Clark Hays's Blog - Posts Tagged "gothic"
Punching the Night in the Teeth: A Crime Scene Mystery
Note: This is a post we wrote for our friends over at OmniMysteryNews.
"Something terrible happened here."
The detective was talking mostly to himself, because the two patrol officers — fresh-faced rookies barely out of the academy and bursting with professional pride — were staring at the carnage, their mouths hanging open like the swinging doors of an abandoned saloon.
After 20 years on the force, the detective had seen a lot, too much, but this was the worst so far. It was 10 in the morning and he needed a drink. Another drink.
He scratched at the salt and pepper stubble on his cheeks and then reached under his rumpled trench coat to adjust the Colt .45 nestled in his shoulder holster. The gun had a name — Brenda — and she was always ready to dance, but this wasn't a shooting thing. Not yet anyway. But the day was young.
Instead, he pulled out his battered notebook, flipped it open and grabbed the dusty pen jammed into his shirt pocket. He clicked it to life, dotting his tongue to start the ink flowing, and then held it like a club over the sweat-stained paper.
He was probably the last cop in America who even used paper, a renegade, a rebel who couldn't play by the rules, even if those rules made entering, storing and retrieving data so much easier.
All the whiskey and divorces and fights and nights alone came crashing down around his shoulders and he lashed out to avoid even one second of introspection.
"What do you see?" he shouted at the youngest of the rookie cops, a boy in the knight blue armor of all the men who came before him, a child who picked up the badge reluctantly and only to appease his father, the cold and distant commissioner.
"I don't know," the boy said, shrinking back.
The detective grinned like a wolf over a lamb, revealing a row of even, white teeth — even rebels could practice good oral hygiene — and a deep-seated mean streak.
"Useless. How about you toots?"
She bristled at the diminutive hurled at her from the washed-out detective, and raised her chin higher defiantly. She couldn't know it yet, but they would be lovers before the sun came up again.
"I can't explain it," she said. "But with all your many years of experience, you must know what's going on. Enlighten us."
This one had fire, he thought. He couldn't know it, but she would break his heart into 18 pieces and flush them, one at a time, by the end of the week.
His eyes narrowed like a hawk circling a field of blind mice. "They stopped cleaning, that's for sure," he said, pointing at to the dishes mounded and molding in the sink. "A long time ago."
The floor was littered with discarded clothes and empty glasses and the drained corpses of vodka and whiskey bottles that clinked together as he paced though them.
"Looks like they were working some angle." Every flat surface was littered with hastily scribbled pages of text and open books, the pages dog-eared and marred by frantic writing in the margins.
"It's like some kind of horror movie," she whispered.
"Yeah, that's right, only this time it's real," the detective said. "There are no sparkling vampires here, no cowboys to ride in and save the day."
He leafed through his notes. "I called around before we got here. They don't have many friends, but the few people who even called themselves casual acquaintances said they hadn't seen these two in months. The last person to see them alive was the bartender at the local gin joint."
He lit a cigarette.
"You can't smoke at a crime scene," the young cop said. His name was Bart and he was still a virgin.
"The dead don't care about smoke," the detective muttered.
"But it's against regulations."
"Screw your regulations," he said with grimace. "All I care about is closing cases."
"And getting bombed," the beautiful rookie muttered. Her name was Tanya and her eyes were the color of jade at night. He imagined her in candlelight, shaking her hair loose and laying her service revolver on the night stand and handing him a drink.
"Until you've walked these streets as long as I have, seen the things I've seen, don't you dare judge me," the detective said.
He touched the computer. "Still warm. I bet that one is too."
She touched it and then jerked her hand back, frightened, nodding that his hunch was right.
"What does it mean?" Bart asked, his voice on the edge of breaking.
The detective spun to face him, his face contorted in rage and anguish. "Haven't you figured it out yet, junior? Can't you see what's going on here? They're writers and they are so far into their project, they've disappeared from the world."
Tanya gasped and held her hand over her mouth, eyes wide with fear. Bart couldn't hold it together any longer. He snatched an ancient and half-full container of now-petrified Kung Pao and retched violently into it.
"What can we do?" Tanya asked, pale, almost translucent, and shaken — like a martini.
"Nothing," the detective said. "They're beyond all hope now." He snapped his notebook closed. "Let's go get some pancakes."
Note: Kathleen McFall and I are starting book four, so things are about to get weird...
Book One: The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance
Book two: The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey
Book three: The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves
"Something terrible happened here."
The detective was talking mostly to himself, because the two patrol officers — fresh-faced rookies barely out of the academy and bursting with professional pride — were staring at the carnage, their mouths hanging open like the swinging doors of an abandoned saloon.
After 20 years on the force, the detective had seen a lot, too much, but this was the worst so far. It was 10 in the morning and he needed a drink. Another drink.
He scratched at the salt and pepper stubble on his cheeks and then reached under his rumpled trench coat to adjust the Colt .45 nestled in his shoulder holster. The gun had a name — Brenda — and she was always ready to dance, but this wasn't a shooting thing. Not yet anyway. But the day was young.
Instead, he pulled out his battered notebook, flipped it open and grabbed the dusty pen jammed into his shirt pocket. He clicked it to life, dotting his tongue to start the ink flowing, and then held it like a club over the sweat-stained paper.
He was probably the last cop in America who even used paper, a renegade, a rebel who couldn't play by the rules, even if those rules made entering, storing and retrieving data so much easier.
All the whiskey and divorces and fights and nights alone came crashing down around his shoulders and he lashed out to avoid even one second of introspection.
"What do you see?" he shouted at the youngest of the rookie cops, a boy in the knight blue armor of all the men who came before him, a child who picked up the badge reluctantly and only to appease his father, the cold and distant commissioner.
"I don't know," the boy said, shrinking back.
The detective grinned like a wolf over a lamb, revealing a row of even, white teeth — even rebels could practice good oral hygiene — and a deep-seated mean streak.
"Useless. How about you toots?"
She bristled at the diminutive hurled at her from the washed-out detective, and raised her chin higher defiantly. She couldn't know it yet, but they would be lovers before the sun came up again.
"I can't explain it," she said. "But with all your many years of experience, you must know what's going on. Enlighten us."
This one had fire, he thought. He couldn't know it, but she would break his heart into 18 pieces and flush them, one at a time, by the end of the week.
His eyes narrowed like a hawk circling a field of blind mice. "They stopped cleaning, that's for sure," he said, pointing at to the dishes mounded and molding in the sink. "A long time ago."
The floor was littered with discarded clothes and empty glasses and the drained corpses of vodka and whiskey bottles that clinked together as he paced though them.
"Looks like they were working some angle." Every flat surface was littered with hastily scribbled pages of text and open books, the pages dog-eared and marred by frantic writing in the margins.
"It's like some kind of horror movie," she whispered.
"Yeah, that's right, only this time it's real," the detective said. "There are no sparkling vampires here, no cowboys to ride in and save the day."
He leafed through his notes. "I called around before we got here. They don't have many friends, but the few people who even called themselves casual acquaintances said they hadn't seen these two in months. The last person to see them alive was the bartender at the local gin joint."
He lit a cigarette.
"You can't smoke at a crime scene," the young cop said. His name was Bart and he was still a virgin.
"The dead don't care about smoke," the detective muttered.
"But it's against regulations."
"Screw your regulations," he said with grimace. "All I care about is closing cases."
"And getting bombed," the beautiful rookie muttered. Her name was Tanya and her eyes were the color of jade at night. He imagined her in candlelight, shaking her hair loose and laying her service revolver on the night stand and handing him a drink.
"Until you've walked these streets as long as I have, seen the things I've seen, don't you dare judge me," the detective said.
He touched the computer. "Still warm. I bet that one is too."
She touched it and then jerked her hand back, frightened, nodding that his hunch was right.
"What does it mean?" Bart asked, his voice on the edge of breaking.
The detective spun to face him, his face contorted in rage and anguish. "Haven't you figured it out yet, junior? Can't you see what's going on here? They're writers and they are so far into their project, they've disappeared from the world."
Tanya gasped and held her hand over her mouth, eyes wide with fear. Bart couldn't hold it together any longer. He snatched an ancient and half-full container of now-petrified Kung Pao and retched violently into it.
"What can we do?" Tanya asked, pale, almost translucent, and shaken — like a martini.
"Nothing," the detective said. "They're beyond all hope now." He snapped his notebook closed. "Let's go get some pancakes."
Note: Kathleen McFall and I are starting book four, so things are about to get weird...
Book One: The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance
Book two: The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey
Book three: The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves
#50DaysofFiverr - Like the Star Wars Cantina for Marketing
The worst part about writing is anything that’s not writing (that means you, marketing)
At the end of a long day of work (writing internal communications masterpieces for a financial services company), all I really want to do is come home, pour a nice tumbler of whiskey and spend a few hours … writing about cowboys and vampires and death cults and metaphysical energy fields. I would too, if wasn’t for the need to market our books.
Sadly, at least for indie authors, marketing is almost as important as creativity and foundational writing skills. Without a marketing plan, you can’t connect with readers and even the best books may languish in obscurity.
That’s why many (most?) nights find us working on marketing plans and studying website trends and designing ads.
Kathleen and I really don’t like marketing, but if we ever hope to achieve our goal of having our creative works contributing to financial self-sufficiency, we have to do it. A lot. Which is why we’re constantly on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and forever thinking about ways to make our limited marketing budget work harder for us.
Then we stumbled across Fiverr.
It’s a website that connects artists, graphic designers and creative types of all stripes with customers in need of logos, testimonials, writing help, graphics, illustrations and more. It’s like the Star Wars cantina, only for creative types, and yeah, we’re Luke in this scenario.
The trick is that the starting price for any service is just $5. You can add more sophisticated components that send the price up a bit, but not much. And they can be delivered crazy fast.
Being thrifty-minded authors (read: broke), Kathleen and I came up with a crazy idea: What if we pooled our limited marketing budget and spent it on fifty $5 products and shared them across our social media channels?
#50DaysofFiverr was born.
It's part marketing campaign, part experiment and all fun. We’re using the considerable talents of the Fiverr community to do the creative work for us – focused on cowboys, vampires and our books (and we've received some truly epic deliverables) – and then we’re going to share it out with the world and see what happens.
Come along for the ride.
I’ll share a few things on Goodreads (check out my photos for a fun caricature), but the best way to participate is by connecting with us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire), Twitter (@cowboyvamp) and Instagram (@cowboyvampire). And remember, it’s #50DaysofFiverr.
When it’s all done, 49 days from now, we’ll have some fun stories and hopefully a few lessons to share.
Oh yeah, and there’s a contest. Share your favorite pieces of work to be entered into a drawing for a $50 (of course) gift card.
At the end of a long day of work (writing internal communications masterpieces for a financial services company), all I really want to do is come home, pour a nice tumbler of whiskey and spend a few hours … writing about cowboys and vampires and death cults and metaphysical energy fields. I would too, if wasn’t for the need to market our books.
Sadly, at least for indie authors, marketing is almost as important as creativity and foundational writing skills. Without a marketing plan, you can’t connect with readers and even the best books may languish in obscurity.
That’s why many (most?) nights find us working on marketing plans and studying website trends and designing ads.
Kathleen and I really don’t like marketing, but if we ever hope to achieve our goal of having our creative works contributing to financial self-sufficiency, we have to do it. A lot. Which is why we’re constantly on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and forever thinking about ways to make our limited marketing budget work harder for us.
Then we stumbled across Fiverr.
It’s a website that connects artists, graphic designers and creative types of all stripes with customers in need of logos, testimonials, writing help, graphics, illustrations and more. It’s like the Star Wars cantina, only for creative types, and yeah, we’re Luke in this scenario.
The trick is that the starting price for any service is just $5. You can add more sophisticated components that send the price up a bit, but not much. And they can be delivered crazy fast.
Being thrifty-minded authors (read: broke), Kathleen and I came up with a crazy idea: What if we pooled our limited marketing budget and spent it on fifty $5 products and shared them across our social media channels?
#50DaysofFiverr was born.
It's part marketing campaign, part experiment and all fun. We’re using the considerable talents of the Fiverr community to do the creative work for us – focused on cowboys, vampires and our books (and we've received some truly epic deliverables) – and then we’re going to share it out with the world and see what happens.
Come along for the ride.
I’ll share a few things on Goodreads (check out my photos for a fun caricature), but the best way to participate is by connecting with us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire), Twitter (@cowboyvamp) and Instagram (@cowboyvampire). And remember, it’s #50DaysofFiverr.
When it’s all done, 49 days from now, we’ll have some fun stories and hopefully a few lessons to share.
Oh yeah, and there’s a contest. Share your favorite pieces of work to be entered into a drawing for a $50 (of course) gift card.
What is the Hell is Western Gothic?
As part of our book tour for The Cowboy and the Vampire: The Last Sunset (the fourth and final book in the series), we were asked to talk about Western Gothic, a genre we might have invented, for one of our blogger pals (view the original post here).
Here's a slightly modified version for our friends on Goodreads:
Western Gothic is a fairly narrow but very deep and wildly entertaining literary genre. We say that as recognized (by each other) experts in the field of Western Gothic Studies, a field and (and likely a genre) we created, and with all the confidence an exhaustive, seconds-long Google search can bestow (see sidebar).
So what is Western Gothic? It is a style of fiction that transplants the moody, death-obsessed themes of classic gothic fiction (think The Castle of Otranto or, of course, Dracula) to the wide open, inspiring vistas of the modern west (Riders of the Purple Sage, or All the Pretty Horses). We’re pretty sure we invented the genre with The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, a series of four books set in the modern west and featuring sexy, brooding vampires bent on world domination.
We wrote the first book — The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance — in 1999. Our fourth and final book in the series — The Cowboy and the Vampire: The Last Sunset — hit the shelves of bookstores on June 9. Not only are we experts in Western Gothic, we’re also pretty good with numbers. It has taken us an average of 4.25 years per book. Western Gothic requires an intense commitment. (Check out book two, The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey, and book three The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves here.)
The Last Sunset, like the first three books, explores the tension and connection between opposites: life and death; mortality and immortality; love and lust; urban and rural; thought and action; strength and decay; good and evil; and country music and whiskey.
Our books — and all books in the Western Gothic genre — exist in the negative space between dark and light. Gothic fiction uses the darkness — the creepy atmosphere, curious, obsessive behavior and morbid thoughts — to focus on the light, providing the perfect backdrop to illuminate the best in people: the desire to overcome death, to hope and to love. Westerns, ironically, use the light to set off the dark, weaving stories of good men pushed to the limits by the cruelty and avarice of others (usually tyrannical land owners) or the blind apathy of nature. Our books live in the borderlands between the two worlds, a forever twilight of gray nights and last sunsets.
We love writing in the Western Gothic genre. Not only do we get to explore huge, archetypal themes about human consciousness, love and death, and more, we get to move our characters across stunning natural landscapes with deconstructed shootouts and heart-pounding action. Add in the quirky humor natural to small towns and a long-suffering cowdog with the soul of a poet — and some pretty steamy undead erotica — and we think it makes for an unforgettable reading experience whatever the label (hint: it’s Western Gothic).
Sidebar: Why Western Gothic isn’t the same as Weird West
Searching for Western Gothic returns a bunch of scattered results and a re-direct to Wikipedia’s entry for Weird Westerns. Weird Westerns are not the same as Western Gothic, which, once again, we probably invented and definitely should have trademarked. By contrast, the Weird Western genre has existed for decades, transports occult shenanigans to the old west, and is probably most often associated with the golden age of pulp paperbacks. Weird Westerns may have reached their apogee with the spooky Jonah Hex comics of the 1970s, but Western Steampunk is a more recent energetic offspring and heir to the crown. Not to dismiss a popular genre, but the West was probably always weird — it took two writers, Clark Hays (me) and Kathleen McFall, to make it Gothic.
Here's a slightly modified version for our friends on Goodreads:
Western Gothic is a fairly narrow but very deep and wildly entertaining literary genre. We say that as recognized (by each other) experts in the field of Western Gothic Studies, a field and (and likely a genre) we created, and with all the confidence an exhaustive, seconds-long Google search can bestow (see sidebar).
So what is Western Gothic? It is a style of fiction that transplants the moody, death-obsessed themes of classic gothic fiction (think The Castle of Otranto or, of course, Dracula) to the wide open, inspiring vistas of the modern west (Riders of the Purple Sage, or All the Pretty Horses). We’re pretty sure we invented the genre with The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, a series of four books set in the modern west and featuring sexy, brooding vampires bent on world domination.
We wrote the first book — The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance — in 1999. Our fourth and final book in the series — The Cowboy and the Vampire: The Last Sunset — hit the shelves of bookstores on June 9. Not only are we experts in Western Gothic, we’re also pretty good with numbers. It has taken us an average of 4.25 years per book. Western Gothic requires an intense commitment. (Check out book two, The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey, and book three The Cowboy and the Vampire: Rough Trails and Shallow Graves here.)
The Last Sunset, like the first three books, explores the tension and connection between opposites: life and death; mortality and immortality; love and lust; urban and rural; thought and action; strength and decay; good and evil; and country music and whiskey.
Our books — and all books in the Western Gothic genre — exist in the negative space between dark and light. Gothic fiction uses the darkness — the creepy atmosphere, curious, obsessive behavior and morbid thoughts — to focus on the light, providing the perfect backdrop to illuminate the best in people: the desire to overcome death, to hope and to love. Westerns, ironically, use the light to set off the dark, weaving stories of good men pushed to the limits by the cruelty and avarice of others (usually tyrannical land owners) or the blind apathy of nature. Our books live in the borderlands between the two worlds, a forever twilight of gray nights and last sunsets.
We love writing in the Western Gothic genre. Not only do we get to explore huge, archetypal themes about human consciousness, love and death, and more, we get to move our characters across stunning natural landscapes with deconstructed shootouts and heart-pounding action. Add in the quirky humor natural to small towns and a long-suffering cowdog with the soul of a poet — and some pretty steamy undead erotica — and we think it makes for an unforgettable reading experience whatever the label (hint: it’s Western Gothic).
Sidebar: Why Western Gothic isn’t the same as Weird West
Searching for Western Gothic returns a bunch of scattered results and a re-direct to Wikipedia’s entry for Weird Westerns. Weird Westerns are not the same as Western Gothic, which, once again, we probably invented and definitely should have trademarked. By contrast, the Weird Western genre has existed for decades, transports occult shenanigans to the old west, and is probably most often associated with the golden age of pulp paperbacks. Weird Westerns may have reached their apogee with the spooky Jonah Hex comics of the 1970s, but Western Steampunk is a more recent energetic offspring and heir to the crown. Not to dismiss a popular genre, but the West was probably always weird — it took two writers, Clark Hays (me) and Kathleen McFall, to make it Gothic.
