Richard Dansky's Blog, page 10

Snowbird Gothic Stories 7 - "The Mad Eyes of the Heron King"

Sometimes, you get lucky.

Every writer, I’m sure, can tell you stories of times they got unlucky. Of magazines that closed, of anthologies that never hit print, of editors who went offline or publishers who winked out of existence prior to street date. I can think of a few examples from my own history, including the memorable “we’re not publishing the book because the editor got t-boned by a school bus” and having word that a publisher I was signed to was shutting down get leaked literally mid-panel at a convention.

But every so often it goes the other way, as with “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King”.

You can generally tell what kind of story I’m writing by the title. If the title is short, the narrative is going to be straightforward and the story’s going to be plot-driven (see: “Coin Drop” in Dark Faith 2). If the title is long and convoluted, like “For the Autumn Queen...” or “And the Rain Fell Through Her Fingers”, odds are it’s going to be more of a mood/tone piece. “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King”, unsurprisingly, falls into the latter category.

The inspiration for the story came from my daily commute, which takes me over Lake Crabtree in Cary. Now when I say “over”, I mean “over. The lake’s an artificial flood control structure. Most of it is to the east of Aviation Boulevard, which runs through it on a raised berm, but to the west there’s a smaller, shallower marshy area that occasionally lures nervous kayakers, and more frequently features sunning turtles, ducks, and various varieties of herons ankle-stepping their way through the muck. The last is what caught my eye, their dainty, formal body language zipping to the place in my brain where anthropomorphism lives, and the rest of the story came from there. Lots of office buildings are situated tastefully on the shores of the lake (whose waters are so tainted with PCBs that eating the fish therein is considered a Very Bad Idea). Why wouldn’t a corporate nebbish find a nice lakeside spot to sit down in? Why wouldn’t he admire the seeming nobility and freedom of the long-legged lords of this domain? Why not indeed?

Of course, that was the writing. The publishing is where I got lucky. Maurice Broaddus, another member of the far-flung writers’ group known as The Bastard Sons of Mort Castle, was putting together Dark Faith at the time. I, being oblivious, had shotgunned the story out to the group for feedback. Maurice read it and loved it.

Then he said it was too bad it wasn’t faith-based, or he’d pick it up for the anthology.

Then he said maybe it was about looking for faith in something that wasn’t religion.

Then he said, and I paraphrase here, bloody hell, I’m the editor, and I want this story.

And who was I to say no? To do so would have been foolish.

And the Heron King does not suffer fools gladly.

****

Incidentally, folks, you can now download an excerpt of the book at Goodreads, including “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King”. (You can also enter to win a copy of my upcoming novel VAPORWARE there as well) And as always, if you read and liked the book, please take a moment and

Things. Stuff. A Free Book.

On the eve of a two-week sojourn to Toronto to put various touches (not bad, not finishing) on Splinter Cell: Blacklist. I solemnly swear that this time, I am actually going to visit the Hockey Hall of Fame, largely because, well, I haven't yet, and it seems like the sort of thing one should do. I will, however, be avoiding poutine like the very devil.
Want to win a free copy of VAPORWARE? Sign up for the contest over at Goodreads. Just want to gaze in awe on the cover art? Check out the book's page over at JournalStone. Want to buy it? It comes out in May - yes, we have a release date.
SNOWBIRD GOTHIC is still kicking along quite nicely. You can find it for sale here and here, among other places. I'll be continuing the series of stories-behind-the-stories tomorrow with "The Mad Eyes Of The Heron King", from the original Dark Faith anthology. Also, if you read and enjoyed the book, please do take the time to rate it at Amazon, Goodreads or wherever. I hate asking, but it does help get the word out.
I seem to have gotten my hands on a copy of the Robin Laws-edited The Lion and the Aardvark . Don't ask how; all you need to know is that filthy lucre changed hands, and that no aardvarks were hurt in the exchange.  Inside you'll find my story "The Unicorn At The Soiree", along with a veritable Aesopian cornucopia of tales by a whole raft of wonderful authors. The fox and the crow both say to check it out.
Oh, hey, more reviews and stuff. Here's one of a Maine-set detective novel, Playing God . Here's a reprint of one I did ages ago for a Manly Wade Wellman book. And here's one for what feels like the best storyline Fables has yet produced, Cubs in Toyland . New Brief Lines will be up next week, Lord willing and the word counts don't rise.
Oh, and if you're feeling analytical, check out Research Triangle Analysts, run by the brilliant and talented Dr. Melinda Thielbar. Smart people saying smart things about data - worth checking out, especially if you're in the RTP area.
GDC is coming up, and this year, for the first time, it means the Game Narrative Summit. Freshly transplanted from Austin and feeling frisky, we have an all-star lineup of speakers including Noah Falstein, Susan O'Connor, Corey May, and many more - plus all the other cool stuff one comes to expect from the GNS.
And last but most certainly not least, it is confirmed that I'll be appearing at the Oxford Writing Festival in Oxford, OH next month. Get all the gory details here!
See you from Toronto...

Snowbird Gothic Stories 6 - "Let The House Sing Me To Sleep"

My day job is making video games. My upcoming novel, VAPORWARE (available in May from JournalStone) is about video games. Another story I had published, “Killer App”, was about a video game. You might say it’s a motif in my life; I’ve been making games of one sort or another since I was nine. I enjoy playing games, I enjoy hanging around gamers, and I find the process of game development as fascinating as the end product.

“Let The House Sing Me To Sleep” isn’t about games, but it is about a gamer, and his online buddy, and the little slices of life that get communicated back and forth wtthout context in this age of electronic communication. In a way, the fact that the protagonist and his friend game together gives them more closeness than our hero has with his wife, or with his home. At the same time, the gaps of understanding that can arise in the spaces around this sort of communication can be both hidden and massive, with unexpectedly tragic results.

This story appears for the first time in the collection. It’s also the first (and possibly the last) time I’ll ever attempt an epistolary story. But when the theme of the story is alienation, that sort of chopped, staccato style seems to fit perfectly.

A side note - the first draft of this one was done several years back, when Melinda was gone pretty much the entire summer studying for her comprehensives out at her aunt’s farm in Missouri. (No DSL, lots of carbs, no distractions.) So I was home alone a fair bit, when I wasn’t on the road for work, and I can honestly assure you that a house that normally has two people in it simply sounds different when there’s just one. There are sounds that are missing - chatter, footsteps, the clanking of dishes in the sink downstairs or the gurgle of someone else using the plumbing - and there are sounds that are suddenly, inescapably present. The creak of the house settlingat night, a sudden hiss or rumble from the refrigerator, the unexpected footsteps above you of a squirrel scampering across the roof - these stand out, especially after you’ve turned the lights out and the place you’re supposed to be most familiar, most comfortable, is suddenly different.

Sometimes, one little sound is all it takes.

Snowbird Gothic Stories 5 - "Connecting Door"

“Connecting Door” is about 80% true.

It was inspired by one particularly loud evening at a hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where I spent long stretches while recording dialog for Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Blazing Angels. The hotel was half a block up from the pier; I could look out the window and see the lights of the ferris wheel all night long. Down below, the beautiful people walked past, to be gradually replaced by the shuffling homeless once the hour got late and the bars closed and the urge for privacy beat the urge to be seen out and about.

During the course of my stays there, I developed a strong suspicion that one of the desk clerks had a thriving side business going whereby he’d mark rooms as rented, then shuffle them off privately for “parties” of various illicit sorts. I do know that I’d hear a lot of screaming from some of those rooms, but a call down to the desk was generally met with “i’m sorry, there’s nobody in there.”

Which, of course, is where the story came from. If there’s  nobody there, then who’s making all the noise? And if they’re not there, then they don’t have to bend to any rules - polite behavior, polite rules, polite language, Thou Shalt Not Kill...you get the idea.

The first thing anyone says about the story, generally, is a mention of the profanity. When it first appeared at Pseudopod (read by the marvelous George Hrab), I was told that I’d shattered the site’s record for profanity in a single piece, and I’m fairly certain my mark still stands. Whether folks got why there was so much cursing on the other side of the wall was a bit fuzzier; it’s always fun reading comments ascribing utterly erroneous (and usually disparaging) motives for a creative choice.

For my part, I’ve spent far too much time in hotels, and they’ve always struck me as anonymous, consequenceless spaces. Guests, especially business travelers, try to build antiseptic spaces around themselves, defined by the walls of their rooms, and don’t interact with anyone if they can help it. You’re gone tomorrow, so why worry about annoying the people next door whom you don’t know, whom you’ll never meet, and whom you’ll never see again? Turn up the TV, have loud sex, party, and the hell with the guy in the next room because why should you voluntarily accept restraints on your behavior for the benefit of some schmuck you’ll never see?

And so that’s why the story is littered with so much cursing. It the evidence of the unseen breaking of the compact all travelers share, the real proof that none of the rules apply. And once that taboo falls, for the rest, it’s just a matter of time.

Travel safe.

Things That Can Be Told

I have been added to the list of stretch goals for James Wallis' marvelous-looking Kickstarter RPG, Alas Vegas . If he hits the In Over Your Heads stretch goal, I'll be bending my talents toward some supplemental material for the game. And let me say again, it looks marvelous. James is one of my favorite game designers, and the rogue's gallery he's lined up for his stretch goals - folks like Hite and Selinker and Forbeck - make this a crew of hitters that compares favorably to Danny Ocean's. Step up. Chip in. And let me work my evil magic on James' behalf.
I have seen the cover art for VAPORWARE, which will be put out very, very soon by the fine folks at JournalStone. It is absolutely striking, and when I can share it with you, I will.
Speaking of Books That Are Mine, SNOWBIRD GOTHIC is still out there and anxiously awaiting a good home. Matt Bechtel at NECON E-books has done a marvelous job with the layout on the hardcopy edition, and hopefully we'll have those soon as well. In the meantime, you can get it here, or here. And if you like it and feel like writing a review for Amazon or Goodreads, well, I won't say no.
Conference season is fast approaching, so I can say this: I'll be doing a panel at GDC as well as my three workshops, and I'll also be guesting at the Oxford Writing Festival. There's also the Game Narrative Summit at GDC, which I'm on the Advisory Board for, and the East Coast Game Conference, which boasts a new writing track that I just might have something to do with.
As for this weekend, if you're in the Triangle, there's a couple of events I'd like to recommend. Horror film fans should check out the Nevermore Film Festival at the Carolina Theater in Durham, which is chock full of goodness like John Dies At the End. And on Sunday, I'll be volunteering for the MasterChefs event for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Big thanks go out to all the folks like Baen, Mur Lafferty, CZP, and Atomic Empire who donated auction items, and to the volunteer crew I'll be working with in the back room.
And that's all for now.

Snowbird Gothic Stories 4 - "Minus One"

“Minus One” is one of the stories you can blame on work.

I do a great deal of traveling for Ubisoft, and depending on where the game I’m attached to is based, that can mean a lot of time in Paris, or Lyon, or Toronto, or wherever.  Every habit has to start somewhere, though, and for me it started with an extended stay in Paris in 2004 to work on a survival horror game called Cold Fear.

Ubi put me up in a little extended stay hotel in a neighborhood called Bercy, which had a ritzy shopping district and a large park in it and otherwise not much else to recommend it to the confused and timid traveler except easy access to a metro station. (also, a crepe stand strategically positioned at the entry to said metro station. But I digress). This wasn’t my first time out of the country, but it was my first extended stay out of the country, and the hotel staff - used to dealing with business travelers who were considerably more together than newbie game writer guy - didn’t necessarily have a whole hell of a lot of patience for either my questions or my absolutely terrible French. And so finding the laundry (and getting my money back when the ancient machines ate it) became an adventure, and figuring out what to do with trash became a negotiation, and so on and so forth until I finally had it all figured out just in time to go home. And each of these mysteries had to be teased out of the women who worked the front desk, occasionally looking up from their magazines to tell me that it was my imagination that my keycard didn’t work.

But one of the first stumbling blocks I ran into was the elevator. Any tourist guide to Paris will tell you about the Louvre and Notre Dame; it will not tell you that the damn elevator buttons are numbered differently. The floor labeled “1” would be “2” in the US, and then you have all the basement levels numbered in the negatives. Making matters worse was the fact that one of the two elevators in the lobby didn’t have the negative numbers on it, so for a week I was fairly certain I was hallucinating one way or another when I stepped into a lift.

That’s where this story came from, that feeling of uncertainly and dislocation when you step into a place that’s almost, but not quite, like home. So all the humiliations and missteps and fears of getting it wrong - like standing for half an hour in front of a restaurant waiting to get seated when local custom is to seat yourself, or elevators that don’t make sense, or, well, any of a million little things that added up to an unreasoning terror that I was Doing It Wrong. That’s what got distilled into this particular tale, which is one of the new ones in the collection. It’s never been published before, though it nearly made an appearance in an audio anthology that didn’t quite make it off the ground.

So enjoy. And be careful if you go to Bercy. I’m sure that elevator’s still there.

Snowbird Gothic Stories #3 - "Missing Pages"

There is a certain danger implicit in taking a genre fiction piece to a non-genre writing workshop. For one thing, there’s definitely a bit of a literary hierarchy at work in many places, whereby anything genre is reflexively deemed less worthy than something that is “realistic” (excepting, of course, magical realism and the works of Margaret Atwood). There’s also the very real chance that the folks who will be critiquing your piece, whether it be the workshop leader or the fellow attendees, won’t have the vocabulary or the experience to offer useful criticism on some aspects of the story. Someone who doesn’t read horror, doesn’t know horror and doesn’t like horror might be put off enough by the genre of a piece that they’re unable to drill down to the material they can offer useful feedback on. Other folks might simply not be able to deal with genre convention, and base their critiques on a misunderstanding of the work.

“Missing Pages” was originally published in the one and only fiction anthology put out by Hero Games, a pulp-themed collection edited by the estimable James Lowder and dedicated to recreating the various genres of pulp stories under one suitably lurid cover. James was kind enough to let me take a swipe at the Lovecraftian slot - other folks took war stories, or sports stories, or detective stories, or cowboy stories - and the result was “Missing Pages”, a Case of Charles Dexter Ward riff filtered through the perspective of a child whose search for a father figure leads him to some very dark places.

But before it was published, it got workshopped at a writing festival at North Carolina State, which I attended courtesy of my then-manager Kevin Perry. State is notoriously welcoming to specfic writers; award-winning science fiction writer John Kessel is on faculty, for starters. But workshop attendees are always a mixed lot, and the folks in this one (Kevin aside) tended toward the more mundane. One guy had attempted noir and, in my opinion, failed terribly. There were a few older women in there writing sweet domestic drama stuff, and so it went. And then there was me, in the corner, with “Missing Pages”.

We went back and forth on it a bit, and the workshop leader provided some valuable tips. But at the end of the session, when we were wrapping up, one of my fellow workshoppers made a comment that made me realize that she had no idea what had actually happened in the story. She thought it had a happy ending. And when I told her that it didn’t (yeah, I know, spoilers, but c’mon, it’s Lovecraft homage. There’s no such thing as a happy ending in Lovecraft homage) she got shocked look on her face, drew herself up, and said, “You mean we don’t get him back?”

No. We don’t. But how he gets lost, well, that’s the interesting part.

Another Review Escapes

And there goes my review of The Devil's Trenchcoat, a Hellblazer collection, over at Sleeping Hedgehog.

I swear, I have no idea where these things come from half the time.

Things That Happened

This is the thing my wonderful wife Melinda presented me with on the morning of Valentine's Day:



She also got me a hat. I got her a Darrell Schweitzer short story collection. We're like that.

In scribbly stuff, there's a new Brief Lines up at Green Man Review, and a review of Sherlock Holmes Vs. Dracula over at Sleeping Hedgehog. And for those of you more athletically inclined, there's an accounting of my first trip to a Duke-Carolina basketball game, the college hoops holy of holies, and what happened when I took my father there. As for the Snowbird Gothic stories-behind-stories, the next one will be "Missing Pages", which was my first official dabble in Lovecraftian fiction.

And I hate to ask this, folks, but if you do read Snowbird Gothic and you like it, please leave a review on Amazon or B&N or Goodreads or Smashwords or wherever you see it. It's a big world for a small collection to get lost in out there, and every little good word helps. So in advance, thank you.

Snowbird Gothic Stories - "And The Rain Fell Through Her Fingers"

“And the Rain Fell Through Her Fingers” was written in the throes of my courtship of the brilliant and talented Melinda Thielbar, who at the time was living in Chicago whilst I dwelt amongst the apartment hives of Cary, NC. (Note: Melinda and I have been married for seven-plus years. That tells you how old this story is.)

The particular apartment complex I was living in at the time was smack dab across the street from some of the ritziest, most expensive and most overwrought homes in the greater Triangle area. When I moved in, the guy who took my signature and my deposit said to me, “Welcome to the highest-paid zip code in North Carolina.” “I’ll be doing my part to bring that average down,” I told him, and hooboy, did I, but that’s another story (literally).

The apartment complex was a prime example of its type: pool, clubhouse, cookie-cutter apartments stacked three levels high, all wrapped in a gooey wrapper of parking lot that was given various names like “Winding Way” and “Willow Walk”. I was on the ground floor of my building, which meant I had a little patio that edged up on a couple square feet of nicely tended mulch with some shrubs in it, and then it was sixty feet of blacktop to the property line. The whole thing was laid out in a rough moebius loop, the strands of driveway circling back around and in on each other so that it was nearly impossible to find any given building, or get out if you were trying to leave.

As apartments went, it wasn’t bad, but it radiated temporary. It was a place for people who were figuring out their next move. Stay too long and people looked at you funny, because nobody stayed if they could help it. And that’s where I lived for the year and a half when Melinda and I were figuring out our next move. We were lucky in that she was on the road a lot for SAS, whose headquarters was down the road from my apartment, so she could route through Raleigh often and we could see each other that way. But she was on the road a lot, and we both liked where we were, and there’s a hell of a lot involved in picking up and moving cross-country for someone, even someone you love utterly.

So this story comes from that period of uncertainty, and from that moment when it feels like not choosing might be the best choice you can make. It also comes from wanting to turn the traditional ghost story on its head a little bit. No destiny, no star-crossed lovers, no right person magically happens to be in the right place at the right time. Instead, it’s a story set in a place for temporary people, where the only connections you make are accidental, and aren’t meant to be the ones that last.