Cody Goodfellow

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

Welcome to Storytellers Unplugged. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

So…
I’m out the door right behind Skipp, and it’s been illuminating fun, but I’m too overtaxed to do right by the essays, and judging by the dearth of comments, either something else really awesome is happening the 10th of the month, or somebody else should be doing more with this slot than I have, to date.

I work about ten hours a day, six days a week, at home, at the same desk, in the same chair, where I write. I get a little bit of writing done every day, mostly taking the time out of sleep, and I fight like hell to get a full day’s writing in on my one day off. So, taking a day every month to write an essay about writing becomes a bit like a prisoner spending his monthly conjugal visit talking about having sex… or worse, trying to lecture someone else on how to do it.

I can’t explain how I write, because I’m powerless not to do it. I can’t advise how to develop a writing career, because what I have of one so far has happened in spite of myself. The only writing advice I ever took to heart was given to me by an elementary school teacher who told me that when you stop writing, you stop being a writer. Maybe not the best advice for an impressionable child, but she also gave me The Shining to read, so thanks, Nancy! 

The best career advice I got was from Greg Bear, when, in the ninth grade, I mooched half of his lunch when he spoke at my school. “If you never turn your nose up at free food, you just might make it as a writer.”

I’ve been writing seriously for about fifteen years, and for all but the last three or four, nothing much happened. While working full-time and staying home with my daughter, I wrote instead of sleeping, going out or watching TV. I let my first marriage and my health go to hell, without even really thinking about a career. I just wanted to write something truly fucking amazing, and if I could do that, just once, it wouldn’t matter if I died the next day.

I wrote a couple of books, and had an obscenely good time with them. This, I knew, was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I got just enough praise to encourage me to market myself, network and seriously pursue becoming a professional writer. I slept less. I argued with my wife that someday, it would all pay off. I agreed to a divorce. I did not heed deeply persuasive impulses to drive into a bridge abutment. Whenever I wasn’t writing, I was nothing and nobody, but if I could break through and make just enough money from writing to do it and nothing else, I’d BE a writer, and then I could rest.

I moved to LA. Teamed up with the inestimable Mr. Skipp. Seduced and married a beautiful, brilliant woman who loves me for what I can do, not for what I might make from it. And I wrote like a mad motherfucker on meth.

And finally, a few months ago, I got printed proof that I am a bonafide, honest-to-God writer.

I got it from a doctor.

While I was still light years from quitting my day job, with no awards to share the shelf with my assistant softball coaches’ trophies, I had snapped up many of the most coveted occupational diseases from writing, and in record time. The left ascending ventricle of my heart is beginning to block up from a lifetime of shitty food, and my lungs are ripe for emphysema. While not cancerous or permanently damaged yet, if you were grilling them, they’d be just about ready to eat.

I’m still well enough to carry on as I always have, but the doctor told me that if I do so, I’ll probably be dead in five years. I’m still looking for a more fun doctor.

If writing has taught me anything about the real world, it’s the difference between novel characters and short story characters. Short stories are about events that happen to people, leaving very little room for the character to change or adapt to the plot, which in horror must needs in some way underscore the character’s flaws and failings. Poetic justice is served, or a challenge to pinpoints the weak spots in the hero’s armor. In our particular brand of evil, we test characters to destruction by throwing the impossible and the unacceptable into their lives, and with few exceptions, they play the hand they are dealt. Whether or not the characters survive or are shattered by their brush with the author’s machinations, we leave them behind knowing they probably won’t transcend the moment the curtain closed on the story. Otherwise, we’d be reading about them in a novel.

In novels, naturally, the characters have to survive, and adapt and grow, because that’s what they’re about, so they’re more hopeful than short stories. To survive a horror novel takes much more than running and screaming and luck. One’s inner demons must be slain, before the literal monsters can be climactically routed. A novel’s hero must somehow play a better hand than they’ve been dealt, because that’s what we all hope for in ourselves, and those we love, no matter what the real world throws at them.

Nobody can say for sure what they’re really made of, until they face a horrific situation. Maybe this stuff prepares us for real horror, and maybe we’re kidding ourselves. I began to consume horror right around the time real horror became commonplace in my life, so I have always believed it has saved my sanity. But the doctor’s warning seemed to me like a particularly weak twist ending. And in true pulp gothic style, it seemed like the fulfillment of a family curse.

My father’s family was a happy one––prosperous, healthy and seething with creativity–– but shit just kept happening to them. My grandfather was an architect; he supervised a heavy renovation of the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. He died when I was two, of a heart attack during a trial where prosecutors pressured him to testify against a mobbed-up construction company. I had an aunt, whom I never met, because she was killed by her husband on their honeymoon. My grandmother had a nervous breakdown when her husband died, and tried to give away all her money and possessions. They had her committed, during which time they found cancer in her jaw, and removed all her teeth. When she took to hoarding food and stealing from the nurses, they figured she was cured, and released her. My other aunt lived with crippling agoraphobia, only leaving the house with her husband, but she lived long enough to see her only daughter killed in a car crash on Christmas Eve. A few years ago, she fell asleep smoking a cigarette and burned her house down.

My father lost an eye when he was twelve, to a kid throwing rocks at the beach. He loved to surf, but with no depth perception, he couldn’t compete professionally. He liked to sing, but he was terrible. He loved Tolkien and Lovecraft and monster movies, and he burned to do something creative with his life, but early on, he decided to dedicate himself to the art of staying high. My mom threw him out when I was three, and I don’t recall that I saw him more than ten times before he died, when I was eight.

I have pictures from the fishing trip we took, the last time I saw him, and in them, we’re both smiling, holding a string of trout from Twin Lakes in Mammoth, but I don’t remember the trip. I vividly remember when he came to pick me up to go camping, and because he was roaring drunk and wouldn’t leave without me, the guys from around the trailer park beat the shit out of him before the sheriff took him to jail. In the pictures, his one eye is almost swelled shut, but he’s smiling.

Horror stories were much more than just escapism for me, as a child. They helped me channel my anger into something that could explain what I was feeling better than religion, which seemed to threaten that if I didn’t start loving God, He’d hate my family even more than He already did. I can trace my love of horror and the grotesque straight back to my one-eyed father, along with all the other, less healthy, habits he passed on. My drive to succeed as a writer could be tracked back to his failure, my willingness to sacrifice everything for it a reaction to his giving in to despair. But in driving so hard to become something that all my dead relatives would have been proud of, I had only found a new way to fulfill my programming, and let obsession consume my life.

The world is full of short story characters: people who never learn from their mistakes, who never see themselves in the mirror, who never deal with the rusty, dysfunctional mainsprings of their own natures, and so follow their scripted fates to predictable ends. These are the chumps we gleefully feed into the meat-grinders of our short stories, hopefully passing on a bit of truth about human nature, for those with ears to hear it.

It’s easy to see why scientific materialism is so frightening to so many people. The notion that heredity+potty training= destiny pretty much trashes free will, and religion, art and literature bravely argue that we are capable of more. But for every bootstrapping Horatio Alger, there’s a helplessly evil Albert Fish, or a Phineas Gage. Alger may have been programmed to succeed, while Gage was reprogrammed by a freak accident to become a bastard. It sucks, but when you can pick your horrors, you’re really shopping for a fantasy.

Smarts and imagination hardly guarantee surviving to a ripe, novel-length age. Brains can talk you quite eloquently out of your own good; you can rationalize more risky, self-destructive behavior with an artistic license than anything else. Writing can be excellent therapy, but even the best writers are often too weak to deal with what they discover about themselves. Henry James, in The Aspern Papers and The Jolly Corner, fetishizes almost ritualized moments of confrontation that mirror the primal scene of sexual discovery, unmasking a powerful but stunted intellect, unable to confront some disabling childhood trauma. Dickens was so haunted by his youthful employment as a bottle-polisher that he lived in fear of poverty even as he dominated the reading public with sentimental novels about orphans and waifs lifted out of poverty by angelic patrons. And those are the happy endings. Howard, Hemingway, Plath and Wallace are just a few examples of how writers can touch others, without healing themselves.

Novels are how we try to convince ourselves that people can not only survive the unacceptable, but grow and live happily ever after. The signs that we must change do not always come in short, sharp Twilight Zone shocks,  but most of us blithely ignore them until it’s too late.

Lately, I’ve begun to meet people who really liked my books and, bless their kooky hearts, worry about my health. I’m touched by this, but it also makes me uncomfortable. Writing has been the source of many of the greatest joys in my life, but some of the things it tries to show me about myself are difficult to face. It’s not the writing that’s killing me, but a host of things I’ve wrapped around it, that are wearing me out before my time. I can’t quit writing, but I’m trying to overcome generations of bad programming by restoring some balance to my life. 

My new wife truly loves and understands me, and she understands my family curse. Her grandfather wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, had a radio show on NBC in the 50′s, and was John Wayne’s favorite dialogue doctor. He and his wife had four children and a house in the heart of Beverly Hills, a perfect life bought with writing, at a time when a short-short story could pay for a weekend in Acapulco. He died of a heart attack at age forty, and I doubt any of you have ever read his most celebrated novel, The Sugarplum Staircase.

I’m not going to quit writing, but I’m trying to change almost everything else. We got a dog, who bites my feet if I don’t walk him every day. I’m taking scuba diving lessons, and long naps. I’ve enrolled in a master’s course in positivity and gratitude, just by haning out with the Skipper. And don’t dump your RJ Reynolds stock just yet, but someday soon, I’m quitting smoking.  I’m going to embrace the parts of my writing that add years and joy to my life, and try to minimize the arguing, arm-waving and signifying that so many of us do in order to “be” writers, and the stressing out over why it isn’t working out as quickly as it should. I’m pushing as diligently as ever to quit my day job, but not at the cost of sleep, or time with my family. It may not make me a better or a more famous writer, but it should let me become an older one.

All I’m really trying to say with this epic bummer-thon, is that the family of writers is beset by its own set of “curses:” so many ways to fulfill our bad programming, to sabotage, self-destruct and burn out early, and so much that we miss, in writing and life, by chasing the wrong goals, or the right ones the wrong way. It’s not impossible to get everything you think you want in the short term, if you only sell your life cheaply enough. I realize now that what my teacher was trying to tell me was that the joy of writing should lie in the act, itself. Anything that comes between you and that joy should be treated with suspicion, but we block out the warning signs of burnout and worse at our peril. I can feel myself dying in this chair, and I am trying to pace myself and pick my battles, so I can make it to see how it all turns out.

I am not trying to discourage anyone from throwing themselves passionately into writing, or chasing the dream of writing for a living. I take my writing as seriously as a heart attack, but I’m not willing to bet my life on it, anymore. I’m in it because this is what I do. So long as there are dollar specials at Furr’s Cafeteria and unguarded pies cooling on windowsills, I’ll keep doing it.
(But if I ever do get rich… free pie for all!)

CODY:

One of the best perks of writing is that you can control your image, even create it out of whole cloth. Granted, for some, it might be a downer not getting grabbed in malls by strangers who think they know you, but the nature of literary fame puts one behind a curtain, to be a name and a voice in the dark. To give readers a peek at the face behind the curtain is to trade some of that mystery for a taste of the intimacy that begins to bond writer to reader, and begin a career.

There’s no reason an author photo should diminish a writer’s mystique, though, and many, many reasons why this can be a dealmaking marketing tool.

Long before you’re famous, and even before you’re published, a thoughtfully produced portrait can start to plug you in to readers… or it can warn them that they’re dealing with a goofball.

SKIPP:

Or both! [laughs] I mean, I always thought, growing up, that the whole publicity thing was hilarious. So when it came my time, I just thought, why not make it hilarious on purpose? Or at least have fun with the process?

CODY:

Ladies and gentlemen, witness Exhibit A. When everybody else in the field was still posing with tombstones and oozing chiaroscuro gravitas, Skipp & Spector went with zany, surreal Looney Tunes rock star images that conveyed their deep-fried sense of humor, while also skewering the stuffy solemnity of literary fame. Because the harder you try to look scary in a posed photograph, the more likely you are to end up making somebody laugh, anyway.

But even if you don’t have a bullpen with Mad Magazine cartoonists or Helmut Newton in it, you can still nail a reader with a sharply crafted image. It doesn’t have to make people laugh or shiver, but the desired effect, a glimpse into not just who you are, but how you see yourself, can indeed do both.

Whether or not we are individually a treat to look upon, I think there’s a bit of discomfort with portraits for many authors. Some are uncomfortable posing for pictures for a host of reasons; if any of us really enjoyed being photographed, we’d be in some other business.

There is, too, a sense of giving away some of the mystique that rightfully accrues to a writer, who must succeed or fail on their words, and who builds a mystique that interacts with the reader’s imagination. The writer is the demiurge who crafted a world and everything walking, crawling and croaking in it, and so takes on a mantle of subtle divinity in the reader’s mind.

Too often, the portrait on the dust jacket or the website image is a letdown, an awkward shot of the man behind the curtain. The first time I saw what John Shirley looked like, I was vaguely disappointed that his hair wasn’t on fire, and he wasn’t a walking coral reef of angst-slurping astral parasites. Just a guy who doesn’t sleep much, but the big mirrorshades hiding his eyes held something back, even as we see his well-lit face. If he were to turn to look out of the picture at us, we would only see ourselves, reflected.

One of the most common pitfalls of rookie card author photos is the imperative to look like an author. Having written that first novel in the wee hours between day job and brutally curtailed sleep, one feels transformed, at least partially, into a new creature, and must needs signify this with a portrait at the desk where the great work was accomplished, or before a wall of books, with one hand stroking or supporting the chin, a remote but contemplative cast to the features, as if the next great work is already taking shape in the aether between themselves and the camera lens. There is a pressure to look haunted, preoccupied, but while the real thing is mesmerizing, as in any pic of the late great Charles Beaumont, the insincere pose of same is flat-out laughable.

If you can carry off the genial but inscrutable smirk of a King or the smoldering cult-leader gorgon gaze of a Schow or a Mieville, or you’re just naturally gifted with an intriguingly erudite mug, more power to you.

But your work should prove you’re a writer. The portrait should give a sense of who and what else you are.

Robert E. Howard’s most famous pictures show him as a bare-knuckle boxer, or a sour-faced hoodlum in a snappy fedora; he could easily pass muster in one of his own stories.

SKIPP:

Author photos don’t have a rich tradition of excellence. Musicians? Yes. Actors? Yes. Artists? Sometimes. Writers? Not so much.

Why? Well, first, because writers are often weirdly socialized creatures. It’s an internalized discipline, where the attention is focused not without but within. To really show how a writer works, in a photograph, you’d probably need a picture of their brain. And even that just shows the playing field, not the actual game in progress.

There are, of course, celebrity writers (and I’m not talking about celebrities from other fields who decide to write a book; I’m talking about writers who become FAMOUS FOR BEING WRITERS).

So what do they do, to achieve this feat?

They become publicly interesting to people.

And, kids? If you want to be publicly interesting to people, then interesting pictures help. They just do. Whether you like it or not, even the most readerly among us are also visually driven.

My favorite pictures of people – famous or otherwise – are the ones that offer a glimpse into who they really are. Sometimes, it’s the expression on their face. Sometimes, it’s the juxtaposition or person and place. Sometimes, a prop is involved.

In a film directing course I once took from Dov Simons of the Hollywood Film Institute, he said that the most important promotional snapshot a director could have taken – if they wanted to be known as a director – was one in which they stood behind a motion picture camera, staring intently through the lens.

He was, of course, correct. It was so stupidly obvious that the whole class laughed out loud. And I was not the only one who actually slapped themselves in the face, the way you do when you just spent an hour searching for something that was right in your back pocket.

So it’s not like I don’t understand the impulse to get shot in front of your prodigious bookcase. It’s an obvious prop. And I even used it once myself.

But a writer posing before his bookcase is like a rock star posing in front of a CD rack.

And since a shot of you at the word processor might not be quite as exciting as a shot of a rock star in mid-guitar solo – although there are definitely exceptions, so don’t rule it out entirely – there are some other things you might try.

TAKE LOTS OF PICS

Make friends with some people who are as obsessed with photography as you are with writing. Spend an afternoon or evening concocting shots that might be fun and/or revealing. Consider random shots taken by friends, who caught you in great, unexpected moments. PLAY AROUND! It might be fun!

TAILOR SHOTS TO PROJECTS

If you wrote an urban story, get a cool city shot. If your book is in the backwoods, stand in front of the wildest-looking tree you can find. If your story takes place on a boat, GET ON A FUCKING BOAT!

And remember: Photoshop is your friend.

EITHER BE YOURSELF, OR FULLY EMBODY THE PERSON YOU’RE PRETENDING TO BE.

Either one can work. It’s up to you. I prefer the real deal, myself. But a well-played character is its own reward.

NO MATTER WHAT, BE INTERESTING.

Cuz if you’re not, why should people read your book? The fact is – if your work is interesting – then you ARE interesting. Let your photograph reflect that.

If you don’t, then you didn’t. And you have no one to blame but yourself.

That said…

YOU DON’T HAVE TO TAKE AUTHOR PHOTOS.

Many famous authors – from Thomas Pynchon to Thomas Ligotti to Bentley Little – don’t want to be seen at all. They become men or women of mystery. And that’s cool, too.

There are a million ways to play this stuff. And the ball is in your court.

In the end, my advice is to try shit. See what works. Apply the same rigor and attention to detail that you apply to the writing itself.

Trial and error is the name of the game.

And if a picture’s worth a thousand words, then it might be worth your time to take some.

I want to write about the kinds of people

The others want erased

–The Wolfgang Press, “Sucker”

I need some attention;

I shoot into the light

–Peter Gabriel, “Family Snapshot”

To try to wed together the excellent arguments Mr. Castle, Mr. Hodge  and the Tems offered this month (or at least to steal their clothes while they’re all rhetorically skinny-dipping), it’s a lead-pipe cinch that solid characterization is the secret ingredient that allows genre lit to transcend formula, and become indistinguishable from magic. This is a more essential ingredient for horror, than any other genre. If the people in your story don’t have somewhere else they’d rather be, and the wherewithal to try to get there, than you’re just frying ants with a magnifying glass. But while it is vital that the reader connect with the characters, is it really so important that the reader actually like them?

In “serious” mainstream literature, character occurs more or less in a plotless vacuum, so the characters’  choices or lack of same are what passes for a plot. Crime And Punishment, The Stranger and The Immoralist all shoehorn us in the skins of monsters, as they try to live with their aimless evil. But in genre literature, the writer takes the characters on a ride, and if she hopes to entice the reader to come along, it should be a ride they want to take, and the character with whom they’re going to experience the story should offer a secure, comfortable seat. Shouldn’t it?

I know there’s probably something wrong with me, but I’ve almost always rooted for the bad guys. It’s not because I identified with their goals or methods, but what they were doing, or trying to do, was made watching movies or comics worthwhile. In genre movies, the hero is often a blank slate, a comfortable chair for the audience to sit in and vicariously enjoy being handsome, vitally important, and pure of heart. Bleh. James Bond, Sindbad and Luke Skywalker are pawns, easily duped and manipulated by the villains on the Manichean chessboard, but destined to win, because the game is perpetually rigged.

I have put down many, many books, and turned off many movies, because I didn’t care about what happened to the characters. But the ones that I love and return to most, are those that strike that amazing balance between fascination and repulsion; my favorites let me take a ride in a truly unlikable character in a way that illuminates the ugly shadows of human nature, and takes me to places decent folk never go.

In my dreams–the ones I remember–I almost always follow someone else, rather than inhabiting them, or playing myself. As a reader, I was far more drawn to fascinatingly flawed characters, than ones I liked, or with whom I could identify. Books and movies are like a telescope through which I can intimately observe the kinds of people I never could share a smoke with, without coming to grievous harm.

Al Pacino’s character in Dog Day Afternoon is a great cinematic example. As the robbery spins into a siege and Sonny goes out to face an army of cops armed only with an arsenal of raw nerve, we’re not sure whose side we’re on. He’s charismatic and intense, yet repulsive and confused,  and we are not invited into his head, so much as we are held hostage, clinging to him to find out why it’s happening, as well as what’s going to happen. When we finally find out his motivation, it kicks us miles away from identifying with this guy or validating his choices, but it teaches us a lot more about human nature, than if the game had been stacked with a likable guy who ends up in the same situation, or if we were riding with an anti-hero who robs banks to hit back against a crooked system run by assholes and buffoons, as in Bonnie & Clyde and Dillinger.

My best writing has never been about expressing or confessing myself, but interrogating others, and the best stories I’ve written (or, at least, the best-received so far) have all proceeded from asking how some people look at themselves in the morning. My story “Burning Names,” which appeared in Cemetery Dance a few years back, came from catching a tweaker as they tried to shoulder-surf my social security number as I filled out forms at a courthouse. In trying to figure out what that person would end up doing with my stolen identity, I found that I could, in turn, steal theirs, and I had a lot more fun with hers, than she would have, with mine.

It’s easy for these kinds of stories to devolve into a rote formula–”bad things happen to bad people”–a kind of instant pulp karma that EC Comics distilled into its pure essence. Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror dished out justice straight from the Hammurabi Code, and while it was delicious in eight-page bouts, it was also not very edifying, because the depiction of human evil was so shallow. The characters in EC Comics were so reflexively immoral that they leaped from petty theft or extortion to cold-blooded murder before page 3, freeing up the remaining panels for the creeping reveal of some clanky ironic retribution.  They get the just desserts that Raskolnikov prays for, in a tidy way that’s more reassuring than scary, to those with no murder in their hearts.

Whether or not we’d like to share a beer with our characters, a clear advantage of bad characters is that their stories will most likely go untold, in the wide world they inhabit. If a family moves into a haunted house and survives the experience, they’re going to rush to every media outlet in the land with proof of life beyond death, and milk it for a string of movies and TV specials. It’s kind of important, in a good horror or fantasy story, that the plot not spill out of the writer’s control and change the world; it’s not instant death, but it does swing the balance of plausibility wildly out  of true. If we can believe that a horror story might have occurred in the world we inhabit, it sticks and does its work far more effectively, and this is hard to sustain if people walk away from the denouement with a story to tell Larry King. How much more plausible is a haunted house story, then, if the protagonists break into the house with larceny on their minds, rather than a pleasant vacation?

Less likable characters can also take initiative in ways ordinary folks can’t. Hammett was a genius at brushing us back from his plug-ugly anti-heroes, and keeping us following eagerly on their trails, rather than inhabiting their pants. When Sam Spade or the Continental Op tumbles to the twisted root of a case, he doesn’t bother to spell it out for you, even as he’s telling you the story. He figures it out and begins to lay a trap for the doomed evildoers, that’s at least as devious as the skullduggery he’s uncovering. This keeps with Scooby Doo Rule #3, (if the characters spell out the plan ahead of time, it always goes to hell), but it also lets the character be more of a player in the plot, than a pawn.

And finally, bad characters are great for the same reason they’re so tough to do properly. While everyone is more or less captivated by the effects of bad behavior, we’re still very much in the dark, most of us, about the ongoing processes behind it. Villains enjoy inflicting pain and despair because somebody has to do it, but the motivations of people who routinely do terrible things to themselves and others is often misunderstood, especially when it needs to be bent to conform to a plot. I can’t help but think of the assholes in so many of Stephen King’s stories, who serve to contrast and ground the supernatural weirdness with a mundane human mirror. From Mrs. Carmody in The Mist to the bullies in It, these dicks sometimes reveal a bit about how human evil works, but increasingly over his career (see The Langoliers or The Green Mile), King plugs in a sadistic fuckup from central casting, whose inner workings take a distant third priority to helping to grease the plot machinery.

What Hodge said about the cardinal importance of living, breathing characters goes double for the bad ones. Quite often, a traumatic childhood episode is the prime mover of bad behavior, but the push-button, abuse-in-evil-out dynamic that modern psychology has been chopped down to in popular entertainment is pretty weak tea. Look at how Michael Myers’s cartoonish broken home in Rob Zombie’s Halloween diminishes his evil to a knee-jerk rampage. Hannibal Lecter, too, was a formidably inscrutable devil, but when Harris let him become a lethal anti-hero, he upset the sense that there is any good or evil in his world, only sheep and wolves. On the flipside, take Michael Haneke’s ingeniously infuriating Funny Games, where the villains not only gleefully play with our craving for a motive, but look us in the eye and address us directly, shaming us for our callow voyeurism. “Have you had enough?” Paul asks, when we have had entirely too much, and nothing at all, that we expected.

Somewhere between these opposing, equally empty icons, lies a vivid depiction of real human evil that isn’t fettered by notions of heroism and villainy, and therein lies a treasure trove of story seeds that most writers overlook. I can’t think of any better exponent of this golden mean of evil than John Shirley, whose dastardly characters reveal the broken child inside every bad guy. The horrors that engulf his protagonists are just as often of their own design as they are unfathomable predators from beyond, and the broken rationales they hide behind are far more revealing than a visit with the likable nuclear families or burned-out but noble cops from most writers’ bullpens. If horror fiction is uniquely poised to offer any truly edifying lessons to the reader, it’s penetrating insight into the real machinations that drive douchebags… if not to arm our readers against the douchy wiles of others, then, perhaps, to force them to confront and defuse the symptoms of encroaching douchebaggery in themselves.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t toss a shout-out to a song that, more than any other single work, moved me to separate agreeing with a character, to wanting to understand them. Peter Gabriel’s “Family Snapshot” is a rousing, upbeat tune that would make a great opener for a campaign rally. The song’s parade-watching narrator excitedly builds suspense and bathes you in his anticipation, as he prepares to take charge of history by assassinating the president. It’s giddily unsettling to hear him explain why: “I don’t really hate you,” he ruefully admits, but then proclaims, simply, “I want to be somebody; you were like that, too.” Caught up in the stirring magic of the moment, the narrator is remorseless and psychotically detached, perfectly at ease with the paradox of killing without a cause. Only after the bullet is fired, and the music breaks down into a reverie, does the singer retreat to his true self: “a lonely boy, hiding behind the front door.”

As a kid growing up in the 70′s, I was haunted by the ghosts of great men whose blood had been spilled in the public square, their world-changing lives ended by mysterious, dead-eyed men like Oswald (et al.), Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, for reasons that sounded like the work of a ruthless hack. The first time I heard “Family Snapshot” and every time thereafter, I felt gifted with an insight that goes deeper than the excuses people give for their evil and others, and I’m not ashamed to say that it’s the only song that, no matter how many times I hear it, moves me to tears.

So let’s all shed a tear, and a few more drops of sweat, for our hard-working douchebags. They deserve more love and more dedicated probing than the likable characters, who get along pretty well, on their own. After all, more love and probing is all most of us douchebags ever really wanted, in the first place…

From birth, I had the best possible training for becoming a writer. I was born an only child. That I was also an angry, sneaky, antisocial creep with a rancid imagination only sealed the deal. When there was nothing good on either of the two TV channels, I had to make up my own fun, and my games usually took the form of ridiculously elaborate fantasy epics, which I would illustrate as comics or act out with my rubber dinosaurs and Fisher Price Adventure People (banding together against hyper-Freudian Play-Doh tentacle-monsters). Coming up with these spellbinding shenanigans was as easy as sleeping, but sharing them with–or inflicting them upon–others was a much taller order.

Like many beginning writers, I began with projects that were much too ambitious, and soon lost momentum, as the story got bogged down in arbitrary choices and uncertainties, and died out. For years, I would cultivate ideas I couldn’t trap on paper, and develop them by talking about them with friends, or strangers I hoped to freak out.

Another bad habit I took years to kick was my aversion to organization; my ideas tend to form as nonlinear blobs of story elements, and I fought with every ounce of my right-hemispheric dominant brain against imposing a linear structure on the process. It wasn’t until college, with weekly essays and research papers that demanded rigid outline structure, that I began to think through my fiction with any coherence.

Having worked so hard to become a functional one-man party, why would I complicate things by inviting someone else over? If you’re really handy with a Kleenex and a bottle of Jergen’s lotion, you might not see the point of going out on a Saturday night, either.  But because I wasn’t ready to write a whole book by myself, collaborating with another struggling writer seemed like a good strategy. Someone whose skills complemented mine, would be just the crutch I’d need, to get my hopelessly elaborate ideas into shape.

Writers aren’t always solitary loners by nature, but to some degree, you have to be; if you don’t love to frolic alone in your own brain for hours on end, you’ll never finish anything, so having a partner there to play bongos, pack bowls and change the music, at first, sounds like a dandy idea. But I had few examples of literary duos to build on, as a reader. Lovecraft’s “collaborations” were for-hire hackwork, and Ellison’s Partners In Wonder and Medea collections were like stunt shows, feats of derring-do that nonetheless bore Ellison’s stamp as indelibly as if his words were printed with radium ink. I could name the successful collaborative teams of genre fiction writers on one hand, if I was Gumby. (And please, commenters, jump in with pre-1980′s precedents, and if possible, send them to me, circa 1987.)

But then, one fateful spring day at the 7-11, as I was paying for my Fango, Marvel comics and a seven-layer Slurpee, two scary guys came over the counter, beat me senseless and took my comic money, and my arcade and pizza reserves, to boot. Though they left behind only a cartoonish composite sketch, I would never forget their names, or the book they traded for my allowance, along with my naked soul, and hopes for a normal future.

The book was The Scream, by Skipp and Spector. I won’t go overboard with the impact their books had on me, beyond observing that what they did would have been remarkable from one author, but the fact that two guys wrote them seemed to make it more of a daring highwire chainsaw-juggling act. It was like dressing up in a pantomime horse outfit, and entering a rodeo, and throwing every rider. You couldn’t see the seams in the suit that held them together. They didn’t use each other as a crutch, or split the book down the middle in some artificial way. They became a third writer, a giant capable of superhuman feats few writers would dare to dream up alone.

My own collaborative efforts were not so fruitful. One guy I worked with was a great sounding-board, and helped develop ideas wonderfully, even if he never seemed to actually finish any of his end of the work. He was a great teacher, as I had to learn to do all of the work myself, and to see that having nobody else to blame was a wonderful incentive to finish. Another guy had enormous drive and plentiful ideas, but our tastes and instincts collided so often that the final products were deeply conflicted in tone, and doomed. I think we both learned that if you’re chronically fighting with the other guy to get your ideas down on the paper, you’re more than capable of doing the whole thing yourself.

I went to college to become a screenwriter, but the most valuable lesson I learned there was that if I wanted a story told my way, I would have to write it as a book. I had come full-circle, back to the sneaky, hermitic weirdo who made up monsters with Play-Doh. I could finally do the whole thing myself, and I knew that even if nobody came, I could throw one hell of a party. What would I have to gain, by adding another host?

I ultimately discovered that only once you’ve gotten your own writing chops in order, can a collaboration become more than the sum of its parts. In trying to team up with somebody who covered for my own weaknesses, I was stunting my own growth, and trying to become something less than I could be, alone.

Only when I could write a whole novel by myself, did the attraction of working with another writer start to really kick in; as a way to reshuffle my own creative deck with new cards that would play off my own familiar obsessions in new and intriguing ways. Someone who could keep up and even set a demanding pace, would add surprises and strange new noises to the mix, and do more than just dump his own ingredients in with mine. If it were to work, the other writer would have to know how to subordinate his creativity, in tandem with mine, to an empty suit, which we would jointly inhabit, and thereby become a three-legged giant, capable of running full-tilt and kicking every ass we passed, along the way.

How fitting, that the guy I ended up working with was one of the punks who mugged me, that fateful spring day in 1988.  (For readers eager to take a lesson and bug out: if you’re going to collaborate with another writer, try to find someone of at least equal abilities, and, if possible, a gigantic influence on your own work.)

I wasn’t actively looking for a partner to form a genre-bending Voltron, but soon after I met Skipp, we naturally drifted into working on stuff together. Music came first, because it was loose and intuitive and accidental, and the results were a laugh riot. Acting in a couple film projects he directed, I observed and learned from his instinctive ability to soak up feedback and evolve his vision to make it a compound, all-seeing fly-eye affair. We did a couple short stories, simple impromptu games that took on an almost mystical urgency, as they began to inflate that empty third suit, and our work together developed a fluidity that soon bamboozled even our own efforts to pick it apart.  The partnership quickly grew up, got off the couch and went out looking for work. We’re both proud as hell of that kid, and expect to hear great things from him, any day now.

Since the Puritan days of my childhood, tag-team and shared-world projects have become much more common, and duos like Preston & Child and sometime teams like Blaylock and Powers (as William Ashbless) are allowed to openly cavort in public, while literary sluts like Keene, Golden and Lebbon seem hell-bent on scoring with everybody in the genre. Working with Skipp carries, naturally, a mantle of prestige and some anticipatory baggage. Our first book together builds on some classic splatterpunk shock-tactics, but Jake’s Wake is going to shock readers who expect a Skipp & Spector rehash; this third guy doesn’t write like either of us, or anyone we know. And the stuff after that aims to tilt the whole mainstream like the deck of the Titanic, dumping all those hapless, squeaky-clean suckers into our backyard.
He’s an arrogant bastard, our third guy, but show me a three-legged giant who isn’t…

In college, my roommate Steve and I used to interview bands for the on-campus radio station, and by our senior year, we’d gotten pretty jaded. We’d had milkshakes with Mr. Bungle and sushi with Shonen Knife, and when the Revolting Cocks needed a keg in their dressing room, or Nivek Ogre was freaking out on a layover at LAX, they knew whom to call. But when I finally got a chance to talk to someone from the last band on my list, I was physically afraid of picking up the phone.

Only a handful of people I’ve met have ever heard of Coil, and of those unhappy few, the ones who can stand them at all are, generally speaking, a bunch of perverts and gluttons for the most inscrutable brands of weirdness. With songs like “Anal Staircase” and “The Sewage Worker’s Birthday Party,” they left no uncertainty about where their heads were at, but their albums included copious liner notes detailing the arcane inspirations for each song, from the base pleasures of ergot poisoning and chili torture to L’Autreaumont’s proto-surreal Maldoror poems and Alfred Jarry’s absurdist Ubu plays. Clive Barker’s first choice to score Hellraiser, the band were axed by producers who thought their music was too sinister for a movie about torture-fetishists from Hell. His blurb on the vinyl release of the soundtrack said it all: “The only band whose music I’ve ever had to take off, because it was making my bowels churn.”

The video Coil’s Peter Christopherson made for Nine Inch Nails’ Broken EP was a mock-snuff home movie so unflinchingly realistic that Interscope shitcanned it and snuffed its release. Surely, they couldn’t actually harm me through the phone, and if they tried any mind control techniques, Steve would restrain me from doing anything crazy while under hypnosis. But I still had that delicious thrill you get as a kid, just before ringing the doorbell of the scariest house in the neighborhood on Halloween night.

This lasted about a minute into the interview.

John Balance was a soft-spoken, shy interview subject, but soon warmed up and commenced blowing my mind with astounding anecdotes and tidbits about the band’s various fetishes. Late in the interview, I paid him what I thought was a compliment in praising their genius for capturing evil in their music, and asked about how they approach making music that made people so uncomfortable.

Balance was silent long enough that I worried that he might have hung up. Finally, he said, in a slightly hurt tone, “We always tried to just make music that was beautiful.”
It took me a few moments to ride out the satori he’d planted in my undercaffeinated brain and recover the thread of the conversation, because he’d got me to thinking about the funhouse mirror quality of the artist’s intent, and about how much more profoundly disturbing evil can be, when it seeks to be beautiful.

This simple statement explained for me why I was drawn to qualities in art and literature and music that sat mostly, but not easily, within the fantastic or experimental domains, and nailed a common thread. Suddenly, it made sense why so much of horrific entertainment, in setting out to be scary or grotesque, merely turned out ridiculous, or ugly. That profound chill, that sense of haunting that separates Val Lewton’s Cat People from other drek in the same vein, for instance, is the same wild hair that made lifelong schizophrenic Adolf Wolfli’s collages of soup cans in 1910 so much more meaningful than Andy Warhol’s contrived pop art renditions of same forty years later. It’s in the mystery that drove Wolfli to try to communicate something of almost mystical significance with, among other things, Campbell’s soup cans. It’s what makes Henry Darger’s tortured Vivian Girls epics so much more edifying––and terrifying––than Lolita or any other art that dares to try to explain why some adult males are complete freaks.

The most resonant entertainment for me out of that time and since, not only revered the awe and beauty of the unspeakable, but which gave the antagonist something more to play with than just coming back from the dead and fucking with people. Clive Barker’s “In The Hills, The Cities” blew my mind around the same time, because the monstrous titans of the story were not out to crush and destroy; this was a traditional Communist picnic outing gone awry, and the crazy beauty of what they were trying to do shone through the story and made the monsters something to weep for.

John Balance died a few years ago, having pretty much ruined his health chasing after a penumbral beauty that looked, to everyone else, like the polyp-pocked haunches of Hell. I think that, ever since, I have had quite a lot of quality horror ruined for me, because so many seem to try too hard to be scary or gross, when the stuff that continues to send me is informed by a borderline psychotic compulsion to revel in how beautiful darkness is.

I just got back from my honeymoon in Costa Rica. It was wonderful; I got a ton of writing done.

Naturally, none of it ended up on paper, as I had my hands full; but every waking minute contributed fresh fodder for a mill that has been grinding out the same second-hand crud for much too long. My brain chemistry is still radically altered from a stampede of new experiences and sensations, and I came back with a (mental) commonplace book filled with ideas for a new collection of short stories (and just in time! Somebody had to do something, to fight this desperate shortage of horrific short fiction…)

Everyone knows that the shock of being saturated in an alien environment is a wondrous kickstart for cracked-out creativity, but while many of us draw inspiration from the peculiar nature of their hometowns, secure in writing what they know, many of us can’t resist the urge to write ourselves into places no sane tourist would ever want to visit. My first book is set largely in California locales I know by heart, but the sequel chewed through its leash and rambled from Idaho to Iraq by way of a radioactive atoll in the South Pacific, and I am told I did a decent job of painting those locales, by people who have experienced them in vivo.

But there is something tangible, yet elusive, that informs a real sense of place. No scattershot use of street names and italicized jargon will truly nail it, and no parading of contrived local color will ever really nail the soul of a city or a jungle or Roman catacomb, unless you’ve gotten its stink in your hair, and left your sweat on its stones. But people who believe that probably also can’t look a loved one in the eye and lie with complete conviction; and I’ll bet their books aren’t all that convincing, either.

Because experiencing an environment and relating its genius loci are two distinct skills. Living there does not naturally empower the writer to make the reader live there. If I’ve read one book that trots out the mystique and magic of New York, I’ve read a hundred, and a skeptic could convincingly argue that only a handful of the authors need have lived there, and the rest have all been cribbing, and getting the rest out of travel books and maps. I get it! Greenwich Village is a decayed bohemian mantrap, crawling with aging hippies and skeevy punkers, and the limousines cruising the feeding frenzy of Wall Street are like sharks.

Yes indeed, New York is really that awesome. A huge part of its mystique is that every corner of it has been immortalized in stories, song, movies and TV, so that we all feel like we’ve lived there, and actually visiting it feels like stepping into mythology. Double ditto with Los Angeles: every genre writer who lived there seemed to see it through Raymond Chandler’s eyes until David Schow rediscovered what an unspeakably seedy mutant hell-hive Hollywood had become.

So please, if you live in New York, set your book somewhere exotic, like New Jersey. And remember how much an exotic setting can serve as a backdrop for an amazing story. It takes a lot of work, but it’s not impossible to make the reader feel like you’ve been there, and bring them into it so they feel they have, as well.

In Song Of Kali, Dan Simmons conveys a traveler’s familiarity with India to rival Forster’s Passage To India, the sights and smells and sickness interwoven with a keen eye for the details that betray the spirit of the place that few can capture by imagination alone. In Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime, his surrealistic Central America is a fever dream of detail born of vividly recalled life experience. But is evoking a sense of place without having experienced it really that much harder to pull off than any other kind of lie?

With Mother’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my mom’s choices made me into the adult, the father and the writer I’ve become. (Thinking is easier and cheaper than shopping.)

And aside from concluding that my mom is better than your mom, I realized that she gave me a gift I don’t suppose many horror writers really ever got from their parents and other family. My mom didn’t just teach me to read, or encourage me to write, draw or make music; she never once, to my recollection, discouraged me from reading or writing horror, and never tried to make me feel guilty about honestly expressing myself, beyond her inveterate critical comment, “I think I’m getting a migraine.”

Many reading this might disagree, but I believe that much of horror lit’s inferiority complex begins in the home, and it’s deeply rooted in the writer’s psyche, by the time we start making friends and picking fights on message boards.

We all grew up reading the same anthologies in the 80’s boom, and each and every one was prefaced with variants, sometimes elegant, often pugnacious, on the defense of horror; proclaiming its prehistoric pedigree and its sneaky presence in so many mainstream classics, and maybe taking a stab at the catharsis argument, or a more daring poke at the real appeal such atrocious stories could offer to damaged/enlightened souls, and the subtle, superhuman powers conferred on them thereby. We shook our heads at the ignorance of our elders for banning EC Comics and marginalizing and editing Cronenberg and Carpenter movies, but we must have internalized the judgment on horror as frivolous and morbid at best, and corrupting trash, at worst.

Reading Stephen King, I have always wrestled with the paradox of how the most successful writer of all time could so plainly feel a deep stigma about doing what he loved to do. But King’s predicament always seemed weirder to me than it might to most, because I started reading King at age 8.

When I complained to my third-grade teacher about the lame in-class reading books, she gave me The Shining. She knew I loved monsters because I drew them on every piece of schoolwork, and she knew my mom, because I attended the school where my mom taught (never in her class, but got beat up monthly, just the same, thanks, Mom!). She did not clear it with my mom specifically, but she also took me to see Dawn Of The Dead and bought me my first Fangoria. (And yes, there were times when I wished Ms. Robbins was my mom. Two stupid times.)

My mom was not into horror at all; she loves anything heavier than Kurt Vonnegut would put her into catatleptic fits. I once tricked her into going to see Children Of The Corn, and she had a continuous panic attack from the opening meat slicer scene to the ludicrous flaming tomato god climax, but she didn’t drag me out, and she never asked me why I couldn’t stop laughing at the gory bits.

I hear a lot of other writers talk about how their families have problems with their work. Some of us who come from deeply religious backgrounds or conservative parts of the country often say that they have to lie or even hide what they write about, and while I think this conflict might give more of an edge to the work than otherwise, it often leads to a sameness of tone, that makes so much of modern horror collectively, I think, kind of a bummer.

I don’t think even a plurality of us came from physically abusive homes, and yet child abuse is a horror staple as ubiquitous as the showoff serial killer and the sexy kickass vampire hunter who’s also a vampire. I won’t say so much, but I’ll ask the peanut gallery, if their families disapprove of what they do, and how they cope, and most importantly, how it affects their writing.
But oh yeah, I was talking about my mom…
My childhood was messy even by 70’s standards, and I am told that I was a very angry kid. She claims not to remember big chunks of it, but I remember always feeling loved, despite all the awful things I did. (My worst fallout from reading The Shining was, I called another kid an “officious little prick” at school; he broke a clipboard over my head, and I stabbed him with a pencil… but he later claimed that the “big words” hurt the worst.)
My mom never spanked me; the worst punishment I could get was solitary confinement in the bathroom, until I turned twelve and she found my Walkman and comic books. She worried about me, but she didn’t try to medicate or change me. We went to therapy for a while, and it was kind of fun, and we went to church a few times in my whole childhood, always a different one. Maybe it was because she was feeling spiritually insecure, but I sometimes think she just wanted me to see what it was like. Now, she irregularly attends a nondenominational syncretic church with surfing monks, because nothing about it gives her a headache.
We traveled a lot on the cheap when I was a kid, and backpacked for weeks at a time in the Sierras. I read a King-sized novel almost every day, ate a box of Captain Crunch on the road (the only time I got sugary cereals was on the trail), and I learned to respect total silence, and to put complex streams of thought together over hours and days. I brought that peace back with me, and I can still have it, whenever I need it.
She seldom put her foot down about what entertainment I could consume, and sharpened my wiles with her feeble efforts to thwart me staying up all night watching Godzilla movies, or sneaking into Scanners or The Thing, instead of Popeye or Megaforce.
What I guess I’m trying to say is, my mom somehow nurtured my creative adult self without ever trying to tame it, so I never had to defend what I loved to do to anyone, until I started writing for money. I would never have become the writer I am today, I believe, if I were made to feel I was just printing the devil’s toilet paper.
Thanks, mom. (How’s your head?)

A quick one, because what Skipp said the other day goes double for me… we’re grinding out a novel together at a rate that would shame a sweatshop overseer, but I wanted to leave you a simple question, before I could hack it to death with my own observations.

Is horror, to you, the writer and/or reader, a literature of stuff and tropes––like the western or space opera, defined by what happens in it––or is it a literature of effect, defined solely by how it makes you feel?

I have always proudly described myself as a horror writer––the blank stares, frankly, turn me on. But as I mature and start to develop a persona in the kind of stories I write, I’m finding a whole new level of glass ceiling in the editorial plane. Many editors, while praising the craft of the works, are turning them down because they stray outside a defined “horror” trope. With few exceptions, I’ve read their publications, and know what they do, but it’s apparently a presumptuous mistake to suppose they might want something different. That something unexpected might be, you know… scary?

At a time when markets are dying off and readership is steadily bleeding away to less demanding, more interactive media, I wonder if this isn’t a potentially lethal trait within our genre… namely, the tendency to think of horror stories as anything with vampires, zombies, werewolves and other familiar types. I’ve read westerns with werewolves and crime dramas with vampires, and even these hybrids tend to weaken both their parent genres, instead of building on them. As someone who grew up more enthralled by David Cronenberg than Dracula, I always believed that horror could be extracted from anywhere fear lurks, and soon found the creature features on TV and in books stamped “horror” were the antidote for the night terrors that plagued me as a child.

Just as fantasy has painfully liberated itself from the sword & sorcery clichés that defined it, so horror could grow out of the ghetto it’s been contained in, by looking at the basic tropes we draw stories from, and following the roots of fear out of the familiar, almost comforting funhouse elements we’ve been playing with, for so long. The romance genre covers all feminine aspirations, from a solid marriageable square to a dashing, ne’er-do-well rogue, but its sticky appeal is codified in all kinds of formulae. That works for romance, because it’s escape to a particular refuge. Horror promises no such refuge, but in offering people familiar zombies and ancient evils every time out, aren’t we just making unlovely romance novels?

OK, I said I wouldn’t hack this to death, but damn… OK, I really should be crucifying somebody right now, so let me pose it to you, on my way out: What is horror, to you? Is it any story with monsters and death and grue, or is it any story that seeks to unsettle and wipe that smirk off the face of your naked soul?

(Damn it, where’s my nail gun?)

Thanks,
Cody

NAMING ALL YOUR BABIES
By Cody Goodfellow

I read once in a book on numerology that when Napoleon Bonaparte changed the spelling of his surname from Buonoparte, he changed his destiny, for the value of his revised name foretold his defeat. Alternately, my friend Jeromy is totally unlike any other Jeremy I’ve ever met, though his odd spelling was an accident caused by his Mom being really high when she filled out the birth certificate.

It almost always stops my writing dead, when I have to come up with a name for a character or, worse, a company. While I’ll have the names of my main characters firmly in mind, there’s always a host of supporting players who could be pegged in the outline as “the doctor” or “enigmatic night nurse who communicates only in coded enemas” (thanks, Quirk Generator!), but who now have to be endowed with that which identifies us as unique, and, arguably, shapes the nature of their lives.

Names are sacred; Adam didn’t do much of anything but name things, until he was forced to invent pants. With a name, you can do so much more than just apply for a fraudulent line of credit. You have insight into the named one’s life, and his or her parents’ hopes and dreams for them. Few of us were named in haste or indifference, and even traditionalist parents who stick to the apostolic table for all given names often try to spice up the birth certificate to give their precious snowflake a tiny gleam of extra specialness. I once worked with a guy named Rand John Montoya. He had seven brothers, all named for apostles, but on their middle names. Their first names were ALL Rand.

I bring this up because too often, the names I come across in reading fiction stop me as decisively as when I have to write them myself, but it’s too often because a careless or ill-fitting or just plain dumb name is like the loose thread in an otherwise well-woven lie.

Many parents have no imagination; sadly, it’s not a prerequisite for becoming a parent. But if they have any, or think they have any, they will often bring all of it to bear, as nowhere else, on the naming of their child. The world will use their children for good or ill, but to the extent that they can shape fate, they will try, by claiming some destiny for their offspring with a nifty handle.

At least they try. Somebody, once, thought Mildred a fetching name for a girl, and Seymour a fine name for a man. In naming a character, you’re reverse-engineering their lives, retroactively creating the pressure of living with an awkward name, or living up to a storied or evocative one. Even in America, where anyone can run a doomed campaign for president, no kid can be named Brad and not turn out loud and obnoxious, any more than a girl named Candy can escape the gravity of the stripper pole.

Too often, the names of peripheral or supporting––and even major––characters in an ill-christened story sound like roles in a movie. They can tell you too much, and they smack of second-hand reality, inhabited by types hatched out of central casting right before the action begins, and not people who have had to sign checks and permission slips and defend their name on the playground. If your hard-nosed private eye is named Harry Canyon or Bolt Upright, he probably had a real hard time in school, what with all the other junior gumshoes and dames scoring their first double-entendres off him. Perhaps, like many people unsatisfied with their numerological lot, he changed his name from Tim Weinersen.

This is a whole other tricky patch for some writers, especially in nicknames, and particularly especially with regard to underworld crime figure names. Guys like Scarface Al Capone or Ben “Bugsy” Siegel would defenestrate any douchebag who called them by their nicknames, which the cops often coined and spread to goad guys they couldn’t collar outright.

Even in a world where clueless underworld hacks learn how to carry themselves and conduct business by watching gangster movies, criminals, like artists, religious visionaries and everyone else, create new identities for themselves that they want to live in. And foreign names mean something: the syllables can’t be interchangeably slapped together to make something Italian-sounding or plausibly Chinese. And all of this goes DOUBLE for hillbilly and redneck names.

Even a plain, unassuming handle meant to help someone fit in will have some sense of a person having conceived it. Sure, most people’s names are rather plain, as are their lives.
For God’s sake, don’t write about those people.

I get by the naming stumbling block when I can by keeping a notepad where I jot down names and sundry other shit that sticks in my mind, but just as often, a good name will lurk for weeks or months until I need an appropriately eccentric yet believable handle. The right name does more than fit with a full-grown character’s life; it creates a history and a destiny, or the illusion of same. Sometimes, a trip through the phone book is needed. But it’s never something I take lightly, because the characters should be plausible enough lies to fool your mom, if they’re going to be any help with their part of the story you’re trying to tell.

Giving birth to all these people at once is a pain, and it would be nice if they named themselves, as they sometimes do, but if you make a habit of giving the peripheral names in your cast as thorough a vetting as your principals, you’ll be able to do it, as I hope to one day, without the crutch of Jeromy’s mom’s old epidural.