Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer - Posts Tagged "evil"

Do you have a book in you? I mean that question figuratively and not literally. If you literally have a book in you, please turn off your computer and seek medical help.

No, I am asking if you have within you the desire to write a book.

I did. I always have. Well, at least since I realized that the only job that really combined my love of lying with making an income was that of being a writer.

I worked on several books over the years.

One, called "Hell," was going to be about a race war in the United States. Yeah. I never had a central character. It was just vignettes about the horrors of a new Civil War. It was inspired by the riots after the Rodney King verdict and hearing Mike Bowers mention the riots in a speech he gave to the Griffin Kiwanis Club.

I worked on "Hell" for several years.

One day I had the epiphany-after hearing a news report-that the US was no longer divided between African-Americans and Caucasions. It was also divided between Asians, Hispanics and others. It was divided by sex, by gender and by sexual preference, by age and by generation.

After "Hell," I worked on a book about Franklin Roosevelt. I could never get the purpose of the novel straight. Was it alternate history? Was it horror? I struggled with it for years. Someday I may work on it again.

Last year I decided to try National Novel Writing Month. Basically, I set aside everything I had been working on and started a new story.

The inciting incident was based on something my grandfather had told me. Poppa Mack, Maxie McCullough, said that his father had taken him to see the last public hanging in Spalding County.

That incident became the starting point for a story that I called "Hanging" and that became "Evil is Always Human."

I was pleased with the final product. Here's why: the characters.

I have read about authors who plot out their stories with elaborate outlines. I cannot do that, apparently. I wrote my book as if I were following real people and merely telling what happened to them. They seemed real. When they would sometimes do something that did not seem real, I would let the character tell me the right action to put in.

The characters, particularly the mother, are paradoxes. They don't always do what I would expect them to do, but they do what people do. Sometimes, that is unexpected. Sometimes they are strong; sometimes they are weak, evil, lazy and even inattentive.

"Evil is Always Human" is a story that I am happy with as it stands. Some of the folks who have read it have specifically asked for a sequel. It is a story that I already know. It's not a pretty story. The characters who survived the first book don't become better people who recognize the errors of their ways. They just keep going like people do.

I humbly ask that you buy my book. Read it. Let me know what you think. Thanks.

“Sickness will surely take the mind where minds don’t usually go.” – a line from the rock-opera Tommy by the Who.

I was in high school when that movie premiered and I had to see it because Elton John was the Pinball Wizard. When I did see it, I was impressed with the whole thing.

The girl who was ever-so-briefly my girlfriend at the time got the Tommy album by the Who afterwards because she was a lot cooler than I was. (Actually another boy had bought her the album, but he was a lot cooler than I was, too.)

Anyhow, this is not about Tommy. It’s about sickness.

I think sometimes that dreams are mental illness: that we have brief little takes on what it’s like to live in the illogical world of the mentally ill. Some of those little takes yield ideas that challenge us to consider alternatives to the “logical world.”

For me, those little takes include some pretty bizarre trips into places where there is knee-deep snow and no visible streets and houses occupied by ghosts. There are places where the zombie apocalypse is strictly for entertainment purposes and yields the opportunity for target practice without the fear of horrid death.

There are places where my dead father is still alive, his death a misunderstanding and his advice and help and support still right there where I need it.

Last night’s little stroll into insanity included a chicken egg that had something alive in it, something black and feathered and hideous and that I didn’t want to see so I washed the rotting shell until it gradually disintegrated in my hand and the thing I didn’t want to see got caught in the sinktrap where it squirmed just enough that I would know it was not dead.

Yeah, I like my dreams, even the ones that totally creep me out. I know that they are just little excursions into insanity, little trips into a world that I can’t get to any other way.

“Well, why aren’t you excited?” Priscilla asked me.

“I am.”

“Well, you don’t act like it. If my book was up for an award, I’d be excited.”

“I’m happy about it. I’m not going to win because my book is such a downer.”

“Are the others upbeat?”

“I don’t really know, but I gotta figure some of them are.”

My book, Evil is Always Human, is a finalist in the General Adult Fiction category for the 2013 ForeWord Reviews contest. I told Priscilla about it because she has been supportive of my writing and her mother actually read the book. She expected me to be excited. I am pretty pleased with that fact, but there’s no point getting excited about it. I kind of think excitement is for suckers because ultimately nothing works out and you’re going to die anyhow. I mean, you can be pleased because something good happened, but by no means should you somehow think that the other shoe will hover in midair in perpetuity.

“Oh, look,” she said. “Here it is on their website.” She was online throughout this conversation and we only made eye contact twice and then briefly. That's how I like my conversations: brief and distracted.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s not a picture of the cover because apparently I effed that part up.”

“Still, it’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah.”

“So when will they announce the winner?”

“I think it’s in June,” I said, but I really didn’t know. “It’s judged by people in the field in some way. I don’t remember exactly who judges, but I remember thinking it was a group of people who knew something about writing and reading and books and stuff.” There I went, being all eloquent with words and stuff.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Well. My mom really liked it.” Priscilla still hasn’t read it. “You might win.”

“I’m working on the sequel.”

I don’t recall her reply to that. I think by then, she was surfing Pinterest for shoes or something.

“I have had a lot of people want me to write the sequel,” I told her. Then I did the math in my head and realized that “a lot of people” was probably twenty, max. Well. That was still twenty people who actually verbally told me that they wanted to know what happened next to my miserable main character.

I can go ahead right here and tell you: Nothing good. At least, not a lotta good. But it’s okay because he doesn’t get really excited about things either.