Some people don’t care where the stories they read came from. I do. A peek behind the curtain is certainly not a mandatory excursion, but I’ve always appreciated it when an author illuminates his inspiration. If that’s not your bag, feel free to exit, travel safe, and we’ll see you next time around.
“It Takes a Light Touch For This Sort of Work” was inspired by the two young gitano ladies that picked my pocket on a trip to Spain. It happened on my very first day in Madrid, only hours after landing, and they used the technique described in the story, obscuring what their fleet little fingers did in my pocket with a map and a lot of feigned hysteria. When Leta sees a group of tourists in the Plaza Mayor ripe for plucking, then dismisses them because she recognizes one whose wallet she had already taken and found nothing in? Yeah, that’s me. I was so taken with Spain itself and the memory of that little run-in with street criminals that I just had to find a story in it. So, I asked myself, What if that young lady acquired something from a mark’s pocket that she wished she hadn’t?
“The Devil You Know” was a dry run for a screenwriting project. My screenwriting partner, Chad Rouch, and I were developing an original TV series pilot about an itinerant gun-toting preacher fighting supernatural menace in the Old West. In the midst of building the pilot and the series to follow, I sat down and hammered out my vision of our main character and how we might first meet him, just to establish the mood and texture that we would be aiming for in our teleplay. Many years and many drafts later, the teleplay itself is very different from the original story I wrote. Still, I always had a fondness for this first, stark vision of Zebulon Delphi and his world, so I present the story here in a newer, fuller form: still structured and stripped down like the first draft I wrote, but sporting some embellishments from later drafts of the teleplay.
I wrote “Dureski’s Requiem” as an ode to the power of music. I’ve always been a music nut (my ridiculously cumbersome CD and iTunes libraries will attest to the fact) precisely because it’s a strange, alien language for me. I’ve dabbled in playing guitar and I’ve read music theory, but the simple fact is that what composers and songwriters do really mystifies and amazes me, even as it exercises an unending fascination. So, I resolved to tell a story wherein music itself was a weapon, and to challenge myself with describing in the clumsy, exacting medium of words the abstract, wordless power of music’s frozen sonic architecture. Hopefully, I succeeded.
Until the next time…
Dale Lucas
Saint Petersburg, FL
June, 2012
As a special offering, here is the firest chapter of my neo-pulp novel Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights. (Available where ever books and e-books are sold.)