Author Archive: Eric Fritzius

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.  

The Black Star of Kingston

My very first audio book narration, The Black Star of Kingston, by S.D. Smith, is now available.  Currently it is only available via its publisher, Story Warren Books, but it will eventually be available via Audible and iTunes within a week.

Sam says some very kind words about my performance at his blog over at SDSmith.net.  The project was a pleasure to work on and I look forward to new adventures in audio down the road.  (Not the least of which will be my own audio book for A Consternation of Monsters.)

Check it out.

Like many of the stories I’ve written, “Old Country,” recently adapted for the Consternation of Monsters Podcast, has its origins in a shared fictional universe created by me and several friends during our college years in the early to mid-1990s.  We were big fans of the I.C.E. Heroes Role Playing system used by the game Champions.  (Specifically, we were playing the 4th edition of the system, which had then recently been published in a big blue hard cover book with extraordinarily sketchy binding, resulting, almost universally, in what “handy pull-out sections” when that binding failed.  I should add that my own personal copy of the book remains completely intact, but this has more to do with my hardly ever bothering to open it then or now.  But I digress.)  Champions, and the Heroes RPG system it used, was a game designed to let you simulate super heroic battles on paper and within your imagination.  Much like any other role playing game, the players played characters who went on adventures designed by a central game master, who subsequently ran all the non-player characters, both villainous and non, who the players would encounter and often fight.  We eschewed the use of the store-bought Champions characters, of course, in favor of characters of our own creation.  For our own superheroic characters we chose to imagine what we ourselves would be like were we equipped with super powers of our own.  So I played a version of myself, Eric Fritzius, who had the perhaps unfortunate luck to have been consulted on directions by a crew of lost alien in a big black space ship, and who, in the process, was accidentally injured mortally.  Guilt-ridden, the aliens, the Tentriconians, crammed his consciousness into a new body composed of their primary form of technology, a wondrous substance called 5thMatter. Only it didn’t seem to work, so they dumped the body and fled the planet.  (There is, of course, more to it than that.)  Eric awoke, days later, to find news reports of a strange ebony-colored being floating around his college campus, and to subsequently find that this being was himself in a different form.  Naturally, he became a super hero and joined with a team of fellow super-heroic college students called Avatar.

“What what?” you say.  “Avatar?  There are only a billion other franchises using that term.  Can’t you guys be more original?”  Well, in 1991 we were the major holders of the title, as far as we were concerned.  James Cameron and the Last Airbender folks came along well over a decade later.  So shut it.

Avatar, we decided early on, was a legacy team and ours was the third incarnation of it.  The first existed in the 1920s, the second in the `60s through the early `70s, and then on to us starting in 1991.  Similarly, our major enemies–a technocratic semi-terrorist organization called Chess–had also existed in one form or another in each of these eras.  My friend Sujay Shaunak (Mobius) was our primary GM, mapping out some challenges for us to face, keeping long-term storytelling plans close to the vest so that the various plot points could be revealed along the way in a very comic-style sequential storytelling style.  Occasionally others among us would GM, primarily Joe Evans and C. Marcus Hammack.  They too had their own little corners of the universe separate from the adventures Sujay was leading us on.  (This also meant Sujay could actually play his character once in a while.)  They tended to come up with their own villainous teams for us to fight which did not overlap with the backstories of the other GMs, so as not to step on anyone’s toes.  I wound up becoming a defacto 4th co-developer of this shared universe due to my penchant for world-building.  I set about creating a database of all the characters and concepts we’d created, along with a timeline to keep our adventures all straight.  While I was at it, I sketched in some details of the previous incarnations of our team, creating most of the characters on those teams in the process and fleshing out the backstory of our universe.  Eventually, as our characters did a bit of time traveling and so forth, further historical events were added to the timeline and database.  I took a special shine to one of the characters Marcus created, a mysterious little old lady he called Madam Z who I outright stole from him and imagined much of her backstory.  Wrote a handful of short stories about her as well, one of which hinted at possibilities of this backstory, though revealed nothing too tangible.  She tends to wander through other stories, though, and appears more than twice in A Consternation of Monsters.  So I became the 4th guardian of what was then called the Avatar Universe.

What does this have to do with mobsters with mystic ties in 1983?  Glad you asked.

Having determined that the second team called Avatar had disbanned in the early `70s, we felt it necessary to explain why they would have done this if Chess was still around–which they clearly were since we were fighting them in the `90s.  Our solution was that Chess had only seemingly been defeated in the 1970s, but reared their head again in the 1980s, slowly and quietly seeking to wrest control of organized crime in our home turf city of New Auckland, Va.  We figured they would have overwhelmed the mob of the era had they wanted to.  Trouble was, Joe’s part of our shared universe revolved largely around a mob in the early 1990s that still existed and were not run by Chess.  So I came up with the notion that the mob of the 1980s wound up bringing in reinforcements to fight off the advance of Chess.  And these reinforcements, I imagined, would be called the Spirit Syndicate.  I further imagined that this was not the first time in the history of the Sicilian Mafia that this had occurred.  I speculated that it could even have happened centuries back, during the formative days of what would become this Thing of Ours.

The original version of “Old Country” told that story, but it appears in much the same manner as you see it in the published version.  Other than a possible allusion to unnamed forces stepping in and messing with the “family” business, not much differs.  I was mainly interested in telling the story of Martin Riscilli receiving a phone call alerting him to his impending doom and being forced by circumstances to try the craziest thing he can think of, following the advice of his crazy old grandmothers.  The outcome of the original story implies that the forces he summons to help him might be sticking around for a while, which could potentially lead to a new renaissance for the local mob against any forces that might be trying to subvert them–be they technocratic semi-terrorist organizations or human men and women within an organized crime family looking to consolidate power, as the case may be.  The story could still work in either scenario, but from my point of view now we’re going with the later.

I even began toying with the idea that this story could be set in my new home state of West Virginia, as there is a certain amount of organized crime activity such as this in parts of the state.  One reviewer already picked up on this, though there are scarcely any hints toward that in the story itself.

“Old Country” ends on something of a cliffhanger.  It implies there is more story to come and was designed to allow the reader to fill in what that story might be.  That’s kind of my philosophy in short story writing.  Of course, I have my own version of what that story will be (“New Country”), as well as the story that comes after it (“Other Country”).  What will Martin do now that he’s been presented with tremendous power and a painful loss?  After all, if Jimmy Jambalaya made this move on Martin, the son of a valued mob soldier, would it really have been done without some degree of consent from those at a higher rank?  And what is his sister Rachel’s role in all this?  She was, after all, another recipient of the stories of Sparrow Salvatore and Natale; she too received a birthright.  What does the future hold for 1983?