Author Archives: Quincy J. Allen

About Quincy J. Allen

Quincy J. Allen, a cross-genre author, has published a litany of short stories in multiple anthologies, magazines, eZines, and one omnibus since he started his writing career in 2009. His first short story collection Out Through the Attic, came out in 2014 from 7DS Books, and he made his first short story pro-sale in 2014 with “Jimmy Krinklepot and the White Rebels of Hayberry,” included in WordFire’s A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories. Chemical Burn, his first novel, was a finalist in RMFW’s Colorado Gold Contest in 2011, and his latest novel Blood Curse, Book 2 in The Blood War Chronicles, is now available in Print and Digital editions on Amazon and digital formats on Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Smashwords. He is currently working on his first media tie-in novel for the Aradio brothers’ Colt the Outlander IP, and expects that book to release in early-to-mid 2017. He also has a short story appearing in an upcoming Monster Hunters, Inc. anthology from Larry Correia and Baen due out in 2017. He is the publisher and editor of Penny Dread Tales, a short story collection in its fifth volume that has become a labor of love. He also runs RuneWright, LLC, a small marketing and book design business out of his home in Colorado, and hopes to one day live in a place where it never, ever, ever snows.

The Right Voice for a Dick

Author's Perspective Character Narrative Voice POV Quincy Allen The Writing Life 3 Comments

The music was a dirge, some long-forgotten Celtic lament full of wailing. It washed over me like surf over a half-buried corpse at low tide. Ira stood behind the bar cleaning the same glass he’d been running a dirty towel over for the past ten years.

I raised an eyebrow in his direction, just a flicker. It was all I needed. A beer slid down the bar at me. I smiled. We’d been doing this a long time.

I didn’t turn when I heard the door open. Didn’t have to. When Ira’s hand froze on the glass, I knew there was something worth looking at. I peeked at the mirror behind him. The thing in the doorway definitely wasn’t from around here. Neither was whatever it had on a leash, a beast of roughly the same species, but down on all fours.

Both of their heads turned in unison, the noonday sun casting a halo around, squat, inhuman forms. Their bloodshot eyes locked on me, and on they came. I lost an angle on them in the mirror, but the thump of bare, leathery feet and hands placed them right behind me. I took a sip of beer and stared straight ahead.

Your move, I thought as the stench of sulfur wafted around me. Seconds ticked by. A strong hand clamped down on my shoulder, turned me on the barstool, slow enough not to spill the beer still in my hand. That was polite, I thought.

It was the one on all fours that had the intelligent eyes. Strange, that.

“Hoar’thuft. Moid dan sul bree ik rael Jonny Stiles?” it croaked in a voice that was equal parts whisper and bandsaw.

I stared at the little one for exactly three seconds. “Yeah? Who’s asking?” My eyes shifted to the one standing. It smiled, or, at least did what demons use for a smile… all teeth and wide eyes, the sort of look that wakes old church ladies up with screams and sweaty sheets.

“Wuldrix cu sein Beelzebub,” the short one growled.

It was an order, not a request.

My eyes never left his… or its… I could never tell with demons.

“Ira,” I said slowly, “hold my spot. I’ll be back in an hour.”

It was the little one’s turn to smile.

 *  *  *

Colette started April off with a prompt about aliens and bars, the intention being a discussion of voice and perspective in fiction. It sounded like a writing prompt to me, so I came up with what you just read.

(NOTE: Don’t be surprised if you see that in a short story from me one of these days.)

What’s germane to this month’s Fictorian topic is what we can deduce from just 380 words:

  • This is going to be a first-person POV story
  • We’ll pretty much only know what the protagonist Jonny Stiles knows
  • The tone and word choices throughout let us know this is noir fiction and probably detective noir
  • “Alien” doesn’t have to mean from another country or planet
  • Jonny Stiles is a regular in Ira’s bar and might have a drinking problem
  • Jonny isn’t surprised by the presence of demons
  • Jonny speaks the language of Hell
  • Demons know him by name
  • Jonny isn’t surprised to hear that the Devil wants to see him
  • Jonny is cool as a cucumber at the thought of going to Hell

I like to think this is the sort of prose that sucks a reader in and prompts the following questions:

  • Who is Jonny Stiles?
  • Why is he so calm about meeting the Devil in Hell?
  • Why the hell does the Devil want to see Jonny?

It’s these kinds of questions that prompt a reader to care about a protagonist, and, more importantly, encourage the reader to keep going. Furthermore, the advantage of first-person is that the reader knows—or at least hopes—that they’ll be visiting Hell as “I” not as someone else. The reader has a vested interest in the outcome, because it’s happening to them as far as their brain is concerned. That little use of “I” rather than “he” or “she” makes a mountain of difference in the experience. Just imagine… a free trip to Hell, answering the question of one half of the afterlife, without having to pony up one’s immortal soul as part of the bargain.

There are few among us who don’t have that deep, dark little part that is just the teensiest bit curious about Hell, about the seedier side of human endeavor. When a writer offers up the tantalizing promise of feeding that desire, most are willing to take the bait, especially if the price of admission is just a few more words… and a few more… and a few more.

In many respects, that’s what writers need to do: convince the reader to invest the time for just a few more. Writers are crack-dealers when it comes right down to it… feeding brains with a very different sort of drug.

If you’re writing genre fiction, you really do need to consider two things. The first is what and how much of the story you want to expose to the reader. When using first person, the reader should know only what the protagonist knows (with very few exceptions). Using third person opens up doors to getting the perspective of other characters in the story. There are reasons to use both of them, and it’s important for the writer to understand and implement the right one.

The second thing to consider the tone of your language. Word choice is what differentiates your writing from another author’s. It also differentiates noir from tea-cozy from western. There’s a language for damn near every genre, and the people who read that genre speak it fluently. You need to work hard to get your words right, and it’s this process that sets the great writers apart from the good ones… and the bad. The good ones frequently ponder and haggle and angst over a single word. They hold it up to the light and determine if it’s as potent as they need it to be.

So give thought to your words. They can be as potent as crack cocaine or as bland as American cheese.

On a side-note, I have crafted this meaningless bar chart below (tongue in cheek, naturally) as both an experiment and an inside joke with my fellow Fictorians.

barchart

 

Q.

Falling in Love With Evil

Character Craft & Skills Quincy Allen 1 Comment

A while back I had to tell myself to put the keyboard down and step away slowly. As a result, there’s a project I haven’t touched in over a year. What’s worse is that one of the people from a critiquing group back then keeps asking me to finish the damn book.

So what happened?

It’s simple. I fell in love with a major demon and his insidious sidekick. I was drifting away from the hero’s tale and letting that vile pair carry me along in directions I’d never thought of when I was plotting the story. It was starting to look like the demons were not only going to win, but win in a landslide of blood and death and violence and….

Errr… there it goes again. Sorry.

Over the course of the first twelve chapters, it was a lot more fun to step into a demon’s skin and lay waste to anything that crossed its path… and do so in what I must say were rather creative and cruel ways. And as I got deeper and deeper into it, my hero was left “over there” in the next room, waiting to get some airtime.

Writing is freedom. We’re gods in there, and we can literally do whatever we want. And sometimes we need to step back and realize that for the most part, the good guys have to win and there is such a thing as too much… especially when it comes to bad guys.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, and there are certainly great novels that have pushed the limits of even my rather fuzzy notions of propriety, but in my estimation, a story still needs a hero, still needs a villain, and the hero still needs to win unless there’s a very good reason for him or her not to.

So I put the keyboard down and stepped away.

I still have mixed feeling about that. It’s not that I have any qualms about putting together really despicable and dangerous characters. Far from it. It’s that there was a story I wanted to write—one I still do—and the demons were dragging me away from that. There’s a part of me that thinks I should have continued merrily on down that road.  The words were flowing and I was literally running towards a destination. The problem was that I didn’t know what that destination entailed or where it ended.

I was running blind.

Let me couch this all with a little problem I have. I’m running a business, the business of writing, and my novels run too long for an author at my stage of his career. I need to crank out 90k-100k word novels, not 140k word novels. I know this is a problem, because my two finished novels, while good, are too long for their genre… which makes them a hard sell.  It’s okay. The indie market has afforded a number of great opportunities, but I defined my parameters when I started, and for the book I was trying to write, 100k was and still is the max.

I made a business decision, and there it sits—waiting and watching… ready to grab hold of my brain once more.  But the next time I pick it up, probably in the spring of 2015, I’ll be able to wrestle those demons and make them do what I want instead of the other way around. And if I can force them to do my bidding, I think it’ll turn out to be a damn good 100k-word novel.

The moral is, be careful what you write, and make sure you are writing towards a goal. And if you decide to change that goal along the way, be certain the course correction is in your best interests.

 

Q

Milestones

Business Character Motivation Publishing Quincy Allen The Writing Life 1 Comment

I’ve crossed a number of milestones over the past few years: first short story published, first convention panelist, first novel in print, first teaching gig at a writing conference. I’ve managed to predictably repeat those achievements virtually at will, and as nothing more or less than an act thereof. Each and every one of those milestones felt like the success it was, but they were all, at best, minor-league achievements.

Make no mistake, though. To achieve them I’ve had to climb the highest, steepest mountain in my experience. And I have a long way to go.

My career-change from “IT guy” to “writer” back in 2009 set me as my own task master, and I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder. However, every milestone I’ve passed thus far has been small—insignificant when compared to the summit I intend to reach. Added up, however, the sum of those milestones made possible my most current opportunity… and crisis… from which I should be able to derive my greatest achievement to date.

I’m under contract to write a novel.

There is something both thrilling and daunting about committing to a novel under contract rather than selling a completed manuscript.

Daunting.

That word doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Frankly, I’m nervous as hell, hoping I can get Last Stand at the Gates of Heaven written within a somewhat aggressive timeline… and on top of everything else I’m committed to for the first half of 2014. As I type this, the publisher has nothing more in her hands than a title and the pitch I gave her back in November. I, on the other hand, have a deadline and a deliverable of roughly 100k words by the end of May.

What this represents is a first step into the major leagues. Granted, it’s a smaller publisher asking for a stand-alone novel, but the fact is that a publisher asked me to produce a novel. I’m on the hook for delivery. My reputation is at stake. My future is at stake. If I can deliver on this, I’ll know that I can cut it when a large publisher asks me to produce a body of work.

There’s a reason I’m telling you this, and it’s not to sing my own accolades. Quite the contrary. I’m humbled by these circumstances. I’m telling you all this because the path I’m on is one of the primary methods by which part-time writers become self-supporting authors.

The pyramids were not built in a day; each one of them started with a single block. Everest wasn’t climbed over a weekend, and every man or woman who reached that summit started with a single step at its base.

That’s what you have to understand in the writing business. Skill is a factor. So is practice and talent and luck and a lot of things. But if you’re not prepared to build upon your small successes and turn them into larger ones, you should hang it up right now. You have to be in this business for the long haul and grind away as much as you can without losing your mind. You have to invest in yourself each and every day in some fashion, gambling with your own future and the harsh reality that you might not make it.

If you can do all of that, your odds of success increase exponentially. And in the absence of it all, you are virtually guaranteed to fail.

So get to work!

Q

Get Your Fanny Out There!

Business Conventions Motivation Quincy Allen 2 Comments

I used to have a friend—a good one—and that friendship ended recently. It’s a rather long, sordid tale about politics and methods and appearances and styles and plans and… well, a lot of things. And mostly, it has to do with how each of those applies to a burgeoning writing career. Put simply, he and I are on different paths. We’re both committed to those paths. And we came to verbal blows as a result of those paths. Truth be told, we’re no longer friends for a lot of reasons. I’m telling you about the loss of a friend because of how strongly I feel about networking. Our difference of opinion on the subject isn’t why we’re no longer friends, but it was at least one nail in the coffin.

Ultimately, as entertainers (and we absolutely are), the only way we’re going to be successful is for people with disposable incomes to know who we are. And the only way we’re going to stay successful is to ensure that they never forget us—in a positive light, I might add. So how do you do that? Well, I can give you an example of how I got invited to participate in this really fantastic group of writers called the Fictorians—a move that was frowned upon by some. It all started with the Superstars writing seminar. If you’re a writer, you should look that one up. While I was there, I made an effort to meet people and talk with them. I asked what they wrote and how their careers were coming along. They returned the query. Friendships were borne, and not long after they asked me to write a post for them. And one thing led to another… and another.

And now, here I am, a virtual unknown writer who is lucky enough to have you reading his words because of that seminar and the simple process of networking.

The same goes for conventions and conferences. Attend them. (Note the imperative.) And while you’re there, meet and greet as many people as you can. Get to know them. Make them more than acquaintances. TALK to them about who they are and what they’re working on. And be a good listener.

I need to caveat this.

We’re writers, which means that many (most?) of us are introverts who really do prefer spending time at home in a quiet room while we chain words together than we do going to cotillions. It’s the nature of the beast. I have three words for you: GET OVER IT. And do so in, like, the next 4 seconds.  I know that sounds flippant, but the biggest and best free (or nearly so) thing you can do to advance your career is to go out and introduce yourself to the writing community. Let them get to know you. And in that process, you’ll meet fans, you’ll develop contacts, and you’ll get invited to participate in things that help getting your name out there… or vice versa.

My girlfriend uses the phrase “creative sanga” where peoples of like-minded endeavors get together and are subsequently capable of creating things greater than the sum of their parts… or something like that.

It’s not B.S.

The writing community isn’t that large, and it’s full of really amazing people from all walks of life. Discover who they are. This is what business people call networking. I’ve come to refer to it as making friends, and when it comes right down to it, there’s little of the successes I continue to have in my career that aren’t as a direct result of this process.

And while you’re at it, introduce yourself to me. Friend me upon Facebook or Twitter. Look me up at the next convention I’m at. Give me the opportunity to get to know you. I can think of no better way for us to make our ways through this mortal coil as we pursue our writing careers.

It is a dream I have.