Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 9: Dr. Coffee's Pill (2004)

I really don't want to write this one. There. I've said it. Now I have to stop procrastinating and get it done.

Don't get the wrong idea! I love "Dr. Coffee's Pill." It's one of my favorites, and I'm very proud of it. I just re-read it, in fact, in preparation for writing this blog, and I didn't cringe once. Well, maybe once, when I saw a "he" that might have been better clarified in the narration, but the dialogue made it clear whom I was referring to, so ... I am now both overthinking and procrastinating.

Here's the thing. "Dr. Coffee's Pill" is a short story about the relationship between art and pain, and, for me, it is a story that comes from a place of deep personal pain; a pain that  might have killed me once, as I see it.

So ... Let's talk about "Generation X." We weren't given that label for following the non-existent Generation W, no. We were given that name by the Baby Boomers more in line with the term "Brand X." The lesser ones. We weren't like them, and therefore, we were basically deemed defective by the mainstream media of the time. I don't want to overdo it with generalizations here. There are billions of humans on the earth, and more exceptions to every generalization than I am willing to try my hand at counting. That being said, yes, I am using generalizations to make my point, because the generalizations match my experience, and stopping to point out every exceptional member of each generation whom I personally know would be tedious. Suffice it to say, I acknowledge these individuals, and this is not a story about them.

Looking back at my life, I have noticed that most Baby Boomers I knew growing up were extremely good with children, aside from beating the hell out of them. They doted on their children, as long as they could. Gen X was the last generation to have the luxury of a stay-at-home parent, until we became the first generation of what the media dubbed "latch-key kids." The divorce rate skyrocketed with the Baby Boomers, and we wound up with no parent having the luxury of time. Everyone had to have a job. The media dubbed our homes "broken." Gen X got home to an empty house after school. We looked to the television for guidance, as we microwaved our own meals and waited for whichever tired parent we lived with to get home. I'm not saying this to elicit pity; I'm simply pointing out that there was a dramatic change in the average family dynamic, and it threw everyone for a loop. I never bemoaned being a "latch-key kid," at the time. The media did that for me. I was fine with it. I learned to enjoy my independence in the hours when no adults were around to advise me, to tell me yes or no. Still, It was when Gen X hit adolescence, specifically those of us born in the '70s and early '80s,  that the Baby Boomers generally stopped liking us so much. Suddenly, we weren't the obedient and adoring children we had always been. We were angsty teenagers who listened to "immoral" music and dressed like slobs. We didn't jump for joy to greet them when they got home anymore. We were too busy being developmentally normal adolescents and distancing ourselves from parental authority as well as we could. Our parents didn't have the energy or the patience for it, nor were they very inclined to stop and evaluate what was happening, or whether or not it was to be expected. All they saw were behavioral changes they didn't have time to nurture us through.

A lot of us were embittered by their sudden absence in our lives, as we made an effort to spread our wings. And a lot of our parents were embittered by the loss of their innocent children who were now obnoxious teenagers, too big to successfully beat without us realizing we could hit back. As a result, in the late 1980s, there was a trend of teenagers being needlessly tossed into mental hospitals by their parents, who simply didn't know what to do with teenagers. In their minds, teenagers, "Generation X," were the worst, most ungrateful, and mentally deranged people in the world. If they couldn't subdue us with Ritalin, there was nothing else for it. We had to be institutionalized until we learned to either revert to being obedient children or grow instantly into fully functional and responsible adults. There was no time for any in-between phase.

The message was simple. Conform, or vanish.

I was no exception to this trend, and it's another part of my story I don't like to talk about.

In 1988, my mother and father had just divorced. I don't want to get into the private details too much, for the sake of respecting everyone involved. I will say, it was an ugly divorce, and, in that, it wasn't very exceptional. I was luckier than most kids my age, in that my father remained in my life. He left our home, but he didn't leave us. It probably would have been a fairly smooth transition, if my mother hadn't insisted I was depressed and sent me to a psychiatrist I had nothing to say to. I was actually relieved when my dad left. The tension in the apartment had only been getting worse. Mom was getting more and more dramatic, and Dad was getting more and more silent. He didn't speak to anyone. He would stare at books without ever turning a page, just so he didn't have to interact with any of us. He was miserable. She was miserable. We were all miserable. Dad moving out was more like lancing a boil. He and my mother were suffocating each other, and it had to end. Frankly, I never understood how they made it as long as they did. I never understood how two people who were so extremely different even got married in the first place, but I'm glad they did, for my existence's sake.

I'm not  trying to condemn them here. Divorces happen. Toxic relationships break down. It's never pretty. It's never happy. In my opinion, in the case of my parents, it needed to happen in order for everyone to be happy and healthy again. I'm only giving you the backstory so that you understand how I got stuck in this particular situation as a teenager.

Mom insisted I see a psychiatrist, and as I said before, I was not depressed about the divorce; I was relieved. I also didn't have a choice, so I was dropped off once a week or so, to tell the doctor who shall remain nameless here all about why I was depressed and hated my dad. The problem was, I wasn't depressed, and I didn't hate my dad, so I pretty much said nothing. Doctor Moneybags (let's call him that) would ask me questions, and I would say things like, "Yeah," or, "No," or, when I couldn't decide between the two, an I-guess-sinister, "I don't know." I never gave the man any reason to suspect that I was a danger to myself or others. Still, he told my mother that I was, in fact, a danger to myself and others. I denied this tearfully to my mother, when the doctor said I had to be put in a mental hospital so that I didn't murder my family, but he was a doctor, and I was a deranged member of Generation X; branded a smart-ass, a slacker, a punk, a latch-key kid, and every other "X" that the media could invent to slap us across the face with. I had no chance.

Moneybags wanted to put me away that day, but my father put his foot down. It was December, after all. I couldn't miss Christmas! And so it was that the day after Christmas, I was institutionalized.

I met a number of interesting people in the mad house. There was a former child star, who had been on a Saturday morning TV show I had watched years before, whose mental problem was pretty much that she was no longer a child, and her parents didn't understand why. There was another girl who had been put there, because she frequently had sex with her boyfriend and fully intended to continue doing so. There was a boy whose clearest symptoms of insanity included listening to heavy metal music and growing his hair long; another boy whose parents thought he prayed too much; another who had a Mohawk haircut and had smoked some weed. You know ... crazy people.

The point is, despite the opinions of the experts, none of us belonged there.

Dr. Moneybags would come to see me once a week, to continue our non-conversation and collect his check from my dad's insurance. There were other, equally corrupt doctors there who made sure we all took our meds, which were never explained to us. But if we got caught spitting them out, they would watch us swallow them thereafter and check our mouths. If we questioned them or resisted treatment, we were isolated. I once got busted for eating a grape without permission. I was clearly on the path to a depraved life.

While I hadn't been depressed before, that started to change fairly rapidly when I was locked up for months. I didn't see any way out. I started to lose the will to live. I thought if I had to stay there one more night, I would simply die in my sleep. I wasn't about to conform, but I had to pretend that I was in order to survive. The doctors would try to lead me into saying that I wanted to experiment with sex and drugs, but I never took the bait. They were trying to justify keeping me there and draining my dad's insurance money. Curiously enough, when the insurance money ran out, I was declared cured and released.

When I got home, I  stopped expressing my feelings so much, for fear of being sent back to the hospital. I lived with that fear every day until I moved out. I learned to hide my feelings and my actions from my parents and others of their generation. I learned to nod my head until the totally-not-insane grown-ups went away, and I just did my teenager thing on my own, letting them think they had won whatever argument they were having with themselves at me. My mom hid all of the knives from me, still convinced I was a danger to myself and others. She even hid my BB gun, which I find hilarious to this day. My dad, unconvinced by the psychiatric conspiracy theories, fantasized about crossing paths with Dr. Moneybags in public and beating the hell out of him. I, too, fantasized about my dad beating the hell out of Dr. Moneybags.

As a result of all this, I grew up to be an obstinate non-conformist. I evolved from actively hiding my actions and feelings to just not advertising them. I would do what I wanted to do, and if someone noticed and didn't like it, I would shrug and do it anyway. If someone, usually from the previous generation, started having a meltdown over my refusal to obey and conform to what they thought I should be doing, I would watch them melt down, for entertainment, or I would shrug and walk away, continuing to do my own thing, not really caring that they were giving themselves an aneurysm over it. It's something I identify as a Gen X trait. I know we're not all like that, but I am, and most of the people I grew up with are, and so many of the articles I read about Gen X support the whole "does not play well with authority figures" stereotype that can be said to define our generation.

I'm not sure where this cartoon originated, but it's perfection.

So, what does all this have to do with "Dr. Coffee's Pill?"

Everything, as it turns out.

"Dr. Coffee's Pill" was originally an essay assignment in a college English class I was taking in the early 2000s. We'd been studying all of these creative historical figures for weeks, and the professor, Dr. Mary Northcut, whose every class I dutifully signed up for, gave us some prompts to choose from. I chose the one that called for us to imaging some of the people we'd been studying in a support group together. I can't take credit for that part of the idea, but as for who was in the support group, the character of the psychiatrist, the topic of their conversation, and the story that followed, that was all my own.

I based the character of Dr. Coffee on Dr. Moneybags, who had basically stared at me for an hour a week while drinking coffee incessantly, before having me committed. His drinking coffee was the affectation I took the most notice of, so I gave it to my fictional psychiatrist. The artists in the support group were Frederick Chopin, Vincent van Gogh, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Frida Kahlo, all of whom had been affected by profound pain in their lives.

I looked up the artists' own words for a lot of their dialogue, working quotes or stylistically similar phrases into their discussion. The topic of conversation was the relationship between artists and their pain. Would they still be the greats that they were, if someone took away their pain? Dr. Coffee had a pill that promised to do just that.

I dipped into my own pain to write the group session. I went back to my experience with Dr. Moneybags and the mental hospital I should never have been in; the attitude displayed by so many of the Baby Boomers I grew up around, that I should conform, or vanish. Conform, or be erased. Conform, and be erased.

The story was short and to the point. Just the way I like them. Dr. Coffee left the group to discuss his proposition, with the bottle of pills sitting there before them. Would they take the pill and free themselves from the torments of their experience, or would they refuse and continue swimming upstream in a world whose expectations and realities had deeply wounded them.

When the name of the medicine is revealed at the end of the story, it was Basquiat who tied it up so brilliantly, highlighting the truth of the proposed non-solution by crossing out the word. I like to think that, should I find myself in a similar support group for dead artists some day, I would do the same. 

My pain is a bottomless well of emotional intelligence. My pain is the ink that I bleed on the page. My pain informs my joy, and thus my joy is boundless.

I stole this screenshot from Austin Kleon, who stole it from the
documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child.

"Dr. Coffee's Pill" was published to my website as a PDF e-book on December 4, 2004 and in paperback the following year. It was re-issued most recently in 2012, as a Kindle e-book and a print edition available exclusively through my website, via Lulu.com. 

Next: "Metrognomes: Worse Than a Gremlin" (2005)

Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 8: Music of the Metrognomes (2003)

What else can I say? I love these little guys!

It may be best to save the big story about Metrognomes for my upcoming blog about the first novel in the series. Suffice it to say, the two short stories and the novel series were all coming together simultaneously, way back at the dawn of the 21st century.

I want to say it was 2001, when Molly Brimer and I started working on this world in earnest. I was spitting out story ideas, and she was feverishly sketching character designs from my notes and rantings. I wanted to do three fully illustrated short stories to dip my toes into this magical world and to lead into the events of the first novel. They were intended as direct prologues to the larger story that would be told in the books.

I wound up writing two of the three short stories that I had pitched. The third one didn't really come together for me, even though it likely would have been the shortest, and I could have written it in a day. I will likely return to it though. It's never actually left my thoughts.

But, to the subject of this blog: "Music of the Metrognomes" was my first step into this universe; a dramatic departure from the horror fiction I had written up to this point.

I had this idea for a big novel that would tell a story covering about a decade of its characters' lives. I'll come back to this in a later blog, but the short of it is, I chopped that story into treatments for five distinct books, because I thought it would be more easily digestible for readers that way. Then, I decided it was too cartoony, and I thought I'd never actually go there.

That changed, when I met Molly Brimer, while we were both working at a Barnes and Noble subsidiary called Book Stop, in Dallas. She revealed herself to be an amazing illustrator, did some work for me, and reawakened these gnomes in my imagination. Perhaps the story wouldn't have worked for me as a mere prose narrative, but, with illustrations, we might just have something!

She signed on with enthusiasm matching my own, and we started meeting frequently, outside of work, to go over the characters and plot lines for the series.

I was in a really good place creatively when I wrote this first short story. My website was getting a decent number of hits, my first novel was selling steadily, I was well into working on The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas and The Great Debate, and I had so many ideas of where I wanted to go next. I'm so glad I settled on the gnomes!

The overarching theme of the Metrognomes series was about the power of diversity; about gnomes from different cultural backgrounds coming together and adding to each other's strengths. That's really all I wanted to set up in this first short story, aside from the world itself; a world I was very nervous about writing.

I had primarily written horror and other dark fiction up to this point, and I had no idea what the tone of this new world was going to be. That was my first inspiration for writing these little prologues. I wanted to meet the characters before we got into the big story. I wanted to understand their world, before I tried to go there for the length of a full novel.

I had planned to tell the story of how Ak'ten, a magical Old World gnome, and Pete, an atheistic Techgnome, first met as children. However, when I looked into the world to start jotting down a basic plot, I discovered that I was far more interested in the second time they met as children. It gave them each an opportunity to worry their guardians before heading out, by confessing they had each met a gnome whom they were forbidden to associate with, and that they had not seen what the problem was.

The adults in the protagonists' lives were there to establish the philosophical contrasts of the two gnome cultures. Ak'ten was an Old World gnome, training under his mentor Malík to be a shaman someday. His people believed in magic, and fairies, and gods. They viewed Pete's culture to be dangerous blasphemers. The Techgnomes, represented by Pete and his mother Resna, believed in science, technology, and secularism. They had seen too many wars started by religion and had long since abandoned magical, dogmatic thinking. They viewed the Old World gnomes as dangerous pagans. Each of these societies had forbidden their people from interacting with the other, but when Ak'ten and Pete crossed paths, all they could see in each other was a different sort of gnome, who wasn't actually threatening in the least.

The story of their second meeting gave me a chance to foreshadow the friendship that would bloom upon their third, which would be the basis for the novel Metrognomes: The Shaman's Apprentice. 

Nervous as I was to try my hand at fantasy, I was delighted by the characters when I met them on the page. I started to find the tone of the overall series in the young gnomes' innocent curiosity about each other. Once I'd finished this first tale, I knew I could write the novel from the perspective of Ak'ten and Pete without trouble, though they'd be teenagers by the time I touched base with them again.

While Molly did concept sketches for several interior illustrations, it became so time consuming to do them in full color, as we had planned, that we eventually abandoned them in favor of getting the story published sooner, with the intention of doing an illustrated second edition later. Molly did finish a couple of the full color paintings, before we let the idea go, and one of them was chosen to serve as the cover art for the e-book. I would still love to work with Molly on finishing these other illustrations someday. Time will tell, if we ever have the chance to go back and do just that.

"Music of the Metrognomes" was published as a free PDF e-book on my website on July 30, 2003. It was the first story I ever published in that format. A number of e-book and print editions would follow over the years, the most recent being the 2013 Kindle e-book and a paperback available exclusively through my website, via Lulu.com.

This story has always been very dear to me. I met some of my favorite characters in its pages. In fact, to this day, Ak'ten and Pete remain two of my very best friends.

Next: "Dr. Coffee's Pill" (2004)

Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 7: The Great Debate (2003)

The Great Debate was my second multi-format book release. It was a short book of short fiction; four stories, one of which had already been published on its own previously; and it was the hardest writing project I had ever taken on at the time.

I was still in that bleeding demons phase of my early writing career. I was struggling with things, as I wrote in "Part 1" of this blog series. I was struggling with coming out, with the hypocrisy of the church I had been raised to believe in, with the fear of them being right and my being wrong; the fear of Hell. The fear, and the reality, of being rejected by people who mattered to me.

I had launched my writing career with the publication of my short story, "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," in 1999, and it had been cathartic. It had been healing, in the way that having a good cry is healing. But it hadn't sorted the issues in my soul. It had merely opened the floodgates. I needed to say more. Much more.

I set out to write an anthology of stories that would illustrate the process of coming out as gay while struggling with the self-hatred  happily encouraged by a deeply religious upbringing. I was always angry about these things, and rightly so.

I didn't start writing the book as a cohesive thing at all. I wrote "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," and called it a day. I'm not sure, exactly, of the order, but I think the next story I started in on was actually the last in the book, "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." The third story I got sucked into was the novella, "Six Nights to Damnation," which was placed second in the anthology, and the fourth was "Christian's Dilemma," which wound up sitting between "Six Nights" and "Reverend Philips."

It took me years to write this book.

It was still the late 1990s when I started "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." I had fully embraced the Theatre culture on the campus of Richland College at this point. I had made friends of all the girls, and the other guys were often overheard saying things like, "What does Glenn have that I don't have?"

The answer? Safety! I wasn't trying to get anything out of the women in our group, other than the  friendship they freely offered. It was a game to us, not letting the straight guys know what was up. The girls would drag me into the ladies' room for chats, never explaining to the straight men what was happening. And it was still dangerous to be completely out. Even in a college Theatre group. There were men who were known to be a threat, and everyone knew it. So the women kept my secret from these men, after sussing it out for themselves.

Those were good times; the promise of creative freedom was all around me. I started growing out my hair, expressing myself boldly in everything I did. I had written all of the stories I would publish in 1999, but that year had not yet come. I felt that my writing had been bold, and my spirit had taken the hint and followed suit. I was out to my friends, but not to most of my family. I still feared the repercussions of that particular act of future boldness.

The group of us actors was cast in a production of Frankenstein, and the director, a noted puppeteer from Mexico, wanted to form a script from our ad-libs. It was bliss! We weren't just memorizing lines from a prewritten script, we were forming the script effortlessly, as we played off of each other's imaginations on the stage. I was doing everything Theatre at this point in my life. I practically lived on campus.

One of my many Theatre-related classes had us all write and read aloud a one-act play for a final grade. This is where "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell" was born. I was inspired by my outrage at Westboro Baptist Church, which was often in the headlines of the day for their brutal homophobic bigotry. Their leader, Reverend Fred Phelps, was on trash talk shows all the time, red faced and furious, shouting his sinister catchphrase, "You're going to Hell!" at the gay community and their allies alike. He was a raging microcosm of the evils of the Christian church worldwide. Granted, some churches taught "tolerance," but even this was an insult. We didn't want or deserve to be merely "tolerated." We wanted and deserved to be fully accepted and embraced for who we were!

Fred Phelps was the genesis of the character, but Aidan Philips was certainly not a clone of the man. I took the attitudes of other like-minded pastors, the sinister actions of other churches that were obsessed with attacking gay people and their families, and I put them all into one character. I wrote this one-act play for class, performed it, and felt like I wanted it to be more. I wanted to expand it, even if only a tiny bit. I wanted Reverend Philips' bigotry to go beyond homosexuality. There were other hateful headlines. Women being run out of the church for leaving their abusive husbands, children of white mothers being exhumed from the grave when the church learned that their father was black. Monstrous acts being done in the name of Christianity! I wanted Reverend Philips to embody them all in his personal mission.

Script-in-hand, post Intro to Theatre class, I mapped out The Great Debate, planning to expand upon these themes progressively with each story, using "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" as the springboard and "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell" as the resolution. It seemed simple enough; write three new stories, stick them between the two I already had, add a scene or two to "Reverend Philips," and bam, there's a new book. I erroneously thought I could knock it out pretty fast.

By the end of the process, I would swear off writing structured anthologies and working with illustrations forever! Here, in 2020, I'm laughing at myself for that, but the feeling was real. This book was hard to write!

I wanted the book to serve as one collective metaphor. It was really about coming out as gay in a community of faith, confronting the hypocrisies, embracing and valuing oneself, and becoming a positive example for others in coming out myself. From beginning to end, the stories told a meta-story about the importance of coming out and standing up to the crippling power of fear.

"The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," was the first step: Recognition. In the coming out process, we first recognize that we are not like the so-called "white fleeced sheep." We are not welcome by them, unless we stay hidden and pretend to be just like them. There are social consequences to not going along with the herd, but there are personal consequences for conforming. We choose our consequences. Do we serve our haters, or do we serve our selves?

In order to come out, we must choose to serve ourselves; to step off of that ledge, to allow them to ostracize us, forcing us to sleep outside in the rain, like the protagonist of that story, with their taunts and promises of Hell.

These evil assurances invariably lead to fear, when you've been brainwashed your entire life into believing these attitudes to be the unequivocal word of God. So, after one has taken the first step, the next is to face one's fear, and that is what "Six Nights to Damnation" was really all about. It was a story about these fears being proven right. It was a story about what we fear will happen after coming out; that it will destroy us, that we will ruin every relationship that matters to us; that we will find no mercy or forgiveness under God; that we will be perfectly damned for what we are.

In order to transcend these fears, we first have to look them dead in the eye.

The novella's protagonist, Anthony Paul, faced his fears, and they destroyed him. He became the very monster that he had feared he would. And, in the end, he was nothing more than food for the creatures of Hell. This story works great as part of the overall metaphor of the book, but I would never give it a solo publication. On its own, it could only be seen as hatefully homophobic; as supporting the corrupt teachings of Christianity and other religions. As a part of the whole, it is redeemed in the end as an honest part of a much larger internal process.

This one was probably the hardest to write for me. "Six Nights to Damnation" was me, as a writer, facing some personal taboos. I wrote a torrid sex scene for the first time, I killed off a child, and even more horribly for me, I killed off a dog! At the time, some of these things were actually funny to me, once I got to them. I have a habit of writing sex scenes to be deliberately over the top and laughing as I do. When people tell me how much those scenes titillated them, in my head, I'm remembering how hard I personally laughed while writing them. I got through it, just the same. I even laughed when Anthony, having just murdered his six-year-old cousin, cheesily told his wife that Christopher was, "Out like a light," when she asked if he was sleeping. This was, of course, before I knew any children as an adult, before I would even write "Night Light." But the murder was still nightmarish for me to write, even if I did let out a few ghoulish giggles as a coping mechanism. In truth, I was utterly disturbed by the murderous nature of Anthony as the story progressed. I was riddled with nightmares by the butchered bodies piling up in the trunk of his car. And, all that considered, the hardest part was killing Patches the dog. I stopped writing for a bit when I got there. I couldn't do it, but I knew the story demanded it of me. In Cry, Wolf, there was a dog, Sampson, slated to die in the outline, who had other and better ideas for himself, in defiance of my outline, that helped to tie up the novel perfectly in the end. Sampson survived, but there was no hope for Patches. I have a powerful memory of taking a shower, trying to put off the moment, and breaking down sobbing, because I had to kill the dog.

Then ... I killed the dog, and it was awful. But I did it. I faced it, and I wrote it, and the story worked. The horrific metaphor of Anthony's fears being realized was complete.

The next step on the coming out journey, after acknowledging these fears, is defeating them; self-forgiveness; taking a side in the great ethical and theological debate; learning to love ourselves unconditionally, despite the abusive teachings of a life-long system of belief. That's where "Christian's Dilemma" came in.

This story was more autobiographical than the rest for me. It was about a man, Christian Rivers, Jr., who had come out in his faith community as bisexual. He had continued to fight the uphill battle, remained a leader in his church, but he had not been genuinely accepted by the Church. He was still told that his very being was a sin, that he was an affront to God, that he was hurting his family. He was struggling with all of the fears that had been presented in "Six Nights to Damnation."

"Christian's Dilemma" also confronts the problem of suicide in the gay community. The suicide rate is much higher among young LGBTQ people who do not feel accepted by their families or other communities. The story opens with Christian being urged by a demon in his closet to take a gun and kill himself, ridding the world of the inevitable pain he was going to cause by his mere continued existence. He was assured that everyone would be happier without him. Then he trips over an angel on his front porch, and a fresh perspective comes to him in conversation with that angel, one of his guardian angels. He starts to pick apart the mixed messages of the Bible, of the Christian faith, of an inexplicable dogmatic presentation of the Supreme Being as a petty monster. In the end, he accepts himself, he doesn't just ponder the possibility of God's love, he accepts it as a reality, and he chooses life; full life, as the man he was born to be.

The challenge in writing this one for me was facing my own inner "suicide demons;" facing the part of me that was filled with self-loathing because I'd been told to feel that way about myself my whole life. Writing this story for the protagonist was the same as experiencing his personal revelations for myself. I came out on the other end of it changed. I was ready to take the next step ... sort of.

There was another story I had planned to put in The Great Debate that just didn't happen. It was about an ostrich who'd been raised by eagles and didn't know he wasn't an eagle until he grew up. This was maybe the only instance of me not knowing where a story was going before I sat down to write it. I did write one scene, as I recall, and I loved it. It was funny and cartoony. It would have added a whole other vibe to the book. I got stuck on the story for a long time. I even spitballed ideas to friends, never coming up with a satisfying conclusion. I finally abandoned it, realizing the cartoony vibe probably didn't fit the book anyway, and feeling the message of self-acceptance would have been somewhat redundant. I may go back and finish this story someday, if the ending presents itself, but in all this time, that has yet to happen. I'm comfortable with my choice to leave it behind.

That brings us back to good ol', bad 'ol Reverend Philips. I thought it would be weird and cool to end the book with a play, rather than prose. I wanted to add a couple more scenes to the one-act, to flesh it out, to make it more about the full hypocrisy of Christian hate groups. I realized pretty quickly, however, that I could get deeper into it through a traditional prose narrative. I wanted to convey thoughts and feelings, beyond the dialogue and stage directions. This meant I would have to do an extensive rewrite of what I already had, which took more time. For the additional scenes, I pulled from the headlines. The aforementioned exhuming of children's bodies being the most gruesome. My main character here wasn't just guilty of hate speech. Unlike the real-world pastor who had inspired him, Aidan Philips was guilty of orchestrating lethal attacks on gay people.

This story openly steals from Dickens, then takes it to the next level. Instead of merely revisiting his past crimes under the guidance of his former protege, Reverend Philips is forced to live as the various types of people he has condemned in the name of Christ. He has to feel a battered wife's anguish as she fights off her husband and escapes with their child, he has to feel the deep and sacred truth of a gay couple falling in love, he has to feel the unconditional love in the hearts of an interracial family. He returns from this astral journey a changed man, with a new mission.

The final step in the coming out metaphor of The Great Debate, then, is that once we have identified our truth, once we have faced our fears and defeated them, once we have accepted and forgiven ourselves, learned to love ourselves, we must become proactive. We must unflinchingly guide and defend others as they make this same journey, whether they are facing discrimination for the same reasons we did or for some other, equally insane reason. We are all equal in value, as humans. The oppression of any  unjustly marginalized group, is the oppression of humanity itself. If we do not accept every opportunity to stand up for others, it means very little that we ever stood up for ourselves. The next, and final step, is to see ourselves in others and treat them no differently than we have treated ourselves.

I had wanted to publish this book in 2000, the year after Cry, Wolf, but it took a lot of time to fight through the first draft. Then I had to go and get ambitious, deciding it would be cool to have illustrations at the top of each chapter, since I already had one for "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep." It took a lot of extra time and money, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I've learned over the years that it is always best to follow a vision, even if it takes more work to realize it; even if it takes far more time than I had planned to spend with a project. My sister, who had already provided the Website art for "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," did another black-and-white illustration for "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." Molly Fine (then surnamed Brimer), did the illustrations for "Christian's Dilemma," and "Six Nights to Damnation." The "Six Nights" illustration caused us insane amounts of grief with the publisher. For some reason, grayscale was declared undoable. Molly had done a brilliant color graphic that looked terrible in solid black-and-white. She had actually done two, to give me a choice, but they both looked equally bad when stripped both of color and the subtitles of grays. She did another in white chalk on black paper that was gorgeous, only for the publisher to change their tune and say that grayscale was fine. This nightmare was the main reason I swore off using illustrations; a vow that would be undone when we got to the world of Metrognomes, but that's a story for the next blog.

The Great Debate was released, at last, on January 13, 2003 in hardback and trade paperback editions, followed by a release party at Lucky Dog Books on April 27. I dedicated the book to my friend Charlotte Deaton, the mother of one of my best friends from my teenage years. Charlotte had been there for me when I needed some extra courage, when I had to get my first HIV test, when I needed someone to hug after getting the word that the test had come back negative and I was in the clear. Facing such fears is what writing The Great Debate had been about for me. It seemed the perfect touch to dedicate it to such a friend, who had been there for me during its writing.

The publication of this anthology ended an anxiety-inducing drought that followed the third chapter of The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas. After publishing nothing in 2002, it was a Godzilla-sized relief to get this book behind me and finally have it out in the world, being read.

I tried to get iUniverse to release an e-book, when Kindle started making waves in the publishing world, but they told me that would require an entire new edition of the print versions, that I would have to finance. I went on to work on cutting out the middleman. Meanwhile, they eventually released an e-book of their own in 2011, without consulting me. I found this both irritating and amusing. I released my own revised edition of the book in 2012, in hardback, trade paperback, and Kindle e-book. For the e-book, I was finally able to present the two color illustrations in color. A pocket paperback was released in 2017.

The Great Debate remains one of my most widely read books, and it remains one of the closest to my heart. A forever reminder of where I was when I wrote it; a reminder of my responsibility to speak out and be brave for those who find themselves on a similar path.

Next: "Music of the Metrognomes" (2003)

Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 6: The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas, Volume I--The Vampire Murders (2000-2001)

I love soap operas. I love their over-the-top, often campy melodrama, their plots that twist and turn in every direction, and the very idea of a story that just keeps on going, cliff hanger after cliffhanger. In the late 1990s I had also recently fallen in love with the fictional town of Nightfire, Texas while writing Cry, Wolf, and I wanted to go back there, desperately. That's really where it all began with this one. I wanted to write a soap opera set in the world of that novel, and so I took a close look at that world, and I realized that it would be more interesting for me if I set the story in the past, long before the events of  the novel itself. I pointed my mind's eye to the year of my birth, and the characters came right out of the ether, eager to share the ... days of their lives ... with me. And so was born my serial novel, The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas.

I also wanted to keep the momentum going from the short stories I had posted on my website, which were, as planned, bringing people back to my site regularly and helping me to sell my novel. I loved the idea of the Victorian era serial novels, or penny dreadfuls; literary cliffhangers that kept people coming back, week after week, to read the next chapter. I thought a story told in this old fashioned, piecemeal style would be even better at keeping readers coming back to my site between standard book releases than the short stories had been. I was working on my next book already, so I knew I wanted, and needed, to keep the interest of the readers I had already gained.

Setting the story in 1974 gave me a creative canvas of about twenty-three years to tell a story, before the characters would come up against the events of Cry, Wolf. I had the three leads already developed in my mind: Ray Don, Bradley Stevens, and Sam Turner, and I was very interested in their humanity. I was drawn to the story of realistic, small town Texas life in general; the everyday people living in this town, dealing with the social issues and world events of the time in which they lived. I would have been happy to write entirely in the fashion of American realism at this point, to keep the characters free of paranormal plot lines until 1997, when that whole werewolf thing was destined to go down.

But then, what would readers of a more reality-based soap opera think if they hadn't read the werewolf novel first? It just wouldn't jibe when they got there. We would go from twenty plus years of serious historical fiction, heavy on the social issues of racism, sexism, the political climate of the late 20th century, peppered with soap opera romance tropes that would add all of the most dramatic ups and downs in the characters' lives, to then ... suddenly the town gets ransacked by a werewolf?

No.

As resistant as I was to the idea, the reality of a soap opera set in Nightfire, Texas was that, while I wanted it to be more Knots Landing, it absolutely had to lean more into the genre tropes of Dark Shadows. Seeing the truth in this, the need for the supernatural to be present in the story from the start, I wanted to find a way to make one of the central protagonists forever steeped in the paranormal, so that the narrative would never lose that thread as the series progressed, and the werewolf-centric events of Cry, Wolf would not seem unreasonable to the reader who discovered Chronicles first and moved on to the novel from there.

So far, I hadn't forced anything into the story that didn't belong there. Adding a supernatural element was a demand made by the world and characters themselves. But I did, for the first time as a writer, resist the solution that they presented to me.

My mind was simultaneously working out the details of another series set in the same universe (still to actually be written), about a 1920s paranormal investigator. His side-kick in these stories was going to be a centuries-old vampire named Valentine Alexas. When I asked the Nightfire Universe the question of how to anchor The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas in the supernatural, while still keeping the main drive of the narrative about every day human struggles, it showed me this vampire, five decades or so after those other adventures he would have had, returning to Nightfire in secret, a death mark on his head, and needing to lie low in a place where werewolves couldn't touch him. I had my supernatural hook ... but I didn't want it, not in the way it had presented itself to me. I didn't want to do Dark Shadows; I wanted to do something original. I wanted to do something new.

I tried to force something else, to avoid the Dark Shadows vampire-next-door plot line. I would have much rather used a werewolf, but the continuity of Cry, Wolf made it impossible for a werewolf to be living secretly in the town in 1974. I thought about making one of the leads a ghost, but it just didn't work. It didn't manifest or even make sense alongside the other everyday human characters. It just wasn't meant to be. The story wanted a vampire; equal parts monster and human. And, yes, it had been done. But then, so had werewolves, ghosts, zombies, time travel, possession ... Dark Shadows had done them all.

But Dark Shadows had hardly originated the premise of the gentleman vampire. I think we have Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula to thank for making the gentleman vampire eternally famous, but we also had an earlier 19th century serial novel called Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood to thank for originating the concept, and we had, more recently, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and its many sequels to thank for perpetuating it. While I feared being seen as ripping off Dark Shadows (the 1991 iteration of which was, at the time, and still is one of my all-time favorite soaps), the gentleman vampire had actually already become an established literary genre. And my vampire, Valentinus Alexas, was not a depraved, yet redeemable murderer like Dark Shadows' Barnabas Collins when he first arrived on the scene, he was not morbidly depressed for all time like Anne Rice's Louis de Pointe du Lac, or flashy and audacious like her more prolific Lestat de Lioncourt, nor was he an irredeemable monster like Bram Stoker's eponymous Count Dracula. My vampire was his own man, so to speak. While there would be inevitable genre parallels for a centuries-old vampire who had been places and seen things throughout history, Valen, as he called himself, just wanted to fit in. He wanted to be taken for human and hide out from werewolves. He was a wealthy philanthropist who mostly wanted to keep to himself and read, while hanging out with his pet wolf Raksha. Certainly his two natures were in conflict, the man and the monster, but it struck me that this is true for all of us. In fact, Valen's inevitable inner conflict made him the most human character in the cast. And he was decidedly well adjusted for having this conflict, compared to the other "gentleman vampires" noted above. At last, I accepted him as a part of this story, and in no time at all, my acceptance grew into enthusiasm. The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas immediately became something unique; a modern-day penny dreadful about vampires, love triangles, and social issues.

Now that we've covered the inspiration, I think it's important to note exactly who I was in life at the time I sat down to write the first story arc in the series. I had just published my first novel, I was building a readership, and I was perfectly happy with where I was going. I had a heart for social justice, and I finally had a platform with which to tackle the issues closest to my heart. Unfortunately, I was also drowning in white privilege and perfectly ignorant to certain realities of racism.

White privilege: if you don't think it's real, then you have it. As for me, I wasn't in a place of disbelieving white privilege; in fact, mine was so bad that I had never even heard the term. I didn't even recognize it as a concept. That's not to say I was blind or ignorant to the evils of racism, I just didn't understand that my perspective was not universal.

Here's why that's relevant:

I made racism one of the key issues in The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas. For the most part, I'm happy with how I depicted it. I feel that I did a lot of things right. Yes, the leads consist of four men, three of whom were white and only one of whom was black. This was something I had seen growing up, on television, in films. Sitcoms and movies tended to cast a "token black" character, and this character was usually comedy relief. I hated that. I thought what I had experienced in school wasn't being represented by these stories. I felt like the idea of a group of white friends having one black friend, who didn't have any other black friends, and who was inevitably presented as a clown, was both absurd and demeaning to black people. So, I wanted to tackle it from within. I wanted a "token black" character who was rescued by white people (a common and offensive trope in stories of the time) to turn around in chapter 2 and rescue the white people. I wanted him to appear to be one more token character from the offset, only to become the hero of the story as it progressed. I feel like I did this fairly well.

I wanted to showcase the racism I had seen growing up; the racism that didn't make sense to me, because I was brought up in public schools post-desegregation, and I had friends of all kinds and always had, and to us race never appeared to be an issue. The most horrible children I grew up with were more concerned with how much money any given family had, rather than their race. In fact, we never discussed or even argued about race. Not knowingly. But then there was the specter of white privilege looming over us, and we didn't even know it.

We saw racism. We saw it in the generation that preceded us and even more from the generations that preceded them. Racist chants and racist jokes flew from the mouths of our relatives, who had grown up in a very segregated and discriminatory society that would have been perfectly alien to my generation of white children. At least for the white children I grew up around. We didn't know why the older generations felt so threatened by people who simply had different shades of skin than we did. And, I do realize that my experience wasn't universal, even as a white child. I know there were and are many white supremacists even today who are a part of Generation X. My point here is two-fold. For one, I saw racism in the '70s and '80s and was very familiar with its cruelty and ignorance, and I wanted to showcase that in my story as realistically as I could from my own memories. Second, I had no idea that racism hadn't literally ended in the 1990s, when it simply didn't seem to exist in my social groups at all.

But the only reason it didn't seem to exist, was because, as a white person, I didn't have to deal with it on a daily basis. That, in essence, is white privilege. I didn't see it, because I didn't have to. I thought we were living in a near-post-racist society, because none of my white friends seemed to be racists, and none of my other friends were ever attacked in my presence. I had the blissful ignorance and privilege of not seeing it anymore. Rarely even hearing it from the generational old guard, because by the 1990s they knew their attitudes were socially unacceptable, and they at least did us the favor of keeping it to themselves, which my mind translated into the idea that they no longer felt the way they used to about race.

So I did this. I depicted the racism of the 1970s I had witnessed in my story. I put those slurs in the mouths of my characters, be they hero or villain. In my mind, they were ignorant, and everyone reading the story would know that. Surely everyone would understand that I wasn't advocating for their language and opinions. It was important to present even the "good guys" as having ignorant racist attitudes, even when they thought they didn't. I got that right, I think. My mistake was in thinking it was obvious that they were in the wrong. The first arc does nothing to challenge them. It does nothing to address the racism of the town head-on. It simply showcases it and then allows it. The characters make ignorant statements that were intended to be just that, but the narrative never makes it clear that these statements were made in ignorance.

Now, I knew that the long arc of the series was going to see racism come to a head; that all of these things would be called out and addressed as the story grew forward; that even the "good guys" would be forced to face and confront their own ignorance and make a choice about whether to recognize it and change, or ignore it and turn a blind eye to the realities of being white in the American south in the 1970s. I knew it, and my white privilege told me that everyone shared my attitudes and that there was no reason to over-explain within the narrative structure of the story.

It wasn't until well after the series was in print that I woke up to the truth of American racism; that I recognized that white privilege was even a thing at all, and that I had been blinded by it all my life, even as a man who valued diversity. It was after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and the white supremacists came out of the woodwork like insects. They were everywhere. Some people I had known all my life became unrecognizable to me. Under the current administration, this has only intensified. Today, I am painfully aware of modern racism, of my own white privilege, of the fact that we are nowhere near living in a post-racist society in these early days of the 21st century.

Of course, the second arc of the series would begin to touch on these issues more directly, but it was still being presented through the lens of ignorance. The black protagonist, Sam, was actually guilty of saying some of the most ignorant things in the entire narrative. And I knew we were going to come back to that and explain it. It's a weird story as to why Sam has no idea, and we'll get there in the third arc, but I didn't think I needed to address it anywhere in the first two. I thought readers would simply "get it." I thought they'd accept that there had to be some out-there reason for Sam's attitude that would be addressed in time, because obviously the ignorant things coming out of his mouth were unfathomably wrong.

And maybe my readers did get it. I suppose it's possible that I'm overthinking the matter. In all the years that The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas has now been in print, I've yet to receive a single complaint about what I now perceive as its racially flawed narrative. Seeing it now so clearly as I do, this genuinely surprises me. I may be the only one who sees my presentation of 1970s southern racism in the story as flawed, but I sincerely doubt it, just as I sincerely doubt that these novels will continue to move forward in time without their flaws being more widely criticized for what they are, if nothing is done to correct it.

All that said, I really do love the series. I love the characters, the story, the soap opera format. And I will be addressing the ignorance of the original presentation in a more permanent way next year, when the series is re-released. I have written an introduction to the re-issue of Volume I, which basically sums up everything I just said, so that readers know how I really feel about the issues the characters are struggling with. In the re-issue of Volume II I'm planning to add a line or two of dialogue, maybe even a scene or two, to balance it all out, to call it out and set the stage a bit better for Volume III, which will tackle racism head-on as planned.

Meanwhile, the characters who live in Nightfire, Texas, be they black, white, Latino, vampire, ghost, or gray wolf, are all very dear to me, and I look forward to picking up their story again very soon.

The first three chapters of The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas were published between March 2000 and August 2001, constituting the first full arc of the series. These chapters were collected as a novella, in hardback and e-book editions, as The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas, Volume I: The Vampire Murders in February of 2013. The novella has since been released in trade paperback and pocket paperback editions as well.

And of course the series has continued with another twelve chapters, that were published between 2005 and 2012, but I'll save my reminiscences on that arc for another blog.

For now, as always:

The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas will continue ...

Next: The Great Debate (2003)

Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 5: Night Light (2000)

I freely admit that "Part 4" of this series started out like a creepy Reddit post. This one's going to be a lot more of that, so buckle up.

If I wanted to give an easy, surfacy answer to the question of where the short story "Night Light" came from, all I'd have to do is say, "It came from a doodle I did while talking on the phone." True story. I used to doodle a lot when I was on the phone, back when all phones were attached to the wall by cords, restricting my options and mobility so long as the conversation lasted. It was during one such phone call in the late 1990s that I doodled a creature that would ultimately serve as the inspiration for the story's antagonist, the closet monster Ooga Booga.

That's if I wanted to give a quick, easy answer.

However, if I wanted to go deep, tell you the whole story behind the story? We've gotta get weird; we've gotta get creepy; like the story itself.

As with Cry, Wolf, this one comes with a bit of a paranormal backstory. I'm going to say this upfront: I'm not trying to convince anyone that my interpretation of what I experienced as a child is the correct interpretation. It is entirely possible that I was, for some unknown reason, insane for years, to the point of auditory and visual hallucinations, and that these hallucinations inexplicably started and stopped parallel to the time that my family moved into and out of this particular apartment. I don't think I was insane, but either way, the experience was real for me. The experience was terrifying.

When I was ten years old, my family moved into a haunted apartment. That's my interpretation of what I went through. I didn't talk about it much at the time, and I don't talk about it much now. As with the thing I saw in the parking lot, detailed in the previous entry, I don't like talking about it. I'm uncomfortable with it. I don't want people to question my sanity or my honesty. I'd rather just leave it alone and ponder its mystery, discuss it only with people who have had similar experiences. But I do want to be open about my experience as a writer, about my influences, about how my personal journey has fed into my work. To that end, I'm going to tell you just a little bit about the haunted apartment, at least as far as it directly relates to "Night Light."

Our apartment building in Dallas was located right across the parking lot from an old slave cemetery. The cemetery was actually directly behind the playground across the street from us. Once a year, for several years in a row, tarantulas would swarm out of the cemetery, adding to the creep factor exponentially. I doubt there was any supernatural reason for this; it was probably more a result of the slave portion of the grounds being run down, gated off, and overgrown at the time. That was something everyone could see. I was not alone in the dread I felt about these spiders; the nightmares they brought on when it was their season.

But I was alone in what I suspect was another result of living beside an old, neglected graveyard.

It didn't start all at once. It built up slowly over the years. I think it started with the incident in the closet. I had a big closet in this apartment, and I loved to go in there and play with my toys. I would build forts under the shelves with some big, cardboard building blocks I had, and I would hide out behind them and draw. One day, I was in the closet, doing just that, and I started to think about ghosts. I had just read something in a restaurant about ghosts in the White House, and my mind started wandering back to the topic. I felt a chill, saw the goosebumps coming up on my arms, and then the closet door slammed shut, the light went out, and I heard a malicious laugh. It was a loud laugh; a man's laugh; not an ambiguous sound at all.

I screamed and bolted through the wall of blocks, opened the closet door, and ran out of my room, through the hall, and out into the living room, where I found everyone behaving normally, barely acknowledging my presence, dashing my hopes that it had been my father playing a twisted, out-of-character prank on me.

I kept it to myself. Actually, I can't recall ever telling that story to anyone before now. I instinctively knew I would not be believed.

As time went on, things escalated. I would hear footsteps in the hallway at night. Very distinctive footsteps. At the time, my maternal grandmother was living with us, and she had taken my sister's room at the opposite end of the hallway, while my sister had moved into the bottom bunk in my room. I always took an auditory inventory at night. I could hear my sister breathing steadily in the bottom bunk, my grandmother in her room, my mother and father both snoring loudly in their room on the other side of the apartment. My dog was often sleeping at the foot of my bed or snuggled right up beside me. Everyone was accounted for, and then the footsteps would come, when I was the only one left awake. When they crossed into my bedroom, I would cover my head and pray, every night, in a state of sheer terror. I would pray, and the footsteps would come right up next to the bed, and then I would hear breathing, right beside my head. There was no question in my mind that whatever this thing was, it knew it was scaring me. It wanted to scare me.

There was a malevolent energy about the building we were in too. Every single couple that moved in upstairs became violent after a few months, fought loudly, physically, broke up, and moved out. My own parents broke up, and my father moved out. This is more likely coincidence than anything else, but it was something I wondered about even then. Was the thing making people angry? Was it feeding on the negative emotions? The fear? The rage? The brutality? I was a child, so all I could do was wonder helplessly.

I lost sleep. Time after time I was too tired to get through school the next day after one of these visits from the invisible man. I would lie awake praying fervently, all night, and I would be exhausted by morning. I would fall asleep in class, or I would stay home sick with my mother. When I was a teenager, I would even cut class sometimes, just because I was so tired and couldn't keep my head up.

After my father moved out and my mother started working, it got even worse. I would be home alone, often. Doors would slam shut. Kitchen drawers would open and close. Most of the door slamming came from the room that my sister and grandmother took turns with. I thought that was actually its room, from before we had moved in. And it would come walking down the hall from there at night and into my room. I was the only one awake, so I would always be the one to get the visit. I have never experienced such a prolonged state of terror before or since. It scarred me for life.

It got so bad during the last year or so that we were in that apartment that I would make a run for my mother's room and sleep on the floor. There were times when I didn't make it. It found ways to scare me, to herd me back. One night that I was too terrified to be in my room, it made itself known in the living room when I tried to escape to my mom's room, and I had to close myself into the hallway and sit, vigilant, with my back in a corner so that nothing could come up behind me, crying and waiting for morning. I was in Hell.

I told my mother finally. I told her exactly what was going on. If you've read "Night Light," some of this will start to sound familiar to you. My mother told me very plainly that it was "just the air conditioner" making those sounds. I felt invisible. I felt completely alone. No matter what I told her had happened, she insisted it was the air conditioner and that I should go to bed and not be afraid.

Just the air conditioner ... laughing in a deep and menacing voice, slamming the closet door, my sister's door, opening and closing the drawers in the kitchen, and a great many other things I don't feel an immediate need to get into. The point is, if it had been the air conditioner, I'm pretty sure an AC repairman would have needed to bring along an exorcist.

We finally moved out, and things had begun to escalate daily as we made our preparations. I had to walk home from school to an empty apartment for a week or two, and I eventually just resolved to spend the whole time on the front porch, waiting for my mom to get off work and come and pick me up to go to the new town house each day. I was so relieved when the nightmare ended. We moved into the new place, and whatever it was that had been assaulting me for all those years stayed behind.

But here's the part that upset me the most; the part that really did trigger this short story years later, when I set out to write the story of this silly looking monster I had doodled on an envelope. The topic came up, after we were settled in the new town house, and, for once, my mother did not return to her tired old "just the air conditioner" explanation. Instead, she shocked me with the truth.

She told me that when we first moved into the apartment, they had found bloody clothes stashed in the space above the shower, in the bathroom that was between my room and my sister's room; that she had thought about it when I had started to tell her I was being harassed by a ghost; that she had kept it from me in order to keep me from being frightened. I was so angry when she told me this! I'm glad she did, because it was a validation. Proof of the paranormal? No. But it was something that began to give credence to my story outside of my own experience. Still, it was knowledge that would have helped me at the time; that would have told me I wasn't invisible, unheard, disbelieved. I had suffered all those years with nothing more than, "It's just the air conditioner," when she had known full well the whole time that there could be something to what I was telling her.

I know she wasn't being malicious. No parent ever gets everything right. All they can do is try. Her call was to protect me from the truth. Having never, as far as I know, experienced such a thing herself, I suppose she had no idea just exactly how terrified I was every night. I forgive her for that now, but when I wrote "Night Light" my subconscious was still processing the waking nightmare that I had lived through. I think that apartment is a big part of why I wound up writing horror stories when I grew up. You write what you know. You write from your experience.

As I wrote "Night Light," all of these old wounds opened up; the horror of being a child who wasn't being heard, the mother who insisted it was just the air conditioner and went to bed to sleep soundly while her child lay awake in terror. It was a retaliation, this story. It was a "What if it had gotten even worse?" scenario. I saw my mother's choice as negligent at the time I wrote the story, and so the story was about the possible lethal results of a parent not listening to their child. It was cathartic.

My feelings about "Night Light" have taken a couple of dramatic turns over the years. And I definitely don't think my mother was being negligent anymore; I just think she made the wrong call while trying to make the right call. All parents do it from time to time. All parents.

One of the things that happened to change my feelings about this story was the birth of my then-best friend's son in 2005. I had loved "Night Light" for its creepy weirdness, for its catharsis, for its brutal, ballsy ending. But, when Sebastian was born, and I bonded with him, my feelings for "Night Light" turned. I hated the story. In fact, it was the only story I had written that I felt this way about. I felt like it was a stain on my soul. I hated it for its hopelessness, for its brutal, heartless ending, for its failure to hear the cries of its protagonist, Luke, for help. The narrative left Luke's plight ignored, and he suffered without end until the monster at last got its meal. Yes, it's implied that his parents were punished for their neglect after the story, when they went in to their son's room to find him gone, to find his blood all over the floor. But that wasn't the way it should have gone! Luke was an innocent! He deserved to be heard and seen! So, I hated it from he moment I looked into Sebastian's eyes and saw his smile as he wrapped his tiny hand around my finger for the first time.

Of course, things changed for me again, when the characters started reaching out to me, telling me the story didn't actually end where I thought it did, showing me what happened next, that Luke was okay, that he did indeed get justice after all. They showed me "Night Light II," and the journey of these characters continued. I'll tell you all about it when we get that far in this retrospective blog series, but that's all I really have to say about the inspiration for the first one and how I relate to it; why I wrote it and how I wrote it.

"Night Light" was published directly to my Website in February of 2000, replacing "The Ghost in the Olive Grove," with which it shared a universe. This story is a key piece for me. Not only for my strong, emotional link to it, but also for the fact that it started my horror fiction down the path of universe-building, when Luke's mother mentioned her friend Amy, the protagonist of "The Ghost in the Olive Grove," whom she hadn't heard from since June.

Nineteen years later, "Night Light" stands as one of my all time favorite short stories. It's creepy. It's weird. It has ... teeth. As I look at the unpublished manuscripts currently on my desk, as I contemplate all of my plans for the future of the Nightfire Universe, it is abundantly clear that "Night Light," along with "Night Light II," is really the cornerstone of that fictional realm. And as for that realm, there is no end in sight.

Next: The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas, Volume I: The Vampire Murders

Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 4: Cry, Wolf--Shadow of the Werewolf (1999)

As with the most recent edition of the novel in question, I'm going to start this entry with a prologue.  In the interest of this blog series being as honest and open as it can be, I'm going to tell you something I never thought I would publicly admit to; something that I saw when I was a teenager. It's important. We'll come back to it more than once; in this entry and in the next.

What I saw and how I saw it is a story that would give my late mother another stroke and my father his first, because neither of them were ever aware of my nightly adventures in my early teens. You see, I found it thrilling to sneak out through my window at night and wander the apartment complex that we lived in.  We're going to come back to this complex in the next entry in more detail, but for now I'll just say that the property had ... issues. There were dangerous elements; not least of which were gangs and child molesters. Sneaking out in the dead of night was a stupid thing to do. But I wasn't doing it to win a Nobel prize. I was doing it for the thrill. The danger wasn't discouraging to me; there was danger at home anyway; rather, the presence of the outside dangers was the primary motivation. But this thing that I saw resulted in my never sneaking out again.

So, I was doing my dangerous thing that night. I was outside, unsupervised and dressed for bed. Everyone at home and throughout most of the apartment complex was asleep. I was unseen. I could sneak in and out of all the places across the property where I wasn't allowed to go during the day. Nothing new. In fact, seeing something out of the ordinary, almost getting caught, and sneaking back home unharmed with an accelerated heart rate were all par for the course. This time, I was crawling around the parking lot across the street, as quietly as I could, trying not to be seen by anyone who might do me harm or tell on me. Surveying my surroundings and trying to determine which way to sneak next, I looked out across the lot, and I saw something big jump up on top of one of the cars. It was a massive, shadow-like thing, and it made not a sound as it landed. I was too stunned at first to feel fear. I observed it. It was almost ape-like, with long arms and a bulky torso, but it had ears like a dog's. Not the floppy, cute kind, but pointed and alert. At the same time, it didn't seem real at all. It was a shadow. It had a shape, but I could only guess at its texture; its physical reality. It turned its head, and it looked directly at me with glowing, red eyes.

I had no idea what it was, unless it was a demon, but in that sobering instant, I knew that I was dead.

I had no reason to believe I would ever survive this encounter, but I couldn't think of anything else to do but run, and so I did, as stealthily as I could without losing speed. I ran home and crawled  trembling through the window, and only after closing it turned to look behind me, and I saw it, still on top of the car, watching me. It jumped off and vanished into the shadows of the night, and I hid under my blankets and prayed until the sun came up.

I never snuck out again.

This experience was singular. I can't prove that it happened. I'm the only one who knows it did. I, and perhaps the thing that I saw. I also can't prove that the thing I saw was actually there and not a hallucination, but I did see it, and I had never hallucinated before, as far as I knew. But whether it was imagined or physically present, I did have this experience, and it did impact me enough to change my nocturnal behaviors for the duration of my youth.

But, as I said, we'll come back to that.

The story behind the story of my first novel actually begins when I was about fifteen years old. I have mentioned in earlier blog posts my obsessive habit of writing bizarre short fiction, mostly devoid of dialogue. These were adventurous tales of sentient vegetables and the like doing absurd and generally amoral things, without much reason, until I wrote the words, "The End." The most fun bit of trivia regarding this particular creative drug I had stumbled upon is that I did so for a grade.

My 9th grade English teachers, Mr. Burke and Mrs. Johnson, are to blame for everything. How they indulged me! As long as I correctly used every one of that week's vocabulary words, I got an A; no matter how absurd the story that brought these words together may have been. Mr. Burke did once ask me, "Why are all of your stories about a pickle and a mushroom in the Land of Stupid?" There was no sensible answer to this question, of course. It's simply what I saw when I sat down to write. ("Paging Dr. Freud.") Mrs. Johnson, on the other hand, simply declared, "You're either going to be the next Stephen King, or you're going to wind up on display as the most perverted mind in America." Still, they both indulged me, and I continued to make As in Creative Writing. I continued to explore and enjoy the act of literary storytelling. I started to do it even when I wasn't assigned to. I started to write at home, because I had to. I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours after school, to write these stories uninterrupted. I would write by hand until my knuckles bled. I needed to see what happened to these characters next. Before long, my mind was always in the Land of Stupid.

Most of my creative notions at this time started with the question, "Wouldn't it be weird if ...?" Cry, Wolf was no exception, for the question at its unintended genesis was, "Wouldn't it be weird if I turned in a piece of serious horror fiction for Creative Writing, instead of the next adventure in the Land of Stupid?" I thought it would be a brilliant way to take my beloved English teachers off guard; to shock them.

I put my thinking cap on and tried to force a story. I thought about werewolves; about how they just weren't scary in most of their appearances. Classic films, like The Wolf Man or any of the others starring Lon Chaney Jr., were comedies to me. In then-modern movies, like The Howling, they appeared more monstrous but just as comical, even to a child, but I knew they could be scary. I had seen other films, like Silver Bullet and The Beast Must Die, that had left me feeling something other than simply amused. The Beast Must Die, I watched, alone at night, in my grandparents' house, when my family was staying with them on vacation. It terrified me for years. And Silver Bullet didn't frighten me so much as it fascinated me. Just this year, I revisited The Beast Must Die, and I was delighted at how much I laughed. It's a fun movie, but I think one needs to be a child in order to find it as terrifying as I did at the time. As for Silver Bullet, I haven't seen it since I was a child. The point is, these films were evidence to me that werewolves could be frightening and fascinating, rather than simply absurd. Werewolves were a concept that needed a makeover.

I tried and tried to come up with a truly frightening werewolf tale for my Creative Writing assignment ... and I wound up writing yet another story about a pickle and a mushroom in the Land of Stupid, thoroughly disappointed in myself for the bitter failure no one knew I had experienced. I took solace in reminding myself that writing was only done for a laugh. I was not a serious writer, and clearly I was never meant to be. Writing silly short stories remained just as fun thereafter, if not more so, but my failure to transition into something more serious never did stop nagging at my subconscious. All the same, I let it go for years.

If you'll allow me a tangent here, I think there's something to be said for reading. I have seen it said many times by authors far more seasoned than I, that reading voraciously is an essential part of being a writer. I agree with that. It's true, at least, for them and for me. But I have no inexorable proof that reading more definitively influenced me. Only a suspicion. My father bought me a copy of Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: Heir to the Empire when I was still in high school. I finally read it the following year, and the first book I ever bought with my own money was the second volume of that trilogy when it was published that same year. I started tracking down every Star Wars novel and comic book that I could find and actually reading them.Then, years after my niggling failure to write a horror story, I discovered the vast trove of wonders that was the public library. I discovered the works of Richard Bach, Anne Rice, Stephen King, and others.  In my early twenties, I was a voracious reader for the first time in my life. Eventually I started to read just about anything I could get my hands on. I don't know that this directly impacted what happened next, but, as I said, I suspect that it did.

I hadn't thought about writing a werewolf story in years. In fact, I had gleefully continued to expand the little universe of weird fiction I had created in 9th grade. Even those stories had gotten a bit more sophisticated, but I still had no vision of myself as a serious writer. Then, all at once, everything changed. I was in bed one night, in 1995, drifting away on the border between sleep and consciousness, when a werewolf story popped into my head as if zapped there on a lightning bolt. The whole story; beginning, middle, and end; all the characters; the fictional town where they lived. It was all there. When I had long since stopped trying to force it, the story forced itself on me instead.

I literally sprang out of bed, because I knew I had to write this down before it faded. I didn't go back to bed until I had typed out the full chapter-by-chapter outline for what would become the novel Cry, Wolf.

Of course, I didn't know what to do with this outline. I didn't know where it had come from. I didn't find it particularly scary, either. It was just an interesting story to me. I wanted to see it fleshed out on the page. The existence of the outline actually frightened me far more than its content, because I knew that no one could write this novel but me ... and I was no novelist. I had never written long form fiction, and I had no reason to believe that I could. But the story would not leave me alone. The characters began to come to life in my mind's eye. It soon dawned on me that, if I could write a hundred short stories, surely I could write seventeen chapters, and when it was done I would have a novel.

I did a bit of research on werewolves. I discovered some curious things that were full of potential, but had no place in the book I wanted to write. I made notes and saved them for later. We'll come back to some of that.

I forced myself to sit down and write, almost every day, never believing that I would actually ever finish the manuscript; never fully believing that I had any right to think I could stand with my heroes from the library; with Richard Bach, whose work was so profoundly inspirational, with Anne Rice, whose books were so glorious and fearless, with Stephen King, whose genius in creating a believable world of far fetched, yet perfectly realistic, fiction was unmatched. I had no right to think I would ever be able to craft a full length novel that was in any way worthy of being read. Who was I to even try?

But I did try. It was daunting. It filled me with crippling anxiety every time I tried to sit down and write. There were days I couldn't make myself. It was a horror. It was a task. I found I hated writing, when I wasn't in the act of it. I hated the very thought of it. I hated to think I had to sit there and give my full ADD-afflicted attention to anything for long stretches of time. I hated it! I knew I would never write another novel after this one. I knew full well this exercise was going nowhere, but I had to get it done. The story and the characters compelled me.

It became an addiction. While I hated writing, when I wasn't doing it, I loved writing when I was. I found comfort in my heroes. I read an interview with Richard Bach, in which he confessed how much he hated to write. I found an interview with Stephen King, in which he confessed to feeling like a hack and a fraud who had no business writing novels. I found myself in them. I found encouragement in their discouragements, because they were my own.

And I found myself in the novel. I found an outlet for my fears. The protagonist started out as the person I thought I was supposed to be and, over the course of the novel, turned into the person I feared I actually was. Between these two extremes, it wasn't so much a story about a monster as it was about a crisis of faith; a crisis of identity. It was about a teenager struggling with biological urges that were forbidden by his faith. It was a story about wrestling with two incompatible things and feeling broken for it. In fact, an angel showed up late in the novel and tried to help Daniel reconcile, but Daniel wouldn't hear it. It was much easier for him to hate himself for what he was, measuring himself against a dogma that had failed him. Daniel and I were the same.

As for the werewolf itself, I already knew what it looked like. It wasn't a monster covered in fur, like the costumed actors from The Howling; it wasn't a man with little, protruding teeth and a blackened nose, like Lon Chaney, Jr., and it wasn't a human fully turned into a four-legged animal, like the big, fluffy dog in The Beast Must Die. No, this werewolf was a shadow; a demon; and I had seen it when I was a teenager, sneaking around my apartments in the dead of night. While the story mapped out in the outline did not strike me as frightening, the premise of this demonic being did. A werewolf that was a shadow; that blended in with the night and could travel silently, taking its victims perfectly unaware. It was a terrifying presence in the novel, fueled by a trauma from my youth.

It took me two years of fighting myself and my ADD to finish a rough draft. In that time, I went through the break-up that I wrote about in Parts 1 and 3 of this blog series. While the dark conclusion to the book was already in the outline, that break-up fueled the last few chapters when I wrote them in detail; especially the last scene shared between Daniel and Tom. I was much more Tom in that scene, and my romantic counterpart the monster who had broken my heart. Still, Daniel's pain and grief were my own pain and grief as the story came to a close. We were both heartbroken by where we found ourselves as we lived Daniel's story together.

Another odd thing about the outline was that I wrote it in 1995, but from the beginning, the story was set in 1997, the year I finished the first draft. I hadn't planned to spend two years on the book. But I realized the prophetic coincidence when I printed out the final chapter on Mother's Day 1997. It being a Sunday, I went to church and told everyone proudly that I had just finished my first novel.

My first novel, not the only novel I would ever write. In fact, as I wrote Cry, Wolf, more ideas for serious fiction were flooding into  my mind. I outlined the first three novels in a science-fiction series I have yet to write in 1995, after I started work on Cry, Wolf. The reason I haven't written them yet is that other ideas pushed their way forward in my mind and took priority. That's how it was, once I started down the path. Even Cry, Wolf itself, which was conceived as a self-contained story, started giving me ideas about where the survivors would go after the last chapter; that maybe there was a sequel that needed to be written. I went back to the interesting things I had found in my research for the book, the things that didn't quite fit the narrative, and I planted little seeds, just in case I wanted to return to these characters in the future and tell the story of what happened next. At the end of the book, for example, a man named Julius shows up, without context or explanation. In a stand-alone novel, this was a bit of bad storytelling, but if I did write a sequel, it would be revealed as necessary.

I didn't wait to start writing another several things all at once after finishing Cry, Wolf. By the end of the process, I had come to realize that I was indeed a serious writer now. I was driven by more complex concepts than a pickle and a mushroom having their adventures in the Land of Stupid, though I credit those silly old friends for lighting the fire. I dedicated Cry, Wolf to my high school English teachers, who indulged my madness from the beginning; who allowed me to be as creative as I wanted to be. I will forever be grateful to all of them. I would never be looking back on twenty years of a writing career without them.

I entered Cry, Wolf in contests over the next two years, just to get noticed. I was eventually contacted by Xlibris Corporation, in 1999. This wasn't a traditional publisher, it was more of a vanity press, but they were utilizing a newer self-publishing model called print-on-demand which was appealing to me. It opened the possibility that I could publish the book while I was still seeking a home for it with a traditional publisher. I signed on with them, my father put up the money, and Cry, Wolf was published in December of that year. Little did I realize that the whole process of self-publishing would reveal itself as a further creative outlet for me. I loved indie-publishing! I loved being in full control of my work! Over the past twenty years, I've made a career out of being an indie guy. Aside from money, there' s no real motivation for me to ever sign on with a traditional publisher, and I would only ever do so if they were willing to indulge my indie spirit. I'll have more to say on that, when we get to Metrognomes.

I didn't have any say about the layout of the book with Xlibris, aside from choosing the least evil of their templates, but I was permitted to provide my own cover art, if I so desired. I commissioned my friend Sean Seybold, a man of many artistic talents, to do the cover. He did a brilliant piece that I have in a frame to this day. I was disappointed that Xlibris wouldn't fill the front cover with this image, instead putting it in a little rectangle and surrounding it with a pattern of gray that, to me, resembled a tombstone, which filled the bulk of the front cover. Still, it was a thrill to see my first book coming together when they sent me the galleys in the mail.

Cry, Wolf was released simultaneously in hardback, trade paperback, and the then-brand-new PDF e-book formats. That was also the year I got a job working in a book store. I would check the database daily, until my book finally showed up in the system, categorized inexplicably as a yoga book, on December 9, 1999. I've never had New York Times Best Seller numbers, but, for an indie book, it sold pretty well and has experienced renewed interest, off and on, over the years since.

My only regret when it was first in print was that I thought, in retrospect, it took too long to get to the werewolf. I wanted it to have a prologue. I also started writing a sequel in short order, when the characters demanded it of me. I've been working on that book, off and on, for two decades now. Serving both of these ambitions, I released a second edition of the novel in 2014, with a prologue that introduces werewolves into the story right off the bat and a series title, Shadow of the Werewolf, that will accommodate the sequel, when it is finally published, hopefully next year.

I felt like I came full circle with this novel, when I was doing research for the sequel, and I found Cry, Wolf by Glenn Slade Clark, Jr. listed as a source in one of the books I was using as a source myself. In effect, I was researching the work of an author who had researched me in order to write the book I was using as research material, so, I might as well have gone to myself for answers. Of course, I was only one of many sources the author cited, but it was no less gratifying to see my own book listed there with all the others.

Cry, Wolf: Shadow of the Werewolf is a bit dated now. I wanted to capture the 1990s teenage experience in a bottle, and I feel like I accomplished that, at least from my own perspective. I wanted it to be dated. I wanted it to be grounded in a specific point in time. But it's also dated in the sense that I would never be capable of writing it as it stands today. I've grown a lot, as an author, since this book, and I'm glad to say so. I don't write dialogue the way I wrote it then, I don't write with the same anxieties that I suffered then, and I'm not afraid to go much deeper into my characters than I ever dared to do in Cry, Wolf. That being said, I never would have grown into the author I am today, if I had never written this book in exactly the way that I did.

It surprised me how many people demanded a sequel of me when it was first released. Readers saw an unfinished story, where I saw a completed story. Granted, a sequel is coming. You were right, and I was wrong. Just ask that perfectly out-of-place character Julius in "Chapter XVI." Sure, he's popped up again in the universe, but he's never been explained. I've enjoyed getting into Book II again, over the past year or so; getting back to the characters who started me on this path all those years ago. Julius will get his long-overdue explanation in that book, which I'm calling A Wayward Path: Shadow of the Werewolf.

Cry, Wolf started a journey for me. It introduced me to an essential part of my own story, and, as is the case with Shadow of the Werewolf, that story is far from over.