started off at 16, I went back to Kelly and they found me something. This pattern continued for the next many years. Kelly would find me a decent temp job, I’d do a good job at it, they’d hire me on permanently and then I’d quit right around my year anniversary.

Then I grew the hell up. I was about to get married and was sick of being poor and sick of being a nomad. I’d bailed on the soul sucking technical support job that Kelly started me off with, but was able to talk them into giving me one last shot. Now, two years later I realize what a blessing this job is. It started off as a routine secretary job doing a lot of typing and filing and copying. But by the time they hired me on permanently I’d made the job my own. Now I do a little grant work, some research support, and quite a bit of work with department financials. It’s challenging enough to keep me from being bored and my work is actually helping people. Every once in a while I think about maybe working on a Masters Degree in Health Policy or something to become a manager, but I’m not quite that responsible yet. I like my job, and I like writing when I get home for now. This is the first job I’ve had where I wouldn’t immediately quit the day I get a book deal. I can see the two coexisting nicely well into my future.

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).

Football and My Son’s Future

The Great American Pasttime is not baseball, it’s watching baseball on TV with your kid, or watching football on TV with your kid and looking at that cute little person and hoping they are so good at something they because wealthy and famous and can support your future retirement.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I don’t know why, but I’ve really been into watching baseball this year and I took Spenser to his first Tigers game already and tomorrow we’re going to a minor league baseball game in Lansing (it’s sad that I can’t remember if I already wrote about just getting interested in baseball this year. It sounds like something I’ve written but I haven’t posted much recently and I don’t think it was one of the few posts that I remember. I’m also to lazy to go and check the archive so we’ll just assume I already did and move on).

Even more exciting than baseball is the coming of football season. The Lions start training camp tomorrow and they have an open practice at Ford Field next Saturday that I want to take Spenser to. This is the best time to be a Lions fan. Nothing but potential. Oddly enough, this is the worst time to be a Michigan fan because we’re so eager to get on with the next season and get the stink of last year out of the air.

Last year was great because I got to watch a lot of football with Spenser, particularly college football. On Saturday mornings Becky would sleep late and I’d get up with Spenser and we’d watch ESPN College Game Day and then whatever good matchups were on. I’ll watch any college football game anytime. The plan was to take Spenser to a Lions game at the end of the season but that didn’t end up working out. Hopefully mommy, daddy, Spenser, and the new baby will get to go to a game this year. Gotta take advantage of that Under 2 Are Free loophole as long as we can.

So through all of this, I’ve been thinking about Spenser’s future. The Lions #1 draft pick quarterback Matt Stafford was interviewed in the Free Press this week and he talked about growing up watching Florida State football with his dad and I just think all of that is so cool. I hope I don’t end up pressuring Spenser too much one way or the other about his passions and his career choice, but I just hope he and the new baby share some of my own passions and none of my failures.

Needles and Kindles

I’ve been thinking about a few things and I’m not sure how much detail I want to go into until I start writing so that should be fun for you. If it turns out to be a truly excessive amount I’ll probably break it up into a couple posts.

First, Paul Guyot is always telling me to get my priorities straight so instead of leading with one of the two writing issues on my brain, I’ll start with the parenting issue: vaccines. With one baby under our belts and another quickly on the way, Becky and I have been receiving recommendations regarding vaccinating or not vaccinating our new baby. My initial reaction was, eh, y’all are nut jobs. The doctors treating my child are almost always parents themselves and if they thought there was any danger in it they’d let me know. Also, the hospital where our kids our born (and where I work) is always at the front of the pack when it comes to pediatric research. But some people made me feel guilty or made out like I was a bad parent if I didn’t research the topic a bit so I did.

It didn’t take long to reinforce my initial reaction. Almost all of the material supporting vaccinating children comes from peer-reviewed scientific journals, respected pediatric hospitals, and government agencies. With little exception, the stuff against vaccination came from nut jobs, non-medical experts, family members, celebrities, and disgruntled scientists using amateurish web pages with names like vaccinesarethedevil.com or dontmurderourchildren.com I won’t go into all of the specifics here but in summary, vaccines are safer than they’ve ever been, show absolutely no link to causing autism, and are the best bet to keep your child from suffering from some unholy oldtimey disease like whooping cough. If you’re interested in more research I direct you to the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia or the Vaccine Safety Page for Every Child By Two.

Now to the writing issues. First, I have a new short story out called “Word Games” in the anthology UNCAGE ME edited by Jen Jordan. It doesn’t seem to be in any bookstores near me but I got my contributor copy in the mail and that’s always a cool feeling. I had a little promotion going to try and build up some interest in the anthology, and my story specifically, but that seems to be dead in the water after getting only about six requests. This, mixed with my failures in the Great Kindle Experiment, has got me thinking about the future of writing. I do believe that e-books, and electronic publishing and all that new technoblooey is eventually the future of the publishing industry but there seems to be a catch. To truly make the most of the techno future of e-publishing you need to be established in traditional publishing first.

Almost everyone who has had any measure of success experimenting with the Kindle or electronic publishing did so because they already had an audience built through good old fashioned traditional publishing. Right now, and even more so into the future, any writer looking to make a good living from writing is going to have to have a platform that they can extend into a variety of other fields. And right now, the platform that still works best is to have novels published by traditional publishers. Once you have a book out there, even if you only get a miniscule advance for it, you can parlay that validation into gigs writing comics, or television, or movies, or video games or whatever other venue offers more financial incentive than book publishing.

From a writer’s standpoint, the best thing traditional publishing has going for it is respect. I suspect this will change in the far future, but I don’t see that change coming too soon. You can really see it with playwrights. It’s become nearly impossible for a writer to make a full living writing for the stage, but the bulk of the top names in theater bring in other income by writing for more lucrative, if not prestigious, mediums. It won’t be long before the same is true of novelists. Like I said, I really don’t know what sort of business model will emerge to compensate prose writers in the future once the weight of traditional publishing’s decades long stupidity finally causes it to collapse in on itself, but I know that for me, and writers of my generation, the best bet is to pursue a traditional publishing contract through traditional means and build a traditional audience, and then use that platform to branch off into more experimental or more lucrative markets.

Win A Date With Me and Scott Phillips…Sort Of

The new anthology from Bleak House Books UNCAGE ME is out this week. Edited by the lovely Jen Jordan, it features a stellar lineup of crime fiction all stars…plus me. I feel like Brandon Inge. Unfortunately, because I arrived late to the party, my story WORD GAMES didn’t appear in the galleys that were sent around to reviewers. So to make sure my story is given the full opportunity for the ripping I’m sure many are certain it deserves, I and Jen have devised a plan.

The first 25 people to email me at bryon (dot) quertermous (at) gmail (dot) com will receive a free copy of the pdf file of entire anthology that includes stories from Scott Phillips, Allan Guthrie, Christa Faust, Victor Gischler, J.A. Konrath, J.D. Rhoades, Declan Burke, Brian Azzarello, Steven Torres, Stewart Macbride, Simon Kernick, Patrick Bagley, Greg Bardsley, Stephen Blackmore, Tim Maleeny, Nick Stone, Martyn Waites, Talia Berliner, Maxim Jakubowski, Gregg Hurwitz, Blake Crouch, and more.

And what do you have to do to earn this free gift? Horrible, unspeakable things, right? Nope. Just review my story and one other story in the anthology on your blog or website or myspace or FaceBook or whatever electronic substitute you have for interpersonal communication and send me the link. I’ll post the links on my blog and FaceBook page which should also send traffic your way because I’m really very popular. The reviews don’t have to be happy happy ribbons and jelly beans, but if it devolves into slander I reserve the right to remove it.

Any questions? Get to requesting. Oh yeah, go out and buy a physical copy too. It’s just the right thing to do.

P.S. For those who already own the anthology, if you post a review of my story and one other story from the anthology, send me the link and I’ll put all of the names into a hat for an Amazon.com giftcard.