The Malachi Stone Interview

By Steve Weddle

The world of Malachi Stone is an experience. Not just the books, of course. His personas. The Facebook army he's created. Roughly 48% of my friends on Facebook are Malachi Stone. Recently, he took time out of his busy schedule of creating personalities and writing novels to chat with me.

Steve Weddle: When I try to explain your writing style to people, I say it has a certain gravitas implied, as well as a complete disregard for normalcy. I say it’s like Theodore Dreiser meets Kurt Vonnegut in the middle of a Sunday sermon. Does that seem accurate? Am I missing an important element? 

Malachi Stone: Wow! Thank you so much, Steve! May I lift a quote from that and use it as a blurb? Actually, I have a passion for originality. If, after I've written something, I detect the faintest hint of imitation, I delete it and start over. My worst nightmare is publishing a novel and then discovering there's unconscious plagiarism lurking somewhere.

SW: What sort of element – plot, character, setting – do you start with when writing a novel? 

MS: Not to be flippant, but I just start writing and before long the characters write themselves. I do tend to favor dark characters with strange and powerful obsessions, who inhabit convoluted plots and exotic locales like Belleville IL, which, as you may know, is the sister city of Paderborn Germany.

SW: Through the years, you’ve been active in Smashwords, Authonomy, and the Amazon direct publishing, as well as other online sites. Is it helpful to go the agent route or is direct publishing a solid plan? Aside from “Write a good book,” do you have any strong feelings on the state of publishing from an author’s point of view?

MS: Like so many others, I fell back on DIY only because I was shut out of traditional publishing. Once upon a time I had been represented by a capable literary agent/editor who threw her best efforts into it but after more than three years couldn't "find a home" for any of my novels, as the saying goes. I'm far from bitter about it; she worked hard and never made a dime off me.

Maybe I'm too personally invested in my novels to be able to bear seeing them homeless. Whatever the reason, I don't take rejection well. My wife says she remembers me staying up all night after the breakup with my agent. Writing, I've always believed, is a form of performance art. When one editor after another rejects my books, it's like I'm center stage in an old vaudeville theater, giving them a righteous buck and wing, while out in the audience all these assholes are lobbing overripe tomatoes at me—tomatoes like, "people don't want to read about negative protagonists," or "too much explicit sex." So, unwilling to give up on writing, I started looking around, and self publishing seemed to be the only option.

Amazon is the big dog on the block, of course, but I also publish on Nook Press (Barnes & Noble) and on the two aggregators Draft2Digital and Smashwords. Smashwords is not only an aggregator but also publishes ebooks on its own site. Draft2Digital offers user-friendly formatting but charges you ten per cent off the top for that service. Nook Press is a no-brainer. You just slap your .docx manuscript up on their site and you're published, Dude. The others require a bit more effort, but anyone can do it with a little practice. I taught myself to format my novels for Kindle, Smashwords and, more recently, CreateSpace for POD paperback editions of all ten.

Self publishing is a daunting and yet exhilarating experience for an author. You're putting yourself on the line balls-out, with no copy editor, no story editor, no legal department, no publicity department and no sales team. (Notice how I eliminated the Oxford comma in that last sentence? Why? Because I wanted to, that's why.)

As to formatting, you're better off doing it yourself rather than ponying up money to somebody else to do it for you. I've found out that you CAN teach an old dog new tricks, especially when that old dog has an aversion to paying other people to format books that, if they sell at all, will net me less than two bucks a throw. CreateSpace took me nearly a week, off and on, to master, but I'd rather do it that way than pay CreateSpace's people $399 and up to do it for me. Now that I know how, although I'm by no means an expert—my knowledge is limited to Word 7, for instance—I'd be happy to help anyone who wants to go the do-it-yourself route. Just email me at iamtherealmalachistone@gmail.com and I'll send you a flowchart I developed specifically for CreateSpace formatting. It may not be perfect but it worked for me.

Smashwords is another challenge to master, but they do offer you a free ebook style guide that tells you everything you need to know about formatting your book for epublication on their site. Here's the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52. It's 27,600 words of mind-numbing boredom (just kidding) but if you follow it step by step you will wind up with a manuscript that will pass perfectly through Smashwords' meatgrinder software.

As to the state of publishing from an author's point of view, the Internet has radically changed the game. To be blunt, now any dumb ass can write a book and see it in a digital format that looks just like it was professionally published. In fact, in ebooks published by the Big Five one can often spot glaring errors of formatting, grammar and composition, even spelling, despite the fact that we live in the spell check age.

The single most daunting problem confronting any self-published author is this: PROMOTION. I can furnish no useful advice about promoting one's novel, online or otherwise, even though promotion is the key to success. I do know a few things that have not worked for me. For instance, despite the fact that at last count I have 1130 FB friends (three of whom are me), 600+ Twitter followers and 266 people who like my FB author page, I've found Facebook and Twitter to be utterly useless for book promotion. Likewise, I have failed to create an audible blogging buzz. More of a popcorn fart, really. Pimping for reviews has proven a total waste of time. So what does that leave? Door-to-door sales? Cold calling? Infomercials featuring ShamWow's Vince? You tell me.

SW: How did the creation “Malachi Stone” come about?

MS: Malachi was derived from Malachi Chapter Three, where God promises His people that if they bring their offerings into the storehouse He will open the windows of heaven and pour down for them more blessings and more bounty than they can hold. Stone connotes enduring strength. Stone is the one thing that lasts. For all we know the ancient Egyptians may have had iPads, but only the hieroglyphics they carved in stone remain.

SW: Is it not possible to publish these novels under your own name?

MS: No. In my conservative profession and conservative church it might cause my family and me some grief. Not that I think there's a thing wrong with any of my novels—I've moved beyond my initial ambivalence in that regard—but why tempt fate?

SW: I imagine the nom de plume has helped in some ways, but has the “Malachi Stone” persona limited you in a way?

MS: He's overborne my real personality in a Jekyll and Hyde takeover bid. (Or is it Heckle and Jeckle?) While I don't think I'm anything like my pseudonymous alter ego, I find him wasting more and more of my time on Facebook spreading his own peculiar and toxic brand of misanthropic and transgressive humor. One of his most popular FB features is Perverts on Parade, also Not This Guy Again, The Fake Cop News, and Belleville IL: Honey, Let's Stay Here Forever. He's become like a guy with ten followers and his own nightly webcast who thinks he's the next Howard Stern. Talk about performance art!

SW: With a dozen books out there already, where do you suggest a new start? Do you think some of the novels are more "accessible" for a new reader? Do you see of them as more plot-driven? More of a character piece?

MS: Currently I'm around 16,000 words into writing a legal thriller with the working title WANTON AND WILLFUL, about a lawyer whose ambition to be a judge hooks him up with a powerful political boss known as The Junkman, a wheelchair-bound scrap metal dealer. The Junkman views our hero's headstrong wife as a career liability. Later that night, hero catches his wife at home with a young stud, and accidentally dials 911. The police show up, cast him as the bad guy and order him to leave the house for the night. Hours later, after doing a little drinking, he comes back home anyway where he discovers his wife's car still in the garage and something banging away off-balance in the washer. He lifts up the lid and, guess what? [Cue Bernard Herrmann PSYCHO score] Inside is his headstrong wife's severed head.

That's all I have so far. I don't know what I'll do with my latest novel once it's finished. I hate to throw it down the dumper of self publishing because it may be one of the best things I've ever written. On the other hand, I balk at the idea of sending out a couple thousand email queries and getting stiffed again. But I'm damned if I'll let this indecision keep me from finishing, even if I have to write the rest for the sheer pluperfect subjunctive hell of it. Had I finished...?

As to accessibility, all of my novels score in the high seventies to low eighties on the Flesch Reading Ease scale (That's easier to read than the Reader's Digest) and land around the fourth or fifth grade level on Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level test. Other than content, all my novels would qualify as YA fiction. Since something like 80% of YA fiction is read by adults (a depressing statistic in and of itself) my novels should pose no problem as far as reading difficulty is concerned.
Other than that, my personal favorites among my novels are CONJURER'S OATH and DEVIL'S TOLL, both for the magical realism, the humor and the characters. Let's face it, character is everything. If you enjoy legal thrillers and watch Nancy Grace, try HARD BREAK. Prefer scary shit but burned out on Stephen King? Read OZARK BANSHEE. (One older gentleman came up and told me after I'd performed a reading of OZARK at Subterranean Books, a St. Louis indie bookstore, that the passage I'd read was so scary it would surely give him insomnia. I still treasure that compliment. And don't call me Shirley.)

PRIVATE SHOWINGS and WICKED KING DICK are two novels I wrote years ago, and are the most traditional in terms of writing style. Both are more plot-driven than my later works. ST. AGNES' EVE is the first novel I ever wrote. It has undergone extensive editing by professionals. HEARTBALM is a sequel to ST. AGNES' EVE but stands alone. Personally I prefer the sequel, again for the humor and characters. (There's a horny woman of a certain age with ridiculously overdeveloped breasts and a spastic neck condition, a seven-foot biker street-named Snuggle, and a hottie secretary who shifts without warning into the persona and patois of a forties film noir gun moll.)

Rounding out the field of ten are DEAD MAN'S ACT and SHARP FORCE TRAUMA, my Bosco Hoël series. Bosco Hoël is a small-town attorney who encounters more than his share of grisly murders. Both books have elements of magical realism. In DEAD MAN'S ACT, Bosco is targeted by a bloodthirsty Odinistic cult wreaking havoc in a Midwestern farming community. In SHARP FORCE TRAUMA, a novella, I was going for a Nick and Nora Charles flavor in the dialogue between Bosco and his attorney-wife Brenda. Read it and see whether I succeeded. And don't miss the goofy nut in SHARP FORCE TRAUMA who cross-dresses as a nun, haunts the corridors and the chapel of a Chicago hospital, and engages Bosco in abstruse theological discussions peppered with dirty jokes and sudden violence. Or is he/she merely a hallucination brought on by Bosco's sleep disturbances? SHARP FORCE TRAUMA is my latest completed work and I'm kinda proud of it, as you can probably tell.
All my novels are available to sample or purchase here: http://www.amazon.com/Malachi-Stone/e/B0069696AE. Amazon refused to publish RUDE SCRAWLS, my short story collection. Never fear. You can order RUDE SCRAWLS from Barnes & Noble's site and from many other fine retailers. RUDE SCRAWLS is not for bluenoses, as the plain-brown-wrapper book ads in men's magazines used to say when I was a kid. It's "a compendium of short stories featuring adults misbehaving in various and sundry ways. None of the characters in this anthology of modern day morality tales are any better than they have to be, and some are quite a bit worse than they ought to be," quoting the book description. In RUDE SCRAWLS I'm going for the kind of stories you might get if John O'Hara were living today and wrote for Hustler. Enjoy.

Find out more about Malachi Stone at Smashwords and Amazon.

Thanks to Malachi Stone, wherever and whoever he is.

Add to your reading list with FREE goodness

By Steve Weddle

We're observing Memorial Day weekend here in the states. The holiday was originally called Decoration Day and set up to honor fallen Union soldiers after the War of Northern Aggression. Following the War to End All Wars, the holiday was changed to include all our dead soldiers -- even the Confederates, presumably. I have soldiers all over my family tree. My father served during the Vietnam War and lived to talk about it. Some weren't so fortunate. Not that our fallen soldiers are reading this blog, but, you know, thanks to them.

Speaking of reading this blog, I doubt this is a weekend of heavy traffic. From honoring the war dead to grilling with your family, you could be doing many other things. Including reading some really cool stuff on the innerwebs -- for freesies.

I want to make sure you know about a few really cool books that exist complete or in part on these same innerwebs I'm communicating to your from.

John Hornor Jacobs, an Arkansan good with the art in NEEDLE, has a good start of his fancy, ass-kicking Western THE INCORRUPTIBLES, his "wester/fantasy/steam-punk" slice of brilliance.

We rode through fields burning like the plains of hell, Fisk on the black, Banty on the roan bay, and me on Bess, the mule, leading a string of ponies. We came up from the delta and the lush watershed of the Big Rill through the edge of the farmlands. Settlers worked the fields, shovels in hand, throwing dirt on the fallowfires. Poor folk, eking a living off the land.

"That aedile wants another hunting expedition, they'll be floating his body back to New Damnation," Banty said, low and through his teeth.

Fisk sniffed, glanced at the smoke billowing above us, and then back out over the Big Rill's sun-hammered silver. No one moves the way Fisk does. Slow and deliberate, each gesture languid and relaxed. Until it isn't.

The Cornelian churned the waters, bragrags whipping in the wind, steaming upriver, while we kept pace. Fisk and I took the escort contract from Marcellus out of New Damnation, but the aedile's tribune saddled us with Banty, the greenhorn, who was good for nothing, except big talk and no action. The tribune wasn't a bad fellow, but even good folks make mistakes.

Fisk watched the Cornelian, the sky, the land. He remained still but his eyes never stopped roving, grey eyes, bleached by sun and years in the elements. Partners for the last decade and I still didn't know anything about the man, other than scraps and pieces. Had a family once. Could shoot out the eye of a sparrow on the wing. Feared no man, nor Vaettir. No rest until the stretchers are gone from the earth. He hated them with passion only reserved for Gods, dangerous women, and whiskey.

Head count conscripts milled about on the boat's galleries, staring out into the West, no doubt scanning the horizon for stretchers, terrified. Up on the top deck in the shadow of the pilot's roost stood an an umbrella, and the frill of patrician women. The stacks, daemon fired, blew ash and cinder skyward as if answering the flames of the fields.

Fire calls to fire, they say. I believe that.

From where I sat on Bess, I watched the other scouts, Sharbo, Ellis, and Jimson riding the western shore, stirrup high in fallow growth. No farms that side of the river, so close to the mountains. Stretchers come down, raiding.

Fisk said, slowly, "How you figure, Mr. Bantam?"

Banty put a hand on his pistol, a Hellfire .32 with Imp rounds. Sure to sully his soul, but deadly.

"I'll kill him."

Fisk glanced at the young man, taking in the rumpled uniform, the tight grip on his pistol.

"You might be stupid enough, at that."

--

Another great piece of writing is growing each day on the innerwebs. Dan O'Shea has hooked up his treadmill to power his laptop (or some such craziness) and is running it full of juice and jabs to the gut. His GRAVITY OF MAMMON is already a few dozen chapters in. Here's how it opens.

Nick Hardin never thought his first Hollywood party would be in a big-assed tent on the Chad-Sudan border, but here he was, nursing a gin and tonic, hoping he’d set things up far enough west that he was out of RPG range in case some Janjaweed punk got a bug up his ass. Fucking Mooney and his do-gooder shit.

Hardin had run into Jerry Mooney in Khartoum almost a year back. Darfur was heating up as the PR play of choice for socially conscious Hollywood types looking to bump up their Q scores. Hardin was heading out on his usual fixer gig for one of the networks. Same gig he’d been running since he got out of the Foreign Legion back in 1996 – logistics on a file footage job. Camera guy, sound guy, some former BBC face with the right kind of public school accent and safari guide outfit. Get 10 or 15 minutes in the can from the hell hole of the week so Nightline’s got something for a slow news day. Run the film, then cut back to the studio where the talking heads and maybe someone from Medicines sans Frontiers or some Foggy Bottom undersecretary could cluck their tongues between beer commercials. A little of the self-flagellation that a goodly portion of the folks that actually watch Nightline like to engage in before bed – helps them sleep better. Hardin’s job? Line up some transport and some security that, when you bought them for a couple of days, stayed bought. Point the talent at the right locations, pay off the right warlords, make sure the face gets his interview without getting his throat cut and the crew gets out without having to buy back their equipment at ten bucks on the dollar.

The face in this case being Nigel Fox. Hardin liked Nigel, and Nigel liked gin. That’s why he was spending his twilight years stringing the massacre circuit when he used to cover No. 10 Downing Street for BBC 1. Hardin had done Somalia with Nigel, Liberia back in the Taylor days. Kinshasha, Rawanda. The beginnings of a beautiful friendship. Hardin waited at the Khartoum airport by the Twin Otter he’d chartered as Nigel walked across the tarmac with his crew, a couple of stoner Italian adrenaline junkies. And with Jerry Mooney.

Hardin had heard of Mooney, of course. Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor. Square-jawed leading man in a maybe dozen chart-topping flicks. Probably more than a dozen – Hardin figured a few had come out that hadn’t made it to the flea-bag cinema down the street from his place in Accra.

“Nick Hardin,” said Nigel, “meet Jerry Mooney.”

“Jerry,” said Hardin, shaking hands. He turned to Nigel. “We still shooting news or are we making a movie?”

“Little of both, old boy,” Nigel said. “Ran into Jerry here at the Hilton night before last. Splendid chap. Shared a bottle of Boodles, and let me have more than half. Anyway, he was headed down to Darfur for a look-see, some video-blog thing for his web site. Marvelously technical, beyond me of course. But his fixer bolted on him, left the poor man stranded. All for one and one for all, of course, so I told him he could pack along with us.”

“Nice of you spend my nickel, Nigel,” said Hardin.

“Hey, Nick,” said Mooney, “Look, I know I’m imposing, and I know you’ve got to make a living. The guy I was supposed to meet up with, he’d said $500 a day, American, plus expenses. Nigel tells me we’re back tomorrow night, so that’s two days. Suppose we say $2500, is that fair?”

Usury is what it was, but Mooney threw out the number. Mooney was starting to smell like the gravy train. With a capital G and a capital train.

“Yeah, OK,” said Hardin.

Mooney smiled. Big, dimpled movie star smile. “All right. Off to the heart of darkness.”

Hardin caught the little smirk from Nigel. They always do that, the first timers. Drop the Conrad on you. But the darkness wasn’t concentrated in a heart anywhere. It had metasticzed into hundreds of tumors. Some, like Darfur, were a thousand miles wide. But most of them were about the size of a qat-chewing 13-year-old with an AK-47.

Nigel waved the Italians back to the truck. “You’ve forgot the bloody gin.”

--

And now for something completely different. Malachi Stone has somewhere close to 84 novels completed. He's just waiting on his checks. Here's the newest one he's posting, NIGHTMARE NUMBER NINE.

“Charred meat gets me hot.” She grinned at him, trying for lewd and crude. The steak joint was nothing special, one of those where they let you throw peanut shells on the floor and every twenty minutes or so they make the waitresses get up and line dance just in case your conversation lags.

His and her conversation hadn’t lagged. He’d never taken his eyes off of her, not once, even though the waitresses all wore tight jeans and skimpy western tops and danced right beside them, practically on top of them in fact, all of them twitching their butts and clapping their hands in rhythm to the country music. He’d ignored them. She was making an extra effort to be vivacious tonight, a rare treat for him. He was eating it up all through dinner.

He slipped a steak knife into his coat sleeve on the way out after leaving a generous enough tip so that nobody’d mind.

He opened the passenger door for her in the parking lot. She turned to slide in and was just starting to smile at him in that open-mouthed way she had—there was a black string of charred meat dangling from her left upper canine—when he put the knife in her, never breaking eye contact.

He put the body in a funny place. Then he drove home and went to sleep. Heavy meals always made him logy.

*******************************************************
The date of my appointment turned out to be the first day Brenda had the saddle splint off her nose. Both her eyes were still black like a raccoon’s but the bruises under her eyes and across her cheeks had faded to the colors of autumn. We both were weary of explaining their presence to every client of ours who’d wandered into the office over the past two weeks. I’m sure at least half of them, as well as most of the attorneys, clerks and judges Brenda and I dealt with every day at the courthouse, suspected me of being a wife-beater. The truth was more difficult to explain, but hardly less shameful, at least for me.

The nurse weighed me before ushering us into a sterile white examining room with a single print hanging on the wall. After a moment some long-ago vestige of my college art apprece course kicked in and I recognized it as William Blake. I pointed it out to Brenda.

"Michael Binding Satan,” she acknowledged, slurring her pronunciation of “Satan.” She still hadn’t had the repair surgery and her speech was affected in a subtle way. “Has kind of a yin yang thing going on, don’t you think? Appropriate for a sleep disorders clinic I suppose.”

“Why’s that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? The one having the nightmare is Satan. He represents the chaos of the subconscious mind. Check out the rictus of terror on his face, the reptilian tail flailing around like Leviathan. And see the Archangel Michael putting a sleeper hold on Old Scratch, getting ready to pin him to the mat? Michael represents man’s consciousness fully awakened, putting the sleep disorder devil under his feet once and for all. Don’t you find it encouraging?”

“I could have used you in first year art apprece class.”

“You’ve used me often enough since then, Darling. And don’t you love it how the pronunciation of college course titles reverts to a pidgin Italian? Art apprece. Or soce for sociology, as in, ‘I sold back my soce book and only got a lousy buck for it.’ Guess I’m more sensitive to pronunciation issues these days.”

“Non lo parlo molto bene,” I singsonged.

“You’re the only person I ever met who took Italian in college. Why, Bosco? Perchè?”

“I needed a language.”

“We all need a language, dear heart. We’re a communicative species. But why Italian? I don’t think I ever asked you that before. It must have been over a cute girl. It was over a cute girl, wasn’t it?”

Brenda was my second wife, Betsy had been my first, a big mistake but soon corrected. Even though I was still working my way through the B’s I knew enough not to rise to that bait. “I wanted to read Dante in the original language,” I told her. Mercifully, the doctor chose that moment to appear.

Addressing Brenda the doctor said, “Looks like you were in a knockout.”

“Thank you for noticing, Doctor, but I’m afraid the man sitting next to me is the patient.”

Still focused on Brenda, who despite her injuries was and is a remarkably attractive woman, the doctor asked her, “So how are you doing?”

“I’m still prone to mouth breathing and am often mistaken for Boris Karloff on the telephone, but other than that I’m hanging in there, Doctor.”

“Nonsense. No one with ears could ever mistake your lovely voice for Boris Karloff’s.”

“You’re very kind. I was referring to my lisp. A temporary condition caused by my deviated nasal septum.”

“I know a good man for that.”

“So do I, Doctor. The problem is finding the time for going under the good man’s knife.”

“Yes, I see from the patient questionnaire that you two are husband and wife attorneys. That must make for a busy and challenging life.”

“Mine’s busy,” I broke in. “Hers is challenging.”

The doctor took a history. From Brenda second-hand, a fact I found rather disquieting. He asked her whether I ever walked in my sleep, talked gibberish in my sleep, slept with my eyes open, or in general behaved like a zombie after bedtime. Brenda answered every question in the affirmative, a fact I found even more disquieting.

“Does your husband ever rise stiffly in bed?”

“I beg your pardon, Doctor?” Brenda replied.

“You mistake my meaning. What I meant was, does he sit up in bed stiff as a corpse from time to time?”

She told him yes.

“And does he often awaken disoriented or confused, or with a blank look on his face?”

“Yes, Doctor. He stays that way all day long, too. Just look at him.”

“I don’t know whether you’re approaching this matter with the appropriate degree of gravity, Ms. Hoël.”

“Gravity? You want gravity, Doc? Try going ten rounds with this one some night. It’s like walking blindfolded into a pitching machine.”

“I only meant—”

Brenda asked, “So what’s the bad news, Doc? Give it to us; we can take it.”

“In my time I’ve encountered enough wives and girlfriends with cracked ribs, dislocated jaws and deviated nasal septa to recognize a case of night terrors when I see one,” the doctor said. He looked to be about thirty and had the air of a driving instructor about him. A driving instructor who spent more time pumping iron in the weight room at Gold’s Gym than he did poring over the medical literature. And even though we were in the examining room I couldn’t help noticing him poring over my wife’s gracefully crossed legs and picturing him pumping her instead of iron.

“Night terrors,” I said. “I’ve heard of those. Isn’t that where you see little green men coming to take you away?”

“Not necessarily. Sometimes they’re more of a teal.” He studied Brenda’s face for any reaction, then lowered his gaze to her right foot bouncing with nervous impatience. “Yes, night terrors, with a generous side order of adult-onset somnambulism. I’m fairly well convinced of my diagnosis, but to confirm it I’m ordering a sleep study. How’s this evening sound? We’ll plan on checking you in at the center around eightish.”

“Sounds like a preposterously early bedtime to me,” I said. “What about elevenish? Or even stroke-of-midnightish?”

The doctor didn’t smile. His stare had crept up to Brenda’s thighs and nestled there. She tugged at the hem of her skirt.

--

All three guys, fellow Team Decker members, continue to work on posting their stuff up on the web, for free. Call it sharing, promotion, beta testing, whatever. It's great to see so much good stuff out here. Right now, you've got three hunks of brilliance to enjoy. Make a note and when these books are on the end caps at Barnes and Noble and the front page at Amazon, you'll have fresh pieces of awesome to use your rewards cards on.