Author Neil Gaiman is trying to start a new Halloween tradition called All Hallows’ Read. I think giving away books for trick-or-treat is a bit cost prohibitive, but there are plenty of great short stories that work just as well. The foundation of the horror genre is built on the short story, after all. So I’ll post a few of my favorites for this merry, scary night. Enjoy.
The Masque of the Red Death — Edgar Allan Poe
The Damned Thing — Ambrose Bierce
The Judge’s House — Bram Stoker
One of my most memorable Halloween moments occurred when I was in fifth grade, so I would’ve been nine years old. The teacher assigned us to write a scary story for the upcoming holiday. She had but one rule: no blood. None of the stories could be bloody. I argued with her at length about that proviso, but she remained inflexible . . . which only meant I had to get creative to circumvent it.
She gave us a week to come up with our stories. The Friday before Halloween we all read them aloud to the class. The kids pushed their desks against the walls then everyone sat cross-legged on the floor in a semicircle, and in the middle was a stool for the various guest readers. The teacher closed the thick plastic curtains and shut off the lights to bathe us in darkness.
Each student took turns reading his or her story in front of the others, even using a flashlight under the chin for appropriate atmosphere. Finally it was my opportunity to sit on the stool. The tale I wrote was meant to be a sequel to Stephen King’s It. I don’t know why I made that choice, considering I’d neither read the book nor seen the movie by that point. All I knew of the novel was that it involved an evil clown, and clowns gave me the creeps.
I kept a few of the stories I wrote from my elementary schooldays: one a fantasy about leprechauns, another about a time-traveling scientist. But this particular piece has been lost to the ages, and I must admit that stings a bit. Fortunately I remember it vividly, so at least it hasn’t been entirely forgotten. The gist was thus:
A kid comes home from school one afternoon to find the house empty, so he watches some TV to pass the time. He turns on a scary movie — Stephen King’s It — and falls asleep on the couch. A violent thunderstorm passes by, during which an errant lightning bolt strikes the home’s TV antenna. The lightning magically activates the television, allowing the film’s killer clown to invade our world.
The clown kidnaps the boy and drags him into the TV set. Now trapped inside the television, the boy’s stranded deep within a complex labyrinth. He tries to uncover an escape route, hitting one dead end after another. And all the while he hears the clown taunting him, threatening his life. The jester’s sing-song voice grows in strength as he moves effortlessly through the maze toward the boy.
After a time the kid discovers an exit. He spies a window through which he’s able to view his living room. The only problem is that the portal’s above a wall and out of reach. The boy jumps up and gains a tenuous hold atop the wall. As he starts to pull himself up, the clown appears and seizes his foot to drag him back into the darkness.
At that point the kid grabs his trusty pocketknife, the one his grandfather had given him for his tenth birthday (*). He takes the knife and amputates the clown’s arm with a single slash (**). The clown screams in agony, his gaping wound spurting green pus (***).
After that the boy pulls himself back through the television and into the real world. The one-armed clown pursues him, trailing halfway through the TV set when the boy grabs a basketball and smashes the glass screen with it. The clown is defeated, reality restored. THE END (****).
About halfway through reading the story, I recall looking up from my handwritten pages. In that moment every person in the room was focused on my tale, a fictional world I had conjured from nothing but my imagination. Two dozen people, including the teacher, hanging on my every word to find out what happened next. That instant was frozen in my mind, seared like an after-image in my retinas.
That day I learned there was power in telling stories; more than that, there was magic. I don’t want to oversell that point because it sounds too bohemian for my tastes. But there is a certain level of truth in the matter, as any writer will tell you. Some stories effectively tell themselves, become greater than the sum of their parts. It’s rare when it happens, which makes it all the more special.
In retrospect that was a pivotal moment that helped point me in the direction of writing, even though I hadn’t been aware of it at the time. Let me add Happy Halloween; have a safe evening trick-or-treating. Don’t let any bogies snatch you away, and remember not all monsters wear masks.
____________________
* A line verbatim I still remember vividly from the original story.
** Because that’s how it would happen in real life, my nine-year-old self figured. No muscle or sinew, bone or cartiledge to worry about, just instant amputation.
*** Not blood, I pointed out to the teacher, gangrenous pus. I was so proud.
**** Once my classmates had a chance to share their stories, everybody voted on whose was their favorite, the scariest. Guess who won that year?
Two signings of note coming up. On Saturday (October 22) I’ll be at the Regency Park Library for their annual author fair. Stop by between 1 PM – 3PM to say hi or pick up any of my novels. The address is 9701 Little Road in Port Richey.
And a reminder that I’ll be the October author guest at the Progress Energy art gallery in New Port Richey. That’s tomorrow the 21st at 6:30 PM. Address is 6231 Grand Blvd in NPR; parking is across the street. I’ll be reading a selection from my latest novel, The Shadow Wolves, and answering any questions about writing, publishing or horror in general.
Hope to see you this weekend.
Today I reached one million words for my writing, a goal thirteen years in the making. In truth, I likely surpassed that millionth word some months ago, between blog posts, message boards, emails, school assignments and so forth. But in terms of my fiction output — short stories, novels, screenplays and the like — I’ve had to draw a line somewhere. Based on my most accurate estimates, I crossed that milestone this afternoon.
Now that number doesn’t mean anything to you; realistically, it doesn’t matter much to me either. It’s just that one million words was a long-term goal I had set for myself when I first began to write. It’s a nice round number for starters, so many zeroes, more of a psychological signpost than anything else.
Furthermore, I had read Ray Bradbury’s sage advice (from Zen in the Art of Writing, I believe) that all writers have a million bad words in them. I understood that by the point I reached that lofty amount, even Bradbury, one of my favorite authors, would be forced to consider me a “real” writer by his own definition. Sounds needy and insecure, right? Hey, I was thirteen at the time.
Over the years I’ve come to disagree with his numbers, though his original sentiment remains valid. All writers must flush the dreck out of their systems before they can mine the best storytelling material. I personally think one million words is too much. That translates to roughly four thousand pages, eight reams of paper, the equivalent of ten novels. The way I see it: if you don’t know what you’re doing by your eleventh book, you haven’t paid close enough attention.
I believe each author has his or her individual substitute for the Bradbury Benchmark. For many people it’ll be less than one million; for some lost souls it may be more. Looking back on my own bibliography, I’d say there’s a good (or bad) 350,000 words’ worth of stories, novellas and scripts that are utterly forgettable. Juvenilia from my earliest days in the trenches, when I was learning the mechanics of storytelling, from syntax and plotting to shaping words into pictures and balancing all the story elements together like pieces in an engine block.
Those first 350,000 words were the most important in my nascent writing apprenticeship, accounting for the first six years of work. That includes several published short stories and pieces that won me writing awards, not to mention an unpublished novel. Hence my first million, at least in Bradbury’s sense, was closer to one-third of that actual amount. After that I started producing tales that were uniquely mine, stories only I could tell because they spoke to issues that resonated within myself.
So tonight I shall celebrate in my own small way, by continuing work on my sixth novel. Here’s to the next million words . . .
In honor of Halloween’s impending approach and my October anniversary, this month I dropped the prices on my e-books. They’re all $2.99 through the end of the month, whereas they’re usually $3.99. I try to keep my prices affordable throughout the year, always less than five bucks a pop.
I caught up on the Doctor Who finale over the weekend. My guess that the Doctor was the impossible astronaut turned out to be wrong. I felt the ending was a bit of a cheat, but still very good. Good television keeps you guessing. I hate shows like Terra Nova, where you can see every plot twist coming because the producers don’t take any storytelling risks.
This month marks thirteen years since I began writing, October of 1998. I had scribbled a few stories before that time, always for school assignments (including a memorable Halloween one I’ll blog about later this month). But 1998 is when storytelling went from something for which I had a knack to a private hobby, then eventually something I got paid to do.
I wrote diligently for eighteen months before composing a story I was willing to let someone else see, something I felt was worth submitting to magazine editors. Although that particular tale never got published (a flash fiction piece, as I recall), I kept at it and pounded out story after story. Six months later I sold my first published piece to a horror anthology for professional rates. I was a fifteen-year-old freshman in high school. See, persistence does pay off.
To help celebrate this lucky thirteenth anniversary, I’ll be doing some special stuff throughout the month; I’m not ready to announce it all at the moment (probably next week). In addition I have another major milestone coming up this month, my first million words. Based upon my calculations, I’m not far from my millionth word. The number doesn’t mean much in reality, but it’s an important psychological barrier for me. I’ll speak to that later in the month too. So stick around and help me count down to one million.
Between the countdown, the sales specials and Halloween itself, October’s gonna be a busy month. And to top off everything, today I began my next book project. All I’ll say for now is that it’s a horror novel. More info forthcoming, once I have a large chunk of the book behind me.
This week (9/24 through 10/1) is Banned Books Week. Make sure to pick up a copy of something appropriately subversive. Might I suggest the paperback version of The Shadow Wolves? Or peruse the Top 100 banned books of the last decade.
I’ve done some housekeeping on the website, rearranging the furniture and whatnot. I updated the Blogbuster Tour tab with links to all my guest posts. Also updated The Shop section to include The Shadow Wolves. The e-book has been on sale for a couple months now, and I just received the first bundle of print copies. For those of you who pre-ordered the novel, rest assured that your copies will be autographed, packaged and mailed before week’s end. And thank you for your interest in my work.
Anyone else who wants a signed copy can buy one direct from the site. Amazon and Barnes & Noble can’t do that for you. (Of course you can always purchase unsigned copies from those retailers, as well as indie bookstores.) That goes for all my novels too; I make sure to always keep extra copies on hand so I never run out.
In other news, today Amazon announced the next version of its bestselling Kindle e-book reader. The cheapest model is presently $79. Now that the price point is under $100, it’s gonna be a huge seller this holiday season.
And yesterday Stephen King announced he’s working on a sequel to The Shining, titled Dr. Sleep. I’m re-reading that classic book at the moment, and I look forward to finding out what Danny Torrance is up to.
Tuesday was Roald Day Day, as is every September 13th. Had he lived to see the day, it would’ve been his 95th birthday. I’m a big fan of Dahl’s. Not necessarily his children’s work (which can be dark at times, no doubt) so much as his short stories. My favorite is probably “A Lamb to Slaughter,” a nasty little piece about a woman who murders her husband with . . . well, that would ruin the ending.
Years ago I watched a documentary about Dahl’s life. I can’t remember if it was on PBS or some cable channel; I can’t seem to track it down. As beloved a figure he was to generations of British and American school kids, his own children found him aloof and emotionally distant. He was also quite the spy and ladies’ man during WWII, as is recounted in the book The Irregulars.
Earlier this week I came across an articleI wanted to share about Dahl. He wrote a lot of his work in a small shed behind his house. The Roald Dahl estate is trying to save that cottage and make it a permanent fixture of their Dahl museum. The price tag is around $800K, which is pretty steep to move and restore a shed.
Roald Dahl with, I believe, a young Santa Claus
I thought this week’s episode of Doctor Who was brilliant. I didn’t expect to enjoy it nearly as much as I did, mostly because I’m not a fan of hard sci-fi stories. But a love story that transcends time and space is an irresistible hook. And while the ending was completely telegraphed, that was only because it was the right ending.
Last week’s show (“Night Terrors”) was a boring, padded mess. I expected to like it, since anything with creepy dolls is a winner in my book. However the pacing was way too slow, as if producers had thirty minutes’ worth of material that they stretched into an hour.
This was the polar opposite problem of “Let’s Kill Hitler”, which felt like a two-parter crammed into one episode. A fantastic storyline all told, minus the robot assassin controlled by tiny time travelers. I only wish it had more Hitler.
The most important thing “The Girl Who Waited” did was lay the foundation of the season finale, “The Wedding of River Song.” Keep in mind the Doctor showed up halfway through “Let’s Kill Hitler” in a tuxedo (one assumes the same he wore at the end of “The Big Bang”). So obviously as he was dying, he first took a jaunt in the Tardis to marry River like he promised.
Now the idea that there can only be one Amy in the Tardis at once is the crux of the entire season. It’s very Highlander; there can only be one. My guess for the finale is that the Doctor creates a parallel timestream by trying to defeat Madam Kovarian (or some such baddie). His actions create a paradox (pair o’ Docs?), wherein two Doctors can’t exist simultaneously. So one of them must die . . . at Lake Silencio, in the season opener. I suppose the Impossible Astronaut who kills the Doctor is the Doctor. But the Doctor from the “proper” timestream. Go back and read the debut entry from this blog: go on, I’ll wait. (The first entry, written the day after “The Big Bang” aired.) This notion goes back to the Doctor trying to assassinate himself, although it looks like the same Doctor rather than a future non-Matt Smith one. And his purposes are for good rather than evil.
We know the Silence are coming back in the finale, and that Silence will fall when the Question is asked. What question? Doctor who? My guess is that the question is his name. I’m pretty sure that’s what he whispered into River’s ear as he died, for she does the same when she meets the Tenth Doctor and their roles are reversed.
We’ll see how many of my predictions come true. I’ve had some hits and some misses in the past; I look forward to seeing how it all plays out.
Hope everyone had a nice Labor Day weekend. I wanted to share this picture, which is the author photo for The Shadow Wolves. As it’s a werewolf novel, this pic seemed like the logical choice.
And for my winners of the Blogbuster Tour, be assured your prizes are in the mail. I sent them off this morning, so you should have them in a week or so.
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