New military-noir piece "Church of War" on crime-fiction site Shotgun Honey.

It's a thrill to get a piece accepted to a venue you're already a big fan of. Shotgun Honey has been a prominent flash-noir leader for years now - their authors are legion and I'm grateful to be one of among them.

My piece "Church of War" brings the battlefield home, but bare-fisted. It was partly inspired by my time working for Mil-Tree, a non-profit in Joshua Tree that aims to heal the wounds of war. Needless to say, nothing even remotely close to what happens in my story happened at my time there. I was fortunate enough to meet some of the nicest, well-adjusted guys and gals there whose battle tales were the last thing on their minds when wanting to chop it up with me. You might consider the main character Bradley Miller as a fever dream of my sub-conscience, who might have felt unworthy in their presence as I got to hear their everyday stories of integrity/humility. 

Read CHURCH OF WAR by Gabriel Hart

Submission call for GHOSTWRITING THE WIP - a non-fiction project about writing.

Hello,

I'm reaching out to writers in my inner/outer circle to gauge interest in a non-fiction project about writing, which I am calling GHOSTWRITING THE WIP.

Most of us have used ourselves in our work. It's often inevitable, whether it be us writing in the first person consciously based on ourselves, or us consciously trying to divorce ourselves from the main character – only to find that a lot of that character's qualities end up mirroring our own anyway. We'll often learn a thing or two about ourselves we may have been suppressing when choosing that latter path – like amateur psychoanalysis.

The prompt: What about our works-in-progress/published work that predicts the future? Have you ever included a scenario or character in your work that was not based on your past or present – either too far out to be believable or just properly abstract – that ended up taking some shape or form in “the real world” far after the fact?

I've had a substantial handful of these occurrences. I refuse to think I am the only one, so that's hopefully where you come in.

I'm not necessarily looking for something as grandiose as Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven being published hot on the heels of our current pandemic. I want this to come from a much more personal vista – which I see as having the potential to yield even stranger results that might be more difficult to explain away.

It's important to emphasize that this is not to imply any of us are claiming to be armchair prophets. What I want to stir the pot about is the non-linear quality of time, its relation to creativity, and how writing can radiate tentacles of the unconscious to reach out and touch something more tangible than we may think at the time of the passage's conception.

I'm also welcoming innocent journal writing into this, as well as third mind techniques of automatic writing and cut-up.

I'm looking for a chance to interview some of you over email, or else offer the opportunity to write your own nutshell account that I may be able to pull a quote or two from.

Once I get an idea of interest, I'll be pitching it to a list of literary venues as an article, essay, or maybe something larger.

Interested parties write to me directly at mrgabrielhart@gmail.com

Thanks.

New audio story "Black Pit Blues" on the Two Year Anniversary episode of Simultaneous Times podcast.

           Somehow this will be my second dog story for Simultaneous Times in less than a year? I guess I'm "the dog story" guy now.
    "Black Pit Blues" is a speculative fiction tale using a local phenomenon as a springboard - the abandoned Desert Hot Springs Pitbulls breeding with coyotes in Whitewater. In BPB we witness animal Darwinism outliving the mental illness of a troubled but well-meaning human.
     Music by the unmistakable RedBlueBlackSilver.
Click below for link.
"Black Pit Blues" by Gabriel Hart on Simultaneous Times, Episode 25.

New short-stories on the horizon: Anthologies in Australia, Florida and beyond

   Between editing my upcoming novel Lies of Heaven and working on my daunting WIP High Prey Drive, I've been using much of 2020 to develop my short-story muscle. I'm one of those writers that finds himself more comfortable stretching out in a novel length effort, so I've found it a great challenge to have to reign myself in for the smaller word counts. A tough lesson to learn: Just because you have a lot to say, doesn't mean you have to say it all, all the time. But short stories can be so gratifying - they often leave it to the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks that their wonder runs away with.

   I wish I can remember who said it this way: "A short story is about a murder. A novel is about the murderer."

   So I've got some shorties coming out in these next couple months. "The Lonesome Defeat of Bridge-Repair" will be included in the gargantuan Burning Love and Bleeding Hearts Anthology (Things In The Well, Australia) to be released on Valentine's Day. Also from Australia, Black Hare Press will be releasing their Twenty-Twenty Anthology which will include my noir "Straight To The Bone" which concerns four rivaling men's hygiene business moguls. And hopefully not last, my story "Wrath Child's Atrophy" will be appearing in "Little Boy Lost: More Tales of Youth Disrupted" (Mannison Press, Florida). WCA is sort of like Stand By Me but with heavy metal kids.

PRIDE OF THE COG: A Field Guide For Creatives To Outwit Their Day Job, by Gabriel Hart

(The following was written in 2016, originally slated to appear in Zara Kand's anthology on The Creative Process, a project since abandoned until further notice)

                                                                 

                      PRIDE OF THE COG  

       A Field Guide For Creatives To Outwit Their Day Job                          By Gabriel Hart       

            

      I am often asked, by those who don’t seem to harbor any artistic cell in their bodies, about my artistic process; how exactly the path is tread from a mere thought or idea to the finished “product” (and a question I often ask myself is, what’s wrong with it merely remaining a thought or an idea? Why corrupt its innocence by poking and prodding at it all?).  The inquiry irks me every time, and I fire back with the paranoid arrogance of a criminal trying to frame a bystander through blatant (AKA sadly transparent) manipulation:

    “ WELL, if you have to ask, then you don’t deserve to know, as you obviously don’t have a creative bone in your body.  Why should I tell you, if you’re just going to ape my steer in order to cheat your way through a life where you clearly shouldn’t quit your dead-end day job!?!?”

            I am humbly reminded far too late, that this person is actually my co-worker and I am also working at our dead-end day job.

            So, what is exactly wrong with that - an artist being “forced” to work among the unwashed, where we were once so proud to claim origin?

            What else would we expect, Entitlement?

            What else would we want, Privilege?

            When must this authenticity cease in order to become successful? The initial inspiration for your life’s work was this backdrop, and if you’re expecting the rest of us to continue to relate to your output, it should continue to include this backdrop – which should encompass the nagging theft of your true calling, the bone-crushing weight of society’s expectations. Let us call this classist environment “The Ever-Looming Extortion of Your Soul” and let us dissect an example of its inherent divinity.

            You wake up every morning with the oozing abyss of your deepest, most fertile subconscious still swirling in your head. You feel that anything is possible, that anything can and will happen. You may even cherry-pick your nightmares for ingredients to appear in your next creation, ecstatic to be reminded that your unique brain was responsible for such concrete tangibility, when it was finally allowed to rest. You pay tribute to this phenomenon by writing it down, or if it was piercing enough, it tore a part of your mind down where it now excitedly tries to lay dormant until your next direction.

           

            There is just one problem: The rising rays of your life’s work is about to compete with the growing shadows of your day’s work. It is here where you are a character in someone else’s play, in which you must repeat the same lines over and over again and interact with hundreds, sometimes thousands of other people who’s main objective seems to be making you forget everything great you had planned.

            You arrive to work reluctantly, still piecing together the disembodied serpent of your interlacing genius, when suddenly, somebody has the nerve to ask you simple directions to the peanut butter and you nearly meltdown, as you were in the middle of a serious emergency that existed solely in your own head!

            As individuals, we forget the importance of ourselves as cogs in a larger, only seemingly un-artistic machine. It should be considered a symptom of artistic integrity to know how to adapt to poetic discomfort rather than entertain the delusion of a complete removal from it.

           

            Who do we really think we are when we insist that we are too good for the mundane? Let us not forget the vitality of living amongst the doldrums with our brothers and sisters. By giving our fellow-man even a sliver of arrogance when he is merely trying to eat and get out of your sight, perhaps even trying to get back to his life’s work, we have slowed down his process as well as our own, our frequencies scrambled due to our lack of confidence and organization, unable to properly file away our still-fermenting creative flood. This is of utter importance to hone, as we know good and well something even more mind-shattering is likely to come our way, where we must not only be on guard, but with a low-heat on our backburners.

            Otherwise, we burn it all down.

            That said, let us ask ourselves; where is the accountability of our little precious melting snowflake of a thought or idea? What fucking good was it when it did not possess the spine to withstand a lady asking you what she is supposed to do with spaghetti sauce?

            Let us look at the dead-end job: not as a sieve where we lose ideas, but as a filter where only the most refined bits of our creativity shall pass into being. The repetition, chaos, idiocy, and oppressive nature of this environment shall merely tighten the crosshatch of this strainer, challenging the integrity of each concept.

           

            Remember, our thoughts are not necessarily gospel just because we are the ones that thought them. More often than not, it is advantageous to get rid of any evidence that it actually came from you.

           

            This is where our second mind comes in, the artist’s brain in its purist form. In the scenario of the automaton task, the hopeless grinding of doing something against one’s instinct. Our body occupied, our mind will then wander out of protest - a convulsing, squirming escape as it floats to more divine heights. As our brain focuses on, say, bagging groceries for the consumer, our second mind should, in theory, get right back to our life’s work. If we are true artists, we should be no strangers to this form of dissociation, knowing we must spend the rest of our day perfecting a balance between these hemispheres.

            99.9% of us adore and look up to Nick Cave. But Cave revealed his artistic process that seemed to reek of fallacy, when he audaciously boasted that he “clocks in” to work every day to his “office” for eight hours where he sits at his typewriter or piano and sees what comes out of him, uninterrupted. Not to assume Cave doesn’t have a horde of personal demons and self-doubt keeping his output a consistent challenge, but even that concept seems a luxury when you subtract the everyday hierarches, economical struggles, and social quicksand that keep the rest of us from fully realizing our creative work. There is no doubt that he has earned this luxury on a hard-road lasting decades long, but I lost a sizeable sliver of respect for the man who thinks that he is “just like us” just because he has some self-induced discipline, re-appropriating proletariat terms like “clocking in” and “office.”

            But we have digressed…

            “EXCUSE ME! I’m talking to you. Where are the flat taco shells?!? This is the third time I’ve asked you where the flat taco shells are and you seem to just be ignoring me! Where’s your manager?”

           

            Our threat of potentially getting fired is a more than a reasonable motivator to leave our musings on the shelf for a second.

            “I’m so sorry, Miss. Is it tortillas you’re looking for?

            “Well, I’m not sure what THAT is! Do I look like I speak Spanish?”

            “No, of course not, M’am…In fact, you look as pasty white as these tortillas right here!

            “Ah, thank you! SEE, WHAT DID I SAY - FLAT TACO SHELLS!!!”

                                                           

                  

            It is a hard-boiled battlefield out there for the working class artist. So much so, that at times it feels like you should not only retreat, but refrain from existing in it altogether. But it is this friction – the grinding of a situation that essentially should not be that naturally causes the spark of the transmundane where we reach beyond the confines of the physical world. The more guts we have to be present in the mundane, the more strength/focus we'll have to be present in the transmundane. Or how another TM (Transcendental Meditation)refers to it - The Unified Field, where all ideas are born.

            It’s a no-brainer to say “write everything down” but let us go beyond documenting not just your own thoughts and ideas, but also utilizing the absurd hurdles that get in our way – thus re-appropriating your opposing forces. Many consider this to be the most simple form of practical magic - not only is this the obvious first step of turning your miasmic imagination into tangible reality, but it also a way of gaining control over its antithesis.

            In other words, whistle while you work! Whether you be one of the Seven Dwarves or one in Seven Slaves - if it was all worth a damn, you will have an interesting puzzle to subpoena your subconscious with when you arrive back home that evening.

            

           But then, as you open your own front door, you are greeted by your partner, who may have forgotten to say hello, as they hold in front of you a long list of chores that need tending to, immediately.

            So here’s to dreaming…

                                                                                                       Gabriel Hart

                                                                                                       Morongo Valley

                                                                                                       November 2019

PANEL DISCUSSION FOR NEA's "THE BIG READ" - "What Defines Literary Genres?" with Gabriel Hart, Susan Rukeyser, and Jon Christopher (mediated by Jean-Paul Garnier)

   Last month I had the pleasure of joining fellow desert authors Susan, Jon, and Jean-Paul to dissect literary genres for The National Endowment For The Arts "Big Read" event at Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree. It was meditative, opinionated and even hilarious at parts, and I think we all walked away seeing certain genres we thought we had pinned in a slightly broader way. You can hear it in its entirety here.

   "The Big Read" oversaw a month's worth of events focusing on Emily St. John Mandel's brilliant dystopian-fiction best-seller, "Station Eleven." Since there had been a lot of opposing viewpoints pertaining to what genre it fell into, we included it in our discussion - praising it as well as picking it apart, while challenging our own definitions of literary genre.

                             (L-R: Jean-Paul Garnier, Gabriel Hart, Susan Rukeyser, Jon Christopher)
                                                                                           Photo by Mia Torres.

My next reading will be Saturday, July 6th at San Diego's genre-fiction paradise Mysterious Galaxy As a special "In Discussion" panel, moderated by bruja-fiction author Lizz Huerta , I'll be joined with J.S. Breukelaar and Keith McCleary. The event is free and starts at 2pm.