Paul reads his short story “Down the Valley Wild.” Available now in MP3 format in our Exclusive Material section.

Enjoy!

Couldn’t let this one pass …

LONDON (Reuters) - The living dead beat rhino horn to be named Oddest Book Title of the Year.

Bookseller magazine gave the award Friday to a self-help book on being haunted entitled People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It.

The Story

The Book at Amazon

I recently did something I’d never done before. I read an entire novel in e-book format. I know I’m late to the party. Way late. Welcome to the 1990s, and all of that. But quite honestly, despite thousands of attempts over the years, I’ve never developed the mental muscles needed to become a good “screen reader.” I’m one of those guys who has to print out everything I write before I can proofread and edit it. I download stories from the Web and immediately print them out, too. Sometimes, I even print long Web pages, so I can hold the information in my hot little hands. It’s not that I don’t try reading on screen. It’s just that I’m no good at it. No matter what I do, no matter how intently I focus, I tend to get restless and impatient after just a few minutes. I start to squirm. And pretty soon I’m scrolling faster and faster, skimming more than reading.

Then, about six weeks ago, I decided to buy a copy of Stephen King’s The Cell for my Palm. The book was already on its way from my preferred online retailer (I live in the wilderness, remember). I could have simply waited for it to arrive, but I wanted to get a head start. I figured I’d purchase the e-book, play around with it a bit, and read at least some of it before the hardcopy showed up in my mailbox.

As luck would have it, I picked the perfect time to do it. I had a lot of meetings that week and found myself spending way too much time just sitting around, waiting for board members to assemble, gavels to fall and proceedings to begin. In the past, I would have filled that time by staring aimlessly at the ceiling, chatting idly with other audience members or gazing with dismay at my growing to-do list. Suddenly I could pass the time a whole new way, by firing up the Palm and skipping right past the jam-packed date book, reading 20 or 30 pages of The Cell instead. I not only found it convenient, comfortable and useful, it was actually kind of fun, and much to my surprise, I finished the entire e-book two days before the novel turned up in the mail.

Will I do it again someday? Maybe. I don’t think I’ll ever get addicted to screen reading, and I certainly won’t opt for e-books over ink-and-paper or even audio, but I won’t automatically dismiss them, either.

So, go ahead. Tell me how out of date I am. Call me a Luddite. I can take it. But give me some credit for persistence, too, for trying again and again until I finally got it. And don’t be surprised if the next time you see me, I’m squinting at my Palm with a big grin on my face. Playing Tetris? Maybe … or maybe just catching up with the rest of the world at last.

If you haven’t read part one yet, scroll down. Then come back up here for the rest.

P.W. Sinclair’s Horrorstruck columns never drew many comments, but there were a few kind words here and there, which was nice. I had never expected those backpage essays to generate lots of attention. They were there to do a job, to be a little palate cleanser after a heavy meal, and at that I guess they mostly succeeded.

In the beginning, there were only three people who knew that I was P.W. I knew, of course. So did my wife. So did Dave Silva. But what happened as time went by? Did anyone else ever catch on? To the best of my knowledge, just one person – a good friend and Horrorstruck columnist (Hi, Shelia!) who revealed her suspicions in a brief note. “It’s funny how P.W. Sinclair sounds a lot like you do in your letters,” she wrote. And then the coup de grace: “I wonder what P.W. stands for? Pseudonymous Writer, perhaps?”

I was impressed with her deduction skills and her sense of humor. Maybe she should have been writing the magazine’s back page. I was also amused that she’d given me credit for being more clever than I was. I liked the idea of P.W. standing for “Pseudonymous Writer,” but hadn’t been sharp enough to think of it myself. For all I knew, the initials could have stood for Pendergast Wainwright or Psychological Warrior or Piggly Wiggly.

P.W. might have vanished along with Horrorstruck if I hadn’t made the unusual decision to use the penname on “Getting Back,” my contribution to the Post Mortem anthology that Dave and I were putting together. To this day, I can’t say with any real certainty why I did that. I was really proud of the story, and still am satisfied with it today, so it’s not as if I was trying to hide the authorship of a substandard work. Still, there was almost certainly a degree of hiding involved, since I was feeling a bit shy about putting my name on the cover of the book and on one of the longest stories inside. I also enjoyed the thought of people wondering who P.W. Sinclair was – the only writer in the anthology who didn’t come with any sort of “name” or reputation. And finally, there was some ego involved. At the time, my career was starting to take off, and I think I decided, way back in some dark recess of my mind, that it might be helpful some day to have a pseudonym ready to go, with an established name and a list of credits, all set to use when I had two stories appearing in the same issue of a magazine or four new books coming out in the same month. I was, in effect, trying to give P.W. a leg up in the business while preparing for my own eventual superstardom. I know. Go ahead. Laugh now. It’s all right.

As it turned out, the name P.W. Sinclair never appeared on another piece of writing. After Post Mortem came out, he simply disappeared from the radar screen, vanishing just as quickly as he’d been born on that day I needed a Horrorstruck column and couldn’t find anyone to write it.

If I had it to do over again, I’m sure I’d put my real name on “Getting Back.” If the story is ever republished somewhere, I will use my real name. In the meantime, subscribers to our mailing list will find both names on the tale. It seems only fitting. It seems fair. I’m happy to share credit with P.W. one last time, thanking him for the thankless services he provided me, and I hope you’ll think of him kindly as you read his words.

First things first. If you haven’t signed up for our mailing list and gotten your free copies of our Post Mortem stories, “Getting Back” and “Brothers,” why not do it right now? Go ahead … I’ll wait.

Okay, you’re back. All signed up for the list? Got the stories? Good.

The release of “Getting Back” to list members marks a first for me: the first time I’m officially revealing that I was P.W. Sinclair, under whose name that story appeared in Post Mortem. Now, I understand this isn’t exactly earthshaking news. It’s not as if there were hundreds of people, or even dozens, or (let’s be honest) even one, spending sleepless nights wondering about P.W. Sinclair’s true identity. But I still want to explain who P.W. was and how he came to be.

I invented P.W. many years ago, when I was publishing my magazine, Horrorstruck. He was born of necessity. From the very first days of the magazine, I had wanted to conclude each issue with a lighthearted backpage column – not humor, necessarily, but something a little lighter and fluffier for loyal readers who had just worked their way through 50 or 60 pages of horror analysis, news, critiques, and articles about the hardships of being a freelance writer. The problem was, I couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the task. I had plenty of people who wanted to write for me, but they all wanted to be Tom Monteleone, whose MAFIA columns were making waves and drawing lots of attention. I tried to explain. I said, “I already have a Tom Monteleone in the magazine, and as luck would have it, he’s not just a Tom Monteleone, he’s the Tom Monteleone. I don’t need another one.” To no avail. Everyone wanted to be the next disseminator of controversial opinions. Nobody wanted to write a few hundred words of goofiness to wrap up each issue of the magazine.

So I did it myself.

As for the decision to use a pseudonym … I honestly didn’t think about it very much. I just did it. Part of it, I suppose, was wanting to avoid yet another page of Paul F. Olson in a magazine that already had a lot of Paul F. Olson. Part of it may have been embarrassment or self-protection: wanting to hide behind another identity in case my attempts at humor fell flat, as they sometimes (often?) did.

I chose the name quickly and easily. In an early unpublished novel, written just after high school, I had a character named Louis St. Onge, a DJ who went by the radio name Pat Sinclair. I thought about that novel one day, and decided it would be fun to fall back on that particular character – an inside joke that was so far inside I was the only person in the world to know about it. For some reason, “Pat” seemed a little too definitive for Horrorstruck, so I added a bit of mystery by using initials instead, and P.W. Sinclair was born.

To be continued …

I had two items on the agenda today. The first was to tell you about a new anthology by Delirium Press called In Delirium. It was a clever idea … get together a group of writers that had been published by Delirium, have each of them contribute a short story, put all the stories together and offer the book to Delirium’s Shane Ryan Staley as a gift of appreciation from all the writers. I wish the idea had been mine, but it was the brainchild of Brian Keene, who also edited the anthology.

The story I submitted to Brian was called “Watershed.” It was a reprint from many years ago, but I thought it still held up well. And apparently it held up well enough to make it into the book.

So I was going to tell you how you could pick up a copy if you were interested. Unfortunately, when I went to Delirium’s website (http://www.deliriumbooks.com/) to check out the price, etc. I discovered that the book had sold out in pre-publication. Still, if you get a moment, you might want to pop in over there and check out some of their other titles. Shane tends to publish material that’s a little more gruesome than I generally write, but there’s a good selection to sift through if you enjoy the horror genre.

The second item I wanted to tell you about is called A Little White Book of Lies. It’s published by Borderlands Press, as part of their Little Book Series. The concept is simple … pick a color, create a theme around that color, then add in some stories that fit the theme. White lies quickly became my theme, since it runs through so many of my stories, and these are the stories that I selected to be reprinted: “Fade In/Fade Out,” “Brothers,” “The Hollow,” and “Where The Past Lay Buried.” Sandwiched in between these is a new short story, titled “Never Far From Mind,” which fits right into the theme since it’s all about lying and self-deception.

Now, let me be perfectly honest with you … I’m quite pleased with the theme and the collection of stories that were built around it. However, the Little Book Series is unique in that the books are quite literally little. They measure 4 3/4″ by 6 1/4″. Some readers may find this off-putting. Others may find it intriguing.

A Little White Book of Lies comes numbered and signed, and sells for $20.00. You can learn more by dropping by the Borderlands Press site here: http://www.borderlandspress.com/white.html

Welcome to olsonandsilva.com, the new Web home of writers and editors Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva. Whether old friend or new, we’re glad to have you with us!

There’s not much here right now, but be patient. Good things are coming. In the days and weeks ahead, you’ll see more and more content being added to this site. You’ll be able to learn a little more about who we are, what we’ve done in the past, and what we’re going to be doing in the future. There will also be lots of goodies here to feed your fiction addiction — stories and serials and … well, just wait and see. You won’t be disappointed.

While you’re here, please take a moment to join our mailing list, and be sure to subscribe to the feed for this blog so that you can be the first to know when new items are posted and new material is available.

Paul and Dave