What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Tell us about the first story/stories you ever wrote. First book, published or no.

by Paul D. Marks

I don’t really remember what the first story I wrote was. But when I started writing I was trying to write more mainstream or literary fiction. And just in the last few weeks I resurrected one of those ancient stories, rewrote it as crime fiction and sent it out into the world to hopefully be picked up somewhere. The theme is the same as the original story, as well as some of the elements, but I like it better as a murder mystery than as “serious” fiction. Especially because, as one of my first stories I was horrified at how badly written it was. But I liked the idea enough to keep it in the back of mind all these years and try again with the basic elements from it. I think it works better this time. Hope so anyway.

Breaking News: Speaking of stories, and before I get back to the current question, Coast to Coast: Noir from Sea to Shining Sea, volume 3 in the Coast to Coast series of crime fiction anthologies that Andy McAleer and I co-edit dropped last week. Twelve noir stories from twelve terrific authors, with stories set throughout the US from…coast to coast. The “chronology” of the book (if that’s the right word) goes from the West Coast to the East Coast, noir all the way. The authors are: Colleen Collins, Brendan DuBois, Alison Gaylin, Tom MacDonald, Andrew McAleer, Michael Mallory, Paul D. Marks, Dennis Palumbo, Stephen D. Rogers, John Shepphird, Jaden Terrell, Dave Zeltserman. See the post I did earlier this week at SleuthSayers for more on this collection: Hope you’ll want to check it out: 

Available at Amazon and Down & Out Books

And now we return you to our regular programming already in progress: Another thing I remember is that I began by writing poems and song lyrics. I wanted to be a rock star—who didn’t? But I was always writing something.

One of my early novels—maybe my first completed novel, that’s also hard to remember—a satire about a screenwriter trying to make it in Hollywood, was almost published way back in the 80s. Almost. It was accepted for publication (if that's the right terminology) by a major publisher.  But then there was a "housecleaning" at that publisher: the old team of editors and assistant editors got swept out. And the new team didn't want most of the old team's slate of projects, so I got swept out with the "new broom". So that one almost got published. But by the time it was put into “turnaround” it was too late for it as a lot of the humor was dated. Remember Fawn Hall, Jessica Hahn, Donna Rice and Gary Hart—see what I mean, dated. ’Cause even though it was about a guy trying to make it in Hollywood, it had a lot of topical and satirical humor of the day. I work on it every once in a while to remove the dated satirical elements and make it more neutral in terms of topicality. So one of these days it might see the light.

The first writing that I got paid for was a piece in one of the L.A. papers about John Lennon on, I believe, the one year anniversary of his murder. It wasn't fiction, but it felt awfully good to actually get paid for writing something. But even though it felt good to be paid, I had mixed emotions because of the subject matter. Appropriate that this should appear today as today is John Lennon's birthday.

Available on Amazon

My first published fiction, but certainly not the first story I wrote, was a short story called Angels Flight (before Michael Connelly borrowed the title from me 😉). It was published in the Murder by Thirteen anthology and republished in L.A. Late @ Night, a collection of five of my stories. A review of L.A. Late @ Night in All Due Respect calls Angels Flight the reviewer's favorite story in the collection and says this about the two main characters, "They're a dynamic pair, and I'd like to see them together in more stories," so I might just have to oblige him.

The title for Angels Flight was inspired by the famous funicular railway in downtown L.A. and my love for old Los Angeles. I think the story was inspired when they drained one of the lakes in L.A. and found all kinds of junk there. So in my story they drain Echo Park Lake, find a dead body and the story takes off from there. And even though it was originally published a looooooooong time ago, it's still one of my favorites. I think it's (hopefully) surprise ending brings to mind Shakespeare's quote, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

Angels Flight

After Angels Flight, I had more stories published and eventually my novel White Heat, and others. And then I happily reached one of my major short stories goals, getting published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and its sister publication Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Another thrill was to be listed on the cover of EQMM, as well as winning their Readers Award. So there’s always hope, don’t give up.

All I can do to end is quote another rock band, the Grateful Dead, "What a long strange trip it's been." 

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

The Blues Don't Care got a nice review from It was a Dark and Stormy Book Club.

“On one level it’s a mystery where Bobby Saxon, with secrets he wants no one to find out, works to solve a murder and clear his name under extraordinary racially tinged circumstances. With a lot of twists and turns, this is an excellent mystery.  It takes place in World War II-era Los Angeles, and the author does a brilliant job that brings the long-gone era alive with memorable characters, scents, descriptions, and most of all, jazz. Highly recommended."

Buy on Amazon or Down & Out Books

***

And Tom Bergin at The Name is Archer Facebook page had this to say about Coast to Coast Noir:

"This is the new book out that contains stories by Archer group members Paul D. Marks and Dennis Palumbo. There are 12 stories in all in this collection and so far I've read the stories by Paul and Dennis. They are both really good stories. Paul's story is called Nowhere Man. The story is set in Southern California and the year is 1965. The story does conjure up the Beatles song but is also a very clever nod to the 1944 movie Laura. The story by Dennis is titled Steel City Blues and is set in Pittsburgh in the year 1970. Here's the opening line of the story - I'm sitting at my usual spot on the roof, back against one of the brick smokestacks, the revolver across my upraised knees. Dennis never wastes any time getting the reader involved in his stories and Steel City Blues is no exception. Interestingly both of these stories deal with obsession. Both stories show what can happen when a man becomes obsessed with a woman. It's noir. Things don't go well. Check the book out. I have a feeling the remaining ten stories will be as good as these two."

Please join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/paul.d.marks and check out my web site www.PaulDMarks.com

Let It Bleed

Did you ever have any doubts about your decision to be a writer?

by Paul D. Marks

Every minute of every effing day!

The end.

Well, the end of the first part.

The Other Part:

I think every writer—at least this version of EveryWriter—has doubts about our decision to be a writer. It’s like those Facebook memes that go around: This is what my friends think I do as a writer. But what we really do is toil in the salt mines of our minds. I’m not saying it’s the down and dirty work of toiling in real salt mines. But it’s also not as easy as some people think.

Like Red Smith said, “There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

That’s all there is to it.

My writing life has been all over the map. From op-ed pieces to radio scripts and script doctoring to short stories and novels. And though it’s always been a roller coaster, I was always glad to have the opportunity to express myself and be creative. Despite the idiots one sometimes has to deal with.

I like the writing—not so much the biz side of it.

So let’s talk about the...

...Doubts and Reasons to Quit:

1) No one really understands what you do. I made my living rewriting other people’s scripts and optioning my own spec scripts to various people. One of the hardest parts of my film work was that, as a rewriter, there was no screen credit, so my dad could never figure out what I did for a living—and certainly didn’t understand how it all worked. Couldn’t take his friends to Westwood and show them my name on the silver screen. That was frustrating, but not as frustrating as dealing with some of the personalities. But did that (no screen credit) make me doubt my decision to be a writer? Hell, no. I just started writing short stories and novels. You get credit there...most of the time.

2) No one respects what you do: I once had a producer threaten to send his friends in the Mossad to get me when we argued about a script I was working on for him. I was warned about him before I started, but I thought I’m a brave soul, I’ll give it a shot. He’d hired me to write a script based on his idea—then hated everything I came up with, even though it was exactly what we’d talked about, but it wasn’t him, his writing, in every nuance. Hell, he should have written the damn thing himself... But he couldn’t and wouldn’t. No he’d rather just threaten me. So, of course, I sat up every night with night vision goggles, a CAR-15 (it was a while ago), flame thrower, a couple-a cruise missiles (Tom Cruise Missiles ‘cause he could protect the hell out of me) and an AWACs circling overhead, and lay in wait for them to swarm the hill behind my house. A .50 cal would have been better than the CAR-15, but since they never came I guess it didn’t matter. Maybe they’re still on their way and I seem to have misplaced the CAR-15. But did the Mossad threat make me doubt my decision to be a writer, hell no. I just bought myself a new Kevlar vest.  : )

3) Everyone thinks they can do it better: And then there was the Golden Turkey Leg. I had a spec script that dealt peripherally with Voodoo, but it wasn’t “supernatural”. Another producer wanted to make it more mystical, scary, more Voodoo-ey, sci-fi, sleazy, seedy, make-Ed-Wood-look-like-a-genius-bad, and to that end he wanted me to add something about some golden object that was magical and mystical and for want of a better word I called it “the golden turkey leg”—well, not to his face. He also wanted me to bring a character back from the dead—now that’s Voodoo...ey—turning a pretty good thriller into a grade Z schlockfest horror story that would even make Roger Corman at his cheapest cringe. Then, as if it couldn’t get any weirder, he knew the “perfect” guy to do the theme song: Michael Bolton. And when I say he “knew” Michael Bolton I mean he really did; they were buds or something. And no offense to anyone who likes him, but he’s just not my taste. Give me Ian Gillan and Joey Ramone. So maybe I’m glad that that one never got out of development hell. And he wanted Armand Assante (whose name he kept mispronouncing as “Assant,” leaving off the “ay” at the end) to play the lead. He would have been great for the part when he was younger, but I had nightmares about the producer approaching him, mispronouncing his name, and the actor being so offended he would refuse the part. Then to top it all off, my wife and I were at a toy show in Pasadena (one of my hobbies is collecting old toys) and we ran into said producer, who’s there with his wife and kid, maybe around six or seven years old, selling old dolls. So, he asks me to look after said kid, who at least was a sweet said kid, so he and his wife can walk around the toy show, unfettered. The worst part is he wasn’t even selling the kind of toys I was looking for. So in addition to working on screenplays, I’m also a great babysitter, I just don’t cook or do windows, except Microsoft Windows. And another one bites the dust, another one that never made it to the silver screen, but at least I got paid. But I plan to turn them all into novels someday. They’re already “outlined,” as the screenplays are sort of like outlines. Were this producer’s ideas better? Well, if you like Golden Turkey Legs, I suppose so. But did that make me doubt my decision to be a writer? Hell no, I’m a glutton for punishment.


Reasons to Stay:

Because you can’t do anything else, literally, despite the BS. So you just open that vein and let it bleed.

Or as the Clash said, “Should I Stay or Should I Go”—“If I go there will be trouble, And if I stay it will be double.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQnCVBertf0

THE NAME GAME REDUX

What’s in a name? Do you give careful thought to the names of your characters or do you draw them out of a hat?


By Paul D. Marks

As Art can attest, it’s hard to come on Fridays since people have sometimes stolen your thunder earlier in the week. My post was called The Name Game, but now it’s redux – great minds and all of that.

I do give careful thought to my characters' names. Neither the first nor last name is chosen at random. Sometimes characters are named after friends or enemies or in homage to someone or something. Sometimes I want a “plain Jane” type of name and sometimes I want something more symbolic or allegorical. Sometimes the name just comes to me. Other times I’ll look in baby naming books or other research sources to help me figure out an appropriate name.

Even when the characters have simple names like “Johnny Jones” from one of my current works-in-progress, the name was still given a fair amount of thought. On the one hand, it’s a common, clichéd name. But that’s how it’s meant, as we don’t know the character’s real name and this is simply how the narrator refers to him. It could just as easily have been John Doe, Joe Smith, Bill Johnson or any of a hundred other common names.

Naming characters is sort of like naming children or pets. You visualize the kid’s first day of school and how the teacher will call role and mispronounce the name or what cruel nicknames the other kids will twist it into. And then pick a name you hope the kid will live up to and won’t get teased about too much. Actually this is how I ended up naming my character Duke in White Heat. Duke’s relationship with his dad is not the greatest father-son relationship. His father cruelly named him “Marion,” after John Wayne’s real first name. Not a nice thing to do to a boy and maybe that’s one of the reasons they don’t get along and certainly why Duke chose that as a nickname.

Also, when naming pets, I like to pick names that are unique and mean something to me and my wife. Something that captures their personality, but that also won’t be too hard or too embarrassing to yell out when calling them to come. You don’t want to be yelling “Here Mr. Snuggles” when your neighbor walks by. So our Rottweiler was called Bogie. And our black cats Curley and Moe. Our mostly Rottweiler, but who looked nothing like one, was Audie, after Audie Murphy. and our German Shepherd is Pepper, full name Sgt. Pepper, after the Beatles album.



There are several “rules” I try to follow when naming characters:

They shouldn’t be too hard to pronounce – you don’t want readers stumbling over them.
Don’t try too hard to be unique – like soap opera characters that always have names like Raven Snow or Chastity Chamberfield, unless going for humor or irony.

Names can be symbolic, foreshadow or can be ironic. In my story 51-50, the cop character, Cleaver, is purposely named after Ward Cleaver, the all-American father on Leave it to Beaver. I wanted to play against the all-American image of Ward Cleaver with a tough cop about to lose his sanity.

Names can be revenge for someone you don’t like – but be careful when doing this and disguise it well.


Names can be an homage. In my short story Free Fall, the femme fatale is named Gloria, after film noir icon and femme fatale Gloria Grahame. In Broken Windows, the sequel to White Heat and not yet published, there is a character named Chandler – a woman cop – but we all know who that name pays homage to. And in my story L.A. Late @ Night and my noir story Born Under a Bad Sign, there is a cop named Larry Darrell – which pays homage to Somerset Maugham’s character in The Razor’s Edge. Not that he’s much like Maugham’s Larry Darrell, but still.

Names can give insight into the character – who they are and where they’re from – sometimes the story behind the name can give you a little extra info about the character – for example Michael Connelly’s Harry “Hieronymus” Bosch – a unique name and an interesting story behind it.

Sometimes names should break stereo types: In White Heat there is an African-American character named Warren. Someone who read the book said Warren wasn’t a black name. But I named the character after a black Marine friend I’d had. Just because a character is black or Hispanic, or any other ethnicity, doesn’t mean they have to have an ethnic-sounding name.

And character names often change in later drafts. Sometimes I just use “placeholder” names until after I get to know the characters better. Then, if I think of the perfect name later on, I can use search and replace to change it later.

Names are important and can be fun. Like the old song, The Name Game (written by Shirley Ellis – and ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jfVpizj1Uk

The name game!
Shirley!
Shirley, Shirley bo Birley Bonana fanna fo Firley
Fee fy mo Mirley, Shirley!

Lincoln!
Lincoln, Lincoln bo Bincoln Bonana fanna fo Fincoln
Fee fy mo Mincoln, Lincoln!

Come on everybody!
I say now let's play a game
I betcha I can make a rhyme out of anybody's name
The first letter of the name, I treat it like it wasn't there
But a B or an F or an M will appear
And then I say bo add a B then I say the name and Bonana fanna and a fo
And then I say the name again with an F very plain and a fee fy and a mo
And then I say the name again with an M this time
And there isn't any name that I can't rhyme.

Tinker, Tailor, Coroner, Private Eye

If you had a chance to work in law enforcement, which area would see yourself in and why? The coroner’s office? Homicide division? Beat cop? Criminal psychologist? Private investigator? Defense attorney?

by Paul D. Marks

Of the list above, I know which I absolutely would not want to do: Defense attorney: Even Alan Dershowitz concedes that most defendants are guilty. And I couldn't defend a guilty party, especially because the tactics used by the defense are often despicable – particularly when they try to throw the blame on another clearly innocent party to confuse the issue and throw doubt on their often clearly guilty clients. I just could not defend a rapist or a murderer. So, no defense attorney for me. Maybe that’s why I wrote my story L.A. Late @ Night that appeared originally in Murder on Sunset Boulevard (and recently republished in a collection of my stories also called L.A. Late @ Night) about a defense attorney who has second thoughts when she realizes her client is guilty and decides to do something about it...

That leaves the rest of the list:

Coroner's office: Well, I've seen my fair share of blood and guts. That said, I'm also the kind of person who whenever they hear/see symptoms of a disease decides they have that disease. Which is why I can't watch shows like ER or Grey's Anatomy. I guess I can handle blood and guts to some extent, but not symptoms. I think this is what happens with medical students (so maybe I should have been a doctor). So, nope, coroner's office is kaput.






Homicide division: Now we're getting closer. The idea of solving cases and bringing the bad guys to justice strikes home with me. Yeah, I could do that. Third degree and all, with a new energy-saving bulb of course.






Beat cop: Nah. Dealing with all the bad and crazy people you'd have to deal with would make me nuts. And I'd probably end up in the hoosegow myself. That's sort of what my story 51-50, cop slang for crazy, is about. (Originally published in the Psycho Noir issue Dave Zeltserman's Hardluck Stories anthology, but now reprinted in the L.A. Late @ Night collection.)





Criminal psychologist: While psychology interests me, to deal with all those psychos would probably make me psycho and you'd have to have a gun with a hair trigger taped under your desk aiming straight at your client...just in case. Probably not a good way to begin a relationship.






Private investigator: Yeah, now you're talking. Bring the bad guys to justice. And you get to wear a trenchcoat and fedora and use words like gat and gunsel. And slap guys like eternal weasels Elisha Cook, Jr. and Peter Lorre around. Of course, you take your fair share of beatings too, so turnabout is fair play I guess. But still, gumshoe. Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? Or P.I., private dick, private eye, shamus, Pinkerton or Continental Op. And though he's more modern, I hope Duke Rogers, my P.I. in White Heat, carries on their tradition with grace and gats. And you get to have an office in a romantically seedy building with the proverbial flashing neon sign outside the window and the perpetual pitter patter of rain on that window that looks out to the City of Angels. Oh, and here's a happy little ditty about our fair city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_8U93SvVyY



There's one element that was left off the list above: Prosecutor: Probably the best fit for me. A lot of people that have known me through the years say I should have been a lawyer (though I'm not sure if that's a compliment or not...),. I like the idea of being a litigator 'cause I love a good fight. Corporate law, nah. Criminal law, the D.A.'s office, sure. Being able to put the bad guys away, to argue a case. To logically prove a guilty party guilty. Prosecutor would be a good fit for me. But if I chose that route could I still wear the trenchcoat and fedora?

Who, What, Why, When and Where Dunit?

When you start a new book do you know whodunit from the get-go? If so, how do you ensure you don't unconsciously give it away? And if not, when do you decide whodunit?

by Paul D. Marks

I have to start off sort of like I started the last blog post two weeks ago. Then it was 'yes' and 'no' to the question. Now it's 'it depends'. Because there is no right or wrong way to do anything most of the time. So sometimes you know who the badguy is from the get-go, and sometimes you don't.

Different stories generate from different ideas and sometimes those ideas are more "complete" than other times. Sometimes you might come up with a good villain and build the story around them, so you know whodunit right off and work up to that.

Sometimes you start with the main character or a peripheral character, so you might not know whodunit. And if you work like me, a "pantster," you just start writing and see where it goes—and can even be surprised by whodunit. And sometimes (there's that iffy word again) you have a plot idea or a hook or some notes or thoughts in your head about incidents or actions, character bits, dialogue, maybe an opening line or scene, etc., and you weave those into the story as you go and see whodunit from there.

And sometimes you might think you know whodunit...but your characters come to life and have lives of their own, take you in a different direction and surprise you. So the second part of the question—when do you decide whodunit?—works itself out one way or another, depending on which route mentioned here or above you take. At least if you're a pantster. Obviously, people who outline might have all of this worked out ahead of time.

As to how not to unconsciously giveaway who done it – that's where having other people read your story can come in handy. They can see the stuff that the writer is too close to notice. So you read and re-read and write and rewrite, and as you do, you try to catch and fix those kinds of things. And this is where it can be an advantage to be a pantster—since you don’t know who the bad guy is, you end up writing it in a way that doesn’t reveal too much and later, when you’ve figured out who the bad guy is, you can go back and add little hints earlier.

In my novel White Heat, not only do I know who the badguy is from the beginning, but so does the reader (sort of). Because he goes into the main character's office, private detective Duke Rogers, and hires Duke to find a "long lost friend." It's such an easy gig that Duke doesn't even do the paperwork, just tells the guy to come back in a couple of days. Duke gets the info for him, the guy pays for it and splits. Duke doesn't even know his name, or at least his real name. A short time later he's reading the paper, finds the "long lost friend" has been murdered and Duke knows he inadvertently helped the bad guy find her. Feeling guilty, he determines to track the badguy down on his own time. But where to start? As I say, we meet the badguy right away, but we don't really know who he is, where he's from, etc. And that's the main plot of the book, Duke trying to figure out who he is and find him and bring him to justice.

One Amazon reviewer complained that we "know" who the killer is too early on. But, as I say, we do and we don't. We see him, but we don't know who he is or anything substantive about him. This reader had a problem with that, and that's fine. But I knew who the killer was and Duke knew who he was (sort of) and that's the story. Sometimes the mystery is not in ‘who done it’ but in the why, where and how? What I'm trying to say is that for me the story and characters are often more interesting than the whodunit, though that's fun too.

In another example, in my short story Dead Man's Curve, from the anthology Last Exit to Murder, the main character, Ray Hood, is a guy on his uppers. He's old, he's a druggie and his glory days as a backup guitarist for Jan and Dean are behind him. So when he gets a chance to do an illegal favor for a friend that might lead to his eventually getting another shot at the spotlight he jumps at it. But what interests me is Ray's story, more than the overarching plot or whodunit, as we know who dun it early on. I was even concerned that the editors might want to take out a couple of "quiet" scenes that didn't necessarily advance the plot, but they didn't and I was glad. Especially because those were my favorite scenes in the story. The scenes where we get to know Ray, see what happened to him, see his day to day life. The rest of the story moves ahead at a quick pace, those scenes slow it down a bit, but in a good way, I think. I guess what I’m saying here is that even though I write mystery and noir stuff I tend to focus more on characters and the why rather than the who done it.

We all read mysteries for different reasons, but a lot of the time it is because we want a sense of justice and good triumphing over evil, as well as for character and the actual "mystery". Even in noir and hardboiled there is ultimately some kind of justice, though it is usually a little muddied and unclear. In real life murders go unsolved for years, sometimes never to be solved. The Black Dahlia murder is still unsolved, but in fiction it has been solved dozens of times. So the who-dunit is obviously important to us. We want resolution, but we also want to learn and experience something more than just whodunit. We want to know the characters on a deeper level and the why of it and that's important too.

And Happy Fourth of July to everyone:

The Long and Winding Road

How did your first novel/story come about and how long did it take to get it published?

by Paul D. Marks
 

Since I love using Beatle song titles, the path to my first fiction publication was a long and winding road.

There's really no simple or easy answer to the question of how my first story came about because it's so long ago who really remembers? I know who doesn't: me. I don't even remember what my first story was. What I do remember is that I was always writing something. I think I started off writing poems and song lyrics. One time I even wrote some lyrics in the margins of a science test. And the science teacher also happened to have a music publishing biz on the side – which I didn't know. He liked the lyrics so much he wanted to publish the song. Unfortunately, the lyrics I wrote were for the Beatles' I'm Only Sleeping.

But one of my early novels, a satire about a screenwriter trying to make it in Hollywood, was almost published way back in the 80s. Almost. It was accepted for publication (if that's the right terminology) by a major publisher. But then there was a "housecleaning" at that publisher: the old team of editors and assistant editors got swept out. And the new team didn't want most of the old team's slate of projects, so I got swept out with the "new broom". So that one almost got published. But by the time it was put into "turnaround" it was too late for it as a lot of the humor was dated. Remember Fawn Hall, Jessica Hahn, Donna Rice and Gary Hart – see what I mean, dated. 'Cause even though it was about a guy trying to make it in Hollywood, it had a lot of topical and satirical humor of the day. I work on it every once in a while to remove the dated satirical elements and make it more neutral in terms of topicality. So one of these days it might see the light.

The first writing that I got paid for was a piece in one of the L.A. papers about John Lennon on, I believe, the one year anniversary of his murder. It wasn't fiction, but it felt awfully good to actually get paid for writing something. But even though it felt good to be paid, there were mixed emotions because of the subject matter.

My first published fiction was a story called Angels Flight (before Michael Connelly borrowed the title from me 😉). It was published in the Murder by Thirteen anthology and recently republished in L.A. Late @ Night, a collection of five of my stories. A new review of L.A. Late @ Night in the current issue of All Due Respect calls Angels Flight the reviewer's favorite story in the collection and says this about the two main characters, "They're a dynamic pair, and I'd like to see them together in more stories," so I might just have to oblige him.

The title for Angels Flight was inspired by the famous funicular railway in downtown L.A. and my love for old Los Angeles. I think the story was inspired when they drained one of the lakes in L.A. and found all kinds of junk there. So in my story they drain Echo Park Lake, finding a dead body and the story takes off from there. And even though it was originally published in 1997, it's still one of my favorites. I think it's (hopefully) surprise ending brings to mind Shakespeare's quote, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

After Angels Flight, I had more stories published and eventually my novel White Heat. And all I can do to end is quote another rock band, the Grateful Dead, "What a long strange trip it's been."