Posts by Authors

• Good Night, Mrs. Calabash, Wherever You Are

  The Year Ahead

  

  This is my final column for The Night Bazaar. The blog was conceived as a way to promote writers who had books coming out from Night Shade in 2011, and next year it’ll be promoting writers who have books coming out from Night Shade in 2012, so that puts me on the night train to the big adios, suckers.

  Thanks to Courtney for getting this blog up and running — it’s been a blast. And it’s been a pleasure to blog with talents like Bradley, Kameron, John, Stina, Katy, and Martha, not to mention our brilliant parade of guest bloggers.

  I haven’t got the foggiest idea what the new year will hold for me, writing-wise, since the novels I’m currently working on are not yet sold. I hope to work with Night Shade again, but not every book works for every publisher, and it really isn’t anything personal. So in the meantime, here’s where you can find me in the year to come.

  You can visit my personal site at Thomasroche.com.

  You can find ebook editions of my other zombie/paranormal stories on Amazon, here, here, here, here, and here, or read my 1997 dark erotica collection Dark Matter now back in ebook form from Renaissance eBooks.

  You can find me weekly blogging about science, technology and the paranormal at Techyum.com.

  You can find me blogging about sex, science and politics at TinyNibbles.com.

  If you’re in San Francisco or its environs, you can take the 60-hour training for sex educators that I teach twice a year with San Francisco Sex Information. This is a sex-positive, life-changing, life-affirming class that aims for a descriptive, rather than a proscriptive, approach. It provides concrete information for teachers, writers, psychotherapists, social workers, doctors, nurses, ministers, reproductive counselors, and anyone else who provides her or his clients with descriptive information about sexuality.

  You can find me blogging every month or so about writing erotica at WriteSex.net.

  You can read my hard-boiled crime blog at Boiled Hard.

  You can add me on Good Reads, Twitter, Facebook, Twitpic, and Flickr, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can check out my Amazon Author Page.

  You can also add me on Tumblr, if you’re one of those people.

  You can also add The Panama Laugh on Facebook and Twitter.

  And if you enjoyed The Panama Laugh and want to see a sequel, you can visit PanamaLaugh.com for updates.

  Of course you can always just drop me a line, which is cool, too. Hopefully you’ll be seeing lots more of me on the bookshelves, virtual or otherwise. But whatever the future brings, it’s been hella fun blogging here. Thanks for listening.

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• Hellhound On My Trail

  The Year in Review

  This week’s topic is  ”What was the year like for you as a writer.” Such a topic is dangerous for me. It encourages me to navel-gaze, something I’m far too good at. So, honoring the mood of the season, I’ll try to keep it moderately brief, and hopefully maudlin as hell.

  2011 was the third year I’ve lived without a day job (though the first year, 2009, was a partial one). I like it. I’ve also loved my day jobs, but there’s something exceedingly “special” — in both its ironic and non-ironic senses — about being able to focus totally on reading and writing.

  And when I say reading and writing, that’s what I mean. Reading is the side of the writing life that I never thought I’d like so much, and for me, it has to be a daily occurrence, or I lose a sense of what I’m here for.

  In 2011, Night Shade Books published my first novel under my own name, The Panama Laugh. One of the prompts for this week’s topic is “How have things changed for you pre- and post-publication,” and the answer is that it hasn’t changed that much. It’s delightful to get paid for a piece of work you love, and it’s indescribably wonderful to have people enjoy it. But even so, what I look forward to most is writing the next page.

  Too many other things have changed in the world for me to generalize what 2011 was like for me personally. Too many personal things were weird and wonky, to the point of disaster, this past year, for me to give a damn about any of this writing crap. I like doing it. I’ve always liked doing it. That said, it is a pain in the ass, and most days I’d rather swallow hot coals than put words on the page.

  I do it because I don’t know any better. I do it because I’m incapable of taking logical steps to better my life. I do it because I’m stubborn as hell. I do it because I love the human race, and if I tried to express it any other way, I’d explode. I do it because I hate the human race, and if I tried to express it any other way, they’d (rightly) throw me in jail.

  I do it because I probably occupy some kind of space on the autism spectrum, and writing half-completed action novels is one of my tics. I do it because, look, here’s another year drizzled by, I’m almost dead, and I don’t have any sense of what that means. I’ve got a hellhound on my trail; I always have, and those of you who don’t, or think you don’t…well, no offense, but I just don’t understand you. That’s okay, though…you probably don’t understand me, either, so it’s cool.

  People who live unhaunted are different than me in some essential way. I’m not sure if I envy them or resent them, but I know I’d rather be them than me. Nobody asked, though, so here I am.

  Writing and reading are the only activities that help me be OK with that.

  There you go: maudlin navelgazing for Christmas. Hope your 2011 was as splendid as mine.

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• Two SF/Fantasy Predictions for 2012

  Lessons Learned

  Author’s note: Since my fellow bloggers changed the topic for this week from “genre trends” to “marketing lessons,” but I had already written this column, I’m posting my piece on the original topic.

  

  Genre Trends for 2012

  I’m notoriously bad at staying on top of trends in any medium.

  This is true of music, literature, art and design, technology, movies, TV…Sometimes I’m way ahead of the curve; sometimes I’m well behind it. I joined Friendster and Tribe before Facebook existed — but when I design a website, it looks like the 1996 has risen from the grave to wreak its bloody vengeance on the universe.

  Regardless, you can consider yourself guaranteed that whatever’s trendy this year, I’ve either never heard of it or I’m annoyed by it. If I ever liked it, I’ve lost interest in it, and I disapprove of people who are now into it. It doesn’t matter what trend it is; if you’re into it now, I either have no interest in discussing it with you, or I think your a mope for liking it.

  It’s nothing personal. I’m not trying to be “cool,” I’m just funny that way. So if you mention your cool proto-coalpunk corset or how you’re writing a Gothic pinot noir mystery, and I roll my eyes, you don’t have to worry that you’ve made a social faux pas. On the contrary, you’re in good company: people whose trendy obsessions I disapprove of; it’s a very large club.

  Plus, you can rest easy knowing that whatever trendy topics you’re into right now, I’ll be into it five years from now, and I may have forgotten that I ever disapproved of it.

  Then, you can feel free to pull the same shit on me. (more…)

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• How I Found My Strengths as a Writer

  Strengths and Weaknesses

  I’m far from convinced there’s any such profession as “writer” anymore; we’re all multi-taskers, by definition.

  But there is this thing called “writing,” yes, and occasionally I get to do it.

  When it comes to writing itself, I like to believe that my strengths are far more numerous than my weaknesses.

  But it’s quite possible that I’m kidding myself.

  What I do find is that the more I write, the less my strengths matter and the more my weaknesses do. That’s because writing a lot of fiction puts me face-to-face with every possible roadblock in my creative process, and every roadblock is a potential “debunking” of my strengths. It doesn’t matter how great I can write X type of scene, if Y type of scene keeps me from ever finishing my novel.

  As a result, all that my strengths do is allow me to get past the weaknesses, or manage them effectively. That’s great news, yeah, but if I take the time to celebrate my strengths, it only slows me down.

  Here’s an example. (more…)

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• The Young Adult Apocalypse

  YA Fiction

  My first piece of published young adult fiction is the 10,000-word Deepwater Miracle,” which appeared in Night Shade’s Z: Zombie Stories just this past year. That’s assuming you don’t count “The Beast With Blood Red Eyes,” the first fantasy story I ever got paid for, which appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, a “family” publication, way back in 1989. That story was not written intentionally to be a YA work; “Deepwater Miracle,” on the other hand, was written specifically for a YA anthology.

  What’s the difference? I have no idea. I’ve long loved YA fiction when it grabs me; I’ve even dipped into the Middle Readers category by obsessively reading the entire Animorphs series some years back. Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat books were hugely influential on me, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what makes them young adult, other than that they’ve got young adults in them. I read the Tom Swift, Jr. books over and over again as a kid, and I read those books’ predecessors — written from the teens through the twenties — later in life, taking close note of how the weird tropes of adolescent innocence and rampant racism seemed to mix like oil and water.

  With “Deepwater Miracle,” I knew I needed protagonists who fell into the proper age range, so I started out with that restriction in mind. I also knew I couldn’t use the F-word incessantly the way I did in The Panama Laugh. This was a bit strange to me because when I was in high school, the F-word was a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and sometimes even a pronoun. But you never said it when teachers were within earshot, so I could kinda get my head around that. “The readers are now the teachers…got it.” Or maybe it’s that the editor is the teacher. Regardless, keep the cursing down to a dull roar. Beyond that, there weren’t many restrictions. (more…)

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• Thanks for the Readers

  Giving Thanks

  If I started thanking all the people I owe thanks to, I could be here the rest of the day and y’all would stop reading around about page sixty-zillion, if not before.

  So I want to instead write briefly about how much I appreciate the readers in my life.

  In that, I don’t just mean just the people who read what I write now — who, yes, I am very thankful for. So, yeah, thanks to all of you who take a moment to read these ramblings, or my ramblings elsewhere, or my books.

  But in the U.S., it’s the day after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving week is a time that’s usually about family for those of us lucky enough to have family (which, incidentally, I like to remember that plenty of people don’t). So I’m going to take a moment to be thankful for the readers in my family who taught me, early in life, to love reading — by doing it themselves. (more…)

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• The Luxury of War

  War in Fiction

  One of the things that has recurrently made my personal relationships more, um, challenging, is that I can’t stop thinking about war. I spent most of my childhood dreaming about killing people. I just couldn’t get over how awesome it would be to get to carry a gun and be bad-ass and, like, blow people away and stuff.

  Mind you, protagonists at the beginning of war novels show themselves to be gung-ho and then get beaten down and turned into hard-boiled combat veterans by events. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to go to war to have that happen; I was all over that cigar-chewing grizzled combat vet schtick by some point during the Reagan years.

  I skipped the whole “Duty and honor and courage and discipline” thing and just skipped right to “The horror! The horror!”

  That was, clearly, a symptom of underlying neurosis. I probably would have gotten the hell 4F’ed out of me before anyone in any military organization sniffed enough glue to think it’d be a good idea to hand someone like me a rifle. I was a lunatic well before I reached draft age.

  Mind you, we no longer had a draft in the United States. It tells you more about my own pathology than about world events when I say that I thought for damn sure I’d get drafted in the coming conflagration sure to erupt when the first Iraq war exploded across the region and dragged the United States into a war with Russia, Pakistan, Bahrain — and what the hell? — India. I felt quite confident in envisioning my own ignominious death in the Arabian dust, bleating my desperate phosgene-choked cry to the heavens: “The horror! The horror!”

  In retrospect, I know it was not very likely I was going to get drafted into the Army and killed in entertaining ways. Even if war in Iraq had erupted into a wider confrontation, there would not have been a draft in the United States. And even if the draft had been activated (I was, incidentally, registered for Selective Service), even the Army would have had the sense to take one look at me, plant my ass in a $600 office chair somewhere, and say, “Come on, soldier — do you wanna live forever? Write us some damn press releases!”

  But the fear of war was the canvas on which I painted my own internal terrors, because it’s far more romantic to be worried about something that never comes than it is to freak out about the shit right around the corner. Daily, I thank my lucky stars I had (and have) that luxury. (more…)

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• Readings and Signings

  Readings and Signings

  I love signing books, but I’m really not a big fan of “signings,” in an organized sense. I feel they keep me at arm’s length from the fans.

  I’m fine with the idea that, if I ever get rich and famous, I might have limited time and a lot of people who want to meet me. In that case, a signing-behind-a-table format might be the best way to achieve that. But I feel like when I’m getting started — and I’m still getting started, yeah, twenty years on, that’s how writing works — there’s no point in putting me behind a table so that people can ritually file by me like I’m handing out the Eucharist.

  I’d rather shake hands with readers and shoot the shit, hear what they liked about my book or what they hated about it, or what they’re planning to like or hate about it, and graciously say “Thank you” when someone asks me to sign their book, the same way I do if someone comes up to me after a convention panel and does the same. It’s a huge compliment to be asked to sign my book (or someone else’s, if they’ve mistaken me for M. Christian). I’m always pleased to sign books.

  But the idea of sitting behind a table reminds me too much of the many hours I’ve spent chatting with other writers behind tent cards at mass autographings. This is a great format for incredibly famous people, who have a zillion fans and only so many hours in the day. For me, it’s always felt isolating. I much prefer to meet people, rather than have them creep past me as if I’m a pharmacist handing out Xanotabs.

  Readings, on the other hand, I love. They’re terrifying and invigorating…or they should be. I say this as the veteran of literally hundreds of readings over the years. I love them; they’re incredibly challenging and very scary. But mostly, they’re different than writing, and I cannot emphasize this simple fact enough. Think of a reading as basically going up there and reading this thing you wrote, and I believe you’re missing the value of performing in front of an audience.

  There is a personality to every audience, and “working a crowd” requires lots of improvisation. I spend a great deal of my life listening to audiobooks, lectures, and podcasts, and a significant amount of it watching comedy performances. I’m the veteran of literally hundreds of readings, which means I’ve watched and listened to thousands of live literary performances. I’m very much a veteran of live readings, both as an audience member and a performer, and I can tell you, they require a whole bag of tricks that looks almost nothing like “writing a good book.” (more…)

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• Heroes and Heroines

  Heroes & Heroines

  I’m never quite sure what makes a hero, which I think is probably the key to knowing what makes a hero.

  I look at it this way: if being a hero was easy, everyone would do it. But it’s not just that being a hero takes work or sacrifice…on the contrary, it takes knowing what to do to remedy a grievous situation, or at least prevent it from getting any worse. That’s actually a really tall order for most of us.

  A hero is somebody who’s willing to get the knowledge necessary to understand what can be done without screwing up the world even worse than it’s screwed up. That doesn’t mean all protagonists are heroes — far from it. Many, even most, might have some heroic qualities…especially in adventure fiction. But that doesn’t make them heroes.

  Incidentally, I’m not talking about real-world heroes, because this week I can’t bear to. Let’s just talk about fiction, and I’ll be mildly apolitical for once. My righteous rage just went on vacation.

  To me, the most interesting characters have always those heroes who screwed something up royally themselves, and are trying to make amends. This comes, I think, from my interest in the noir genre — but you can see it in many places. It’s typical of Westerns. It’s frequently seen in horror. It’s the underlying theme of Star Wars (though I would assert that Star Wars does it pretty badly). Darth Vader turns out to have basically screwed up the universe, and the entire pair of trilogies is (supposedly) about him getting his shit together. Way to go, Darth! Could you maybe have figured that out before you screwed up the universe?

  That’s one of the reasons heroism as a concept doesn’t always translate to the real world. When someone commits heinous crimes (They killed the younglings!!) and then is all, “Whooops! Where did I get that idea!?!?” they shouldn’t get a free pass…not in the real world, or Sammy Gravano would be running the FBI. (more…)

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• Say Hello to the Monster: What Halloween Has to do with Occupy Oakland

  Halloween
  

  Photo by AJStream, from Flickr.

  When I was a kid, I never really cared what I was for Halloween, as long as it got to kill people.

  More often than not, I dressed up as the characters I thought were having a way more exciting life than me: guys in the Army.

  Yeah, I know (now) that guys in the Army don’t have it all that good. It’s not all ultra-cool stuff like crouching in a rice paddy eating baked beans from a can off the end of your still-bloody bayonet. It’s, like, paperwork and saluting and stuff, and trying to get your mortgage paid on a salary that dwindles every year. It probably sucked then and it probably sucks now, but I was a kid, WTF did I know? I thought it was all John Wayne in The Longest Day and Bob Crane in Hogan’s Heroes, romancing German girls and giving Gestapo guys wedgies. That’s what war is, right?

  My father is a hardcore military nerd, just like me, so he helped me hugely with his vast stores of knowledge on uniforms and gear from his eight years as a mortarman in the National Guard, an early-’40s childhood spent watching newsreels from the war, and his compulsive reading in contemporary military history. He explained to me the exact shape and configuration of a white phosphorous grenade (armed forces designation AN-M14, in case you’re wondering) and helped me figure out how a Shasta Cola can could be turned into one and exactly what it would do to the interior of a tank with a crew of Hans-es and Gunther-s in it, which I thought was friggin’ awesome. Death! Murder! Mayhem! Burn those Nazis alive! Fry up some German sausage! Freedom forever! God Bless America! All enemies, foreign and domestic! Eat lead, suckers!

  What’s that, you say? Didn’t I want to be an astronaut? Sure, I would have dressed up as an astronaut…as soon as those pansies in Congress started arming NASA! Seriously, they were sending people into orbit without even sidearms? Hell, you think the Russies are that stupid? I don’t think so, hippie! What happens when the space zombies come…you gonna hit ‘em with algebra? Slap ‘em around with your Master’s degree? Only wimps dressed up as astronauts for Halloween. (more…)

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