How to work a screwdriver

Contrary to what some people who know me might think, I don't just read horror. I also read about horror. This is not only fun, it also gives me insight into the heads of people who've been able to be successful writers.

(By the way, if you want to write good horror, don't read H.P. Lovecraft's 'Supernatural Horror in Literature,' Stephen King's 'On Writing,' or the introduction that Mary Shelley wrote for 'Frankenstein' where she describes her thought process as she came up with her ghost story, and talks about the need to 'awaken thrilling horror'. I don't need any more competition than I already have.

< End sarcasm>.)

Another benefit is that I get to hear about all the good stories that other people have read. Part of my ongoing education is catching up on all the classics that I skipped reading when I was younger. A short while back, I bought an e-copy of Henry James' 'Turn of the Screw.' My Kindle tells me I've gotten though about seven percent of it, and from what little I know of the story I think I've gotten a thorough idea of the introduction.

Note: I will try to not give away spoilers, but my first priority is to make my point.

Damn, that thing is solid. The initial setting, what I'll call the sub-setting, gives us a summed-up idea of the mood of the story, and a rough clue about who is going to survive. Then we start with the account of the real narrator, and she tells us who she is, where she is in her life, her thoughts on this new job, on the guy who hired her, and on the people she's going to be spending this next part of her life with. We even get that first little hint, the one that we recognize because we know we're reading a horror tale, but that our heroine ignores because that's what people do with little details in a situation like hers.

Here's our first lesson, a screwdriver is not a hammer. You don't start out by pounding with it. You place the screw where you want it, carefully fit your tool to it, and apply just a little bit of pressure to hold it in place.

Though it seems idyllic, our heroine's situation comes with a bit of pre-supplied pressure. She is out on her own for the first time, in the real world. At a tender young age, she is put in charge of property and children, something that would be daunting by itself. She dives right in, though, and sets her mind on steering the ship.

Then you apply a little more pressure, and twist.

Just as she is getting her feet under her, something unexpected occurs. Not something that has us screaming 'Ah-ha!' It's something strange, and we don't get a full explanation right away. Also, it really doesn't make sense, not according to everything we understand about this place and this people. I have a personal hunch it will end up making a lot of sense when we get a fuller sense of things, though.

This is actually my second attempt at this story. Right after I divorced, I became a steady patron of the library in the town where I was living, and they had a multi-cassette tape (remember those?) set of the book. I tried to listen to it as I puttered around my tiny apartment over a cold Thanksgiving weekend, but couldn't get past the first ten minutes. Maybe it was just the narrator's voice, which sounded very solid, stoic, and very British. It was too easy for me to shift it into the background noise.

I'm looking forward to reading more of this, and writing more stories of my own.

If I was head of PR for the church of Satan

Claudia has been off at San Japan this weekend, so I have the house to myself. I would love to say that I've been frantically pounding away at something the whole time, but I suspect my nose might knock a hole through my monitor. What I've been doing is wasting time playing Wow and watching some old movies that I appreciate seeing once in a while.

Bittermint is creeping along. I never realized how something gets set in my head until now. Doing a partial rewrite on a story or even on Roja wasn't this hard. I had the initial idea for it, and that idea stayed the focus until I had to change it to give the adventure a little more zing. Now it's like any time I have it in front of me and my fingers are about to press the keys to change some of the words, the me from all those months ago opens a time-portal right behind me and screams, 'What are you doing? Leave it alone!' Because when I write something, I will pound on it until I think it's pretty good. Then I think about all the stories that I really like, the ones that I re-read once every couple of years. Then I take a long, honest look at this thing that I've created. More often than not, I quietly close the web browser window where I was about to submit what I had written, then start ripping it apart again. It's hard to do that, so I don't stop until I can read the whole thing and not say to myself, 'Maybe it could be better there.' Not once.

That's not just a matter of principle. It's to keep myself sane. If I send something out, unless it's to one of the VERY few places that will give you a yes or no within a day or two, I have to sit and wait. I get up in the morning, go to work, and have a few hours after work before going to bed. The whole time, there's this little voice in the back of my head that's whispering, 'Did you fix that one comma? Sure, you thought about fixing it, but did you ever really get around to it? Also, now that you've had time to consider it, wouldn't that one scene sound better from the other guy's point of view? It wouldn't take long to fix it and send it in again. I'm sure they wouldn't mind.'

You get my point. When I send it, it's my brave little story, and it's ready to go out into the big mean world. I don't want to be one of those parents who hover, and then turn on the TV years later to hear all about how my little baby has driven a bus full of nuns into a wood chipper.

It could happen, I'm sure of it.

So that's how Bittermint Tea and Ironlace Orchids is shaping. Some point in the near future, I'll finish it, it will hopefully come out, and if I get it right, I'll be inspiring some of the same kind of hate that I felt for all the folks at TSR who wrote those AD&D modules when my character overlooked something that was staring me in the face the whole time.

Oh, the title of this post? One of the harsher facts about living in Houston is that we have quite a few folks down here who don't have a roof over their heads. Drive pretty much anywhere in this town and you'll see them standing by the side of the road, asking for money. We also have some people who stand there asking for money who wear clean clothes, who don't have a bag or bundle of their possessions tucked nearby, and who might be unshaven but never have that built up coating of sweat and dirt that you get when all you have to wash yourself with is some water and a cloth. These people are the ones who usually have a sign that contains the phrase 'God Bless.' Seeing a guy with one of those signs today, the same place I've seen him before, I got a seriously warped idea for a commercial. A picture would open with one of those guys walking up and down a line of cars waiting at a stop light. He holds up his sign, and then a man in an all-black suit with a blood red tie steps in to view, speaking right to us. He says, “Seems everyone who's down on their luck these days is a devout follower of you-know-who. But you never see anyone begging with a sign that says, 'Hail Satan,' do you? Have you ever wondered what we've got that the other guy doesn't? Why don't you stop by some time, and we'll talk.” He walks up to the first man, puts his arm around his shoulder, and they walk off. Fade out.

If you laughed at that, you're going to hell. Don't worry, I'll hold the door open for you.

Still writing.

Bacon is NOT the same thing as ham

Okay everyone, have a seat and get out a pencil and a piece of paper. Write down this formula: Something horrific = horror. Now is that right? It does look like it, I'll admit. 'Something' could be anything, and 'horrific' even contains most of the letters of horror. But I hope everyone here has the same feeling in their gut that I do, that there's more to it than that.

Straight up, in-your-face horror only scares us so briefly that the length of time might not be measurable unless you use one of those branches of math that's built on unreal and irrational numbers. The kind of horror that makes us feel better when it's over contains a measured amount of ambiguity and a measured amount of certainty, in the right proportions and added at the right time. To use a cooking analogy, something I'm just as qualified to use as I am to repair Model T's, the dish isn't dependent on the meat as much as it is on the spices and the preparation.

Let's compare two dishes. They both contain the same meat but follow two different recipes, and end up with two very different results. The meat we'll use will be something solid for this genre: the slow, agonizing death of a child.

The recipe in one story is from a movie my wife told me about that starts off with an exceptionally gruesome scene. An innocent little girl is trapped in a small space, and the space is flooded with wet cement. She screams for her daddy the whole time, and the scene cuts just before we see her die. She could be anyone's child, yours or mine.

I watched the whole movie, Walled In, and while the girl's death is mentioned later, there's no direct relevance. She isn't the only one to die that way, and that was the only scene that the young actress has. That whole gut-wrenching event was a throw-away.

The other recipe comes from the Japanese movie 'Ringu,' and its American remake. In this example, we see a little girl thrown into a well and left to die of exposure. Though the death is later explained to be slow and terrible, we're only given a few seconds of the attack and seeing her fall.

This little girl has supernatural powers, and those powers make life hell for the people around her. Her death isn't revealed until we're halfway through the movie, and the person who kills her is a family member driven to the act out of desperation. She's a central character and the protagonists spend the movie trying to find out just what happened to her. One item to note is that in the Japanese version, it's hinted that she might be of non-human origin, (and in a horror movie that kind of hint is pretty reliable) and that she kills a man with her abilities even before she becomes a vengeful ghost. This makes her something alien to us, and even though we cringe at seeing her killed, we can move on.

So set these two entree's on the table next to each other and compare them side by side. One has the meat dropped on top where it's the first thing you'll taste when you bite into it, and the other has it further in. Why does this matter?

In real life, the death of a child horrifies us, as it should. Whether we read about it in the news or hear about it in a conversation at the water-cooler, it means something to us. Using that connection when you tell a story, either on film or in print, is like using explosives to blast a tunnel through a mountain. You damn well better know what you're doing, or this shit will go off in your face. The meat needs to blend in with the rest of the dish.

The silly thing is that the throw-away wasn't needed in Walled In. The movie was good, with what I would call solid acting and a fairly good story. I'll guess that the girl's death was put in to shock us right off the bat. Well, it does that, but it makes the whole rest of the movie seem like it's waiting for the real action to begin. When you get the spiciest part in the first bite, the rest can't help but seem bland.

I loved The Ring. It's a good, well-paced ghost story that pushes the right buttons. It has the meat mixed in with the spices, and things blend. It leaves us wanting more of the same taste.

That's why we cook.

That's why I write.

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.