Gut(ted) Instincts

Posted by Tarleisio on December 29, 2014

Gut(ted) Instincts

– When Eureka! Moments happen…

For the past two months, I’ve been wrestling. Wrestling the Fail Demon, wrestling the virtual page, and wrestling a Quantum Demonology prequel in Danish I had hopes to submit to publication in time for a New Year’s Eve deadline. To get the word out about me, to establish my questionable reputation, to maybe? start getting just a little buzz in just one small corner of the world. Just a little.

This evening, I had a eureka moment, the moment when I suddenly realized a vital fact:

It ain’t happening, baby.

After 12.000 words and not a little headache, after trying to translate pithy John Milton quotes and nailing a story arc to the page, nope… it’s not happening.

Seriously, folks, I really hoped it would. Hoped that maybe this one, maybe this time, maybe, baby. I really could pull this rabbit out of my hat and knock out 20.000 words of peerless prose.

Only to find that as my story progressed, my feelings of doom, dread and river-in-Egypt syndrome bloomed so very much faster than any time-lapse photography ever could.

The words were leaden. The cursor d-r-a-g-g-e-d across the page. I’m perfectly bilingual and verbally dextrous, so why the hell couldn’t I write in another language?

Then it hit me, that proverbial sandbag of insight right smack in my solar plexus.

Because I couldn’t feel it.

I’ll spare you the details of my unorthodox trans-Atlantic upbringing, but suffice it to say my first language was not Danish, for all I was born in Copenhagen and am a Danish citizen, but English. I mostly think in English (and some French and Italian), I certainly feel in English, and most importantly, I’ve received far more accolades (such as they are) writing in English than virtually anything I’ve achieved in Denmark. It helps not at all that my beloved (lethally smart) younger sister is an acknowledged journalist, author and blogger with the situation in reverse: born in the US, she’s far more truly Danish than I could ever be.

When we discussed our different projects a few days ago, she mentioned one of her own pet peeves about the English language: “There’s just too many… adjectives, too many descriptions, too much verbosity. I don’t need to have everything spelled out, and if you have to spell it out with adjectives, you’re not trying hard enough as a writer.” (She was referring to her elder sister’s novel.)

Ouch.

But back in the solitude of my own apartment, after the sting subsided, I realized that what she disliked was precisely what I loved best.

Verbosity. Adjectives. Describing the unknowable. And last but never least, feeling those words in your gut as you type them.

Whether it’s major mental constipation on my part (Denmark holds quite a few not-so-happy memories for me) or simple bloody-mindedness, I picked myself off the floor after that sandbag hit and made a decision.

Sometimes, your gut instinct knows what you can’t consciously acknowledge – in this case, when something feels wrong, it’s because it is, at least for me. So then, I thought.

Fuck it.

The prequel novella, titled “The Confessions of Apollyon”, is the story of the Devil (Dev, as he’s called in QD), what and who he is and how he came to be that guardian of nightmares and negatives. It begins on the very same night as Quantum Demonology and even in that same blues café a few hours before the QD protagonist walks through the door in search of mulled wine.

Some time ago, I became the proud owner of ten perfectly valid ISBN numbers and even registered an imprimatur under my own name. I’m also registered with the print-on-demand printer who printed the hardcover edition of Quantum Demonology.

So here’s what will happen: Over the next month or so, Dev’s story will be translated and rewritten for English-speaking audiences and formatted for publication. I’m registered with Amazon as an author. I know book bloggers who might be interested.

More to the point since that hit of the metaphorical sandbag, I’ve experienced an incredible sense of relief. Even my cats are finally able to share the room with me. I won’t have to stress around like a madwoman to meet that New Year’s Eve deadline, and can even devote some time to some of my other writing projects.

This does beg a question.

Would you – if you’ve read and enjoyed Quantum Demonology – like to know a little more about the one character in the story that a lot of readers relate to?

Tell me all about it in the comments!

Blood On The Floor

Posted by Tarleisio on November 5, 2014

Thoughts on the eve of a Red Letter Day

It was… a dark and stormy night, that Friday the 6th of November 2009, a night I was bored, couldn’t settle down, couldn’t sit still.

So I went through my browser history and located a link to a image I found a few days before that stuck in my mind, mostly for reasons I can’t possibly repeat, but I’ll tell you this:

It was some picture!

I still don’t know how long I simply stared at that picture when some diabolical voice whispered in my metaphorical ear:

What if?

Any writer can tell you – all stories, one way or another, begin not with Once Upon A Time, but with What If.

Lo and behold – an idea arrived! I had no idea what sort of idea, nor even where it came from, but in about two hours and typing as if taking ectoplasmic dictation, I had a short story about a woman in a café at midnight, a woman who had nothing at all and even less to lose.

Because I’m the sort of reckless, hapless person who does this sort of thing, I next posted it as an incidental short story on the virtual soapbox I had at the time – a blog about music, madness and feminism called MoltenMetalMama. I expected absolutely nothing. I did not even expect anyone to actually read it, for all I had 13 (!) blog followers at the time. Then again, you never know…

Yet the following morning, a comment landed in my inbox. One faithful reader had read it. Liked it. And even taken the time to comment my (lack of) storytelling abilities had blown him away! Right before he asked:

“So what happened next?”

What happened next was this: before November morphed into December, I found out I was writing a full-blown novel, wtf. No game plan, no idea how it would end or where the story would go, yet I completed over a fourth of it by the end of December.

And kept going. Going on the days the words flowed like champagne and bloomed like perfume, going on the days it seemed more like squeezing dried out toothpaste from an empty tube, and I had many of those, too.

Which is why Quantum Demonology is (also) dedicated to Portland OR resident and all-around fab fella Phil Hanson, because without him, I would never have had the courage to keep going, even as I fell through the rabbit hole of my own subconscious into very scary and very dark places I never even knew I had.

Four years later – a year ago today – I came out of the closet as what I totally thought was a dream come true: a soon-to-be-published writer, of a rather curious novel called Quantum Demonology.

This happened because of two things: One, after finishing the book nine months to the day later, I became a perfume blogger to satisfy my girlie itches and aesthetic inclinations, but mainly to become a better writer.

After a while, I ventured on to other perfume blogs and made connections and comments with other bloggers. One of them had a dream to become a publisher. She had read the original draft of QD (with more plotholes than even I could count) and thought it had the potential to become a book that would sell.

Would I like to publish it with her?

I couldn’t say no.

So on December 17^th last year, and with a great deal of trepidation, the book was published by Nigel’s Flight of Austin TX to modest fanfare on the social media outlets of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and elsewhere.

And then. Then came that cautionary tale of all debuting and vainglorious writers everywhere.

Nothing.

Well, I thought, give it time. These things take time.

Understand, this was and is in many multilayered ways a very personal book. It was a book that ended up costing me my marriage, a dearly beloved son I have no idea when I’ll see again, and virtually everything I had. It wasn’t just a book, it was in so many ways the story of a life that could very well have been my own if only things never happened the way they did.

Review copies were sent, press releases sent out. Contacts were (likely) bombarded with alternate, counter-culture versions of

‘So how do you love it?’

Three months later, I was informed about my first royalty check – also the only money I’ve ever made writing in my life.

And still nothing. No one was curious, no one wanted to find out something about the inspirations behind it (for all it’s very much a Goth(ic)/post-punk/metalhead story), no one was interested in the figuratively naked writer across the Atlantic, shivering in the social media blast of Being Utterly Exposed As A Potboiler Writer.

Do you know, that would be perfectly OK, if not for the occasional emails from my publisher feeding me pablum about future hopes and possibilities that usually kept me off my local high-rise bridge that day.

Stranger things have happened!

Just like my protagonist, I had/have nothing at all and even less to lose. Unlike my story, all those so-called “possibilities” were nothing more than pie in the sky.

So I stepped up my game and thought long and hard about what we could do to move the merchandise a bit higher up on the Amazon food chain. I came up with alternate ideas on how to market it, came to discover thanks to a New York PR maven (bless her!) I had a unique angle to market it with and wrote all my ideas down for my publisher’s delectation in a future Skype conversation.

Except – this was in May – my timing was lousy. My publisher told me in exquisitely hyper-polite language to fuck the hell off.

Well, I did.

She never wrote me back again.

Some time later, I was more than a little outraged to discover she was working on another book with another writer – this one, I gather, slightly less of a hard sell, maybe? Or was it since I wasn’t an overnight sensation I had been dropped like a hot potato to rot in that infernal pit of Hades reserved for failed loser writer wannabes?

Before I shoot myself in the foot even more than I already have, I’d like to say that I was gently raised to be polite, nice and grateful at all times. I was also raised to answer all letters, emails and private messages promptly.

In the six months since I’ve fucked off, I’ve sent her five emails and two letters requesting to terminate my contract, so I can have my pathetic little nightmare back more or less intact.

No response.

On the two social media outlets I have left for her, I sent her a PM/DM today, asking nothing more than she contact me at her earliest opportunity today, in the hopes of at least hearing from a human being again, but really <evil snicker> hoping this blog post wouldn’t be necessary.

No response.

Here’s the thing: this woman, who I once regarded as a dear friend, spent quite a bit of money to get my book published, money I never asked her to spend on my behalf no less and money I certainly don’t have. For that and quite a few other things beside, I’ll always be grateful, just as I’ll always be grateful to know what I learned in the helter-skelter two months it took from ‘start revising’ to ‘publish’.

I can understand the shame of a miscalculation, the chagrin of a failed marketing approach, the embarrassment of not being able to deliver a nicely tied up dream on a silver-screened platter, or the lies fed to an isolated, dissociated misanthrope misfit to keep that dream alive.

Shit happens.

Most of it, I can even forgive. I’m human, too.

What sticks in my metaphorical craw, however, is not being deemed worthy of the honesty I told her in our very first Skype conversation was my one and only demand. And a disturbing and very unsettling feeling of being violated in some indefinable way, since that dream was not really hers to sell, but mine.

According to the terms of our contract, it will expire on December 17^th this year for non-payment of royalties accrued in the past six months. Not that I expect any, you understand. Still, it burns me no end if this is how it ends.

This is not, so far as I know, how any professional publisher does business.

I will likely never see a dime off Quantum Demonology ever again, unless (as I also hope), I either prepare a new edition or another publisher bites, one with a better work ethic and hopefully infinitely better communication skills.

Meanwhile, most US literary agents won’t touch me or my manuscript with a ten-foot pole so long as I’m still under contract.

Meanwhile, the blood on the metaphorical floor is all and only my own.

Sic transit gloriam scriptori.

Don’t. Buy. This. Book

Posted by Tarleisio on August 12, 2014

Cover design by Rosy England Fisher, The Oculus Studio, Portland, OR

Once upon a time nearly five years ago, a rather lonely and severely dissociated middle-aged woman wrote a short story inspired by a photo (never mind the photo) that somehow turned into a Faustian tale of a woman who did NOT sell her soul to the Devil in exchange for a dream – to become a full-blown, professional writer. The story ended when she took the Devil’s bait, and that, thought this writer, would be the end of it.

Until a reader (one of her four regular readers on her defunct blog, Moltenmetalmama, asked that fatal, terrible question:

So what happened next?

What happened next? That reader – one of the three to whom the book is dedicated – egged her, which is to say, me, on to write out the entire story of … what happened next, and so, the book that eventually became Quantum Demonology was born.

And before I knew it, all sorts of things happened in quick succession. I became a perfume blogger and then a perfume writer, gained a following for my words, and even created a perfume project with indie perfumer Ellen Covey of Olympic Orchids around the book’s torrid story of good, evil, the Devil and a writer.

Along the way, the potholed, first-draft version of the book was revised, edited and revised again. I knew I had something, knew it meant something, knew, as all artists do (if they’re lucky) This Could Be A Thing.

But the problem with pathological self doubt and having to do everything on your own is precisely… that you have to do everything on your own. It just so happens that one of my own creative quirks is the need to be kicked. In other words, I need a swift, hard kick to my derriere before I swallow all self-doubt and insecurity and get stuff out there.

I had a story. A good one, so I thought at the time. I needed ~~fame and glory and a gazillion dollars~~ a publisher, and for that, I needed an agent, and to get an agent, I needed to write that most dreaded item in the history of literature: The Query Letter.

Then, a miracle happened. I just know it did. I was contacted by a long-time virtual friend and fellow blogger and asked:

How would you like to publish Quantum Demonology?

What? No query letter? No agent? With a friend? Are you KIDDING?

So almost a year ago, I signed a fairly standard publishing contract and signed into an insane deadline. Apart from my photo session, I have absolutely no recall of the month of November last year. I was too busy revising and polishing off my story to a high and glossy sheen, which was to say… for the first chunk of ten chapters, I spent two days in bed with the covers over my head moaning spicy alternate phrases for “I suck! I can’t!”

Yet we could, and we didn’t.

Quantum Demonology was published as an e-book for Amazon Kindle on December 6th, and in a beautiful hardcover edition on Amazon on December 17th.

My publisher and I had all sorts of ideas on how to market it, where to market it and who to send it to. So far as I know, being half a world away, it was sent to quite a few people for review.

Quite a few lovely people on Facebook, who knew me as a perfume writer, bought or downloaded it, read it and a few (five) reviewed it on Amazon. I can’t tell you whether it was out of a sense of friendship (since I couldn’t afford to bribe anyone) or obligation that made them give it a five-star rating, but it could also possibly be they thought the book was just that good…

Then, on February 12th this year, I received my first ever Kirkus review. And wow, was I ever surprised that it was a good one! The reviewer didn’t hate it!

I think I floated for about two whole days. Well, apart from the fact that the protagonist of QD did NOT sell her soul, but as my sister, a published writer herself said when I brought it up, we have absolutely no control over how our stories are received.

But even with all those free review copies she sent out, no one wanted to so much as talk to me. No interview requests, nothing.

Not one.

Over the course of this past spring, the ambience between my publisher and myself became increasingly… strange. I was told of things that supposedly happened. I began to cook up alternate marketing ideas and wrote them down. I even guerilla-bombed a favorite band of mine and handed out book postcards after a gig, because it was all the drummer’s fault anyway.

He did say he was flattered…

In May, I sent off an email to my publisher to ask for a Skype session at the worst possible time, I gather. Because basically, she told me in excruciatingly polite language (the kind that slaps you across the face with a metaphorical glove), to eff the hell off.

Meanwhile, I also received the only money I’ve ever made from writing: a royalty check for $92 and change. (I blew it on a fountain pen I’ve wanted for years, so I could sign my own books in style) The book sold 22 copies in hardcover.

That was three months ago. My emails go unanswered. My Twitter DM was ignored. All I currently know is this: she’s preparing to publish book number two. Book no. one – which would be mine – is evidently not a priority any longer. I say ‘evidently’, because I have nothing at all to go on.

Having said that, a very, very dear friend gave the book a rave review – on one of the planet’s biggest perfume blogs.

This story – and the sequel underway in bits and pieces as I type – is my baby. I don’t have a gazillion projects to juggle bookwise because I don’t have the time, meaning the money. No one I know would ever demand a synopsis for screenplay development, because I don’t know anyone who does that.

My contract explicitly states that my publisher has the rights only to the edition published by her. In other words, a different cover and a few small changes would mean a new edition, which would mean… I could do this myself. So long as I also buy two new ISBNs, a bar code and a registration fee with the print-on-demand printers, and at this time, I can’t afford that.

Alas, I don’t own the rights to the beautiful cover designed by Rosy England Fisher, my publisher does. Which really kills me, since Rosy encapsulated everything I ever hoped that cover could be and a few more things I never dared to ask for.

There is surely a special section of Hell reserved for those unhappy souls who pounce on their email hoping against hope that some day, an answer will come. Or simply any kind of response at all.

For the longest time, I debated with myself on whether to go public with this. My publisher spent a lot of time and money to get Quantum Demonology out as a book, and for that alone, I can never repay her, nor for her enthusiasm as we battled Heaven and Hell last autumn.

But three months of silence is more than long enough.

At this time, I don’t know what the future of Quantum Demonology will be, or even if it has a future. I’m so poor, not even Lulu is an option to self-publish.

But here’s what I can do.

Tell you this:

Don’t buy this book.

Ritual Magick

Posted by Tarleisio on May 20, 2014

– How a writer builds a rabbit hole – and stays in it!

Ask anyone who knows one – artists of any stripe are a superstitious lot. They each have their own invocations, preparations and magickal formulae to set up their creative space and prepare, even if they never know what, precisely, they’re preparing for.

A writer friend of mine calls this ‘circling the wagons’. This is a code phrase for writers who will do anything, literally anything to avoid having to write. If the brilliant 2005 documentary ‘Dreams With Sharp Teeth’ is any indication, not even the highly prolific Harlan Ellison is exempt. Which gives me more courage than he’ll likely ever know.

Writers will… get away from their computers, start a load of laundry, plow through the dirty dishes, straighten up their desks, begin ill-advised home improvement projects, turn the WiFi back on and surf the Web. Whatever it takes to distract from the fact that The Hour Is Nigh and no excuses are valid any longer.

It is time to invoke and conjure. Which is a terrifying time and a truly scary place, because from that moment on, no writer is able to control much at all. (For writers, creative control = editing).

But first, the comforting magick of ritual to make sure that rabbit hole is as safe and secure as can be and thoroughly feathered.

For me, this means… Lighting the gold candle in the Feng Shui-ed prosperity area of my writing space. It’s surrounded by “gold” coins (leftover euros from a trip to Florence) in a red dish flanked by a green wine bottle containing a purple silk lotus.

Second, tea. Since I don’t usually drink coffee after 5 PM, that means tea. Sometimes it’s mint and sometimes it’s an exotic Korean variety a friend sent to me recently (chrysanthemum tea, anyone?) but mostly, it’s either green tea, lavender tea or good old-fashioned Earl Grey.

Third, music. I can’t even begin to stress how important this is. I have concocted an 11-hour playlist specifically for writing, because here’s another doozy – I am physically/psychologically/mentally incapable of writing to any music I don’t know well. If it’s not so familiar I know the lyrics by heart more or less, I’ll get distracted and before I know it… exit rabbithole. I’ll start thinking about the lyrics, the artist, the circumstances, the album, the reviews of said album and before long, I’ll plaster myself all over Wikipedia to look up something completely irrelevant. And so, the Muse leaves the building. And I’m eclectic – in no order of importance my playlist contains… the Ramones, the original Misfits, Fields of the Nephilim, the Cocteau Twins, the Cure, Nick Cave, Iggy Pop, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Burzum, Darkthrone (I’m a massive Fenriz fan), Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Donald Fagen, Godsmack, Tool, Type O Negative, Pantera, AC/DC, Frank Zappa, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sheila Chandra, Kate Bush, Ondyne’s Demise, Nox Arcana, Joy Division and Danzig.

Fourth, although it maybe should have been first, is to ensure my two cats (the Edward Albee George & Martha of the feline world) are fed and watered. Woe betide me if I overlook this single step, since those pesky creatures will not allow me to do anything – except fall and break my neck on one of them – until I do.

Fifth, I either perfume my person and the room or else I burn incense. This makes sense given that I’m also a perfume writer. Eighteen spectacular perfumes were created to conjure up the Devil in a bottle, and trust me – they work!

So. The iPig is playing. The candle is lit. The room is perfumed with infernal permutations of labdanum and frankincense. The blinds are down and the cats are asleep.

Now, I can finally begin to begin to begin.

This is where the horror story starts!

Because the monsters and demons are waiting in the wings for their turn in the spotlight.

Writing Sexy – Sexy Writing

Posted by Tarleisio on March 12, 2014

– on the perils of rolling with Cousin Id

Whenever I’m asked one of those ‘how did you’ questions about ‘writing sexy’ (which is never defined by the questioner, strangely enough), I often joke that if you can write about perfume or sex, you can write about anything.

This isn’t strictly true, but in an age that has a celebrated UK prize for Worst Sex Scene, I figured I might as well hedge my bets, especially in a book that has so darn many of them, each of them pivotal to the overall story arc, as I came to discover when I revised the book for publication.

The fact is, sex sells. As a favorite arch-villain says in a favorite TV series, everything is about sex. Except sex. Sex is about power. (Now you know!)

In this post-Fifty Shades age, the readers who might read my book are becoming more jaded, more blasé and demanding in their judgment of what constitutes a ‘sexy’ book.

Therein lies a treacherous peril. Because of that blasted, wretched, execrable piece of clit lit called ‘Fifty Shades’, its two sequels, the movies and the countless imitators.

Let me start by stating this first: I have an immense respect for the cultural impact of precisely what E. L. James has done: She got women thinking – and talking – about what turns them on to such an extent it’s become a cultural touchstone. I’m far less happy that she has hugely misrepresented the inner workings of BDSM, and in so doing given vast numbers of people all sorts of wrong impressions on how such relationships actually work. And really livid her heroine is such a passive, naïve nincompoop of a cardboard, two-dimensional ‘character’.

Worst of all to my literary mind is the woman couldn’t write it without hauling out the most tired, overexposed clichés in the Oxford English Dictionary. It may be effective, but it sure ain’t pretty… and I only made it through Volume One before I wanted those hours of my life back.

So it follows that any comparisons to that particular collection of prose curls my toes in all the worst ways. That’s not what I set out to accomplish.

I have my own idols of erotic writing and certain standards I try to live up to. Erica Jong, Anne Rice, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Colette, Apollinaire, Pauline Réage, certain passages of Huysmann’s À Rebours and À Bás, Baudelaire’s poetry… I could go on. All of these writers have inspired me to such an extent, they’ve become the gold standard for the kind of writing I felt I could send out into the world without blushing.

Yet in the reviews I’ve received and in the comments and emails that have followed in the wake of Quantum Demonology, that s-word keeps recurring. Sexy.

Thank you. I tried. And this is how.

To begin with, I’m not exactly a blushing virgin. A wide range of experiences has been much more of a bonus that I ever expected. (Thanks, guys!) Interpret that as you please.

Second – and I can’t emphasize this enough – the character of Dev as he’s portrayed in the published book is not based on anyone I know or have ever known. In the first draft, there were many references to a former (toxic) boyfriend I once knew, but you can bet your booties I took every single reference out when I revised it for publication.

Third, in complete opposition to Hemingway’s maxim of ‘writing drunk and editing sober’ and contrary to what you might think, every draft I ever wrote was written in a time of absolute celibacy. If it weren’t, I’d be far too busy to write… 😉

Celibacy does astonishing things to the creative imagination. As Anaïs Nin once noted in a similar context and I’ll paraphrase, when you’re starving on a desert island, you don’t dream of three McDs cheeseburgers, you dream of sixteen course haute cuisine extravaganzas with all the wines to match.

But the biggest caveat in writing ‘sexy’ is this one: it has to fit the storyline, suit the characters as they’re written and the overall arc. Because if it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong in the story to begin with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, you might think. But how do you write about it?

Thanks to my training as a graphic artist, I’m very keyed into the visual. In other words, I have to see what I write as a movie (NOT that kind) and choreograph it in my head with lights, mood, ambience. I also have to remember that it’s far more erotic to imply and suggest than to spell everything out in graphic and boring detail. The trick is to set one tiny cog in motion in the reader’s mind and watch the domino effect from there. That way, I’m not spelling out s-e-x-y, the reader’s imagination is. Which is far more effective than anything I could write.

Next, I have to write it out as I ‘see’ it in my mind. Most of what put the ‘sexy’ in Quantum Demonology was rewritten and revised a minimum of eight to ten times before I sent it on. Some were just skipped altogether at the time and finally knocked out two hours before the deadline in exasperated desperation and a lot of despair. All of them written with a great deal of pencil chewing, cursing in several languages, teeth gnashing, figurative banging my head on my keyboard and sheer, utter agony – not because I’m a prude, but because it’s the hardest writing you can do, bar none. And if it didn’t work for me, it didn’t work at all.

Strangely enough, one of my readers of draft three mentioned ‘the very depths of depravity’, which surprised me no end. I thought I hadn’t been depraved enough, debauched enough, sawed through that branch of a sure thing hard enough to freefall.

In other words, I felt that somewhere, I wimped out. I feel a little less so now the book is out to judge or condemn, but I do know enough to realize that I could have been far more depraved, except it would have been far less successful as a book if I had.

I’ve received many compliments on that ‘sexy’ book. But the two biggest compliments of all came from two male friends of mine – one a most excellent acknowledged writer himself – when they both said my words had turned them on…

Which means I finally got something right!

How To Feed Your Villain

Posted by Tarleisio on February 23, 2014

– & something on how to conjure one

Without antagonists, what would stories be? For one, much less interesting to read. A good (or great) antagonist tends to stick in your mind a long time after the book is finished, because the antagonist(s) moves the story forward, keeps the reader on his or her toes and puts the protagonist(s) through sheer, utter Hell.

If that’s not a recipe for a good time, I don’t know what is.

But there’s a bit more to a villain than simply being the Bad Guy, especially if you’re conjuring him from scratch.

The thing is, it’s all too easy to write a villain. Simply write him bad….with few to no redeeming features and less motivation, and there you have it – fodder for countless Marvel superhero comics.

Except to this discerning reader, villains of that ilk are dead boring to read about, never mind to write.

Back when Lilith Queen of the Succubi popped up out of the ether and gate-crashed my story (It’s not as if I actually invited her along for the ride), I pulled out every single rabbit in the hat to make her as thoroughly evil as possible. But at the same time, I worried that maybe I, too, had fallen in the Marvel trap and made her too one-dimensional, too cartoonish to be entirely convincing. In fact, I felt so bad about it as time went on that I vowed to make Lilith the subject of a prequel (how did she get that way?) just to explicate her. But as I came to discover, Lilith as a character had a definite impact on the readers I had at the time. In other words, maybe I somehow managed to add a few extra shades and layers so she wasn’t all… Evil with a capital E, but more complex than that.

Meanwhile, I have a sequel to Quantum Demonology to write. Another villain to conjure. Only now, we’re dealing with what is technically a monster of a particular – and nasty – kind, so nasty in fact, that there really isn’t much in the way of occult literature on these creatures to go by, and that’s surprising. Or is it?

It’s almost as if my source material has clammed up by unstated agreement.

‘We won’t go there, not mention this creature, simply pretend he doesn’t exist.’

Why?

Could it be because an incubus – supposedly the epitome of all a woman could possibly desire – cuts far too close to those harrowing masculine nightmares of insufficiency?

In which case, I’m rather obligated to explore just what an incubus is… and does!

Are you curious?

Illustration: ‘Burning’ by Boris Vallejo. With thanks to Tiger Powers.

Round Two

Posted by Tarleisio on January 28, 2014

– the care and feeding of a sequel

What makes a writer? It’s not the fact that you are forever considered weird by people who don’t <cough> have that urge, it’s not that you have a published book and can now write it on your resumé, it’s not even the right to brag at dinner parties when people ask you what you do.

It’s simple. You write. On those days (and there will be many) when the words seem to dry up like laundry on low-humidity days, when the white space of the paper laughs at your audacity, when you’re sick and you’re tired of having to rake the coals of your imagination over the fires of your neuroses, you simply… write a sentence. And another. Trust me, they do add up after a while.

So in the interests of preserving my questionable sanity while I sit here praying for the miracles to happen, while the weather is dire and cold and I have nothing else to distract me except Facebook and YouTube, I have been researching and writing sketches for Quantum Demonology, The Sequel.

I thought that would never happen. I though that story as it stands is perfectly rounded, finished and tied with a satin bow. Until I caught the loophole staring me in the face in the last chapter. I can’t tell you why it’s there any more than I can tell you why I wrote the entire story.

I just did.

But at the time and even today, I wondered whether this would be a fluke idea. Would this be it – would I get one good story idea in my life as a writer and then languish a career away by beating a thoroughly dead horse to Amazon and beyond?

Some long time ago, I had a strange and disturbing dream that basically gave me the skeleton of the plot in the QD sequel on a platter, including the antagonist’s name. As writers do, I wrote it down in one of my ever-present notebooks. And then – also as writers do – I promptly forgot about it. The time wasn’t right, the moment not yet, the idea too much of an embryo to survive in the wilds of my imagination.

But all this time later, that cauldron of creativity bubbles away. Since I don’t have anything else to distract me (apart from a massive backlog of overdue reviews, which sounds suspiciously like work, that curse of the thinking classes), since I sit in the Waiting Room for the crazy train to depart, I might as well… be a writer. And write.

Or research, which is also a great excuse not to write. I have a few key locations in place, I have a cast of characters, I even have a new one to fall in love with, as all writers must. I have bookmarks of real estate sites for some of the locations, and I’ve even pinned a few to Google Earth so I can at least get the geography right. I have, as I said, a skeleton of a plot. Actually, it would be more correct to state I have two femurs, a ribcage and a shoulder bone with which to construct it. I’ll locate the rest of those 202 bones as I go.

Only now, the ante is up. Anyone who loves and reads the original book will want to continue their immersion into the world of Dev and his attitude problem. Certain expectations must be met, certain conditions fulfilled, all of them combined adding up to a textbook case of action paralysis that never plagued me during the first draft of Quantum Demonology, because back then, it was just for fun, three readers and the Resident Buttkicker I lived with and read to at the time who never did find out how that story ended.

Tell me my life depends on my prose and my muse will clam up faster than an oyster in New Orleans. Tell me it’s just a game, just for fun, what-the-hey, just give me what you’ve got and do whatever you have fun with, and my muse plants his toothsome derrière in my windowsill to breathe fire on my page, and curls up behind me at night. (We single gals take our thrills where we find them!)

So I’ll just pretend… it’s you and it’s me here. No expectations, no heavy-handed reputation to live up to, just a little fun and games.

Now, let me take you away… to the nighttime cesspits of Hollywood, the sidewalks of New York and a house in Ditmas Park, to a world of extremes, to another writer with too much to prove and an aging rock star who needs a reboot, to a drummer who wants to sell his soul and a woman in mortal peril. Next, let me tell you about the monster who unites them all…

See you there?

An excerpt – The Devil’s Prologue

Posted by Tarleisio on January 25, 2014

My awfully wedded wife had finally discovered how to utterly destroy humanity. It was a plan so simple, so elegant it couldn’t possibly fail, and being who I am, it couldn’t possibly succeed, either. Repercussions, logistics to sort out and questions we all wanted to avoid.

A nightmare enchilada of global proportion. She had to be stopped.

“You don’t think you’re going to stop me, do you? I’d handle your job so much better than you. You’ve gone far too soft these past few years. I’ve been here long enough by now, I know all the technicalities no matter what Saint Peter thinks, and poor Asmodeus needs something constructive to do, he gets bored so easily….”

Lilith paced the floor in front of my chair and thought out loud, but I had already tuned her out. Four thousand years of a miserable marriage will have that effect. As she kept talking and pacing, I just sat back and watched her, watched that long, leggy stride eat up the rug in six steps, watched her turn as elegant as any runway model, blonde hair swinging, before pacing back again.

She was flawless. Flawlessly beautiful in that twenty-first century porn-star manner that left no room for imperfections, quirks or doubts, and flawless bored me.

Besides, any woman who begins every single sentence with ‘I’ is nothing but trouble. Trust me. I know.

“You don’t understand at all, do you?” I finally said. “For you, it’s all so simple, all so black-and-white, all so nicely categorized into tidy little boxes that say it must be a cinch to do my job. Nothing is that simple, Lilith.”

“Four thousand years, and you still sound like a scratched vinyl LP, don’t you? ‘Nothing is that simple’ ” she taunted. “Bullshit. Just more male chauvinist pseudo-philosophical cant from someone who thinks he’s better than me simply for having a penis…”

Did I tell you that my lovely wife became a screaming lesbian just to spite me? Nothing against lesbians, but spite. Really.

She’s Queen of the Succubi. No coincidence.

The instant before I tuned her out again, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text message from Saint Peter.

“God’s study. All done. Wait for it!”

If she only knew what I was planning.

I stood up to leave.

Surprised at the names? The truth would surprise you even more.

Once, you needed to give the personification of evil an evil face, needed to dehumanize and externalize it to make it easier to identify. If your history has taught you anything, it’s that true evil can wear any face at all. Including your own.

Forget the lies you’ve been force-fed since childhood. Forget that I am supposed to be God’s adversary. Like all dogma and most religion, it’s nothing but a select few shining truths wrapped around a hundred million incandescent, mind-controlling lies.

I’ve been called so many different names I can’t take them seriously any longer. Satan, The Devil, Lucifer, Apollyon, The Fallen One, Evil Incarnate, Mephistopheles, Son of the Morning Star, Shaitan, The Adversary – you humans have never lacked imagination. I don’t have cloven feet, do not in fact look or function much different than you should I choose.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I had a wife I needed to destroy before she destroyed humanity. I needed a little human help. Once upon a time the present Queen of the Succubi was human, before she forced herself upon me and refused to let me go.

So Saint Peter was given an assignment. To find a human intelligent enough to do the job, someone amenable to the benefits we could provide, who could handle the inevitable horrors that came with it. Over six billion humans on Earth, and we only needed one.

A woman. Since nothing destroys a woman like another one.

But if I have to put myself on the line here Saint Peter, I thought to myself as I left Hell behind me and climbed the stairs to God’s study, make sure she’s got a nice pair of tits.

And if you can, please make her a blonde.

☠ ☠ ☠

The Waiting Room

Posted by Tarleisio on January 22, 2014

Writing a novel is such an involved process that most people aren’t aware of that endless gap from writing ‘The End’ until the day you have a bound, printed book in your hand. In an ideal world containing overinflated delusions of grandeur, so the demented writer’s mind thinks, we would get published to instant and raucous acclaim, skyrocketing sales and within two weeks Hollywood would be barking at our doorstep about options and rights.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have some news for you. It doesn’t work quite like that any longer if indeed it ever did.

Quantum Demonology was published for Amazon Kindle on December 6^th 2013, and in hardcover through Amazon on December 17^th (the official publication date) by the new indie publisher Nigel’s Flight. A Euro-friendly Customs-free version is also available on Amazon UK. Although the plans were underway over the summer of 2013 and the contract was signed in September, neither the publisher, the artist or the author shifted into high gear until mid-October for a variety of reasons none of us could control.

Having said that, three people – the author, the graphic designer/cover artist and the publisher – managed to completely rewrite, revise, polish, edit, proof-read, design, revise, typeset and proof an original manuscript of 212,000 words (give or take a few) down to 190, 210 and get it to press, bound and in a physical bookstore in two months minus one day.

It happened across two continents and nine time zones. I’ve yet to actually meet my publisher in person or the artist. The artist is in Portland, the publisher in Austin, and meanwhile in an obscure garret apartment in an obscure town in Denmark, the author – that would be me – sits at 4 AM on a snowy January night and wonders why the earth hasn’t moved yet.

After such a massive energy surge, it’s very hard to slow d-o-w-n. It’s like owning a beautiful, brand-new Maserati just screaming for rubber to burn, and it sits in a garage and smolders.

Meanwhile, for reasons I can scarcely explain or articulate, I sit here in what I’ve come to call The Waiting Room. In Quantum Demonology, the Waiting Room is the place where the story ‘times out’, takes a break, and comes to terms with what lies ahead. That’s also a great description for my own present state of limbo, as that force of nature who took a massive chance on an unknown writer (and her own peace of mind) lines up all the metaphorical ducks in the shooting gallery and cleans the Winchester she dearly prays the author will shoot them with.

To be fair, there’s a lot to be said in favor of someone who plans to turn you into the next Charlaine Harris, if not Anne Rice. She knows as I do that I have more sizzling stories up my sleeve.

So as I wait – for the epiphany, for the massive sea change I sense is coming, for all the marvels and wonders ahead, I do what I can to keep myself sane. I map out the sequel, and introduce a few new characters along with Dev and his feisty writer. Some of the characters from QD will be back to wreak havoc with my carefully laid plans. Some facts will be revealed, some events will change, some semblance of plot is emerging in my dreams, in my journal, in the dirty dishwater of my quotidian life.

I wrestle with my other writing, which for whatever reasons seems a bit frivolous now the book is out. I watch an awful lot of BBC history documentaries on YouTube. I entertain my two cats. I daydream. I read. I run mock interviews in my head to come up with sassy answers to silly questions. I pray to Freya, to Sophia, to Providence and Fortuna:

Please don’t let me fall flat on my face. Please don’t let me disappoint. Please let me show just how bright I can burn. Please.

Above all else, I sit in the Waiting Room, which looks a lot like Grand Central Station in New York City, eyeing the clock up above, waiting for my crazy train to be announced.

As surely it will, any day now…

A Transgressional Affair

Posted by Tarleisio on January 17, 2014

Being the true confessions of a (newly) published writer

Someone once said that the problem with a published book of the kind with your name on it, is you can’t take it back. If you’ve written it as “ Anon” or even a pseudonym you can always shrug and feign your innocence. It wasn’t you. Nope. As if.

As if you’d ever write such a §!”#€%&/()=?_∞£¶[ awful collection of questionable prose.

So when I received an offer to have it published by a new publisher who would make this her first book, I toyed for some time with the idea of a pseudonym. If only so I could shrug, smirk and feign my innocence.

But then – such being the perfidious nature of vainglorious writers – my vanity kicked in. It wasn’t as if I had anything to hide, scores of people already knew me by name elsewhere on the web, and down below in that swirling, seething, molasses-black mass of egomania, I wanted the accolades, the acclaim, the solicitous care and feeding of my ego. (I wish!)

Yet far more than anything at all else, I wanted to flip the metaphorical bird at all the skeptics, non-believers, doubters, haters and every single sucker who ever tried to grind me down. I did want to write my own humble ‘Kilroy was here’ on the hallowed walls of literature, I wanted to leave an epitaph behind that said I did this, I wrote that, I cooked it all up out of music, boredom, desperation and the darkness I spent all my life trying to deny I even had.

Only to find I might as well have been as naked as Botticelli’s Venus (if looking nowhere so good) once the book was out on Amazon.

It’s all true. I can’t take it back or deny I had anything to do with it. For every doubt I’ve had along the long journey from out-there idea to hardcover and Kindle edition, for every time I’ve clutched my feline teddy bear and burrowed under the covers wishing the whole nightmare enchilada would just go away and disappear, down below in the Sea of Egomania, I was damn proud of that book, damn proud I did it, and inordinately proud all those so-called doubters and non-creative types who sneered condescendingly and flatly stated ‘they had never had that (cough)…urge’, all those who said ‘Forget about being published. That will never happen.’ – they could all just kiss my Taboo-painted toes, because by Golly, I did it!

And by Golly, I feel so very naked, because… I can’t take it back.

All in all, it’s been – a most transgressional affair.

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