Psycho Killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est? (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being a Serial Killer)

I didn't plan to become a serial killer; it just kind of happened.

Hang on, I should probably back up a little bit here. And, before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, I have not killed anyone and I don't think I ever will. Sure, like most writers, I have a questionable internet search history, but that just comes with the territory, right?

Right?

Anyway. 

As I've mentioned before, one of my favorite things about Twitter (or the platform formerly known as Twitter, if you insist) is the use of prompts that get me thinking and writing. I spent many years of my life not writing any fiction at all, and when I started again there were some old muscles that hadn't stretched in a long time. And so I stretched, grateful for the exercise. 

I stretched my way into my first published short story, an opportunity that grew from responding to daily #TimeTravelAuthors posts. I'm working on a sequel that tells the same story from a different character's point of view; those muscles are getting stronger and more confident.

This past winter I found #CreativityStir prompts, daily inspiration for stories, poems, or wherever the photo may lead you. The images were interesting, and the community in the comments welcomed me immediately. And if the first few months hadn't been lovely pictures of things like doves and castles and a guy walking in the woods, I probably wouldn't be where I am today. 

Last month the prompts turned spooky, with supernatural pictures (and now video clips) to inspire us all. I came up with a couple of fun ghost stories, but I didn't have time to participate every day. I knew I'd have more time for mental workouts in August, and I looked forward to finding out what the next theme would be.

And then at the end of July, the announcement came: August would be Serial Killer Month.

Well, friends, I had to think about that. You see, I've been hard at work for two years now on a middle-grade science-fiction epic ten-book series that I'm convinced will be the biggest thing since that kid discovered he was a wizard, and I think I'm supposed to think about my image as a middle-grade author. Or at least not confuse the marketing team for my future bestsellers by writing in a wide range of genres. 

So I had to ask myself: should I stretch my writing muscles with some dark, definitely not middle-grade story ideas? Or should I sit out this month to protect my image?

I decided to stretch, a little tentatively at first. Other writers in the group encouraged me, and one in particular gave me permission to be someone else for the month: #NatTheRipper. 

So now I spend a few minutes each morning sipping coffee and trying to put myself in the head of a killer. Usually the rest of my family is getting ready for today's summer vacation adventure while I'm doing this; sometimes I write on my phone while we walk on the beach, and they don't suspect a thing. 

I'm really glad I found this group - all of the writers are brilliant and the conversations are hilarious. We've all stretched in ways that we didn't expect, and created worlds and characters that never would have existed without these prompts. 

Oh, that picture of the guy walking in the woods I mentioned earlier? That turned into a short story that I think will be published in an anthology of stories inspired by these prompts soon, and that one stretched to some very weird places. More on that later. 

I don't think I'm going to be a thriller writer, but it's fun to stretch in that direction, and it feels good to strengthen those muscles. Maybe under a pen name...

Location, Location, Location

 When I was a kid, I had a big backyard. Maybe not the biggest, but there was room for a football game plus a basketball court, sandbox, playset, and a little stream that would freeze in the winter so you could go ice skating. Behind the yard, and going on forever as far as I could tell, there were thick woods filled with trails and secret treehouses. For a kid growing up just outside of Detroit, it was heaven.

For a young writer (and voracious reader) it was more than that: it offered a never-ending choice of perfect spots to hide with a good book, a notebook, and a pencil until mom's voice found its way through the branches to beckon me home with the promise of lunch or dinner or bedtime. I remember one spot in particular that I loved, and to this day I still believe I did my best writing there.

Thinking back on it now, I'm sure the tree was no more than fifteen feet high, but in my memory it's at least a hundred, and I would climb up to the very top with my writing tools and brilliant ideas. There were a couple of thick branches that bent perfectly around each other to create a seat, complete with places to tuck my feet to make sure I didn't fall while I wrote. 

I don't know how often I really sat up there to write, or for how long, or even what stories I wrote up there. It's possible my recollection is colored by the warm sepia-toned filter of nostalgia; I think I stayed up there all day most days, and I think I wrote the greatest short stories and poetry the world had ever seen.

If any of that is true, I'm giving all credit to the greatest writing spot in the world. 

Since I started writing again, I hadn't given much thought to where I was writing. We have an office in our home that didn't get much use until the pandemic made me a virtual teacher, playing drama games with faces on a screen in an empty room. I slowly started to claim the desk there as a writing space, and suddenly it started to look like this:

No branches, no view, nowhere to tuck my feet. 

I didn't think much of it, and I got some good writing done in that mess. A few months later, we took the family on a summer road trip, and I found new writing spots:

Right now I'm sitting on a screened-in deck overlooking a thick forest on a hill that slopes down to what we call "the creek" here on the coast of Maine - really it's a narrow tributary of the Kennebec River just before it joins the Atlantic Ocean.

 

I've got a chair, and I don't need to hook my feet around anything to keep my balance, but the view is everything I remember. It's a spot that makes it easy to feel like a kid again, inspired to write the greatest stories in the world. 

In fact, I should get back to that now.

 

How to Write a Book*

When I was a kid, I spent a good amount of summer evenings perched on a handy crook of a branch high up in what I called my Writing Tree. In my memory, that tree is at least forty feet high, but I bet if I went and visited it now I'd find that it's only ten feet or so. Whatever the truth really was, I felt like I was on top of the world as I'd sit up there and write stories until the shadows got steep enough to send me home. 

I remember a couple of those stories, but most are gone now. There was one about two friends who get transported into a pinball game and have to find their way back to the real world while dodging balls and flippers, and there was an epic fantasy about a boy who discovers he's the Chosen One in a magical kingdom. I'm sure the rest were similarly brilliant.

I kept writing through high school and college, but by then I had decided I wanted to be a theatre artist, so that's where I focused my time and energy. And I did pretty well at it - I was the Artistic Director of Eclipse Theatre Company in Chicago for ten years, got some great reviews and a couple of awards - but I never figured out how to make a living doing it. 

And then I got married and had kids, and it got harder to justify spending so much time making so little money. I was also teaching part-time, and part-time stay-at-home dad. Theatre started to drift away. 

And then there was a global pandemic. You know what that was like.

Once my son started preschool, I found myself a part-time stay-at-home guy with no kids to take care of and an artistic itch that I didn't know how to scratch. I thought about trying my hand at commercial acting or voice-over work, or maybe going back to try to recapture that feeling I had at the top of the Writing Tree.

When I started writing THE FIRST KID ON MARS, I had no idea I was writing THE FIRST KID ON MARS. All I knew was that I suddenly had some free time, and wanted to try writing something. I made up an opening line and used it as a prompt:

Tomorrow is going to be different, she thought to herself.

That was it. I had no idea who she was or what happened today. But I started writing, and discovered after a couple of pages that what happened today was that Abby had accidentally stolen Zamara's very old and important copy of Winnie-the-Pooh at school (because she thought that Zamara had stolen hers; neither of them knew the other had brought the same book for Show and Tell). I also discovered that tomorrow would indeed be different - Abby would start her journey of moving to Mars, and those books would play an essential role in her story.

I think I'm what the writing community calls a pantser. But then I started planning. 

By the time I finished chapter three, I had mapped out a plan for a ten-book story. My desk suddenly looked like this:

Major plot points. Twists. Character bios. Names of Martian cities (I won't use those until book three or four). A history of civilization on Mars that goes back literally millions of years. A history of Earth politics and science that stretches forward decades into the future. Research on space elevators, rockets, and what happens when you cry in zero gravity (hint - it's beautiful).  

The plan still gives me some room for flying by the seat of my pants, but I do know the important things that need to happen across the ten books. So maybe I'm a plantser? 

Spellcheck sure doesn't like that, but I kind of do. 

I've finished a pretty solid draft of THE FIRST KID ON MARS now, and I'm trying to figure out the best next steps to share it with the world. I'm also a little bit in disbelief that I actually wrote a book. That kid sitting in his tree with his notebook and pencils would be awfully proud of me. 

*results may vary

A New Feeling

I just did something I'd never done before. 

I just held a book in my hands, which of course I've done millions of times before (I'm guessing), but this time it was different. This book had a story I wrote in it, and that was a new feeling for me. 

The book is The Accidental Time Traveler Collective, and my story in it is called "Blue Skies," about a skydiving accident that takes a weird turn to become a time-traveling battle for the future. 

Amazon delivered it today (yup, it's available on Amazon), and when I opened the package I was knocked out by the beauty of the cover. It's really stunning artwork that grabs your attention and piques your curiosity.

I didn't spend much time there though. There was something I wanted to see that I had never seen in print before:

by Nathaniel Swift

I gotta say, it's a pretty fantastic feeling. 

And I've got a good feeling that this is just the beginning.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

 Last summer, I started responding to daily #TimeTravelAuthors posts on Twitter, sharing snippets and details from a book I hadn't written yet. I thought it might help me develop a story, or at worst be a not-very-funny joke that would disappear into the ethereal nothingness of the Internet.

The first post was a simple introduction with an explanation of what I was going to do (or what I had already done in the future), and a promise that things would get weird.

Spoiler alert: things got weird.

The next day, the prompt asked for a single line from your book. I imagined myself looking into the future, holding my book in my hand, and flipping it open to a random page. Here's the line I saw and shared:

Hannah ran, her feet splashing in the rising puddles, but she knew it was too late.

I didn't know what that meant then, and I still don't know now. I don't know why the puddles are rising (or even if puddles rise), and I don't know what she's too late for. 

But I do know this sentence will appear on a random page in SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN whenever future me writes it, and I'm confident that I'll have figured it out by then. 

Oh, that title -- I discovered that a little over a month in, when the daily prompt asked for the title of your book, and I had to time travel to find out what future me had decided to call it.

Around the same time, one of the other authors participating, one of the ones who had actually written a book already, sent a message to some of the other authors, including the one who was just making this all up (that's me). Who's interested in a crazy idea? he asked.

As you can probably guess by now, I'm a sucker for a crazy idea. 

He wanted to see if we were interested in contributing a short story to a new anthology of time travel fiction. I was definitely interested, and this time the fact that I hadn't written anything yet wasn't a problem. 

That was in September. Today is December 8th, and my story BLUE SKIES is available to purchase for e-readers as part of the anthology The Accidental Time Traveler Collective. It's my debut as a published author, and I still can't quite believe this all happened so fast. 

But then, I guess time is relative when we're talking about time travel stories. 

Why Time Travel?

First of all, I feel like I say this all the time, but only because it's true:

I didn't set out to be a Time Travel Author, but here we are. After following through on a Twitter joke, I now have not one but two stories that feature time travel. One is a novel that will be written in the future (I'm still discovering more about it every day); the other is a short story that will soon be my first published writing. I'll share more of that story soon.

As soon as I dipped my toes in the water of time travel fiction, I couldn't stop myself from jumping right in to see where the current took me. The Twitter joke turned into an emotional story about a girl going back in time to meet her dad, who left her family when she was a baby. The time travel device gave me the freedom to let the story go anywhere (or more importantly, anywhen) -- when I discovered a scene where 13-year-old Hannah is playing baseball with her dad, who also happens to be 13 at the time, I realized the magic that time travel stories can create. 

When I was 13, I played baseball with my friends too (but not with my daughter time traveling from the future, at least as far as I know), and sometimes there would be close plays. We didn't have umpires -- heck, we didn't have bases most of the time, so arguing about whether someone's foot touched the base before the ball hit the glove could get messy. Sometimes one side would give up in the face of a louder or bigger kid's opinion, but sometimes both sides stood their ground, and we had no choice but to call for a do-over. 

We'd rewind time for thirty seconds or so, and reset from right before the controversial play. We'd all check in with each other to make sure we arrived at the same moment in time: it's a 2-1 count with one out and a runner on second, and Timmy just stepped back on the mound after answering his mom's call (ten minutes until dinner's ready!) from across the yard.

Time travel. I've been doing it my whole life. 

I love stories about do-overs: second (or third or fourth) chances, rewriting history, getting the Infinity Stones first so The Snap never happened in the first place. 

I love reading them, I love watching them, and now I love writing them. 

My only regret is that I didn't start sooner.

Maybe I can get a do-over? 

What's in a Name?

A few days ago, someone told me that I always have "snappy" titles for my stories. I felt some pride, but also a lot of humble gratitude for what I see as a lucky streak of stumbling into a title. 

It got me thinking: where do these titles come from? How did I get lucky with snappy ones? Here's a quick run-down...

THE FIRST KID ON MARS

• This is the story that brought me back to writing (a story that I still need to tell here), and the title fell out of the sky halfway through chapter one. All I knew at first was that there was a young girl in a classroom. When the principal called from the office, I found out that the girl, Abby, had been picked for a mission that would make her the first kid on Mars. I did a quick google search to make sure no one else had already used that title, and that was it. 

SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN

• This story started out as a Twitter joke and took on a life of its own; I discovered new details about it every day, and about a month in I discovered that the 2016 World Series was an important event for the main characters. The 2016 World Series finished with a dramatic rain delay in the 9th inning of a tied game 7. Nobody knows exactly what happened in the locker rooms, but after seventeen minutes of rain the Cubs came out to rally for the win.

BLUE SKIES

• I was invited to contribute a short story to an anthology of time travel authors (I still can't believe this really happened), and jumped into a story that starts with a skydiving accident and time hops to 2142 and back, so a dad can help his daughter save the world. I looked up skydiving lingo and found "blue skies" - a phrase that can mean hello, goodbye, and good luck in the skydiving community. And then it matched up with the lullaby dad used to sing to his little girl, so it had to be the title.

LOOKING FOR KISMET

• I saw a book on a table at the school I teach at, part of a messy pile of books next to a note that said "FREE!" The title of the book grabbed me - Searching for Serendipity - but I didn't grab the book. I did let that phrase kick around in my head for a few days, until it was joined by memories of my old cat Kismet, and an imagined story of neighborhood kids looking for Kismet when she runs away. 

Looking at this list, I guess I do feel like I've gotten pretty lucky with snappy titles. Any other name might not smell so sweet.