Bev Vincent

– Bev Vincent

(Podcast version of this post available here)

Let’s talk about god for a minute.

No, wait! Come back! This has nothing to do with religion.

The god I’m talking about is the one in the machine. Deus ex machina. In early Greek drama, it wasn’t unusual for a god to step onto the stage at a critical moment and set things aright—or amok. The gods were often shown sitting on their lofty perches on Mount Olympus observing, commenting on and meddling in the lives of the human characters.

Thousands of years later, there is little room for that kind of god in fiction.

Imagine this scenario. A man, recently turned into a vampire, hunts down his first victim late one night on the back streets of Manhattan. He selects a target at random, a man who made the ill-advised decision to take a shortcut through an alley on the way to his hotel. The vampire pounces, knocking the man to the ground. As he pulls back his lips to bare his fangs, he discovers that his victim is the very same person who, decades earlier, bullied him on the playground of their Nebraska schoolyard. Sweet vengeance.

Which part of this story is harder to swallow? The fact that man has become a vampire, or that his randomly selected victim from a pool of a million possible candidates is someone he knew long ago and far away? The answer to that question demonstrates the limitations of coincidence in fiction.

On a recent episode of CSI, the team investigated two independent cases. A bull-rider was found dead in the rodeo ring, and a prostitute was the victim of a hit-and-run accident in another part of town. The investigators discover that the prostitute was last seen in the cowboy’s hotel room and the vehicle that struck her was stolen from him after he died. The cases are obviously connected. Except, in the final analysis, they aren’t. The men who killed the cowboy and stole his truck hit the prostitute by random chance. They had no idea who she was until they were arrested.

That scenario didn’t work for me at all. There are surely situations in real life where coincidences like this happen, but not only is truth stranger than fiction, fiction usually has to be far less strange than truth. Even if the CSI storyline was drawn from a real event, “that’s the way it really happened” is no explanation for the fictionalized coincidental convergence of events. Coincidence is a delicate matter to handle in fiction—too much and you strain or shatter credibility.

In another CSI episode, two women are murdered on the same night. They’re identical twins separated at birth, and neither knew of the existence of the other, though they only lived a few miles apart. Hoo-boy, that sounds like a stinker. However, as it turns out, the killer wanted something one of the women possessed. He happened upon the wrong twin and killed her, then went back to “her house” only to discover his murder victim alive and well, so he killed her too and took what he was looking for. This was a somewhat more palatable use of coincidence. The writers put the seemingly unlikely occurrence to good use and created an interesting and intriguing mystery. It’s a fine line, though.

Early novels often made use of deus ex machina. Clues or witnesses were deliberately withheld from a detective in a mystery novel until just the right moment. A spy discovers he possessed the perfect gadget to get him out of a sticky situation, though it was never mentioned before. The cavalry showed up when the situation was lost to save the day.

There’s a certain charm to these stories, but they wouldn’t fly in modern fiction. We’ve become more sophisticated, both as readers and writers, and we expect more. Things must happen for discernable reasons and lucky finds are seen as cheating the audience. Even the Greeks knew this. Aristotle, in his Poetics, argued that the resolution of a plot must arise internally, following from previous action of the play.

If you’re assembling your plot and you get to a point where you think “they’ll never believe what happens next” then perhaps you should rethink what happens next. The last thing you want is for a reader to slam down the book in disgust, thinking—I can’t believe he did that.

–by Bev Vincent

I’ve written about this subject before in On Writing Horror as part of an essay on marketing myths. However, I thought a real-life example might help drive a message home.

Four years ago, I read a call for submissions for a royalty-only e-anthology. If there’s anything you should run from faster than a royalty-only anthology, it’s a royalty-only e-anthology.

“Royalty only” means you don’t get paid up front for your story. You are promised a pro-rated percentage of a fraction (typically 50%) of the total proceeds from sales. In theory, that sounds promising. If the book sells a thousand copies at $10 each, you’ll be getting a cut of $5000. Assume twenty authors in the book and all stories roughly the same length, and you’re looking at about $250, not bad for a short story.

The problem is, very few anthologies sell a thousand copies—especially those from the small press. A hundred copies is more like it. My largest royalty check for this type of anthology is $18.00. Not quite as attractive as $250, right? And that’s the largest check by an order of magnitude. I have received two checks for one anthology in the amounts of $1.05 and $0.87 respectively. Laughing all the way to the bank, I tell you. And when you translate that into the number of eyeballs on the page, well, it’s a sad, sad situation, as Elton John once said. I’m not going to get into the debate between writing for art or for visibility versus filthy lucre here. (If you want to read a recent debate about pay rates and professionalism, read through this recent thread on Shocklines.) Suffice to say that I like getting paid for my work. It’s one of my favorite things. I also like to have my stories read.

If print anthologies are a tough sell, e-anthos are worse. The rumored wave of online readers has yet to materialize, and the demise of books—printed books—has not yet come to fruition. People are staying away from electronic books in droves. If an e-anthology falls in the wood, no one will read it. (At least no trees were sacrificed.) Your precious story will be “lightly published” at best, and first serial rights are gone forever. Any subsequent appearances will perforce be as reprints, and you’re not likely to get $250 for one of those.

Naïve as I was, I wrote a story for the anthology, submitted it, had it accepted, and had the gumption to feel proud of the accomplishment. I wish I could plead youth and foolish innocence, but the truth is, I wasn’t all that young. Foolish, perhaps. Innocent, arguably, at least in the ways of the publishing world. Desperate, more like—desperate for publication credits and willing to sacrifice any number of things to get there. I bought into the belief that you had to work your way up the ladder by starting small as you learned your craft instead of learning your craft and then aiming high.

However, as it turned out, fate had other plans for my story and me. The publisher behind the e-anthology closed up shop and the editor returned the story rights to me. What was once accepted became unaccepted, and I had the story back in my grubby little paws, unviolated.

Remarketing stories written for theme anthologies can be problematic. I didn’t know what to do with the story, so it stayed in my filing cabinet for a while. Dormant, but not dead. A year or two later, I saw the guidelines for a no-entry-fee contest (the best kind) that I thought the story might fit, but only after some fairly major reconstruction. For one thing, my story was set in the wine district of Australia. The contest mandated that the stories be set in New England. I needed a wine district, mountain overlooks and a beach. Fortunately, after a little research, I was able to find all of these where I needed them. A complete rewrite also removed many of the elements I included in the original version to make it fit the anthology theme. A complete rewrite also improved the prose. A different story went off to the contest. I had high hopes—I always do.

Unfortunately, the story didn’t win. However, the contest organizer informed me that several judges had rated my story highly. That gave me more confidence, so I printed out a fresh copy and aimed high.

Last week, I received an acceptance letter from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I have a list of top-tier markets, places I’ve dreamt about being published. Cemetery Dance magazine was one, and I’ve had the good fortune to publish both fiction and non-fiction in that periodical. Others on the list include Asimov’s, F&SF, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine…and EQMM.

What do these dream venues all have in common? They’re pro markets, true, but there are a decent number of those around. These are pro markets that have been around for years. Decades in many cases. And they have significant circulations. That means visibility. That means exposure. Don’t let any other type of market seduce you with the promise of “payment in exposure.” The only place where you’ll get serious exposure is in a book or magazine that appears on the shelves in your local bookstore or is sent to a large subscriber database. Your readership will instantly expand far beyond the people who read only small press publications. People from Seattle to Key West and San Diego to Presque Isle (look it up) who like crime fiction will have the opportunity to read my story. Tens of thousands. EQMM, launched in 1941, is the longest-running mystery digest of all time and has a circulation of nearly 200,000.

That’s so much better than the six people who might have paid to download the e-anthology that never was. Including four friends, a guy I work with. And me, of course.

In 2000, I was just getting underway as a writer. I was a member of an online critique group and starting to gain enough confidence to submit my short fiction. I heard that an online magazine called The Harrow was having a Halloween contest with $50 and publication as prizes. A few days later, I saw an episode of 60 Minutes or 20/20 when I saw a segment about an obsessive compulsive disorder called “harming obsession.” While I watched, all I could think was: What would happen to a person with this disorder if he was out driving on Halloween night? And thus was born the story that follows.

The story took first place in the contest, and was published online with a neat illustration by GAK. It was later reprinted in the anthology Octoberland (Flesh and Blood Press, 2002) and was my first fiction appearance in Cemetery Dance magazine. It’s one of the stories that has generated the most response from readers of all my short works. I thought it was time to share it for Halloween.

Without further ado, here is “Harming Obsession.” A podcast version, read by me, is also available at Podango. Comments appreciated.

Harming Obsession

By Bev Vincent

It had been a gentle bump.

A small jolt.

Surely too minor to have been caused by a child.

So many small children were running around on this dark night, though. What if it had been a child and not a pothole or a cardboard box?

It could have been a child. In the darkness, the trick-or-treaters were well camouflaged by their black vampire and witch costumes.

It could have been.

What if it was?

What if?

This wasn’t the first time Victor thought he might have hit someone with his car. Every time—and there were days when it happened on a dozen or more occasions—he had to go back to the scene to convince himself it was only his imagination.

His compulsion.

Sometimes he spent fifteen or twenty minutes combing through ditches and hedges, adrenaline rushing through his veins, awash in guilt at the possibility that he might have carelessly caused a death. Often he returned a second or third time to reassure himself that he hadn’t overlooked something.

Victor stopped the car in the middle of the road. He had never struck anyone. Every time he went to look, there was no evidence of an accident.

What if it had been real this time? All those other times didn’t matter. What if a child cloaked in a dark costume, too preoccupied with tricks and treats to pay attention, had gotten too close to his car? What if—even now—he or she lay in the road behind him, a small body surrounded by candy that had tumbled out of a plastic orange jack-o-lantern?

Bleeding, suffering, dying?

The more Victor thought about it, the more convinced he became that it hadn’t been a simple bump in the road. It felt different.

It must have been a child.

So many of them out tonight, and they weren’t paying attention. They never did, but especially not tonight. It made driving nerve-racking.

He swore under his breath as his heart throbbed in his ears. Why was he out here on a night like this? It was crazy. Eleanor knew how he got when he was driving, but she had insisted. They were running low on candy, and it was up to him to get more.

His hands clutched the steering wheel while sinews stood out on either side of his neck. Sweat beaded on his brow, even though it was one of the coldest autumn nights yet. Risk of frost, the forecast had said, and here he was sweating in his car.

Resigned to the inevitable, Victor opened the door and stepped into the brisk night. His flashlight was in a pocket on the driver’s door where he always kept it. This wasn’t the first time he had needed to search the roadside in the dark.

It probably wouldn’t be the last.

It’s just my OCD talking, he chided himself. His therapist encouraged him to stop fighting the obsessive-compulsive disorder by talking back to it to remove its power over him, but that hadn’t worked. “Harming obsession” was the official diagnosis. “Hit ‘n Run” disease. He knew that a chemical imbalance in his brain was responsible for his feelings of guilt over something that hadn’t happened.

Probably hadn’t happened.

But what if? It was possible, wasn’t it?

And the bump had felt . . . different.

It could easily have been a small child, crushed beneath his back wheel, now lying mangled on the roadside.

Victor turned on the flashlight and swept its intense beam back and forth across the street. He looked under the car to make sure that the child wasn’t trapped beneath, caught in the muffler or the axle.

Nothing.

Nearby, a gaggle of costumed kids trick-or-treated from one house to the next, a jumble of legs, candy sacks and laughter.

No one paid attention to him as he continued his search, flashing the light over the median strip, which was covered with bushes and plants. The deep shadows among them could easily hide a child’s crushed figure.

No blood, no body.

He pushed his way through the hedges to the other side of the median for fear that he had struck the child hard enough to throw him or her all the way across the street.

Nothing.

He searched the same places again from the opposite direction, in case he had missed something. Back at the car, he looked underneath again.

Nothing.

His heart rate gradually returned to normal and a chill seeped into his bones. He chuffed a lungful of air and watched his breath vaporize.

Another false alarm. He got back into the car and slipped the flashlight into the door pocket.

An automobile horn beeped gently behind him as lights flashed across his rearview mirror. He was blocking the lane. Victor waved into the mirror, started the engine and continued down the street toward the convenience store.

The return trip was excruciating. Children scurried everywhere. Victor drove at a crawl, trying to focus his concentration on the street and his driving, but was continually distracted by the small people milling around on the sidewalks and at street crossings. They were so close to him. The exterior of the car chassis felt huge while at the same time the interior constricted around him.

The convenience store was a little over two miles from Victor’s house—not so convenient as all that, he raged—and it had taken him fifteen minutes to cover only half the distance back home. Walking might have been just as fast. He had stopped four times so far to look under his car, to sweep the road behind him after feeling a bump.

His mind raced. Still another mile to go. He was tempted to pull over, leave the car where it was and walk back home. Eleanor could come and get the blasted thing herself in the morning. It was her fault he was out here, after all.

Damned candy.

Huge raindrops ricocheted off the windshield, increasing rapidly to a steady drizzle. Victor shivered as he imagined spending the next twenty minutes or more plodding home through the frigid rain.

The windshield wipers scraped and moaned as he reduced his speed further and continued down the dark street.

Ahead, lights gleamed. In the darkness, compounded by the streaking rain on the windshield, Victor couldn’t be sure of their color. They seemed to be flashing. Red and blue. An accident?

The lights came from the opposite lane, across the median. As he drew close, he recognized the surroundings. It was where he had first stopped earlier this evening to search for an accident victim.

He had been right!

Deep inside, he had known he was right this time. Vindication gave him a perverse feeling of elation. All those times, stopping and checking, searching, crawling under the car, poking in the bushes, were suddenly validated. He wasn’t crazy after all.

He pulled onto the edge of the road and sat behind the wheel with the engine running, his wipers dragging across the windshield.

A fire truck, an ambulance and a tow truck had gathered at the scene in addition to the two police cars. Automobiles were backed up as far as he could see in the opposite direction. It had been over half an hour since he’d passed by this spot, so traffic had been tied up for a long time.

What should he do? Part of him wanted to go to the police, turn himself in, proclaim his guilt. He could see himself doing that. He could also see the crowd turning on him. He had left a small child to die in the cold, dark street, rain pelting off her foam-rubber Halloween mask. He could picture rain puddled around her little body—he was sure it was a girl—as dissolving candy dyed the water red and purple.

He couldn’t see how he had missed the girl’s body, though. He had searched thoroughly. Three times, no less. Still, what was done, was done. He’d hit and he had run.

Now he needed to see if he was going to get caught.

Sitting on the roadside was probably not the best strategy to avoid the attention of the police. He put the car into gear and eased forward again.

As he drew even with the accident scene, he tried to adopt an appropriate mixture of interest and indifference. If he ignored the accident altogether, that would certainly be noticed and marked. If he showed too much interest, that, too, would be suspicious.

Only when the wrecker maneuvered to hook up to a damaged car did Victor realize that this was not a hit-and-run scene but rather a routine traffic mishap. One car had rear-ended another. Quite solidly, from the look of it. The hood of the rearmost car was badly buckled. Someone—perhaps the driver—stood on the roadside holding a towel to his forehead. In the brilliant beam from a police car floodlight, he thought he could see blood on the towel.

The scene gripped Victor’s attention. His mind raced. He hadn’t run anyone down!

He was so obsessed with the accident scene, a scene for which he was not responsible, that he wandered from his lane and brushed against the median curb. The front wheel scraped along the prominent concrete ridge, twisting the steering wheel in his hands. He fought to maintain control as the car jerked suddenly toward the ditch. Finally he straightened out, thankful that there had been no vehicles in the other lane. He had probably scraped the hell out of his front hubcap, but he was back in control.

He looked back at the accident scene, watching it as he eased along in the rainy darkness. The flashing lights reflected in his side and rearview mirrors, growing fainter in the gloom.

The car didn’t handle well on the rest of the trip home, but at least he didn’t have any more illusions that he had run someone down. The road was slick but smooth and there were no potholes or speed bumps to induce that gripping, inescapable certainty that he had hit someone.

He had likely inflicted significant damage on his car, though. Thrown the front end out of alignment, perhaps even ruined something in the undercarriage. His muffler, maybe, or the oilpan. He surveyed the array of gauges around the speedometer, but no warning lights were illuminated.

Tomorrow would be plenty of time to worry about that. He could take the car to the garage and get it checked out in the light of day.

He pulled into the driveway, slammed the transmission into park, grabbed the sack of candy from the seat beside him and locked the door as he got out.

The cold, unforgiving drizzle made Victor clutch his coat tightly around him as he walked the ten feet to the back door and its protective canopy. Jack-o-lanterns grinned back at him ghoulishly from the railing, the candles within fighting to stay alive against the rain and growing wind.

He opened the front door, stripped off his wet jacket and greeted the warmth within the house.

How good to be home after such an excruciating ordeal.

In the driveway, rainwater gathered around the wheels of his car.

The puddles on the driver’s side were slowly turning purple and green as candy spilling from the shredded pumpkin pail caught in the undercarriage dissolved.

On the passenger side, the water slowly turned crimson.