Writing in the "Age of Plague"

When Daniel Defoe published his novel A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, people did not think it was a novel at all, but an actual account of events in the year 1665. If anything, they considered Defoe (who would have been five at the time) as the editor, and that his editorial contributions were minimal. The book was even more detailed than the celebrated diaries of Samuel Pepys who actually wrote during the Great Plague (1665-1666). In the work, Defoe mentioned real neighborhoods, real people and even wrote about individual houses.

The book was well received when published and was still well regarded in 1780, but by then it was considered a realistic novel. This is a tribute to Defoe's research skills, for he read hundreds of original documents and interviewed oldsters who had lived through the calamity that struck London, adding to it his own childhood memories. Of course, not every literary scholar and historian considers the case closed on whether or not it's a novel. It lacks the structure of a novel, reads like a memoir and carries a gravitas greater than many historical accounts of the period. The question will probably never be settled.

It's been 298 years since the publishing of the book, 355 years since the setting of the novel, and modern readers probably don't know that Defoe wrote anything other than Robinson Crusoe (another book taken initially as real history), and even fewer remember their history lessons about the Great Plague. Of course, that may change a bit now that we find ourselves beset by the pestilence out of China, which now goes by the name of COVID19 (it's a trendy thing, giving everything an easy-to-recall acronym or portmanteau designation). Being stuck inside for a few weeks, some people might actually pick up that history book they kept from high school, for some reason.

A few years ago, I had a series of dreams that I converted into plots for novels. Pulling a novel out of a dream is nothing new for me, but this was unusual in that it happened over a two-month period and resulted in about forty different plots. The genres were varied, from science fiction to crime to fantasy to western. When I have more ideas than I can immediately do anything with, I usually jot down the idea, include some mnemonics (to jog my memory later) and sketch a few rough ideas as to characters and setting. This time, however, I gave the stories titles, wrote detailed plots and extensive characterizations, and developed cover ideas using GIMP and Canva. I also typed out the first several pages of the story so I could hit the ground running if/when I came back to it.

After finishing the fifth DCI Ravyn novel, Murder Amongst the Rushes, I thought it was time to take a brief vacation from dark and legend-haunted Hammershire County and pursue a few other projects. I looked in my files and saw that Behind Thick Walls, an amalgamation of the Crime and Post-Apocalyptic genres was the most developed of the stories. It seemed to me that with a working cover, a complete list of characters with full biographies and about a dozen pages of the novel written, it would be a fairly easy matter to dive into the project and get going. And so, in early November 2019, I started work on the novel and wrote in the beginning blurb...

"...but there was nothing natural about the plague that swept the world, seemingly in the twinkling of an eye. Earth’s peoples went to sleep in a time beset by wars and rumors of war, secure in their empires of technology and commerce, and awoke to an Age of Plague."

And then, as I worked off and on on it (personal and family situations prevented a concentrated and sustained effort), I found events in the real world warping to mimic the fictional situation. Oh, there were differences, of course. The story is set in Mexico and COVID19 is nowhere near as terrible as the plague in the story, at least not yet. And, while it seems we need only wait out COVID19 (as we did Spanish Flu, Asian Flu and SARS), the plague of the book ("Rot") seems to be the gift that keeps giving.

When I first started, I drew a measure of inspiration from Defoe's book, Pepys' diaries, and the crime novels of Elmore Leonard. As the year turned, and we entered January and February, I discovered my fictional inspiration pushed aside by the news of the day. And now, with California on lock-down for the foreseeable future, I find myself writing about a society beset by plague while living in a society beset by plague. Am I (are we all) trapped in a meta-novel? If so, I hope the cosmic writer is not as cavalier with characters, as I often am.

Hopefully, we won't hear the sound of a Typewriter in the Sky...

It Was My Mother's Fault

When I was young, there were three magazines I could always count on finding around the house -- True Story, True Detective and Fate.

True Story, started in 1919, part of a genre called confession stories, tales usually written in the first person, telling of emotionally charged situations and romances. At the time, I thought the magazine lived up to its name and the the "confessions" were true. Happily, they were fiction. Of the three magazines, it was the only one I had to read on the sly. It wasn't so much that it actually contained naughty stories (compared to today's standards they were sparkling clean) but that they addressed subjects such as infidelity, alcoholism and all the other facets of life that gossiping neighbors only spoke of in whispers, and only after making sure no young ears were present...hey, I was good at not being noticed. My nose may have been stuck in a book, but my ears were quivering. So, even though my mother never told me I could not read them, I knew enough not to get caught. Admittedly, my sheltered upbringing meant that much of what went on in the stories was incomprehensible to me, but, even so, the stories were compelling. The magazine is still around, but I assume its fiction has kept pace with the times, unfortunately.

True Detective was probably the best of the true crime magazines that proliferated during the Forties and Fifties, and my mother always had plenty on hand. Even back then, I was an aficionado of crime, a budding criminologist. When I opened my first detective agency at age nine, it was inspired equally by Sherlock Holmes and True Detective. While I may have been confused about the veracity of confession stories, I harbored no such doubt about the reports of murder, robberies and sex crimes found in the pages of True Detective. I appeared in the magazine in the very early Sixties. One of the stories, a murder, I think, took place in National City and the newspaper reporter (the magazine provided a nice second income for crime journalists and literate police officers) submitted several photographs to illustrate the article. In one of the photos, there we are, Aunt Joyce and me, crossing Highland Avenue at 15th Street. Aunt Joyce attended National City Junior High her walk home took her past Highland (now Otis) Elementary, and sometimes we would end up walking together...my grandparents lived down the street from us on E. 17th Street. My grandmother, also an avid reader of such magazines, discovered the photo and promptly called my mother. They were both appalled their children had appeared, even as innocent bystanders, in such a magazine, but Joyce and I were thrilled. Unfortunately, True Detective did not survive into the 21st Century, coming to an end in the mid-Nineties. The demise of the magazine was explained by former True Detective managing editor Marc Gerald: “...our readership of blue hairs, shut-ins, Greyhound bus riders, cops and ax murderers was old and dying fast.” 

Fate Magazine is another periodical that has survived into this strange new century, and of the three magazines probably had the most effect on me and my writing. Even today, I sometimes peruse my copies from the Fifties and Sixties for inspiration. The purpose of Fate remains unchanged after 60 years and four owners -- reveal the strange true mysteries of the world, such as UFOs, cryptozology, psychic phenomena, ghosts, lost civilizations and the like. As you can see, the covers have changed over the years, but the content remains uniform. I like the art covers, but by the time I came across my mother's stash, the magazine had switched to the type of cover depicted in the center. While I don't personally care for the modern photo cover it was in one of those issues that my story about the Hohokam Indians appeared, an article that led to a 2-hour interview on a Phoenix radio station.

Occasionally I am asked about influences upon my writing. Of course I mention my favorite writers, such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Raymond Chandler and Joseph Conrad, and the many books such as Moby Dick, Atlas Shrugged and At the Mountains of Madness. I also mention the events of my own life such as serving in the military, riding trains around Europe, and experiencing tragic losses. But I also have to give a nod to these three magazines, publications that many might call "trashy." But I really don't feel responsible for these dubious influences -- it was my mother's fault.

My Friend in the Desert

During the 80s and 90s I was quite active in the Small Press, a period I've written about previously in this blog. For those not in the know, Small Press was collectively all the little books, journals, magazines and newsletters that proliferated in the shadows cast by giants. Where Doubleday might consider a low press run as 100,000 a Small Press book publisher might consider 250 a very high press run; where general circulation magazines might aim for millions of subscribers, Small Press editors were happy to get fifty, not counting relatives.

I entered the Small Press first as a writer, then an editor/publisher. It was quite an exciting time. One of the things that made it so enjoyable was the ability to meet people who had similar interests and goals. Most of these acquaintances were epistolary, but a few did result in actual encounters. One of the most memorable was t. winter-damon, a writer of fantastic tales who lived in the midst of a vast desert. In Tucson, to be exact.

Me & Damon -- circa March, 1989

If you look up t. winter-damon, you'll be told that it's the pen name of Timothy Winter Damon, but he always had me call him Damon, and his wife resolutely called him Tim. After more than thirty years, it's difficult to the exact details of our first encounter or precisely how it came about, but it started with a letter about writing and publishing, then a random remark on my part about an upcoming journey, followed by an invitation by Damon.

In those days I was wont to take occasional journeys into the wastelands, as I always referred to the desert areas to the East. The trips were partly meditative, partly restorative. After dwelling among the swarms of humanity, there is something curative in solitude. The aesthetic hermits and monks of old knew the value of "getting away from it all." Besides, I liked to visit Indian ruins, ghost towns and odd places along the byways of the Southwest, whereas my family considered it a form of torture.

Damon lived in Tucson, in the midst of the Wastelands, and was a regular contributor to many of my Small Press projects. He was possessed of a soaring imagination, a flair for expressing himself, and a boundless zeal for self-promotion. When I attended the World Fantasy Convention as a panelist in the early 90s, I found myself sitting at a table with Damon and his wife during one of the get-togethers. Abruptly, we found ourselves sans Damon. Occasionally I glimpsed him as he zoomed around the room, seating himself at one table after another -- he made a busy, busy bee look very lazy. When I mentioned this to Diane she laughed and said: "Tim is a master of self-promotion. He'll come back with at least a dozen contracts or agreements. He sells himself better than a two-dollar-hooker at a Shriners convention."

Most writers who have to interact with editors have to step out of some kind of a comfort zone to do so. Speaking for myself, my comfort zone is about the size of an old-style phone booth...maybe a little smaller. Damon's comfort zone was, apparently, as far as the eye could see, and then some.

Damon's interests were likewise wide ranging, but a large percentage of his writing was in horror fiction, especially in the genre then known as splatterpunk. It was a very visceral form of writing, very blood and gore, and was very big in the 80s, not so much later on, and rarely referred to now. My interest in horror writing was less...squishy, more philosophical and idea-driven, though, of course, I was not above ripping out the occasional heart, as long as it was in as good cause.

Despite our different approaches, we collaborated on several stories. Our usual mode of writing was the "round robin" method. That's where one writer pens a section, then passes it to another for the next. We wrote each other into corners, then dared the other to break out. Since his strengths were atmosphere and insanity, and mine were action and dialogue, we ended up with some very strange and wonderful stories that sometimes he was able to sell to an editor, sometimes not. As Damon said to me: "When the Splatterpunk Elvis Dark Fairy story doesn't sell to the Splatterpunk Elvis Dark Fairy anthology, what are you going to do with it?"

I treasure my memories of Damon's friendship. Even when I stopped traveling about so much after my auto accident, we still traded letters and stories. When I think of him, I think of the stories we wrote -- castles made from human bones, zeppelin battles over the Mountains of Madness, civilization-destroying powers locked in the ancient vaults of a dead planet, sail-billowing ships on sapphire seas beneath strange constellations, or lost souls trying to survive in terror-ridden cities.

I also recall the biography he wrote about me for Shoggoth, a Lovecraft-themed Small Press magazine published in Australia. I didn't understand at the time why he was asking so many questions about me, my life and my writing, but it all became clear when the magazine appeared in my mailbox and I read, with mounting dread, "Ralph E Vaughan: Visionary of the Dreamlands." It also contained Damon's review of my then-newest story, The Dreaming Detective, a tale of Sherlock Holmes in HPL's Dreamlands. It was as embarrassing as it was flattering.

Sadly, Damon is no longer with us. Our correspondence tapered off after the start of the millennium, There was no argument, no disagreement, no falling out of any kind, as so often happens in fannish friendships. It was just an evolution. If I had to pick some reason, I might look to the rise of e-publishing and the decline of the Small Press, which had always been a paper-based phenomena. Lacking a focus, we drifted It's like those high school friendships. You're BFFs, then infrequent lunch companions, and finally Christmas card exchangers; then, one day, you realize you forgot to send a card, and didn't get one either.

It was toward the beginning of 2009 that I learned of Damon's death a few months earlier. He passed on 28 November 2008, about six months shy of his sixtieth birthday. He left behind an enduring body of fiction that will probably never be completely catalogued -- a drawback of the Small Press, where issues often never made it outside its small circle of subscribers. I will always remember him, will ever miss his wit, intellect and humor. My friend -- the Wizard of the Wastelands, the Master Scribe of the Eastern Desert.

Something's Brewing and Brevity Of Pen

My co-administrator Arimintha recently published a collection of her one-act plays. I asked if she would share something about her experience with writing for the theatre...

I have been writing one-act plays for over ten years. I was fortunate to get involved with a theatre that would produce them and then lucky enough to have some of my plays produced for The North Park Playwright Festival at the North Park Vaudeville and Candy Shoppe.

Recently, I took some of these plays and some others that I had written and and collected them in book form. It is not a collection of every play I’ve ever written. Such a book would be too long, and there are some that I still probably wouldn’t put in.

A few factors go into how I write. Some involve story, I often start with a kernel of something – perhaps a visual I want to see, an issue I’m facing, or a subject I want to write about. Something’s Brewing was based on a creation myth I had started when I couldn’t sleep one night and then further expanded upon a few years after I had originally wrote it. Have a Nice Death was based on the visual of a Goth cheerleader. It’s In the Cards was based on the idea that Fate was a card dealer.

What I really want to talk about is why I write one-act plays and things to keep in mind when you are writing them.

I write them because they happen to be easier to get produced. The theatre I worked at produced one act plays every month and a lot of playwright festivals are looking for those as well. To have a full-length play produced can be very hard. You often have to either fund it yourself, or be already established. It’s not impossible, but it is much more difficult.

The other reason I do it is because I find that it is all the space I need to get a story across. I have been told I have brevity of pen and when writing one-act plays, this is a good trait to have. Boltin’ and Joltin’ was written for a short screenplay contest. I was given some parameters and a maximum page count. When I looked on the forums, many people were finding it hard not to go over the page count and also had trouble trimming what they wrote. My advice is to keep the parts necessary to your story. You may have a line you love or a subplot that you think is awesome, but check if it supports your story or if it can go without it.  Decide if it is necessary to the story or it's just your ego talking. When there is a call for submissions, you want to give them a complete play, not something that is part of a larger work. Even if it is from a larger work, it must be able to stand on its own and be a complete story.

Keep your staging simple, your cast small, and have a minimal amount of set changes. You only have so many pages to tell your story and a lot of times people will choose your play based not only on the material, but also how easy it will be to stage. A cast of ten or more is unwieldy. Intricate sets and lots of set changes are not always feasible. When I was directing for some playwright festivals, I would go through the first page and look at how many actors I would need to work with. Because these were plays that were less than 10 minutes, anything with more than four characters or more than one set would get put into the pile that wasn’t going to get read. There may have been some really great plays in there, but because of limitations, they had to go to the side.

The last part is about formatting and following instructions.  If you are submitting for a specific venue, follow the instructions given. The quickest way to be put into the rejected pile is to not follow instructions. In terms of formatting, if you are going to direct them yourself or they are being produced at a theatre that does not have hard and fast formatting guidelines, you can mostly make your own. The main thing to remember is to make it easy for the actors to read and make notes on. If submitting to a more mainstream venue, I would recommend using software like Celtix. It is a free program and has tools for various formats such as stage plays, screenplays, radio shows, etc.

I enjoyed very much writing these and rewriting them for this collection. As I read through them, some of them took me back to my early 20’s, which sometimes seems like a lifetime ago.  I wrote these to be easy to stage in smaller theatres which don’t have a lot of resources. Some of these I directed and had a specific theatre in mind while I was writing. Some I wrote and were produced later and then it was up to the director to decide how to stage them.  All of them were written with the limited resources of small theatres in mind and I hope you enjoy them.

To order Something's Brewing & Other One-Act Plays

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Look it up!

"Look it up!"

I am sure, were you to ask either the Kid or the Kidette what phrase they heard thrown at them most often while growing up, I think "Look it up!" would top the list, even more than "Do your homework," "Clean your room" or "Eat your vegetables" -- I don't think we ever (or if we did it was rarely) used the phrase "What do you think you're doing?" because we just didn't want to hear an answer that was simultaneously silly and logical. 

We would use an unfamiliar word, and they wanted to know whether or not they had been insulted -- look it up. We would mention an unfamiliar country -- look it up. A new writer -- look it up. Some ancient long-dead tribe -- look it up. Some archaic or foreign phrase -- look it up. Misspelled words in their English assignments -- look it up. The reason, of course, was because, if you look it up, you're much more likely to remember it; just giving an answer to a child instills laziness and a contempt for learning. The result is that we have two industrious, well-educated, smart aleck children with large vocabularies.

My favorite reference books are still books, you know the kind made with paper, and I use them all the time in my writing. My first go-to book is the dictionary, in my case the Funk & Wagnalls College Standard Dictionary, copyrighted 1943. In this world of spell-checks and digital illiteracy, you probably wonder why use a dictionary at all, much less one seventy years old: it comes from a time when accuracy mattered.

Part of the reason is to look up the spelling, and while we're on the subject, I should mention that nothing beats proofing your own work by reading it aloud -- a spell-checker won't help you if you've spelled "bog" as "boy" or "lost" as "lust," but you can surely hear the difference, and will save yourself much embarrassment. The main reason I use the dictionary is the obvious one, to look up the definition, to see if that word that popped so quickly into my mind is really the best one to carry the load I'm giving it. While the F&W is my workhorse lexicon, I have a few other dictionaries that I turn to from time to time. First, is the Britannica World Language Edition of Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary (1959) in two volumes, mainly because of its seven-language dictionary. Another two-volume dictionary I use is The American College Encyclopedic Dictionary (1952), which I like because of the language commentaries in the first volume and the supplements in the second, as well as the clarity of the definitions throughout. Two other dictionaries used less often but still valuable are Webster's Third New International Dictionary and The Readers' Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary, which accompanied me when I left home long ago.

Another must-have book for any writer is a thesaurus, and I have two. My most used edition is Pocket Book's Roget's Pocket Thesaurus, which has been helping me to find the right word since the late 60s (and looks it). When I need a thesaurus with a wider range of selections I turn to Roget's International Thesaurus published by Crowell in 1962. Both of these books use the system developed by Dr Peter Mark Roget for his first thesaurus in 1852, that is words arranged by classification, then by divisions and sections, each step narrowing down groups of related words. I've tried using thesauri arranged alphabetically, but they just don't work for me. A thesaurus can be a very dangerous book in the wrong hands, as I found out when I was a newspaper editor in the 70s and encountered a young journalist who had been told in school not to use the word "said." Interviewees would shout, harangue, stump, blurt, exclaim, call, yell, whisper, murmur, repeat, state, aver...anything but "said." I could not get her to understand that words have shades of meaning, that words were generally not interchangeable, and everything depended upon context and connotation...so I locked her thesaurus in my desk drawer.

Another valuable book for a writer is neither dictionary nor thesaurus, but the Word Menu, created by the late Stephen Glazier. Its concept is stunningly simple -- divide the language into subjects, such as "Science and Technology" or "Institutions." Then break those subjects into smaller divisions, such as Mathematics or Politics. Then break them into even more specific lists. So, under "Part Three- Domestic Life" we have "The Home," under which have "Exterior Structure," a category of which is "Window, Walls & Facades," where we find short definitions for anta, bailey, bay window, bondstone, bull's-eye window (one of my favorite words), casement, Catherine wheel window...and on through wall, window and windowpane. To find the right word, you don't have to necessarily know what it means, just what, or where, it is. Stephen lived to see the completion of his monumental work but not to see it published. He died 20 January 1992, eight months before publication; he was 44.

What books you need as a writer, other than a good dictionary, a traditional thesaurus and a Word Menu, depends on what you write. I use an atlas quite often, but because most of my writing is historical I usually use atlases other people would consider outdated. Beside period atlases, I use several historical ones, particularly The Penguin Atlas of World History, as well as guidebooks from Baedeker and Muirhead. And because I also write of imaginary places I find that atlases of "maybe lands" are also handy. If you write suspense or spy novels, you might find The Ultimate Spy Book of use, and I find the Combat & Survival series in 28 volumes nifty as well. Fantasy writers might need books about dragons or the Middle Ages, or maybe A Field Guide to the Little People ("Marissa, do you still have my copy?"). Anyway, the kind of writer you are, the sort fiction or non-fiction you write, and your own curiosity level will determine which reference books you need to have at hand while you create...and you really do need books, especially in this digital age.