Criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the vampires come from, part two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I'm writing about it.

Genesis and evolution of the vampire, part one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A necessary step?

Ask your standard Joe on the street what horror is sometime. I'm willing to bet that A: He or she gives examples rather than a definition, and B: Most of those examples are movies, and they include things like Dracula, Friday the Thirteenth, and Halloween, if they're my age. If they're not, well, hopefully it's American Horror Story or even Paranormal Activity. Just please not Twilight, because it really isn't horror.

Now I need to veer a bit to one side here. Hold on to the rail, please. While I'm distrustful of those who say one genre or another has a 'purpose' or function,' I do think that some types of fiction (printed or filmed) have effects on people. One effect that horror can have, depending on how your head is wired, is to help you deal with the 'real' things that you're afraid of. You watch Roddy McDowall triumph over a murderous, psychotic ghost, then you don't think having to ask your grouchy boss for some vacation time is as bad as you thought it could be. A girl survives (mostly) an encounter with a crazed family who kill all her friends with meathooks and chainsaws, so you can survive doing your taxes. A young doctor finds his true love and saves her from the vampirous reincarnation of her distant ancestor, so I can get over the disappointment of rejection and send more of my work out. We can tell all those motivational gurus that they're full of it, but those poor fools whose only sin was to take a wrong turn? Heck, that was us just last week.

Now here's my question, how far off the path of reality do we need to go? With the success of the Saw and Hostel series of movies, I'd be hard pressed to say that those films don't offer their audiences something. But I wonder if it's the same as the ones with a supernatural element. I know that there's nothing overtly supernatural in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so maybe my second example isn't the best, but the sheer craziness of the Leatherface family keeps it from being torture porn. Even one of my favorite directors, Takashi Miike, filmed 'Audition,' and had a cameo in one of the Hostel movies (brief tangent, I saw Audition, and it creeped me out like nothing else since when I saw Night of the Living Dead, at about age ten).

Does it make the horror easier to deal with, if it's about something unreal? I'm not going to address people's beliefs on ghosts, etc here, because for this discussion it isn't rellevant. Do we come away better armored for having watched The Exorcist, or The Last House on the Left?

What, you think I know? I'm asking the question. What's your answer?

Sadly, the bit in the second paragraph about rejection is true to life. Amazon shot down Roja based on the pitch alone, and Gray Matter Press declined on Dirty. Oh well.

I'm still writing.

Why the ending matters so much

Okay, picture this: You're a contestant on a game show, and your challenge is to run an obstacle courser. It's a really strange one, and you've got a crowd of people standing in front of it, and they will decide whether you win or lose. It's a big crowd, too.

First, you get up on a stage, and you have to get the crowd interested. So you tell them a scary story about a family living in a haunted house, and how your heroes were smart enough to solve the mystery, and kind enough to be gentle to the people who had the best of intentions when they started it. You've got 'em.

Then you're off. You climb up a narrow beam, carefully balancing between falling one way or the other. You run at breakneck speed toward solid walls, nimbly finding some way over, under, or around them at the last minute. Far above the crowd, you get progressively farther out on ledges, somehow always able to keep from falling.

Through the whole thing, you've been moving in roughly the same direction. At the end of the course that you're headed toward there are two posts with a ribbon tied across them and a big sign above them that says 'Finish.' You spring over the last obstacle in your way and dash along the straight, open path. At the last minute, you come to a dead stop and run off in a different direction. You go to a tree that no one was paying any attention to, slap it like a kid playing tag, and take your bows in front of the crowd.

By the way, did I mention my wife and I watched 'Red Lights' on Netflix last week?

Most of the time when you tell a story, you're going somewhere. Cast your mind way back to geometry class and see yourself drawing your story like a line on a sheet of graph paper. You start at a point, and go in a certain direction for a certain distance. (So it's a ray illustrating a vector, if you remember all those terms) Even if you wibble around and don't go in a straight line, your reader can still see the graph in their heads. They can see where you started, and where you finished. They'll probably even draw their own simplified, straighter line to remember the story. So if you curve, have a reason.

But if you only curve a little (and some curving is a good thing), your reader soon gets an idea where you're headed before you get there. If you curve a lot, it takes longer, but most will eventually figure out the direction that you're going. This is a good thing. People enjoy having a certain amount of knowledge about how a story is going to end. Not all of it, but a certain amount. Letting them pick out the point of the ending, on their own, makes them emotionally invested. They're gambling with a bit of their own happiness.

So if you zip along in a straight line at the end and then suddenly go in a different direction and stop, your audience has invested with you and lost. How likely are you to keep investing with a broker that lost your money?

Given that, why would someone change directions at the last minute like that? Well, imagine you're the one running the obstacle course. The whole point of this is to please the audience. (You want them to keep investing with you!) So, right as you step out to wait for the signal to start the course, you take a good look at them, just to see if you can judge what they might be in the mood for.

They're all wearing masks; big, plain white ones with tiny holes for eyes. They don't even have any features. You have no idea if the people are smiling, frowning, or laughing while you risk life and limb for their amusement. Because we're using this as an analogy for making a film or writing a book, we can include the fact that you can have either test screenings or beta readers. But all that does is pull one or two people from the audience at those times that you take a quick break and have those people take off their masks for a minute while you ask them if they like how things are going so far. You don't get to run the whole course, and then do it again differently if most of the people didn't like it. You get one shot per course. Period.

So you better know ahead of time if the audience will appreciate your little twist that you think is the coolest thing ever. If you're a film-maker, you need to watch other films and learn how their audiences reacted. If you're a writer, you better read other books in your genre and know if the audience liked them or not. The people who went to see those film-makers/writers run their courses are the same ones who will be watching you.

By the way, a bit of research on the web shows that there might be an alternate ending to 'Red Lights.' I hope so.

Still writing.

How to dance

For the first few days after I sent Roja in, I was in this weird state of, 'okay, now what do I do?' Working on short stories after doing a book feels like a step back. I keep wanting to dive nosefirst into the next one. Of course, bitter experience has shown me that's one of the best ways to foul something up.

So I started on one that's a little different. It's not horror, or even science fiction. It might have its roots in the months that I spent down in Panama when I was in the Marine Corps, or it may just have been lodged in a loose stitch in my little bag of nightmares. Sometimes I get a stray beat in my heat that won't go away, the kind that you find yourself tapping your foot to when you're not paying attention. At some point, I could see a man dancing to that beat, and the audience clapping it in time. This guy can move like few human beings have ever been able to move, and people love him for it. Then I saw something really bloody happen, right there on the stage.

On a different note, my wife took me to see Hansel and Gretel, Witch Hunters today. It was a good fun, but more like an action movie than I thought it would be. It reminded me a lot of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, only without the historical connections. That gave it a lot more room to play around with themes that it wouldn't normally have. It was fun.

Still writing, only right now it feels like dancing.