THOMAS PLUCK is one of our newer shining stars in the field of short, hard fiction, a writer who's passion and anger at injustice pulse like hot blood in every word he writes. His work has appeared at Plots With Guns, Beat to a Pulp, Crimespree, Shotgun Honey, and other notable places.
Nowhere is Tommy's anger at social injustice and cruelty more evident than in the new anthology, LOST CHILDREN. But I'll let him tell you about it himself...
I want to talk to you about the most boring question in the world, which is Why Do You Write?
I write because I'm pissed off, that's why. I'm angry. The abuse of power drives me to a frothing, violent rage, and because I'd rather walk freely on the earth and not be caged among the marijuana smokers and scofflaws who can't buy their way out of prison like our aristocratic betters, I write about it instead of hammering railroad spikes through the skulls of my targets.
The abuse of power takes many forms. In crime fiction it's most often a crooked cop, or a shady politician or power broker, but politics is merely behavior writ large. The weakest among us are children, and the abuse of power over them is our vilest crime. To quote my friend Fiona Johnson, "Some children are lost before they have even started living. Some children are a throw-away commodity like a burger box that’s left to blow down the street in the wind and rain."
That's the cue she gave for her guest post at Flash Fiction Friday, and she ponied up £5 per tale to her favorite charity, Children 1st. I joined in and donated $5 per entry to PROTECT.org, and 44 writers answered the challenge. We donated over $600, but knew we could do more. So we took 30 of the best stories and collected them in an e-book called Lost Children: A Charity Anthology, now available on Amazon for Kindle, Barnes & Noble for Nook, and at Smashwords in epub, PDF, mobi, Sony e-Reader, Kobo, and viewable online.
All the proceeds- after the retailers take their cut- go to PROTECT: The National Association to Protect Children, which advocates political reform for children in the U.S., and Children 1st Scotland, who help vulnerable children and families in Scotland. PROTECT was co-founded by author Andrew Vachss, which is how I first learned of it. They've done a lot of good in the States. So if you're angry at the latest abuse- whether it's shower rapes at Penn State, that Texas judge whipping his handicapped daughter on camera, the 5,000 cases of abuse covered up by the Boy Scouts of America... this is something you can do about it. PROTECT fights to fund the laws that let these bastards get away with it.
If you're angry like me, you can write. But you can also donate and make a difference, and get thirty powerful tales from the likes of Ron Earl Phillips, Paul D. Brazill. David Barber, Luca Veste, Benoit Lelievre, Erin Zulkoski, J.F. Juzwik, Susan Tepper, and many more including Fiona "McDroll" Johnson and myself.
You can follow the donations at the book's blog, Lost Children: A Charity Anthology.
Stay angry,
Thomas Pluck
