Suicide Kings

Christopher J. Ferguson is an associate professor of psychology at Stetson University where he studies violent behavior and the effects of media violence.  His research has generally questioned whether media such as video game violence contributes meaningfully to societal violence and his work has been cited by the US Supreme Court.  He lives in Winter Springs, Florida with his wife and son. 

Do you travel to do research or for inspiration? Can you share some special places with us?

I love to travel and have often been inspired by places I’ve been.  Suicide Kings came about due to a trip to Florence.  I had gone there for an academic conference and went myself for that trip without my wife and son.  Homesickness set in pretty quick and I found myself unusually despondent despite basically being on vacation.  Florence as a city is both very beautiful and very imposing, still having many tall Renaissance buildings that loom over you and cut out a view of the horizon.  I remember thinking to myself, “This would be an excellent city to die in.” And thus was Suicide Kings born.  I wrote what would become chapters 2 and 3 there in Florence or in the airports on the way home.

Give a short synop of your most recently published book.

As a young woman in Florence, Diana Savrano’s life is a privileged one of elegant balls, handsome suitors and frivolity.  But the sudden death of her mother leaves her adrift and abandoned.  As she sobs over her mother's casket, another member of the procession reveals the awful truth: that before her last days, Diana's mother had joined a Luciferian cult.  Despite knowing little beyond her pampered world, Diana determines to unmask those responsible for her mother’s death.  But someone does not want such secrets revealed, and they are willing to send assassins to keep her silent.  Paranoia and loneliness set in as even her closest friends reveal hidden agendas.  Worst of all, the further she follows the intertwined threads, the closer they appear to lead to her own father. 

How much of yourself is hidden in the characters in the book?

That’s a particularly interesting question since the lead characters are mainly female!  I’ll let readers psychoanalyze me if they wish!  But I think, of course, as writers, some of ourselves ends up in characters, particularly characters we identify with.  And for a character like Diana Savrano, I drew as well from the strong women in my life, particularly my wife and my mother.  That’s one element of myself as well that was crucial to this book, and a lot of my writing really: I am most interested in strong women characters.  I’ve written some stories with male leads but, overall, don’t find them to be quite as interesting.  And I think there is a need for more books (and movies and television shows) with strong women (and girl) characters.

What challenges did you face while writing this book?

The biggest challenges for me are time and energy.  I have a full-time “day job” and a family that likes attention, so with that, finding a few hours here or there to write can be tricky.  And I’ll be honest, that time also competes with things like compelling television!  Given the enormous amount of hours that go into writing a book, maintaining some degree of diligence to get it done is always the tricky part.  It’s easy to come up with a great idea, harder to write it down!

What do you think is the greatest lesson you’ve learned about writing so far? What advice can you give new writers?

Persistence, I’d say, is the greatest virtue of the writers, whether writing fiction, non-fiction or academic publishing, it’s all the same.  Rejection is our lot in life, and being able to persist and believe in what we’re doing in the face of that rejection.  That may sound bleak, but it’s the way of things.  People who are able to persevere, to improve their craft, to remain sure of what they’re doing in the face of early rejection will be the ones to ultimately succeed.  If you let fear of rejection stop you, it will be impossible to advance in any kind of career in writing. 

Where do you store ideas for later use: in your head, in a notebook, or on a spreadsheet?

It’s all in my head!  I’ve tried other approaches before, particularly notes and outlines, but ultimately I prefer to let things be a bit more free-form.  I think that helps stories to develop a bit more organically.  Very often the way a story comes out is quite different from what I’d originally envisioned.

Where can folks learn more about your books and events?

My web-page is www.Christopherjferguson.com.  Suicide Kings can be found on Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/Suicide-Kings-Christopher-J-Ferguson/dp/1628300701/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388069487

Tears of Isis

James Dorr combines the charm of a gentleman born in the US South with the wiles of a near-New York City upbringing, the canniness of a one-time New England resident, and the guile of an outwardly stolid Midwesterner.  Or so he says.  It is known that he was born in Florida, grew up in New Jersey, went to college in Massachusetts, and currently lives in Indiana.  He is a short story writer and poet working mainly in dark fantasy and horror with forays into science fiction and mystery, and has previously worked as a technical writer for an academic computing center, associate editor on a city magazine, a nonfiction freelance writer, and a semi-professional Renaissance musician.  In addition to three prose collections and one of poetry, Dorr has had nearly 400 appearances in publications ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Yellow Bat Review. 

He also has a cat named Wednesday, for Wednesday Addams in the original 1960s TV show The Addams Family.

Wecome to the blog, James.

How has your environment affected your writing?

How has it not?  But environment is more than just the things around one, it’s the noticing of these things -- the close attention.  Travel can be a part of it, but there’s also research, and the leisure to visit the library.  For instance, in the title story of my latest book, the action at the end takes place in the Boston, Massachusetts area where I lived for about five years.  But the story starts in San Francisco, where I’ve never been, yet through research -- even if it may have ended up being condensed into just a few sentences -- I hope I’ve made it seem as alive as the locations later on.  But then there’s also the environment of the mind, the completely made up, influenced in part by the things one has read.  In my own case I’ll cite The Complete Greek Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (say what?  For an explanation -- and why you might read these too, if you haven’t -- see my introduction to Telling Tales of Terror:  Essays on Writing Horror & Dark Fiction, Kim Richards, ed., Damnation Books, 2012); The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe;  Ray Bradbury’s The October Country and The Martian Chronicles, et al.; I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. . . .  The list goes on. 

Give a short synop of your most recently published book.

Art and creation, Medusa and creatures of the sea, blood-drinking with or without foreign entanglement, musical instruments fashioned from bone, Cinderella and sleeping beauties, women who keep pets, insects and UFOs, ghouls as servants and restless undead.  And Isis herself as both weeping mother and vulture-winged icon of death and destruction.  These are among the subjects that inspire the seventeen stories (plus opening poem) in The Tears of Isis, my latest collection published last May (2013) by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing ( http://perpetualpublishing.com/the-tears-of-isis/.  Citing the book’s blurb, “the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney spoke of art as ‘making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature,’” and so in The Tears of Isis I hope will be found both the beauty that Sidney and others admired, and also the grotesque, the strange and bizarre.      

  

How much of yourself is hidden in the characters in the book?

The Tears of Isis has an overall theme on the link between beauty and destruction, of art and death, even beginning with a poem and ending with a story that are both about sculptors.  I don’t sculpt myself, but I used to do some illustrating and I still cartoon a little.  I also play music.  I write poems.  I like to perform at readings.  In short, I relate to the artistic side of a number of the stories’ characters, whether directly or indirectly -- as well as the problem solving side, because that’s a part of the creative process too.  But at the same time, I also face the destructive (including self-destructive) side of creation, for example the isolation it forces when one must concentrate on a work in progress.  

What challenges did you face while writing this book?

For The Tears of Isis, part of the attraction was that I’d have a free hand from start to finish, the only “restriction” being that it had to total at least 60,000 words, in contrast to previous fiction collections for which I simply supplied a number of stories for the publisher to choose from and, from them, construct the actual book.  So I had to learn to be an editor:  to look at a large number of stories and narrow them down to a manageable few, and then to look at these as groupings from which I could choose what I thought might be an appropriate theme, in this case the idea of art and beauty as holding within themselves a destructive aspect (and thus beginning with a poem of Medusa as sculptress, at least symbolically turning her models into stone, while the closing title story comes back to another sculptress who leaves her own trail of victims behind her).  From there the challenge was to select individual stories that I could order in such a way that each might seem to flow into the next in at least some aspect -- even if completely different in other ways -- offering readers a wide variety in themselves, yet adding up to a greater unity when the book is taken as a whole.  That is, hopefully, leaving readers with a feeling that what they’ve just read amounts, in some way, to more than just a few evenings’ entertainment.

What do you think is the greatest lesson you’ve learned about writing so far? What advice can you give new writers?

The first thing is character, even if sometimes it may not seem apparent.  A. J. Budrys defined the first three elements of a story as a Being (character) in a Situation (environment) with a Problem (motivation).  It’s the solving of the problem (or failure to solve) that becomes the story.  But what makes a character is the author’s getting into his or her (or its, especially if it’s a villain -- it could be an alien or a sentient monster) head.  To become that being, see through its eyes, hear through its ears, smell through its nose, feel with its feelings -- themselves influenced by the being’s environment too -- and convey those feelings to us as if you were yourself the character.  This is the meaning of “show, don’t tell”:  Telling is an author’s description of a character; showing is the author’s conveying an understanding of what that character feels and does and why.

And one more lesson is persistence.  Victory comes not only to the bold, but to those who keep at it, the same as a character in a story, suffering defeats (rejections) and disappointments but still striving forward until a goal has been reached.  And then realizing that that’s just the first goal.    

Can you tell us your future writing goals/projects?

Last month, as I write this, I sold a story called “Casket Girls” to the electronic magazine Daily Science Fiction, a vampire tale relating a legend of New Orleans, which was the location of  2013’s World Horror Convention.  So in a sense, that was my “What did you do on summer vacation?” story.   In a larger sense, though, I’ve been working on a series of stories that, somewhat like the late Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronlcles, add up to a sort of quasi-novel.  Set in the “Tombs,” a huge necropolis and its environs on a far-future, dying Earth, sixteen of these have been published already in various places, including three (two reprints, “Mara’s Room” and “River Red,” and one, “The Ice Maiden,” for the first time) in The Tears of Isis, and another, “Raising the Dead,” is scheduled to be out in White Cat Publications’s steampunk anthology Airships  & Automatons.  While I’m currently continuing to treat these as separate items, writing and marketing them as stand-alone stories, I may eventually start to look into a book publication for these as well, possibly with a larger publisher. 

Then another project of sorts, of which The Tears of Isis is itself a part, is to start getting some of my older stories back into print, often in anthologies that sound intriguing in themselves, but are unlikely to pay as much as might be appropriate for an original story.  This, of course, has something to do with the economy too, but I’ve been writing long enough that I don’t want some of my earliest professional work to be forgotten. 

And then, of course, I’m writing new stories -- and lots of poetry -- often these days fairly short and tailored to the internet market, of which “Casket Girls” is a recent example. 

  

Where can folks learn more about your books and events, and are your books available in print and ebook formats? (please provide the buy link for easy reader accessibility)

I have four full-size collections, more information on all of which can be found by clicking their pictures in the center column of my blog, along with several single-story electronic chapbooks and a slew of individual fiction and poetry appearances, some of which can be found on my Amazon author Page, http://www.amazon.com/James%20Dorr/e/B004XWCVUS/ref=la_B004XWCVUS_pg_1?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_82%3AB004XWCVUS&ie=UTF8&qid=1382916681

My first two (mostly) fiction collections are Strange Mistresses:  Tales of Wonder and Romance and Darker Loves:  Tales of Mystery and Regret from Dark Regions Press, which are available in print via Amazon, et al., as well as directly from the publisher by clicking  http://www.darkregions.com/james-dorr/

My third, all-poetry collection is Vamps:  A Retrospective, from Sam’s Dot Publishing/White Cat Publications, and can be found in both print and ebook editions at http://www.whitecatpublications.com/products-page/poetry/vamps-2/ 

My newest collection is The Tears of Isis which is available in print and electronic forms from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, as noted above, as well as on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon UK.  The local (American) Amazon site is located at http://www.amazon.com/The-Tears-Isis-James-Dorr/dp/0988748843      

Then finally there’s my blog itself for up-to-date information on sales, books, etc., as well as an occasional sample poem or story at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com

Wishing you the best of sales in the new year, James!

Here's to a great NEW YEAR!

As 2013 wounds down, I turn my thoughts to an optimistic new year for all of us. I have finished Sticking Point, the last of the Logan Hunter series, and spent time with family and friends during the Christmas season.

As I wait for the new mystery's release, I've begun work on a laborious task: researching a medieval ancestor who was a Knight of the Bath. My hope is to write a novel about Sir Geoffrey Plantagenet and how he became a knight. I have 24 books that I've collected, and I can already tell that this will be the biggest challenge I've ever had during my writing career. Please weigh in if you have experience with historical fiction. I need all the help I can get.

Now that the holiday season is nearly over, I invite authors and industry experts to once again submit blog tours or answer a few questions about writing and the latest book. Fresh material will begin on January 6th. I hope you'll stayed tuned and comment when you can. We love to hear from you and appreciate your thoughts and feedback. Thank you for the support!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Giving thanks

As Thanksgiving approaches once again, I'd like to extend my warmest wishes to all who venture over to my blog and continue to support me in so many ways. I hope you all have the most meaningful holiday season ever.

My editor has the Sticking Point manuscript in her hands and promises to have it back to me next week. Of course I want to drop everything else and "fix" it and get it off to the publisher. Sticking Point is the fifth and final novel in the Logan Hunter series. While I absolutely love Logan and most of the characters who've shown up over the course of the series, I feel that this book brings her full-circle and seems a great place to leave her behind and move on to other projects.  

Having said that, I am decorating for Christmas now, a little earlier than usual, but I'm not as fast as I once was and I have oodles of stuff. Christmas is my favorite time of year because it brings out the best in everyone and and provides many opportunities to hug and tell folks we love  and appreciate them. Let me state here and now how much you guys mean to me. Stay tuned for a late January Sticking Point release.  This cover is a photograph taken by North Carolina's own Jason Penland. Isn't it gorgeous?

An interview with Mary L. Tabor

It is my pleasure to introduce you to the online magazine 

Shelf Unbound: What to read next in independent publishing,

a mag we all need to know about, and to Mary L. Tabor, whom publisher and editor Margaret Brown interviewed.

Shelf Unbound book review magazine, a 2013 Maggie Award finalist for Best Digital-Only Publication, reaches more than 125,000 readers in the U.S. and in 59 other countries around the globe. Subscriptions to Shelf Unbound are free at www.shelfmediagroup.com.

Margaret Brown discovered Mary’s novel at the Manhattan Book Expo in fall 2012 and was so taken by the book she decided to profile Mary in the magazine. Brown has graciously agreed to allow me to reprint that interview here.

 But first a bit more about Mary: She’s the author of the novel Who by Fire, the memoir (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story and the connected short stories The Woman Who Never Cooked. She’s profiled in Poets&Writers, the Sept/Oct 2013 issue in the article “From Corporate to Creative: Leaving a career to Pursue an MFA.”

Mary was honored at the Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival’s Local Author Fair at the DCJCC on 16^th Street, NW (1529 16th Street NW), on Sunday, October 13, at 7:00 PM. We all send her our heart-felt congratulations on this competitive achievement.

Program Co-Sponsors: Creative Writing Program of the George Washington University English Department, The Writer’s Center, Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University

Mary also has a radio show on Rare Bird Blogtalk Radio and she interviewed Margaret Brown after the interview below ran. You can listen to Margaret Brown and Mary Tabor talking live.

Here’s Margaret’s interview with Mary published originally 12 February/March 2013 Unbound 13:

Outer Banks Publishing Group

www.outerbankspublishing.com

Shelf Unbound: You have your main character creating the story of his deceased wife’s affair through memory and invention. It’s a novel approach to narrative — how did you arrive at it?

Mary L. Tabor: It’s fascinating to me that you use these two words memory and invention. Robert invents the story he didn’t know as he tries to discover what his wife actually did while she was alive. Perhaps the biggest risk I take in the novel is that use of invention. But I still have to make clear to the reader that real time, what I call the “now” or the present action of the story, is always operating, driving the plot forward, driving my narrator Robert forward. As Robert and I invented the story he didn’t know, my own memories invaded as they inevitably

will for the writer of any story. Memory

Mary L. Tabor’s

ingeniously constructed

and emotionally rich

Who by Fire has a

middle-aged widower

traversing the downward

spiral of his marriage.

Highly recommended

for your book club.

by its very nature is flawed, but the need to revisit memory over and over again is part and parcel of being human and alive. Revisiting memory is the way we search for meaning in our lives, for the narrative of who we are and who we might become. In some sense, we’re inventing. But in fact we’re searching for emotional truth. As writers, we aspire to find that. When fiction rings true like a bell, we believe it.

Shelf: The story reveals the fissures in two marriages. You’ve written about marriage before — what interests you about the subject?

Tabor: The ultimate challenge to our humanity gets played out day in and day out in marriage.  When E.M. Forster asserts in the epigraph to Howard’s End, “Only connect…”, he sets the challenge for all of us. In a committed relationship with another, whether there be a contract or not, we romantics hope for transcendence in love. But, of course, our flawed humanity that includes the baggage of our past gets played out in daily living. It gets played out in the ordinary: buying the groceries, commuting, sweeping up the messes that occur again and again. The only way through all that, I think, is to believe that transcendence in love comes hand-in-hand with the transformation of one’s self — not the other, not the beloved. But that’s only part of my answer. Marriage as subject provides for me a solid place to search for answers about the meaning of existence. Not to get too philosophical on you, but the search for meaning is the reason I write — and read.

Shelf: One of the main female characters is named Evan. I’m wondering why you chose a masculine name for her?

Tabor: Until you asked me, I hadn’t realized Evan is a male name. The unconscious mind is tricky, isn’t it? I love the character Evan more than anyone else in the book. The answer might be as simple as this: As I’m heterosexual, perhaps I unconsciously gave her that name.

Shelf: You’ve taught creative writing. What did you learn in the process of writing this book that you would share with your students?

Tabor: Save everything. I think most writers are hoarders. When a student has told me after a workshop that he’s going to trash a story, I’ve reacted in horror, but until I wrote this book,  I’m not sure I fully understood why. Many years ago, I read an article in the newspaper about a baby’s bones found in a suitcase in the attic of a house after it had been sold on Veazey Street in DC. I cut it out and saved it. Didn’t know why, just couldn’t forget it. Later I wrote a short story about what might have happened and titled it “The Suitcase.” That story, reenvisioned, became a key part of the novel.

Shelf: You recently posted on your blog: “I’ve written a novel entitled Who by Fire, ten years in the making, and I’m pretty sure not many folks will ever hear of it or read it.” What would it mean to you if people did read it?

Tabor: I know from all your questions that you understand the risks, the unusual structure of this novel. If it ever got read, I would cry because I’d be so indebted to those readers, as I am to you. I would cry in gratitude.

Follow Mary on Twitter.

Like her on Facebook.

Visit her website.

Join her book club on Goodreads.

Folks, let's make Mary cry! lol  Read her books!

Patricia Gligor's Mixed Messages

Patricia Gligor is a Cincinnati native. She enjoys reading mystery/suspense novels, touring and photographing old houses and traveling. Mixed Messages and Unfinished Business, the first two novels in her Malone Mystery series, were published by Post Mortem Press. Both books are available at Amazon, B&N and other fine retailers. She has just sent Desperate Deeds, the third book in her series, to her publisher. Look for it early next year.

Visit her blog at: http://pat-writersforum.blogspot.com/

Welcome back to the blog, Patricia. How has your environment affected your writing?

I live on the west side of Cincinnati, the setting for the first three novels in my mystery series. When I think back to my childhood, I realize that it’s no wonder I became a mystery writer. My parents, younger brother and I lived in an old two-story house with all kinds of good places to play Hide’n Seek. The basement was an especially scary place; the foundation had thick stone walls, a fruit cellar and a coal bin. We had a large backyard and, at the end of it, a woods extended as far as the eye could see with a cemetery just barely visible in the distance. It was the perfect breeding ground for a young girl, who loved to read Judy Bolton and Nancy Drew mysteries, to develop a fertile imagination.

It certainly sounds like it. How many books have you written?

I’ve written three books to date. I had attempted to write two other novels (not mysteries) before I wrote Mixed Messages but neither of them sustained my interest long enough for me to finish them. Now, the characters in my Malone mystery series refuse to let me go.

I understand that. Give a short synopsis of Mixed Messages.

“It’s estimated that there are at least twenty to thirty active serial killers in the United States at any given time. There’s one on the loose on the west side of Cincinnati.

It’s the week of Halloween and Ann Kern struggles with several issues. Her primary concern is her marriage which, like her west side neighborhood, is in jeopardy. Her husband is drinking heavily and his behavior toward her is erratic. One minute, he’s the kind, loving man she married and, the next minute, he’s cold and cruel.

Ann dismisses a psychic’s warning that she is in danger. But, when she receives a series of ominous biblical quotes, she grows nervous and suspicious of everyone, including her own husband.

As the bizarre and frightening events unfold, Ann discovers a handmade tombstone marked with her name, pushing her close to the edge. Will she be the Westwood Strangler’s next victim?”

You have my attention. How much of yourself is hidden in the characters in your books?

That’s an interesting question. Before I began writing novels, I wrote a lot of short stories. When I look back over them, I realize there was a lot of “me” in the characters. I thought I had gotten that out of my system but, as I develop the characters in my series, I see bits and pieces of “me” in some of them. Sometimes, that’s a positive thing and other times . . . . J

You know, that raises an interesting question. My husband tells people he doesn’t know where are my macabre characters come from and that he sleeps with one eye open. I sometimes scare myself, having no idea where the graphic violence in some scenes came from. For example, if Just North of Luck, my second novel, became a movie, I’m not sure I could watch it. I have to wonder how many other writers feel the same way about some of their work.

Do your characters take on a life of their own? If so, which is your favorite?

Although I’m a plotter, my characters always have the final say and, as I write, my outline becomes more of a guideline.

It’s difficult to pick a favorite character. I love seventy-nine year old, Olivia, because, even though she’s been through a lot of hard times in her life, she hasn’t let any of that make her bitter. She’s a kind, generous, loving person.

I’m also partial to my main character, Ann Kern, who, as the series progresses, grows from the shy, nervous wife of an alcoholic to a stronger, more assertive woman.

Where do you store ideas for later use: in your head, in a notebook, or on a spreadsheet?

I am a note-maker! I never trust storing ideas in my head. They would rattle around in there and quite possibly end up lost. So, I keep pen and paper handy at all times. When I first have an idea for a book, I jot it down on a scrap of paper. As the stack of papers begins to grow, I condense them onto one page, which becomes two, three, etc. Finally, I create my chapter by chapter outline. Then, I begin to write. It’s a long process but it seems to be the only one that works for me.

Can you tell us your future writing goals/projects?

My next writing project will be the fourth book for my Malone mystery series and there will be a change in locale. The Kern family will visit Ann’s sister, Marnie, and her boyfriend, Sam, who live near Charleston, South Carolina. It promises to be an exciting vacation!

At some point in the future, I want to write a standalone novel or two, in addition to continuing my series.

Are your books available in print and eBook formats?

Yes, Susan, they are. Here’s the link to my author page:        

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007VDDUPQ

Thanks for inviting me to be here today.

Nice to have you back. Continued success!

An Invitation

I invite any followers of this blog to contact me about being a guest here. I welcome not only writers but other industry experts and avid readers. It's always nice to get all perspectives. 

HAPPY FALL, Y'ALL !