Don't trip and fall. Don't trip and fall. Don't trip and fall.

Yeah. I haven't been posting. This time of year is crazy enough, and on top of all the normal things I have a self-imposed deadline of the end of the year to finish In The Dark. So I'm running that last lap, seeing the finish line get ever closer and closer, and the image of slipping and planting myself face first into the dirt is the one that keeps popping up in my head. So I haven't been posting.

I have taken some time (small amounts) to do something besides sit and curse at my pc. My best beloved took me out to see the National Museum of Funeral History the other day, and that was a really fun place to visit. They've got hearses and carriages and vehicles to haul people, living and otherwise, that I never knew existed. Their exhibit on mourning clothes should definitely be seen, preferably when you're the only one in the building, and it's late at night.

We have good friends over to celebrate New Year's Eve, something that's a tradition in this house. Let the revelry commence just as soon as I and my wife get home from working that night.

Let it commence when I'm done writing.

Edit:  Wow, this is my 100th post!  Onward and upward!

When Shoplifting Is Encouraged

Part of the reason, I think, that it takes me so long to rewrite something is because when I write it, I only write the story. Here's the hors d'oeuvre, maybe something light to keep things going, try this meat and before you finish it there are vegetables of course, are you ready for something hot and sweet as a desert? There, wasn't that a good meal? What else could you want?

Oh, that's right. I need to put all of that in dishes before I serve it. Those clothes weren't expensive, were they?

I tend to not make an outline of a story until I'm either done or almost done, and even then I only make it to get all the time-lines straight and make sure I haven't had someone die before they do a chain-saw ballet. Maybe at one point I'll try outlining something before writing it, but sitting here writing this, just the thought of deciding how a story is going to develop more than two or three points ahead of time feels like getting locked into a box and mailed to France, but for real. I can feel a small space getting smaller with me in it, being dragged and shoved to someplace foreign where I don't know the language or the people. If someone forgets to put the right stamps on my box, I'll end up collecting dust in a corner of an empty building.

You see, the unknown is part of the fun. As I write, I may have some idea of where I want to end up, but it's only an idea. Half the time I get there, half the time I discover someplace better to be, and the third half of the time I find out the spot I once had in mind was never there in the first place and I have to plan the trip all over again. It's a journey, one I enjoy taking and inviting you along for the company. In real life I try to plan trips ahead of time, because I don't like getting lost. When I write, I love getting lost.

So when I'm done with the first draft of a story, or even better, a book, it's got no dish to sit in. It's a big pile of meats, vegetables, and scoops of ice cream, sitting together on the table. I've taken a fun journey, but I've also made a mess. The food needs dishes, and my story needs a world, a time, someplace to happen where the people and events can stand out from all the background. It needs all the things that it isn't, so we can clearly see what it is.

This is where shoplifting comes in handy. The person next to me at that inconvenient red light has no idea my story even exists, nor do the three women ahead of me in line at the restaurant I once ate at, nor do all the people who post remarks online on the websites that I get my news from. All of these people drive, walk, make conversation to pass the time, and scratch the backs of their ears when they have an itch. They have jobs, pasts, love lives, and their own outlooks on life and death. Their minds are as filled as yours or mine, and everything they do puts those minds on display. All you have to do is open your eyes and ears to catch those tidbits that are useful.

Now there is a line between picking up useful tidbits like how those ladies refer to their medications, and violating someone's personal space. When I shoplift words, phrases, or mannerisms from people I do it hit and run style, and I do it in public where I reduce my chance of getting sued. If you do it some other way you might just find out what the stalking laws in your area are like. Remember, you're not the one who decides when you're too close, the other person is, and they might be toting mace or a pistol.

(Oh, and if I get a call from your lawyer, asking me to appear as a witness for you? I'm deleting this post, and when I call him back I'll pretend I only speak Russian. Привет !)

Remember, the point is to add to the story.

The point is to write.

Today's lesson: Goats Don't Grow On Trees

Sorry about not posting last weekend. I was working on In The Dark, and because I'm the head of the safety committee where I work, I also had to put together an action plan for next year. All part of making sure no one gets killed which is something I do believe in, despite rumors to the contrary.

As opposed to my writing, where people regularly get killed. Speaking of which (writing, not killing), I'm at that point on In The Dark where the going is slow and grinding. All those little bits where I just wrote disconnected action sequences? Well, now I have to not only fill in all the bits between them, the whole thing has to make sense! I forget who said it, but the adage of 'Books aren't written, they're rewritten,' has proved itself twice in a row now. I really think it takes more work the second time around.

Oh, the title of the post? My wife has a sense of humor something like mine. I frequently tell people that I just don't have a sense of humor at all, especially at work. That's because at work I'm usually focused on something, and because I work in a warehouse environment, that something is often the sort that can get you seriously hurt. So I don't let my mind wander.

But I do have something that I call a sense of humor. Today my wife and I were out and about, and we saw some people begging on the side of the road. We both sometimes give money to people in need, but only when we don't feel like we're being taken advantage of, and this time we didn't give. But we did start talking about it, and I started putting different scenarios to her, trying to find the point that she would part with her money. I got to where the hypothetical beggars were kids in a school band, and one of them was out on the median, in a kilt and playing a set of bagpipes. Then, she admitted, she would contribute. “Because goats don't grow on trees.” Makes perfect sense, right?

Still writing.

Why the why?

There's a blog I read, 'The Horror Digest... (and other stuff),' that covers scary movies, cool odds and ends, and how great sandwiches can be. The writer is one of those people who appreciates good, classic cinema whether it's flavored with adrenaline or cheese, so she's got my interest from the get go. I check in every once in a while, and so far I've been able to resist the compulsion to go back and read every-single-post. (But there's a quote from the Borg that is probably appropriate here) Today when I noticed an entry on one of my old favorites, I had to check it out.

'The Car' is another of the movies that I saw as a kid that I think really influenced the way I tell a story. Set in a small town somewhere in a Utah desert, it shows how one bizarre looking car carefully and sadistically goes about tearing apart all the bonds that keep the community together. With no driver behind the wheel, it runs over, crushes, and knocks off a cliff anyone it encounters, but in a strangely methodical pattern. The first pair to die are two kids, off on their own a mile or so from town. Next is a man hitchhiking by a house at the outskirts, leaving the family as witnesses. Each attack is more brazen than the last, until it runs people over right in the middle of the streets. Confronted with the growing realization that nothing they do stops it, we see all the protagonists' hope gradually become despair.

Yet through the whole thing, no reason for the car's vendetta is ever given. At the beginning of the film we see the car drive up out of the desert, and that's it. Now the blood can start to flow. When I showed the movie to my wife, her first question, and the question asked in 'The Horror Digest,' was, why? Was the town built on an Indian burial ground? Did an innocent motorist get killed on the streets? Is there a cursed artifact tucked away in someone’s home, brought back from a vacation in the big city? Why is this car here, hurting us?

Believe it or not, I have never asked that question, not even once. Maybe I'm just conditioned from too much TV in my earlier years to just swallow whatever gets set in front of me, but anyone who knows me or reads my ramblings can probably figure that's not how my head works. I'll take something apart down to the bare bones and then see just what those bones are made of, and if they really fit together as neatly as they seem to. I WANT to know the why, and all the whys behind it.

To me, the sort of why that would make the attacks logical doesn't fit the story. Some time ago I was looking for a particular scene in the film on Youtube, hoping that someone would have posted it. What I ran across was a video from a guy with a vlog who was posting about movies that he felt ripped off one of his favorites, Jaws. I got a bit irked at his opinion, but I can see a comparison, one that touches on my point. In Jaws, there's no reason given for why this three-ton tooth machine is suddenly here and dining on people. It's something about how we relate to this kind of predator that our heads tend to skip the logical questions about it and go straight to 'GET THE ---- OUT OF HERE!' The shark is a force of nature, one that we already have a very personal understanding with. To twist a quote from Jaws, you're on the beach and someone yells 'shark' and you panic. You're standing in the street and someone yells 'car' and you panic. Why? Because you already know you're vulnerable.

Right there is your answer. Maybe the feeling doesn't resonate as clearly as the film makers hoped, but the logic is the same. The car doesn't need someone to drive it, it doesn't need to refuel, and it doesn't need to worry about bending an axle or puncturing a tire. It kills people and shatters our belief in a fair universe because that's what it's here to do. It's primal, elemental, and as deadly and uncaring as a tornado, or a shark. If not fought and defeated it would kill everyone in sight, then knock over every building and crush every artifact of man's creation until there was nothing left but ruin. Then it would move on to the next town.

Spoiler: In the movie, after the car is defeated by burying it under half a mountain, what happens? The town is saved, the sun rises, and our heroes start to get back to their lives. Then we see the car pulling into a major city, ready to start all over again, because that's what it's here to do.

If you have any love for scary movies, thoughtful critiques, or appreciation for a picture of a polite British boy captioned with 'A naked American man stole my balloons,' then go check out The Horror Digest...(plus other stuff) at http://horrordigest.blogspot.com/. I've given up hope of not going through the whole thing, and am leaving its window open on my browser. So far I'm back to 2010, and still smiling, laughing, and occasionally cringing.

I'm also still writing.

Space

The final frontier.

Is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.

Okay, this one may ramble just a bit. I need to describe space to the readers of my second book in a few choice paragraphs, and I'd like your thoughts about my choices of words.

By the way, if you actually need me to give you the sources of those two quotes above, please turn in your sense of wonder, because you're not using it.

This is the first science fiction story that I have written, though if chance favors me it won't be the last. What usually comes out of my pen are horrific stories about people, ones like you and me. If they seem to have one or two traits that make them different, hopefully by the end of the story it's clear that those variations are rather tiny, and that those people aren't that different after all.

This book is also about a person, and I've already bent your ear about the work that's going in to make him someone we can cheer for. Now I need to focus on the environment. It doesn't have voice, I can't describe it so that you associate it with that one teacher who was kind to you grade school or that dog you were always terrified of, and it sure as hell isn't going to have a sudden epiphany and become our hero's sidekick. But it's a character too, and I need to make you believe it's real.

I've got a small advantage, of course, in that this one actually exists. Real people, ones like you and me, have flown up and met it face to face. We've loaned it tools and toys, and gotten some of them back with little notes describing it's likes and dislikes. It's all around us, and there's more of it than there is of us, our home, or anything else. Whatever isn't something else, is it. It's the default.

But, as we've said, this is fiction. Reality is there for us to use, and we NEED to be selective in what facts we use, dishing out the ones that support our narrow points of view and tucking all the others under a loose corner of the carpet somewhere. If we don't, all we'll have is an amateurish documentary and the story will sound like a Monty Python skit where a character from last week's show seems to walk onto the set by mistake. We decide the attitude of the universe and everything in it.

Space is not our friend in this tale. It wants to kill us, in very unpleasant ways. We haven't mastered it, and we know it. We can hold it back, keep it from taking our heat, our water, and our air, but only imperfectly. It can feel every strength of our defenses, and every flaw. It has killed men, families, and entire rocket ships. Not through any intent, but just by being what it is, and through the simplest and dumbest circumstances possible: human error.

You forgot to check that seal on your air tank? Or you didn't check it again after the valve contracted from the colder outside temperature? Oops. Maybe you should just sit down and think pleasant thoughts. Think that little light built onto your helmet is enough for you to find your way back to the hatch after you're done with your work outside? I hope you're right, because the ships are big, don't have outside lights, and there's no sun to show you which way is which. Did the person who put your suit together break up with their spouse the night before they punched in to work and installed all that insulation? Hope they kept their mind on their job, because when hypothermia starts to set in you may or may not notice. Are there any holes in the layer of material that keeps out all those really nasty cosmic rays? Let's not dwell on what would happen if there are. Do you know how dry the near-total vacuum of space is? Dry enough to leach water out of your skin, from your eyes, and every time you open your mouth. How much water is in your body? How much can you lose before things get unpleasant? No seal is perfect, after all.

You did check the line that keeps you attached to the ship, right? If it breaks, you'll drift away an inch at a time, for eternity.

Maybe that's how I need to describe it: death by default. A reader would throw the book away if I wasted their time by describing all those little details in every single scene that could have them, so when I spell them out once or twice the first few times and then mention that so and so 'went through the drill' a couple of times after that, it'll seem normal. A few more pages, and a reader might have forgotten about them altogether. Then when someone we like suddenly says, “Oh God, my lungs are burning,” we'll remember and (hopefully) say to ourselves, 'Oh shit, I forgot about that.'

That's the main thrust that I want, that it is a threat, and the second you forget that, you're the example they'll mention to the next guy. If I can do that, and include some point of view descriptions that show how all that nasty potential has shaped people's feelings about it, that might be enough. That might work.

Thanks. It really helps to use you as a sounding board to bounce these thoughts off of.

Now I just need to write it.

P.S. Happy Veteran's Day!

Why do we want characters to change?

So as I'm beating my head against the brick wall that has 'In the Dark' painted on it (graffiti style), I'm slowly getting a better grasp of my protagonist. The first drafting set the framework of the story, but when I wrote it I was thinking about dozens of books and short stories that had the tone I wanted to capture. Now I need to make changes so that I'm playing the notes to produce those tones myself.

One note I realized wasn't right was the fact that my hero, who is not all cuddly and nice to begin with, is the same person at the end of the book that he is at the beginning. A change must be made, but, since knowing the reason helps guide the action, why? Why can't we let our good guy just go through the action, fight the bad guy and win or lose the girl, and then come home and go to bed early so that tomorrow he's ready to do it all over again? Why do we need this person to grow?

In real life, our views on change are selective. If we get a raise, rock on. If we find out our job is moving to the far east without us, well, that stinks. Change can be good or bad, but unless it's the exact kind we're seeking, we tend to view it with distrust. It's a huge, lurking unknown, and I've covered how we feel about that a few times now.

But this is fiction, in print or on a screen. The rules are different, and this fiction has to show us either what we desire or what we fear. For most of us, our lives are filled with struggles. Sometimes we fight to achieve something, but way too often we have to fight to keep what we already have or just to get through the day. We get up, maybe have some coffee and spend a few minutes with our family or the internet, and then we're off to work. The next eight or more hours are spent loading boxes, smiling at customers as they chew us out because they have to read the manual to know how to program their DVR, or whatever needs to be done to pay the mortgage. It's a struggle.

So when John McClean or Douglas Quaid has to fight to try to save some idiot about to get himself killed or find a way to live through his wife betraying him, we empathize. Most of us don't risk getting shot at while we're on the clock (some do. Please don't forget that), but the fact that we both have a fight on our hands gives us something in common with these heroes. It makes them someone we could sit down and have a beer with at the end of the day.

Way back when, my Texas history teacher taught us that one of the characteristics of the people of Texas is our strong work ethic. I think the feeling is not quite as simple as that, and I also think the point is valid for a lot of people, not just those from my home state. We don't just believe that we should work, we believe that if we work hard we'll be rewarded, and not just with our $7.25 per hour. We have faith that if we consistently give our earnest effort, we'll achieve our dream.

Now wouldn't it be great if we could see an example of that play out, right in front of us? If we could see someone who we identify with confirm our deeply-held hope? We could just sit there and nod, saying to ourselves, 'Yep. That's how it should be.'

Let me clarify that this isn't a blank check for our ego. It's safe to say that a lot of us think it would be awfully nice to have a bunch of people that we find attractive at our beck and call. Maybe we'd treat them like a bunch of pampered princes(ses), or maybe we'd keep them in chains and rags because that's what we think they deserve. (I see a future blog post about this) As a fantasy, it's fairly common. Try to make it a reality, and brother you'll open enough cans of worms to fish up every critter in the sea. If our hero doesn't just get the girl at the end of the story, but gets five or six of them, we may cheer and applaud, but we'll also be envious, which would cut back our empathy for him.

Note that this is a cultural attitude mainly of those of us here in the U.S., and that our friends in other countries feel differently. The French in particular seem to be able to be a bit more honest.

Also note that even though I've spoken about a guy through this whole thing, the same principles apply to the heroines in 'chick flicks.' Hope knows no gender, it's just that the movies that try to speak to women directly tend to have less sidekicks and explosions than those aimed at men.

So we need struggle, and we need change. Can we cheer our alter ego saving the farm, getting the girl, or taking the gold-medal for one-armed kayaking? All three? Absolutely. Would we cheer if he loses his home, is asked to be the best man when the woman of his dreams marries his best friend, or succumbs to stage fright just as he's about to enter the kayaking contest? Not unless the denouement shows us that he's learned something about himself. Maybe some day I'll be able to wrap my head around the appeal that tragedies have for some people, but I can't remember the last one I saw or read, and I don't think I've ever seen one willingly.

Damn I can type a lot when I get going on a subject, can't I? Enough pondering for now. Time to write.

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.

Necessary Stupidity

So many of these posts start out as discussions with my wife. We were having lunch today, I was shooting a story idea at her, and we ended up going back and forth about the stupid things that we see fictional characters do. It happens in pretty much all the different genre, but we see it in horror and thriller movies and stories primarily. The worlds where bad things happen.

For my two cents, we all have various degrees of empathy for our fellow human beings. We see them driving expensive cars, read about how many of them have lost their jobs, and see them begging in the streets. We can say to ourselves, 'That's life.' We move on. But sometimes something horrendous happens. The kind of something that shocks us out of our comfort zone.

Because newspapers and sleazy book publishers want to make money (and I can empathize with that, at least), they write about these horrible things, and they put a lot of energy into making us feel them. They give the details that make us cringe and shudder, but it's our reactions that I'll focus on here. I read Yahoo news a lot, and when I read a story where something bad happened, I'll often also read the comments that people post. A huge amount of them pick the story apart, finding little things that the victim did that they imply contributed to it. Some of them even post assumptions or guesses that do the same. Victim blaming? Yes. But why?

Back to scary books and movies. Nine times out of ten, the innocent people do something dumb. We see them go into the old, dark, house. They pick up the spooky artifact or read from the ancient book that's lying out. They split up. Again, why?

The characters in these horror stories may be dumb, but I don't think the people writing or producing them are. They want you to buy their product, so they put some thought into making it something that you would want to buy. Similarly, we can complain about how dumb people are in general, but most don't usually make dumb decisions that would put them in harm's way, and we know that.

Remember when I described how people create their own worlds in their heads? In order to be able to get up out of bed in the morning and fall asleep at night, most people convince themselves of something: that the world is basically a safe place, and that if they just play by 'the rules,' they'll be safe. Nothing bad will happen to them. They have to believe that.

Now maybe some writers do it on purpose, maybe some do it on instinct without being consciously aware of it, and maybe some do it just because that's what everyone else does. But the fact that so many people do it, leads me to think I'm on the right track when I say there is a reason for the stupid choices that victims in horror stories make. That gives our audience something to grab hold of and say, 'That person isn't me. I would never do something that dumb. The horrible things that I'm seeing can't happen to me.'

I advocated for the dumb heroine in an earlier post, comparing the mistakes we see that stereotype character make to what might happen in real life. But, as I pointed out at the end, she doesn't exist in real life. She's a part of something we read or watch for entertainment, and when that entertainment is horror a lot of us need a buffer between what happens to her (or him) and them. That way it stays entertainment, and doesn't become something to worry about. That way, it's something that we buy, and might remember later when we see something else by the same writer.

So now, let me go write something like that.

If you take the wrong road ---

Then it might not be a good idea to turn into the trees and tear a hole through the woods as you get back to the one you want. Claudia and I saw the new Riddick movie last week, and in the first few minutes they addressed a rather large pachyderm that was standing in the corner. The movie has our hero on his own again, without the female sidekick/love interest that Riddick never showed any love for because that would compromise his machismo.

(I'm not being sarcastic on that last point. If it's believable, not showing romantic feelings can be a really powerful component of characterization.)

But also absent from any contribution to the action are the million or so followers that our hero had acquired in the last film. That, as James Perfoy once said, is where the onion is.

They show us a quick flashback where our hero is trying to find his home planet, and the treacherous SOB from the previous film tricks him into going down to a desolate world and arranges an ambush. Riddick survives, but is not pursued because his attackers think he's dead. Now we can get on with the story we wanted to tell. Does it work?

Well, maybe. According to everything my psychic powers and the mighty internet tell me, there was a consensus that Riddick needed to be on his own for this new sequel. There's a reason my wife calls the Riddick movies 'Conan in space.' The similarities are many and obvious, and both heroes share the same type of appeal. They are inhumanly strong, deceptively cunning, and always do more good than they do harm. Both are incarnations of the same archetype, and a heavy component of that archetype is independence. Who does Conan/Riddick need? No one. Period. They'll spend some time with people that they can tolerate, and are quick to form alliances of necessity with good guys and bad guys. But at the end of the story, they're on their way to the next planet or town, and we already know that if they can't find some fresh trouble, they'll make some. Note that Riddick is a bit darker than our favorite Cimmerian. We never see him carousing in a bar, buying beer for his fellows and singing obscene ballads, and he doesn't hesitate to scare someone, male or female, if he thinks they deserve it. This may be due to the fact that Riddick is a more modern character, needing to build on R. E. Howard's legacy instead of just copying it.

Which might be exactly where the onion is. Howard only wrote a few tales in which Conan had won himself a crown, and if memory serves, most of them involve him needing to leave the palace either to defend his kingdom or because it's been stolen from him. Someone out on their own making their own place in the world has more appeal to us than a guy in a huge castle with swords, gold, and women at his disposal. So yes, a change of address for Mr. Diesel's character was in order.

But doing it all at once, taking the whole mass of people, firepower, and ships out of the equation in one big Whoosh, stretches disbelief. Was there no ally among them at all? How about some self-serving toady who knows that if this particular treacherous SOB takes over, he's going to get a one-way trip out the nearest airlock? Some blindly loyal, new member of the guard? No one?

So in a perfect world, it would still happen, but not exactly as we see it. Maybe a revolt, that our hero may or may not have seen coming. If he didn't really trust them, it would have a nice way of disorganizing them.

By the way, if I haven't said so before or recently enough, these little critiques aren't my way of shooting down other people's works. I write, and the point of looking at movies, books, and stories that are out in the world is to see what people watch and read, so that I get a sense of what has already been done, so I can write my own stories instead of copying others'. When I point out what I see as flaws, it's so I don't write something, let it sit while I go around thinking I've got the next Stoker award sewn up, then go back and read it and scream, “Oh hell, what did I do here?”

It's so I can write the absolute best stories that I am capable of.

The principle of Newton's Cradle as applied to a kick in the head

You all know what I'm talking about, right? That cool desk top toy with four or five steel balls suspended in a frame. You lift one at either end and let it drop. When that ball hits the others the energy is transmitted right through them, and the one at the far end swings out, falls back, and so on back and forth.

Now we're going to get into a bit of a rant here, but that's okay because -

A: this is my blog, and I can do whatever I damn well feel like with it, and

B: this ties into writing. Everything ties into writing.

My wife, who busts her backside at anything and everything she does, got 'let go' from her job the other day. It seems she finished an assignment (not her first), and was told they didn't need her anymore.

I love my wife. Take that as fact. You may also take my statement that she is not the sort of person to be satisfied with 'just doing her job' as a fact. Once she gets her feet under her, which doesn't take very long, she ends up finding better, stronger, faster ways of doing the work. This is part of the reason that no matter what the explanation, I'm not on the side of the people who cut her loose. Just not going to happen.

Now we come back to writing. I've read a lot of books over the years. Some were good, some were bad, and some were so bad that the publisher should have been sued and forced to plant more trees to replace the paper that was wasted printing the books. One of the factors in the latter is that the stories feel like they're taking place on a stage somewhere in an abandoned theater, being played by people who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. The characters have no real passion. They have no spark as individuals, and they don't have that interactive spark that could make us identify with them as a group. When one of them yells, their next door neighbor doesn't bang on the wall, call the police, or come over to see what's wrong because that neighbor is offstage taking a smoke break. When the plot, such as it is, lifts one of the balls in the Newton's cradle and lets it go, that ball smacks into the next one with a dull thunk. Nothing else happens. Energy is destroyed.

Now let's get a more passionate response in there. After I found out my best beloved was canned, I tried to emotionally support her as best I could, and then the next day I told one of my co-workers that if he didn't start looking behind him when he backed up in a forklift, I was going to turn his head all the way around so that he could do it automatically. There's a little more to the story than just that, of course, and I'll put in a disclaimer here that I might be stretching a truth to tell a good story, but you see my point. The energy of what happened to one ball gets transmitted to the next one, and then that ball passes it along to the next. Energy doesn't disappear.

So that's how we make our characters a little more lifelike, and how we vent to the whole world that our spouse was treated in a way that we do not approve of.

And I'll write with that in mind.

Truth and Fiction

Something that I've believed for a long time now is that you're never too old for new experiences. I don't care if you manage to live to be a thousand, if you think you've seen it all, I suspect that most of what you're seeing is sand from the patch where you've stuck you head in it.

This relates to my chosen trade because it means that there's always more fodder for the next story out there. Getting inspired is a separate matter, yes. But there's always new material out there.

One of the stumbling blocks to tapping this vast resource is that truth (real life) isn't just stranger than fiction, it's only partially connected to it. The connection is primal, and strong, but it isn't all that wide. Fiction is clearer and cleaner than life will ever be, which is part of its appeal. Life is what we live, and it is not, nor has it ever been, simple and easy to orient a compass in. One of the reasons I have yet to like a true crime book that I've read is because people aren't characters, and to make them fit into that finely-cast mold you've got to skew some facts and throw others out the window. A look at which facts get chosen for which treatment usually reveals the writer's 'fingerprints,' their own feelings and prejudices, which don't belong in a book that's supposed to be giving us a slice of real life. The people who can't differentiate between where fiction and truth connect and where they don't often end up as the subjects of those true crime books, either as criminals or victims.

I spent this past weekend up in Dallas, at AnimeFest. My wife went up Thursday and I took a bus Saturday because I couldn't get the time off and because I needed at least one full night of sleep. Saturday night, after helping at the Pan-Gaia Designs booth until the dealer's room closed, I was a bit restless so I went down to the hotel bar for a beer. It turned out to be a sports bar, which is not normally my preferred place to spend time, but they had Shiner Bock on draft. (Well, they did until I drank the last of it)

I'm sitting at one of the counter tables near the bar itself, sipping my beer and reading an e-book, when two attractive young ladies walk in. Now, there's no shortage of attractive young ladies at an anime convention, but while I don't like stereotyping anyone, most young ladies do fit into certain patterns. Most are in costume to one degree or another, or in comfy, casual clothes. They travel in groups or with their significant others, as sadly there's no shortage of asshats at an anime con either. If they wear jewelry, it's simple, or something related to their favorite show or game. They also have an abundance of happy enthusiasm, if they haven't just crossed paths with an asshat.

The two ladies who came in weren't wearing con badges, they were dressed up nicely, and wore a bit more jewelry than is normal. They came in as a pair, and when they stepped into the bar they scanned the room. Not with the sort of look that someone has when they're trying to locate a familiar face, with the look you have when you're sizing up an opponent. They grabbed a menu from the bar, and sat next to me.

Now I like to think I'm good shape, but I'm in good shape for someone who's lived my life and has reached middle age. Unless there's a reason, I don't dress to impress. I dress for comfort. I had my e-book reader with me, but I don't think that these days that's an indicator that the owner has a lot of money. Have I also mentioned that the oldest I would put these two is in their mid-twenties?

The one closest to me smiles, holding up the drink menu, and asks if there's anything I could recommend. I ask if she likes beer or mixed drinks, and she just smiles shyly and says that she's a lightweight. Her friend, sitting on the other side of Miss Lightweight, leans forward and studies me with a serious look. If I was writing the scene, I'd describe the look as hard and calculating.

I say to the girl near me that she might try one of the beers, recommending Shiner. She smiles again, and asks me what I'm doing here. I change hands with my book so my wedding ring happens to show and say that I'm here at the convention helping my wife, who has a booth in the dealer's room.

Her smile changes to a polite one, and she turns away to confer over the menu with her friend. They catch a waiter as he walks by, ordering some nachos. Then they get up, and a few minutes later are seated at a table with two guys, and everyone's smiling.

I couldn't tell you just when in that chain of events that it dawned on me I was talking with, as Terry Pratchett put it, Ladies of Negotiable Affection, but the experience was a surreal one. Everyone has to make a living, and I don't place those ladies higher or lower on the 'scale of worth' than I would anyone else that I don't really know. But I can tell you that until that moment, I would have never written any scene like that. In the world I was living in, it just wouldn't happen. Now I live in a broader one.

Shortly thereafter, the bar ran out of Shiner. I went upstairs, and told the whole thing to Claudia. She laughed.

Still writing.

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.

Reminded of a line about Cliff Burton

One of the bands that I discovered when I was at Camp Pendleton was a fun group called Metallica. This was back in the days of cassette players, and while the hand held ones were common, a lot of folks carried 'boom boxes' of various sizes. The main difference between the two was while the smaller ones had a speaker, unless you wanted your music to sound like a handful of marbles in a clothes dryer, you used headphones. The boom boxes were designed with better speakers.

So I was wandering around the squad bay one Sunday afternoon, on firewatch. This meant I was in uniform, I couldn't sit down and read, and if something awful happened, I was supposed to be the one who dealt with it. What it meant to me was that I was walking around an open room the size of a small airport lounge and bored out my skull. So of course, when I heard some guy's boom box vibrating with sound that made me think of a mob hit squad bludgeoning some poor fool to death with guitars and drums, I asked, “Hey, what is that?”

“Master of Puppets.”

The next time I went to the PX, I looked in the music section. There was a tape with cover art showing rows and rows of white crosses used as gravestones. The dead grass that grew among them was thick and neglected, and puppet strings connected the stones to hands that were way up in heaven. I forked over some of my hard-earned money, and listened to the whole tape that night. That's how I got hooked.

While I was, and remain, a fan I wasn't a devoted fan. I didn't join the fan club and I wasn't in a position to take leave whenever I wanted so I could go to a concert. This also took place in the days before the web, and so it was a while later before I found out that one of the guitar-bludgeoners, Cliff Burton, had died. When I got back from the nine-month deployment that was my share of Desert Storm, I was hanging around in a friend's room, and he had one of the popular music magazines sitting out. Inside was a tribute to Burton, and the writer had summed up his feelings in a simple phrase: Death sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The other day Fear.net had an article about Richard Matheson dying. To me that doesn't just suck. It means the circle of people I would enjoy spending time with, sharing ideas with, and getting inspired by is now smaller. It means no more books, or stories period, by a man who could write tales that would stick in your head and pop back up just as you were trying to sleep. It means I can never shake hands with the man who scared the holy **** out of me.

My favorite horror movies and shows are a diverse bunch. The Legend of Hell House is up near the top of the list, and goodies like the old Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner scares everyone on the plane by trying to get them to look out the window will never get old. Stir of Echoes was just creepy, and Last Man on Earth scared and saddened me. I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man when I was a kid, and it really bugged me because it touched on real-life themes and problems that even today you don't see in horror movies. (and it still didn't do the book justice, as I later found out) Most of these were movies or episodes that I encountered when I was young, and it really never occurred to me to notice who wrote them. I can look back and say maybe I thought it would be like looking up a magician's sleeve. Once you know the trick, the magic is gone.

Once I did connect all the dots, the hunt was on. Every time I went browsing at Barnes and Noble or Borders, I made sure to check the M section of either the horror or general fiction. I went back to the video store and rented Trilogy of Terror and watched it with fresh eyes. When I heard that someone had once asked George Romero where he got the idea of people being trapped in a house and surrounded by the undead, and he (supposedly) said, 'I stole it from Richard Matheson,' I must have split my own face, grinning.

Well, the magic may not be gone, but the magician sure as hell is. There will be no more tricks from one of the greatest of conjurers, someone who not only made us shudder but made us think. Forgive me if I stand up one more time to applaud.

Then I'm going to get back to writing.

Wait, I wrote this?

After enjoying Saturday as the first day off I've had in two weeks, I spent Sunday running Welcome Home through a rewrite, trying to get it ready to submit before I called it a night. According to my spreadsheet (yes, I keep track of these things. Don't you?) the last time I sent this story out was three months ago. Shame on me for letting it sit idle that long.

This was an annoying rewrite for a couple of reasons. First, this is one of the older stories that I have. I worked on this thing when I lived up in the panhandle, and part of the reason it sticks in my head so well is because I busted my butt researching it. It takes place in North Carolina, an area that I have a passing acquaintance with from my days of being stationed at Camp Lejeune. But it covers a lot of past history of a fictional small town, and I wanted to do such a place, and the state it sits in, justice. So I checked out books from the library and dug into online databases for information on everything from the logging and tobacco industries to what kind of birds might be found in such a place. Now imagine how I felt when I gave this story, which I think is damn good, a read-through Sunday and noticed how all that liberally applied knowledge was dragging the tale down like a lead weight tied around a sprinter's big toe. I chopped the history and wildlife down a bit and saved three hundred words. It's still a large story, but the smaller size makes a wee bit more sellable. That'll help ease the grousing over the feeling, maybe justified, maybe not, of so much time going to waste.

Second? Well, as I just mentioned, I like this one. When I finally put the last comma on the last rewrite, I got one of those rare highs that you sometimes feel when you can look at something you've made and you can't help but channel your inner Keanu Reeves and just say, 'Whoa.' Maybe it's vain, but I sometimes read my own stuff after enough time has passed from writing it. I know the story, but the little details get lost in day to day life, and that's a good thing. It keeps me from obsessing over something I've put the 'finished' stamp on, and it lets me write something else. Only this time when I went back, all those really cool details were there, but so were a hell of a lot of things that quickly earned the label of 'What is this crap?' There were descriptives and ramblings that sounded like a fourth grader wrote them after discovering Edgar Allan Poe. If they were in published books, they would be the books you shove under the couch when company dropped by. What made it so damn annoying is that I have submitted 'Welcome Home' to more than one publication, and proofread it. This story has gone out with my name on it and with me singing its praises in my own head each time. Either my doppelganger crept up here and screwed with the file, or my viewpoint has changed in the years since I wrote it. Now that could be a good thing, sure. Hell, I can't think of any circumstance that would keep it from being a great thing. But looking at the story as it was, I have got to admit that the editors were right to reject it. If I was in their shoes, I would have rejected it too. That makes me a bit less confident that all the other stuff that I've sent out is up to par.

But enough reflecting. Time to get back to writing.