I can honestly say that I have had more than my fair share of bizarre experiences.  My life isn’t a complete madhouse or anything but there have certainly been moments that are worth a mention.  One in particular ended up becoming inspiration for a character in my first novel and while that character didn’t end up getting showcased as much as I would like, I think he’ll be making some future appearances.

These events occurred on a day when I was helping a friend rake leaves in a condo complex that he was maintaining.  We spent the morning working hard then at around noon we stopped for a lunch break, heading towards the nearby convenience store to grab a sandwich.  On the way there we’re having a debate about politics and I manage to hit him with a point he hadn’t considered before, so he stops walking while he considers it.  As he’s standing very still, deep in thought, a tiny spider takes that moment to descend by a thread from behind his right ear.  That was the creepiest thing I’d seen in a while, so of course I had to explain the expression on my face.  We had a good laugh about it, grabbed our lunch and then went back to work.

After laboring for another few hours, we finished up and then I went to catch the bus home.  What I didn’t yet realize is that I’d picked up a few critters myself.  When I got on the bus I was exhausted so immediately picked the nearest seat available.  It was at the front of the bus; the first forward facing seats behind the inward facing “courtesy seats” reserved for the elderly and disabled, all of which were full.  I was surrounded by people who, while not directly facing me, were all within easy viewing distance of the spectacle to come.

Not too long into the bus ride I noticed a little brown critter on my left sleeve that I thought was probably a tick.  Any other time I might have jumped and shaken it off but being so exhausted from my day’s work I couldn’t really be bothered to put that much effort into it.  Instead I simply leaned forward and brushed it onto the floor.  Soon after, I felt a little tickle at my right ankle and watched with mild interest as a large brown centipede crawled out of my pant leg, down my boot and away towards the back of the bus.  A few minutes later I feel another tickle, this time on my arm, so I give my sleeve a shake and out drops a white spider.  Contrasting starkly with the black floor of the bus, the spider skitters towards the other passengers, many of whom lift their feet up off the floor until it had moved past them.  Next the flutter of wings near the back of my neck drew my attention.  Tilting my head forward and pushing my shoulders back, I created a space between my jacket and upper back, and whatever was back there flew out to freedom.  I never did see what it was, I was far too tired to bother turning my head to look, assuming it was a small moth or perhaps a grasshopper.

Half way into the bus ride, and four insects lighter, I finally look up to see the faces of the people around me.  Now at this time in my life I was in excellent physical shape, was clad in black from my leather jacket to my steel toed boots, and had a shaved head.  I was already a scarier than average looking individual, more so on that particular day because I was also wearing the pissed off facial expression everyone gets after a hard day’s work.  Adding to this image the fact that I had spent the last few minutes casually shedding insects, the faces of the people looking back at me were masks of horror and disgust, each shrinking down in their seats and looking away when I made eye contact.

When I realized what had happened, I didn’t apologize or even really react.  The first thought that came into my head was to pray.  I said to myself, “Dear Lord, I have never asked you for anything before and I will never ask you for anything again.  All I want right now, more than anything else, is the power to cough up some beetles right now.  Or to be able to pull a handful of cockroaches out of my pocket.  Something.  Anything to be able to really push this to the limit.”

Sadly my prayers went unanswered but at least I will forever remember the terror I inspired by being creepy bug guy for an afternoon.

I’m trying to enable comments on weblog posts but WordPress is being difficult.   I have them turned off on the main pages which leaves some German line at the bottom of every page, “Kommentare sind geschlossen”.  I think that might mean comments are disabled.  I’m trying to get rid of that line on the pages but leave comments enabled on the web posts and I can only seem to do either one or the other.  My cousin, the web guy, is working on it for me.

I’m also going to be getting some sample chapters up soon.  While there have been some technical considerations to worry about the biggest problem has actually been deciding which chapters I want to put up.  Originally I’ve been sending out the first five in my agent submissions and I was thinking of doing the same for the sample chapters on the site, however I’ve had a change of heart recently.  I’ve been thinking that chapters four through six show the greatest diversity of characters and situations in the smallest amount of space so that’s what might end up both in my future submissions and on the site.  I’ll make a decision on that soon.

Fright Night 1985 - Even the movie poster was fantastic.

There aren’t too many people who understand why I love this movie so much.  In fact, half my friends dismiss it as 80’s cheese.  Sure it’s out of date, you can’t possibly have a quarter century go by without something being lost along the way, but the core reasons why I love this film so much remain untouched by the passage of time.  Fright Night is, and I say this in spite of the disdaining glares it will earn me from the peanut gallery, one of the three core sources that really defined for me what it means to be a vampire.

The first thing it taught me is a vampire’s need for secrecy (this may seem obvious in retrospect but before this film all I had seen were the gratuitous vampire gore-fests that let plausibility fall by the wayside.)   Due to being so vulnerable during the day, vampires need to keep their illegal, immoral and supernatural activities below the radar so as not to draw the attention of police and vampire hunters.  In Fright Night, the vampire buys a house in a quiet neighborhood and acts like a regular homeowner while his human servant who protects him during the daytime introduces himself as a roommate; both having moved in temporarily under the guise of fixing up the place for resale.  While some concessions had to be made that would allow the main character to discover the vampire living next door (otherwise there wouldn’t be a story) the vampire mostly just kept to himself and went about his business.  He wasn’t running around town, flashing his fangs and displaying his supernatural powers for all to see; he was careful, subtle and discreet.

Next is deception, which is a major theme for my vampires.  I’ve made mention of one key scene on my page on vampiric weaknesses under the section about the Invitation flaw but there is one other scene in this film that resonated with me so much that it became a major inspiration for one of my main characters.  After the protagonist’s girlfriend is kidnapped and turned into a vampire, he later meets her as he’s hunting down the main villain.  Upon seeing him, she immediately turns away and begins crying, “You promised you wouldn’t let him get me Charlie.  You promised to protect me.”  He of course feels bad and  instinctively moves in to console her.  Once he gets close enough she turns around and leaps at him fangs first.  Why this was such a critical scene for me was because despite the fact that she wasn’t feeling sad or scared, and indeed may no longer have even been capable of those feelings, it sure didn’t stop her from pretending that she felt them to get what she wanted.  Why wouldn’t a vampire act scared, helpless, vulnerable or even just play stupid if it helped them achieve their goals?  Pretending to be less than you are, or even just pretending to be something different, is a powerful tool in getting your adversary or prey to underestimate you.

The last lesson that Fright Night taught me, and probably one of the most important, is about the safeguard of believability. There are half a dozen examples in the movie where the main character tries to tell people that his neighbor is a vampire and of course nobody believes him.  Not his friends, not the police and not the man who’s devoted his life to making vampire films.  Maybe shouting accusations of vampires a few centuries ago would have brought an inquisition to check it out but in the modern, skeptical times in which we live such claims are met with rolled eyes, laughter or scolding dismissal.  This made a lot of sense to me.  One of a vampire’s most powerful survival tools is probably the simple fact that we’re too enlightened to believe they exist anymore.  Our skepticism is their social camouflage and as long as they don’t provide any actual, direct proof to the contrary then they’re safe from the rest of society.

If you can look past it’s slightly dated appearance and a few small plot concessions, I believe that Fright Night is still one of the most outstanding vampire movies of all time.

Now that the site is (mostly) complete I’m going to go back to working on some actual fiction projects.  While I’d like to write another novel it’s probably in my best interests right now to focus on some of my short story ideas as it’ll be far easier to get my novels published if I can build a resume of the short stories I’ve sold first.  I have a couple short works planned out in my head, both vampire stories, that I think have a lot of potential.

Today is the day I can call the site officially live and ready for general viewing.  There are still a few things I need to do before I can really call it finished but I should have the minor details sorted out in a week or two.

I am not my characters.  This is a disclaimer I’ve had to give voice to in the gaming community for years.  I roll up a character for a particular tabletop or LARP game, one who is perhaps a little weird, or kind of an asshole or just out and out evil, then I jump in and play the part to the best of my ability.  What often happens is those who haven’t spent any time speaking to me outside of the game assume that this identity is my own and treat me accordingly.  People that would possibly have ended up as good friends if they had met me in different circumstances would do their best to avoid me both in game and out.

This form of typecasting is an annoyance for a lot of gamers, especially for the better role players who do appreciate the variety of character options available to them, and often results in some degree of interpersonal conflict.  Any gamer who plays a conflict oriented character usually does so for the enjoyment of the in game social and political interactions that those character types get involved in.  It is (usually) not some twisted desire to be the villain in real life.  It’s simply a matter of providing good storytelling opportunities.  Often times it’s the evil bastards that get the most involved in the plot while the nice guy characters usually end up sitting on the sidelines.

Since showing my first work to a few people I’ve found that I have to again make the same disclaimer.  The vampires in my book are evil bastards of one kind or another and predators in every sense of the word.  Is it because I have some secret desire to be one of those bastards in real life, to treat people like toys to be used and discarded when I’m through with them?  Not at all.  It’s all about the storytelling potential those evil bastards represent.  If every character in a particular story was a fluffy nice guy that got along with everybody in every social situation that wouldn’t make for very interesting fiction.  Nobody wants to read a 300 page story of everybody playing nice.  They’d be bored to death.  The rude, heartless, evil, sadistic bastards are there because it’s good for the story and that’s all there is to it.

What else I’ve noticed from a few of my readers is an occurrence of this misunderstanding in a slightly different way.  The main male character of The Games of Master Rule is a quiet, keep out of trouble kind of guy; honest, polite, chivalrous and a complete pushover.  There are also a couple instances of secondary characters who exhibit similar behavior.  They’re shy, lacking in confidence or outright whipped into obedience.  I’m finding myself having to make the same old protests about these characters as I used to about my evil gaming characters.  These guys aren’t me any more than any other character I write or act out in a game are.  Sure there may be little pieces of me within them, that’s really unavoidable with any character I write, but it’s a fairly small fragment of their personality as a whole.  These characters are the way they are not because I couldn’t resist putting myself into the story to act out some fantasy but because, for a couple different reasons, it made the most sense for the plot.

The first is that these are the kinds of people that vampires would most likely pick on.  Think of any other predator and how they hunt.  A wolf doesn’t chase down the biggest and fastest deer, the one that he has the least hope of catching.  He goes for the stray at the back; the smallest, the slowest or the most injured one.  The wolf hunts whatever prey will provide the easiest meal and I see no reason why vampires should be any different.  Why take a risk on a dangerous meal when the safer choice is just as delicious?

The other reason why these people are the way they are is because of the influence of the vampires themselves.  Vampires are traditionally very powerful and manipulative creatures, able to play with people’s thoughts and emotions, and they use this power to break people down.  What once might have been an average person will under the control of a vampire become obedient, submissive, loyal, weak and probably head over heels in supernaturally induced love.  Basically they turn people into pets that will serve their interests in the same manner that we have guard dogs or hunting falcons serve ours.

Perhaps after I’ve written a few more works, with a greater variety of characters, then I won’t have to deal with this kind of typecasting anymore.  In the meantime, I suppose it’s an annoyance I’ll just have to live with.

Rejection.  It’s something every writer has to deal with.  I haven’t had a lot of rejections at this point, less than ten, and they’ve all been very generic “Dear Author” type letters but I can already see that there’s going to be a lot more to come.  It’s part of the business.  I’ve actually put aside a large envelope to save them all in.

The first few rejection letters that appear don’t feel like a big deal, but as the rejections become more frequent and begin to pile up, despondency can begin to take its toll.  The more agents that say no to my work diminishes the available pool of agents that might say yes and it’s difficult not to get a little discouraged.  There are however a few things I try to keep in mind about rejection, to keep my spirits up and retain a realistic perspective.

• Nothing can be gained by giving up.  As I understand it, Twilight was rejected over 100 times before Stephanie Meyer found a publisher who would take it.  Since finding that one it’s become a wildly successful series.  She’s written four popular books which have bloomed into a movie franchise, has multiple lines of merchandise and is probably a multimillionaire.  Now there are 100 agents and publishers who are kicking themselves hard for not getting in on that while they had the chance.  She could have quit any time after the first 100 rejections but she didn’t and her persistence paid off.
• Timing is everything.  Publishers and agents have an existing client list and projects on the go all the time, and even though a particular work may be interesting to them, they may not have the time or resources to pursue a new project when it’s received.  This is often the case when an agent says “We respond in 6-8 weeks for queries” and you get a response in under ten days.  If it takes your letter four days to get there and four days to get back, then it was likely only looked at long enough to find the self addressed stamped envelope within so they can fire it back out the door.  No matter how interested a particular agent or publisher might be, sometimes their dance card is simply full.
• Vampire stories are beginning to wear out their welcome with some people.  The examples of vampire fiction these last twenty years especially have not been all that spectacular.  Cuddlepires, Emo-Vamps, B-movie expositions of gratuitous blood and nudity, mindless disposable villains, and of course the examples of vampires that aren’t really vampires have given the whole genre a bad name.  So when I come along with vampire fiction portraying them in a much more traditional manner (evil fiends, nocturnal, cursed by God, etc.), it’s simply not received in the way that it’s intended.  The second they read the word vampire, their minds immediately draw forth all the bad examples of vampire fiction they’ve seen over the years and my work gets lumped in along with the garbage.
• Vampire stories fall into a specific sub-genre of Horror called Dark Fantasy and while many agents exist that handle the former, I’ve been getting the sense there are less who handle the latter.  I think by writing a story with a supernatural theme to it I’ve limited my prospective market.  The average reader seems to want more reality based fear in their lives and would rather read books about serial killers than monsters.
• The first book is always the hardest sell.  Sometimes it doesn’t matter how interesting or well written a book is, the simple fact that it’s being submitted by someone who’s never had anything else published before will earn it an automatic, rubber stamp rejection.  If an existing author, one that already has a few works in print, were to take the same novel and submit it then it would probably be snapped up without a second thought.  The work itself hasn’t changed, just the weight behind the author’s name on the front cover.  That’s the publishing world equivalent of  “I can’t get a job because I have no experience and I have no experience because I can’t get a job.”  It’s likely that a large percentage of rejection letters that come back to me are due entirely to the fact that I’m still a nobody.  I’m sure a lot of agents don’t even look too far past my name on the letterhead.

So after all that you may be asking, “Have you ever just considered that the real reason nobody wants your work is because it simply sucks?”  Of course I have.  One can’t possibly create anything this big without wondering if they’ve done a good job on it.  There are a few people I’ve let read it, people who I can trust to give me honest feedback even if it isn’t necessarily positive, and it’s been quite well received all around.  They’ve all been laymen, as opposed to literary professionals, but those are the types of people who would be reading my work so their opinion holds great weight with me.  Not everybody liked absolutely everything but on the whole, they all really enjoyed the story, characters and dialogue.

That’s what keeps me from giving up.  I truly believe that there are enough people out there who are as sick of bad vampire fiction as I am, who want to see vampires being vampires again, and who would love to read this story that I have a chance.  It doesn’t matter how slim that chance is either; anything more than zero is worth the time and effort to pursue my goals.

Edit:  Of course it does help if you’re not being a total amateur about your submission.

Welcome to my weblog.  This site is currently under construction and probably will be a work in progress for a couple of weeks.