On Dangerous Ground

This anthology of western noir is coming soon from editors Ed Gorman, Dave Zeltserman, and Martin H. Greenberg courtesy of the fine folks at Cemetery Dance. My story "Durston" is included, and it's in dangerous company. You can check out the full Table of Contents over at the Cemetery Dance site.

A few words about the tale itself: On rare occasions, lightning strikes. This was one of them. Ace writer/editor Ed Gorman asked me for a hardboiled western with a brutal, noirish bent, and the opening of "Durston" came to me as soon as I sat down at the computer. From there it was a race to type fast enough to tell the story without forgetting any of it. Even better, "Durston" was one of those stories that hit the page at final-draft quality. I wish every story went like that. I'd wear out a lot more keyboards if they did.

Locus on "Vampire Lake"

"Vampire Lake" has snagged Lois Tilton's Good Story Award in her latest Short Fiction column over at Locus. In part, Tilton says of my forthcoming novella in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2: "This is it. In many anthologies there is a standout story, one that readers will always recall when the book comes to mind. ["Vampire Lake"] is the longest, darkest tale in the book, a dark dark fantasy in the Western mode... There is more than spatter here, there is hemorrhage. There is horror."

Tilton also makes an interesting point about the Weird Western, writing that it's a subgenre which "not only tolerates but encourages hyperbole and highly-colored language." Which, in truth, is one of the major attractions for me. Stories like "Vampire Lake," "Durston" (in Lesser Demons), and "The Bars on Satan's Jailhouse" were flatout fun to write, allowing me to bust off the cinches more than a little bit and go for it.

I like that... and it's just one reason I'll be writing more Weird Westerns.

Sunday Supplement 3/6/11

Peter Bogdanovich on Kiss Me Deadly (and, yes, I'm a huge Robert Aldrich fan).

Simon Wood on Five Things Readers Can Do To Help Their Favorite Writers.

Rockin' Randy Fox riffs on Swiss hotel clerks and the great cosmic whack-a-mole game of sevenities UFO sightings (Part Deux!)

Props for Pic.

Horror's Big Dawg is back.

Laird Barron weighs in on writers to watch. And, yep -- based on that Warren Oates line, I'll have to hunt up some Scott Nicolay.

The Last Man on Earth... with back problems.

Happy Birthday, Frankie!

Today is American Frankenstein's first birthday... and all I can say is, "Wow. Time really does fly when you're having fun."

Thanks to Kevin Nordstrom for (yet another) boss illo, and thanks to all of you for tuning in to the blog. Here's hoping you'll keep on clicking over in the year to come. After all, that's what puts the jolt to this particular monster... so thanks for the lightning, one and all.

A Man's Got To Know His Limitations

I've often wished I was a faster writer. Oh, sometimes I have been. One of my best writing memories is finishing my first novel in a one-day marathon. Yep. I wrote the last several chapters of Slippin' Into Darkness in a blur, as close to a feeling of automatic writing as I've ever come. Seems to me it was about 50 pages, but that number may have been inflated by time and distance from the event itself. Memory has a way of doing that -- especially memories of the pleasant variety. Still, that one day at the computer left me with an amazing feeling that has endured... as did the novel I managed to write in six weeks (The Ten-Ounce Siesta).

But mostly, I'm not fast. I suppose I'd rather get a story right than get it done half-assed, and more often than not that takes time. Plus life and job and commitments have a way of bucking you out of the saddle at the worst moments. Still, I always think I can get things done faster than I can, and I'm always disappointed when I fall short. You'd think I'd learn the simple lesson Dirty Harry laid out in Magnum Force a long time ago: "A man's got to know his limitations."

Or maybe (with me, anyway) it goes like this: I know my limitations; the problem is I always think I can defy them.

Damn. I wish I was faster.

The Promise

"I'd been out of the recording scene for three years, I was in my mid-twenties and already trying to prove I wasn't a 'flash in the pan', a 'one-hit wonder', a creation of the record-company star-making machine. I knew who I was (well, I was pretty sure) and who I wanted to be. I knew the stakes I wanted to play for, so I picked the hardest of what I had, music that would leave no room to be misunderstood about what I felt was at risk and what might be attained over the American airwaves of popular radio in 1978. Power, directness and austerity were my goals. Tough music for folks in tough circumstances."

--Bruce Springsteen
Liner Notes
The Promise

Chilling Tales

Checking in today with some news for fans of my bride's fiction -- you can find a new Tia Travis story in Chilling Tales, an anthology edited by Michael Kelly and published by Edge. Tia's tale is called "The Weight of Stones," and it's the closer in this all-Canadian compilation of dark fiction.

Chilling Tales has a street date of March 1, so grab a copy soon (Amazon is taking preorders). Tia received her copy today, and it's a sharp little package. I'm looking forward to reading new fiction from Gemma Files (always a fave), my buddies Ian Rogers and Jason Ridler, and a host of Canuck talent whose names are familiar but whose work I've yet to sample. In his introduction, Mike Kelly promises "...a distinctly Canadian worldview, a disquieting solitude, perhaps, or a tangible loneliness, that permeates all these stories and makes them truly chilling tales."

For those who'd like a sample of Tia's story, check out the opening below:

She sleeps beneath ninety million tons of limestone.

A sigh that might be the wind siphons through the Pass. Gustiest corridor in the territory, a convergence of plates where mountains break loose from the sky, where violence is measured both in moments and eras, where sunlight splinters through crevices and flowers live and die in darkness. If you listen, you might hear a grain of sand sift through the labyrinth of boulders.

If you listen, you might hear her breathing.

I hold my own breath and map the movements of her heart... the rise and fall of her lungs. I held that last breath for her until I passed beyond the need for it. The desire for it.

Lie still. I will find you...