Influence Part 1 (of an indeterminate number)

Influences make us who we are. The people, ideas, and works of art that inspire us to a higher plane of existence are quite indispensable, and without them we would know nothing but this little place we call madness that is our mind. I want to take a few posts to discuss the influences on my life, beginning with the book that reminded me that I loved telling stories.

Before Bag of Bones, I had never read Stephen King and I'm pretty sure I never saw any movies based on his works. I have this odd quirk that keeps me from following something popular just because it's popular, and so I think that perhaps knowing I was "supposed" to like him kept me from actually liking him. Yet, when my stepdad gave me his used copy of this book while I was in college, something about it intrigued me. I opened the book and could not put it down. I think I probably read the entire novel in about three days, forsaking much-needed sleep (I was a Senior after all) to satisfy my curiosity about what would happen next. I was hooked in all the right ways, and it was then that I realized that I, too, could write stories that not only frightened people but also encouraged them to enjoy life. Bag of Bones is a romantic ghost story that transcends its genre and is my very favorite of King's works (although, admittedly, I haven't read them all). I don't think I have to tell you that King is an amazing writer because let's be frank: you either know this to be true or you will never know how true it is.

The miniseries starring Pierce Brosnan is top-notch as well should you be more inclined to watch than read (although I certainly hope that's not the case. The world already has too many watchers and not enough readers, but I digress). If it weren't for this book, I never would have started writing Immolation, my soon-to-be-published novel. But above all that, I never would have understood what Mr. King says about writing: that writing is not actually what a writer does. A writer simply acts as the psychic in a seance with imaginary characters who use him/her as their amanuensis to tell the world what it needs to hear. If you are a writer, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you are a reader...thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking the time to lend me your eyes and your heart. I will try my best to treat it with the dignity it deserves.

Until Death is defeated...

Sam

Patience

My mom used to always tell me that patience is a virtue, and I believe what my mom tells me (she's pretty smart). The problem with virtues is that they are like grasping oil: just when you think you've got it, you realize you only have a little bit and the rest has slipped between your fingers. I thought I was a patient person, but the past few days have been the longest days of my life. I'm waiting to hear back from the publisher about the next step for Immolation and a few days has turned into years of torture and mortification in Purgatory.

While I wait, though, I have been amazed at the encouragement from many of my friends. My good friend Russell Schmidt informed me of some most excellent news (and no, I haven't watched Bill and Ted recently, why do you ask?) and when the time is right I'll share it with you all. In the meantime, let's go support him and read his ridiculously awesome blog here:

On the "amazing friends" front, my friend Judah McNiel has offered to help me with an author website that actually looks like it wasn't made by two "Nigerians" trying to give me 15 million dollars. I'd give you his website, but I don't know it, so just pretend you went to it and enjoyed it very much.

Finally, in this installment of "amazing friends" (I feel like I should copyright that before DC Comics gets an idea in their heads) go harass my friend Mark Carver by buying his books, the first of which can be ordered here: Ignore the reviews that call his book "a miss" or other such nonsense. I suspect this was written by forty-year-old men living in their parent's basements who look suspiciously like this guy:

Though I've mentioned a few people here, I can never thank all of you enough for all you've done to help me, even if it was just encouraging me to keep going. You all mean the world to me.

Sam

Being published

For those of you who may not know, I was recently offered a publishing deal, so I'm kind of a big deal. Well, once things get rolling. Check back here as I am going to be updating the blog much more often, especially as the ball gets rolling. I took down most of my past posts and only left up a few that I felt were either important or too cherished to delete.

Thank you again to all those who have supported and believed in me. It is truly humbling to realize what wonderful people are out there.

Sam

Love Is Not Found Between Your Legs- A Man's Guide to a Woman's Happiness

I want to talk to women here. The men can stay too, if they'll keep it down, because this is important for women to hear. I want you to understand something ladies: Love is not found between your legs. Life may come from there, but living does not. What is in between your ears-your mind-that is where love, and happiness, and true life can be found. It is not enough to go through this world trying to be loved, trying to find love, looking for happiness. You must realize that happiness is the way, and that there is no path to finding it. The Constitution of the United States of America may guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but happiness is not truly pursued. This is a lie. One pursues a lover, or a dream, or even a criminal; happiness is not to be pursued, because happiness simply is. If you are not happy, it is not because you haven’t found happiness but because you don’t believe that you deserve to be happy. But all people deserve happiness, even the wickedest of us all. For if the wicked would only realize their innate happiness, they might not be wicked.

Our society is lying to you, and it lies to you every day. It tells you that to be happy, you must be skinny, or have the nicest clothes, or the greatest hair, or the whitest teeth, or the best job, or the richest husband. Or whatever else they can sell you on so you’ll buy their magazines and their products to make you “beautiful” when you already are so just by virtue of being a woman. You see, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Yet society does it every day. Take the recent Dove beauty project, wherein they have a forensic artist draw pictures of women describing themselves and then pictures of the same woman being described by another woman who has just met her. The results tend to show that women think they are much less attractive than others see them. Herein is the issue. We pursue the opinions of others for our own affirmation, and we are met with either heartache when they do not validate us or shock when they show us we are much better than we thought. It is a disease that affects us all, but unfortunately it affects women much more so. Women want to be thought of as pretty, no matter what they say. There is no greater compliment to a woman than to tell her she is beautiful.

Yet women do not want to believe that they are beautiful. They look at magazines with their airbrushing and Photoshopping and think, “This is what I should look like. But I don’t. therefore, I must be ugly…or at least not as pretty as I could be.” Well I want you to understand this right now. You, as a woman, are beautiful. Not one of us on this earth would be here without women, and so many of us would have never survived without women. While the men are running around doing all kinds of things-from the good like taking care of their families to the bad like leaving their families behind because they’re irresponsible to the truly horrific, like abusing their families-women tend to take up the slack. This is not a diatribe against men, no feminazi rantings from a self-loathing man. I am a man, and I am proud to be one, but I can see the writing on the wall. Society may be built by men, but its foundations are built by women. As the saying goes, the man may be the head but the woman is the neck, turning the head where she wants it to go.

But society doesn’t want you to realize your inherent beauty as women. Society shows you two views of women, both of which are detrimental to your own self-esteem and self-worth. The first view is that all men are stupid, and therefore you must be the cynical, sighing stick in the mud who takes all the fun out of everything. Look at almost every commercial that features a dad and a mom and you’ll see what I mean. They tend to go something like this. Son wants to build a treehouse. Dad, not knowing how to do so, refuses to admit his inability, so dad and son begin the project. Mom comes out to see what is going on, finds dad with his head stuck in a beehive running around like a madman, and son is doing all the work. Sighing, mom rolls her eyes, fends off the bees, frees dad, and then suggests that they hire a contractor. While we may laugh at this commercial, the underlying lesson here is simple: Men are stupid and incompetent, women are shrewish and sarcastic, and mom wants to make sure that she interrupts any potential bonding time between dad and son. Or maybe I read too much into these things.

The second view is that women are objects designed for pleasure. Now this comes in different forms. They can be bikini models, Playboy bunnies, cooks, maids, servants whose only purpose in life is to please the men. But the idea is the same. In this view, women are meant to be objects. Men can masturbate to their pictures, can slap their behinds as they walk by, can basically be the big stupid animals that the women know they are anyway (after all, they’ve seen the commercials) and women are supposed to take it. The funny thing is, when this is criticized, inevitably someone will come out in defense, talking about how the hypersexualization of women is a good thing because now women are seen as sexual beings and women deserve earth-shattering orgasms (as if the entire purpose of sex was to have an orgasm) and the only way they can accomplish this is by walking around completely nude, teasing men into such a frenzy that they basically consummate this illusion of love with something akin to rape-which, incidentally, is called “rough sex” and which will produce this amazing orgasm that every woman deserves. It’s pure, unadulterated bullshit, but it’s what we are told to believe.

Some women will rebel against this stereotype, but unfortunately many times this rebellion is not positive at all. Back in 1993 Queen Latifah released the song U.N.I.T.Y. with the words, “Who you callin’ a bitch?” It was a song which took to task the degradation of women, especially in hip-hop. Nowadays, the answer to Latifah’s question would be, “Myself. I’m the baddest bitch.” The script, as they say, has been flipped. Women will call themselves bitches, as if this is some kind of badge of honor. You can even buy t-shirts that say asinine things like, 1% Angel, 99% Bitch”. But you’re not a bitch, you are a human being. Bitches are female canines who go in heat and get humped by every horny dog in the neighborhood. Calling oneself a bitch is akin to calling oneself a chewed up piece of meat: good if you’re hungry and need something but definitely not your first choice. Men do not want bitches, little boys do.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Men do not want your breasts, your vagina, or any other part of you. Men want you as the total package, with your mind and your heart, your smile and your sense of humor, your anger and your tenderness. All of you, that’s what men want. Little boys want something warm to play in. books and magazine articles galore have been written about what men want. If you want to know what men want, the simple answer is this: what do you want? Until you know what you want, you will never find a man that will satisfy you, because as I said, happiness is not found in anything other than your mind. If you’re looking for little boys, immature half-men who like to play with toys, then by all means buy every Maybelline product you can, try every diet out there, buy every single trendy article of clothing that exists. Open your legs for anyone and everyone. But if you want a man, learn to want yourself first. Because if you don’t want yourself, what makes you think anyone else worth having would want you?

Coming Attractions

Hello faithful blog readers. Just posting to let you know I haven't forgotten this thing, just been busy. I wanted to let you know that I have a few posts in the works, including one about my recent adventure to the Georgia Ren Faire. I'll even have pics of that excursion! I know, I know, you can't wait. But you'll have to.

Lest you think that is all for this post, fear not! I'm going to share with you all an excerpt from a short story I'm currently working on. Let me know what you guys think.

There are things that exist in this world, things that we don’t want to exist, things whose existence we fear. You see them, at the edge of vision. A shape appears in the corner of your eye as you shower, only to disappear when you look straight at it. A hulking shadow hovers ominously in the corner of your room, and when you reach frantically for the light at your bedside it flees, as if it were never there. And you convince yourself that these instances were nothing: a figment of your imagination wherein you saw the steam from the shower fogging the glass of the shower door. The monstrous shadow in your room was simply the moonlight casting off of the tree outside, mingling with your coat which you carelessly left hanging on the closet door rather than putting it away. Obviously, this is all you have seen, and your imagination has done the rest.

But your psyche tells you this is impossible, for how can the steam dance in such a way on the glass door as to make the shape of a ghostly young woman, pale and intoxicating in her beauty, beckoning for you to come dance with her? How could the moon cause your coat’s shadow to entwine itself with the tree outside and make a creature of such hideousness that words fail to describe it? But you cast these thoughts aside, for there’s no such thing as ghosts. Science has proven over and over that the supernatural does not exist. Science has explained everything or, if it hasn’t, it is well on its way to a solution. You tell yourself this, for you fear the truth. Science, that great god of humanism, has worked its magic and alleviated your fears in a way that no other religion has. It has saved you from the awful truth: that monsters exist in this world, waiting in the shadows to devour your very soul. But you do not fear them, for science has told you that even your soul does not exist.

That's all for now. Thanks everyone for your support!

Why Writers Need Psychiatrists

As a writer, it can sometimes seem impossible to find time to write. When time is found, motivation is often lacking. When motivation and time are found, the phone tends to ring and there are people on the other line who chose that particular moment to tell you something you already knew or really didn't want to know in the first place. And if you tell them you're writing, they tend to say, "Oh, that's wonderful! What are you writing about?" or ignore you completely and continue on with their (obviously) more important story.

So how does a writer accomplish anything, ever, and not pull out his or her hair in frustration? Well, Stephen King is famous for saying that writer's write. Writer's don't necessarily get paid. They don't always get to go on TV or on book tours or sell movie rights or even get published. But they write. And any writer who writes can tell you that there is nothing like it in the world. Everything melts away when a writer is writing, and this is why we seem so incredibly cranky when we are interrupted from our writing. It's why we're so frustrated when writer's block strikes. Writing is not just our hobby, it's not even a drug. Writing is the reason we exist, and it is the closest one can become to understanding what it must feel like to be God.

We write because we must, for if we do not we end up unfulfilled and bitter, all the creations inside our brains warring and trampling and doing God knows what else in an effort to break free of our minds and share them with the world. Yet we fear that even when we get them onto paper that they will never be shared, or if shared they will be ridiculed and despised. We do not believe the praises of friends and family because they are our friends and family and are supposed to tell us that our writing is "wonderful". Being a writer is, I imagine, akin to being a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex.

But please, whatever you do, don't stop giving us praises. We need them, for besides writing your praises are our life's blood. And please, whatever else you do, give us honest criticism as well. We need it as well, even if we kick and scream and hate you and make voodoo dolls of you to stick railroad spikes through or, as the shirt says, "you'll end up in my novel".

And please, for the love of God, support us.

I love you all, my family, friends, and fans.

Sam

Eye of the Beholder

Hello again and thank you to all who have been reading my blog. I've been sending out query letters for some of my short stories and am still waiting to hear back from the last query I sent out to an agent. Hopefully, something will come from all of this. I appreciate all of you who have taken time to by my book from Kindle and I hope I will be able to point you to a place to buy a hard copy in the near future. Until then, I thought I'd share a short story I've written entitled Eye of the Beholder. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it, and that you will comment below and share the link with your friends on Facebook and anywhere else you feel is appropriate.

And now, without further ado, here is the story.

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER BY: SAM REESE

You’ve never looked so beautiful. I know I’ve said those words before, and I meant them. Every time. Like when, after being friends for years, we went on our first date. I still remember how you looked when I asked you out: nervous, unsure, awkward even. You never were completely comfortable in your own skin, but you were always so striking, the way your ebony hair seemed to both clash and mesh with those cerulean eyes. God, you could never see how flawless you were.

But that night…that night your beauty was beyond belief. Remember how you tried canceling on me when I came to pick you up? Your mother said you’d had an accident and I immediately thought the worst. There I was, all of 17, and my entire world was gone thinking you’d been maimed-killed even-in some horrendous accident. Then, when she told me what really happened, how your brother had thrown one of his toy cars and hit you in the eye…well, I laughed. I couldn’t help it, the image was so ridiculous. And let’s be honest, your brother has always been a brat.

I remember I went up to your room and knocked on the door, told you that it was me, and you told me to go away. “I’m hideous,” you said. I told you that was impossible; black eye or not, you were still the most beautiful girl in the world. And I was right. When you finally opened the door, you’d never looked so beautiful.

Remember when you were pregnant with Katie? I remember the glow on your face in the beginning, your smile beaming from your face and lighting the world around you. I on the other hand was terrified. I knew I was going to be a lousy father but you never doubted me at all. You were always there, telling me things about myself that I didn’t believe at first, but the more you said them the more I wanted to believe them. You were, in so many ways, my rock and my anchor. Thank you for that.

When you got into your last trimester, you had gotten huge. Your ankles were swollen and so was the rest of you. Remember that day you tried getting up from the couch, grunting and straining and then collapsing in frustration? Tears began pouring from your eyes and you screamed, a heart-rending scream if ever there were one. I came running into the room on two wheels, terrified that you’d hurt yourself and the baby.

“What’s wrong honey?” I asked you, pulling you to me and caressing your hair.

“I’m so fat, and ugly, and I smell. I can’t bathe properly, I eat like a pig, horse, and cow combined. My feet are swollen, my hair’s a wreck, our house looks like a bomb went off in it, I can’t work…” Then you burst into a sobbing fit, unable to hold the sorrow back any longer. I took you to the bathroom, stripped you of all your clothes, and bathed you from head to toe. Remember that? Then I put you in bed, kissed your eyes and whispered into your ears, “Sweetheart, you’ve never looked so beautiful.”

The worst news in my life came when we learned you had breast cancer. My world crumbled around me, thinking that if we didn’t beat this thing we’d never get to grow old together. I think the worst news in your life came when they said you had to have a mastectomy. I remember you just sat at the kitchen table that day, staring at absolutely nothing, looking like a man who had just been a participant at Tet. I didn’t know what to say to you because to me your breasts, while certainly enjoyable, were not you. And I loved you. But I suppose in your mind they were an integral part of your being, as if you were no longer you without both of them.

After the surgery when you were allowed to come home, remember how you wouldn’t let me see you undress? You told me to go away, to turn off the lights, to wait until you were done in the bathroom before coming in. you cried constantly; never was there a moment when your eyes were dry it seemed. After two weeks I couldn’t take it anymore, and I determined that this thing would not beat us. Remember how angry you were when I burst in on you in the shower? You screamed at me, cursed my name, made accusations about the legitimacy of my birth. It was the first time I had seen you naked since the mastectomy, and I couldn’t stop staring.

“Stop staring at it! For God’s sake, don’t look at me like I’m some circus freak on display for your amusement!” You snatched your towel down, pulling the rack with it. You stumbled out of the shower and as I caught you I saw the hatred and pain in your eyes.

“What? Shocked at how ugly your wife is?”

“You’ve never looked so beautiful,” I said, and then I kissed you full on the lips. That night we made love, and I swear it was the greatest of our lives.

Now here we are. We had a few good years of no cancer, but when it came back, this time in your brain, it was horrendous. Every night, I prayed to God for mercy, for grace, for healing. I guess I got the first and third, because you didn’t suffer long and you’re not suffering from the disease anymore. I stand here, looking at you for the last time, this box cradling you in its arms as you wait to be lowered into the earth from whence we all came, and all I can think is…

…you’ve never looked so beautiful.

THE END