What the hell am I doing?

Yeah, I missed an entry. Not the first, etc.

I'm chipping away at the unfinished bits of In The Dark, and I just had one of those moments where I feel like not only did I show up at work without my pants, but I left my keycard at home and I can't even get through the door. Some very unhelpful voice in my head is asking, “What are you doing? You've never written a science fiction novel before! This doesn't have any cool monsters or ray guns! It doesn't even have warp drive! How can you write a science fiction story were no one can go faster than the speed of light?”

I know that voice. It was with me just before I signed my name on the dotted line that would send me off to boot camp and guarantee that the next four years of my life would be planned out by someone else. It told me I was making a mistake by getting married, divorced, and then married again. That whispering, shrieking, laughing voice is with me every time I make an important decision, have a chance to take something back, or see someone better or worse off than I am now. Sometimes it offers good advice, so I can't just tell it to go get lost. Hell, sometimes I listen to that voice, write down what it says, and then go use all of it in a story. Sometimes it talks like my mom or dad, or schoolteachers who I never quite saw eye to eye with. Sometimes it's even the voice of people I see every day, and who I know would say those exact things if I asked for their opinions. Maybe someday I'll stop hearing that voice, but maybe not.

In this particular case, though, I am telling it to get lost. It spoke to me while I was writing Roja, telling me I would never finish it.

Still writing.

Voices in everyone's heads

You know, one of these days I'm going to reach the point where I never miss a scheduled update on this blog. Obviously, I'm not there yet.

Burnt Offerings Books declined on my story, but with kind words. Naturally, I sent them another story, just to teach them a lesson.

I'm at the point in 'In The Dark' where I'm looking at each character and seeing if they actually have a voice, or if they sound like some offstage player reading his lines while getting a massage. If I don't see their faces in my head when I read their words, I'm not done. This is one field where movies have an advantage. You can see each person speak and hear their real voice. I was about to say radio has it too, but the days of fiction being a regular feature on the airwaves are definitely receding. Of course, now we have podcasts, so the same lesson applies.

I have no way of testing this, but I think that everyone makes up their own voices when they read a story. We patch together a hodgepodge of TV actors, people we know or used to know, and voices of random strangers that talk on their phones in public. All those voices go into our heads, stored on the audio track of our lives. So when we need to hear Mack Bolan or Roland speak, we draw on that vast, randomly-organized data bank. What does that have to do with what I'm talking about? It means that no matter what I do, no one is going to hear the gruff, plainly-speaking sergeant of the guard in exactly the way that I imagine him. He'll be their big brother, the cop that pulled them over when they didn't see that new stop sign, or the drill instructor that they lived in fear of for three months. They take the bones and flesh them out all on their own.

So, I can slack off? Nope. I still need to tell them what type of person that sergeant is. Does he sound educated? Speak with an accent? Does he monologue because he loves the sound of his own voice, or because he has something he feels has to be said? Or does he only say five words in the whole story because he just doesn't talk much. I need to give my readers a full set of bones. Can you imagine a sergeant of the guard with one leg, only a few ribs, and half of a mustache? Well, I can, but not for this book.

Still writing.

The Lemonade Stand

Okay, normally I avoid politics because I don't like the divisive effect that the issue has, but a recent law pushed a button because of all the assumptions it made. Here's your warning sign. This is not safe for work, church, or any other circumstances where where it could get you into trouble, and it is graphic as hell. If you go past this point, I am not responsible for hurt feelings. We're all adults here.

A man and some of his friends open a lemonade stand on a street corner downtown. They sell cups of lemonade and soft drinks for fifty cents. They do a brisk business, until a certain law goes into effect.

That morning, a lady walks up. “Let me have one cup of lemonade.”

“Um, are you gay?”

“What?”

“Are you gay?”

She looks at him, shocked, as if he had just asked her if she was gay.

“Are you serious? No! I am not gay!”

“Okay, sorry. I can't serve you. Let me find someone who can. Rick, do you have a problem with straights?”

“Not as long as they're kinky.”

The first man turns back to the woman. “He wants to know if you're into BDSM. You know, spanking, dominance, stuff like that.”

The second man leans over to say, “Dom or sub, doesn't matter. I don't even care if you switch. I believe in equal opportunity.”

She screams, “I don't do any of that!”

The first man, the owner, holds up his hand. “Ma'am, I need you to lower your voice. I'm not going to ask any of my employees to serve someone if it would violate what they believe in. If you can't accept that, you can take your business elsewhere.”

“My boss wants a cup of lemonade, from this stand! Do you have any idea of the hell I'll catch if I come back without it?”

“No, but it sounds like he's using this errand to find out something that you'd be able to sue the hell out of him if he asked for himself. I'll bet he plans some way of getting you to tell him which one of us sells it to you.”

They start going down the line, asking all the employees if they're willing to sell the woman a cup of lemonade.

The woman who runs the register says, “I'll serve you if you're polyamorous, but only poly. I don't agree with swinging. Oh, and don't even ask me to serve you if you cheat, ever.”

The boy who stocks the water and ice says, “Ma'am, I'll be happy to serve you, just as long as you're celibate.”

The grumpy old man mixing the lemonade says, “Forget it. If you're the sort to leave the house without your husband, I don't even want to talk to you.”

A man down at the end smiles and yells out, “I'll serve anyone, as long as they practice bestiality!”

“Jesus, Clive, keep your voice down! Sorry, he went to school with my mom. Let's see who else we have.”

A woman who has been counting the cases of soft drinks waves them both over.

“So you're straight.”

“Yes.”

“Monogamous, not perverted, and not into animals.”

“Definitely not.”

“Married?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, this is your first marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You said you don't cheat,either? By cheating I mean sex with anyone but your husband. I don't care what you call it.”

“No, I have never cheated.”

“You're not a furry, are you?”

When the other woman just looked at her with a blank expression, the employee said, “Never mind, never mind. You don't look like one, anyway. Let me see your neck.”

“My neck? What for?”

“Some people, mostly women, do something I think is absolutely abhorrent. They choke themselves. They think it helps get them off, but it's just sick.”

“My god, I've never even heard of that.”

“I'm sorry you had to. One cup of lemonade?”

“Yes! Finally!”

“Fifty cents please.”

“There's no tax?”

“We eat the tax. The way business has dropped off, we have to.”

The woman puts two quarters in the employee's hand, and just before she hands the cup over, the employee asks, “Wait, you don't masturbate, do you?”

When the woman just stands there in embarrassed silence, the employee shrieks, ”Oh my god, you touched me with your hand! Get out of my sight!”

Near tears, the woman starts to walk away. But the man on the end, grinning, draws another cup and runs up to her.

“Look, I know you don't like animals, but just say you do.”

“No!”

“What'll it hurt? You don't have to mean it, just say it. Then we'll both be happy. Hey, just tell your boss that some new kid served you, and he didn't ask a damn thing.”

The woman looked at the cup in the man's hand, and thought of the casual way her boss had asked her to pick it up on her way back from lunch.

“Okay, I like animals. I absolutely love them. I do them morning, noon, and night. Satisfied?”

“Here you go. Don't worry about paying, I'll take care of it.”

She walks away, but before she gets to the street she turns around and comes back.

“Let me ask you something. You really have sex with animals?”

The man chuckles.

“Lady, I ended up with cancer four years ago. They had to take both the family jewels, and I haven't gotten it up since. Messing with people like you is one of the few joys I still have.”

Laughing at other people's terror

My first marriage was a rocky one. We moved up to Dumas, a small town in the panhandle where my wife was born and where her parents lived. Being suddenly thrust into a town where I knew no one and where there were none of my usual interests put me in a bit of a spot. Everyone was friendly, but there weren't many people I could connect with.

At one point, the company I worked for changed their vacation schedule to synchronize it with the calender year instead of the fiscal year. Those of us with days left to take had to take them before the end of the period. I took four Fridays in a row off, and spent the extra time with my daughter.

Those were good days. I would sleep in (my insomnia was worse back then), write for a few hours or drive down and explore Amarillo, then pick Maddy up from the babysitters a couple of hours early. My wife was in a work-study program at the time, so we had the rest of the day to ourselves. These were Maddy-Daddy days.

We would go to the park, stop by the library to return books and check out new ones, play games, and read together. We had fun. Being the skilled chef that I am, when it was time for dinner I would boil water to make macaroni and cheese, and open a can of corn or some other vegetable that we both enjoyed. Before bed, we would watch some TV together.

Around that time, MTV came up with a new reality show called 'Fear.' They would gather a group of young, enthusiastic kids and drop them in an abandoned prison, hospital, or some other place that would make a good setting for a B-list horror movie. I've never had a taste for reality shows, because the concept has the same flaws that you'll find in true crime books and movies 'Based on a true story.' Reality doesn't make a good story, not unless you chop out a lot of the relevant facts.

But Fear, and all the similar shows that followed it gave me something I could use: an illustrated guide on how people scare themselves. I don't think that any of those kids found real ghosts, and I'm highly suspicious that it's become common practice to have some member of the production crew hidden at the location to slam doors, move objects, and open windows when no one else is looking. But the show, and the current shows, often managed to get the mood and tone down near-perfect. The kids were the stars, and deservedly so. They made up their own reasons why the spirits are either trying to communicate with them or telling them to get out. They nervously crept down into basements with rats, leaking pipes, and broken windows, wondering where those squeaking, dripping, and whispering sounds were coming from. Clutching each other in the dark, with one light right on each person's face (so the camera could get a good shot) and one focused light that only let them see a few feet ahead, they never let their night vision build up. Take away the scary back-story, or just let them perform all their tasks during the day, and the series would have been like every other reality show. Just overacting drama.

You haven't gotten the impression I didn't love watching it, though, have you? Or that I don't take advantage of the fact that SyFy has episodes of a similar series up on their website? Sorry, but when it comes to scaring people, I'll get out the Dots and the popcorn. My daughter got her share of giggles and smiles out of it, too.

Wow, thinking about that makes me want to write.