Fall: The Last Testament of Lucifer Morningstar

AN AMAZON HOT NEW RELEASE!! 
TOP 20 CONTEMPORARY FANTASY!
FALL: The Last Testament of Lucifer Morningstar
(The Fallen Trilogy: Book One)

Now just $3.99. Cheaper than a cup of java.
For fans of Neil Gaiman and Steven Brust

And so it came to pass in the waning days of our century that a curious deal was struck between Heaven and Hell, or more specifically between Lucifer Morning Star and the Presence.

The Book of Life, that book that holds the names of those souls deemed for salvation has been stolen from the Silver City. Without the Book there can be no Judgement as foretold in the Revelation.

Two renegade angels are suspect and are believed to be on Earth. For reasons known only to himself, Lucifer accepts the deal with Heaven to recover the Book of Life. 

But jealousy and pride are not an exclusive domain. A small band of angels lead by Mika’il, the Angel of Vengeance seeks to stop him.

Accompanying the Morning Star on the most important quest in Creation are Maggie McCreedy, a recently widowed romance writer now witness to Lucifer’s Testament; Duma, a misfit angel who almost joined in the Fall; Andrew Honeybone, a not quite yet dead, but rotting lawyer, and Mr. Pouge, an enigmatic gorilla of a man.

Together their journey takes them from the Silver City of Heaven to the Ninth Circle of Hell to the now desert wasteland of an earthly Eden.

It is a mythical mystery tale of redemption, deceit, salvation, betrayal and faith.


FALL: The Last Testament of Lucifer Morningstar
$3.99 on Amazon Kindle. Contains excerpts of FOUNTAIN (or Art Has a Right to Children), CLONING CHRIST: The Second Book of Daniel and Skin Deep (coming soon). 


 FALL: The Last Testament of Lucifer Morningstar
$3.99 on Barnes & Noble NOOK


Thanks for your amazing support! And drop me a line: david@davidscotthay.com.
xoxoxo
DSH

DAM

The Digital Americana Magazine

Howdy folks:

If you're not reading this digital magazine you should. It's chock full of great writing, essays, design, and cultural (pop) touchstones. It's the one mag you should have on your iPad. And for you tactile peeps, you can even order a print copy. Which I am certain to do.

The Digital Americana Magazine

I first met Tony, the editor/founder/publisher/multi-hyphenate at a bar in Charlotte. I won't give you the preamble as it's kinda boring, but we struck up a nice conversation. I'd seen his magazine, he saw my reading of FOUNTAIN at Queens and now I'm, at least for this issue, a contributing writer.

I've got a nice little essay/piece called POST MFA, that gives you some insight into approaching an MFA writing program, some friendly advice on keeping your eye on that prize and then a nice excerpt of my book. But that ain't all folks. This is their huge summer issue. 100+ pages of the good stuff.

The Digital Americana Magazine

I can be a sumbitch critic and mean drunk when it comes to these matters, cuz, shit, this stuff is important. So let me say, regardless of being included in this project, it's one I would have followed and will follow. And I'm proud to be a part of it. Heh.

Check it out.

The Digital Americana Magazine

The Window by Catherine Campbell

Howdy folks:

I'm posting/reprinting (with permission) this lovely short piece of fiction for your reading enjoyment.

xoxox
DSH

The Window by Catherine Campbell

My mother loved my writing very much. She took my stories from my hands like newborns. She leaned down into them and hummed songs that she never hummed to me as a child, and she hummed to them as she slowly curled each story in on itself. She tied them with twine and hung them upside down from the rafters in the room we called Our Room. We did not have a refrigerator. We did not have a trunk.

I paced up and down our room beneath white bouquets of paper. I perpetuated our spring. The walls and floor and ceiling were chestnut planks and they threatened me with their darkness, so I wrote stories as quickly as I could. Sometimes I had to tell the same story again. My mother would take it from my hands and read it and she would smile as usual, but she would not touch my cheek as she did when I wrote a new story. She curled the paper up and hummed, and then cried because she could not have something new to dream about that night.

My father, who lived in Daddy's Room, was not here very much and when he was he did not stay for very long. I heard him enter his Room late in the evening when I was supposed to be asleep. He came with friends. I listened to them talk, their voices deep and well-worn like mud boots. I repeated their words over and over into the dark, up to the rafters above me, hoping to imprint the paper with my breath. What pieces I remembered I built into the next story. Those were my mother's favorites because they were from The Real Outside. Sometimes we opened the door from our room to look out there. We took turns turning the knob. My mother and I were free. But we just stood there, breathing, looking. We closed the door as quietly as we could, as if it had never happened.

Daddy's Room stayed empty one time for three weeks, then a few years. I waited to hear him come back one evening, but he never did. I wrote stories about what might have happened to him, but I quickly learned that these made my mother cry, and I didn't like to see her cry, so I wrote stories about her and my father together. I wrote about the wonderful places they saw in the Real Outside. I wrote about their sailboat, and their cave of crystals, and the time they danced in a deep forest and slept until they were covered with sand.

My mother died with twine in her fingers. I buried her beneath the floorboards with one of my stories covering her eyes so she would have something to see on her way. She never taught me to bundle my writing so the bouquets above me yellowed. The floor, instead, grew white. I waded through loose papers. The stories mixed themselves up. The silverfish came. The moths crowded my eyes so I could not see what I was writing. One day I took our axe for wood and chopped a window into the chestnut wall. I pulled up a chair to the hole in Our Room, and felt the moths desperately flutter around my body, bumping into my neck, confusing my skin for the brightness of the Real Outside. They spilled out into the fresh air and disintegrated. I pulled my pen from my dress pocket and set it in my lap. Then I pulled a pack of matches that I used to fight the dark. I lit one and dropped it at my feet.


Catherine is an MFA candidate at Queens University of Charlotte. She can be reached at lostsurfboard@hotmail.com or Twitter: @bookish_type.

How Not To Do A DVD Audio Commentary For Your Feature Film Debut

Stay up very, very late at a wedding (best man). Get up very, very early. Fly from South Texas to LA. 

Get picked up by a PA who is wondering outloud about how he's going to get repaid for the money he spent on lunch for the producers. Go see a bad student film at USC. Grab a quick bite.

Do an on camera interview for over an hour. Forget to pretend the interviewer is one of your producers whose voice will be dubbed in later. Make eye contact with crew when you're supposed to pretend they're not there.

Deal with the landlord of the rental space who wants to load in his music equipment so he can start recording an album the next morning.

Watch the movie in a sun-filled room with the TV on the floor, in a chair a different height from your co-commentator Hex (Director of Photography). And no beer. Try to be funny out of the gate.

Hear that the producers only made it halfway through their commentary. Vow to make it in one push. Drink Coke. Out of the can. Burp into microphone several times. Talk through movie -- something your instincts will scream is wrong. Interupt each other all the time.

Omit every funny story related to the shoot that you've used to entertain friends and family.
Realize that the five minute story related to a 20 second scene will carry you past your favorite scene in the movie. Realize how many things you would have shot differently.

End the commentary as soon as the credits start to roll. Plug website. Knock over Coke can. Forget free copies of the movie. Make mental note to rerecord.

Accept that you probably never will.

Realize that no one will listen to the commentary for six months to a year.

Realize that no one will listen to the commentary.

Write blog about it.

Repost blog about it.

HARD SCRAMBLED feature trailer

Click here: HARD SCRAMBLED Pay Per View 

A Group Critique (Where's the Blood? - writing advice for my peers)

Fellow writers: 

The following is a group critique I did for my Small Group during the course of my MFA. I've excised names, but looking back over this I think the advice could resonate for any writer. Myself included. And remember, I've got just enough experience and expensive whiskey to be a danger to myself and those around me. Heh. 

xoxoxo

DSH

Dear Podmates:

Each of you will be receiving your marked up pages with my indecipherable line notes and suggestions. I keep a copy, so if you ever feel the need for clarification I’ll be able to refer to the gibberish that graces your stories.

Now that being said.

Something I’ve noticed after reading these submissions, and perhaps it’s been true for most of the previous submissions as well, and that is there’s a dearth of camera movement. Emotionally, as well as technically. It’s as though the writer’s mind’s eye is stuck at eye level twenty feet away, in a medium shot. Everything is described as you would see on a safe TV show. Every action, description or emotional reaction seems to have the same weight. A line or two, a few well chosen adverbs. We never seem to zoom in on an object, let alone an emotion.  (And by “every”, I mean in a general, but dominant sense.)

A great technical example would be the opening to THE LOVE OF A WOMAN and the examination of the deceased opthamologist’s tool.  It’s a bit more akin to Eastern filmmaking where one opens a movie or a scene on an object that resonates thematically. Western filmmakers have a tendency to open on the dreaded establishing shot.  (A cityscape, the Brady house, the Seinfeld diner).  Nothing is ominous, devastating, ornate or intricate. Everything seems to be given the same perfunctory muted weight.  And this applies to emotions as well. And sometimes this is fine, as in a muted stabbing to death with a bagel knife (XXXXX, you gotta make that a bagel knife, not a bacon knife-- set-up, pay-off). That distancing has a chilling effect, but when the whole piece has that weight it tends to read cold. I feel like the stories are just going through their paces and I don’t mean that as hack pieces, because clearly there is some strong talent here-- please understand that.

What I don’t sense is an intention in the writing. A driving force.  Or an emotional investment. It’s more of a so, that happened. Not the work of a writer with something to say, let alone an exploration of themes or meditation on larger issues. We seem to be for the most part plot/vignette driven. I for one would like to see some abstractness or dirty laundry hung on these plotlines. No one seems to be putting themselves out there.  I don’t see any blood on the page. And like a shark, if I don’t sense blood, I’m not interested.

One of the first assignments I give in my playwriting and screenwriting classes and were I to teach fiction writing, I would do so as well, and that is to make a list of your deepest personal beliefs. It can be pages and pages or a list of sound bites. A list of human traits you admire, a list of traits you despise. What are some of the greatest things a human can do? The worst? Give examples. What were some of your darkest moments, your brightest. Your life motto. Now that they have that down on paper, they can mine it for their stories, characters, and structure to enhance and enrich their initial concepts.  I mean, aren’t stories supposed to be vehicles for this? I’ve seen your math, pod-mates, I’d love to see your jazz.

And maybe these are pieces that are leading to something greater, maybe it’s the pressure of having adult lives and deadlines. And perhaps, I’m projecting. Perhaps, I could be guilty of the same thing in the early stages of The Fountain. Satire does retain a certain distance, but going forward I’m trying to be more cognizant of the emotional gravity of the piece. Something I confided to Pinckney back at Queens that this was my greatest fear for this project. I want the story to resonate emotionally. To have a heart.  Some gravitas, as he suggested in my last critique.   Not just, as XXXXXX put it, making fun of art and artists. I’m trying BJN, there’s a lot of blood and fear hidden in those pages.

Your friend of the Text,

DSH

David Scott Hay is the author of the postmodern literary novel FOUNTAIN*  as well as two genre books Cloning Christ and FALL: The Last Testament of Lucifer Morningstar as DS Hay (clever, huh?).

He is also a Contributing Editor for Digital Americana Magazine.

And is currently co-authoring the Civil Rights play THE MARKER with David Barr III and Glen Jeffers, slated to premiere Feb 2012. david@davidscotthay.com

FOUNTAIN - will you drink?

Now on sale.

click here: FOUNTAIN by David Scott Hay

Praise for FOUNTAIN:

"Darkly funny... a howling success!" - Pinckney Benedict, MIRACLE BOY AND OTHER STORIES

"Smart, inventive, and accomplished." - Naeem Murr, THE PERFECT MAN

A story that stretches from Chicago to Mars.

click here: FOUNTAIN by David Scott Hay

MASTER! MASTER!

I didn't realize this shirt would match so well.

of Fine Arts, that is. In Creative Writing (which always makes me think of unicorns and spiral notebooks and skulls), more specifically in Fiction and Stage & Screen. This MFA 19 years after receiving my BA in Professional Writing.

In between those two degrees I've written:

a shitload.

And I was fortunate to have had some successes here and there.

Queens didn't teach me to write, but it did push me to be a better writer. To push my voice, not alter it. And perhaps more importantly, it introduced me to a community of serious fiction writers who not only inspire me, but are just as happy to drink and laugh as they are to throw down about the craft.  (Ah, "Queens' Finest.") We'll be doing so for the next 19 years. Count on it.

That hood is just as much about those 19 years as it was about the two year program. And I'm glad I'm done with both. This was and is a milestone that is easy to appreciate, and in writing that can be a rare thing.

XOXOX
DSH

CLONING CHRIST: The Second Book of Daniel

CLONING CHRIST: The Second Book of Daniel

Sales are picking up nicely on this, my techno science thriller, and I find that very satisfying.

Due to the structure of the book I didn't have to go back and update it for this new digital age. Which I am grateful for, because, well, I'm a lazy bastard.  And second I wanted to honor the younger author and the time in which it was written. Many overnights spent exploring this topic and how it might come to to fruition. Some amazing interviews with experts in the then emerging field of cloning.

I think the book has room for a thrilling sequel (there's no cliffhanger so you're getting a complete story) and maybe if things (demand) merit it, I'll explore that possibility, and I know after revisiting it, I thought, Hmmm, I wonder what happens next for our gang... in this new digital age?

But for now, I'll file that story away and maybe it will take root. As a writer it's sometimes fun to go back and play with the old toys, it's just to hard sometimes to tear ourselves away from the new shiny ones.

And speaking of new and shiny.FOUNTAIN.

Thanks for your support,
DSH