I’m ambivalent about today’s post. I fear that it reveals things about me that perhaps shouldn’t be revealed. Especially on such a bright soft Sunday afternoon. It’s a 3 a.m. darkness of the soul post.

One of the bewilderingly many reasons that I quit writing for so long is that my internal critic shut me down, to the point that I couldn’t even begin creative work, much less finish it.

I wrote darker and darker fiction, to the point that I ceased selling what I wrote. Righfully so, I think.

It was a bad decade or two for me. I began to self-censor, as a dysfunctional survival tactic. That’s one of the best ways to kill yourself as a writer.

I’m mostly past that now, so no boo-hoos for me. My life right now is happy, and getting better each month.

‘Do Me Good’ was the last story I had published. It’s such a fucked-up story that one editor rejected it with a scathing critique that made it obvious that he hadn’t finished reading it. When I read it at a con in Oklahoma, several people abruptly left the room in the middle of the session. They came up to me afterward to reassure me that it wasn’t because they thought the story was bad, just that they were getting nauseated.

It ended up being published in the (semi)famous Fall 1993 ‘Death’ issue of the Pulphouse hardback magazine, the last issue they got out before expiring.

As I wrote in my submission cover letter, I’m horrified that I had this story in my head, but rather pleased with its execution. It’s violence-porn, and it’s the most primal, nasty thing I’ll ever write.

Do Me Good

And here’s the sound-track to it:

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When I was five or six, my father was stationed in Kaiserslautern, Germany. (Kaiserslautern received its name from the favorite hunting retreat of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who ruled the Holy Roman Empire from 1155 until 1190. Like caesar slaughter, I guess.) My maternal grandmother came over to visit for a month and we took to the road, seeing the sights of Europe, including Rome.

Back then, the Colosseum was in the middle of an enormous traffic circle (which long ago was shut down as the traffic vibrations were hurting the building.) We drove around and around that once, caught in the crazy traffic. I got car sick.

I threw up.

Now, forty-five years later, I’m once again having an indirect effect on that same area. Jumper the movie based on my books Jumper and Reflex did some shooting there last month.

Photo by Philippe Antonello/20th Century Fox
(I probably threw up on this exact spot.)

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