What this machine runs on

So it's Friday night around 8 o'clock, and I'm at my usual spot on the couch with the laptop--where else, on my lap--Gangster #1 is on the tube, I've just pounded a bottle of Guinness (the shame and horror, the black stuff in a bottle, it's just unnatural, but I've got four cans in the fridge, the bottle was a left over from a sixer I picked up at a store that only stocked bottles.) and now I'm drinking a cup of coffee to take the edge off the slight beer buzz I've gotten from drinking 12 oz of stout in 10 seconds, because I have to pick my big brother up from the airport in a couple of hours, and even though the airport is only a ten minute drive from my house, I don't like the idea of driving around slightly impaired. 

So coffee it is.

I've been pretty caffeinated all day, but then again, I'm pretty caffeinated every day. When you wake up at 4:30 every morning and go to bed around 10:00 PM every night, I might as well have an IV with a fresh 12 cup pot of french roast strapped to a vein every waking moment of the day to keep me up and moving. Not that I'm complaining, anyone who knows me will attest to my love affair with coffee. Plus the caffeine drove me to finish up and submit a couple more stories today. Plus the day job was pretty productive overall.

So instead of just kicking back and enjoying Gangster #1 and maybe read 20 or 30 pages of the Lee Child novel I'm reading and letting my head relax after such a productive day, I decide to jump on the bloggy blog and. . .plug a couple of my stories that went online today.

I mentioned them both early on in the week.

First is my new flash piece over at Flash Fiction Offensive 

It's a Noir weeper, so make sure to have plenty of Kleenex's on hand when you give it a read.

The second is my first appearance at Plots with Guns

As I mentioned in my previous post, the story appearing is one of my favorite degenerates of 2008. Plus, I'm appearing along side Frank Bill again and some other really fine writers. 

Typically I spread my Plots with Guns reading over a couple of months, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to polish off the issue in a few days.

Anyway, gotta go, the torture scene is coming up in Gangster #1 

big fear equals big bullshit?

I don't know if it's just me, but is anyone else sick of fear? 

I mean, seriously, I don't think there's been a single point in my life where I haven't been scared shitless by one thing or another. I think the only time where I didn't fear anything was back in the 70's when I was a little guy and all that really mattered to me was comic books and Saturday morning cartoons.

But as soon as the 80's rolled around and I was able to join in on the conversations (or at the very least comprehend)  my boisterous of my Irish working class family instigated was when the fear started to take hold.

The 80's was all about nuclear annihilation and the imminent threat of communism, and, of course the added threat of the dreaded crack and pot and coke that was absolutely going to destroy the youth of America. The drugs and the just say no campaign--like most teenagers of my generation--was more a joke than anything else, largely because most of us were spending our weekends and after school time downing beers and doing bong tokes, and none of us were out running wild in the streets, or breaking into the nest door neighbors house in order to support our drug "addictions". But, maybe it was just where I lived. I grew up in a fairly rural area where the crime rate was practically non-existent. But in the Mid-west and larger cities America experienced the birth of the gated community to keep the violent, crack addicted ghetto dwellers out and the middle class safe and behind bars.

My big fear in the 80's was nuclear annihilation. Yeah, I was convinced at any second the bomb was going to drop and the commies were going to come marching across U.S. borders and enslave our entire country. Movies like the Day after and Red Dawn and Rambo and Rocky 4 and the Terminator said that human destruction was inevitable and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it. I, of course, bought into this shit hook line and sinker.

We of course know what happened to the Commies (at least the most vocal collection of nations, the USSR.) And most folks could care less about a nuclear strike at this point.

In the 90's, well, to be honest, I really didn't give a shit about anything. I didn't pay attention to the news. I never read magazines (for the exception of Maximum Rock'n'roll which I read religiously.) picked up a newspaper, and most of the time I didn't own or have access to a television, and I more or less kept my nose buried in a book and ignored what was going on in the world. So whatever people were scared of back then, I could care less.

Then the 2000's rolled around, and I took my head out of the sand largely because I more or less became a responsible, involved citizen. A suburbanite with a job, a wife, a home with cable and a computer that provided a nonstop stream of information.

And then the World trade center attacks happened and suddenly the U.S. was going bug shit over guys in turbans and the war on drugs was replaced with the war on terror. And I'm not even going to in to the environment and the imminent disaster that human race is inevitably going to be destroyed by.

And now it's the economy.

I can't turn on the TV or read a magazine or turn on the computer without being bombarded by more and more news of the inevitable financial world collapse.

I'm not going to further list all the things that so many news agencies have already beaten into our skulls over the past six months.

What I have figured out is that life in the 90's really wasn't all that bad, and I've more or less decided to bury my head in the sand again and just be concerned with what's important to me. Yes, I'm still going to read the news online, I'm still going to watch TV, and read Time magazine and the other periodicals I typically read. But when it comes right down to it, I'm just not going to give a shit anymore.

I'm giving fear and anxiety about the world at large the middle finger and keep doing the things I love and nothing else. Because to me, the only way to live is keeping my head buried deep underground.

Still alive part the 2nd, the return of the self aggrandizing bastard

Here we are again.

So I figured I'd head on over here to Bloody knuckles to gear myself up before I took a run at a couple of shorts I wanted to get finished up this weekend. Plus I wanted to share some cool news and a few links as well.

Well, I have to say this week has been one of the coolest in my brief publishing life. Not only did my story from Pulp Pusher hit, but so did my first Podcast at Crimewav.com (This was the big news I mentioned in previous posts.) Aldo the Mystery Dawg (I'm not even going to attempt to link up all the stuff Aldo does online, but trust me when I say the dude is busy.) E-mailed me a couple of weeks ago asking me to use one of my stories that appeared on his long fiction site Darkest Before the Dawn . Needless to say I was stoked and immediately replied with a big fat YES! If you haven't been to Crimewav.com, I suggest you take a gander. I've been hooked ever since they ran Jason Starr's excellent short, "The last Bachelor of North Miami" in episode 3. 

The podast of my story, "A Quiet minute of Reflection." turned out really well thanks to the awesome efforts of Julio from NY and the voice actors who worked on the story. Also, I can't thank Aldo enough for opportunity to appear along side so many great writer's.  I will also give everyone the warning ahead of time that the story starts out pretty NC-17, so be forewarned.

Okay, enough of me sucking other people's dick's and back to going down on myself.

In more great news about me, Anthony Neil Smith, great grand daddy editor supreme of Plots with Guns and author of Yellow Medicine and the forth coming Hotdoggin'  picked up my story, 'Clinical Trial' for issue #5 of PWG. I love me some Plots with Guns, and the story that's appearing is my favorite story (outside of my story, Performance Anxiety, over at Bad Things)

that I wrote in 2008. I had a blast writing it, and I hope you take a look at it when it hits. (Also make sure to give Frank Bill's new one a look as well. Yeah, the guy is every where right now.)

And in the last of the self promotion crap, Rey from Flash Fiction Offensive picked up one of the the first new ones of 2009. The Zine is still in its infancy, but what they've put out so far has been pretty good. so make sure and check it out, or if you have a flash piece, why not think about sending it over so he can take a look. 

And last but far from least, Aldo (Yeah, that Aldo again) picked up the first Hardboiled story I ever put to paper for Darkest Before the Dawn. The story is called 'Savage Henry Sings the Blues' and I wrote at the end of 2005 in a spiral notebook and only recently type it up (I'm planning on doing this with a few other pieces I wrote when I finally figured out that I really liked writing about shitty people who like doing shitty things to other shitty people.)Now, I'll be the first to admit that the story is not my best work, but it has a big place in the red lumpy thing in my chest.

Aldo also informed me that Darkest will be getting a new URL much in the same vein as his other site Powderburn Flash, I can't wait to see how it looks once it's up.

One last thing before I scat. I always like passing cool links along when I come across them, and today Duane "Polish Magic" Swiercynski posted a cool mini-writing bio at his little slice of head space Secret Dead Blog. As I've said before, I dig Duane's stuff, and his blog was the one that turned me into the obsessive blog reader I am today.(and all because I was just looking for more information on the dude after reading his second novel, the Wheelman, and wanted to find more info about the guy.) Take a couple of minutes and give it a read if you haven't already. It's cool because it's neat to know even super inovative writer's like Duane had their growing pains.

Anyway, enough fucking around, and back to the races.

yeah, I'm alive

So I figured I'd do a quick pop in to the old bloggy blog. I haven't been intentionally ignoring my neglected child, it's just I happen to like my short fiction kids a little more. But here I am, giving it a little love, I might even take old bloody knuckles out to McDonald's for a happy meal before I head back to short story land and attempt to talk my thugs and thugets out of going to college and settling down in the suburbs.

But anyway, I've been busy the last few weeks. The last of the 2008 stories have been kicked out into the world. Fifteen have found homes, three are floating around begging for change and a place to stay, and the final two are stuck in the limbo of print publications. One's only been gone a couple of months, the other it's been nearly five. What a difference between online publications and the print journals. Most online zines I send to provide you with some kind of response in less than a month, but print keeps you on a long leash, and keeps you heading to the mailbox for a response of some sort. I'm strongly considering sending the one that's been gone for five months just so I can get some kind of feed back on it. (Yes, I have become a By-line junkie, and by the way, I'm starting to think publishing online is a far more viable means for a youngish writer such as myself to gain attention for their writing,) But, I might still give it a couple of more weeks before I do it.

I have to say that 2008 was a great year for my writing. Along with the 20 shorts I finished off, I somehow managed to complete the first draft of of 90,000 word hard-boilded novel(which I'm attempting to cut down by 20,000 words) and wrote over 40 blog post on Myspace. It was a good year, and this year seems to be shaping up pretty strong. 

So far, I've put out three new stories, and I'm managing to edit down the book and have set a deadline for myself to have a new draft completed by the end of April, but honestly, I'm not putting any pressure on myself to get it done, it just feels like I've been living with the ghost of it so long now that I just want have it out of my hands so I can move onto another long project.

So, anyway, I better wrap things up. I took a decongestant earlier (Yeah, guess what, sick again. So far this winter, I'm pretty sure  I've been continuously sick for the last month-and-a-half. It sucks, and I'm very ready for the warm weather to make back into the Valley of the sun just so my sinuses can have a chance to dry out.) and it's starting to make me a little sleepy.

But before I go, I mentioned in my last post that I was going to announce something pretty cool. Now it hasn't happened yet, but I'm busting a nut wanting to talk about it. . .but I'm going to save it until it happens, sorry.

But in other good news, I did manage to place a story with Pulp Pusher, Tony Black's excellent all things Hard-Boiled/Noir zine. The story needed to go through a rewrite before Tony picked it up, but the changes were minor overall. Also, chances are I'll be appearing along side my favorite country fried noir writer, Frank Bill.  If you haven't read Frank's stuff yet, I encourage you to sit down at your computer and head over to Plots with Guns and Thuglit and take a gander at the man's fiction. It's great stuff, and I'll be the first to say it, chances are Frank is going to be one of those guys like Daniel Woodrell and Cormac McCarthy-- a real writer's writer--who's going to make some serious noise in the next couple of years. 

And, yes, I'm being dead serious when I say this, the guy's got some crazy skills

And in more Me, me, me (what else are blogs for?) news, I've also got another one up over at A Twist of Noir. Make sure to check it out if you haven't already.

So that's it, I'm going to go and blow my nose until what's left of my brain tumbles out into the Kleenex along with all the snot crammed up in my sinuses

Assuming makes an ass out of you. . .and makes me want to cave in your skull with a sledge hammer

When you do something creative in your spare time--whether your writing, painting, making music, whatever--for some reason people who don't spend their free time in a creative vein always seem to make certain assumption's about people who do. Typically, what I've run into is that the  non-creative types are assuming that creative types are using. You know what I mean by using, right? Smoking the ganja, hitting the crack pipe, shooting up something that's going to turn your mind and body into a lump of non-motivated human jelly. And they really think you're stoned out of your mind when they find out your doing it for free. 

The way the assumers figure it, you've gotta be high to be giving it away.

True enough, back in the day, let's just say I had no issues with controlled substances. But when it comes right down to it, I don't know anyone in my generation who did have "issues" with narcotics. But I can honestly say that I haven't used a controlled substance of any sort in nine or ten years. True, I love my beer, I love my caffeine, and I love writing, and, yeah, I give the stuff I write away! And I do it all dead sober. Would I like to make money off of what I'm writing? Sure, who wouldn't want to make a living off of doing something you love? Will I be broken up if it never happens? Not really, because I really love doing this.

But maybe it's just me. Maybe I just throw out that I'm a fucked up loser vibe?

Or maybe I just know too many who should take their heads out their asses.

Anyway, I got some cool news a couple of days ago from the Mystery Dawg 

editor extraordnaire/super busy guy of Powder Burn Flash 

Darkest Before the Dawn and Crimewav.com

I'll share more when said news drops in a couple of days. 

Like too little butter over too much bread

I'll be the first to admit that I like to stay busy. It's not a condition I use to embrace in my early twenties, back when everything could wait until tomorrow and I'd actually get around to it in a week or two after I said I would get it done. But things change, you get older, you settle down, raise a family, and all that extra time you use to have just isn't there any more, and you can't put things off until tomorrow or the next week, you have to get to them now, and if you don't it's going to completely screw up what you have to get done tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

Blah blah blah.

So I stay busy, I keep myself on task and set daily goals for myself.

Yeah, I'm one of those tools who writes lists of what to do the next day right before I log off the computer, and I e-mail myself that list to my work address. I also keep a physical list of shit that just has to get done at the job and add on to it from the list I e-mailed to myself the night before. The list is usual a combination work/writing/everyday life stuff. 

Yeah, I know, it even sounds a little on the obsessive side to me, and I'm the guy doing this to himself every day.

Here's been the problem with the lists lately.

I've been losing track.

I've been veering off course, way off course, and it's been happening for months now.

Here's the deal.

For the most part I'm a pretty laid back guy. I'm a go with the flow type. Personally, I think it's the only way you can live day to day without pulling your hair out or putting yourself into early grave. But, just like every one these days, the economy has me pretty on edge. Don't get me wrong, I've got a good job, the wife and I are also down right cheap when it comes to our personal finances, and we're not one of those families who live beyond our needs, but still, shit happens. Stuff that is way beyond your control suddenly makes the world a far more uncomfortable place to live in. 

So what's been happening when I pull myself out of bed every day at 4:30 in the morning is I start to feel the weight of the day to come and I grow anxious. It's not "Oh my F@*KING God the world is coming to an end!" kind of anxiety, it's just, well, a weight. It's the hope for the best but prepare for the worst kind of thing, which just isn't me at all. 

That's the wife.

The problem with this attitude I'm taking on is that it's causing me to lose my precious focus.

But like most things, I'm just trying to go with the flow and hoping everything will work out for the best.

Here's the other problem with this attitude I've been adopting, it's effecting the over all writing life. The more anxious I become, the less I've been producing.

This is bad because:

A) Writing is my escape, my way of drawing myself away from my day to day shit, and this less writing I do, the greater the time I have to focus on the negative.

B) I really do not have time for my writing life to slow down right now due to deadlines.

Yeah, deadlines.

Over the past couple or few months, my stories have been gaining me a wee bit of attention, and this attention has garnered me a few different invites to write for print anthologies that will be coming out in 2010. These anthologies are being edited by people I greatly resepct and who I do not want to let  down. Don't get me wrong, the stories are going well, and I'm more or less on target, but I'm putting more and more preasure on myself to get these stories done on time or way before they're due. But you know how it is, sometimes puttting too much preasure on yourself makes you freeze up and end up in a situation like I was in the past couple of months when my productivity level ground to a halt.

But whatever. Some nights are going to have to be like tonight when I take a mental deep breath and forget about everything else except the machine in front of me and get lost for a few hours in my Crooked little world.

Speaking of Crooked  I have a new story up over at Crooked web-zine. The story is a P.I. story of sorts, or anti- P.I. story, or a story written by a guy who really isn't a huge fan of P.I. stories. Anyway, I'm appearing along side Patti Abbott and Clair Dickson two young ladies who I have nothing but respect for, and whose stories I absolutely love. If you don't know who Patti is, well, just type her name into Google and you'll find a million or so entries of all the stories she's published. And Clair writes about one of the few P.I.'s I actually like (Along with Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor and Dave White's Jackson Donne) Bo Fexler. This is issue #2 of Crooked and I hope it continues for a long time to come. Please check it out.