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!

Van Dyne’s Zuvembies

“When hate makes life worth living…”

Cryptozoology is the study of cryptids: those creatures of myth, folklore, legend, and imagination that science sniffs at, and yet may in fact exist. Much like the coelacanth, thought extinct for 65 million years, only to be found alive and well in 1938. Seems science doesn’t know everything.

Writers of the paranormal love cryptids. They are their stock in trade, their bread and butter. Yet, of the hundreds of cryptids available, relatively few find their way into the tales of the paranormal writers.

Way back in 1934, Robert E Howard wrote a story titled, “Pigeons from Hell”, which was published in the May 1938 issue of Weird Tales, two years after Howard’s death.

The story is a superb example of Southern Gothic horror, and features a creature of Howard’s invention, although drawn from Voodoo myth — the zuvembie.

Given the current zombie craze, I would’ve thought someone would’ve made use of the zuvembie before now. To my knowledge, no one has.

So you may be asking, “What the heck is a zuvembie?” That’s a good question, and I’m glad you asked. Let me satisfy your curiosity with a scene from Van Dyne’s Zuvembies:

“Can someone please tell me what the hell a zuvembie is?” NicAskill asked.

Dr Heber cleared his throat. “A zuvembie is a creature that is often classed as one of the undead.”

“You mean like zombies and vampires?” NicAskill asked.

“Yes. Although technically speaking, a zuvembie is not dead. Simply changed.” Heber paused a moment to clean his glasses. He put them back on and continued.

“In traditional voodoo, a bokor, that is, a magician, creates a zombie from someone who is already dead. A zombie is a re-animated corpse that does the bidding of the bokor. A zombie is essentially a slave.”

“So there’s no zombie virus?” Jones asked.

“No. That is the stuff of cheap pulp fiction and B-rated movies.”

“So no zombie apocalypse,” Jones said.

Heber shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

“So if a zombie is a slave, what’s a zuvembie?” NicAskill asked.

“As I said,” Heber explained, “a zombie is a slave of the bokor, created by powerful spells that are cast by the bokor. A zuvembie, on the other hand, has never died. The creator of a zuvembie may or may not be a bokor. However, the creator of the zuvembie has gone through the necessary rituals and been taught the secret of making the Black Brew, which, when drunk, will turn a woman into a zuvembie.”

“Only women can become zuvembies?” Jones asked.

“That is correct,” Heber replied. “Only women.”

“Why?” The question came from NicAskill.

“Because hate and revenge are the motivators and the required emotions to become a zuvembie.” Heber shrugged. “It seems women, as a sex, have so often been viewed as inferior that they and they alone possess the necessary hatred and desire for revenge to become a zuvembie.”

NicAskill sat back in her seat. “Wow.”

Heber, a smile on his face, continued. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The zuvembie is the personification of female hate and revenge.”

“So what’s this thing like?” Jones asked.

Heber explained, “According to the lore, ancient lore that predates voodoo and goes back to West African snake religions, once a woman drinks the Black Brew she ceases to be a human. She becomes one with the denizens of the Black World. Friends and family cease to exist. A zuvembie has command over some aspects of nature. It can control owls, snakes, bats, and werewolves to do its bidding. The creature can summon darkness in order to blot out a small amount of light.

“Unless killed by lead or steel, it lives forever. Time means nothing to the zuvembie; it exists, as it were, outside of time. It no longer eats human food, and dwells in a house or a cave much as a bat does.

“The zuvembie cannot speak, at least not as humans do, and it does not think as humans think. However, by the sound of its voice it can hypnotize the living and summon a person to his or her death. And once the thing has killed a person, it can control the lifeless corpse until the corpse grows cold and the blood ceases to flow. The corpse becomes the slave, as it were, of the zuvembie and will do whatever the zuvembie commands it to do.”

“Good night,” Jones said. “It’s a good thing women don’t know about this zuvembie thing.”

“Shut up, Jones,” NicAskill said.

“One more thing,” Dr Heber said. “The zuvembie has but one pleasure in life.”

“What’s that?” Mostyn asked.

“To kill human beings.”

So now you know what a zuvembie is. Pretty scary stuff, coming as it did from the stories REH’s grandmother told him. Nothing like folklore to scare the bejeezus out of you.

Van Dyne’s Zuvembies is at the beta readers, and I’m looking to publish it late June or early July.

In the meantime check out the other Pierce Mostyn adventures. They’re filled with monsters, daring-do, and will convince you to keep the lights on at night.

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

Original illustration from Weird Tales for Pigeons from Hell

On the Shortness of Life

A little over a week ago, I learned of the death of a fellow indie author. I did not know Laila Doncaster, except in passing. We exchanged a few words now and then on Twitter, occasionally retweeted each other’s tweets, and that was that.

Her first book of a projected series was published on May 1st. Her bio on Amazon speaks of looking forward to an early retirement. And now she’s dead.

I am saddened. Very much so. A person looking forward to the future, an exciting future, and now there is no future. She’s gone.

Every now and again someone will chasten me for my attitude towards my writing. The sense of intense urgency I have to put pen to paper.

I am driven to produce as much as I can, as fast as I can, and get as many copies of my books into as many hands as I can.

I’m told I shouldn’t feel so driven. I’m told I shouldn’t be looking over my shoulder for the Grim Reaper, while my pen is scratching out page after page of words.

All I can say in response to these well-meaning folk is to quote Seneca: “The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

Or to paraphrase: I might die tonight — I need to write today. After all, only I can write my books; and I have many score begging to be written down.

Seneca’s essay, On the Shortness of Life, needs to be required reading. It is the antidote to the carelessness with which most of us approach life and live life — which is the most non-renewable of resources.

I’m 67 years old, and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I’ve wasted most of the time given to me in this thing we call life.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. However, it wasn’t until I was 37 that I actually, in all seriousness, began to act on my desire instead of just dabble. And it was another 11 years before I began to see the fruit of that action.

According to the actuarial tables, I have another 10 years to live. That’s not a lot of time. And anything can happen between now and then to shorten those 10 years.

Seneca wrote:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

There’s some comfort in that advice, yet how many of us know how to use our time and not waste it? I confess I’m still struggling with that one. But here, too, Seneca has some advice for us:

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

In other words, it is unproductive busyness, unproductive worry and anxiety, unproductive lack of focus, unproductive preoccupation with things that don’t matter that rob us of the one thing that does matter — irreplaceable time.

It is the life lived deliberately that is the fruitful life. It is the focused life that is the productive life. As Rainer Maria Rilke advised the young poet: once you’ve decided you must write, then you must structure your life so that nothing gets in the way of writing. Harlan Ellison put it more cryptically: “Writers write.”

I might beat the actuarial odds. My mom was 80 when she died. My dad is 87. His mother died in her 90s, although the last few years she was debilitated by a stroke, and his father died a month shy of his 103 birthday. But I can’t bank on it. Which means I have to write today.

As Seneca noted:

…the man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man, who is already full and satisfied, food which he does not want but can hold.

Living deliberately is the key. And when we do, life — no matter how long or short — is time enough to accomplish great things.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy and productive living!

Fiction Is People

Fiction is all about people. At least good fiction is. That’s why good fiction stays with us. Why it’s memorable.

Theodore Sturgeon once said, “Good fiction is people. And people are people you know.” Which is probably the point of the old writing adage: write what you know.

It’s all fine and dandy for the writer to show off his or her knowledge about cars, or cooking, or stamp collecting, or orchids — but if those things don’t touch people, so what?

Of late, I’ve been watching Colombo. The lieutenant is a wonderfully drawn character, and certainly went a long way to contribute to the show’s popularity. What I find of even more interest, is that Colombo knows people. He knows what makes them tick. What is likely and unlikely behavior. He’s a shrink masquerading as a police officer in a rumpled raincoat.

Columbo is all about people: their greed, their habits. And how it is that in the end, who they are is what ultimately trips up their attempts to get away with murder.

Good fiction is about people, because without people there is no story. How can a story exist without people? Sure, we can substitute animals for people, but that’s just a camouflage. The story is still about people, and still tells us something about the human condition. It is as Ray Bradbury noted: create your characters (the people), let them do their thing — and there is the story.

There are writers who get hung up on plot. They have to detail each little action in the story. Too often, what gets lost along the way are the people in the story. And the reader knows it. The characters are flat, lifeless paper dolls.

Now some readers don’t care. They devour the story and move on to the next one. Those readers are kind of like junkies just looking for reading fix.

However, I think most readers want a quality reading experience. They want to read about people like themselves, or about people they would like to become, doing wonderful and amazing things.

Tarzan is memorable because he personifies the best in us and is ultimately someone who we’d like to be.

Rex Stout gave us the sedentary eccentric genius, Nero Wolfe, and the wisecracking man of action, Archie Goodwin. I find myself drawn to both of them, but particularly to Wolfe. Why? Because I would like to be the master of that brownstone. Good food, good books, the big globe, beautiful orchids. I’d just sub tea for the beer.

I can’t recall any story that I remember solely because of the plot. I do, though, remember many because of the characters. Bilbo Baggins. Hercule Poirot. Sherlock Holmes. Carnacki. Rona Dean (from RH Hale’s Church Mouse). Tony Price and Chris Allard (from Richard Schwindt’s two mystery series). Carol (from Steve Bargdill’s Banana Sandwich). The Zombie from Ben Willoughby’s The Undude. Tatsuya (from Crispian Thurlborn’s 01134). And more. So many more.

Fiction is all about people. Fiction is us.

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

Reading Indie

I am surprised by the number of authors on Twitter who say they don’t have time to read, or who don’t read books by indie authors.

Don’t Have Time To Read

This one just boggles my mind. How can a writer say he or she doesn’t have time to read?

That’s like a painter saying he doesn’t have time to look at art.

Or a woodworker saying he doesn’t have time to look at other examples of woodworking.

Stephen King has noted that if one wants to be a writer, he needs to do two things:

1. Read a lot
2. Write a lot

And Mr. King is not alone in his sentiment. Every writer who makes a living from writing says the same thing.

Reading the writing of other writers not only provides enjoyment for the reader — but it is a seminar on how others approach the art and craft of storytelling.

Writers need to be readers.

Don’t Read Indie

This too boggles my mind. How can an indie author not read the words of his or her fellows?

That’s like an eye doctor never talking with other eye doctors. How is that going to work? I would not want to go to that doctor.

It saddens me to see indie authors not list an indie book when they play those Twitter games of list your current favorite reads. Or an indie author when they’re tagged to list current favorite authors.

I read an average of four books a month, along with a bushel basket of short stories and novelettes. I also sneak in some nonfiction. And most of my reading is of indie authors.

Mind you, I don’t read bestsellers. I find bestsellers, for the most part, not the best books. I scour the bottom of the barrel and maybe the middle of the barrel. That is where I find the real talent. The writers who truly know how to tell a good story. And I find it a shame that those writers are the ones who deserve to be bestsellers and are not.

Indie April is over. But that doesn’t mean the adventure has to stop. Those indie authors are still there waiting to be discovered. Go out and discover them. Find those books that are not in the top 300,000 on Amazon’s paid list. That’s where you’ll find the good stuff.

Writers, if you are serious about your craft, read lots and write lots.

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