Author Archive: Eric Fritzius

August 5 – 6, 2016– (Lewisburg Literary Festival in Lewisburg, W.Va)  I’ll be attending the Lewisburg Literary Festival (August 5-6, 2016) as an author, playwright, and member of the LLF planning committee.

• Throughout the weekend, I’ll be selling and signing copies of A Consternation of Monsters at the Literary Festival Bookstore, located on West Washington Street in the Greenbrier Valley Visitor’s Center.  Lots of authors, publishers, and booksellers will be on hand there, so please drop by.

• On Friday, August 5, at 9:30 p.m., my short play, Playing Cards by Twilight’s Shine, will be performed at Hill & Holler Pizza, on Jefferson Street (the old Fort Savannah Location, for those who’ve not been here in a couple of years).  The 12 minute play, co-starring Dr. Larry Davis, Chally Erb, and myself,  will kick off an evening of improv comedy from the Wilmington, NC, comedy and film-making troupe, LosCaballeros.  Come on by for beer and funny in equal parts.

Photo credit: Amanda Carper

It’s been a week.  I should have written something before now, but we’ve been a little busy.

As some of you may know, my wife and I live in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, which, along with many other counties in the state, was hit by severe flooding last Thursday. They’re calling it a 1000 year flood.  We were getting up to five inches of rain an hour at times, sending sheets of water down the hills, causing the creeks and rivers to flood, filling up the lowlands and washing away hundreds of homes. And some of those creeks and rivers ran through towns, which has been devastating. I’m able to report, though, that we, our home, and our animals are all safe and got through the flooding largely unscathed.

The wife called me on Wednesday of last week to let me know a derecho was predicted for the early hours of Thursday morning.  Derechos are fast moving lines of storms, often with tremendous winds.  We take predictions of them seriously, because pretty much our whole state was affected by one back in 2012, and were completely unprepared for it.  The result was over a week without power for our area, with few gas stations able to pump fuel, let alone sell us any, most stores only taking cash, people holding freezer parties to eat the food they had been saving before it all perished, a blistering accompanying heatwave, and my wife and I with long vehicle journeys to make with only the gas we could siphon from the lawn mower.  After that experience, we put preparations into place to prevent us going through the worst of what we did then–such as keeping multi-gallon water jugs at hand, a generator (purchased during the last derecho), fuel, a Berkey water filtration system, extra food, the whole works.  The wife basically became a prepper, though just what she was prepping for was indeterminate.

On hearing the news from her on Wednesday, I gassed up the cars, got a chunk of cash from the ATM and began battening down the hatches.  I even did all my prep for the writing class I was to teach on Thursday, at the Federal Prison in Beckley, just in case we lost power and I was unable to print handouts.  We would not be caught unaware.  This was so much worse, though.

We watched the news coverage on the Weather Channel.  They seemed to be burning a lot of calories in putting the fear of the storms and tornadoes into folks in the Chicago area.  Some twisters were sighted, but the big weather they were predicting didn’t seem like it was happening at quite the level they were trumpeting.  The graphic “60 Million in Danger Zone” was a constant presence on the screen, but the wife and I were starting to feel like this whole thing was going to amount to some thunderstorms and not much else.

Around 2 a.m. on Thursday, the lighting began.  No thunder yet, just lots of lighting.  I unplugged everything and went back to sleep.  The derecho was supposed to hit between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m.  Not much happened, though.  Some rain.  Some more lightning.  Some more rain.  No real wind to speak of.  I gave a sigh of relief.  The wife rose and went to work.

The rain continued to increase in intensity.  We had some pretty severe downpours before 1 p., to the point that I had to go check the basement to make sure we weren’t taking on water.  There was a little coming under the basement door, but it hadn’t even made it to the drain.  Our house is up on a hill and nowhere near a creek or river.  So I hadn’t expected much.  Every hour or two, though, another huge downpour would hit us, lasting 20 minutes at a stretch sometimes.  We began to get flash flood warnings, continually updated to increase the time we would be under them.  I wasn’t really concerned, though.  To me flash floods mean a little water might cross a road here or there.  The river might rise a little.  We get that sort of thing every year and usually just results in the Ronceverte Island Amphitheater being submerged for a couple of days.

My wife kept me updated with what she was hearing on the police scanner at her clinic.  Folks in lower lying areas, like White Sulphur Springs, Rainelle and Richwood were being hit the hardest.  A dam near Richwood had failed and there was flooding in town, but I didn’t know how bad yet.  I was supposed to leave for Beckley by 4.  At 3:30, the wife called and demanded I call ahead and make sure all the roads were clear, because she didn’t want me washing away like some of the people she was hearing about.  I called the prison and, in an unprecedented event, someone answered.  They said the community college teacher had cancelled his class because part of the interstate was under water.  He’s at least twice the man I am, so I said that was good enough for me and cancelled my class as well.

By late afternoon, images began to appear online of the flooding in White Sulphur Springs, a town not far away.  When I saw the video of a burning house floating along a road, then crashing into a bridge, I knew shit was officially bad.  It wasn’t the only image of houses washing away or cars being buffeted by currents.  White Sulphur itself basically only has three roads leading into it, all of which were now under deep water.  Emergency crews couldn’t get in or out.  My later wife told me heartbreaking stories of listening to the scanner and hearing the rescue workers who had made it in before the flood grew too high.  They could hear people screaming for help, but couldn’t get to them because the available boats were all busy rescuing others elsewhere.  They were begging for boats, or even just rope.  The high water rescue crew that had been brought in could only do so much.

After 5p, we got another torrential downpour.  I went to check the basement.  Water was pouring under the door and the small pond it was making had now passed the floor drain and was spreading toward the water heater as I watched.  I splashed in to see the drain was clogged with some leaves that had blown in the door last fall.  I flung them out and it started draining just fine.  I imagined the drain outside the basement’s exterior door was also full, so I opened it to check, only to find that around six inches of water had built up on the other side of the door, much of which spilled into the basement before I could get it shut again.  I had to go back upstairs, then outside in the downpour, and around to the door with a rake to get all the mulch and debris out of the drain and out of the sloped basement descent.  Water was still running down the yard and right down the slope, though, carrying more debris with it.  So I found a shovel and dug a trench in the ground to lead the water away from the basement.  I hoped it would work.  It seemed to do okay.

The rest of the evening was spent trying to follow the news online and via my wife, who kept me updated.  One friend had to brave waist deep water, carrying her children, to get out of her home before the flood waters reached it. Fortunately in that case, a man with a backhoe happened by shortly afterward and dug a trench to divert the water away from their house, and it was not damaged. But it was a very close thing by about two inches.  Her house survived.

I also texted our friends Rebecca and Chester to see how they were faring down their twisty windy road.  They said they were fine and invited us to come over for stew and Coronas to wait out the storm.  An hour later, Rebecca texted back: “Update… Ok, so we have NO road.”  Their driveway, the culvert beneath it, and much of the road they lived on were gone, washed away in what she described as a raging river.  “All is well, just won’t be leaving for a while,” she said.  Not long after that, a maple tree fell across both of their vehicles.  In a miracle, it didn’t crush their vehicles, but lodged against the hill beside their house in just such a way that it simply lay above them.  A week later, they’re still stranded there, though they’re able to climb out and catch rides with their kids, who came to help.

Reports are that there are only around 23 dead following the storms, but reports also say there are close to 200 still missing.  The death toll will rise, I’m sure.  My wife has already learned of three of her patients who were lost to the flooding.  A few people in the area who were feared dead, though, have turned up alive.

There are many nonprofit organizations on a state and national level who are doing a lot to help.  Churches have become shelters and base stations for disaster relief efforts of the Red Cross and the Southern Baptist Convention Disaster Relief.  The United Way has teamed with St. James Episcopal to help distribute food and supplies where needed.  Mud out crews from around the state are streaming in to help tear out drywall and carpeting from homes that were damaged by flooding so that they can possibly be repaired by contractors later.  My wife and I joined such a crew based out of our church and helped clear out the basement for an elderly couple in White Sulphur Springs, and removed soaked carpet from another house.  We were not, however, in the most damaged areas of the town, but in a place where the flooding did not reach, but which was flooded all the same by the failure of a storm drainage system.  We’ve been to Alderson to deliver food.  The damage there is not as visibly bad but there are lots of mud-filled homes along the river, whose residents are now displaced to the community center.  Whole families are there, sleeping on cots.  Donations of clothing from the area had been delivered before we arrived and the outpouring of support there was impressive.  Now that FEMA is involved, there’s a coordinating organization that’s designed to get help where it’s needed by working with all the other relief organizations already in the area.

The major damage to something that affects me personally, however, did not involve endangered lives, but the Greenbrier Valley Theatre, where I often act.  They took on nearly six feet of water in their basement, submerging the costume shop as well as their stock of costumes, props, furniture and set pieces.  It’s been pumped out now and a disaster cleanup team has been working diligently since Monday.  But I spent last Sunday down there, splashing through stagnant water, helping haul out 40 years worth of costumes, props, and furniture.  There were a lot of people helping including every member of GVT’s staff, equity actors and community actors alike, the GVTeens group, musicians, and community volunteers.  The GVT staff were the hardest workers of the lot.  I don’t know where they found the energy.  After four hours, my fat ass was about to drop.  But thanks to in-house cooks and massive food donations from restaurants like Del Sol Cafe, we were able to keep fueled and I was able to do seven hours.  Since then we’ve been helping to launder as many costumes as I could fit in my car, hoping to save it from mold, mildew and flood water riest.  So much of it will still be lost.

It’s been a strange and sad week.  And it’s going to be years before everything in the area can be restored to normalcy, if such a thing can be achieved for even half of the affected people.

It’s so very odd to feel guilty that we personally escaped harm, but I somehow do.

I will be one of the writers reading during the monthly Writers Can Read event at Empire Books and News in Huntington, June 20 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.  The event is hosted by author Eliot Parker (Fragile Brilliance).  

The featured readers of the night will be Bram Stoker award winner Michael Knost and Brian Hatcher, both of Woodland Press.  If you’re in the Huntington area, please stop by and say “howdy” and hear some great horror readings.

We’re just 20 days away from the Opera House PlayFest, a festival of seven 10 minute plays to be performed at the Pocahontas County Opera House in Marlinton, which I am directing.  The festival features the works of playwrights T.K. Lee, Chris Shaw Swanson, Brett Hursey, Tom Stobart, Jonathan Joy, and myself.

As you may have gathered from the Actual Overheard Conversation I posted recently, we have indeed returned from a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico.  It was a fantastic experience all around, though, as with many of our trips, was not without its hiccups.

We flew to San Juan for a medical conference at which my wife was an attendee and at which I had no responsibilities, but to turn up for the President’s Banquet and any other food and booze-related events there might be.  Beyond that, I was a free agent in a beautiful country.

The adventure began before we even left, though.

A few days before the trip, the wife was checking our plane tickets online via her iPad.  “Hey,” she said.  “They’ve booked us on separate flights.”

“What?” I said.  “The whole trip?”

“No.  We fly together from Charleston to Atlanta, but then you’re on one flight and I”m on one that leaves half an hour… no, mine leaves first and yours flies out half an hour later,” she said.

“What the hell?” I said.  But in my mind I was already in paranoia mode.  Two separate flights.  That had to mean one of them was going down, right?  We both had to make the trip, but fate was going to deal one of us a bad hand Final Destination style?  Why else would tickets we booked at the exact same time get split up like that?  And the more I dwelt on this the more I began to quietly accept it–no matter how insane that might seem.  In fact, I even went to the higher power about it.

Heavenly Father, I prayed. If one of our planes is destined to crash, please let it be mine, I selflessly continued.  Too many people rely on Ashley and if one of us has to die please let it be me, I magnanimously finished. Amen.

The night before our flight, I happened to mention something to the wife about our separate flights from Atlanta at which point she quietly said, “Oh.”  And then she began to smile.  “About that…”

I instantly knew.  “You were lying?” I said. “You lied about the separate flights?”

“Only a little.”

I should have known.  After all, the wife has a tell to let you know when she’s lying: it’s when you can see her lips moving as she speaks.  And her flip-flopping about which of us was leaving a half-hour before the other was too good of a specific detail.  She at least had the decency to look embarrassed through her amusement.

“I forgot I hadn’t told you we really weren’t flying separate,” she said.

“I prayed about that,” I said.  “I was convinced it meant one of our planes was going to crash, and I prayed that if one of them had to that God should let it be mine because too many people were relying on you.  And you lied.”

“Sorry.”

We rose at 4 a.m. on a Monday, drove to Charleston, did not have time for breakfast, managed to remember to bring proper identification and to park in long-term parking, boarded the same plane and made our journey to Puerto Rico.  The waters were sufficiently blue-green as we descended over San Juan.

We taxied to our hotel, the Acacia in the Coronado district, a lovely little self-described boutique hotel within a 45 second walk to the beach.  And after check in, we headed to said beach where there were to be found a goodly number of beautiful people wearing an insufficient amount of beachwear.  As well they shouldn’t!  If I looked like them, I’d be shucking clothes and thonging it up, too.

Last night I dreamed I was being slowly-yet-diligently pursued by an undead Nancy Reagan.

Now, I say Undead Nancy Reagan, but Nancy wasn’t gross or rotting or anything, as zombie symptoms can present.  No, she looked pretty much like she always did–red dress, pearls, what have you.  Regardless, in the dream I knew that she was undead because she never spoke a word, but, instead, doggedly pursued me at a pace slightly slower than walking–though never at anything approaching an undignified shamble.

Her face, during her leisurely hunt, remained a mask of resigned bemusement, as if she were stalking a stray jelly bean that had rolled out of Ronnie’s grasp, or perhaps an errant coffee stain left on a side-table in the East Room by, say, Casper Weinberger.  I knew with certainty, though, that if she were to ever catch up to me I would meet my end.  Perhaps she would bite me and then I too would become an Undead Nancy Reagan, forever cursed to stubbornly and with delicately measured steps, prowl after new victims.

I’m here to report that Undead Nancy Reagan was pretty easy to evade, though her tenacious trailing of me, as well as my hard rule against whacking former first ladies with a cricket bat, left me with little choice but to trap her in a series of rooms; only escaping through another door or a window, myself, when there was not space enough to otherwise slip past her.  And there she would remain for awhile–Undead Nancy Reagan trapped in a bathroom, or Undead Nancy Reagan trapped in a walk-in pantry. (When did I get a walk-in pantry, anyway?)

And life otherwise went on for me in the dream, and there were other dream-life concerns to attend to that did not involve the mother of “Just Say No” (and Patti and Ron Jr.)  But always in the back of my head was the knowledge that at any moment some fool was going to hear her scratching and let her out, and then once again I’d have to not-particularly-briskly flee from Undead Nancy Reagan.

I’m sure Walter Mondale used to have this dream, too.

I just learned that three of my short plays have been chosen for production as part of the upcoming West Virginia Playwrights Festival in Clarksburg, May 20-22.  Perhaps ironically, that’s the same weekend as the Opera House PlayFest, a play festival I’m directing at the Pocahontas County Opera House on May 20-21.  In fact one of those plays, “…to a Flame,” will appear in both festivals, potentially competing with itself.

I’m thrilled my plays (also including “A Game of Twenty…” and “Fargo 3D”) will be a part of this first inaugural event honoring playwrights of the Mountain State.  We’re not a state that’s known for its drama, and yet an awful lot of it is produced throughout the state, and has been historically. Time to change some perceptions.

And I’m doing my part with the Opera House PlayFest, which will feature three WV playwrights, including myself, as well as playwrights from Mississippi, Ohio and Virginia, too.

More information will soon be posted here.

I’m a big fan of coincidences and synchronicity. They add spice to life. I’ve, on occasion, tried to note a few on this page, mainly the ones I’ve noticed while consuming various media. However, I’ve now had a big one hit me when it comes to my work as a playwright and writer of short stories.  One of my plays, “Playing Cards by Twilight’s Shine” is currently being produced by the Greenbrier Valley Theatre.  And it is around this play that some rather nice coincidences have cropped up.

Like a couple of my plays, though, this one began life as a short story of the same title, written for a workshop taught by my friend and mentor Belinda Anderson.  The short story version told the tale of a nearly blind moonshiner, in fictional Eldridge, West Virginia (mentioned in the introduction to A Consternation of Monsters) who decides to retire after the government tries to drop a house on him–or so he believes.  The town’s doctor and sheriff are opposed to this plan, for what they think are very sound reasons, and so the old man has to take matters into his own hands.  Eventually, he’s locked up and the part-time public defender of Eldridge County (part time because he’s been hired on the cheap, due to being a disgraced and nearly disbarred attorney, who no one else will hire), is called upon to defend the old man.  Secrets and polite fictions to be revealed to all parties involved.  On a larger scale, though, the story commented on the epidemic of meth and prescription pill abuse that plague small towns across the nation, but particularly in this poor state.  I envisioned a rural fantasy in which one small town is saved from such poisons because nothing else can compete with the magical elixir of Old Man Hartsook’s `shine.  For the first time ever, alcoholism saves the say!

The base story itself was inspired by a couple of different moonshiner stories I’d heard, blended together, as well as a kernel of an idea that had been in my writer’s notebook for years.  The three main characters, however, were partially inspired by three men I’ve known in life, none of whom have met one another and two of which have since passed beyond this mortal coil.

Howard Little was partially inspired by *a character in another story I’d helped write for Belinda’s class, but primarily by my Uncle Howard.  Howard Rainey wasn’t really my uncle, but a coffee drinking buddy of my dad’s who I shared many an hour and many a Shoney’s or House-of-Barbecue/Allgood’s Barbecue booth with over the years.  (House of Barbecue was a chain of diner-style barbecue restaurants in the 1970s.  I think it went under, but the one in my home town changed its name to Allgoods and continued on for a few more years.  It’s now a dry-cleaners.)  Howard was a former attorney himself, though not one disgraced and nearly disbarred, as far as I know.  However, he had certainly battled some personal demons that had made it impossible for him to practice law anymore.  By the time I knew him, much of that was in his past, but I liked the idea of a character with some baggage having to defend this moonshiner and there was a nugget of inspiration to be found in Uncle Howard’s story.  Howard died in 2010, but I didn’t learn of his passing until 2011.  I decided to give the character his surname and have subsequently toned down the demons of his past for the play adaptation–which, I promise, I’m coming to.

*The other inspirational character was from a group writing project in which one of my class was given a scenario, wrote the first few pages of the story, then passed it on to the next person to continue, and on around the class until everyone had had a turn to write.  The scenario involved the bed & breakfast run by one of my classmates, Dick Lewis (author of the excellent collection Naked Man’s Rock).  I was the second writer in the chain, and created the character of an attorney from Huntington who was trying to have an affair at the bed & breakfast.  I then thought it would be funny for that attorney to show up again in the story I was writing for class. The trouble was, he wound up getting shot dead during the course of the group’s story, so by the time “Playing Cards…” was turned in it didn’t make sense for him to be the same man.  It’s what I get for trying to be meta.

Doc Adams was inspired by a physician I know whose name I think I’ll not reveal here.  I was looking to portray a kindly country doctor and immediately thought of this man, who’s one of the best physicians and human beings I’ve ever known and who is every bit the kindly country doctor at heart.  He’s also a guy I’ve never known to have any connection to moonshine at all, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d had a nip in his day.  The internet being eternal, I think it’s best to keep him anonymous here.  He knows who he is.

In thinking of the kind of man I wanted to portray in Sheriff Lane, though, I thought of one of the people who was present on the night I had my first drink of moonshine, the writer Terry McNemar.  Terry was a big guy, a Vietnam vet, a biker, a fighter, and for many many years a building contractor.  I first met him at a writers conference in 2004 (my first moonshine experience), but didn’t get to know him until 2006 (my first encounter with the delicious and deadly Apple Pie moonshine.  (After that night, I swore I would write an epic poem about the experience entitled “Damn you, damn you, damn you Apple Pie Moonshine.”  That was as far as I got.)  It was during Terry’s job as a contractor that he came to be injured and spent a good few years in pain and limited mobility as a result–which he, of course, worked right through.  For a while, he was getting around with a walking stick to help support him.  I wanted a down-to-earth guy like Terry to be my sheriff, so I gave Sheriff Lane the same first name, and even let him borrow Terry’s waking stick.  One of my major regrets in my entire life is that I did not send this story to the real Terry McNemar.  I told him a little about it, but I don’t know if I ever mentioned how he inspired it.  Every couple of years, I would tell him I was going to send it to him, but it always seemed just one more draft away from being ready for his eyes.  He passed away last Autumn.  I was pleased to hear that he really liked my collection of stories, but alas this one, with about as big a monster as you could envision, wasn’t included in it.

While the original drafts had quite a bit of bare prose exposition, the scenes with dialogue in the story were of the sort that might lend themselves to the stage.  Once the characters appear, the story is mostly told through dialogue and has a very centralized setting.  Because of this, I decided to try adapting it as a stage play. It was a matter of editing out most of the prose, or finding ways to convey the same information as dialogue.  I cut the scene with Old Man Hartsook being interviewed by Howard Little, and kept everything limited to the final scene of the story, which was basically Doc Adams, Sheriff Lane and Howard sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of a former savings and loan turned sheriff’s department.  It worked pretty well, but it was nowhere close to 10 minutes in length.  More like 20.  Fortunately, that year, the Greenbrier Valley Theatre opened their New Voices Play Festival to plays between 15 and 30 minutes.  I thought I was a shoe in.  It was not, however, accepted for that year’s festival, and they were right not to do so.  Despite my 30 minute ceiling, my play was too long for the story it was telling and I was too in love with the original short story material to permit myself to properly edit it into something less than 20 minutes in length.  Each since then, though, when it came around to New Voices submission time, I would usually bust out my latest draft and see if I could whittle it down into something workable.  I could never seem to get it below 15 pages, though, so I never submitted it to 10 minute festivals like New Voices had become.  I whittled and whittled and killed my darlings, and then killed their reanimated corpses which kept lumbering back in again, but it was no use.  This year I didn’t have anything else ready to go when it came time to submit.  Oh, I could have buckled down and drafted something, but I didn’t have the time to final draft something.  So I returned to “Playing Cards…” and whittled some more.  I managed to get it down to 13 pages and under 13 minutes.  I cut out a lot of backstory stuff, turned the b-plot story about Howard’s substance abuse into hints, and then removed those hints as well.  But one thing that refused to leave the script was the stage direction that Sheriff Terry Lane walks with a cane and a limp.  He just did.

I submitted the play this year with the caveat that I would completely understand if it was rejected for being over time by at least two minutes, but I thought it would lose structural integrity if I chopped any more.  I just wanted someone to read it, cause I thought it was pretty good.  If it didn’t get in, that was fine, because I had already been asked to direct one of the final plays, and would also likely act in another.  I’d be busy enough.  GVT read “Playing Cards…” and accepted it, though.  Then, just when I thought I was home free, they forced me to edit it more to get it closer to 10 minutes.  I managed to cut it down to 11 pages.  And I have to say, as is usually the case, it’s a stronger piece for the cuts.  And Terry’s cane still stayed put.

Now to the coincidental part.

Almost.

A friend of mine in town is Chally Erb.  He’s a Vietnam vet who came back to the states, moved to San Francisco, stopped cutting his hair, grew dreadlocks, became a clown and a dancer and joined up with a group of hippies and homesteaders, like the many such groups that settled in Greenbrier, Monroe, Summers and Pocahontas Counties in the 1970s.  I first worked with him years ago on a performance dance piece he did with his grandkids.  He’s once of the nicest guys on the planet, always recognizable for both his dreads and for his pickup truck, which was covered in toys and action figures glued across its surface.  At any town festival (this town is all about a festival) he could be seen in full clown attire, usually towering above the crowds atop eight foot stilt shoes.  He has a huge resume as a performer and choreographer, as does his wife, Beth White.  I’d never seen him act, though, until the New Voices festival of 2015.  He and I were cast in a play called “Black Friday,” about two sets of parents on a Black Friday quest for a much-needed doll.  I got to play my patented snooty rich guy dad.  Chally, still with his dreads, was the far more earthy, blue collar dad.  He’d never done any acting for GVT, having done most of his local performing with the Trillium Performing Arts Collective, ostensibly the competition across town, though not really, cause Trillium is primarily a dance-based performing arts group.  I’ve worked with Trillium several times as well, and think it’s a great idea for local performers to cross-pollinate between the groups.  We talked about it, and he did too. Chally was a pleasure to work with and the show turned out a hit of the evening.

A few weeks later, I heard that Chally had been diagnosed with ALS.  It was an announcement that fell on his friends and acquaintances like a building collapse, because Chally was always this beacon of light, always active, always moving, and that light was already starting to dim as the disease took its hold.

Back in December, during auditions for the 2016 New Voices festival, Chally rolled in in an electric wheelchair.  It had been a few months since I’d seen him and he had changed beyond the wheelchair.  Maybe the most noticeable change, though, was his hair.  His dreads were gone.  He said the last time he’d had a haircut was in Vietnam, but he’d cut off all of his dreads for charity.

Chally auditioned with a scene from my play. He read the part of Sheriff Lane and did an excellent job, having a natural cameraderie with Dr. Larry Davis, who read for Doc Adams. (No, Dr. Davis is not the doc who inspired Doc Adams, though he’s inhabited the role so well I can hardly see anyone else doing it.) What was more, with his hair cut short, Chally looked the part of a law enforcement officer. Gears were already starting to mesh in my head, as I imagined a possible rewrite of the play to accommodate the wheelchair. Turns out, this would be unnecessary. Chally is not wheelchair bound, though he does use it to get around most days because it’s tiring to walk. When he does walk, it’s with a cane. And there’s little call in the script for Sheriff Lane to ever stand.  It’s almost like I wrote the part for him, but it pre-dated his condition by years.

I think Terry would have liked to have seen Chally playing his namesake in this play.  Lord knows Terry himself would never have taken the role.  I managed to recruit him to play a role in some plays by Joe McCabe that we did at the writers conference one year, but he didn’t take the stage without some liquid courage from a mason jar beforehand.

Chally remains a beacon of light. He’s excellent in “Playing Cards…” as are all the cast members. If you’re in the area, drop by and check it out this weekend at the Greenbrier Valley Theatre.

“Playing Cards by Twilight’s Shine” starring (from left to right) Dr. Larry Davis, Chally Erb, and Travis Eads.

Tonight is our pay-what-you-can preview night for the 2016 New Voices Play Festival at the Greenbrier Valley Theatre​ in Lewisburg.

Featured among the seven plays of the evening are a play I directed (“Forever” by local playwright Danny Boone), a play I co-star in (“Housekeeping”) and a play that I wrote (“Playing Cards by Twilight’s Shine”).

Preview showtime is tonight 7 p.m. at GVT.

Opening night (with customary after-party) will be Thursday at 7 p.m.

Ladies and gentlemen yesterday was a ride.

It was mid-week for my Kindle free ebook promotion on A Consternation of Monsters and sales had been only so-so in that department.  On Monday it moved 56 units.  Tuesday moved 133.  I thought that was pretty good.  But last Sunday I’d secured the services of FreeBooksy.com to help promote this sale and the earliest day they had available was Wednesday.  I figured if sales shot up then, I’d know where the traffic was coming from.  

Before going to bed Tuesday night, the wife kept asking me if I’d made any of Kindle’s bestsellers lists for free ebooks.  I told her no and that I wasn’t likely to since 180 free books sold is not big change by Amazon standards.  She thought it sounded bigger, though, until she finally looked up my book’s actual ranking number.  I was sitting at around 2200 on the free ebook bestsellers list.  They only show the top 100 on any of their bestsellers pages.  I went to sleep kind of disheartened, but still awaiting what FreeBooksy might do.  

When I woke up on Wednesday, I’d already sold 26 units.  Not bad, I thought.  Later in the morning, I decided to send out an email to nearly everyone in my email address book.  I figured if I was giving the book away to strangers then people I care about ought to know about it, too.  I made a joke toward the end of the email about being nowhere near the bestsellers mark, but that it was my dream to crack the top 1000.  I decided I wanted the actual ranking number I was currently at to include as well, just to show how far I had to go.  Instead of 2200, though, I was at 1216 on overall free ebooks and #40 on free ebooks in paranormal/urban fantasy.  I had to pinch myself.  And it really hurt!  

I went to check my Kindle sales figures and they were in the 300s.  And throughout the day that number continued to rocket skyward while the book climbed higher and higher on the bestsellers list in paranormal/urban fantasy.  It ended the day at #3 and when I woke up I was sitting at 87 on the overall free ebooks list.  It cracked the top 100!  And I sold over 1600 books total for the day.  (I say “sold,” though I’m not seeing a dime from this yet.  I’m still in this just hoping to get the book in front of eyes.  If only a quarter of the folks who “bought” it leave me a review on Amazon, I’ll count that as a success.)

Before we get too excited, though, I should just point out that the book is steadily sinking on the overall free ebooks list, as sales today are not blazing like they were yesterday.  They’re doing all right, already approaching Tuesday end-of-day numbers before noon, but things are dropping off.  (I hate to say it, and am making no claims about it, but for a brief time my book was even a slightly better bestseller than the free ebook English Standard version of the Holy Bible, at numbers 94 and 95 respectively.) 

As penance, and so my ego doesn’t swell any larger, I just went and looked at my print sales ranking among the bestsellers.  It’s currently sitting at a sobering #859,976.  That’s right.  I am the author of the 859,976th bestselling print book on Amazon. Break out the champagne, y’all.  

If you’ve not picked your free copy of the Consternation eBook, you have until midnight on Friday, January 15, 2016 to do so for free.  After that, it’s going up to $3.99.