DARK TIDES CALLING

I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEA AGAIN,

TO THE LONELY SEA AND SKY,

AND ALL I ASK IS A TALL SHIP

AND A STAR TO STEER BY.

- John Masefield

Yesterday, William Faulkner talked of how fear binds your prose. Today, I will speak on how the soul frees it.

The only philosophy many learn is the one they see on the small screen or large. Those tales stem from the screen play – the written word.

William Faulkner wrote many such in Hollywood.

But remember : Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Louis Lamour wrote that his friend was any book that gave him a new idea or a new slant on an old one.

The words of a story confirm the readers’ prejudices or opens a window to a broader view of a world than can never be fully grasped.

If our words are shoddy, vulgar, then we help cheapen the minds of those who read them.

If we speak of struggling hearts in conflict with themselves then we speak to the bruised soul searching for itself.

Great joy makes us love the world, but it is suffering that makes us understand it.

A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is a mirror.

Books are the automobiles of the mind, the ships that transport us across the seas of imagination to ports filled with mystery, intrigue, and love.

Yet the cars of today seem but style-less boxes spat out by an industry concerned only with profit and fast turn-over. So, too, are the popular books of today.

If one would construct a car or a novel, one must understand the basic mechanics of each. Most of you already know how to write sentences. You must now learn how to write TRUE ones.

And what are true sentences?

Ones which speak the truths of the bruised heart and the searching soul. The irony is that people often say they have not found themselves. But the self is not something one finds.

It is something one creates with each step, each choice we make.

The hell to be endured after death is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this life by habitually fashioning our character in hurtful ways.

Such a person is always selfish. No matter how secret his ambition is, it makes him keep his thoughts at home.

But the heartbroken ones – whose hearts have been plowed by sorrow – they are the ones who give us consolation, compassion, and caring.

In short, success is to spend one’s life for something that outlasts it.

Writing true is a kind of magic. The magic of the child that still sits lonely and largely unheard deep within you.

What that child wanted long ago is what the child in all of us still wants : to be heard, to be loved, to feel safe … to laugh once again.

There are many paths that lead us away from that child, tangled ones which murmur false promises.

Fill your story with characters who have chosen different paths for the same lost destinations –

and bring them into conflict with each other and with themselves.

Do that and you will write a true story whose ending will surprise even yourself.

***

FIRST CAMPAIGNER CHALLENGE_THE DEVIL YOU SAY

Here is my entry for the first campaigner challenge from Rach Writes,

we had to write a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words starting with "the door swung open"

and for a bit more of a challenge ending with "the door swung shut,"

plus being 200 words exactly:

Samuel McCord came to my rescue in this bit of flash fiction --


The door swung open.

It does that a lot at Meilori’s, my haunted jazz club. Usually Lucifer doesn’t walk in. Like now.

At least, he believed he was Lucifer. He called himself DayStar. Sadly, he had the sheer power and intellect to convince a lot of people he was who he said he was . I wasn’t one of them.

He was simply deluded. I smiled bitterly. There was a lot of that going around.

Dressed in an Armani suit, DayStar walked to my table and sat down.

The lights around my table went dark. All I could make out were his deep gray eyes.

"Hypocrite, I lie to others while you lie to yourself. What is the difference between you and me?"

I got my voice to work. "That question keeps me up nights."

"Excellent," laughed DayStar. “Have you ever thought how good it feels to kill people with that right hand of yours?”

“Each life is unique. Ending those lives should never feel good.”

“Really? It must feel good to God. He does it all the time.”

Laughing like the breaking of brittle bones, he got up and disappeared. I looked to the front.

The door swung shut.

***

I AM WILLIAM FAULKNER. I AM DEAD. YET I DID NOT DIE.

I am William Faulkner. I am dead.

Yet I did not die.

I, like so many who did not believe in an afterlife,

live here in the jazz club, Meilori’s.

Meilori’s :

the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the French Quarter’s circumference like a single cloud in its ring of horizon,

laying its vast shadow to the uttermost rim of horizon; musing, brooding, symbolic and imponderable, tall as clouds, solid as rock,

dominating all: protector of the weak, judge and curb of the passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and hopes of the helpless.

Here, I find myself standing outside the window of the storefront of humanity, still observing as a writer but unable to reach out and touch with fingers of new prose.

Except through Roland’s kindness.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained that by now we can almost bear it. Of course there are still problems of the spirit. Yet one question looms above all:

When will I be blown up?

By terrorist plot,

by Nature’s increasingly hostile hand,

or by the cruel strangulation of mishandled economics.

Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing

because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat of wresting something from nothing.

You must learn them again.

You must teach yourself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

And teaching yourself that,

forget it forever,

leaving no room in your writing for anything but the old truths of the heart,

the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Until you do so, you labor under a curse.

You write not of love but of lust,

of defeats in which no one loses anything of value,

of victories without hope and,

worst of all, without pity or compassion. Your griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

You write not of the heart but of the sex glands.

I remember that night in Meilori’s when McCord and I talked.

How words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly living goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other.

That sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they have forgotten the words.

Forgotten the words by being too busy living them.

So write those words in your prose.

Write them so that others may prove their truth by living them,

And in so doing, forgetting them as they forget they are breathing.

***
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WHY FRIENDSHIP? {a return visit}

Friendship.

My most popular post, visited many times each day is this one.

So I thought I would bring it to the attention of my new friends, adding some new items to make it interesting to those who read my earlier post :

Anais Nin, the enigmatic French author famous for her journals spanning 60 fascinating years, wrote :

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world dawns."

It would be hard to say whether King Solomon was made more alone by his many wives or by the prison of his throne.

Nonetheless, King Solomon wrote : "Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up."

Friendship.

It is what is so very lacking in today's cyber-society where everyone is twittering, but no one is listening. Or giving a damn. They are hunched over their blackberries, waiting impatiently for the message to end so they can jump in with, what is essentially, a "Listen to me!"

Because so few of us have it, friendship and its portrayal are what will bring us back to a novel over and over again. I know that it is the case for me. And for the friends I talk to.

Frodo and Sam. Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Spencer and Hawk (from the always entertaining Robert B. Parker series.) Elvis Cole and Joe Pike (from the Robert Crais fascinating detective series.) Bill and Ted. Calvin and Hobbes.

Family is a crap shoot. Love cools. But friendship endures.

Friendship is one of the cornerstones of my surreal Noir, FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE. Two friends :

Samuel McCord, agnostic undead Texas Ranger. Renfield, haunted revenant priest.

They have known one another since Istanbul was Constantinople and honor still had meaning.

Both love mysterious, beautiful, deadly women. McCord would say all beautiful women are both mysterious and deadly. His love is Meilori, a being from another plane of existence. "Born of stardust and the sea" as she once told him.

And Father Renfield loves Sister Magda, the nun who serves with him in his church. Yet the friendship of the two undead men is a kind of love in itself like David's and Jonathan's :

{At this point in the novel, Renfield, the vampire priest, and his best friend, Sam McCord, are stepping out from behind MEILORI'S, looking at the flooded street before them.} :


Renfield bent down and picked up a floating child’s doll, its false hair soaked and hanging. Its glassy eyes eerily reminded me of too many human corpses I had seen floating down this same street.

Renfield stroked the plastic cheek softly as if it had been the flesh of the girl who had lost her doll. Closing his eyes, he dropped the doll with a splash that sounded much too loud.

That splash said it all. Renfield looked my way with eyes that clawed at me.

“I could take the Blitz. It came from Man. This .... This is from God.”

I just looked at him. From God? I bit back the words that first came to my lips.

It was plain he was hurting inside. And I put up with such talk from Renfield. He was my friend. And he was a priest.

Priests were supposed to see life through the filter of faith. Still, I had lost faith in the unseen long ago. It had slowly faded like mist on a summer sea.

But there is a toll to such a thing. I looked around about us, trying to see it through my friend’s eyes of faith. I failed. Not a first for me.

Renfield’s head was down, though his eyes followed the floating body of the plastic doll as the currents pulled it under the black waters.

“Do you think He finally has had enough of us, Sam? Enough of our cruelty, our madness?”

I rubbed gloved fingers across my face. Like I said, I was at a loss at whether the Great Mystery even existed or not, much less be able to give a true answer to that question.

But Renfield had his own doubts about God. He was my friend, and I wouldn't push him over that dark edge.

“Hell, Padre, I don’t know. Could be.”

I smiled bitter. “You know the Lakota Sioux call God The Great Mystery.”

“You call Him that, too, as I recall.”

“Yeah, ‘cause what He’s up to most of the times is surely a great mystery to me.”

He studied me. “You’re not ---”

He waved a hand around us. “ --- mad at Him for all of this?”

Mad at someone who might only exist in empty prayers to equally empty darkness? I saw the anguish in my friend’s eyes. I chose my words carefully.

“Hell, Padre, we all chose to live in a city seven feet below sea level right by the coast, protected by levees built and maintained by a corrupt government. What did we think would happen?”

Renfield shook his head. “We all denied. It’s what humans do.”

His lips twisted. “Even those of us whose humanity is only a memory.”

I clamped a hand on his left shoulder. “You’re human where it counts.”

His face twitched as if his tongue tasted bad. “And where’s that?”

“Your soul, Renfield, your soul.”

“I lost that a long time ago, Sam.”

I might be at a loss about God, mind you. But I was sure about the soul, for I had seen its lack often enough in too many eyes. Just like I saw its solid presence within Renfield's.

“No, you didn’t. Like mine, your soul is a cocklebur. You can’t shake it no matter what you do.”

He smiled wearily. “I must have missed that verse in the Bible.”

“Gotta read the small print, Padre.”
*****************************************************
I'll let Mark Twain have the last word on friendship : "Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with."
****************************

BY DEGREES WE DIE; BY OURSELVES WE MOURN

As Tropical Storm Lee bears down upon my community, I paused to reflect --

Yesterday as we went about our daily lives :

An innocent man was lynched in a country whose name most of us can't spell.

An impressionable baby was born to a hateful mother.

Three young men were killed by sniper fire.

A hungry old woman opened a can of dog food to eat for her one meal of the day.

And we passed a lonely, hopeless soul, looking for one pair of eyes that gave a damn.

There is empty ground in most souls we pass. Sometimes that leeched soil is within our own soul. We cannot save the world.

Often it is beyond us to even save ourselves.

That which we can do, we must do, or else we help the darkness grow thicker.

Even one feeble candle can show the way for the next step. And what does this have to do with writing you ask.

Everything.

We cast out our words into the darkness of the cyber-void.

We do not know who stops by our blogs, weary of spirit, drained of hope. We do know that tragedy and heartbreak is an everyday event. We know how to write.

Let us build up not tear down. Write to support, to strengthen, to lessen the load of the unknown reader in the shadows.

Maybe even to make lips that had forgotten how to smile break into a laugh, weak but the more needed because of that.

There is war. There is pestilence. There is famine. But none of them prepare you for someone moaning over trifles. Yet, on the other hand, no one enjoys having their mountain made into a mole hill by a spectator safe on the sidelines.

What did Mark Twain write?

"Nothing that grieves us can be called little. By the eternal law of proportion, a child's loss of a beloved doll and a king's loss of his crown are events of the same size."

Billy Graham once wrote : "Puppy love is real to the puppy."

Compassion. Understanding. Laughter. I try to make them my three writing companions.

And when we write our novels, we need to always keep in mind the living person who will read our words.

Is our story one that touches the heart? Is it real? Even in fantasy, our characters can seem real if their pain is common to our own : alienation, loneliness, yearning for love.

And keep in mind to always include laughter.

After seriously commenting on his strict requirements for perspective hosts, Mark Twain added with a twinkle in his writer's eye :

"When I am ill-natured, which is rare for the paragon of virtue that I am, I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel -

where I can ring up a domestic and give him a quarter. And then commense to break furniture over him. Whereupon I go to bed calmed and sleep as peacefully as a child."

And it is comforting that even a genius like Mark Twain was once thrown out of the office of a publisher.

"I got into his office by mistake. He thought I wanted to purchase one of his books, not the other way around. His lips contracted so fast his teeth fell out. And he threw me out."

Twenty-five years later that publisher met Twain on the street and profusely apologized : "I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the 19th century."

Mark Twain remembers the event this way :

"It was a most handsome apology, and I told him so. I then confided that several times each year since that time I mused over that incident and had in fancy taken his life, always in new and in increasingly cruel, inhuman ways --

but henceforth, I would hold him my true and valued friend -- and I promised never to kill him again -- in fancy or in fact."

Mark Twain had his own take on publishers from his long association with them :

"All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The truth that they --

like Columbus --

didn't discover what they expected to discover, didn't discover what they set out to discover, doesn't trouble them in the least."

And so I leave you with yet another song by Thea Gilmore, accompanied by Joan Baez :

HEART STOPPER

Love.

What is its color? How much space does it take up in our heart?

Doesn't your heart feel near to bursting when you first spot the one you love?

And when it dies, the Grand Canyon seems small compared to the hollowness in that same heart.

Francine and Denise have given us the prompt, HEART-STOPPER, to use this Friday :

http://fridaynightwriters.blogspot.com/

My entry is from ADRIFT IN THE TIME STREAM.

Many have emailed me asking what could possibly destroy such a one as Samuel McCord as Maija threatened last week.

Before she fell in love with Samuel, Meilori had made a pretense of assisting DayStar for her own purposes. But she learns even the pretense carries a steep price.

DayStar has taken possession of her body after the BALL OF DEATH & MADNESS, and he sends her against her beloved.

Samuel is seemingly without a single weapon. We join the festivities at that point :

DayStar studied me like a steak he was about to eat.

“You are weaponless.”

I pulled King Solomon’s knife from its neck sheath. “Not completely.”

He smiled. “Ah, so you want the dying to be up-close and personal, do you?”

His eyes grew dreamy. “Let us slow the pace to this last dance, shall we?”

Meilori spoke low. “You must kill me, beloved, for if you should die by my hand, I would kill myself anyway.”

I locked my eyes on hers.

“This is not going to work out like he plans --- beloved.”

DayStar murmured, “You simply have no idea.”

“Keep telling you. I usually don’t.”

He smiled, and Meilori spun elegantly, holding her bone sword up high with both hands.

And it began.

Eyes.

I felt them on me.

Meilori’s : weeping with an aching love, a hollowing sadness, and utter terror.

Fallen’s : bruised, fearful, yet whispering an unreasoning hope.

Renfield’s : dark, filled with remorse and regret.

Maija’s : blue pools of icy regard in whose depths swam uncertainty and longing.

Meilori wheeled gracefully around me as if to some melody of death only she could hear. Me?

It seemed as if I could hear the trumpets of a bull fight as it reached its bloody climax. I was under no illusions who was the bull in this fight.

I was bone weary, moving with all the skill and stealth of a wounded moose. Meilori was as the wind given life, light, ethereal, and full of death.

And DayStar could move her with even more speed than I could muster.

My gloved hand clutched Solomon’s blade tighter, my fingers feeling numb and sweaty.

Meilori danced about me, meeting my each body shift easily, gracefully.

Her jade eyes seemed to swallow me. Her voice was a wet husk.

“I love you, my Samuel.”

“And I you.”

Fallen whimpered as the tears bled from her hollow eyes. Renfield turned his eyes away.

Maija looked first at me, then at her sister, her blue eyes slowly turning to DayStar with hate. DayStar began to smile wider.

The trumpets only I could hear started to crescendo. The dance was nearly done.

Meilori’s lips worked wordlessly as she fought the possession of her body. Black tears seeped from the corners of her eyes.

“We will meet again where the shadows never fall.”

DayStar laughed. Meilori's jaw firmed. My right hand suddenly became stone.

With uncomprehending eyes, I saw Solomon’s blade in it fly impossibly fast straight into Meilori’s heart. DayStar cursed.

Fallen sucked in a breath. Meilori fell into my arms that were once again mine.

No!

She had taken control of my body as DayStar had taken control of hers. No! This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. No!

She lay limp in my arms. Her eyes rolling up, she tried to speak but couldn’t.

Only a wet gurgle came out. But still I heard her voice murmur within my mind. One word.

One last word.

‘Beloved.’

I heard an animal wail. Wail as if its guts had been scooped out. Then it came to me. No animal was wailing in pain.

It was me.

Me.

And DayStar laughed.
***
Not part of my entry, but this poem by Stephen Crane begins the next chapter. I add it for Andy and my other friends who enjoy poetry.

“Places among the stars,

Soft gardens near the sun,

Shed no beams upon my weak heart,

Since she is here

In a place of blackness,

Not your golden days

Nor your silver nights

Can call me to you.

Since she is here

In a place of blackness,

Here I stay and wait.”

***

THE VOTES ARE IN!!

THE VOTES ARE IN!!

And not a NO among them.

Victor and the spirit of Bruce Lee are irritatingly smug about it, of course.

THE NEW DRAW DATE for my FANTABULOUS CONTEST is

OCTOBER 1ST (October being my birth month and all.)

WRITE A REVIEW ON AMAZON ABOUT ANY OF MY eBOOKS, AND YOU RECEIVE 5 ENTRIES FOR THE CONTEST TO WIN :

A STEPHEN KING AUTOGRAPHED copy of NEEDFUL THINGS or

A DEAN KOONTZ AUTOGRAPED copy of THE TAKING or

A LAURELL K. HAMILTON AUTOGRAPHED copy of DANSE MACABRE!!

THERE WILL BE 3 WINNERS on OCTOBER 1ST.

I know many of you do not have much time. Three of my eBooks are short and not too exxpensive (99 cents) :

THE LAST SHAMAN

{Think Stephen King and Louis Lamour teaming to write their explanation of 2012.}

LET THE WIND BLOW THROUGH YOU

{Not unlike what Louis Lamour and Raymond Chandler might have written if they tried for a GODFATHER tale with a bit of ROMEO & JULIET thrown in.}

BLOOD WILL TELL

{What if STEPHEN KING visited the blood center in which I work and wrote an alien invasion tale certain to have you never donating blood or sleeping sound again.}

I'm not saying you should read and review those particular novels of mine -- just that they are affordable and short.
***

This just in : John Locke paves new road for self-published

It seems that perhaps John Locke has paved the way for us Indie Published Authors in a new way by signing with Simon & Schuster :

John Locke is not giving up any rights. He has not signed a “publishing” deal, but a distribution deal.

He will remain the publisher of the print editions. Simon & Schuster will distribute them. And he retains complete control of the digital editions –

no deal has been struck there.

Rather than abandoning the indie path, John Locke has leveraged his huge self-publishing sales to strike a highly unusual print deal.

It’s extremely rare for a publisher –

especially a major player like Simon & Schuster – to sign a “print only” deal of any kind. The reason for this is obvious: print is in decline and digital is exploding.

Normally, a print deal will involve the publisher licensing the rights to sell your book, for which they pay you royalties (and often an advance on royalties) in return.

This is very different. Essentially, as Mike Shatzkin points out, John Locke is hiring Simon & Schuster to distribute his books.

Details are scant at the moment. I don’t know if John Locke is paying them a percentage for their distribution services, or a flat fee, and I don’t know who is going to cover things like printing costs.

Either way, this is a fine deal for John Locke, and a progressive approach from Simon & Schuster.

They get a piece of the print action from a bankable self-publisher who was unwilling to sign a traditional publishing deal, and he gets access to the vast majority of readers who haven’t made the switch to e-books yet.

Everyone will make money out of this. Which is why it won’t be the last deal of its kind.

Many successful self-publishers aren’t interested in a traditional deal which forces them to give up the vast majority of their digital royalties.

Indeed, many of those who signed with Amazon’s imprints said that they wouldn’t have signed with anyone else, with the vastly increased digital royalties on offer being a major factor.

There position is understandable. They have built up a huge readership own their own, and they are loathe to hand that over to a publisher for a small slice of the digital pie.

Even though the vast majority of readers are still in print, self-publishers know which way the market is headed,

and often don’t want to be locked into a deal with poor digital royalty rates just to gain access to print readers (whose numbers will continue to fall).

If this deal is a watershed,

if the large publishers are now prepared to sign print-only deals, or distribution-only deals, there will be a lot of self-publishers interested.

It makes sense for publishers too –

at least in the short term. They have control of the print distribution network, and they can produce quality physical books at low prices.

They also know that the very best self-publishers are experts in targeting their readers, and selling to them.

Interesting, Roland

***