Breath & Shadow

Ability Maine is a nonprofit organization which advocates for the rights and inclusion of people with disabilities. They also produce a blogzine called Breath & Shadow, which spotlights writing by many of the people they support. Each issue brings some excellent poetry, nonfiction, flash fiction, short stories, essays and reviews. The Spring 2013 issue features hard-hitting piece of flash fiction by William Ward called "The Jungle." Check it out today. You won't be disappointed. You might even see things from a new perspective.

In Which the Errant Writer Returns, However Briefly

Eight months without a blog post. And yet--somehow--the world keeps on doing its collective thing. So just for the record, I'm not dead and I didn't go off to walk the Earth like Cain in Kung Fu.

Or is it Kane? I dunno.

Even though it's been quiet here, I've had plenty to keep me busy: promotions at work, trips to camp, parting ways with my agent and getting turned down by another, revisions and even some new writing.

New writing?

Oh, yeah. I've been working on nasty little bit of country noir that's almost ready to rear its ugly head. Ever seen road-kill used as a boxing glove? Yep, I went there.

And I'm reading.

Lots of reading.

Always reading.

If there was one thing guaranteed to piss off my old man, it was the sight of me sitting down with a book. But he was a prick and I hardly spoke a word to him during the last ten years of his life. So there you go. To this day, I just can't bring myself to trust anyone who dislikes books.

So read something.

I'll be back later.

Chris Holm Springs into Action

I'm not a regular reader of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but I do pick it up whenever it featured work by writers whose work I admire. Like Chris F. Holm. He writes memorable short fiction and it's only a matter of time before some publisher snaps the two novels he's completed so far.


The May 2010 issue of AHMM kicks off with Chris' latest story, "Action." If you enjoy Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder* series of novels and short stories, then "Action" is your bag, baby. It's a funny, fast-paced heist story. The May AHMM is on the newsstands now, so rush on out and buy a copy.


*Bonus points if you can spot Chris' little tip o' the hat to the late MWA Grand Master.

Guest Blogger: Stephen D. Rogers

The Shot to Death Blog March

"I am so going to fuck you up"

--from "Tenant at Will"

So begins one of the 31 stories in Shot to Death (ISBN 978-0982589908). Within that beginning lurks the ending to the story and everything that happens between the beginning and the end. Or at least it seems that way to me.

I love the emphasis created by the word "so." That first line shows me a real can-do attitude that I have to admire. Just as long as the person talking isn't talking to me. This time.

An opening like that, with no clear directive, forces me to forge a framework. Immediately I can scrap all characters who could be expected to utter such words as well as all characters who might expect to hear them.

"I am so going to fuck you up." So says a mother to her daughter.

That daughter is a tenant at will, free to leave at any time, and yet she listens to such abuse. Maybe she kicks it back, but she's there to hear it in the first place.

Can she not afford to leave or does she feel obligated to stay? What would change either of those two possibilities?

Maybe both are true. Maybe she can't afford to leave and she feels obligated to stay, although perhaps her mother's attitude is chipping away at the latter.

The former would change if the daughter was offered somewhere else to live. Perhaps love is on the horizon. Or at least a relationship that isn't so acidic.

She has, however, been in a dysfunctional situation, and those have a tendency to cling. She might escape. She might even find love. Even so, I fear her mother is going to get in the last word.

"I am so going to fuck you up."

All that remains is the writing.

For a chance to win a signed copy of Shot to Death, click on over to stephendrogers.com and submit your completed entry.

Then visit the schedule to see how you can march along.

And then come back here to post your comments. Phew.

Feero Goes Feral: THE FERAL PAGES is Now Live (Or, A Little BSP for PSB)

The debut issue of Lyman Feero's cross-genre e-zine The Feral Pages is now online and ready to kick you upside the head (in, y'know, a good way). This issue's features include:

"The Cove" by Patrick Shawn Bagley

"A Better Life" by Chris F. Holm

"A Fine and Private Place" by David Dvorkin

"The Devil with Bavarians" by Maren Foley

"Kicking Sand Across the Line: Blurring the Genres" an editorial by Lyman Feero

Call for Submissions: The Feral Pages

Lyman Feero is taking submissions for his new cross-genre e-zine, The Feral Pages. The October/November issue goes live on 10/15. Featured stories include Chris F. Holm's wonderfully disturbing "A Better Life" and my own "The Cove." Submission guidelines can be found here. I hope all of you writers and readers will help support what promises to be a unique new venue for short fiction.

What I've Been Doin' Lately

I just submitted a short story called "The Cove" to Lyman Feero for his forthcoming e-zine The Feral Pages. I don't know if my story will make the grade, but I'm interested to see the debut issue of this new cross-genre 'zine. "The Cove" is, of course, just the sort of heart-warming tale you've come to expect from me. Just messin'. Don't panic. It's another down-and-dirty Wesserunsett story.

Jed Ayres is posting a series of narratives about crime songs on the Hardboiled Wonderland blog. He's going to run them over the next few weeks. I wrote a piece about Robert Earl Keen's song "The Road Goes on Forever." When I told my wife about it, she said, "Big surprise there." So maybe I do play that tune a bit too often.

On the novel front, there's bad news and good. The bad news is that Bitter Water Blues hasn't found a publisher. The good news is that Bitter Water Blues hasn't found a publisher.

Huh?

That's right, I'm happy with rejection because it made me take a serious, critical look at the manuscript. Right now, I'm working on a complete rewrite, including the removal of one of the major characters and his entire storyline. Hey, I've told you people before that revision doesn't scare me.

I'm also working on turning some previously-trimmed sections of BWB into a short story. We'll see how that goes...

Muckle Onto a Free Copy of UNCAGE ME

Want to win a free copy of Uncage Me? Of course you do. Who wouldn't? Well, Terrie Farley Moran has one to give away at the Women of Mystery blog. She also says some nice things about my story, "Welcome to Wal-Mart, Motherfucker." Go on over there for all the details. The entry deadline is this Saturday.

I've Never Been Called "Top Quality" Before...

Blogging at Women of Mystery, the perspicacious Terry Farley Moran has many nice things to say about Uncage Me, including this: "I was delighted to see so many top quality contributors: Declan Burke, Tim Maleeny, J.D. Rhoades and Patrick Shawn Bagley to name a few."

Among her favorite pieces in the anthology is Steven Torres' "The Biography Stoop, the Thief." I agree it's a great story and, given just how much reviewers seem to dig it, I'll be surprised if it fails to garner Steven a few award nominations next year.

Terry plans on raffling off a copy of Uncage Me next month, so check back at Women of Mystery for further details. Of course, you could always buy a copy from your local independent bookseller (or order online). No pressure. I'm just saying.

Uncage Me Unleashed

Uncage Me went on sale today. Yeah, I'm probably biased because I have a story in it, but I think it's a helluva good anthology. Editor Jen Jordan put together new work by some of the best writers in the crimefic biz: Christa Faust, Scott Phillips, Victor Gischler, Greg Bardsley, J.A. Konrath, Stephen Blackmoore, Allan Guthrie, Declan Burke and more, with an introduction by none other than John Connolly. Ask for it at your local bookstore or order online ($24.95 cloth/$14.95 trade paperback).

August Hanrahan is Dead. Long Live August Hanrahan

Not long after my short story “Pandora” appeared in Thrilling Detective, I began taking a fresh look at it and wondering if it could be expanded upon. I was mostly pleased with the story as written, but felt there might be more to it. So I sat down and started diddling with the thing. After a couple of days, the realization crept up and kicked me in the nards: I’d begun turning “Pandora” into a novel.

For those of you who haven’t read the original story (you bastards!), August Hanrahan was a private investigator until he lost his license for interfering with a police investigation (and inadvertently causing the deaths of two people). His left hand was also maimed during that final case and can no longer play guitar. He’s embittered, angry and prone to violence. A couple of old hippies convince August to search for a missing child, goading him into it by mentioning his murdered nephew. Wind him up and off he goes…

Now. Here’s the problem.

I hate August’s name.

Sure, I came up with it, but I’ve come to hate that fucking name. It sounds like I tried too hard to give him a unique moniker, something along the lines of Elvis Cole, Derek Strange, Harry Bosch, Easy Rawlins, etc. I like those characters, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that August sounds gimmicky.

Before he was called August, the character’s name was Gideon “Giddy” Cross. Yeah, I know that’s even worse. I was going to keep it though, until I discovered it had been the name of an obscure comic book character from the ‘70s. But Gideon Cross wasn’t the character’s original name, either.

The character who later became Gideon Cross and then August Hanrahan began life in a story called “The Western Gate,” which was published in issue #53 of The Iconoclast (1998). He wasn’t a detective then, but crime was a central element. The character’s name at the time?

Harris Tilton.

The idea was that he hated the name Harris (and hated being called Harry almost as much), so he always insisted that people call him Tilt. I’ve mulled it over for a while now, and I’ve decided to reinstate the character’s original name. Does it matter to anyone but me? Probably not. But writing Pandora-the-novel feels much more natural in Tilt’s voice than it did in August’s…even though the voice is essentially the same. “It’s all in your head…it’s all in your head…”

So I’ll leave you with a treat (depending on your idea of a “treat”). What follows is the opening page of “The Western Gate,” the very first Tilt story, as published in The Iconoclast eleven years ago. Warts and all. The title, by the way, is taken from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Luke Havergal.”

From THE WESTERN GATE:

My father sits there smoking a Lucky Strike, watching Rollo State Penitentiary and the eight grid-patterned streets of Rollo, Wyoming getting smaller in the passenger’s-side mirror. When finally there is nothing behind us but mountaintops and nothing ahead but rolling pasture and the arrow-straight macadam, he looks at me and says, “Thanks.” His first word to me since I picked him up outside the gate. Hell, his first word to me in my whole life as far as I can remember. I’d never even gotten a letter from him until about three months ago.

He’s clean-shaven with a fresh haircut to match. His hair’s mostly gray and his skin’s surprisingly tan for a guy who’s spent twenty-three of the last thirty years in prison. Other than the hair, a few wrinkles and a small fish hook-shaped scar below his left earlobe, he looks just like me. No wonder my mother couldn’t stand the sight of me. She saw in me the man who’d left her, seventeen years old and eight months pregnant, in the middle of the night; the man who’d run off to the west for God knows what reason, only to end up killing some stranger in Wyoming. She saw in me the man who drove her to the bottle, to Jesus, and back to the bottle. Walter Tilton. What could she do with a baby who was the spitting image of Walter Tilton but dump him on her older sister and crawl deeper into booze and religion.

“Harris,” Dad says. We’ve been traveling about two hours now. “Harris, I got to make a piss stop.”

“Nobody calls me Harris.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I hate it.”

“It’s your name, the one your mother liked best for a boy.”

“It’s a faggoty name. Sounds like a character off Mawsterpiece Theater.”

“So what do people call you? Harry?”

“Tilt. Just Tilt.”

“Izzat what your Aunt Polly and Uncle Ray call you?”

Ray’s still snoring in the backseat, too overwhelmed by the idea of being out from under Aunt Polly’s thumb to take in any of the sights.

“Uncle Ray calls me Tilt,” I say, pulling onto the shoulder. “Polly usually just refers to me as You or That Boy.”

Dad snorts, gets out of the car to do his business by the trunk.

Spinetingler

The spring '09 issue of Spinetingler is live, locked and loaded. This time around, there's new fiction by Anthony Rainone, Stephen D. Rogers, Fiona Kay Crawford, Graham "Crimespot" Powell and others. Sandra Ruttan interviews Russel D. McLean. Jim Napier talks with Phyllis Smallman. Brian Lindenmuth grills Craig McDonald. There are reviews of books by Linda L. Richards, Sean Chercover, Tom Schreck and more, more, more. All of that, plus an excerpt of Declan Burke's hard-hitting novel The Big O.

Hey, Get a Load of Quertermous

Bryon Quertermous has put together a little collection of some of his nastiest (and that's saying something) short stories. But, wait a minute...I'll let Bryon give you the lowdown himself:

I collected three of my favorite stories that had been previously published online or in small circulation magazine but are now almost impossible to find and bundled them together in a collection I'm calling A Load of Quertermous.

Featured in the collection are the following stories:
"Load" - The tale of a sperm back robbery in Detroit gone off the rails.
"Mr. Saturday Special" - A little ditty about a private detective inFlint, MI who spends his daughter's birthday helping his ex-wife's lawyer save his son from jail.
"Alter Road" - A story that follows a preacher with a violent past whofaces the greatest test of faith and grace when his son is murdered by hillbilly meth dealers.

I've also written brand new introductions for all three stories discussing their creation and the inspiration behind them. This collection is available now for the amazing low price of $1.99 and can be had as PDF file for reading on any computer (or for printing to read on the train or in bed or wherever) or as a download for the Amazon Kindle. The Amazon download is immediate but the PDF will come once PayPal sends me an email indication a donation has been made and then I'll zip it off to the email address used for the donation. You can find all of the necessary information at http://loadofquertermous.blogspot.com

Here's a Question for You Readerly and Writerly Type People

Short stories that get expanded into novels.

Good? Bad? Cheesy? Drawbacks? Advantages?

Discuss.

Kieran Shea in EQMM

Kieran Shea is one of my favorite "new" writers. The man has some serious chops. His story "The Lifeguard Method" appears in the August issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, available at newsstands and bookstores everywhere. It's a P.I. story, which Kieran admits isn't his usual thing. I can't wait to see what he did to put his own blood-stained stamp on the genre. You'll be sorry if you miss this one.

Carl Brookins Digs UNCAGE ME

Carl Brookins, author of several mystery novels, read Uncage Me without flinching. You can check out his insightful review here.

Hat tip to Stephen Blackmoore.

Where’d I Put Those Finnish-Language Instructional Tapes?

Juri Nummelin reports that the third issue of his flash fiction magazine Ässä is about to be unleashed upon the Finnish-speaking world. This time around, Ässä features translations of short-shorts by Joe R. Lansdale, Sandra Scoppettone, James McGowan, Patti Abbott, Paul “Braz Knuckles” Brazill and yours truly in addition to new writing by Tapani Bagge and Juri himself.

Cool thing #1: “One More Mess” is the first of my stories ever to be translated into another language. I'm still riding the buzz from that.

Cool thing #2: I have a story in the same magazine as Joe R. Lansdale, author of the "Hap and Leonard" series and Bubba Ho-Tep. That's not to say any of the other featured writers are slouches. They're all damn good. But I've admired Lansdale's work for at least twenty years and it's a treat to share literary space with him, even though I can't read a word of Finnish.

Hit List

Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery
Edited by Sarah Cortez and Liz Martínez
Arte Público Press, 2009 ($19.95)

I’m always wary of any anthology that purports to present the “best” of anything. Editors who set such a high literary mark often fail to reach it. However, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery delivers seventeen top-notch stories by established and lesser-known writers. Among my favorites in this anthology are Manuel Ramos' "The Skull of Pancho Villa," Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's "The Right Profile" and "In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino" by Richie Narvaez. I'm a sucker for Steven Torres' Precinct Puerto Rico novels, so the inclusion of a Luis Gonzalo story was a great treat. There's also a Chico Santana story by A.E. Roman. This was my first exposure to Roman's fiction, and it has me looking forward to his debut novel, Chinatown Angel.

As co-editor Sarah Cortez notes in her introduction, the stories in Hit List run the range from hardboiled to cozy. While I don't much care for the latter, this antho's strength is that it offers a good sampling of Latino crime writing to suit just about any taste. Do these short stories truly represent the “best” of Latino mystery? I don't know. But it's a damn fine anthology that deserves to be read, passed around, and read again.

"Go blind from overexposure to pure awesomeness."

Got the page proofs for Uncage Me yesterday. I caught a mistake (my own, not an editorial one) in "Welcome to Wal-Mart, Motherfucker." It was an easily fixed continuity error. Here's the big surprise, though...it was the first time I'd read my story since last May and I'm actually happy with the thing. I feel good about it and, as you may know, I'm one of my own harshest critics.

I've been working my way through the other stories in Uncage Me. Tell you what; they kick ass. John Connolly rightly points out in his brilliant introduction that these stories assembled by editor Jen Jordan are not for the squeamish, but if you're a fan of modern noir fiction you need get your blood-stained mitts on this anthology. It comes out swinging July 24. The hardcover edition is $24.95, though there will be a simultaneous paperback release for $14.95. The special Evidence Collection version is $45.

So what do you get for your hard-earned bucks? Well, let's see how this lineup grabs you...

Ten Gallons of Infected Saliva by Scott Phillips
No Thanks, Please by Declan Burke
Games by Bryon Quertermous
The Biography of Stoop, the Thief by Steven Torres
Roy by Brian Azzarello
Back and Forth by Gregg Hurwitz
Prisoner of Love by Tim Maleeny
Paper Thin Hotel by Nick Stone
Threat Management by Martyn Waites
Players by J.D. Rhoades
Robert Hayer’s Dead by Simon Kernick
Welcome to Wal-Mart, Motherfucker by Patrick Shawn Bagley
Fire Girl by Victor Gischler
Hotshot 52 by Greg Bardsley
School Daze by J.A. Konrath
Like that Japanese Chick What Broke Up Van Halen by Stephen Blackmoore
The Ballad of Manky Milne by Stuart MacBride
The Turnip Farm by Allan Guthrie
The Footjob by Christa Faust
*69 by Blake Crouch
Dinner for Toby by Simon Wood
Cow Palace by Talia Berliner
We Mate in the Dark by Maxim Jakubowski
Spin the Bottle by Pearce Hansen

Still can't quite wrap my head around the idea of being in such company.

Publishers Weekly on UNCAGE ME

They didn't mention my story, but I didn't expect they would since I'm one of those "unfamiliar names." I can only hope that "Welcome to Wal-Mart, Motherfucker" wasn't one of the stories they considered "duds." Overall, it's a good review.


Uncage Me
Edited by Jen Jordan. Bleak House (www.bleakhousebooks.com), $24.95 (296p) ISBN 978-1-60648-015-1; $14.95 paper ISBN 978-1-60648-016-8

While John Connolly (The Reapers) rightly notes in his introduction that this all-original anthology isn't for the fainthearted, noir lovers will find plenty to savor among the 22 stories from both familiar and unfamiliar names. Steven Torres offers the most moving selection, “The Biography of Stoop, the Thief,” in which a 14-year-old boy tries to save the mother who abandoned him for a life on the streets as a substance abuser. Tim Maleeny's “Prisoner of Love” not only features twists and betrayals but manages to make an ambiguous resolution satisfying rather than frustrating. There are some duds, like Maxim Jakubowski's shocker “We Mate in the Dark,” with its pointless savagery, but on the whole the contributors demonstrate the ability to create believable and memorable characters as well as settings in a few pages. (July).

Review ©2009 Publishers Weekly.