Richard Dansky

It was at the Chicago World Horror Con, a lot of people sitting at a long table in a long room in a long stretch of hotel that was more or less the basement. At least, I think it was. I know a lot of people who got lost once or twice trying to find it.

The occasion was Mort Castle’s writing workshop, and the room was full of very serious writerly types at various stages of incubation. We were there to learn at the feet of the master, or, at the very least near them, and at the end of the first day’s session he’d given us homework. It was a simple assignment, really – a short sketch about someone who’d disappointed you. Write it, print it out, be prepared to read it to the rest of the class on day 2.

My then-girlfriend (now my wife) and I had gone back to her apartment after the con had broken up (or, more accurately, had broken down) and taken turns at her computer hammering out our pieces. 150 words, polished and repolished and oh-my-God-what-if-he-hates-it and printed out in triplicate because one copy might get run over or thrown up on or something and two just didn’t seem like enough.

And as we trooped into the session, there was the day’s guest writer. Gary Braunbeck, invited in to sit in judgment and critique on what we had to show. Truth be told, at that point I didn’t exactly know who Gary was. I just knew that he was An Important Writer come to sit in judgment on all us velveteen writer types, and whose name elicited knowing nods (from those who’d read his work) or panicked eye-widening (from those who hadn’t and thought that there would be a quiz).

We went around the room, reading our own work. The content broke down with eerie precision along gender lines. The women had pieces about parental abandonment or humiliation, about trauma and abuse. The men had funny stories about Beatles action figures and bicycles and the like. To a man, I think, we felt ours didn’t measure up.

Mine was about a baseball glove – a Cesar Cedeno autographed model, to be particular. Well, that, and not getting into a Little League game where everyone was supposed to play, and other inane traumas of youth. And Gary waited until I finished, and he said this:

“You got beaten up a lot as a kid, didn’t you?”

He said more than that, of course, all of which was tremendously helpful as I struggled toward coherence in my writing. He was very gracious outside the workshop as well, through the rest of the convention and beyond, and I read a bunch of his stuff in a hurry so the next time we talked I wouldn’t be quite as unedumacated.

But those first words stuck with me. They’d pop up at the oddest times – mid-gaming magazine interview, during intense writing jags, driving cross-country – and eventually I got the message. Build a damn story around them already. It only took three years, mind you, but that’s just me. I’m cautious about these things.

But the story couldn’t just be about the words, of course. It was the words and the situation and the first flush of anticipated humiliation as those words came out, and somehow that all had to be captured, hunted down and nailed in place so that I could drive umpteen hours in peace, or at least give other voices in my head a chance to be heard.

So I wrote it. I decided early on that it had to be a riff on the hoary “write what you know” truism, and that it had to be at least moderately unpleasant, and that those words – “You got beaten up a lot as a kid, didn’t you?” – would be at the beginning. It went through about nine different permutations, including the one where the kindly writing instructor turns out to be a Lovecraftian boojum who eats the hapless student, and the one wherein it turns out all of the attendees are ghosts, and the one, well, never mind. They all popped up, got tried on for size, and discarded, because they didn’t support what by then I had come to regard as The Line.

What I ended up with, ultimately, was quieter than what I’d anticipated. Smaller in scope. More personal for the characters, as opposed to for me. And, because it was a horror story about a horror writer and God knows the world needs a few dozen more of those, it promptly set about languishing in the “not yet sold” pile. I didn’t mind much, though. It was out of my head and on paper (or at least, on electrons), and I didn’t hear The Line popping up at odd and occasionally embarrassing intervals any more. Eventually, I came to regard the writing of that particular story as more of an exorcism than anything else, and pulled it out of the submission rotation.

Which, of course, is precisely when it sold. Sold to a friend and fellow writer who’d helped start a podcasting horror magazine and was bravely co-editing it. She’d read it back in embryonic stage, had occasionally asked about its progress, and ultimately pounced.

Thankfully, it didn’t put up much resistance, and now you can find it online at Pseudopod (Gratuitous plug! Gratuitous plug!), read by a man I’ve never met for the listening pleasure of thousands.

But that story doesn’t happen without Gary Braunbeck, without that one line and that one instance and the understanding of how I could have felt at that moment. It wouldn’t have happened without that particular dynamic between instructor and student, without the insight of the commentary and the reaction of the students to it, and all of those combining to present a vision or two of “here’s where this might go.” So thank you, Gary and Mort, for setting the stage for that particular piece of literary mayhem, and for opening the door to others.

And yes, I did get beaten up a lot as a kid. Maybe this one time, it helped.