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.

Molte Grazie, Italia

You know what my favorite horror movie is?

No, not that favorite. Not that favorite. No, that's not one of my favorites anymore. But it might be a favorite next week.

Well, yes. They do tend to migrate. But a whole bunch of them are the sort that will never be nominated for an Academy Award, and if you ever find yourself trapped in an elevator with an actor who has gotten one of those little statues and you mention these films, that poor unfortunate is likely to scream themselves to death. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Different countries have different ideas about what elements fit in films. I think it was in Rue Morgue a few years back that I read how a lot of the classic films from south of the border contain action, horror, comedy, and even a dance number or two, just to give their viewers as much variety as they can. That's the form down there, and the formula. European cinema got a bit of a head start on us over here in the States, and it's had more time to season and mature, and to develop different formulae. Hence, they have a type of film that you don't (or didn't used to) see over here: The Giallo.

The name comes from the Italian word for yellow, and a bit of grade-school level research tells me that the films are called that because the crime thrillers that the genre grew from were a series of paperbacks with yellow covers. I can see that. But if a case of mass amnesia suddenly hit the world, these movies would probably be named after a different color, red.

These movies are like multi-frame works of art. Shots are staged and set to say something, not just 'Here's the street our heroes are walking down.' The long, empty hallway with bare light bulbs swinging to and fro is the single path our heroine can take, and in one way or another, it leads to death. The fact that the driver of the coach sits up so rigidly, has those cold, noble features, and that the camera is never on him when we hear his voice is a sure sign that he's one of the blood-drinking undead. A soft drink machine in an ancient castle that's being rennovated isn't a sign of progress, it's a source of garish light in the choking darkness and a reminder of modern man's impotence in the face of all those forces lurking in the castle which spill and feed on blood.

Oh yes, the rich, red blood. It spurts, flows, and spatters over everything. It runs down walls, sprays on ceilings, and gathers in pools for unsuspecting victims to step in and notice just a second too late. In the world of the Giallo film, the human body contains over a hundred gallons of it, and its sole purpose is to exit that body in the most gruesome fashion possible. This is art painted with a sharp instrument.

One point to make is that, as art, realism takes a back seat to effect. My own speculation on why these films don't have wider appeal in the U.S. is because we're not used to suspending our disbelief to the point of perceiving a story as a homogenous idea, like an animated tarot card. Here plot is secondary to image, and human motives are stripped down to their base elements and plugged in like batteries to power the movie. In some ways they're more simple, but more mature than what we're used to. It doesn't help that some of the dubbing from Italian to English sounds like it was done by actors who were rejected from soap opera auditions for being too dramatic, either.

I don't see myself writing anything like these. My ideas are drawn from a different deck of cards, and I don't think the printed word is an effective medium for the kind of expression that we're talking about. I like to wander through tales where not only do things change, but the whole feeling can change. In a Giallo if there's an interesting character who isn't the hero or heroine,you can usually count on them dying, and I've already told you how the blood is going to come out. What about a story with two villains and no hero? How about one that starts off with telling you no one is going to get killed? Horror is a wide field, with room for everyone.

That's where I write.

My wife is going to be published

Just a few days ago I got a text at my work. At that moment I think I was arguing with my shipping computer that there was no such place as 'No Name Needed' in the state of Texas, when I heard the happy, beepy/chirpy noise that my phone makes when someone wants my attention to their printed words. Normally texts at work are a nuisance, as a lot of them are about warning me that there's dog yak on the carpet waiting for me to get home. But on that day it was three simple words that brightened my whole day. 'I got accepted.'

A short while back friend of ours told Claudia and me about an anthology series that was being put together called 'Dirty Magick.' One of them is set in New Orleans, and is a cross-genre book combining fantasy and detective elements. While the idea didn't generate any spark in my head, it did in hers, and she was able to draw on the time she spent over there. She sat down and cranked out a story in just a few days, a nice one about murder and the voodoo loa that had a flavor I had never seen before. It has a bit of old-style noir and a dash of Constantine-style attitude, and it's what's going to be Claudia's first time published on paper.

Technically, she was published before me. Once upon a time she sent in a story to the CHUD website, and they accepted it. She let me read it, back when we were dating, and it was one of the things that made me a little more intrigued about this quirky woman I was trading e-mails with. Some random stranger read her story, and decided that other random strangers would enjoy reading it. That's how you get picked. This was years before I got 'Roaming' into Absent Willow Review. Rock on.

Not long after I got my contributor's copy of 'Hard Luck,' Claudia found a shelf in the house with some empty space on it. She cleared the whole thing off, and put 'Hard Luck' and 'Handsome Devil' on it. Then she told me that I better get busy and fill up the rest of the shelf. Now I get to tell her that we're having a race. Once the shelf gets filled up, we count who has more books on it. Winner gets, – well, we'll think of something.

So to keep the ball rolling I sent 'Dear, Sweet Edina' to Apex Magazine. I finished a really harsh short called 'The God Box' a few days ago, and my poor wife has already called it the most awful thing I have ever written. As soon as she finishes going over it I'll make whatever corrections are needed and get it sent out.

Then I'll write something else.

Selling the genders to each other

There's a chain of restaurants called Twin Peaks, and their major advertising point seems to be their waitresses, who have to fit within a very narrow ranges of measurements, including weight and bust size. (my wife confirmed that the first time we ate there, asking our server) We've been there twice now, and both times I was surprised by how good the food is.

The décor got us talking, as most things do. What, we wondered, would a a restaurant focused on the opposite demographic look like? If someone wants to lure in the average Jane Q. Public, what do they use as bait? A catchy name, to start off with. Maybe 'Brawn.' That's short, easy to remember, and lets you know what you're in for. How about the servers? Men, of course, but where Hooters and Twin Peaks each have standard uniforms, Claudia and I thought a little variety would be in order. After all, when you're castle-building, you may as well go in for the deluxe model with all the frills.

We came up with some good candidates, like a lumberjack (a direct steal from the ladies around us at the time), a stereotypical brawny Scott in a kilt, your classic Hollywood barbarian, and a sampling of the different types of gladiators that the ancient Romans used to organize for fights in the local arena. So far, so good.

We were pretty clear on what our target market was, your average straight woman and your average gay man, and part of my interest in the conversation was getting a better idea of how to write stories that have appeal across the gender lines. I've had good reactions from women to my stories, but understanding exactly why person XX liked story GB is something I need to be better at. Um, did you just mutter, 'Control freak?' Where on earth did you get that idea?

But halfway through a dish of queso, I started having some doubts. The generic concept is so obvious, why hadn't someone come up with it before? A quick Google search for 'Male version' popped up with 'Male version of Hooters' as the second option. There's lots of discussion on the topic, loads of jokes, and even a Youtube video of a skit done by a comedy troupe. But no websites for open businesses.

Further discussion followed. I offered the observation that men seem to be more visually oriented, and hence the constant sight of lovely ladies is more incentive to come spend their money than the reverse would be for women. I was told that my observation is outdated, and a bit of minor research done later suggests that this idea has been called into question recently. Then the conversation moved into an uncomfortable area, and places like that are where most of my stories come from.

Maybe both men and women are equally connected to the input from our eyes. But there's connection, and then there's comfort. Imagine: it's late at night, on a deserted street in a non-residential neighborhood, when a man and a woman pass each other on the sidewalk. Just as they're side by side, one gives the other a smile that says, 'I'm really enjoying looking at you.' If the man smiles at the woman, is this the opening scene for a romantic comedy about love at first sight, or for a very dark thriller about infatuation and madness? How about if the woman smiles at the man?

Of course you can't tell. Each setting could go either way. But if you know this book or movie was written by some high-school dropout who's never taken a writing class in his life, which would you expect? More to the point, if you're the man in our scenario, would you give that look if you knew the woman was armed? Ladies, if you were in that real-life situation, would you want to be armed?

Classic models about desire and gender are being reexamined, but a very ugly truth has been more or less constant since we started hanging out in groups to fight off the lions and other meat-eaters. Men are more likely to be a threat to women than vice-versa, usually that threat is linked with our sex drives, and those facts are more well-known among women than men. I've got my own thoughts on the first two and believe me when I say that sooner or later you'll see them in print. But that third one, in my opinion, is the most relevant. If you can't see how that's relevant to our hypothetical restaurant, ponder this. Would it be on the mind of the very last customer of the day? The woman who's alone in a building with twenty well-built men who have had to smile and be nice for the last eight or more hours?

Now take all that, and apply it to whatever you want to do. Think about it when you're writing a story for an anthology with a female target audience, or a screenplay for a cable channel that focuses on women's issues, or if you just want to make your female characters seem like they're not just guys who put on make-up at the beginning of the day.

Also, I do want to specify one thing. This is a blog post, and as such it's a focused discussion on a particular topic. My full feelings on subjects like this are very involved, and constantly evolving. As this topic is more sensitive than a nitroglycerin milkshake, please don't assume I've given you a complete opinion.

Still writing.

Relaoding

Welcome, 2015! Come on in and make yourself at home. Never mind the mess. The last tenant was a bit lax on the housecleaning. We've got plenty of space for improvements, built in connections for new ideas and more power, and I think that back room would be perfect for new achievements. Oh, wait. You didn't bring any baggage, did you?

So less then a week into this new year, I've already got a lot on my plate. I want to touch up Roja, then stick it on a hook and toss it into those murky waters to catch an agent. I have 'In the Dark' making rounds, including to the fantastic person who did most of the proofing on Roja. There's one short story getting rewritten, and another getting written again because the original was on paper only and that paper is somewhere in nowhere land. Oh, and I need to finish The Red Man Burning this year, too.

Aside from just being psychotic and ambitious, there's a point to all this, of course. This is what I want to make my living at. To do that, I need to produce. Production = Money. Money = me riding around the house on a gyro-balanced unicycle on Monday mornings instead of going to my current job. Well, in theory anyway.

That's the point.

Side note, good news. It looks like 'Penny Dreadful' is going to be returning this year. Chills and shivers for everyone. Possible good news? There is talk of a Space:1999 remake. I will reuse what I posted on Facebook when the subject came up.

“Everyone repeat after me: Please don't suck.”

Writing, and will still be writing when this year closes.

No news like bad news

When you create horrible events and want your poor, unsuspecting reader to gasp and shudder, you need them to know the people who have all those terrible things happen to them. Watching 'Alien,' we cringe when the helmet is cut away and we still can't see John Hurt's face, and we squirm in our seats when that very Freudian alien pops out of his chest. Why? Because we've spent the last thirty or so minutes getting to know him. Yes, his best scenes come after the facehugger drops off. But by the time that 'leathery object' opens up, we at least have a good idea of whether or not Kane would be getting a Christmas card from us, and whether or not we could kill some time with him over a bottle of beer and a conversation about politics.

That's part of how we get involved in a story. Relating to characters, seeing and understanding how they relate to other characters. It's not the only way, just the most well-established. There are one-person plays, and movies and stories with only one character. But even most of those have phone calls or letters or whatever so that we know that our hero is not the last human on earth. Maybe one of the great masters can do it, but fortunately for me there aren't enough of them to give the rest of us regular competition.

That caring is important, because it's what keeps us reading the story or watching the film. It may or may not be set up as such, but the tale is a recording of that character. A slice of their life, and maybe the last one.

You can argue with me, but my humble opinion is that bad news connects us with characters like good news never will. Most of us achieve a kind of equilibrium in our lives, and if we're climbing whatever ladder we're on, we climb it one rung at a time, according to plan. To us, 'normal' is either continuity or slow progress. When we're introduced to Bob and his wife Jane, who are getting started building a life for themselves, we get to know them pretty quickly. New beginnings are a blank slate, one that we often read our on lives into.

In a book or a movie, when someone wins the lottery or has their rich uncle leave them millions, most of us scream 'plot device.' Now, everything is a plot device, because if it isn't, it gets edited out (or it should). But if our heroes move into the creepy mansion not because they inherited it, but because Dad lost his job or Mom is blacklisted for blowing the whistle on the local PTA's cocaine fundraiser, and it's the only place they can afford, then we understand that they're having hard times, and hard times are something we can all relate to. We can give a family who's in a middle of a run of bad luck some sympathy, because we hope that someone would give us a bit of sympathy when we find ourselves in that same situation. A person or family living high on the hog only makes most of us feel envious, which is why you don't see a lot of millionaire protagonists. I remember the hero in 'Bag of Bones' was worth quite a lot, but King is a lot better at this than most of us, and even he had to kill off the man's wife.

Maybe part of it is selfish, too. Empathizing for people in need makes us feel good about ourselves, but envy is a false comfort that only makes us colder. Everyone is a hero in their own mind, and the good guys don't wish a bus would run over their lucky neighbor. Only flesh and blood people do that.

This isn't strictly a random post. Some people that I'm close with decided to call it quits recently. Again, it's a bit selfish, but it seems there's a little less happiness in the world right now. Time moves on, and life changes. It doesn't ask how we feel about the changes, either.

Boy, sounds like the perfect set up for a horror movie, doesn't it? Maybe I'll write something and put one of the characters in a similar situation.