Las Vegas Noir

Q: I just read your amazing story "Crip" in Las Vegas Noir and now I am ordering your novel All or Nothing at Amazon! What a great story! It is monstrous and beautiful at the same time and some of the lines in it are so true. How do you go about writing stories? Where does your creativity come from? Tell me how you wrote that story. Is it based on a true story? It seems so real.

A: Okay, "Crip," hmmm. . . well, that story was written shortly after my mother passed away last year. I got the call for the story while she was sick and started working on it while we were making funeral arrangements and going through that whole process. But I was in too much pain, and so I called the editor and asked for an extension because of the circumstances.

What I was trying to do was write a story about a little boy who witnesses brutality and is badly scarred internally and externally by it, but the narrative voice in my head after my mother's passing was rather dark, due to my depression--too dark to tell a child's story. So I made the child grow up, and he became Crip, the Mustard Man, and the voice worked better now. I wanted him to live in his adult present, but be haunted by the childhood of brutality, and I wanted that haunting memory to help him somehow, or help somebody, in his present. I am a gambler and I know a lot about gambling, so I know of the suffering children of gamblers go through--so here came the innocent little girl and her weak (gambler) father. After that, the story just flowed out--I had the voice, I had the characters, I had the setting--like that.

What I like best about that story is the ending. The ending was done in honor of my mother, a woman who loved stories with a sad, but heroic ending followed by a denouement, or a moral, that put a little sunshine back in.

Thanks,

Preston