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 funny thing happened on my way here.

Thanks to Netflix, I have something of a nightly ritual now. I found out a while back that if I get really into working on something and then try to go to bed, mental inertia keeps my head running in the same direction for a couple of hours. Lying there in the dark, I keep getting ideas for new stories and little insights on how I could improve existing ones. So I'll turn on a flashlight (I accidentally turned on the over head light once in the middle of the night when I thought Claudia was still up and in her study. The sounds she made convinced me that between midnight and six AM my loving wife is replaced by some alien life form that is both homicidal and photosensitive. I now use the flashlight) and write my new ideas down. Then three minutes later another idea will pop up. You see where this is going.

So I enjoy some TV reruns to shift my brain into neutral before closing down. I watch shows I saw and loved when I was younger, and some of the shows that gave the seeds of ideas that are still banging around in my mind today. One of these was the original Mission: Impossible series, truly a gem if there ever was one.

I started at the beginning, and got a shock when I discovered that stoic Peter Graves has not always been the infallible leader of our team. Steven Hill was originally in that position, and did a good job of it. But I'm noticing something else, too.

As I work my way through them, I'm re-watching some of the ones that made a big impression on me. That's where I got another one of those moments where I have to admit, just to myself, that I'm not a kid any more.

You know the premise of the show. Mister Phelps gets a set of instructions on a tape-recorder that's been stashed in an abandoned car somewhere, or hidden in a phone booth marked 'Out of order.' He briefs his team of super-spies, and then they dive right into the action. We know what they need to do, but because a detail or two from the plan never gets mentioned, we don't know exactly how they're going to do it. Somewhere along the line, something seems to go wrong. But more often than not, it turns out to have been part of the strategy from the beginning.

I never questioned how none of those tape recorders were ever discovered and vandalized by kids, or how Phelps’s car was never stolen when he left it parked in the street with the top down. Having studied a bit of electronics engineering and a smattering of statics, I now look at all those neat toys with a bit of skepticism, wondering how much range a detonator with no antenna would have and pondering what metal that expanding beam has to be made of to go all the way across a room without collapsing under its own weight. But the biggest shock is coming from the tension in the scenes. Most of them are repeats for me, and at some point over all the years I'm sure I've gone over them all in head at one point or another. I've probably even used them as a model when I'm trying to give to readers the same effect that these shows had on me. What you take in when you're young forms your framework.

Good grief but some of those lines are campy. Peter Graves sounds like he's reciting Shakespeare, and Martin Landau hams it up enough to be a three course Christmas dinner. Peter Lupus and Greg Morris now seem just a little stiff, though I've found one episode where they both get a bit more of the spotlight.

On the other hand, damn but Barbara Bain seems to be made of ice. She's got a lot more on screen presence than I ever remember. It really is a pity they didn't let her get a little more hands-on with the dirty work. She could have pulled it off. On the other hand, it probably would have made people's heads explode, back then. The TV watching audience of that time likely wasn't ready to see a ruthless female. Might be part of the reason that real-world female agents were so effective.

It's like someone went back in time and made them all re-film every episode, with none of what really mattered to me in the show. I have my memories, and they don't match what I see. How? Well, it's difficult to admit this, but the obvious answer is that the change isn't in the show, but in my head. Some of the episodes were made before I was even born, so I couldn't have been too old when I saw them. The thought of having once been naïve enough to worry whether the team would survive, let alone succeed, is, well, let's just say I plan on claiming my blog was hacked on the day this post was written if I ever get asked about it.

Am I going to stop watching? Heck no. Even with the mismatch, to me this series will always be the standard that all the others are judged against. This show emphasized wit over brawn, and the agents are more like con men than soldiers. Without Mission Impossible, I don't think there would have ever been shows like Hustle, or Macgyver. It had, and still has, the appeal of being a little more sophisticated than what the James Bond franchise became for a while. Unrealistic gadgets or no, there's a lot of the real here.

So I'll watch it, after I write.

The world's biggest marshmallow

So yesterday, my wife and I brought home a new addition to the household. She's named Diamond, is a boxer/retriever mix, and in the first hour she had established herself in the pecking order somewhere below our long-haired cat. A single paw-swipe at her nose sent her running away and hiding behind my wife, who was trying to be supportive while laughing so hard she had to sit down.

The book is coming along, slowly, but it's getting where I need it to be. I'm also looking at new markets where I can submit some of the stories I have sitting around on my hard drive. Also, I'll probably go through Roja at least one more time before I consider it ready to use as agent-bait. It's nice to have a plan of what to do. Now the only thing left is to follow through.

Some small part of my brain is also going back to The Red Man Burning. I haven't worked on it in a while, not since I missed getting In The Dark done on time (which still annoys the hell out of me). I'm having to go back to all those weird, awkward moments from when I was a kid. That's a time when you have to find your own way in a world where you have almost no say in what goes on in your own life, the people who have power of life and death over you have a set of priorities that they created long before you ever showed up, and everything from doorknobs to grocery shelves are designed for people who are six inches to a foot taller than you. Childhood has been romantisized in our culture into some magical, beautiful period in our lives when the world is fresh and beautiful and there's no lesson so hard that we can't get through it. I'm sure someone, somewhere, grew up in a place like that, but the more people I meet, the more I think that childhood is when spirits are broken and psychopaths learn just how well they're going to fit in. We all go through that period, and then we selectively scrub our memories of it until we're left with something we can tell ourselves and other people.

That's what I need to capture.

In the middle of writing this, Diamond started whining, which we've figured might be her signal for 'Could I step outside for a moment? I have some business to attend to.' I was only planning on taking her out into the backyard, but right now it's cool and misty out, with something that's not quite fog thickening up to the point where anything farther than a block away is hidden in soft gray clouds. I grabbed her leash and we both took a tour of the neighborhood while her toe nails clicked on the sidewalk, and every other sound was muted by the mist. Beautiful.

To end this on a cheery note, if I can get this to work right, I'll be posting a picture of our new dog right here. She's a big, furry lump of woof, and she's dozing in front of my desk while I'm writing this.

Still writing.