New release from loveyoudivine!
The Hounds of Hollenbeck

Allen and Sam are unlikely lovers. Both are graduate students at Browning College in the small Pacific Northwest town of Lagrange. Allen works with hyper-intelligent dogs on a secret Army project, while Sam is a detective on the police force who is also pursuing his masters degree in criminology. Everything changes when one of Allen's professors finds dismembered human bodies in her research habitat. Sam investigates and uncovers evidence of a brutal serial killer who targets young gay men. The trail leads back to the Army lab, to Allen, and to his beloved experimental dog Teena. The tension increases when Allen disappears and Teena leads Sam on a desperate search to save him.

Excerpt:

After the play, they strolled hand in hand in the Campus Commons, a large park in the middle of the College. The main buildings faced onto this wooded reserve, while College Street looped about it. Tonight, as with most nights, cars cruising the night clogged the street.

Allen took his hand and smiled. "I had a wonderful time tonight." They detoured around puddles in the sidewalk and the air filled with the fresh scent of the light shower that had come and gone while they were in the play.

"I did too." A light breeze rustled the trees and stirred the leaves that clustered on the ground. "Geeze, look at all these worms." He looked in disgust at the slimy creatures that covered the walkway.

"It's the weather. They've come out because of the rain." Allen knelt and probed the soil to the side of the path. A gaggle of beetles waddled away from his fingers. "See, there's a whole universe down here if you know where to look."

"It's just creepy. You know beetles eat dead things."

"That's the way of the world." Allen stood and brushed himself, then took Sam's hand again. "Let's sit for a bit. I know a place down by the Duck Pond." He led the way to a secluded park bench that rested under an ancient oak tree. Ducks paddled in the moonlight across the little pond, quacking and diving for food.

They sat close to one another watching the birds swim and the moonlight glimmer on the pond. Allen sighed. "I'm glad you sat at my table in the Union, even if you are a table thief."

"Is that what you thought I was doing?" Sam put his arm around him. "I saw you come in and decided I wasn't going to let you get away." He brushed Allen's hair out of his eyes. "Did you know you have the most beautiful eyes?"

"These beady things?"

"You have eyes that were made to be kissed." He leaned forward and slipped off his glasses. Allen's breath warmed his cheek as his lips brushed his eyelids. "Even here, in the moonlight, your eyes are this incredible color. I don't know that I've seen that shade of blue before."

Allen's finger traced a line down his cheek. "You're so beautiful you scare me, you know that?" His sigh broke in his throat.

"The only thing I'm afraid of is that I'll lose you, now that I've found you." He wove his fingers through Allen's soft curls. Sam pulled him close and inhaled his sweet scent. Their lips touched in a silent grace note of anticipation.

"We found each other, I think," Allen whispered in his ear.

Sam pressed closer, pulling him in a tight embrace. Their lips touched anew, this time in a thunderous crescendo of sensation. Their bodies twisted in longing and their souls rejoiced at the promise of new love. Sam dared to slip his tongue forward and the willing softness of the other's mouth yielded to his advance. Their tongues twined about one another and their teeth clicked in percussive cadence to their yearning. The kiss lasted but a moment, but it promised an eternity.

Sam pulled back and gazed into his eyes. "Where did you learn to kiss like that?" His heart raced in his chest and his hands trembled.

A smiled played with Allen's lips and his eyes twinkled. "You mean where did you learn to kiss like that, don't you? I felt as if we were the only people in the universe. Like you didn't have anything else to do but kiss me." He rested his head on Sam's shoulder.

"I felt the same way." He descended again, his mouth greedy for sensation and his soul hungry for sustenance.

The second kiss stretched longer than the first. Allen's hands traced circles on his back and his muscles rippled in response. His own hands reached lower and stroked the hardness that strained at Allen's khakis. Their moans of pleasure merged with the quiet splash of ducks diving and the gentle rustle of leaves blowing in the breeze. Their tongues embraced in a liquid caress that transcended passion and sang with ardor.

Sam gasped, withdrew and played again with those amazing curls. "With any other guy, I'd have you off in the bushes by now. But with you, I want the first time to be special."

"I know what you mean." His fingers played with Sam's earlobes and followed tendons down his neck to his collar. "I want this to be more than a one night stand, you know? It's already the best first date I've ever had in my life. Shit, it's the best date I've ever had."

"Me too." Sam grinned. "Does that mean you'll go out with me tomorrow night?"

Allen sat back and fisted him in the shoulder. "Of course, you idiot."

"I'll fix dinner if you'll come to my place." He leered at him. "Said the spider to the fly."

Allen just smiled back and kissed him on the cheek. "I'd like that. A lot."

They strolled through the park and back to Sam's car. On the way, a dilapidated old van cruised by, streaming blue exhaust in its wake. Sam didn't notice the van slow and the man inside stare at Allen before it sped away into the darkness.

Characters

What kind of characters do you like to read about?

One of the author discussion groups to which I belong recently asked the inverse question: what kind of characters do we, as authors, like to write about? The other authors all gave really good, if somewhat different, answers to this question. Everyone agreed that characters should be realistic, with flaws and imperfections just like people we meet on the street. Of course, a story about an ordinary character, in an ordinary setting , on an ordinary day, doing ordinary things will be, well, pretty ordinary. So, unless one has the talent to produce a masterwork like Ulysses which does exactly the above, there must be something about your character that inspires the imagination.

Sometimes the character might have unusual abilities. Good Will Hunting is an excellent example of a story in which a character from an ordinary background has extraordinary abilities. In other cases, we find ordinary characters in extraordinary situations. The Birds is surely such a tale, in which an extraordinary event challenges both the characters and their social matrix. Sometimes the characters might be in a setting which is culturally or historically remote from the reader, so that what is ordinary for the characters is unusual for the audience. Much of science fiction and fantasy fall into this category, as does historical fiction. The point of this is that in an interesting story characters confront a challenge. Sometimes the character is successful, sometimes not. Sometimes the character changes and grows, sometimes the character's flaws lead to a tragic denouement. In the best cases, the fictional conflict engages and changes something in the readers.

In order to inspire the imagination, characters must exhibit traits for good or ill that the reader can recognize. In novels with both a protagonist and antagonist, both must represent believable types that the reader can love or hate. In more complex works, such as Anna Karenina, good and evil may be at war inside the characters and this internal conflict drives the story forward.

It's clear that there are lots of things that can make a character interesting. Even the most insipid character, when thrust into an unusual chain of events, can become interesting -- think of North by Northwest, for example. Alternatively, the most dynamic and charismatic of characters stuck in a prosaic setting with no conflict is boring. Superman is interesting only when his super-powers aren't up the challenge!

This brings me to my answer to the question about what characters interest me. All of the other answers are interesting and weave together to make characters I'd want to read and write about, but what most interests me are the relationships of my characters. When Gene Siskel reviewed movies, one could always count on him to like movies with strong relationships. His instincts coincide with mine exactly. The relationships among the characters, between the characters and their culture, between the characters and their physical world -- this is what I find most interesting. Relationships reveal the internal depths of the character, expose conflict, and generate change. The physicist Arthur Eddington once said:

We often think that when we have completed our study of one, we know all about two, because "two" is "one and one." We forget that we still have to make a study of "and."

This insight applies as much to real -- and fictional! -- people as it does to mathematics. We all live in and interact with the world about us. Even before Friday's arrival, Robinson Caruso confronted and surmounted obstacles in his world. These conflicts, and his reactions to them, both exposed his character and set the stage for internal growth.

So, my answer to what kind of character I find interesting is that I am less interested in the character than in the relationships between the character and the world about him.

Hitchcock: Anticipitating Suspense

An Homage to Hitchcock

By Max Griffin

I love films. There is something about sitting in the dark and losing yourself in the panorama unfolding on the big screen. There is a totality to the cinematic experience that engages the senses in ways that the stage and prose cannot. The music and the acting enhance the experience, to be sure, but it is the camera that makes all the difference. The camera becomes my eye, roaming over the scene and the characters, snooping out surprising little details that the players on the screen don't know or see. The most skilled directors use the camera to fold the audience into the narrative, empowering us to imagine and create the story in partnership with the artists creating the cinematic experience.

When I write, I imagine my stories as a movie running through my mind. I think of the scenes and descriptions in terms of what the camera would see, and hear a soundtrack playing in my head. So, last week when the American Film Institute released lists of the "Top Ten Films" in various genres, I thought of cinematic influences on my writing. The AFI "Mystery" genre turned out to contain some of my favorite films: "Vertigo," "Rear Window," "North by Northwest," and "Dial M for Murder," among others. It should come as no surprise that Alfred Hitchcock directed four of the ten "Top Ten" movies in the Mystery genre. In fact, Hitchcock's theories about suspense and the psychology of the camera's eye influence my stories in ways that are both explicit and subtle. When I remember Hitchcock's lessons, my stories have greater emotional impact and higher levels of suspense. When I forget those lessons, my prose falls flat no matter how clever my plot, how lyrical my writing, or how quirky my characters might be.

So, what are those lessons? I think the first, and most important lesson, is that the story happens in the mind of your audience. The characters, the dialog, the mise en scene, all of these are devices to draw your audience in and make them your partner in imagining your story. In films, the director has the camera, with all the tricks of angle and zooming, along with the music, the expression on the actor's face, the sound effects, and many other details to achieve this fundamental goal. On the printed page, the task is both harder and simpler. It's harder since everything must happen in the reader's imagination: there is no score, there are no actors, there is no Foley artist. But it's easier too, because the author can saturate the reader's senses by describing all of these things and more. Many authors forget, for example, to include scent in their stories, yet this is one of the most powerful and intimate of all our sensations. In any case, keeping the reader actively and emotionally engaged in the story is the first, and most fundamental, job of the author.

Hitchcock downplayed both plot and dialog in his movies. That doesn't mean these are unimportant, for he recognized that people will identify with characters, even villains. Hitchcock once said, “People don’t always express their inner thoughts to one another. A conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person thinks or needs.” In film, the camera's eye can reveal what is happening in the character's mind despite what he or she is saying. A famous example happens in the opening scenes of "Notorious." The camera starts with a wide shot of a party and we hear a trivial conversation between Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains. How boring. But while they talk the camera zooms in on the two of them, and then continues with a slow but inevitable gaze down to a close-up of Bergman's fingers flipping nervously with a set of keys hidden in the folds of her skirt. We know from the eye of the camera that Bergman is hiding something, and these keys must play a role in her deception. This is no longer boring, but rather intriguing: the director has introduced both mystery and suspense. The author does the same thing in a well-written story, picking and choosing which details to describe and which to leave to the mind's eye of the reader. The reader is engaged by incomplete information which creates suspense. Even the most pedestrian of stories needs suspense, else the reader will become bored and move on to something more engaging.

Consider "Rear Window." Here, the journalist played by Jimmie Stewart mimics the audience: he sits in his apartment and imagines stories about the neighbors outside his window, as if watching a real-world movie. Eventually he draws his girl friend and his health care worker into his voyeuristic imaginings. Meanwhile, we, the audience, are the real voyeurs, watching in the darkness as the story of the voyeur on the screen unfolds. What drives this story is not his broken leg, nor the mystery centered on the Raymond Burr character. What drives this are the little tragedies: Miss Lonelyhearts, the young marrieds, the party girl, and broken relationship between Stewart's and Grace Kelley's characters. Everything else is an excuse for us, the voyeurs in the audience, to spy on the lives exposed on the screen. We don't care so much about what happens as about the people caught up in their individual, lonely sagas.

Hitchcock didn't exactly disdain plot; what he recognized is that the plot is something the characters care about, while the audience cares about the characters. Characters need plot devices to set them in motion and to give them a reason for speaking and acting; Hitchcock was interested in the psychology of the characters, not the love affair that made them steal a fortune from their boss, as in "Psycho," or the crimes they are hiding, as in "Shadow of Doubt." He called these plot devices a "MacGuffin" to emphasize that they are just a tool and not central to the task of engaging the imagination of the audience. In "Vertigo," the plot device is a detective trailing the mentally ill wife of a client. This is just an excuse -- and not a very interesting or plausible one -- to set in motion the haunting interactions between the Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak characters. In "North by Northwest," the Leo G. Carrol character says of the spies, "Well, let's say he's an importer and exporter. What of? Government secrets." That's enough explanation, since in this movie it is the chase and the mistaken identity that matter, not the "secrets" tht the James Mason character steals. I like reading science fiction too, but all too often in SciFi the story and characters hang on the MacGuffin rather than the other way around; clever technology or sociology is just a MacGuffin unless the eye is focused on the characters. I'm far more interested in the personal implications of, say, teleportation, than the technicalities about how it might work. Well, I confess as a scientist, I'm interested in the latter too, but not in a work of fiction.

With respect to suspense, perhaps the most important lesson Hitchcock teaches us is the difference between shock and suspense. Peter Bogdanovich, in his New York Times homage to Hitchcock in 1999 relates the following quote from the master:

''We come to our old analogy of the bomb. You and I sit here talking. We're having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn't mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! A bomb goes off and the audience is shocked -- for 15 seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, show that a bomb has been placed there, establish that it's going to go off at 1 P.M. -- it's now a quarter of one, ten of one -- show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. Look under the table! You fool! Now the audience is working for 10 minutes, instead of being surprised for 15 seconds.''

A more terse summary is the Hitchcock aphorism, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." Of course, it is the audience which anticipates the bang -- the characters must be unaware of that it is coming. In "Psycho," for example, the audience learns about the psychotic Mother before the Martin Balsam character enters the house on the hill. We know, but he does not, that a crazed killer awaits as he climbs the stairs. That makes the scene one of the most suspenseful in all of cinema.

"Psycho" also teaches a lesson most forgotten and most needed in cinema and fiction today: don't show the bomb going off! In the famous shower sequence, we never see the knife strike. The director reveals the attack through a sequence of quick cuts, slashing back and forth so the audience imagines the knife cutting, but never sees it strike its victim. When the attack is over, the camera focuses on Janet Leigh's character's now dead, unblinking eye and her lifeblood whirling down the drain. The audience is left to imagine, but to never see, her horrific wounds. This is much worse, and much more terrifying, than an explicit image of a brutalized body.

There are many more lessons to be learned from the Master of Suspense, far too many for such a short essay as this. His theories and innovations changed cinema forever, and his influence echoes throughout popular culture today. His dark vision inspires the movies that play in mind and that I transcribe so imperfectly to the pages of my stories. His relentless eye always remained focused on humanity and on those impulses that lend both sorrow and joy to our lives. His dramatic insights continue to inform and entertain. He was and remains an artistic genius.

Welcome

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