Polishing

Last weekend was fun. My wife and I had friends over Saturday for a game of Mana Punk (http://mana-punk.com/) and in between my character recovering from an attack by something called a grave grub and dodging a gorilla sheathed in fire, our group discovered that we were going through one of the new modules for the game, Aria of Sorrow. Jeremy gave me a copy a few weeks back so I could go through it and get more familiar with the game, and now I'm glad I held off on reading it.

Also, summer has firmly settled in to Houston. This is noteworthy because the summers down here are not like summers anywhere else. If a Houston summer decided to go on the road for a while and seek its fortune, I can only imagine the horror. When it took I45 north and explored Dallas and Fort Worth, both cities and their many suburbs would declare emergencies and shut down when people discovered that their clothes were sweat-glued to their bodies. When it got to the dry panhandle, people wouldn't mind the heat but they would all stop what they were doing and take pictures of cars, buildings, and everything sinking into the mud that used to the southern edge of the high plains. If the traveling summer (I need to use that as a story title) got all the way to the north pole, then you, me, and everyone else would get washed into never-never land by the resulting tidal wave. Then the Elder Ones would thaw out and get the planet back.

But then I wouldn't be around to see Handsome Devil in print, so forget that.

Jeremy asked me to give Bittermint Tea a bit of a rewrite, saying it needs a smidge more atmosphere. Initially I was thinking that the GM would be able to pull that off from the framework I had lain, but I'm a bit spoiled in that regard from being raised on old Hammer Horror movies that starred people like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Those two and their peers could give you a chill by just looking at their watches. So I'm tweaking the adventure hook and adding what was going to be just a children's story but is quickly growing into a creation myth. (that'll teach him to send something back to me, dammit!) I've set myself a possibly ambitious deadline of having it done this weekend.

So I need to get back to writing.

Next

So, while I'm on pins and needles waiting for January to hurry up and get here, what am I doing?

I've just sent off a query to The Dreadful Cafe, telling them what a fantastic fit 'Stilling the Demons' would be for their Membrane anthology. The last time I tried to sell that story to anyone was back in October, and Tor graciously declined, so it needed some air. Yesterday my lady love and I had lunch with our friends Jen and Jeremy, who own Hot Goblin Press and the Mana Punk gaming system. He's looked over Bittermint Tea and Ironlace Orchids, and he had some suggestions about ways to tweak it. One bit of advice he gave sticks with me. When you're writing an adventure module, if you can get the players to say WTF in the first five minutes, you've got them. Jeremy's been doing this for a while, and I'm pondering ways to follow his hint.

It's bugging me a bit to have In the Dark and The Red Man Burning sitting on the back burner, but I already have one book finished, and I need to work on getting it sold. I saved a copy of it to my Kindle so I can read it during my lunch breaks, and I'm seeing a place or two where it could be stronger. I was rushed to get it ready for the Amazon contest, and I have to admit it's not as good as it could be. I still get to grouse, though. They rejected it on the first past, meaning they never read anything but my pitch.

Oh, I'm also waiting on the contract for Dirty to arrive in the mail. I can not put into words how cool it is to type those words.

Am I still writing? Hell yes.

I am going to be published

I got the e-mail last Monday. Actually I got one before that, asking for a bio. That set a nerve in the center of my brain twitching and made all the tiny bones inside my ear canal vibrate. But I didn't want to say anything in case things fell through. It's on.

It still doesn't feel real. I've seen the table of contents for the book, and my name is right there alongside some pretty distinguished company. But some unhelpful voice in my head keeps whispering, “That doesn't mean anything. It's just some words typed into a file and then that file was posted. What if you go around claiming you're going to be in this book, and then Godzilla wades ashore and destroys the city where the publisher lives? You're going to look pretty silly, aren't you?”

What, the voices in your head are logical?

Part of this lurking dread comes from a decision I made a while back. I didn't want to be one of those people who go around claiming to be a writer when in reality they hardly ever put words on a page, or who blogs endlessly and expects that to count. When 'I am a writer' is a functional reality, I will write more often than I don't, and send those words off to a publisher. Those publishers will send money back, and I will spend that money. I don't plan to quit my job just yet, but if I can make enough money throwing nightmares and daydreams at people, I'm not going to keep moving boxes and wire in a warehouse where it gets to be a hundred degrees during the summer. I've introduced myself as 'a writer with a day job' once or twice, but that's a placeholder. If I were to smile at someone and say, 'Hi. I'm Stephen Pope, and I work a forty-hour week at a regular job and then come home and alternate between pounding on a word file and walking around muttering to myself,' I might be a bit more honest, but I'm going to get even more funny looks from the people around me than I do now.

The anthology is called Handsome Devil: Tales of Sin and Seduction, and it's due out in January from Prime Books. My piece, Dirty, involves a young girl coming of age while living in a Civil War-era house who hates the new boarder that her mom has taken up with. If you think you can guess where the story goes, I would say you might be on track. But this track is longer and more twisted than you can expect, even if you've been around a few tracks before.

In a way, it's probably a good thing that this doesn't feel real yet, a very good thing. Every time I think about it and make myself believe that it's actually happening I start giggling like Jack Nicholson's version of the joker. I creep people out enough as it is.

I'm not going to stop writing.

Cruelty, casual and ignorant

Once, when I was way too young, I saw the 1965 version of Agatha Christie's famous 'Ten Little Indians.' I was probably about seven or so, and my sister and I were spending our days at a babysitter's house. I assume this was during the summer, because I think we would get taken over there shortly after breakfast, but the truth is I can't remember. My recollection of childhood is blurry like that.

The film is good, and while there's no blood shown, it's still a bit darker than I would want a child to see. There are four versions of the film, and even though the '65 incarnation isn't my favorite, it's fun to watch. I have it on DVD, and when I watched it the other day I wondered if they had released my favorite version on to DVD yet. That's when I did a Google search.

I found out that they have released it, but when I looked at some of the titles that were coming up as translated versions of the film, and book, the names didn't make sense. I've picked up a bit of Spanish over the years, and what I was reading under the Spanish and other Romance language versions substituted a word for the color black in the title. With a 'WTF' look on my face, I followed up.

It seems when the book was released it had a slightly different title. I found a copy of the book in a library sometime during my time in the Corps, and it had a title of 'And then there were none,' which I recognized from a poem that is used in the book, so these many years I've thought that was the title. But when Ms. Christie sent her story out into the world back in 1939 the poem wasn't about Indians, and the island it takes place on wasn't named Indian Island. The original title was Ten Little N*****s. That's why the Spanish version came up as Diez Negritos.

I was born and raised in Dallas, and spent time growing up in smaller cities and some small towns. I know enough about the South to connect with the pride that a person can feel in claiming it as where their roots come from, but I do not feel that it will ever clean itself from the taint of slavery. No matter what else happened, from the culture, through the courage, to the full facts of who did or didn't own slaves, the South has a permanent stain on it that comes from stolen lives, shed blood, and the attitude that let people sip their tea or whiskey while other human beings were getting bullwhipped just up the road. There were people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line who saw it as an abomination, to be sure. But not enough of them to prevent it or change it. The founding fathers of this country didn't outlaw it when they put together either the Articles of Confederation or later, the Constitution. They kicked the can down the road, with results that are history.

I know that attitudes in the past were different. One of my favorite writers, H.P. Lovecraft, and some of his contemporaries, had that same attitude. The problem is that the attitude was based in ignorance, the kind that lets an intelligent person see themselves as 'better' than other human beings, if not by divine providence, then at least by inherent nature. If any of those writers had simply sat down and put in the time to get to know these people that they were dismissing so casually, they might have had one of those epiphanies that make life so interesting.

That laxness comes at a price. How many young people who are black have heard of Ms. Christie and picked up one of her books, and after enjoying it, might have decided to find out more about this lady who told such great stories? When they found out that one book's original title, do you think they kept reading any further? When we keep our ignorance out on the kitchen table where anyone who drops by can see it, those visitors are going to stop listening to what we have to say.

That's how this connects to writing. If you want someone besides just the people who think exactly the way you think to hear your voice, you damn well better be someone worth listening too. Good points are valuable. Ignorance is cheap and plentiful, you can find it on most radio and TV channels.

So with that in mind, back to writing.