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.