by J. D. Brink
Lightning strike.
“Doll” lives again.
“Lonely” also made the rounds with little expectation for success. Then, to my happy surprise, the editor at Cemetery Moon magazine was interested. He’d enjoyed it and wanted to run it.
Of course, I quickly said yes.
And it would be over a year before I heard anything else about it.
I’d given up by then, but the next issue did finally come out and the story finally saw the light of day. Paul had waited a long time to get chewed on and killed by that dirty slut from the alleyway, but at last he had his night of glory.
And now again. Hopefully, this time, even more gloriously.
The third story, “Unfeeling,” was not a sexual experiment.
It was written from the first line on.
You might think that all stories naturally start with the first line on, but what I mean is this: I was at a Barnes and Noble bookstore (a usual hangout of mine) and I had to pee (a usual bathroom of mine). In case you’ve never been in a B&N men’s room, the usual set-up is two stalls and a urinal. I stood at the urinal to do my business and there on the floor, right below the divider that separated me from the first toilet bowl, was a tiny brown-black puddle.
It was not watery stool, if that’s what you’re thinking.
At least I don’t think it was.
It seemed to be filth that had dripped from the metal divider of the toilet cubical. That wall had obviously gotten wet somehow (I don’t care to speculate on how) and now there was this small, nasty-looking black puddle on the bathroom floor between the toilets.
When I walked out, I literally thought to myself: “Somebody needs to get a mop in there.”
The story grew from there.
So there it is.
I know a magician isn’t supposed to reveal all his secrets, but I always enjoy reading about the writing process and evolution of stories, and I thought maybe you would too.
And these three simple, short tales actually have some interesting back-story themselves; it would be a shame to never share them.
Hmmm…
Hello again. 2019 here.
Yes, now it’s 2019. All this time jumping is confusing, isn’t it?
I’m republishing Walk again, now with a brand new cover and as the first book of the Git & Shadows Collection.
And upon rereading (and slightly revising) all this Memory Lane stuff again, I realize that the 2012 afterword was written before “Mime” had been added to the book.
Once upon a time the cover said, “A Trio of Dark Tales.” Then I added “Mime” but I obviously never added the story behind it.
Not that there’s much to say. I do have a snippet of memory, though, that I could share…
I remember walking down a back street in Carlsbad, California, where I was still stationed and living near Camp Pendleton.
Oh, that’s a nice town. And I had a fantastic location, too. Just a few blocks from downtown, a straight shot to Pizza Port, not to mention Alejandro’s for breakfast burritos, and this little taco joint that was great to hit after leaving the bars…
But I’m getting off topic. Sorry.
(Damn, I miss those days!)
Anyway, there was a street that ran parallel to and on the opposite side of the main drag, and I was just out for a walk and trying to dream up a story. I wanted to write something (as opposed to nothing) and wanted it to be quick and quaint and just this perfect little package delivered with the speed and impact of a bullet.
And as I walked, I imagined a tall, lithe mime walking in my place. But a creepy, scary, white-faced bastard.
And the story quickly evolved from there.
So I suppose that was a third “deliberate” story.
It was what I called “genetically engineered” to be published. Not just a wild, twisting bramble that grows naturally, but something decided upon and designed to hopefully strike a nerve with an editor and be easy to pick up and publish.
(Being so short helps that, too. There’s always room for Jello, after all.)
And it did.
The nice editor at Ascent Aspirations accepted it for publication in October 2009. It became one of my first publication credits.
And that’s that.
Okay. No more rambling, no more time jumping.
Thank you for reading this book and this exhaustive history of the history of time traveling history. I hope you enjoyed everything.
Or that some of it gave you nightmares.
Well… Preferably, both.
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
Afterword to Kiss of the Maiden
I often feel the need to narrate outside of the stories themselves. Either to give a bit of interesting history on the stories or novel, or just to explain how I screwed something up.
In this case, it’s a bit of both.
The first time I published Kiss of the Maiden it was just that story. Which, in case you hadn’t guessed, is not all there is to that story.
It was the first chapter of a book proposal for a military space adventure that I had in mind to write for an existing sci-fi universe; one that started about 30 years ago with a game and has, over the decades, evolved into quite a substantial grim dark, SF universe with a huge international fanbase. (I am one of those fans, too.) The sole publisher of said universe opened rare windows for submissions to write within that universe. I assembled my book proposal, outlined an entire novel, and sent it in. This was, say… 2012? Something like that.
I never heard back from them. Meaning, they weren’t interested.
Not a big deal: 99% of writer submissions don’t get published.
But, since I couldn’t write the planned novel as it was—since I had no rights to that universe or the brand of characters that exist within it—I put the whole thing in a drawer and forgot all about it.
I’ve since come to realize, however, that I can still tell the tales of Handsome Kynes; I just have to do so in my own universe. Basically, knock off all the proper names and aspects that go with that brand and just add my own.
And I will do that. Someday. Hopefully someday soon.
See, part of my problem is that I have a bazillion stories in my head, across a wide range of genres, and little to no time to make them happen. I thought getting out of the Navy would help that but… so far it has not. I am still the sole breadwinner of my family in the chaotic realms of the Civilian World, where I don’t have Uncle Sam right there to guarantee food and shelter.
I’ve since developed my own little saying: The grass may or may not be greener on the other side of the fence, but there is always dog shit in every yard.
At least there’s less threat of me being removed from my family to enter a far away war zone in this yard…
But I digress. (Whatever that means…)
Long story short, I didn’t want that shark hunting chapter to go unseen for another decade or more. So I figured it made a decent short story on its own and published it as such.
Then I thought that was basically just a tease and doesn’t do well all by itself. So I took it down.
Fast-forward to now. I get this idea to link together all my “grit & shadows” books and stories and figure I can republish the same title with a handful more stories to tell. All linked by similar voice and/or mood. That gruff, first-person, noir-style narrator. Or dark, brooding moodiness. Or just having something to do with kisses from maidens you’re better off avoiding.
And so, here they are. As for other historical bits, the other four stories you’ve just read have also been seen elsewhere before appearing here.
Epidemic received an Honorable Mention from the international Writers of the Future Contest. I submitted it several other places as well, never quite sure how it would be received. Addiction in America right now is a touchy subject, after all. I think much of the blame can be squarely placed on the shoulders of those who have made billions of dollars from the broken lives of its victims, but maybe not ev
eryone feels that way. If you took offense to this story in some way, I deeply apologize. My intention was not to mock or belittle the victims. It was to point a finger at a possible source of our current plague and compare it all to the complacent vampirism that it is.
You’ll also notice that the story begins in a mall food court. That really is where the story began. I myself was eating Mediterranean food, heavy on the garlic sauce, and was doing a bit of people watching. The germ of opioids equals vampires may have already existed in my brain and maybe I was just trying to find a path to bring it out. I’m really not sure. Inspiration doesn’t always explain itself.
The Proposal appeared in Weirdbook #41; just days ago from the time of my typing this, actually. The editor there, Douglass Draa (a fellow Ohioan now living abroad, I found out), was going to accept it for #40 but ran out of room. I was happy to have him squeeze it into issue #41, however. If you like weird, Lovecraftian, or pulpy SF/F, they have 41 thick issues of it worth exploring.
Another note on The Proposal: the characters are named for my paternal grandparents, both now departed from this world, Jim and Pauline Brink.
We miss you.
Kiss of the Maiden I have already explained. Sometime in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future I hope to pen the adventures of the reluctant military SF hero, Revis “Handsome” Kynes. I plan to loosely pattern his journey after The Odyssey—the cunning yet stubborn hero-philosopher trying to get home from war. You’ll see (eventually). It’ll be fun.
Snake Eyes appears in the cyberverse as a standalone short story and within the covers of my 13-tale collection Green-Eyed Monster (also published this year). Since it is very much a sci-fi noir story, I wanted to include it here, as well. Both it and Moondance have some detailed histories as to their origin stories, which are detailed in Green-Eye and I’d rather not rehash it all again here…
Well, that seems kind of lazy on my part, doesn’t it?
I’ll cut it to the quick instead: Snake Eyes was an idea originally called “Probability and Bullets” that I had scribbled in a tiny notebook that was lost in a jacket pocket for years. In 2017 I pulled that jacket out of the closet, put my hand in the pockets, and rediscovered a story worth finally writing. It’s not going to win any awards, but I like it.
Moondance was inspired under a full moon—no shit, I’m serious—during two consecutive Christmas seasons on Navy Base Yokosuka in Japan. On the first one I came up with the idea and on the second, a year later, I remembered and finally wrote it. It was then published by Crimson Streets modern pulp (another fine source of reading material, if this is your thing). And then again by me as a standalone and within the Green-Eyed Monster collection.
And now here, again, because I want to gather all my current noir-style tales under the Grit & Shadows mark. A fun, holiday-themed story, in my opinion. (Though not the holiday season it was born into.)
I have long gathered my noir-shaded stories under the umbrella of “Grit & Shadows,” rather unofficially. With the re-publication of Kiss which you now hold, I decided to string all these together as a series by that name. So if you haven’t yet read the four noir-horror stories in A Long Walk Down a Dark Alley, you might like to go back and do that.
I also encourage you to check out the novel One-Eyed Jacks, which is probably my oldest noir tale, based loosely on true adventures I had 16+ years ago in the Navy. (Okay, very loosely based, but I did go to Saipan and gamble a bit in their casino. And wrote the first short story while aboard ship many years ago.) It’s less horror-flavored than many of these stories, but tastes way more like Sam Spade/Maltese Falcon than some of these others.
As always, thanks for reading.
J. D. Brink
Mystery
Afterword to One-Eyed Jacks
This story has a lot of history. For me, anyway. Looking back over the notes I made years ago—14 years ago, in fact—I was amazed at what I rediscovered about this story and the time that I spent writing it.
I started on this final revision almost fourteen years to the day from when I completed that very first draft on August 7, 2002. (I started this final revision on August 18, 2016.) According to my notes, on the night that I finished, I was “sitting in my apartment, hoping to go visit Sirena in the hospital, a girl I hardly knew but had talked to (drunk and sober, once each).” This was my apartment in Yokosuka, Japan, during my first hitch in the Navy. (I’m writing this nostalgic afterword eight years into my second hitch, and also in Yokosuka, Japan!) I would also have romantic relationships with Sirena twice. (We broke up in November, I think, and got back together on New Years Eve.)
Anyway, those notes were finished at the conclusion of the first draft, 2002. I would rewrite this story multiple times over 1.4 decades and make some major changes along the way: Jack wasn’t always named Jack. The story was originally entitled Solitaire. And Alma was originally some kind of water goddess.
These changes happened during my own Wandering: When I failed to thrive out west and had to return to Ohio in late 2004. While I was in nursing school, probably around 2007. And again once I was back in the Navy and living north of San Diego.
Still, I’ve been afraid to come back and work on this story. I like Jack, and the themes and ideas here, and I was afraid of messing them up. I wanted to wait until I was “a better writer” to come back to this. Last month, in August of 2016, I finally decided it was time to blow the dust off this puppy and make it happen. Putting it off indefinitely wasn’t doing anyone any good. At that rate, no one would ever read it.
And honestly, now that I have come back to it, it’s not quite as wham-bang as I remembered… Kind of like how you remember Thundercats being the coolest show ever when you were a kid, but if you watched it now, decades later, a pillar of your childhood would crack and crumble away as you realized how not-quite-as-cool that show probably looks through adult eyes. If I were writing this short novel from scratch today, it would probably come out a bit differently, in style and storyline. And would probably have a bigger page count.
Even so, it is what it is. If I tried to totally rewrite it using my fourteen-years-older writer’s voice, it wouldn’t be the same story anymore. And that would suck, especially after unearthing all these neat nostalgic nuggets from my old computer files of 2002. Writing about Jack’s adventures was therapeutic for me in 2002, 2004, 2007, and even 2010. And while I’ve evolved into someone else since that time (as we all do throughout our lives), I won’t dismiss that evolutionary process by giving Jack and company a complete, radical overhaul. It meant more to me then, and so it means a lot to me now.
In fact, this isn’t even the first time I’ve sat down to write this author’s afterword either! Allow me to tell you the story of the story from twelve years ago. Here are a few highlights from my efforts in 2004:
Girls basketball. That’s where all this started.
On an ordinary day back in January of 2002, I was eating lunch on the mess decks of the USS Cowpens, the guided-missile cruiser I am proud to say I was then serving aboard as a cryptologist (a “spook,” one of those nerdy secretive types who can’t tell you what they do). On the mess decks were two televisions running ESPN. Just as they were turning off the TVs to chase us out for clean-up, there came a blip of a story about girls basketball entitled, “A Pack of Wildcards.” I never found out what that had to do with basketball, but it stuck in my head as a motif I could use for the story that was trying to take shape in my head.
Shortly thereafter, Cowpens set sail for ports Pacific, including a liberty call in Saipan. My descriptions are a little grittier than the reality, but they aren’t off by much.
On the way there, I remember sitting up on deck, nestled between the hazed grey hull and a chaff launcher, a notebook in my lap and the sun on my face. The vast, blue, undulating waves of the pure open ocean are what inspired Alma to first be a nymph or deity of the sea.
I probably knew at least two women named Alma, as well; there are a lot of Filipinas i
n Yokosuka. And the name fit well with two other names in the story, thus inspired:
I had recently bought a complete collection of the works of Edgar Allen Poe from the base exchange (department store) and was reading “The Gold Bug,” which I remembered from high school as possibly being the very first mystery story ever written. I wanted my story to be a mystery, too. So, to pay homage, I named three of my main characters after that author: Edgar, Alma, and Poh.
I wrote some of the story before we hit Saipan and Tinian, and obviously much of it afterward. I’d write on the boat, off-duty. Sometimes I worked at a corner table of the mess deck when it was open in the evenings, and sometimes I’d sit at tiny table in our berthing and work after lights-out. The only light in our dark, fifty-one-man living space came from the dim red lamps above and the pale glow of my screen. My LPO (leading petty officer—supervisor) would sometimes find me tapping away at my keyboard on his way to bed and whisper from his rack, “What’s up, Hemmingway? Done with that novel yet?” It was nice to have some encouragement toward something that was in no way Navy related. (Thanks, Sully!)
A few more truthful tidbits: There is a nice hotel with a big flagstone, open-air lobby right on the beach, but it’s the Hyatt or the Hilton or some other giant chain resort; the Seaside was the name of the club on-base in Yokosuka.
I met a girl named Mona in Singapore who was staying in room 205 of a hotel there (which is Ming’s room). And I wanted to later name Swan’s daughter after a girlfriend, Sirena, whose family had migrated from Hong Kong to England, but she never did tell me the original Chinese name her parents had picked out for her.
The Moonlight Club was actually called the Starlight Club, and there were a lot of sailors in there (me included), though I honestly don’t remember if it was a strip joint or not. (But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably was.)