• 12 Plays
  • Red Right Hand (Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds Cover) (Bonus Track)Arctic Monkeys

Marcus woke to find himself flat on the filthy cement floor, his head in a pool of warm blood that he somehow knew was not his own.

A quick inventory told him all he needed to know: Legs? Broken. Eyes? Not yet adjusted to the darkness. Arms? Exhausted, but likely able to lift himself. Ears? Full of blood, but working well enough to hear the skritching noises in the blackness; the rats would be coming soon.

I should have figured it out far sooner, Marcus thought as he tried hauling his limp frame through the sticky gore. It smelled of copper and sugar. Laughing grimly at his own naiveté, he recalled a lyric from an old Nick Cave song:

You’re one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan,
designed and directed
by his red right hand

- - -

Q:Do you have a favorite book? And, because that's a loaded question, maybe you just limit it to a favorite author or genre? Which book/author was it that inspired you to start writing in the first place?

embracingthelost

Yikes. That’s one of those questions along the lines of “what’s your favorite food?”

Nonetheless, when I was a wee lad, I was particularly fond of P.G. Wodehouse and also Douglas Adams, and I think those two gentlemen are largely responsible for shaping my writing “style” as a teen and young adult, before I actually discovered and shaped and honed my own voice. And that’s the real trick of writing, isn’t it?

down the rabbit hole

Writing good fiction requires good research.

Sometimes that research leads you to places you’d least expect.

And sometimes those places lead to still other places. Darker places. Hidden places. Places where you get lost and wander and begin to wonder what is real and what isn’t and no this can’t possibly be true because that would change everything you thought was real and these are only secondary sources and you think it’s likely all hearsay and folklore and you feel better for a little while.

But it nags at you. You need to know more. You want the truth.

So you spend days and weeks using all of your skills and pulling all of your strings and calling in all of your favors to seek out the primary sources and while individually they are mundane and nonsensical you start seeing patterns and once you dig deeper and put the pieces together you…

Well, you panic. You lose your tenuous grip on sanity and start wondering who else knows what you now know and your days are spent in thick clouds of paranoia and fear and hopelessness.

But in the end, you’ll find a way to rationalize. To pretend it’s not real. To make a story out of it like you wanted to do in the first place.

You’ll tell your story and pass it off as “fiction” and people will read it and enjoy it but from that point on the rest of your life will be a lie. You’ll smile during the day but every night you will toss and turn and stare at the moonlit ceiling of your bedroom and wonder when they will come for you.

Across that midnight landscape he rides with his toppling burden of despair and hope, bearing with him the beast’s face and the dream, but unable to cast off either or to believe in either. For he is man, the changeling, in whom the sense of goodness has not perished, nor an eye for some supernatural guidepost in the night.
Loren Eiseley, from his essay “Strangeness in the Proportion” in The Night Country.