HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: "GIRL OF GREAT PRICE" From GIRL TROUBLE, Milo Fowler

                                                        "GIRL OF GREAT PRICE"

When I was a kid, I learned to write on an old manual typewriter. My first novels were messy, full of typos and plot holes. But they were fun. And at age 15, that's what it was all about.

Private eye Charlie Madison was one of my first characters, and The Double Murder was his big debut—over a hundred pages of snappy banter, mob hits, double-crossing dames, car chases, and even some alligators. A horrible parody, it'll never see the light of day.

Halfway through Write1Sub1 2011, I came up with the first story about Charlie I'd written in decades. It wasn't anything like his original case, but he was the same quick-witted, intrepid detective. I subbed "Girl of Great Price" to Criminal Element, assuming I'd receive a form letter rejection in two months, tops. Instead, Claire Eddy (TOR Books) emailed informing me that she was my editor on this project. After I picked myself up off the floor, I went to work, and my story was eventually included in the Girl Trouble anthology.

"Girl of Great Price" is the first in a future noir detective series. The sequel, Immaterial Evidence, is now available from Musa Publishing.

BIO:  Milo James Fowler is a teacher by day, speculative fictioneer by night. Stop by anytime: www.milojamesfowler.com

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER, Eric Cline

As a 1972 model h. sapien, I have spent roughly half my life pre-internet and half post-internet (as of...NOW).  I use the technology happily and frequently, but I still have enough perspective to look at some of our toys with a certain detachment.

One morning, I was the last person to get on the bus.  A young woman who had a seat saw an older, fatter person carrying both a laptop bag and a lunchbox, and offered me her seat.  I protested, but she politely insisted, and I took it, with much gratitude.  She stood in the aisle in front of me during the ride.  She was on her smart phone during the entire time, using the Facebook app.  As I watched, for a 20 minute ride, she simply hit like, like, like, scrolled, hit like, like, like, scrolled, etc.

I was a bit appalled, because here was a very nice, polite young lady, intelligent and with good moral values (from all that I could see), who was reduced to a carpal-tunnel-risking adjunct of a Facebook app.  (Yeah, yeah, she could have been having the greatest time in the world doing that, but I made a superficial judgment at that time.  Besides, since I've established my own Facebook account, I've seen the Tyranny of the Clicks up close.)

The wheels started turning, and I thought of all of the ways people could trust technology too much.  At first it suggested the "Cautionary Tale" science fiction story (I've been published in that genre), but then I thought, "what if the one beguiled by the technology isn't a good person?  The 'Just Desserts' story....?"  I dropped the science fiction angle.  Instead, it would be a crook who trusted in his own IT prowess too much.  No doubt, I was influenced by any number of those news stories about loss of privacy on the internet and identity theft. 

Then, one day, starting a new story, I wrote the line: "The woman who fired me has a lovely daughter." 

All of which goes to show that the final story can run far afield from the original inspiration.

Eric Cline was born in Independence, Missouri, a city saturated with memories of and monuments to President Harry S. Truman. It was in an Independence thrift store that Eric’s mom purchased him children’s science fiction books by “Paul French,” a.k.a. Isaac Asimov. Eric went on to devour all of the books in the Mid-Continent Public Library. Eric holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, and once considered teaching as a profession. He has waited tables at a total of three restaurants. He was at the last restaurant after he got his master’s degree, which gave him some indication of how well teaching would pay. He now works in an office and writes on evenings and weekends. After a fitful original attempt to write, Eric turned his attention to reading, work, and study, before returning to writing with a vengeance in 2007. He, his wife, and his three dogs live in Maryland

How I Came to Write This Story: Hoodwinked by Nigel Bird

Hoodwinked came to me with the collision of ideas, as is often the case.

2 years ago, just over, I was to get married in the summer.  There was talk of a Stag-do, but I had no intention of painting any town any colour.  Thankfully, a good friend of mine understood my feelings and was also keen to mark the event.

His choice of celebration?  An afternoon at the Edinburgh Film Festival to see Winter’s Bone.  He couldn’t have made a wiser choice.

Better still, there was a Q and A with the director and the main actress afterwards where we found out about some of the thoughts that went into the film and the way they’d used local people from the mountains on screen.

It got me thinking about how that might have affected a rural community, the arrival of a film crew and all its associated bits and bobs.

The question must have formed a seed and that seed was planted somewhere in my brain.

Part two came at a safari park in Scotland called Blair Drummond.

To finish our day, we went to the birds of prey exhibition.  There’s something very moving about watching a bird in flight.  Match that wonder with sharp claws, huge wing spans and frighteningly shaped beaks and it would be hard not to be impressed.

So taken was I by their prowess that the idea of such a beast picking up a child from the ground was formed.  It certainly seemed possible the way the birds swooped towards the lure.

When the show was over, I went over to the bird-handler and asked the question.  Could a bird of prey steal a baby?

There was an awkward silence and I’m not sure how we filled it.

Perhaps he saw the harmless creature that lives inside of me, or the way I am with my own children.  Whatever it was, he must have decided that it was a safe piece of information to be dishing out.

His answer was that, yes, it could happen.  No doubt about it.  Especially if it were an Indian Eagle.

This was like the water for the seed that was planted earlier.

Imagine a mountain man forced into a position where he felt he needed to take revenge.  Take it a step further and make that man a bird-handler who could train his bird to do pretty much whatever he wanted. 

All I needed was to create the need for revenge, and who better to plant that at the door of than the film star of a movie such as Winter’s Bone. 

The chemistry was there, all I needed to do was to breathe life into it.  In other words, the difficult part.

Whether I manage to pull off the sense of place or the right tone in the speech is another matter – being a Brit didn’t make that particularly easy – and I’ll leave that for you to judge.

Thing is, it was accepted at All Due Respect, and that meant a lot to me.  Still does. 

You can check Hoodwinked out in the ADR anthology that’s just come out.  There’s a collection of talent there that is screaming out to be read.  I recommend it highly and hope that this has tickled something in you that will take you over to the page.

Thanks here to Alec Cizak and to Chris Rhatigan for their support and their unselfish sharing of their talents.

How I Came to Write This Story: Dale Philips

The new Nightfalls anthology is a good thing, a collection of fine stories where the proceeds go to help those less fortunate.

When editor Katherine Tomlinson asked me if I'd like to submit a story, I said yes, and told her I'd just published a collection of stories about the end of the world, Apocalypse Tango: http://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Tango-Five-Story-Collection/dp/1477514902/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355098564&sr=1-1&keywords=apocalypse+tango

Uh... she said, well, that's what the new collection is about.
Okay, no problem, I'll just write another one...
But I'd used up my available scenarios.

When she told me about the charity the proceeds were going to, the idea began to form. Since the last night of 12/21 was so close to Christmas, it grew to having the apocalypse seen through the eyes of a young Latino child, who's confused as to why the grownups are acting so strangely around the time Santa is supposed to come. And since the Los Angeles area charity was there, that became the locale, and even the theme. The prompt for the collection guided precisely what the story was to be.

Within the tale, I wanted to explore the different reactions that people would have: some lose themselves in drinking or drugs, some end on their knees praying for salvation or redemption, some who would like to end with pleasures of the flesh (going out with a bang, not a whimper), some in finally getting that one thing they've always dreamed of, and some, committing that last act of ultimate love.

And a nod to the apocalypse coming 50 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we came within a whisker of having it happen then. Plus ca change, you know...

Religion, death, Christmas, love, and the end of the world, all in a few thousand worlds. Guess that says it all.

How I Came To Write This Story: Nic Korpon

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How I Came to Write the Story: “His Footsteps are Made of Soot”

From the collection Bar Scars, by Nik Korpon

I’d always heard of writers rewriting a story numerous times. They’d say things like ‘It wasn’t working’ or ‘I couldn’t find the voice’ or ‘I had nothing else to do that day.’ Fuck that, I figured. Write the story and be done with it. If it didn’t work, drop it and forget it and write something else that was more interesting. Revisiting a story a bunch of times from different angles sounded too much like homework, not writing. And yes, I understand and agree that the work needs time to mature and you should always revise until it’s right, and with novels I do just that. But I’m not very good at short stories and I get bored quickly.

That being said, of course Fate would set out to make me look like a hypocrite, as it seems wont to do. The version of “His Footsteps are Made of Soot” that appears in my collection Bar Scars (Snubnose Press) is probably the fourth version I’d written. The first one was called Home Surgery and the Jersey Shore, and I can’t remember what the others were. Probably because they sucked a big one. I think the first time I wrote it was somewhere around 2006. I was walking through the Giant in Hampden, a neighborhood in North Baltimore, at 3 AM or so. Some guy passed me in the aisle, pushing his cart with the one wheel wobbling. I couldn’t help but stare at the most random assortment of crap he had in there. Listerine, chuck round, mouse traps, shaving cream and more. All I could think of was that show Supermarket Sweep, where contestants ran around the shop piling everything not-nailed-down into their cart.

A couple days later I was passing the light hours with the other bartender and we got on the subject of home businesses, something we could do instead of getting people drunk professionally. Someone came up with the idea of becoming a home surgeon, likely because neither of us had health insurance to cover anything professional, and I flashed on the weirdo’s cart. The rest, as they say, is history.

Actually, no, it’s not.

The story I wrote sucked. It was twee and tried so hard to pluck heartstrings that it dislocated my fingers. I vaguely remember some plot device with a box of frozen corndogs, which I guess was me checking the quirky box. It went into some dark folder on my desktop for a while until I stumbled across it a couple times. The concept was still interesting, though none of the rewrites were working, largely due to the relationship between the narrator and his dead brother. Something about the emotional core of the story just didn’t snap, so it sat and collected mold, which was fitting, considering the eventual setting.

After I wrote “Alex and the Music Box,” another story in the collection, I came across a throwaway line I’d edited out about the near-blind lady next door listening to Press Your Luck really loud and I immediately discovered the mother I needed for “Footsteps.” I saw her living like a ghost as she grieved her dead junkie husband, all while her son tried to bring her back to the land of the living. The idea of loving a living dead woman who was loving a long dead man was infinitely more interesting to me. Add in a healthy dose of fire-ravaged ambiance that mirrored the characters’ inner landscapes and Fate was well on its way to making me look like a jerk. Somewhere in that house, beneath ash and damp newspapers crawling with silverfish, I’d found the voice of the story. All I had to do was let it mold.

How I Came to Write This Story: Eric Beetner

How I Came To Write That Story (and design that cover)

By Eric Beetner

The original Pulp Ink anthology is a stellar collection and one I'm proud to be a part of. I lucked out when then inspiration from Pulp Fiction I was given turned out to be, Zed's Dead, Baby. How could I go wrong?

When Chris Rhatigan and Nigel Bird announced they were doing another Pulp Ink, and the proceeds were going to charity, I jumped at the chance. Chris and Nigel wanted to open the gates of crime fiction a little this time out. They wanted horror too, or crime and horror mixed. This was an exciting prospect for me. I grew up a horror movie buff. In high school my walls were covered - to the point where not single inch of the most boring tan walls in the world were visible. Really. Ask my Dad.

So blending two of my greatest loves into one story? I ran with it.

My story, One-Armed Bandit starts out as a crime tale. A man has been caught stealing from the boss and he is about to pay the price for it. Turns out he wasn't stealing only money, but a little between the sheets time with the boss man's wife.

In the second half of the story, it turns horror. A severed arm becomes re-animated to exact revenge. You might recognize the image of a disembodied arm from the cover at of Pulp Ink 2. This is no accident.

As art director for Snubnose Press, I have been designing book covers for a majority of Snubnose releases. But I'm not so vain as to assume anyone would want my own story to be representative of the collection. I feel it is important to note that the idea for using the severed arm on the cover art was Chris and Nigel's idea. We had already toyed with the dirty typewriter and the grimy background, but when I added the bloody arm scrawling the title across the page, well, Pulp Ink 2 quickly became one of my favorite book covers I've designed. It's the kind of image I would have hung on my wall in those younger days.

And inside, it gets even better. I don't know what kind of mojo those two guys have, but they have pulled together another outstanding anthology and another one I am so proud to be associated with. For the proceeds to go to charity is icing on the blood-frosted cake.

I'm very glad readers have the option to get PI2 as a print book as well as an ebook. The cover art will live on my shelf as a source of pride as much as the story inside.

How I Came to Write This Story: Andrez Bergen

PULP INK 2: LAZARUS SLEPT

Just so we’re straight, Roy Scherer is me.

Well, he’s a smidgeon me. The guy is far more gung-ho and proactive in diabolical situations, ones in which I’d probably curl up in a corner and cry. We share a certain amount of cynicism, though he takes his to extremes, and I like to think I’m a lot nicer than Roy. I hope I am, anyway.

Where we meet is in a lack of love for zombies.

I don’t know what it is, but I never had a soft-spot for brain-eating fiends lurching about above ground. When it came to horror, I much prefer my terrifying aliens—The Thing from Another World still gets to me—and vampires, so long as these babies are free of the vices of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer.

Which is one of the reasons that I approached the genre when Nigel and Chris invited me to pen my first published “horror” story for Pulp Ink 2.

At the time I was researching the great Peter Lorre, partly an idea I had for a character that is part homage in my upcoming novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, and otherwise because Lorre reminds me of a Polish mate of mine, Mateusz Sikora, an artist with whom I started a record label years ago.

Lorre, for me, is one of the highlights in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, and he rocks his brief scenes in Casablanca.

Anyway, wasn’t I talking up zombies?

In retrospect, the yarn is a bit of a cop out. The solitary zombie in my Pulp Ink 2 story ends up not being a zombie at all, but someone suffering from Lazarus syndrome—actually a real enigma; look it up on Wikipedia.

For the story I decided to conjure up two new characters, the hardbitten, grouchy Roy Scherer I’ve already mentioned, and his younger, bookish-yet-dizzy partner in supermundane investigations, Suzie Miller.

They came out of some recess of my brain that’d lapped up odd-couple interaction from the likes of, well, The Odd Couple, along with the ‘70s Rock Hudson vehicle McMillan & Wife, and more obvious recent telly offerings Moonlighting and Remington Steele. I’d be remiss to add that The Thin Man is vaguely in there as well.

Obviously Roy and Suzie clicked for me—straight after the Pulp Ink 2 story, I wrote two others featuring the bickering, constantly irritated duo. I’m thinking more.

So, anyway, I hope you find the time to check out this inaugural piece. There are far better stories by the other writers like Patti Abbott, Eric Beetner, Heath Lowrance, Matthew C. Funk, Richard Godwin, Christopher Black, James Everington, Julia Madeleine, Katherine Tomlinson, R. Thomas Brown, and Court Merrigan.

And what a dark, pulpish, occasionally fun romp it all is.

Andrez Bergen

How I Came to Write This Story: Joe Clifford

The novel RED BAKER by Robert Ward is free today for Kindle.

From Pulp Ink 2: Joe Clifford

With the Occupy movement in full swing out here in San Francisco, I’d read an article where protestors had been granted entry into a bank lobby. This is the Bay Area, after all; we support our counterculture. I don’t recall how long they were allowed to stay inside, but as a writer I didn’t need much more; I had the premise of a story.

Politically, I am a left-leaning, pinko commie bastard. I support progressive causes and think FOX News is the Devil. Still, having lived on the Left Coast for almost half my life now, it’s tough not to roll your eyes at some of the things Northern California permits. I mean, if you get the occasional headache, you can get a prescription for weed out here (not that I mind; I believe all drugs should be legal. Except meth. That shit will fuck you up), and the idea that protestors would be allow to stage a demonstration in a bank struck me as a little silly. But the criminal in me thought, Wow, if I were a bank robber and saw that, I’d be all over that shit.

For “Occupy Opportunity,” I wanted to comment on the Occupy phenomena, which, frankly, I found myself torn over. On the one hand, I am always game for sticking it to the Man, the Johnny Cash middle finger Fuck You to the world—“What are you rebelling against?” “What have you got?” It’s pretty hard to look around these days, see the disproportionate distribution of wealth, and not feel enraged. The interesting part, however, was how little sympathy I found myself having for Occupy. For years I’d wondered when were the masses going to get fed up with the privileged few owning so much, and here it was happening, and I couldn’t help but feel ambivalent to the cause. Even now I am not sure why. I have a little more money these days, am a bit older, a husband and father. I don’t think that’s it, though. I suppose it’s like my friend Jenny Dreadful said, and I’m paraphrasing here, but the people who are really hurting are too busy working their three crap, minimum wage jobs to take the take off to join a bunch of college kids pissed that Mommy and Daddy aren’t footing their tuition anymore.

I don’t know if that is true, but I liked the line, or at least how I recalled Jenny saying it, and I believe I use it almost verbatim.

I conceived the basic plot while jogging, which is where I come up with most of my ideas. It’s a simple turn, a “twist” of sorts, a man finally seeing the light; it let me achieve a political end I was after.

In the story, two lifelong criminals, the narrator and his childhood buddy/partner-in-crime, Eddie, have moved to San Francisco, where they have been laying low because of a promise they made each other. When someone was killed during a Midwest bank robbery, they swore: no more guns. After reading about the Occupy protestors being allowed access to the lobby of Wells Fargo (in my story this occurs before the fact), the two crooks decide it’s time to get back to work.

Now, I am no fan of hippies. Liberal socialism is cool. Burning Man and hacky sack, not so much. I hate their food, their music, and they smell bad. You can’t say this stuff in fiction, unless it’s in the mouth of a character. Both my characters hate hippies. They also hate their not-too-distant cousin, the hipster.

When my bank robbers attend the protest, they see nothing but a whiny bunch of hipsters looking for handouts and shortcuts. They serve as the mouthpieces for “the other side,” those who see Occupy as malcontents, the side that might say “the world needs ditch diggers too” (I had fun with this concept, criminals spouting moral absolutes). Then something happens. One of the men, Eddie, starts actually talking and listening to the protestors and begins to understand fully the struggles of the disenfranchised, the inherent injustice behind a health-care-for-profit system, capitalist greed, etc., and he has an epiphany and decides he has to take a stand.

What happens next? Well, for that you’ll have to read the story…

How I Came to Write This Story: R. Narvaez

How I Came to Write This Story: “Zinger” from Roachkiller and Other Stories

Way back in the 20th century, I had a freelance job writing web site reviews, and I came across a contest for Best Hollywood Movie Pitch. Looking at previous winners, it seemed the funniest entries won. So, I dashed off the first thing I thought of: "A vicious serial killer is electrocuted while at the same time, miles away, a standup comedian electrocutes himself while ironing. Through the wires, their souls get switched! How will the killer deal with being a single dad? Will the standup comedian think hell is funny?” It was so basic and so ridiculous, I was surprised Adam Sandler hadn’t made a movie of it—yet (starting countdown . . . NOW). I won the contest—receiving the ephemeral-yet-ever-lovely prize of bragging rights—but more importantly the idea stayed with me, maybe because it was so basic and so ridiculous. Like a pop song that just won’t leave your head unless you knock it out, some story ideas won’t go away unless you do something with them—or you drink a lot. I decided to do something with it.

So a few years ago I sat down and wrote a story to go with my contest-winning Hollywood pitch, adding names, filling out characters, but removing the whole cliché trip to Hell. (Free advice to writers: “Hell’s been done.”) The idea was still so silly I made sure to put in a lot of humor, something I usually am frugal with when it comes to noir (mustn’t let laughs get in the way of a good murder). A friend I showed it to suggested the perfect title: “Zinger.” Now all I had to do was find the story a home.

But who publishes darkly comic crime fiction with a supernatural twist? I submitted. Horror magazines turned it away—“Too crime fictionish.” I submitted. Noir magazines didn't want anything to do with slipstreammery. “Just guns and gals, please.”

I . . . All right, I didn’t submit that hard, but it gets frustrating when no one wants your baby. So the story got buried for a long while . . .

But then last year I was looking through my stories to put together my ebook compilation, Roachkiller and Other Stories. I had 10 stories ready to go, but I just before I sent them to the publisher I realized one story was noirly, but not as noirly as the others in the book. But if noir=dark, then “Zinger”—even with its scene of a serial killer doing a stand up set—was noir. So I decided to include it in my collection. In fact, it became a selling point, as all the other stories were previously published and may have been already read by my fans (big shout out to both of you!), and this was a story no one had read before.

Now I'm just waiting for someone (Mr. Sandler, I’ll take your call now) to option the story and make it into a great big B movie. I can already picture it at my local video store, with a lurid cover, a giant discount sticker, and starring Louis C.K. (in either role).

R. Narvaez has had work featured in Indian Country Noir, Long Island Noir, Murdaland, Plots with Guns, Thrilling Detective, and You Don't Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens. His new book is Roachkiller and Other Stories.

How I Came to Write This Story: B.V. Lawson

(Make sure you read to the bottom and then comment, friends)

BV Lawson: How I Came to Write this Story:

"Ill-Gotten Games" from Untreed Reads

Once a musician, always a musician. Even if you're no longer performing, music gets tangled up in the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs of your DNA. I played the piano for many years before my chosen life path veered away from the instrument, and I haven't touched one in years. But I still play the piano in my dreams. My protagonist, Scott Drayco, was a musical child prodigy headed for an illustrious career when a carjacking ruined his dreams and steered him toward a life in law enforcement—first the FBI and then as a freelance crime consultant.

Drayco's music and academic past often come looking for him in his cases, sometimes haunting him, sometimes taunting him. His wide-ranging background and "magic decoder brain" (fine-tuned from working through Bach counterpoint) make him well suited to take on oddities like the one featured in my short novella, "Ill-Gotten Games," from Untreed Reads.

Since I began my writing career as a poet, I often find poetry creeping into my crime fiction. When I saw an article on the rise of Twitter poetry, I had the idea for a modern take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale where Sherlock Holmes receives coded messages in the mail. In this case, Drayco is hired by Benny Baskin, the "world's most diminutive attorney" (4' 9" in his platform shoes) to help prove Baskin's client is innocent of theft and murder.

That’s all fine and good until the man they suspect is the real killer starts sending Drayco quatrain clues via cellphone. (Sherlock would have loved smartphones.) Drayco races around the landmarks of Washington, D.C., solving the cellphone codes on-the-fly while trying to find five small Egyptian Hathor figurines stolen from a shipment to the Smithsonian—the same heist where the victim was murdered. The killer stays one step ahead, though, and his little "game" (which he dubs "Drayconian hide and seek") spells danger for Drayco. If he "wins" the game, he may ultimately lose.

As to how I chose the particular D.C. landmarks from among hundreds in the city, well, Drayco figures out the pattern eventually, and maybe astute readers will, too.

Art, poetry, and music were all used throughout history to express, define and inspire the best and worst of human experience, whether it's the ancient Egyptians or Arthur Conan Doyle. Sometimes, when these forces come together, they spur Revolution or Enlightenment. Other times, they inspire contemporary writers like yours truly and form the genesis of a little crime story of revenge, redemption and relationships gone awry.

By the way, Drayco still plays the piano on the Steinway in the corner of his townhome. And I’m jealous.

BV Lawson is still basking in the glow from her recent Derringer Award for the short story, “Touch of Death.” She also has a new noir story in Needle, “Push Comes to Shove,” and continues pursuing her novel series starring Scott Drayco.

BV will send a gift certificate for a copy of “Ill-Gotten Games” to two names drawn at random from comments to this post.