This, That, and the Other Thing

March cometh, and I realize almost four months have passed since my last blog/update. That’s entirely too long, but sometimes life has a way of making us forget just how fast it’s passing.

Anyway, no overarching topic for this one, just lots of little things to mention!

First, StoneGarden.net Publishing offered up The Uncanny Valley as a free Kindle download for just 48 hours this past month. It’s usually $2.99, but FREE has a certain ring to it, and the results were fantastic. By Sunday morning it had reached #6 on Kindle’s bestseller list for short story collections and #20 for Kindle horror books, and it remained within ten or so numbers of that throughout the rest of the day. By the end of the 48 hours, over 750 people had downloaded it, which really makes me happy. I hope everyone enjoys it…Just knowing that so many new readers have the book in-hand (so to speak) is gratifying. I never take a single one for granted.

On top of that, my first collection, Scaring the Crows: 21 Tales for Noon or Midnight, is now available for Kindle! Check it out here.

Next up, bestselling fantasy author Piers Anthony, who so kindly reviewed Scaring the Crows in 2010, also offered to review The Uncanny Valley after I sent him a copy shortly before the turn of the year. I hadn’t expected him to review it, and told him so when sending it along; he’s a busy man, and I was already grateful that he’d reviewed the other book. Yet he went ahead and reviewed The Uncanny Valley anyway, and just published his thoughts in the February edition of his online newsletter. Moreover, he enjoyed it, which means a great deal to me. Piers always goes above and beyond in terms of kindness and consideration, and moreover is honest – so if he compliments my work, I not only appreciate it…I believe him. And here’s the link.

I’ve had many irons in the fire lately. In addition to meeting my new students and getting the new semester started with them, I’m also working on two editing project by people I greatly admire. The first is a collection, Fog, and Other Stories, by author/poet Laury Egan. Laury has been a great proponent of my work, and edited a middle draft of The Uncanny Valley, also suggesting a change in the order of the stories that undoubtedly made the book stronger. It is my pleasure to now have the chance to repay the favor, especially because Fog… is a true gem. StoneGarden will be publishing it sometime in the next few months, and I will certainly link it here.

The other project is a YA book from none other than John Randall York, the extraordinary artist who has illustrated both of my books, and who, if I have any say in it, will illustrate all those still to come. John has turned his hand to writing, and has not one but two books coming out from StoneGarden this year: Blerbin, which I’m editing, and a picture book called King Bronty. Blerbin takes place in a zoo that has far more to it than meets the eye, and I’m having great fun reading the early draft.

Finally, I’m also finishing up the latest round of edits on my own new project, On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home. This one is slated for publication in August, and the revision process is finally reaching the point where I’m beginning to feel satisfied, more or less, with all of the stories I’ve chosen to include. I’d like to have the entire project in fighting shape and ready to go by the beginning of summer, because I’m starting to think about Uncanny Valley again. Last summer I wrote 27,000 words of the prequel, and I have about that much still to go. I think Uncanny has many stories left to be told, and only a few have yet been written. This one is a doozy…and some of the plot points that had been giving me trouble toward the end of last summer are no longer standing in the way. The path forward is now obvious – but it will take a great deal of work to clear it completely.

Some other odds and ends:

One of my unpublished short stories, “The Eleventh Hour,” will be appearing in Mark Crittenden’s forthcoming anthology, Dreams of Duality, under Mark’s Red Skies Press publishing imprint. It’s a pleasure to be appearing in another of Mark’s projects. Here’s a link to his site.

The new, big-budget version of The Woman in Black is now out in theaters. I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.

Other Movies I Want to See This Year:

The Dark Knight Rises
The Avengers
The Hobbit
The Raven
Prometheus
The Hunger Games
The Great Gatsby
American Reunion

Wishing everyone a Happy March (and hopefully an early Spring),

Greg

“A Pleasing Terror” – When (and How) Horror Truly Does Its Job

Well, October has come and gone, and Halloween, my favorite holiday, is now just a recent memory. Unfortunately October, which I love dearly, is also always my busiest month of the year – and this year was no exception.

So before I knew it, Halloween was upon us. I didn’t dig out my beloved Halloween decorations until the same afternoon, and was barely able to decorate the front of the house and the yard before the neighborhood kids started hitting the streets and it was time to take our own out (as Eeyore and Tigger) for their brief, enchanted evening. But I did get it done, and was even able to spend the late night after everyone else went to sleep watching scary movies. Yet knowing I’d missed my chance to enjoy the weeks leading up to Halloween still saddens me.

And now, as luck would have it, I find myself suddenly caught up with work and able to write, read, and watch movies again – in the second week of November. So I’ve decided I’m going to make the best of it. There are still some red and gold leaves on the trees (despite the freak blizzard last weekend), and apple cider is still well-stocked at Giant Eagle. I’m not willing to let the holiday go just yet. It’s a state of mind, after all – just like Christmas or Thanksgiving. So tonight I’m going to heat me up some cider, steal some leftover Halloween candy from my kids, and catch up on some scary movies.

For me, this can be a challenge, because very little by way of film or writing gives me what the great ghost story writer M.R. James referred to as “a pleasing terror.” I love horror movies and I love ghost stories – but they, like everything else, are bound by Sturgeon’s Law: “ninety percent of everything is crap.”

It’s difficult to examine all the things, both great and small, that make horror movies (and, by proxy, horror stories) work. But the greatest mark of success is how well the writers and directors in the genre understand and act upon H.P. Lovecraft’s famous statement: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

Working under the general assumption that what applies to film also applies (or at least translates) to the written word, I’ll focus on movies from here on out to prove the point.

In film, what we don’t see is universally scarier than what we do. Suggestion is all it takes, coupled with well-placed, short moments of revelation…usually toward the end. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are very rare.

Why? Because the imagination is humanity’s greatest gift as well as its greatest enemy. In horror, the merest suggestion of the uncanny allows our minds to fill in what we don’t see with the worst things we can possibly imagine. Hence, our intrinsic, genetic fear of the dark.

In Japanese culture, supreme horror is felt not through blood, guts, violence and a great slathering of special effects. Instead, to see someone simply standing in the corner of a room – someone who shouldn’t be there, or who couldn’t be there – is enough to create the “pleasing terror” of which James spoke.

The best example of the effectiveness of this “less is more” approach can be found by comparing two movies, both released in 1999.

The first is The Haunting, an hour and a half of big-budget eye candy that, on first glance, would seem likely to have everything going for it. The film is based – loosely based – on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, perhaps the greatest haunted house novel of the 20th Century. That, coupled with a solid cast including Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Owen Wilson, gave horror aficionados hope.

It was not to be…Literally ten minutes in, a fountain fills with blood and a cheesy CG hand reaches out to grasp one of the characters – and that’s all it took. The mystery was dispelled, the ghosts were campy; the unknown was known and the audience wasn’t scared.

The next 80 minutes were no different. The movie hit us with every CG spook its writers and effects team could devise. These included, among many others: talking wooden heads; a bed that comes alive; an enormous, animate fireplace; and, finally, the big baddie himself, all CG darkness and writhing vapor.

No one so much as gasped. It was unbelievable, it was overkill, and most importantly, it left nothing to the imagination. Famous actors and a mountainous budget couldn’t save this film…in fact, they killed it.

At virtually the same time, a small underground film began making itself known through word of mouth, a few scattered magazine articles, and a then-new viral method: the Internet.

Stephen King has gone on record as saying that he walked out of the theater during The Blair Witch Project…not because he disliked it, but because it disturbed him. And that’s a very good sign.

I saw Blair Witch in the theater, after the initial buzz had died down and viewers were already firmly divided into two camps: those who felt the movie was a cheap, overrated mess about nothing; and those who felt the movie was a cheap stroke of genius that had single-handedly revitalized the mainstream horror genre after a decade-long slump.

As you can probably guess, I fall in the latter camp.

The Blair Witch Project, like its descendant Paranormal Activity franchise, cost next to nothing to make, and ended up grossing hundreds of millions of dollars – giving it one of the greatest cost-to-profit ratios of any film ever made.

More importantly, as a horror movie it works.

Nothing is ever seen. Nothing. No witch. No monsters. No ghosts. No spirits. And there are certainly no special effects. The creepiest moment (besides the ending) is when the increasingly unhinged and desperate trio see little hands beating on the outside of their tent and hear the haunting laughter of children – deep in the woods, in the middle of the night. And, of course, when they open the tent flaps, what do they see?

You guessed it.

Suggestion is more powerful than direct presentation. The imagination is more powerful than any special effect. And it is this example of contrasting horror films that proves it, although there are dozens and dozens of others that support it too (perhaps not as dramatically).

M.R. James also believed in the “slow build” – providing a normal setting with a normal, even boring character, and then slowly, ever-so-slowly, pulling the rug out from under him until before he even realizes what is happening, he’s fighting for his life against a malevolent supernatural force. At that point, it’s either fight or die, so he has to accept the reality of the ghost – and often even that isn’t enough to save him. We relate to such stories because they are convincingly mundane…and then quite gradually not, until the final blow falls and the screamer of an ending knocks us happily sideways.

Beautiful.

One film that fits this mold perfectly is the 1989 made-for-television adaptation of Susan Hill’s classic ghost story, The Woman in Black. Shown only a few times on TV, released for just a short time on VHS before being yanked, it has since garnered a large and devoted following of horror fans who feel it ranks among the best horror films of all time. Again…no special effects, no gore, a PG rating…but it delivers some of the scariest moments ever put to film, simply because we can relate to Arthur Kidd’s circumstances and aren’t smacked in the back of the head with too much, too soon. Eventually, like in the best M.R. James stories, we see enough to leave us palpitating…but only when the time is right, and never before.

I’ve shown this movie to my high school students as a study in mood, foreshadowing, suspense, and character development, usually after we read The Great Gatsby (which, believe it or not, shares many story-telling devices with it). And this coming February, all my former students who have watched the original version with me will get to sit down in a theater and watch the new version, starring Daniel Radcliffe. I’ll be there too. Judging from the trailer, this second adaptation is more atmospheric, more graphic, more intense…more everything than the original. But will it be more scary? I really, truly hope so, but it has a very fine line to walk.

I could go on, but after a three-month silence I’m eager to post this and let everyone know I’m still alive. Next time, if anyone is interested, I’ll include a list of what I consider to be some of the most effective ghost stories ever written – and a list of some truly creepy (pleasingly creepy) movies, too.

Now I’m off to raid the kids’ candy again…

On Time, Summer’s Ending, and Some Other Things

As a teacher, I still have the benefit of viewing summer the same way I viewed it when young.  And now, just as then, what seemed long in the coming was short in the doing. Fall, my favorite season, is once more just around the corner.

Yet there is also a difference.  At 33, the months of my adulthood now pass like weeks, and the weeks now pass like days.  This seems both inevitable and universal – everyone has commented on the phenomenon at some time or another, to the point where it has almost become cliché.  Yet it feels strange, like many things do, when it finally hits you…and you realize it’s both startlingly and inexorably real.  And nothing can be done about it… Time can only be felt in context; it is impossible to remove ourselves from it.

Stephen King wrote a beautiful story about this, called “My Pretty Pony.”  In it, the boy’s grandfather, a dying old man, tells him, “…you got to remember that you don’t own time; it’s time that owns you. It goes along outside you at the same speed every second of every day. It don’t care a pisshole in the snow for you, but that don’t matter if you got a pretty pony.”  The pony, of course, is Time…and it has a “wicked nature” but is still pretty…still worth appreciating, since it’s all that we have.  As King concludes, “…having a pony to ride was better than having no pony at all, no matter how the weather of its heart might lie.”

I benefit from reminding myself of this now and then, and should probably do so more often.  Like Dylan Thomas wrote in “Fern Hill,” Time held me green and dying / though I sang in my chains like the sea.

However wicked Time’s nature, it’s the song that truly matters.

On a less “profound” note, some miscellany:

Two new reviews of The Uncanny Valley have popped up in the last week, both four-star.  I’ve linked them on the Uncanny Valley page.  One, from Book Republik, comes straight outta Minsk, Belarus!

I gave a talk/reading/signing at the Monroeville Public Library several weeks ago, and had a blast.  The audience was small but enthusiastic, and it’s always fun to build enthusiasm through direct interaction – my enthusiasm from theirs, theirs (hopefully) from mine.  The same holds true in a classroom setting, and I think that’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching so much: the building of enthusiasm and knowledge through sharing and interaction.

Finally, in taking stock of my productivity over the summer, I see that I’ve written 26,000 words of the Uncanny Valley sequel (prequel, actually), which is very satisfying, especially considering that the first book is only 10,000 words longer than that.  This one isn’t an interrelated collection of short stories like Uncanny, but a full novel that unravels through journal entries, letters, and newspaper articles.  When I began, I expected it to be about the same length as the first book, but it is growing in the telling, and I now project three distinct parts that, in total, will likely reach 50,000 words.  So I’m a smidge over halfway along, and happy.

I also finished two new short stories, and hope to finish the rough draft of one more to polish off my next collection, On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home.  That one’s due to see the light of day next year, with the second Uncanny book to follow close on its heels in 2013.

So, that’s lots done, and lots still to do and look forward to. Not a bad summer.  Now back to school and onward to Fall! Target had their Halloween cards out this evening, and even though it’s only August 14, I’m already feeling the thrill of anticipation.

What is Old Becomes New Again…

I watched two excellent movies in the past week – one, a Japanese film called 13 Assassins; the other, a Chinese film called Ip Man.

Both follow standard plots. 2010’s 13 Assassins, directed by Takashi Miike (an extraordinarily prolific director known in the US primarily for his shocking, brutal, and brilliant Audition), is a remake of the 1963 film of the same name, and also has echoes of Seven Samurai and its American counterpart, The Magnificent Seven.  In a nutshell, the year is 1884, the age of the samurai is almost over, and some of the last, great warriors of the era are called upon to assassinate a sadistic lord before he can rise to national power and threaten the peace of the country.

It’s a suicide mission, and the movie culminates in a final showdown between the 13 chosen to carry out the job (12 samurai and one man who is, interestingly enough, just possibly a demon) and the 200 warriors who live to protect the assassins’ target.

Well, it’s all been done before – the standard “small band against incredible odds” film we’ve seen over and over in movies ranging from 300, Saving Private Ryan, and Star Wars, to True Grit, Kill Bill, and Tombstone.

But it, like many of the movies listed above, still works.  13 Assassins is incredibly satisfying.  The villain is so evil, his actions so heinous, you want to see him taken out (painfully) literally two minutes into the movie.  The leading samurai are well-characterized and charismatic, due to both fine acting and good writing.  The screenplay is an excellent blend of characterization, plot, action, and mood.  And the directing (especially with regards to the 35-minute battle at the end) is masterful.

Then there’s the 2008 Chinese film Ip Man, (very) loosely based on a ten-year period in the life of the Wing Chun master who, later in life, mentored Bruce Lee and helped spread Wing Chun martial arts across the globe.  It’s a standard biopic, and of course virtually all biopics follow the same general plot arc: subject starts with very little, subject builds a good life for himself based on charisma and talent, subject reaches (or almost reaches) the top, subject suffers a devastating setback (or series of them), subject defies the odds to find redemption and validation – inspiring others in the process.

End of movie.

Think Cinderella Man, Sea Biscuit, Rocky, Walk the Line, Ray, Ali, The King’s Speech, etc., etc…

But again, it works here.  Ip Man possesses the clichéd arc, clichéd characterization, clichéd motives, and every other cliché in the book – but it, like 13 Assassins, is oddly satisfying.

Why?

The answer is in the artistry.

In 1839, Edgar Allan Poe published “The Fall of the House of Usher” in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine.  At that point in the game, the “Gothic” story had more or less already worn out its welcome, or at least become so commonplace that it was widely parodied and considered somewhat passé.  Wapole’s The Castle of Otranto had been published 75 years earlier, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk had been shocking readers for over four decades, and even the Romantic poets and their dabbling in the genre had come and gone by the time Poe published “…Usher.”

But we’ve all read “The Fall of the House of Usher,” while very few of us have even heard of The Castle of Otranto or The Monk, let alone the hundreds of other stories, novels, and poems that comprised the Gothic genre before its appearance.  Poe’s story breathed new life into a fading field, and helped (along with the works of the Brontes, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, among a few other standouts) rejuvenate the genre to such a degree that it remains a powerful literary form today…Think Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” much of Flannery O’Connor, all of H.P. Lovecraft, and a healthy dose of Stephen King.

Why?

Because Poe could take a standard, tired form and do not only what everyone else before him had done with it – but do it just as well as the best of them, and often better.  In “Usher…” he employed parallelism in an ingenious way.  He introduced not only characters, but a narrator of questionable sanity. And he described everything in a lush, baroque fashion that even Hawthorne couldn’t match.

In short, he one-upped his predecessors and contemporaries in just 20 short pages.

The magic isn’t just in the tale, but in the telling.

Imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Michael Bay, or The Road written by Nicholas Sparks.

Imagine The Great Gatsby – on the surface just a 1920s soap opera  — written by anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It’s not possible, and this is why the book remains The Great American Novel yet simply can’t be filmed effectively, as the four existing attempts aptly demonstrate (I have faint hope for the forthcoming Baz Luhrman adaptation, but it’s very faint).

So to come back to 13 Assassins and Ip Man:

Both work because their plots, though standard, are so exquisitely rendered through various areas of artistry that they remind us why the genres became popular in the first place.  In that regard, the formulas regain their effectiveness…the clichés become welcome…and the audience’s groans become gasps (Paranormal Activity, anyone?).

Thus, what is old truly can become new again.

When it comes to storytelling, this is something that all players, in all mediums, would do well to recognize and remember.

Launch Day!

Dear Friends,

Today I’m sending out the formal announcement “opening” this site. Please come in, browse around, ask questions, leave comments, tell friends, tell enemies, tell your pets, tell your diary, and come back often!

I also thought it would be fun to include a Q&A for my next blog entry, so if you have any questions about anything you might be interested in having me answer, ask away, especially if it’s about writing.

Also, with perfect timing, John York’s local newspaper in Tyler, Texas just published an EXCELLENT feature, both on his work, and on The Uncanny Valley. It’s an absolute pleasure to collaborate on these projects with John, and it makes me very happy to see yet another article devoted to his talent:

Tylerite Randy York Provides Unique Art Style to Collection of Short Stories.

The ribbon is now officially cut.  Welcome.

Reviews for The Uncanny Valley…

Reviews for The Uncanny Valley have begun to appear, and I’m thrilled by the positive response so far.  Here are links to those that have cropped up in the last few weeks:

Review of The Uncanny Valley by Booksellers Without Borders, July 13, 2011

Review of The Uncanny Valley in Dreadful Tales, July 12, 2011

Four-Star Review of The Uncanny Valley by I’m Loving Books, July 5, 2011

Review of The Uncanny Valley on Bibliobanter, June 30, 2011

The Bookshelf “Book of the Week” Review of The Uncanny Valley, June 27, 2011

Five-Star Review of The Uncanny Valley by SF Writer Girl, June 18, 2011

“Gregory Miller’s The Uncanny Valley is a Treat” – The Austin Post, June 13, 2011

Four-Star Review of The Uncanny Valley by Book Reviews Weekly

Welcome!

Dear Friends,

With the help of Katie Hartlove, I am finally starting a website that will focus on my writing, collecting in one place my thoughts on the process, reviews for my books, links to all the places my work has been published, and whatever else may come to mind. From time to time I’ll also likely use this as a forum to discuss the writing of others. This is a new but satisfying step in my life as an author, and I hope you’ll join me.

To begin, The Uncanny Valley: Tales from a Lost Town is slowly gaining traction, with reviews and interviews starting to appear, and reader responses starting to come in.  It’s an exciting time, especially because this is a book that is quite close to my heart, and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for it — as more people find out about it, read it, and comment on it.  Also, of my two books it is the first to be offered as both a paperback and for the Kindle.

I’m also just finishing up (with Katie) the edits for the Sam’s Dot Publishing anthology Potters Field 4.  This is, as the title suggests, the fourth installment in the popular series, which features stories about unmarked graves in all their dark and varied forms. It will be published toward the end of summer, and I’m eager to finally see it in print after all the work everyone involved has put into it.

Review copies are still available for those who would like to feature The Uncanny Valley on their sites.  I’ll also be posting details on some upcoming appearances I’ll be making for the book — signings, readings, talks, and all that good stuff.

Finally, this site is still a baby, and is therefore currently under construction, but in the days, weeks, and months ahead, I look forward to turning it into a place where anyone who is interested can find everything they may want regarding my work.

I’d love to hear from you.

Greg