Keith Deininger's Blog, page 15

New Flash Fiction: "Jeremy" by Keith Deininger

Yeah, I have a new flash fiction story featured in Horror D'Oeuvres. It's a strange little one. Here's how it begins:

Jeremy needed to use the bathroom. He could no longer convince himself he could wait until lunchtime. His bladder pulsed, almost painfully; he could feel it bulging, expanding. He had to go—now!

He raised his hand. Mrs. Mullins pretended not to see. He squirmed in his seat. He jiggled his palm. She ignored him and continued to lecture. He dropped his hand and tried to think of something to take his mind from his ballooning gut... Read More >>

For the rest

GHOSTS OF EDEN Coming November 2014

Ah, there's that feeling again, more of my dark imagination unleashed on the world. Makes me happy.

Here's the synopsis:

A neglected and abused little girl…A hopeless drug addict…Horrifying visions of bizarre beings that may or may not be human…A haunted desert refuge that could hold the key to everything…and all of it tied together by a mysterious jar that contains the secrets of good and evil, reality and nightmares, creation and death…and everything in between…

Following a family tragedy, Kayla, a twelve-year-old orphan, and Garty, a college dropout and junkie, are sent to spend the summer with an enigmatic uncle neither of them have ever known, at his palatial desert home in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the Atomic Bomb. While Garty struggles to come to grips with his reckless past, and Kayla attempts to discover her place in the world, their Uncle Xander reveals the true purpose for them being there.

Soon, dark secrets will be revealed. They will be shown things that will change their perceptions of the physical universe, because nothing is as it seems, and no one is safe from the terrifying secrets awaiting them. When the strange jar is opened, otherworldly horrors slip forth with ambitions of dominance, oppression and terror.

Eden will be reborn.

Signing Marrow's Pit

So, look what I'm doing right now...

These sheets are to be signed and numbered for the limited edition hardcover of MARROW'S PIT. It really is a feeling like no other to touch these pages and put my personal mark on them, such that it is. MARROW'S PIT is a crazy ride from start to finish and I hope people enjoy it. 

Coming in March 2014...

Built to encompass the entire range of lifeless mountains, it had always, relentlessly, clanked on and on. Within, vast halls and endless corridors were filled with the sounds of metal on metal, with hissing steam, with squealing gears. In the eyes of its citizens, it was sacred, deified, omniscient. Enshrined in their mythology for innumerable generations, it had gone by countless designations, but its truest name was perhaps its plainest: the Machine.

For Ballard, the Machine is a place of tedium, and ignorance, and cruelty. He sees little use in his mundane job and secretly questions the purpose of the Machine. When tragedy strikes, Ballard is forced to embark on a paranoid journey that will take him outside of the Machine, and everything he’s ever known, over the edge into darkness, past the point of no return…toward the blackness known as Marrow’s Pit.

Click here for more information about Marrow's Pit and DarkFuse Books.

'WITHIN US ALL' Edits - The Tedium Continues

I always groan when it comes time to edit a novel manuscript. For me, the 2nd and 3rd drafts are the least fun (except when I find something missing entirely and get to write something new). By this point, I've already done a lot of re-writing, as I don't consider my 1st drafts complete until I've fixed the glaring continuity errors, and name changes, and major motivations, etc--all those things that stick in my head and won't leave me alone until they've been attended. Of course, as I read through the manuscript, I always discover many more things that still need to be fixed. I take copious notes.

The strange thing about this novel, Within Us All, is that one of its major underlying themes is the artistic struggle. It involves a young man commissioned to paint a dark mural and his struggle for perfection with it, that drives him into a sort of obsessive frenzy. So, as I begin the next draft, the difficulties I face are mirrored in the text I edit.

Contemplating the end of the world

“It could be disease, some sort of plague synthesized in a lab and accidentally unleashed. One day a lab tech gets sick, her nose starts to run; she sneezes at work, while fixing dinner at home, all over the baby. She can’t help it. Two days later, she and her family are dead. Two weeks, and people all over the world are sick.”

James smiled. “Yeah, or maybe that meteor thing. You know, like what killed the dinosaurs.”

Allie shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Maybe we don’t even see it coming, or those who do don’t tell anybody because there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Everyone’s going about their business like normal and suddenly the sky grows dark, there’s a shrieking sound, the earth rumbles and shakes. People duck for cover, but there’s nowhere to hide. Then they can see it, the size of the moon but getting bigger and bigger. And right before impact, they see the striations and pores in the asteroid, shapes from a terrifying otherworld, at a time before life on planet Earth, and some of them see a face, grinning at them before they know no more.”

Allie smiled. He loved it when she smiled. “Or nuclear war,” she said. “Humanity’s need for conflict collides with its technological innovations of destruction. The conflict leads world leaders to begin pushing their secret red buttons. Major cities all over the world are blanked out, explosions leaving only ash outlines of people on the walls of buildings they once built and lived within. The rest grow sick from the toxic fallout. No one survives. Cockroaches inherit the Earth.”

“Or zombies,” James said. “It could be zombies. Some sort of pathogen that turns everyone who’s died into walking dead things hungry for the flesh of the living. And those few left alive are forced to fight for their survival.”

Allie’s smile dropped away. “Science fiction,” she said.

“It could happen.”

“No,” Allie said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “When it comes, it’ll be subtle.” She paused, licking her lips. “Most won’t know it’s happened, the world having slipped out of place. Many will simply fade as if they never were, and those who linger will be like ghosts, obsolete, no longer aware their time is over. Before long, humanity has forgotten itself.”

“It’s weird we talk of humanity as if we’re not a part of it.”

“That is weird.”

“You really think people will be the cause of their own destruction, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s bleak.”

He entered her.

247 Words: struggling with word count

Okay, here's why I'm bothered by the daily word count advice often given to aspiring writers. It's simple: some passages must be written slowly. Especially, I've found, beginnings and endings. One must take care as one begins, to be sure one's setup is sufficient. In my experience, once I get the opening setup just the way I want, I'll be able to vomit the words up quickly later. Once I have a firm grasp on the situation to which I'm writing and sufficiently developed characters I know can make their own decisions, I begin to write very quickly. It flows from there. I wrote the second half of "Out of the Jar" (a 70k word novel I'm currently shopping around for potential publication) in just a couple of weeks. There was one day I wrote 8000 words.

My point is that productive writing comes from putting in consistent time and effort and should not be judged solely on word count. Although I know Stephen King is known for his 2000 words per day rule, and, on the other end of the spectrum, James Joyce is said to have struggled for days composing a single sentence, one would do best to shoot for a general weekly or monthly average. I believe in what Mark Danielewski called the "Jane Goodall Method" where the writer has to be present every day in front of his/her work so that, even though many days may be uneventful drudgery, when inspiration strikes you won't miss that perfect moment and you'll be in front of the page to record it.

Which is all to make myself feel better as I've struggled this week to start a new piece (having completed the first draft of "Within Us All," which I will now put aside for at least a couple of weeks before I tackle the next draft). It's probably a novella, but it can be difficult to tell in the beginning. I know the direction I want to go in; I can see the story, the vague disturbances I want to feel, but I haven't known how to begin.

It took my three days to write this opening passage, combing over it again and again, scrapping things I started, but just weren't right for the story I'm trying to tell. It's still going through changes, will probably evolve somewhat as the story progresses. Here it is:

247 words

          The night before, he’d dreamed about her.
          She had dark, straight hair--black--that fell past her bare shoulders rich and glossy like caramel. She didn’t see him. He watched her closely through the window, as the flow of traffic drew him past. She wasn’t sitting on the bus bench, but crouching to the side of it, looking down. Something she’d dropped? She was feeling the ground with her hands, padding the bare soil, the lumps of grass. Her head was cocked, as if listening intensely. She stood. She lifted her hand and cupped it over her eyes, to shield them from the sun, and looked up. Her face lit and he could see, even from this distance, her eyes glimmering blue as the breeze caressed hair from her cheeks--her smile illuminated the streets. It was nice to see a woman smiling so openly in public. He craned his neck at the stop light, realizing she wore a grimace, not a smile, and her eyes were wet. A cloud passed over the sun and the world was veiled in a gray pall, but she continued to shine bright. He wondered what had happened to her, what had upset her, what she saw that he couldn’t. Something gleamed about her head, ultraviolet--her eyes shone--and he noticed several other people watching her, staring. And then someone’s car horn blared and he accelerated forward and around the corner and gone.
           The next day, everything was different.

In a dream she walked through the forest...

Don't Forget to Give Someone a Scary Book for Halloween!

A tradition begun by Neil Gaiman. Give horror this Halloween.

Win a Free Autographed Copy of THE NEW FLESH!

Halloween Haunts 2013: A Walk in the Mists by Keith Deininger

Today I have a guest blog over at the Horror Writers Association website for Halloween Haunts 2013 where I take a walk in the mists of memory and share some creepy, non-fiction Halloween moments from my life.

Take a quick look, leave a comment (any time through the end of the month) and you just might win this autographed copy of THE NEW FLESH. Afraid I'm not much of a sketch artist, but sometimes I doodle anyway...

Plink...

He stood in the doorway and tried to control his breathing. The room was empty except for an old man sitting crouched forward on a lone chair. The old man had a knife in one hand and his index finger extended with the other; he was slowly whittling his finger with the knife, taking thin curls of flesh with each swipe. Below him, to catch the shavings and the blood, there was a tin bucket. Blood dripped from the old man’s finger.

Plink...plink…

“‘Ello, young feller,” the old man said, and continued to whittle.

Plink.

Zach held the card up so he could read it: 'Is this a dream?'

He looked at the old man. The old man did not disappear.

Plink.