Tag Archives: short stories

Short, dark and than some

My short story “Taming the Tiger” will be published in the collection, The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Joni Mitchell, later this spring by Untreed Reads. I wrote the story more than a year ago, so it was a little jarring to look back through it as it’s being prepared for publication and realize how dark it is. There is a sinister love triangle, a twisted power struggle, and a Talented Mr. Ripley-style murder. This isn’t the first time I’ve written dark short fiction. In fact, when I started thinking about it, all of my short stories, both published and unpublished, explore disquieting themes and paint bleak pictures of humans and their motivations.

All of this got me wondering: just what kind of monster am I?!

It’s probably common for people to assume that writers match their writing. Ernest Hemingway, whose books center on dashing, macho men battling their inner demons, was a dashing, macho man, battling inner demons. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Gatsby-like party boy. When asked where his dark inspirations stemmed from, Stephen King had this answer: “People think I must be a strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It’s in a jar on my desk.” (For the record, King isn’t quite the sicko his books would make him appear, but he was a raging alcoholic for decades, and even now he’s known for being quirky and elusive).

In my case, though, the darkness of my imaginary worlds doesn’t match up with my personality. I’m generally jolly and usually upbeat. I like wiener dog races and the color yellow and pictures of newborn babies wearing giant hair bows. My childhood had the usual share of minor traumas, but I grew up surrounded by loving family members. So why, when I sit down at a computer, does blood and fire pour out of my fingertips?

My fellow mystery writer and good friend, Tracee DeHahn, and I were talking about this phenomenon recently. She, too, is a uniformly upbeat person who comes from a stable background. We’re both relatively new to the world of mystery writing and have been wowed by the kindness and affability of the mystery authors we meet. Seriously, Malice Domestic, the annual gathering of writers who spend their days mentally murdering people, is filled with folks who are, on the whole, kinder than your average church bake sale committee (though, it has to be said, much, much raunchier).

My theory is that for many writers, the page is a safe place to process negative emotions. For me at least, fiction is like an external hard drive to store my darkness. Even cheerful people like me have heaps and heaps of bad thoughts that need to find expression.

Maybe I particularly like to visit those dark places in short fiction because it seems to allow me just enough time to explore those themes without absorbing them. Short fiction is a long weekend in the Land of Id — the raw, exposed, and sometimes downright yucky swamp in my emotional landscape. Visiting Id-Land allows me to appreciate life back at my emotional dwelling place: Giant Baby Bow Town.

 

Word architects

After a long hiatus, I finally started working on a novel again this month. With apologies to all the very patient Lindsay Harding fans, I haven’t started working on the next chaplain mystery. Instead, I’ve begun revising the manuscript for the middle-grade adventure novel I wrote a few years back in the hopes that I can submit it to agents in the fall. It feels good to be back in the saddle!

During this fallow period in which the sum total of my finished writing projects consisted of a single 1,500 word short story, something surprising happened. I’ve been offered two really cool opportunities to put on my Author Hat© and do Cool Author Things©. In my experience, that doesn’t usually happen. I’ve found that if I don’t promote the heck out of my books, attend conferences, and crank out new material, my sales dwindle to a trickle and my Author Hat© gathers dust in its metaphorical closet. Luck was on my side the past few months, though!

jeriandmindy
Celebrating with Jeri Rogers, Literary Editor of Artemis Journal at LitFest Pasadena.

Cool thing No. 1: I got to go to LA and be fancy in a room full of extraordinarily talented people. That 1,500 word short story I mentioned above won the Artemis-Lightbringer “Women hold up half the sky” competition for science fiction with feminist themes and a strong female protagonist. My story received dual publication in Artemis Journal and on the Hollywood NOW website in addition to a cash prize from Hollywood NOW. You can check out my story in the 2018 edition of Artemis or hear it performed by actor and filmmaker Kamala Lopez, recorded live at LitFest Pasadena a few weeks ago. My story starts around minute 57. There’s also a little awards ceremony at the end where I give an impromptu, margarita-fueled speech.

Cool thing No. 2: I’ve been invited to go to one of my favorite places in the world, the Outer Banks, and give a book talk on Saturday, September 29th. Here’s how that whole thing came about. My friend Pam is an innkeeper. Kind of an 18th-century throwback job, huh? She keeps inn (inn-keeps?) at the White Doe Inn in Manteo on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She recently started up a series of evening arts events and, knowing that A Death in Duck is set near there, she invited me to come give a book talk as part of the series. I said yes before she even finished inviting me.

Both of these unexpected wonderful opportunities reminded me of something. When you publish something or otherwise put your writing out into the world, you lose control of where that writing goes or how it will impact people. Being a writer is kind of like building a house. You may build that house for a specific client or with a clear vision for who will inhabit it. But years, decades, or, if you’re incredibly lucky, centuries later, that house could be roughly the same. Or maybe it will have undergone a complete renovation or maybe it’ll be a crack den. Once you hand it over to the world, you can’t control who lives there or what they do.

The same is true of writing. People’s reactions can be scary or disappointing, like when a series of negative reviews from homophobes blights your book’s Amazon page (the literary equivalent of a crack house?). But they can also be thrilling and encouraging, like when you get to travel to both coasts within the space of a few months to share your work. Not bad for an unproductive year.

Mindy Quigley in Space!

I got word a few weeks ago that my short story “Equality Day” was selected as the winner of the 2018 Women Hold Up Half the Sky Award, sponsored by Artemis Journal, Light Bringer Project & the Hollywood Chapter of the National Organization for Women.

The contest required me to write a science fiction story with feminist themes and a strong female protagonist. I’ve never attempted anything even remotely like this. Though I did manage to birth an infant, launch a child into middle school, and have my kitchen renovated, 2017 was a spectacularly unproductive year for me in terms of writing. For most of the year, I’d felt all but brain-dead. However, when a writer friend sent me the contest details, I could feel my long-stilled creative juices begin to softly burble.

I’ve written before about how I tend to approach writing like a project to be managed. The contest had a very concise 1,500 word limit, which made it feel like a do-able project. I didn’t have to try to snap my sleep-deprived synapses into shape in order to knit the details of an entire novel together. I just had to maintain concentration for a few hours at a time. Pulp-O-Mizer_Cover_Image

 

Even still, the road to triumph was paved with many false starts and deleted pixels. When I begin a short story, I almost always start with an idea that’s WAY too big for a short story. That was even more true with “Equality Day,” where the story I wanted to tell had enough detail for at least three feature-length films. The world I pictured had achieved a veneer of social equality by eliminating all outward signs of gender. I didn’t want it to be hard-core scifi (no spaceships, no time travel, no blue-skinned creatures sporting ray guns). But despite the similarities to our own world, the story remained stubbornly unwieldy and enormous, and there seemed to be no way to make it smaller. To make matters worse, I had next-to-zero time to sit down and start working through my ideas on paper.

Weirdly, the fact that baby-rearing gave me so little time to write improved the story. What I lacked in computer time, I made up for in many nights of half-conscious cogitation. Throughout November and into December, while I was nursing my son, I kicked around ways to bring the story under control. Late one night, with my little son suctioned to me like a remora fish, a vision dawned on me–a little child who lived in a genderless world, seeing a woman for the first time. Before I slipped back in bed that night, I jotted down what became the first sentence in “Equality Day”:

The first time I saw a woman, I must’ve been about five.

That sentence gave me what I needed to get started. A few furious drafting sessions and many edits later, I’d managed to tell the story I’d wanted to tell, in only 1,468 words.

Look out for “Equality Day” in Artemis Journal and on the Hollywood NOW website in early May. And look out for me at LitFest Pasadena where the story will be read on stage by a celebrity guest on May 19, 2018!

The Four Questions

I’ll be reading this short story this afternoon at the Blacksburg Library, but for those who can’t make the reading, and who don’t have Montgomery County local access TV, and who can’t wait for it to be posted on the New River Valley Voices YouTube channel, here ’tis. A little more serious than my usual fare. Let me know what you think!

THE FOUR QUESTIONS
The news came on the day of the Passover Seder.

“Sorry, darling, but your father won’t be joining us,” < my mother said, planting a kiss on my cheek as I stepped into the hallway. A vodka martini dangled from her hand like a vestigial appendage. “He’s chosen to pass the holiday with Karen or Corinna or whatever this one’s name is. But on the upside, Tess has made Gefilte fish from scratch. Nothing like soggy fish balls to soothe the sting of betrayal, eh?” She arched a wry eyebrow.

As if on cue, my little sister, Tess, flew down the stairs. “Pretty wild, huh? We’re taking bets on whether this one will be older than me.”

Tess, obese, myopic, lovable, neurotic Tess, possessed little more than a half-completed Master’s Degree in Film Studies from UC-San Diego _ and myriad pollen allergies, but she’d recently decided to become an organic chicken farmer. She and her boyfriend, who’d inherited money, but not business acumen, from his father, had put in an offer on a 70-acre parcel in rural Mississippi, complete with coops for 35,000 laying hens. Their business plan was liberally peppered with phrases like “radical self-reliance” and included a strategy to feed the chickens on a diet rich in seaweed. To my knowledge, Tess has never touched a live chicken. We indulge her, of course. < Families are supportive. That’s what families do. Families indulge things.

But Tess is the youngest, and there are still no grandchildren, so even if she goes around spouting agricultural pronouncements like a poultry-specific version of the Oracle of Delphi, the finding of the hidden afikomen and the recitation of the Four Questions fall to her.

My older sisters, the twins, took the news about my father like cosmopolitan sophisticates, laughingly wondering how long it would be before Dad would announce that we had a new little brother or sister. They took their cues from our mother. For her, the zap of a joke could staunch the blood pouring from any wound, and a quick-witted retort could dispel unpleasantness with the swiftness of a magician’s wand. My mother’s eyes smiled along with the twins, but her mouth was sewn up into a tight button.

I alone, it seemed, was astonished by my father’s absence. To me, it seemed like some trick of the light that would be revealed as an optical illusion. “Ta-da!” someone would spring from the shadows and shout. “He was here all the time!” Instead, there was an empty chair next to Tess who was enthusiastically belting Mah Nishtanah, the Four Questions, like she was trying to stage a Hebrew rendition of Oklahoma! “Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot?” What is different, this night, from all other nights?

***

I got through dinner, even the homemade Gefilte fish, but after we got home, my husband found me in a sobbing heap, splayed next to the tub like an unmolded Jell-O.

“Come on, babe,” he consoled, bent low, hand on my back. “They’ve always been miserable. They were doomed from the start, like Romeo and Juliet, only without the stabbings or the sonnets or the suicides. Or the romance. Okay, not like Shakespeare, but you know what I mean.”

I shook my head. I knew he was trying to cheer me up, but I couldn’t even muster a smile. Fran and Benjamin Aaronson of Evanston, Illinois, passing their Seders separately for the first time in 33 years.

Puffy-faced and red-eyed, I dragged a toothbrush back and forth in my mouth, thinking of my own Four Questions.

Had my parents always been miserable? Probably. When they fought, the insults they hurled had a seemingly inexhaustible power supply, a nuclear arsenal, mutually-assured destruction. But their banter fed on the same fuel, igniting explosions of laughter that reduced them to tears and shook the very walls of our house.

Was my mother to blame at all? Most likely. Her ruthlessness as a public prosecutor was second only to her ruthlessness toward her liver, which she’d spent her life doing her best to pickle. And although my father could give every bit as good as he got, no doubt he could be forgiven for seeking out eyes that could look upon him without that unfocused glassiness.

And to what could I ascribe my father’s philandering, which was stitched into the very binding of their marriage? It wasn’t a midlife crisis—Nana Ruth once told me that it had always been this way, even when they were dating. And it had always seemed to me like a game he and my mother were playing together. Sure, the joke was sick, but I thought she was in on it.

As I climbed into bed next to my sleeping husband, it was a fourth question that planted itself in my mind and took root like a fast-spreading bamboo. Whatever they’d had, hadn’t it always been the same? For 33 years. Through four daughters. Through the death of my only brother, little Evan, the wispy candle flame of his life snuffed out before he even took his first breath. Through my father’s prostate cancer scare, hadn’t she tended him during the long months of treatment and recovery? Through my mother’s fear of flying, so paralyzing that when my Nana Ruth was dying, and mother had one of her panic attacks in the departure terminal at O’Hare, hadn’t he driven her through the night and day all the way down to Miami—26 hours—so she could be with her mother in the final hours? Hadn’t what they had been the same through my wedding the previous summer, when they had stood next to the chuppah, smiling and holding hands with habitual ease as Jason and I took our vows.

What is different, this night, from all other nights? I rolled the question around in my mind, trying to recall the moment when everything transformed. Some words, maybe? An insult too far? A joke that fell flat? If I could only find out what had changed things, I could use that knowledge to dig a firebreak around my own marriage. To keep the spark from catching, and burning my life to the ground.