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May ’23 Newsletter

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Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family.

Recent Announcements:

My essay on Stephen King’s FROM A BUICK 8 came out in late April with THE SINISTER SCOOP. Be sure to check that out here

I have an interview with Kyle Starks coming out late this month with the Scoop. Keep an eye out for that!

Project Progress:

My beta readers officially have the newest version of my sci-fantasy WIP. While they read that, I am working on my speculative sci-fi piece, still no other news to share there or on the horror WIP. 

Recent Fascinations:

My previous fascination seemed, at least to me, to carry a lot of weight, and I’m not really sure how to follow that up in this one. I have been thinking a lot on self-publishing versus traditional publishing (in relation to the direction I want to go), but I don’t think I have enough concrete thoughts on that to really talk about it here. Instead, I’d like to take a moment to share something I’ve had on my mind for a long while that is much less important, but still pertinent.

But first, some photographs of a book crime:

Above are some pictures of my personal copy of CHRISTINE. It’s one of my favorite King novels, and that particular copy is the first King book I ever purchased (in about 2009 for 60 cents). As I’ve started down the path of collecting all of King’s published bibliography, this little copy (a first edition signet paperback from ‘83) has stuck out as the lone survivor of some long forgotten past. It rode in my backpack for damn-near all of highschool, and has seen hundreds of miles of highway and probably more than a dozen read throughs. It seems like a strange contradiction to my pristine first edition hardback of DUMA KEY and my collection of Grant DARK TOWER books, but when I feel a deeper connection to that battered and abused paperback than I do a lot of the other books in the collection. 

This isn’t another essay on King, I’ll save the story of that particularly abused copy of CHRISTINE for when I do that entry in my essay series on the Scoop, but instead a conversation on book collecting. Right around the same time that I decided to build a complete King collection, I started an Instagram in connection to my writing. As a natural connection, I also began following some King collectors. I quickly found myself in a wild world of ornate bookshelves, multiple-full run paperback collections, and incredible levels of collection preservation. 

I want to stop for a second and have an aside where I make two quick statements:

  1. I am not passing judgment on collectors who have really elaborate set-ups.
  2. I am not making any commentary on the bookstagram/bookish/shelfie process or influencer industry. 

Instead, what this is really about, to me, anyway, is what I see my book collection as. It seems that, unlike a lot of other online book/writing space folks, I’ve read a good bit of what’s sitting on my shelves. I try not to hang on to books I don’t really love, or at least have some connection to, and even the few there I haven’t read have often been read by someone else in my household. Not only have most of my personal books been read, but they have been well read. Many have broken spines, torn covers, annotations written in pencil. Many have sticky notes that have been in them for years. I abuse my books, with no real regard towards whether they are hardback or paperback. In comparison to a lot of influencers online, my bookshelf looks…unsettling. 

Here, take a look:

That’s just one of my shelves, and the other one isn’t much better. And again, this isn’t to say that my shelf is a real, lived shelf and the shelves of influencers are facades. I’m jealous of their aesthetic flair (and space!), and I’m also decidedly not an influencer centered around my collection. But I am someone who DEEPLY loves books. I spend about as much time reading as I do writing. It can be a bit disheartening, or at least a little frustrating, to see the internetification of book collecting head in a direction that delegitmizes my own personal collection. Commentary about spine cracking, about bent or torn pages. 

All of this eventually led me to thinking about my own work, and what I want out of my books once I (finally) put them out into the world. I’ve been thinking about whether I want to see them on the shelves of collections, neat and protected and not a scratch, or if I want to see them beat to hell. I see authors like Sanderson releasing bespoke, short run leather editions with neat gold lettering. Those are obviously books never meant to be read (take the fact that there’s an entire guide to reading them without rubbing the gold embossing off), and that idea just…irks me. It irks me in a way that the neat and aesthetic shelves do not. Even books like that previously mentioned DUMA KEY get read. I don’t purchase books I do not intend to read.

I can’t say that I will never release a bespoke edition of one of my books. But I can tell you a couple things with absolute certainty. I’m keeping that copy of Christine, and I want my books, every edition of them, to be read. 

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

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April ’23

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Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family.

Thanks for reading Billy Don Loper-Fiction and Fascinations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Recent Announcements:

My interview with MALEVOLENT creator Harlan Guthrie went live on THE SINISTER SCOOP earlier this month, so be sure to check that out!

I also just announced that I will be interviewing comic creator and all around artistic great Kyle Starks this month, and that article will be coming out in May. 

Project Progress:

Still making steady progress on edits to get it to a second round of beta readers. Currently at about 50% completion of this read through. All other projects are on standby at the moment!

Recent Fascinations:

For a long while, I’ve had a lot of ideas and feelings about being a writer percolating at the back of my mind. After my conversation with Harlan Guthrie, and our in-depth discussion on the reality of being a creative, those ideas finally crystallized into something real that I feel like I can vocalize in an at least halfway clear manner. 

Early on in my real-writer journey, I fell in with the Taco Bell Quarterly craze of raging against the literary machine and discussing the anti-glamorous life many creatives lead. But as I shifted my focus more and more towards genre fiction, I started to second guess the entire world I’d been raging against. I stopped focusing on the literary-ness of everything and started following more and more indie authors, more hard-genre writers, and more horror media creators. As I entered that space I found a world absent of self-important pretense, of constant cloying for membership to the exclusive club of literary writers. Instead I found a community of writers who just love to fuckin’ write. Who support each other. Who offer free to submit, paying markets that encourage the entry of new writers. Who publish anthologies based on vibes, not the hunt for understanding from an abstract literary empire that no one really understands. 

In other words, in the genre writing scene, I found the world Taco Bell Quarterly hopes to create. I don’t know any other way to put it. 

What shocked me though, as I started to fall more and more into this genre space, is how totally unaware so many literary writers seem to be of its existence. More times than I can count I have seen a writer complain about the intricate, gatekeeping issues of the literary fiction space, and wish for a myriad of improvements. An overwhelming number of times, that improvement is already a common, expected factor in the genre publishing space. That is not to say that genre publishing, which makes up an overwhelming majority of the entire field, is not strife with its own problems. Getting an agent and getting published is intense and more difficult than most expect. Marketing for books, even once they are published, is inconsistent and rests largely on the shoulders of the author. Self-Publishing isn’t much better, often expensive and almost always a sunk cost, all to publish into an overstuffed space dominated almost entirely by one corporation. 

So, like I said. Genre has its own problems. But the thing is, those issues are ALSO Lit-Fic’s issues. 

So, if Lit-Fic is strife with additional problems that genre seems absent of, despite its own issues, then why aren’t writers, not necessarily publishers, but writers, taking genre’s lead? I pondered on this for a good while, but it wasn’t until my interview with Guthrie that I really started to see what might be the heart of the issue. 

Throughout the second half of the interview, Guthrie talked a lot about “writing for the medium,” and while we weren’t talking about genre or literary versus genre fiction, the topic struck a chord with me in a way I did not expect. I don’t have an M.F.A., but I am, or was, an academic. I’m a historian by training, and throughout my undergraduate studies I took a handful of creative writing courses, all of which focused exclusively on Lit-Fic. Genre was discouraged for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. I say that only to say: I am familiar with the space and the expectations it contains. I understand the gatekeeping and expectations intimately. In fact, of my three published/accepted short stories, all of them are literary fiction. And to me, there is the crux of it all. I am a published literary fiction writer, but I also write genre and participate in genre spaces. I participate in genre spaces, because literary spaces are filled with anger, frustration, and constant pretentious comparisons.

So, as I ruminated on this juxtaposition, I wondered why many of the TBQ warriors demanding a more open, welcoming space didn’t just transition to the genre space. Why are so many literary authors perfectly happy to ask for paying markets and welcoming spaces, but scoff at the idea of just hanging out with the genre-writing public. The non-M.F.A. holding, day job working, good-times loving part of the writing community. You know…the NANO crowd.

Fighting to find a table at the literary community has a long and storied history in literary writing, but that sort of thing is what TBQ hopes to push away from. But at the same time, a lot of Lit-Fic writers still decry genre and focus on only “real” writing. In other words, they aren’t writing their story, they’re writing to push themselves into a space that has a number of restrictions, of expectations. They aren’t writing for their story, they’re focused on writing literary fiction, on writing for the medium, not the project. Literary writers are trying to find a way out of the gated community that is Lit-Fic, they’re trying to find a way over the wall. All the while trying to claw their way into a “genre” of fiction that has the highest gates of all. Instead of just writing their art and being part of a group that wants them, they aren’t writing the story and letting the medium follow. They’re writing for the medium. A lot of my fellow literary writers spend, from my perspective, more of their time complaining about writing than they do actually writing. In the modern social media landscape, being a Lit-Fic writer is more about complaining about Lit-Fic publishing than it is about actually writing Lit-Fic.

Like Guthrie said, “…if you are a creative, and you want to create, don’t start at the finish line, sit down and think of what kind of story you want to tell.”

Or, if I might put it in a more blunt way taking a slightly modified page from Brent Cobb’s songbook: 

Sometimes sayin’ nothin’ says it all and then some more

Conjecture causes bull and fuels unnecessary wars

Poets know hiding the truth somewhere between the lines somehow

Makes it seem worth more for those looking to find

Some answers to the troubles this life brings

Shut up and sing

Maybe it’s time for Lit-Fic to drop the pretense and stop complaining about the sheets that are on the bed we made. Shut up and write. 

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

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March ’23 Newsletter

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Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family.

Thanks for reading Billy Don Loper-Fiction and Fascinations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Recent Announcements:

This month I will be interviewing Harlan Guthrie, the man behind the Malevolent audio drama podcast. I can’t wait to sit down with him and talk about all things eldritch horror, podcasting, and the connections between audio drama and prose fiction. 

Also, I’m excited to announce I’ll be interviewing Harlan Guthrie of Malevolent, a wonderful eldritch horror audio drama later this month. Updates to come!

I also completed my interview with Cat Voleur early this month, so be watching out for that this summer in ARCHIVE OF THE ODD. Updates to come. 

Project Progress:

Sci-fantasy story is back from the copy editor! I’m making the changes in preparation for a second round of beta reading. I made some progress on the scifi story this month, but all other projects are still on second-class status until this one is finished. 

Recent Fascinations:

Imposter syndrome is a hell of a thing, ain’t it? For authors it can come in so many forms and at so many different places along the process that it is almost a required right of passage. Every writer feels imposter syndrome at some point. Sometimes it’s when you read someone else’s work and it feels so, so much better than your own. Sometimes it’s when you are working on a project that has you stumped, and you wonder why you even bother. For a lucky few of us it’s when we get published, even just short fiction. We get published and immediately start talking about how hollow it all feels and how we have to chase the next high (Also Known As the TBQ Effect). Then at times, it’s when we edit and wonder what bumbling, pig headed, jackass idiot wrote this in the first place. And whose decision was it to make me clean this mess up? And WHY exactly can’t this idiot just get it right the first time?

If you can’t tell, I’m currently feeling a touch of that last one. 

I’m most of the way through a pretty serious edit of my sci-fantasy manuscript after getting it back from the copy editor and, of course, I’m feeling some doubts. My main character needs serious edits to keep her personality consistent, and her love interest required much of the same. I think I’ve got the love interest’s personality straightened out, but I’m not sure I have my MC’s nailed down just yet. Part of me knows I will eventually. I still have another round of beta readers left and another read through by my copy editor, and by the end of it all I know I’ll have everything worked out. Still, though, it’s hard not to dwell on the issues while they’re there on the page. 

This is especially true during the editing process, when you’re spending hours and hours hyper focused on the flaws of the piece, trying to find every way you can to iron them out and make everything neat and proper. 

Maybe modern review culture is partly to blame, it is certainly to blame for the idea that everyone has to like everything and relate to it for a work to be considered good in the common way. My MC isn’t particularly likable, she’s anxious and headstrong, and aggravating, but that’s the point. This is a single story in her journey, and it’s a journey I want to tell, because it’s one I identify with, regardless of if I like her. 

I have to keep reminding myself that even the finished product won’t speak for the entirety of my ability, that it’s a process made up of many people wearing many hats. Most of all, I have to remind myself that there’s no one I’m impostering. 

I’m just a writer, and when I’m done it might be good or it might be bad, but It will undeniably be mine. 

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

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February ’23

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Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by for my first newsletter of 2023! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family. 

Thanks for reading Billy Don Loper-Fiction and Fascinations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Recent Announcements:

Since my last newsletter two of my short stories have been accepted to publication. The first was “Father, or the Pain that Lingers,” and it was published in late January. It can be read here: http://www.usmproductmag.com/current-issue. The second was “Key to the Heart,” a story which recently won a story competition at a local bookstore (The Author Shoppe, Hattiesburg, MS). It’s been picked up by Panorame Journal for their Summer Gothic issue, which will come out Summer ‘23. 

Outside of these publications (wild that I can put an ‘S’ on the end of that already), I have also joined THE SINISTER SCOOP horror media website as a contributor. (check them out here: https://www.thesinisterscoop.com/home). There should be some cool stuff coming from me there soon. 

Also, in March I’ll be interviewing horror author Cat Voleur for ARCHIVE OF THE ODD, (

https://archiveoftheodd.com/

), so stay tuned for more there. 

Project Progress:

My sci-fantasy story has officially been sent to the copy editor! Once I get it back, there’ll be a lot of work left to do, but in the meantime I’ve moved back to my speculative sci-fi story and hope to make a little progress on it in the meantime. 

Recent Fascinations:

Two of my most recent reads have put an interesting topic at the front of my attention. In January I read through Stephen King’s novel HEARTS IN ATLANTIS and D.J. James’s novella STITCHES. These two stories, despite both being part of the paranormal genre, could not be more different. However, it isn’t the distinctions of genre nuance (such as STITCHES being a body horror story and HEARTS IN ATLANTIS being a psychic thriller), but instead it is the classification of writing the two fall into. 

While the spectrum of written works is as wide a tapestry as possible, two extreme distinctions exist that do not necessarily communicate quality, but do communicate density: Literary Fiction and Independent Genre Fiction. Literary Fiction is often dense, metaphorically layered, and an overall more complex experience. Independent Genre Fiction, on the other hand, is often quick to read, exciting, and focused on telling a compelling (or terrifying) story. Language and metaphor come second in Independent Genre, in other words. 

I’ve often considered myself a primarily-literary reader. Prose and metaphor have always been very important to me, and because of that I’ve often scoffed (yes I’m ashamed of this) at independent fiction. However, reading STITCHES and then finishing up HEARTS IN ATLANTIS really caused me to think about what that kind of perspective means. King is the undeniable…king of genre fiction, but HEARTS IN ATLANTIS is a true masterwork in literary fiction, it just happens to have a slight paranormal tint in places. If Shirley Jackson or Nathanial Hawthorne are literary writers, then so is King in the instance of HEARTS. D.J. James, though, did not write a literary story in STITCHES. James instead invokes memories of 1960s and 70s pulp paperback horror novels. STITCHES is bloody, disturbing, and fast moving. It leaves the reader with a feeling of sick dread. The prose is simple, if at times a little clunky, but it conveys its story in a quick, direct fashion that leaves plenty of room for the disgust to splash out of the page. HEARTS IN ATLANTIS is a story in the vein of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, while STITCHES is the paperback version of 1980s slasher horror. B-Movie on the page, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, that kind of fiction is an important part of the genre, and often provides room for more literary works to breathe. 

So as I read STITCHES and began making criticisms to myself about the quality of the prose not being quite as high as other books, I found myself realizing that those kinds of criticisms are, by definition, meaningless. STITCHES was not supposed to be a literary masterpiece. It isn’t a psychological, complex horror movie. It is FRIDAY THE 13TH. 

And that’s okay. You should read HEARTS IN ATLANTIS, but you should also read STITCHES. 

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

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January ’23

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Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by for my first newsletter of 2023! I hope you enjoy it and can share it with your friends and family. 

Recent Announcements:

In late December of ‘22 I started a “Bookstagram” account on Instagram in an effort to further share news about my writing and do a little review work on the books and media that I spend so much of my time consuming. So far it’s been an interesting experiment, and if you want to check me out there my username is @bloperficiton. 

Project Progress:

I’ve moved onto the next stage of editing of my sci-fantasy manuscript, grammar edits to prepare it for my copy editor. However, that process is taking far longer than I anticipated, because I did not get near the amount of writing done during the Christmas/New Year holidays I had intended. It’s likely that that planned deadline is going to have to be moved back to the second half of this month/early Feb. 

Other projects are still on hold until this deadline is dealt with. 

Recent Fascinations:

After finishing up THE FAR MERIDIAN, which I still highly recommend, I moved on to another podcast-audio drama titled GIVE ME AWAY, which I don’t recommend (check out my review on Instagram). However, as the year wound down and I progressively started focusing more of my free time into my writing, specifically the not-writing part of being a writer, I’ve found myself considering the idea of “being literary” and being a writer in general. 

In December, my first story was accepted for publication. While it won’t be in print until the Summer, the guarantee of publication shifted the way I think about being a writer in a way I never thought it would. I had told myself for a long time, years and years, that once I was published I wouldn’t be an aspiring author but a real, proper writer of fiction. Even though I won’t earn a red cent from this publication, it’s still the lifelong realization of a childhood dream. I found out my story was accepted just as I pulled into my driveway after a long week at my day job, and I sat in the car for a minute, telling myself over and over again that I had finally made it. 

I’m a writer.

Then I went inside and cooked and tended to my infant the same as any other day. The next Monday I woke up and went to work and did the same work I do Monday-Friday. There were certainly congratulations from friends and family, and I’m still ecstatic to have achieved this, but to me it seems that as soon as I reached that long-chased goal, another appeared just as fast. 

I’m a writer, sure. Now let’s find a way to do it for money. And that, dear reader, is the real hat trick. 

So I started a Facebook page and this newsletter and an Instagram and suddenly there’s more to all of this than writing. There’s building an audience and posting and being public. And to be quite frank, none of it feels very “literary” at all. 

A part of me had always imagined big bookshelves and roll top desks and quiet contemplative writing framed by the chase of publication as the peak literary goal. Certainly that’s part of it, at least part of the mindset, but so too is the marketing and the audiences and the social media of it all. The meaning of “suffer for your art” really seems to have changed, at least for this social media luddite. 

Anyway, @bloperficiton, like-share-subscribe, and all that good stuff. 

Thanks for Reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

Posted on

December ’22

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Welcome to the Newsletter!

This one will be a little different than what I have planned going forward, but thanks for checking it out.

Why a Newsletter? (and why now?)

Author newsletters are the lit world’s standard, and Substack makes that process a lot easier than running a traditional email listserv. So instead of running a listserv, I’m going to try out running a monthly (as it is currently planned anyway) newsletter here.

As far as why now: I’m early in my writing career, having just had my first short story accepted for publication. I’m hoping that this space can become an accountability tool as much as a genuine place for delivering updates and other tidbits. Writing often and in many different ways is a key way to hone the craft, so that’s part of what I hope to do here.

So here is the first edition of my newsletter! I hope you enjoy it, and thanks for reading.

Recent Announcements:

  • In October my short story “Key to the Heart” won the Author Shoppe’s Scary Story Contest. You can read the story here: https://billyloperhistory.com/short-stories/a-short-story-key-to-the-heart/
  • In December my short story “Anatomy of a Waterfall” was awarded 3rd place in the Tishomingo Arts Council’s 2022 Fall Writing Competition. It was then selected to for publication in the 2023 Edition of THE VIEW FROM WOODALL.

Project Progress

I’m currently working my way through an edit of my current manuscript, a sci-fantasy series focused around a library. I’m planning to get it to a copyeditor by mid January.

Outside of that, I’m also working on a horror novella and a sci-fi story unrelated to my other manuscript. Those are both on pause until January.

Recent Fascinations:

Lately I’ve been working my way through THE FAR MERIDIAN, a magical realism audio drama focused on mental health and trauma. (Check it out here: https://www.whisperforge.org/thefarmeridian). It’s a fantastic show that is as thought provoking as it is genuinely charming. For me, audio dramas are hit and miss as a format, but this one has been an absolute hit. But it, combined with my read throughs of Stephen King’s THE INSTITUTE and a friend’s manuscript, has me thinking about theme in the context of different genres.

THE FAR MERIDIAN is a deeply introspective and emotionally powerful story, while THE INSTITUTE is a thriller mostly focused on fast paced action and shocking revelations (a standard for most King stories, to be sure), and my friends manuscript (which I will be providing no plot details for out of respect for him) is an absurdist comedy. Yet all three of these works focus a lot on repressed trauma in one form or another. The different genres of these stories lend themselves to different explorations of this topic, each does it with the reverence and respect it deserves.

Far Meridian focuses on the ways that unexplored trauma can fester in unexpected and unseen ways. Kings’ Institute spends most of its page count exploring the institutional exacerbation of trauma and oppressive unforeseen forces. My friend’s manuscript explores generational expectations and the trauma it imposes. Each of these stories are different from one another in almost every way except the underlying theme of trauma and what it means to the characters. Genre does not, after all, define theming.

I don’t know how I ended up going through three stories with a similar theme at the same time, but it has ended up topical to my own writing as I work through one of my own characters with PTSD. I’m a discovery writer, so as of now I have no real idea where this character will head in the coming sequels to my current project, but I know their past and their trauma will play a major role. All of these works have shown me that, regardless of the direction in style and tone the sequels of this project take, there will be a way to tackle this trauma in a respectful and accurate way.

There’s not much detail I can go into here beyond that (I don’t like to reveal details about my stories until they refinished and settled). I can say that all of those stories handle the theme well, and I hope to do the same.

Check out THE FAR MERIDIAN and THE INSTITUTE. They’re both worth your time.

Thanks for Reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

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ANNOUNCEMENT-Short Story News

My short fiction “Anatomy of a Waterfall” was chosen as the third place winner of the Tishomingo Arts Council 2022 Fall Writing Competition. As a result of this, the piece will be published in the next edition of THE VIEW FROM WOODALL.

I cannot begin to explain how honored I am to have this piece chosen for this. My life has been strange the past couple of years, and all of that came together to create this piece. I lost my grandmother to an aggressive cancer in 2020, had my first child this year, and have been busy trying to make something of my writing. So I’m happy TAC has given me this chance. I’ll always be grateful.

If you’re interested in the story, keep a watch and I’ll be sure to share once its published!

Thanks for reading-Billy Don.

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A Short Story: Key to the Heart

An Author’s Note: This short story was written for the first time in 2015, then heavily revised in 2018. Since then I’ve struggled to find a home for it in the world of fiction magazines and journals. Its shocking nature, reliance on fast paced action, and lack of real metaphorical weight has made it a difficult sell to the magazine world, which tends to focus on more contemplative fiction. However, it has found a wonderful home with the Author Shoppe, a unique bookshop in Hattiesburg, MS. I have referred to Hattiesburg as my home for most of my life, even though I’ve never lived there but have always instead lived nearby. It is a great honor to have this story chosen as a winner in the Author Shoppe’s 2022 Scary Story competition. I can’t think of a better place for it to be recognized than in the town that birthed this story. So, since the Author Shoppe does not have an avenue for publishing short fiction, I’ve decided to take it upon myself to self-publish this piece so that it can be shared with their patrons. It might not be literary or speculative or contemplative, but as the Author Shoppe has noted it is oh, so scary. Enjoy my piece Key to the Heart.

Nancy fumbled with her keys as she tried to open the door to her townhouse, the scrubs she wore wrinkled and stained with the signs and smells of the sixteen-hour shift that had consumed her day. The soft glow of a lamp peered at her through the window on the door, casting long shadows behind her that flickered through the filter of her movements. After what felt like a lifetime, her searching hand found the keys, lost in the vastness of her bag, and clasped around them with enthusiastic frustration. With a quick turn, the lock clicked and she swung open the door. As she stepped in she flipped the light switch on and turned to walk towards her bedroom at the back of the house, but as she turned her heart dropped.

“Fuck,” she whispered, and her eyes raced through the room, bouncing off the scene like pinballs. Papers were strewn across the floor, every drawer in view ripped open and all the furniture upturned. Nancy collapsed onto the door and slid to the floor, her mind reeling as it worked to reject the scene laid out in front of her. Her pained, tired eyes looked out into the house with dismay, but after a moment, her mind caught up with her body, and she leapt to her feet. 

The key, she thought, conscious of the sound of her voice in her own mind. God fuck I hope they didn’t find the key. They can’t have found the key, they can’t they can’t they can’t. She sprinted to her bedroom so fast that as she rounded the corner in the hallway her right foot slipped just enough for her to come crashing to the ground. She landed hard on her right hip, and her heavy frame drove her into the tile floor with such violence that she screamed out from the shock alone. Her heart pumped with such visceral intensity that the pain did not make its way to her brain, and she came back to her feet at the same speed with which she had fallen. 

In the bedroom she reached to open the top drawer of her dresser, but her hand found air as it grasped at nothing. The drawer laid empty on the floor at her feet. No, she thought, and her mind slammed to a halt. No. No no. No nononononononono. Not the key. God not the key. How, what. Where is the KEY? She screamed at herself now, the throbbing pain of her hip having made its way to her nerves. She shambled back into the hallway and to the room across from her bedroom. She put her hand on the doorknob, and her head began to pound with the all too familiar pain of anxiety. She opened the door. Shit, she thought, a yellow splash of light hitting her feet, the sound proofing material on the inside of the door marked with the imprint of a bare foot. How the fuck did he get out. How did he GET. OUT? What am I supposed to do? Oh Jesus fuck I am done this is it this is the end I am done. This is it. 

Nancy ran down the steps and left the door open behind her. By the time she reached the end, her breath came in shivering gulps. The pain in her hip throbbed at every step. When she saw the state of her basement, she shrieked, unsure of where the breath to do so had come from. The chains she had used to hold him lay on the ground still mounted in their home on the floor. The cuffs were missing, and a hacksaw lay half-propped against the wall. The table that held her tools was upturned,  her whips and ropes were ripped from the walls, and the supplies she kept on shelves along the far wall pillaged and strewn on the ground. For a moment, she thought he had somehow managed to reach the tools, but then a memory came rushing back to her. 

God dammit, she thought. God damn me. She remembered teasing him with the saw, slapping him again and again, and just before she started to cut, she heard her alarm echo down the stairs. As she stopped her play time and started up the stairs, she sat the saw on the table just a little too close to the edge. It fell, she thought. She was in a haze, staring at the mess covering her playroom. She remembered topping the stairs and hearing the sharp ping of clanging metal, thinking he was pulling at his chains. The saw fell.

“IT FUCKING FELL!” she screamed. Her mind flew into a rage, and she kicked at the tools on the ground and screamed into the abyss that her playroom had become, her hip screaming back at her in its still ringing pain. She almost couldn’t see through her anger, and she slammed her right fist into the block wall of her basement. The bones crunched, her knuckles busted open, and she let out a shriek that was half fury, half agony. As she clutched her hand, she surveyed the destroyed room. The hot sting of tears rolled down her face as she grinned at the mess that surrounded her. I’m done, she thought as her mind calmed and her hand was starting to throb harder and harder, a wildness settling in her hazel eyes. I’m done. They’ll catch me now. She sighed, looked at her broken hand, and noticed the way her knuckle bone was visible through the blood. “Short lived hobby,” she said aloud. In a state somewhere between melancholy and despair, she climbed back up the steps, her hip fading as the pain of her hand crescendoed to a bellowing volume. She took almost twice as long to go up them as she did to fly down them just moments before, and as she did her mind worked through the few options she had left. As she walked back to her front door, she saw it. On the ground, half covered by strewn papers and broken belongings, was the key and beside it was the lock box that had once held more than a dozen photographs.

She picked them up and dropped them into the trash can near her front door before she glanced out the window. She listened to the sounds of police sirens begin to crescendo across the city as they headed towards her home. Her mind numb from the failure and implosion of her world, Nancy walked to her kitchen, grabbed a large butcher’s cleaver, and placed it in a glass casserole dish. She looked at it for a minute, to be sure she had considered all her options, and covered it with a lid. As she started out the door with the dish in her left hand, a throb of pain from her right side reminded her of her bleeding fist, the trail of blood around her invisible to her whirling mind and foggy eyes. 

“That won’t do,” she said in a trance-like tone and turned back to the kitchen. She wrapped the hand in paper towels and put an oven mitt on. Her hand panged with pain, and she winced as she pulled the mitt over the broken bones. Out of sight, out of mind she thought, half laughing. She walked out of the door, careful to lock it behind her. 

Outside of the house the strobing red and blue lights started to light up the night sky only a few miles away. She let out an exasperated sigh and straightened her hair with her mitt-covered hand while she ignored the streaks of pain that ran down her arm. She walked down the sidewalk to her neighbor’s house, a small, ranch-style home almost a ticky tacky match to her own. She walked to the front door and adjusted herself to give off her best kind neighbor appearance and knocked. A tall, well-built man opened it and gave an honest grin. 

“Hey Nance,” he said as he leaned his head out of the door. “something going on nearby huh?.” The sound of police sirens was almost breathing down their necks. His eyes scanned over her, and he noticed how tired her eyes seemed, heavy and framed in dark circles. “Long day?”

“Real long,” she answered. “I made this casserole, and I don’t think I could ever get it all eaten by myself.” She held up the dish and gave a faint grin, the multi-angled shadows from the door and the streetlights behind her obscuring the fact that the dish was empty, save a solemn knife. “Hungry?” Her hand throbbed in the oven mitt, but she was careful never to break the smile. 

“You know me Nance,” he said, “always hungry. Come on in.” The man turned and walked back into the house, and Nancy followed behind him. She shut the door just as the police rounded the corner, and the light filled the windows of the house.

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Looking for Plot in Strange Places: Dood, Juanita, and the Importance of Narrative Context

A Note From Me: The Ballad of Dood and Juanita, and how it shows us to examine a narrative in context, has been on my mind lately. This is a longer one, so thanks for reading!

Spoilers for the plot of Dood and Juanita

Concept albums, or albums meant to explore a concept beyond musical composition itself, aren’t a new–well, concept. David Bowie was famous for his Ziggy Stardust concept albums. Actor and all around eccentric man, Christopher Lee wrote and performed a number of heavy metal concept albums based. Rock acts, Rap artists, indie darlings (see the phenomenal Phoebe Bridgers), and instrumentalists have taken on the task of telling loosely connected narratives through their art. Country music, especially the Country and Western sub-genre, has perhaps been the most fertile genre for the concept album. The likes of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Marty Robbins tackled the idea of the narrative west through their music more than once in their careers. 

Sturgill Simpson’s 2021 concept album THE BALLAD OF DOOD AND JUANITA stands out as an interesting example of narrative storytelling, and it has an important lesson to teach on how we study those narratives. Sturgill first made use of the concept album in his 2019 outing SOUND & FURY, which was a hard rock abstract concept album, named after Faulkner’s (in)famous abstract novel. However, DOOD AND JUANITA is not an exercise in abstraction. Instead, it feels as if it is telling a story from an episode of GUNSMOKE, HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL, or BONANZA.

DOOD AND JUANITA consists of ten songs, and each one serves as a main plot beat within the narrative. From Juanita’s kidnapping to the death of Dood’s dog Sam, Simpson tackles the story of a Kentucky pioneer’s journey to save his wife. The music, it goes without saying considering it is the Grammy Award winning Sturgill Simpson at the helm, is phenomenal. But considering it dispenses with the concept album’s typical abstract complexity, discerning listeners might find the narrative of DOOD AND JUANITA simple and formulaic. 

Listeners expecting the weaving ideas of the Ziggy Stardust albums might be disappointed by Sturgill’s utilization of the concept album this time around. However, it is unfair to look at DOOD AND JUANITA through such a simple lense. While song to song, and plot beat to plot beat, the album’s narrative core feels formulaic, there is a lot more meat to dig into there than it might first seem. 

Simpson has layered the story throughout the album in a way that reveals more and more details with repeat listens. Dood’s relationship with his love Juanita, his mule shamrock, and his Shawnee heritage, are only a few of the details that weave themselves throughout the narrative. The first full song on the album, track #2 “Ol’ Dood,” gives a great deal of detail about Dood’s personality and background in order to serve the narrative of the album. From that song alone the listener can see Dood as if he were a character on stage, a fact which is a testament to the clarity of Simpson’s lyrics. After returning to the song a second time,  listeners might identify the way the song lays the groundwork for the rest of the album. The description of his ability with a rifle and his shawnee upbringing foreshadow the way that Dood eventually enacts his vengeance on Juanita’s kidnapper. For a narrative concept album that only has a runtime of about 30 minutes, DOOD AND JUANITA tells a pretty interesting and layered story.

The layered storytelling in DOOD AND JUANITA is not necessarily something revolutionary, and not even unique within the concept album sub-genre. However, it does serve as a recent example of something every reader, and writer should keep in mind. 

In the post-post-[post?]modern era, media analysis has taken a lot of criticism. The “the curtains are blue,” argument comes to mind when I think of what internet media criticism has become. However, that criticism, especially the critical-rating style analysis popular in magazines and online, is not necessarily unwarranted. 

Readers and media critics cannot, and should not, analyze the narrative quality of a young adult novel cannot in comparison with the works of Faulkner, Dickens, and Melville. Movie goers cannot examine the narrative quality of a children’s cartoon against the works of Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan. Even more important than avoiding these comparisons is avoiding inter-discipline comparisons, which can create a total misunderstanding of the narrative context a piece of art exists within. 

David Bowie’s most well known concept album, THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS, is a complex, abstract, and beautiful work of art. Any listener will notice that the narrative at its core has much more nuance and layered metaphor than  DOOD AND JUANITA. ZIGGY STARDUST is also three times longer than Simpson’s Country and Western narrative. In the context of concept albums, ZIGGY STARDUST is a Jack Kerouac novel, whereas DOOD AND JUANITA is a Jack London short story. 

No, DOOD AND JUANITA doesn’t have a particularly deep narrative, but in the context of other concept albums, there is a lot to love in Simpson’s latest outing.

Check it out here if you’re interested (not a sponsor).

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An Update about Me and this Website

This website was created to serve as my digital portfolio during the job hunt that consumed my final semesters of graduate school, and after I found and secured a job this website was abandoned in the absolute whirlwind that was finishing my thesis, moving, and getting settled into my new life. On top of all that, my first child was born in March of this year, creating a new layer of chaos in my life that has slowed down any external efforts I have. So I wanted to share an update about what this website will be going forward, as well as what I am working on and what can be expected in the months going forward.

To begin with, I won’t be as active in the academic history space going forward. My career has taken a different turn, and its not something I am interested in working on outside of a 9-5, so there won’t be as much academic research and writing going forward. That said, I am working with the Covington County Genealogical and Historical society on a number of projects, and I’ll be posting updates about that work and what I’m doing within the local/community history space here in Mississippi. Be sure to follow along for those updates.

Most recently, I gave a presentation on community history research that can be seen here.

Beyond these public history efforts, I am actively pursuing my lifelong passion of creative writing. I can’t say that it will go anywhere and that I’ll be published anytime soon, but I can say that this is the first time I have had time to really pursue these efforts. I will be updating with any news in that area here.

Outside of all of these (I swear this is the last time I say that), I am planning to start (trying) to do regular blog posts here. These posts might be book reviews, general musings, or cultural/historical tidbits. I hope to keep them light hearted and easy to produce, so if that sounds like something your interested in, keep a check in here.

Thanks for reading.

-Billy Don.

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