David R Slayton

Oct182013

Sometimes I Miss Vampires, but I Miss My Doc Martens More

I’ll confess that I’ve been over vampires for a while. They lost their sparkle some years ago, to the point where I recently picked up an urban fantasy that was really drawing me in until a vampire showed up and drowned me in cliché.

I wasn’t always so burned out on bloodsuckers. Years before Buffy put a stake through my heart, I held a dark and twisty love for Anne Rice, New Orleans, and all things that went bump in the night. I was an angsty boy, Goth before we called it Goth.*

I cut my own hair and dyed my clothes if anyone tried to dress me in colors. My father called me the “Prince of Darkness.” It wasn’t that I celebrated depression by wearing a lot of black. It’s that wearing black gave air to a feeling, a claustrophobia I felt about my own skin, that I hadn’t been able to express.

I write a lot about damaged characters. Sometimes their marks are physical, sometimes spiritual . And they can’t always name the source of the injury, usually because they haven’t yet identified it. I write about these boys, and they are usually boys, because I was that boy. I write about them finding some peace, some healing, because despite my young adult angst, anger, and walking around in the rain, I’ve found those things.**

My primary problem with vampires is that most of them are idiots. They live forever and never evolve. They never grow. You shouldn’t get to be immortal if you’re going to be an immortal idiot. Okay that, and I think that 100 years of high school is my idea of hell.

I loved Anne Rice because she showed us vampires struggling to change. Lestat wanted to break all the rules, burn down the world, and still settle into a quiet little townhouse with Louis at the end of it. Okay, I’ve a 1950s ranch with weird siding and cats, but I’ve settled down enough that I only occasionally want to scream. I never burned the world down and trying mostly singed just me. I’m not a broken boy anymore, but I remember him. He informs my stories. He sits in the dark, where he can see. He’s got something to show you, and he’s got a match ready to light.

*The term still eludes me since the gothic style let more light into cathedrals. You want shadows and gloom, get yourself a Romanesque basilica.

** It does, by the way, get better. Hang in there. It does. I promise.

Sep292013

The Stars Shone Bright

Texas isn’t home. It never felt like home. And it does not call me back. Still, I go there for work sometimes. This week I had the fairly disconcerting experience of being sent to Dallas where my hotel stood about a mile from my first apartment in the demilitarized zone between Grand Prairie and Arlington. Gunshots weren’t uncommon and the cops couldn’t decide which suburb should police it, so neither did.

I went by the brick mini-manor my father owned with my first stepmother, where I lived as a teen. I wanted to climb the fence, see the backyard, where I first kissed a boy in the rain, under a willow tree, beside my father’s goldfish pond. The experience washed me in bittersweet sentiment, in memories both good and bad. They mixed with feelings that were often just so overwhelming back then.

That boy, my first love, also overwhelmed me. The neighborhood was new then, freshly plopped atop the black mud they called Gumbo. We’d sneak around at night, wandering through unfinished houses, musing where we’d put the furniture, the piano, if the house was ours. It was perhaps the only time in my life when I yearned for domesticity. When it ended, after a few years of me pining and him denying me, Dallas felt like a crater. I climbed out and trekked to Denver on a scholarship earned through all the bad poetry the experience inspired.

Texas doesn’t call me back. Still, I had to see. I walked around the little park where I ditched school to read Margaret Atwood’s CAT’S EYE in one intense sitting. There were a lot of books in Texas. A lot of coffee. I was lonely. I was bored. So I read. I read voraciously. And I told stories, about myself, about him, the other boy.

When people ask me what I write I tell them that I write the book I always yearned for when I was a young adult, the YA book I still can’t find: an action-heavy fantasy with a gay protagonist. I write other books, but that’s the book I want to publish, the book I never see on all the YA shelves and tables that seem to be slowly winning all the shelf space. And I have to think there’s room.

Sep212013

Hello Autumn!

It’s been a fantastic, busy summer. I set a while ago to try and see the entire Shakespearean canon before I died, and I managed to knock quite a few of them off my list this year. I’ve been to Boulder and San Diego, Cedar City, Utah, and finally landed in Ashland, Oregon. Among it all I had the pleasure of taking my god daughter to her first play.

As I watch, as I listen, I start to find themes in the plays that reflect my own life or my own writing. That’s the point of it all, isn’t it? Shakespeare was written for the masses. The struggles of his characters, particularly in love and matters of station, would have resonated with his audience.

When I compare it Young Adult literature, I can’t help but see how writers do the same: first love is a constant, though after a summer filled with reading YA, I’m getting a little weary of triangles involving the good boy, the bad boy, and a female lead that can’t see past this struggle to more important matters. Still, it’s an old story. There’s even a jealous triangle in King Lear, and it works destruction on all its members.

It’s easy to note Shakespeare’s influence on literature. For me, I didn’t really discover the point until I started college, with a professor who made me read Hamlet so closely that she tested us on footnotes. Even with her encouragement, and even with my love of reading, I’ve never been good at reading plays. I have to hear them, to see them. I don’t think I really fell in love with a Midsummer’s Night Dream until I saw it in Ashland, done in the new style that’s as multimedia and lively as possible. Now I’m fairly obsessed with it.

I arrived in Ashland so stressed out from my day job that I was nearly in tears, after one of the worst days of travel I’ve ever experienced. Now I’m renewed, at least enough to blog again, and hopefully with lots of great plot tangles to ponder and unwind. If great literature has a point for me, a purpose, it’s that it can help us escape our troubles, and help us sort some things out while we’re gone.

Jul62013

“Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys.”

The PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER is one of those books that can hit you pretty hard. For me, someone who felt pretty isolated as a young adult, someone who could really have benefited from the Internet and social media, it had an intense impact. I was that weird kid. I am still that weird kid.

A friend recently watched the movie and a group of us gathered to watch it with her. Comparisons to the book were inevitable, and sort of the whole point. While I didn’t dislike the movie (of course I thought the book was better), the film did remind me of something critical that the book taught me: those first real friends, the first people you meet who are like you, can save your life.

Another important reminder was how easily we forget our young adult experience. Some people seem forever caught in that time, perpetual teenagers who skipped the valuable steps of finding one’s self. Others seem destroyed by it: what happened to them in that period never goes away. It lingers as a destructive time. And still, a third group seems content to wholly forget what it was like to come of age. These are the parents who can’t imagine why their teens act the way they do.

PERKS is an important book to me because it depicts the time when I came of age, and it references wonderful music like the Smiths, already defunct when I discovered them but whose songs spoke so clearly to what I was feeling and going through.

Since I write YA, I work hard to remember it all (embarrassing and painful as much of it is). It would be easy to slip into self-pity here, but I look back at my experience and realize that while I was that weird kid, he grew into a unique adult who can’t imagine being anybody else. And I think of the good friends I’ve had, then and since, all a little weird in their own way, and I’m grateful for every one.

Jun222013

Influences: Past, Present and Future

Anyone who’s known me a long time will hear me talk about Ultima, the series of rpg video games that provided me with some much needed escape in high school. The vagueness of the characters got me telling myself more about them. The long hours I spent, camped in my grandmother’s tiny second bedroom, staring into a black and white television set with controller of my Nintendo fixed in my hands were formative. It wasn’t long after that I wrote my first piece of fantasy: a terrible little thing with swords made of gemstones. Still, it was a start.

I’d always been a world builder. It’s the part I enjoy the most. Funny that I never got into tabletop gaming until gaming until my 30s. I guess I’d clung to the idea that I’d lose my connection to reality. I know it’s happened with video games. Last summer I completely fell into Dragon’s Dogma. I don’t remember Labor Day, but I remember hunting remishrooms to gift to Reynard, the cute wandering peddler.With tabletop, I found a lab for ideas. Writing a novel is very different than gaming, but still, I knew I was starting to nail a character when someone would talk about them like they were real.

But nothing influences me like books. Joss Whedon once said that you either watch television or you make it. It’s not the same with reading. You have to read in order to write, not just to know the market, but to learn. I haven’t been blogging a lot lately, and when I have, it’s mostly to review a book that really struck me. I’ve said before that bad books can teach you as much as good. I remember good lines from bad books, good parts of terrible books, and the scene stealing secondary character that should have been the star. Yet the really great books are the ones that lodge overall in my memory.

So I’m back to blogging, but I’ll be changing my focus a bit. From here on I’ll be including what the book I read taught me about writing. And I’ll be getting a bit more personal about the influence a book, film, or game had on me. I’ll try to avoid spoilers whenever possible but sometimes I’ll need to go into plot to talk about what I got out of the book, so I’ll let you know if there’s spoilers.

Apr292013

A Young Adult Book That Can Teach Literary Fiction a Thing or Two: Yeah, It’s That Good

I have to confess that I can be terrible about book recommendations. They pile up, float around my brain, and sometimes surface years later. I don’t doubt they’re a good read, but I sort of have to discover a book for myself. I can be just as bad about books gifted to me. They sit in a stack, slowly read but always growing in number. If I’m ever snowed in for six months, I might get to them all.

I first heard about Chris Crutcher’s STAYING FAT FOR SARAH BYRNES about fifteen years ago. A teacher recommended it to me in passing, and I forgot about it until recently, when I started writing a YA book and therefore, started consuming YA books en masse. STAYING FAT… popped up and wow, I’m glad it did.

I’ve read a lot of YA. There’s romantic YA, fantastic YA (my corner of the block), and there’s a set I’d call “heavy YA.” In the heavy YA category I’d put the PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, SPROUT, and anything that really dives into the young adult experience in a realistic manner. STAYING FAT FOR SARAH BYRNES might be the reigning champion. It’s dark, but genuinely funny, while delving into questions about religion, morality, and what bonds us with other kids.

This is one of those books that I sort of feel like an idiot for not reading sooner. It won a large number of awards and is famous enough that it should have penetrated my bubble even back when I was being an English major snob about books (a habit I’m happy to have broken). STAYING FAT is one of those cases where I can set a Young Adult book beside a good number of literary fiction novels and it just blows them all away.

In case you’re as in the dark as I was, it goes like this: Eric used to be fat. He’s still husky, but joining the swim team in high school has thinned him out. He fought it for a while, inhaling more food than was healthy, because being fat was what bonded him to Sarah Byrnes. Their childhood friendship was built on the foundation of his weight and her hideously disfigured face. Now Sarah isn’t speaking. She’s in an institution, and Eric is determined to draw her out. To do so, he recaps their exploits and how their friendship started. Along the way, Eric deals with a number of issues typical to high school: deciding where he stands on some things and learning how to go after what he wants. STAYING FAT…reminds me what it’s so easy to forget as an adult: that school was no golden youth, and that teenagers deal with heavy issues, heavy consequences, and heavy choices all the time. I’d tell you more about the book, but if you don’t already know, just pick it up. If you’re a parent, a teacher, anyone interested in writing young adult lit, or anyone just interested in reading a good book, then put this one at the top of your stack. I feel that strongly about it, me, who forgets recommendations and really wish I hadn’t ignored this one.

Apr292013

I Came for the Dragons and Stayed for the Madman: HAVEMERCY and SHADOW MAGIC

Charming rogues, tough woman warriors, and puny wizards are just some of the stock tropes in fantasy that have become clichés over the years. Finding fresh characters can be a challenge, so discovering Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett’s series has been a real gift.

The first book, HAVEMERCY, was recommended by my friend Alex Harrow when I asked for a fantasy with a gay character that had a more positive viewpoint than what I found in Richard K. Morgan’s books. I didn’t know what to make of HAVEMERCY. I liked the political tensions, and I loved the clockwork dragons that may or may not be alive. The romance however, dragged for me. Still, the book tried to draw me in with a few cunning plot twists. Despite a potent conclusion, I wasn’t completely hooked. Yet I was intrigued enough to pick up the second book, SHADOW MAGIC, and then they had me.

Jones and Bennett build their novels around four points of view, which are paired and usually opposing. In HAVEMERCY, the mage Royston is paired with a humble scholar, Hal while a foul-mouthed brute of an airman of the dragon corps, Rook is foiled against Thom, the beleaguered scholar sent to give the men of the corps what amounts to sensitivity training. Where SHADOW MAGIC really engaged me was in one of its two pairs: General Alcibiades and Caius Greylace. The conflict/friendship between these two made the entire book for me. Young, with a creepy Talent for fear-based mental magic, Caius delights in causing chaos (proving that he might not be the best member of the diplomatic envoy of which they’re part). Alcibiades is far more straight-laced, far more the stern soldier. He’s no fan of magic, even though he has it, and considers Caius a complete annoyance. The interaction between Caius and Alcibiades, and how they view one another, made the book for me.

If you want a fantasy with multiple points of view that does a great job of contrasting characters, then I recommend this series. It’s unconventional and very different: just what I was looking for. I’ve picked up the next two, DRAGON SOUL and STEEL HANDS, and I’m hoping to see more of Caius and Al.

Apr232013

Dogs Lie Down: “Rule One: The Doctor Lies.”

Narrators usually treat the reader as a confidant. They tell us secrets, confess their crimes, and in return we share their shocks and downfalls. We solve the mystery with them, and sometimes, possibly depending on how many thrillers you’ve read, you think faster than the narrator and beat them to the solution. It’s a careful game a writer plays with her audience: spinning out details so you walk with the narrator, but don’t solve the case before he does. But what happens when the narrator isn’t fully aware? Maybe they lack something the reader has? Then the game becomes downright delicate and it takes a writer with precise control of her craft to pit the narrator’s awareness against what the reader has already figured out.

Mark Haddon’s the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is an exercise in such craft. His protagonist, Christopher, suffers from Asperger’s (though I don’t believe it’s ever named). A boy on a mission to solve a mystery, he lacks the understanding of other people’s emotions that guides most of us through human interactions. As Christopher’s quest grows more complex, he strains against that lack, even as the reader sees things Christopher can’t.

It’s a beautiful little book that reminds me of how lucky I am that some things, like relationships, don’t come so easily for everyone. Christopher is original character. He’s brilliant at math, affectionate to his pet rat, and exact in the manner in which he follows the spelled out to him: which gives him several clever, logical outs when those rules aren’t expressed in practical ways.

Haddon builds a simple mystery that would fit well in a children’s book, the murder of a neighbor’s dog, into something of much graver importance. When Christopher has to push himself to go beyond the boundaries of the safe world his parents built for him, you worry for him in a very different way than you would worry for a child. I loved this book. My friend Alfred recommended this book to me after we were talking about readers and narrators. Reading it taught me a lot about how to use the reader’s intelligence to the writer’s ends, even in a first person point of view where the reader doesn’t know more than Christopher, they just understand more.

Feb272013

An Interview on Series Writing with Cecy Robson, author of SEALED WITH A CURSE – Plus a Giveaway!

I asked Cecy Robson, author SEALED WITH A CURSE: A WEIRD GIRLS NOVEL, about writing a series. She was kind enough to share some of her experience.

1. You’d written a few Weird Girls books before you landed an agent. How many had you completed and how much rework did you do?

I had three Weird Girls novels, three Weird novellas, and a spin-off novel written before I met my agent. When I signed with Penguin, Book One of my series had actually been divided into two novels. Those took the most work because I had to expand them into two books. The others were easier because they were already done. I rewrote each because my writing style had changed, and I because I had to match them with how the characters had developed. The details, plot arc, etc. remained the same.

2. Do you feel like it was better to have multiple books completed, or would it have been better to just have one?

My agent signed me after reading my first novel, knowing it had series potential. She didn’t realize I’d already written the next two installments and was overjoyed when I told her. Publishers―at least with regard to adult novels―like series. In fact, they expect it. Unless you’re a big name like Stephen King―who has the power to write a standalone novel and have it sell big―publishers want a project that can go on for several books and typically offer 2-3 book deals. Series potential makes an author more appealing. More books equal more money.

3. How much seeding do you do? For example, how much setup for book two did you put into SEALED WITH A CURSE?

I add enough to stir the curiosity of the reader. For example, I had a character that continued to make an appearance throughout SEALED WITH A CURSE. He never said much, but his presence suggested he had a purpose. He, ahem, shows up dead on my “weird” girls’ doorstep in the first few pages of A CURSED EMBRACE. The reader discovers his role as A CURSED EMBRACE unfolds.

4. A lot of paranormal series stretch on for a long time. Kim Harrison’s the Hollows and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books both come to mind. How far out do you suggest a series writer plan?

I planned closely for the first three that I wrote―hoping for a multi-book deal. However, I plotted out―at least in my head―seven books for my protagonist, Celia Wird. Since my series is about four sisters with unique supernatural abilities, I’ve since been “encouraged” by my agent and editor to start thinking about books for the other three sisters. I think it’s important when a writer creates a storyline to include strong supporting characters so they may potentially get their own spin-offs.

5. And of course, when’s your next book out?

A CURSED EMBRACE, releases July 2, 2013 followed by CURSED BY DESTINY (tent. title) January 2014.

I had the pleasure of meeting Cecy at the Backspace conference a few years ago. Aside from being a talented, dedicated, writer, she’s a genuinely nice person. I really appreciate her taking the time to answer these questions.

Cecy is offering a signed copy of SEALED WITH A CURSE to one of our readers. Like her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter. Let me know in the comments or by email (author@davidrslayton.com), and we’ll choose the winner at random.

Dec82012

A Fine Line between Pleasure and Pain: Read in Case of Self Doubt

I slept and dreamed that life was joy,
I awoke and saw that life was duty,
I acted, and behold duty was joy.
– Rabindranath Tagore

Having finished the work in progress, I’ve moved on to the next project: which means I’ve opened a book about a third done that I started a while back. While I am largely pleased with a lot of what I found beneath the dust: solid plot, good scene breaks, nice levels of action – something critical was missing. My last project had a really strong main character, a real scene stealer. One of the important things for me in the new book is to push myself, try to write a new character (and not just keep recycling a single personality type). While working on this, at making the new guy distinct from the old one, edits and critiques of the last book are coming in. Together, this makes writing more work than pleasure. It’s work I want to be doing, but expressing it raised a conversation with a friend about writing for the joy of it and writing towards trying to publish while another friend was struggling with being blocked too busy with her daily life to find the time to work on her book.

By nature, writing novels is a weird exercise. You work alone, maybe talking through ideas or discussing elements of the book, but ultimately, you do it by yourself. You steal time away from friends and family, forgoing television or the gym to find the time to put hand to keyboard. Then you start to share it with others, getting input, and learning that you completely fouled something up in the first act. Critical feedback too early in the game can crush your motivation, so you ignore it until you’re ready. Then you rewrite, edit, rewrite, for what feels like forever. When you’re finished, no matter how hard you worked, there’s no guarantee of success. So how do you keep going?

Write the book you believe in, the story you want to tell. This way, when the rejections come, and they may be little or they may be huge, you can keep going. It takes a little delusion to believe in your writing, but not too much. Over-confidence can blind you to self-improvement. I think one of the hardest things about writing a book is learning that you may never sell it. You might never make it big enough to see one of your books on the rack at your local bookstore. Each rejection can dissuade you, get you down. You’ve got to push past this, improving and striving while you sift through the feedback to learn what’s useful. This is where writing for the fun of it comes in. Take pleasure in the craft, in the work. Don’t give up, and keep getting better. It’s toil. It’s hard. And it has to be worth it even if you never publish. Write because you love to.

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