A Snippet

I’m gearing up for the launch of the 7th Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation: Van Dyne’s Zuvembies.

The release date is July 20th.

The final read through, actually the computer is reading the text to me, is going along nicely, and I’m still catching extra words, an extra space between words, and the like. I want the text as clean as I can make it. No one likes a text with errors. Yet they happen. Even to the big corporate guys. If I get a book for free or under $3, I’m pretty forgiving. If I’m paying big bucks, much less so.

To wet your whistle for the new Pierce Mostyn, I’m giving you a snippet. Enjoy the Prologue to Van Dyne’s Zuvembies!

She looked at the address, back at the slip of paper, and then back at the number over the door.

This is the place, she thought, and walked down the short walk to the door. A man, coming out, held the door for her.

“Thank you,” she said, and entered the building. A ordinary, nondescript three-story on Northern Boulevard in Queens.

The directory in the lobby told her she wanted the third floor. At the elevator, she pressed the up button and waited. There was a bit of a musty odor to the old and dingy carpet, and the young woman wrinkled her nose at the smell. When the elevator doors opened, she got in, and pressed three. In a moment the doors opened once more, she got out, and turned into the corridor. 

Suite 304 was to her left. She walked a dozen steps and stopped in front of a plain door with frosted glass window and the name Asher and Associates painted on the glass in black letters.

She looked once more at the slip of paper, took a deep breath, and  exhaled. Her hand pushed down on the door handle, and giving it a push,  the door opened, and the young woman walked in.

There was a small waiting room with a half-dozen beige plastic chairs lined up along one wall. A pretty little redhead, with the most beautiful smile, sat behind a desk opposite the plastic chairs. A counter fronted the desk, and a sign announced that the desk was home to the receptionist.

The redhead, smile still in place, said, “How may I help you?”

“I’m Sofia Rivera. I have an appointment for three.”

The receptionist looked at her computer screen, tapped a few keys, and studied the screen for a moment.

Sofia was jealous. How could anyone be so happy as to smile like that?

The redhead looked at her. “Please have a seat. The therapist will be with you in a minute.”

Sofia sat and put her hand in her pocket for her phone. It wasn’t there, and the anger bubbled up. Why did they have to take her phone away? It was so unfair. And if her sister hadn’t blabbed…

God, I hate Maria, she thought. Why can’t Dad take my side? And that woman he married. She really, really has it in for me. I hate them. I hate them all.

A door next to the receptionist opened, and a dark-skinned Indian woman called her name.

Sofia got up and walked over to her.

The woman smiled and said, “I’m Kashvi Pushpagiri, your therapist. Follow me.”

She led Sofia to a room that was on the spacious side, indicated a chair for her to sit in, and took a seat in the chair across from her. A round coffee table sat between the two chairs.

“So tell me why you’ve come to see me.”

“Everyone’s against me.”

The therapist arched an eyebrow. “Everyone?”

“My dad never takes my side. My sister’s a blabbermouth. My step-mom thinks I’m worthless and turns my dad against me. I just hate them.”

“You hate them? Actually hate them?”

There was a pause. “Well, maybe hate is a little strong.”

“Is it? Perhaps you do hate them. Didn’t they wrong you? Aren’t they against you?”

“Well, yeah, they are.”

“Have you considered that perhaps they hate you.”

“Really?”

Pushpagiri nodded.

“Wow. I never thought of that. I mean, like, I can see my step-mom, and maybe my sister, but my dad?”

“Did you want him to marry your step-mom?”

“Hell, no!” Realizing what she’d said, Sofia, somewhat embarrassed, apologized. “Sorry.”

“That’s quite alright. You are in emotional pain. Those who should love you, don’t. You are all alone. But I’m here to help.” Kashvi favored Sofia with a smile.

“You really think they’re against me?”

“Why are you defending them?”

“I’m not!”

“Sounds like it to me. Do you want to be walked on your entire life?”

“No. No, I don’t want that.”

“Your sister blabbed something which you trusted her to keep a secret.”

Sofia nodded.

“What was it?”

“I had my boyfriend over when Dad and Lu, that’s my step-mom, Lucinda, when they were out.”

“And that’s a problem?”

“Well, uh, we were, uh, in my room and…”

“You were having sex.”

“No, not sex. But we were, well, you know.”

“Making out.”

“Yeah.”

“And your sister told your dad and step-mom and you got in trouble.”

“She even called me a slut! Lu did. She should talk.”

“Sofia, it’s very important, if you want to become a strong woman, it’s very important for you to face and express your rage. You must voice your hate. We at Asher and Associates practice what we call primal rage therapy.”

“I just want what’s fair.”

“We all do.”

“So what’s this primal rage thing?”

“Women have been held down for a long time. Essentially ever since humans began. Prehistoric women, because they were weaker than men, were abused by them. Skeletons of those prehistoric women show what are commonly called abuse fractures. And let’s face it: nothing’s changed. We are still being abused. Biologically we carry the rage, the hate, of our abuse in our DNA. That’s why it is very important for us to let it out. To stop repressing it. We must go back to our primal state and rage against our oppressors.”

“How do I do that?”

“By using the oppressors and abusers we face today to take us back to our primal selves. Each day, you must do a five-minute hate. Put the picture of one of your oppressors before you and scream out your hate. Change the picture each day. Did you bring a picture with you?”

Sofia nodded. “I brought a picture of my sister.”

“Good. Let’s practice the five-minute hate right now. Put the picture on the coffee table. Let’s hate her together.”

For five minutes Kashvi Pushpagiri and Sofia Rivera hurled abuse and hateful words at the picture. They screamed at it and hit it. When the five minutes were over, Sofia felt exhausted, yet invigorated.

“I’m going to give you our special primal hate drink.” Kashvi walked over to a shelf, retrieved a bottle, and gave it to Sofia. “Drink this tonight and while doing so fill your mind with hateful thoughts. Remember how freeing the five-minute hate felt?”

Sofia nodded.

“Think those thoughts again while drinking the bottle.”

“That’s it? Just drink this?”

“Yes and don’t forget the hateful thoughts while drinking. It doesn’t taste very good, so drink it quickly. You have to drink all of it. Thinking the hateful thoughts helps the medicine go down.” Kashvi smiled.

Sofia looked at the bottle, and then at her therapist. “Okay.”

“That’s it. See you next week. Brittany will set you up with an appointment.”

Kashvi stood and walked Sofia out to the lobby.

At the door they said goodbye. Kashvi went back to her office and Sofia walked over to the reception desk. 

The redhead gave her an appointment card with a date and time on it. “Does that work for you?”

Sofia looked at the card and nodded. “Does this stuff really work?”

The redhead smiled. “Yes, it does. You will be a whole new person.”

Sofia smiled and left the office. On the elevator going down, she realized how free she’d felt after that hating. She actually felt good and empowered. And she liked feeling good.

I’m Editing

I’ve gotten Van Dyne’s Zuvembies back from the beta readers, and made corrections based on their suggestions. Now I am beginning the final editing process.

Rather than pay $450 or more for a professional (whatever that means) editor, I bought ProWritingAid for a lifetime fee of $300. I made the purchase to up my game, so to speak.

We writers fall into habits. And those habits are what often result in sloppy writing.

Using the best editing software I can buy, I get all of the services a professional editor can provide at a tiny fraction of the cost. Technology is a sound business investment, because any businessman will tell you that the single most expensive part of doing business is personnel.

That is why people are constantly being replaced by technology. That is why raising the minimum wage is a fallacy: those workers, who would benefit, will be replaced by machines — because in the long run machines are cheaper.

Today, even though I buy a First Class airline ticket, I no longer get First Class service and have to check-in my own luggage. Why? It’s because the airline can then employ less personnel.

So, rather than pay a human editor to edit each book I write, I paid a one time fee — and I get all the same advice and recommendations. And probably more, because the human eye is fallible. The machine is not.

I have a list of editors that I will never use because the books they supposedly edited are rife with errors. Humans are fallible.

I can read a text three or four times. Yet when I have the computer read it to me, I still find errors. The human brain will try to make sense of the sentence, and so I read things that aren’t there. On the other hand, the computer reads exactly what’s there. It misses nothing.

ProWritingAid is a very useful tool. Is it the best? I don’t know. Several authors I know like it and recommended it. I tried the software, saw the potential to improve my books, and bought it. And that’s a simple unsolicited observation.

Because May was a personally tumultuous month, I’m behind on my publishing schedule. But I’m catching up. Van Dyne’s Zuvembies will come out next month and after that I have a Justinia Wright novel and novelette to follow.

Now it is back to editing for me.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy editing!

Why the Novella?

Novels are long works of fiction. How long depends on who you ask. Today, novels tend to be quite long on average. After all, publishers need to make a buck. As a reader, though, I find them bloated, ungainly, and filled with lots of boring stuff I usually skip over. Elmore Leonard’s rule about not putting in your novel the stuff readers skip over is routinely ignored in today’s publishing world.

However, that was not always the case. There was a time when novels topped out at 60,000-70,000 words. And most where in the 40,000 word range. For me, as a reader, that’s the length I like. Anything longer has to be super doggone good or I stop reading. Life is too short for boring.

I love short stories. They’re concise and provide bite size entertainment. Some of the most powerful pieces of fiction I’ve read are short stories. Such gems as “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken; “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki; “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway; “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe; and “The Spotted Dog” by Anthony Trollope, to name a few.

Nothing can beat the impact of a well-written short story.

On the other hand, within the last couple years I’ve come to very much appreciate those middle length forms: the novelette, and the novella.

Longer than a short story, the novelette and novella allow for more expensive treatment of the story, deeper treatment of the characters. And I find novelettes and novellas give me a more satisfying read than novels because there is no padding, no boring parts, no filler material to satisfy a publisher’s or editor’s length requirements.

As a writer, I find the novelette, running roughly between 7,000 and 20,000 words, and the novella, at 20,000 to 50,000 words, give me enough space to tell the story, flesh out the characters, and omit the parts I as a reader would probably skip over.

Certain genres, such as horror and perhaps mystery, are at their best in the novella and novelette length.

When reading a horror novel, too often I find the author incapable of maintaining the atmosphere and the suspense. The result is a roller coaster of increasing and decreasing tension, rather than slowly building suspense, tension, and terror which culminate in the climax of the story.

Mystery novels often have unnecessary filler to pad out the length. The sleuth runs here, runs there, often getting nowhere. He or she spends time navel gazing, or baking, or knitting, or we might be treated to an extended tourist guide view of the locale.

In my own writing, I’ve been gradually moving from the novel to the novella and novelette. The Justinia Wright novels are the last hold outs. Although they are relatively short novels for mysteries. They average between 49,000 and 51,000 words, with the longest being 54,000.

Nevertheless, in the future I see more novelette and novella length Justinia Wright mysteries, such as Vampire House, Genome, the novelettes comprising Trio in Death-Sharp Minor, and the forthcoming The Nine Deadly Dolls.

From the beginning, the Pierce Mostyn series has been in novella length and I have no plans to change. The novella gives me plenty of space to tell the story with satisfying pacing, tension, and atmosphere; and to give the reader good character development.

Given how busy our lives are these days, it seems to me fiction that can provide a satisfying virtual experience in one sitting, say, on the bus or train commuting to work, or listening in the car during the daily commute, or in the evening after work, or on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, such a read would be ideal. A visit to another world taking just about an hour, perhaps two. Sounds perfect to me.

The novella and the novelette: not too big and not too small. They are just right.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Where Ideas Come From

The world is an amazing place. It is filled with unlimited stimuli for our senses and our minds.

Something so simple as the wind moving the pine tree in an impromptu dance can bring forth images from other times, other places. Or that pine in the wind can be a soothing balm for our eyes and mind.

To my way of thinking, the thing that separates a writer from a non-writer is the ability to take the thoughts, patterns, and images we experience around us and see a story in them. The non-writer simply experiences the world. The writer not only experiences, but sees the stories that are there.

For 30 years I worked in county government and hated it. Yet, that job provided me with the seed idea for my first mystery, Festival of Death, gave me experiences and information and insights that I’ve used in many poems, short stories, and novels.

One morning a sentence popped into my head: Today I killed a man and a woman. A provocative sentence that! Must’ve had a bad day at work! That sentence, though, grew into my post-apocalyptic cozy catastrophe The Rocheport Saga.

The job isn’t the only source of ideas, however. Story ideas are everywhere.

The Pierce Mostyn series has a genesis that goes back decades. In the early 70s I became a member of a Minneapolis-based horror and pulp fiction fan group. I met Donald Wandrei, Carl Jacobi, Weird Tales artist Jon Arfstrom, and Jack Koblas, who went on to became a noted regional historian and biographer.

That fan group also introduced me to The X-Files, although many years passed before I actually watched the show.

Then sometime in 2017, after watching a few episodes of The X-Files, I got the idea for a mash-up between The X-Files and the Cthulhu Mythos. I liked the idea of an FBI agent hunting monsters and aliens. And what’s not to like about Cthulhu and his ilk?

After that idea took hold, it was a simple matter of a few broad brushstrokes to create the Mostyn world, and I was in business. But what stories would I tell about Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena?

The first three Mostyn tales were heavily inspired by HP Lovecraft’s stories “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “The Mound”, and “The Lurking Fear”.

The next Mostyn stories, however, drew inspiration from a variety of sources: Van Dyne’s Vampires from cryptozoology (the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil in particular); the seed idea for The Medusa Ritual came from the Heald/Lovecraft story “The Man of Stone” and the Medusa myth; Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City” and the movie The Mummy gave me the launch pad for Demons in the Dunes; and the forth coming Van Dyne’s Zuvembies makes use of Robert E Howard’s creation which appeared in his story “Pigeons from Hell”.

There is nothing new under the sun, the writer of Ecclesiastes declared. And he’s right. Everything plays off of everything else. Someone may come up with a unique and memorable way to express the thought, but most likely the thought itself is not unique. Someone said or wrote something like it before.

All one has to have are the eyes to see the stories, the many stories, that are all around us. If you have those eyes, you’re a writer. If you don’t, perhaps you can learn.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy creating!

Valdis Damien van Dyne

Pierce Mostyn not only has Cthulhu to think about, he also has Valdis Damien van Dyne.

Sherlock Holmes had his Moriarty. Nero Wolfe had his Zeck. Nayland Smith had his Dr Fu Manchu. Hence, I think it only natural for Mostyn to have his van Dyne.

The Diabolical Mastermind trope has been around for a long time, and has served readers, moviegoers, and TV watchers quite well. The Diabolical Mastermind is the ultimate test for the hero.

A few readers have asked, “Why van Dyne, when you already have the ultimate evil in Cthulhu?” And that is a good question.

In part, I created van Dyne for a very human face to put on the evil in our world. I relish good cosmic horror. It is the ultimate expression of the objective meaninglessness of humanity. As such, cosmic horror shows us that our meaning and purpose is all inside. Who we are cannot be found out there. It can only be found within. We must discover who we are through introspection.

Nietzsche advises us to look to art for discovering who we are. What he meant was, just as the gods are all creators so are we humans creators. It is through the act of creating that we find ourselves and express who and what we are as individuals.

While cosmic horror pictures all of this for us, for many of us it is all too abstract. What does all that have to do with the day today evil I encounter?

The Diabolical Mastermind, in a way, puts a human face to the ultimate evil that causes the ultimate horror. It’s rather difficult to come to grips with Cthulhu or Azathoth. It’s much easier for us to understand a Moriarty, or a Fu Manchu, or a Valdis Damien van Dyne.

In Pierce Mostyn’s world, van Dyne is the human counterpart to Cthulhu. Both are evil. Both exert incredible and extensive influence in the affairs of the world. And both want to take over the world, caring little about the fate of the human inhabitants in the process.

If all goes well, Van Dyne’s Zuvembies will be published at the end of this month; when we will see another titanic struggle between the forces of good (Mostyn, Bardon, and the rest of the OUP gang), and the forces of evil — personified in Valdis Damien van Dyne. The fate of the world hangs in the balance!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!