One Slice or Two?

Well, in forty minutes tonight I wrote a flash piece, edited it in an hour, did a re-write over the next hour, and sent it out to Neon Magazine

There are several reasons I'm like "Geoffrey's Pizza", 835 words. First, and foremost, it made my wife cry. No joke. Honest to God tears over the ending of this story. I had guests tonight and let them read it, and not one of them looked happy afterwards, which tells me it punches in just the right place.

The second, and selfish, reason is that it is the first piece I've both began and finished since the birth of my children. I was starting to worry there were no good ideas left in my head what with all the work around the house and at the office, not to mention the recent pressure. So I have a new goal, now. A story a week. Not a finished, complete product, but something. Be it good or bad, short or long, one finished first draft of something every week. Length is not an issue. Taste is not an issue. Just something to keep me in practice until the kids sleep through the night and the house settles down.

The last time I stopped writing regularly, I ended up spending three years repairing the paddlewheel on a 100 year old steamboat.

So, back to it. Tomorrow I start trying to find my story for that week, and by next Saturday I resolve to have the first draft finished.

In the meantime, let's see what happens with my pizza order, eh?

On a different note, we took the babies and Sophie to the market today grocery shopping. There were nuns there. I have decided nothing I can ever write is scarier than a nun cooing over the baby strapped to your chest. I was squirming the whole time, expecting rulers to flash through the air and smakc my palms.

Plus, it's just a little uncomfortable to have a Bride of Christ looking at your personal Product of Lust.

Speaking of uncomfortable, this song kickstarted another story idea. It's a song about lynching, extremely haunting.



Peace,
J.C. Tabler

In the treetop...

So I have some choices. I have a rather long zombie piece, that I'm thinking will never really work as a short story, that I started writing for the World is Dead anthology. tonight, though, I started on something else, a short piece.

It's...I don't know. I'm going to need a critique of the first draft to see what I need to do to it. The zombie thing..well...I came in with an image that was meant to be a background shot, and turned into a 2,027 word short story. I'm not sure what I think of it. I like it, it hints at a world but never goes into strict detail. The ending seems somewhat expected, though. I'm thinking I need some feedback before my edits.

In short, I finished the story I think I'm going to be submitting to World is Dead , the first draft at least, in one two hour sitting tonight. I like the plot, but I may have to expand it. Any volunteer readers out there to tell me this stinks and really needs to be rewritten from the ground up?

I'm thinking of the title "Rock A Bye Baby".

Hmm.

Still waiting on that Harvest Hill rejection letter...

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

A post for y'all

Because I have to mow the lawn and go buy fireworks, I don't really have time to do a nice, long update. Instead, I present something from my crap pile, a scene from a story that never got finished and probably never will. without any further pause, here's the introduction to Stranger in My Homeland.

The first Saturday in May, as written about by Hunter S. all those years ago with his limey friend in tow, was decadent and depraved. It lacked the civil or social value that was inherent in every other high class society meeting this town threw. Instead of string quartets and cocktail conversations about recent pieces of art, there were garish hats and strong mint juleps that stained the white linen suits of the men on the way down, then on the way back up as they hunched over a toilet. Meanwhile, from their boxes in the bandstands, those wealthy few watched the teeming masses on a sea of green surrounded by brown track, a mob of humanity that was circled sporadically by the rumble and pound of hooves on mud as thoroughbreds strained by. High society watching low society as the sport of kings separated the two into their proper social standings. It always seemed strangely appropriate to me.

“Damn tourists,” I mutter, stirring tea and staring into the roiling crush of bodies.

A crowd has moved into town in their bright suits and ties, fat men with faces reddened by muggy air and liquor. Their voices bray through the air, calling to one another in an intense mixture of affectionate curses and amounts of lost money. The tongues curl with accents that sound as foreign as Arabic. Clipped words and missing r’s drown out the lazy drawl that normally fills the street. My knuckles turn white against the cool glass.

“One mint julep,” a portly man in a lime green suit yells out, “and make it good this time.”

The green man wraps one fleshy arm around the waist of a blonde haired faux-southern belle. He whispers something in her ear and she laughs, a harsh nasal noise. Her hands flutter weakly in the air to catch the sun on the gold rings that line her fingers, and she licks his ear as she mumbles something back. Judging from the hungry look that crosses the green man’s face, I guess her response was a lewd suggestion that almost overrode the desire to watch horses run.

I watch the crowd mill about in front of Churchhill Downs. Down the street come the raucous catcalls and hoots of the local revelers. Adopted locals, every one of them, as no self respecting Louisvillian would actually attend the Derby. It was an unwritten rule, like nodding to complete strangers on the street when meeting their eyes. The actual citizens, those born and bred on the too-small streets of Kentucky’s largest city, were at home watching the race on TV, placing their bets in small pools, drawing horse names from a hat as they drank heavily with close friends and not in close quarters with heavy people.

“Heigh-ho Silver, away!” the man in the green suit brays a foot away my steps, flinging his arms into the air so violently that his julep splashes over the side of the silver cup and smacks wetly onto the sidewalk, a mixture of booze and crushed ice.

The suit is glaring in this crowd, a beacon of poor taste and too much money. Lime green, so bright that it looks as if it belongs in the window of a seedy bar advertising a second-rate beer in flashing neon, it’s the sore thumb of a gaudy circus. The color isn’t found in nature, isn’t found anywhere down here except on tiny, old black men headed to church or on the backs of pimps down in Portland. It’s a hustler’s suit, a hustler’s color, what money would look like if a madman with a box of markers designed it, and this guy thinks it makes him fit in. What he doesn’t want to say, the loathing and superiority that brought him south to view the sport of kings in a neighborhood of peasants, is shouted by that garish color. It says, very simply, that he has the money and ability to dress this way anytime he wants, that his status lets him pull it off.

“Jackass,” I mumble, taking another sip of iced tea.

The horses would run later in the afternoon carrying their miniature riders. Every breath would be held as the first leg of the Triple Crown played out in a town that, the rest of the year, was considered a backwater city in a backwater state. By the end of the week these people would be in their homes telling tales of rednecks and hillbillies as they dined over tiny portions of overpriced food. While swigging martinis and ignoring strangers they would laugh uproariously at the simple folk of the south, of Kentucky, and swear that they would never come back.

What I’ve never understood is why they even bother to make a pilgrimage down here. Was it to bask in the decadence of a city they knew nothing about, or just to get drunk like the green suit and his whore? They could just have easily stayed home, these two invaders, watched the race on television and placed their bets with some high class bookie in a quiet little bar where a she-he that looked like Marilyn Monroe crooned Ella Fitzgerald in front of a small jazz trio. If they hate us, our city, our people, our way of life the rest of the year, then I don’t see why they should embrace the worst of the state for a few days in May before going back to treating us like the redheaded stepchild of America.

His face goes blank as the julep is swigged, then twists into a mixture of disgust and perverse delight at tasting something that, no doubt, he thinks is a true delicacy of a backwards people. His whore laughs again, a nasal sound that slices into the very core of the skull and dances on the bone. She wants a drink, tugging the cup from his hands and spilling a mixture that no Kentuckian ever really touches down the front of her dress. Even from here I can see her makeup, placed so carefully on cleavage, start to run down the fabric. Any self-respecting woman would have started crying, screaming at the injustice done to such an obviously expensive outfit. Her response is to grab the green man and force his face between her breasts, to lick the offending alcohol off her body. He goes to work at his new job with vigor and determination, sliding his tongue furiously over exposed skin.

Now the mob continues in its movement, pushing along the man in the green suit and his painted bride-for-a-night, a rolling river of decadence surging through the gates of the Downs. I sip the last of my tea, set it on the rusted metal porch table. In an hour it would be time to go to the bar and settle onto a corner stool before the race was run. Once the drunks had lost their money and gone to draw out more they would flood the Rose Bar with their foreign accents and noxious, whiskey-fumed breath. Any longer than an hour’s wait and it would be impossible to find a seat after these invaders on my peace found out there was a bar within walking distance. I heft myself out of the chair, slip my hat over a balding scalp, and decide to brave the crowd in favor of a quiet drink away from this madness.

Northern Haunts

Well, got a letter from Tim Deal, editor of Shroud's Northern Haunts anthology the other day. It was a request for a rewrite on my story "It Wonder Me". I rewrote, sent it back to him with the changes noted in an e-mail. Today, I heard back.

"Many Comforting Words", a ghost story set in Eastern Connecticut (formerly "It Wonder Me", a ghost story set in Pennsylvania Dutch country) will be published in the Northern Haunts anthology. Considering that, almost two years ago, my grandmother (who was the glue in my family and the namesake of my unborn youngest daughter) died of cancer, I'm very happy to be involved with this anthology.

Alright!

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

Calling for help

This is gonna sound dumb, but...

Anyone out there willing to give "The Simple Account of Sergeant Shea, Immediately Prior to the End of the World" a read for me, let me know if it's even mildly entertaining? Finished up the first draft edits tonight, wanted to get someone new's opinion on it.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

Heading out of character

It is very rare that I write anything without an eye on markets it could go in, but the Mythos piece was one of those. Of course, after finishing the first round of revisions, I find it nearly impossible to place it with any market. The narrative, the perspective, the light-hearted approach, and the short length seem to set it firmly outside of the boundaries established by most publications normally interested in Mythos sort of work. Instead, I have decided to do something else with it, and after final revisions will make a gift of it to a friend of mine who has a love of all things Lovecraft, as well as a strange sense of humor.

Knowing this, I decided concise titlings can go to hell. I have decided to name it:
"The Simple Account of Sergeant Shea, Immediately Prior to the End of the World."

So there. After revisions, I may just make it generally available to anyone who wants a chuckle of some sort, either at me or at the piece itself.

Peace,

J.C. Tabler

Little Known Stuff

Stephen King's less exciting book: "Pet Seminary"

Alright, that's out of my system. Started work on the Mythos story today. Had to find a way around Lovecraft's destruction of Innsmouth, but I managed alright. Like how it's working, especially the narrative style right now. I know, I'm breaking a few standards of new Lovecraft stuff, but this isn't really Lovecraft...it's comedy with a Mythos slant on it. For it to work I had to have a familiar Lovecraft setting known pretty widely, and Innsmouth was the best one. So...I rebuilt Innsmouth.

That's my project this week, to finish and revise this piece, then get started on the revenge story.

Plus, to start a new thing, my daughter's quote of the day.

Sophie: "I broke your fan to make all my chocolate chips!"

My babygirl is weird.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

Heresy, Thy Name is Tabler

According to the almost-finished first draft of this story, Jesus was a good-natured guy with his eye on the prize and Judas really wasn't that horrible of a fellow. I've gotten up to the climactic scene, which I plan on finishing up tonight. Looks like it'll come in either a hair over or a hair under 4,000 words, depending on whether I decide to go with a crucifixion or not. I would finish the whole thing tonight, except no work was done on it last night.

Yesterday, after calling police departments all over the state of Ohio looking for a year old accident report (piecemeal work for my father doesn't pay amazingly well, but it never has a dull moment attached to it), I was sitting at the office watching an episode of "Law and Order" when my phone rang. It was my upstairs neighbors, good friends of ours, who had just gotten back from a family reunion in Eastern Tennessee (No, there were no zombie Dolly Partons there). I answered, thinking they were asking where we left their key as we fed the animals, to find out my wife was in the hospital.

Nothing's wrong. Apparently she's a lil anemic thanks to the multiple gestation pregnancy. For the guys like me, it means her blood pressure fluctuates because she's got more than one baby in her. She passed out while talking to our neighbors, and they rushed her to the hospital. The doctors decided to keep her overnight for observation, but everything came back alright and both she and the babies are fine. I responded by sleeping alone on the couch, staring at the Dawn of the Dead poster over the T.V., and rushing back up there this morning. She was released with orders to take extra iron supplements and be more careful around the house.

Today, while she was napping, I sat down to muscle through this story. I don't want to give a lot of plot off, just that the narrator is one of the original 12 disciples, and it shifts between first person present and first person past tense. It also rejects most of what I learned about the last days of Christ's life. I was a little disappointed, in my research, to learn that one of, if not the, main idea is a major principle of the Coptic and Gnostic belief systems, but hey. I can at least write an old idea well and see what it gets me.

Alright, time to fix dinner, eat it, and cuddle with my wife before finishing up this scene. Take'er easy, folks!

EDIT 5/13/08 - 22:56

Finished the first draft of my heresy tonight. Wife's going to read it over after she gets done talking to her brother, tomorrow I'll start the edit on it, should finish around dinner time. This is one that I'm actually gonna look for a proofreader on, so if there's anyone out there who wants to read this sucker over, I'd be happy to send it out. Will, bless him, just isn't that into religion and is definitely gonna be bored to tears within two paragraphs.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

It went askew

Started working on a possible submission for the Age of Blood and Snow (is that right?) anthology. About two pages in, I realized it wasn't going to end up dark enough for them, but I still like the idea. This story is getting finished.

This, however, is one my mother and nobody at my church can ever read...I think they'd refer to it as heresy.

More later, heading to the office now.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

Haunting Melody

I can't stop listening to Cole Porter.

Anyhow, started, edited, and finished up a piece for submission to the Northen Haunts thing today. Nothing great, though I did have to call my brother-in-law to get a little bit of advice on naming and old newspaper names up in his area. While my wife chatted for two hours, I typed, trimmed, edited, trimmed, typed, trimmed, reread, titled, and did a word count check on the piece. The first draft weighed in at a little over 1,000 words. The final draft sent out? Well..

...It was 666 words. Exactly.

I swear it wasn't intentional...

Peace,

J.C. Tabler

Shorted

Not much today. Getting ready to go out. Just wanted to drop a line and say that "No Tell Motel" made the short-list for the Voices anthology. Not a sale, but it's a step up the ladder. Now we wait to see if it makes it to the last round. to be honest, I'm happy just to make it this far.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

I've Scared Myself

So I'm working on the "Creepy Doll" story, hoping to get it finished in time to edit, revise, and send it in to the Ghosts in the Machine anthology. My problem is, that as a Stepdad and a Parent-to-Be, I'm starting to bother myself with this story. It took a very, very dark turn last night that I wasn't planning on, touching on a taboo subject, and I sort of frightened myself a little not just at the subject matter but at how easy it was to write.

I originally had a couple different ways to get from point A to point B, as I knew where it was going but was uncertain on a couple scenes. Typing them, they went from disturbing to just...plain...well, I'm a little shaken by it myself. Not that I'm an amazingly good writer, just the subject matter it hits on is unsettling.

Luckily, there're only two-three more scenes left in the story, then it'll be a wrap on the first draft and edits/revisions left.

I need some warm milk and a cigarette.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

Great Big Gobs of Greasy, Grimey..

You know the rest. Been a hectic couple of days. There's some infighting going on in the family, but that' not unusual. We're all a little off our rockers over here.

This weekend is Thunder Over Louisville, the first one that I've lived downtown for. It is a little disconcerting, to be truthful. I'm already searching for things to do this weekend that will get me out of downtown and away from the traffic. I could always just pack up the wife and laptop and head out to Ray and Angie's on Saturday, as they plan on having some sort of get together. I think it's a spectacular idea, as long as I have no plans to return home until around two in the morning due to all the road closures that'll be happening.

Got a rejection back for my "cheeky" zombie dialogue today, the same one that got sent back from Bits of the Dead. I had resubmitted it to The Town Drunk, and got another "well-written, but not quite right for us" rejection. Not bad, though. I rarely get the "this is horrible" rejection letter, and most of the time get very polite, nice, and personal ones. I see it as a point of pride that I get more personal rejections than form, though it would be nice to occassionally get a personal acceptance, you know what I mean Vern?

Rewrote the "cheeky" piece, added about 500 words or so to lengthen it a bit and put some meat on the characters. It was originally a big bit of dialogue with a few speech tags, written to pump a nice and funny lil story into 500 words or less. Adding a little bit more, I wouldn't call it a story as much as just a nice little scene, and a decent enough chuckle from everyone. After pumping in those extra words, I did a couple revisions with my Blue Pen of Death, then sent it off to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine to get the next in a series of rejections for it. Hey, if nothing else there's always The Rejected Quarterly after two more, right? Right.

Alright, at work, finishing up soon, then grabbing chow with my folks while the little lady is at work. Then, if it's not time to pick her up, I'll head home and get some story work done on the "Creepy Doll" story, which started going a different direction the other day and may turn out to be speculative fiction after all.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

Marathon

Years and years ago, a Greek runner made a mad dash to tell the outcome of a battle. He ran an ungodly distance in a short time, never pausing, and upon reaching his destination yelled a single word "Victory" before collapsing dead. The battle was that of Marathon, to which the race gained its name, and has been used since to signify any long distance goal achieved in a single session.

Tonight I sat down with a little under 2,000 words on paper already and muscled my way through the first draft of my story for the Unspeakable Horrors anthology. It needs work, but the first draft turned out well. Tomorrow I'll be sending it out to get an edit from some friends of mine, then I'll be sitting down to do the rewrite, another edit, and get it packaged up and sent out.

So there we go.

I feel tired, worn, and accomplished at this exact moment in time.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

It's been a bit

Let's see, we got ourselves snowed in today. That's the big news. I'm also about to brave the winter cold to run for cigarettes. I am out of smokes.

Now, on to the other stuff. Started a story the other week about a Prohibition agent in 1924 who has, at the end of the story, a supernatural encounter that changes everything for him. This was written in a week, finished today, and edited a couple hours later. I then turned around and submitted it to Harvest Hill Anthology by Graveside Tales. So we start waiting on the rejections.

Speaking of rejections, I got another one for "A Dream of England" from the second volume of the Eclipse Anthology. Not a big deal, they take extremely good work, and this story just isn't it. I'm going to shelf it for a bit, then do another major rewrite on the story to see if I can fix whatever problems there are with it.

Got a rejection for a short piece submitted to Lone Star Stories, though the rejection letter was extremely nice and personal.

Still haven't heard back from Aberrant Dreams for "Dead Air", McSweeneys for a story whose name stays under my hat for the moment until the rejection comes back, Allegory for that short (very short) ghost story I was working on, or Modern Drunkard for "The Tribe of Harry". Among those four, the only one I never expect to hear from is the last, as their staff, for some reason, refuses to send out rejection letters.

I've got another story I'm working on, which I'm referring to as "Sci Fi Molly" for the moment until I finish it, edit it, and stick a title on it.

Till next time,
J.C. Tabler

Bedtime

Well, I finally wrote my ghost story. This morning. In about 40 minutes.

I hate flash fiction. I mean, I really despise it. I think a good story should take the reader for a ride, both in development and in resolution, and I have a hard time believing that you can do this in less that one thousand words. Still, I signed up for a "Writer's Group Reading" tonight because, frankly, I'm getting bored sitting around the house on Wednesday nights. Plus, with Des pregnant any time out of the house is like a godsend.

The only thing is that there is a requirement to bring a piece for reading to these groups. Flash fiction, with this month's topic being "Weird Western". Since I've gone far over the "flash fiction" requirements on everything else, I wrote my ghost story with a slight variation on the image I'd mentioned in an earlier post. I then trimmed it to about 950 words, stuck it in SMF, and saved it for printing later.

Hopefully this thing will help me loosen up my block on the other couple of tales I'm working on, not to mention the "Long One".

I'll let you know how it goes.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

Blocked

Alright, so normally I don't like to talk plot. This time...well...

The other day I got to thinking about how annoying it is to be a Kentuckian during the Derby. That is a truly horrible time of year. People from all over flock to get a taste of "southern charm" and generally make our lives a living hell for several days in a row. Meanwhile, we can't go anywhere or do anything without getting asked directions, told how different things are where they're from, or even eat out because every table is taken.

So, on a boring day last week at the office, I decided to get my own version of revenge by playing out every Louisvillian's Derby fantasy. The problem? I've been away from the story for a few days now, so what was once very clear has become fuzzy. Today I only got two hundred words on paper before calling it quits.

This, ladies and gentlemen, sucks. So tomorrow I'm coming home from work, sitting down, and getting this damn story rolling again. If I don't i want one of you to come over here and smack the hell out of me.

Time to smoke a cigarette and hit the hay. I'm dead tired tonight.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

Marraige is...boring

I got married Friday. What's new in your world?

With twins on the way we decided that marital bliss in June wouldn't be a good idea, so Friday we gathered our things and got hitched on short notice. This makes certain that I can lie to my children about one mroe thing, namely whether or not we were married when they were conceived. I'll be more than happy to tell them that they were just born early. As I plan on fibbing to my children about many, many things over the years, it shouldn't matter too much. At least not as much as when I tell them Abraham Lincoln was the man who invented the penny.

Today I've puttered around since getting up at 5:30 in the morning, eating a bowl of cereal and catching up on all of the news I've missed in the past week. Did you know there was a shooting in Illinois? No lie, I had no clue until this morning. I've been understandably distracted by other things over the past week, so now that we've started to fall into line it makes more sense.

The "novel" got stuck on the backburner when I started a freewrite the other day, then had an idea for a short story I want to finish well before Derby this year.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler

A Dream of Selling

"A Dream of England" came home today with a polite form rejection from Intergalactic Medicine Show. In response, I'm going to look at it and see if I need to do another rewrite, then submit it to a small game market.

More later, kinda busy right now.

Being Constructive

So the weekend has been a lot of tears in our household. To lose a cat, especially one like Zed-Head, after only a year...it seems too soon for us. Desi is slowly coming to terms with it, though this is a big blow. Zetti's brother died in the summer of 2007 in a farm accident, when one of the vehicles hit the poor Kitty. She was torn up about that. She's heartbroken about this.

We buried him yesterday morning on a piece of lan at my parent's place, under a nice old tree. I couldn't help but crack a joke, one of my ways of dealing with grief. I looked at her and said "I know what yer thinkin', but dun do it. What ya put in the ground up thar ain't always what comes out." She laughed, I laughed, and then we both cried and buried our cat.

Today I took advantage of the quiet house (Des is at work) to finish "The Tribe of Harry", a short fiction piece I started work on last week. First person perspective with a lot of dialogue, easy on the narrative descriptions. It's a new form for me, as I tend to overload the descriptions and let the dialogue tell the character's past instead of the current story. Coming in at just over 11 pages, typed, non-SMF, it seemed like a fun enough first draft to me. I've sent it off to my regular gang of proofreaders and my upstairs editor to lambast. Once they're done, I'll rewrite it.

I'll keep this pretty short, as I have to go pick up Des in a moment. I'll be rewriting and submitting "The Tribe of Harry" this week after I get back the comments for it. That's just about all I have today.

To anyone reading this, bet on the Pats.

Peace,
J.C. Tabler