Weston Ochse

I’m not here to tell you what to do. I have no great words of wisdom to present to you. I’m just a writer who spends his time working, writing and being with family. In fact, if you were hoping for some long lost secret of writing you might as well go somewhere else. I have nothing really important to say. Nothing other than JESUS CHRIST ON A POGO STICK but I just want to play an effing video game. Any video game. Even Ms. Pacman would do. Maybe Dig Dug. Frogger. Oh! How about Asheron’s Call? Mamamamamama! I miss it. I need it. I can almost taste it. Oh please oh please oh please let me have it.

Just for a moment.

I can stop.

I’m a big boy.

I know when enough is enough.

Please. Can I just play one game? One measly little game won’t hurt anyone will it? I’ll even be quiet. I’ll turn the surround sound off. Maybe even subtitle it in German. That way it’s educational. Will that do? Please. You won’t even know I’m there. It’ll just be me and the game and the German subtitles and nothing else. I won’t even need anything. You don’t have to feed me. You don’t have to give me anything to drink. I won’t even ask to use the bathroom. Okay. Okay.. If you won’t let me play, maybe I can just sit here a while and watch you play. It’s so cool. It’s so smooth. I can’t believe what they can do with 3D nowadays. Man, for a computerized girl, she’s a hottie! OHMYGOD! Did you just see that dragon swoop in and take that guy out? OHMYGOD! That is so badass!

…and that’s my problem. Video games are wicked cool. I love them. I could play them every hour of every day and be about as happy as a person could be. Really! Honestly! That’s the way I feel.

So then how is it that other people are playing video games and kicking three-dimensional monster booty and I’m not? Don’t I deserve to fly? Can’t I have Boots of Speed, a Wand of Life Regeneration and a +20 Bow? Am I such a bad guy that I’m not allowed to do what everyone else is doing?

That fact is that I made a decision in 2000 to become a writer. Knowing my addictive personality and the pure joy I have for games, I knew that if I was going to be any success at all, I needed to concentrate on the business of writing. And for a new writer, the business of writing meant that I’d spend all of my time writing, talking about writing, reading and then writing some more. I couldn’t afford to play games. I had the dream of becoming a writer, maybe even someone special, maybe even someone like Bradbury or Heinlein or one of those writers I awed over when I was growing up and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I decided that writing was the most important thing…but not before I almost lost it all.

Here’s my story.

I’m an OG– Original Gamer. I began playing the first boxed set of D&D when it came out. Bless my parents, but they gave it to me for Christmas. When was that? 1978? 1979? I soon progressed to playing with friends, staying up all night, learning the olfactory ramifications of marathon game play and the culinary delights of day old pizza. I had a 15th Level kick-ass Halfling Fighter-Thief named Racker who worshipped the Nehwon God Death and whose sole purpose in life was to create chaos in places of order and restore order to places of chaos. He was a misunderstood little man-thing whose only real fault was his vorpal beserker sword which played hell with his ability to make friends and keep them.

Over the next several years I played at a regular rate, not too much or too little, just enough to keep me and my 20-sided dice happy. Then in 1986 two things happened– I began playing D&D in earnest and the Commodore 64 came out. Games like The Bard’s Tale and Gunship hooked me forever. My God, do you mean that you can play a game like D&D on the computer? Over the next fifteen years I’d buy computers for the sole purpose of playing games like The Bard’s Tale, rationalizing that the machine was a good educational tool and would help me finish college. Balderdash. All I cared about were the games.

As far as D&D, I was in the infantry at Fort Carson, Colorado, and if we weren’t playing at war, we were playing at D&D. It was then that I met one of my very best friends, and the Fabio for the main character of my next novel, RECALLED TO LIFE, Kimo Kalanui. Like a junk merchant pusher I introduced him to D&D and all the glories of the game. A year later, he moved away to Germany to defend the free world from the evils of the Warsaw Pact and teach the commies the benefits of ice dice logic. When I next saw him in 1991 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he’d become the Dungeon Master King of the Cosmos with gaming books in German, French; even Russian back-alley DM cookbooks that were hastily cribbed in Cyrillic with the threat of Siberian gulags awaiting the proletariat gamers who’d created them. Kimo had dice I never heard of. He had hit charts that narrowed the wound down to the pinkie. He’d become a demigod in the Hawaiian DM Mythos.

Over the next six years we’d play D&D every chance we got. When we tired of that, we’d play Shadowrun or Marvel Superheroes or the Spellfire Card Game or the Wildcats Card Game. Our group of permanent players was me, Kimo, Rod, Mike and Dirk. We had great times, we died heroically and often and enjoyed every minute of it. Like all good things, however, this too came to pass and I was moved on by the Army.

After a divorce and a move, I landed on my feet in Arizona. I’d been writing a little bit and decided that with the move I’d dedicate myself to writing. I wrote twenty stories before the first was published. Then I wrote the stories for Scary Rednecks and they became popular. Before I knew it, people knew my name and I was realizing an infinitesimal amount of success. I went to Denver for the World Horror Convention. I met Dick Laymon who admitted to liking my writing. I met Doug Clegg who told David Silva and Don D’Auria that I was a guy to watch. I met this hot chick named Yvonne Navarro who kissed me on the cheek when I left, her way of saying that she liked me. Life couldn’t have been any better.

Oh yes it could. Because when I returned home, I got an email from Kimo telling me to jack in and tune out. The gang had returned, he said, and was playing online in the world of Asheron’s Call, and for $9.99 a month, a piece of software and a little hardware, I too could fight alongside my running mates of old, kicking monster ass and looking good doing it.

So I Jacked in and tuned out…for four months. Asheron’s Call is a fantasy MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game for Microsoft Windows-based PCs, released in late 1999. It features a vast, nearly-seamless 3D world simultaneously occupied by hundreds of players and fantasy creatures. (Wikpedia). We used third-party software called Roger Wilco, the predecessor to Voice-Over-IP, where we operated using the equivalent of tactical headsets. We were a hunter-killer unit who’d spend time taking down big nasties like the insectile Othoi, hulking Lugians and berserker Rottweiler Reed Sharks using the finest of magical weapons, armor and items that could be bartered, bought, found or made from the bodies of said nasties. Good God Lord of Junk Merchants but it was a glorious season of mayhem and monsters. I played day and night. I’d get up to go run in the morning, come back and play, take a shower then hurry to work, rush home for lunch and play and go back to work and think about playing then come home and play until I couldn’t stop my forehead from bouncing off the v-g-b-h-n-j-m keys, then wake up and do it all again. I did this day after day after day after day and would have continued, but my computer crashed and I lost my character and I had to reload the game and start a new character, and it was then I realized that when I’d started it was May and, oh look at the time, now it’s September.

What had I done? Where had I gone? I started to remember some of the things that I was supposed to do. Doug Clegg had spoken with Don D’Auria, editor of Leisure Books, who told me that I should submit a novel to him. For a writer to be told to send in a novel is an incredible opportunity. I was working on Scarecrow Gods at the time. You remember that novel, the one which was finally published in 2005 and won the Bram Stoker Award in 2006. I told Don about it and he said it sounded interesting and to send it in. Sometimes I can’t help but think that those four months equaled four years of publishing purgatory (to this day I still haven’t published Scarecrow Gods in mass market form). And what about Yvonne? She all but smacked me over the head with a hot-lipped pass and I ignored her. Would she ever talk to me again? Had I ruined my chances for good? What was I thinking?

Honestly, it was like coming out of a fog. It was as if I’d been drugged or placed in a trance the entire time. I’ve had two major surgeries where I’ve spent a month each in the Land of Percocet Fairies and it wasn’t until I was off the drug that I realized how seriously messed up I’d been. But instead of percocet it’s Warcraft, Dungeon Siege, Age of Empires, City of Heroes and City of Villians and Guild Wars–or in my case Asheron’s Call.

Brian Knight said it well. “Video games are fun, but addicting, and potentially crippling to the imagination. Games give you everything. You don’t have to work for it, which is appealing to many, who consider reading a chore. In the end it’s a bad trade though, because while video games may engage your attention, they will never expand your imagination.”

They not only engage my attention, they hijack it.

From an article on C/NET:

Dennis Bennett was failing his college classes, his marriage was in trouble, and he wasn’t being much of a father to his 1-year-old son. But he had progressed to Level 58 as Madrid, the Great Shaman of the North, his character in the online role-playing game “EverQuest,” and that was all that mattered at the time.

“The game almost ruined my life,” said the network engineer in southern Indiana. “It was my life. I ceased being me; I became Madrid, the Great Shaman of the North. Thinking of it now, I almost cringe; it’s so sad.”

Long a subject of half-serious jokes among devotees of computer and video games, game addiction is receiving serious attention lately as fantasy games such as “EverQuest“–nicknamed “EverCrack” by many players– proliferate.

As I read this article, I knew that Dennis was me. EverCrack. YES! I still remember Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. I knew it all, even the special codes and I could make that hooker do things even hookers blushed at.

By now you see how I am. I want to be a writer, but with a video game I can’t be trusted. If you were to leave me
alone in your house with a video game and a bowl of goldfish for me to feed, then you deserve what happens. You’d come home a week later for gold fish sushi and I’d proudly show you my brand new Chainfrinkle Level 15 Anti-Dragon Spit Armor and my Vorpal Nose Clippers of Most Gruesome Death that I won off a Player Killer who underestimated me at 4 AM on Tuesday morning, right after my speed injection of Cheetos and Jolt Cola, and you’d have no one to blame but yourself.

I admire those who can write and play and succeed. I can’t do it. I want to. But I can’t. I am, however, willing to learn. Just give me a game and watch me try. Come on. Trust me. I’ll even use German subtitles and turn the sound off. Just give me five minutes. Or ten. Or a lifetime.

_____

Thanks to the boys and girls at The Other Dark Place for their help
with my research for this article. Thanks also to the makers of video
games whose products are beyond amazing, remarkably addictive and
the digital kryptonite of this border town writer who goes by the name Weston Ochse.

by Weston Ochse

The horror writing industry annually bestows the Bram Stoker Award on unsuspecting writers, editors and publishers to acknowledge superior achievement in one form or another. This year, my novel Scarecrow Gods, was voted onto the final ballot by the membership of the Horror Writer’s Association, and then last night during an awards ceremony in Newark, was awarded the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in First Novel.

People have their own philosophies about awards and what they mean. Some of my friends would as soon trade an award for a good cup of java. Others can be found sacrificing naked Bali Bushman in front of their trophies every weekend. Well, I haven’t received a lot of awards in my life. I have a baseball trophy from when I was eight. I have a speech writing trophy from the Woodsman of America awarded when I was ten. I have a few martial arts trophies gathering dust in a closet. After twenty years in the Army I have four rows of medals, many which were given just for being in the right place at the right time. And that’s it, unless you include a paperweight I won for a writing contest, which by the way is pretty cool because it has a bat inside.

So this award means a lot to me. To be recognized by my peers for excellence in a novel that I was so nervous about, to receive accolades for all those long lonely nights, and to know that there are people in the universe who think astonishingly highly of my work, is a personal redemption of the first measure. I’m damn happy and not afraid to say it.

Therefore I’m going to do a little laurel-resting before I get back to working on my novel, tip back a beer or two and watch a sunset while this good feeling still fills me. And I leave you with the speech I wrote that Mike Arnzen, three-time Stoker Winner in his own right, gave on my behalf to a roomful of writers, editors, publishers and fans. I leave this to you, because many of you didn’t hear it, and if there’s anyone that I need to thank, it’s you.

Stoker Award Acceptance Speech

Absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for this award. It means so much to me.

My parents showed me early on that the path through life begins and ends with literature. I grew up reading Hemingway, Tolkien, Steinbeck, Terry Brooks, King and Straub. Their work astounded me, carried me from adventure to adventure and made me yearn to be a writer. As I struggled to learn how to write, I read Clive Barker, China Mieville, Doug Clegg, and Dick Laymon, admiring their particular strengths and wondering if I could ever write as well…wishing I could write as well.

During the two years it took me to write Scarecrow Gods, as I sat alone in the dark with only the light of the screen to guide my path, I doubted I could do it. When I let the book sit for a year without submitting it, it was because I doubted that it was good enough to read. When Delirium accepted the book, I was amazed, and thought that I’d really pulled a fast one, wondering what I’d do when I was finally figured out.

But I shouldn’t have worried. To win this award and be acknowledged by my peers means that my doubts were unfounded. I can write well. People care about my characters. They want to know about Maggot Man and Billy Bones. They care about Danny and want him to find his sister. The Land of Inside-Out is wondrous indeed.

So thanks to my publisher, Shane Staley, for his confidence in me, and his advice on the best way to end Scarecrow Gods. Do you realize that this means he’s published three Best First Novels in a row! If that doesn’t tell you about his savvy, it should.

Thanks to Bob Strauss for championing Maxom Phinxs and telling everyone who’d listen how great a book Scarecrow Gods was. Thanks to Alan Clark for an amazing cover. Thanks to booksellers everywhere, especially Matt Swartz, Roy Robbins, Larry Roberts and Clarkesworld Books. Thanks to my mom and dad and my most lovely and talented wife, Yvonne. Thanks to you, the members of the Horror Writer’s Association for this recognition. But most of all, thanks to my fans, those of you who keep track of what I’m doing, read my stories, and shout to the walls of the world how much you love my work. Without you, I would be nothing but that self-doubting writer sitting alone in the dark with only the light of my screen to guide my path.

Thank you so much.

For a complete list of winners, you can find them at the Horror Fiction News Network.

Take Care

By Weston Ochse

Why go to writer’s conventions?

Is it the free beer? Is it the free liquor? Or is it an attempt to deplete the vast reservoir of stale chips commonly found at parties at 3 A.M.? Or is a convention merely a reason to get out from behind your computer to interact with humans rather than emoticons? I say it’s all the above, but most importantly, conventions are a writer’s vehicle for networking. So read closely, because the most secret and mysterious Davinci Code of convention networking was bestowed on me this weekend during a secret cabal meeting in room 312, and I have broken my sacred vow of silence to bestow it on you.

I recently attended the World Horror Convention in San Francisco where all manner of writers, fans, editors, publishers, artists and actors were in attendance. Conventions of this ilk are the pinnacle of networking and allow writers such as myself networking opportunities that don’t normally exist. The problem is that I don’t always take advantage of all opportunities presented me. Together, using four situations that occurred during the World Horror Convention, let’s see if I succeeded in networking.

SITUATION 1. Me and fellow authors Chris Golden, Ed Lee, James Moore and Yvonne Navarro (frequently referred to as my wife) decide that Friday was a brilliant day to take a few hours off from the convention and trek to Fisherman’s Wharf. Chris and Jim leave early, hiking over the San Francisco hills. Yvonne, Ed Lee and I arrive a little later by taxi. We talk over an amazing seafood dinner, tour the wharf, then decide to forego a taxi and walk back to the hotel—at least 20 blocks over some serious hills. Picture this if you will…me happily singing Army cadence with Chris snapping jokes, Jim trying to get his knee to work like they had when he was twenty and Lee inventing curses as he flips me off, the latter of which I have a video of that I will post when I return from Miami.

The hills get longer, the curses get louder and the knee gets worse. I’m still screaming cadence—

Up the hill,

No sweat.

Ain’t shit,

Better yet.

My zest for the challenge gets the better of me as I scream louder and louder. At first Lee enjoys it, recalling memories of his own Army days, but the more I call cadence, the more he begins to hate me. Yvonne soon begins to give me looks only a wife can give, but I ignore them. The only one unfazed is Chris who’s busy joyously making smart remarks about all of us as he stomps forward. I race ahead of everyone up an impossible incline, ignoring the pain in my quads, belting cadence at the top of my lungs. When I get to the top of that hill, I spin and begin filming. I forget who I am. I forget where I am. I begin filming, feeling like Francis Ford Coppola directing Apocalypse Now San Francisco Redux, screams escaping from my mouth as I get whacked out into it—

Your sister does it

Piece of cake.

Your momma does it,

For God’s sake.

Lee flips me off again. Jim groans but keeps moving. Yvonne’s glare bores into me. Chris continues to chide. And me, I scream—

You can do it,

Or I’m gonna kill.

Get your ass,

Up the hill!

So rate this networking experience. How’d I do? Think I helped my career?

SITUATION 2. Many of you know that for the third year in a row, I was put in charge of the Gross Out Contest Bouncers. We don’t really break shins, but we are the judge’s props placed amid the chaos of the contest to create fear and uncertainty about the safety of the Gross Out contestant. This year was no exception. We had a terrific crew—Jim Moore, Drew Williams, Nick Cook, Minh, Steven Shrewsberry, John Hay and myself. Contestants fled before us. Audience members huddled in fear. Everything was great with the world.

Then John Pelan convinces the actor Bill Mosely to do a cold read of Goon as a spontaneous addition to the contest. I saw House of 1000 Corpses. I saw The Devils Rejects. And I was in awe. But I wasn’t going to let that awe interfere with my job. Before Mr. Billy Badass Mosely takes the mike, I grab it from him and proclaim to the universe my duty as a bouncer saying, You better entertain and gross us out Mr. Mosely or else I’ll rip that mike from your fucking hands and kick you off our stage just like all the other poor motherfuckers.

The crowd roars for a moment and I am god! Bill Mosely gives me the look he gave the old woman at the beginning of Devil’s Rejects right before he kills her.

So rate this networking experience. How’d I do? Think I helped my career?

SITUATION 3. It wasn’t but a few minutes later that the next situation occurs. After Bill Mosely read, the judges had finished their deliberation and Brian Keene grabbed the first Asian in the room to help him count the hanging chads (Bouncer Minh), Rain Graves asks the bouncers to stall. Several bad jokes later, and with the crowd getting ugly, John Pelan speaks up from his place at the table. Weston, he shouts. Show us your tits and I’ll give you a contract. My head twists and my jaw drops int
o the expression made famous on Looney Tunes for What the fuck did he just say? I knew he was talking about publishing a story I’d submitted to him a while back for the next Darkside Anthology, but what the hell was this need to show my body parts to a ballroom filled with people.

Several thoughts ran through my head—

Why does John Pelan want to see my tits?

How badly do I want to be in the Darkside Anthology?

Why does John Pelan want to see my tits?

Will I respect myself in the morning?

Will my wife respect me in the morning?

Why does John Pelan want to see my tits?

I hesitate for a full minute, the crowd cheering me on, John cajoling from the stage, my wife waiting to see what I’d do. Finally, I make my decision. I grab the microphone and say, You all heard it. You are my witnesses. Consider this a verbal contract.

And I did it. I showed my tits to the world, one at a time, side shots, until the whole audience howled.

So rate this networking experience. How’d I do? Think I helped my career?

SITUATION 4. Peter Straub is not only an icon, but is arguably the most accessible ‘most successful’ writer out there. Since 2002, we’ve been on a first name basis, something that continually blows my mind because of the great respect I have for the man and his accomplishments. Every convention, I make a point of spending a few minutes with Peter. Not because I’m sucking up. Not because I want anything from him. None of the reasons you’re thinking of. I speak with him because I genuinely like him. I think he’s one hell of a guy.

Sunday afternoon, near the end of the convention, Peter sat down beside me and we chatted for a few moments. We didn’t talk about the craft. We didn’t talk about anything of great import. The world was safe from our speculation. We just asked about each other, talking about his health, my dog, and other things personal and private. It didn’t last more than a few moments, then he went his way, and I went mine.

So rate this networking experience. How’d I do? Think I helped my career?

There you have it– four situations where I was able to network with fellow writers. Did I help my career? Let’s see the results.

SITUATION 1. Ed Lee sent a restraining order. Jim Moore sent his hospital bill. My wife is pissed. Chris Golden loved the whole thing. And my voice is hoarse from all the screaming.

SITUATION 2. Bill Mosely promised me later that if I ever set foot in Hollywood, he’d introduce me to the real cast of Devil’s Rejects and eat my spleen for lunch.

SITUATION 3. A warrant is out for my arrest for lewd and lascivious acts.

SITUATION 4. This seems to be the only thing I did where bodily harm wasn’t promised me.

* * *

What do we learn from this? Tone it down? The road to success is paved with calm and collected stones? Even with Peter, I didn’t help my career; I was just a friend talking to a friend. Maybe I’m in the wrong business. Maybe I just don’t understand what it takes to successfully network. Or maybe, just maybe, networking at conventions is an unconscious process we undertake that requires nothing more than us being ourselves. Some people try too hard and you can see it. Some people become stalkers instead of friends. Some people use their ego as a shield keeping everyone else at bay. I’m glad to say that in my circle of friends, this isn’t the case.

And in the end, as I sit here in Miami nearly a week after the convention, Ed Lee, Jim Moore, Chris Golden and my wife have fond memories of our Bataan Death March across the city. Bill Mosely told me how much fun he had on the stage at the Gross Out Contest. Every other author was jealous of me, admitting that tit-showing would be a small price to pay for being in Pelan’s next anthology. And Peter is still my friend.

You see, there is no Most Secret and Mysterious Davinci Code of Convention Networking. There are no secret handshakes, or cabalistic meetings in room 312. There are no passwords or He-man-woman-hater-high signs. There are no satanic rites to success. If anything I did during the WHC weekend helped my career, it was by being myself and writing well. All else was osmosis.

Weston Ochse
Coconut Grove
On the Road

By Weston Ochse

There’s that famous episode of Twilight Zone with Burgess Meredith at the end of the world; do you remember this one? Of course you do. Anyone who loves books can relate to that episode, much less writers, publishers and fans. The episode is ‘Time Enough at Last’ and refers to the henpecked booklover, one Mr. Henry Bemis, who after being the sole survivor of a nuclear war has nothing more to worry about except the time he has to read all the books he’d never been able to read. See, Mr. Bemis was a voracious book lover and all he cared about was books, so the loss of humanity was no loss to him. But then at the moment of his greatest joy, he breaks his glasses and is unable to see that which he most desires. I think I cried the first time I saw it wedged between black and white scenes of Vietnam, Zenith gas commercials and Walter Cronkite telling us how it was.

When I think of the possibility of books disappearing, I think of Henry Bemis. When I’m told that iPods and the internet will replace the book medium, I think of Henry Bemis. When I’m told that the Age of the Book has passed, I shudder and think of Henry Bemis.

How many times have you read a message board, emailed or talked about books coming to an end as a medium for reading? What about how publishers are publishing less and less? Some say it’s because King, Koontz and Rice (and Dan Brown) have the market sewn up. Others say there isn’t the same interest in books there was a decade ago. I’ve heard it all postulated virtually everywhere I go on the web, especially by some writers I know. They’re calling for the End Times. They’re harkening the Time of Bemis. If’ what they say is true, you have to believe that Heinleinian Firefighters are on their way to burn all the books because they’ve superceded obsolescence; everything worth printing is already on the internet and available on your daily podcast with Shakira’s Barefoot Confessions, USA vs Sweden Curling Championship and the Life and Times of Huggy Bear: I Used to Be Somebody.

Roll over and play dead. Bemis time is here.

Let’s look at the facts, internet usage ‘has increased an average of 18% per annum and over the last five years has reached 1 Billion users and will double within ten years.’ (Jakob Neilson of Alertbox, December 19, 2005)

‘Sixty-eight percent of American adults, or about 137 million people, use the Internet, up from 63 percent one year ago. Thirty-two percent of American adults, or about 65 million people, do not go online, and it is not always by choice. Those who are currently offline have had varying levels of exposure to the online world. One in five American adults say they have never used the Internet or email and do not live in an Internet-connected household. At the other end of the spectrum, 53 percent of home Internet users have high-speed access,’ says Pew Charitable Trust.

Books are dead. The internet rules. Strap on your iPod, book phone or mp3 library, because there’s going to be a duel at High Noon, and the librarian’s gun ain’t loaded.

This is one I know you’ve heard before…Horror is dead…a perfect place to start teaching the Bemis Condition. Once I explain it to you here, you’ll see how it applies across the board. So for those of you hyperventilating into a bag right now, breathe deeply a few more times. Hope is here.

About horror…

Since the boom of the early 1990s and the ensuing decline, there’s been a public wake for this genre where writers and fans have drunk themselves stupored, reminiscing about the good times when Horror was a real genre, horror books were really published and horror authors were read; not eBooks, not reprinted Harlan Ellison books scanned into Russian websites, not email serials, but real paper and glue books with ‘the smell.’

There’s only one problem? Where’s the body? If it’s dead, there has to be a body. Something that big is sure to start stinking and wouldn’t have gone unnoticed for long. Horror’s dead so where’s the corpse?

OKAY! WHO STOLE THE BODY OF THE HORROR GENRE?!!!

Does anyone besides me read this magazine called Locus? If you’re in the industry, meaning if you write, publish, review or are a fan of science fiction, fantasy and horror, you really should get this magazine. In addition to reviews, interviews, stats, facts, and all sorts of juicy information, Locus has a year in review where it reveals the state of the publishing industry. Their cumulative book summary this year encompasses several dozen pages and twice that many charts, graphs and tables, but there’s one that I’m going to share giving full credit. I think by looking at this you’ll see what I’m getting at.

ORIGINAL BOOKS PUBLISHED

                      2000   2001   2002   2003   2004   2005

SF Novels       230     251     256     236     253     258

Fantasy

Novels            258     282     333     340     389   &nb
sp; 414

Horror

Novels              80     151     112     171     172     212

1. I deleted categories that don’t apply.
2. Includes Y.A. Books.
3. Does not include P.O.D. or Vanity.
4. Sorry about the formatting, I can’t seem to fix this table and get it closer to the preceding paragraph.

So let me get this straight: the number of internet subscribers is through the roof, new technologies are coming out everyday that enable us to tune in and drop out, every second a new reason for us not to read is invented, yet there’s been an across the board increase in books published with the largest number jump appearing in Horror?

Yep.

So what’s the problem? There is no problem. Books aren’t going away, in fact, I think I’ve shown that books are more popular than ever. If you want to read books electronically, then do it. Upload, download, inject, infect or whatever it is called that you do to those small gadgets used to transport and view information. Read on a plane, in a train, or on the plains of Spain. Zip it, zap it, iPod it, or fire it directly into your optic nerve. Online books, stories, poems, recipes, and articles, to include this very article you’re reading now, are the kinds of things you should be reading to keep your mind from collapsing into a degenerative state of Silly Putty. The internet is a tool, so use it.

But do me a favor.

Don’t be a Bemis.

Here’s the introduction for Time Enough At Last, as said in the immortal voice of Rod Serling:

“Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself – without anyone.”

But we know that didn’t happen. He broke his glasses and was unable to read, that which he most desired. This episode of Twilight Zone is analogous to ePublishing. It could be a metaphor for the computer. It’s more than a morality tale, it’s a technology tale and a horror story of the first degree. Remember, that the only thing that limited Henry Bemis from reading was technology; the medium by which he read books which were his glasses. We’d all be Henry Bemis if books were only available online, our medium, the computer. We’re only a lightning strike, a faulty switch, a sleepy workman or a natural disaster away from becoming Henry Bemis at the end of the world. Nah. Books ain’t dead. We no better. So don’t be a Bemis.

Rod Serling said it best:

“The best-laid plans of mice and men – and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Bemis. . . in the Twilight Zone.”

By Weston Ochse

I was thinking the other day about my friends.

Not those people I went to high school with, or old army buddies, but the friends I’ve made in the writing profession. It’s amazing really how close you can get to someone without spending any real time with them, and on some occasions, never having met them at all.

I started writing in the mid-90s. Very soon I fell into a group of troublemakers in the HorrorNet Chatroom (who have come to be known as the Cabal). Most of us (with the exception of Ray Garton, Tom Picirilli, Douglass Clegg and Paul Wilson who stopped in to harass us) were at the same place in our writing, struggling to find our voice and be heard over the great chorus of creativity. Honestly, every evening was like being a member of the Little Rascals. We were close friends, eager to speak with each other and able to tell secrets that we couldn’t tell those closest to us.

Then I discovered List Serves and subscribed to a few. Darktales, MIT Writers and HorrorWriters were my favorites during those days. The lists weren’t as interactive and lacked the immediacy of the HorrorNet Chat, but they served their purpose, allowing me to reach out to a growing fan base, discover new friends and enter into business enterprises. I became the editor of the online journal Bloody Muse because of this. I collaborated with this guy from Pennsylvania on what would become a Scary Redneck franchise. I met editors, I met fans, I met fellow writers and I met friends.

Know how you can tell which ones are friends? When you meet them in real life you’re smiling like a giddy school girl and find that you have nothing to say because they already know all there is to know about you.

I remember the first time I met my Cabal Mates. I was sitting in the bar of the Drake Hotel in Denver drinking a Fat Tire wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into (my first Convention). Suddenly a bunch of inebriated ne’re-do-wells stumbled into the bar. After awhile, one came over to my table and asked if I was Weston. Five seconds later I was being introduced to the members of the Cabal and it was like we were old friends. The feelings of acceptance and friendship I experienced were those you usually felt only after years of terrestrial friendships; or after a traumatic or life-changing event.

Why was I so happy to see these folks?

I’m not the end all be all of knowledge, nor am I some great Buddha coming down from a Tibetan mountaintop to dispense wisdom, nor am I a Jungian psychologist who can tell you what dreams are made of, but I think I have this one figured out. I think it comes down to this. What we do in the backyard and in the grocery store and in our living rooms rests firmly in the realm of the normal and is a part of the lives of our friends, neighbors and family. But the out-pouring of our souls, the writing if you will, that we do in front of our computers is as personal an activity as there is. We interrogate our imagination with words and plots. We delve into the hoary depths of our fears and report what we’ve seen. Sometimes we are embarrassed with how our minds work. We don’t understand why we write what we do and we can’t stop.

Our family loves us. We have friends from high school and college and our jobs. We have our favorite checkout line at the grocery store. We know people in our towns and they know us. But for all the love and all the friendship and all the kum-ba-ya how ya doin’s that we exchange with our barber and the cute girl in aisle three, they cannot understand where the viciousness, the horror, the weirdness, the many-tentacled beasts, the vile murder, the unrelenting mayhem, the putrid grotesqueries, the rapes, the disembowelments and the just plain evilness comes from.

We’re afraid that they’ll associate what we write with who we are; and sometimes they do.

Leave behind whatever psychosis makes us do what we do. That’s for another article down the road. The fact is that we write this vile stuff and we love it. These friends I spoke of earlier, those who I never met, but felt close to– they all had one thing in common. They accepted me for what I wrote, gave me encouragement to keep doing it, and understood the catharsis inherent in the writing of it. I was able to get closer to these strangers about something very personal and dear to me than I was to my family or friends.

This isn’t an indictment on my family and friends. They’re normal people and should live normal lives, thinking normal things, doing normal tasks.

Who are we to try and make them understand what they can’t understand?

And guess what? We don’t have to.

Because of the magnificence of modern technology, we’re able to reach out and touch people of our ilk at any hour of the day or night, on message boards, chats, lists, MySpace accounts, Live Journals, blogs and instant messages. No longer are we alone in what we do. There are entire communities out there who accept and encourage us.

I wonder how writers communicated before the internet. My wife tells me of this thing called a letter. Days, sometimes weeks, would pass before a single thought could be conveyed. What a lonely existence it must have been.

So let me take a moment and thank all of my writing friends. Thank you for being there, for accepting me and encouraging me. There are those of you who I feel closer to than some members of my own family. And one day perhaps we’ll even meet.

Until next time…see you in virtuality.

By Weston Ochse

We all started somewhere. None of us appeared as fully-formed writers able to detect passive voice after that first gurgling breath.

This was especially true for me. My journey to grammatical confidence was a long one. Even after high school, it took a while to figure out what the teacher really meant when she explained to the whole class the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. I was too busy reading ahead in my literary reader, so it wasn’t until later that a friend in a critique group pointed out the difference to me along with the usage.

Grammar came to be at odd times. Sometimes I’d parse the information on my own while reading a novel or the bathroom wall at a truck stop. Other times I’d have to ask, usually depending on fellow writers, professors and critique groups for charity. On rare occasions, an editor would point out my flaws in a crimped and harried hand, barely legible instructions scrawled in the margins of a form rejection which I treasured and tried to decipher as if it were a map I’d been handed to the secret island of Published Professionals, hidden behind a layer of clouds far out in the Sea of Perseverance. On the rarest of occasions, an editor would set aside his or her own time and prepare a rejection letter detailing my grammatical malfeasance in such a way that I could not help but realize that my writing has been grotesquely suffering from ignorance.

This happened to me in 1997 the first year I began to write. Among the stories that will never see print is one called A Popular Judgment– a preachy morality tale thinly disguised as a JRR Tolkien meets Judge Roy Bean meets LA Law sword and sorcery melodrama. I remember thinking at the time that my talent was extraordinary, my plotting visionary, and the story an amazing contribution to literature. I knew in my heart of hearts that the story was destined to be placed in the Hall of the Literary King so that those few worthy souls who dared the perilous trek to grammatical excellence, could look upon it with reverent awe at the Temple at the End of the World, knowing that they could never equal the story in quality or insightfulness.

What was amazing was that it didn’t end up in the trash. For my first rejection for this story was from the magazine World’s of Fantasy and Horror, formerly and currently known to the world as Weird Tales. The rejection letter ran four pages of evenly spaced, informative and forever helpful guidance on all of the rules of grammar I’d deftly avoided while writing the story. This was no form letter, but a personalized indictment on my skill as a fictionalist, one which I took as divine guidance, instead of devilish damnation.

Among the many rules I’d trampled in my haste to see my words in print had to do with a little known (to me) concept called ‘the antecedent.’ You may have heard of this pesky invention, particularly in reference to pronouns. Clearly I had never heard of it, for the phrase ‘your continual and repeated misuse of antecedents to their pronouns rendered many passages indecipherable’ caught me entirely off guard. At first I was certain the editors were having their way with me. I figured they’d jerked the word from the ether, laid it on the page, and sent it to me, them all sitting on their thrones in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, snorting beers and laughing at my expense. So, not quite believing that my stellar writing was as indecipherable as described, and thinking the editor may have been a few beers short of an 18 Pack, I checked the dictionary. To my profound amazement, I discovered that the word did exist. Antecedent was an actual word.

Here–

From Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Main Entry: an•te•ced•ent
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Medieval Latin & Latin; Medieval Latin antecedent-, antecedens, from Latin, what precedes, from neuter of antecedent-, antecedens, present participle of antecedere to go before, from ante- + cedere to go
1 : a substantive word, phrase, or clause whose denotation is referred to by a pronoun (as John in “Mary saw John and called to him”); broadly : a word or phrase replaced by a substitute.

Seeing as how it was a real word, and not something created in an anagram engine, I was beginning to see an inkling of what they meant. After all, I had a whole bunch of pronouns in the story. I thought I knew what they were doing, but maybe they’d gotten out of control, which pronouns were prone to if left unattended.

Deciding that I’d go to the Master of All Things Grammatical to solve this problem, I called my mother and the conversation went something like this–

Me: “Hi mom. What’s incorrect use of an antecedent to a pronoun mean?”

Mom: “Hi son. I’m fine thank you. So is your father, although I keep telling him he needs to lose some weight. Too much butter, you know. Now what was your question?”

Me: “What’s incorrect use of an antecedent to a pronoun mean? I mean if I was to use this antecedent-thingy incorrectly what would happen?”

Mom: “Did you get another rejection?”

Me: “Saying I did, and pretending that I got a letter telling me that I incorrectly used the antecedent to pronouns, what would that mean?”

Mom: “You know you really should have finished college.”

Me: “Mom. Concentrate.”

Mom: “I’m just saying. They would have taught that to you in college had you attended and not decided to party your scholarship away.”

Me: “Mom. I’m going to hang up.”

Mom: Sighing dramatically, “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. He fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. Who fell down?”

Me: “What are you– Oh! That’s easy. Jack fell down.”

Mom: “And you know that because there is only one male in the preceding sentence to which the pronoun ‘he’ referred. Now, try this one. Jack and Bill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. He fell down and broke his crown and he came tumbling after. Who fell down?”

Me: “That’s just crazy. Why would Jack and Bill go up a hill?”

Mom: “Concentrate and answer the question.”

Me: “I can’t answer the question. Who’s this Bill guy anyway? I’ve never even heard of him. I have no idea who fell down. I don’t know who broke their crown. I can’t tell if it was Jack or Bill? “

Mom: “Exactly. Now go look at your story and see if there are any Jack or Bills.”

Me: “What? Who?”

And she left me to figure the rest of it out on my own. Now my Mom was a HS English Teacher, so she had more than a passing acquaintance with the rules of grammar and in her inimical way was able to teach me what I’d failed to comprehend in school, glean off the page of a novel, or parse from the wall of a men’s room. Additionally, I’ve never consciously made that mistake again, often reading back over a manuscript specifically looking for antecedent errors.

Antecedents can be troublesome. I’ve included a link for some rules and examples of other ways they can be misused. Some of you will be surprised.
Here’s the link.

Since I received that rejection letter back in 1997, I’ve been fortunate to publish a lot of stories, columns, reviews and a novel, and to each of these, I owe that King of Prussian editor a small piece of credit. You never know when good advice is going to come your way, so be open to it, or your work will never find it’s place in the Hall of the Literary King at the Temple at the End of the World–or for that matter, published at all.

Now take a look at the title of this article. See anything interesting?

By Weston Ochse

The thought had never crossed my mind. I’d made fun of them in junior high school. I’d stolen girls from them in high school. I was a preppy kid who wore jeans and polo shirts. What the hell did I know from rednecks? Sure, I lived in Tennessee, but I wasn’t from Tennessee.

So when I was walking across the parking lot of the Drake Hotel in Denver for WHC 2001, I didn’t know who the hell the yokel was talking to when he yelled, ‘there’s that redneck guy.’ I swear to you I turned to see who it was, and you know what I discovered? It was me.

Now more than four years later I’m cognizant that our writing styles can create a fiction in the minds of readers that we are what we write. Let me test this theory. When talking about writers, if I say Zombie Guy, who comes to mind? I knew you’d think of him. Case closed. I win.

I was raised reading all the dead white men of literature. I’d been weaned on Shakespeare since I was ten. I spent Sunday evenings watching Masterpiece Theater, stuttering through months of I, Claudius, yawning through Bronte, and sneaking peaks at Thor and Hulk while Dickens played morality plays. I was raised for better things. I was taught to never say ‘dang.’ I’ve never had sex with a cousin. So why did I become a redneck?

Because I asked for it.

Short version of a long tale. Back in 1999, David Whitman and I decided to get together and write something because our styles at the time were similar. We’d planned to do a slap-dashed chapbook with three stories that we’d probably pay people to read. But a publisher came along who happened to believe in us and asked for, not 3, but 21 stories of ultimately what was titled Scary Rednecks and Other Inbred Horrors. The book placed David and me on the literary map. People knew who we were. Doug Clegg talked smack about my writing. Richard Laymon wanted to meet me. What the hell? Is this how it was supposed to happen?

Then the redneck-seeking man stumbled across my path in the parking lot of the Drake. Then it happened again. And again. And again. Hell! They were everywhere. Sometimes I’d look to see who they were talking to. Sometimes I told them I had no idea what they were talking about. Other times I grumbled and ignored them. Sometimes I smiled and said, ‘Yep, that’s me.’ I’m not smart enough to be able to diagnose my psychosis, but I do know that I was fighting the appellation tooth and nail. I did not want to be that redneck guy. I was smarter than that.

SO THEN WHY WAS EVERYONE CALLING ME A REDNECK?!!

They told me, they being the mystical they that say everything, that because I wrote the stories and am known for the book I’ll forever be known as a redneck.

“How can that be?” I asked.

“Better writers than you have suffered similar fates,” they said as they then proceeded to tell me of Robert McCammon who was known as a HORROR WRITER but wanted to be just a WRITER. When they wouldn’t let him publish what ultimately became Speaks the Nightbird a dozen years later because it wasn’t HORROR, he quit writing. Now this shook me, because as a self respecting writer of horror, I not only knew McCammon, but had erected a shrine to him in a dark corner of my apartment where Wolf’s Hour and They Thirst were constantly caressed with the small bones of animals, only surpassed by Boy’s Life which held the place of honor and got first blood for every virgin sacrifice.

At that point I figured there was nothing I could do. So at conventions and signings when people shouted to the Redneck Man, I raised my hand and waved. I knew how to play with others. I got an A- in behavior. I could do this easy. And when an independent film company said they wanted to make a movie of my redneck story Catfish Gods I said okay. And when the sequel collection called Appalachian Galapagos was published, I grinned mightily and embraced the redneck. And now that Scary Rednecks is being republished in hardback by Delirium, I am pretty happy.

So why the turnaround? What was my epiphany? Nothing more than this– if I am the casualty of my success, then at least I’ve had success. And it was as simple as that. After four years I am embracing my inner redneck. If you call to me across a parking lot saying, “There’s the Redneck Man,” I’ll come and shake your hand proudly and ask how you’re doing.

To this day Redneck Stories comprise about a quarter of my published works. To some I will always be a redneck. To others I’ll be known as the guy who created Billy Bones who spoke in palindromes and anagram to confuse the voices in his head from the novel Scarecrow Gods. To future fans and friends I’ll be known as a the guy who created the misunderstood Hawaiian Bouncer named Kimo from Recalled to Life or Warrant Officer Rudy Ray Moore who only wanted to get rich in Iraq from Babylon Smiles. But I’m not kidding myself. The redneck will endure. Look at Ed Lee or Joe Landsdale. They are the Demi-Kings of Redneckdom. If I am but a knight, then I’m happy to be in the company of two successful, skilled and popular authors who have been able to, not only maintain the mantle of redneck, but add more mantles to their broad literary shoulders.

The Zombie Guy I mentioned earlier, did you think Brian Keene? I thought so. Brian and I are great friends. Less than twenty percent of his
work is Zombie, yet for many of you that is how you identify him. Zombie websites across the globe talk-up his Zombiefication of the genre. Nigerian book readers are probably asking for the third book of the Rising Trilogy, assuming that Keene only does Zombies. But we know better. We know how amazing Terminal was. We know that he can get as redneck as yours truly in his short stories. We know that he is more than the sum of his Zombies.

So what does this mean to you? Don’t worry about what you write. Just write well, write often, and have editors who are smarter than you advise you on how to better your craft. If people begin to identify you with your work then you’ve done something great. Doing something great is good right? So do you want to be a redneck? It’s worked for me. If not I hear Zombies are hot now.