So my friend A.J. Brown and I recently decided to switch blogs, and he’s sent me a really interesting (and entertaining) article about when it’s okay to write a story and when a story is too much. If you’re interested in reading my interview with A.J. on his blog, check it out here: A Spattering of Blood with A.J. Brown. While you’re over there, check out A.J.’s other cool stuff, including more interviews with great writers (including ME!) and some really great free fiction. With no further ado, here is the very talented A.J. Brown!

**Taptaptap**

Hey, is this thing on?

**Taptap**

Whoa, there it goes. Thanks back there, whatever your name is.

Good evening. I’m AJ and these fine folks you see behind me are the myriad of personalities that hang out in my head. Some you may recognize. Others not so much.

They are with me today to (hopefully sit still and be quiet. They are so much like three year olds) ask two questions: When is a story too much? And, when is it okay to tell a story? We start with Dwight Patterson, who is on my left here. Yeah, the one with the slicked back black hair and the tuxedo with the red vest (he likes to dress like Dracula for some reason). Dwight, if you will.

DP: **Ahem** When is a story too much?

Thank you, Dwight. You can have a seat. Go ahead. Have a seat. No, leave the owner of this establishment alone—she’s friends with Herbie and you know how protective he is of his friends…

To answer the question: A story is too much when a reader says it is. Wait. You in the back, sit down until we’re done and hear us out. Mr. Blackwords is itching to get hold of someone today and you won’t like him when he gets hold of you. As I was saying, a story is too much when a reader says it is. However, it depends on the reader. Some folks are just too squeamish and don’t like a bunch of details. Some folks want all the gory information they can get. Others, like me, prefer when things are implied, not so much shown in all its glory.

Each reader is different. Like a person with a high tolerance for pain, readers either have or do not have a high threshold for explicit details. My friend, Stephen W. Sommerville, writes graphic stories that are quite bizarre. A person with a weak stomach or who gets disgusted easily probably shouldn’t read his work. By skipping over Sommerville’s work the reader would miss out on many unique storylines and interesting characters. I find his writing strangely entertaining even though he pushes the envelope near its limits.

Another friend of mine, the talented Paula Ray, writes in more subtle tones, layering her poems and stories in a manner that the details are a little more shocking in their revelation than someone who shows you everything unfolding. She would be on the opposite end of the scale as Mr. Sommerville.

In my story, Rise up Nanking, published in the Ruthless Anthology (yeah, shameless plug, I know) there are vivid descriptions of what happened in what has been dubbed the ‘Rape of Nanjing’ (which happened in the early 1930’s). I researched this event and found my stomach churning as I read of the atrocities of what happened. When I wrote the story there was no way to sidestep the reality of the events, the brutality and hatred that were behind them. By the end of the story I was disgusted with myself for writing it. I pushed myself to a limit that I rarely step over. I will probably never write something as brutal ever again.

Most stories fall somewhere between Paula and Stephen, pushing the boundaries a little, but not stepping over them. Rise up Nanking was closer to Sommerville than Paula.

To this I want to add, as readers, we all know what we like and don’t like. If you begin reading a book and it’s not to your liking because it is either too subtle or too in your face or not enough of either of those, then do one of two things: either keep reading and you may find you like the story or put it down and find something more to your liking. However—and I stress the word HOWEVER—do not blame the writer if you don’t like it. It’s not your cup of tea. Fine, just move on to another tale and sip the words from that cup.

Crashman Jack would you mind coming forward? Stop snickering. So what if he looks like a Lego crash test dummy—he races cars after all.

CMJ: When is it okay to tell a story?

Thank you, Crashman Jack.

This is sometimes a touchy subject. I wrote Rise up Nanking nearly eighty years after it happened. Most folks outside of Asia don’t even know about the events. So, when is it okay to write about a tragedy? This is another of those questions that begs the reader to answer it. In my opinion, it is okay to write a story when the story wants to be told. Stephen King wrote a piece that appears in the collection Just After Sunset. The story is called The Things They Left Behind and it’s based on the events in a man’s life, post 9/11. This man cheated death by not going to work that day. Many of his co-workers did not have such fortunate fates, having been at work when the planes hit the towers. The collection came out in 2008, just barely seven years after the events of 9/11. Too soon? For some, maybe. For those with wounds that run deep from the loss of loved ones or from being in the towers and barely escaping or from skipping out on work that day, the story could bring back some terrifying moments; some heart-wrenching moments, some guilt…

Here in South Carolina the name Susan Smith brings anger to a lot of folks, especially in the Union area where she killed her two children by strapping them into their car seats and driving her car into a pond. Though the event happened over fifteen years ago, the tragic loss of the two children, aged three and one, tears at the hearts of those who lived there at the time. A few years later I was reading a short story collection titled Robert Bloch’s Psychos. In it a story by Jane Yolen, A Southern Night, appeared. It was clearly about the Susan Smith murders and written just three years after she committed them. Too soon? Maybe for the folks in Union, but for the rest of the world who only caught glimpses of the story in the news, maybe not.

I have read dark stories about post-Katrina events, stories about the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, other stories, much darker than King’s, about 9/11. They are what they are.

This is my take on the question: Life creates stories for us. Tragedy, more often than not, is the basis of most good stories. Whether that tragedy is a love story where the two lovers take their own lives at the end because of feuding families, or that of two Hobbits in their quest to destroy a ring that should have never been made, or the story of a great boat sinking that was supposedly unsinkable, tragedy creates most stories.

Ed Gein, a young man turned killer, is the basis for many characters in horror movies, from Norman Bates in Pscyho to Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs to Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Real people are the basis of great fictional characters, even if their views on life and death are skewed.

Whether it’s a mother killing her children or war or planes crashing into buildings or love lost to betrayal or death or even a misunderstanding, tragedy is the foundation of most great stories and their characters. Tragedy can’t be avoided—it happens daily. Take a look around you. Someone you know has been abused. Someone you know has just lost a loved one or a job. Somewhere in the world there is a fire, a hurricane, tornado, thunderstorm, tsunami, flood… you get the point. Lives are affected everyday by the events around them.

Life is a story, made up of chapters and many of those chapters are not sweet and neat and tied into a little ribbon. It’s not always happily ever after. So, when is the right time to tell a story? My answer is simple: When a story needs to be told… After all, life and its tragedies are the basis of most stories…

Thank you folks here at the Breathe Compound for having me and the boys. Now, I will take my leave and try to gather up all the personalities that came with me… Herbie… wait, put the needles down…

1. Got my first royalty check today. Cool.
2. Very busy with PTO stuff, but in a good way. It’s fun seeing people work together to make something great happen.
3. Finally almost done potty-training my youngest. Of course, now the real work begins.
4. A great big thank you to the folks at The Trent Wood Times for the article on Secrets of the Lotus that appeared today. I still remember the first time I saw my name in print in a newspaper. Of course, it doesn’t give quite the same thrill anymore as it did when I saw it all those years ago in The Transylvania Times. I wonder if that first time is what started me on this path, or if my path was already decided for me?
5. Breathing Moment: The moment when my daughter, who is suffering from her first cold of the season, informed me that “Hugs make my nose better.” I stopped what I was doing and picked her up immediately, and I’m so glad I did.
6. Greenpoints: Who am I kidding? I drive a tank that gets 13 miles to the gallon. Isn’t that basically like pouring gas out on the highway?

I titled this blog post aptly, I think. Yes, I live in the same town as a famous writer. Whew. What a relief. Got that one off my chest. He’s a great guy. I’ve spoken to him on a few occasions and been to a couple of his events in town. He’s done wonderful things with his money—funding charities and building schools. I’m not going to mention his name, but if you did a little research it wouldn’t be hard to figure it out. And for the record, I like him and I love his family.

That said, it’s not a dream come true for an aspiring writer to live in the same town as him. Not only in the same town, but literally right down the river. Well, down the river and around the creek, anyway. This guy has multiple best-sellers, and most of his best-sellers have become blockbuster movies. How do I compare with that?

If I lived in my old hometown, I’d be considered quite a success story by now. If I still lived in many of the other places I’ve lived since then, I’d be a success. A very big fish in some semi-small ponds. And yet, I find myself, a published author—and published by a real publisher, no less—living in the shadow of the biggest fish of all.

It’s not so bad, maybe. A shadow is still shade, right? And shade is valuable in Eastern NC. Sometimes, maybe, it’s quite comfy living in shadow. No real pressure. Hell, whatever I could think of doing as a writer has already been done by the guy that lives a few doors away. But still.

Yeah, there’s that. I want to be recognized for my writing. So I work harder, I promote more. And I write, write, write. I try to learn from my small successes and slightly larger failures. And I stop to look around every once in a while and don’t feel so very alone.

You see, there are a lot of really talented writers here in my town who haven’t achieved the same recognition as the writer I refer to (and he doesn’t need a plug, trust me). They work hard, they publish books, they go to signings. They don’t get the big book deals, but sometimes they get to see their books on the shelves in bookstores. And most of all, they continue to write. I salute them for that.

Maybe I’ll get there eventually.

September is here and it brings with it a break, at last, in ninety-degree temperatures. Taking advantage of this the other day, I took a walk with my kids. I was amazed by how very talkative my two boys got on this walk! We’ve lived in our house for not quite a year now, but they’ve thoroughly explored the neighborhood. They know more neighbors than I do, and we’ve had to impress upon them the importance of staying out of the woods during the summer due to the very real danger of copperheads and water moccasins.

On this particular walk I was thrilled to find that my boys have already discovered the local legend.

Every neighborhood has one. The house nobody lives in. The mysterious, unknown, dark, deserted house. Or the patch of woods nobody ever developed. Or graveyard. Or the park where some kid broke his head/neck/back (maybe).

These legends color our childhoods in a very real way, regardless of how loosely they’re based in fact. A friend of mine, Steve Lowe, recently blogged about another of my favorite childhood urban legends: the ghost boy in Three Men and a Baby. Check out his blog here: Three Men and a Flashback. As he says, we now have Snopes.com to dispel many of our old urban legends. But the neighborhood legends won’t ever be taken away. I mean, who can deny this legend from our new neighborhood? (Names changed to protect the very innocent minds that invented this one.)

“See that house, Mommy? Nobody lives there. The people who lived there were all killed. Drake says he looked in the window and there are books on the shelves and pots on the stove. And guess what? There was a balloon that said YOU’RE NEXT on it.”

Ooh. Feel the chill?

Today I spent a good bit of time rushing around getting ready for the arrival of an unwanted guest by the name of Earl. Hopefully he won’t actually make it here, but it’s going to be a near miss, nonetheless. While forced to wait in carpool for my son, I rolled down my windows, checked the latest forecast on my cell phone and closed my eyes for a breathing moment.

While living on the coast, I’ve seen a few hurricanes. Bonnie and Ophelia come to mind. Ophelia was another storm that wasn’t supposed to be “that bad”. A category 1 hurricane by the time she hit the shore of North Carolina, she lingered for hours, tearing up piers and ripping off roofs. I remember sitting up that night thinking how very wrong man can be when he tries to predict the will of God.

When I see the spectacular whirling disk of clouds that is a hurricane, I know there is a God. In fact, I would say these are my greatest moments of faith. What else could create such a massive force and send it spinning across the globe, crashing through our creations?

So today I watched the clouds spinning counterclockwise and thought of the huge storm they were a part of. I took a deep breath and remembered the story I wrote a couple of years ago. It was part of a competition called The Long Write in which several writers participated. We were given a prompt and a certain amount of time (two days, I think) to write a story. As you can imagine, the finished product was not highly polished. However, we got a lot of good stories, or at least kernels of ideas from it. I’m printing The Wheel in the same condition it was in when I turned it in for the contest. I’m off to batten down a few more hatches. Enjoy!

This is my breathing moment of the day. I wrote something that I know is good. It happens every now and then. You write a line and you know it captures something. So after I wrote it, I took a minute to breathe. Anyway, I wanted to share it with someone, and I figured, what the hell? If you read my blog, you’re a friend, and it might as well be you. So, here it is, an excerpt from my almost complete work-in-progress, ALWAYS FAITHFUL:

As she stood there in her dead husband’s home, his rings still on her finger and her gaze held by a man she could no longer deny her feelings for, Alicia realized that not all beginnings start at the same place, and she wondered where this path could lead her if she followed it.

It’s just a sentence, yes. But it’s kind of important to me. It’s the first sentence anyone but me has read of ALWAYS FAITHFUL, and I think it gets to the heart of the romance in the story, although that’s only one thread of many in this one.

I kind of really hope you liked it.

“Procrastination is the thief of time.” Edward Young, an eighteenth century British poet, may have said it first, but in my mind I’ll always attribute it to my high school chemistry teacher. I think it was the way he said it. “Procrastination is the…thief…of time.” Just like that. Whenever I’m tempted to procrastinate, I hear his voice in my head. Don’t remember a thing about chemistry or the proper use of test tubes, Bunsen burners and pipettes, but those words will always haunt me.

So when is procrastination no longer procrastination but a breathing moment? When is a breathing moment procrastination? I’ve been examining this question a fair amount as I get back into the whirlwind of school and its demands. With three kids in three different schools on three different schedules, I’ve got my work cut out for me. I foresee that my “breathing moments” are going to become even more important as the year progresses.

Will I have that guilty feeling I get when I’m procrastinating? As I sit on my front porch watching red and yellow and brown leaves fall from the maple and poplar trees, will I be able to forget two stories waiting to be edited, my as yet unfinished work-in-progress, PTO emails to be sent and two loads of laundry waiting to be folded? Will I be able to keep my breathing moments from becoming a short-lived thing of the past?

I have every intention of hushing that little voice of my old teacher whenever he pipes up. Shhh. I’m not procrastinating. I’m breathing.

Today:
Breathing Moment: Took my kids to the pool. One last hurrah before summer ended. I sat on the edge of the baby pool watching my three-year-old play and my six-year-old jump from the diving board. My ten-year-old is already back at school. He probably needs a breathing moment or two.
Greenpoints: Instead of throwing away the disposable plastic plates my kids used for breakfast, I washed them. It would have been easier to throw them out, and washing them sort of defeats the purpose of disposable plates, but even a couple of extra uses might help.

“When will your book be available in print?” People keep asking me this, and sadly, I don’t know for sure if SECRETS OF THE LOTUS will be available in print at all. That’s up to the publisher, Lyrical Press. Because they foot the bill for this book, it’s their business to decide if it’s worth their dime to make SECRETS OF THE LOTUS available in print. I would like to point out that SECRETS has received THREE favorable reviews. If you’d like to read these, here are some links:

Single Titles Review
Happily Ever After Review
Romance Book Scene Review

If you’re convinced by the reviews that my book has something to offer and you really do want to see it in print, purchase an e-copy at lyricalpress.com. That’s really the only way to show the publisher the book is worth something in someone’s opinion. SECRETS is also available from many other ebook retailers.

On the bright side, you can see my name in print now, if you want. My werewolf story “Black Dog Alley” is one of the many excellent stories featured in Liquid Imagination’s DREAMS AND SCREAMS anthology. DREAMS AND SCREAMS is available for purchase from Lulu.com here: LIQUID IMAGINATION’S DREAMS AND SCREAMS.

I haven’t been good about keeping you guys up to date on these, but I am practicing them. Anyway, here are my Breathing Moments and Greenpoints from today and yesterday.

BREATHING MOMENT:
Yesterday: I stopped to look at the moon shining on the water. It’s not full yet, so it must have been its angle in the sky that turned the creek outside my house into molten silver. Beautiful.
Today: The moment when I saw my son stand with the rest of his fifth grade class, I concentrated on breathing in and out for a moment. A little more than ten years ago, in the hospital, I held him in my arms in the hospital and wondered how on earth anything could be so beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

GREENPOINTS:
Yesterday: I didn’t start my car AT ALL! This is a big thing since my car is a gas-guzzling minivan.
Today: I turned off the lights in the kitchen during the evening hours when no one was there. It’s more convenient to leave them on, but we might as well save that electricity, right?

Just as I’m beginning to be discouraged, I get a little whiff of hope. So many books are written and published today, and then they languish forgotten on the imaginary shelves of Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. I have no real reason to believe SECRETS OF THE LOTUS won’t be one of those books. Remember Disney’s Chicken Little wishing on a star? “Come on. All I need is a chance!” I know I’m not the only writer out there that feels that way.

This week has been a week of mixed emotions in my writing life. From a rejection by an agent to being absolutely blown away by the reception my little Free Fiction page received (thanks in large part to a grassroots effort by a couple of my friends to spread the word, but still), I’ve been pretty well torn on how to feel about whether to even keep on keeping on. I’ve certainly got plenty of other things to spend my time on.

Then, out of the blue, I find a tweet (I’ve just started Twittering) about SECRETS. It got five hearts from Romance Book Scene! How awesome is that? Want to check it out? Here you go: Romance Book Scene Reviews SECRETS OF THE LOTUS. The author, Roni, who I swear I don’t know, calls my book, among other things a “sweet love story” and a “very nicely written contemporary romance”.

Maybe my writing career isn’t a hopeless loss, after all.