Salem’s Lot , aka, Writers Are Losers and So am I

Salem’s Lot. Also known as Jerusalem’s Lot.

Published in 1975 after his first novel Carrie went gang busters, Salem’s Lot is Stephen King’s full blown commitment to genre and the answer to a question only he was willing to ask: what if Dracula came to the states and moved into some small bumblefuck town?

Ahem… NEEEERRRRRRRDDDDDDDD

Sigh, how old are you Stephen? Shouldn’t you be writing serious literature?

Lucky for us, as far as Stevie is concerned, this is serious literature. So pour yourself a Schlitz, spark up a Pall Mall, and put on your necklace of garlic, cause I’m about to dive in and get real catty with this shit.

Thanks to multiple waves of vampire fiction and all its collective lore, I can speculate alot about what would happen if Dracula put down first, last, and security on a one bedroom above a dive bar in my home town of Oxford Pennsylvania.

No parties, no girls, shared bathroom down the hall, and keep the killing to a minimum.

First off, I don’t think it would end well for anyone in that town, and to King’s credit, he agreed. Contrary to the standard Dracula tale, which is as lonely a story gets about a very bad dude with a very broken heart, King’s vampires are more the zombie-type as far as exponential spread goes, following the I am Legend model of vampire. Such a vampire codifies the villain more in terms of a disease, but King does a good job reigning this in with the head vampire Barlow and the addition of a haunted house, maintaining those much needed gothic tones.

Welcome to Hot Topic, how may I help you?

For this reason, it’s a more enjoyable vampire story because it somehow combines those gothic tones with some good ole’ fashioned monster killing, prompting a reflection less on how true love can push you to evil, and more about where you hid your shotgun shells.

Is it my favorite vampire book? No. For that I would probably vote somewhere between Cronin’s The Passage Trilogy, or Let The Right One In. Still, Salem’s Lot has got some panache, no doubt. In particular was the way in which he saw through the slow but sure death of a small town, and it’s this that reminds me that no matter how much King resists underlying metaphor and allegory, he still can’t help but sneak in those little things that underlie all the schlock of his genre offerings. The big picture of Salem’s Lot isn’t so much vampires as it is the death of a small town, and for those of us hoping to smuggle horror into a PhD dissertation, we thank you Professor King, you’ve made academia gory again.

I’ll will admit, for its few flaws, the novel creeped me out when describing the way in which the infection spread, not to mention the universally feared abandoned house.

I mean, do we HAVE to search the basement for supplies?

Abandoned towns give me anxiety, and while it may be highly unlikely that anything at all close to what happened in Salem’s Lot could happen in real life without someone finding out, I can’t help but think of the pre-cell phone/internet era where information had to be printed and delivered if you wanted to know what was going on. Shit, even now there are probably a hundred small towns in Pennsylvania I’ve never been to, let alone heard of, but you bet your ass I wouldn’t bother stopping if I was driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and saw nothing but boarded up buildings.

So let us all give thanks and a sincere kudos for King doing what he does best: slowly but surely scaring the hell out of us with something we didn’t think could ever scare us. In the advent of his second novel, the quintessential vampire in a small American town is forever in our collective psyche, and horror is certainly much better for it.

With this, however, comes a second offering of King into the canon of genre story telling: the writer as main character.

I smell trouble… and a terrible idea for a new book.

Barf.

I don’t know if there’s anything more ridiculous than the idea that a writer would be involved in anything beyond having bad coffee breath and wearing out their sweat pants. Yet somehow, Ben Mears, the central character to Salem’s Lot, isn’t brutally killed after two pages through mere circumstances of venturing out of his office to snag another cup of coffee he won’t bother tipping on because all writers are poor (prove me wrong). Other options of getting killed would be: brained at the local bar after asking them to turn the music down so he can write (go home, Ben), having a heart attack after seeing boobs for the first time when Susan Norton hikes up her dress, or drowning while in the midst of a swirlie given to him by local bully turned high school janitor/sheriff (hard times). All would be far more realistic, but realism isn’t really King’s thang if you know what I mean.

A haunted car???? REALLY!?!?

Instead, Ben is not only present during the circumstances of Salem’s Lot becoming Our Town with vampires. He’s the fucking hero. As in, “There’s trouble a brewin’… better get that writer Mears… he’ll know what to do.”

If you know what this is, we’re already best friends. Actually we now live together.

What? No he won’t!

And you know why I know this? Because as a writer, I can tell you with absolute authority that the only thing I’m sought after for with any sense of urgency are cocktail recipes and pirated copies of microsoft word, the latter of which I can’t even afford a computer advanced enough to download.

But vampires? Let’s do a little improv here.

Bill… thank god you’re here. Vampires have taken over our small town! Can you help us?

I sure can! I’ll call for some help.

Are they writers?

What? No. We’re total losers…

Then who?

The police. And some other weirdos I know who own guns.

Do they write?

No…

Well… do you know any capable children we can ask to help us?

What? No! We shouldn’t involve children in this at all.

I’m calling my ten year old nephew now… he just started writing short stories and is pretty sharp for his age.

-vampires enter, laughing while killing us all-

In conclusion, the chances of your town ever being invaded by vampires is pretty goddamn slim, but the chances of a writer committing any act of bravery and saving the day is even slimmer. So next time you need help from something you feel is completely out of your control, I’d skip the guy that wrote Air Dance and call someone who’s actually fired a gun before.

Until next time…

Home sweet home.

At first the restaurant I managed at was lowering their capacity and shortening their hours, then we were furloughed, and now we are laid off. All in a matter of just one single week. My health insurance goes until the end of April. Then it’s the great unknown after that.

Time are strange. Unprecedented, as everyone has said to the extent there’s been a handful of “jinx!” moments . My wife thinks its the ego, or narcissism, to think this moment in history is something that will stand out, but I would argue, as I often do, that it is a significant moment in time because it isn’t just America that is house bound, but the world. Which would sort of be like if planes crashed into the tallest buildings of every major city on the planet simultaneously, only the people who piloted those planes were invisible.

That said, I now get to live the life I always dreamed of. Being a writer. Or, at least, I get to pretend like I am one and experience what that would sort of be like. Sans the periodic visits to friends and dining out (I miss restaurants alot), it’s not too bad. I write early in the morning, eat, exercise, write some more, read, eat dinner with my wife, write some more, exercise late, and then crack off with a cocktail or two (or three) and binge watch whatever show I’ve decided to dig into (currently watching Billions; good, not great, but I’ve read it gets great later on).

Given that circumstances of being house bound for at least a month, I’ve decided to also pitch my novel The Magnificent early, which is to say, I had originally decided to spend the spring rewriting and pitch by summer. But since I have no work and plenty of time, I’m going to do the rewrite now and try to have it in agents’ inbox before I’m called back to work in May (fingers crossed), or June (worst case, I believe). Because, if there’s anything I can say with certainty, its that when the restaurant I work at finally does reopen, we are going to be surrounded by restaurants that will not be able to afford to reopen, and therefore, extremely busy. I doubt I’ll have much mental energy to continue writing, at least not to the extent I do now, and quite frankly, I will probably prefer the return to a daily routine that isn’t so creative, but rather more engaged with other people and the day to day of running a multi million dollar restaurant.

So I’ve outlined the next novel, a vampire yarn tentatively titled Little Men (think Let The Right One In with some E.T., creepy farms and pot smoking teens). With that mostly finished, I’m wrapping up The Magnificent, and back on querytracker to curate a list of agents to pitch. Its way different than the last go around, in that I find myself having changed. There’s no longer that feeling of desperation. Yes, I’m pretending to “be a writer”, but I don’t find myself nearly as emotionally invested in the validation an agent brings (or publication for that matter). Before, when I pitched A Song For John, I would have bent over backwards and pitched anyone remotely appropriate for the work, desperately checking my email, frantically reading their corresponding twitter for some hint that they received my magnum opus.

Now I find myself scrutinizing the list; this person likes thrillers, but also is building their list for YA fantasy. Do not query. This person likes horror, but isn’t interested in paranormal horror. Do not query. This agent wants the next Tana French. Meh… maybe query?

Nah. Why waste anyone’s time? Not only that, I feel like I don’t want to just say yes, but to prod, to ask them questions. I feel less like I’m seeking acceptance and more like I’m setting up job interviews for someone who will work for me. Because while its a reciprocative relationship, all too often I hear stories of authors being bullied by agents, being ignored, or argumentative when an author asks hard questions or wants clarity on what their plan of action is. That last bit literally happened to me when I asked a prospective agent questions about what their agency could do for me, to which they argued over the notion of questioning at all if I was willing to pitch them in the first place. Hey man, I pitch because you are interested in x, y, and z. Now that you’re interested in me, I’d like to know more. If you don’t want to do a song and dance, I’ll go elsewhere.

Lastly, I’ve come across a handful of agents who want their author to have a platform. And this is the one thing I worry about. What do I really have to say to anyone beyond the stories I wish to tell? Or the snarky tweets I end up sending while half in the bag at two in the morning? I want to think the work is enough. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I should start posting drink recipes like all the other bartenders and bar managers that are out of work right now. Drink my drink, buy my book.

Speaking of which, you can now, and should, by my book The Eight Eyes That Watch You Die. It could use a few reviews and I have it on good authority that it is about to get a few published reviews by book reviewers.

Until next time, watch movie, read a book, eat a tub of ice cream. No one is watching, right? And be scary. They say Shakespeare wrote King Leer while quarantining himself during the plague, blah blah blah, okay we get it. But yeah… now is the time to be create if you’ve got the mental capacity to do it.

If not, sit back and someone else be scary for you.

All The Blogs I Follow Are In Russian

2019. Holy shit, has time really flown since I last looked at this.

If you know me personally, than you already know all the weird changes I’ve gone through. Buying a house, changing jobs, getting another cat, and visiting a few countries/places I hadn’t been to before. You probably also forgot that I was super into writing and was convinced this is what I would do with my life. Remember A Song For John? Me neither. Remember that agent I had for like six months? Ugh. And while I politely declined from talking shit before because it seemed in bad taste, I’ll just say it so others can avoid the experience I went through: it was the Virginia Kidd Agency and it could not have been a bigger waste of my time. Of course, as I’ve come to find, the best lessons are those learned the hard way, and if I have to admit it, it wasn’t like I brought a lot to the table. The book was bad. I was a bad writer. I was desperate and I couldn’t see through my desperation that things were not going well, much like the way many of my writer friends did not see the shit storm that was brewing with Curbside Splendor (just google it). I had a book and an agent! I WAS SUCCESSFUL!

Well, shit in one hand, write in the other. What can I say? Things didn’t turn out the way I thought they would’ve. People change. I remember years ago I had followed a good friend of mine on twitter only to recently log in and check out his feed, finding nothing but Russian bots tweeting ads for knock off sunglasses. I wonder, what happened to him? What happened to all the people I used to check in on? Many of the blogs I once followed are now in Chinese, making me feel lucky my own unused wordpress didn’t fall victim to such hacking. Though, if it did, at least there would’ve been posts every now and again and a few deals on some sick shades.

Point being, people give up. They stop writing, stop posting blogs, stop logging into that tumblr they worked so hard on. They move on with their lives and don’t bother posting about it. But I didn’t give up. I just stopped talking about it.

So here are some updates.

I have a short story collection that is finally seeing the light of day, The Eight Eyes That Watch You Die, which features Dream Dress alongside seven other stories about silk, a highly addictive psychotropic drug made from spider silk (this, courtesy of Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing). Secondly, I am novelizing the script that did really well in all those contests and, despite working like a dog at my job, am almost finished.

So yes… writing can be kind of bummer. It takes more than it gives. And sometimes, you lie to yourself that things are going great when they really aren’t. But, I survived it. I live in a house that I own (wow, major adulting there), I’ve got a good job and health insurance. I’m happily married, and as far as I know, in pretty good health. So maybe writing was a bright star I gazed into, not realizing it had become a black hole that was kind of sucking the life out of me. Nowadays, it’s a pretty nice escape from my day to day, a release valve on some of the pressure I feel. Stephen King has a saying about life being a support system for art.

When I really think about it, it means a quality of life that is separate from work. So here’s to writing when I actually feel like it, not because I feel like I have to.

Until next time, here’s to being scary.