When is a dump not a dump?

So just what have I been doing? As far as writing goes, not a whole hell of a lot. A couple of years ago I joined the safety committee at my day job, and recently the guy in charge was shuffled to another division. So now I'm trying to tell my peers to stop and look around a corner before they come tearing around it, driving either an order picker or a forklift and hauling either a thousand pounds of wire or a pallet of light bulbs. Doing that is easy. Doing it and not sounding like an asshole is a little more difficult.

I had lunch with a friend today while my wife enjoyed some silence, and while enjoying some quality enchiladas, my friend and I had a conversation about Bob from the Dresden Files, and Michael Crichten's books. This leads me to ponder something relevant to rewriting In The Dark: How do you dump a whole lot of information onto your reader and avoid losing them?

While my platoon sat on a ship for over nine months and waited to find out whether or not we were going to be sent in to multiple layers of mines, barbed wire, and people who really wanted to kill us, we played cards, watched movies on a TV that we bought ourselves, and did whatever we could to pass the time. I don't remember where I got it, but one of the books I devoured during that period was The Andromeda Strain. I had fallen in love with the original movie when I was a kid, and thought it would be a fun read. This was back during the period of my life when, while I was definitely aware that sometimes things were changed between the book and making a movie, I didn't really understand why, and wouldn't have sympathized if someone explained it to me.

Early in chapter one I realized that this wasn't exactly the story I already knew, and in that same chapter I began my education in viruses, bacteria, and all other kinds of bugs that can do nasty things to the human body. It kept my interest, because I like that kind of stuff, but it definitely broke the spell of storytelling. You do that, you're in trouble. Part of the reason Jim Butcher's Dresden books work, is because Bob is part of the story, and not just a 'talking head.' We learn the nuts and bolts of magic while the plot advances, and we never really notice that new data has been downloaded into our heads. The movie version of Andromeda Strain had to do a bit of info-dumping, and they got away with it by using shorter scenes where Person A, who knows something, has to explain it to person B so that B can go do their job. Plot advances, mission accomplished.

In the Dark is going to be science fiction. That's going to be pretty obvious from the beginning. But that still leaves me needing to say, 'Okay, people here are basically the same as you and me, with these exceptions. If you're comfortable with these specific new technologies, you'll have no problems in this world. There are no telepaths, no little green men, and no lightsabers.' I've got a bit of an advantage in that it's as close to hard science as I can make it and still have the story. I can define by exception from the real world rather than build a new world from scratch. There are a few differences, but those differences are important.

So that's what's spinning around in the background of my head while I'm trying to convince my supervisor that having everyone know ahead of time that he's going to get on the PA system and just say 'Fire drill,' is not a real fire drill. I'm sure whatever problems I encounter will end up in the book.

By the way, because I promised my wife I would post it: On Friday I came home from work, and right after I put my stuff down I went to give her a hug. When my hand went around her, it found something sharp on her back. As I pulled it up to look at what was lightly stuck in my palm, she says, 'Oh there's where that needle and thread went.' Perils of being married to a costumer. I got her back, though. When I had a reheated Monte Cristo sandwich for dinner, and she expressed her disdain for my sandwich, I thrust it at her, proclaiming, 'The power of Cristo compels you!' Getting 'that look' from her is one of the great joys in my life.

Still writing.

Criticism

I got a rejection Saturday. Not something new, but this one was a personalized response, which are pretty rare even in these days of e-subs and e-replys. The editor enjoyed the suspense and mystery of it (The story I sent in was 'Roaming'), but felt that the writing itself needed some tightening. I've been pretty much pounding back and forth on 'In the Dark' and 'The Red Man Burning,' so I haven't even scribbled on a short for a while. But I pulled up the version that I sent in and took a look at it.

I have a quiet reaction to criticism. On one hand, this is an opinion from one of my primary targets, but on the other, if I didn't think the damn thing was perfect I wouldn't have sent it in. I write for the reader, but it's the editor who makes the decision to toss money at me, or not. When you go looking for advice on writing, you find there's an endless supply of it. But one bit that I found by Marion Zimmer Bradley more or less smacked me in the head when I read it. As it settled in to become a permanent note in my mental book, it also reduced my sense of humor about this business by just another fraction. Without quoting too much of it, because that's called violating a copyright, the sentence that was printed in big, bold script said basically this: Editors don't buy good stories, they buy stories that they think their readers will pay to read.

Take as long as you need for that to settle in. It's still settling in for me, and I read it months ago. That doesn't just add another hoop for you to jump through in order to get your work on someone else's paper. That means you need to churn out a finished product that will please one person, and then go on to please the final audience. You need to please the readers themselves because they are the ones who will end up spending money on your piece in the magazine, and who will later see your name and buy the next magazine, or your book. But they will never see your story unless you first defeat the editor. In a perfect world, the editor has the exact same taste as the readers. Guess which world we live in.

Here's the article, and I owe a debt to Ms. Bradley for it.

http://www.mzbworks.com/why.htm

When I re-read 'Roaming' I did see some places where the editor may have been on the money. He said that the writing itself needed to be tightened up, so I'm going through and cleaning out anything that might be ambiguous, or repetitious.

So I'll rewrite it, and send it in again.

Where the vampires come from, part two

  Okay, this is part two of a post that I started last week. We're connecting whatever dots we can find to figure out a way (not THE way) that people might have come up with the vampire myth. If you're just joining us, go back one entry. We'll wait for you.

So that person lying there in the dark is going to be thinking in terms of what they already know. Maybe I'm cynical, but I do think a lot of us look down on the folks who lived back then, judging them to be ignorant and superstitious. After all, they didn't know about germs, or electricity, and most of them couldn't read. How smart could they have been? Well, smart enough to grow their own food, know how to deliver their own children, and the poorer ones even had to build their own homes. Could you do that? For that matter, can you say that you would know about bacteria and viruses if multiple people hadn't told you about them? Have you ever seen either? (Here's a hint. You can't see viruses, not even with a microscope. They're too small)

So that's you and me lying there in the dark, feeling the cold night air where ever it gets in through the covers. We're hoping that Aunty Em won't die, but we're hoping even harder that whatever is slowly killing her won't come after us. Then we hear something. Sure, it's probably just the house settling, like it has a thousand times before. But now we're afraid, and we've had lots of time to wonder just what is making Aunty Em sick. Is it an animal? A man? Something that only looks like a man?

We might also think about Aunt Bea, who died not too long ago. She and Aunty Em were so close. Remember that one of the original legends about vampires was that they were people who came back from the dead and preyed on members of their former families. But how is it getting to Aunty Em? Everyone keeps an eye on her during the day, so it must be something that comes out at night, when everyone is asleep. Her door is kept closed, and the front door is kept closed and bolted. Can it become a mist, and just seep in through the gaps in the windowpane? Can it change its shape and so that it's narrow enough to slide between the door and the jamb? It has to be able to do something, right?

But just what is it doing? How is it weakening her? Our family member has probably seen people die from blood loss before, either in an accident or by violence (remember the time period that we're dealing with). Some of the similarities would probably stand out: turning pale, sluggishness, delirium, falling unconscious, then dying. Is that what's happening to Aunty Em, they might wonder? But if whatever is attacking her is bleeding her, where does the blood go? What is it doing, swallowing it?

Now here I'm going to take a bit of a jump. Because I work with fiction, I'm allowed to take reasonable jumps, especially if they get me someplace interesting.

A while back I picked up the King James version of the bible, determined to go through it from Genesis to Revelation. While I was trying to get through the old testament, one thing stuck out. Blood is important. I don't mean blood in terms of being related, I mean blood that is spilled. When the details and the procedures for the sacrifices are lain out, we see over and over that the blood belongs to God. The people might get some of the meat, and the priests usually got their cut, but the blood was sprinkled on the horns of the altar. The symbolism of the blood of Christ is important, but it's human blood we're thinking about. How many makes and remakes of 'Dracula' have used the 'blood is the life' line? That goes back to Leviticus 17:11.

So if the thought of blood-stealing occurs to us while we're lying alone in the dark (and we are alone. Even if someone is sharing the room or the bed, they're probably asleep or too afraid of what's happening to talk about it. If you can't talk about what's scaring you, you're alone), that's going to scare us even more, isn't it? This thing, whatever it is, isn't just killing us. It's tampering with something sacred, something that may as well have 'Property of God' stamped on it. What happens to us if we let it take our blood? There's also a bit in the bible (Leviticus 19:28, among others) about mutilating ourselves, reminding us that we don't own this flesh and blood, we're just the caretakers. If we don't stop this intruder from stealing our blood, is God going to be upset, are we going to end up damned? End up becoming one of those things and coming back to the house to attack Uncle Owen? There's a dark sort of symmetry to that.

These are the kinds of thoughts that might occur to our family member if they have a sick relative. Now let's change it just a bit. Remember, these people live with all kinds of phenomenon that they have no understandable explanation for. Diseases, decay, and conditions like epilepsy. Again, where no one that we can trust provides an explanation, we make up our own. Some of the recorded explanations seem eerily similar to what we've been talking about here. Demons that posses people and make them fall on the ground, foaming at the mouth, or who sneak into your dreams night after night and distract you with naughty visions while stealing your other bodily fluids, and who even come in male and female varieties. We don't hear as much about incubi and succubi these days, partly because we've sort of blended them in with vampires due to their common characteristics, and partly because we've got a little more knowledge of human biology and psychology. The form is different, but the function is the same.

Like I said last week, just a train of thought. Follow it at your own peril.

I'm slowly slogging through the rewrite of In the Dark, as well as laying down the first chapter of Red Man Burning. The first chapter of the latter has our Protagonist as a young boy, and pulling up relevant chunks of my younger days feels odd, in a good but creepy at the same time way.

And I'm writing about it.

Genesis and evolution of the vampire, part one

Okay, this post is going to be in two parts. I came up with this last weekend, but the idea took a while to gel, and it ended up being pretty long. Some friends of mine got married last Sunday (congratulation Micky and Michelle!), and at the reception I overheard a brief bit of conversation, about vampires. Someone said that they had always understood that the vampire myth grew from the fear of death. Now that claim got a certain set of my brain cells humming, thinking that it wouldn't have been as simple as that. I didn't get into it at the reception, because when I get going on a subject that I like, I can go on and on for a while. That's good for a blog entry, but not so good for a gathering that's supposed to be for wishing the new couple a nice, happy life together. In addition, about half the people there did not seem like the sort that would enjoy a long, drawn out discussion about dying in a rather unpleasant way.

Now this is going to blend varying amounts of fact and speculation. It is not gospel, nor is it me saying 'this is the way it happened.' This might be the way it happened, or it might be similar to one of the ways it happened. Or it might just be me letting my brain go off on its own for a while. But it will at least try to follow a logical path, and by doing that we can learn something. Be warned, that path is going into some pretty dark territory.

Walk through this doorway with me. Careful where you step, because we're now back in medieval times. This is a typical city, and isn't the smell lovely? Yep, that's shit in the streets. Mainly human. Stay alert while you're walking around, because people dump their bedpans out of their windows. Also, try to not look weak. Even if this place has a city watch, they're not going to care what happens to a couple of strangers.

Let's choose a home at random. For our purposes, it could be a peasant's hut or a noble's manor, or anything in between. Here we go. We'll get to the rest of the family in a minute, but for now, look at this person. It's the middle of the day and they're in bed, and not because they felt like sleeping in. They're sick. They are a bit sicker today than they were yesterday, and tomorrow they'll be a bit sicker than they are today. I don't know if it's typhus, syphilis, tuberculosis, or one of those strange diseases that we're not familiar with in modern times. But no one thinks that this person is going to live through the month.

Now let's look at the rest of the family. All of them, the husband or wife, the children, and the uncles and aunts who live in this house, know the sick person well. They've worked with them, shared meals with them, and probably even had an occasion to sleep in the same room with them a few times. That person is part of their life, and everyday they see that person get weaker and weaker.

The kind of fear that type of environment produces settles into a person's head. It stays there, and it will pop up when things get quiet, like when a person is trying to get to sleep. Now imagine one of those family members, old or young, man or woman, lying there in the quiet, dark house. They can't stop thinking about Aunty Em (we'll borrow that name because it's convenient), about how pale she looks, and about how she sounds when she coughs. Given sanitary conditions and life expectancy in the period we're in, it's probably not the first person our sleepless subject has seen waste away, and it probably won't be the last.

One thing that people everywhere have in common, and I don't think we acquired it recently, is the need for answers. We have our inner view of the world, and when something unknown confronts us, we have a deep-seated need for who, what, when, where, how, and why. We need these labels so we can make this strange threat fit into our world. Ironically, all the reference points we use for the who, what, etc, are the cornerstones of our preexisting world. A traumatic event can expand people's worlds, but there's no guarantee that it will.

Take that setting, and think about it. I'll come back to it. Daylight savings time has struck, and I need to see if I can fall asleep without thinking about something horrible. But if I can't I'll at least have something to write about.