DAVID LEE HOLCOMB

Category: My Work

  • “Writing Fiction in Turbulent Times”

    “Writing Fiction in Turbulent Times”

    Title graphic for a writing lecture by David Lee Holcomb entitled "Fiction Writing in Turbulent Times."

    Join me on Thursday, January 15, at 6 pm at the Fayetteville Public Library for an evening of conversation and entertainment.

    This will be a bit different from my previous outings at Pearl’s Books, the West Fork Public Library, the NWA Book Fest, and so on. This time, I won’t just be talking about my latest book (although there’ll be some of that), but I’ll be going into the whole process of creating a work of fiction from nothing but a truckload of words and the desire to tell a story. I’ll draw on my own experience while also bringing in observations and advice from great writers and artists.

    We’ll go through several questions together. For instance:

    • Why write novels when the whole damn world is on fire?
    • Why should anybody listen to anything I’ve got to say about writing?
    • Where does your novel start? Where does it end?
    • How does a story get from “Once upon a time…” all the way to “…and they lived happily ever after,” without ending up in a ditch somewhere?
    • Are there any rules for writing a book, and if so, what are they, and who got to make them up?
    • Is it crazy to start writing when your life is already half over?

    This event is free and open to the public.

    Come out and enjoy the warmth and comfort of the Walker Community Room at the Fayetteville Public Library with me. At the very least I can promise to be entertaining and energetic . . . and maybe something I tell you will trigger that creative spark you’ve been keeping hidden all this time!

  • Proof of life…

    Proof of life…

    Sales on my first fantasy novel, Strange News, are going reasonably well — knock wood! In terms of costs, I may be on track to break even on this one by this time next year, at which point I hope to have a new book ready to hit the streets.

    As for that work-in-progress, I’m halfway through the first draft, coming up on what the writing expert YouTubers call the “midpoint reversal.” The middle of every book is a bloody mess to write, and this one is no exception, but I think (I hope!) I’ve learned a few things by now. I’m moving a little more smoothly than usual through this difficult stretch. Thoughts and prayers, everybody.

    The upcoming book will be titled Apocryphon, and it dips into the fantasy genre a little more deeply than Strange News. Still no dragons or swords or incestuous royal families slaughtering each other at weddings, but most of the story takes place on an alternate Earth where something that might be called magic is common. Get ready to pay a visit to Palliset, the City at the Center of Time:

    As long as you have the necessary time banked up, any westbound train will take you from Boston or Bengaluru or Beijing to the Grand Plaza Station, but no earthly airship has ever looked down on Palliset’s dusty sprawl, and no Pallisene explorer has ever found the slightest trace of a superhighway or a McDonald’s, no matter how far from the plateau they’ve traveled. Palliset is an island of civilization in an otherwise empty world of endless scrub desert and shortgrass prairie at the other end of a train ride from anywhere on Earth.

    A paradox. A whole city of paradoxes. The center of all things, the Book of Secrets called it. Is this magic? It’s certainly not logical, not reasonable. It’s a place Mac might have invented just to fluster me, to make me laugh. Maybe that’s all magic ever is.

    In Palliset, nobody cares about the contradictions. They’ve always been here. They’ve always been who they are. They expect to be here until the end of time.

    But then, don’t we all?

    — From Apocryphon: Bishop Berkeley’s Book of Secrets, by David Lee Holcomb. Coming in 2026.

    A man stands in the midst of a library. Books and papers fly around him.
  • Fiction: “The Woman At Front Two”

    Fiction: “The Woman At Front Two”

    Image of burned-out matches.

    The woman at table Front Two does not look happy.

    This seems wildly unfair, given that she is drop-dead gorgeous and reeks of money. I am at a stage in my life where I’m sure having a hot body and a little extra cash would solve all my problems, with some self-esteem left over to share with friends and acquaintances. The woman in the caramel-colored suit and white silk blouse should be lighting up that end of the room; instead, she’s generating her own gravity, pulling the light down into herself and smothering it.

    Maybe she just needs a nice slice of cheesecake.

    “More coffee?”

    “Please.”

    I top up her cup and stand back. “Anything else I can do for you?”

    She takes a sip. I admire her bracelet, a chunky thing made of grayish-blue stones the color of a fresh bruise. She looks up at me, and I see that her eyes are the same color.

    “I think that’s highly unlikely, don’t you?” she says.

    (more…)
  • Fiction: “Pirates”

    Fiction: “Pirates”

    The visitor wore cargo shorts two sizes too big, a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt, grimy canvas deck shoes, and a blond ponytail.

    “No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t have a library card. I’m a pirate.”

    Kellie Lovell didn’t bat an eyelash. Situations like this came with her job.

    “In that case, you won’t be able to take any materials out of the building.”

    The man smiled. He was missing a tooth on the left side, lower jaw.

    “Yes, ma’am. I understand. Where I’m staying, I don’t have much room for books.”

    The librarian nodded. She assumed that the visitor was living in one of two nearby facilities, a homeless shelter and an assisted-living center, which together provided a number of unusual library visitors every week.

    “Tell me again the name of the ship?”

    “It’s the Bountiful Bess,” the visitor said. “She was the Battling Bess, but me and my friends, we changed the name. We didn’t want to give the wrong impression.”

    (more…)
  • Fiction: “Volcano”

    Fiction: “Volcano”

    In the westernmost part of the African nation of Cameroon lies Lake Nyos.

    As lakes go, Nyos is not all that large, a bit less than four hundred acres. It is an expanse of still water surrounded by fertile green hills, occupying a crater on the side of an inactive—mostly inactive—volcano, the water held in place by a natural dam of old lava. To all appearances, this is a peaceful, green place.

    Far beneath Nyos, however, lies another lake, this one of molten rock, a survivor of the days when volcanoes reared fiery heads, and the region was racked by earthquakes and eruptions. Gases rising from that crucible gradually work their way up through fifty miles of solid rock to the surface, where they escape one prison only to be trapped again, this time by the weight of the lake on top of them. The carbon dioxide escaping from the magma below has accumulated for eons, with hundreds of thousands of tons of gas slowly becoming trapped in the cold waters of the deep lake bottom.

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  • Fiction: “The Late Blonde”

    Fiction: “The Late Blonde”

    The dead blonde in the babydoll nightie was fast becoming a nuisance.

    Danny Zickell struggled to keep his mind on his playing, watching the apparition sashay among the tables. She was mouthing the lyrics to “I Surrender Dear,” her eyes half closed in what she undoubtedly believed was an expression of soulful concentration, while the ostrich-feather trim of her outfit swayed gently in counterpoint to the music.

    Under any other circumstances, Danny would have been happy to look at Emily DuCaine all night long: she was five-five, curvy and blonde, with the kind of big, blue eyes that made you feel like you were the only man in the world. Silky Maloney had undoubtedly thought he was the only man in Emily’s world right up until he caught her sharing a sweet little love nest with a trombone player on the fourth floor of the Olympia Hotel.

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  • Fiction: “Prissy’s Mother”

    Fiction: “Prissy’s Mother”

    Prissy sat at the kitchen table, leafing through a Betty Crocker cookbook; her mother stood behind her, braiding Prissy’s silky blond hair.

    Prissy: the name defined her. No one called “Prissy” by friends and foes alike could possibly be anything other than a high-strung, imperious, bratty child. Prissy was all these things and more, and she ruled the household into which she had been born with a relentless, whiny arrogance. She was not reading the cookbook, merely looking at the pictures, occasionally holding up the book to demand that her mother prepare this dessert or that casserole for dinner tomorrow night.

    “Not this week, honey. You know we have all that chicken in the freezer…” When Prissy’s mother talked, you could hear the origins of Prissy’s whine. Less affected, more heartfelt, plowed deep into a personality already heavy with grievance, but still recognizable.

    (more…)
  • Good, gooder, goodest.

    Good, gooder, goodest.

    image of French philosopher Voltaire

    Way back in 1770 the French philosopher, historian, and poet Voltaire wrote that “Perfect is the Enemy of Good.”1 He was quoting an Italian proverb, which was itself probably derived from the Greeks or the Etruscans or somebody, but we’ll go with Voltaire because he said so many wonderful things and deserves all the credit he can get.

    This statement, “Perfect is the Enemy of Good,” seems troubling at first glance. Shouldn’t we strive for perfection, even if we know that we — flawed beasts that we are — can never achieve it? According to yet another poet, Robert Browning, “…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”2

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  • In the Mood

    In the Mood

    Masks of tragedy and comedy

    Way back during my turbulent twenties – about the time Nancy Reagan was tossing out Rosalynn’s White House china, and Mount St Helens was tossing its summit into low earth orbit – I had a friend.

    We’re going to call this friend “Carl,” mainly because that’s his name, and when I try to use pseudonyms I lose track of who’s who from one paragraph to the next. Carl was a director of theatrical productions, and possessed a wealth of interesting – if occasionally impenetrable – epigrams with which he informed and edified his actors. In the course of a friendship that lasted many years (and continues to this day, thanks to the internet) I managed to retain two important and enduring lessons from Carl’s store of wisdom:

    A) that cultural sophistication is something you evolve over time, not something you can pick up by watching a lot of public television, and

    B) that “mood” spelled backwards is “doom”.

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  • Bonfire of the Vanities

    Bonfire of the Vanities

    During my survey of the art news this week I happened upon a provocative headline from the Daily Beast: “Why Artist Gerhard Richter Destroys His Own Art” . The title of the article is a bit misleading: the writer asks the question but she does not actually attempt to answer it. Instead she merely elaborates on the fact that Mr Richter has destroyed a considerable number of his own paintings over the years. She did, however, get me thinking about artists and their emotional relationship to the products of their craft — because I, too, often feel the desire to haul a big load of my artwork out into the yard and set it on fire.

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