It’s been more than a week since I’ve posted, and when I do post, it’s not what the People of the Plains in my fantasy novel, Mirrororrim, call news of “doings.”
So, yeah, I’m a writer with 16 titles (8 novels, 6 memoirs/creative nonfiction, 1 collection of short stories, 1 poetry chapbook, and 1 children’s book) to my name and two more in the works. I’ve done all that writing over the last six years, since I began my transition. I’ve been a professional writer and teacher of writing nearly all my life. Yet, art, I’ve found, is impossible to create without authenticity to myself. Not until I was real to me could I really write, paint, and bake what makes my heart sing.
The dusk of this calendar year and the Northern Hemisphere’s arc to the Winter Solstice are a time for me to account for what I’ve been up to.
Hang Girl
The first half of 2023, I worked hard at what, in retrospect, was an octopus of a tale, with no fewer than 12 lead characters and a plot line that grew plot lines like a hydra. It’s the third title in my Chronicles of Diana Atestesso series, that started innocently enough with The Fire Golem, continued in The Smoking Inn, and took on tentacles in Hang Girl. When I first conceived of heroine Diana in The Fire Golem, I felt inspired by a combination of the movie, Captain Marvel, and the mythic work of
, both of which pushed to the fore the very needed heroine’s quest, after literally centuries of male hero tales. I didn’t meet Diana Atestesso with those sources in mind. Instead, she stood up and rammed her story into my heart. My third novel, The Fire Golem, was the first one I sparked fresh off the anvil, the previous Maria (of the angels) and Mirrororrim being tales I’d lived with for 30-40 years before putting them into novelic form.As spunky as Diana is, she wasn’t gonna let me get off so easy with just one title. She’s resourceful, adventurous, and multitalented, as her defeating the horrors of an abusive ex-husband secretly hiding in her home (The Fire Golem) and her foray into turning a church into a bar and being the unexpected vanguard of Texas LGBTQIA+ activism in The Smoking Inn attest. After those two tales, she and husband Finn had a lot more to say.
Hang Girl is that statement that couldn’t be contained solely in Diana. As she has the penchant for doing, she had to bring in a host of friends, some brand-new to my novelic universe and others old friends from Maria and Yanter.
“Innocent” Beginnings
I started simply enough on a horror-themed short story with the working title of “Haunted House,” that had nothing remotely to do with Diana:
“You’re a smart little prick,” old man Gibbons spit, the hole in the shed glass behind him staring through me.
Dean and Troy had scattered, the second rock still in my hand, having winged a clean exit wound through the shed window.
“I make smart fuckers pay,” sneered Gibbons. “That shed was haunted till you plunked a river stone through the window. Let the bad air out. How ’bout I give ya a harder challenge than breakin’ glass—will ya worm your way out of that so easy?”
“Tell my old man,” I said. “He’ll have me work it off by painting this fuck-dump of a shed or something dumbass like that.”
He shook his head.
“You don’t get it, smart as you are. I have a house that makes smart little fuckers pay, like my whore bride paid. You should meet her now.”
“Is she as fossilized as you?”
He smiled.
“She’s aged a little since she hung herself in my shed. Here’s the deal, ya little fucker. Key to my house is yours. You and your lover buddies stay there Friday dusk to Sunday dawn.”
“That dump?” It was top of the hill from the shed, which is how I liked it to stay. “I’ll get bedbugs that’ve sucked your blood.”
He sneered. “Things ain’t what they seem from the outside—just like a braggin’ prick like you is really a pussy. That’s the deal.”
“I’m not a pussy.”
“‘I’m not a pussy!’ the dripping cunt shrieks.” He snickered and headed up the hill. Over his back, he flung, “Next time you cross swords with me, maybe you’ll show respect.”
Oh, that did it.
“Respect? Everyone in the county despises you.”
He turned with a cave-eyed hunger.
“A few respected me before they died. If you’re afraid to take the deal, stop bleedin’ out your pussy mouth.”
I moved to head home.
Three steps later, I turned and said, “I’ll do it. There’re worse things than dying!”
His back shook with a laugh.
“Oh, there are, sonny. You’re gonna get acquainted enough with ’em to wish you died before you set foot on the threshold. Friday, six o’clock. Bring your tampons.”
The old man was someone Diana had thought she’d bested before. But the sonofabitch keeps coming back. From a creepy old dude preying on middle-school kids, he grows into a warlock who drags 11 other people into his take on hell, including Diana, Finn, Maria, Costeen, Sarah, Tami, Diana’s daughter, and a few new characters.
It became the most wildly sprawling narrative I’d attempted, which is saying a lot if you’ve read Mirrororrim. At any given moment, I literally didn’t know what was going to happen next. Such are the risks of writing subject matter I hadn’t spent decades mulling over.
Extravagant Introversion
And writing is a risk. I don’t mean trying to market it and weather the inevitable rejections. I mean the risk of becoming something more than I was before I wrote it. For writing, if I’m doing it in earnest, dips far more deeply into me and into the world I interact with than mere conscious thought allows. It’s an alchemy of magik, serendipity, and the awareness that I’ve taken on more than I bargained for when I tapped old man Gibbons into my keyboard.
When I watch a movie or read another author’s tale, that maker is my guide, operating by rules they and I implicitly stake out and agree on by virtue of my continuing to take in the next scene. When I write, I have none of those comfy rules.
I’m a highly functioning introvert who doesn’t snort coke and glad-hand everyone at the party. But it happens anyway. Except in writing, I make none of the introductions. My characters introduce themselves to me and force me to learn more about life and myself with every word they tell me. I didn’t seek them out. I don’t even know they exist till I’ve committed myself to, say, a vignette in which a perverse old man challenges a kid to the ego-horrific equivalent of a dick duel.
Seven-League Heroine Boots
What does my heroine have to do with that? I swear, it wasn’t till the 15th revision that I got a clue. To this day, I’m not sure what it’s all about.
But there they are, stomping around in seven-league boots, these characters who crash the haunted-house party and give the old man a run for his money—that is, only after he’s transported them to hell and more.
Maria’s heart jolts like it hasn’t since she had prophetic nightmares a lifetime ago. Her husband has vanished under the gaze of that creepy painting whose one pupil bores in on her.
“You know who I am, bitch!” comes a hiss. “I’m the taint in the blood, the Mark of Cain. Sop me away, but the meat still seeps blood. I claim what’s mine before cunts like you snatch it away.”
“What did you do to my husband? ’Ware, monster! I serve the Ancient Wells!”
The portrait winces at the name of the wells but the rasping voice tears into her brain.
“Here’s the deal—you can put your pert little ass on the line to rescue Hubby Dear, or you can turn around, file a missing-persons report, and stay comfy in your little home o’ wonders. The portal’s closing! What’s your pleasure?”
Maria stretches out her hand in a command of summoning.
“I take no pleasure stepping into a trap, Demon. I call you out!! You are in the House of the Ages, and I am its Oracle!”
Maria feels the grip of a hell-wind sucking her into the portrait. Instead of fighting the vortex, she steps into it, driving her fingers into his remaining eye to extract the remaining pill. It’s in her mouth and she’s gone, even as the old man snaps jaws on where she was a second before.
So, I Got Sucked In
The risk is in not being able to come back. To see who you are once the tale is told.
You won’t be the same. I know I’m not for having written it.
In my next post, I’ll tell you how the suckage worked with the massive nonfiction book I spawned in the second half of 2023, taking me places not even old man Gibbons could have nightmared up for me.
Hang Girl is available in Kindle, paperback, and hardback formats here, with an audio version to come in the near future.