New Year, New Stories

 

Congratulations! You made it through another year! Some years feel longer than others, don't they?

Hopefully your New Year's Eve was a good one. In my neck of the woods we've got a few families that take their celebrations seriously, and every New Year's Eve, and Christmas, and Fourth Of July, they go whole hog with the fireworks. Like setting one of those thick metal launch tubes up in the street in front of their houses, and loading it up with industrial-grade rockets that you can see for over a mile. Hit the deck.

Last month I took a leap, and put one of my stories up for sale on Amazon, something that I've been reluctant to do. That reluctance stems from the fact that it's awfully similar to self-publishing. If you know anyone who's been in the writing business for a while, say those two words to them. They might react with an expression that makes you think you've triggered a memory of the time they came home from a long weekend trip during the summer, only to discover that someone left the milk out on the counter, left the container open, in fact.

Yeah, historically it hasn't been regarded highly. Think about what kind of a reputation 4chan has today, and you'll get the idea.

But that was over a generation ago. Want to know how many books I have on my Kindle? Here's a hint, it's in the triple digits. A bit of non-conclusive research shows that while printed book sales still outnumber their cyber counterparts, the gap is narrower than most people would think.

I'm still working on getting my works published on paper, because I don't think anything is ever going to replace that magic of holding a book in your hands. Touch makes the fantasy seem a little more real, it leaves an impression in out nerves. To quote an obscure comic limited series, 'That's old power.'

So check it out. It's in the Amazon Kindle store, under my name, Stephen Pope, and the name of the story is Simple. A short story, but I think you'll like it.

I've a whole year to fill up. Better get started.

Still writing.

Catching up

 

How many times have I let the dust build up here? Right now my honest answer is, at least once more, Miss Swann. As always.

But I'm brushing off the dust here again, throwing the switches to see if the circuits still work and if the juices still flow. They're flowing. Yes, they're flowing.

About a month ago, I started watching X, the movie by Ti West. I shut it off after a few minutes, my mind drifting and me realizing I wasn't in the mood for anything I had to seriously focus on. I've watched bits and pieces of it since then, but nothing more than a bit at a time. Sunday night I finished it, and I'm glad I did.

Now from here on I'm going to get into spoilers. So if you haven't seen X, step away and fix that. I'll still be here when you finish.

Damn, was that good or what?

A lot has been said about starting a movie by building tension right from the beginning. I think that one of the reasons I didn't finish X in one sitting is because I wasn't expecting it to do that as effectively as it did. The opening teases us with just enough of a hint at the ending to let us draw our own, likely false, conclusions on how things would turn out. Then we cut to our heroes, two beautiful ladies take center stage, joined shortly by a third. Three men, and three women. Maybe we don't like all of them, but we can relate to them. We're already emotionally involved.

The tension builds. There are conflicts within the group because they're all working toward a single purpose, yet no one's motivations quite line up with anyone else's, do they? They head out to the country, silent and isolating, where they meet an old couple who are definitely not on the same page as our heroes. Lust, frustration, jealousy/envy, and betrayal all keep things rolling at an increasing pace. Add spices like guns, cocaine, (most people are still puritanical enough to get uneasy witnessing casual drug use) all the issues surrounding sex, and the fact that being around people who are really old gives us an uncomfortable reminder of our own mortality, and you've got a damn good recipe.

There are little treats sprinkled here and there, too. The movie referencing itself ('one god damned fucked up horror picture') and other films. The first and last shots of our protagonist have them repeating the same action. All those moments when suddenly something we've become familiar with now has a deeper, shocking reason for being there.

There's a prequel, and I'm looking forward to it, wanting to see if it can fill those big shoes that X delivered. Will they connect the two stories as well as I hope they do? (Those holes in the wall of the barn, hell of a coincidence that they were spaced just right, isn't it? Or were they made for that purpose, years before our three women and three men ever arrived out in the country?) I don't know, but I'm going to find out.

As for me, my pen and keyboard are cranking out fiction again, so I'll be dropping things in the dark, murky waters once more and seeing what gets hooked. Like getting back up on a bike, you can still do it and you can also remember the pain of every time you fell. I still feel it.

By the way, it's okay. I won't tell on you, hiding back there. Yeah, I know you kept reading even though you hadn't seen the movie yet. Don't worry, those surprises are still waiting for you.

Still writing.

Again, why? Also, for who?

 

It's October, and right now, somewhere in my head the Silver Shamrock company song is playing, on and on and on. The weather is cooler, and when I get up in the morning, the earth and the sky are still cloaked in glorious darkness.

(Why does that last one make me happy? I suspect it has something to do with my insomnia. Dragging myself out of bed only to find that the sun, and therefor the rest of the word, is already hard at work just gets under my skin. The night is mine, so quit stealing it, you over-sized Hindenburg)

I've recently been taking advantage of the fact that someone at Amazon was clever enough to realize that a lot of people would pay money to read all the full-sized horror comics that used to exist in my younger days. Creepy, Eerie, and all the rest always had a special magic that no one else seemed able to replicate. Maybe they seemed a little wilder, or more disgusting. Probably both, and probably due to the fact that they never sported the fashionable little seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority. Now that I'm a bit older and know a little more about the kind of insane, paranoid claims people used to (and still do) make about the effect of this kind of stuff, they seem even better.

That's good. Because, to put it kindly, now that I'm using grown-up eyes to look at them, these charming tokens of yesterday have a few, well, warts. There's a lot of repetition of the same basic themes, and oh lord but some of these stories are dumb. Also, and there's enough plagiarism in these titles to nominate them for an award. But did my naive younger self know that? Oh hell no. Wow, this guy rebuilt his ancestral home, only to find it infested with a swam of cursed, hungry rats? Why can't the people who write print books come up with stuff this good?

But at the same time, these stories never seemed to take themselves seriously. All the groan-inducing one-liners and semi-homophones that we now associate only with our favorite Cryptkeeper? Liberally sprinkled through every introduction. Plus, there's something about the hosts that have the feel if not a bit of the look of another less-scary comic-book character, Alfred E. Neuman. Can a character be creepy but not scary? Maybe. Maybe that's what they were going for. If so it might support a thought I have to explain some of those comics' appeal.

The special recipe that made up Creepy and its ilk is different from 'mainstream' horror comics, (yeah, I know there's no such thing) but it achieves something that's a little more subtle than you would expect. List out the essential ingredients, like the all-visual format, lack of adult themes, generous dose of humor, and simple, almost clownish narrators that speak directly to the readers. That almost sounds like it's designed for a child, doesn't it? The next step up from Richard Scary is Uncle Creepy? Given the fact that when these stories came out, a lot of the target audience was in the 12-15 year age range, that fits.

Now these stories do the same thing, maybe to a greater or lesser degree, that 'grown-up' tales do. They give us something to believe in. Murder your wife and stuff her body up the chimney? The maid will light a fire which will build up heat and pressure, and your wife will blast out the chimney like a bullet from a barrel and then she'll land on top of you, just as you were outside at the front gate, explaining to the sheriff that you have no idea where she is. Use hypnosis or special effects to convince your business partner that their dead child wants them to sell the company to you, cheap, and retire? Don't worry. That person will find some way to sell the whole thing so that you can retire, too. You've been such a good friend, after all.

Remember that I'm an atheist. These stories rarely if ever drop the literal god out of a machine, unless it's a little known protector god of a forgotten tribe or village, and even then that divinity almost never speaks. We see the business end of religion, delivered like a fastball to the face. We see results without needing to hear the dogma.

This gives us something important. Justice. Simple justice, delivered on time every time. Oh yes, we get irony too. But it and the good-person-triumphs-in-the-end trope that we sometimes see has a vector, a purpose that we can understand. The unwritten message is blunt, and reassuring. Maybe the universe doesn't care what happens to us, but maybe there's some mechanism to balance it. Hurt, and you'll be hurt. Take advantage, and you'll be taken. The cosmic rule of get what you give.

Now remember the age range that I said I thought these books were targeted towards?

How well do you remember your life from those years? Were you happy? Loved? Were you one of those weirdos who looked forward to going to school?

Did you feel powerful?

How secure was your fresh, ten-year-old world? When did you first have a family member or a beloved pet die? No one is dealt the same starting hand of cards as anyone else, but I'll bet if we all policebox-hopped back a few decades and one by one splashed a dash of vertaserum to all of our younger selves and asked, 'do you think you're safe?' then the nays would be in the majority. Life cannot be consistently kind, and some kids learn that lesson early. Bad things happen, really bad things. An adult can fight, or buy something to help protect against those bad things. What can a child do? Yes in theory the parents have the job to protect, but let's be honest here. You learned the adults in your life had limits on what they could do before they ever admitted it to you, didn't you? Seeing them every day, relying in them for food and shelter, you took special notice of their flaws and failings. Oh but don't you dare discuss it openly. Keep it secret, and forget that you ever saw it. If you pretend the danger isn't there, then it won't hurt you, right?

Wouldn't it have been nice to have a little reassurance, delivered in a humorous format, that you're not alone in this big, scary world?

This idea could be reaching, certainly. The stories in these old comic books were fun to read, and that was reason enough for kids to buy them. In most cases a cigar is just a cigar. But I do think there's truth in this thought. You and I are members of a species that rarely, if ever, has only one thing to say about any particular topic, and often the best lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves.

I'm looking at the short story market once again. An idea that was born during that hard freeze of nearly a year ago is still kicking around, and I still have other stories that haven't been published yet. Oh and I haven't forgotten my novels.

Am I still writing? Yes. Still writing.

A complicated Shape

My girlfriend once asked me who my favorite horror movie icon is, and it took me a while to decide. I had a long list to sort through but ultimately I had to eliminate all the less-popular ones. If Richard Matheson were a little better known I would have said Emeric Belasco. But in the end, I named a good one. Michael Myers.

She later gave me a beautiful, hand-made print of Michael enduring the horror of being lovingly nuzzled by some lazy kittens. I'm looking at is as I type this in, and suffice to say that this is probably not a situation that John Carpenter ever pictured.

Michael Meyers is a creation with a lot of different elements in him, and they blend together so well that usually we can't even see them . But they make him what he is, and we feel them every time that we see him.

Look at Michael's face. It's made of stiff, spray-painted rubber. Touch it. It's cold and rough under your fingers. That face never changes. Its black, empty eyes never blink. The face is stark, dead, and unchanging. Michael moves at a steady, unhurried pace, always in a straight line toward his goal. One of the first episodes of Dr. Who that I saw contained a plot point called robophbia, a dread and paranoia caused by being around androids and their stiff, dead features for too long. Seeing something move like a person but that doesn't meeting the criteria of being a person pushes the bad buttons in us. Some half-assed research shows that there's no such thing as robophobia in this world we live in. But give it time. We communicate among our own kind with facial expression, and Michael only has one. Do you remember the scene in part two where Myers walks through a plate glass door without breaking that relentless, direct stride of his? What if, once we develop real, functioning androids, someone were to dress one in coveralls, hand it a carving knife, and program it to stalk and carve? How similar would that result be to what we see on the screen? Carpenter's Shape and Cameron's Terminator both draw from the same source of dread, and it won't run dry until the human race is a cold, dead echo.

Yet, Michael has two arms, two legs, and a head. He was born from a woman, ate food to grow up big and strong, and was even examined by multiple doctors. There's a man inside those dark, bland, coveralls, and that fact has implications. Because multiple writers invented and then reinvented Michael over the decades (damn I feel old) I'm going to distill my observation down to what I consider our topic's essence. The exact nature of that essence is unknown, and we'll cover more on that later. But let's look at this: Michael Myers is a fictional character, who has a physical form in the stories that he appears in, and that form is indistinguishable from a human male. He expresses himself with face to face murder. That's Mr. Myers 101. Curse of Thorn is iffy at best, so I'm not going to include it as a factor when I ask this question: what prevents you from picking up a knife, from stalking babysitters and horny teens? What prevents me from looking people in the eye, letting fear build, then killing them? Arrest? Imprisonment/execution? Homeowner with a twelve-gauge blasting a hole in me? Sorry but those are risks and possible consequences. The honest answer is nothing. If I want to dress up and kill, you can't prevent me, and I can't prevent you. It's an ugly reminder of the flip side of human potential. What took us to the moon can also take us into nightmares. That's what makes Myers a warning of what we are and what we can be.

But keep going deeper. Yes, there's a man inside that mask, but what's inside the man? Evil, according to Doctor Loomis.

(Am I the only one, though, who sees hint after hint that the good doctor lost his objectivity, and lost it early on? His pursuit of Myers drives him to mania, and if Loomis isn't trying to patiently explain to you why you need to do things his way, then he doesn't seem like a very pleasant person to be around. What would Loomis do without Myers? Maybe that's the most telling point about the doctor, and a significant point in our discussion. Because the likely answer is, not much that would grab our attention. There's no hint that he's naturally obsessive, in fact there's no hint of anything about him that doesn't relate to Myers. He's a part of the Shape that extends beyond the man's body)

Aside from Loomis' claims, we have no idea what goes on inside Myer's head. He doesn't speak any language except body language, and analyzing that yields nothing we can understand. His movements are simple, direct, and mechanical. We know he wants to kill his one special girl, anyone close to her, and anyone whose death will hurt her. He wants to hurt her, but we don't know why. His goals, sadly, are very human, and very male. But they are no less out of our reach of understanding. His drives are a black box, as black as his eyes.

That's where we come back to horror, because we've come back to fear. We already fear the unknown, and we'll fear it even more when it picks up thin, sharpened steel. If Freddy or Velma ever pulled off the Shape's mask and explained him, that would be the end. Not of murder, maybe. But of the sort of fear that we cultivate and harvest here. The magical sort of fear that traces its roots back to shapes in the darkened closet and unexplained sounds in the night.

If times were normal, this is probably where the post would end. But they aren't are they? If you're reading this when I post it, then you're living through an age that will be included in the next generations of history books. This post started because of a feeling I had that connected Michael Myers' flavor of fear to what we're all going through right now. But that idea is elusive, and needs some time to gel. I'll either put it up here, or I'll write a story from it, and later you may get to read my grousing that no publisher is willing to buy quality literature these days.

Still writing.

Black lives matter.

All Hallow's Eve

I admit it, when it comes to this time of year, I'm twelve years old. I love all the decorations, the cool costumes, and the hundreds of different sources of myth that get dredged up and mixed together into a rich, spicy soup that feeds every fear of the dark and the unknown that has crawled around in the back of mankind's collective heads since we started banging the rocks together. Does it hurt that down here the temperature finally takes a bit of a dip this lovely time of year, and that it gets dark sooner? No, not at all.

Problem is, these last couple of Halloweens have not been as epic as I had hoped they would be. Something always seemed to pop up at the last minute that would wreck my plans. Or, and this is the shitty part about real life, that really awesome idea I had come up with that looked so perfect in my head turned out to be something off the set of the original Doctor Who series when I translated it into worldly matter. That's how it goes sometimes.

This year, it looked like the same thing was going to happen. There's still leftover problems from Harvey to deal with, I left renewing the registration on my car until the last minute, and I've made three trips to the dentist in the last month to take care of a problem that's been causing me enough pain to keep me from sleeping at night. This morning I got up early, headed in there again, and got a set of stitches taken out that I've been feeling inside my mouth for a week. Then I came home and let the pain killers kick in.

Then, I got off my butt and got to work. I hit Home Depot and picked up a couple of poles and some jute twine. Then I slapped together a pair of Saint Andrew's crosses, dressed up a dummy I had lying around, (go ahead and ask) and with the addition of some lights and the plastic, pre-carved pumpkins Claudia and I have been collecting over the years, my house was ready. A few days ago I stopped by one of the Halloween mega-stores that I've mentioned in a previous post, and picked up a mask that wasn't half bad. Add that to some black ren faire garb, and I was in business.

There was rain, but it stopped often enough to let the kids get out. I was up and down most of the evening answering the ringing of the doorbell, and I got another taste of that lovely moment when small children don't get to finish saying 'Trick or Treat.' One little girl came right out and said that she was scared of me, but that she loved my costume. She left smiling.

Let me know what you think. B-movie material?

Still writing.

A feast of flavors

How many Hannibal Lecters are there?

Well, that depends on how many you've gone out and met. The first one I met was a small man with six fingers on one hand. The second was a man with a subtle, sinister smile and who sometimes made a lisping, slurping noise when excited (and he looked a lot like Odin from the recent Thor movies). The third had darker hair, a much bolder voice and pronounced the first syllable in 'privacy' as in 'prim.' The fourth was a young man, and I followed him through the sort of childhood that would either make a sane person hope for the end of the world or drive them to nudge it along toward that end. The fifth I recently made the acquaintance of, and he's a quiet, cultured man who moves through his life with a slow, deliberate grace.

All of them are killers, and none of them would blink while they cut you open and browsed through your insides like a housewife at the local farmer's market.

Makes you wonder. There's only one source, regardless of the inspiration for that source. So where did they all come from? Why, from you and me of course. Let's take a moment and feel pride in our creations.

Why did Thomas Harris give the good doctor his initial traits, small, with slicked-back hair, limbs possessed of wiry strength? Well, Harris encountered a real-life killer who looks a bit like that, only at first he didn't understand the crimes the man had committed. I'm pulling this from Wikipedia, so there's likely a richer story behind it, but every good character has multiple roots, and you and I only have so much time here. Harris had a gut-level experience that was back-dated with the word KILLER in bright, bold letters, and he picked details from that experience with the intent of us putting our own KILLER stamps on his character, on his book. We were the target audience. I'd say the technique worked rather well, wouldn't you?

If we work chronologically, the next incarnation comes from Brian Cox working in front of a camera for the film Manhunter. He has a some of the physical traits, but we never see him kill anyone, despite all the backstory we're given about the bodies he's left in his wake. Instead, this Lecter is a button-pusher. He sends our hero running out of the room in a panic with a few well-placed points of conversation, and the tortured, murderous psychopath who slaughters whole families admires Doctor Lecter. These facts are presented to us to make us think, 'Christ, if this man can do all this while he's locked up, what would happen if he could get his hands on people?' What indeed.

Now we come to Mister Hopkin's portrayal. Yes, in a movie where you don't have a powerful actor there are some things that you can do to compensate for it, and hell no I'm not saying Cox's performance is sub-par, by any means. But Hopkin's Lecter has enough presence to blow all the other characters in Silence Of The Lambs out of the water. The accent he speaks with alone is just creepy, and the quiet monotone that it's delivered in makes me think of an audio recording of The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar I heard many years ago, the voice of the dead speaking to the living. See you soon, it whispers, at all of us.

Then there's that boy, that fine young Hannibal. (Nope. Couldn't resist) We see him portrayed with more than one actor's face, but there's only one that we associate with the cold dread that the name Hannibal inspires. Give me a contrary opinion if you want to, but that face is a little... Off. It's odd in the same way that Christopher Walken's is, handsome, but not something a lot of us would want to open our eyes to in the middle of the night. This Hannibal starts off his life a little better than most of us, which adds another dimension to the intelligent personae that's consistent through all the incarnations of our anti-hero. He gets dealt a bad hand of cards in his life, but presses on, though the part of that boy that might have once been able to laugh at himself seems to be missing. He wanders through life until he has a new family to replace the one that was killed, and for a moment maybe we get to believe that the rest of his life could have been lived 'normally.' He kills before the opportunity to avenge his little sister's death presents itself, but only after being insulted and bullied by someone bigger, stronger, and dumber than himself, and I think that qualifier is important. For all his skill and rage, this future icon is still a boy. We can enjoy stories about evil kids, but how many good or successful ones are there that don't have the child infected by some outside element, be it extra-terrestrial or supernatural. Innocence and childhood are intertwined icons, and if this handsome blond boy had begun his grown-up life already indulging his murderous urges, he would have lost our sympathy. As a character, Hannibal needs our empathy. This is one of the bigger challenges facing everyone who re-imagines him.

Of course we also have the latest and certainly not the least. In the TV series, Hannibal seems inhumanly poised and cultured, so much so that I think the only reason we can believe in him as a person is because we walked into this story already knowing the characters. Using my in-depth research techniques (browsing IMDB when I can't sleep) I discovered that Mads Mikkelson approached the role with a fresh perspective, playing this charming killer as if he was the devil. If you watch the series you'll see that the character does a good job in this role. He tempts, and it might even be said that he fulfills the traditional duties of the devil, dealing harshly with those who transgress. Though it might be more accurate to say that he does the work that we wish the devil would get around to, chopping up that asshole who cut us off on the highway and making that snooty clerk at the DMV regret being so rude. That's the key.

I'm not trying to just gush here about how engrossing Hannibal is as a fictional character, I do that in private. This is peeking into the whys and wherefors behind the fact that a lot of people (myself included) are willing to pay money to read and see this man's story. Hannibal is an anti-hero, like any other bad guy we root for. But the intensity of his actions make it hard to admit why we like him. I think a lot of us have moments where we would love do exactly what he does, kill some person in our lives who offends us (not hurts us, offends us) and express such pure contempt for that person that we eat them. I try to avoid getting too graphic here, but let me address an unspoken fact that would be a part of Hannibal's life if he existed in the real world: his digestion. We all know what goes up must come down, right? Well, what goes in must come out. Imagine all those faces of Doctor Lecter, each taking care of personal business, remembering their meals and remembering the preparation. These men would be smiling while they sat.

But we never see, or even hear about that. Why? Because while our egos would love to lead us on an exploration of alternative cuisine, those same egos don't want us within a thousand miles of all the complications. Lecter went to medical school. Look around, because it's not difficult to find horror stories about that experience. Have you ever smelled the insides of a mammal that's been opened up? How about had fluids from those insides splash over you, soaking down into your socks? Once the good doctor removed the delicacies he was after, there would have been a hundred and twenty more pounds of person to dispose of, minimum. That weight comes from bones, blood vessels, organs, and goopy stuff inside those organs. Yeah, the movies never show our well-mannered gentleman dealing with bowels.

By not showing that, it lets us gloss over the ugly bits of reality. We get the good without the bad. The gourmet meal without having to pay the bill or wash the dishes. Obvious, right? The trick is knowing which is which, what to serve and what to toss in the trash and hope our neighbor doesn't get nosy. If I had the secret to that, well for starters I'd be getting paid for these words you're reading. But I can at least recognize when someone gets it right, like with the good doctor. I can think about what I like and what buttons it pushes inside me. I can put all that in my own blender, hit puree and see what I end up with. Dinner is served.

By the way, I'm eating while I write this. Eating meat.

While I write.

It was a dark and -

So there's this Harvey. Drops in uninvited, and won't take the hint and get the hell out. Now true, he did give us some notice that he was coming. But, honestly? He's the sort of jerk who's so unreliable that notice isn't really much help. We can't keep him out, can't tell him to stay away, and even if we leave to avoid him there's a risk he'll break in and trash our place. Hell, he might even show up early to catch us while we're packing the car or delay his arrival so we waste time out of town and end up exiled, unable to come back to our home until who knows when.

I'm finishing this on Friday, the Friday after the huge rainstorm that hit Houston so bad that the damage is being counted in billions. I started writing it the previous Friday, hoping the power would stay on. It did, and for the first day or so when the hurricane became a tropical storm and hit Houston with endless water and wind, things were okay. My friends and I passed texts around to say who had the lights off in their neighborhoods and everyone swapped videos of rivers that have street signs barely sticking out of them and the roofs of cars that can almost be seen under their surface. It rained, hard and fast, then it would stop long enough for me to take the dog for a walk around the neighborhood. Of course, we had to walk in the middle of the street because a lot of the sidewalks were either caked in mud or under water, and we could only walk so far before we hit places where the streets themselves were submerged. Then we would head back in before it started pouring again. At night, during the quiet moments, there were frogs all over the neighborhood, singing. At home, with the storm locked outside but raging, it felt like all the real disaster was a comfortable distance away.

That was it through Sunday. On Monday evening as I was forcing Diamond to tend to her business in the backyard even though the sky was pouring water on her head, Claudia yelled that she needed me. I got in to see that the ceiling was leaking in the library, less than three feet from her desk, where her computer is. We got buckets and plastic bags under the leak, which was coming down in multiple streams. While we were trying to come up with a long-term plan, we noticed the sheet rock was sagging.

The whole piece fell down within twenty minutes, all in a mess of insulation, cardboard backing for the sheet rock, and the nails that had been holding it up. We got a tarp under the buckets, and watched a part of our house fall apart while trying to make peace with the fact that we couldn't do anything to stop it.

Eventually the rain stopped for a while. I stayed up that night to make sure it didn't get worse. I'm not sure what I would have done if it had.

Cabin fever is a real thing. Claudia and I were cooped up in the house from Friday afternoon until Tuesday, when I was able to drive around and find one of our favorite Mexican restaurants open. But on that Monday night, we had been crammed together the whole time, both worrying. You would think it would be a perfect time to binge watch Game of Thrones, or do anything else that eats up time, but it wasn't. We gave each other space, both of us feeling tense and anxious. Sad fact is, I couldn't even write, especially after the leaks made the ceiling fall in. I was too locked in the moment to go anywhere else in my head, even though a trip elsewhere would have been just the thing at that time.

The next day we heard that the national guard had been called out, and on those moments when I got out of the house I started seeing and hearing helicopters. There was water built up along the edges of the streets around my house, but not covering them. I had slept during the morning, and I stayed up again the next night, insisting that Claudia get some rest. Of course it was raining that night, and the ceiling started leaking where our kitchen meets our living room. I got some plastic tubs under it, cursed, and tried to keep an eye on it to make sure I caught any leaking water. There was still water leaking into the first set of tubs in the library.

At around one in the morning, there was another wet, tearing sound and another piece of my house hit the floor hard enough that I was sure it was going to wake Claudia up. At that point I just said fuck it, made sure the buckets were still catching the old and new streams of water, and started on the mess. I put on latex gloves, because my hands began to itch not long after picking up the huge piles of insulation from the first collapse, and scooped handfuls of wet gunk into a trash bag. I took the larger pieces of what used to be my ceiling and put them in a cardboard box. (trash pick up had not happened, naturally) I got out my old ka-bar knife and cut the pieces of sheetrock that were broken off but still hanging from the cardboard backing at the edges of the hole. While I was doing at this I would pause every once in a while to look up through the hole that was the size of a car door. I could see the slats of my roof.

That's where we stand now, except that I noticed a slow leak in the damned garage too, some night when I was walking around the house. The rain is gone for now, and Claudia hit the ground running as soon as it did. We've already filed an insurance claim, had FEMA come out, and now we're just waiting on the roofer, who understandably is a tad busy right now.

Now I've got a moment to sit still and really think. My workplace opened up on Thursday, and and during those disorganized two days we got some hint of the real mess. Some of my friends and co-workers got out in their trucks and boats during the worst of it and rescued people who were trapped in their houses or up on their roofs. Despite, or maybe because of, all the crap that I needed to keep an eye on at home, when I read their posts and saw their pictures I really wanted to get out there, to ride out there on the cold, black water and help all the people who are a hell of a lot worse off than I am. During the storm there would be occasional photos of flooded houses and rescues by jeep or boat. The official death toll has risen, and I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Pieces of overpasses have collapsed, and at one place so much water washed over one of the highways that the concrete barriers along its sides were pushed perpendicular to the line of traffic, forming an above-ground river channel.

So what's next? Start fixing. Though we've got some ugly damage, Claudia and I still have a roof over our heads. Other people are still in shelters, some are throwing out all of their furniture because their house was flooded, and others have to go hunting for wherever their cars were washed away to. Gas prices are going up, and there's a curfew on. But we're alive, and we're moving on.

As for me, I'm still writing.

Regulation ghosts

There's a well-known series of books about vampires that I once started to read. I picked up the first book, read a powerful, graphic opening, and then about five pages into the meat of the story, closed the book. I haven't picked it up since, and that was over ten years ago.

That book, and that second scene where I was first introduced to the hero of the story, has stayed in my head all this time. Because I think I can make a point that can help other people who just might be picking up a pen for the first time, I'm going to explain why.

As I tend to do, I'm not going to specify the series. If you've read it, you'll recognize it. It happens to be one of my wife's favorites, so it's yet another subject for us to have lively discussions about. We've had quite a few.

It's set during the cold war, and the opening shows a very unconventional autopsy that ends in shootings and an explosion. This sets a top-secret Soviet program back years of progress. The second scene shows a young man reporting for his first day of work as the person in charge of a British project that opposes the other one that we just read about. Inside a room accessed by a secret door, our hero meets a ghost. Instead of rattling chains or demanding that his son avenge his murder, this spectre gives our hero a short report on the events in the first scene. This patriotic spook passes on military intelligence.

Disclaimer: you already know that every word of this is my opinion. This is my word, not the word, and it's sure as hell not the last word. This is a word about what I choose to write words about. Horror.

What's wrong with a ghost doing its part for queen and country? Nothing. It shows nobility and a willingness for self-sacrifice. But it also shows a connected, enlightened empathy, a willingness to look out for the little guy. It also shows an intelligent involvement in the present. This ghost is not an old, dusty record player endlessly spinning the same scratched vinyl disc. More's the pity.

Despite having vampires as the main antagonists of the series, the series isn't horror. It's science fiction. There's an understandable rhyme and reason to the universe, clear cause and effect, and some ghosts have our back.

You know, maybe it's that last point in particular which explains why I don't think I'll ever pick that book up again. I like horror, and part, I believe, of a good horror story is our inability to truly grasp the parts of the universe that are trying to drown us in its bathtub. Borrowing/Butchering a quote, the strongest fear is fear of the unknown, and when we can see an expression of love from a ghost, we feel we know it, even if there are facets of its existence that we can't possibly grasp. It smacks too much of Casper, and cheesy Lifetime movies where the tragic but plucky heroine is constantly getting scared out of her wits by the spook in her new house, which – surprise! Was only trying to warn her that the cardboard-cutout handsome guy she's seeing is the asshole who ghostified the house's prior tenant.

You know, if I never achieve anything else lasting as a writer, if I can only get 'ghostified' in the dictionary, my life will have meaning.

I've covered a bit of this before, so let me try to rephrase it while contributing something new. I'm going to label this set of words the rules for ghosts. These points are what I keep in my head when I sit down to write a ghost story that I want to scare people with, and not just because these guidelines would produce a story that I would probably enjoy reading. I think each of these points pushes a button in people's minds. I think they dig under the floorboards and get inside the spaces between the walls.

1. A ghost did something unusual during its mortal life. Though it's rarely explained why this matters, it's important because millions of people die every year, but they don't all come back. So our ghost has to have been remarkable in some way. It developed an obsession, it became consumed with greed, it died a painful death, or it lived a life so empty that just reading about it makes us worry that we haven't done enough with our own lives. There will be no ghosts of milquetoast accountants who died in their sleep or of mediocre soccer moms who passed peacefully, surrounded by loving family members. Normal doesn't make a ghost.

2. A ghost does not have a wide range of responses to stimuli. A haunt can be subtle or obvious, though our story is more effective if it at least starts off subtle. But it won't break dishes in the kitchen one day, file a lawsuit at the county clerk's office the next, and finish off the week by possessing the lady next door so it can sit down with the new owner of its house and hammer out a twenty-page contract agreeing to co-inhabit the house on a time sharing basis. A ghost is emotion and energy, like lightning finding the shortest path to the ground.

3. A ghost has a limited range of focus. The internal logic on this is sketchy, but in all the stories the shades are fixed to something, some remnant of their past (more on that below). A haunted house, hotel, car, toy, or town. Even a person can be haunted. A ghost might be mobile, but not randomly so. It's tied to a person, place, or thing. A spectral afterlife is an old-fashioned marriage where the options for divorce are extremely limited.

4. Because it was once a living person but is now dead, a ghost is tied to the past. This reflects the symbolism of what a fictional ghost is to a reader, old memories or feelings that won't stay buried. In a haunted house, radios play commercials for companies that went under twenty years ago, a bottle of soft drink sweetened with high fructose corn syrup tastes like the good old stuff that was made with real sugar, and a tattered old dress smells fresh and clean with just a hint of a forgotten lover's perfume. But it's all a phantom. Spend a night in a house that once burned down and you'll wake up in a moldy ruin. Join that gracious host for a week of feasting, and you'll starve to death. Show up on a dock to meet that lover who once got away, and sooner or later your body will wash up on shore. The past belongs to the dead, not the living.

6. A ghost can't experience personal growth, including learning new facts, or keeping up with changing events. This is a matching point to the previous one. The possibility of change, of molding the future, belongs to the living and not the dead. Those who have died but are sticking around are stuck with what they had when they were once alive, body, mind, and spirit. A ghost of someone who died in the service of MI-6 would whisper, scream, and write, 'Blake is a traitor' long after the man himself was dead and buried. They're always playing the same game of chess, one where the moves are announced but the pieces never advance. A person who freezes to death comes back as a ghost who will never be warm. The shade of a person who died feeling betrayed will never forgive. Never.

Hey, remind me to read something with a happy ending when I'm done here, okay?

Another A-kon has come and gone. This year it was held in Fort Worth, but there were familiar faces and familiar shenanigans. The day before the con started, some knucklehead decided to play Bruce Lee and kick open a pair of double doors at the hotel. The doors were expensive.

I wrote Bruce Lee in the above paragraph, but the person who told me about it actually cited Jet Li. Uh oh, can't I learn new names, or references? Am I stuck in the past? Maybe I am.

Because I'm still writing.

Why we're all liars

Are you fucking kidding me?

Imagine this. I wait outside the front of my house for the postal carrier, pretending to trim the trees. When he or she comes by I say, “Hey, be careful. My neighbor is letting his dog wander loose, and it's a mean one.”

Or, I go down to the grocery store and stand by the entrance while I pretend to text my wife and ask what kind of cheese she wants me to get. When a customer with either darker skin or wearing some kind of religious clothing clears the checkout line I go up to the manager and say, “Excuse me, but that person just pulled some steaks out from underneath their coat.”

Or, I drive down to Brownsville, at the Mexican border, and I run around yelling, “The Mexicans are coming! The Mexicans are coming! Their tanks will be here in fifteen minutes!”

Or, I take a bus to Boston, Massachusetts, and run up and down the streets yelling, “The British are coming! The British are coming! They're worried about Trump taking power and they're going to invade!”

Now at what point did your disbelief give you pause?

A few days ago a man named Edgar Maddison Welch scared the hell out of some people and could have gotten those people and himself killed. The details are few and far between right now, but what's generally agreed on is this: He read some writings online that claimed a certain pizzeria was just a front that masked child abuse. He believed those writings strongly enough to arm himself and go down there. He fired his weapon inside the business, and later he was arrested.

Now, we haven't heard directly from him (and if he or his lawyer have any sense at all, we won't), but a couple of facts stand out.

1. He didn't go in shooting, wasn't focused on killing every adult in the building.
2. One phrase keeps being used over and over again, in quotes. Self-investigate. Again, we haven't heard from Welch's lawyers (by now he should have some), but whoever they are they haven't come forward to denounce this quote as false, and every time it's repeated it digs this man's grave a little deeper. A very specific grave.

Now I've stated my assumptions first. If any of them turn out to be false, then my conclusion is invalid for Mr Welch, but my point is still going to be valid.

I don't think he is a fanatic. We've seen a lot of fanatics lately, in this country and others, and they go in with guns blazing, intent on racking up as high a body count as they can. Blood is the goal for fanatics because as far as they're concerned they're the ones god chose to whip the whole world into shape, and when you're having that intimate a tea party with your spook of choice, blood is the only drink you serve.

So if he isn't a fanatic, what is he?

Naïve. A naïve fool.

If you just got an incredulous look on your face, please understand my terms. There's no pain or damage that a fanatic can inflict that a fool can't match. Anyone can inflict pain and shed blood. You. Me. Anyone.

Again, how did he wind up where he is now? He read a story online, something along the lines of the bait stories that leap out at you while you're waiting in line at the grocery store, and he went in there ready to shoot. If you claim he isn't a fool, show me what scale he used to judge that all the people in there were part of that conspiracy, and that's why he didn't mind driving them into a panic. Show me where he studied the architecture of the building to be sure that whatever point he fired that weapon at didn't have a brick wall or metal pipes or something else solid enough to shatter the round and send fragments into the crowd. You fire a rifle inside, you're gambling with your own life and with other's lives. He's a damn fool.

Go back to those example I gave you above. Some of them I think most of us would fall for, but they get progressively ridiculous. Now add a fact to each case. In the first, I've been feuding with my neighbor because his dog has been doing his business on my lawn. Second, I'm wearing a tee shirt that says 'God bless the KKK.' Third, I've set up a little stand by the side of the road, and it has a big banner that says, 'Anti-tank rockets, $500 dollars apiece.' Fourth, if anyone stops to listen to me explain my claim, I tell them that in order to get the whole story they'll need to buy my book, and I just happen to have a few copies with me. In other words, in each case I have a reason to lie that benefits me personally. Now does that fact give you pause, even in those cases that seemed straightforward?

Then put your pause function on speed-dial, because you're going to be using it. Everyone has a reason to lie. Why? It's fun to lie. Why the hell do you think I want to make my living doing it? Why do you think damn near everyone does it, every single day of their lives? It's free, it gets the liar some attention, and it's easy. Now I'm not talking about the simple lies that make a person's day easier. 'Damn, honey. I meant to unload the dishwasher but I forgot.' 'Honey, you know I would never forget your birthday. I had reservations for dinner but the boss says I have to work late.' Those are lies of convenience. They're a quick shot of bullshit to cover up mistakes, and so, we benefit from telling them. But the person who first claimed that J. Edgar Hoover liked long dresses and frilly undies? That friend of yours and mine who swears that their cousin's neighbor once popped her poodle in the microwave to dry it off? They get that moment when we fall for it, and that shared magic when a good story finds an audience. Storytelling is magical, and magic can be worked with truth or bullshit. That's the power of magic.

But please don't start believing in spirits to the point of handing over money to Madame Zelocka, who claims she has an urgent message from your-long departed Uncle Phil. Believe in fairies if you want to, but not to the point of hateful words for someone who doesn't. Don't be so ready to believe that hundreds of people can consciously work together to keep a secret, a secret that's spread all over the web. If you do, you're a fool. Not evil, but a fool.

Enough with the blogging. Let me get back to telling lies that I'll get paid for.

Back to writing.

To hell with you. I am the exception.

Coming toward the end of another year. Not the best one, true. But who knows what the future holds? Not me, says the flea.

Another Halloween has come and gone, which in itself should have prodded me to write. This year I played with an interpretation of Krampus, cuddly Santa's uglier, meaner big brother, as my costume. It still needs some tweaking, but I got a lot of comments on how cool it was, and one of the best complements you can get that special day of the year. 'Trick or trea –.' That's the golden moment when someone a third of your height looks up at you and forgets that the secret code phrase ends with a plea for goodies. That's when they look up at you and maybe see what you're trying to show them; the dark, special magic that our ancestors once wove by sharing stories over campfires. I might have inspired a budding young storyteller this October night. Or one of America's future serial killers. I take no responsibility either way.

Of course we also had the annual turkey massacre, which my wife and I celebrated with our traditional pasta. Let me sum it up thusly: Yum.

This entry's title needs some backstory. I haven't gone to many conventions lately, a trend I plan on breaking, soon. But there were a few I used to go to quite regularly, always finding some good panels where I could ask questions of people who have fought, and won, the same fight I'm in right now. The student learns from the master, so it is written.

Yet inevitably the master says or does something that makes the student yell, “Are you f---ing kidding me?” Or at least, that's what sometimes happens.

Was at a con once upon a time, went to a panel, someone asked a question. So far so good. Now I don't know if this lady, sitting among the other writers on the panel, who answered that question and most of the other questions just didn't get enough sleep the night before, if someone ran over her dog the day before she came to the con, or if she was just constipated. But that day her answers were the most condescending, pedantic, shallow, shovelful of crap I had ever heard at that con or any other gathering where the point was supposed to be to enlighten. Not only were we all told to not mind when our stories were rejected, we all had to parrot a neat little phrase back at this woman, like good, obedient schoolchildren. I am not the exception. Repeat after me, I am not the exception.

She was annoyed, because often when she edited for anthologies, people would send her stories that exceeded the requested word count, or were in a genre other than the one asked for. She was really upset when one of the attendees asked what the hell the traditional phrase, 'not what we're looking for at this time' meant, venting some of the frustration that builds up when your story doesn't make the cut and all you get is a vague, one-sentence reason on your e-mailed rejection slip and you can't get any useful information out of it. Just move on and send it somewhere else, was her answer. It's just rejection. It's nothing personal.

Let me tell you this, you reading these words I don't know where and I don't know when. You are the fucking exception, from the atoms that make up that very tip top fraction of your highest hair to that spark inside that you might call your soul. You are the cog in the machine that decides, you know what, today I'll see what happens if I start spinning in this other direction, and to hell with the machine. You are the crazy one who dreams. When someone tells you that you aren't, laugh at them, give them a single-finger salute, or if you have one handy, feel free to throw a bucket of warm piss on them. They've earned it.

Did she have a point? She had a piece of a point, I'll give her that. The woman is sharp, and knows her stuff. Does she know more than me? Oh hell yes. That doesn't mean that she had the right answer, or that if she did, that she provided it. 

Her point, her whole point, was about her, and her ego. The point she should have had, because she was addressing a bunch of frustrated people who had shelled out money to be in that room, was to not let that aching, enduring sting of rejection be the deciding factor. To take that rage and despair that always pops back up and channel it into hunting down another agent, or open anthology. To once again pound the damn keyboard to crank out yet another pitch.

Also, just send it somewhere else? If you've been at this a while then you know that there's no magical list of people sitting anxiously at their PC's with money burning holes in their bank accounts, waiting for quality (fill in your genre) stories. Are there some lists? Hell yes, and praise (fill in your deity) for that. These are often set up and maintained by other writers, some for free, some for pay. I've never heard of anyone getting rich or even just making a living from such a list. Nor do I expect to hear about one anytime soon.

Yeah, that bit of a point that she had. If you send a fantastic comedy story to someone who is reading for an anthology full of noir thrillers, you're going to get rejected. You might even annoy the editor so much that they remember your name and bite you in the ass later. Can you afford to take that chance? I have listened to enough editors to know that the only thing worse than sending them an e-mail asking if the word count they listed is a hard limit is not even asking and sending in a story that's larger than they asked for. If your submission is ten or thirty words over the limit, they PROBABLY won't care. But they decide that, not you. If that overworked editor is putting together a paying anthology or magazine issue and they've put out a general call for submissions, then they're probably going to get a thousand submissions, or more.

That means, if our anthology has room for ten stories, that almost a hundred times more stories will be rejected than will be accepted.

So yes, pay attention to what they ask for. Sticking out by breaking the rules is going to get your hard-written tale yanked out of the running. But don't stop sending things in. Send in stories that will pass through all the filters. That's what those requirements are.

But remember this. Ten of those hypothetical people who sent stories in, got into that book.

Who are those ten, then? Well by definition, they're the exceptions.

Have I made my point? If I haven't, let me pick up a hammer and make it. Saying 'I am not the exception' means accepting that 'I will not get picked.' The minute I accept that, I'll delete this blog, burn my computer with all my stories stored on it, and drill out the part of my brain that dreams. When that woman talked to me and everyone else in that room like we were nothing better than cogs, why did she do it? Because she was annoyed. What did she tell us? Don't get annoyed.

Okay. Let's check the horse's vital signs. It's dead, Jim.

The con in question took place a few years ago, and I've been mulling over whether the incident needed to be talked about ever since then. If she or anyone else recognizes themselves in the above anecdote and needs to tell their side of it, that's what the comments section is for. Ball's in your court.

Also, while putting this down I came up with some other points that might give everyone an idea of what it's like to be on the receiving end of all those submissions, and it may be next week's post. We'll see.

In the meantime, I am the exception, after all. I'll keep writing.

One of those moments in life that are all too rare

Every once in a while, a bunch of different events get scheduled in the same period. That's been the case these last two months. Right before A-kon I attended the wedding of some friends, and had just a few days to get ready for Dallas. A-kon was a success, and I've got an upcoming post detailing my adventures there. Hint: people lost their pants.

But last month, well last month I flew out to Nevada, put on a suit, and watched as my daughter walked up onto a stage, was handed a diploma, and then moved the tassel on her cap from one side to the other.

I'm proud of her. I'm happy that I was able to be there to witness her milestone achievement.

Nope. Those words don't do the moment justice.

Maybe I'm just getting old and sentimental (yeah, fuck you too), but I want to get this right. I want to put down in words how I feel, describing it well enough so that a thousand years from now when time-traveling bug-eyed aliens from Neptune browse the web, they'll find this post and say, “Okay, we understand.”

I was there when my daughter was born. She was tall and strong as a baby, and she only got taller and stronger as time went on. When she was, I think, five years old, she challenged something I was telling her, an event that found its way into the story I was then writing.

Her mother and I divorced when she was still young, and I had to sit down with her one day and tell her that when she came home from school that afternoon that I wasn't going to be there. That memory still hurts.

Through the years we've been separated by as little as a hundred miles and as much as the entire length of the country. Time went on, without all those day-to-day moments when life happens. That's a loss I can never make up.

But last month I hopped on a plane and flew to Nevada. The desert climate didn't faze me, but the elevation was murder. I spent a short day talking with her and getting as caught up as I could, and then I stood in line, then took a seat along with a thousand other parents, all of us waiting for our turn to witness for our children. There were signs forbidding horns, balloons, and big gaudy banners, and I saw dozens of each before the ceremony began. I should have brought some.

They didn't call the class up in alphabetical order, so everyone kept following along with the names as they were listed in the schedule, holding it up and carefully moving their finger down each line as the names were called out. (this all happened in a college auditorium, so I also should have brought some binoculars) Somewhere, deep down and propping up all that eagerness and enthusiasm, I don't think there was a person in that building that wasn't holding the door to their anxiety closet shut as hard as they could. I think we all shared a secret dread that the name we were waiting for would never be called. That someone would go through all the paperwork one last time and find some signature missing or some box not checked and say, “Whoops. Well at least we caught it before they tried to graduate.” Bet it was even worse for the ones waiting to be called.

I waited. Her boyfriend's family waited. Everyone waited.

They called her name. A thousand people watched her walk across that stage to get a handshake and a diploma, and none of them had a bigger smile or a more swollen chest than me. If I could have opened the roof of that building to shout to the whole world, 'Look at what my daughter has achieved,' I would have done it, and you would have heard it.

My daughter has graduated.

Still smiling about it. I'm happy to have written about it, too.

Still here, and still -

Short update, because I'm writing this as I'm prepping to head up to Dallas for Project A-Kon. Claudia has expanded her business, teaming up with a friend of hers who is also an artist, and founded LuxWyrks. Lots of new stuff, including postcards with swearing fairies. So if you're up there this weekend, stop by the booth in the Artist Alley and say hello!

Last entry detailed my first shot at sending Roja to an agent, and since you haven't heard me singing (wherever you happen to be) then you've probably realized that fame and fortune haven't yet found their way to my door. That first agent declined, as did the second. So as I'm packing, I'm also taking the draft of my next pitch to work on, and I've already got the agent selected.

Still writing.

So this is the deep end

Been away for a while, but it's been productive time. Got rid of some stumbling blocks that have been preventing me from building a website, and found a glaring error in my current book that I can fix. Claudia has been published, again, so now she and I have started a little book collection of our successes.

I also, as of tonight, put together a query package for Roja and sent it to an agent. What comes to mind is the moment a few (cough) years ago when I was young and didn't know how to swim. I was in a pool with some other naïve kids listening to a nice lady explain how to not drown when I took a step forward to get some space around me. The water was clean but not clear, so I didn't know I had been standing on a raised platform against the side of the pool and suddenly the cold, heavy water was six inches deeper than I was tall. I remember treading water, or doing something like it, and realizing I was suddenly in very deep shit. I've had that same feeling once or twice since then, but there's nothing like the first time.

Fortunately, I didn't drown, because the nice lady patiently picked me up and got me back on the platform. I learned how to swim, and ended up doing my part to teach a brand new generation of naïve kids how to not drown a few years later. Hitting the send button tonight was like taking that one extra step all over again. Yep, this is cold, heavy water, and boy is it deep.

I'm not going to name the agent. The research I've been able to do clued me in on the incredible amount of BS that already gets flung at people who do that job, and the last thing I want to do is add to the pile. Trust me, if things go well people will hear me singing their praises from the rooftops.

Now? Well it's time to wait. I'll touch base with all those people who are reading In The Dark for me, catch up on all the reading that I've fallen behind on, and get back to plugging away on The Red Man Burning.

It's time to write.

My wife, the dognapper

I love my wife.

(Your honor, the defense would like to submit this blog entry. The defendant was obviously a devoted husband. How can anyone think he committed such a horrible act against the woman who was the focus of his life?)

Claudia and I have a series of running jokes between us. She says that I enjoy scaring small children, and I say that she has a tattoo that only small animals can see, announcing to all of them that she's an easy mark. There's ample evidence for both claims.

So when I got a call at work, while it may have been unusual for my wife to tell me we had a new dog, it was believable. It seems she saw this cute Pomeranian limping on the side of the road when she was coming home, and when she stopped the car, got out and made goo goo noises at it, it sensed a soft heart and hopped right in. Anyone else, that dog would have barked and probably whipped out a can of mace. My wife? Nope.

So she takes it to the vet, where the dog is pronounced to be in good health but does not have one of those handy microchips. She calls a couple of friends who will act as foster caregivers of animals, but it will be a few days before any of them have space and or time to take it. So she gives me the call.

This is not the first call like this I've received. Last year it was a chihuahua, one who was so people-friendly he would stand up on his hind legs and dance with you, and would hop in my lap whenever I sat down with him in the room. To avoid getting too attached to him, Claudia didn't want to give him a name. When I saw him for the first time, I joked that he was small enough to sleep in a soup bowl, so I just called him Soup. Eventually he was taken in by a family with kids.

Of course, while he was here, he earned himself the second name of 'Sir Pees a Lot.' Seems he was never fixed (or broken, as Claudia calls it), and felt the need to clear up any misconceptions about who owned the chairs, the toolbox, and the floor. He was also so hyper that he was never still. Ever. Imagine life with a large, affectionate rat who uses speed. That was Soup, and that was the reason I was a bit cautious about celebrating having another critter in the household.

The vet finishes the Pomeranian’s examination, (the damn thing was so furry, she had to hold it up by its hind legs to get a idea of whether it was male or not. It was) it gets loaded into the car for the next chapter in its life, and Claudia heads for home.

Now that soft heart does have some advantages. She's got a sense of connection that most people don’t have that lets her get closer, faster, to other people who have it. So when she's almost home and sees a man wandering around, she recognizes the look on his face. The look tells her right away what's going on.

“Are you looking for a dog?”

Where did the man live? Two streets over from our house. Where was my wife when she saw the poor lost dog? Two streets over. The man had held a door open for just one second too long, and Fluffy (yes, that is his real name) went for an unauthorized stroll. Who could have foreseen that he would get kidnapped?

So Fluffy is home, his owner has promised to get him chipped, and I get to ask my wife if the animal police have a warrant out for her arrest. Fluffy's owner is a handyman, so we now have someone to call if something needs to fixed. That's how real life works sometimes.

That's what makes writing about it such fun.

My puzzle pieces are not your puzzle pieces, even though they look the same

Let me explain what I mean. I've used the analogy of building a brick wall to describe the process of writing a story before, but let's take the same process and use a different description. When I write, I want to have a cohesive whole when I'm done. I want something that my wife can hand to a co-worker and say, 'Read this.' When that stranger is done, they should have a clear picture in their heads. One image. People can interpret it in all the different ways that they want (and that's one of the ways you can tell the goods ones, in my opinion), but they will agree that they see the same thing.

The irony is, that one image is put together from hundreds of smaller images. In your average work of fiction, most of the major characters are assembled from traits lifted from parents, friends, and people who once sat next to the author on the bus. If a location like a park or a house only has a minor part in our story, we can import it from real life. If we're going to do something unwholesome with it, like have the little old lady character stop there to check her map and see a gaunt, withered woman walk toward her, dragging her long hair on the ground and leaving a wet, bloody trail, well then maybe we should make up our own location. Or pick a real one and modify it (change the little pieces that make up the big piece) so much that its unrecognizable.

Now if I take these pieces:

An old Twilight Zone episode, The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.

A sound bite from a segment of This American Life, describing how a family deals with a grandmother's progressing Alzheimer’s.

News story after news story about young, growing boys and girls walking away from their families and lives to join Islamic State.

My experience tonight walking the dog. Seeing darkened houses and empty streets. Everything was silent, except for the music coming from one house at the end of a cul de sac; a light, carefree tune from the forties. Something to dance to in a wholesome, innocent manner, imagining that all your troubles are over and that no new ones will ever arrive.

I can mix them up and around in my head and see how they might fit together. Does the grandmother listen to the music, or does she keep asking where her favorite grandson is? Are things as cozy and friendly on Maple Street as they seem, or has our grandmother started spilling some of the embarrassing secrets that she's collected over her long life?

Now, you and I both have that same set of pieces, but here's the trick. They won't fit together for you the same way that they will for me. I've given you a couple of examples of how they fit in my head, but how would you have assembled them on your own? What are the odds that you would have come up with those specific pairings? Even assuming you and I both write horror, if piece A fits with piece B for me, you'll put A with C, and I'll ask you where the hell you got that connection point on C because I didn't see it until you showed me. We're all our own machines, churning out our own results no matter if you input the same data into two of us, or two thousand.

Now this is not going to hold up as an excuse to plagiarize someone's finished product, believe me. There are the writer's equivalents of brush strokes, as well as people's ability to pick up the intent and the feeling of a piece of writing, good or bad. That's not even taking into account the patterns that any decent search program can find. Get your own pieces, and write your own puzzle.

That's what I'm going to do, get back to writing.

Subliminal blood, sublime blood

I might have mentioned (once or twice) how much I love the Nightstalker series. I grew up watching it on broadcast TV, sometimes on the big set in my parents room, sometimes in my own room with the lights off and the bedsheets in my hand ready to be pulled over my head if things got too intense. I think a person gets a lot out of a childhood with the right amount of fear of the boogyman.

Now that technology has progressed to the point where a person can have more movies and shows available than would have fit in an entire house of VHS tapes, I like to indulge myself once in a while. The short, single season of Carl Kolchak's exploration of his own dark world is one of those indulgences.

There's one episode, Chopper, that I saw recently. An updated version of the story of the headless horseman, its first death comes with the roar of a motorcycle engine and the cold chime of polished steel. Highlander fans take note of the type of sword used to collect heads and its distinctive white grip. This was more than a decade before anyone heard of Connor MacLeod.

But we don't see the blood. The engine sound cuts out and we hear the sword ring. We get a brief, frame-frozen shot of the blade and the neck, and an instant later we see and hear the anguish of an innocent bystander who bore witness.

We don't see the blood, but we believe in it. The same part of our brains that helped small children watch painted herd animals come alive on cave walls lit by flickering firelight gives us the experience of seeing blood everywhere when we don't see it with our eyes. We have faith in the blood. Can I get an Amen?

Remember Psycho? Marion Crane, nude and oblivious, taking a nice, relaxing shower to ease the sting of realizing that love doesn't really conquer all? Just as she's about to settle into a life containing a little less faith, dear Mother arrives to provide a religious conversion on the edge of a butcher knife. After that movie was shown, there were people that swore Hitchcock had pulled a Wizard of Oz style effect and filmed the blood in color. People were as certain they saw crimson running down that shower drain as they were of their own names. In their heart of hearts, they believed it.

Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for that scene, liking the way it looked on film. Children all across the U.S. add the blood of Marion Crane to milk every day, and they guzzle it down with smiles on their sweet, innocent faces. I have some in my refrigerator right now.

I've known that scene used chocolate syrup for a while now, and a short time ago I had the pleasure of introducing my two nephews to Psycho. (You want a challenge? Try keeping a straight face while people you know are debating whether the killer is Norman or his mother) Sitting there and seeing a story play out that I already knew, it didn't make a difference. When I looked at watery chocolate syrup, I could feel Marion Crane dying, right there in front of me in black and white.

Now suppose someone is working with words and not pictures, and they want to make believers out of their readers . How do they cast that same spell?

Well, let's look at the tools we have, and at what we need to do. We need to convey a set of sensations, and we have every word in the English language and its competitors, and we also have all those fears our readers carry around with them. We have their dreads, as Mister Barker once put it. Those special kinds of fears that people think about and plan to avoid even when there's no source for them around. Most of those comes from old instincts that are buried so deep they're written in the language of nerve endings, sounds, and smells.

Feel: something sharp drags across the skin of your throat, and then the front of your shirt is wet.

Hear: the voice of a strong person who you respect for their intelligence, babbling in that tired, frustrated way that we automatically connect with someone suffering from Alzheimer's, or a non-fatal head wound.

Smell: that thick, wet, sweetness that sticks on someone's skin and hair when they get near a dead body lying out in the hot sun. That smell you can taste and feel.

Back to puppies and kittens. Please take your barf bags with you when you leave.

Important point: this medicine, like all others, only works when given in the correct dosage. Too much and we overload the system, numbing the reader. Too little and defensive reactions kick in, like denial. We end up with an audience that we've vaccinated against us. Curses, foiled again.

That's a rather complicated set of circumstances. How do we keep track of everything? By keeping our goal in mind. We want to tell a good story.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's good to be back, writing.

I have been assimilated

One of the points of my philosophy that I use on a near-daily basis, is the thought that anything can be either a benefit or a hindrance. I do mean anything. That million dollars you just inherited? If you broadcast your good fortune far and wide, get ready to to meet every relative you never heard of and all their cousins and step-siblings. Those chicken wings you grabbed for lunch turned out to be slightly underdone, and you spend a night worshiping the porcelain Buddha? Keep that story in the back of your mind, and the next time some annoying co-worker or fellow guest at a party won't take the hint that you're not enjoying their conversation. I once had a flat tire on a two lane highway in the middle of nowhere, temperature about a hundred degrees. So I struck up a conversation with the tow truck driver and found out some interesting information about how small-town life in that part of the state functions. It's all in how you use it, to quote Emma Frost.

So when my ancient clam-shell phone started locking up, forcing me to shut it off and reboot it at least once a day, it wasn't the falling of a trusted soldier. It was the opportunity to explore all the new technology that's available, a chance to grow.

(Oh man, I cursed that piece of junk out. Called it everything from an over-priced calculator to a miss-begotten piece of ape droppings. I had already been reduced to charging it in the car because I lost the wall charger at a con a few months ago. Why couldn't I get a new charger? They don't make them for that phone anymore.)

My best beloved had to head in and swap her phone out around this time, so, well, I was at the store anyway. I now own a smartphone with more computing power than the first computer I ever used in school, the trusty TRS-80.

How is this relevant to putting words on a page? Well, once I figure out how to use my new toy, I'll be able to have my characters use apps, have on-and-off text conversations, and web surf while in a car. Just like the cool kids.

But that's not how you get the things that make your creations breath, the bits of fictional people that make us smile at their happiness or curse their stupidity (maybe calling them a miss-begotten piece of ape droppings). We connect on an emotional level, and there's the rub. That dread that I felt when the salesman started going over all the features that the different phones have? Current generation readers won't feel that. My daughter has had her own phone for years now, and it's as much an extension of her as the pen I'm holding in my hand. To her, new tech is new magic. It's one of the sweet things that make life fun. If I write a story about someone from my generation who finally gets a smart phone, only to find its infected with digital gremlins who set him up with a fake, large-breasted profile on a dating site, well I'm sure there are a few readers who would like it. But you can tell from how closely I'm keeping that idea a secret what I think of its potential. Here's a hint, except for a couple of particulars, that idea dates back to black and white television.

To spice new tech with fear, you need fear that everyone feels. You need something that grips old and young and all points in between alike. Dig down, past the enthusiasm and the isolation. There's plenty of fertile ground.

So if you'll excuse me, I need to go plant something in that soil, and keep writing.

One other thing? If I know you personally, don't feel neglected if I don't call for a while. My phone was so old that the salesman didn't have a cord to transfer my contacts. I have to re-enter them all by hand.