Wow, how time slips away. My last post was called "Busy Writing" and that was a couple of months ago. Sorry for not checking in sooner, but I've been . . . busy writing. My buddy Tim and I are little over 30,000 words on the manuscript we're co-writing. That's been a hell of a fun ride so far. I've wanted to try a true collaborative project for so long and now to see it happen, and see it happening in a really seamless way, is terrific. I'm also revising a couple of novels.
Equilibrium Overturned, an anthology from Grey Matter Press was published last week. It has my story "The Alamo Incident" in it, if you want to check it out. I intend to do more stories featuring the character Timaeus Shields, who is the fictional son of John Shields, the armorer for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. If you happen to read the story, drop me a line and let me know what you think. Well, I finished a short story based on that dream I had. I'm calling it "The Two Front Ones," and we'll see if it can do anything on the market.
In the meanwhile, I've started an intriguing project with a co-worker. I've always wanted to collaborate with someone on a novel. I always thought it would be a terrific way to forge a great friendship. On the other hand, I suppose it could also end up being a way to make a lifelong enemy. But I try to be a glass half-full sort of guy. The particular story will be about zombies and is set in the 1940s and 50s in Colorado. It's my co-worker's idea. He hasn't done a lot of writing in his life, it seems, but from the early draft of a first chapter and from just hanging out with him a bit, I can tell he's a very good storyteller. Plus it runs in his family, since his grandfather had both fiction and non-fiction books published by Random House, Avon, and a host of other large presses. I can't wait to see where this project goes. In the meanwhile I'm working on two other novels as well. One's going into its third draft, the other its second. More on those later . . . I work two jobs, one as a full-time reference librarian, and another as a contract librarian for an online virtual reference service called AskColorado. The AskColorado gig has me getting up around 5:30AM, and I usually staff it for a couple of hours a day, then head on to my regular job. On Mondays and Thursdays, however, I don't have to be into work until noon, so I usually go back to bed after doing my AskColorado shift and get a few more hours of sleep, usually from 7-9AM.
What's intriguing to me is how vivid my dreams are during these morning naps, and how much I can remember about them. I know everyone dreams during the night, but I honestly can't remember one nightly dream in months. When I sleep from 7-9AM, though, I have many vivid and powerful dreams which I seem to remember in detail. Many of these have inspired short stories, some of which have been published. This morning's dream is going to get worked into a short story. In the dream, I'm the son of a famous scientist/dentist. My father always cleaned my teeth for me as a boy. Or so I thought. It turns out he was etching strangely brilliant scientific equations into the enamel of my teeth using some sort of super-advanced laser. The equations can only be read with something like an electron microscope. In the dream, my father has died, and I get into an accident that knocks out one of my teeth. Unfortunately, the tooth falls into the hands of a Bad Guy, who studies the tooth and realizes there's something engraved on it. After that, I end up being chased by roughly 1,000 people who all want to play Tooth Fairy. I woke up before my unconscious mind could do all my work for me, but there's nothing sweeter than going to bed and waking up with a short story premise. Now to the writing . . . One thing I'd thought I'd talk about on this blog is the back story to some of my work, mostly because I like reading about how writers come up with their ideas. Trigger Point was my first published novel, but it was actually accepted after The Survivors. For several years, I'd served as a freelance writer for Massage & Bodywork Magazine, mainly doing little write-ups on products and stories of interest to massage therapists. As my role expanded a little bit, I was assigned to interview massage therapists about their practice, with an emphasis on how they new practitioners could establish and promote their business. One thing that struck me immediately is how much the attitudes of massage therapists and librarians overlap. Both are essentially service positions, and both careers attract people who are dedicated to helping others as best they can. As I interviewed more and more massage therapists, the prototype for a character grew in my mind. I was also doing a lot of readers advisory as a librarian, and following trends in popular genres. I was intrigued that patrons seemed to gravitate to mystery stories where the characters were just about anything other than a detective or a police officer. I saw caterers, chefs, lawyers, and just about every profession you can think of represented in the popular mystery series on our library shelves. Which got me thinking--is there a mystery series involving a massage therapist? I couldn't find one, so I set out to right it. I initially intended to write a cozy mystery. My imagination tends toward violence, however, so that seemed unwise. While I was in search of a plot, news broke about Philip Markoff, the so-called Craigslist Killer. He was, among other things, murdering prostitutes who advertised themselves as massage therapists online. The associations between massage and prostitution is old. It's one of the banes of the licensed massage therapist (LMT), and I remember several of the people I'd interviewed talking about how they had to educate their own families about misconceptions. Right away I knew I had the basis of my plot: a serial killer would be striking at online prostitutes who shielded their activities under the guise of massage therapy. The twist would be that one of the prostitutes really had been a massage therapist who'd fallen on hard times and made poor decisions. Her murder would bring in my main character, a dedicated LMT and instructor determined to bring her former student's murderer to justice. The novel was composed pretty fast. I did 80,000 words in three weeks, a real marathon session for me considering it usually takes me 3-5 months to compose the first draft of a novel. The rapid progress was due in part, I think, to outlining the story in advance, which is something I hardly ever do, for whatever reason. Trigger Point, a massage modality, just seemed like a perfect title for a mystery/suspense novel, and it plays an important part in the story as well. I sort of envisioned an entire series based on massage terms--Trigger Point, Release Point, Pressure Point, Reflex Point. I've not been able to return to the series so far, but hopefully one day I will. Trigger Point is the most commercial novel I've written, and so its early rejections were more frustrating than usual. One publisher said, "The prologue moves along beautifully and is very tense. But the story really bogs down in the first chapter." Now, in manuscript form the prologue was five pages long, and the first chapter was three pages long. I'm not sure how a story could bog down in that amount of time, but the publisher acted like I'd just cut and pasted something from the middle of Ulysses to start chapter one. Give the novel a try and let me know what you think. It's only available in e-book format. You can also find it through Overdrive, the largest e-book vendor for public libraries. So I found this on Yahoo news. You know, there was a time when being an alligator, a crocodile or a caiman really meant something. Now an otter can kick your ass. My childhood was spent watching Wild Kingdom and I feel like Marlin Perkins lied to me. He probably had hours of footage of alligators getting taken down by otters, but edited the footage to make it the other way around in order to please the pro-alligator lobby. It seems most animal documentaries use doctored footage to one degree or another, but I think it'd make for an amusing short story if it were discovered that most films have covered up the fact that the food chain is absurdly reversed, and that weak, cuddly, cute animals routinely stalk and devour the animals everyone has been taught to believe are predators. One could imagine in such a world that even zoos exist to further the illusion of the food chain as what people think it should be, rather than what it is. Maybe I'll make a novel out of this idea. I'll call it The Zookeeper's Daughter. This is almost a non-update update, but I do have some news to share. Over Christmas, while visiting my parents for a week, I wrote two stories. I was specifically targeting two anthologies. As of today, I've learned both stories got accepted. I cannot say more, though, until I've signed contracts. I'll be quite happy to be in both publications though. In one situation, I've worked with the editor before; in the second, it was a blind submission. I've been asked to cut the second story nearly in half, to 5,000 words from 10,000 words. I'll gladly do it, as I'd much rather write a great 5,000 word story than a middling 10,000 word one. That Christmas week was one of the most intense writing experiences I've ever had. My house was burglarized the week prior to it, and I'd spent the last several days in shock and dealing with oppressive feelings of violation. A door was kicked in and destroyed, so there was also the emergency rush of having to repair and re-secure the house before leaving it abandoned for so many days. I didn't write one word over those hectic days, so by the time I reached my parents' house in Kentucky I just had this tremendous build-up of writing energy, and a very real desire to just flee into my imagination and leave the turmoil behind. The net result is that I wrote 17,000 words in 4 days, which has to be near the top of my word output over any similar stretch of time. There was an intensity to the writing I had not felt in a long time, and I was reminded of myself around the age of 13 or 14, when I first felt the desire to tell stories and create characters. While not entirely friendless, I would classify myself as a lonely kid, often cheery on the outside but deeply depressed within. That depression and the urge to escape it was part of the same gasoline that fueled my 4-day word binge over Christmas. Often times there is a sense of great satisfaction upon completing a story or a novel, but that's not the same as what I experienced over Christmas, and it's not the same as what I used to feel as a teenager after writing longhand for hours on end. Satisfaction is not the same as joy.
In that rush of writing in late December, I found joy again. I'll try to hold onto it in 2014. This hits a little too close to home for me. I've been without a soft drink of any sort for 21 days. Before that, I was drinking well over a 2-liter of Coke Zero or Pepsi Max every day. I was even working on a patent for this little nipple designed to fit over the bottle, so I could just lay on my back, tuck the 2-liter between my drawn knees, and nurse that sweet nectar all day.
I knew that soft-drinks might be hurting my bones, but I thought there were other tradeoffs. After consuming the stuff for so long, I was certain it'd make me immune to most diseases. I imagined an invading team of viruses communicating to each other once inside my body-- "It's no good! There's a layer of plastic encasing his vital organs. We can't penetrate it. We're buggin' out! Game over, man! Game over!" The best thing about quitting soft drinks is I'm starting to get sensitivity in my tongue again. My taste buds, after years of being mowed down by a scythe of acid, are returning. I can tell the difference between steak and ice cream now. Amazing! But I'll always want the taste, and I know it owns me. The other day I found myself going to the supermarket check-out line with two 2-liters in hand. I was shocked because I didn't even remember picking them up. I know I can't resist going down the soft drink aisle. All those colors! It's like strolling along a rainbow. I just want to go up and down the aisle striking the 2-liters with a Xylophone mallet and singing a song about life being beautiful. And life is beautiful. But it's a little more boring when it's not carbonated. Being a librarian, I pretty much have no choice but to notice the occasional trend in book publishing. Of particular note the last few years is the number of titles with the word "daughter" in them. In fact it seems like the title of every other book on the market uses the same boring construct: The [Insert Job Profession]’s Daughter. I'll review for those following at home:
Trust me, I could list another 800 titles. Daughters, daughters everywhere, all the titles did shriek! The predominance of XX chromosomal offspring in book titles is really staggering. What about the XYs? Don’t fictional people have sons anymore? (To be fair, The Pope’s Daughter and The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter are actually about real people, so they’re somewhat off the hook). So what’s going on here? I want to blame Amy Tan for starting the trend, but maybe it was Loretta Lynn, the Coal Miner’s Daughter. I should have changed The Survivors to The Survivor's Daughter. I probably would have won the Lambda Literary Award instead of just being a finalist. But that's me--always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Or the daughter, for that matter. Welcome to my website and blog. This isn't my first attempt at a blog--if you picked up a copy of my novel The Survivors, you'll note that the About the Author section directs people to a blog that, along with Facebook, constituted the entirety of my online presence. I really hated that blog, and I can't even remember its address now. More than that, I hated blogging itself and found my own posts to be deadly dull. Recently, however, I've had the experience of writing for my library's website, Books and Beyond (I won't provide a link, as I've inadvertently helped kill that blog--a long story), and found the experience much to my liking. So I've decided to give personal blogging another try.
Who am I? Well, I'm a writer and reference librarian living in Denver, CO. I'm originally from Kentucky. I have a Masters degree in literature from the University of Kentucky and a Masters degree in library science from the University of Illinois. I'm most proud of the library degree, because the diploma simply says Master of Science without any further specification. This lets me tell people I'm a chemist. Overall, though, I'm a storyteller. Writing's been my obsession since I was about 13 years old and I've had a long, long apprenticeship before achieving even the smallest measure of success. Here's to persistence! You might be wondering about the illustration at the top of this blog. It's the artwork that was created at Waylines Magazine to accompany my story "The Seer." Darryl Knickrehm, the publisher and illustrator at Waylines did an incredible job with this piece, and since any blog should have a certain soothsaying quality to it, I figured what the hell. Perhaps the picture is a little too dark and twisted to headline a writer's blog, but at the same time I think it captures the spirit of the publishing process: a forlorn writer turning his back while well-armed slushpile readers blasts his manuscript into pieces! |
AuthorSean Eads is a writer living in Denver, CO. Originally from Kentucky, he works as a reference librarian. Archives
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