Polishing

Last weekend was fun. My wife and I had friends over Saturday for a game of Mana Punk (http://mana-punk.com/) and in between my character recovering from an attack by something called a grave grub and dodging a gorilla sheathed in fire, our group discovered that we were going through one of the new modules for the game, Aria of Sorrow. Jeremy gave me a copy a few weeks back so I could go through it and get more familiar with the game, and now I'm glad I held off on reading it.

Also, summer has firmly settled in to Houston. This is noteworthy because the summers down here are not like summers anywhere else. If a Houston summer decided to go on the road for a while and seek its fortune, I can only imagine the horror. When it took I45 north and explored Dallas and Fort Worth, both cities and their many suburbs would declare emergencies and shut down when people discovered that their clothes were sweat-glued to their bodies. When it got to the dry panhandle, people wouldn't mind the heat but they would all stop what they were doing and take pictures of cars, buildings, and everything sinking into the mud that used to the southern edge of the high plains. If the traveling summer (I need to use that as a story title) got all the way to the north pole, then you, me, and everyone else would get washed into never-never land by the resulting tidal wave. Then the Elder Ones would thaw out and get the planet back.

But then I wouldn't be around to see Handsome Devil in print, so forget that.

Jeremy asked me to give Bittermint Tea a bit of a rewrite, saying it needs a smidge more atmosphere. Initially I was thinking that the GM would be able to pull that off from the framework I had lain, but I'm a bit spoiled in that regard from being raised on old Hammer Horror movies that starred people like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Those two and their peers could give you a chill by just looking at their watches. So I'm tweaking the adventure hook and adding what was going to be just a children's story but is quickly growing into a creation myth. (that'll teach him to send something back to me, dammit!) I've set myself a possibly ambitious deadline of having it done this weekend.

So I need to get back to writing.

Next

So, while I'm on pins and needles waiting for January to hurry up and get here, what am I doing?

I've just sent off a query to The Dreadful Cafe, telling them what a fantastic fit 'Stilling the Demons' would be for their Membrane anthology. The last time I tried to sell that story to anyone was back in October, and Tor graciously declined, so it needed some air. Yesterday my lady love and I had lunch with our friends Jen and Jeremy, who own Hot Goblin Press and the Mana Punk gaming system. He's looked over Bittermint Tea and Ironlace Orchids, and he had some suggestions about ways to tweak it. One bit of advice he gave sticks with me. When you're writing an adventure module, if you can get the players to say WTF in the first five minutes, you've got them. Jeremy's been doing this for a while, and I'm pondering ways to follow his hint.

It's bugging me a bit to have In the Dark and The Red Man Burning sitting on the back burner, but I already have one book finished, and I need to work on getting it sold. I saved a copy of it to my Kindle so I can read it during my lunch breaks, and I'm seeing a place or two where it could be stronger. I was rushed to get it ready for the Amazon contest, and I have to admit it's not as good as it could be. I still get to grouse, though. They rejected it on the first past, meaning they never read anything but my pitch.

Oh, I'm also waiting on the contract for Dirty to arrive in the mail. I can not put into words how cool it is to type those words.

Am I still writing? Hell yes.

I am going to be published

I got the e-mail last Monday. Actually I got one before that, asking for a bio. That set a nerve in the center of my brain twitching and made all the tiny bones inside my ear canal vibrate. But I didn't want to say anything in case things fell through. It's on.

It still doesn't feel real. I've seen the table of contents for the book, and my name is right there alongside some pretty distinguished company. But some unhelpful voice in my head keeps whispering, “That doesn't mean anything. It's just some words typed into a file and then that file was posted. What if you go around claiming you're going to be in this book, and then Godzilla wades ashore and destroys the city where the publisher lives? You're going to look pretty silly, aren't you?”

What, the voices in your head are logical?

Part of this lurking dread comes from a decision I made a while back. I didn't want to be one of those people who go around claiming to be a writer when in reality they hardly ever put words on a page, or who blogs endlessly and expects that to count. When 'I am a writer' is a functional reality, I will write more often than I don't, and send those words off to a publisher. Those publishers will send money back, and I will spend that money. I don't plan to quit my job just yet, but if I can make enough money throwing nightmares and daydreams at people, I'm not going to keep moving boxes and wire in a warehouse where it gets to be a hundred degrees during the summer. I've introduced myself as 'a writer with a day job' once or twice, but that's a placeholder. If I were to smile at someone and say, 'Hi. I'm Stephen Pope, and I work a forty-hour week at a regular job and then come home and alternate between pounding on a word file and walking around muttering to myself,' I might be a bit more honest, but I'm going to get even more funny looks from the people around me than I do now.

The anthology is called Handsome Devil: Tales of Sin and Seduction, and it's due out in January from Prime Books. My piece, Dirty, involves a young girl coming of age while living in a Civil War-era house who hates the new boarder that her mom has taken up with. If you think you can guess where the story goes, I would say you might be on track. But this track is longer and more twisted than you can expect, even if you've been around a few tracks before.

In a way, it's probably a good thing that this doesn't feel real yet, a very good thing. Every time I think about it and make myself believe that it's actually happening I start giggling like Jack Nicholson's version of the joker. I creep people out enough as it is.

I'm not going to stop writing.

Cruelty, casual and ignorant

Once, when I was way too young, I saw the 1965 version of Agatha Christie's famous 'Ten Little Indians.' I was probably about seven or so, and my sister and I were spending our days at a babysitter's house. I assume this was during the summer, because I think we would get taken over there shortly after breakfast, but the truth is I can't remember. My recollection of childhood is blurry like that.

The film is good, and while there's no blood shown, it's still a bit darker than I would want a child to see. There are four versions of the film, and even though the '65 incarnation isn't my favorite, it's fun to watch. I have it on DVD, and when I watched it the other day I wondered if they had released my favorite version on to DVD yet. That's when I did a Google search.

I found out that they have released it, but when I looked at some of the titles that were coming up as translated versions of the film, and book, the names didn't make sense. I've picked up a bit of Spanish over the years, and what I was reading under the Spanish and other Romance language versions substituted a word for the color black in the title. With a 'WTF' look on my face, I followed up.

It seems when the book was released it had a slightly different title. I found a copy of the book in a library sometime during my time in the Corps, and it had a title of 'And then there were none,' which I recognized from a poem that is used in the book, so these many years I've thought that was the title. But when Ms. Christie sent her story out into the world back in 1939 the poem wasn't about Indians, and the island it takes place on wasn't named Indian Island. The original title was Ten Little N*****s. That's why the Spanish version came up as Diez Negritos.

I was born and raised in Dallas, and spent time growing up in smaller cities and some small towns. I know enough about the South to connect with the pride that a person can feel in claiming it as where their roots come from, but I do not feel that it will ever clean itself from the taint of slavery. No matter what else happened, from the culture, through the courage, to the full facts of who did or didn't own slaves, the South has a permanent stain on it that comes from stolen lives, shed blood, and the attitude that let people sip their tea or whiskey while other human beings were getting bullwhipped just up the road. There were people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line who saw it as an abomination, to be sure. But not enough of them to prevent it or change it. The founding fathers of this country didn't outlaw it when they put together either the Articles of Confederation or later, the Constitution. They kicked the can down the road, with results that are history.

I know that attitudes in the past were different. One of my favorite writers, H.P. Lovecraft, and some of his contemporaries, had that same attitude. The problem is that the attitude was based in ignorance, the kind that lets an intelligent person see themselves as 'better' than other human beings, if not by divine providence, then at least by inherent nature. If any of those writers had simply sat down and put in the time to get to know these people that they were dismissing so casually, they might have had one of those epiphanies that make life so interesting.

That laxness comes at a price. How many young people who are black have heard of Ms. Christie and picked up one of her books, and after enjoying it, might have decided to find out more about this lady who told such great stories? When they found out that one book's original title, do you think they kept reading any further? When we keep our ignorance out on the kitchen table where anyone who drops by can see it, those visitors are going to stop listening to what we have to say.

That's how this connects to writing. If you want someone besides just the people who think exactly the way you think to hear your voice, you damn well better be someone worth listening too. Good points are valuable. Ignorance is cheap and plentiful, you can find it on most radio and TV channels.

So with that in mind, back to writing.

Reminded of a line about Cliff Burton

One of the bands that I discovered when I was at Camp Pendleton was a fun group called Metallica. This was back in the days of cassette players, and while the hand held ones were common, a lot of folks carried 'boom boxes' of various sizes. The main difference between the two was while the smaller ones had a speaker, unless you wanted your music to sound like a handful of marbles in a clothes dryer, you used headphones. The boom boxes were designed with better speakers.

So I was wandering around the squad bay one Sunday afternoon, on firewatch. This meant I was in uniform, I couldn't sit down and read, and if something awful happened, I was supposed to be the one who dealt with it. What it meant to me was that I was walking around an open room the size of a small airport lounge and bored out my skull. So of course, when I heard some guy's boom box vibrating with sound that made me think of a mob hit squad bludgeoning some poor fool to death with guitars and drums, I asked, “Hey, what is that?”

“Master of Puppets.”

The next time I went to the PX, I looked in the music section. There was a tape with cover art showing rows and rows of white crosses used as gravestones. The dead grass that grew among them was thick and neglected, and puppet strings connected the stones to hands that were way up in heaven. I forked over some of my hard-earned money, and listened to the whole tape that night. That's how I got hooked.

While I was, and remain, a fan I wasn't a devoted fan. I didn't join the fan club and I wasn't in a position to take leave whenever I wanted so I could go to a concert. This also took place in the days before the web, and so it was a while later before I found out that one of the guitar-bludgeoners, Cliff Burton, had died. When I got back from the nine-month deployment that was my share of Desert Storm, I was hanging around in a friend's room, and he had one of the popular music magazines sitting out. Inside was a tribute to Burton, and the writer had summed up his feelings in a simple phrase: Death sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The other day Fear.net had an article about Richard Matheson dying. To me that doesn't just suck. It means the circle of people I would enjoy spending time with, sharing ideas with, and getting inspired by is now smaller. It means no more books, or stories period, by a man who could write tales that would stick in your head and pop back up just as you were trying to sleep. It means I can never shake hands with the man who scared the holy **** out of me.

My favorite horror movies and shows are a diverse bunch. The Legend of Hell House is up near the top of the list, and goodies like the old Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner scares everyone on the plane by trying to get them to look out the window will never get old. Stir of Echoes was just creepy, and Last Man on Earth scared and saddened me. I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man when I was a kid, and it really bugged me because it touched on real-life themes and problems that even today you don't see in horror movies. (and it still didn't do the book justice, as I later found out) Most of these were movies or episodes that I encountered when I was young, and it really never occurred to me to notice who wrote them. I can look back and say maybe I thought it would be like looking up a magician's sleeve. Once you know the trick, the magic is gone.

Once I did connect all the dots, the hunt was on. Every time I went browsing at Barnes and Noble or Borders, I made sure to check the M section of either the horror or general fiction. I went back to the video store and rented Trilogy of Terror and watched it with fresh eyes. When I heard that someone had once asked George Romero where he got the idea of people being trapped in a house and surrounded by the undead, and he (supposedly) said, 'I stole it from Richard Matheson,' I must have split my own face, grinning.

Well, the magic may not be gone, but the magician sure as hell is. There will be no more tricks from one of the greatest of conjurers, someone who not only made us shudder but made us think. Forgive me if I stand up one more time to applaud.

Then I'm going to get back to writing.

Wait, I wrote this?

After enjoying Saturday as the first day off I've had in two weeks, I spent Sunday running Welcome Home through a rewrite, trying to get it ready to submit before I called it a night. According to my spreadsheet (yes, I keep track of these things. Don't you?) the last time I sent this story out was three months ago. Shame on me for letting it sit idle that long.

This was an annoying rewrite for a couple of reasons. First, this is one of the older stories that I have. I worked on this thing when I lived up in the panhandle, and part of the reason it sticks in my head so well is because I busted my butt researching it. It takes place in North Carolina, an area that I have a passing acquaintance with from my days of being stationed at Camp Lejeune. But it covers a lot of past history of a fictional small town, and I wanted to do such a place, and the state it sits in, justice. So I checked out books from the library and dug into online databases for information on everything from the logging and tobacco industries to what kind of birds might be found in such a place. Now imagine how I felt when I gave this story, which I think is damn good, a read-through Sunday and noticed how all that liberally applied knowledge was dragging the tale down like a lead weight tied around a sprinter's big toe. I chopped the history and wildlife down a bit and saved three hundred words. It's still a large story, but the smaller size makes a wee bit more sellable. That'll help ease the grousing over the feeling, maybe justified, maybe not, of so much time going to waste.

Second? Well, as I just mentioned, I like this one. When I finally put the last comma on the last rewrite, I got one of those rare highs that you sometimes feel when you can look at something you've made and you can't help but channel your inner Keanu Reeves and just say, 'Whoa.' Maybe it's vain, but I sometimes read my own stuff after enough time has passed from writing it. I know the story, but the little details get lost in day to day life, and that's a good thing. It keeps me from obsessing over something I've put the 'finished' stamp on, and it lets me write something else. Only this time when I went back, all those really cool details were there, but so were a hell of a lot of things that quickly earned the label of 'What is this crap?' There were descriptives and ramblings that sounded like a fourth grader wrote them after discovering Edgar Allan Poe. If they were in published books, they would be the books you shove under the couch when company dropped by. What made it so damn annoying is that I have submitted 'Welcome Home' to more than one publication, and proofread it. This story has gone out with my name on it and with me singing its praises in my own head each time. Either my doppelganger crept up here and screwed with the file, or my viewpoint has changed in the years since I wrote it. Now that could be a good thing, sure. Hell, I can't think of any circumstance that would keep it from being a great thing. But looking at the story as it was, I have got to admit that the editors were right to reject it. If I was in their shoes, I would have rejected it too. That makes me a bit less confident that all the other stuff that I've sent out is up to par.

But enough reflecting. Time to get back to writing.

Done, with a couple of things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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