Bonus Disk: Knuckleduster

Even though getting your story fix with ebooks is rapidly becoming a popular thing if not the downright main way people get their content, I wish more books worked like a DVD. You go see a movie in the theater (or at least this is what I do) and immediately you're wondering what special features the DVD will have. I love behind-the-scenes stuff. Besides coffee and jasmine rice (not combined), random trivia is a major food group to me.

(Update: Some presses do a P.S. thing at the end, with an interview with the author and previews of the next installment in the series or another author's similar work. Still, to me, this does not quite cut my trivia feverishness.)

So, for other of you trivia nuts, here is the "special features" for Knuckleduster. Spoiler alert in full effect, by the way.


1. What's in a name?

Knuckleduster didn't have a title until about a week before I started sending it out to small presses who take unsolicited submissions. It was Hard Wired for a while, but I never really liked it. Finally, I had it. And then it was changed again, since Knuckleduster: Project Silver Fox was too wordy--and a bit like a Harry Potter title. I still have the contract that features that as the title that was acquired by Medallion Press. Strange, since I only see it as Knuckleduster now.

Brody's full name is said toward the beginning, when he's being released from the police station. Broadwell Alexander Calhoun.

Broadwell will be covered later on, down below, but when doing research for Knuckleduster, I heard "Brody" as a term meaning "instigating a fight." They might've been saying "brawdy" I'm not sure, but either way it stuck.

Alexander is a reference to Alex from A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. The distopic novel was a major influence on me. The reference to A Clockwork Orange continues with the plot, Brody being essentially programmed to be one who resists, holds back, when his true nature is much more violent. Also, Brody's carotene lenses stain his eyes, yes, orange.



Calhoun is the name of a pretty popular lake here in Minnesota, centrally located in Minneapolis, for its beaches and hangout spots. Brody is from the Twin Cities area, and even though it hasn't been mentioned yet in the storyline, he is the (fictional) descendant of the man who the lake was named after, John C. Calhoun, a real person. Perhaps having an ancestor like John C. Calhoun, a man who was an advocate for slavery, Brody's determination to be a good person has been cemented, a part of him trying to cleanse the Calhoun name . . .

The Siblings Ashbury.

Thorp's name is a reference to one of my author heroes, Roderick Thorpe. You may not know his name because a majority of his work is now out of print [correction: a lot of his stuff is now back in print, as of 2012], but I'm sure you know one of the movies that was an adaptation of his novel Nothing Lasts Forever: none other than Die Hard. I read Nothing Lasts Forever when I was in middle school and it made me want to try my hand at more actiony fare featuring a hero-against-the-odds than the Resident Evil-inspired horror short stories I'd been writing. With his sister, Nectar, there's a lot of allusions to insects in Knuckleduster and Nectar's name was meant to inspire something that's to be pursued, something good and pure and worthy of fighting to find.



Ashbury being a reference to the district in San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, which is known for its number of hippies. With both Nectar and Thorp having the last name, it was meant to hint at their seemingly opposing viewpoints on the military. Thorp, although proud of having been in the Army, hates his past and hates the idea he was tricked into going to war. Although he wouldn't admit it, he truly is right in line with hippie beliefs, although he'd probably call it be another name. His sister, Nectar, is a dedicated subscriber to hippie culture, having cracked the idea of going after Hark Telecomm at her place of work with her fellow protestors at Mother Nature's Womb.

Even the serial killer on the loose in Chicago, Titian Shandorf, is a dual reference. Titian is another name for orange, or another hue (okay, I don't know how it works with colors), which is meant to reflect Brody and his orange-stained eyes and hint at a connection between them being like two sides of the same coin or what Brody could become. Shandorf is a reference to the lead singer of Monster Magnet, Dave Wyndorf, a band I listened to a lot when I was writing the original story that'd later become Knuckleduster, way back in the 90s. Speaking of which . . .


2. Unlikely Origins

In the mid and late 90s, I started writing. No real objective with it, but just writing for the fun of it as you do as a kid. I came up with a superhero character, the Hunter, who wore body armor in not-at-all-stealthy black and yellow stripes. Like a giant bee. A giant bee with guns. He was like the Punisher had a baby with a hornet, and it was the Hunter. Who lived in a helicopter. Yeah. It was as silly as something a kid who grew up on action movies and reading Spawn could've come up with. Later, when thinking I could maybe (with some heavy editing) use the Hunter in some way, I began taking the character apart and seeing what I liked about him the most. That being that he had cybernetic eyes that allowed him to see in the dark, only having them because . . . well, I never figured that part out. He was blind without them, that's all there was to it. The Hunter, you see, had no back story. He was just a dude who dressed like a bee, had a crap-ton of guns, and lived in a helicopter. I was like eleven, all right? Anyway, coming back to the character, I liked the blindness aspect but didn't want to go that sci-fi with having full-on cybernetic eyes and thought of what, if anything I ever wrote, could be done with real science. My brother in law, at the time, was just starting to come to terms with the fact that he was going blind. And I wanted nothing more than for the doctors to find some way to allow him to see, surgical, medicinal, or otherwise. I still want carotene lenses to be a thing.

So I peeled away the superhero vibe, the helicopter house (sigh, sad to see it go) and applied that to the idea I had about a character that did bad things but never tried to get out of them, someone who accepted all badness he perpetrated, but only on the surface. Really, inside, he'd done other bad things that even he couldn't remember. Boom. Brody.

But I didn't know what to do with it. I had a character, or a rough draft of one, but nothing else. Setting it aside, I started getting into noir and detective stories, reading a lot of Dashiell Hammett. I started a short story completely unrelated to what would become the rejiggered Hunter, about a guy who between shifts washing dishes at a chain restaurant solved missing persons cases plucked from that board they just outside all Walmarts. Truth was, he was suicidal but deeply religious and didn't want to die by his own hand but instead dive headlong into these cases with no regard for his own wellbeing, which would make him the ultimate nightmare for any kidnapper. I'm up-selling it here. It sucked. But I liked the suicidal detective, scraped off the religious aspect (since I couldn't write it convincingly enough not being a religious person myself whatsoever), and then set that aside as well.

Liking to combine ideas, taking two seemingly unrelated things and trying to Frankenstein them together, I began mind-riffing on the idea of the blind superhero-who's-not-a-superhero and the suicidal detective-for-hire being the same person. Huh, I thought, I might have something here. I just didn't know what.


3. Not a Sci-Fi Writer

I wrote some sci-fi before Knuckleduster, but nothing I really liked. I believe all writers, being totally frank here, for every one good book in them, they have three crappy ones. If not completely crappy, at least in need of major reworking and years of drawing board-ing. When I started taking writing seriously, trying to get short stories out there and send around some manuscripts I'd been tinkering on, it'd all been literary fiction. Or, to be more specific, quirky literary fiction. And even more specifically: Dark, quirky literary fiction. I wrote a story about a man who talks to his hemorrhoid. A crime scene photographer who comes upon a woman who's face was eaten by her cats. More than a few about drug addicts doing stupid, drug addicty things. All very much grounded in reality--aside from the flights of fancy with those drug-dabblin' dudes. And the hemorrhoid, for those keeping score, wasn't actually speaking, it was the guy struggling with the things in his life he couldn't actually control. Okay, so yeah, maybe a heightened version of reality.

I'd also done some screenplay writing, which was going nowhere. Met some people, entered some contests, had a few people show a mild interest in more of my stuff, but I was beginning to hate the movie industry, even the independent scene. This was something that remained with me for quite a while, all up until I met someone that changed my mind about the entire thing just last year, someone I'm collaborating with currently, actually, on a cyberpunk short film no less! But, for a long time, became frustrated and eventually burned out on screenplays and decided to go back to writing fiction. It felt right.

I've always got at least one or two books going. Look at my night stand and the lamp is practically in a small fort of books surrounding it. At the time when I was thinking about combining the suicidal detective and the reworked, more realistic Hunter character, I was reading a lot of cyberpunk as well as the Dashiell Hammetts. I was getting closer to returning not only to fiction, but also science-fiction, I just didn't know it yet.

My dad got me into sci-fi. Whenever Mom worked late and it was just he and I, we'd rent Robocop or Terminator. Alien and Aliens becoming a particular obsessions of mine, even though they scared the crap out of me. Predator, another. All of those 80s super-gorey action flicks that combined horror and sci-fi, with a heavy dollop of ultra violence. These films, even though they probably mentally scarred me, were a major influence on Knuckleduster. I've always wanted to jump into sci-fi with both feet. Why not now? I'd use what I'd learn of writing disturbing flash fiction and expand it while simultaenously leaping head first into science fiction with no idea whether my clunker of a Frankensteined story idea would spread wings or get 10s across the board in the face plant category.

Lesson here, speaking with 20-20 hindsight, is if a project feels safe, don't bother writing it. If it feels like a sure-fire winner, again, don't bother. If it scares you, if there's a better-than-good chance you'll crash and burn . . . well, strap in and chase that sucker down. Means you're onto something.


4. Weapon of Choice

Brody's personal brand of street justice is made with a set of brass knuckles. I wanted him to have not only a zippy nickname, but also something that made him synonomous with something, like Indiana Jones is with a whip or Spider-Man is with incessant constant belly-aching about Mary Jane. You know. Can't have one without the other. So, I thought for a while what would not only be a good contrast against a sci-fi setting full of gizmos and doo-dads, something very analogue and blunt and almost archaic, but something, when seen, immediately makes people raise their hands and back away. Yeah. Brass knuckles sure tend to do that. They're scary, at least to me.

Expanding a little here on this topic, and this is kind of a personal family story, but I'll share it with you because you're nice and omit the names for fear of my mother sending me a rather scathing email later on. See, one side of my family comes from a rather rough-and-tumble sort from the deep South. And I mean deep South. In my ancestry, I have more than one family member who was tried for horse-thieving. Yeah. And, as times advance and families adopt to the new ways of things with each successive generation, some (not all) of my family members continued with this outlaw mentality. Guns to a house in the deep South are like that Magic Ninja blender thing in affluent "Yankee" homes, so that goes without saying. But brass knuckles, switchblades, and the like, those for a long time were perfectly legal. A-okay to own and carry, because they . . . well, at the time, weren't considered anything more than personal defense tools. Then the law got passed and all brass knuckles and switchblades had to be either kept at home or destroyed. Completely illegal to own one whatsoever and if you got caught with one (not even using it), it was a felony. So a member of my family, who was rather fond of brass knuckles and had a somewhat large collection of them (especially since you can only wear a maximum of two sets at any given time), had no idea what to do with them. So he bagged them up and dropped them down a well. I was never allowed to see them, or hold them, perhaps for fear of any lingering DNA on them, but I always thought about that well and how at the bottom, in a burlap sack, eight to ten sets of brass knuckles lay down there, buried, forgotten, hidden . . .

Hmmm. Maybe that was a bigger influence than I thought . . .


5. Other Influences

If you follow me on Twitter, or have read this blog in the past, you've probably picked up on the fact that I'm a bit of a gamer. Video games, oddly enough, have become a major source of inspiration to me lately. If not directly inspired from a game's plot or story mechanics of the one I'm playing, I might get ideas completely unrelated to the game's genre or vibe simply because gaming for me is a great brain-degreaser. It channels something, I think, for me at least, that lets me think creatively and simmering ideas can go on in the background while I'm saving the world from aliens on screen in the foreground.

Knuckleduster, though, was largely influenced by one game series in particular, though. Deus Ex for the PC (and later PlayStation 2) was enormously eye-opening to me when I first played it. Not only because of its (then) amazing graphics, but because of the story it was telling. It was gritty, bold. It felt like a real world with real problems, and the science fictiony things were conveyed on a human level. It wasn't walking tanks or space commandos battling hordes of evil zombies or aliens. It was people versus people, with convincing motivations and backstabbery and intrigue and conspiracies. So good.

I've mentioned using music as "mind keys" for writers before. Taking a song that fits the vibe of your work-in-progress and only listening to it when working your fiction until the two develop a glue between them of sorts where one will remind you of the other and vice-versa. I've been doing this for a while now and it has yet to fail me. I'll do Bonus Disk posts on all of my books after they've been out for a little while, and share these songs for each novel. But, for Knuckleduster, the "mind key" song has always been the cover of Radiohead's "National Anthem" by the Yoshida Brothers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=...

Since finishing up the edits for Knuckleduster, I have yet listened to this song again. Even as much as I love it. I avoid it when I put my iPod on shuffle, because the only time I listen to it again (and again and again and again) will be when I begin work on the next Brody Calhoun book.

And with that, I shall bring Bonus Disk for Knuckleduster to a close. If I happen to think of any more factoids, I'll be sure to update. But until then, thanks for checking out the first edition of Bonus Disk.