P.R. O'Leary's Blog: PROLeary.com, page 6

14 Day Writing Challenge – Part 1

After too long away from creative work due to personal reasons, I needed something to reinvigorate my brain. Thankfully, a loved one noticed what I needed and put together a 14 day writing challenge to get me back into my sweet spot.

I plan to post about them here as I go, and hopefully share some of what I wrote with you. Maybe you’ll find some of these challenges worthwhile. If you do (or if you don’t), let me know and we can compare notes.

I just finished day two, and am having fun so far.

Day 1: Turn on your TV. Write down the first line that you hear and write a story based on it.

Not having cable, I put a random Twitch channel on my PC and the first line that I heard was “60 seconds remaining”. I quite like the story I wrote (the last minute of a man aboard a self-destructing space ship) so I won’t be posting it on this site as of yet. Another draft or two and some editing and I’ll try submitting it for publication.

Day 2: Find the 7th book from your bookshelf. Open it up to page 7. Look at the 7th sentence on the page. Begin a poem that begins with that sentence and limit the length to 7 lines.

The seventh book on my shelf is 999: 29 Original Tales of Horror and Suspense. The seventh sentence on the seventh page is

To be polite, Chirkov said he would consider the acquisition: evidently a great bargain.

Not the best first line to a poem, for sure. I used it verbatim originally but below I used some creative license to lop off the first few words. The rest of the poem is unchanged from what I originally wrote.

He would consider the acquisition:

evidentally a great bargain.

But he knew the superstition

That a deal made in gypsy jargon

Has hidden in it a silent condition:

A new plot in the family garden

And an untimely visit to the mortician

Well, poetry is not my strong-suit, but it was fun to try to write something that worked.

More challenges to come over the next few days!

New Fiction on The Devilfish Review

The new issue of Devilfish Review is out, and it contains a story of mine called Diminishing Returns.

I wrote this a long time ago after reading Chuck Palahniuk’s essays on writing. I have a different style now but I do like some of the language in this one. Let me know what you think!

As always, if you want to know where to find my writing just click the Writing tab above.

What I Learned by Playing Fiasco

Fiasco is a role-playing game where things go wrong. It’s a GM-less cooperative story-telling system that facilities a story of converging fates that combine in catastrophic but oh-so-entertaining ways.

To set up a story you each choose things off of some charts. Relationships, Needs, Locations, Objects. From there you make characters and start acting out scenes. Then, terrible things happen and you continue the process to its grievous conclusion.

For each game you pick a playset, which supplies those charts and directs you towards a specific genre or style. There is a surprising breadth of playsets to choice from, but the core system is the same.

Fiasco is very good at what it does. I recommend you grab some friends and a playset and give it a try.

I have played a few games of it, and each one has been better than the last. As I go I’m starting to learn what makes the game work well. Since Fiasco is essentially a story-creation engine, I found that what I learned can be applied to writing as well.

1) Each character has to have a need. Even if you don’t explicitly state it, you should know as the writer what is driving this characters decisions. If it makes sense to you it will make sense to the reader.

2) Characters should have connections with each other. If characters are working in their own little bubbles, they don’t have real reasons to be in scenes together. Give them reasons to interact that they care about and have fun from there.

4) Each scene needs a goal. This is so important in Fiasco as well as writing! I don’t like to think of where a scene is going to go. I like to think about where the characters want the scene to go. If they get it there or not, well, that’s the fun part about playing the game or about writing the scene. Either way, the goal is what drives the story.

5) Have fun! Relationships, needs, objects and locations are the building blocks. Make each block as interesting as possible. Everything has been written already except the things only you can think of.

6) As usual, all rules are made to be broken. If something isn’t working, don’t stick with the rules, just do what feels right and move along. Nothing sucks time and creative energy like trying to follow rules that aren’t clear or aren’t working.

Overall, the fact that Fiasco and the art of story creation use the same principles shows that the game hits upon the fundamentals of how stories work. And that is the beauty of it. It directs you to do what writers are supposed to do: tell a good story. It’s a great activity to help you hone in on what makes good fiction tick.

Upcoming Stories

I haven’t been posting much but I have been writing. So here’s a quick update on some upcoming publications.

Weirdbook Magazine is publishing a story of mine in Issue #32.

 

Also look for a new piece of mine in the next issue of Devilfish Review.

More to come soon!

Recent Reads: Film, Seizures, Schizophrenia, Virtual Reality, Cowboys, and Swedish Furniture

I haven’t posted about my recent reads in a while. I’m stretching the definition of “recent” in this post but I will press on nonetheless.

It’s been so long that I have over twenty books I could write about. Below are just a few of the interesting ones:

Flicker – Theodore Roszak

Have you ever read a book that feels like it was written specifically for you? Flicker is that for me. Theodore Roszak must have wrote this book with me in mind. The story is about a young film student during the birth of grindhouse cinema who stumbles upon a forgotten horror director who may or may not be using his films to advance the sinister agenda of a centuries-old cult.

But there so is so much more going on! The whole thing is a sordid and dangerous journey into the underside of film history. Orson Welles shows up! The collecting and search for 35mm film prints is a huge part! There is so much for me to love in this book that I have to stop myself from giving any more away. I’ve already said to much.

It’s not just the subject matter, though. The book is written in dense but electrifying prose. Roszak is no slouch. His writing is very intelligent and full of the real knowledge of the type of story he is trying to tell.

Dare Me and The Fever – Megan Abbott

Speaking of electrifying prose, these two novels by Megan Abbott are full of it. Dare Me is the story of a group of high school cheerleaders whose world is turned upside down with the introduction of a new coach. The problem with the book is that the story for me went a little wayward two-thirds through and I lost interest in the characters. But the prose, my god, how great it was!

The Fever had writing that was just as good but the story remained interesting and had me hooked throughout. The young girls of a small town are stricken with strange seizures. The tension this causes starts to bring out everyone’s dark secrets. It’s a nuanced story but Abbott’s prose really sets the mood and had me shaking my head in amazement at times.

Doomed - Chuck Palahniuk

This sequel to Damned gave me the same feel as all of Palahniuk’s last few books: claustrophobia. It’s as if his prose keeps you distant from the story and the characters. The feeling I get while reading of his books only engages me in certain ways. Gut reactions mostly. But my brain is never engaged besides enjoying his turns of phrase. And more importantly, my heart is never engaged.

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

Here is a case of a book with a story that is so much fun that I didn’t care about writing itself. It wasn’t poorly written or anything, but definitely a level or three below any of the above authors. Still, this one had an engaging story that pulled whole story components from the pop culture of my childhood.

It’s about a virtual reality world with a hidden easter egg that will give the one who finds it control of one of the most important companies in the world. The creator of this world is a huge fan of 80’s pop culture and video games, so all of the hints he leaves are steeping in that trivia. It was all lots of fun.

I’m Not Sam - Jack Ketchum, Lucky McKee

This one intrigued me from it’s plot summary: a woman wakes up and suddenly is someone else. She’s no longer the loving wife Samantha. She’s five years old and has never before seen this man that is supposed to be her husband. Ketchum and Mckee follow this story towards an interesting conclusion, but I don’t think it went far enough. I found it unfulfilling.

Black Hat Jack - Joe R. Lansdale

Landsdale is a pulpy, fast-paced and fun writer. His books read like great movies. His writing pops. This is a western tale about a black cowboy and his adventures with the titular legendary hero. There are tense gunfights, great characters and clever dialog. Lots of period flare and a very unique narrative voice.

The Tenants - Bernard Malamud

The lone tenant in a rundown Brooklyn apartment building in 1971 is trying to finish his novel. A black man (named Willie Spearmint!) starts squatting in a nearby room in the building to work on his own writing. The book examines issues of race, art, rivalry, love, sex, friendship.

Malamud is a good writer and he did something interesting in this book. He put different endings to the story at different points in the middle of the book. It’s an interesting experiment that is buoyed by the Willie Spearmint character, who is a joy to read about.

Horrorstor – Grady Hendrix

The book is presented like a weird piece of marketing material for an Ikea knockoff store. That part of the book is spot on. The story is about the strange goings on at the store once it closes down for the night. It’s a gimmicky book and a gimmicky story and Hendrix doesn’t quite have enough writing chops to pull it off. But is a well-produced!

On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

Dry and British but full of real insight. The wedding night of a young couple has huge repercussions for the rest of their lives. It’s a rather sad story. The problem is that at less than 200 pages it felt a bit long. I think it would have worked better as a shorter piece. Still, I can see the draw of McEwan. I’m looking forward to reading some of his longer works.

From a Buick 8 and Under the Dome - Stephen King

Stephen King is a towering figure in the fiction world. And these two book show why. He is very readable, creates interesting characters and puts them in interesting situations. He is able to keep a lot of balls in the air at one time and have them come crashing down when the time is right.

From a Buick 8 is a more subtle and slow story but never boring. A country police station has a strange object in their tool shed. One that may or may not be from another world. Where did it come from? How do they handle it? It builds well to an ending that I quite liked.

Under The Dome is the story of a town inexplicably cut off from the rest of the world by a strange invisible dome. There are tons of characters and tons of stories. Reading it was like consuming a big hearty home-cooked meal of Stephen King nostalgia. Satisfying, if not ground-breaking.

 

An excerpt from my new novel The Man Who Drew You

I’m 180,000 words into a new novel, titled The Man Who Drew You, a magical realism adventure filled with over 400 of my own original drawings!

Below is an excerpt with the art that will be included in the final version. Give it a read and let me know what you think!

Chapter 3: Maze of Paint

It had been tough to get to the painting, but Ansel reached it by climbing the ornate ivy carved into the column beside it. He had to extend one bare foot over and rest it on the painting below it, but after that he was able to lean his lithe body across to read the tiny plague on the frame. The painting was hung ten feet up on the wall of the room named “The Elemental Cuniform Proportionairies”, and this particular painting was named A Lad in Blue Polishing the Tail Lights of a Motor Car.

Ansel licked it, pressing his tongue on the rough paint and sliding it back and forth, starting at the corners and working inward as usual. He hoped this one would lead him not to another painting, but to the exit of this god-forsaken museum.

His food reserves were running low. Water wasn’t a problem, due to the many fountains and decorative spouts that popped up in the floors and the walls of every other room. But he had eaten his last bologna sandwich weeks ago and was only surviving by consuming the various potted plants he had come across. But had hadn’t found one of those in a few days. He had even eaten his leather moccasins, boiling them over a candle in a piece of his bicycle helmet filled with fountain water.

And now, bare-footed, bare-headed and starving, he desperately licked the painting, using his special tongue powers to search for any glimpse of the past that could help get him out of this place.

The images came quickly this time, and Ansel realized just as quickly that this wasn’t the one he was looking for. The first painting. Painting Prime. He could see images in his mind’s eye, like his tongue was a pink slab of RF cable connecting the painting to his brain. He could see an easel, with A Lad in Blue Polishing the Tail Lights of a Motor Car sitting on it. The easel was in front of a blank wall. Sunlight was coming from behind him and dappling across the wall. In front of him was a hand holding out a paint brush. The hand was ensconced in a black glove, and it was moving the brush across the painting. Except the paint was coming off the canvas. Time was flowing backwards.

The image in Ansel’s brain was flying by in fast reverse, so it was only a few seconds of licking before he could see that the painting on the easel was completely empty, and that the artist was removing the blank canvas and replacing it with another complete painting. The one that he had completed just before A Lad in Blue Polishing the Tail Lights of a Motor Car. The next painting that Ansel had to find, which will hopefully lead him back to the beginning of this mess so he could find a way out of here.

This new painting was now baked into Ansel’s brain via his tongue powers, and he vaguely remembered seeing it a couple hundred rooms ago. He headed back in that direction, wandering in circles through the same sections of rooms until eventually he found it sometime the next day. It was in a room labeled “The Vertical Oluvian Triumvirate”, which contained three tall paintings on one wall. Ansel’s target was in the middle. It had a small plague under it that read Love Lost Between Two Song Birds.

He immediately ran up to it and began licking, and the image he got this time was the same as usual. The painting on an easel. But this timesomething was different. It took Ansel a few seconds to figure out what it was. The same gloved hand was there, and it was moving in the same fast reverse, removing paint from the canvas. Then he saw it. The easel was no longer in front of a blank wall. It was in front of a window.

It was too dark outside the window to see what the view was, but Ansel could see a reflection in the glass. He could see the painter, his brush flying back and forth with wild abandon, his face screwed intently at the canvas. Ansel recognized that face.

It was his own.

Ansel screamed.

New Fiction in Acidic Fiction: Corrosive Chronicles Volume 1

Acidic Fiction: Corrosive Chronicles Volume 1 is now out. You can purchase both the trade book and the eBook versions from Amazon.

My story, Stowaway, is contained therein. It’s about an overpopulated, diseased and ravaged future-Earth and one guy who will do anything to escape it.

And that’s not all you’ll get! There are 13 other stories showcasing the best of Acidic Fiction.

Check it out and do some reading. It’s fun.

 

 

LitReactor Flash Fiction Contest Winner: “Sighting”

I am proud to be the co-winner of the February Flash Fiction contest over at LitReactor. We had to write a story that was exactly 30 words about or inspired by Big Foot.

I thought it would be interesting to see the thought process that went into the story. My initial idea was to do the opposite of the usual Big Foot sighting tale. So I thought it would be interesting if Big Foot was the main character and he had sighted a human.

So I started with that idea and, since a common problem with micro-fiction stories is that they aren’t really “stories”, I really wanted to make sure it had a beginning middle and an end. I didn’t think about the 30 word constraint at first. I would just make it short and fix it from there.

My first version (41 words):

Every night I search, hoping to see it again. But it’s elusive and doesn’t show its pale pink face. So I lope back to my cave, lean my furry hide against the cold stone, and dream of something other than solitude.

I had to shorten it to get rid of 11 words, but I wanted to keep the four main points: The narrator is Big Foot, Big foot sees a human, wants to see it again but doesn’t, stays sad and lonesome.

Here is the final version (30 words):

Every night I hope it returns but I never see its pale pink face. So I lope to my lonely cave, lean my furry hide against cold stone, and dream.

In my opinion, the first version is best, but that’s the problem with artificially giving a story a limit. It’s an interesting tool to flex your writing brain, but it may not be what’s best for the story.

Thanks to LitReactor for running the contest and for the prize: a copy of The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac by Sharma Shields.

Anthology Acidic Fiction #1: Corrosive Chronicles coming soon!

The Acidic Fiction website is putting out an anthology of their best fiction from 2014. I am very happy that my story Stowaway was chosen to be included. The book is being published sometime at the end of March 2015. I’ll keep you updated on the release.

In the meantime, check out some of the cool stories posted for free on the site!

ThickJam is gone, so here is a free story

The below story was previously published in the online journal ThickJam. (Issue #279, May 2013)

Since that publication is no more, I am posting “Madame Regret” here.

Free words for your brain!

Madame Regret

P.R. O’Leary

Most people call me looking for a reason. A reason to do something. It’s always different. Some want to get a divorce. Some want to quit their job. Some want to have a baby. Some want to get an abortion. They call me, asking, pleading with me to rationalize some epic change in their lives. They don’t say this outright, but I know what they need.

Why me? Well, I’m just the one that picks up the phone. The 1-900 number they call sends them through a touchpad maze until, after they have signed away their credit card, they are redirected to me.

When my phone rings, I pick it up. “Psychic Hotline, this is Madame Elsa, how may I be of service?” Sometimes I call myself Madame Olivia, or Madame Grace. It doesn’t matter. After I say that there is always a pause. Then they speak.

“Yeah… Hi Madame Elsa” Olivia, Grace, Greenroot. “I have this problem. I want to know if I should quit my job.”

Divorce my wife.

Have this baby.

Buy a house.

This is where the psychic part comes in. They expect me to read their future. To karmically sense the outcome. I do, in a way. I have no special powers, no sixth sense or anything. I just know that they all want the same answer. “Yes.” I tell them.

Yes, you should quit that job. You should have this baby. You should get divorced. You should quit school. Yes. Yes. Yes. I rationalize things. I make things okay. They use that little three-letter word as a reason to do what they really wanted to do anyway.

Their response is always the same after that. A heavy sigh of relief. A pause. Then a grateful “Thanks so much, Madame Julie.” Madame Earthwand. Madame Tigerpaw. Madame Silvertop.

I tell them it’s no problem. I have seen the future and they are going to make the right decision. Then they hang up. One minute is all it takes. One minute at $9.95. They have just spent ten bucks to put their minds at ease.

When I first started I would wonder if I was doing the right thing. Telling them to go change their life, just like that, without knowing anything about them except the sound of their sad pleading voice. I always told myself yes. I was helping people. I was making a difference.

Then one day things started to change. I got a call. “Psychic Hotline, this is Madame Rosewood, how may I be of service to you today?”

Silence. Then a man’s voice. Crackling loud. “Madame Rosewood.” I wait. The voice comes again. Solid and angry.

“Or should I say, Madame Orchid.”

Maybe I have used Madame Orchid before, and the voice is as unfamiliar as every voice I hear over that phone.

“I divorced my wife!” The voice is screaming now.

“I divorced my wife and now my life is over! She bled me dry, that bitch! Fuck you Madame Orchid! Fuck you Madame Rose! I have nothing left! Did you see that in my future you fucking hoe bag!”

I hang up. I was just called a hoe bag. Someone just spent ten bucks to call me a fucking hoe bag.

The phone rings again. I gather myself.

“Psychic Hotline, this is Madame Opal, how may I be of service to you today?”

Another voice this time. Female. High and piercing.

“Madame goddamn motherfucking Opal my fucking ass!”

There is screaming in the background. A kid crying. A baby.

“You told me to have that fucking baby you fucking shank! Madame fucking Opal!” The screaming in the background gets louder. I try to talk back, to say that she is just overwhelmed with having a child.

“Overwhelmed! Overwhelmed! You don’t know what over-fucking-whelmed is Madame goddamn Opal! My baby is fucking retarded! Did you hear me? Fucking retarded! I am gonna have to feed him with a bottle for the rest of his life! You told me to have a fucking retarded baby you fucking sick twisted—“

I hang up.

Again, the phone rings.

This time it’s a man yelling that he just quit the best job he ever had because I told him to. He calls me a pube rat.

The next call is a young couple. Each taking turns with the phone. Cursing me for telling them to buy this house. This goddamn crackpit that they just bought. They call me an ass worm and a pus bag.

After that, I stop answering the phone.

I only pushed people toward the decision they were already going to make. They needed me to be their inspiration, and then they need me to be their fall guy. Someone to blame. It wasn’t their decision. I told them to. It was my idea.

After that, I quit my job at the Psychic Hotline.

I got a job at a Tarot Card hotline instead. When people call, I ask them what they want to know. I pretend to shuffle cards and deal out cards and read cards. I make up meanings for the Emperor card and the Lovers card and the Judgment card. After I have dealt all my imaginary cards and told all about their imaginary meanings, I always tell my client exactly what they need to hear.

You are going to regret your decision no matter what you do.