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.

Truth and Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still writing.

Life's little random bits

Okay, give me a second here. Because my wife and I are both exhausted at the end of a normal work day, laundry normally gets done on weekends. In this little chore, my beloved shamelessly exploits my machismo, and I end up being the one to load the washer and the dryer. Just now, as I was putting a load of colors in, the alarm on the car, about a foot away, goes off. I had the keychain and alarm remote in my pocket, and one of the keys probably hit the panic button. Our garage is not a large one, and so the sound bounced around and I jumped about three feet in the air. I'm still hearing the horn, somewhere in the background noise of my head.

Big deal? No. Just one of those odd moments that prove how chaotic the real world is. But think how something like that could be used in a story. While driving to lunch this afternoon, I saw a man riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. He was wearing a black suit, black sneakers, and a black straw cowboy hat. The black sunglasses added just the right touch. Now he could have been on his way home from church, on his way to church, or maybe he just didn't have a car to drive at that time and felt like dressing up anyway when he went out to lunch. Whatever the reason, I can say with 99% percent certainty that it's nothing alarming, and probably not even interesting.

But what could it have been, if we ignored the laws of probability? If we were characters in books we like to read or in movies that we like to watch, what might have happened? Would he have noticed us staring, cranked a bit on his handlebar brakes to slow down, and then turned around to come tap on the passenger-side window? Might we have seen him get a flat tire, and then come ask us for a ride because he's on his way to an exorcism, and can't be late? Maybe we would have forgotten about him completely, until we came home and saw him waiting on our front porch, smiling at us.

A little while back when I was explaining how that 'dumb' heroine might not be so dumb, I asked you to take note of all the little details of life around you that might mean something. Now think about all those odd, random moments you've had when life took a turn without signaling. Have you ever seen someone streak across the room while you and your friends were playing bingo? Encountered some idiot driving the wrong way on the street? Been talking to someone in a darkened room during the middle of the night, you turn around to see what they're suddenly looking at over your shoulder, and you see a single balloon drifting down the hall toward you?

Pick one of those moments, and pull it in the direction of your preferred genre. What's the story behind what you saw? If you're a romantic, is that person driving the wrong way trying to get to their true love's house before they go off with someone else? It's too easy to pigeonhole the streakers into comedy, so let's make them players in a drama about a bunch of guys on a Navy ship sitting around for weeks as they wait for the day when they go in the take the beaches of Kuwait. That's a teeny bit of humor in a long, slow story about young men wondering whether or not they're going to survive.

Get your mind used to doing that, to taking those odd moments, and even those normal moments, and then say 'What if -?” Congratulations. That's the first step to writing.

That's what I'm doing.