The grubby heirs of Excalibur: swords in the world of Eddie LaCrosse
My friend Teresa Frohock, author of Miserere: An Autumn Tale (my review is here), asked me how the idea for naming Eddie LaCrosse’s swords came about. I thought this might be interesting to others as well. First came the idea of writing the initial novel, The Sword-Edged Blonde, as if it were a 40s detective novel. This was after years--well, Read more
The Hum and the Shiver eBook sale!
As the release day for the second Tufa novel, Wisp of a Thing, approaches, you can now get the eBook of the first, The Hum and the Shiver, for only $2.99. It's a limited-time offer, so hurry before supplies...oh, wait, it's an eBook, they've got plenty. But the sale ends June 7, 2013! Click here to order from Amazon for Read more
Guest blog: Dale Short on his film Recovering Racist
I was honored to be the first contributor to this documentary Kickstarter project, and rather than attempt to convince you myself, I asked acclaimed author Dale Short, one of the people behind the film, to explain where the idea came from and how important it is. And please check out the video trailer at the end of his article Read more
Book Review: Paperback Writer by Mark Shipper
"Rock and roll is a joke and the joke is on anyone--performer or audience--who ever takes it for any more than that..." (p. 11) Writing about music, as I've said before, is tricky. The ones who do it well--P.F. Kluge, Sheila Kay Adams, Lee Smith--take it very seriously. So it follows that writing a parody about music, one that's simultaneously Read moreIf you go to the book page for The Hum and the Shiver here on my website and scroll down, you’ll see the words FREE DOWNLOAD.
Click on the link, and you’ll get the entire song “The Hum and the Shiver,” as featured in the book trailer. If you’re curious, you can also go to this blog post and read about how Jennifer and the Tufa are inextricably linked.
Thanks to Jennifer Goree for granting permission to share her marvelous song.
The bell from Black Sam's Whydah
When I began thinking about the next Eddie LaCrosse novel, sometime during the final stages of Dark Jenny, I knew I needed a simple hook for it. The previous books had them: The Sword-Edged Blonde came from the song, “Rhiannon,” Burn Me Deadly came from a mash-up of Kiss Me Deadly and the idea of dragons as nuclear weapons, and Dark Jenny was, of course, inspired by King Arthur. So what, I pondered, would be next?
At first I considered the idea of a DaVinci Code-ish (okay, really, a Foucault’s Pendulum-ish) mystery set in my made-up world. That immediately felt impractical, as it would require creating far more history, backstory and mythology than I felt the series could bear. I did try, though, creating a chain of clues for Eddie to discover, each one leading him to the next, in a globe-trotting adventure. But it quickly grew cumbersome, and untrue to the character’s noirish origins. So I downshifted to a more traditional treasure hunt, this time based on my lifelong interest in the Oak Island Money Pit (more on that in another blog post). That led me to the simple hook I needed: pirates.
But what pirates? Which pirate?
I wanted to base my pirates on real ones. And there were a lot of good ones out there. But I needed one who turned pirate for the right sort of reason, one that would inspire someone to hire Eddie to go after him.
And that led me to Black Sam Bellamy, and his ship, the Whydah, which went down in 1717.
The first-person account of the Whydah's rediscovery.
The Whydah stands as the only pirate ship whose wreck has been positively identified (her bell, with her name on it, was discovered in 1984; see above illustration). But the story of Black Sam is what really got my attention. He turned pirate not from greed or vengeance, but from love: he wanted to amass a fortune, then return to marry his Cape Cod girlfriend. That was the kind of hook on which I could hang an Eddie LaCrosse story.
Now, as with most initial ideas, the story became its own thing in the telling. Black Edward might do some of the same things as his inspiration Black Sam, but his reasons are eventually revealed to be completely different, as is his ultimate fate. But using the real man as the basis for the story continues something I established with my first Eddie novel, namely to find fantasy analogues for elements of real life whenever possible (that’s why, in that first novel, a horse gets a parking ticket).
So Wake of the Bloody Angel, while it moves into a new setting (see this blog post for more information about that) and introduces new characters, also follows the series’ unspoken (and extremely loose) rules. Because the fun of writing them is in giving readers exactly what they expect, but in ways they don’t anticipate. That way it stays fresh for you, and me.
Back when I first wrote the stories that comprise volume one of The Firefly Witch tales, I also discovered the use of music to set the mood for writing. I know from talking to other writers that it’s a common thing now, and probably was back then–Stephen King blasted AC/DC when he was working, for example. But with no internet to connect me with other authors, I not only discovered it on my own, but thought perhaps I was unique.
The two songs I associated with Ry and Tanna Tully were specifically about their relationship, and more specifically about how Ry saw his girlfriend/wife. This was sort of inevitable, given that I’d decided to tell the stories from Ry’s point of view. In a sense, that choice freed me from a level of objectivity that would’ve been hard to maintain. I couldn’t constantly reiterate how beautiful Tanna was, or keep describing that beauty in detail, without it becoming tedious. However, it was a snap to describe how Ry saw her and felt about her, because it established the stories’ central relationship in a way that an objective, third-person perspective never could. And it really didn’t matter if Tanna was the most attractive woman in the world; what mattered was that Ry thought she was. As I revise the stories for the next volume, I’m reminded of the wisdom of that decision. I’d like to say it was a conscious choice, and in some ways, it was. But there was also a healthy dollup of beginner’s luck.
The first song that connected itself to the stories (and I use that phrase deliberately; I never set out to find songs, they just appear and resonate) was “Spooky,” released by the Classics IV in 1968. First, the song itself is brilliant: there’s a sense of wind through bare trees in the production, and the vocals are simply and fun. If you pay close attention to the end of the story, “The Chill in the Air Wakes the Ghosts Off the Ground,”* you’ll catch the pretty blatant shout-out to the song.
The other song, 1985′s “And She Was,” is by the Talking Heads. Ironically, I’ve never been a huge fan of David Byrne, but this song has a joyousness that goes beyond the arrogant smugness of most of his work. The story, possibly apocryphal, is that Byrne wrote the song about a girl who liked to take LSD in a field next to a Yoo-Hoo factory. But whatever the inspiration, it’s always felt to me like a man delighted with a girl’s quirks, and that’s certainly how Ry feels about Tanna; hell, he’d have to, to put up with them.
These songs let me quickly access the mood I’m after when I’m writing. And, now that I’m revamping and revising these Firefly Witch stories, that’s become an incredibly crucial thing. I wrote the original versions of most of these stories fifteen years ago, when both the world and this writer were very different; the music lets me reconnect with how I originally felt about them, and why I felt their stories were worth telling.
*the title of this story comes from a slightly misheard lyric in “Harvest Moon” by the awesome Jason and the Scorchers
Dark Jenny cover
Today the mass market paperback edition of the third Eddie LaCrosse novel, Dark Jenny, hits shelves. It includes a preview from the upcoming Wake of the Bloody Angel, one that’s different from the preview in the paperback of Burn Me Deadly.
There was no book trailer for the original release of Dark Jenny, but there is one for the new edition. Check it out below:
Want a chance to win a copy? Leave a comment before midnight on Memorial Day.
Sterlin Harjo at Sundance in 2007
Sterlin Harjo is an Oklahoma filmmaker with two extraordinary feature films under his belt. His first, Four Sheets to the Wind, is about a young man struggling to connect to the world after the loss of his father; Barking Water tells of two elderly lovers on a last road trip. Both are set against the background of Oklahoma Native Americans (Harjo belongs to the Seminole and Creek Nations), but they’re not special-interest films at all; they’re universal stories about feelings that we all have, against a unique and vivid cultural background.
Here’s the trailer for Four Sheets to the Wind:
One of the things that impressed me about the films was the tightness of the stories; it’s one thing to do a tight script, it’s another to do a tight one that feels loose, the way reality feels loose. Both Harjo’s films seem to have a leisurely pace, presenting the unhurried minutiae of the characters’ lives, but by the end it all matters and it all has weight. It’s also significant that, whether due to budget or aesthetics, the movies are filled with the look, sounds and locations of real life.
Here’s an example of the kind of realistic detail you won’t find in mainstream commercial cinema. In Four Sheets to the Wind, a character is awakened by a noise; now, strictly speaking, it could be any noise, from a barking dog to a coffee maker. But Harjo uses a truck’s squealing fan belt. Most mainstream filmmakers would have no idea what this sound even is, let alone what causes it, or what its presence says about the socioeconomic position of the family. It’s a tiny real-life detail that conveys an awful lot in a simple noise.
See the trailer for Barking Water:
Sterlin was kind enough to answer some questions for me about his approach to writing.
AB: Your two feature films have the common story element of people struggling to communicate. In Four Sheets to the Wind, Cufe is desperate for someone to really listen to him, and in Barking Water, Frankie and Irene are trying to repair a lifetime of miscommunication. Why is that theme of such interest to you?
SH: Not sure. There are a couple of themes that I deal with: communication/language and death. They always seem to find there way into my work.
I know you share a cultural background with your films’ subjects; how much of the actual stories also come from real life?
A lot of the characters are based on personalities that Im familiar with. Cufe in Four Sheets is based off my cousin, with a little bit of me in the mix. All the films have scenes or stories that have been adapted from real life. That’s really the only way I can write. That’s why my stories are culturally specific and set in Oklahoma.
One element that gives your films such impact is that, for the most part, everything is underplayed. There’s not a lot of histrionics, which is one reason the climax of Barking Water is so powerful. Do you know it’s going to have that tone from the moment you envision a story, or does it arise out of the material?
I always take the low key route. I just like subtlety. I am always striving to be truthful. I love how older Indians in my family tell stories. It can be about anything… about nothing, but the way they tell it makes it compelling. I love the films of John Cassavetes and Jim Jarmusch. Very different filmmakers, but neither care much for false reactions or theatrics. Both seem very real, in very different ways.
You mentioned Cassavetes: his films feel like they’re improvised, yet they’re not: pretty much everything is scripted. How do you use improvisation in your films?
I do improv, like Cassevetes, in rehearsal. But most everything is written.
One of my favorite comments about writing comes from screenwriter/director David Koepp, who was urged to eliminate the heavy Chicago accents in his film, Stir of Echoes: paraphrased, he says that the more specific you are with your characters’ reality, the more the audience will see the universal in them. As a reader/viewer, I’ve found that to be true, and I try to embrace it in my own writing. What do you think about that idea, and how does the concept apply to your work?
I agree. I think the more specific you get the more universal your story/film is. I always try to write from the characters perspective. Not the audience perspective. Because if you create a world where people can go into they will get into the film more.
Currently Harjo’s work is regularly featured at This Land, an Oklahoma-based arts project that includes a TV series of short documentaries (I’m partial to Indian Elvis). I appreciate him stopping by to answer some questions, and look forward to his future work.
I’ve been teaching a class for teen writers at the local library, and like any teaching job, the teacher gets as much out of it as the students. These kids are all there because they want to be, and they’ve proven through our first revision pass (my notes on their stories) that they can take editorial comments without freaking out. Even better, than can then implement those comments and improve their stories, often in ways the notes didn’t actually suggest. In other words, they’re real writers.
One particular issue, though, runs through all their work: a tendency to overwrite. They describe everything a character does, or the physical environment, in far too much detail. Their transitions, where a character leaves one location and goes to another, are especially problematic. This falls under number 10 of Elmore Leonard’s rules for good writing: Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.
Now, me being a professional, you’d think I’d be long past that problem, right?
In my upcoming novel Wake of the Bloody Angel, my hero Eddie LaCrosse has to hire a ship to track down a pirate. He’s also brought along Jane Argo, a fellow sword jockey with a background in both piracy and pirate hunting. I wrote page after page, chapter after chapter, detailing how they found their ship, the Red Cow, and negotiated with its captain. I had them put together a hand-picked crew, each with his or her own story. And no matter how hard I tried, the whole section just sat there like a lump. Despite my best efforts, it seemed determined to be one of those Leonardian parts that readers tended to skip. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t write this any better.
The most boring part of any trip.
Then my wife, aka the smartest person I know, put it all in perspective. ”He’s basically buying a ticket. How exciting can that be?”
Boom goes the dynamite, as they say.
I deleted the chapters because, just like I tell the kids in my writing class, there’s no point in writing it if the reader’s going to skip over it looking for the next interesting thing. I put the whole section offstage, in the break between two realizations. One chapter ends with Eddie exclaiming, “Son of–” following one bit of insight, and the next begins “–a bitch!” after another. In the first, he’s on land. In the second, he’s already aboard the Red Cow, weeks into his hunt for the pirate Black Edward Tew.
I could have probably left that bit of overwriting in, and with a lot of effort gotten it presentable. But it would still remain unnecessary. And that’s the concept I’m going to try to convey to the kids in my class.
Because, hey: I’m long past that sort of thing myself. Right?
I sold my first short story in 1996. It appeared in a defunct horror zine called Gaslight: Tales of the Unsane.
It introduced Tanita “Tanna” Tully, a character I subsequently wrote about for nearly ten years. She was: a) blind, but could see in the presence of fireflies, b) a parapsychologist, and c) a Wiccan high priestess known as Lady Firefly. The stories were told mostly in first person by her husband, a small-town reporter. These tales appeared sporadically through the early 2000s, mostly in PanGaia magazine. When my novels took off, Lady Firefly gave way to Eddie LaCrosse, Baron Zginski and Bronwyn Hyatt. I still occasionally get asked about her, though, by readers wondering if I’ll ever bring her back.
Wonder no more. Because Tanna Tully, Lady Firefly, is indeed back.
The cover for the first Firefly Witch collection
The first three-story chapbook, The Firefly Witch, will be available for download on Amazon beginning May 14 for only $2.99. The stories introduce Tanna Tully, her husband Ry, and their home of Weakleyville, TN, a small college town near the Kentucky border. They involve magic, romance, humor and a touch of Southern Gothic.
I had a couple of goals when I originally wrote these stories. I wanted to show that an established couple could be fun to hang out with, much like Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man (in fact, when asked to describe the stories, I often facetiously called them, The Thin Man Goes to Hell). I tried to depict actual Wiccan beliefs and practices seriously; that means it’s shown as a religion, not a hobby, and Tanna draws her strength and courage from it. And it was my first attempt to write something set in the contemporary South that I knew.
When I first tried to place them, the urban fantasy genre didn’t exist; they weren’t scary enough for the pure horror zines, and they were too scary for the pure literary journals. But much like the idea of a high fantasy detective series about a tough “sword jockey,” I knew the stories would eventually find a home. Now, thanks to technology and new ways of looking at old genres, they have.
This first collection tells how Ry and Tanna met, fell in love and got married. There are also ghosts, including what might be the first ghost in the world. Two of the stories, “The Chill in the Air Wakes the Ghosts Off the Ground” and “The Darren Stevens Club,” have been previously published; the third, “Lost and Found,” appears for the first time in this collection. Subsequent collections will include haunted roller coasters, psychopathic psychics, women who can blind you with their glow, and giant frogs.
For those who remember Ry and Tanna, I hope you’ll be tickled to see these stories available again. For those who don’t, I think you’ll enjoy them. They’re people I’d like to hang out with, if they were real. I’d love to discuss philosophy with Tanna, and join Ry for a beer at Cadillac’s.
I just don’t know if I’d want to visit a haunted house with them after dark.
Okay, so the fourth adventure of sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse, Wake of the Bloody Angel, hits shelves and reading devices this summer. What’s it about, you ask?
Pirates.
Why shouldn't I smile? I'm a goddamn pirate! Charlton Heston as Long John Silver in the best version of Treasure Island.
Oh, sure, there’s other things: the weight of the past, the nature of truth, the limits of friendship, sea monsters. But the selling point for me, the reason I wanted to write it, is simply that one word: Pirates.
See, not to brag (okay, maybe a little), but I was into pirates before they became cool again. Sure, I liked the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie; but before that I’d also liked the Errol Flynn triumvirate of Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, and Against All Flags. I liked Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate, and Tyrone Power in The Black Swan. I liked little-known pirate films such as Nate and Hayes, starring Tommy Lee Jones, and Swashbuckler, with Robert Shaw.
And before all those movies, there was the book: Treasure Island. It was the first “real” book I read to both my sons. It has everything a boy expects from a novel: action, adventure, suspense, a hero they can identify with, and one of the great lovable villains, Long John Silver. That it also involves pirates, and treasure, and castaways, and mutiny, and the lore of the mysterious Captain Flint, doesn’t hurt at all.
Maureen O'Hara puts Tyrone Power in his place in The Black Swan.
For each Eddie LaCrosse novel, I try to come up with a new setting. In The Sword-Edged Blonde, we traveled his world to learn about Eddie and his past; Burn Me Deadly concentrated on Eddie’s present, and the town of Neceda where he lives; then, after two novels where we met his friends, Dark Jenny drops Eddie alone and with no allies into the middle of an island kingdom, where he’s suspect number one in a murder. In each case, the idea was to both change the physical location, and a find a new way for Eddie to interact with it.
Errol Flynn as Captain Peter Blood.
So for Wake of the Bloody Angel, he goes to sea. With a crew of ex-pirates who are now pirate hunters, and in the company of Jane Argo, currently a sword jockey like Eddie, before that a pirate-hunter, and before that a pirate herself. His quarry is a friend’s former lover, the pirate who made the single greatest haul in all of recorded pirate history, then vanished with it.
That’s my skeleton. The muscles and flesh on it, though, are informed by a lifetime of watching and reading about swashbucklers in action. Eddie is no Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn (well, maybe the slightly-past-his-prime Errol of Against All Flags), but hopefully you’ll enjoy reading about his adventures on the high seas. And watch for more of the novel’s background and inspirations, coming soon.
Want to win an ARC of Wake of the Bloody Angel? Tell me about your favorite pirate in the comments (and make sure to leave an e-mail so I can reach you if you win). Contest ends at midnight, May 6.
Unfinished, and about boredom. One of the best three books of 2011? Really?
For the first time since 1977, the Pulitzer Prize committee chose not to give an award for fiction this year.
The responses have been vociferous and bifurcated (those are high literary terms for loud and split). It’s been denounced alternately as a flaw in literature itself, or in the committees doing the nominating and selecting, respectively.
The nominating committee–Michael Cunningham, a past winner for his novel The Hours, NPR host Maureen Corrigan and New Orleans Times-Picayun book editor Susan Larson–were, by all accounts, a reasonable group. You had a writer, someone who talks to a lot of writers, and someone who professionally reads and evaluates a lot of books. Together, according to this story, they read over 300 books in nine months. The three books they submitted were Swamplandia by Karen Russel, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Theoretically, the Pulitzer award committee would real all three, then pick a winner.
And that’s where it gets kind of squirrelly.
The one book entirely written by its author AND first published in 2011. Just sayin
Of these three books, only Swamplandia was a real, honest-to-God finished and current piece of writing. Train Dreams is a novella first published in 2002, which common sense says should disqualify it for an award ten years later (although the Pulitzer rules are pretty vague on who and what is eligible). And The Pale King (a novel about boredom, if you can believe it) was left unfinished at the time of Wallace’s 2010 suicide and subsequently completed by an editor, which means it’s not even all his work.
I haven’t read Swamplandia, but it certainly sounds like the kind of book that wins awards. The Pulitzer website calls it, “An adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years.” Its author, Karen Russell, has already won a boatload of other awards for her fiction. So what happened?
We may never know. The Pulitzer folks are under no obligation to explain their reasoning, and can give (or not) their awards to whomever they want. But despite their denials it’s tempting to read into it a comment, if not an outright indictment, of the overall state of “literature.” There has always been a dichotomy between the books that sell and the books that critics love, but it’s rarely been a wider gulf than it is right now, thanks to changes in the book industry itself. Seldom has a more repulsive “writer” also been a bestseller than the likes of Jersey Shore’s Snooki, for example.
And really, Pulitzerati, you expect us to believe that an unfinished novel about boredom is better than every other book released in 2011, except two? Those sorts of critical blinders don’t help your case.
I have no answer or explanation for this. I’m happy to consider it an observation about the so-called “literary” genre that has abandoned such basics as good storytelling, some sort of moral perspective and even the basics of grammar (you’ll never find as many sentence fragments in a genre book as you do in some “literary” works). But ultimately it may tell us nothing, except how out of touch elite awards organizations can be. And that’s not news at all.
A few weeks ago, my friend Elizabeth Keathley wrote a guest blog here about the new run of the Wonder Woman comic. Recent issues have caused her to re-evaluate her original comments.
*****
Last month, I wrote a piece for this blog recommending the new run of Wonder Woman, based on the first four issues of the digital release. It is with a heavy heart that I return to rescind my recommendation, based on some rather strange story turns in issues five through seven. There’s not a lot I could write that hasn’t been written in detail, with page scans, by Colin Smith on his blog, but I felt I owed it to this audience to come back and explain that I don’t think the new comic is really so great anymore.
Image from the animated movie.
I’m not one of those people who would only be happy with an idea of Wonder Woman I have in my head. I thought the animated Wonder Woman movie was very good, despite it being far from the Wonder Woman I have in my mind. What I ask of WW writers is that they treat women, especially the title character, with respect. Wonder Woman is a feminist full of compassion – she’s a hero. Sadly the current DC misogyny creates an atmosphere of editorial bias that results in really crappy treatment of women. While never having the pleasure of meeting Dan Didio, his every response to questions regarding the current status of women in the DC universe can be justly characterized as hostile; see this response from last year’s Comicon as an example.
One gets the feeling that Didio is angry with women, or that he at the very least doesn’t think they should be allowed to play in his club house, which is weird since many women like myself were happily playing there before he came along and threw all our toys out the window and used the rest to make borderline porn. Sorry for the rant; I get passionate about Wonder Woman. My youngest daughter is named Diana.
David Willis also sums up how Didio’s approach to female characters is bad for business over here. Most frustratingly, it doesn’t matter how badly the current run of DC comics twists Wonder Woman or her Amazon sisters in the the marketplace of ideas. DC comics could publish a storyline so horrific that no one would ever buy Wonder Woman again, and the publishing run would continue. When William Moulton Marsten created Wonder Woman in the 1940′s, he signed a contract stating that if DC fails to publish a Wonder Woman title for 90 days, the rights to Wonder Woman revert to his heirs. DC almost dropped the ball once after Crisis on Infinite Earths (where Wonder Woman was actually killed off), and quickly ran a three issue filler storyline. That filler storyline, in which a classic Wonder Woman rescued a bratty little girl, was great. Afterwards she was rebooted again, and I wasn’t sorry; the new run by George Perez turned out to contain some of my favorite new Wonder Woman stories.
Gone are the days when I could maintain hope that one more reboot with a new writer might give me a good monthly Wonder Woman read. Alan Moore, who signed a similar deal for Watchmen, recently gave a sad interview about the current use of his Watchmen characters. It doesn’t matter how bad the new Watchmen comics are, DC will never go out of business because they own the liscensing rights to the originals. It doesn’t matter how bad the current Wonder Woman comics are, or if no one buys them, because DC makes loads of money from Wonder Woman lunchboxes, underwear, and toys.
Of course, those Wonder Woman products are bought by little girls who love their cartoon character, a hero who is strong and brave and kind, who hangs out with her friends in the Justice League and can be counted on to be a solid team player when the fate of the Earth is on the line. I wish I could say the same about the Wonder Woman in the current run of comics.
