#ThrowbackThursday: Happy B-day to White Wolf

Two monsters studied one another, and for them, the war was over.

White Wolf released on this day six years ago. How has it been that long? 

The road to the first Sons of Rome book was long and paved with self-doubt and heaps of necessary patience. It was an idea that first germinated when I was still in high school. Its first characters were Fulk and Anna, and Val and Mia. I didn't then know how those four characters fit together within the larger narrative, but when I played with them on paper, I was running two parallel storylines that I hoped to some day converge. Val was always a vampire, and always Vlad's brother, but in my earliest drafts, Fulk was a demon instead of a werewolf, though always the First Baron Strange of Blackmere, a delightfully real nobleman listed in the annals of British aristocracy. 

I never managed more than a page or two; mostly, I was jotting notes, daydreaming, and collecting aimless plot bunnies in spiral notebooks. After I graduated college, and started my blog, I attempted several times to begin the series, in a variety of ways: efforts that all stalled out before I'd made anything like progress. Something was missing. Some vital piece of the puzzle that would click everything into place. The project had become monstrous in scope in my mind, and I couldn't figure out how to attack it. I needed an order of operations. 

White Wolf, and all its characters, chiefly Nik and Sasha, proved to be that missing piece. Not only did I quickly fall in love with them, and feel the need to tell their stories, but Alexei and the Romanov/Muscovite/Third Rome storyline proved to be an essential and galvanizing building block of the overarching plot of the whole series. By the time I was halfway through the first draft of White Wolf, my vision for Sons of Rome was complete, if daunting, and I knew I had something special on my hands. 

This series is my intricate and convoluted love letter to vampires, to wolves, to magic; to Gothic romance, and Classic horror, and epic fantasy sagas. It's bloody, and violent, and spans literal centuries. Not just a "few of my favorite things," but all of them.

The first four books are available, and book four ends on a positive, uplifting, satisfying conclusion, opposed to a cliff hanger, which is a good thing because I don't know when I'll return to this world. One day, I tell myself. After all, I haven't had the chance to introduce Richard, yet. And there's a certain pantheon of old gods waiting its turn as well. 

One day.

Until then, Happy Birthday to White Wolf, and Happy Halloween, everyone! 

 

Happy Halloween Week: Tarry Town

 

The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind.

 

If you’ve ever read Washington Irving’s much-beloved short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” I think my writing style becomes self-evident. It has always been, and will doubtless always be, my favorite work of fiction. As a very little girl, I fell in love with the story itself, thanks in large part to Bing Crosby and the animated Disney featurette, which is not only adorable, but lovingly faithful, and, of course, exquisitely narrated. Save the musical numbers, almost all the audio is a straight-up recitation of the text.

As for the text itself, I quickly fell in love with it as well, when I was old enough to read it. Irving liked words. Scratch that: he loved them. His joy for language leaps off the page, and it’s clear, upon reading any of his work, that the telling was as much if not more fun than the plot of a story. All of his stories are, in fact, rather simple; it’s the execution of them, their onion layers, their asides, their backstories, that make them most interesting.

Given it’s baked into my imagination, I’ve found myself wondering, this Halloween season more than those previous, if I was always destined to be a verbose and elaborative writer, that it was some latent instinct with regard to storytelling, even in my earliest, kindergarten attempts, and if that’s why I’ve always loved Irving. Or if my obsession with this story from an early age shaped the way I would eventually write as an adult. Bit of a chicken and egg situation, honestly, and I may never know the answer.

In any event, this is my annual “I love Sleepy Hollow” post. And speaking of: though I generally dislike film adaptations of books, and I especially don’t like creative license being taken too far, Tim Burton’s 1999 film Sleepy Hollow is absolutely perfect, and also the perfect Halloween watch. I’m not even a Burton fan, but the way he managed to capture the vibe, and even a few frame-for-frame shots from the animated short, and spin them into something darker, truer, and more sinister, in which Christopher Walken plays the Horseman, and it’s absurd, but it’s awesome…it’s a feat, let me tell you. The musical score, the sets, the coloring, and, most especially, the grisly practical effects, outshine most modern movies. And the riding! The horse is gorgeous, and whoever’s riding him did a beautiful job.

Happy Halloween, fellow pedagogues.

In one part of the road leading to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.

~*~

The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means.

#TeaserTuesday: Better and Deeper and Truer

Lord Have Mercy: The Complete Novel

“I think it was right sweet,” Devin said, on the porch of Walsh’s old place out by the train tracks. Night had fallen, a net of stars hanging suspended above them, and the last train had rumbled past five minutes ago, its roar now a distant, shrinking echo like far off thunder. An open cooler sat between them on the edge of the porch, where their legs dangled over into the weeds, loaded with ice and beer. “Chivalrous. Perhaps heroic…if you’re in the mind to give the boy hero credit.”

“We won’t go that far.” Mercy set his empty can aside and reached for a fresh, dripping water in fat, dark discs onto the porch boards. “But it was – a not shitty thing he did.”

Devin snorted.

“Surprising,” Mercy added.

“What? That he’d do something brave for his brother? Come on, then. You’re not surprised. My boys are at each other’s throats all the time, but they would have done the same.”

Mercy skated him a look.

“That’s right,” Devin said, grinning as he lifted his can. “I’m paternal now.”

There was a lot to be said in response to that, but the growl of approaching motorcycles snared both their attentions.

Devin hopped to his feet, more agilely than a man his age should have been capable. “Wait here,” he said, setting his beer aside and rounding the porch toward the overgrown gravel driveway, gun appearing in his hand without any visible reach for one.

“Sure thing, Papa.”

Mercy caught the grin he tossed over his shoulder before he melted out of sight.

The bikes arrived with a symphonic grumble, and then were silenced. Voices floated around the cabin, masculine, familiar, soothing, even if he couldn’t understand the words. And then he heard running footsteps crunching over the gravel, racing around the cabin, heading toward him.

Mercy set his beer down, stood, and turned, and when Ava came flying around the corner, – he’d known it was her right away, the strike of her shoes on the gravel, the speed at which her long legs carried her to him – for a moment, the past superimposed itself over the present.

She was eight and all knees and elbows, dark pigtails streaming behind her. She was ten, and shooting up again, her jeans turned to high-waters over the harness boots she insisted on wearing instead of sandals. She was thirteen, fifteen, seventeen and wondrous, and begging him to love her, which was ridiculous, because he already did, he always had, how could he not? She was twenty-two, and hating him, and that was okay, because he loved her enough for the both of them. And she was twenty-two, still, and marrying him, promising to love him forever, because of course she could, did, would, because their love had always existed, no matter its shape or its weight or the directions it took them; it was something patiently waiting for them both, star-destined and inescapable, labeled so quickly and wrongly by those outside of it.

Her smile was wide, but wobbly, and there were tears in her eyes, and she was reaching out before she got to him. She was thirty, and she’d borne three of his babies, she loved him still, they loved each other better and deeper and truer than they ever had.

They’d been apart four days and it had felt like years.

He caught her around the waist and tucked her under his chin, and the others who’d come were kind enough to hang back out of sight, until Ava had whispered, “Hi, baby,” and blotted her eyes dry on his shirtfront.

“Hi, baby,” he echoed, and rubbed her back until she stopped trembling.

 

Happy Halloween Week: Edgar Allan

 

There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

- "The Masque of the Red Death"

I love Halloween. How utterly uninspired and cliche of me for loving Poe as well, but here we are. 

I think the brilliance of Poe is the brevity of his short stories, and what he manages to accomplish within that limited narrative space. As someone whose skills lie in long-form storytelling, I'm always wildly impressed by a successfully executed short story. It's no easy feat to convey a wealth of conflict and sentiment in just a few-thousand words, but Poe not only managed it, he carved himself indelibly and forever famously in the landscape of American literature. Why? Skill, yes. But mostly because of the horror. Horror is affecting and memorable. 

I think there are readers who enjoy horror (me), and those who might not enjoy it, per se, but are both fascinated by it, and by the fascination it holds for fans. In either case, everyone's heard of at least one Poe story or poem, and even those who don't enjoy his work still felt some kind of way when they read "[T]ear up the planks! - here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!" There's something visceral and touching about the macabre; the contemplation of dark, unpleasant, or wicked deeds grips us with the same kind of fervor as love or heartbreak. True Crime wouldn't be such a runaway hit of a genre if not. 

Stylistically, Poe does two things that I think make his fiction effective. One, he throws the reader immediately into the narrator's deepest confidence. There's no slow intro, no convoluted backstory; in the stories that seem to be taking their time establishing setting, those paragraphs are pulling double duty: they're establishing the setting and vibe of the story, and they're also lulling you into a sense of calm so he can spring The Horror on you at the perfect moment. Some of his narrators, as in the case of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat," are truly horrendous people, but he presents their perspectives in a plain-spoken, unselfconscious manner that trusts the audience to come to the right conclusion without a lot of hand-holding or moralizing. 

And two: he punches you right in the face with The Horror, and then ducks neatly away without dawdling about with any sort of conclusion or lesson-learning. Just boom, look at this! And out. 

No one currently writes in Poe's prose style, nor should they: as delightful as it was/is, language has evolved and modernized, and a modern-set story written by a modern author is going to reflect the pose stylings of today. But the set up and payoff approach of his stories is something we still see in most horror writing. It's a formula that still works, as timeless as it is stirring. And his prose is inspiring and useful; while I wouldn't want to duplicate it exactly, his particular, handpicked approach to detail is a worthy area of study. 

I also happen to think that all of Poe's work is ripe for modern interpretation. Every one of his short stories and poems has the potential to become a long-form novel, TV series, or film, given the right approach, and a broad enough imagination. 

Spooky Reads: Vampires

 

I posted a Reel on Insta earlier in which I declared "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" my favorite piece of fiction, and the Headless Horseman my favorite monster of all time. That's why it, and he, will get a separate post to celebrate Halloween next week. 

When it comes to creature features as a genre, however, I'm a vampire girl all the way. The crumbling Gothic mansions, old-fashioned wardrobes, and ethereal beauty as a means to draw prey are all excellent. The angst inherent with immortality is chef's kiss. And, of course, the erotic overtones (sometimes subtle hints, other times delightfully explicit) that come with the blood-sucking territory. 

I've always loved vampire-focused fiction, but I didn't try my hand at writing it until 2017, when I started the Sons of Rome series. It took me until then to feel ready for it: to feel like my writing skills finally matched my ideas, and that I could flesh them out in the way I felt they deserved. 

Every author has his or her own unique vampire lore, and mine strays pretty far from the classic image of the vampire. Val and co. can walk in the sunlight, can reproduce genetically in addition to turning the willing and unwilling; vampires can be born, in my books, and age until they reach their physical peak. They must drink blood in order to stay vital, but they eat human food as well. I made most of my decisions because a good many of my vampires are real-life figures from history, and I couldn't have Vlad the Impaler or Richard the Lionheart sleeping in a coffin all day. My books won't suit anyone looking for a classic vampire experience: my vamps are strong, immortal, psychically powerful blood-drinkers who can slumber for long periods of time...but they also drink liquor, and smoke cigarettes, and feel pain. 

Writing that has made me miss them again 😢

Dracula is a classic for a reason, but the title of Favorite Vampires goes to the legendary Anne Rice's creations. If you want to write vampire fiction, I think Interview With the Vampire is necessary reading...though I challenge you to stop there. The Vampire Lestat is where you properly meet the Brat Prince, and Rice's Vampire Chronicles are his, more than anyone else's. He's certainly been an inspiration for me - not just with Sons of Rome, but across all my series. Every gremlin character I've written has a little sprinkling of Lestat dust along the top for flavor. 

#ThrowbackThursday: Nothing More

 

He said, “Everyone’s going to know, now.”

“Let them know.”

He arched a brow. “Your sister?”

She sighed, because it did smart a little, the idea of having to do the walk of shame in front of Cass – but she was determined to be an adult about it. About him. “She’s seventeen, not four. She has to understand that I have–” A love life, she almost said. A boyfriend. “You,” she finished, instead, and something shivered across his face, impossible to parse, before he went grim and nodded. Puffed on his smoke.

“Fine.”

She went to the ensuite to brush her teeth and check that the collar of her gown covered any love bites. He joined her, stony-faced and composed once more, hair tied back in a low knot, wearing last night’s clothes, since his bag was presumably elsewhere in the flat. Raven debated going out ahead of him, providing at least the semblance of having slept separately – but dashed the thought. If everyone was going to know, she might as well leave little doubt.

“Ready?” she asked him.

He made a face. “You sound like we’re going to war.”

“Darling, with my family, war is always a distinct possibility.” 

 

I could say that if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't make all the Dartmoor books so expansive and interlaced. Shorter, snappier standalones that could be skipped or read out of order. 

I could say that...but it wouldn't be true. My favorite aspects of these books are all the connections, carry-throughs, and messy entanglements. I really enjoyed Nothing More, and it, like all the other books in the series, lays groundwork for future messiness. I originally planned to tackle Cassandra next, but that feels like a Bad Idea at this point. 

Anyway: if you skipped this one when it released, and wondered who the heck Toly was in LHM, this is his and Raven's book - as much as any book in this series belongs to one couple. It's also about Tenny, and Reese, and Devin, and Ian, and the New York Dogs, and the Kozlov bratva. It's about families: families worth being loyal to, and families who scar you deeply. It's about second and even third chances, and how, sometimes, even when we know better, it's impossible to let go of bonds from the past. 

Fun fact: Toly first appeared in The Wild Charge, guarding the elevator in the Ritz. He then had a guest starring role in Long Way Down, before finally landing his own headliner role. His and Raven's first real interaction was in TWC, when he hustled her away from Times Square after she watched Ian [redacted] Jack Waverly on the taken-over big screens. 

You can check the "Nothing More" tag for debriefs and reflections on the novel. 

#Workshop Wednesday: A Tailored Approach

 

Y'all probably think that I stretch the horse riding/book writing metaphor to breaking point, but I'll never get over the similarities. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" No, "Why is a horse like a novel?" Writing and riding aren't that many letters off, after all. 

Today's metaphor is: the moment you start swinging words like "always" and "every time" around, an exception is going to smack you in the face. Figuratively in the case of fiction. Literally, sometimes, when it comes to Kit Kat. In both cases, tailoring education yields more positive results. 

In my tenure as barn manager, I worked with lots of little ones. Weanlings and yearlings, just like human children, need lots of education and hands-on work. Because horses are prey animals, those early years require lots of what we call desensitization. There's a boogey man in every doorway, and a monster lurking in the depths of each shadow. An empty shavings bag caught by the wind is a ghost, and a tipped-over bucket is going to eat them. Don't get me started on blankets: absolutely deadly. It's important to introduce them to all sorts of stimuli, from flags and balloons, to tarps, poles, fake flowers, umbrellas...anything they could conceivably encounter that might spook them. Not only does this build confidence and reduce the likelihood of spooks and bolts, but it builds the trust between horse and handler, too, and sets you up for future success. 

Enter Kit Kat. 

Some of it can be chalked up to having a Quarter Horse Brain™, but mostly she's just naturally fearless. Even at six months, I could tell she was going to grow up to be a Boss Mare. She's confident, thoughtful, and walks toward scary things rather than shying away from them. This is amazing! She's not afraid of fireworks, gunshots, tarps, poles, other animals, or plastic bags of all shapes and sizes. But it means my training approach has to be tailored for her needs. It's not one size fits all: the same approach won't work with every horse. 

She's what you'd call a "pocket pony." She wants inside your pocket. Rather than trying to get free, she's usually trying to get on top of you, so our groundwork has been all about establishing and respecting boundaries, and yielding to pressure: laterally and backward. She's sharp, which means once she's done something, she gets bored with repeating it over and over, so I have to mix things up every day. Her default setting is a strong side-eye that just screams "why are we doing this again? How lame." This week, I introduced a little incentive with treats, and it's been a game changer. I know that there are old school cowboys who would say I should make her, rather than encouraging her with cookies, but so long as she's respectful about it, I'd much rather develop a positive working relationship than one built on force. 

That's a long way of saying: it's important to assess the individual needs of a horse and adjust the work accordingly. I need to work on building Kit Kat's flexibility and topline strength, and don't need to focus on scary boogers as much. 

Here's another for-instance: years ago, I was having a Coke at the picnic table after a ride and chatting with some of the boarders. One of them, a very sweet lady without much riding experience, asked me about my ride, which she'd watched from the barn. "How did you know to do a circle down here?" she asked. 

I said, "After the extension down the long side, I could feel that he was getting too strung-out and hollow-backed, and I needed to pull him back, ask for the bend in the circle, and get him to slow down and come back under himself so he could sit down behind."

She said, "But how could you tell he was hollow?"

I don't remember my exact answer, but I do remember struggling for a beat or two, because for me, that had become as second-nature and effortless as knowing when to apply your foot to the brake pedal of a car: I could feel the change in my horse's gait and carriage and reacted accordingly to rebalance him so he was moving in a more positive way. Years of practice and education meant I knew how to rebalance him. But the boarder's knowledge was much more rudimentary, and it was clear that she would need lots of practice in developing a "feel" for her horse's movement before she would automatically know how to help him during a ride. 

She and I couldn't have taken a joint lesson because we were working at different skill levels and had different training needs. A tailored approach wins the day.

I promise I'm getting to the book part of this (very) extended metaphor. 

I was a member of RWA for only one year, from 2015 to 2016. I didn't renew my membership because there were several aspects of the organization I didn't care for. I know it's overgone a total overhaul, and I'd be curious to know what its environment is like now. It was too high school cafeteria, you-can't-sit-with-us when I was there. Someone at a meeting actually handed my bookmark (with my website and contact details) back to me when I said that I was self-published. She didn't want to be seen speaking with me. 

But I was struck by something at one meeting. We were listening to a presentation about different character archetypes, and it was a good presentation. We had handouts and we were taking notes, and I was breaking down Ava's archetype on my worksheet. A member raised her hand with a question, and when she was called upon, she said, "I'm having trouble coming up with names for my characters." The speaker was visibly baffled. Other members chimed in with suggestions, and a side discussion broke out about character names, and the presentation stalled out for a little while before returning to topic. 

The thing that struck me was how different the needs of the members were. I was in the middle of writing The Skeleton King at the time, and someone sitting two rows up was in the conceptualization stage of her very first story. 

There were hundreds of members, each one in a different phase of authorhood. On one hand, this makes for a diverse and rich environment, and each member can contribute a new perspective on the unifying goal of writing professionally. But on the other hand, it meant that most of the monthly lecture topics were very middle of the road: generalized, without providing deep dives for those just starting, nor those at a more advanced stage who were working toward creating overarching series storylines or juggling strong secondary or tertiary storylines. This is of course not anyone's fault, but it left me wishing there were more resources, and that there was a broader range of resources so writers at every level could learn something valuable. 

Wouldn't it be cool if there were more intimate writing education/mentorship groups within an organization like RWA? Wipe away all that close-to-the-vest competitiveness and offer real instruction. Groups where first-time authors could work from earliest concepts through brainstorming, story mapping, and prose writing with the help of a mentor? And groups where more seasoned writers could tackle more specific issues? 

The answer to this, I'm sure, is to form friend groups within the larger group and help each other. This happens, and this is great, peer review is certainly helpful, but I'm thinking of a more structured course. Or courses. Something for writers who don't have the time or finances to enroll in college classes, but who still want to enhance their writing through literature study, writing exercises, and one-on-one work with mentors. Deep dive analyses, grammar and punctuation refreshers, and self-editing guidance. 

I think it would be cool. Probably something like that does exist, but it would be wonderful to see it incorporated into a big organization. 

Just some thoughts I had this evening while working with my girl. 

#ReadingLife: The Hunter

 

"D'ye know the word 'outlaw'?" Mart asks the table in general. "D'ye know where that comes from? Back in the day, a man that done the dirt on his people was put outside the law. If you could catch him, you could do whatever you chose to him. You could tie him up hand and foot and hand him over to the authorities, if you wanted. Or you could beat the shite outa him, or hang him from a tree. The law didn't protect him anymore."

It's surreal to know that Tana French has only penned eight novels, given the space they take up in my mind; that corner dedicated to admiring the work of wordsmiths, and learning what I can from master craftsmen. And I don't use the term master craftsmen lightly. There are plenty of writers who can structure a correct and informative sentence. Who can roll those one after the next into cogent paragraphs. Who can stack those into highly readable pages, over the course of which plot unfolds, and characters develop. Before you know it, a whole book's been birthed. But it takes a whole other kind of creative to transmute the elements of a decent novel into a work that is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Tana French has such a keen understanding of human frailty and resilience that her writing elevates even the simplest of situations into razor sharp, goosebump-inducing moments of dread, expectation, and a sort of Irish melancholy so sweet it stings as well as soothes. Every character is so nuanced, so perfectly gray, that you never hate any of them, even if they deserve it, even if they're working against our protagonists. From the first page, you understand that you aren't reading a morality play; there is no agenda here, political or otherwise. These are stories about people, their hearts messy, French's handling of their tales spun with a deft hand. Hers is a lush but particular skill with prose. 

The Hunter is her first multi-POV novel, which I thought might blunt the mystery, but, as ever, she held her cards close to the vest until the very end, the reveal as satisfying as it was unremarkable in its execution, and all the more artistic because of it. 

It's rare for me to find French readers in the wild, and so I'll keep pounding the drum. If you haven't read her work, you should. I am, as ever, thankful that her first novel, In the Woods, caught my eye in a Borders bookstore more than a decade ago. I've always said that I want to write like her when I grow up, and that still holds true today. If I get back into writing, it'll be in no small part thanks to her inspiration. 

#ReadingLife: The Watchers

Today's spooky read is The Watchers, by A.M. Shine, and it hit my radar earlier this year thanks to the trailers for the film adaptation - which I have not watched, but plan to soon. Shine is Irish, and the novel is set in Connemara. His author bio states that he's passionate about the Gothic horror tradition, and The Watchers is certainly Gothic. In the true sense. Today, the term "Gothic" most often references the aesthetic of a novel, but, more substantively, it refers to "the battle between humanity and unnatural forces of evil." A bleak and hopeless landscape is of course a part of the overall haunting atmosphere of this genre. 

The novel opens with a stinger prologue that immediately raises all the fine hairs on the back of your neck. We then cut to our heroine, Mina, a struggling artist who makes most of her money at the gambling tables, and who spends her days and evenings at a local pub sketching strangers. She's a watcher herself. She takes a job from a barfly friend: transporting a parrot to a buyer in Connemara. She never reaches her destination. Instead, her car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, her phone dies, and after a cold night spent in the car, she sets off on foot...into the dark and scary forest. 

Pro tip: don't ever go walking through the dark and scary forest. 

What follows is genuinely terrifying and pulse-pounding at moments. I, admittedly, read the bulk of the book in the daylight, and saved less hair-raising books for just before bed. There's two twists, one I anticipated...and which turns out not to be as twisty as I expected. The horrors are not, in fact, manmade. I was anticipating a Cabin in the Woods situation, but it turns out nightmares are real. Yikes. And the second twist is The Sixth Sense-worthy, and very cleverly woven into the narrative. The type that makes you reflect back on all that came before with an "ooooh. Okay. I can see it now." And which doesn't make you feel foolish, only delighted by the author's cunning subterfuge. 

Without spoiling too much, I'll recommend this novel to anyone who likes a dose of fairytales and folklore with their horror, and who enjoys the Irish flair for lushly drawn environments and introspective characters. 

Growing Season/Harvest Season

 

Last year, I planted twelve different varieties of pumpkin in lightweight grow bags. I started them on the driveway, where the hot concrete could help with germination. Once the leaves unfurled, I toted them all across the yard and set them up on the cattle panel planting tunnel, so the vines could crawl up and over the wire. I tended them through the summer and into the fall: watering, feeding, helping their tendrils find the best grips on the cattle panels. I hand-picked the stink bugs off one-by-one, crushing them between gloved thumb and forefinger, and scraping the eggs from the undersides of the leaves with a linoleum knife. Even so, I wasn't able to harvest a single pumpkin. 

Georgia isn't the ideal growing zone, for starters. It was too hot, and, being planted above ground in containers, and with the vines growing vertically, rather than along the ground where they could root and draw moisture, it became impossible to water them enough. The bugs, manageable at first, multiplied in the thousands and overwhelmed everything. The few pumpkins that began to ripen were besieged by boring caterpillars that killed them from the inside out. It all proved - pun intended - fruitless. 

My fledgling, sometimes sad efforts toward growing food and flowers have highlighted the startling truth of farming: we as consumers take the time and effort of it for granted. For instance, I have ten little Meyer lemons on my lemon tree this year, and it's taken them all summer to ripen - and they're still not ripe. Then think of going into the grocery store and buying ten lemons to heap in a bowl for a kitchen photo shoot. I think of all the deformed and bug-eaten dahlias this year that weren't worth cutting; I think of the entire plants that rotted thanks to a rainy spell and died, tubers and all. And then I think of buying a cheap bouquet at Kroger without a second thought. Months of effort and hard work and back pain, all ephemeral, disposable, and taken for granted. 

Obviously, growing food and flowers is more than worth that effort, whether it's a small patch of garden in your backyard, or a massive lemon grove that provides citrus to millions. Humans need food, need flavor, need beauty, no matter how fleeting. 

Art is a different kind of sustenance, but the soul is no less hungry than the stomach. That's the thought that has powered me through those glum spells when I've wondered, in this age of ghostwriters and AI, if putting a year's worth of effort into a novel is worthwhile. Some days I think yes. Artistically, if my efforts offered a bit of comfort or joy to even one person, then the work was worth it. But there are days when I think it isn't. Does hard work pay off? I don't know. 

But I know that there are seasons for growing, and seasons for harvesting. The harvest is when you learn what you've done right, and how you need to change your routine for the next year's growth. This harvest has made some things very clear, and I suppose that's all we can ask of seasons such as this. 

#ReadingLife: The Twisted Ones

 

Sharing more spooky reads! This one's a personal favorite that I read back in 2019, and which I still think about every time I hear a woodpecker tapping away on a tree trunk. 

Because I'm a masochist, I gave myself a firm Christmas Eve release date for Golden Eagle. I wanted to give myself a full month for editing and proofing, which meant that, with Halloween looming, I was sweating that deadline. I still had the entirety of the multi-cut-scene action finale of the novel to write, and mental exhaustion set in hard. One of my strategies in that kind of situation is to keep a book that I'm reading at my desk, and work in short bursts. I write a few hundred words, then pick up my Kindle and read a few pages. Instead of the drag of checking email or scrolling social media, reading fiction in this instance helps keep the brain muscles working, and enables me to power through high-octane chapters. In 2019, I downloaded The Twisted Ones on a whim, and it helped me finish the office building/Ingraham Institute showdowns in Golden Eagle. It also became one of my favorite horror novels. 

T. Kingfisher's prose is a deft blend of casual, intimate, and literary. Colorful and lyrical descriptions are brought down to earth through the immediate familiarity her first-person narrators establish in the opening paragraphs. It's a kind of comfortable intimacy that persists through the course of the novel, and which makes us terrified for the main character - "Mouse" in this instance - as the familiar and the quaint and the safe give way to gasp-inducing horror. Kingfisher is good: she's clever but doesn't need to flex those muscles in a braggadocious way; her writing is easy. You slide into it right away and never want to leave. Best of all, and a rarity in horror fiction: her characters are likeable. The mains, yes, but the supporting cast, too. 

I won't offer spoilers in case you want to go read the book (and you should!), but the basic premise is that our main character, nicknamed Mouse, inherits a junk-filled house after her great-uncle dies, and she makes the trek with her dog out into the woods to start sorting through the detritus of his hoarding streak. Initially, the unsettling occurrences can be chalked up to a new, unfamiliar place, and the typical noise characteristic of all forests. But things quickly go sideways from there. (Like I said before, woodpeckers weird me out a little to this day, after reading the book.) Amidst the scares, Mouse makes friends with her kindly neighbors, and, no worries, the dog makes it to the end; that's one spoiler I don't think you'll mind. 

Reading this book felt like stumbling upon a horror novel written specifically to meet my tastes: well-rounded, likeable characters, creepy-crawly atmosphere, legitimate scares, but a positive ending. As much as I love spooky stories, I do so hate dour or dire endings. I'm a weeny that way. 

This spooky season, I hope to read A House With Good Bones by the same author. I also want to recommend her novel The Hollow Places, which scared the heck out of me, and also gave me a whole new outlook on river otters (IYKYK).

#TeaserTuesday: Church People

 The following post contains spoilers for Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son, which you can grab here:

Kindle/Paperback

Nook

Kobo

You can also snag the complete novel, all four installments compiled, for Kindle and paperback:

Lord Have Mercy: The Complete Novel

It was quiet in the way of all churches, steps careful, voices hushed. But inevitably loud because of the sheer scope of the place: the high, vaulted ceilings and all its secret nooks and angles trebled each tiny sound into a constant wall of not-unpleasant white noise. A pair of old, stooped women were lighting candles. Two pews ahead and to the left, a young man sat with his head bent and his hands clasped, lips moving soundlessly in what looked to be fervent prayer.

Aidan had thought about praying, when he first sat down, but only because he’d been bowled over by the beauty of the place. Its blue-and-white check marble floors; its gold-set frescoes; its gleaming organ pipes as tall and awe-inspiring as the tubular towers of Oz. There was something…reverent…about the air in here. It smelled of candlewax, and linseed oil, but something rarified, too, that spooked him a little. Like when he was a kid, and Maggie had taken him into a fancy store, and told him, sweetly but firmly, not to touch anything. His boots had left muddy scuffs on the tile, and he was half-tempted to get down on his knees and mop the streaks up with his sleeve.

But he didn’t know how to pray. Other than a few desperate mental declarations of oh God at moments of crisis, he’d never called upon the man upstairs. Had never been to bible study, nor learned any of the hymns. His people were not church people – “church” meant club meetings, in his world. Mercy was Catholic, and doubtless could have offered guidance, but Mercy was still at the hospital, battling an infection.

Maybe it didn’t matter. Sitting here, resting in this place, was clarifying in a secular way, too. He hadn’t known when he first entered that his heart was pounding, but knew it had been now, as he felt it slow and steady in his chest, his breaths even, and deep, and unencumbered. 

In outlaw MC culture, official club meetings are called "church," and they take place in a special meeting room dubbed the "chapel." Throughout the Dartmoor Series, the fate of the club has been decided in a series of quiet, out of the way meetings between only a handful of members, but voted into practice at church. It's fitting, then, that Aidan hears three versions of the unvarnished, apolitical truth of the club, and his father's role in it, inside an actual church. 

In this scene, which is one of my favorites of the novel, Aidan entertains three visitors. Ghost, obviously, and necessarily, because this scene is about them, and the fragile, newborn attempt at something like an honest relationship between men - of equals - rather than father and son. But I didn't want to start with Ghost. 

I like the caution and intricacy of Ghost being three steps removed. Ian notifies Ava, who in turn notifies Ghost: Ghost knows he's made a mess of everything, perhaps irrevocably, and he's come to slink in quietly. Ava's perspective here was necessary, because she's the only other person who knows what it's like to be Ghost's child. She's always been more resilient than Aidan in that regard, but she's also colder by nature, and grew up with both parents; she doesn't have the maternal abandonment issues that have always plagued Aidan. 

Ian's presence is necessary, too. He loves Ghost, but his perception of him is wholly different than that of any Lean Dog. His line to Aidan is one I've been wanting to use for a long time. 

“Our perceptions of people are all relative, I suppose.” His gaze, though soft, drilled straight into Aidan with a force that left him wanting to sway backward. “It’s all about perspective. Ghost is perhaps not a good man, but he’s the best man I’ve ever known personally.”

#ReadingLife: Horror Movie

It's spooky season, and that calls for spooky reads. My most recent is a new release from a popular, but new-to-me author: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay.

In short: yes, I would recommend it for horror fans. It's brief, punchy, and manipulates the timeline to best effect to keep you curious and engaged and turning the pages. It also manages to build dread toward a certain turning point, and then completely subvert expectations when the promised scene finally arrives.  

But it's also very meta - as in too meta. The narrator's self-awareness borders on navel-gazing, and, while I believe this to be deliberate, that we are supposed to empathize, but not sympathize nor like him, I had my Jeff Winger moments while reading. 

I look at horror through two broad lenses. The horror is either the culmination of a character's actions and choices, or the horror is something external, an event or an affliction that happens to the character, and then drives the narrative from a reactive point of view. For an example: remember that old movie The Blob with Steve McQueen? The blob that falls to earth in a meteor is an external horror that preys upon the film's victims. Compare that to The Fly, where the horror is the direct result of ambition, hubris, and human error. 

All horror is most effective when it preys not just upon our instinctual, automatic fears of our environment, of oddities and the uncanny, but our fears of ourselves as well. Our insecurities, and jealousies, and personal failings. Short tempers, and prejudices, and past traumas. That's why I've never cared for slasher films: the horror is entirely external; terrifying, yes, but the internal horrors have to be manufactured by a false sense of security, or lapses in judgement: teenagers having sex in a car, turning down the wrong road, failing to look behind them. It's a senseless sort of violence - which of course is naturally occurring in real life, but which, in fiction, fails to provide satisfaction or something upon which to ruminate. 

Horror Movie is a story within a story: a script for a film within the story of the film's making, and the transformation from boy to monster unfolds in both narratives. It's a transformation that is wonderfully effective. It's a clever book, though it perhaps revels in this too much; in places, it's anything but subtle. 

The plot runs along two concurrent timelines, past and present. In the past, our narrator is a young, broke graduate in need of a job, approached by a college friend and her creative partner about a mostly-silent role in the indie horror movie they're filming. In the present, uploaded clips from the original, never-released movie go viral online, and a Hollywood reboot is in the making, set to use the narrator, in a few scenes, as his original "Thin Kid" character. The original script tells the tale of a group of four high school friends, one of whom is the Thin Kid. At the film's opening, his three friends lead him through the woods to an abandoned school building, where they take him to an empty classroom, put a mask on him, and force him to stay put. Over time, through rituals of bullying, dehumanizing, and even a little blood magic, the Thin Kid becomes an actual, physical monster, and seeks his revenge. 

It's a direct, and easily translatable metaphor, but the script includes the twist I mentioned earlier. The narrator recalls a particular scene that he describes as "wild," and context clues leave the reader with the assumption that it's a scene of wild violence. Monster carnage. I won't spoil it, but it instead is the cleverest scene in the whole novel. It breaks the fourth wall in a way that really works, and leaves us reflecting on all the ways in which we consume horror; to such a degree that it left me squirming and delighted at the same time. 

The main character's present-day voice is the narration of an audiobook, a conceit that seems absurd at the end of the novel, and leaves me asking - again, effectively - is this supposed to be an actual audiobook? Was it narrated from a prison cell? Or merely in our narrator's head? Does the final transformation take place in a real, physical sense? Or is it more masking? In that sense, the one-two punch of a revolting scene alongside an ambiguous outcome at the novel's end checks every horror box. It elevates the novel from a sequence of uncomfortable and unsettling events to an outright scare. 

While I liked the book, I can't say I liked any of the characters - and that's okay. In fact, I'd argue that's beside the point when it comes to horror. Sometimes you come across a horror novel in which you fall in love with the characters, but horror's main objective is to establish a sense of intimacy; to help you know the players in the novel, whether or not you like them or loathe them. And the thing about expertly-fleshed out characters we loathe...we usually find at least some kernel of our own truth within their stories. Be it a passing thought, or an action, or a reaction, every character in a horror novel offers us glimmers of the things we don't like about ourselves. That, then, is the most horrifying part of all. 

LHM: Beautiful

The following post contains spoilers for Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son, which you can grab here:

Kindle/Paperback

Nook

Kobo

You can also snag the complete novel, all four installments compiled, for Kindle and paperback:

Lord Have Mercy: The Complete Novel

Relief washed over Mercy as elation, and with it came the ugly dizziness of blood loss. He turned, and carefully lowered himself to sit on the edge of the dock, boots dangling over the edge. He lifted his arm – lead-heavy, no longer painful, only dragging, which wasn’t a good sign, he knew – so that Ava could sit down beside him, and tuck herself beneath it. She was shivering as though cold, despite the hot, sweaty feel of her cheek when she pressed it down on his shoulder.

“Good job, Mama.” He tried to pat her waist, but his hand didn’t want to cooperate.

In the water, Big Son had begun his death roll.

“You, too.” She turned her head and pressed her lips to his shoulder before resettling, her warm, familiar weight better than any drug against his side.

Mercy’s head felt cotton-stuffed, dry, and floaty, like he’d taken morphine. But it was pleasant. Dreamy. “He really is beautiful, isn’t he?”

“He is, baby,” Ava agreed. “Like you.”