How lessons layer

I spent last night with an old friend that I hadn't seen in years. It's an episode of The Twilight Zone titled 'A nice place to visit.' Most of my childhood is a vague blur, but some stories, and the first moments that I spent with them, are with me every moment of my life. It doesn't matter if I read them or watched them, and truth be told a hell of a lot of them came from my many hours of watching TV.

The first time I saw this sad story about a man named Valentine I was lying on the floor of my aunt's apartment in Washington, DC. My mother, sister, and I were up there on vacation, and while seeing all the monuments and pieces of history was incredible, any time spent with my mother's sister was tense. Children didn't really fit in her world, either the physical one around her or in her head, and her reaction to me and my sister always seemed to imply that we were the problem. One that she took personally. To stay occupied and away from her, I watched almost as much TV that summer as I would have at home, and I was always on the lookout for magic.

Bits of magic that you find when you're young stay with you, and you feel them when you encounter more. Once you've seen a young, pretty girl tell a priest that his mother is performing intimate acts in hell, or seen a freckle-faced boy turn a man into a bobbing Jack-in-the-Box, well, your concept of children is going to be a little more complicated than the 'innocent and helpless' archetype that gets used so frequently.

If, after sampling this magic, you become inclined to start practicing your own, you tend to first want to duplicate what you've seen. If you paint, and it was Munch's 'The Scream' that made you pick up a brush, you're probably going to try to paint something that evokes the same feelings, and your first tools are going to be the colors, lines, and shapes that Munch used. If you see Criss Angel levitate or see Penn and Teller make the same card appear out of nowhere three or four times, those might not be the first tricks that you learn, but they will be milestones that you judge your own ability by.

Likewise, if you start telling stories, the stories that make the strongest impressions on you are going to be your handholds when you start that uphill climb.

See how cleverly I connected this back to that Twilight Zone episode? It's almost like I saw someone else do that bit of slight of hand and decided I could do it too, isn't it?

My opinion? Our minds don't grow like the bodies of a cat, cow, or chicken, producing new cells that are a little different each time and letting the old ones die, until we're left with something that only bears a resemblance to the original form but is obviously more advanced. My opinion? We grow like trees, keeping that first fragile growth and adding layer after layer on top of it. We grow like this as we learn more and push higher, becoming stronger to deal with what the world throws at us. We all carry everything we ever were inside us, and we still have all the dozens or hundreds of contradictory points of view that we ever developed. They are part of our inner structure whether we like it or not. A child who steps out into the deep end before they're ready and gets that cold, wet sensation of water trying to push itself over their lips and nose to drown them will carry that impression with them for the rest of their life. What will they do with it? There are infinite possibilities in infinite directions. They could do nothing and just have nightmares of opportunity every once in a while. Or they could develop it into a paralyzing phobia. Or they could get an attitude about it and learn to swim so well they compete professionally.

From what I can remember, I might have seen the ending of 'a nice place to visit' coming. That mocking, insulting laugh out of someone who had been nothing but cuddly and polite the whole time was the perfect, final touch. Every story I write that has a 'twist' ending where the hints have been provided, owe something to this tale. If I can provide for someone what was once given to me, I've done my job.

Some post-viewing research revealed that it was Charles Beaumont who wrote that story, and that he produced some other damn good ones too. It also showed the sad, unfair way that he died. In the end, he couldn't write.

That's going to stay with me. Think I'll go write.

Grinding, recreating, and dealing with squatters

Rewriting a book is like opening your mouth in front of a mirror, picking one of your molars at random, and then pulling it out with a set of tweezers. I know I've said that a couple of times before, but until I find a more apt metaphor, we're all stuck with that one. There are a trillion little places in 'In The Dark' that need patching, smoothing, or nuking and paving, and going through it is slow.

While I'm at work I'm cruising around a warehouse on an order-picker, sometimes muscling ninety-pound reels into a cart while fifty feet up in the air, so I can't keep a paper or digital copy with me. Not that I would ever write when I should be working. Never.

But I do get breaks, and it's not worth it to haul stuff from my car and then back again. So to fill those voids that would otherwise be spent talking to my co-workers about baseball or football, I've started rewriting an old story of mine, from scratch. I had the damn thing done and finished some years ago, but I think it was one of the ones that never got typed in. It was all on paper, and somewhere during a divorce, a move, and then another move, those pieces of paper ended up somewhere besides where I can find them. So I'm slogging through familiar territory and hoping I can remember all the cool parts. Of course I won't be able to, but the fun part is that I have another chance to not write all the mistakes that the first version had, whatever they were.

With Handsome Devil coming out in January, I've been putting thought into promoting it, and myself, in every single way that I can. Which means it's time to get dragged another precious few inches into the twenty-first century. So one night I wrapped my security blanket around my shoulders, and (with the help of my wife, who has mumbled more about this type of thing in her sleep than I will ever know) tried to buy a website with my name on it. Now imagine the look on my face when I found the dot com address already taken. I've known that other Stephen Pope's exist for a while now, and some of them even have my middle initial, but there was nothing about a person on the site. Just a colorful, cheery-looking ad for all the great stuff a certain web company offers. Nothing at all to do with the site name.

Was the site mine to begin with? Heck no. That company could and probably has made the claim of just taking the initiative and getting their name out there. But of course, the old, childish argument of 'I didn't see your name on it,' comes to mind. Websites are organized according to our language system, and that means some have people's name on them. That makes them not interchangeable, as it makes no sense for Ed Gruberman dot com to be a page dedicated to the life of Albert Einstein, and it was about Mr. Einstein hardly anyone would ever find it.

Should we have to pay for those sites? Yes, because that's how the computers that store the sites are paid for. That company paid for the site, and they got it. There's not really a right or a wrong at work here, I believe. Just that sense of recognizing, again, that the universe does not take our feelings into account.

So I bought Stephen Pope dot net. Now all I need is to pay someone who knows what they're doing to make me a really cool website on it, full of zombies, ninja, and sparkly unicorns that twerk. Fame and fortune are bound to follow.

Until then I'll keep writing.

Mister Chick, what the hell are you doing here?

It is October. I'm sure this month means different things to different people, but to me it means Halloween. Halloween. This entire thirty-one day period is given to us so that we can revel in horror movies, scary books, and dress up like we secretly wish we could all year long. This is what it meant to me as a kid, and it's what it means to me now.

For the past couple of years I have been reasonably successful in my efforts to come up with costumes and themes that send small children and grown adults running away from my yard as fast as they can while still screaming at the top of their lungs. I take great satisfaction in this. So this weekend I took my wife shopping for tools and props to achieve those noble ends. I love those huge Halloween megastores that pop up this time of year that are a cross between a haunted house attraction and a Walmart. I have the same amount of fun wandering around in them that I did sorting through the comic book rack when I was a kid.

So we're looking around, and as I check out a nice collection of little skulls that sit on a shelf, I see something that slams the breaks on in my head. It's a little booklet a couple of inches tall and about five wide with a black and orange picture of a jack o' lantern on its cover, sitting there doing an excellent job of blending in with all the Halloween decorations.

I read some Chick Tracts when I was little, and ended up disliking them. The comic-book style format got me to read them, but I always came away with negative feelings. The first few times they were effective in getting me scared that I was headed to hell for little things like reading House of Mystery and not basing every decision I made on what someone's version of God might think of it, and inducing that kind of fear in a child is the kind of mean act that creates mean adults. Also, the first time I read one I could tell whoever wrote the stories only saw the world in black and white. When you claim a TV show (Bewitched) has lead people to worship Satan, you're not living in the same zip code as the rest of us.

As far as the person who left it there, I'm of two minds. I've read the literature, which suggests leaving them where people can find them, and I've seen them laying out at bookstores and different kinds of conventions. If that person genuinely believes that their faith is the absolute truth, and that a person might be saved from hell by dropping off a little book, then I can't find fault there. But to believe in the kind of world that Chick shows you, you have to believe in a world where nothing is ordinary, and nothing comes from man. It's either God's, or Old Scratch's. That attitude forbids any expression of doubt, and you can't have honest soul-searching to ponder whether you're doing the right thing or not because anything other than their version of truth sends you to hell. There's no room for you to contribute anything because God's already provided everything you'll need, and there's no room to grow. Just stay exactly as you are, and don't think for yourself.

Funny how I grew up loathing that mindset, isn't it?

My wife and I saw 'Machete Kills' today. That movie is pure silly, bloody, over-the-top-and-then-over-the-hill fun. Watch it.

Still writing.

Back from FenCon

Saturday I took a bus up to Dallas to help my best beloved pack up her booth and come home from FenCon X. She had gone up to work in the dealer's room, and I went up to do the heavy lifting (my wife has no trouble abusing my machismo) and to see some friends with her.

FenCon is always fun. Apart from the fondness that I will always feel from tying for third place in their short story contest with 'Trolls' once upon a time, it was one of the first fun and relaxed conventions that I started going to. It's a bit more literary-minded than a lot of others, so I can usually find a panel or two with subjects that match my interests.

My time was short this trip, so I didn't get to hit any events, but there was a room party with good friends, including the fantastic lady who proofread 'Dirty' for me. Good luck helped me make a couple of contacts that will be handy when I get down to editing the gritty details of 'In The Dark.'

I was also able to hear two separate people refer to a certain iconic Dr Who monster as a 'Darlek.' Where else could you find that but Texas, I ask you?

The bus trip also enabled me to get a big chunk of reading done. One of the good movies I saw when I was little was 'The Day of the Jackal,' and it set the bar in my head for thriller movies. One of the cool things about having an e-book reader is the ability to make all those impulse purchases at home that I used to have to go out for. ( A leading cause of why book stores are closing everywhere. I really hope they figure out a way to adapt) A while back I bought the Frederick Forsyth novel that the movie was based on.

It turns out that the film was a fairly true adaptation, and reading the book helps clarify a couple of points that can be a tad murky on screen. From what I was able to gather with a bit of research on the setting of the book, Forsyth painted a pretty accurate picture of how a lot of people in post WWII France felt about Charles de Gaulle, both for his foreign and domestic policies. That's the sort of detail that doesn't make it into most history books, the sort that gives you a fuller understanding real life. The book was a damn good read, and I may get his 'The Dogs of War' next, because that's another movie that I love.

Damn, now I'm inspired to go write. What a shame.