If you’re thinking of getting any of my books for the holidays, it couldn’t be easier. I’ve got you covered, even for autographed books!
I’ve been recommending this essay for years to every writer I know. And it’s free to read online…
I compiled a list of fun facts about this brilliant mathematician after reading two biographies. The oddest little things stayed with me, and here they are…
Our book Stuff Every American Should Know got a little mention on Amanda Waas’s blog, You’re Welcome, which offers tips for shoppers, among other things. It’s always nice to get a plug, but now I covet the Honest Abe glasses she mentions. Learn how to get them at the link below.
Thanks, Amanda!
Here’s the cover of one of my next books. Hope to get it out in the next few weeks.
It’s your basic short story horror collection—with a touch of crime fiction, sci-fi, ghosts and cryptozoology. As always, if anyone would like to review the book, contact me and I’ll send you a free copy when I’m ready to release it. I don’t ask for anything more than an honest review.
I talked more about the book in this post.
Here’s the pitch:
***
His hand is fashioned from the night sky.
It is powerful, dark, deadly.
He dwells in the world’s oldest mountains and always comes bearing gifts.
Truth is, he cares nothing for you. He is a trickster, a prankster, a demonic being who desires only to wreak casual violence on every human he meets.
He’s about to offer you a bargain.
Don’t trust him.
* * *
ARM OF DARKNESS contains six short stories from the author of The Mesmerist, for a total of 30,000 words.
* Skullworm
* Roadhouse
* Glow
* Kin
* Sunshine lady
And the origin story:
* Arm of Darkness
Cover by Jeroen ten Berge
Denise and I will be visiting the radio show Charlotte Talks on Friday, November 30, to talk about Stuff Every American Should Know.
WFAE is an NPR station in the Charlotte, NC, area. The show, hosted by Mike Collins, is on at 9:00 AM every morning. You can grab the live-streaming radio link here (at the top of the page), or simply tune in later to grab the mp3 file (at the right of the page) to listen at your leisure.
This is the third time we’ll be on the program, but I’m still a little nervous about this appearance. Stuff is a little book, but it’s packed with lots of stories, anecdotes, history that I haven’t thought about in months. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of my head.
Afterward, we’ll be heading north for some meetings and to visit relatives. Hope to fill you in from the road.
Here’s the cover of one of my next books. Hope to get it out before the end of the year. It will feature a character that will first appear in a short story of mine next year in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
The book’s an urban fantasy. (Some would even call it a paranormal whodunnit — a mash-up of a straight mystery with elements of witchcraft and ghosts.)
As always if anyone would like to review the book, contact me and I’ll send you a free copy when I’m ready to release it. I don’t ask for anything more than an honest review.
Here’s the pitch:
***
In an ancient chapel in an ancient land, an old woman screeches a warning:
“Beware the touch of Job—he’s cursed!”
Matteo Scarpone is a man more sinned against than sinning.
Once a cool-headed logician and the pride of Rome’s carabinieri, he’s devastated when disaster rocks his world.
He is a lost man. Beaten. Shaken.
HAUNTED.
Shunned as an embarrassment, he is exiled to a tiny village in the sticks—a hamlet, a burg, a borgo.
But in this land of vineyards and olive groves, life is far from idyllic. Murder, witchcraft and hate taint the soil once tread by the Etruscans.
Now the young captain must unravel a series of murders that pit him against a cynical evil and force him to use a power
—A GIFT
— A CURSE
that he has long denied.
* * *
THE MARSHAL OF THE BORGO
A full-length urban fantasy by the author of The Mesmerist.
Cover by Jeroen ten Berge
My Fibonacci book got an unexpected plug today on the website of the nationally syndicated public radio program Harmonia Early Music. The program occasionally chooses dates in history at random and provides a little history and music about what was going on then.
Harmonia’s chosen year 1250 was a bad one for Fibonacci. It’s the year he most likely died, during an occurrence of the plague in Pisa, Italy. The program’s audio is lushly scored; you can check out the mp3 at the link above. The written transcript is here, along with the link to my book.
2018 Update: Indiana Public Radio’s permalink omits the transcript, music playlist, and the reference to my book, but you can still listen to the audio of the show.
Bill Glavin was a writing teacher of mine in college. We stayed in touch after I graduated and would meet every now and then along the banks of the Beaverkill River in upstate New York. There he managed to teach me whatever I know about fly-fishing, which is still not much. It’s a sport I only ever did with him. I liked going up there and living in a camper for a few days and hearing him talk against the sound of a river.
He was from Boston and had a funny accent. He loved sports, mostly baseball, and on many of those nights in front of the fire he’d listen to a game on the radio. I knew nothing about sports and couldn’t really bond with him about that. But I was into books and writing, and he had plenty to say about that.
His later, younger students got to know him during the rise of Harry Potter, and referred to Glavin as their Dumbledore. Our thing—his and mine—was crime fiction. He loved Sherlock Holmes, he loved Rex Stout. He enjoyed “newer” guys too, like Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke, and Boston guys like Robert B. Parker and Dennis Lehane, of course. In fact, the first book signing I ever attended was when Glavin took me to meet Parker, who was signing at the university bookstore. Imagine that: Robert B. Parker signing at a university bookstore! The writer looked bored out of his mind, and was horrified that Glavin would want a signed copy of Love & Glory, a love story which Parker had written early in his career and which a reviewer had once described as “cloying and bathetic.” (That was the sole reason Glavin wanted it.)
Glavin loved the writing of Mark Twain and never stopped looking for writing that made him laugh. He always said it was hard to write funny, yet he certainly seemed to turn up countless of great examples for us to read and dissect in class. He culled them from newspapers and magazines, and later in his teaching career, the Internet. I once watched him try to read a Dave Barry column all the way through without stopping. He was laughing so hard that tears ran down his face. The piece wasn’t nearly that funny the next time I read it for myself.
From about the mid-seventies on, Glavin ran a one-man placement center from his office in the journalism school in Syracuse. Whenever former students called asking him for help looking for a job, he’d start working the phones. I don’t know how many of those calls resulted in jobs, but the Syracuse journalism mafia is no joke in New York City. A lot of the editors running those magazines got their start in one of Glavin’s classes, trying to write three paragraphs without using a form of the verb to be. Many of the students in the magazine department were women; still are, I guess. Guys were rare in that major. I don’t know why.
Maybe that’s why we bonded, why he became a second father to me. (There’s nothing wrong about my dad, by the way. He’s a stand-up guy, just not a writer.) Long after college I’d phone Glavin to ask his advice on pieces I was working on, or to share a hilarious article I’d found, or to talk about a great book I’d read, or just to hear his gravelly, smoker’s voice. Much of the time I spent on the phone with him consisted of me trying to get him to laugh. I loved hearing his chuckle.
Surprisingly for a guy who helped so many others perfect their craft, Glavin did little writing of his own. I was not the only person who told him he ought to write about fishing. He loved it so much, didn’t he? Hadn’t he read us countless excerpts of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It over the years? Why couldn’t he try his hand at that kind of memoir? He certainly had the stories to fill it.
He said nah, if he wrote about fishing then fishing would become work, and he never wanted to let that happen. One night on the river he admitted that there was one thing he wanted to write about, and maybe one day he would.
"The older I get," he said, "the more obsessed I become in the things that obsessed me as a kid. I don’t know why that is, but it is. And I’d want to figure out why."
I assumed he was talking about three things: baseball, fishing, and writing. Glavin never married and never had kids. His students and faculty colleagues were his closest family. He had plenty of time to indulge in those obsessions, and his colleagues probably envied his freedom to do so.
Two years ago, Glavin got sick. At first the monster plodded along, then roused itself to tear through his lungs. A bunch of people rushed to Bill’s bedside, hoping to say goodbye. I showed up late in the game, and the sight of him shook me. I remember uttering a single, silent prayer, directed to whomever: If you’re going to kill him, do it now. Or work a fucking miracle. This halfway thing is bullshit.
Maybe once every 30 years those of us among the irreligious are allowed a run on the hotline. Glavin died the next morning. He would have been 70 today. It’s hard to sit quietly sometimes and think or talk about him because it still hurts. Until now I’ve resisted trying to write about him.
We all want a loved one’s death to mean something. Holding onto a signifier—whether a word or an object—is akin to hanging onto the ones we’ve lost. Glavin’s words on the river are the ones I think about the most these days. I think he was trying to make sense of something most novelists I know accept as gospel: that all fiction springs from their obsessions. That’s certainly true for me right now. If your fiction has any power at all, it’s because you’re mining something that’s authentic for you. If your work is in any way unique, it’s because you had experiences growing up that were wholly your own but still somehow universal.
The second you start writing, all these things starting coming out. That’s probably why writing is hard. You’re constantly dodging the landmines of your past, selecting the stuff that furthers your art and ignoring the stuff that only makes good therapy sessions. When it’s going well, that act can be beautiful. It’s helpful to remind myself from time to time that all the raw material comes from the same place. They are things lodged in my heart. Like you, Bill.
Photo courtesy Syracuse University.
When I was in college, my journalism professors urged us to read the work of writers such as Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe who wrote nonfiction using the techniques of fiction. In the 1960s and 70s, they called this New Journalism. Today I think you’d call it writing interestingly.
Fiction writers of the period also dabbled in this style of writing. Norman Mailer is primarily known as a novelist, but when he wrote his “nonfiction novel,” The Executioner’s Song, he basically reported the shit out of murderer Gary Gilmore’s life and wrote the story like a novel. Closer to our time, David Eggers did something similar with Zeitoun. The novelist who first showed everyone how it could be done was Truman Capote, who wrote In Cold Blood.
Earlier this year, I came across this fascinating 1957 profile Capote did of Marlon Brando for The New Yorker. It’s a fun read and far lighter than throwing yourself into a book about a family that was annihilated in Kansas. But just this week I came across this article in the Columbia Journalism Review about the writing of Capote’s Brando piece, and why it was so groundbreaking for its time. I’m posting the links here because I want to be able to track them down when I need them again.
The more I distance myself from journalism, the more I become a junkie for this kind of writing.
1) What is the title of your next book?
Arm of Darkness.
2) Where did the idea come from for the book?
About twenty-five years ago I wrote a short story about a petty crook who wanders into a roadhouse to get out of a snowstorm and has a horrifying encounter with a mysterious stranger. I always liked the story but never did anything with it. Then, over the years, every time I found myself procrastinating on a work-for-money project, I’d bang out another one of these short stories to waste time. I never did anything with these stories either. I’ve never been good about selling my fiction work. But I started revising the pieces last year and was surprised to find that they formed a pretty coherent collection because every story has, at its heart, one character who kicks the action into motion: A man with an arm fashioned from the night sky.
3) What genre does your book fall under?
Horror. Definitely horror. With elements of crime, sci-fi, ghosts, and, uh, cryptozoology.
4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
You know, it’s not a great question because it would be a very disjointed, episodic movie. But I figure people like Sam Elliott or Jackie Earle Haley or even a heavily disfigured Ryan Gosling could play the man with the arm of darkness.
5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A mysterious demonic stranger intrudes upon the lives of unsuspecting people from all walks of life, good and bad, and forces them to make choices with horrific consequences.
6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Self-pubbed, baby, all the way. I calculate that my wife and I have sold more than 300,000 copies of books that we’ve written separately or together. But they’re all nonfiction. I have no track record in traditional publishing as a fiction writer. Right now, I kind of like that. Short story collections are hard sells to traditional publishers, anyway. I just like pretending that I’m an old-time pulp writer for now. I have a hat I can wear that fits the bill.
7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
In real time, the whole book probably took five months to write the first draft. Just keep in mind that that time was spread out over a period of about 20 years. Then a burst of writing at the end pulled them into a unit. Mostly, that later work recast and grounded the stories in a specific place—the American southeast where I now live.
8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Honestly, I think it has more in common with those old Weird Tales stories you used to see back in the day. Or TV anthologies such as Twilight Zone or Tales From the Crypt.
9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I’ve been a journalist most of my life. From time to time, I’d come across some weird real-life stories that obsessed me and made me want to cast them as fiction. But practically speaking, each of these stores was written as a way to procrastinate from other work I was doing. They entertained me. After a while, I started liking the character at the center of the stories.
10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
Two of the stories at the end—the most recent ones—were based on real-life cases I encountered in the course of other work. One involves an early 20th-Century woman who insisted on being buried in a glass-topped tomb when she died. Why? So that the sun would always shine on her face.
By the way, if anyone reading this would like a free copy in exchange for an honest review when the book comes out, let me know and I’ll get you a copy as soon as I’m ready to publish.
Okay. I’m done. Now, I’d like to introduce these five writers. Please check out their blogs next Wednesday to see what they’ve been working on. I hope you’ll be moved to buy some of their work along the way!
Last couple of days I’ve been doing my spousely duty, which in this household means sending out emails to everyone on our mailing list (1,100+ names) to tell them about Denise’s upcoming book, The Girls of Atomic City. The book’s available for pre-order but no one’s going to pre-order it if they don’t know about it. Hence the spam, er, emailing of longtime friends and colleagues.
As I do this, I can’t help think what I’d do if I got one of these emails. The book’s three to four month’s off at this point. That’s a hard sell, in my opinion. A really hard sell, given that the holidays are coming. People have tons of other buying to do at this point in the year. Why buy a book that isn’t going to come out until March?
You’d think.
And yet, we’re actually getting emails from people who are taking Denise up on the giveaway she’s offered in the spam—uh, e-newsletter we just sent out. I think the trick with these things is to focus the letter on just the bare essentials (here’s a book, you can pre-order it, here’s why you’d do it) and send only to those who have a vested interest in your cause. In this case, we’re sending to friends, family, and colleagues who have been asking her about this book for six years or so. It’s our way of saying, a) This has not been a figment of Denise’s imagination, b) Remember all those times you said you couldn’t wait to see it? Put up or shut up.
The fourth important group we sent the email out to is the people who live in the city where the book takes place, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Residents here are justifiably proud of the role they played in WWII, and this is arguably the only book about the city that’s been published by a major publisher. They’re excited, and they’re placing orders.
The fifth important group is actually kind of tricky: it’s the fans who’ve bought our previous books. It’s tricky because we’ve written books in different genres. It’s hard to ask someone who liked our freelance money book or one of our history titles if they might be interested in a WWII history title. But I think we have to do it. If nothing else, it’ll winnow the list down to people who are our diehard readers.
Going forward, it’s raising some interesting issues for us. We’re written a lot of books together, and there was always some strength derived from the fact that we were marching off into the world together. If people hated our book, we would deal with it together. But going forward, we’re writing our own books. Here Denise has authored this huge American history title. And I’m going out with more fiction work—a departure, given my previous work.
We’ll see how it goes.
If anyone would like to get on Denise’s list for future mailings, the list is here.
If you want to get on my list, sign up here.
My buddy Jack, who lives in Hoboken, NJ, finally got his electricity back on, and put together this report on his post-Sandy adventures.
The post is fairly long, but worth a scroll-through for the photos alone. You get a sense of what it’s like to live for a few days in an American disaster zone, with National Guard troops providing supplies and transport, Good Samaritans showing up to dole out hot, free food to strangers, and people with electricity offering extension cords so neighbors can charge their devices and send “I’m okay!” notes to family and friends.
Please note: This website uses affiliate links, typically for books or products mentioned on the site. If you click on one of these links and purchase anything, the owner of this site may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
