A Slave to the Evil Queen AKA Revision

It's been a busy past few days folks, mostly due to the writer's single most feared nemesis (And, yes, his best friend as well.) the evil bitch Goddess known as re-writing. Yes, I have been hard at work at building out the new scenes from Elaine Ash's short fiction challenge (By the way, thanks for everyone who popped in and commented on "Life on the Mesa".  So a tip of the hat to Patti Abbott, Patrick Bagley, Frank Bill, Aldo Calcago, Paul Brazil, David Cranmer, Scott Parker, Charles Gramlich, Dave Zeltserman, Charlie Stella--who was there, folks, but lurking around the edges, but that's how the man rolls--Ray, and the detailed, poignant comments of Brian Lindemuth. All of you brought something to the table and I appreciate it. But the biggest thanks goes out to Elaine for offering up her time and energy towards improving the story. . . And by the way, if I forgot anybody, sorry, I'm rushing a little bit tonight.) and working on some other revisions that slipped in under my nose at the last second.  Add in the old day job thing and the over crowded life of a two career household raising a very active two-year-old, well, you all know how it is?(All work and no play. All work and no play. All work and no play. Paging Dr. Torrance. Medication time, medication time. Insert Jack Nicholson cliche here.)

But since I've been such a good boy the past few days, (Especially today, stunning word count, great productivity at the day job, and I even manged to get some reading in at lunch today.) I figured I deserved a dirty, sweaty quicky with Bloody Knucks to pass along some crime fiction stuff.

Okay, first one's a quick mention, because just about every crime fiction related blog on the net has run the link, but I figured I'd run it one more time just so that it's permanently burned into your sub-conscious. It's Spinetingler Awards season again, so if you haven't already, you can vote right HERE

Speaking of Spinetingler and Brian Lindemuth, the man himself has been running a new column the past few weeks over at Bookspot Centeral called Short Thoughts on Short Fiction. I'm a pretty regular reader of Crimespot and it was a big hoot to see that such a cool fiction/comics/movies/pop culture site  dedicating space to short crime fiction on the web. 

Brian also tweeted me letting me know that another one of Bookspot's regular columnists is going to be doing the same thing for SF/F on the web as well. 

And we now we clumsily segway into the subject of Twitter. In case you don't know what 

Twitter is, it's this semi-annoying social networking site where you can let everyone in your ever expanding little world know what you're doing every second of every day in 140 words or less. Think of it as Facebook without the pictures. Yeah, I make fun of it a little bit, but I'm on it three or four times a night screwing around, and so is just about every crime/Pulp 

writer out there right now. So if you want to know what guys and gals like Neil Smith, Victor Gischler, Duane Swierczyski, Al Guthrie, Dave White, Christina Faust, Bill Crider, Meagan Abbott, Gerard Brennan, etc, are up to, go ahead and sign up to participate in yet another time suck (I am not a corporate whore! I am not a corporate whore!) 

And my final clumsy transition of the night is dedicated to everyones favorite Scotsman, Al Guthrie.

If you're not familiar with Al's ever expanding body of novels, do yourself a favor and head over to your favorite independent bookseller (This little statement should get me out of the whole corporate whore category.) and pick up one or four of his books. The man is a favorite of mine and I tend to rush out and snap up any new work he puts out. Luckily , what he has to offer this week is 100% free of charge and available at CrimeWav.com

The Podcast this week is of Al's story the Turnip Farm 

So if you haven't experienced CrimeWav.com for yourself yet, this just might be the week to go and do it. (And while you there, go ahead and scroll down to Episode 27 

for my little slice of Hardboiled merriment. 

Anyway, folks, bedsheets and the prospect of six hours of sleep is calling me.

Goodnight

Elaine Ash Fiction challenge is LIVE!

As I mentioned in my last annoyingly whiny post, I've been making the rounds with a horror/noir story of mine and to date it has been rejected three times. I really love the story, but for some reason it's just not finding a home. So, what I did (other than weeping like a two-year-old with a skinned knee and a dirty diaper.) was send it over to Elaine Ash Editor-at-Large for Beat to a Pulp e-zine, who made the offer to writer's who had stories that weren't quite set for publication or had been turned down (or had been turned down multiple times.) to send their not quite ready for print stories along to her with the overall purpose of giving younger writer's the experience of working with an editor and removing the overall mystery of the editoral process. So, over the past few days, Elaine and I have been e-mailing and we spent about an hour on the phone hammering out what I wanted to accomplish with the story and what she thought would make it a better.

Overall the experience has been very cool and Elaine is pretty insightful, and the Editorial experiment went live as of today, and I'm Elaine's first test subject.

You can read my story: "Life on the Mesa" right HERE

So go on over, take a peak, leave a comment, take a piss on it, set it on fire, make love to it, whatever.

Also, this is only part one of the experiment, two other writer's will be having their material picked apart and reassembled. The writer's are close friend of old Bloody Knucks, Frank Bill,

and George Miller.

Welcome to my Tuesday night pity party

So anyway, folks, I'm going to keep this one short tonight, because, honestly, I've been putting a little too much time, energy, and thought into it so far today and I'm ready to put it to bed. (Not to mention I've been going through a great writing jag the last few weeks, and I want to keep up the momentum.) 

But the way I figure it, old Bloody Knucks can carry the last of the weight before I move on.

And what, you may ask, is this idiot rambling on about?

Rejection.

It's part of life, I know this, I get this. . .it's especially true in the writing life. Sometimes you just work your ass off on a story or a chapter, whatever, and you think it's the greatest piece of writing you've ever put to paper. In fact, it's better than anything that anyone has ever put to paper. (Okay, maybe that's going a little too far.) But, anyway, you know the story you put down is just the utter shit With a Capital S!  So you do your re-write, and it's still just as solid. . .in fact you like it even more, and then you send it out into the world. Maybe to a print mag you read and enjoy on a regular basis, or a zine you read with even greater regularity.

And then you wait. . . 

And wait. . .

And finally you get back an e-mail or a SASE with the big let down. 

Form rejection letter.

But this, of course, doesn't deter you. Yeah, you're let down, you're a little pissed, but you believe in your Capital S story, so you send it out again.

And wait, thinking this is going to be it, this next editor will see the genius of your story and will rush to publish your polished little gem.

And then, e-mail saying thanks but, no.

So, you research further into the markets, find another place to send it . . . and same freaking cycle.

This is what I've been going through the past few months with a little horror/noir story I wrote back in the middle of December, and I'll be the first one to admit that I really like this piece. I had a blast writing and then re-writing, the whole deal, but apparently, I'm the only one who does. 3 separate zines have kicked the story back to me and I'm really not understanding the reason why?

So, as I sat at my desk at work today, staring dead eyed at the newest rejection letter for my horror/noir piece of solid gold, I remembered a little challenge Elaine Ash 

offered up on her blog at the end of February where she would basically take a story that had yet been published or turned down and give it a going over with thee old editorial brush. When I read about it courtesy of Patti Abbott's

blog, I thought to myself, hey, what a cool idea that is! I even went so far as to post a link on Bloody Knucks and commented on it on Elaine's blog, thinking how cool it would be to hand something over to her, but not really having anything for it at the moment. . .that is until today.

Anyway, Elaine wrote me back asking what I had to give her, and I sent her along the story. . .I guess we'll see what she has to say.

Whew! Well, I feel better now, on with the show, folks, and thanks for listening.

PS

I'll keep you posted on what Elaine has to say.

And the major issue with blogging is. . .

Is when you have absolutely shit to say, but you still want to use it to get yourself reved up--or in my case, postponing formatting manuscripts (Yeah, adding address & contact info, numbering pages, double spacing for editor readability. I know none of it's hard when you're working in Word, it's just time consuming.) and cleaning first drafts up so they're final drafts--and you really want to write something meaningful; something full of news of upcoming publications. But what you come up with is. . .well, mundane.

There really hasn't been anything going on at the Rawson Household for the past week or so. The baby was getting over a cold, me and her Mom are experiencing some of the worst allergies symptoms ever, with mine getting so bad that I had to go to the doctor yesterday and get loaded down with enough drugs to choke a horse. Writing has been steady, a lot of longer stories getting ready to be sent out and I've managed to polish a huge chunk of ye ole novel, which is making me happier than a clam.  

And of course, tons of reading. I'm finishing up Tom Piccirilli's newest, the Coldest Mile (By the way folks, in case you haven't read it on Pic's blog, The Cold Spot, the man is giving away a signed, pre-advanced readers copy of his 

next release Shadow Season,

and all you have to do is review the man's newest book on your blog, on your Myspace, facebook, 

twitter, sky-writing, et cetera. Now in case you don't know what a pre-advanced reader's copy 

is, it's basically a copy of the manuscript in a three ring binder with the cover 

art slid into the lament of the binder.  Publisher's usually put about twenty or so of these together so the novelist and his agent can send them out for pre-review to news agencies and other writers for pre-reviews and blurbs. Now if you're into collecting books as much as I am, this is a pretty cool contest to get yourself involved in.) which has just kicked ass and which I'll be posting a review of in the next couple of days. I'm also reading Ray Banks, No More Heroes,  great so far by the way.

In other book news, Two of my favorite novelists are finally coming out with with new books this summer. First up is Megan Abbott whose new one, Bury Me Deep, is headed to a book store near you in July (By the way folks, the novel is set 

in Phoenix, AZ, so I'd like to start an official e-mail campaign to get Megan to tour with the book, and start the tour here in AZ. Yeah, it's pure Hell here in July, but I'd love to meet this lady and get her to sign her other four novels for me.)

If you haven't read Ms. Abbott yet, I suggest you get yourself over to Amazon or B&N and snap yourself up her other three books. Her books are always crisp and creepy as Hell so have fun with them.

The second release--and the one that has my nipples stiff enough to cut glass--is by 

none other than James Ellroy and is the final volume in his  USA trilogy, Blood Is A Rover.

The official release date is September 15th, six days before my 36th birthday. If you've never read Ellroy, do yourself a favor and start reading the first two books in the trilogy American Tabloid and the Cold Six Thousand, trust me when I tell you you won't be disappointed. Also, if you get the opportunity to see the man read, jump at the chance, the guy is one of the last true Asshole writers in America,  he's a serious character (The last time Ellroy was at the Poisoned Pen, the man was straight up flirting with my wife while he was signing my books and I was more or less laughing my ass off at him doing it the entire time.) and his readings are nothing short of amazing.

Speaking of reading, friend of Bloody Knucks, Patrick Shawn Bagley has a pretty amusing post up at his wad of Internet, Bitter Water Blog, about the overall importance of reading as it relates to writing. The sad part about this post is I run into guys like the person in Patrick's post at least once every couple of months, so I couldn't help but chuckle when I read it.

And one last item, (Yeah, I guess I had a little more to write about than I thought) the Ultra prolific Bill Crider has a Podcast of his story Cranked up over at CrimeWav.com. The story originally appeared in the Busted Flush press anthology, Damn Near Dead. It's a great story and a great site so give it a listen.

Anyway, back to the races for me.

Web crime reported @32nd & Twitter Ave.!

Like most crime/mystery writer's on the web, not only do I maintain this little grumpy bear of a blog, but I'm also medium-to-hardcore addicted to reading other blogs. The fact of the matter is that I spend most of my Internet time either Facebooking, Twittering,(yes, I have succumbed to the blink of an eye trend of micro-blogging.) and cruising blogs. All of it is a time suck--this we all know--but it is fun, and most of the time it makes for some pretty cool and informative reading. And I--like most bloggers--occasionally enjoy passing along links of sites that I've run across that you may have missed. So here are a few blogs that have been around for awhile that you may have missed.

Okay first off is Crime Scene Northern Ireland. For those of you who don't all ready know, I'm a hug fan of Irish crime fiction. Ever since I picked up my first Ken Bruen novel (the White Trilogy, basically the U.S. version of Bruen's first three D.S. Brant novels.) I've been hooked. And the site that 

further drew me into the tangled, bloody web of the chappies was Declan Burke's amazing Crime Always Pays. (I mean, seriously, how can you resist it, the great 

reviews, interviews, and, of course, the free swag, pretty much make it a daily stop for me.) Well, being a pure junkie for Irish Hard-boiled news and reviews, I went in search for other sources. Luckily I didn't have far to travel, because Dec posted a link to CSNI right on Crime Always Pays (Go figure.) and I've been more or less a regular visitor to the site ever since.

CSNI is maintained by man about town and post-troubles tough guy Gerard Brennan. Gerard has been making a lot of noise on the short fiction front lately starting with an appearance in A Twist of Noir, issue #29 of Thuglit (If you haven't read it yet, the story, Hard Rock, is downright mean.) and an equally impressive piece over at Three Crows Press called Lucinda. Gerard is a seriously cool guy, and he's been getting some pretty 

great interviews lately with the likes of Dave Zeltserman and Al "Sunshine" Guthrie. (Who also happens to be Gerard's agent.) So if you've got a minute or two (and God knows you do, you may be busy, but you know you're looking for yet another time suck right about now.) go ahead and check out CSNI and go ahead and check out Gerard's other writings at his official website while your at it, too. (And, yes, you can follow him over at Twitter

as well.)

Speaking of Dave Zeltserman, the man himself also runs a nifty little blog that goes by the same name as his sick little stunner of a third novel,

  Small Crimes. Just in case you don't know who Dave is, I pretty much 

consider the guy to be one of the key figures (Along with the Mystery Dawgs, Anthony Neil Smith, Victor Gischler, 

and Sean Doolittle among others) of reviving the American Hard-boiled tradition with his three amazing novels Fast Lane, Bad Thoughts, and the aforementioned Small Crimes. He was also the editor of  the seminal e-zine Hardluck Stories. What makes Small Crimes such a great blog largely has to do with 

Dave's phenomenal series of posts, Lessons from the Trenches. The series of fourteen posts are all about the pitfalls of being a young writer and dealing with the publishing world and the struggles that go along with it. The series was not only fun and informative to read, but also taught me the real key to working and living as a writer is persistence with a capital P. So once again, check it out. (And as a side note, Dave truly is one of the nice guys of Noir.  Ask him just about anything about the writing process and he's more than likely to share it with you. But I don't think you can follow him on Twitter yet.)

Okay, and last, but far from least (Luckily, I got all my fiction writing done for tonight when I started this bad boy of a post.) is Eastern Standard Crime, an awesome (and I'm sure familiar) crime fiction review site of new badass editor on the block of Crooked e-zine Geoff Eighinger. Geoff, perhaps, blogs more than any person I know, (No, I'm not going to link all of them.) and most of the time I'm in awe of how he can keep up the pace that he does. But out of all of them (other than Crooked.) ECS is my favorite. Largely because Geoff not only reviews novels (both current and classic.) but he also reviews short fiction appearing on the web and in print, which is pretty rare for a review site. (And, yes, he's reviewed a few of my earlier pieces.) So, same as before, if you haven't already, check it out. (And you can also follow Geoff on Twitter as well.)

And now, take a deep breath, relax, and finish this freaking long winded post up. Oh, and by the way, you can follow my silly ass on Twitter as well as over at Facebook.

By the way, I want to give a quick nod of thanks to Duane "the Prince of Philly" Swierczyski

for taking a few minutes out of his day to school me on how to do the tiny.url thing over at Twitter. (And, guess what, you can follow him over there, too.)

A quick drop in to talk about shit other than me

So I thought I'd do a quick pop in before I finished up working on a few re-writes to share a some cool links. (Yes, I am avoiding the dreaded re-writes, and trust me when I say I have a shitload of them right now, but seriously, I am going to make this quick because I actually want to finish up this group of current stories so I can move on down the line of the to be written pile.)

First link comes in the form of a reminder from Neil Smith

(And  from Frank Bill) that the good folks of storySouth, have opened up the polls for the Million Writer's Award. Now the award is open to any web based story and both readers and editors are eligible to vote for the story of their choice. But here's the deal, as a reader, you can only vote once, and the story you are nominating had to go through some type of editorial process. No self published folks, so if you posted the story on your blog, and it only saw time on your blog, your ineligible. What's so cool about Million Writer's (at least for me.) is that I discovered a buttload of stories I hadn't read before, and even better, I discovered a ton of markets I'd never heard of either. So if you know of a story you feel would benefit from the exposure (Not to mention the $500 1st prize swag.) stop in and do some nominating and check out the 60 or so stories already nominated.

Also, in case you you weren't aware of it, Chris Grant over at A Twist of Noir  is running the first ever Twist of Noir writing competition. The first place prize is 25 bucks. (And, yes, my entry happens to be one of the rewrites.) The comp also has a theme, which is Alienation. The deal is that the submission can be up 5000 words and an original work. And intead of copying and pasting the piece--which Chris normally has you do--send it as a Word .Doc or as RTF file. The deadline for the comp is March 30th, so if you've got a piece of short trash about love lorn losers or something along those lines, you might want to consider sending it along.

And last but far from least, my man Paul Brazil made his Twist of Noir debut on Sunday and also got himself into Beat to A Pulp as well for one of the June stories. If you haven't read Paul's stuff yet, the Twist of Noir story might be the place to start. Think of him as a Noir Bukowski, yeah, he's one funny ass dude, who happens to think dead bodies are hilarious (and who can blame him.) I'm raising a can of the black stuff to you, brother!

Anyway, see you in a couple of days.

Friday night grumblings

So it's my usual spot, Friday night, the end of the sectional sofa closest to the lamp, laptop open, a  stack of books next to me (Westlake, Piccirilli, Block, and one of my favorite Irishmen, Declan Burke) that I've only opened briefly between writing my own stuff. The tube is on, HBO, the Ruins (which, by the way is just as bad and boring as the book, I mean, come on, carnivorous plants, that shit's just not that scary. I read the book based on Stephen King's review of it and struggled with just about every single page mostly because all the character's are so goddamn unlikable. And from what I've paid attention to so far in the movie, it's pretty much a word-for-word adaptation of the book, except the movie just seems like slaughter porn to me. But with movies and books, once I start them, I pretty much can't stop them until I'm done, no matter how silly and unsatisfying I find them to be.) and I'm taking a break from some stories I'm revising before I send them out into the great beyond. So, since I'm not really all that interested in the movie, and the books just seem a little too cumbersome right now, I decide to jump online, read some book reviews from FBF and screw around on the ye ole blog.

The week's been a long one mostly because between this weekend and last, I don't feel like I've gotten anytime to catch my breath and just relax,(this is the major issue with having company 

staying at your house--don't get me wrong, I loved seeing my big brother and we had a blast--you tend to get way out routine and the whole concept of relaxation goes right out the window.) and take it easy. Luckily, the baby is going over to the grandparents this weekend so there'll be a ton of alone time abound. Plenty of time to stay up late, write, and spend some time with what's going on in my head.

The only major issue with spending quality time in my head is that I get to thinking a little too much about subjects that, for the most part I shouldn't be spending too much time on.

I started thinking about how earlier this evening I was sitting up in the batcave (i.e., my office) a little after the wife had gotten home from her job and I was responding to some e-mail's from a couple of friends when my wife starts calling for me from down stairs. We're getting ready to go out, you see, nothing too demanding, just your typical Friday night grocery shopping, and she's calling me so we can get going; she's calling me down to help her get 

the daughter ready to go. And I'll be the first to admit that I got just the tiniest bit angry. Not screaming and yelling angry, just mumble under my breath angry. Mostly what I was pissed about was the issue of time and finding said time and trying to figure where it goes, where it all went? And how I can get some more it so I can do shit like respond to e-mails and write without having to worry about the over all constraints of time?

I haven't really figured out how to never worry about having enough leisure time yet? And to be honest with you, I don't think I'll ever figure it out.

But what I did start thinking about was time in the terms of age. Now, I've never been the type of person who dwells on age. Seriously, I've always found the folks who feel embarrassed that they're about to turn 30 or 40 or 50 or whatever to be kind 

of fucking ridiculous. But I got to really thinking about it, I'm 35, I'm rapidly edging up towards middle age. It really doesn't bother me all that much, what kind of bothers me is the wasted potential of my youth. . .

Yeah, this is one of them if I only knew then what I know now sob sister things. 

I'll be the first one to admit I was a total fuck up in my 20's. I was one of those guys you saw at the bar's who was just way too fucked up for his own good. I was the guy who didn't spend a minute sober, and needed to have his head knocked in (which happened a couple of times.) for realizing that he shouldn't be screwing himself up so much. Yeah, I did my fair share of writing back in the day, but it was mostly under confident scribbles of a dumb shit street loser. Nothing I'd want in print. (Unfortunately some of that stuff made it out there, mostly in the form of Xeroxed broadsheets and zines and not on the net where shit is more or less permanent.)

But I think about those times, and if only I had the brain of now as opposed to the brain of the fuck up?

What would have been different?

My best guess is I would have been still the same fuck up I was, I'd just be a little better read and write a little better. And of course, I probably wouldn't be sitting here at the end of this sectional sofa whining about being 35 and not having enough time to do the shit that I like; me and five or six billion other people.

Besides, regrets for pansies who've never lived life.

Anyway, end of rant and on to writing stuff. Not my writing stuff, but a guy I greatly admire. Namely, Tom Piccirilli. I've been reading Tom's stuff for the past couple of years after Bruen gave the guy a couple of big props, so I hunted down a couple of his old paperbacks from my local used bookshop, 

Bookman's, and devoured them both in about a week. After that I went on Amazon and ordered the rest brand spanking new and I've been hooked ever since. Tom had another one come out last week called the Coldest Mile it's the follow up to his award winning hard-boiled novel the Cold Spot. The premise of the series is pretty simple; imagine if Richard Stark's Parker had a son who dies and then had to raise his grandson? As you can guess, some fairly fucked up shit goes down, and Tom has created a pretty classic Hardboiled character in Chase, the said grandson. So if you haven't tried out Tom yet, I'll suggest you pick up both a copy of the Cold spot and the Coldest mile.

Forgotten books Friday--Safe Harbor by Eugene Izzi

So as I mentioned the day before, Patti Abbott asked me to participate in the weekly series of reviewing genre novels that have some how slipped through the cracks and have gone out of print known as Forgotten books Friday. I've been a big fan of the series for the past 6 months or so and was more than happy to add my three-quarters of a cent into the already enormous  number of writer's who already take part in it.

So, being all about the Hard-boiled/Noir side of Pulp fiction, I decided to pick a book from a novelist who has had a fairly large impact on my life as a writer, and who I admire intensely and for some reason or another is very out of print even though he published 17 novels in his all too brief of a life.

The writer I'm talking about is Chicago novelist, Eugene Izzi.

If you're not familiar with Izzi's writing or the man's life,(or his death, which has been more or less turned into retarded conspiracy theorist garbage over the years, where as the man's huge body of work has become all but forgotten.) I'm not going recount it here. But I'll tell you this, Izzi was the type of writer who I truly admire, namely, a once hard living working class kid who found redemption through crime fiction. (Yeah, folks, I'm kind of a bigot like that, as in I tend to think the best novelists are the ones without much formal education and are more or less self taught--no offense to the MFA folks out there.)

Safe Harbor was Izzi's final novel before his untimely death, and is the story of Mark Torrance, a decent enough guy making his way in the world  as a social worker. He's married to a successful psychologist, has three kids, a house in the suburbs, all the good stuff. However, before all the good stuff, Mark was named Tommy Torelli. As Torrelli he lived as thief and all around scumbag for one of the five New York families. But like most mobsters, Torrelli is eventually arrested for a botched caper and is leaned on hard by the NYPD and the Fed's to turn state's evidence and rat out his Maffia family. Tommy--unlike most of his real life contemporaries--stands strong and chooses to remain silent and loyal. The only issue is that Tommy's boss is scared shitless that Tommy will suddenly get scared of doing hard time and rat out his entire crew in order to avoid it, so the boss starts to threaten the life of Tommy's infant son, Mario. Because of these threats, Tommy becomes Mark and goes into the witness protection program in order to protect his son's life.

Life is more or less normal, even happy after Mark and Mario strike out on their own after being sheltered by the witness protection program. Mark meets his wife, they marry, have a couple of more kids, life is good. However, Mark and his wife, Caroline, are starting to experience a wide gulf in their marriage largely because Mark has failed to share anything of his past with her out of fear that she won't understand the mistakes of his past life, he even believes she might even leave him if she finds out. (To all the married guys out their, haven't we learned that the Golden rule is usually the best rule when it comes to marriage.) To add to the overall household tension,

the Torrances' psychotic next door neighbor, Tomczak--who eeks out a minor living as columnist for an alternatively weekly, but is really nothing more than a Mama's boy still tied to her purse strings--is going to break the story of Mark's previous life, which will result in a top notch assassin named Bracken--who is obsessed with committing the perfect murder-- agreeing to take Mark and his family out.

As you can probably already guess, there's a lot going on in Safe Harbor (No, I haven't even mentioned Mark's former witness protection program handler and his dying wife, or the cop set to hunt down Bracken, or Bracken's transvestite lover Tawny, or the racist black boxing coach at Mark's work.) and that's the major issue with the novel as a whole--there's just too much going on. There's too many character's populating the story, so much so that the reader (at least this reader) begins to drift as Izzi fails to move the story along and is bogged down in over characterization. 

The characterization also happens to be the strongest point of the novel. Izzi intimately crafts each character so they become fully fleshed out creations who you can't help but care about. Also, I really feel Izzi and his editor could have easily trimmed this novel down a good one-hundred to one-hundred-and-fifty pages. With Izzi's style being so spare and stark, 2oo-to-250 pages would have really done the trick and kept the book moving along at race car speed. Unfortunately, Izzi was of a generation of novelists where 90,000 words was considered a short novel.

Also, the beginning of the book is such a Goodfellas  pastiche I could barely make it past the opening twenty pages, even though I started to really enjoy the board characterization after ward

So in overall judgement, I'd have to say Safe Harbor isn't exactly the best place to start off in the Izzi cannon. If I was to recommend a title where to begin, I might suggest his excellent novel Invasions or another of his late career novels the Criminalist.

So, anyway,  folks, I didn't promise you Harold Bloom style criticism, but I had fun writing it.

Thanks for your time.

Writing and drinking, Drinking and writing

I don't know what it is, but when ever I do a little drinking, I tend to want to jump on the old blog and just write about grand old me instead of the little fictional fuck ups roaming around in my skull. 

Well, it's the same set of circumstances as the last time I was glomming some beers (Difference being I'm not waiting to pick my brother up from the airport and instead of Gangster #1 being on the tube, it's You Kill Me, staring Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic Hitman [Quick side note, if I was a hitman I think I'd pretty much be walking around whacked out of my skull all the time, either on booze or some type of pain killer like Hillbilly Heroin or Percocets] and I'm still drinking Guinness [In the can this time, thank God] and I'm getting ready to drink another cup of coffee to take off the beer buzz from pounding 14.5 ounces of the best beer ever brewed in 10-to-15 seconds.) the only thing is that I'm working in the morning and I'm not really all that keen on sporting a hang over or any such 

shit. So, I'm sticking with one can of the black stuff and then I'm sticking with the coffee.

And I'm not really going to be talking too much about myself(just a little) and concentrating on some good shit that's going on around the Internet instead.

First off, I should let you know that Out of the Gutter is finally open for submissions. As always, OOTG does the theme thing for it's issues, and the theme for issue #6 is Sexploitation. I've been working on a couple of pieces for this bad boy since the theme was originally announced, so hopefully I'll be sending something out to the sickos at OOTG by the end of the weekend. (Yes, it is a date weekend for me and the wife, which means this sorry excuse for a pulp writer doesn't have to get up with a two-year-old Sunday morning, which means I get to 

write until 2 or 3 in the morning. Yeah, no shit, I'm a boring date.) Also, great grand daddy editor Neil Smith 

is now accepting submissions for the next Plots with Guns, which happens to also have a theme, as in Plots with Rayguns. From what I under stand, what Neil wants is crime fiction set in 2509 or some such shit (Yeah, I've got one going for this one too, and I'm really happy with it so far.)

Next item up is an interesting little challenge coming up from Elaine Ash 

co-editor of Beat to a Pulp. What Elaine is offering to do is provide her unrivaled services as an editor (Frank Bill has told me about working with Elaine, and I'm pretty impressed with what I've been hearing so far.) by taking your stinker of a story that's been rejected time and time again and giving you  the chance to actually work with editor. She'll be posting the beginning results and then the end results from what I understand. I think 

it's a pretty cool experiment and you should check it out.

And last but not least here's a little something in the free shit category. Irish Crime fiction wunderkind (and in my humble opinion, one of the founding father's of Irish crime fiction, along with Bruen and Connolly) Adrian McKinty 

Is giving away 5 signed ARCS of his new one FIFTY GRAND over at his little slice of the Internet pie. All you gotta do is guess how many drinks the chappie paid for on his trip down to Cuba while he was writing the book.(And please don't be intimidated by the number of posts, like most blogs, Adrian has a string of regular readers, and like most Irishmen, Adrian loves to communicate and interact with said readers, but my guess is there's only 15 or so entries right now.)

And last but far, far from least is shit about me. You guessed it, I've got another short popping up over at PowderBurn Flash

either on Thursday or Friday. I had a lot of fun with the story when I wrote it, so I hope you like it. Also, I'll be doing my first Forgotten Book Friday. Patti Abbott 

e-mailed me about doing my first review for it about a month ago, so I figured, what the hell. So, I'll be posting that sometime tomorrow night.

Okay, one more Crime fiction submission thing that I just remembered (Yeah, still gotta a bit of a buzz.) Chris Pimental, editor of Bad Things

is looking to start Publishing weekly flash stories. So if you've got some thing nasty 800 words or less, go ahead and send something over to the man. Chris runs a tight operation over at Bad Things, and he's a great editor too

Alright, so I'm almost done here, but I wanted to take a second to thank all the good folks who have been giving me big props over at their Blogs for my recent short story activities. When I finally started sending my stuff out over a year ago, I had no idea I would have the chance to meet so many great people and fellow writers. It's been fun so far, and hopefully the good times and stories will just keep rolling through the new year. Any way here's my thanks to the academy list of folks who I owe a big thanks and a beer to:

The always classy Sandra Seamans

Good friend of Bloody Knucks and short story and Screenwriter, Jed Ayres

Yet another redneck noir bad ass I know Patrick Shawn Bagley

And the always mercurial Paul David Brazill who's been one of my biggest supporters since day one and is starting to shape up into a pretty great writer himself.

And as always, Frank Bill, is just one bad ass mother fucker who I was lucky enough to trip across over at Facebook. 

Alright, that's it for the group hug, motherfuckers, back off before I need to cut you