This weekend, I got out of my cave for a bit and headed to a local sci-fi and fantasy convention. The digs were modest, the sights and sounds tamer than, say, a ComiCon. Someone described the particular day I attended as “Relaxicon.” At 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, yeah, it was totally that.
I’m not really awake. Someone pried my eyes open and quickly snapped a picture.
But it was seriously fun, and I met some interesting people. I had the privilege of sitting on two panels with some heavy-hitting authors who have achieved success beyond anything I can even hope for. I made some new friends. And I made some new contacts at a local annual event, so I hope they’ll allow me back next year.
A couple weeks ago, in my summer update, I wrote about how 2016 hadn’t really panned out the way I’d hoped. It hasn’t been a bad year at all. In fact, production-wise, I feel like I’ve written some of the best fiction of my life. And while I haven’t had much to announce this year, some of that production is paying off.
I’m thrilled to announce Gamut, a new literary magazine, has accepted a short story of mine. I can’t stress the previous sentence’s verb enough.
An acceptance from any market is a great thing. It’s acknowledgement for hard work and dedication, not to mention passion for a piece. It says you did something right, but more than that, it says someone else believes in the story as much as you do. And now the story has an avenue to reach other readers.
But contributing to Gamut is a whole different accomplishment. Not only is Gamut an amazing project (and I’ll get to that in a moment) that is the brainchild of some people I hold in high regard, but it’s also a professional market.
Concept: Everything from Western fairy tales, fables, and myths is real. The powers of good and evil, light and dark, are locked in an eternal struggle that goes all the way back to the beginning of time. A modern day woman finds herself wrapped up in the war as she discovers she has the power of influence, to command the light and the dark, but the other side of that coin is she has become a target.
Execution: Do nothing that is obvious. Subvert expectations time and again. Build a rich, alluring world that incorporates fantastical elements of old Anglo-Saxon cultures to modern urban contemporaries. Create unique characters based on familiar ideas. Entertain. Stimulate the intellect. Cut the fat and reject nonsense. Tell a simple, powerful story that’s never been told before.
My experience in reading Frightfully Ever After by Nick DeWolf had a recurring theme, which was to be continually impressed by how incredibly imaginative it is. Originality and creativity are planted firmly in the driver’s seat. In trying to analyze the experience, I kept thinking of words like “alluring,” “captivating,” and “immersive.” I’ll no doubt use those words multiple times as I write this.
Though not a tome—and by fantasy standards, it’s relatively short—it secretes imagination. Cracking this book open, breaking its spine for the first time, I had to wonder if this thing was bound in the bone marrow of Beowulf or Edgar Allan Poe.
At the beginning of this year, I teased some big things. I learned a lesson in teasers: It’s not a good idea unless the things you’re teasing are definite. Many of my hopes for 2016 haven’t quite panned out. I finished my second novel, but I’ve struggled to find a home for it. I’ve also finished some solid short stories, but it’s been a mix of rejection and taking a long time to hear back.
I get it. I’m shooting for the stars, and it takes a long time for even light to travel through interstellar space.
However, in the face of a disappointing 2016 (seriously, has anyone had a good 2016?), one of those things I teased (something big regarding Carrier) is definitely happening.
That’s an interior proof. But wait, wasn’t Carrier already published? Yes.
Notes From a Necrophobe by T.C. Armstrong is a novel about one family trying to survive the end of the world with zombies and biological hazards and terrible humans, oh my! It may sound familiar, but it isn’t. Keep reading.
This is a world that is coping with a parasitic threat, which has turned our most precious resource (water) into the most deadly substance on the planet. There hasn’t been a total collapse, but we get the immediate sense that the collapse is still happening. There are authorities, though their power is limited, and as expected, they only get less capable as the story progresses.
One of the main themes is that life goes on after the apocalypse but that there’s a yearning for the time before. The difference is that, after the end, some modern conveniences persist, including the Internet and TV. The characters grow to rely on these resources, which makes their inevitable removal that much more painful. It’s an interesting approach to the end because it’s somewhat atypical. The theme is familiar, but it has new nuances.
The treatment of the infection seems to be that the threat is the disease, not necessarily the monsters it creates. It’s a really interesting tone. The characters have to be especially careful about the environment, and the zombies are part of the world they find themselves in. They are an elevated kind of vermin. One character even laments in one of my favorite lines early on, “They are like cockroaches these days.”
Another favorite line of mine involves one of the characters calling another a “wenchbag.” I like it because it reminds me that this novel has a very wide range of tones of voice, and T.C. juxtaposes it in a humorous way. T.C. writes from the perspective of a mother as well as all of her children, one of which is an adolescent. Each of the characters have a distinct voice, and it’s certainly one of my favorite aspects of the book.
In fact, much of the story is told from the perspective of the children, and this gives the book a somewhat young adult feel to it. It’s well done in that it isn’t overwrought with ignorance to convey youth. We aren’t beaten over the head with it. The kids are people with their own personalities and ideas. Though, it certainly contains its fair share of high-level writing, including some scientific exposition, as well as adult-level ideas and themes. Of course, there’s the violence and gore.
In a way, Notes From a Necrophobe spans all ages.
It reads like journal entries, but it isn’t an epistolary. The writing style is a good mix of contemporary and modern fiction.
Apart from the standard terminology, T.C.’s writing has a specific personality. At times, it is morbidly funny without being pure horror satire. The comedy is based in these characters being jaded with the horrors of their world, but they aren’t casual about its dangers.
There are pretty clearly three acts to the story, though they aren’t delineated in text. With each act, the characters’ situation obviously grows more dire, and it is when conditions are at their bleakest that I felt like T.C.’s writing was at its most potent. That said, I tend to enjoy that kind of thing more, and another reader may find one of the other acts more entertaining or interesting. In this sense, Notes From a Necrophobe offers a range of experiences.
Overall, Notes From a Necrophobe succeeds in distinguishing itself in well-trodden territory. I think any zombie fiction fan will find it enjoyable, but even outside of the genre, there’s plenty of intrigue and enjoyment to be had.
I’m sitting here at my desk, and instead of working on moving my WIPs to the “Ready for Humiliation” folder, I’m staring at my bookshelf. I’m gazing at the spines of Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy, and I’m thinking about reading them again.
I recently finished the third book, The City of Mirrors, and it’s one of few trilogies that I can legitimately, honestly say I loved. It has everything (well, many things) I look for in fiction: a fantastical, alluring world; rich mythology; risky storytelling; deep characters; solid writing that is at times literary; complexity in just about everything. In a word: depth.
I loved it, but I’m not thinking about reading it again only because of how I felt about it. You see, The Passage is one of the only trilogies or series I bought into immediately. I can’t recall any others that I picked up before they were all completely written. And Justin Cronin isn’t cranking out a new novel every quarter. He’s putting three or four years of his life into a book, and that’s a lot of time for a reader between books. But it’s part of the reason they are so good.
I’m increasingly of the mind that good fiction cannot be rushed out the door, that authors need to live in their worlds and with their characters to truly grant them the substance they need to create meaning and allow readers to leave and take with them whatever it is they find there in those pages.
Granted, I know plenty of authors who put out really good work annually and semi-annually. Those people are freaks.
I don’t know if this is the book you deserve, but it’s the book you need. (That’s clever, you see, because there are a lot of Batman references in this book… ahem, anyway.)
Blake Twenty-Three by Slade Grayson begins with a message the literary world needs to hear: “Just have fun.” We often forget reading and storytelling is supposed to be something we enjoy. Many of us get so stilted and wooden with our critical analysis and pushing our nerd glasses up on the bridges of our noses that we overlook an integral part of the reading experience: escape. If one-half of storytelling is information conveyance, the other half is signal quality. Maybe “integrity” is the right word there. I don’t know, but what it boils down to is a measure of enjoyment.
I’m a metal head. I’m a metal head, and Nick Menza died yesterday. I’m a metal head, and Nick Menza died yesterday of a sudden heart attack. It’s funny how something happening to someone you’ve never met can hurt you on so many levels, especially when their life has had such a profound effect on yours.
Who was Nick Menza? A legendary drummer with the misfortune of forever being overshadowed. Even in his death, people will remember 2016 as the year Bowie and Prince died. But not me. Not metal heads. We’ll remember Nick.
Nick played drums in Megadeth during their most influential and arguably most creative era. He joined the band for their album called “Rust in Peace,” which metal heads often cite as one of the greatest metal albums of all time. He left the band after “Cryptic Writings,” which metal heads aren’t so fond of, but I’d fight for it.
Sometimes, people come here and say, “oh, you do reviews. Well, I wrote a novel, and I have a blog. Why don’t we swap reviews?” It’s true that reviews are the life blood of any indie writer (have you reviewed Carrier yet?), but I write reviews here because, in addition to being an author, I’m also a reader. And sometimes, a good story gets me so hot that I have to tell people about it. I’m human. It’s only natural.
In 2006, I left a Virginia Regal Cinemas mad as hell. The first X-Men movie wasn’t perfect, but it was a slam dunk for superhero films and a great beginning for the franchise. X-Men 2 was very good until the ending. X-Men 3 was a crushing defeat for fans and a prime example of how overbearing movie producers can ruin a film.
It has to be this. It has to do that. Demands like these lead to a story that is contrived. But what’s interesting to me is that X-Men 3 didn’t just feel contrived. It had such rippling effects to the series that it’s ruined every film since.
This is the measure of Brett Ratner’s failure in X-Men 3. If you’re not aware, the first two X-Men films were directed by Bryan Singer. But when Singer was unavailable to direct X-Men 3 because he was working on Superman Returns (which is underappreciated, in my opinion), the movie producers opted not to wait for him, and that decision ruined the franchise.
Last week, I finally got around to watching X-Men: Days of Future past. The premise is that the events of the original trilogy led to an apocalyptic future where genocidal robots, called Sentinels, fought a war with mutant-kind, and the rest of humanity was collateral damage. As a result, there are very few people left in this apocalyptic wasteland, and it’s all because we couldn’t learn to overcome our primal fear of people who are different.
