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.

Everyone else

Man, look at this place. Where did all the dust come from? I need to have a word with the maid.

This is a story where nothing horrible happens. There are no monsters lurking under the bed or in the closet. All the children's imaginary friends are benign, and they don't really exist in the first place. The babysitter is a sweet girl who's saving money for college, and she's going to pledge to the best sorority on campus when she gets there. Daddy doesn't keep body parts in the secret freezer in the basement, and Mommy didn't accidentally run over a hobo while she was on her way back from visiting the young stud she's seeing on the side.

This is about all the people who are never going to be the main character in one of my stories, Stephen King's, the late Richard Matheson's, or the stories of anyone else who enjoys distributing cold shivers. When something is happening to whoever's in Hell House, Hill House, or the Overlook, nothing is happening to all the other people of the world, and that's how they like it. So let's spread some of our special kind of love their way, shall we? Otherwise their lives would be so boring.

Unless a story is set on a desert island or a different planet, it's likely to contain characters that are out of the range of action. The sweet old lady who lives one street over from the haunted house, the cop who used to patrol a certain area of town but who got promoted before all the children in that area learned that new song about the Donner Party, and the sorority sister (who once baby-sat to earn money for school) of the woman who's hearing voices in her head that tell her to add some rat poison to the cookies she's making for the PTO meeting. Now all these fine people are (probably) going to live happy, normal lives, but they're in our story. They're there because as unique as it would be to have a haunted house set in a huge, open space in the middle of a city, or a housewife who never spoke more than five words to anyone while she was in school, if your average reader learns about those things, their disbelief is going to get very heavy.

These people are going to take up space in our story anyway, so let's put them to work and make them earn their keep. I'm sure we can find something fun to do with them.

Now if we, the writers, do our job well, then our protagonist, which in this case will be a plucky older woman, will easily stand out from all these literary extras. She'll have lots of small attributes that combine to make an interesting whole, and make us connect to her. But we have a limited amount of clay to use in putting her together, because the polar opposite of that mute housewife, the little old woman who's been everything from a nuclear physicist to a decorated commando, is just ridiculous. If she's traveled during her life, she might be able to understand how a new immigrant would have a different sense of the way traffic laws work, but not if she's lived a life of near-isolation in a small town. If that part of her life is a key part of the plot, well then she can have a friend, someone that's traveled a bit, and who can point out that our hero doesn't know everything, despite all the self-confidence that she does.

Or maybe we've written ourselves into a corner. The words are pouring out hard and heavy, and before you know it, the little-old-lady Miss Marple clone that we've fallen in love with is on top of a fifteen story building with the door to the stairs blocked by generic slasher who's set his dog loose to play 'Fetch a piece of the sleuth.' What now? Well, maybe she's wearing a coat. It's summer, but the weather has taken an unexpected chill. Now she's so dedicated to solving the mystery of the missing golden crock pot, that she just ran out of her house that morning without thinking. Her first stop was to visit her friend who once was a long-distance runner, to ask how easy it would be to run three miles with a heavy crock pot on your back. Her friend is a practical sort of person, who loaned our absent-minded sleuth a jacket, the one she has on now as a ferocious chihuahua is bearing down on her. As Lullabelle is running up to eat our sweet little old lady, (it's my scenario, so I get to name the dog) our heroine has one of those moments where a person's brain moves faster than their consciousness can follow. She reaches into the pocket without knowing why, because the survival instinct in her has recognized the jacket she's wearing as the same one she's seen her friend in before, when that friend goes running. Our heroine's hand comes out clutching a can of pepper spray. Lullabelle gets a face-full, and while that doesn't end the peril it gives our heroine some breathing room. Plus, we've just avoided getting a reputation as a writer who snuffs little old ladies.

Now that's a good use for someone who would otherwise just drift along as part of the background noise, but it's also an obvious use. Often the best parts of a story are the ones that the readers fill in for themselves. Let's take another look at our heroine.

What's her outlook on life? Is she optimistic? Jaded? Does she believe in her local councilman but wouldn't trust the current president if he said the sun would rise tomorrow? This is part of all those quirks that make her distinctive. Now how do we convey those quirks? Well, we can spend two pages or more on an inner monologue and put our readers to sleep, or we can follow our heroine through her day. When she gets up in the morning one of the first things she does is get the paper. (Which is telling of itself. She has a computer, but still likes the ritual of reading her newspaper) Does she mumble something to herself about the paperboy because he threw it under her car? Does she find a hand-written note inside the paper, thanking her for recovering the paperboy's bicycle when it was stolen last week? Or is the paper right in front of her door, hand-placed there because the paperboy has learned the hard way that this little old lady is a former cop, when last month he offered to give her a special discount if she started paying cash and his parents got a visit from a patrolman.

Now take all that possibility, and multiply by however many minor characters your story will contain. The people don't even have to have to have active parts in the story. In the above example we showed what kind of person our heroine is by watching her do something completely normal, but it was something normal that she did in her own way. The paperboy himself never entered the picture.

There are no limits. All those neighbors, paperboys, and old friends? They're yours, so make them fit.

Now if you'll pardon me, I have some little old ladies to kill off.

Still writing.