Writer, Photographer, Performer, Psychonaut, Muckraker

UPDATE: Now available via Amazon.

I finally put together a bunch of my short stories into a collection, and it’s now available as an ebook from Smashwords. You can purchase it for $1.99 (cheap!).

Here is a listing of the stories, with a brief description:

Six tales of modern horror from a delightfully twisted mind:

Invocation of the Incisor: A couple vacationing with their infant daughter at the Delaware shore awaken an ancient secret.

Occupants: A novice occultist is initiated into the dark truth behind alien abductions.

Lunch Meat: In the dsytopian future, meat is not quite what it seems.

The Milk Man: A kidnapped corporate fixer has his lactose intolerance pushed to horrifying limits. (This one always gets a good audience reaction when read aloud, particularly when I use a glass of milk as a prop.)

The Blackwater Lights: A reporter investigating mysterious aerial lights in a rural West Virginia town comes face-to-face with their mind-melting source. This was my very first published short story (in the anthology Legends of the Mountain State: Ghostly Tales from the State of West Virginia, edited by Michael Knost and published by Woodland Press).

Enochian Call: A call to a phone sex line leads to a hellish encounter with a faceless sexual predator.

This is not material for those who are easily disturbed or offended. But you wouldn’t be here if you were, right?

Note: The book will soon be available via Amazon and Apple’s iBooks store. I’ll post when they become available for purchase.

Sample or purchase Invocation of the Incisor and Other Dark Tales at Amazon or Smashwords (more formats to come).

I guest blogged at Helluo Librorum, a terrific writing blog run by Teresa Frohock. Writing a novel and trying to get it published is often a lonely, brutal, and soul-crushing adventure, and I wanted to offer some tangible and candid advice that might help others avoid my unrealistic expectations and embarrassing gaffes.

I hope it serves as encouragement, too. Because that’s what every writer needs most.

One Writer’s Journey: From Nowhere to Somewhere, But Not Quite There Yet
at Helluo Librorum

Other posts about writing:

The Write’s Book of Hope
Books About Writing by Two Stephens

Since I acquired my iPad, I’ve been devouring ebooks. I’ve discovered that, aesthetics aside, there’s no real difference between reading a book in its dead tree version versus a book on a screen. Either format can transport me to into that magical state of consciousness where the world outside disappears and I am absorbed in a world of words, whether those words are made of ink or electrons.

One thing really bugs me, however, and that is formatting.

Without fail, every ebook I have read has suffered from broken words or other typographical glitches. I recently began Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, for one example, and in my first reading session I’ve already encountered at least four broken words—words that were probably hyphenated in the original text but are broken by Amazon’s formatting (I think those are referred to as “soft hyphens”). Also missing was a drop cap from a chapter opening. And it’s not just Amazon at fault—all of the books I’ve purchased from Apple’s iBooks store have had the same problems.

Are publishers not doing enough quality control before submitting their texts to Amazon, B&N, and the iBookstore? That seems to be the case. I understand that one benefit of electronic readers—the ability to resize and change fonts—is what causes some of the broken words and other glitches. It doesn’t kill the reading experience, but it’s annoying and kills the all-important immersion in the material. And it’s just plain ugly, too.

I expect my electronic books to be as carefully edited and formatted as any I’d buy in dead tree form. And they aren’t. I wouldn’t accept multiple typographic errors in a hard-copy book from a major publisher—why should ebooks get a pass?

The Writer’s Book of Hope: Getting from Frustration to Publication by Ralph Keyes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars As my book circulates among some NYC editors, I decided to re-read this, and it was incredibly rewarding—maybe more so now that I’ve been working with what the author calls the “pub people.” Keyes understands the plight of any serious writer—the need to learn to deal with rejection, to understand that frustration and disappointment are not just inevitable, but that they are an integral part of the process, even for the most successful. Highly recommended. View all my reviews >>

Mark Galli, who wrote about my transformative mystical experience under the influence of psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Christianity Today, revisits the subject in light of the recent spate of articles about the Hopkins research. I addressed his original article and how he labeled my beliefs about the experience “narcissistic” here, and he responded with some thoughtful comments.

In his current article, The End of Christianity as We Know It, he again mentions my experience, though he inaccurately labels me as a Roman Catholic (I was raised Roman Catholic, but haven’t considered myself a mainstream Christian, much less a Catholic, since I began to question Catholic dogma as a preteen). He also unwittingly makes the case for the Perennial Philosophy, best described by Aldous Huxley as:

…The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal.

To his credit, Galli is a bit more open to the value of non-Christian mystical experiences in this recent piece, writing:

Some Christians balk at the artificiality of drug induced mysticism, but that may merely be an aesthetic distaste. In the long run, it may not end up being any more serious than those who at first thought it unnatural to use penicillin to heal infections.

But then, as I suppose he must as a writer for a magazine that calls itself “A magazine of evangelical conviction” (emphasis mine), he twists himself in knots to push the primacy of evangelical Christianity as the only true path to divinity. Which is a shame. I suspect Galli is a mystic, as he clearly understands the value of primary transcendent experiences, but he can’t break out of the dogmatic beliefs that insist there is only one true source of them—the man from Nazareth.

At the core of such fundamentalist dogma is a schism—a binary division that says “You’re either with us or against us.” It’s the fatal flaw of all fundamentalist religions, from Galli’s flavor of Christianity to the radical interpretations of Islam that propel fanatics to fly planes into buildings. Mystical awareness should be, and frequently is, the solvent for such literal interpretations, opening the minds of experiencers to deeper understandings of universal consciousness and the interconnectedness of all beings. To those who have had these profound and life-changing insights, religious squabbling over dogma, literal interpretations of ancient holy books, and the primacy of one version of God over another is like arguing over which shade of green is the real green.

I’m a junkie for books about writing, but out of the dozens I’ve read over the years, two books written by guys named Stephen rise far above the rest: Stephen King’s On Writing and the unfortunately titled but indispensable The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction by Stephen Koch.

King’s book is a combination autobiography and nuts-and-bolts instruction about the craft. If you are thinking about writing a novel you should immediately read On Writing, even if you don’t particularly care for King’s work. It is by far the best, no-nonsense account of the reality of the writing life and its requirements—the ability to sit in a chair and bang on the keys, repeatedly, day-in and day-out, until something resembling a novel emerges. And then to return again, and again, until it’s worthy of the light of day. Until I read this a second time, I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to write a book. King convinced me I did, and I’m grateful that he didn’t sugarcoat what is ultimately a lonely, difficult, grueling—but immensely rewarding—process.

If you can imagine cramming several years of MFA classes into 272 pages of text, you would find it in between the covers of Stephen Koch’s brilliant guidebook. I could blather on about it, but I suggest you read the stellar reviews on Amazon instead, including a ringing endorsement by Madison Smartt Bell.

There are plenty of by-the-numbers how-to books about writing, but very few about the totality of the writing life. The two Stephens tell it like it is, without romanticizing or dumbing down, and for anyone contemplating writing a book I can’t think of better sources of inspiration.

CityLit Project (a terrific organization that deserves your support) interviewed me for their newsletter. It’s available as a PDF here.

Take note: if you think something is overused, it is a cliché or it is clichéd. Saying, “Oh, that is so cliché” is improper. Rather, you could say “Oh, that is such a cliché” or “That is so clichéd.” I’m amazed at how often I see and hear this grammatical faux pas.

I’ll be duking it out as CityLit’s representative in Baltimore’s debut Literary Death Match, a multi-city reading/performance series sponsored by Opium Magazine and described as “the magic mushroom of Planet Lit.” Here’s a description from Opium’s site:

Opium’s Literary Death Match . . . marries the literary and performative aspects of Def Poetry Jam, rapier-witted quips of American Idol’s judging (without any meanness), and the ridiculousness and hilarity of Double Dare.

Each episode of this competitive, humor-centric reading series features a thrilling mix of four famous and emerging authors (all representing a literary publication, press or concern–either online or in print) who perform their most electric writing (in eight minutes or less) before a lively audience and a panel of three all-star judges. After each pair of readings, the judges—focused on literary merit, performance and intangibles—take turns spouting hilarious, off-the-wall commentary about each story, then select their favorite to advance to the finals.

The two finalists then compete in the Literary Death Match finale, which trades in the show’s literary sensibility for an absurd and comical climax to determine who takes home the Literary Death Match crown.

It may sound like a circus—and that’s half the point. Opium and the Literary Death Match have long been passionate about inspecting new and innovative ways to present text on the page and off of it, and the most fascinating part about the LDM is how seriously attentive the audience is during each reading. We’ve called this the great literary ruse: an audacious and inviting title, a harebrained finale, but in-between the judging creates a relationship with the viewer as a judge themselves.

The event takes place at the Windup Space on January 30th—full details here. Come on out and support literary lunacy in Charm City!