What the Hell is a Storyside?

Greetings, WYMOP fans!

If you’re following me on Facebook, or even Twitter (and I’m mocked for my pathetic level of Twitterliness, I can assure you), you’ve probably seen me posting about The Storyside, or even things from The Storyside. You may have clicked into them, you may not, but I’m pretty sure at one time or another you’ve thought What the hell is a Storyside?

Well, I’m here to tell you.

By now you ought to know I’m a writer—you’re reading something I’ve written right now, for Christ’s sake. But I do write more than blog posts, Facebook posts, and the (very) occasional tweet: I write stories. I write fiction. I have an Amazon author’s page, where you can find the two dozen places I’ve had my short fiction published. I’ve even—I’m going to blow my own horn here, something I don’t do often because it makes me very uncomfortable—won a couple of industry awards, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (kind of a big deal for me) and had an honorable mention from a pretty prestigious “Best Of” list.

It isn’t enough.

There are so many writers out there, all trying to make a go of it, it’s hard to get noticed. The crowd is so big it’s not enough to just stand out from it, you have to stand way out. Your stuff can’t just be good: it has to be great.

In late 2014 I got word of a small group of writers, most of them fairly local to me, who were joining forces with an intent that had me pricking up my ears: they wanted to pool their resources to put out the best product possible. They intended to mesh their individual skill sets to act as a lens, focusing each individual’s work like a linguistic laser. They were banding together to fight injustice, to right that which is wrong, and to serve all mankind!

Oh, wait, that’s the Super Friends.

Sorry. They did look at me a little funny when I asked them if I could be Batman, but—after a vetting the likes of which the Secret Service could take a lesson from—they allowed me to join them in their endeavor. They don’t have to know I sit behind my word processor in a cape and cowl now, do they? Nope. Nobody’s business but my own.

So that’s how I managed to team up with the group now known as The Storyside:

David Daniel—winner of the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America Best First Private Eye Novel contest and a Shamus Award nominee, author of, among other things, the Alex Rasmussen detective series and more than eighty short stories

Stacey Longo—a 2015 eFestival of Words runner up for Best Anthology: Wicked Seasons (Editor), Featured Author on the 2014 Connecticut Authors Trail, professional copy editor, author of, most recently, Ordinary Boy, and My Mom has MS

Ursula Wong—regional winner of the New Hampshire Writer’s Project flash fiction contest, author of the novel Purple Trees

Vlad V. —editor, publishing consultant, freelance writer, former newspaper correspondent, author of The Button, and Brachman’s Underworld, and now our managing editor and fearless leader.

Oh, and me. I, uh, write and edit stuff.

Or, as I like to think of them, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Hawkgirl, and Superman. But they don’t need to know that, do they? Nobody’s business but my own.

So that’s what The Storyside’s all about: five writers determined to help each other raise the level of their game, and bring you, the reader, the best product possible, whether it’s a book one of us has for sale, or a short-short story we’re offering on our blog for free. Some of us are dark; some of us aren’t. We are self, small-press, and traditionally published. We are writers, editors, and (let us not forget!) readers. We are men and women with one goal in mind: to bring you, the public, the best possible stories, in the highest quality books. The Storyside has already published two anthologies of dark fiction—Insanity Tales, and Insanity Tales II: the Sense of Fear—and I’m not really going out on a limb when I say they are damn good. And that was while we were still finding our feet, and learning to work as a team.

You might want to keep an eye on us. We started out doing it right, and it’s only going to get better.

To try a sample or two of what we’re all about, click on the links below to get to The Storyside blog:

“The Visit,” a free short story from Rob Smales

“How I Was Inspired by a Homicidal Cannibal,” by Stacey Longo

“Adverbs Aren’t Your Friends:” writing advice from Vlad V.

Go ahead. Check them out.

Talk to you later!

P.S.—I’m Batman.

Victor the Visitor!

Greetings, people of Earth! Uh . . . and all WYMOP fans, of course.

This week's story starts a couple of years ago. I returned from a trip to Colorado to find my room wasn't as empty as I'd left it. Apparently, we had a visitor from, well, pretty damn far away, and he'd taken up residence in my room as a way to hide from the govern . . . I mean, to try to ease into our society. It seems he lost his luggage, and I had the particular joy of walking into my room at 2:00 am to find a naked stranger standing, a bit bug-eyed, in the corner. For some reason, my mom decided not to warn me that he was there.

Thanks, Mom!

Eventually, I talked the visitor (there was a bit of a communication barrier, but I finally started just calling him Victor--he seems to like it) into coming out of the shadows of my room and borrowing some of my clothes. They were a bit bright for me anyway, and I thought it might help the poor bastard fit in a little if he looked like a tourist. I mean, tourists are supposed to be a little odd, right? Anyway, after his little makeover, Victor seemed to feel a little better about being here. Maybe it was just not being naked? I dunno. But he seemed a bit perkier once he had some pants on--though it was hard to tell if he was smiling at all: I don't think he actually has any teeth.





Once he started to come out of his shell, I decided to greet him properly, and officially welcome him to the Ear--uh, I mean America. Massachusetts, yeah, that's it, I welcomed him to Massachusetts.

So with nothing else to do, Victor stood in the corner of my room. During the day, I'd talk to him, teaching him to understand English, though he never actually spoke a word of it to me. At least, not out loud . . . which is how all people speak, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Nope, he never "spoke" a word to me. Not one word.

Then, last weekend, as I was getting ready to go to Rock and Shock, a three-day horror and music extravaganza in Worcester, and I came home from work on Thursday and found this:

Apparently, someone in the house was watching Wheel of Fortune while I was at work, and Victor became fascinated with Vanna White--not in the eighteen-year-old hormonal young man way, but in the "Hey, I could do that!" way. 

He made it pretty clear he wanted to go to Rock and Shock with me.

In fact, I found him waiting in the car the next morning, all belted in and rarin' to go.

He doesn't have a lot of expression, but he still seemed impatient to get on the road.

He's either waving for me to come on right here, or giving me the finger. Kind of hard to tell . . .

So we drove on to Worcester, and the DCU Center. We did get a few odd looks on the drive:

But Victor took them as his due and moved on. Once we arrived, he did his thing. I have to say, he was surprisingly professional the entire time--though it was a long two days.

The drive home was uneventful.

Once we got home, I started unloading the car. Victor was supposed to be helping, but he disappeared right at the start. It wasn't until I got all of the stuff back into the house that I went into my room and found him:

The poor baby was just exhausted from the big weekend. I didn't have the heart to wake him, so I wound up on the couch for the night.

Now, you'd think that would have been enough for the big galoot, but he was invited back to Worcester for a reading event the very next weekend, and there's been talk of him coming to North East Comic Con in early December. I think he's letting me tag along in December, which is pretty cool, but yesterday he went on an audition that has me wondering just how long I'll still be in the picture.

I just hope, you know, when Victor hits the big time, that he remembers where he came from, and who chauffeured him to his first shows. I hope he remembers who his real friends are, from way back when he was just a naked dude standing in a dark corner.

"Me and Vic - BFFs"

Thanks, Mom!

Talk to you later!

May the Force be With You . . . Always.

Hi there, WYMOP readers.

This is the story of a book. But not just any book: one I was working on.

The book had a projected publication date of October 10th. A deadline, if you will. All it needed was one more proofread—one more go-through with the red pen, in a physical copy of the two-hundred-and-forty-page book (called a “proof copy,” or “proof” for short, because we all have just that little imagination) looking for typo s, mipssellings, grammatical inconsistencies and the like. Is it a fun job? It can be. Is it time consuming? Yes.

My partner was ordering the proof copies, which was fine with me: less for me to worry about, right?

Right?

So she ordered hers on Tuesday, September 29, and mine on Wednesday the 30th. We live in different states, and Amazon won’t let you send proof copies of a book to two different places on the same day, because . . . well, okay I have no idea why they do that, other than they’re Amazon, so they just do what they bloody like. Hers then arrived the day after that, October 1, just two days after it shipped.

Fantastic, we thought. Two days. Rob’s copy should arrive on the second, and we can work very hard (sometimes, we call this “busting ass”—it’s an industry term) and have everything ready in time for the October 10 publication date.

So my partner got to work, and I settled down to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

The weekend passed, and I was losing my mind. It was Monday the 5th, and then Tuesday the 6th—I’m sure of the dates, because my extremely deadline-driven editing partner reminded me of them. Repeatedly. The deadline was just four (4!) days away, and I didn’t even have the book in my hands yet. I could hear her grinding her teeth from over a hundred miles away. We (okay, she) located a tracking number and went online, only to discover Amazon had sent it UPS, who took six days to get it from South Carolina to Massachusetts . . . and then started the process again by dropping it in the mail for the rest of the trip.

I was not pleased.

Luckily, though, the Postal Service was right on the ball. UPS had mailed it in Lynnfield, MA, and the very same day it arrived in my local post office in Salem, MA. I called to verify, and yes, they had it there—the man I spoke with had it in his hot little hands.

“That’s terrific!” I said. “I’m actually delivering the mail over here in Marblehead, but I’m out at four thirty, so I should be able to swing by and pick that up before the window closes at five.” If I pick it up at five, I thought, I could be working on it by six, and it’s still only October 6th, so if I really bust some ass, I should—

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We can’t do that.”

I tried to say “I beg your pardon?” and “I’m sorry?” and “What?” and “Why?” all at the same time, but all that came out of me was a flat “Hah?”

“The thing is,” he explained, correctly interpreting my Archie Bunkerian grunt as confusion, “your package is in our system to be delivered tomorrow. If it’s not delivered tomorrow, it’ll be counted against us as a missed delivery.”

“But you’ll have delivered it,” I said. “Early, even. In essence, you’ll be doing the job better.”

“But it’s in there for tomorrow, you see, so we can’t scan it as delivered today. The system won’t let us. And if you take the package tonight, then we won’t have it to scan tomorrow, when the system’s looking for it, which means it’ll show up as a miss. Sorry, man.”

So this system, one that’s giving me things to deliver to customers sometimes up to a month late, is specifically set up so as to not even be able to deliver something early? Even when the customer wants to go pick it up?

So I picked the book up the next morning—the earliest the system would allow—and then had to wait until that afternoon anyway to start proofreading in earnest. The afternoon of October 7, to be precise. Just three days before the deadline.

How does she grind those teeth so loud?

Here are some little bits of what happened over the next couple of days.

• Spent four and a half hours at the library, sitting in what they laughingly refer to as a “chair.” I call it a “cracking-your-ass-in-the-wrong-direction device.” Either way, I’ll say one thing for it: I was in no danger of falling asleep while reading.
• I got home at 10:30 and took the book to bed with me at around 11:00, editing on my lap desk. I was in no danger of cracking my ass in the wrong direction, and managed to work, hunched forward over that lap desk until sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 am before . . .
• I woke at 4:15 am. I was sitting up in bed, all the lights on, the book spilling off the lap desk to the side, my red pen still in hand. I really had to pee, but that wasn’t what wakened me: I’d felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if thirty-two teeth had cracked in pain and were suddenly ground down to powder. I checked the book and saw I only had two and a half pages to finish in that particular story, and decided I didn’t really have to go that bad. I pulled the book onto the desk, hunching forward with my red pen . . .
• 7:00 am—paid a coworker $5.00 to sit next to me in the break room and tell anyone who tried to talk to me, “I think he’s busy.” I had another hour before I was to start work. I pulled the book closer on the table, hunching forward with my red pen . . .
• I woke at 4:05 am, upright in bed, lights on, book on lap desk, pen in hand, no need, whatsoever, to pee. But I’d felt a great disturbance in the Force . . . I hunched forward, red pen in hand . . .
• 8:00 pm—it’s done! I’m done! Whazza! Who’s your daddy? Happy dancing like Snoopy and Woodstock atop that damn red doghouse! I . . . I . . . I still had to get home so I could get the edits to my partner, so she could add them to the file and then upload the whole shebang. Forget the Force, forget the red pen, I was hunched forward over the wheel, cursing like a pirate with stepped-on bunions, speeding through the night like my Mini was an asshole-powered rocket . . .

Insanity Tales II: The Sense of Fear – Publication Date October 10, 2015

by David Daniel (Author), Stacey Longo (Contributor), Vlad V. (Contributor), Rob Smales (Contributor), Ursula Wong(Contributor), Dale T. Phillips (Contributor)

Success! Whazza! Who’s your daddy? Happy dancing like Snoopy and Woodstock atop that damn red doghouse! Now all we have to do is hope the copies we ordered will be here in time to bring to the next event we’re doing, which is Rock and Shock, and it starts this Friday. Only three delivery days away.

What was that? Did you feel it? I . . . I just felt a great disturbance in the Force . . .

Talk to you later!

It's Coming to the End... Sort of?

Three weeks from today it will be Friday, May 4th. It will also be the 365th day in a row that I'll have blogged without missing a single day.

Huzzah!

It will also be the last day that I'll be blogging without missing a single day.

When I started this blog my intent was to give myself a place to write some of the more funny, light-hearted things I'm capable of writing, since I seem to have fallen into the habit of writing Horror stories.  I am comfortable writing Horror, and I've managed to get a few things published in the genre, but that's not all I can do. I have a story that will be in an anthology of Christmas stories that's coming out this December that proves it, but I needed to remind myself more often.

So I started coming here and reminding myself every day.

Don't get me wrong, for the most part this blog has been a lot of fun. I have some anectotes in here that, with a little polish, I might submit somewhere as short stories. I have done some writing in here that I like very much, and I think I was, at times, pretty entertaining, and that was a good portion of the fun.

Also, I have some people who have become my constant audience, and that has been great too. Every writer loves to have his stuff read, and most want to have it liked. The fact that I had a returning audience, however small, was like a vitamin shot in the arm for me on a pretty much daily basis.

The problem is that this blog takes time. I have a few projects going where I am trying to get more of my writing published - the only way to make a name for myself out there is to get my name out there. I have stories I'm writing for magazines and e-zines, as well as some books simmering on the back burners of my writing stove, some short story collections as well as a possible future novel. Well, two novels. And a couple of novellas... Okay, I have a lot of stuff to do, and I think I'm going to need some of the time this blog has been taking, both in the writing part and the thinking part.

That's another thing. It's hard to come up with something to write about every day that you, my readers, might find funny. Sometimes I dropped the ball, and when I go back and read some of my entries I can always tell when it was one of those days. Mixed in with some pretty funny stories and some not bad writing, there are quite a few stinkers; days where I was stuck for something and just wrote anything I could think of, funny or not. When I read those posts, I'm embarrassed by them; If you all were good enough to take the time to read this stuff, the least I should have done is the best I could for you. Sometimes I didn't. All I can do is tell you all "sorry about that."

So, this May 4th will bring me to the end of my daily blog.... but not of blogging entirely.

I have too much fun here to quit this thing entirely, but I do think I need to cut it back a bit. I need to free up some more of my time so I can finish my projects and get my name out there, as best I can. I'm 42 people, and I'll be 43 by the time May 4th rolls around. With regards to writing - I think I have to get a wiggle on. But I still want this reminder that I can write things that might make people laugh from time to time, and I want to keep practicing at doing just that.

Also, I do like having an audience, however small.

Oh, and so you know: Though I can see from day to day that blog pages are read, and which blog pages are read, I can not see anything about the people doing the reading. If I register 40 page reads in a day, I have no way of knowing if that was 40 individuals logging in and reading a page each, or if there were 5 people reading 8 pages each, or if it was simply a single visitor, bored out of their mind and with time to kill, flipping along and reading 40 pages in a day. When I say I have no idea how large my audience is, and that I'm not sure, for the most part, who makes it up, I'm not kidding.

Now - on to the pitch for votes!
I have 3 weeks to decide how often I will be blogging after the 4th. I see some writers who blog once a week, some once a month, and some just whenever the mood strikes them and they feel like sticking some words together. I was thinking about once a week, but then I was thinking about once a month... Hell, I can't make up my mind, so I decided to ask for your opinion.

In the upper right corner of the page you'll find a poll asking you how often you think I should blog: once a month, once a week, and whenever I feel like it. Please, weigh in and let me know what you want. You all are my very first audience, and I'd love it if you all had a say. So please don't just read all this, shrug and move on to do something else. Take a second to vote up above there. The more votes I get the better I'll feel about whatever decision is made, and I'm leaving the poll up there right until the 4th, so everyone has time to vote, including people who only read me once a week.

Whatever the outcome, I'll have both more time for my fiction as well as time to give you all the best work I can, hopefully entertaining you with every post.

Looking forward to your votes!

Talk to you later!

                   -Thank you for your time, every bit of it.

                                                        -Rob

Photo Finish

So I have this short story idea, and I’ve been waiting to write it. It fits well into a short story collection I’m working on, and I’m kind of writing them in order, and I just haven’t gotten to this one yet. 

The basic premise is a young guy sees an old Polaroid Instamatic camera in a consignment or pawn shop. It has some film with it, and even though the guy tells him the film’s most likely gone bad after all this time, the kid buys it anyway, just on a lark. He takes a couple of pictures, and the machine spits them out just like it should, and the film actually works. The photos may be a little cloudy… but he’s having fun with this old camera. And then he notices that, no matter what he takes a picture of, no matter where it is, there’s this guy in the shot. He wasn’t there when the pictures were taken, but there he is in the pictures, every single one, starting with the first shot where the guy’s way off, almost lost in the distance. But, the kid notices, with each new picture the guy’s getting closer…

Creepy, right? A haunted camera. The story goes on from there, but you get the basic idea. I’m all kinds of happy about this idea because it seems to be pretty original, and I’m looking for that. So, like I said, I’m holding on to this story until I get to the spot where I think it will fit with some other stories I’m writing. Been holding on to it for more than a year now. And then…

So I was looking at my mother’s bookshelves, and there’s a whole section on Stephen King. I’ve read a lot of the books from that section. A lot. But there’s one that I’m not certain I’ve read, a novella collection of his called Four Past Midnight. I looked at the table of contents to see what stories are in there, maybe jog my memory a bit. One of the stories, The Langoliers, I remember reading, and The Library Policeman sounds familiar, but the other two, Secret Window, Secret Garden, and The Sun Dog don’t sound familiar at all. So I checked on line for the collection, looking to read a small synopsis of the stories involved, maybe that will jog my memory.

And here is the first line of the description of the story titled The Sun Dog:

Kevin Delevan receives a Sun 660 Polaroid camera for his fifteenth birthday. He soon notices that there is something strange about the camera: the only photographs it produces are of a malicious, feral black dog that seems to move closer with each shot as though to attack the person who is taking the pictures.

Son of a bitch.

Now I’m all wanting to read the story to see if I’ve read it before and my subconscious is playing ‘Oh, what a wonderful idea I’ve had *nudge, nudge, wink*’ with me. But I’m not going to read it. Not until I finish writing my story, so I can avoid any inadvertent ‘influence’. Though, if I was going to be influenced, I could choose worse influences than Stephen King…

Now all I have to do is try to figure out how I can make a case for Mr. King stealing my idea.

More than 20 years before I even had it.

Yeah, I know, I hear you. Good luck, Dude.

Talk to you later!

Say What?

The other night when I got to Handsome's house, he was all excited and needed to show me something on his computer. I sat down to take a look and saw a pair of walkie-talkies, the kind that are built to look like wrist watches.

"I want to get these for me and MM," he said, naming his best friend. "Are they any good? Will they reach his house from here? I've been trying to figure it out, and it's in English, but I still can't understand it."

So I sat there and looked at the specs list and all the technical data they had about the talkies, and they looked pretty good. They had more than enough range for him, I thought.

"But they're trying to get you to buy them," I told Handsome. "It's not like they're going to put out an advertisement pointing out that they're crap. I'd like to read some customer reviews or something."

"I was reading the other stuff, where they tell you about the walkie-talkies," he said, "but that's the part I couldn't understand."

So I looked at the product descriptions, where they told you, in plain English, all about the product you were looking at. Or, at least, they were supposed to.

I started laughing.

I laughed some more.

When I was done laughing, I explained to Handsome that it wasn't his fault he couldn't understand the descriptions. I couldn't understand them either.

"I think these were written in Chinese," I said. "Then they were translated into English. By someone who doesn't speak English."

Here are some examples of their 'description'. See if they make sense to you...

• Civil Walkie Talkie refers to those Walkie Talkies that their transmit power is 0.5-1w, their power ranges are 400-480MHz.
• Huh?
•  Also this Walkie Talkie is usually a short communicating distance.
• What?
  
• The Civil Walkie Talkie is the wireless communicating equipment approved by the country and can be used without license. The Civil Walkie Talkie features a small volume, varied of colors and low price, is suitable for individual business trip, travel and hotel use
• Okay, look, you lost me at 'The Civil Walkie Talkie is"!

Okay, obviously this is a company that doesn't pay a hell of a lot for translations. I kind of picture them making the guy from the mail room sit down with a Cantonese/English dictionary and whipping him into a frenzy!

Here are some other little gems I found while perusing this and other products available on their website:

• It's normal that squeaking may be heard on the channel when two radios is several meters near or closer. 
  
• If there is difference between required communication distance and practical distance, the communication can be realized through adjustment of radio RF power or squelch level.
  
• Wii is an innovative system and part of the 7th generation of video game systems. Gaming always has the power to bring us so many unforgettable moments, which has become a part of life. At the moment, you have no refusal reasons for perfecting your Nintendo Wii system. The Wii Accessories is here for meeting your various needs, which includes Controllers, Batteries & Chargers, Memory, Adapters & Cables, Cases, and Accessory Kits. These nintendo wii accessories come with excellent operation performance that ensures great Wii playing motions. Get what you need to make your Wii games more enjoyable.

Is it any wonder Handsome was having trouble understanding just what those walkie-talkies could do? That passage above about the Wii gaming system threw me for a loop, and I'm an adult college graduate with a degree in English who has been working on sharpening my language skills for the past 18 months. Plus, we actually own a Wii!

I'd like to take this opportunity to offer my services as a copy editor to the company in question. Seriously people, how can someone buy anything from you when all they can do is laugh?

*Sigh*

Talk to you later!