Category Archives: fiction

Anatomy of a story: Sueños

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Where does artistic inspiration come from?

There’s one theory on this for writers. Writers either draw inspiration from their inner worlds, or from the world around them.

Why not both at the same time?

For my story, Sueños, which was published here in the journal Empyrean, I used my own experience, and the outside world, to create this story.

First, what’s it about? 

Dylan is a young soldier stationed in El Paso who has to drive across Texas for (…spoiler…)  the funeral of his brother. Along the way his pickup truck breaks down and he’s forced to detour to the small town of Sueños, where he’s brought to a strange house for the birthday party of an unnaturally alluring woman named Veronica. There, he’s given a tempting choice: abandon his grief forever. But, of course, there is a price.

So where did the external inspiration come from?

Some years ago a friend loaned me a book of essays by a Mexican writer named Juan Villoro. Essays aren’t my typical thing, but his were great. One in particular stood out, his recollection of him as a young soldier. While going home one weekend, he gets sidetracked and ends up at a strange party where he meets a beautiful girl. It’s a story of idealized love captured in a moment of time, a story of endless possibility without the messiness of reality.

The story captivated me. I HAD to do something with it. Revisit it. Rework it. Repurpose it. I saw in it  something hidden, something darker. Something supernatural, so I set about re-interpreting it through that lens. In the arts this is called interpolation, where an artist takes an existing work and fashions it into something new and different. Music does this a lot. If I was profiting off this story surely I’d be giving Señor Villoro a chunk of my earnings, but alas, zero divided by anything equals zero. (Don’t go into writing for the money.)

In terms of my interpretation, I added layers of menace and danger along with hints of vampirism. Who doesn’t love a good vampire tale? But I also chose to not be heavy handed.

What about my internal inspiration?

Ten years ago my father was killed in a plane crash. He piloted a small plane that failed upon take-off. Ironically, before he died I wrote a story available here about a guy who was left rich and rudderless after his parents died in a small plane crash. Obviously the worry was there in my mind before my father actually died. After his death I knew of course that this event would surface in my writing, but I never intentionally set out to write about it.

There was one strange thing that happened when my father died, and this is what I chose to focus on. At the time I was working in Manhattan. My mother gave me the call. I made it home to Jersey City and then got in my car to drive the 40 minutes to my parents house. On that drive it still wasn’t real to me. It was just a phone call. There was this great gulf of distance between me and the death, and my thinking was, as long as I am not at their house, it isn’t real. It didn’t even happen! I told myself that maybe I’d had some kind of psychotic break and made it all up (even though I knew that wasn’t true.) That distance gave me distance, which was exactly what I needed at the time.

It was all real, of course. Afterward came the usual stuff associated with a death in the family, the wakes and funeral mass and burial and the visitors and the paperwork and the concerns about the future and all of that. But for a 40-minute drive, none of it was real. I was living in a zone outside of time and life. That’s what I wanted to write about, that blessed denial you know isn’t true and won’t last. That’s where Dylan exists in Sueños, in a land of dreams, and whether he chooses to wake up or not, there will be a price. As one of my characters tells him, there’s always a price.

So my advice for writers out there is to study great writing and storytelling. Learn from it. Read, please. And don’t feel like you have to excavate the tragedies in your life, but don’t keep them buried either.

Power Prompts: Episode 10

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Haunted house historian, Dumb blonde

Genre: Steampunk

Setting: A church

Trope: Curse of the pharaoh

POV/tense: 3rd/future

The result:

Veronica Cespides will fume with hate for her hair. She’d gotten it dyed by a new woman in her salon, a woman who apparently was too afraid of burning Veronica’s scalp, so instead of platinum it was more like yellowish with a tinge of fire hydrant red.

No one would take her seriously now.

Not like it mattered.

She’ll stand at the entrance of Saint Mary’s of the Sky, one of the oldest churches in the city, ensconced in a blimp soaring above the river. She’ll adjust her bustle and check her pocket watch.

He’s late, she’ll fume silently.

Just as she’s about to power up her jet-pack and steam back to solid ground a hand will tap her on her shoulder. She’ll turn and stare into the eyes of a balding man in an ascot with a monocle. Not stare into his eyes exactly but more like stare down at his eyes.

“Hello, I am Rupert Kenmore. You must be Veronica.”

“No, I am not Veronica. I am…” she’ll fumble for a moment. “I am Mary Skyship.”

He’ll laugh. “Ah, that’s a good one. No, seriously, you are her. I’ve seen your daguerreotype. But I thought you were blonder.” His laugh will falter at her stony reaction. “Well,” he’ll say, “not the best start to a blind date.”

“Blind?” she’ll ask. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you were blind. It’s amazing how you can train your eyes to look directly into mine. Did they teach you that at blind school? Or is it a hearing thing.”

He’ll laugh with more certainty. “I love a woman with a sense of humor. Then he’ll loop his arm around hers. And what is it you do again, Veronica, aside from looking so effortlessly stunning?”

“I spend a lot of time on charity work. Mostly dogs and cats that are missing a paw. Paws for Pets. They make the most stunning mechanical limbs for our furry friends. Really it’s amazing. And it’s heartwarming to know that I’m making such a huge difference in the world.”

He’ll clear his throat. “Yes, yes, that is amazing. You must be well positioned in life.”

“If you can call it that,” she’ll say. “My father was on one of the expeditions to the pyramids. Apparently there was some sort of curse in one of the tombs and that nasty pharaoh did a job on my father. He came back and fell ill. He swelled up like a rotten potato. Then, boom. He exploded all over the hospital. I was in tears for days. But he set me up for life. So now I can help those poor poor pawless pets.

Rupert will get excited. “Curse of the pharaoh? You have to tell me more. I’m so interested in such supernatural occurrences.”

“Are you? Really?”

“Yes of course. Didn’t your friend tell you about me?”

“She said you were taller. And had more hair.”

He’ll brush her words aside. “Such superficial matters. Anyway. I’m a haunted house historian. I travel the country seeking out the strange and unexplained. I’ve even seen a ghost.”

“A real one? What was his name?”

He’ll laugh. “Ghosts don’t talk. They only moan.”

“Oh, that’s so disappointing. Tell me, Rupert, why did you ask to meet me here at this old abandoned church of all places?”

“To explore, of course. Abandoned churches are the best hunting grounds for ghosts. Especially this one. Did you know why St Mary’s of the Sky is abandoned? There was a satanic ritual that was held here. Four people sacrificed on the holy altar. And I’m here to investigate.”

“Oh that sounds so thrilling.” She’ll look at Rupert with slightly different eyes. “He’ll seem a little taller, and his hair, well it’s more distinguished.”

“Promise me this, Rupert, if we find ghosts here, can we ask their names? I’ve always wanted to talk to a real live ghost.”

Anatomy of a Story: The History of Value Shopping in 21st-Century America

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I’m a fan of short titles. One word is the ideal for me. The reasoning is, if you can boil the essence of your story into as few letters as possible, you’ve got some skill on display. So what explains this story of mine, The History of Value Shopping in 12st-Century America, which is probably the longest title I’ve ever chosen? Is it unfocused? Does it suck?

Suckiness, for lack of a better word, is subjective, and apparently this insanely long titled story did not suck as per the folks at Monkeybicycle, who published it here.

What I think happened, regarding the title is this: sometimes you’ve got to let the story (and title) be whatever it is.

The History of Value Shopping in 21-st Century America is a deceptively simple story. Ellie Sears is a college student working on her thesis (hence the story’s title) by visiting dollar stores. She meets Lucinda, a clerk, a mysterious girl with a secret, and Lucinda brings Ellie along on an adventure. It’s a story of exploration and attraction (non-sexual) and escape. Hidden selves and alter egos. Maybe.

It’s also one of my shorter stories, clocking in at under 1600 words. It began life in a writing workshop as a power prompt, where you’re given two characters, a genre, a trope, a setting, and the POV/tense, and then you write a story. I came up with the bones of this one, and I thought I maybe had something, so I revisited it, and here we are.

I think at the time I was also in love with Bud Smith’s short story collection Double Bird. He’s great at detail and absurdity, so undoubtedly I was trying to incorporate some of his literary styles, play around with them, try them on, and while I would never consider myself an absurdist, I definitely like tossing in a drunken screaming circus clown now and again.

The moral of this post? I don’t know. Maybe it’s don’t insist on having every title be only one word. And let the story be whatever weirdness it insists on being, so it will find its place in the world.

Photo by Cam Ballard on Unsplash

Power Prompts: Episode 9

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Long Island Real Estate Agent, Archaeologist

Genre: Comedy

Setting: Mount Vesuvius

Trope: Talking animal

POV/tense: 1st/future

And the result:

“You can’t go wrong. Seaside views. Beautiful ocean breezes. And look at these vineyards.” Loretta DiChiara will wave a manicured, overtanned, overjeweled arm around the landscape. “And at only half a mil, it’s a steal.”

Charles Weathergood will take off his fedora and wipe a bead of sweat from his brow. “I don’t know. It seems awfully rocky.”

“Rocky’s good. It keeps the wolves away. They hate rocks.”

“Wolves don’t hate rocks,” I’ll tell Loretta. She’ll give me a death glare. That, or the botox froze her face in a permanent squint. Who can tell.

“And who exactly are you again?” she’ll ask.

“He’s my assistant,” Professor Weathergood will say.

“Honestly Ms DiCharia, the professor is only here to do some excavation on the site, not actually buy it.”

“Hold up,” the professor will say. He’ll start breathing heavy. Too heavy. I’ll whip out his inhaler. He’ll take a mighty pull off it and toss it back to me. “It’s true that I did not intend to buy a piece of property, but, but…” He’ll turn red again and start to wheeze. I’ll toss him the inhaler. He’ll drop it on the black earth and when he bends down to pick it up one of the buttons of his shirt will pop off. Loretta will wince. Maybe? Hard to tell through all the fillers.

“You know, my father, Augustus Weathergood, he was named after the great Roman emperor. He was the emperor here at the time mighty Vesuvius vented her gaseous fury across this very landscape.”

I’ll try to interrupt. “Actually–”

He’ll wave me away with a pasty hand. “And my father was one of the greatest archaeologists of his day.”

“Actually it was Titus,” a voice will say.

I’ll look around. Loretta too. And the professor. No one there but the three of us in this ridiculous heat on this ridiculous stretch of earth.

“Not Augustus, you foolish human.”

Up comes a dog, big and sleek and brown, with big wet fangs. “Oh my fucking lord a talking dog,” Loretta will shriek, covering her mouth with her jeweled-up hand.

“Not a dog, you simpleton, a wolf. And for the record…” the wolf will prance among the rocks like he’s in the Nutcracker. “See? No problem whatsoever traversing these stones.”

“Okay, okay, a talking wolf,” I’ll say. “Isn’t this some sort of sign, professor? Some omen? Some bad omen? As in, no way should you buy this land, not for half a mil, not for fifty grand, no matter what some leatherneck shyster real estate agent says?”

“Hey, you little asshole.”

“And what the hell is a real estate agent from Long Island doing in Italy?”

“If you must know, I happen to be Italian.”

“No shit,” you’ll say.

The professor will wrap a sweaty arm around your shoulder. “Listen, my boy, I don’t want you messing up this deal for me. Please be civil.”

“This deal? It’s an overpriced piece of land being sold by a charlatan complete with a freaking talking wolf.”

“And you’re a talking human,” the wolf will say. “You don’t see me making a scene about you.”

“Because wolves aren’t supposed to talk.”

“Perhaps you’re the one who shouldn’t be talking,” the wolf will say.

“Yeah, asshole.” Loretta will shake her fist at me, her bangles jangling in a fury.

“My dear boy, why don’t you take a break. I believe the heat is getting to you.”

I’ll take a step back. Loretta will glare at me while the professor explains to her that his dream has always been to have his own little piece of Vesuvius, to dig at his will, no oversight from any overbearing authority. The wolf will recline. He’ll follow their conversation, nodding and murmuring. Finally I won’t be able to take it anymore.

“This is so ridiculous.”

“If you don’t like it, then leave, smart boy. I’m about to make a hefty comission.”

“Yes, smart boy,” the wolf will snicker. “Leave.” He’ll climb on all fours and saunter over.
I won’t know if it’s the heat or my shit pay or whatever but I drop to all fours and bite the wolf on his front leg. He’ll scream bloody murder and I’ll hoot laughter and then run to the nearest tavern for a nice cold beer.

Anatomy of a Story: Little Lamb

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Sometimes you need a little blood to make a story come alive. I’m not recommending you take out a razorblade and cut yourself, or someone else, but do it metaphorically.

I used this mindset in the crafting of my short story, Little Lamb, which was just published here by Epoque Press. The story follows Drew as he ventures to a very bizarre late night beach barbecue at the behest of his friend, Patrick, who in many ways is his Jungian shadow. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say there is definitely blood involved.

Let’s rewind first. Credit where credit’s due. As I’ve written here before, someone (Virginia Woolf?) once said books beget books. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was a riff on James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’m a staunch proponent of writers having to READING fiction in order to truly be a great writer (many of them don’t). First, it gives you an insight into great writing and storytelling, and second, it inspires you.

For the past five years or so I’ve been giving myself my own MFA in the craft of the short story, so far covering writers like Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Carver, just to name a few. Reading them. Dissecting them. Hand-writing passages from their stories. Another one of these writers was Yukio Mishima.

Mishima, from Japan, was one of the most prominent mid-century writers. I haven’t done too deep a dive into his bio, but he was an interesting and complicated cat. A difficult human, but also one who put his soul into his writing. You can feel the man’s pulse when you read his work. One of his stories, Raisin Bread, jumped out to me. It resonated. It haunted me.

I knew I had to grapple with it. I wrote passages longhand, over and over, and then I examined the characters and the setting and the plot. I took it all apart in my mind, and then I wanted to reassemble it all into something new, something different—take his set-up and veer off in a wildly different direction.

And that is how Little Lamb came to be born.

It’s weird, this deep dive into the craft of the short story I’ve undertaken. I’ve come to get so attached to these long-dead writers: Flannery and Ernest and Yukio, and I want to show them what they’ve taught me. I can’t do that, but I can share it with the world.

Image source: Epoque Press

Power Prompts: Episode 8

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Fashion victim, A foul-mouthed parrot

Genre: Fan fiction

Setting: Midtown Manhattan

Trope: The last thing I remember

POV/tense: 2nd/past

And the result:

You’ve been stabbed a total of seven times. The first time by your gay boyfriend Billy and Stu at that house party. You survived other stabbings, by your cousin, by Billy’s mom, by your long-lost brother, and by those crazed fans, all donning the ghostface mask. You swore you’d never return to Woodsboro, so you fled to the biggest city in America, no longer Sydney Prescott but some anonymous girl working at the Clinique counter at Macy’s.

And you were late.

In one hand you had your coffee and another a bagel. Tourists swarmed around you. Not just any tourists, but Halloween tourists. Freddys and Jasons, all these wannabe killers and it made your side clench. Which stabbing was that? You couldn’t remember. Too many of them.

PTSD is for pussies. That’s what Gayle Weathers told you, and yeah, she’s a bitch but she has a point. You decided the best thing for you to do was duck through an alley and avoid everyone. As soon as you stepped into the alley your heart calmed. But then halfway alley past the reeking dumpsters a man popped up. At first you thought he was homeless but he was too clean. He wore a cut off t-shirt and Cavarichis and Capezios, looking like some 80s fashion victim.

“Hey baby,” he said to you.

You rolled your eyes. “Not today. I’m late for work.”

He smiled at you. “Aw, come on. I just want to play a game.”

“I’m not in the mood for games.” Behind you you heard people shouting. They seemed far away. So far away. You reminded yourself how you dispatched several of the lamest serial killers who ever lived. This bridge and tunnel twerp was nothing. Still, something about him threw you off. “Just get out of my way.”

He scratched his chin. “Funny, last thing I remember was I was watching a tv program, one of those true crime things. And someone in one of the episodes kind of looked like you.”

“I look like a lot of people.”

“Nah,” he said. “It was definitely you.”

“So what if it was.”

He raised his hands in surrender. “Fine, bitch. Be that way.”

You watched him turn and walk off and your heart settled. Then you hear another voice, this one high pitched. “What’s your favorite scary movie, bitch?”

You looked up and down the alley. No one was there. Then you saw a gostface mask flying through the air, and something white, and something sliver.

“Are you fucking deaf? What’s your favorite scary movie?” the flying mask said.

It hovered in the air in front of you. You pulled the mask off to reveal a white parrot holding a knife in its talons. It lunged the knife at you. It stabbed you in the shoulder. You dropped your coffee and your bagel and reached into your purse and pulled out your revolver and shot. A plume of feathers flew through the air. “You hit me, you whore,” the parrot screeched. Then it dropped to the ground, still clutching the knife.

You walk up to it. The bird lay still. Then it sprung back up and stabbed you in the stomach. You aimed your revolver at the parrot’s head and blew a hole right through it.

Dead. Finally.

“I fucking hate scary movies,” you said as you pressed your hands against your two latest stabbing wounds.

Anatomy of a Story: Time Turns Blood to Dust

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If you’re lucky, some stories come at you all of a sudden like an electric shock. The premise blazes in your brain. The bones of the architecture rise. All in a single moment.

This is what happened to me for my horror story, Time Turns Blood to Dust, just published here in the magazine Uncharted.

Not to say the story was an easy one to write. On the contrary. There was a puzzle I had to solve in crafting the narrative, and it took me what felt like forever to get it just right.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the beginning. Much like the four protagonists in my story, I was spending an aimless day wandering Manhattan when I saw this tiny nondescript bar. I decided to go in for a drink. The bartender was your average hipster white dude. I took a seat and got an IPA.

And then I went to the bathroom.

Right at the urinal someone had scribbled on the wall: DON’T LOOK UP.

Being both superstitious as hell and a not-quite-nonbeliever of things that go bump in the night, I definitely DID NOT look up. I left the men’s room, finished my beer, and went on with my life.

Of course I knew instantly what just happened: I’d been gifted with the premise of my next story. What if I had looked up? Was there some sort of monster up there waiting to consume me?

But premises are everywhere. Plots are harder to come across. My first question: what happens in the story?

My biggest clue was the graffiti. In my story it was a warning. I had to figure out WHO wrote it, and why. Early on I knew I’d be writing four different perspectives. I wanted the challenge of crafting four complete characters in a tight timeline. I also knew all four characters would be men, since another challenge I set for myself was to capture four different emotional experiences from a distinctly male viewpoint.

But which one would be the graffiti author? How does he do it and why? Where should he be in the order of the four?

Another puzzle was this: how to get to a resolution. The great thing about horror is that it opens up new imaginary worlds. The bad thing about horror is that there’s often no real story arc. I used the four stories within a single story to create a story arc, with the first story setting the tone, the second one amping up that tone, the third shifting, and the fourth going in a different direction, all the while giving the horror its due.

And then came the last challenge. What to name it? Don’t Look Up was the obvious title but there was a movie (that I never saw) with that same name. I thought about Obsidian. I love one-word titles but it left me flat. Then, while reading a Flannery O’Connor novella I came across the phrase “time turns blood to dust.” Bingo. It has the word blood in it (always a plus for horror), it captures one of the themes of my story, and it’s slightly pretentious. Everyone should try and be a little pretentious now and then.

Power Prompts: Episode 7

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Heroic dog, Oscar-winning actor

Genre: True Crime

Setting: The set of the movie Titanic

Trope: Body double

POV/tense: Writer’s choice

And the result:

On a sunny Tuesday morning, Hollywood legend Kathy Bates was found bludgeoned to death underneath the Kraft services table on the set of the movie Titanic. The murder weapon, the oscar she won for her role in the movie Misery, lay at her feet. The head of that golden statuette was dented, and stuck to it was a piece of her bloody scalp.

James Cameron, the embattled director, was ruled out as a suspect. Not immediately, at first. The detectives spent five hours interviewing him in one of the steerage cabins. He cried, literal tears running down his face. Sobbing, in fact. At that moment, Titanic wasn’t the worldwide smash it’s remembered as. Rather it was steering course toward flopland, over budget, over schedule. The hollywood press got a perverse glee in reporting every setback. And the murder of the beloved actress was considered the ultimate iceberg that would sink Titanic forever.

The set closed for two weeks. Leonardo DiCaprio, not yet the A-lister he is now, spent those days holed up in a West Hollywood dive downing pint after pint of Guinness, alone, or with some male friends. Rumors spread that it was he who might have bashed Kathy’s skull with mister gold, seeing as he lost his sole nomination. But when one of the detectives arm wrestled DiCaprio, he was quickly stricken from the suspect list.

Next up was Kate Winslet. She took her hiatus in stride, spending her mornings by the pool of her Hollywood Hills hacienda drinking martinis with her corgi on her lap. The dectives interviewturned up nothing susplcious. She merely claimed howmmuch she absolutely adored Bates, and how she could never imagine harming such a glorious thespian. Winslet was stricken from the list, primarily because of her refined British accent.

Weeks turned into months. Cameron begged the LAPD to let him restart shooting—they’d recast her role with Dolly Parton—but it was a no. The culprit had to be found. Justice demanded it.

At a complete loss, the LAPD brought their finest detective to the set. Her name was Wilma, a one hundred and nineteen pound German Shepherd, who’d proven herself in a strinng of drug busts. If anyone could crack the case it would be her.

The detectives brought her to the set and set her free of her leash. Wilma roamed the floors of the ship. Believe it or not, Cameron had actually built an almost life-size replica of the Titanic. Wilma padded and sniffed but nothing.

Then they brought her to the stars trailers. First, DiCaprio’s, where Wilma showed little interest. Then Winslet’s, then all the other minor stars, none of their names remembered.

Hope was nearly lost. The case would never be solved. Cameron’s career would be ruined. Just as the dectives were about to leash up Wilma and load her in the back of the cruiser her ears perked up. She raced off to one of the minor trailers and padded at the door. Inside, she streaked toward the rear and pawed at a black briefcase buried beneath a pile of vintage dresses.

The detectives opened it. Inside were photos of Kathy Bates, all of them with her head cut off, or her body mangled. They even found a voodoo doll with pins sticking in it. The detectives noticed a nametag on the briefcase. It belonged to one Betty-Ann Carmichael: Kathy Bates’ body double.

Carmichael had been a struggling actor for decades. This had been her biggest role since a doublemint gum commercial in 1987.

She confessed to the murder two days later. And that solved the mystery of the most shocking crime in Hollywood since the murder of Sharon Tate.