Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #26: My First Book, The Gallery.

Your first book is like your first time having sex or your first day in school. You never forget it and it's a landmark event in your life. If you're a writer, you always have a soft spot for it—rather like you do for your first lover or your first-grade teacher. The book I published to begin my career as an author-finally-in-print was a novelette titled The Gallery. Like most people's first day in school or first seduction, it took a lot of doing.

I got an acceptance of it by an indie press up in Canada. Naturally, I was elated. But time passed and nothing happened. My attempts to contact the press did not produce replies. Finally, I got an email that said they had to cut costs and were not going to publish The Gallery. I had a contract, and I suppose I could have made trouble, but I decided to just let it slide. Back to the drawing board; back to the weary, tiresome tasks of submitting the story.

The Gallery is about a musician. In fact, it is one of my ongoing characters, Martin Rollins, who appears in far fewer stories than Sossity Chandler, but is notable for being the narrator of the first short story I published, "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake." He has appeared in a couple of others. (Note to self:  write more stories with Rollins as main character.) Martin is doing a concert and meets an artist, Siobhan O'Conner. They fall in together. As their relationship develops, he learns more about her.

She is a skillful artist who is able to live off the sales of her paintings. She is working on a major exhibit. She also suffers from partial amnesia as the result of an automobile accent. She can remember, but large spots of her life—her school days and some of her early adulthood—are blank. As she opens up, and as Martin becomes more involved in her life, he finds out some other things—things that are unsettling.

Most unsettling, she is being stalked. A man named Seamus Keirce—a thin, tall, gangly Irishman—seems to follow her around and warns Martin that he must not let Siobhan sell her art. When asked why, he simply says he has his reasons and he shows up at several events where the young woman is present. Martin feels duty-bound to watch out for her. When he mentions the man's name, Siobhan laughs and says there is a legend about Seamus the Wraith, one of the undead who haunts houses with paintings hanging on their walls and art galleries. An internet search confirms Siobhan's identification of the man. The article Martin reads says that Keirce seems to sustain himself through the power and creativity locked in art. Obviously, Siobhan's art is of particular interest to him.

Tensions mount. Keirce begins to follow Siobhan and also to harass Martin. Siobhan asks him to pick up some paintings she has in a storage area and bring them to her long-awaited art show. When he tries to, he is attacked by Keirce, who admits he is one of the undead and needs the paintings to draw his life energy. He comes at Martin with a knife. Martin is unarmed, but takes a writing pen out of his pocket to use as a weapon. He stabs Keirce in the shoulder with it, hoping to disable him so he cannot use the knife. The pen, a graduation gift from his father, is silver and, once it pierces Seamus the Wraith's skin, destroys him. He vanishes slowly in a flaring of red light. Martin retrieves the pen and takes the paintings to Siobhan's presentation.

All the art has sold out and made her a hundred-thousand of dollars. One is purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Aine, Cletic goddess of poetry and love

They return home that night. Martin dreams. In his dream he sees a goddess. Siobhan has told him about Aine and Cliodna, Celtic goddesses of art, poetry, and fertility. Somehow Martin knows—perhaps the goddess communicates it to him—that the woman in the dream is Aine and that she has inhabited the empty spaces in Siobhan's mind vacated by amnesia; and that she had possessed Siobhan for a mission:  to rid the world of Seamus the Wraith.  In the morning, he sees Aine, in her form as a white gull, fly off.

The story ends on a note of ambiguity. Martin knows Siobhan will not be the same without the goddess possessing her spirit. Still, love can change. 

He lies in bed and contemplates this as a new day begins.

My first book, The Gallery is available through Amazon. It's a great Halloween  read--short enough to finish on that particularly spooky night.

If you want to read a story featuring my ongoing character, Martin Rollins, I suggest "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake" online at Amarillo Bay Magazine; or "The Space Between," which appeared in Scholars and Rogues.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

A brand new book (number nine now) is available as well:  Le Cafe de la Mort offers coffee to die for--and a whole lot more.