Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  I love wrestling with the length and the character and the setting and the motivations. I love trying to get it right. I like the brevity—although sometimes I feel like I am stretching the stories out; I have this mentality that every story should be at least between four and five thousand words. I’m not sure where that comes from—there are certainly fantastic stories out there that are much shorter. But one of my primary struggles with myself as a writer is an innate stubbornness. I get something into my head and become so attached to it that I stick to it even when it demonstrably makes no sense.

  I’m not sure where the stories come from, to give an honest answer to the question that plagues authors at public events or during interviews. They come from somewhere within my brain, sometimes triggered by something I’ve seen or heard, something that made me sit back and think, interesting.

  “Survivor’s Guilt” began as a horror story, written for an anthology call for stories of a thousand words or less. It was originally called “Blues in the Night,” and I thought it was pretty good. But the anthology didn’t take it—didn’t even give me the courtesy of a rejection, which seems to happen more and more as I get older and the bar of what’s considered professional courtesy continues to lower. So I put it aside as a failed story and figured I would go back to it again sometime, when I wasn’t limited to such a low word count. When the opportunity to write something for the Blood on the Bayou anthology came about, I pulled out “Blues in the Night” and rewrote it, made it longer. I had once written an opening for another story that never went anywhere, that I really liked, and so I pilfered it from that other story for this one. And as the story grew, I began to understand it more—and why it didn’t work as a thousand words or less type story. I was pleased with it, and even more thrilled when it was nominated for a Macavity Award. It didn’t win, but I was also short-listed with some amazing authors—Art Taylor, Paul D. Marks, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lawrence Block.

  That still boggles my mind.

  “The Email Always Pings Twice” was written for the MWA anthology Mystery Box; all stories had to be about the contents of a box. As is so often the case, I came up with the title first, and I decided to play with the theme a little bit; years ago I worked in an office where an older woman always referred to her computer as “this stupid box,” and a computer is, in fact, a type of box; something that contains other things. As I played with this idea and the title, the idea of a woman starting a new life by moving in with the man she loves, only to find something in his computer that lets her know that maybe he’s not who she thinks he is, started forming in my head. I also liked the idea of the double ping—her cell phone and her laptop letting her know she had a new email. I thought this outside-the-box thinking about the theme (yes, a bad pun, but it was there for the taking) might just get me into the anthology (they are incredibly competitive), but I was wrong. But I was very pleased when Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine liked it enough to publish it.

  “Acts of Contrition” also was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. It was my first time in their pages, and it was one of the biggest thrills of my career when Janet emailed me that they were going to use it. The great irony of the story—which was used in a special “one year after Katrina” issue—was that it didn’t begin life as a New Orleans story. In the early 1990s I was visiting a friend in Seattle and stepped out onto the balcony of his apartment to smoke a cigarette. It was raining, and through the downpour I could see a priest talking to a young homeless girl. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but both were very animated, and the fact that both were getting soaked in a cold rain didn’t matter to either of them. I went back inside and wrote what I saw down in my journal, adding what were they talking about? On my flight home, a red-eye that left at one in the morning, I couldn’t sleep and so I wrote, in longhand, a story based on what I saw. After I moved to New Orleans, I adapted it to New Orleans—the drenching rain in New Orleans being something I’d become very well acquainted with in the meantime—and when the opportunity for Ellery Queen came along, I worked on the story some more.

  My first crime story with a gay main character to see print was “Annunciation Shotgun.” I was asked to write a story for the New Orleans Noir anthology by Julie Smith. The way Akashic Books’ noir anthologies work is each writer is assigned a neighborhood, and they write a story about that neighborhood. The city noir series also has a diversity requirement, so I was asked to write a story with a gay main character. I had already conceptualized a story called “Constantinople Shotgun” that I wanted to use, but that neighborhood was already taken. I had to moved my story to the lower Garden District, where I’ve lived for over twenty years. I picked Annunciation Street because it was a long and unusual street name; the shotgun from the title is not an actual gun, but rather refers to the shotgun style of house common in New Orleans. I once described a friend as ‘the kind of person who, if you call him and tell him you’ve killed someone, without missing a beat replies, “Well, the first thing we have to do is get rid of the body.’” I wanted to write about that kind of friendship, that kind of bond between two gay men who live next door to each other in the halves of a shotgun style house; how that spatial intimacy allows you insights into each other’s lives.

  “An Arrow for Sebastian” was my second crime story with a gay character to see print. The narrator of the story is removed somewhat from the actual story; it’s told in an observational style. He is observing the events of the story but isn’t really an active participant in them. I remember the opening of the story came to me one afternoon when a friend was telling me about this horrible dinner party she’d been attended the previous evening. As she spoke, I had this image of someone trapped at a horrible dinner party, noticing the young man sitting across the table from him and wondering what his story is. The young man was accompanying a much older gay man whom the narrator dislikes. As I wrote the story, I began to see the young man and developed him more. As I got to know him better, my sympathy for him began to grow. I originally saw him as a hustler, being paid to be the obnoxious gay man’s date for the evening. But as he began developing into a person in my mind, as I gave him a backstory, the story also began shifting and changing. It became more than just a crime story; it became more sad and poignant than I’d originally intended, which made the ending even more tragic. Novelists, Inc., a professional writer’s organization, took the story for their first anthology, Cast of Characters.

  “A Streetcar Named Death” was also published in a Novelists, Inc. anthology; the next year’s I Never Thought I’d See You Again. In the late 1980s, I’d written a story called “Fellow Traveler,” in which a truly awful woman is forced to take public transportation and…well, let’s just say it doesn’t end well. I liked the idea of the story, the basic frame of someone who doesn’t ordinarily take public transportation being forced to and the story springing from that happenstance. When Lou Aronica, who’d edited the first Novelists, Inc. anthology, asked me to contribute a story to this second anthology, I remembered my story about public transportation. At this point, I’d ridden the St. Charles Avenue streetcar in New Orleans many times and was always surprised whenever I ran into someone I knew on board. Using a streetcar as the foundation for the story, and someone having to take it home from work because their car was in the shop, all I needed now was a story. I was actually on the streetcar, watching a young man board, when I wondered, what if you ran into someone who’d harmed you many years later on the streetcar? What would you do? And what would you do if that person got off at a spot in your neighborhood? Someone who harmed you years before now lives in your neighborhood, and after that first time seeing him again on the streetcar, you see him everywhere now. And he doesn’t recognize you.

  That was apparently the right premise, because the story just flowed out of me.

  “Cold Beer No Flies” likewise is also one of my old stories from a particularly fertile writing period in the late 1980s. It was originally se
t in Kansas, at a bar I used to occasionally frequent when I was in college called My Place. In the original version of the story my bartender was a young straight woman, and someone she’d always had a crush on in high school one night shows up at her bar, miserably married to another one of their classmates, and she gets him back to her apartment that night and sleeps with him, only to wake up alone in the morning with a lot of regret. The story never worked; I thought the ending wasn’t right. When the chance to write a story for Florida Happens presented itself, I remembered “Cold Beer No Flies,” reread it, and realized what was wrong with it. I changed the straight woman into a gay man and moved the setting to a small Florida panhandle town, and it evolved from that seed. What is it like for a young gay man to grow up in the smothering climate of a rural small town where he’s seen as a freak and a sinner, something slightly less than human? A victim most of his life, he has plans…and if those plans cross the line into criminality, well, what choice does a poor working-class gay kid in rural Florida have?

  “Housecleaning” was written for Sunshine Noir at the request of the editors, Annamaria Alfieri and Michael Stanley. My mother was actually the inspiration for this story—although the only thing she and the mother in my story have in common is the obsessive cleanliness; I always joke that my mother would have thought Joan Crawford was a slob. That first sentence came to me one day when I was cleaning my apartment. I was filling a bucket with hot water to clean the bathroom, and when I added bleach to the water I actually did think the scent of bleach always reminded him of his mother. I laughed, thought that’s a great opening line for a short story, and made a note of it. When Annamaria and Michael kindly asked me for a story for their anthology, I remembered the line and used it as a starting point. The narrator began to take shape for me as I wrote about the woman his mother was and how who she was impacted who he would become. It’s one of those rare cases where I didn’t know the ending of the story when I started, but as I wrote it inevitably led me down the path to what the ending had to be. The final version of the story is pretty close to the original draft. The only changes I made to the story were some sentence/paragraph revisions here and there to improve the tone, pacing, and wording. The plot, the characters? They didn’t change one bit.

  “The Weight of a Feather” was originally written for an MWA anthology about the Cold War; it, too, was rejected (getting into an MWA anthology is a bucket-list item of mine; I will keep trying until I make it), and then just sat around in my files for years before I pulled it back out and worked on it again. It was my first time writing something that could be considered historical. It was also my first time writing a story not set in the ambiguous present. I tried to remember that some details of modern life (like direct dial telephones) didn’t exist in this postwar world of Washington, DC, that I was writing about. I wanted to write about that very real fear of being exposed as a closeted gay man working for the State Department during the time of McCarthyism, and about what it was like to be gay in that era. In rereading my original draft, I realized I’d stomped on the action by starting the story in the wrong place—I can be terribly stubborn about that sort of thing. While the place I originally opened the story made for an actual great opening, the result of starting there meant everything that came before had to be told in flashback, which slowed the pace down to a crawl: Nothing happened.

  Sometimes it’s best to let things sit so your emotional attachment to what you’ve written lessens and you can then see it more clearly.

  The story behind “Lightning Bugs in a Jar” is an interesting exercise in rejection: It was written for a specific anthology but was cut from the final manuscript by the editor after two extensive revisions/rewrites based on editorial notes. I came up with the title years ago; when I was a kid I always used to catch lightning bugs and keep them in mason jars with holes punched in the lid with a butter knife. I’ve always loved that image and thought it made a great title. I’ve always been interested in creative couples who work in the same discipline, and how difficult that must be for married writers—the sense of support yet competition at the same time, and how the relationship can eventually go sour…and in this particular case, divorce isn’t enough—not after the years of suffering the wife has been put through.

  There’s no loathing quite so intense as that which comes from living in close proximity to another person, is there?

  “Spin Cycle” is one of my post-Katrina stories. Originally written and performed as a radio play, I turned the play into a short story for my anthology Men of the Mean Streets. For “Spin Cycle,” I took something comical yet incredibly frustrating from my real life and used writing about it as a cathartic release. In those days after Katrina, contractors had real power over their clients—they were in short supply and everyone needed repair work done to their homes—and I’ve heard many stories about contractors and their employees that make “Spin Cycle” look tame in comparison. And yes, my contractor’s wife used my washer and dryer, and precisely in the way described in the story. No good deed…

  The final two stories in this collection, “Don’t Look Down” and “My Brother’s Keeper,” are both originals written specifically for it. “Don’t Look Down” originated as a story set in the French Quarter about a has-been music star and the gay journalist who comes to interview him on the eve of a comeback attempt, and was called “Whatever Happened to Billy Starr?” When I visited Italy several years ago and stayed in a villa in the Tuscan village of Panzano, I realized this was the perfect setting for that story. The elements of the village were perfect, and it simply made sense for the story to be set there. Once I moved the setting to Italy and started writing the story, it just continued to grow—but I couldn’t find anything to cut that wouldn’t (in my opinion) irreparably harm the story. While I’m very aware that people might not be satisfied by the ending of the story as written, I am very pleased with it; it does everything I wanted and intended for it to do when I started writing it.

  Several years ago, I ended my Chanse MacLeod series after seven books, with Murder in the Arts District. I said at the time I didn’t know if I would continue to write about Chanse moving forward, but I just couldn’t see writing another novel at the time. “My Brother’s Keeper” is the Chanse novel I never got to write, the one where Chanse goes back to the small East Texas town where he grew up, where his younger brother is in jail, charged with the murder of an upstanding local businessman. In writing this story, I realized there are still Chanse stories I want to tell—but they most likely will be short fiction rather than novels. I am working, in fact, on another Chanse short story—it might become a Kindle single, maybe I’ll do another collection. Who knows? But I do like writing short stories about Chanse, and I do think I will do more in the future.

  So, there you have it: my first collection of crime/suspense stories. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing the stories and pulling them all together into this collection. I have a lot more stories in my filing cabinets, and I get ideas for more stories all the time. (I’ve come up with ideas for three more stories while writing this afterward, as a matter of fact.)

  I love short stories.

  Until next time.

  —Greg Herren

  New Orleans, 2018

  About the Author

  Greg Herren is the award-winning author of over thirty novels and twenty anthologies. He has won two Lambda Literary Awards, an Anthony Award, and numerous others; he has also been short-listed for the Shirley Jackson Award, the Macavity Award, and the Lambda Literary Award an additional twelve times. A public health worker by day, he lives in New Orleans with his partner of over twenty years.

  Books Available From Bold Strokes Books

  Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories by Greg Herren. Award-winning author Greg Herren’s short stories are finally pulled together into a single collection, including the Macavity Award–nominated title story and the first-ever Chanse MacLeod short story. (978-1-63555-413-7)


  Saints + Sinners Anthology 2019, edited by Tracy Cunningham and Paul Willis. An anthology of short fiction featuring the finalist selections from the 2019 Saints + Sinners Literary Festival. (978-1-63555-447-2)

  The Shape of the Earth by Gary Garth McCann. After appearing in Best Gay Love Stories, HarringtonGMFQ, Q Review, and Off the Rocks, Lenny and his partner Dave return in a hotbed of manhood and jealousy. (978-1-63555-391-8)

  Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks by ’Nathan Burgoine. Cole always has a plan—especially for escaping his small-town reputation as “that kid who was kidnapped when he was four”—but when he teleports to a museum, it’s time to face facts: it’s possible he’s a total freak after all. (978-1-163555-098-6)

  Death Checks In by David S. Pederson. Despite Heath’s promises to Alan to not get involved, Heath can’t resist investigating a shopkeeper’s murder in Chicago, which dashes their plans for a romantic weekend getaway. (978-1-163555-329-1)

  Of Echoes Born by ’Nathan Burgoine. A collection of queer fantasy short stories set in Canada from Lambda Literary Award finalist ’Nathan Burgoine. (978-1-63555-096-2)

  The Lurid Sea by Tom Cardamone. Cursed to spend eternity on his knees, Nerites is having the time of his life. (978-1-62639-911-2)

  Sinister Justice by Steve Pickens. When a vigilante targets citizens of Jake Finnigan’s hometown, Jake and his partner Sam fall under suspicion themselves as they investigate the murders. (978-1-63555-094-8)

  Club Arcana: Operation Janus by Jon Wilson. Wizards, demons, Elder Gods: Who knew the universe was so crowded, and that they’d all be out to get Angus McAslan? (978-1-62639-969-3)