Brotherly Love

There are times I think that being a freelancer is just another way to say "I'm a workaholic." Without the security of a day job to pay my bills, I keep a constant running count of cash flow in my head (as well as in Microsoft Money). My goal is always to have the next month's rent in the bank by the 15th of the month. If I don't, I kick into a higher gear, take on some editing gigs, write some book reviews for paying sites, scour the internet for paying markets for short stories, check my amazon sales stats obsessively. (I know, that last one is not particularly productive but I find it soothing.)

When I'm in "get the rent" mode, I am a machine. I can work most people under the table. Except my brother.

My brother makes me look like a sloth. He's an attorney, a sole practitioner based in northern Virginia. He's so busy it's a wonder his head doesn't explode. And on top of that, he has a family and two cats. I know how busy he is so outside of copying him on every single email I send out with a link to a story, I don't ask him to read everything I write. But he does. Which makes me happier than I can tell you.

He may not always like my stories, but he reads them. And when I sent him the story I'm submitting to the Machine of Death 2 anthology (there's still time to submit, see guidelines here), he vetted it for proper courtroom procedure. (I've been called for jury duty twice but never served, and everything else I know about the judicial system I learned from watching trials on TV.) It's a much better story now. I got lucky with my family. I know a lot of people who didn't.

So this is a shout-out to my brother. Thanks Rob.

L.A. Nocturne

I just sold my first copy L.A. Nocturne in the UK. Very exciting.

My second fiction collection: Toxic Reality & Other Tales will be out at the end of the summer. Joy Sillesen of StonyHill Productions is designing the cover and editing and formatting the text. Her striking covers for L.A. Nocturne and Fairy Story have been a big part of their success. They really stand out.

I know I judge a book by its cover, and figure everyone else does too.

It's a numbers game

I am lately obsessed with numbers--my weight (lower is better), my followers on twitter (higher is better) and two lists of things have attracted my attention. I've been adding movies to my NetFlix database so the AI can make recommendations (they keep telling me I'll really, really, really like Speed, and I so don't believe them). I have close to two thousand films listed.

Meanwhile, over at GoodReads, I'm trying to fill out my list of books because I'm now obsessed with listing EVERY SINGLE BOOK I EVER READ. And that is a really large number. I've read several books a week since I was a kid and that hasn't changed. (Except nowadays, people PAY me to read books) I've only got 671 books listed on my GoodReads shelf. Around a quarter of what I listed for movies. (And it's not that I am ashamed of admitting I've read a lot of crap. I read Gothic novels as a teen, and moved on to romance. I read every vampire book ever written except the The Shiny Metal Grin.

I just can't remember every author. I went through my mother's Nero Wolfe books and her Agatha Christies and kept going. Robert Barnard and Liza Cody and more.

But what this enumeration exercise has done is remind me of all the writers I stopped reading but who haven't stopped writing. Why didn't I read all the George Chesbro novels about Mongo? (Because they started getting really odd and fanciful around number 7.) What about all those Elvis Cole books I haven't read? This is definitely a summer to catch up with old friends. And then I'll list the books on my GoodReads shelf.

The Mother of Crawly Things

Today is my friend Berkeley Hunt's birthday. As a writer, she is steeped in Star Trek and Lovecraft, and true crime and classic literature. The distillation of those influences is the essence of this incredibly creepy story, which originally ran in Astonishing Adventures Magazine.

Celebrate Berkeley's birthday by reading her story:

The Mother of Crawly Things

By Berkeley Hunt


Her brother Kevin could put curses on people. Maddie found this out when she was six and caught him eating the chocolate bunny out of her Easter basket. She hadn’t touched it herself because Kevin told her that if the real Easter Bunny saw her take so much as a bite, he would take back the basket and everything in it.
Their mom yelled at Kevin and held back his allowance. That was when he told Maddie he was an acolyte of the Devil and could put curses on people. At first Maddie thought he said “Coke Lite of the Devil,” and that didn’t sound scary at all. Besides, Kevin lied about lots of things. Like that he was the carnation of someone named Hitler and she should scream HEIL, which was German, when he said to. Mom had put a stop to that fast.
The curse Kevin put on her was that she wouldn't like any of Easter dinner. It was hard to believe. The smell of baking ham, sweet and smoky, already filled the dingy little house. It would come out of the oven glazed with yellow pineapple and be set on the table beside green beans in a nest of French’s Fried Onions, the yams she didn’t have to eat if she didn’t want to and all the crescent rolls she could eat. Best of all would be dessert, strawberry pie drowned in syrup redder than Christmas.
But Kevin was 14, a creature that lived in neither the child nor the grownup world but in the murk between. He shared his bedroom with resin monsters out of movies Mom wouldn't even let Maddie see: Alien and Predator and something that had bat wings and a beard and mustache made of twisting green tentacles. He could drive the car, too. Twice now he and his friends had backed it out of the garage and parked it around the corner to make Mom think it was stolen. When she called the police Kevin listened in on the other line and laughed so hard that snot shot out of his nose.
So when he cursed her she stood fast. He hogged the remote and sent her hate-stares all afternoon then did an about-face and let her have his Mountain Dew. He'd even remembered that her fingers weren’t very strong; when he handed it over the can was already open. Maybe the curse was already working, because the Mountain Dew didn’t taste as good as it usually did. And when she sat down to eat the food smells enveloped her like a giant, steamy fart. Her stomach turned itself inside-out and bile, thin and stinging, erupted from her throat and drenched the mashed potatoes.
That made Maddie a believer. Kevin began demanding her dollar-a-week allowance and taking her share of the candy and sodas Mom sometimes bought. By the time she was eight she was forking over all her desserts and doing most of his chores, too. When Mom wasn’t home he even made her mow the lawn with their bulky old mower, a machine whose rusted steel teeth could cut off a toe if she wasn’t careful. All this to keep him from cursing her with flunking a grade or being called a retard and getting beaten up after school every day for the rest of her life.
That was also the year that he totaled the car and Mom couldn't afford to get another one. After awhile she asked Maddie not to accept any more rides from her friends' moms and dads because there was no way to return the favor. Speaking very gently but very gravely too, Mom told her that it was better that Maddie not have anyone to sleep over, either.
Maddie didn’t dare ask why not. She knew it had something to do with the fact that Kevin was 16 now and had tried to give her a dollar if she’d walk around the house without even her panties on. Which meant Maddie couldn't stay at any of her friends' houses, either. No climbing into the other kids' SUVs for trips to the mall and no slumber parties. She might as well be a retard; by the time the year was up she'd be every bit as hated as one.
Even though he didn't curse her, Kevin didn't exactly leave her alone, either. Maddie had a pet snail she'd rescued from the poison in the neighbor-lady's garden and named Jasmine, after her favorite Disney princess. Right after she refused to take his dollar Kevin informed her--with a toothy grin-- that the French ate snails. After cooking them, of course. That's when he whipped his hand from behind his back. He was wearing a ratty old oven mitt and Jasmine was lying right in the center.
Her shell was caved in, her once-pale and glistening snail-skin red and black with angry lines from the old backyard barbecue grill. Maddie cried until her stomach roiled and she thought she might throw up, just like the Easter Sunday when Kevin first put a curse on her.
Mom grounded Kevin. The next day she bought Maddie an ant farm. The day after that, someone took the lid off the ant farm and the day after that ants were all over the kitchen, circling the sugar and flour canisters and tracking their way up the fridge. Naturally her brother was the one who ran for the Raid can and sprayed it everywhere.
The one thing Kevin couldn't stand was crawly things.
Maddie managed to save nine of the ants by inviting them to crawl their way onto her fingertips, then hurrying outside. Deep in the corner of the tiny backyard, behind the disassembled sides of a rusty dog crate and a rabbit hutch whose floor was a solid mass of prehistoric droppings she let them go, hoping that whatever watched over little crawly things would watch over them.
Hoping so hard and so desperately that it amounted to a prayer. One without words, almost without consciousness, fed by horror at what had been done to Jasmine and what was being done to her. To what god or devil, benevolent, malevolent or indifferent, Maddie didn't know. Not until later, after the shrieking stopped and the night was quiet again.
That was after midnight, when kids and grownups alike were supposed to be dead to the world. "Get out! Get OUT!" The screams were high and hysterical and thrilling, because the screams were Kevin's. Maddie ran to his room just as fast as she could, just in time to see the mother of all crawly things slice through the air over her brother’s bed. Big as a grapefruit, it paused as if deliberating. Then it strafed Kevin, just like one of the fighter planes in the Nazi movies he liked. Nose-first it went, right through his tousled, greasy hair.
"IS IT OFF-IS IT OFF-IS IT OFF?" His fingers did a frantic, combing dance and a ragged thumbnail opened up a pimple, ripe for the squeezing. It spat reddy-yellow pus and the Mother of Crawly Things left his hair for the shelf ruled by the bat-winged, tentacle-faced thing.

“KILL it, you stupid …!” Kevin shrilled. Maddie only stood, frozen not with fear but with fascination. The Mother of Crawly Things alighted atop Tentacle-Face, fixing her brother with eyes like round black stones.
Kevin rolled awkwardly out of bed, scooping up a pair of tighty not-so-whities from the floor. He let fly, snapping them the same way he used to snap towels at Maddie. This time all that happened was that Tentacle-Face hit the floor with a crunch and chunks of painted resin, big and small, shot away in all directions. Better yet, even though Kevin was now spewing the Ess-word—and the Eff-Word too—he sounded exactly like a third grader bawling on the playground.

That's when the Mother of Crawly Things took off for a leisurely circle of the room. Whether it really paused in the air in front of Maddie as if showing itself to her or whether Kevin's bawling somehow heightened Maddie's senses she could never afterwards remember. But what she did recall was that one instant it had the enormous white head and shark-like eyes of a potato bug, the next a pale, snaily face and eyes on stalks. Its body was worm-red and segmented, then an iridescent beetle green. It had no legs at all, then six, then hundreds and hundreds. In their moment of communion she thanked it with all her heart.
Then it was gone, sailing over Maddie’s head on wings that belonged now to a dragonfly, now to a moth. Gone, even though the neighborhood was a rough one and the window was shut and the metal bars that overlaid it locked against the night.
Kevin’s bawling had slowed to an irregular hitching and whimpering and still, somehow, their mother hadn’t heard and come running. His nose ran; spit and snot bubbled at the corners of his mouth. His pajama bottoms—none too clean when he first put them on—were wet with fresh pee. When Maddie left she made a point of looking him deliberately up and down, the look one gives a retard.
She woke the next morning to Mom singing in the kitchen. The air smelled like waffles and her choice of toppings: Blueberries or maple syrup and butter. Mere steps away, the door to Kevin’s room was ajar. Maddie gave a careful push and peered it.
The old shag carpet had been trampled flat, as if by millions and millions of tiny feet. A yellow garden spider with one leg missing was trying to extract itself from one of the worn loops. A furry black caterpillar used its many front legs to drag its mashed back end. The old barbecue grill lay across another patch of rug, one gooey as if from the progress of hundreds of snails. Bits of wing and carapace and jaw littered the bed, so many that Kevin’s empty pillow was smashed flat beneath their weight.
Maddie closed the door on the vacant room and headed for the kitchen. She loved waffles.

Photograph of stag beetle courtesy of Eyyedg.

Want to know what editors really want?

Then check out Jim Harrington's ongoing series Six Questions for...
Here's the schedule for July:

7/04—Six Questions for Kyle J Smith, Editor-in-Chief, weasel and gun: variety magazine
7/07—Six Questions for Lorie Lewis Ham, Publisher, Kings River Life
7/11—Six Questions for Rycke Foreman, Executive Chef, 69 Flavors of Paranoia
7/14—Six Questions for John Carr Walker, Editor/Publisher, Trachodon
7/18—Six Questions for Cheryl Anne Gardner, Contributing Editor, Apocrypha & Abstractions
7/21—Six Questions for Greg Dybec, Editor, Fix it Broken
7/25—Six Questions for Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom, Editor, Melusine
7/28—Six Questions for Shawn and Justin Maddey, Founding Editors, Barge Press

Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski

If you can get past the unlikely contrivances that set up the story, you'll be sucked into a character-driven thrill ride that will have you preordering the sequel as soon as you turn the last page.

FUN AND GAMES balances the quirky story with characters that seem real--paging Lindsay Lohan for the role of Lane--and sympathetic. The mystery about what sent Charlie fleeing from Philadelphia interests us but so does the question of who wants Lane dead and why.

A lot of the fun of the story--at least for people who actually live in Los Angeles--is the sense of authenticity. The plot plays out like a mash-up of John Ridley's EVERYBODY SMOKES IN HELL and Elmore Leonard's GET SHORTY. The characters have history and context and their lives are complicated. Sometimes this is tragic--as with Charlie--and sometimes it's hilarious, with the suburban dad who calls himself FACTBOY having to seclude himself in public bathrooms to stay in contact with his client--while his vacationing wife and children get antsy.

The client is an intriguing character herself. We know absolutely nothing about her but it's fascinating to watch her unravel as she has to invent more and more narratives to cover the scenarios that unfold when her plan goes FUBAR. We're not the only one horrified by her total lack of compassion--even second in command can't believe she's so cold-blooded.

Both Lane and Charlie are terrifically damaged people. The writer gives us their internal dialogue so that we are invested in their survival. It's funny that most of Lane's survival skills were learned while making various cheap action movies.

Charlie is almost ridiculously resilient but at the end, he's still standing. We don't know exactly what's going to happen to him when he wakes up from the sedative the EMT administers at the end, but since we know that there are two more books in the series, we can only assume he survives and thrives in some way.

Lane and Charlie have a good run of it, and the writer makes their survival pretty plausible just as he makes the bad guys' ability to track them seem pretty likely. It's a little too fortunate that Charlie has the skillset he does (and his backstory is actually kind of murky--the writer should have just made him an ex-cop instead of some sort of consultant whose role was violent but nebulous).

Charlie is a good man who lives with a terrible burden of guilt. He and Lane are a lot alike and he realizes it. When she confesses her own guilt (as she has to her secret boyfriend), he doesn't offer absolution but he can offer understanding.

The book contains some good action and the finale in the Hunter house is a particularly strong setpiece. The novel is steeped in noir tropes (and great quotes from movies ranging from COBRA to KISS KISS BANG BANG) and the twists of the plot do not disappoint.

Adventures in Children's Publishing

Publishers are always creating new categories ("Urban Fantasy" and "New Weird" for example), but YA (Young Adult) has been around for awhile. My teen years coincided with the heyday of S.E. Hinton, but even then I chafed at the idea of there being a separate category of books for teenagers and those for adults. I was reading mysteries and horror and sci fi but I was also reading history (my father was a Civil War buff) and popular science and "literature" for school.

These days, the YA category is probably the hottest thing out there, though, and keepng abreast of publishing trends means knowing what's going on in the YA category. Adventures in Children's Publishing is a great website for that. And they give away books. Who doesn't love free books? Check them out.