An Explanation of Midnight in the Bowling Alley and Some Other Stuff

Well, it's finally happened. In a few days, I'll be posting the final live story of the first collection, titled Midnight at the Bowling Alley. It's taken a long time to write because of my struggle with depression and procrastination and blah blah blah excuses. Whatever. It's written, and it's being revised as we speak. As promised, this is the back story.

Midnight at the Bowling Alley represents a lot of things to me as a writer. Most obviously, it's my first story to deal with the idea of an afterlife. Much in the spirit of The Dead Astronauts and the approach I used with the question of the existence of a god, I wanted to leave the question open as to whether I was implying that the afterlife exists.

The storyline is simple enough. Oscar and Zeke are on their way to Zeke's mother's birthday party and Oscar has fallen asleep in the car. The opening scene is of Oscar waking from a nightmare he can't remember. They arrive at the bowling alley where the birthday party is. After the usual verbal abuse from Zeke's mom, Oscar decides to hang out alone the rest of the night, but he soon discovers that he may be stuck with Zeke's mom forever. The man at the snack bar says that there's no way out.

After putting The House on Bernard Street on hold, I realized that the verbal abuse that Warren's mother was able to deliver to Aaron in that novel was simply too priceless to shelf, so I've transferred a great deal of her into Zeke's mother.

I also realized that I often will write the same storyline over and over. I've decided to stray from the “man wants out of his own life, tries to get partner to go with him, ultimately goes alone” plot line that I find myself wrapping most of my short stories and novels in, and I've decided that this story should be based on the lack of possible escape rather than pending freedom.

The characters are pretty typical of my work, but as with my previous two stories, this is a horror piece. Horror is a genre where character-driven dramatic elements are scarce, and I think this tendency of mine to put my characters front and center and let the main battles play out inside them sets me apart from other modern indie authors. I'm not content to write a story for the sake of writing one. There's a lot of symbolism in everything I write, though admittedly, it has to be pointed out to me by those who read my work.

I suppose this story could be considered the final in a horror trilogy, though the stories themselves (Our Lives in Ruin, The Dirty Red Fingernails, Midnight at the Bowling Alley) have nothing in common as far as plot or characters go. The three stories before that could be seen as a relationship drama trilogy (Spin the Bottle, The Dead Astronauts, We All Come Home Eventually). The first two stories are mother-oriented and represent my first attempts at short fiction. Some elements of all these stories work, and some do not. I'll have to revise them all pretty heavily once I take them down so that I can put them into book form.

Once I've got books to sell, I plan to sell them a few different ways. Most obviously will be online via a website. However, I am insistent upon meeting the people buying my books, so I will likely try to put together a book tour. Who can say? I might do anything. This part will be discussed in a future blog about Antioch.

Now we come to something which may cause tables to be flipped like dominoes. I am likely finished with the “live” format altogether. I may finish The House on Bernard Street live, but after that, everything will be written in private and then sold as books. It's time I moved on to this phase of my career, though I will say that it has been fun watching the view counters rise on these stories as people read them. I've been giving my work away, however rough-draft it may be, and it has made me no money. I've seen that there are people in the world who are willing to read my work, and it's inspired me to believe that these same people might be willing to pay $1 to download an ebook or $12 to buy a printed book.

Don't let me down.

We All Come Home Eventually: The Back Story

We All Come Home Eventually is a story that actually sprang directly from a line in chapter fourteen of Antioch, where Aaron Dunn talks about how we all come home to what we remember.

The character of Todd is someone that I think a lot of people can relate to on a very basic level, much like Aaron was. In a way, I think that he's sort of an evolution of Aaron, though his ex boyfriend Ryan is certainly no Warren. He's an emotionally abusive omnipresent source of ill feelings for Todd.

His best friend Mark is straight, and he's a constant comfort in the story. I suppose that makes it the opposite of Spin The Bottle, where the straight friend's intentions are not as well-meaning in the end. I do look at the two stories at almost mirrors of one another, both of them dark but for different reasons.

The story is written in first person present tense, which has become my standard way of writing since Antioch. The unique spin I put on this story is that Todd tells the story as though speaking it to Ryan, who is never otherwise in the story more than a few brief mentions of him in passing.

The story has been up for a while, and I've just now gotten around to writing the back story of it. I suppose depression and a busy schedule have a lot to do with it, but you'd think I'd learn to plan for those things.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy We All Come Home Eventually, a short story by myself, Roman Theodore Brandt.

We All Come Home Eventually, by Roman Theodore Brandt

How To Not Get Bombarded With Ihop Cutlery

Prepare your silly scene kid hipster emo vampire boneheaded selves. I am about to rip a general hole in everyones collective asses.

Forgive me for being old. Seriously. I apologize for being 28. I realize that's old age for gays, and believe me, this blog is being written from an old folk's home as a formality.

Being so old, I certainly am unqualified to make any judgments, I'm sure. That being said, watch me do it anyway.

Because I can.

This is my blog, unfortunately for you.

El. Oh. El Camino.

Item one: I'm sorry, but if you're out with me and we're eating or something, and I get a Facebook notification where you're saying “bored, text it,” rest assured that I will kill you. I have four hours to myself, now. Per week. Between work and school and writing, I am booked. If I am able to find the time to hang out with you, and you post something so offensive, so deal-breaking, so spectacularly idiotic and insensitive, rest assured that you will be sampling all of my food. Forcibly, down your face, plates and glasses and spoons bouncing off your person. I will put my sundae up your ungrateful god damned ass. I will shower you in my soda, and I will leave you with the bill in the hopes that I have just made your night more interesting.

I realize that being under 25 makes it mandatory to be bored at all times, but do try to suppress it. Do try.

Item two: Those awful celebration photos I see littering my news feed. The ones where you're singing or something. With your mouth half open and your head cocked to one side, not smiling.

It's pretty rare that anyone makes that face outside of the Internet, but all you shiny rainbow asshats make that face online. It's like a plague. It's like you see a camera phone and your face goes BOOMDUMBASSFUCKME.

I'm sure they make pills for that.

Item three: Let's not post our phone numbers on Facebook walls in comments. I think the reasoning behind this should be obvious to any sentient, sound-minded person. This one is less of a criticism and more of warning.

You wouldn't spray paint your number on the outside of someone's house or car with the words “call me” below it.

Obviously.

Because you, my friend, would look like a god damned asshat. And you would probably be arrested.

And besides that, someone would spend the next five days calling your number and breathing. Am I right?

I MISS U KALL ME *insert phone number*

Classy. Very, very classy.

Darwin award. Here you go.

Item four: You post pictures of yourself, yet you say you're ugly in every one of them. Well, if you're ugly, why spread it around?

Item five: your illiterate haikus instead of human dialogue. Allow me to introduce you to my friends, grammar and punctuation. Admittedly, I post some things with typos sometimes, but I at least respect my native language enough to use it properly, including word wrap.

Humans do not talk like this:

tbh

u r annoyng

but i luv u

u hav no lice

so thats good

im done

<3

No. No no no. Absolutely not. Get rid of it. Kill it with fire. Teach it to write whole sentences or destroy it.

Maybe I'm just old for a gay. I can feel the spindles of age creeping into my bones.

Of course, the people I'm addressing here would never venture far enough into my profile to click on a link to a blog, so I'm ranting. That's all it is.

And it's all in good fun. I don't actually want to punch people with brass knuckles made of dinner plates over a Facebook status. But DAMN it feels good to get this all out.

I hope it was at least educational.

About My Impending Hiatus (Yes, Another Hiatus)

As I've said, it's time for me to take a hiatus.

I've grown a bit tired of the stories I'm writing now. I feel locked into a style of writing that I never intended to own. I wrote the first chapter of Antioch by accident, but since then, I've been writing a long series of relationship dramas.

The truth is that, while I respect this type of writing, I want to write horror. I feel that at my current pace, I'll never be able to write horror. I need time to practice, and time to write.

I do feel that I've gained valuable experience as a writer of character driven dramatic short stories and novels, though.

I'll be releasing two more short stories, and the remainder of The House On Bernard Street, and then I will be in full hiatus. I am only in a partial one right now.

That's not to say I'm not writing or that I won't be writing. I simply won't be publishing it online for a while.

I'll be writing three horror novels, covers and descriptions to follow.

The Caretakers

A novel about a Joe Ramsey and his dying mother, who rent a house in the country. The landlord supplies three men who work around the house, and their presence causes Mrs. Ramsey to get well. But at what cost? Joe learns a sinister secret about the house and the men who inhabit it, and he's soon faced with a decision no one should ever have to make.

The Lucid Dark

A novel about a man who rents a house with four friends when he goes away to college. Before long, though, parts of the house began to disappear. When the bedrooms vanish, so do his friends, and he seems to be the only one who remembers they were ever there to begin with.

Kill John

A novel about John, a college student who's on his own for the first time. He rents a house near campus with a boy he meets in one of his classes. Soon, though, he begins to see dark shadows that look like the people he knows. Soon, he realizes that he can't distinguish between these ghosts and real people they represent, and before long, he's even afraid of himself.

So you see, it's not really a break from writing so much as a step toward goals I'd almost forgotten.

I certainly hope that all of you will stay with me as I change.

A Little Backstory: The Dead Astronauts

Well, the time has come to drop The Dead Astronauts. Never have I been quite as nervous as I am with this release, because this story is technically science fiction.

As I have stated previously, I am no Carl Sagan. I've had to suppress the natural tendency to describe in detail all of the futuristic technology in favor of the focusing on what I know how to do, which is to say, tell a story about two guys who don't know where to go from where they are.

I've very much accepted that I am known as a “gay author,” and with that in mind, I feel that it's my duty to experiment with style, etc. I no longer have any duty to prove how ordinary gay literature is. I've decided that rather than try to prove it, I can do it just by writing what I want to write.

The Dead Astronauts is the story of Henry, a lonely cafeteria worker who wants to know what exists beyond the glass walls of the space station where he has lived all of his life. George, his boyfriend, is perfectly content to live the rest of their lives aboard the craft, and wishes that Henry would stop looking out the windows at the stars and wondering if there's a god.

This is an intensely personal piece for me, as it always is. This story's element of wondering if there's a god was particularly challenging, because as an atheist, I wanted him to come to a solid conclusion that there wasn't one, but it simply did not suit the situation, so I left the whole thing ambiguous, and I'm very proud of that. It's not my duty as an atheist to shove my lack of religion on my readers, and for this particular story, a question of the existence of god was best left unanswered and unbiased in its curiosity, not leaning toward or away from my own convictions.

I think that that's one of the hardest things I've had to overcome as an author: the urge to make my characters all atheist or gay. Granted, most of my main characters are gay, but that's what I know. Religion is not always something that has to be dealt with every time one sits down to write something, though, and for the most part, I prefer to avoid the subject unless it moves the story forward.

I hope that this story means something to someone. As always, thank you to everyone for your continued readership, and for your support.

Indie Author Threatens To Turn World Into Parking Lot

I've decided to put together a tentative release schedule for the next 30 days. I'm going to post the art for the releases in this blog alongside the anticipated drop date.

01/14/13: The Dead Astronauts. This short story takes place on a space station, and follows my most commonly used theme: a character in a very ordinary life (for the time and location) and the desire to find something better. It's one of the riskiest stories I've written, as far as setting and writing style go, because I'm no Carl Sagan. I've taken the focus off of the high tech elements that normally dominate the genre so I can focus on the relationship, which is something I do know how to do.

01/20/13: Chapter Three of The House On Bernard Street. The third installment in my second live novel. With Christmas at Warren's mother's house looming, Aaron faces stress and familial resentment, as well as the equally frightening threat of Christmas at Warren's Dad's house.

01/26/13: We All Come Home Eventually. This short story focuses on the dynamic between a man and his best friend in the aftermath of a breakup. I'll reveal more about this later on.

02/02/13: Our Lives In Ruin. This short story focuses on a man and his mother living in poverty in a small town. More details about this later as well.

Also, at some point, I plan to put up the new art for Spin The Bottle, designed to match the vintage toilet bowl spittoon Saturn rocket thing my new covers have going on. Also, A Tree In The Park and It Might Be My Mother are being taken down after the release of The Dead Astronauts for revision and expansion. 

Stay tuned. I'll link to all of these things as they occur, including any easter eggs I decide to crack open on your collective foreheads.