Revisitations

By Russel D McLean

As we speak, I’m working on a collection of short stories. Yes, if you haven’t been following me on twitter or keeping your eye out for me on Facebook, I’ve been collecting old stories for an e-volume to be titled, THE DEATH OF RONNIE SWEETS (and other stories). The collection will include every Sam Bryson story I wrote for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Thrilling Detective. It won’t include the standalones (they might get an airing sometime) or the two Sam Bryson stories that appeared a long time ago in Crime Scotland Vol 1 (because they present a wildly different character to the one who would eventually appear in the pages of AHMM). But they include a lot of stories that I’m proud of.

And I can say that with conviction because, in order to put the collection together, I had to read each one of them carefully. My plan – and this was something that the editor of Thrilling Detective, Kevin Burton Smith, urged me to do when he heard about the project – was to leave each story warts and all. And for the most part I have.

Why only “for the most part”?

Because sometimes you see things that should never have sneaked through, particularly in early works. A silly typo or a horrific repetition that you can’t get out of your head. And you can’t let it go. Because you have the chance to correct it. In all, I made maybe six changes to all the stories. They were justified, and mostly confined to one story in particular.

It’s strange to look back at old work with new eyes. Particularly the first published works you wrote. These stories are still ones that I am immensely proud of and, while some may say that their early work is “juvenilia” and that they feel they have moved on, you have to think about such things from a reader’s point of view. Clearly these early stories meant enough to readers and editors who wanted to read and publish them. So why are they suddenly not good enough? Are you saying those readers and editors were in some way “juvenile” too? And if your style has changed, that’s fine. But what you have to remember is that you have lived with your work for years, but there are always going to be new readers who will see your through the same eyes that your first readers did. And why would they not have the same reactions?

Reading the stories was fascinating for me. I could track where I was at certain points in my life I could see what I had learned about storytelling. I could trace my obsessions and ideas. I could track an evolution.

But by far one of the most interesting aspects to the collection has been writing a new story about Sam Bryson. The story will be published not only in this collection, but also in a multi-author collection that will be forthcoming soon (I don’t know if I can say anything about it yet). It takes place in 2006, the year where last left Bryson. After all, if we are to believe the opening of THE GOOD SON, in 2008, Bryson has left the PI game and sold his offices on to some bloke called J McNee. Going back to Bryson’s voice after so long – the last Bryson short was written in 2007 – was a strange experience. I worried about the voice changing drastically, about my being unable to write the same character; that perhaps I had changed too much and would no longer know who he was.

But I found myself returning with ease to his fictional world. The old touchstones remained the
same. Perhaps there was something a little easier about his voice; a more confident and mature version of the same character. But it was like seeing an old friend and realising how much you still have in common. My memory hadn’t been lying to me; Sam was still as interesting to me as he had been so many years ago.

Not that I’ve allowed him to stagnate or remain in some state of suspended animation. Every short I wrote was written with the intent to advance Sam in some fashion. And this new one is no different. But if you want to know how… well, I guess you’re just going to have to wait and see.

Looking Back

By Russel D McLean

It’s strange to see your own evolution.

At the end of my US Tour (still in the midst of being recorded on my blog proper, because I’m ludicrously swamped with things to do right now) I recorded a short story of mine, dictated it into audio format for a (hopefully soon to be announced) podcast. It was an older short story, and it was strange to read it again, particularly cold. I could see themes and patterns that I couldn’t then, understand obsessions and ideas I would never have even realised possessed me when I wrote the story.

Time is wonderful like that.

It is an intriguing experience for me to go back to old projects. Every once in a while I dig out what was supposed to be The Big Speculative/Slipstream Novel and read it over thinking about what I would do differently, marvelling at how differently I approached writing it back then, and how it shows the ways in which my mind used to work. No doubt I shall look back at my first two published novels in a few years time with a similar mixture of pride and confusion, wondering how I couldn’t see things then that are so clear with hindsight.

It’s also interesting to me seeing not only the things that have changed, but the things that stay the same. There are themes I cannot escape and ideas and motifs I am still obsessed with, despite a change of genre and hopefully a maturing of my world views (I was in my late teens and early twenties when I wrote the SF novels and in my mid-twenties when I wrote the recorded story). There are themes I notice that perhaps others don’t.

Looking back at early work can be a horrific experience. There is plenty you want to change, and even recording that early short I know I did some on the fly editing when I felt a particular sentence didn’t sound right. I’m sure that annoyed the editor who asked me to do it, but I hope the end result was a good one and I know that I did it for reasons of repetition, deviation or downright idiocy that you only see after five years, and even then probably only if you’re the author of the piece.

The thing is though that you have to look back every once in a while. I’m sure I’m paraphrasing someone much wiser than myself when I say that to know where you’re going you have to look at where you’ve been. Looking back at old work reminds me of what I can do well and what I need to work on. It reminds me of great ideas I wasn’t ready to tackle and bad ideas I really shouldn’t try and confront again if I know what’s good for me.

But most of all, if I can approach it with a healthy sense of humour, sometimes looking back at the writer I was is just entertaining. For me if no one else…