A short story published in Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections – the Summer 2023 Pride issue. Cinnabar Moth Publishing will also be releasing my first Science Fiction novel, “Beyond Tomorrow’s Sun” in December 2024, as well as a few more short stories in the lit zine between now and then.
Fitting In
Honorable Mention: Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2022
My short story “Fitting In” was published by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. This month it received an Honorable Mention in the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2022 from Winning Writers. That’s top 12 out of over 2400 entries.
You can read it here, on the Dead Mule website or check out the judges comments and link to the story at Winning Writers.
Winning Writers is one of my favorite online resources for writers. Whether you’re starting your writing journey or are well-established, it has invaluable content and links to a long list of writing competitions.
Shoes
A piece of flash fiction published by Drunk Monkeys – written a long time ago but seems quite relevant during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. You can read it here, or visit Drunk Monkeys and check out their other content.
https://www.drunkmonkeys.us/2017-posts/2022/3/14/fiction-shoes-ronald-mcguire
WordPress doesn’t like the Drunk Monkeys URL so I can’t embed it. A simple link will have to do.
Shoes
If I ask about your shoes, there’s a reason.
I was sitting in the waiting room – I’d driven a long way to see this one particular doctor – and I knew I had a long wait.
There was an elderly gentleman sitting alone when I got there. I checked in, then sat down near him.
I was filling out a stack of forms – I was a new patient and I had to tell them my life story. Do they think I remember the date when I had my tonsils out? Let’s skip that line.
I sit down, start filling in lines that are too small for my handwriting, and this elderly gentleman compliments my shoes.
I’m deliberate about my shoes. I have shoes for every occasion. As a bonus, my shoes last a long time. I have some I’ve never worn. I’m convinced one day I’ll be in a forest with an axe and those steel-toed shin-high American-made Red Wing boots will say “I told you so.”
“Those are nice shoes you have. One must have good shoes, and those you have are very nice.”
He says this with a German accent. I know this because I’d just spent the summer in Germany, and, yes, I speak German.
Everybody in Germany wanted to speak English. Everybody except the people protesting against the US military. What did they expect? We send plane-loads of 18 and 19 year-old kids over there and you think they’re all gonna behave? No way.
That didn’t have anything to do with me. I was there with my backpack kicking around while the Berlin wall was being broken down into a billion little pieces. I got bored after a while, so I hopped a train to Greece while I waited for the guy I met in Italy to meet me in Belgium to go to a concert. I thanked God, and my parents, every day I was there for the Unlimited Eurail Pass.
I speak enough German that I knew his accent was German.
I thanked him in German, which is easy, and you woulda thought I handed this man a bucket of gold coins. He was really happy. Which, to be honest, made me happy.
Since we didn’t have anything else to do, we talked about shoes. In German. Well, not entirely in German. My vokabular was pretty good, but it wasn’t that good.
He believed shoes were important, that you could learn a lot about someone from there shoes, and even more from how they felt about their shoes.
Maybe it sounds weird or crazy, but the alternative was to sit there in silence and wait to get called back to see the Doc. Why not have a conversation in German about shoes instead?
I don’t remember every word, but we kept at it until his grandson sat down next to him.
This is when things got interesting.
His grandson, a handsome dark-haired thirty-something with a lovely smile and a beautiful soft baritone voice, sat down after finishing up at the check-out counter. Is that what it’s called? I don’t know, the place in the office where you pay and set your next appointment, if you need one.
The handsome grandson sits down and listens to us talk in German then gives me this big perfect-white-toothy smile before he introduces himself. For the barest of seconds I thought about hitting on him, then I checked myself. Grandson wore a ring.
I asked grandson if he spoke German too, and he laughed and said “No way, my grandmother forbid it. My dad doesn’t speak German either.”
Oh. That’s curious. What’s up with that?
Grandad sees the look on my face and starts to explain.
He told me how he fled Germany as a young boy, when the Nazis took over. He escaped, his future wife escaped, and both of them lost their entire families to the concentration camps.
They each, separately, made it to England, with lots of help along the way, especially in France. Their paths didn’t cross until they were placed with two different families on the same street in London. Then they had to get out of London because the verdammt Nazis where bombing the hell out of the place.
They met, they fell in love, they survived the war, and they had not a penny to their names and no relatives left alive. They did what anyone back then would do – they went to America.
“Wir haben das Memo über Israel nicht erhalten,” grandad said, with a smile that looked a lot like grandson’s.
Once again they found themselves living with two families in the same neighborhood, this time in New York. They found jobs, saved up their money, and when the time was right, he proposed.
She said yes, on one condition.
He said “You name it” and she said “We will never speak German in our home, only English, and our children and their children and all the children that ever come after will never speak German.”
Grandson confirmed this, so I know it’s true.
Grandad agreed, they got married, and grandson was the son of their first child. They had five children and twelve grandchildren, so far.
Not one of them speaks a lick of Deutsch.
We went on like that until they finally called me back.
There was something peaceful and sweet in his manner, and about our talk, that caused time to stop for a while. I think other people were listening. In fact, the receptionist sent somebody back before me that should have gone after me. I was fine with it.
In the short time we had together we conversed about shame, hatred, family, love, country, forgiveness, a few other things you wouldn’t expect, and shoes. Sometimes indirectly, when to be direct wasn’t possible.
From this conversation I learned an entire philosophy of shoes, which I believe to be solid to this day.
So, like I said, if I ask about your shoes, there’s a reason.
So You Want to Be a Writer? Part 3
[My third essay for The Dillydoun Review, in which I make the case that writing is the journey and publication is the (first) destination.]
Writing is the First Step
So you want to be a writer, and the starting point seems obvious, write something! Therein lies the problem. Writing, creating, storytelling, that is the beginning of the journey, not the destination. The next step is getting published, and as hard as producing good work can be, getting it in front of readers (other than friends and family) can be the most difficult step to take.
Let’s say you’ve done the work, you’ve refined your novel, you’ve even got objective feedback and some editorial guidance. Now what? Find an agent or a publisher or go the self-publish route? There’s a lot to unpack related to those decisions and processes, so I’m going to save that for my next essay.
In this essay I’m going to focus on the business of getting your short work published digitally, in print, or both. Because you can go big and swing for the fences with your first novel if that works for you, but there are rewards to be reaped when you go small and submit your short stories, creative non-fiction and essays for publication.
A quick search of the internet will turn up thousands of places to submit your work, including literary journals (online and print), writing contests, publishers (particularly anthologies), and several blogging/self-publishing platforms (e.g., Medium). The latter of these offer an opportunity to build and monetize an audience in a ways that didn’t exist before the internet.
Before I dive into the more traditional offerings from this short list, I want to caution new writers. If you choose to post your work on a blog (even your own), or on sites like Medium or Wattpad, be aware that the overwhelming majority of literary journals, writing contests, and publishers consider anything published to any digital platform to be previously published work. This means either they will not consider the work for their platform/publication our it will be treated as a reprint, which at a minimum means any pay rate for the work will be lower than that for previously unpublished work.
I have a WordPress site and I publish almost nothing there. I post links to my published work, which helps both my site and the publishing website. Right now my site generates about 2000 page views per day, which means several hundred people every day have the potential to discover new platforms where my work exists. Is it breaking any records? No, but if a literary journal publishes your work it’s in everyone’s best interest if you direct readers to that journal. The goal, as a new writer, is to get published and connect with readers. I recommend that you consider yourself in a symbiotic relationship with any publisher that gives your work a platform.
With all that said, let’s talk about my three favorite places to submit work, and why.
First and foremost, I love literary journals. I said there were thousands, but this is an understatement. There are online and print journals to match any and every taste and genre. Some are run by large well-funded teams affiliated with a university, others are side projects by young writers, some still in high school, and still others are the result of dedicated writers and editors who are passionate about the written word and give their heart and soul (as well as time and money) to an effort that might never generate revenue.
One of the great things about submitting your work to a journal, whether online, print, or both, is that quite often you will receive editorial feedback on your submission. You may pay a reading fee to get that feedback, but as I said in my previous essay, this is a legitimate and useful tradeoff, a win-win situation.
Keep in mind that most literary journals have limited resources and it takes time for submissions to go through the review process. Patience when submitting your work isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. If you’re not comfortable waiting, perhaps months, to find out if your work has been accepted, then you’re a good candidate for additional fees. In other words, if you want an expedited response, there are quite a few journals that will give you one for a price. To me this is fair, but keep in mind you are likely one of many writers who have submitted and paid a fee for a fast turnaround. The fee guarantees nothing beyond the response time – your odds of acceptance don’t go up, and might even go down due to the speed of the reply. Spend your money wisely.
It’s a good idea to have multiple active submissions at any given moment, even if you’ve only produced one piece of work you feel is ready for submission. I personally do not like simultaneous submissions (submission of the same work to multiple journals). Yes, it is a numbers game to some extent and you need to write, submit, repeat. But as good as it feels to get a “yes” from one journal, if you’ve submitted to multiple journals you’ll have to withdraw your work from consideration from all of them. This is not fun, and while most journals accept work that has been submitted elsewhere, having a piece of work withdrawn is no fun for them either.
My strategy: write, write, and write some more. When I’m not writing, I’m editing. When I think a piece is ready, I find a match (if I haven’t already) and submit. Then move on. Once you submit, it’s out of your hands so you might as well start something new.
Because you never know when an opportunity is going to pop up, a call for submissions or a contest, that is a good match for your work.
Writing contests are second on my list of favorite places to submit my work. Second because they tend to have a long run-up before even a short list is announced. I submitted two stories to a competition and by the time the winners were announced I had revised both stories several times and they were accepted for publication at two different journals. This is where my simultaneous submission rule breaks down. I’d rather withdraw from a competition if my work is accepted for publication than miss out on a chance to get published. To each their own on this point.
Whether you win a competition, make the short list, or are rejected outright, there’s a lot of value in the process for new writers. At the least, you’ll see where you stand against other writers by reading the work of those who place in the competition. In some cases, your submission will garner critical feedback. Such a competition may have a higher entry fee, but in many cases it’s worth it. Just be clear on the vetting and feedback process before you pay your entry fees. As with anything, not every competition is worth the price. Of course, there’s always the chance your work will win the top prize. If this happens, make sure you shout it from the highest mountain top because you deserve the recognition, as does the competition. For lists of sites that can guide you to excellent writing competitions, check out the links in my first essay in this series.
Finally, let’s talk about publishers. In this case I’m referring to book publishers who also publish anthologies of short work. An example of this would be Ab Terra, the sci-fi imprint of Brain Mill Press. While Ab Terra’s focus is on publishing novels, they also produce an annual sci-fi anthology. As with most publishers, submissions for these publications are usually open for a brief time once per year (more often for more frequently published anthologies). This is where preparation and patience are critical. Make sure your work is ready because there are no do-overs, and be certain you are a good fit for the publication because it could be months before you learn whether or not your work is accepted.
The beauty of submitting your work to a publisher for an anthology like this is that the publication will be available in print, and if your piece is accepted, there’s nothing quite like holding a book and opening it to the page where your short story or essay lives. I just ordered two copies of the “Queer as Hell” anthology from Haunted MTL to give away because I honestly can’t wait to crack open the cover and see my story in print. This may not be special to everyone, but to me it’s the first time one of my short stories will appear in print, and in the end, getting published is, for me, the point. Getting published in a print anthology? That’s icing on the cake, and who doesn’t love a little icing now and again?
Just remember, like I said, it is a numbers game. If your work is solid and you know it’s ready, submit it and get back to writing. The more your write, the more you can submit, and in so doing, shift the odds a little more in your favor. Yes, you’ll have to deal with more rejection, but if you’re not ready for rejection, you’re not ready to submit.
But if you’re truly ready, rejection will only make you stronger. Keep writing, keep reading, forge on. You got this.
TIP: If you’re submitting your work, you need a third-person bio. If you don’t know what that is, or how to write one, check out this great set of tips from the folks at Coverfly. (https://www.coverfly.com/5-tips-for-crafting-your-perfect-writer-bio/) Note that these tips are geared toward screenwriters, but they are still useful in helping any writer hone their “pitch.”
Fitting In
Fiction published by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. This goes to a dark place, it is not for the faint of heart. If you can make it through to the end, you’ll see that the story is really about owning your truth, no matter the cost, because the lies will eat you alive. This story received an Honorable Mention from Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2022, a Winning Writers competition.
Enjoy it here, or visit Dead Mule for some truly extraordinary writing (and some fascinating “Southern Legitimacy Statements”).
Trigger Warnings: Violence and offensive language.
Fitting In
As a boy, I longed to speak like the other boys I met when we moved to Georgia.
My parents divorced when I was 4, and my earliest memories are blissful and dreamlike days and nights on my grandparent’s farm in Iowa, early dawn hours of sweet air laced with dew, drifting in with the birdsong through the open window by the bed I shared with my uncle. He was eight, and my moon and stars. I was parked there for a year while my mother went out of state to work and figure out how to make a new life as a single mother.
She married a man in Texas, and his job took us from Houston to New Orleans, then landed us in Georgia, just outside Atlanta.
We got to Georgia as I was starting third grade. A teacher decided there was something wrong with the way I talked, so they set me up with a speech therapist. I don’t know what they set out to fix, but I could take a guess.
All I know is I wanted to sound like all the other kids.
The boys in Georgia would say things like “ain’t” or “dang-it” or “fixin-to” or “crik” and I soaked it up like the earth soaks up the sun.
My mother had no intention of raising what she called “a redneck kid.”
“You won’t go anywhere in life if you don’t speak proper English,” she would say. I never dared ask her what that said about her new husband, the man I called “dad,” and his Texas drawl.
I secretly cataloged the Southern-isms I heard and by high-school I could pass as a native, at least among those who didn’t know the truth.
It felt good, those times I was anonymous, and could drop into the drawl and twang at will and be accepted like any other kid.
It had other uses too, like the time a cop pulled me over for speeding. “Awright young man, I’m gonna write you a warnin’ this time, but I ketch you drivin’ hell-bent for leather agin an’ I’m writing’ ya for real, ya unnerstan’?”
“Yessir, I do, you ain’t never gonna see my face agin, offsir, I swear.”
I could start a new job and slip into a conversation with the other employees without anyone asking me “Where you from boy?”
Living this dual-dialect life also came in handy as training for how to deal with bigger problems.
Like being gay at a time and in a place where such a thing could get a person killed, without much consequence.
I had to talk a certain way, walk a certain way, be a certain way. I had to fit in.
I perfected the act, until one day in Texas, senior year in college, when the lie was ripped away and the truth spilled out like the bloody entrails of a butchered animal.
I had to face a new reality. I had to deal with it. I had to survive those walks across campus where it seemed everyone found joy in shouting out words like “faggot” and “cocksucker” and “queer,” perverting the beauty of their colloquial speech. It was a small school in a small town and everyone was in on the game.
Then one Friday night, I had to fight it.
A fraternity brother, Greg, came to my apartment half drunk and full of rage. He pounded on my door, screaming those words I heard every day. I could hear some of the other guys at the bottom of the stairs. “Damn, boy, give it a rest” or “you’re gonna have the cops here, let’s git outta here” and “what the hell’s wrong with you, man, the girls are waitin’ fir us.”
I’d had enough. I was cornered, there was no other door. I couldn’t run if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to, not this time, not ever again.
I opened the door, and he rushed in. He must have thought being gay made me smaller or weaker. It made me scared, yes, but that night, scared made me dangerous.
He came at me, eyes bloodshot from chugging cheap beer. Greg always drank before he drank. I fell back to buy some space, then grabbed his shirt and swung him around, intent on shoving him back out the front door, ready to throw punches.
He was heavier than I expected. Instead of flinging him back the way he came, I sent him through the bank of windows set low in the wall next to the door.
He crashed through and landed on the porch. I heard a familiar voice shout “Holy shit!”
I stepped onto the front porch, looked down to the parking lot, glaring at the three below me. All of them dropped their “shit eatin’ grins” in a hurry.
I looked back at my former friend, trying to extract himself from a glittering field of shattered glass, blood already flowing down his face in black-red rivers.
My first impulse was to tell him I was sorry, to rush inside and grab a towel to staunch the bleeding, find some way to roll back the clock, try somehow to make things right.
When he looked up at me I could see the force of his hatred rising, the pale blotches of his face turning red, framed by ribbons of blood.
“You fuckin’ faggot!” he screamed, and started to rise.
His scream purged that place in me that housed my empathy.
I was six foot two, and two hundred pounds of well honed muscle, with adrenalin and sobriety on my side.
I grabbed him by his shirt again, pulled him the rest of the way to his feet, and flung him down the stairs.
I hadn’t noticed the two guys rushing up, almost at my landing, until I released Greg to the open air. The ascending and descending forces collided, neutralizing one other. They fell back, none the worse for wear.
It could have ended there. They tried to pull Greg away, to end the mayhem. The neighbors would put up with a lot, especially when it came to me, but screams and shattering glass crossed the line.
Greg shook them off, shoved them away, then turned to look up at me. Before he could speak, I started down the stairs.
All my life, even before that night and ever since, I have experienced profound states of calm in the most dire of circumstances. A car accident, a boat sinking beneath me, a gun pointed at my face, all of these things, and more, had already happened to me before that Friday night. Such situations, when most panic, bring me to an intense mental focus and physical calm. Some special cells in my brain take over and say, “You got this, let’s go.”
When this has happened, people have said I looked different, like another person, like no one they’ve ever seen before, someone that frightened them. Only years later did I learn it had a name – dissociation.
In the case of Greg, my first two steps toward him brought him to a halt and silenced his voice.
I didn’t stop.
He step backwards and slipped on his own blood. He stumbled down to the shared landing between the two second-floor apartments, and fell to his knees, leaving another puddle of himself on the concrete surface.
I kept going.
He couldn’t get to his feet, instead grabbing the next step below him and dragging himself lower. The two who had abandoned him on the staircase came back. They grabbed him by the armpits and dragged him the rest of the way to the parking lot.
I maintained my deliberate pace.
The four of them backed away, all now speechless, until finally the one who I knew wanted least of all to be there said “awright, dammit, awright, it’s a ‘nuff already.”
Then I stopped. His voice grabbed my attention, then his eyes held it.
In a flash I relived all the times we’d spent together, Mark and I. The football games, the parties, the booze, and of course that one particular night, after the party died down, our lives coming together in a fearful embrace that grew into something more. Something I thought would last forever.
Until I walked into his room one afternoon, using the front door key he’d given me almost as an afterthought. I knew the man he was with that day, but even if I hadn’t, my heart would still have broken. The image of the two of them together, burned into my memory.
I made my threats, and he made his, though mine were empty and his became my new reality, placing us on the path we were all now walking.
I suppose there’s a fine line between powerful love and raging hate, and I’d found the way to push him, and everyone else it seemed, across that line. He told a few friends, and in a few day’s time my secret life became an open book, a story to be told and spread with whispered voices in the halls and courtyards and ballfields of higher education.
I didn’t know it then, but though he seemed safe behind his accusations and condemnations, his world was growing smaller and darker than it had ever been. Hindsight educates my understanding of him in a way the experience couldn’t. All I knew then was betrayal and the pain that came with it.
I looked into those pricing blue eyes, and felt it all again. I had to look away from him, to hold back my tears.
I scanned their faces, took note of Greg’s fear, then returned to the source of my suffering. When I saw the look on Mark’s face, with no hint of sadness or regret, I didn’t feel like crying after all.
“Forget I exist,” I said, choking out all the disgust my throat could carry, “I’ve already forgotten you.”
I turned away and headed back up the stairs as the wailing sirens grew closer. I climbed up to my porch and sat on the edge, my legs draped over the top steps.
They piled Greg into the backseat of Mark’s car and before he got in, Mark looked up at me. His face never changed, even as he raised his right hand and shoved his middle finger into the air, a performative act for everyone peeking out through their curtains to witness. I laughed at the impotence of it. He responded by getting in the driver’s seat and slamming the door behind him.
I watched the life I’d known drive away, taillights rushing into the darkness, until the space around me filled with flashing blues and reds, sounds of brakes screeching to a sudden halt.
Four cars, eight officers in all. I guess someone convinced them it was necessary, or maybe they were just bored cops working in a small town.
They held a little confab below me, then one of them made his way up the steps, scanning with his flashlight, trying not to step in any evidence.
I knew him and he knew me. I’d done a month of nightly ride-alongs with him as part of my criminal justice curriculum.
“Hello Tom,” I said. It’d been a while, but I knew we were still on a first-name basis, “how ya doin’?”
“I might ask you the same question,” he said, “you wanna tell me what happened?”
“Not really.”
“Any of this blood belong to you?”
“Nope.”
“You wanna file a report?”
He was standing with his eyes level to mine, just a few feet away. I looked down at the gaggle of officers in the parking lot, all of them with a hand on a hip.
“No,” I said. My voice was calm, my heart beat slow and steady, I felt lighter than I had in years.
“This gonna be a regular thing, ya think?”
“That’s not up to me.”
“No, I guess not,” he said.
With a look down and a nod of his head, everyone but his partner returned to their cars and drove away, lights blinking out as they went.
When they were gone, he leaned in and stared into my eyes. I returned his stare.
“Buddy,” he said, knowing I liked it when he called me that, “you know we can’t protect you. There’s just not…”
“Did I ask you to?”
“It’s my job…”
“And you can’t do it.”
“I’m not your enemy…”
“Yes,” I replied, cool as a Hill Country winter, “you are.”
He pulled back and his voice rose an octave when he asked “How so?”
“The truth used to be my enemy. Now it’s the lie. You’re part of the lie.”
He raised his palms up, “Whatdya want me to do?”
“Nothing.”
We looked at each other until he shook his head and let out a sharp exhale that sounded like defeat.
“You sure you wanna stick it out here?”
“I’ve got three months, then I’m done, nobody’s taking that from me.”
“Might be easier for ya back in Georgia.”
“Here, there, what’s the difference?”
I looked over my shoulder at my ruined window, then down the stairs at the blood already drying on the steps.
“Besides,” I said, “I think I made my point.”
“You think this is gonna quiet things down a bit?”
“Yes,” I said, and believed it, “it’s a small town, news travels fast.”
After that night, I moved through the world like a boulder in a stream, life rushing around me as I waited out the weeks. Some still shouted their hate when I walked across campus, while a few made attempts at eye contact, flashing fervent smiles filled with sadness.
None of it mattered.
I was alone, an outcast in a world filled with lies.
But I wasn’t afraid anymore.
The Not-Zombies Apocalypse
A recently published bit of Sci-Fi satire in Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections. The apocalypse isn’t coming, it’s already here.
So You Want to Be a Writer? Part 4
[My fourth and final essay for The Dillydoun Review. A couple of notes – since I wrote this I have become a member of both the SFWA and the Author’s Guild, and my first traditionally published novel “Beyond Tomorrow’s Sun” will be published by Cinnabar Moth Publishing in December 2024]
In my previous essay I said that the next step, after writing something, is to get published. Following that same line, the next step after publication is to get paid. Of course, lots of people write for the sheer joy of writing and are satisfied for their work to be published without ever getting paid.
I do not fall into that category.
I want to do this full time for the rest of my life and to make that work, I need to earn a living at writing. Additionally, some of the best writers’ associations, like the SFWA – Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America – require members to be published in paying markets that meet specific criteria.
After two years, I’m happy to report that this year I managed to turn a small profit. About enough to pay my electric bill for one month, but a profit all the same. That income was small because it was stacked against the losses incurred with my first book.
It may seem strange to think of writing that way, profit and loss, but it’s essential for me because I self-published that first book, and there’s a ton of cost associated with such an effort.
Of course, I’ve said it before – I made every mistake a new author can make in the self-publishing game, and invented a few new ones. Mistakes cost extra, like sides at a homestyle diner.
There’s nothing wrong with self-publishing and there are a lot of people making very good money at it. But for every one of them there are thousands who never earn a penny from their self-published work.
This may be changing as platforms like Medium and Wattpad offer writers new ways to monetize their writing. For the purpose of this essay, I’m going to focus on a few of the ins and outs of self-publishing novels as compared to traditional publishing, and leave these newer platforms out of the discussion.
Experienced readers can spot most self-published books in an instant, first from the cover, then the layout and font, and of course there’s always the dreaded typos. Enough of those and your novel will look more like alphabet soup than a polished work of art.
Yes, I made all of those mistakes. I created a hideous cover using stock images, chose a terrible font, failed to properly align my pages and paragraphs, and filled every chapter with the worst of amateurish writing (including multiple typos in every chapter).
In the end, for me, that was OK.
It was my first go at a novel and I was in fact an amateur. I got over the embarrassment because after 20 years in the entertainment and media business, I’ve got thick skin that protects me even from my own self-inflicted barbs. Thankfully I had not made any effort to market the book at that point.
Before I go any further, let’s take a moment to set the self-publishing stage.
Amazon is the most obvious behemoth in the industry, but it’s not the only one, especially if we’re talking e-books. The digital marketplace for novels is enormous and multifaceted, with Apple, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, Kobo, and others all getting in on the game. This is not an exhaustive list, but its enough for now.
On the print side, print-on-demand (POD) continues to evolve and grow. Many people still love a bound copy of a book, myself included – I’m a former bookstore owner after all. But the convenience of loading up a lightweight device with a store’s worth of books is hard to beat.
If you’ve written a novel and have decided on self-publishing, like it or not you’re now a player on this stage. If you’re like me, you’re somewhere back in the rigging, or lost in the curtains, nowhere near the spotlight. Gotta start someplace, but before you take the plunge here are some things I learned along the way.
First, publishing your book does not equal selling your book. You need to package that book to look as much like traditionally published books as possible, choose the right platform and format, hire the right editorial services, if you can afford them, and get your marketing game working, including social media.
Quick note: as a good friend and fellow writer once told me, Twitter isn’t for sales, it’s for snark. Your mileage may vary, but I do believe he’s right about the first part of that statement. Use Twitter to build a following and make connections, but don’t expect it to deliver book sales.
When I received the box containing printed copies of my first book, the cover art was like syrup of ipecac for the eyes. Yes, it was that bad. Then I started reading and it got worse. The saving grace is that no reader perusing a shelf would have picked up the book and started reading in the first place.
If you’re going to self-publish, do yourself a favor and get a professionally designed cover, or at least take the time to research what a good cover should look like and how to create one. I redesigned mine and while it’s still not great, it will do for now and has garnered a few compliments, so I’ll call that an improvement. Social media is a good place to find talented artists creating amazing book covers. These will set you back at least $500, and the best ones will cost a lot more. However you create your cover, both your e-book and printed book will use it, so make this first impression count.
Now that you have your packaged product, it’s time to decide where to sell it. This is too broad a topic to cover in one essay, but basically if you go with Amazon and you use Amazon’s free ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and place your e-book in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, you’re done, that’s it. You won’t be able to place your book on any other platform without violating Amazon’s terms, and that ISBN will only be searchable via Amazon. You have to decide if this is OK for you, and clearly there are many writers for whom it’s just fine.
For me, it was a mistake that still needs correcting.
I urge you to buy your own ISBN. It’s neither difficult or expensive and I believe it’s more than worth it. ISBN.org is a good place to start.
Because once you’ve done that, a whole world of opportunity opens up. You can publish your book through every e-book and print-on-demand market out there, and you can hire a company to handle that for you. One such company is Draft2Digital. I’m not endorsing them, I am not currently a customer. But as examples go, they’re a good one. They also get a nod of approval from the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and their “Best Self-Publishing Services” list.
A service like Draft2Digital can take your finished novel and cover art and publish to multiple e-book and POD markets simultaneously. This particular company does not charge any upfront fees and instead takes a cut of sales. If you go this path, do your homework before making any commitment, but its nice to know this type of service exists, especially one that takes some of the risk, and cost, out of the equation.
This is also true for any editorial services you might purchase. A good editor, like a good agent, is worth their weight in gold. I didn’t bother to ask anyone, much less an editor, to read my book before I published it. Huge mistake. I’m eternally grateful to whatever forces in the universe prompted me to re-read my book before I began marketing it.
That’s the next piece of the puzzle, marketing. It’s not enough to post your book to social media, unless you’re Stephen King and one tweet can reach millions of fans. But social media didn’t build Stephen King’s catalog into a juggernaut. Old-school publishing, and a bunch of scary movies, did that.
As with publishing, there are a lot of companies out there that claim they can market your book to their huge social media following. In my opinion, most of these companies are not worth it. They have no idea who is going to see a book promo on their social feeds, and you have no idea if their numbers are legit or their followers are your target audience. Some may be better than others, but if you’re going to use a marketing service, go back to that ALLi list and make an informed choice. I prefer a service that has highly targeted email campaign capabilities, but you may find success elsewhere.
NOTE: DO NOT PAY for reviews of your book on Amazon or any other market. This is a fast way to get the reviews deleted and your book pulled from the platform. Many companies offer this, and it is true that reviews help drive sales, but any company that charges for reviews puts your hard work at risk by potentially violating the terms of almost every marketplace out there. Don’t waste your money. Instead do book swaps, give-aways, etc, always with the caveat that you seek honest reviews, good or bad. You and your readers deserve honest feedback.
Which leads me to the next part of this process, ongoing marketing. You can’t market your book once and expect sales to continue on forever. You can light a fire with a single match, but if you want it to keep you warm through the long dark night, you need to stoke it every so often. A great way to do this is to build your own email list. If you’re serious about being an author, you should have a website. If you have a website, you can place links to your site and to your email sign-up page in your ebook. There are low-cost and free services like TinyLetter that provide an alternative to full-fledge email marketing tools and services. If you want to keep readers engaged, keep them in the loop via opt-in emails. When your next book comes out, you’ll be able to market directly to consumers who’ve already shown interest in your work. You can’t get much more targeted than that.
Now, if all of that hasn’t scared you away from self-publishing then I say go for it. As for me, I was spending more time on publishing, sales, and marketing than I was spending on writing. It was costing me money on top of the time as well.
But I still don’t have a publishing deal because I haven’t put in the effort to get one. After a few ham-fisted attempts at querying agents I realized two things. First, I didn’t know what a good query letter looked like and second, I wasn’t ready for an agent. What I am ready for is a publisher who accepts unsolicited work from un-agented writers. There are more of these out there than you might think! That’s my focus now. I want go the traditional publishing route with my novels going forward, but through a publisher first. If I can make that happen, then maybe I’ll need an agent later and presumably I’ll be ready for eventually. In other words, if a publisher picks up one of my books, and that book sells, it should make meeting a good agent much easier.
Because a lot of what you have to do to be successful as an author, an agency and/or publisher will do for you. They will be taking on the time, effort, cost and risk associated with bringing a new novel from an unknown author into the world. They’re good at it and that’s why they take a percentage, but it’s also why it’s the more difficult path for new authors. We represent unknown risk, and any business that survives for any length of time does so in part by mitigating risk, and publishing is filled to the rafters with risk.
Whichever path you chose, if you take the time to educate yourself, spend you money wisely, and put in the effort to learn as much as you can about the publishing business, you’ll get where you’re going eventually. When that happens, don’t forget where you came from and the journey you’ve undertaken. There are a lot of successful writers out there and one thing many have in common is a willingness to share what they’ve learned on their own journey. In that sense, we call all be like them, even before we’re one of them.
Best of luck – you got this.
Cloudland
A short story published by Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections – my first-ever paranormal romance. The original was over 7000 words, so cutting it down by 50% was a fun challenge. Cinnabar Moth will also be publishing my debut YA SciFi novel, “Beyond Tomorrow’s Sun” in December 2024. (I have a second story in this edition as well – “Dust and Memories”).
A Time to Dance
[Originally published on September 22, 2021 in HauntedMTL’s “Queer as Hell” horror anthology as “Transmigration of a Serial Killer.” This is a revised version with a new title that I think reads a little better. This was my first short story in a print anthology. It’s available on Amazon.]
My feet ached and my legs burned like fire. Hanging over the edge of a thousand foot drop really fucked with my senses. I suppose I should explain how I ended up hanging by my wrists so high up. If I’m being honest, it had to do with all the people I killed. They deserved it, but not everyone saw it that way. I don’t give a damn. Everywhere I went, somebody managed to get on my list.
The voices started out as just voices. Then they showed up in my apartment. Thin fuzzy gray things that oozed out of the walls and did this funky dance, all twisty and gray-black foamy puffs of nothing gyrating away in front of me until I sat up and took notice. After that, every time they showed up I knew what they wanted. More people dead.
I fought like hell the first few times, I think. I don’t remember. I know one night, it was morning actually, but still night, I just accepted they owned me. There was no reasoning with them. Then I killed whoever they told me to kill. That’s what they wanted me to do, so I did it.
One day it was a crotchety old man who drove too slow and flipped off everyone who honked at him, including me. Big mistake. Another time, it was this suburban douchebag with his fat ass wrapped in skinny jeans he stole from his gay brother-in-law while they vacationed at their lake house. He couldn’t be bothered to make his kids shut up and settle down at the burger joint. He just let ‘em raise holy hell and drive everybody nuts. Those little turds sealed his fate when one of ‘em crashed into my table and spilled my beer.
Then there was this cute young princess who wouldn’t stop yammering away on their phone in the checkout line at the grocery store, so damn rude. They never held up a line again.
My favorite was the snot-nosed punk from the private school down the street. That dumbass took a job at my neighborhood liquor store and couldn’t be bothered to say ‘thank you’ when I paid for my case of vodka. I taught him some lessons. He reminded me of Tommy, if Tommy had clear skin and a pretty haircut.
It went on like that for years, maybe months. Time wasn’t much to me, just a slow drag from point a to point b with a bunch of shit to do in-between. I think they thought I could get rid of all the rude, mean, nasty, condescending, dismissive, arrogant people in the world. That’s a tall order for one guy. If Tommy hadn’t left he could have helped. Or maybe he would have ended up on the list. Hard to say.
They didn’t like it if I let anyone get away, so I got better at it and eventually the TV was talking about a serial killer, one of the worst ever, but the TV didn’t know it was me, it just knew it was somebody. Every channel had their own name for me, each of them tried corner the market on the story. It was on all the time until I got sick of hearing it.
I killed the TV, problem solved.
Then the cadre started to pay me visits. I knew what they were because they looked like those asshats from the military school the judge sent me to when I was a kid. Jail would have been better, at least there you can hit back. Want to make a horror movie? Follow a 12 year old around a military academy filled with psychopaths and pedophiles for a year, that shit will keep you up at night.
The cadre didn’t ooze out of the walls like the fuzzy gray things and they damn sure didn’t dance. I’d go to sleep and they would show up, all of them together, wearing their black and red regalia with their shiny gold face plates. They looked liked Hell’s Best Marching Band and when I said so they laughed and told me they didn’t have anything to do with the music, that was a different department. I never did see their faces. I could hear them just fine, even through all that metal, which was weird at first but like everything else I got used to it.
They claimed me as their hero, said I had passed all the tests but one. I didn’t know I was taking tests but I was sure happy to learn I’d been passing them. Hadn’t passed a test since college, as far as I knew, not until the cadre showed up and told me I was their star pupil.
I liked college. Drink, smoke dope, have sex, me and Tommy never got tired of it. Guess that’s why we dropped out, or they kicked us out, or maybe we just stopped going, I don’t know. That was a long time ago.
Finding a job was a hell of a reality check. Tommy worked days, I worked nights, we never saw each other. I’m not even sure when he left. I came home after my overnight shift cleaning taxis and he was gone, along with almost everything in the apartment. Could have been a day, could have been a year, who gives a fuck? He was gone.
Cleaning taxis was a shit job, the lost wallets barely made up for the giz and bubblegum people smeared all over the back seat. You wouldn’t believe what people get up to in those cars. It would make your skin crawl, if you had to clean it up. I got used to it.
My grandad finally died and left me a little something. That wheezy old fart never liked me and I don’t know why he left me his money. Guess it was pity, or maybe I was the only one who would sit in a room with him. He stank of cheap cigars and piss and dirty diapers and never opened a window, not even on nice days. Maybe he wanted me to take care of all those cats he kept locked up with him. That was easy, I just left the door open. One more problem solved. I didn’t give a shit they ate his face off, but the EMTs didn’t take it well.
Anyway, I quit that job and focused on the task at hand. Guess that’s why I started passing the tests, all but the last one. I got real busy after that, my list grew like the trash piles in the alley between my building and the burned out warehouse next door.
The last test was the best test, the cadre said, and if I could pass it I could take things to the next level, wherever that was. They told me I’d be happy there, could live like a king or even a god, and I guess that was good enough for me. If I could pass this last one, they told me, I could be rid of their fuzzy gray intermediaries. That sounded nice too.
All the killing was wearing me out, I almost never slept, which is why the cadre showed up whenever I did mange to catch some shuteye. They said they had to strike while the iron was hot, which made sense to me.
We went together up to the roof of my building. I didn’t know where the roof was before then, I thought it was a lot lower. My building must have kept growing after I moved in, which is an odd thing to consider but it must have happened because it took a long time to get there and it was a long way down when I stepped to the edge.
“This is it,” all of them said, “third time’s the charm.” I didn’t recall a first or second time, but that didn’t surprise me. My head was filled with gaps and dark spaces I’d given up trying to fathom. I didn’t know what day it was most of the time, and I didn’t much care. All of them laughed together when I had that thought. I sometimes forgot they could read my mind. I didn’t think it was funny, but that didn’t stop them from laughing.
I looked down and my city street had turned into a canyon, a dark black ribbon of river flowing through the middle and a big patch of sandy shore directly below me. Strange I could see so clearly so far down, but there it was.
Then they hung me out over the edge.
My feet ached and my legs burned. I never liked heights because my body didn’t like heights. I couldn’t even look at a picture of a height without that throbbing pain and burning sensation clawing at me, pulsing up through the soles of my feet and wrapping itself around my calves, squeezing and squeezing like it was trying to push my legs away from danger, all the blood jamming up at me all at once, burning all the way. People sitting on ledges, construction workers on skyscrapers, some dude about to jump out of an airplane. I couldn’t look at any of it without that pain, that burning.
If you said height was the only thing I was afraid of you’d be spot on. I guess that’s why they chose the roof for the final test.
I was dangling over a canyon 1000 feet deep. How it got there, I’ll never know. The street was gone, the buildings were gone, everything was grey stone cliffs, burnt umber sky, yellow sand, black river.
My feet ached and my legs burned and I knew this was my last chance to pass the test.
“I can do it,” I said, not entirely certain I could.
They laughed together again, and how they managed to all laugh the exact same way at the exact same time, well that’s yet another mystery I’m not gonna solve, “You say that every time,” all of them replied.
“I can do it, I swear!”
“You better hope so, this is your last chance.”
Last chance. Last chance or what?
Then it hit me.
I had to pass this test or things were never gonna change. I would go on forever, a ghost haunting the city. I would have to keep killing until I died of old age. It wasn’t an entirely unappealing option. I was good at it. But I was getting tired of the fuzzy gray things always showing up like that, giving me orders, and the cadre, never letting me sleep.
This was my chance. I could move on, start some new phase of this little operation they’d spun up for me. I knew what had to happen next. I knew how to pass the test. The cadre always loved it when I swore at them, so I tried that little trick again.
“Fuck you, let me go!”
“Look at your hands. You’re holding onto us.”
They were right.
That was the trick. They didn’t have to let go, I did. I could feel their flesh beneath mine, like rough stone scraping at my skin. I could see my fingernails bleeding from the white-knuckle grip, my palms shredding against their rough stony bones. Behind those shiny metal masks I was sure they were all smiling at me, certain I was about to fail again.
Not this time.
I smiled back at them.
“Fuck you,” I said again, just for fun, then I let go.
My feet ached and my legs burned and my heart pounded like the drum they used in an orchestra, the one that sounds like thunder, or bombs, or a cannon.
I fell some more until I wasn’t falling, then stopped so quick I hardly noticed. Everything was quiet and dark for a while. Then it wasn’t. Someone was laughing. Not the cadre’s laughter, this was different. A softer sound, with the hint of a hiss and a bit of crackle, with a resonant rumble running beneath it.
I didn’t open my eyes right away. I felt the gritty grains beneath my back, a hot breeze wafted over my face. I gripped the sandy soil with my fists, like a toddler squeezing a big fat finger just for the feel of it.
The laughter again, closer, not approaching but drifting somewhere behind me, pulling me into the place I’d landed. I sat up. I opened my eyes.
The canyon walls were gone. The fuzzy grays were gone. The cadre were gone. Everything was burnt umber sky boiling over the horizon and rolling above the sand and the river and me, so close I tried to touch it.
I felt a rapturous blast of heat at my back, turned to look and saw the black ribbon of river carrying a tall spinning spire of fire twisting away over the middle of the current. The fire danced and twirled and laughed, maybe at me, maybe not. Maybe it liked being fire and laughed at everything.
My head itched and my feet tingled and my legs began to twist and crack and shape into something bizarre yet familiar, like something from a book I’d read back when I still cared about books. It was a thick one bound in leather and one time my mother slammed it against my wrist to crush what she called a preacher’s wart. I think it worked, the lump went away and my hand still managed to do what it was meant to do.
I smiled when I felt the horns growing from my skull, then marveled at their beauty and symmetry as they curved and twisted up and the pointy tips curled in toward each other. I couldn’t help but laugh.
The fire heard me. It reached out a flickering red-orange appendage and whipped its tip a few times, seducing me with light and heat and motion, a tongue begging for a kiss, or possibly something else.
I rose and stood on black cloven hooves where once my feet had been. Ankles, knees and hips clad in oily fur and bending in directions I didn’t know they could go, all opposite of where they’d once been.
I stumbled at first, then found my balance and stepped onto the river, walked over the flow and danced with the fire, laughing and laughing and laughing, until all the world was fire and motion and deep rumbling throat noises wrapped up in crackles and hisses and pops.
My feet didn’t ache and my legs didn’t burn. I’d never danced before, but now found I couldn’t stop. I spun and leapt and burned in the fire and laughed in the scorching heat’s embrace.
My time had come, my time to dance, and there would never again be any height to fear.
Freelance Content Creation for eDigital
I was recently engaged by eDigital to help the company with their website relaunch, marketing communication, and blog content. Links to the individual blog posts are below, and you can check out the website while you’re there. They’ve got a compelling product suite aimed at the OTT/VOD/Streaming industry. If this is your area, you might enjoy this content and learn something new about a growth-oriented start-up in the media operations sector.
It’s Not Me, It’s You: Competitive Analysis in the VOD Space
OTT Monitoring with SEREEN.watch
Are You Prepared to Maximize your VOD ROI? Are You Ready for Growth?
Timing the Turn
An early piece of flash fiction. I like the longer version of this story better than the flash version, but this is the one that got published. The editor said she “loved the tenderness of this piece” and I’m grateful for those words – that is the tone I was going for after a couple of darker stories were published over the previous few weeks. This is another of my stories related to identity. You can read it here, after the embed, or check out the other great work at Screen Door Review.
Timing the Turn
The locker room was a place I never understood. But I never sought out organized sports until I started high school.
I joined the swim team because I liked the water. I was good at swimming, even better at attracting the attention of the older boys after practice. I was tall for my age.
I didn’t understand their attention until later, until I’d learned the truth about the world. But I knew who I was, even then. One finally broke the silent barrier of looks and moves and eyes wandering. The space came so naturally to him, but not me.
He asked me, standing there naked, all seventeen years of him, if I’d swum on a team before.
“No,” I said, and used my towel to hide.
“You’re good,” he said, hiding nothing, “but your turn is sloppy, your timing sucks.”
“How do I…”
“Coach doesn’t give a shit about freshman. If you wanna learn, I can teach you.”
“I don’t…”
“Do you wanna fix that flop or not?”
I had to look at something. The locker felt like cowardice, the floor felt like shame, the ceiling never occurred to me, so I settled on his eyes.
“Yeah, I’m new…”
“No shit Sherlock,” he said. “Can you stick around?”
“No…my mom is waiting…”
“Too bad, maybe next time.”
He turned, twisting the world around him, tossing me away and behind.
There was never a next time. I wondered for years about his motives. The time came when I imagined his intentions, dreamt of them, and wished I’d stayed there and learned to time the turn.
Sophomore year I played football.
I lost track of him that year and tried to purge his presence from my thoughts, even as his memory lingered against my will.
I was a freshman in college when I saw him again, in another locker room. I was approaching nineteen. A lot had changed.
He recognized me as I did him. There was more of him to see, a statuesque structure of muscle built on the foundation of his youthful swimmer’s build, beautiful cliché in bronze.
“Well, look at you, all grown up.”
I reveled in his recognition.
“You too,” I said, looking down from the height attained in a spectacular burst of growth my junior year. For sport I looked him over, returning the favor of years ago. I wasn’t shy anymore.
“You been workin’ out here all year?” he asked.
“No, since the season ended, when it rains. Closer to my dorm.” I didn’t care what he was about to ask me.
“So, you wanna…”
“Yes.”
“OK,” he laughed, “meet me out front.” He started back toward his clothes, then stopped.
“You drink beer?”
“No, how about some coffee,” I said.
“Sure, ok, coffee it is,” he tossed back and continued walking.
He took his time taking his leave and I took full advantage.
I showered and dressed in a hurry, part of me expecting not to see him again.
He was there, waiting beneath the portico, leaning against a concrete column in jeans and a crimson jacket, a modern-day James Dean.
“Okay to walk?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, “the rain’s not too bad.”
Somewhere between there and the coffee shop, halfway between heaven and earth, as our conversation built a bridge across time, he slipped his hand into mine as easy as letter into a box, enough pressure for me to know he meant it.
“Have you been waiting for me?” I asked.
He laughed and gave a squeeze that found its way up my arm, swirled around my chest, then landed in my brain, reassuring me the laughter wasn’t cruel.
“No,” he said, “well, maybe. I’ve been waiting for someone. Now here you are.”
“How did you know, back then?”
“High school? Are you kidding? I didn’t know shit. I knew I liked you, but I couldn’t say why. Mostly I was scared. Part of me thought you didn’t like me because I’m black.”
“You’re more brown than black,” I said, quoting a movie.
“And you’re more pink than white,” he said, catching the reference like an outfielder catches a pop fly.
I thought about what might have been, had I been a little older. I never saw him as scared, but in retrospect it made sense.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I think I’m what they call a late bloomer,” I said.
Our laughter echoed across the brick wall and pathway, collected by the falling rain shushing through the branches watching over us.
“Well, you’ve definitely bloomed, if that’s the analogy you want to use,” he said.
We reached a turn that would take us from the secluded pathway through a colonnade, then into the open quad. I pulled him to a stop.
“I think you have been waiting for me,” I said.
“What makes you…?”
“Because I’ve been waiting for me too,” I said, “it makes sense.”
“You have to explain that one.”
“Even if we didn’t understand then, we both knew what we wanted. I just had to catch up, and maybe you had to slow down. Like you said, here we are.”
He leaned in to kiss me, our first kiss, my first kiss. It shook my core and left me gasping for air.
“I caught you,” I said, my words forming clouds above us.
We stepped into the open and his hand fell from mine as a stone falls from a ledge. The windows of the quad stared down, innumerable eyes behind their darkness. Our separation a silent acknowledgement that we weren’t as fearless as we thought, disquiet measurable in the space between us.
We covered a lifetime in a hundred paces, then left the monoliths of higher education behind, his hand again finding mine.
We would not live that way forever.
We learned to live our lives at our own deliberate pace, giving the world time to catch up to where we’d arrived, hand in hand no matter who was watching.
A Time to Dance
The “Queer as Hell” horror anthology from Haunted MTL includes my story “Transmigration of a Serial Killer,” my first short story in print. There were some things I didn’t like about the story after it was published – “A Time to Dance” is the revised version. I’m still tinkering with it, to be honest. You can read it below the embed and purchase the anthology from Amazon:
A Time to Dance
My feet ached and my legs burned like fire. Hanging over the edge of a thousand foot drop really fucked with my senses. I suppose I should explain how I ended up hanging by my wrists so high up. If I’m being honest, it had to do with all the people I killed. They deserved it, but not everyone saw it that way. I don’t give a damn. Everywhere I went, somebody managed to get on my list.
The voices started out as just voices. Then they showed up in my apartment. Thin fuzzy gray things that oozed out of the walls and did this funky dance, all twisty and gray-black foamy puffs of nothing gyrating away in front of me until I sat up and took notice. After that, every time they showed up I knew what they wanted. More people dead.
I fought like hell the first few times, I think. I don’t remember. I know one night, it was morning actually, but still night, I just accepted they owned me. There was no reasoning with them. Then I killed whoever they told me to kill. That’s what they wanted me to do, so I did it.
One day it was a crotchety old man who drove too slow and flipped off everyone who honked at him, including me. Big mistake. Another time, it was this suburban douchebag with his fat ass wrapped in skinny jeans he stole from his gay brother-in-law while they vacationed at their lake house. He couldn’t be bothered to make his kids shut up and settle down at the burger joint. He just let ‘em raise holy hell and drive everybody nuts. Those little turds sealed his fate when one of ‘em crashed into my table and spilled my beer.
Then there was this cute young princess who wouldn’t stop yammering away on their phone in the checkout line at the grocery store, so damn rude. They never held up a line again.
My favorite was the snot-nosed punk from the private school down the street. That dumbass took a job at my neighborhood liquor store and couldn’t be bothered to say ‘thank you’ when I paid for my case of vodka. I taught him some lessons. He reminded me of Tommy, if Tommy had clear skin and a pretty haircut.
It went on like that for years, maybe months. Time wasn’t much to me, just a slow drag from point a to point b with a bunch of shit to do in-between. I think they thought I could get rid of all the rude, mean, nasty, condescending, dismissive, arrogant people in the world. That’s a tall order for one guy. If Tommy hadn’t left he could have helped. Or maybe he would have ended up on the list. Hard to say.
They didn’t like it if I let anyone get away, so I got better at it and eventually the TV was talking about a serial killer, one of the worst ever, but the TV didn’t know it was me, it just knew it was somebody. Every channel had their own name for me, each of them tried to corner the market on the story. It was on all the time until I got sick of hearing it.
I killed the TV, problem solved.
Then the cadre started to pay me visits. I knew what they were because they looked like those asshats from the military school the judge sent me to when I was a kid. Jail would have been better, at least there you can hit back. Want to make a horror movie? Follow a 12 year old around a military academy filled with psychopaths and pedophiles for a year, that shit will keep you up at night.
The cadre didn’t ooze out of the walls like the fuzzy gray things and they damn sure didn’t dance. I’d go to sleep and they would show up, all of them together, wearing their black and red regalia with their shiny gold faceplates. They looked liked Hell’s Best Marching Band and when I said so they laughed and told me they didn’t have anything to do with the music, that was a different department. I never did see their faces. I could hear them just fine, even through all that metal, which was weird at first but like everything else I got used to it.
They claimed me as their hero, said I had passed all the tests but one. I didn’t know I was taking tests but I was sure happy to learn I’d been passing them. Hadn’t passed a test since college, as far as I knew, not until the cadre showed up and told me I was their star pupil.
I liked college. Drink, smoke dope, have sex, me and Tommy never got tired of it. Guess that’s why we dropped out, or they kicked us out, or maybe we just stopped going, I don’t know. That was a long time ago.
Finding a job was a hell of a reality check. Tommy worked days, I worked nights, we never saw each other. I’m not even sure when he left. I came home after my overnight shift cleaning taxis and he was gone, along with almost everything in the apartment. Could have been a day, could have been a year, who gives a fuck? He was gone.
Cleaning taxis was a shit job, the lost wallets barely made up for the giz and bubblegum people smeared all over the back seat. You wouldn’t believe what people get up to in those cars. It would make your skin crawl, if you had to clean it up. I got used to it.
My grandad finally died and left me a little something. That wheezy old fart never liked me and I don’t know why he left me his money. Guess it was pity, or maybe I was the only one who would sit in a room with him. He stank of cheap cigars and piss and dirty diapers and never opened a window, not even on nice days. Maybe he wanted me to take care of all those cats he kept locked up with him. That was easy, I just left the door open. One more problem solved. I didn’t give a shit they ate his face off, but the EMTs didn’t take it well.
Anyway, I quit that job and focused on the task at hand. Guess that’s why I started passing the tests, all but the last one. I got real busy after that, my list grew like the trash piles in the alley between my building and the burned out warehouse next door.
The last test was the best test, the cadre said, and if I could pass it I could take things to the next level, wherever that was. They told me I’d be happy there, could live like a king or even a god, and I guess that was good enough for me. If I could pass this last one, they told me, I could be rid of their fuzzy gray intermediaries. That sounded nice too.
All the killing was wearing me out, I almost never slept, which is why the cadre showed up whenever I did mange to catch some shuteye. They said they had to strike while the iron was hot, which made sense to me.
We went together up to the roof of my building. I didn’t know where the roof was before then, I thought it was a lot lower. My building must have kept growing after I moved in, which is an odd thing to consider but it must have happened because it took a long time to get there and it was a long way down when I stepped to the edge.
“This is it,” all of them said, “third time’s the charm.” I didn’t recall a first or second time, but that didn’t surprise me. My head was filled with gaps and dark spaces I’d given up trying to fathom. I didn’t know what day it was most of the time, and I didn’t much care. All of them laughed together when I had that thought. I sometimes forgot they could read my mind. I didn’t think it was funny, but that didn’t stop them from laughing.
I looked down and my city street had turned into a canyon, a dark black ribbon of river flowing through the middle and a big patch of sandy shore directly below me. Strange I could see so clearly so far down, but there it was.
Then they hung me out over the edge.
My feet ached and my legs burned. I never liked heights because my body didn’t like heights. I couldn’t even look at a picture of a height without that throbbing pain and burning sensation clawing at me, pulsing up through the soles of my feet and wrapping itself around my calves, squeezing and squeezing like it was trying to push my legs away from danger, all the blood jamming up at me all at once, burning all the way. People sitting on ledges, construction workers on skyscrapers, some dude about to jump out of an airplane. I couldn’t look at any of it without that pain, that burning.
If you said height was the only thing I was afraid of you’d be spot on. I guess that’s why they chose the roof for the final test.
I was dangling over a canyon 1000 feet deep. How it got there, I’ll never know. The street was gone, the buildings were gone, everything was grey stone cliffs, burnt umber sky, yellow sand, black river.
My feet ached and my legs burned and I knew this was my last chance to pass the test.
“I can do it,” I said, not entirely certain I could.
They laughed together again, and how they managed to all laugh the exact same way at the exact same time, well that’s yet another mystery I’m not gonna solve, “You say that every time,” all of them replied.
“I can do it, I swear!”
“You better hope so, this is your last chance.”
Last chance. Last chance or what?
Then it hit me.
I had to pass this test or things were never gonna change. I would go on forever, a ghost haunting the city. I would have to keep killing until I died of old age. It wasn’t an entirely unappealing option. I was good at it. But I was getting tired of the fuzzy gray things always showing up like that, giving me orders, and the cadre, never letting me sleep.
This was my chance. I could move on, start some new phase of this little operation they’d spun up for me. I knew what had to happen next. I knew how to pass the test. The cadre always loved it when I swore at them, so I tried that little trick again.
“Fuck you, let me go!”
“Look at your hands. You’re holding onto us.”
They were right.
That was the trick. They didn’t have to let go, I did. I could feel their flesh beneath mine, like rough stone scraping at my skin. I could see my fingernails bleeding from the white-knuckle grip, my palms shredding against their rough stony bones. Behind those shiny metal masks I was sure they were all smiling at me, certain I was about to fail again.
Not this time.
I smiled back at them.
“Fuck you,” I said again, just for fun, then I let go.
My feet ached and my legs burned and my heart pounded like one of those drums they use in an orchestra, the one that sounds like thunder, or bombs, or a cannon.
I fell some more until I wasn’t falling, then stopped so quick I hardly noticed. Everything was quiet and dark for a while. Then it wasn’t. Someone was laughing. Not the cadre’s laughter, this was different. A softer sound, with the hint of a hiss and a bit of crackle, with a resonant rumble running beneath it.
I didn’t open my eyes right away. I felt the gritty grains beneath my back, a hot breeze wafted over my face. I gripped the sandy soil with my fists, like a toddler squeezing a big fat finger just for the feel of it.
The laughter again, closer, not approaching but drifting somewhere behind me, pulling me into the place I’d landed. I sat up. I opened my eyes.
The canyon walls were gone. The fuzzy grays were gone. The cadre were gone. Everything was burnt umber sky boiling over the horizon and rolling above the sand and the river and me, so close I tried to touch it.
I felt a rapturous blast of heat at my back, turned to look and saw the black ribbon of river carrying a tall spinning spire of fire twisting away over the middle of the current. The fire danced and twirled and laughed, maybe at me, maybe not. Maybe it liked being fire and laughed at everything.
My head itched and my feet tingled and my legs began to twist and crack and shape into something bizarre yet familiar, like something from a book I’d read back when I still cared about books. It was a thick one bound in leather and one time my mother slammed it against my wrist to crush what she called a preacher’s wart. I think it worked, the lump went away and my hand still managed to do what it was meant to do.
I smiled when I felt the horns growing from my skull, then marveled at their beauty and symmetry as they curved and twisted up and the pointy tips curled in toward each other. I couldn’t help but laugh.
The fire heard me. It reached out a flickering red-orange appendage and whipped its tip a few times, seducing me with light and heat and motion, a tongue begging for a kiss, or possibly something else.
I rose and stood on black cloven hooves where once my feet had been. Ankles, knees and hips clad in oily fur and bending in directions I didn’t know they could go, all opposite of where they’d once been.
I stumbled at first, then found my balance and stepped onto the river, walked over the flow, and danced with the fire, laughing and laughing and laughing, until all the world was fire and motion and deep rumbling throat noises wrapped up in crackles and hisses and pops.
I’d never danced before, but now found I couldn’t stop, not if I wanted to. But my feet didn’t ache and my legs didn’t burn.
It was time to dance, and from then on, always would be.