It's Official... I'm A Misfit

by Michael Seese

Or I will be later this year. Allow me to explain...

A long time ago I wrote a short story titled "The Other Brother: Scandal." 

The concept: The great "consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes has an unknown (to him) twin brother. (Long story short, Mr. & Mrs. Holmes didn't want two brothers to compete with their beloved Mycroft, so they condemned one to an orphanage.) Possessing the renowned Holmes acumen and physical prowess, yet lacking any sense of morality, he turns to a life of crime -- specifically murder -- eavesdropping on his brother's exploits in order to join the game. "Scandal" recasts A Scandal In Bohemia (Doyle's first short story) from the other brother's point of view.

Flash forward to last October. On horrortree.com (to repeat, a great site for authors) I found a call from Bards and Sages Publishing for "The Society Of Misfit Stories." I submitted, and voilà!

The story will appear on their website in December, and in print sometime next year.

Please spread the word. And if you feel like ponying up 99¢ to buy a copy.... that would be OK, too.

It Never Gets Old, Part 2

by Michael Seese

No, my blog did not needle jump. I'm not stuck in a groove. This is a reference to the broken record comment in  yesterday's post. For the second time this week, I got a little present in the mail.

This appears The Literary Hatchet #14, published by Pear Tree Press.

I was especially gratified to receive this acceptance letter a few months back, as this particular story had been rejected five times before. Just goes to show you the value of persistence. Not to mention revising older stories as you become a more mature and (ostensibly) better writer. 

It Never Gets Old, Part 1

by Michael Seese

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I never get tired of holding a book with my name somewhere within it. (Not counting the phone book.)

This is from Confessions Of A Shapeshifter edited by Terrie Leigh Relf.

 Tune in tomorrow for more...

Damn it! You're a writer!

by Michael Seese

It's been a while since I've "written about writing." I truthfully don't feel as though my writing is in a rut. But I have developed a certain routine. I have several novel-length works in progress that I try to make progress on. Then I occasionally get "sidetracked" to either polish a completed novel, or work on a short story.

Last month I sort of did both.

I'd spent the early part of the month expanding a Middle Grade book I had written a year or two back, trying to take it from 11,000 words (which I learned is too short) to 20,000 words (which I learned is about right) based on an agent's feedback.

But in the back of my mind, I had the Nelson Algren contest. Each year, the Chicago Tribune sponsors a short story contest in Algren's name. I entered two years ago, then somehow forgot about it last year.

This year (though technically in calendar year 2015) I resolved to submit something for 2016. I came up with the idea... over the summer, perhaps. I'd jot down little drabbles here and there. But I couldn't seem to find the unifying voice to keep it all together. Suddenly it was January, and the aforementioned MG book had my attention. 

But I resolved to spend the last week-plus before the contest -- the due date was 1/31 -- on the piece.

Then life got in the way that week, and I couldn't garner the time to focus on it. When I went to bed Thursday night (bear in mind, it was due Sunday; but with the kids, it's hard to write on weekends) I'd all but resigned myself to having to pass this year.

When I woke up Friday morning, feeling guilty over my slacker attitude, I shook it off and said, "Damn it! You're a writer! So write it."

I knuckled down, and started wording away. 

Friday...

Saturday...

Sunday...
 
When I made my "Damn it" resolution, I figured I could get in a big chunk of writing Sunday night. Then I realized that my wife and I were going to the Jake Shimabukuro concert. 

(Quick aside: if you have a few minutes watch the video. You won't be disappointed.)

Great! But bummer!

The show started at 7:00. So we were home by 10:00. The deadline was three hours away, since it was due by 11:59 CST.

Write.

Write.

Write.

I finished with literally five minutes to spare.

Is it good? I don't know. Will it win? I really don't know.

But the point is...

Damn it! I'm a writer! And I wrote it.

Bibliography

By Michael Seese

In several long-ago posts, I made reference to my busy October. Specifically, each day during the month of October 2013, I submitted something, somewhere.

The natural outcome of all that writing / emailing / hoping was a rather padded curriculum vitae. It got to the point where I had trouble keeping up with everything that had been published somewhere. (Funny aside: I mis-typed the word "published" just now, and one of the spell-check suggestions was "punished." Quite apropos.)

So I decided to create a bibliography page.

If you're in the mood to be punished, click over and have a look.

I Love Writing!

By Michael Seese

"Well, duh!" you're saying.

OK, some days, it frustrates the h3ll out of me. And then...

When I last mentioned my current WIP, The Secret World Of Gustave Eiffel, I was working through the second revision. It's a much slower go, since I now need to get the right words--rather than any words--down on the page. 

My daily word counts from the past few weeks bear this out.

3/19/13       248
3/20/13      471
3/21/13        85
3/22/13      422
3/23/13           0
3/24/13       191
3/25/13           0
3/26/13      647
3/27/13      705
3/28/13      397
3/29/13    1,275
3/30/13      398
3/31/13       160

Bear in mind, I've also been working on my taxes.

In real life, before the Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel designed the railway terminal at Budapest. He is a pic.

According to the Wikipedia article (on Eiffel), one of the things that made it unique was the fact that you could see the "skeleton" through the glass walls. 

An Eiffel structure with the iron visible...hmmm, where else do we see that?

The Budapest chapter was one that, on the first pass, had been really scant on the details. I had literally two or three paragraphs. So, during my revision effort, I got to this part and thought, What to write, what to write.

Then it hit me.

Between Vienna and Budapest (more or less) is Prague. (A wonderful city, by the way.) When my wife and I visited Prague a dozen years ago, an attraction we had considered visiting, but did not, is the the Kostnice v Sedlci, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints. You may have heard of it as the "bone church." 

Per Wikipedia (again):

The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have in many cases been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel.

Bones...skeleton...structure...

Suddenly, I had this whole side story where the train to Budapest breaks down near Brno (south of Prague, about 55 km from the church), and Eiffel meets a stranger who offers to show him the ossuary, thereby providing the inspiration for both the Budapest station and the Eiffel Tower. (I also got to throw in some history as to why the noon bells in Brno chime at 11:00.)

Bingo!

Here is a little snippet.

    “So you were going to tell me of your people, your history,” Eiffel opened.
    “There is so much to say,” Rint said, “I hope four hours provides enough time.”
    Eiffel soon learned that to say much of the history of the region revolved around repelling hostile armies would be a gross understatement.
    Brno withstood two sieges by the  Kališníci, the “Chalice People,” whose 15th century crusade later came be to called the Hussite Wars. Two hundred years later the city survived the aforementioned Swedish attack. In 1742, the Prussian army of Frederick the Great failed in its attempt at conquest.
    “Such was our reputation as a city of staunch defenders, that your Napoleon Bonaparte chose to leave us alone after he marched into Austerlitz.” 
    “Fascinating!”
    “And understand, the tales I tell of Brno represent a small sample of the adversity our entire region has had to face. Though this may be exaggeration, it seems as though as battle raged somewhere, always, within the Kingdom of Bohemia.”
    “Believe it or not, my friend, I could say the same for France.”
    “War!” Rint said, literally spitting to one side. The poets and minstrels strive to make war glorious. Even beautiful. War is neither. Let me tell you about war.”
    Rint’s war stories were not like those of Alexandre Eiffel. They did not tell of heroics, nor make war sound romantic. They sung of struggles, sacrifices, and suffering, so much so that that Eiffel breathed a sigh of relief when Rint announced, “We are here.”
    The outside, Eiffel thought, is nothing spectacular. Not even out of the ordinary. Smooth granite block walls. Gothic arch windows. Three spires, topped with iron hexagonal cupolas. It could be any church, anywhere.
    “Shall we go in?” Rint asked.
    “Certainly.”
    Inside, Eiffel’s opinion changed the moment he looked up. The first feature which caught his eye was the chandelier. Spanning perhaps eight feet, it faintly glowed a pale, dull white, as it appeared to be carved from ivory or...
    In that instant, his adjectival catalog inverted. Spectacular became spectral. Ordinary, otherworldly. Had his initial assessment included mediocre, he might now have thought macabre.
    “What...what is this?” he asked.
    “The locals call it ‘The Bone Church.’ I imagine you ascertain why.”
    Everywhere Eiffel looked, he saw bones. Human bones. Thousands of human bones.

 Feel free to share an opinion.

Into The Blogosphere...

OK, so blogging has been in existence for, what...nearly ten years? And I'm just now getting around to writing one? Amazing, really, when you consider that I am a writer, and have been one--professionally--for a quarter of a century.

But I always was a late bloomer. I didn't get married until my 30s, and didn't procreate until my 40s. (Word of advice to would-be parents. There's a reason we can begin breeding when we're young; it's because we should breed when we're young.)

So this blog will be about writing. And life as a parent. And life in general. And stuff. Stuff I see every day. Stuff I think. Stuff I think and would like to say, but don't in the interest of political correctness. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and you have been duly warned to expect the occasional weird tangential observation of the sort which seems to percolate out of my brain on a regular, though unscheduled, basis.

But, mostly, I will talk about writing, since it's something that I do every day, whether it's a poem, or a few paragraphs of a short story, or the next scene in my in-progress novella, or something from my book of inter-connected short stories, which currently sits at about 75% done. (Yes, that's foreshadowing, and I do intend to share bits and pieces in future posts.) In fact, I want try out some in-progress material on you, and would appreciate it if you, my dear readers, would offer me honest feedback.

I hope you stop by often and read. I hope you comment. And I hope you enjoy.