Category Archives: writing

Sometimes You Miss The Obvious

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I got a little feedback on the opening chapters of my gay, 80s, cinephile, horror novel and it caused me to see something pretty important that I had missed.

The feedback thought that the opening chapter needed a little more of the world and a little more of the character’s interior life. These were both fair critiques. In all honesty, when I wrote the chapter originally, I hadn’t formed a solid conception of the character and just what was going on. After all, this was the first time I had ‘pantsed’ a novel and those elements developed later. While in editing and revision I had taken care of plot details that would pay off later, because the character was now so well defined in my mind, I failed to edit to that image. So, I began revision but not fully rewriting the first chapter, opening up the main character’s thoughts so the reader met him more fully, and adding color and detail to the San Diego of 1984 that would be accurate and informative.

The character is gay, and the mid-80s, while better than the decades before it, still presented a strong homophobic culture which I utilized to reveal character—the ‘Chick Tracts’ left at his theater and other minor elements. Thinking about the Fundamentalist mindset, growing in power at the time as the nation sprinted towards Reagan’s 49-state sweep, and how it felt to be a gay man in that time focused my search for details that both reflected the world and how the character felt about them.

And that is when I realized I had missed something BIG.

The novel covers a period of time from June 1, 1984, through mid-July of that year and somehow, I managed to forget entirely about Pride, the remembrance and celebration of gay culture commemorating the Stonewall Riot with a march and often a lot of partying. Even if nothing takes place at the march and the character is far too entangled with supernatural threats to be partying, Pride is going to be a vital part of the background for those couple of weeks of the novel.

Now I am revising the first third of the novel, adding in the details and color of Pride week and its aftermath, making the novel better.

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A Fairly Pleasant Week

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After weeks of working overtime and feeling the crush of massive amounts of work, I decided that my mental health required a break and this week I took off Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Now, these days were not entirely my own, but what appointments I had were short and not too troublesome. Monday required a visit to the dentist to have an impression made for the crown of my latest tooth implant. Thanks to the wonders of modern science this time I did not have to hold my mouth closed over a bunch of gunk as it hardened. Instead, they scanned the inside of my mouth with a laser-based measuring device and recreated the contours that way. Very cool.

Tuesday, I visited a speech therapist for techniques that might help control and mitigate the persistent cough that has pestered me for two years.

Wednesday, I took my Kia Soul to our local mechanic for a tune-up as the little car is just about to hit 100,000 miles.

At home during those three days I relaxed and worked on my query letter and I think I have had a breakthrough. The roughest parts of the letter, which is ideally kept to a single page of text, is the paragraphs where you actually pitch the novel. Until this breakthrough I had been focused on describing the plots of the novels I pitched, but I think this theme focused approach might work better. Here is the pitch for the current novel Outrageous Fortune.

In San Diego in 1984 Dave Ludendorff lives a charmed life and is a good man. In spite of being a gay teenager in the ’70s he has never been taunted, hounded, or beaten for his orientation. The arthouse theater he inherited, that Dave has made a sanctuary for the queer and the outcast, thrives. Even with the resurgent Moral Majority of Reagan’s America, his life is good, blessed with friends and health.

The facade of Dave’s life crumbles with the discovery of a film depicting his grandfather leading a human sacrifice, a ritual that brought Dave this preternaturally charmed life. Now, with his grandfather’s cult pursuing him and murderous ghosts unleashed, Dave uncovers that everything he understood about his life, and perhaps himself, is a lie. Only by uncovering his family’s buried secrets can he hope to survive.

The truth, however, forces a terrible choice on Dave. He can accept the benefits of that human sacrifice, preserving his charmed life, but with the knowledge that like his grandfather and father before him he is the sort of evil man who profits from the suffering of others. Or he can destroy the cult, naively face the world without supernatural protections, enduring “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and in truth become the good man he always imagined himself to be.

I am going to do a little more work on it and then we’ll see if this draws better results than the previous version.

Last Sunday was a particularly nice day here in San Diego and my sweetie-wife and I made our regular visit to the zoo. Because we are zoo members, we could ignore the nasty new regulations that are charging people for parking at the Zoo and Balboa Park. With the sun out and hardly a cloud in the sky I brought along my camera and snapped a number of pictures. Here are two, the first shows just how damned nice the paths through the zoo were that day and the second of a hippo, in greyscale, looking like something from a horror film.

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A Thematic Problem with The Red Shirt Issue

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Yesterday evening, I came across a post from a friend online that expressed their middling reaction to del Toro’s Frankenstein prompting a return of my own thoughts that del Toro had worked so hard to make his monster sympathetic that no one of consequence died at its hands, a major deviation from the source text.

del Toro’s use of nameless crew to be killed in a thrilling and exciting opening combat scene with an unstoppable monster makes for a great opening to his luscious film but becomes hollow when the rest of the time the monster is presented melodramatically sympathetic and without emotional or ethical flaws. One could be forgiven for forgetting that the movie opened with mass murder. After all, they were literally nobodies.

Now, I have written about this before calling it his ‘Red Shirt’ problem. For those who are unaware, ‘red shirts’ refers to the often unnamed and wholly uncharacterized extras presented as security officers in Star Trek. These day players came onto the scene and in popular (but exaggerated) opinion died in droves.  The essence is still on target, they were essentially nameless characters brought on to dramatize the danger of that episode, a necessary evil of the time as no network program could go about killing its major and central characters. (This was decades before Game of Thrones would make it a drinking game.)

Western literature and oral tradition stretching back into prehistory is corrupted with a nasty little idea, that some people are simply born better than the rest of us. The nobility deserves their castles, their rich food, and the product of our labor, our bodies, and our lives because of the blue blood that courses through their veins. The ‘Chosen One’ narrative so popular in everything from religion to Star Wars is a product of this form of thinking. Luke and Aragon are good people because they were born to it, not from choice, not from making a decision to be good, but by their very blood. The force and the right to rule flows from their heritage and not their choices. We, the non-chosen, need to step aside and let out betters make the choices that will rule our lives. Our duty is to serve and to be thankful.

And here is the poisonous subtext in the ‘red shirt’ problem, it perpetuates this division of people into those worth and deserving of sympathy, consideration, and ultimately power from those lower, nameless people of the great ‘unwashed masses’ whose existence only matters in the moment that it impacts the monied and good-blooded people worthy of names. There are your ‘betters’ to whom you must defer with titles such as my lord, sir, mister — and to whom you must pay your obedience or suffer the lash and then there is everyone else, ‘red shirts’ to be used and discarded either on the battlefield or the factory to advance the lives and lifestyles of their ‘betters.’ The subtext of nameless victims in horror and action movies is that some lives are inherently more valuable than others.

“Red shirts” are not only a lazy and cheap play for a short cut to dramatic stakes, the practice subtly subverts the egalitarian ideals that all lives are valuable regardless of the accident of their birth or their importance to any particular narrative by regulating some characters to nameless and forgettable disposal.

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The New Year, as We Reckon it, Has Begun

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I think it is important to remember that the dominant calendar of the world, this Gregorian Calendar is not the only marking of the passing years utilized on this planet. While it is the new year for many of us it is not for all of us. But still, it is here in the United States and so I am observing that personally while keeping in mind that my perspective is not the rules of the universe.

I am not one for making resolutions at the turn of the year. It has never held a great deal of weight for me and the few times I have done so the matter was quickly discarded or forgotten. In their place I like to put objectives that are measurable and within my control but do not attempt a ‘re-invention’ of oneself. I also like to look at achievements, even if they are small from the previous years.

2025 was not the best year I have experienced but by far it was not the worst. I completed the first novel where I used no outline of the plot or characters. Now, I am not proposing that writing a novel without an outline is superior to one that was carefully plotted. Both approaches are valid and what matters is if the process works for the author. Outrageous Fortune could not have been written sans outline if I had not written so many novel projects before it with careful outlines. Structure, the use of five acts, a sense of pacing dictated by the flow of the plot, all came from experience that had been born from those outlines.

With Outrageous Fortune completed, edited, and proofed by my lovely sweetie-wife, I have yet another novel to try and win me an agent and another shot at traditional publication.

For 2026 I endeavor to write a new novel, but I think I shall shy away from a concept that I love but do not feel ready to tackle quite yet.

2026 will also see a fresh assault from me and my doctors on this persistent chronic cough left over from my COVID infection of January of 2024. Towards the end of 2025 I seemed to be responding to therapy, but a sinus infection has wiped out all the progress we made.

I also will try, depending on schedules and such, to attend more meetings of the San Diego chapter of the Horror Writers Association. They are good people, I have kept my membership active, and post on the Facebook page but attended zero meetings during 2025.

This is my look forward to 2026 and I hope that yours is kind, good, and happy.

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Hogfather, Outrageous Fortune, and the Unexpected Connection

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This past couple of days my sweetie-wife and I watched the Sky One production of Hogfather, an adaptation of the novel by Terry Pratchett, as part of our holiday traditions. The other holiday movie we often watch at this time of year is Rare Exports from Finland.
After Susan, Death’s granddaughter, has rescued the Hogfather—a Santa Claus analog—from the beings that wanted to destroy him and through that action destroy humanity’s capacity for imagination, she is told by her grandfather Death that humans need to practice believing in the little lies, like the Hogfather, to be ready for the big lies like Justice and Mercy. The theme, stated quite plainly as television is wont to do, is that without imagining such things as justice, how can they be real?
This year this ending and theme struck me quite differently. I had finished my horror novel Outrageous Fortune just a few weeks earlier and its themes were still fresh in my head. Part of the novel’s philosophical grounding is that the universe is utterly indifferent to human existence. It would be wrong to describe the universe as cold, as that implies at least some consideration. It is indifferent, not capable of having any consideration of human behavior and by extension no possibility of punishment or reward. There is existence and only existence as far as the universe is concerned.
Morality, the novel puts forward, is purely a personal perception, but it is also a trap because once it is perceived and recognized, then that knowledge is imprinted permanently on the perceiver’s mind. To recognize that an action is ‘immoral’ within the perceiver’s subjective understanding means it will remain immoral to that person. Whether you do or do not perform that action, the morality of your action is yours to carry as part of your identity regardless of the universe’s indifference. One does not ‘create’ justice; one recognizes it in oneself, or one is ignorant of it.
Pratchett’s work stipulates that belief creates an objective morality, but mine postulates that it never exists objectively but only subjectively, which is the only way we really experience life anyway.

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The San Diego I knew and used in Outrageous Fortune

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My latest horror novel, Outrageous Fortune, is not the first time that my adopted hometown of San Diego, California has been used as a setting for one of my fictions, but it is the most extensive and all the other projects were short stories.

Part of the reason I used San Diego for the novel is because the principal location, the Kensington Theater is a fictionalized version of my favorite theater, the beloved Ken Cinema.

I came to San Diego in 1981 when I was assigned by the US Navy to the USS Bella Wood (LHA-3). At that time this city had a ton of movie theaters, from grand palaces like the Loma out in the Sport Arena area to the grindhouses downtown that played the most interesting exploitive fare 24 hours a day. However, the Ken, a part of the Landmark Chain, was quite special.

The theater was a revival house, played older films in double features that changed on a daily basis and arthouse and foreign films that played longer engagements. From its worn, hard seating, I watched a number of films that became favorites. A double feature of It Came from Outer Space and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, both presented in their original 3-D format. It was at the Ken that I was exposed to David Lynch with a double feature of Little Shop of Horrors(the non-musical original) with Eraserhead.

Such a beloved and treasured space made a natural setting for my story of cursed nitrate film and the ghost trapped in that celluloid.

In the forty-four years that I have lived in this city I have resided in a number of apartments and houses, nearly always with dear friends as roommates. Nearly every apartment that appears in Outrageous Fortune as a character’s home is located in a complex where I lived. These places are vivid in my memory as is Balboa Park — its trails, museums, and eateries — another aspect of my decades living in San Diego.

During 1984, the novel’s setting, I was already a performing member of the shadow cast that participated in the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience at the Ken every Saturday and Sunday. It was among that group of oddballs and misfits that I found a real community where I fitted in with them like they had been a family from which I had merely been absent and not one newly discovered. Once, at a breakfast/brunch with many of them, someone commented to Goldie that I was shy and she exclaimed quite loudly “Bob is shy?” I am quite shy around people I do not know and also in situations that are not a good fit for my personality, the people of the Rocky crowd were not that at all.

So, amid the death, the ghosts, the vengeance, and cultists murdering to advance their twisted and selfish goal, Outrageous Fortune contains love for cinema, for San Diego, and for the Ken Cinema.

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The Neglected Blog

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I have not died, but I have been very tired. Each year from October 15th through December 7th is the Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage plans. It is the period when people who are not new to Medicare can enroll, disenroll, or switch their plans, and my day job deals with those changes, making this time of year a quite busy one. Usually, the workload doesn’t become large and overtime is not offered until later in the AEP, like early to mid-December.

Not this year.

I do not know if more people are retiring early, losing their jobs, or whatnot, but right from the start of the AEP our work queues grew exponentially quickly. I have been taking advantage of the sudden overtime, working 10 hours a day and half a day on Saturdays.

That is not the only reason my poor blog has been neglected.

I have also entered the revise-and-edit phase of my 80s gay cinephile horror novel Final Reel.

Editing and revising is very different than drafting. Now my brain isn’t trying to conjure something from nothing, but rather shape what is already there to the image and form that now exists in my head. This process for my other novel has been mainly one of fixing sentences and paragraphs with minor plot and story changes. Final Reel wasn’t written with an outline—I made it up as I went along. This produced a manuscript where the back half doesn’t fit with the front because it wasn’t until then that I truly understood what I was crafting. So, editing and revising has a lot more revising this time around.

That said, I am extremely happy with it so far, and I think this may be my best novel yet.

However, this poor blog will continue to be neglected for the next several weeks.

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The End of Drafting and the Beginning of Revision

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Friday, the day we honor and celebrate the Norse goddess Freya, I typed the final words of the extremely rough draft of my 80s gay, cinephile, San Diego, cultist, horror novel, with the draft clocking in at a respectable 89,000 words.

As I have written before, this novel I composed without the roadmap of an outline or even hardly anything of a plot in my skull. I knew a few aspects of the project: that it would take place in the mid-80s (I settled on ’84) and in San Diego. In addition to that, it would deal with ghosts in some manner, magic that had been bound to old cellulose nitrate movie film, and use a fictionalized version of the Ken Cinema, a theater that had once been the heart of revival and art house screening in this city, but closed forever in 2020. That was it. That was all I knew about the project when I sat down and wrote the opening scenes and the first chapter.

Characters were invented as they stepped onto the ‘stage’ and ones I thought might be major elements never quite got there and characters I thought were minor became major movers of the plot as it evolved. The plot slowly congealed from the disparate elements that erupted from my brain like Athena from Zeus’ forehead. But as a firmer, clearer, and more consistent picture of the plot emerged, earlier elements did not fit anymore. However, I did not, at that time, go back and either remove those ill-matched elements or revise them, but, like some sharks, I kept moving forward because backwards was death; the novel would only live if I maintained its momentum and reached a satisfying end.

Now that satisfying ending, with themes and plot that emerged organically from the process, has been reached and the task of revising has begun.

Already my opening line has changed to match the new core conflict, and the first chapter now reflects a deeper understanding of the character’s history as he understands it. Much like The Marathon Man, part of the character’s journey is discovering that nothing he thought he knew about his family is actually true.

I think the most important lesson I learned writing Final Reel in this manner is that I must never go back and revise while drafting. It’s easier, more efficient, and ultimately better for the final manuscript to let the inconsistencies live in the text while I discover what it is that really needs to be there.

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The Light at the End of the Tunnel Isn’t a Train

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It took not an inconsiderate application of willpower to not dance around my desk at the office yesterday. For the last two days, actual forward progression on my Work-In-Progress, a novel of ghostly cinematic horror, has been halted while I reverse engineer backstory. I had reached the point where mysteries laid out in the text and bedeviling the characters would begin to be understood and their origins revealed, but because I was ‘pantsing’ this story when I wrote those mysteries I did not actually have the answers and explanations in my head.

Now, I do.

The last two days have been working out from what is known and what has been hinted at, the full shape of the story, why it all exists in the manner that it does, and just what the scope of the dangers truly are. This isn’t entirely ‘pulled out of my ass.’ Some of this I suspected as I wrote the novel but other bits I knew I was leaving for future me to solve, and now present me is future me, and I am so happy with my solutions that dancing was nearly irresistible.

As is so often the case, once that clarity is obtained, a full understanding of not only character and plot but theme and subtext as well, a new and better first line came to me. I don’t need a whole new first scene but now I have the sentence that opens the novel: After the summer of 1984 Dave Ludendorff never again lived a charmed life.

Paramount+

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My Experience Pantsing a Novel

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My current Work in Progress (WIP) is the first novel I have written entirely by the seat of my pants, or less crudely, organically, without any sort of outline to guide me.

When I started the manuscript, I knew a few key things. I knew I wanted to write a story about supernatural occurrences tied to silver nitrate motion picture film, that there would be some sort of ghost involved (my favorite horror genre), and that I would be using a fictionalized version of San Diego’s Ken Theater.

I had planned to create an outline for this book, but before I had completed much research, I felt my enthusiasm flagging, and waiting on the research would likely kill the project. So I dove straight into it with just those elements in my head and a very vague notion of how to make it work in a five-act structure.

Now, some 73,000 words into the project and with the end, if blurry, in sight, the experience has been interesting, particularly with respect to the characters involved.

I have a host of diverse characters—gay and straight, white, black, Asian, young, and old—but it’s two that have caused the theme to leap forward.

Dave, the protagonist of the novel, is the white gay man who owns the independent Kensington Theater, which he inherited from his father, along with a sizeable passive income that allows him not to worry about such banalities as a regular day job. Dave’s father always acknowledged his son’s sexuality with love and acceptance. Dave never faced serious bigotry, even in middle or high school during the 1970s. He has never wanted materially or even emotionally for anything essential—in effect, a charmed life. Dave pays this back by not only being accepting of others who walk a different path but also by making sure his theater is an open and safe place for misfits, geeks, oddballs, and the socially different, particularly during the midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Terrance, originally introduced to further the cursed film plot, has developed into a gay character with a quite different backstory. His family did not have the financial resources that Dave enjoys. Adding to the troubles is that Terrance’s father believed in socially dictated gender roles for men and found his sensitive boy a terrible disappointment, which turned to outright hostility at his son’s preference for men over women as sexual partners. Terrance’s mother, retreating from an emotionally distant and abusive husband, left her boy without the affection children desperately require. By his teenage years, Terrance had already begun self-medicating with pot and beer, and in his aborted college attempts, he discovered harder drugs and attempted to fill the emotional void in his heart with anonymous sex in public parks and bathrooms. In order to cover his emotional wounds and project an acceptable self-image, Terrance became a person expert at putting on a public face, making him an excellent salesman.

While Dave thrives in and fosters community, Terrance has none and suffers from silent isolation, making him easily manipulable by the supernatural forces unleashed.

The themes that have arisen organically from the writing are the importance of community and that we are not just who we choose to be but also what the world has made us. I wonder what other new things will appear in the final chapters and the coming serious revisions.

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