Ghost stories in front of the Christmas tree

A few days ago I finished reading 'The Woman In Black.' As I've probably said before, one of the regrets of my miss-spent youth is that I never dove into a lot of the classics that make up the foundation of my preferred genre. Rest assured, I'm slowly chipping away at that deficiency.

I saw the recent movie first, and I deliberately avoided reading anything about it or the book, to avoid comparing the two until I had finished both. I'm not going to get into spoilers. Go read the one and see the other, in that order.

What got me thinking, and now writing, is a minor bit at the beginning, a tiny little piece of the setting. The image of a large, proper Victorian family sitting in what we would call the living room, staying warm by the fire while winter gusts and blows outside, telling ghost stories.

This is going to be another stroll down the trail of 'maybe,' like I strolled not to long ago when I pondered what might have sparked the first belief in vampires. We're going to meander along this twisted path where ever we may, not minding the destination as much as enjoying the journey. It's not going to be the last word, the first word, or even necessarily a coherent word. This is my word, one of many.

I really wonder what the average person's views on family was, back then. I like having my own house, and I like choosing who comes and goes. Some days it's nice to just sit in the middle of the house and listen to silence.

Things were different, way back when. You might have three generations living under one roof, and everyone sharing bedrooms. Add to that cozy scenario folks coming in from across town or a different town, and you're going to have company no matter where you are in the house. It's a happy time, and even if it doesn't really feel like a happy time, you've got little choice but to act happy. There's whatever version of a feast your life can afford, and probably a bit of wine or gin. You get the renewed love of seeing your whole family together again, and all the petty old quarrels that are part of the same package. Since we're talking about Victorian England here, there's the added stress of it being colder than a witch's pointy hat. Everyone wants that perfect spot by the fire.

At the end of the day, people are going to be tired, maybe a bit grouchy, and groping through the house by lamp or candle-light. Christmas Eve is the traditional time for the stories, though I doubt they were all kept until then. So when the big night comes not only have we had a few day's buildup, but there's the anticipation of wondering just what's in that sock you nailed up by the chimney. The perfect setting to provide a bit of escape.

Why ghost stories? Again, it's dark, which is always scary, and it's cold. The caveman part of our head tells us there won't be as much food running around for us to hunt, and that the days themselves will be shorter. Because of the time period, our family unit has probably seen one or two of its previous members pass on during this season of coughs and chills. If they haven't, they've seen or heard stories of the 'unfortunates' who die from cold and starvation this time of year. Merry Christmas.

The connection is subtle to us, but in those days the relevant themes were more prevalent. The story from the handy family Bible is about death, resurrection, and hope. Father Christmas wasn't so fat and cuddly back then, so in each person's head, he would have that nebulous quality that people associate with a universal father figure: loving, but stern. If that grouchy old man in the big house came back as a ghost when he died, then that means that death isn't the end, no matter how much we fear that it is. It also means we better bite our tongue when Aunt Bertha steals the last bit of pudding, no matter how much we want to call her out on it. We don't want to end up a ghost and miss out on Heaven.

I'll close with that, but I think we can talk about ghosts again, and discuss their emotional well-being or lack thereof.

Still writing.

“One of my favorite blog authors is a lazy bum.”

Okay, guilty. I had plans to at least get something down the weekend before A-Kon, but didn't, obviously. I did some odd chores around the house, and then Claudia and I saw the new X-men movie with some friends that Saturday, which was fun. The verdict from the ladies is that it's worth seeing for the sight of Hugh Jackman's ass alone. This is coming from the same ladies who refer to '300' as 'Beefcake on parade.'

We drove up to Dallas on Wednesday, set up on Thursday, and started selling on Friday. All the rest of the days sort of blur into one long sales pitch with breaks for napping. There were a lot of fun costumes to see, including a Dalek, a battleaxe that was too big to fit in the back of a pickup truck, and the first time I've ever seen a person cosplaying Jigsaw. I was able to get into the Artist's Alley for a bit, too. My daughter had requested that I pick up some buttons for her, and I discovered that there is a small, niche market for art based on the TV series, 'Hannibal.' Curiouser and curiouser.

There were also rumored to be some 'odd' goings on, the sort that you're never able to find anyone willing to confirm or deny that they really happened, but that stick in your head and pop up like bad music from your teen years. Would kids really dig a grave-sized hole in a walkway area and try to spend their nights sleeping in it? Could a vandal desecrate a historic piece of art and expect his excuse of 'I didn't know there was paint in my can of spray paint' to be believed? Is someone warped enough to use a koi fish for a purpose that I'm not going to name in a blog that doesn't screen out minors? Maybe. True or not, they're going to get used at some point.

When my head is working on selling shiny things to pretty ladies, it doesn't wander well, so I've got some catching up to do. In the Dark is reaching that stage where I'm reading the dialogue, listening to the voices of each of the characters and finding uneven spots. These are where it sounds like some deranged brain surgeon attacked them while the other person was speaking and performed impromptu trepanning, because all of a sudden their entire attitude and pattern of speech changes. I know this is what has happened in some books that I've read, and that if I just re-read them enough times I’ll get all the subtle clues that point this out. Rest assured, if you ever notice this problem in one of my stories and you don't get to read about the hero catching the surgeon, it's all the book-printer's fault, because obviously they used an inferior glue and all the pages that would have had the story make perfect sense popped loose and fell out.

Oh, the title of this post? You can that Claudia for that. I can always rely on my wife for subtle hints. Maybe I should have her read all those stories and look for the mad surgeon.

Still writing.

How well do I draw? Umm...

One of the things that I need when I write is at least some idea of the setting. Is everything taking place in the cab of a truck? I need to have a clue how much room there is to move around, what angle the steering wheel is at, and whether the seats have a lot of padding or if they feel like a wooden bench with fabric stretched over them. When I wrote 'Roja' I sat down and drew a map of the town, naming all the important streets. When I wrote 'Stilling the Demons' I got my wife to put me in touch with a friend of hers who sometimes drives a snowplow up in Maine, because I wanted to know the layout of their cabs. Good thing I did, too. I had no idea that there is usually only room for the driver, since the controls for the blade take up the passenger side of the seat. I had set a minor event occurring on the passenger side in the first draft, and had to rewrite it.

Unless you've been in a coma for a few months or are just now reading my blog, you'll know I'm rewriting my second book. This one is science fiction, taking place a long time from now in a solar system far, far away. (Nope. Couldn't resist) Ninety percent of it takes place in one base, located on a dry, hostile world with barely enough of an atmosphere to keep you from popping like a balloon if you walk out the hatch without a pressure suit on. In my head, the base is about the size of my old high school, and all the sections are arranged in a rough square so that almost everything is connected to everything else. It makes a kind of sense, since patterns that work get reused.

I've had a vague idea of the layout for a while now, knowing which side most of the airlocks are on and figuring out where they would put the solar cells to protect them from the blowing wind. But I have scenes that include walking through one section while our hero subtly looks around, taking in the details that will mean something later. I have elements in the plot that hinge on whether or not a person can get from point A to point C without going through point B. So I need to define if those points are in a straight line or not.

Doing this also gives me a better sense of the story happening in a real location, a sense of place. I may end up creating a dozen or more details that never get used, but if all of them are interconnected, and if points two and eleven make it into the book, then after a person reads it and the story is settling in their heads, they just might connect all those invisible dots themselves. Then out of the blue they'll say, 'Ahh, that's why everyone thinks the carpet is made from human hair.' When a person makes a discovery like that for themselves, they invest a little bit of their heart in a time, place, and setting. Call me greedy. That's what I want.

Today was memorial day, and while my time of getting shot at was quite a few years ago, the memories are never very far away. Some of our men and women are going through times like that right now, and some of them have already come back in boxes. Others may ask more, but I just ask that you remember.

My wife and I got out to see Godzilla today, and I liked it. It's a good retelling of what has become a modern myth that has its roots back in the days when trees were black, noon-day skies were off-white, and every person in every movie and TV show had skin that was a shade of gray. They kept a lot of old and good, and added a thing or two that was new and cool, too. The roar remains the same.

Oh, the title of this post? I'm drawing out a map of the base, with all the important places that are used in the book. Looking at it, I have to admit that except for my descriptive text being more mature, and no longer being obsessive about words being complete and spelled out (well, not always), it looks a lot like the ones I used to draw in grade school, showing all the weird and fantastic places I dreamed about seeing and building. So the answer to the question is no, not very well. But the map will do what I need it to do.

It will help with my writing.

It's in my hands

On my way home from work today, I stopped off at Barnes and Noble. I had put in an order a few days ago, and it finally arrived. I walked in and, after getting distracted in the movies section, headed to the counter to pick up my books.

My books.

They belong to other people too, of course. Steve Berman's name is on the covers, where it should be, because he's the one who put out the call for stories, sifted through what was probably a deluge of them, and went through the whole process of turning all our crazy ideas into a book. Richard Bowes's name is on top, followed by Pat Cadigan. There are others, including Tanith Lee,and 'AND MORE...' at the end of the list.

I'm part of that 'AND MORE.' I found my name in the table of contents, and flipped through the book to find 'Dirty.' There it is. But now I'm reading it on paper that someone else printed, in a mass of folded and glued paper, that was put together by a professional printing company. This is my book. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Be glad you're not in the room with me, because I'm discovering that I cackle whenever I look at it. Yep, cackle is the word for it.

So after I post this, I'm going to take a sheet of paper and go downstairs to watch 'Suspiria.' It's what distracted me as I walked in the store, and while I watch it, I'll keep rewriting the last scene in 'In The Dark.' I expect to be cackling while I do it.

That book contains my writing.

Still not real

So when I decided I wanted to be a writer, what did I know about the craft itself? Why I knew everything, of course. You have to tell an interesting story, and tell it in an interesting way. What else could I possibly need to know?

So a lot of today has been spent looking up what units a Geiger counter displays, how many different types of radiation there are and what they're made of, and what the minimum number of people you can have on a generation ship if you need it to actually be self-perpetuating for more than one generation and how likely it is that those people will decide to throw the plan out the window after the third generation of children who grow up never seeing a planet, or a star. Could I just make all of this fun stuff up and get on with it? Sure, and everyone who put any time and effort to study those subjects would drop the book in the trash when they reached that point in the story. Will I put more than a couple of hours into researching these points? No, especially not at this stage. If I discover any big facts about these subjects that contract what I've already written, will I change the storyline? Only if I see a really cool possibility that I can put in without too much rewriting. Otherwise I'll just include some minor plot point to get around that barrier and get on with the story. That's the whole point of all this pounding of the keys.

So it's now all over the Facebook page. Burnt Offerings Books has released 'Hard Luck,' and 'Dirty' is the next to last story in it. Just now I looked the title up on Amazon, and there it is. I have the page up while I'm writing this, and it's causing another of those weird moments where it feels like the ground has dropped out from under my feet and I'm falling in slow motion. There's the title of the book, there's the title o f my story, and there's my name. I'll let you know when it starts feeling real.

Guess what I'm doing, right now.

Another step

So, two days after my last post I got an interesting e-mail. A while back I had submitted a fun little story to another anthology that a different company was putting together. This story I had actually talked to my daughter about a few days ago, and I ended up describing it as part noir, part drama, and part creepy crawly. I'm still pounding at In the Dark, and was only sending things out to keep my foot in the dark, murky waters of story submissions. They can be a pretty treacherous place, and if you don't stick a toe in every once in a while you're likely to hit a rock or an unexpected deep spot when you really need things to go smoothly. I only stick a toe in because it's wise to not put anything in that you're not prepared to lose.

Then I got the e-mail. My story was accepted.

Remember how I described how it didn't feel real when Dirty got accepted? Yeah, again. The pay situation will be different this time, so I still won't be walking into work tomorrow with a lemon meringue pie to surprise my manager with. But this is another bit of polish on my 'brand,' another tool I can use when I go stalking the wild literary agent in its native habitat. This is me feeling maybe a little bit less like a pretend writer, and a maybe a step closer to making my living as one.

Other than that, the weekend was too short, as they always are. Convention season looms, and the wife and I are making plans to run her booth at some. Houston weather is heating up, and I'm already missing winter.

As soon as I get the okay, I'll post the name of the book company, and the name of the anthology. Heck, if you live anywhere near Texas you'll probably hear me singing the name of it from my roof. Friends and family who have heard my, shall we say -striking- singing voice can tell you that it leaves an impression on the listener as they run away as fast as they can.

Still writing? Oh hell yes.

Well, that was an interesting time

Hi! Welcome back! I sure as heck didn't mean to be gone for so long, but I had one problem get thrown at me, then another, then one hit my wife and I and knocked us both down for a bit.

Our most recent addition to the household, Diamond, hadn't been feeling good for a while. I take her outside at night because I'm up later than Claudia, and seeing a fifty-pound dog gorge herself on grass, then throw it all back up right in front of me was one of those moments I need to use in a story. I only hope I can capture it well enough to make all you poor readers feel it as intimately as I did. I didn't throw up, but I'm glad I hadn't recently eaten.

But one day her stomach got really hard, and my wife got home, found a 24 hr vet, and loaded her up in the car. A friend of ours went along to help hold Diamond, and Diamond showed her gratitude by puking all over her. I don't think Claudia and I are going to be living that one down anytime soon.

The vet was closed, despite what their website says, and after some more hunting around (and dropping our friend off to take a shower), we found one and got the bad news. Diamond's stomach was twisted, and she needed surgery right then. Over four thousand dollars worth of surgery.

We don't have that kind of money sitting around waiting for us to give it a call and ask it to come over. So we had to break down and apply for a line of credit, over the phone, and talking to a machine. I really, really, really hate credit cards, and so does Claudia. We buy what we need or want with money that we have, and save up for or do without something if need be. Credit cards have their uses, I know, but (my opinion, of course) they use the holder more than he or she uses it.

But we got it, racked up more debt than either of us had possessed in a long time, and handed our dog over to the vet. Surgery went well, and after a few days of observation, we brought her home with a doped-up smile on her face and a scar full of staples that went the whole length of her underside. The staples just came out Friday.

So I've been coming home on my lunch hour to let her out of her crate (cage) and allow her to stretch her legs for a little while, then locking her up and going back. Claudia has been giving her extra TLC before and after work, and we've both been taking turns sleeping with her on a futon to be there in case she had problems.

I never knew a dog could snore. Did you?

I've still been writing this time, but not at the same pace or with the same zeal. Knowing you suddenly owe that much puts a new light on little things like a cantankerous refrigerator or a headlight that's out. It's worth it though, especially every time Diamond smiles, runs up to get affection, or thwaks the floor with her tail because she's wagging it and she's also too lazy to get up. It's worth it.

Then, good news. I got paid for Dirty. The check arrived, and I sprained my lips from grinning and bruised both ears because I did it so fast and wide. I got paid. I'm in print, and I got paid. Words? What words? This is emoting and floating and running down the street shouting 'Eureka!' I got paid.

Did it cover the vet? Oh heck no. It'll put a scratch in the bill, is all. But I got paid. If I drop dead tomorrow, I'll be talking about it to the valkyrie who picks me up or the ferryman who gives me a ride. No one ever actually came out and told me that I wouldn't make money from this, but a look that lets you know someone thinks it's just an indulgent fantasy, especially from someone close to you, sticks, and not in a good way. I ended up divorcing the person who gave me that look.

But I got paid. For writing.