ThrillerFest Confirmed

So it's official -- I'll be at ThrillerFest at the Grand Hyatt in NYC, July 10-11. I've never attended before, but I've heard that the most important thing is getting a good seat at the bar. One of the many cool parts of the experience is that on June 10th I'll be participating in a panel called "Do You Love Your Villain Too," which according to the schedule is about the importance of believable characters. After that I'll be signing books. And scouting out future villains...

My Heroes Have Always Been Failures

Let me begin by defining my terms -- when we talk about famous failures in literature, we're not really talking about failures, are we? After all, the true failures are the ones nobody knows about, lapsed into permanent obscurity, forgotten by the ages. No, the failures that I'm talking about are the men and women (all right, mostly men) who died thinking of themselves as botched experiments in humanity, the recognition of whose success is almost always after they've become worm food.

Those kind of failures.

Yes, Fitzgerald got me started thinking about this whole phenomenon. But the more I weighed it, the more I realized that, like the man himself, I'm fascinated with the idea of the reach that exceeds the grasp, and many of the writers whose work I read most compulsively can squeeze into this template rather cozily, or at least with the help of a little social lubricant. Poe, yes, and Hemingway, who beat his brains out depression and a bottle, Faulkner and poor, amazing Richard Yates, whose Boston apartment I tracked down a few years ago, just up the street from the bar where he continued to assassinate his liver. What is it with these guys? And more importantly, what is it with me -- am I actually romanticizing such a self-destructive lifestyle?

In fairness to myself -- hey, even I need an advocate -- it's not the lifestyle itself that proves so magnetic over time. At least, not just the lifestyle. Those names in my own index of American literary psychiatric collapse -- the crack ups, in other words -- share a compelling inability to bend to the fashion of their time...they wrote what they had to write, regardless of whether or not the critics adored it, or the public bought it, and in the end that rootless feeling of operating in a void, of following their gut regardless of how unpopular it made them, probably drove them into the bowels of emotional bankruptcy, substance abuse and other bad habits.

In the end, it's not the writer, but the work. And thank God, the work endures.

Every Boy Needs a Hobby

I'm on a Fitzgerald kick right now, a major one. It started with The Pat Hobby Stories, which I'd never read before. Talk about your late-period Fitzgerald -- it doesn't get much later than this collection of short stories, which originally appeared in Esquire right up to (and immediately following) Scotty's death in 1940. The crumbled literary giant was living in a suburb of Encino at the time, soldiering along for the studios whenever he could find work, drinking his pay and doing rewrites on projects like Madame Curie and a weeklong stint on Gone With the Wind before David O. Selznick fired him for rewriting the dialogue.

From what I could glean, Fitzgerald gave screenwriting his full attention, bearing down with the same determined effort that he put toward his prose, but he was never as good at writing for Hollywood as he was writing about it. His doomed script-doctor, Pat Hobby, is a terrifically funny and sardonic main character, an aging holdover from the silent days ("once a good man with structure") dropped into a proto-Entourage studio setting that rings absolutely crystal clear seventy years later. Fitzgerald called Hobby "a rat" but in these tales he's still sympathetic and the stories themselves are so compelling that I ended up on eBay trying to track down the original pre-WWII Esquires in which they appeared...magazines that, appropriately enough, provided the last few dollars for Fitzgerald. At the height of his career his short stories had commanded thousands of dollars; now he was turning out these perfect little vignettes, making just enough to pay the rent and put his daughter through Vassar. An honorable labor, and one whose fruits -- wonderfully -- can be enjoyed today by anyone with a library card.

"Someone has to fight the fight": Dispatches from the Real World

I wanted to thank everyone again for thinking of my dad, who is down in Sri Lanka working for Doctors Without Borders. Your thoughts, prayers and good wishes have been much appreciated.

With the fighting in Sri Lanka seeming to come to an end, my dad is planning on coming home on May 28th.

Several of you asked for any updated information I got about his time down there. I received this email this morning:

"extremely busy now. worked all nite last nite but got some sleep today and really unable to work much in hospital due to the masses of patients begging to be cared for. doing things that never can be forgotten and probably not talked about in polite company. but bottom line is someone has to fight the fight.
so happy the fighting has stopped and that we are getting surgical reinforcements so that i can leave without feeling like hell. there will be months of work just to get the acute phase over with where i am, then the rehab and reconstruction phase will hopefully began."

Again, I just want to express my appreciation to all of you who voiced your support for the work that DWB is doing and has done under unbelievable and horrific circumstances. I know that my dad feels fortunate to have the opportunity to help make things better. The solution to inhumanity, it turns out, is simply humanity.

How Short is Short?

Some kind-hearted person once said, "It's not the size the counts -- it's what you do with it."

I've written short stories, plenty of them. And some of them were very short. Some of the shortest, around a thousand words or less, appeared here on the blog a couple years ago...I went through a kind of phase, you might say. They were fun, one-sitting type deals, as quick and vital as a muscle twitch.

The question is, how short can a story be, and still be considered a story?

A few weeks ago my buddy Rob Swartwood invented a new word for this style of micro-narrative. He called it "hint fiction" and decided to have a contest on his blog, open to everybody who wanted to submit a story, twenty-five words or less. He even landed himself a bona fide celebrity judge, Stewart O'Nan, author of Snow Angels and Last Night at the Lobster.

And the world took notice.

In no time at all, Rob was flooded with entries. The contest wasn't just a success, it was an event. And it seemed like everybody was talking about it. Places like Media Bistro and The New Yorker were writing about Rob's "hint fiction," and faster than you could say "book deal," Rob's agent was fielding a publishing offer from none other than W.W. Norton. As in, The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction.

Of course, publishing is full of writers and PR people that give entire chunks of their skeleton to get within a mile of this kind of buzz. To Rob's immense credit, he's taken a level-headed approach to all of it. Since the deal became real, he's has made contact with some of literature's heaviest hitters, and I happen to know that he's putting together a murderer's row of hint fiction. Frankly, I can't wait for it to come out -- Rob says it's going to be a Fall, 2010 title -- and I'm beyond thrilled for Rob and the way that his brand-new term has ignited such enthusiasm. For a compendium of small stories, this one is going to be big.

By the way, if you want to see my eleven-word contribution to the cause, click on over to Rob's page -- you'll find it there.

My Other Me

My pseudonym finished the first draft of his novel the other day. He's pretty excited about it. I cautioned him about the untrustworthy sense of euphoria that accompanies the completion of a first-draft. "You'll start questioning yourself in a day or two," I said. "By the time your agent gets back to you, you'll hate it."

My pseudonym reminded me that I'm the same way when I finish a draft, and he's right, of course -- what right do I have to take the wind from his sails...or his sales, for that matter? Who knows, his manuscript might actually sell. I passed it along to my agent out of sheer goodwill and wished him the best.

"Thanks," he remarked, and I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or not. After all, he didn't have to remind me how pseudonyms can sometimes surprise you. Everyone's favorite example, Richard Bachman, started out playing farm league but by the time he was through, his sales were as big as Stephen King's. Ed McBain made a lot of money for literary author Evan Hunter. More recently, an excellent writer named Peter Abrahams found New York Times bestselling success with his pseudonym's new novel Dog On It, a mystery narrated by a dog. It's a fun book with a great voice, and Abrahams' pseudonym deserves all the success he's getting.

Of course, I feel obligated to remind my pseudonym, it's also possible that my agent will hate the book, that publishers will reject it, or if--against all odds--it actually gets published, the reading public will ignore it utterly. At this, my pseudonym just shrugs and tells me he'll probably just write another one anyway, just for fun, and if he doesn't, who cares? After all, he reminds me, as my shadow, he's just a slight tilt of the sun away from slipping back into blessed nonexistence.

"Despair is Everywhere": Dispatches from the Real World

If you read my blog, you know that I work in the health care field; when I'm not parenting and writing horror novels, I'm an MRI technologist, which is as close as I'll ever come to medical school.

I come by the vocation fairly: I grew up in and around hospitals and hearing OR stories at the dinner table. My father is a retired surgeon. He worked for forty plus years in general and vascular surgery, and a couple years ago he retired from practice.

Now he works for Doctors Without Borders, and at the moment he's working with a handful of other surgeons and anesthesiologists down in Sri Lanka. If you've been reading the news lately at all, you know it's not going well down there, not just for the government but civilians and foreign aid workers as well. My dad doesn't have much access to computers or the internet, but tonight I received an email from him.

"Conditions here are undescribable. It is a little better now that many have been transferred away. Still there are many patients without beds. Despair is everywhere."

My dad is due back stateside in a few weeks. I haven't seen him since February. My family and I are planning to fly out to his home in Washington State in June to visit and catch up -- to hear in more detail about what he's experienced down there. And while I'll obviously be very happy to sit down and see him, I'll be even happier just to know that he's back safely.

I write horror and suspense by choice, and every so often it's good to be reminded of the schism that separates fiction and reality -- what's cathartic and entertaining, in other words, versus the forces of tension and (let's face it) terror operating in the wider world.

These are things that fiction can't protect us from. All we have is each other.