If something has to be kept secret, it must be true.  Secrets are self-proving.  Lies are loud and wear red hats, e.g. Santa Claus.  Okay, I’m being a tad glib here.  I do not mean that only secrets are true or that all red hats – i.e. loud proclamations — are lies (your red hat is still true blue, Santa).  But secrets tend to be true, else they wouldn’t need hiding.  I think that most people believe this at some level.  In fact some OVER-believe it, glomming onto every “exposed” secret as innately true because life after all is run by conspiracies and manipulative forces.  Consider the power that this reflex gives to persuasion.  Want someone to believe something outlandish?  Present it as a secret.

And in this way my premise statement moves from being a truism about content to a truism about style.  Because if you pretend something is secret only to make it seem valid when you expose it, you’ve given it the style of truth but not necessarily the substance.  And that can be a literary device to disarm the reader.  An effective literary device.  In fact, take it a step further.  Let the secret be some discovery you make contrary to what the writer is saying.  No truth is more acceptable than underlying truth you think you perceive by yourself, after all.  Better yet if you have to pry it out, testifying to your astuteness.  In this model the falseness is the literal statement, parading itself as truth.  The truth is the secret you discern hiding behind the falseness, and it is its opposite.  Thus we have Mark Twain giving us his truth about all humans being of equal worth by having Huck Finn believe he is going to hell for helping the runaway slave Jim escape.  The world has it backwards, Twain is showing us.  Social morality is the real falseness and Huck Finn in the simple purity and honesty of his soul has it right though he believes he will go to hell for his choice.  Edgar Allen Poe gives us an even more direct stylistic example in the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  “True!” his first person narrator tells us too loudly in the very first word, “nervous, very dreadfully nervous I was and am, but why will you say I am mad?”  Already you know the character is mad.  (“Methinks he doth protest too much.”)  He is in your face, asserting his “truth” so loudly that you immediately know it’s a lie.

Life is full of opposites, isn’t it?  It is tempting – particularly in an improbable life like mine – to put more faith in the counterintuitive then into the face value of things.  But that would be another grave error.  Nevertheless, it is counterintuitiveness that seems to yield the most insight into truth when it comes to understanding people and presenting characters.  We are devious, after all, you and I; yet relatively transparent as well to the observer who has developed objectivity.  So, in human behavior, it is often enlightening to look for opposites, contrasts, and apparent contradictions lurking beneath the surface.

These show up most clearly under stress, but with some people the occurrence is pathological.  I find these pathological types to be the most predictable because they always try to be unpredictable, and I often use them for catalyst characters.  They are people who have discovered a game, a posture, an attitude, or a tone that works for them.  They are usually one-trick types who continually use the single gimmick of reverse psychology.  Over time they tend to lose credibility, and so they wear their audiences down to the gullible, the susceptible, or the impaired.  You might see them holding forth where education is scarce, or playing the victim, or sounding witty under neon lights just before “last call.”  Drunk or sober, “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”  Their conflicts are seldom internal but instead come from trying to manipulate the external world.  That’s why they make good catalyst characters.

More fascinating to me are people who are internally conflicted, because they are not neatly consistent or as predictable.  Especially if their emotions are strong.  This happens more with women than men.  And, no, I’m not saying that women are less rational than men.  But I am saying that they tend to be influenced by a more complex range of emotions than men usually are.  In evolutionary terms, anger and aggressiveness work strongest for archetypal men, while a fuller range of emotions has more survival value for archetypal women.  The former (male) tends to solve immediate tactical problems and be direct; the latter (female) may address long-term strategic goals and be indirect.  Which is probably why women get hung with the tag of being unpredictable.  In any event, if this makes sense to you, you can easily see why marketing biases favor physical action books for men (external conflicts) and emotional tension books for women (internal conflicts).  Of course, just as in reality these stereotypes of men and women exist as a mix within individuals of either sex, fully developed writing reflects a mix of simple action and character complexity no matter what the genre or gender.  The nod, though, goes toward internal conflicts with its focus on substantial characterization, if only because most readers are women.  I like that.  It takes me right back to the deliciously counterintuitive wildcard that emotions introduce.

Think of how many things can go wrong with internal conflicts as opposed to external.  In external you have things and events; in internal you have things and events plus all the interpretations and psychological/emotional consequences of external happenings.  Internal is where external crosses into human experience, the nerve center, the point of impact – if a tree falls, does it make a sound?  (Does it matter to you, if you don’t hear it – if you don’t internalize it?)  If you want to experience and communicate life fully, free your characters to be human.  Let them become contradictory, confused, emotional, unstable and changeable – then let them find their way back (or not).  And while you’re at it, free yourself from being that writer/person who has a one-trick pathology and writes/sees with one eye open in the country of the blind.  With two eyes open in life, you have twice the chance of seeing the magic.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

There have been moments — bound in some way to a place or a period of time — that have taken my compassion to another level and made me a more complete writer. Such a time and place was a bitterly cold Christmas when I was living in an old men’s hotel filled with human wrecks. It was a hotel for very old men, indeed. I was 19.

5 years ago I told this story in a column titled EMPTY BOXES I HAVE WORN, and every Christmas I still get mail about it.  Like a pocket of Foxfire glowing on the calendar of my life, that anniversary will not die.  Guess that doesn’t quite make it a tradition, but anything that still endures after half a decade of cold storage will bear revisiting…

The Lawndale was $7 a week the first year I lived there (no, it wasn’t during the Civil War, though it did burn down eventually). Could’ve fled back to the ‘burbs of Detroit for the holidays, could’ve found a home-cooked meal. But I was proud, stupid, a little too martyred when I was actually in that horrid coffin of a room, which was not often. I was doing selfless things gratis for others, I thought. And I was a bit of a maverick, not succeeding where everyone said I was supposed to succeed, nor given to letting my emotions show over the failures. Never mind that I got a million dollars worth of self-pity out of it. I knew that writing was an option that was open to me, but I had the camera pointed in the wrong direction. It was pointed at me. I think a lot of writers start out like that.

When I did have to return to my room at the end of the day – four walls I could almost touch all at the same time – I tried to be numb. Do you know anything as seething with emotion as deliberate numbness? Or as blinding? I hated the Lawndale with such a passion that I was deaf and blind to the human misery and loneliness there, and more importantly for a writer, equally walled off from a lot of incredible stories. In this case, the walls were paper thin, and you could hear the moans and the groans of the dying and the drunk. There were unwritten laws, peculiar to males. If someone came in beat up and bleeding, you might hear every drop of blood dripping on the vinyl runner in the hall, but if you opened your door, the gasping and the rest of it stopped. In that mistrustful place, you didn’t dare flinch before a tiger. No quarter asked, none given. Fine with me. The people I cared for didn’t live at the Lawndale. The place made my skin crawl. And above all, I hated the man across the hall.

All the rooms were as tiny as mine, but unbelievably the man across from me had a roommate. I never saw the roommate, never wanted to, but I had a picture in my mind of a pathetically submissive creature completely enslaved by the brute I did see. The bully would come in, drunk and wheezing, and thirty seconds after his door clicked shut the vilest verbal abuse I’d ever heard would begin. Sometimes it went beyond that, and I’d cringe to hear the blows. But I never quite got the guts to go stop it. Part of the code, you know.

Thus I lived, and so a new Christmas morning came, and with it the hollow feeling that I was, in fact, truly alone. I know now that this is absurd, particularly in a world teeming with emotionally isolated people. But when you are young, there is nothing emptier than the suspicion that your self-pity is justified. I had less to my name than $10 that morning when I set out in my wreck of a car, the “Grey Ghost.” Hit the White Tower, a.k.a. the Porcelain Room, for a “scudburger” Christmas dinner. I don’t remember if there were any other customers at the counter, but I vividly remember the old lady scraping the grill. She was celebrating, you see. Celebrating. Not sitting at the counter waiting to be served, celebrating. It took me a few minutes to catch the irony of that. I had to quit staring at my reflection in the glass opposite and realize that all the photos strung along a green ribbon on one wall were probably her grandchildren. She shuffled back and forth with the gait of someone arthritic or maybe with fallen arches. And, damn it, she was singing. And she had on a silly Santa hat. And there was red and green bric-a-brac and fake snow and angel hair all over the place. A wrapped present, too, though you could see there was nothing in it – just fluffed paper. Don’t remember finishing that scudburger, though it ranks right up there with memorable cuisine. Think I was having a little trouble swallowing at that point. Out of my head, too, because suddenly I knew that if a grandma had to work on Christmas day and could be like that, then I had to stop taking and give something back, and I didn’t have anything. But the bill had knocked my $10 in half, so I left a $5 tip and got the hell out of there.

It was compulsive, and by no means charitable, but I felt better cranking the Grey Ghost to life and starting up Livernois toward Vernor Highway. Hoarfrost on the inside glass of the White Tower, and out here it was arctic, and as I’m approaching the railroad tracks, I see a man in a cardboard box. His head is cut and swollen, blood frozen in his hair, and he’s barefoot. Lawndale rules do not apply in train yards, and the poor bastard, who it turns out has just crawled out of a freight car, is going to freeze very quickly, so I stop. The old story: got drunk, rolled, left to fate. What strikes me is he is naked inside the cardboard box. I mean, they took everything, as if out of malice to let him die. You can’t imagine the blubbering gratitude of a Tennessee man up to visit his sister at Wayne State, who just about becomes a vice-icle when his binge turns bad. It took us a couple of hours to find his sister’s apartment, because he didn’t have a clue, except by scrutinizing every neighborhood as we inched up and down the narrow streets off Woodward. Merry Christmas.

So now I’m feeling pretty good, except that I have to go back to the old men’s burial ground. Revisit the self-pity. Oh, I’d been a good lad for a few hours, and learned something, I guess, but like a movie, it was over. So the Lawndale ate me up, and I climbed to the second floor, and the last room in the line – 210 – which was odd, because later in college I would be in room 210, and again, teaching at Fordson High in Dearborn, 210. Anyway, now that I was back in you know where, you know who came in on my heels and started you know what. The bully was on a tear this time. Drunk, vile and violent. I stood it as long as I could, and longer than I should have by months. Then, when I thought he was going to kill his roommate with the blows, I went out into the hall to stop the creature I loathed. Thought I was going to have to fist his door a couple of good ones, but as it happens it was slightly ajar. He was berating his roommate with terms I cannot begin to write here, and I could hear the smack of flesh on flesh, and as I took two steps toward the wedge of light, I saw it all. The mirror. The face in the mirror. The whole room behind him in the mirror. The marks from the fists were clear on the cheek above the stubble. And I saw the last blow land. But the testosterone boiling in me suddenly went as flat as water. Because he didn’t have a roommate.

He was beating himself. Berating himself. Calling himself everything but a child of God. Nothing I had felt or thought about him all those months could approach the depths of his own self-hate. How could I have been so wrong? An epiphany moment for me? Yeah. You could say. Damn my soul if I ever underestimate any human that badly again, though, I’m sorry to admit, I’ve been over the line too many times since. My self-loathing neighbor slammed the door when he became aware of me, but he opened another to my future as a writer.

I’m not a soft touch. I believe in human excellence and transcendence, if only we can get outside of whatever boxes imprison our thinking. Low expectations cripple people, and are really a vote of no-confidence. It doesn’t matter what that man at the Lawndale lacked. What mattered was what he had, which was a mirror filled with more self-honesty than most of us could stand. He knew who he was. What he was. And at that moment I knew what he could be. I can’t tell you what truths you’ve discovered about yourself or about the human condition, but I know that they will come out in your life one way or another. You may have to look outside the box to find
those truths first, of course. Writers need to engage in that search with openness and vigilance. Good writers never stop searching, or evolving. If people have happened to you today, stories have happened. The world presents us with limitless possibilities. Find the ones you can reach, according to who you are. Until you do that, you have not fulfilled your own potential as an observer, as an artist, or as a human being.

May I thank those who have taken the trouble to email me? What you have to say informs me, shapes me, and makes my life richer. I’m also most grateful for your interest in my books – and, yes, the offer I recently made is still on.  My web site is below if you’d like to take advantage of the stocking-stuffer offer.  The just released $3.99 E-book edition of THE MARTYRING, my Best Novel Finalist from WorldFantasyCon, can be easily downloaded from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, etc., and if you’d like to give it as a gift, I’ll e-mail an author’s greeting to the recipient.  Just send me a name and address, and I’ll follow through on Christmas Day. E-book downloads can be read on Kindles, Nooks and any other eading device, including computers.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

It’s a little late for Thanksgiving, but then again, I’ve never been a big fan of shoving all the thankfulness onto one day. That always seemed to me to be a recipe for being an unappreciative jerk the other 364, because, hey, Thanksgiving’s got it covered. A suitably reverent tweet in the morning, maybe a few “Likes” on Facebook status updates on other folks saying they’re thankful, and we’re done, right? Meh.

Me, I’d rather cheat the calendar, or, at the very least, pull a Canute number on encroaching Christmas for at least one more day, and think about things in this very, very strange life that is professional writing that I’m thankful for. And with that in mind, here’s a very incomplete, deeply scattershot list of a few of the things that I’m thankful for – as reader, as writer, as book reviewer, as whatever.

Because, really, it’s rough out there. There are a ton of folks always eager to take anyone and anything that isn’t theirs down, simply because it isn’t theirs or isn’t them. That’s another reason to give thanks – to let the folks out there who are doing good and generous and noteworthy things something positive, a note of appreciation tucked in with the din of RWAH RWAH RWAH YOU STIIIIINK that can rise to the heavens like burning oilfield smoke. And from the other side, there’s plenty of self-interested chest-pounding, deliberate stalking of controversy in search of the elusive page hit, and general jackassery that can obscure the good stuff that’s out there. That’s a shame, too.

So, without further ado, a baker’s dozen writing-related things and people I’m thankful for.

1 – Girl Genius – Brilliantly inventive, effortlessly inventive, frequently hilarious, this gaslamp fantasy adroitly avoids the Dickensian miserablism that lurks at the heart of so much steampunk. Unafraid in all the right ways – talking cats? Hat-obsessed killing machines called Jagermonsters? Talking castles with a mean streak?? – it takes chances, embraces possibilities, and trusts that the audience is smart enough to keep up. Then there’s the protagonist, Agatha Heterodyne, who is smart, resourceful, courageous, and unlikely ever to be portrayed onscreen by Megan Fox. I’m thankful that three times a week, I get to read a tiny piece of something so brilliantly crafted.

2, 3 & 4 – Matt Forbeck, Chuck Wendig, and Mur Lafferty – They love writing. They enjoy writing. They share their love and enjoyment of writing in every way imaginable, and they do so generously, without arrogating unto themselves the status of self-proclaimed “guru”. The world is full of people who will gladly tell you how to write in exchange for your workshop fees or your allegiance or your guaranteed thumbs-ups on Facebook. How refreshing, then, to have three folks who are so eminently the real deal willing to share what they know, not to make themselves look good, but because they genuinely want to share.

5 – Jack Cady’s “The Night We Buried Road Dog” – It’s a ghost story. It was written two decades ago. I just discovered it this year, and it’s pure magic, a reminder of how good writing can be, even in the most unexpected places. Originally published in 1993, it’s a story about a young man who drives classic cars very fast across the wide-open spaces of the American West, the mysterious figure of the “Road Dog” who haunts those same highways, and the man he works for, who digs a grave for his beloved car. It’s also about ghosts, and about growing up, and about love and memory and finding one’s place and a whole lot of other things I can’t go into without spoiling things, and so I leave it to you to discover, if you haven’t discovered it already. To me, it stands for the idea that there are always undiscovered gems out there, waiting for the joy of the first encounter. (and yes, I know, “Road Dog” won a Stoker and has been reprinted in F&SF and all that jazz. It was new to me. So might it be new to someone else. Don’t judge; just envy the blue lightning of initial discovery)

6 – The community of the Game Narrative Summit at GDC Online, and the fine folks who put on STAGConf, and everyone else out there interested in good storytelling in games – Because the craft isn’t static. Because as new media evolve, as new hardware makes new techniques viable, there’s always room to learn and grow. And so, Stephane Bura and Tom Abernathy and Rhianna Pratchett and Alexis Kennedy and Jeremy Bernstein and Mary De Marle and too many other folks to count, I’m thankful you’re out there doing good work, pushing boundaries, and genuinely giving a damn about how to do this insane job right. Because God knows it would be easy enough to say “It’s just a game” – that’s what some of the critics think, right – and just fill in the blanks of a thousand “Arrggh, he shot me” variants. I’m happy and I’m humbled to work in a field that’s constantly generating concepts like StoryBricks and Andy Walsh’s Ondemand Storytelling and Well-Fed Snakes and a whole bunch of other approaches, all championed by folks who have a keen passion for telling good stories in the medium that speaks to so many of us. Thank you for being out there, guys. Thanks for never stopping. Thanks for making it a thrill to keep up.

7 & 8- ChiZine Publications and Tachyon Publications – I think every the CZP book I’ve seen is gorgeous and memorable, and even the ones that I haven’t necessarily enjoyed have been manifestly themselves, interesting and different and most emphatically not trend-sniffing. Their monthly readings, which I’ve dropped in on a few times, are simply fun, a celebration of the fact that, hey, books are gettin’ made here, folks. Tachyon’s books are elegant, visually understated and always thoughtfully put together. These two aren’t the only smaller presses whose work I’ve enjoyed this year, far from it, but they’ve been the ones whose output has most consistently ended up in the hallowed “read this next” spot on my night table. And for their willingness – and for Apex’s, and Angry Robot’s, and a whole bunch of other people’s – to put books out there that don’t just play it safe in cover art and subject matter and author choice, as a reader and reviewer I’m emphatically thankful.

9 – Anne McCaffrey – I didn’t read a whole lot of her books after the Dinosaur Planet series wrapped up. My first exposure to “The Ship Who Sang” was in a comic book adaptation called Starstream. I never had a secret recipe for klah, and I never had a stuffed firelizard doll I sat on my shoulder at conventions. But the very first videogame I worked on was an adaptation of one of her novel series. Throughout what was a grueling and messy development process, she was always extremely pleasant to work with and generous with her creation. I think I can truthfully say that without Anne McCaffrey, I wouldn’t be where I am, doing what I’m doing today, and for that, I will always be thankful.

10 – Local booksellers – The Regulator, one of the anchors of Ninth Street. Books Do Furnish A Room, tucked away in an unassuming blue building at the back of a gravel lot, where only those in the know and the lucky will stumble across it. Chapel Hill Comics. McIntyre’s. The Brier Creek B&N, where the staff has always been unfailingly polite, friendly, and well-informed. Many, many more. The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area is blessed with an abundance of places bookish people can find treasures. Yesterday, in two stops, I picked up an oral history of Negro League baseball, an award-winning science fiction novel, a “non-fiction” account of hauntings along the Maine coast, and a volume on the unit charged with stealing art treasures back from the Nazis. Thank you for feeding my habit.

11 & 12 – My niece and nephew – Because you like to read. Because you want to read. Because put together, you’re not yet bar/bat mitzvah age, and you both love books. You could not make your uncle prouder.

13 – Bull Spec Magazine – Not just because of the magazine, though the magazine’s great. Strong fiction from a mix of local and international authors, gorgeous covers, the occasional readable book review *cough cough* – it’s good stuff. Or to put it another way, I bought a subscription for my dad, and I write for it. But another part of what makes me thankful for all the work Sam Montgomery-Blinn and team have done putting Bull Spec together is this: I’ve been in Carolina for a dozen years, and until Bull Spec came along, I never found a writing community. You’d think in a region that had John Kessel and Lewis Shiner and David Drake and Mark Van Name and all sorts of other writerly types wandering around loose, there’d be more of that, but no. Bull Spec became something a lot of folks coalesced around. Sometimes it was as simple as Sam sending out an email saying “Hey, you guys know about this thing coming up?” Sometimes it was a formal event, and God help the poor waitresses who had to attend to a post-reading horde of writers. And sometimes it was the thrill of seeing someone you knew in print. All good things, and for that, I am thankful.

The list doesn’t end here, of course. It would be a sad and small world if it did. But to everyone and everything above, and to everyone and everything else out there that makes life a little better for the reading/writing type, thank you.

Happy to be able to offer a job – well, half a job – to any readers who are receptive to same.  Here ‘tis.  Q&A.  You write the questions, I write the answers.  Pay is just the same for both of us.  Srsly.  I am amazed at your feedback, touched by your sharing, daunted by your killer questions, and grateful for your support.  Last month’s vignette of my Avatar moment at Elm Creek in particular brought in lots of e-mail world-wide with stories of magic, fate, and romantic destiny.  So, as promised, here is Bride of Q&A – Q&A 3.  I picked the questions this time based on one of three qualities: either they were things I’m asked repeatedly, are of general interest to writers, or are just plain fascinating and challenging to answer…

Q [Gatlinburg, TN]: When you write a novel how do you prove it’s not slander?  

A: First, understand that slander is verbal; libel is print.  In either case, the best defense is whether or not what you state is true.  Since you are writing fiction, you have another level of protection because you are not claiming it’s true.  In nonfiction your purpose in reporting facts must not be to harm someone with malicious intent, whether or not that becomes an unintended consequence of the truth.  

Q [Zhirkov, Russian Federation & others]: Why do you shave your head?   …      [Fontana, California]: Why do you shave your head in the rain?

A: To take a load off my mind.  Besides, I am in no danger of being mistaken for a Chia pet, and all-or-none is more my style, so I’d rather prune than preen.  As for the rain, you must be referring to the photo some team members took while we were building a church school in the Dominican Republic.  When you are in a part of a country where running water is infrequent, keeping an eye to the sky for purposeful plumbing makes sense.  However, I do not recommend it for flushing toilets.

Q [Roodepoort, S. Africa]: You wrote about your favorite fiction authors a few months back, do you read nonfiction and who are your favorite nonfiction authors?

A: Again, don’t want to rank order writers who include friends, so I’ll just say that I’m currently reading one fav I’ve never met – Mark Steyn, a political commentator whose savoir-faire, genteel manner, wit and intelligence are every bit in the class of Alastair Cook.  Love to read historical, social, political observations from people who come from multiple cultures on either side of the socialism/capitalism divide and can see America objectively. … And, yes, I’m a closet geek who daily combs the Internet for info, including world headlines in translation, the Drudge report for links to news that gets ignored or doesn’t fit the so-called mainstream media’s template/agenda, and especially science sources of every stripe.  I read far more nonfiction than fiction and have all my life.  And if you ask me to weigh into conversation with social commentary, history, or the oceans of science and philosophy percolating in my thin paper skull, I’ll deny everything I just wrote, unless you want to listen to me for the rest of your life or eternity, whichever comes first.  So far, no one has taken me up on the offer, though now and then I get asked why I play dumb.  Who’s playing? 

Q [Oak Grove, MN]: Is the waterfall you’ve photographed situated next to a bike path in Maple Grove?

A: Yes.  Runs parallel to Elm Creek south of Elm Creek Park.  The waterfall isn’t dangerous except for a couple of months a year, but the boulders that appear when t’s drying up can be treacherous.  I know a young man who had to be choppered out of there with a head injury.

Q [Oak Grove, MN]: What has caused you the greatest pain in your life?

A: Spectacular.  Too intriguing to ignore, too probing to answer without flinching.  Should everyone ask themselves this?  Well, it’s a question no one would ask unless they had asked it of themselves, so you deserve some kind of candor.  Okay.  What would be the most painful thing to a romantic idealist who has created multiple paths – paradoxical paths – to follow through life, always keeping the central one as perfect as ideals allow, which of course means it would be impossible in the real world?  Would it be first to discover that the central path was – astonishingly – not only possible but that it had become seemingly inevitable (ah, be careful what you wish for) . . . and then to have it founder pointlessly, tragically, in a way that stumbled over surreal perceptions?  Kind of like successfully walking barefoot the length of a high wire across the Grand Canyon in pitch black night, then tripping over imaginary shoelaces at sunrise as you stroll blissfully unsuspecting over terra firma on the other side.  …  Forgive the generalization for an answer, but I don’t think anyone could relate to the rather emotionally spartan specifics of my life anyway.  The idea of irony, however, is more likely to match the experiences of others, whether it involves something ideal, extreme commitment, blindsiding perceptions, or all of the above. 

Q [Tranca, Philippines]: Why aren’t you writing new books?   …   [Hampstad, Maryland & many others]: When is your next book coming out?

A: I’ve decided to write to the world one person at a time.    Srsly, I know I’ve parlayed carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome ops into an excuse for not working book length, and if procrastination is the thief of time, I’m guilty of grand larceny.  But what with the Sullygram newsletters, this column, blogs, blurbs & forewords for other authors, and mucho correspondence, it seems like I’m writing more than ever.  And somewhere in that procrastination of novels I decided this was also a great time to reincarnate myself yet again, back into my original literary mainstream.  All options are still on the table for me.  Like a train moving through freight yards, I just keep getting longer and longer.  That said, I’m answering this particular question in order to announce that I’ve come to terms with two different companies this month (on the same day!) to begin bringing out my work, old and new, in e-book, audio and print formats.  The first two releases will come out as e-books.  And – ta da! – here’s a flash: the first release is – wait for it, wait for it –TODAY!  Just hours ago Crossroad Press released my Best Novel Finalist from WorldFantasy Con, THE MARTYRING, in E-book form in time for Christmas.  And Tell-Tale Publishing Group will similarly be bringing out BORN BURNING, whose popularity has now pushed it to a 4^th English language edition in two decades.  At $3.99 the E-publishing debut – which can be downloaded and read in any reader, including on a computer – makes a good stocking stuffer, so count on it, I’ll be most appreciative of anyone putting one or both on their holiday list.  Here’s the link where you can get THE MARTYRING now – http://store.crossroadpress.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=101_22_28&products_id=488  – and it will also be available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords in a few days.  My webmaster will be updating our website shortly to include all info: www.thomassullivanauthor.com .

And here’s a special offer I think I can keep up with if I prepare ahead of time.  If you give THE MARTYRING to someone, let me know and I’ll send them an author’s greeting to go with the e-book on Christmas Day or on whatever holiday you may celebrate.  Just email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and include their name and the email address where you want me to send the greeting. 

Finally, if it walks like a chicken, and talks like a chicken, at my house we call it turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but there are no substitutions for my warmest wishes to you every day of the year!  My genuine best to you all!  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

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There is nothing intrinsically sacred about the act of writing. Yes, it’s a strong creative outlet. It’s a wonderful career for those of us lucky enough to be able to do it for a living. And it fuels one of my favorite hobbies, which happens to be kicking back in my hammock with a good book and a glass of lemonade.

But, it’s not holy, and it’s not mandatory. “Oh, you should write a book!” is a wonderful sentiment, but what’s implied in it is “You need to spend a lot of time doing something that you may not enjoy doing and may not do particularly well.” The folks who think that everyone should write are ignoring the fact that many people are neither suited to nor interested in writing – or perhaps in any creative endeavor – and yet will be perfectly fine and happy with that choice, and lead long and fulfilling lives as a result. Indeed, the more shrill voices in the “Everyone MUST write!” camp can, with a little squinting, be seen to be a bit…nervous about their participation in the second-least-sanitary thing you can do by yourself at a keyboard, and their motivational speaker-like manic encouragement of others to join them takes on an air of “convince me that I did the right thing”.

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My first actual publication, out where live human beings I wasn’t related to might read it, was in an academic journal called Lovecraft Studies. The thing I published was part of my undergraduate thesis, a ruthless kidnapping of old H.P.L. in which I dragged him through the thickets and swamps of critical analysis by way of Mikhail Bakhtin. It was, to put it mildly, dry reading for those not inculcated in the rituals of the Advanced English Degree. But when I got the notice that the piece had been accepted – no payment, just a couple of contributor copies, as is academia’s wont – I walked on air. Nearly literally – I was living at my cousin’s place in Boston at the time, and the stairs were steep, and when I read the letter with the acceptance mid-way up to the door I jumped and nearly went back down the hard way. But it was an indescribable moment, one of validation, and excitement, and the first faint embers of thinking that if I could publish once, I really could do it some more.

And along the way to publication, helping hands were there for me every step of the way. Professor Enda Duffy at Wesleyan, my thesis advisor, who taught me theory and turned me into someone who actually could write a serious paper with serious thought behind it. Professor Paul Lewis at Boston College, who worked with me to take it from student paper to professional-level material. And Lovecraft Studies editor S.T. Joshi, twice, who first read over the thesis-as-thesis and commented, and then accepted the paper for his journal.

For all that composition is a solitary ritual, you don’t walk alone in this business.

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The act of writing, if we can decouple it from the veritable supernova of how-to and motivational essays spattered across the blogosphere, is not necessarily fun. It involves long hours, hard work, research (if you’re honest), and the non-zero chance of doing terrible things to your posture, your eyesight, and your marriage. The truth of this leads to a dilemna: For the serious writer, the individual who actually does want to write, who has stories to tell and will, by God, get them out there, then the implicit obstacles in the composition process must be overcome. Don’t do it, and you don’t write. You become that ghastly bore who slinks around parties telling everyone about your novel-in-progress that you gave up on at page 32 because you couldn’t get that first fight scene just right, but, yeah, you’re going to finish some day, really and for sure.

On the other hand, if you’re a casual writer, if you’re scribbling because you enjoy the act, then the obstacles and hard work take on a new meaning. (and let me say that I think there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with being a casual writer, a dabbler, an occasional scribbler. You’re having fun with it? More power to you) It may be surprising to some, but there is absolutely no moral virtue to punishing yourself and those around you by slogging through the writing process if you’re not actually that interested in writing. You don’t get a merit badge, you don’t get an XBox Live Achievement, and you probably don’t become a better human being out of it. What you do stand a strong chance of becoming is a miserable bastard, chained to a project you’re not enjoying but which you are going to finish, God damnit, because God damnit you’re going to finish it. In the meantime, you’re being an unpleasant git to everyone around you because you’re forcing yourself to do something you don’t enjoy for an end goal that’s at best unclear, you’re not doing other things you might enjoy – or need to do – more, and you’re lining up your friends and loved ones for the summarily cruel experience of reading your manuscript and commenting on it in a way that will not cause irreparable rifts in your relationships.

Nobody’s judging you. Write if you want to, not because you think you should.

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The worst lesson I learned about writing, I got in high school. I entered an essay contest  sponsored by the National Objectivist Foundation or something to that effect, largely because I’d read Anthem in class and not absolutely hated it. My essay, on Odysseus and how he was a strong, self-reliant figure (not actually true, if you close-read Homer: the guy’s always getting help from hot princesses, hotter goddesses, gods with bags full of wind, and a crew that indulges his idiotic whim when rowing past the island of the sirens – but I digress), went absolutely nowhere near actual Randian philosophy, because I really hadn’t noticed or internalized much of it while reading the cockamamie book.

The essay came in roughly 249th in the country. I was a national semi-finalist, or some such; I still have the letter around somewhere. And I’d written the damn thing on an electric typewriter in the basement the night before the deadline, one draft, no revisions, because I’d told someone I was going to enter and then forgotten about it until the last minute.

The good lessons there, about working under pressure and generating something coherent under tight deadline – have stayed with me. The bad lesson – the idea that with some natural talent and a little bit of razzle-dazzle, it’s possible to skate without putting the real hard work in – took a long time to put into context. There are times when you really do need to just pound something out and let the fancy fingerwork cover for the fact that you haven’t pored over it the way maybe you would have under ideal circumstances. But it’s too easy to fall into that mode for all writing, to push everything up against the deadline as a way of getting out of a lot of the hard work of writing – iteration, editing, revision, putting in the research to get it just right – and tell yourself it’s the best you could have done under the circumstances.

When it’s the best you could have done under the circumstances, it often behooves you to take a look at how exactly those circumstances got arrived at, and who put you there. A lot of times, it’s you.

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There are only so many tropes that writing advice can hit. Your villains should be interesting. Your hero shouldn’t be an [N] Sue, where n = some value of you, except with bigger secondary sexual characteristics and a smaller waistline. Write every day. You get the idea. These things are everywhere, constantly rewritten by some very smart, very talented, very generous-of-spirit people who do write, and write well, and want you to do the same. They’re also rewritten by mean-spirited jerks, hustlers who don’t write themselves but who will gladly take your nickel in exchange for advice they’ve never put to the test, and never-was-es making their best guesses at a target they can only see through binoculars.

None of which, ultimately, matters. At a certain point, you put down the advice and pick up the pen, or reasonable facsimile thereof. If you’re going to write, you write. If you’re not going to write, that’s fine, too. If you enjoy reading writing advice, and get a kick out of looking for the pithiest way to say, “If you’re going to write a sex scene, it helps if at some point in your life you have actually been naked”, then good on you, and happy reading.

But the fact remains, there is no ultimate end here. There is no moral weight, no checklist, no Mandate of Heaven that you, yes YOU, must write or the pillars of the skies will topple. If you choose to do so, do it well, and to the level that you find rewarding – occasional limerick writer or full-time novelist, it’s your life and you make the call. If you choose not to, that’s your decision, too, and get comfortable with it. Don’t feel you’ve failed God, the universe and your sainted mother because you never finished turning your Shadowrun campaign from college into a grim, gritty urban fantasy novel indistinguishable from the last twenty you just read. You haven’t. You haven’t even failed yourself, unless actually writing that novel was something you did indeed want to do.

And if that’s the case, get off your ass and get to work – but because you want to, not because I told you to.

As one control freak to another…  Uh-oh, way to go, Sully.  You’ve alienated your entire readership already.  But the essential thing about being human – about being anything with a pulse and choices – is trying to control one’s living conditions to make them beneficial to one’s self, isn’t it?  AKA survival.  Like I was saying, as one control freak to another, what might you notice about all those items in the title above?

Did you say they are all things beyond one’s personal control?   Or maybe you just thought, I hate friggin’ questions that try to force me to someone else’s answer, because that’s REALLY controlling!  Either way you reach the central point here: CONTROL IS THE SELECTIVE WAY WE ACCUMULATE PERSONAL BENEFITS AND ELIMINATE THREATS TO OUR WELL-BEING.  (Unless maybe you are an ant or a bee or a communist, in which case you derive your identity only as part of the collective.)

But what if the choices you make in establishing control end up controlling you, limiting you, ceasing to be a benefit?  We grow, after all, and as our needs change, the controls we opted for as security and fulfillment may confine us.  In fact, this is what happens to all of us to one degree or another, I believe.  If you feel like you are trapped by routine and dying inch by inch in the circumstances of your life, the point may not need emphasis.  And if you are a writer – or anyone creative – control may be that faceless enemy you call “writers block,” or maybe you call it boredom or stagnancy or something slightly more accurate that reflects your frustration like…fallow, sedentary, freedom-crushing, soul-rotting premature death.

In such a frame of mind you may regard that list in the title of this essay as the cause of your plight.  Bad joss, you sigh and knuckle under to life’s myriad social mechanisms, myths and pressures that keep you in line (now that’s CONTROLLING).  But those phantom concepts in the title are your escape route, and you should invite them into your daily life with urgent fervor.  Privately…if it must be (you are already living a secret life – shhh.)  You can call those title items anything you wish, but what they really represent is breaking with routine, abandoning the rut, making a right turn when familiar stresses demand you turn left.  Trust your gut – unless it’s filled with fear and guilt.  Fear and guilt bestow false virtue and lock one into a charade of honesty.  Trust your gut if your dreams are still nourishing you there.  Cultivate those terms I’ve used in the title as if they are your universal visa, your all-border pass to all things and all places.  Because that’s what they are.

You wanna take a test drive?  OK.  Escape with me.  Let me switch to my Cannibal Essay format, and give you an example.  How did I shake up my day today?  When did the magic get invited in?  Pick a time.  9:30 AM?…9 ½ is good.  We’re biking up the street on the way to anywhere/everywhere, specific destination unknown, and we stop in at Norby Nation – a family of seven who have sort of adopted me.  In my pocket are five Werther’s butterscotch candies, which I pass out to the kids, who are all clearing weeds from the backyard garden under their father’s (my buddy Bruce’s)direction.  I tell them that the candies are seeds and that if they plant them, a Werther’s tree will grow.  Annaliese – who from age 8 has appointed herself as my personal critic and social advisor – puts me to the test.  She plants one as a challenge to my credibility.  An uh-oh moment for me?  Nay.  This is kismet, serendipity – all those good terms in the title of this essay.  See, this is where you escape the pattern, the rut, and invite the magic in.  I mean, take note, you are hearing from one of the guardians of magic, a child!  You do not chuckle adult-like and blow it off.  Instead, you hie yourself to Walmart’s and buy a 1-foot tall tree (plastic is OK), and then you cram the branches full of Werthers and plant it in NN’s backyard.  Congratulations, you have just broken the Law of Living Tediously – jailbreak, jailbreak! – and your imagination is on the loose, because even if that plastic tree doesn’t take root, something else has.  Read the title again.  You have to nudge that stuff.  It’s there.  And when you do – when you let motivation spark imagination – you kick down the door to inspiration and things just start to HAPPEN.  Trust me, magic is looking for us.  Read on…

So, we’ve opened the door, left the beaten path of the ordinary just by doing a silly little thing, an eccentric thing, crazy and free.  And now we are taking a hike to Elm Creek, a 5600 acre park preserve, thundering along, enlivened by what just happened, keenly in tune with the open-endedness all around us, the sense of prerogative and the existential nature of nature.  The outré forces have stopped being coy with us, because we are true believers…so here it comes, here it comes…the magic!

Only, remember, this really happened and you’re borrowing my life, so you have to understand a little personal histoire first.  The exact spot where I’m standing is sacred ground to me, a place where on March 27, years ago now, I spent the most miraculous afternoon of my life.  So I’ve never stopped revisiting it or celebrating its magic.  It was very much like the romantic idealism of the forest scene in the movie Avatar where Neytiri discovers that Jake Sully (…hey, you know I didn’t write the script!) is the Chosen One because the floating seeds of the Sacred Tree suddenly waft to his arms and shoulders.  And that’s exactly what happens now. I am standing there in this galvanizing place and a half dozen diaphanous seeds floating from whatever mundane source suddenly catch a puff of something’s breath and settle gently on my arms and chest.  Have you ever had that happen with more than one dogwood or dandelion or milkweed “Santa Claus” at the same time?  I don’t know what the seeds were, but at that moment…in that place…parodying that movie right down to my name and romantic history/destiny…?  Wishful thinking, you say. OK.  But life takes place between the ears, and this essay is all about awareness.  Magic follows the path of least resistance, and like I said, when you put yourself in the way of fate, destiny, serendipity, karma, kismet and star-crossed ironies and coincidences, you allow internal realities to trump life’s external appearances.

So, yeah, I’m still a control freak (but one who knows where and when and how to be just the opposite).  I like to analyze (but not judge) and to notice patterns – especially the non-pattern pattern that refutes all other patterns.  Transcendent living begins where you drop logic, relinquish control, and embrace the intuition that arises from some nameless repository of the soul that harbors perfection, quantum leaps of imagination, insight without anchors, and – by any name you choose – magic!

Now, you take control – because even though I enjoy your company, you’re not going to be original if you’re following anyone.  I have no idea where your path goes.  I’m just suggesting that you have to DO something.  Something that refutes what you normally do.  Permit the meaningful and the imaginative to penetrate the predictable and the dull in your life.  It doesn’t have to be dramatic, but it can’t be automatic – i.e. routine.  Drive a different route, shop a different store, walk backward, whistle, splash in puddles as you hike in the rain, confront a lie, pursue a hidden truth, get out in nature away from four walls, talk to yourself when you’re alone and say all the things you don’t dare say in anyone’s presence, sleep on the floor, climb a tree, shout, laugh, revisit the best memory in your life in any way you can (and the worst), phone someone who inspires you, stay up all night, whisper your dreams to a star, whisper your FORBIDDEN dreams to a star.  OR…you can just skip all that and get through life with as little creativity and adventure as possible.  But as the saying goes, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

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