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.

Done, with a couple of things

Okay, A-kon is water under the bridge. Wowza, that one was not easy. My lady love was in charge of the Artist Alley and all its inherent drama, so her number one minion, Alex, and I got to set up and run her booth. We had invaluable help from some friends, but even then it was work. The con was in a new hotel this year, and finding parking was a royal clusterfuck. We supposedly got the right to park at the hotel that we were staying at, but they didn't have enough parking for all the people they rented rooms to, so we ended up having to pay to park at the bigger hotel across the street, and walk over there each morning.

Since none of the usual distractions were available, I was able to catch up on some reading. I got through a couple of stories of the issue of Glimmer Train that I picked up a while back, as well as check out an old issue of Rue Morgue that's been collecting dust in a bag. I also was finally able to finish Lionel Shriver's 'We Need To Talk About Kevin.'

First, this is going to be a negative review. I really really doubt I'm ever going to read any of Mz. Shriver's (she changed her name) stories again. But it's the reason why I'm not going to that I think is important. This is a very well-written book, with solid, well-developed and mostly believable characters. Mz. Shriver has a lot of valid points to make, and she makes them with hard, solid truths.

But finishing that book was like using a dremel tool on my own teeth. A few months ago I read the preview on Amazon, and got intrigued by the concept. Having a Kindle means a bit of instant gratification is (nearly) always within reach, so a couple of clicks and a bit of money later, I had the book. Right when I started reading it, I got that old warning sign of 'just let me get through this one part and then it will get interesting.' Too many times I've pushed through a movie or story with that hope only to turn a page or come to a scene and there's THE END.

There was absolutely no joy in reading this book. It wasn't fun, it was work. Now, that could be because I just don't speak the same literary language as Mz. Shriver, because I picked up the book with my own feelings about the subject matter somehow already well-established in my own head, or because I don't agree with what the author was trying to say. But even if all of that were true, I can usually find some connection with a story. With this, there was nothing.

I went back and reread the post I put up when I was halfway done, and aside from the happiness of being finished, my feelings are exactly the same now as they were then. The characters are all well-established, but they're cartoons. The only parts of them that are believable are their negative traits. Let me be clear on that: I didn't like ANYONE in this book. If I wake up one morning and find myself living in the world of this book, I will steal a car, then go drive a hundred miles an hour on the wrong side of residential streets. I'll get away with it, too, because everyone in this world is fucking blind.

Still writing, and now I have another example of how I do not want my books to turn out.