All Hallow's Eve

I admit it, when it comes to this time of year, I'm twelve years old. I love all the decorations, the cool costumes, and the hundreds of different sources of myth that get dredged up and mixed together into a rich, spicy soup that feeds every fear of the dark and the unknown that has crawled around in the back of mankind's collective heads since we started banging the rocks together. Does it hurt that down here the temperature finally takes a bit of a dip this lovely time of year, and that it gets dark sooner? No, not at all.

Problem is, these last couple of Halloweens have not been as epic as I had hoped they would be. Something always seemed to pop up at the last minute that would wreck my plans. Or, and this is the shitty part about real life, that really awesome idea I had come up with that looked so perfect in my head turned out to be something off the set of the original Doctor Who series when I translated it into worldly matter. That's how it goes sometimes.

This year, it looked like the same thing was going to happen. There's still leftover problems from Harvey to deal with, I left renewing the registration on my car until the last minute, and I've made three trips to the dentist in the last month to take care of a problem that's been causing me enough pain to keep me from sleeping at night. This morning I got up early, headed in there again, and got a set of stitches taken out that I've been feeling inside my mouth for a week. Then I came home and let the pain killers kick in.

Then, I got off my butt and got to work. I hit Home Depot and picked up a couple of poles and some jute twine. Then I slapped together a pair of Saint Andrew's crosses, dressed up a dummy I had lying around, (go ahead and ask) and with the addition of some lights and the plastic, pre-carved pumpkins Claudia and I have been collecting over the years, my house was ready. A few days ago I stopped by one of the Halloween mega-stores that I've mentioned in a previous post, and picked up a mask that wasn't half bad. Add that to some black ren faire garb, and I was in business.

There was rain, but it stopped often enough to let the kids get out. I was up and down most of the evening answering the ringing of the doorbell, and I got another taste of that lovely moment when small children don't get to finish saying 'Trick or Treat.' One little girl came right out and said that she was scared of me, but that she loved my costume. She left smiling.

Let me know what you think. B-movie material?

Still writing.

A feast of flavors

How many Hannibal Lecters are there?

Well, that depends on how many you've gone out and met. The first one I met was a small man with six fingers on one hand. The second was a man with a subtle, sinister smile and who sometimes made a lisping, slurping noise when excited (and he looked a lot like Odin from the recent Thor movies). The third had darker hair, a much bolder voice and pronounced the first syllable in 'privacy' as in 'prim.' The fourth was a young man, and I followed him through the sort of childhood that would either make a sane person hope for the end of the world or drive them to nudge it along toward that end. The fifth I recently made the acquaintance of, and he's a quiet, cultured man who moves through his life with a slow, deliberate grace.

All of them are killers, and none of them would blink while they cut you open and browsed through your insides like a housewife at the local farmer's market.

Makes you wonder. There's only one source, regardless of the inspiration for that source. So where did they all come from? Why, from you and me of course. Let's take a moment and feel pride in our creations.

Why did Thomas Harris give the good doctor his initial traits, small, with slicked-back hair, limbs possessed of wiry strength? Well, Harris encountered a real-life killer who looks a bit like that, only at first he didn't understand the crimes the man had committed. I'm pulling this from Wikipedia, so there's likely a richer story behind it, but every good character has multiple roots, and you and I only have so much time here. Harris had a gut-level experience that was back-dated with the word KILLER in bright, bold letters, and he picked details from that experience with the intent of us putting our own KILLER stamps on his character, on his book. We were the target audience. I'd say the technique worked rather well, wouldn't you?

If we work chronologically, the next incarnation comes from Brian Cox working in front of a camera for the film Manhunter. He has a some of the physical traits, but we never see him kill anyone, despite all the backstory we're given about the bodies he's left in his wake. Instead, this Lecter is a button-pusher. He sends our hero running out of the room in a panic with a few well-placed points of conversation, and the tortured, murderous psychopath who slaughters whole families admires Doctor Lecter. These facts are presented to us to make us think, 'Christ, if this man can do all this while he's locked up, what would happen if he could get his hands on people?' What indeed.

Now we come to Mister Hopkin's portrayal. Yes, in a movie where you don't have a powerful actor there are some things that you can do to compensate for it, and hell no I'm not saying Cox's performance is sub-par, by any means. But Hopkin's Lecter has enough presence to blow all the other characters in Silence Of The Lambs out of the water. The accent he speaks with alone is just creepy, and the quiet monotone that it's delivered in makes me think of an audio recording of The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar I heard many years ago, the voice of the dead speaking to the living. See you soon, it whispers, at all of us.

Then there's that boy, that fine young Hannibal. (Nope. Couldn't resist) We see him portrayed with more than one actor's face, but there's only one that we associate with the cold dread that the name Hannibal inspires. Give me a contrary opinion if you want to, but that face is a little... Off. It's odd in the same way that Christopher Walken's is, handsome, but not something a lot of us would want to open our eyes to in the middle of the night. This Hannibal starts off his life a little better than most of us, which adds another dimension to the intelligent personae that's consistent through all the incarnations of our anti-hero. He gets dealt a bad hand of cards in his life, but presses on, though the part of that boy that might have once been able to laugh at himself seems to be missing. He wanders through life until he has a new family to replace the one that was killed, and for a moment maybe we get to believe that the rest of his life could have been lived 'normally.' He kills before the opportunity to avenge his little sister's death presents itself, but only after being insulted and bullied by someone bigger, stronger, and dumber than himself, and I think that qualifier is important. For all his skill and rage, this future icon is still a boy. We can enjoy stories about evil kids, but how many good or successful ones are there that don't have the child infected by some outside element, be it extra-terrestrial or supernatural. Innocence and childhood are intertwined icons, and if this handsome blond boy had begun his grown-up life already indulging his murderous urges, he would have lost our sympathy. As a character, Hannibal needs our empathy. This is one of the bigger challenges facing everyone who re-imagines him.

Of course we also have the latest and certainly not the least. In the TV series, Hannibal seems inhumanly poised and cultured, so much so that I think the only reason we can believe in him as a person is because we walked into this story already knowing the characters. Using my in-depth research techniques (browsing IMDB when I can't sleep) I discovered that Mads Mikkelson approached the role with a fresh perspective, playing this charming killer as if he was the devil. If you watch the series you'll see that the character does a good job in this role. He tempts, and it might even be said that he fulfills the traditional duties of the devil, dealing harshly with those who transgress. Though it might be more accurate to say that he does the work that we wish the devil would get around to, chopping up that asshole who cut us off on the highway and making that snooty clerk at the DMV regret being so rude. That's the key.

I'm not trying to just gush here about how engrossing Hannibal is as a fictional character, I do that in private. This is peeking into the whys and wherefors behind the fact that a lot of people (myself included) are willing to pay money to read and see this man's story. Hannibal is an anti-hero, like any other bad guy we root for. But the intensity of his actions make it hard to admit why we like him. I think a lot of us have moments where we would love do exactly what he does, kill some person in our lives who offends us (not hurts us, offends us) and express such pure contempt for that person that we eat them. I try to avoid getting too graphic here, but let me address an unspoken fact that would be a part of Hannibal's life if he existed in the real world: his digestion. We all know what goes up must come down, right? Well, what goes in must come out. Imagine all those faces of Doctor Lecter, each taking care of personal business, remembering their meals and remembering the preparation. These men would be smiling while they sat.

But we never see, or even hear about that. Why? Because while our egos would love to lead us on an exploration of alternative cuisine, those same egos don't want us within a thousand miles of all the complications. Lecter went to medical school. Look around, because it's not difficult to find horror stories about that experience. Have you ever smelled the insides of a mammal that's been opened up? How about had fluids from those insides splash over you, soaking down into your socks? Once the good doctor removed the delicacies he was after, there would have been a hundred and twenty more pounds of person to dispose of, minimum. That weight comes from bones, blood vessels, organs, and goopy stuff inside those organs. Yeah, the movies never show our well-mannered gentleman dealing with bowels.

By not showing that, it lets us gloss over the ugly bits of reality. We get the good without the bad. The gourmet meal without having to pay the bill or wash the dishes. Obvious, right? The trick is knowing which is which, what to serve and what to toss in the trash and hope our neighbor doesn't get nosy. If I had the secret to that, well for starters I'd be getting paid for these words you're reading. But I can at least recognize when someone gets it right, like with the good doctor. I can think about what I like and what buttons it pushes inside me. I can put all that in my own blender, hit puree and see what I end up with. Dinner is served.

By the way, I'm eating while I write this. Eating meat.

While I write.

It was a dark and -

So there's this Harvey. Drops in uninvited, and won't take the hint and get the hell out. Now true, he did give us some notice that he was coming. But, honestly? He's the sort of jerk who's so unreliable that notice isn't really much help. We can't keep him out, can't tell him to stay away, and even if we leave to avoid him there's a risk he'll break in and trash our place. Hell, he might even show up early to catch us while we're packing the car or delay his arrival so we waste time out of town and end up exiled, unable to come back to our home until who knows when.

I'm finishing this on Friday, the Friday after the huge rainstorm that hit Houston so bad that the damage is being counted in billions. I started writing it the previous Friday, hoping the power would stay on. It did, and for the first day or so when the hurricane became a tropical storm and hit Houston with endless water and wind, things were okay. My friends and I passed texts around to say who had the lights off in their neighborhoods and everyone swapped videos of rivers that have street signs barely sticking out of them and the roofs of cars that can almost be seen under their surface. It rained, hard and fast, then it would stop long enough for me to take the dog for a walk around the neighborhood. Of course, we had to walk in the middle of the street because a lot of the sidewalks were either caked in mud or under water, and we could only walk so far before we hit places where the streets themselves were submerged. Then we would head back in before it started pouring again. At night, during the quiet moments, there were frogs all over the neighborhood, singing. At home, with the storm locked outside but raging, it felt like all the real disaster was a comfortable distance away.

That was it through Sunday. On Monday evening as I was forcing Diamond to tend to her business in the backyard even though the sky was pouring water on her head, Claudia yelled that she needed me. I got in to see that the ceiling was leaking in the library, less than three feet from her desk, where her computer is. We got buckets and plastic bags under the leak, which was coming down in multiple streams. While we were trying to come up with a long-term plan, we noticed the sheet rock was sagging.

The whole piece fell down within twenty minutes, all in a mess of insulation, cardboard backing for the sheet rock, and the nails that had been holding it up. We got a tarp under the buckets, and watched a part of our house fall apart while trying to make peace with the fact that we couldn't do anything to stop it.

Eventually the rain stopped for a while. I stayed up that night to make sure it didn't get worse. I'm not sure what I would have done if it had.

Cabin fever is a real thing. Claudia and I were cooped up in the house from Friday afternoon until Tuesday, when I was able to drive around and find one of our favorite Mexican restaurants open. But on that Monday night, we had been crammed together the whole time, both worrying. You would think it would be a perfect time to binge watch Game of Thrones, or do anything else that eats up time, but it wasn't. We gave each other space, both of us feeling tense and anxious. Sad fact is, I couldn't even write, especially after the leaks made the ceiling fall in. I was too locked in the moment to go anywhere else in my head, even though a trip elsewhere would have been just the thing at that time.

The next day we heard that the national guard had been called out, and on those moments when I got out of the house I started seeing and hearing helicopters. There was water built up along the edges of the streets around my house, but not covering them. I had slept during the morning, and I stayed up again the next night, insisting that Claudia get some rest. Of course it was raining that night, and the ceiling started leaking where our kitchen meets our living room. I got some plastic tubs under it, cursed, and tried to keep an eye on it to make sure I caught any leaking water. There was still water leaking into the first set of tubs in the library.

At around one in the morning, there was another wet, tearing sound and another piece of my house hit the floor hard enough that I was sure it was going to wake Claudia up. At that point I just said fuck it, made sure the buckets were still catching the old and new streams of water, and started on the mess. I put on latex gloves, because my hands began to itch not long after picking up the huge piles of insulation from the first collapse, and scooped handfuls of wet gunk into a trash bag. I took the larger pieces of what used to be my ceiling and put them in a cardboard box. (trash pick up had not happened, naturally) I got out my old ka-bar knife and cut the pieces of sheetrock that were broken off but still hanging from the cardboard backing at the edges of the hole. While I was doing at this I would pause every once in a while to look up through the hole that was the size of a car door. I could see the slats of my roof.

That's where we stand now, except that I noticed a slow leak in the damned garage too, some night when I was walking around the house. The rain is gone for now, and Claudia hit the ground running as soon as it did. We've already filed an insurance claim, had FEMA come out, and now we're just waiting on the roofer, who understandably is a tad busy right now.

Now I've got a moment to sit still and really think. My workplace opened up on Thursday, and and during those disorganized two days we got some hint of the real mess. Some of my friends and co-workers got out in their trucks and boats during the worst of it and rescued people who were trapped in their houses or up on their roofs. Despite, or maybe because of, all the crap that I needed to keep an eye on at home, when I read their posts and saw their pictures I really wanted to get out there, to ride out there on the cold, black water and help all the people who are a hell of a lot worse off than I am. During the storm there would be occasional photos of flooded houses and rescues by jeep or boat. The official death toll has risen, and I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Pieces of overpasses have collapsed, and at one place so much water washed over one of the highways that the concrete barriers along its sides were pushed perpendicular to the line of traffic, forming an above-ground river channel.

So what's next? Start fixing. Though we've got some ugly damage, Claudia and I still have a roof over our heads. Other people are still in shelters, some are throwing out all of their furniture because their house was flooded, and others have to go hunting for wherever their cars were washed away to. Gas prices are going up, and there's a curfew on. But we're alive, and we're moving on.

As for me, I'm still writing.

Regulation ghosts

There's a well-known series of books about vampires that I once started to read. I picked up the first book, read a powerful, graphic opening, and then about five pages into the meat of the story, closed the book. I haven't picked it up since, and that was over ten years ago.

That book, and that second scene where I was first introduced to the hero of the story, has stayed in my head all this time. Because I think I can make a point that can help other people who just might be picking up a pen for the first time, I'm going to explain why.

As I tend to do, I'm not going to specify the series. If you've read it, you'll recognize it. It happens to be one of my wife's favorites, so it's yet another subject for us to have lively discussions about. We've had quite a few.

It's set during the cold war, and the opening shows a very unconventional autopsy that ends in shootings and an explosion. This sets a top-secret Soviet program back years of progress. The second scene shows a young man reporting for his first day of work as the person in charge of a British project that opposes the other one that we just read about. Inside a room accessed by a secret door, our hero meets a ghost. Instead of rattling chains or demanding that his son avenge his murder, this spectre gives our hero a short report on the events in the first scene. This patriotic spook passes on military intelligence.

Disclaimer: you already know that every word of this is my opinion. This is my word, not the word, and it's sure as hell not the last word. This is a word about what I choose to write words about. Horror.

What's wrong with a ghost doing its part for queen and country? Nothing. It shows nobility and a willingness for self-sacrifice. But it also shows a connected, enlightened empathy, a willingness to look out for the little guy. It also shows an intelligent involvement in the present. This ghost is not an old, dusty record player endlessly spinning the same scratched vinyl disc. More's the pity.

Despite having vampires as the main antagonists of the series, the series isn't horror. It's science fiction. There's an understandable rhyme and reason to the universe, clear cause and effect, and some ghosts have our back.

You know, maybe it's that last point in particular which explains why I don't think I'll ever pick that book up again. I like horror, and part, I believe, of a good horror story is our inability to truly grasp the parts of the universe that are trying to drown us in its bathtub. Borrowing/Butchering a quote, the strongest fear is fear of the unknown, and when we can see an expression of love from a ghost, we feel we know it, even if there are facets of its existence that we can't possibly grasp. It smacks too much of Casper, and cheesy Lifetime movies where the tragic but plucky heroine is constantly getting scared out of her wits by the spook in her new house, which – surprise! Was only trying to warn her that the cardboard-cutout handsome guy she's seeing is the asshole who ghostified the house's prior tenant.

You know, if I never achieve anything else lasting as a writer, if I can only get 'ghostified' in the dictionary, my life will have meaning.

I've covered a bit of this before, so let me try to rephrase it while contributing something new. I'm going to label this set of words the rules for ghosts. These points are what I keep in my head when I sit down to write a ghost story that I want to scare people with, and not just because these guidelines would produce a story that I would probably enjoy reading. I think each of these points pushes a button in people's minds. I think they dig under the floorboards and get inside the spaces between the walls.

1. A ghost did something unusual during its mortal life. Though it's rarely explained why this matters, it's important because millions of people die every year, but they don't all come back. So our ghost has to have been remarkable in some way. It developed an obsession, it became consumed with greed, it died a painful death, or it lived a life so empty that just reading about it makes us worry that we haven't done enough with our own lives. There will be no ghosts of milquetoast accountants who died in their sleep or of mediocre soccer moms who passed peacefully, surrounded by loving family members. Normal doesn't make a ghost.

2. A ghost does not have a wide range of responses to stimuli. A haunt can be subtle or obvious, though our story is more effective if it at least starts off subtle. But it won't break dishes in the kitchen one day, file a lawsuit at the county clerk's office the next, and finish off the week by possessing the lady next door so it can sit down with the new owner of its house and hammer out a twenty-page contract agreeing to co-inhabit the house on a time sharing basis. A ghost is emotion and energy, like lightning finding the shortest path to the ground.

3. A ghost has a limited range of focus. The internal logic on this is sketchy, but in all the stories the shades are fixed to something, some remnant of their past (more on that below). A haunted house, hotel, car, toy, or town. Even a person can be haunted. A ghost might be mobile, but not randomly so. It's tied to a person, place, or thing. A spectral afterlife is an old-fashioned marriage where the options for divorce are extremely limited.

4. Because it was once a living person but is now dead, a ghost is tied to the past. This reflects the symbolism of what a fictional ghost is to a reader, old memories or feelings that won't stay buried. In a haunted house, radios play commercials for companies that went under twenty years ago, a bottle of soft drink sweetened with high fructose corn syrup tastes like the good old stuff that was made with real sugar, and a tattered old dress smells fresh and clean with just a hint of a forgotten lover's perfume. But it's all a phantom. Spend a night in a house that once burned down and you'll wake up in a moldy ruin. Join that gracious host for a week of feasting, and you'll starve to death. Show up on a dock to meet that lover who once got away, and sooner or later your body will wash up on shore. The past belongs to the dead, not the living.

6. A ghost can't experience personal growth, including learning new facts, or keeping up with changing events. This is a matching point to the previous one. The possibility of change, of molding the future, belongs to the living and not the dead. Those who have died but are sticking around are stuck with what they had when they were once alive, body, mind, and spirit. A ghost of someone who died in the service of MI-6 would whisper, scream, and write, 'Blake is a traitor' long after the man himself was dead and buried. They're always playing the same game of chess, one where the moves are announced but the pieces never advance. A person who freezes to death comes back as a ghost who will never be warm. The shade of a person who died feeling betrayed will never forgive. Never.

Hey, remind me to read something with a happy ending when I'm done here, okay?

Another A-kon has come and gone. This year it was held in Fort Worth, but there were familiar faces and familiar shenanigans. The day before the con started, some knucklehead decided to play Bruce Lee and kick open a pair of double doors at the hotel. The doors were expensive.

I wrote Bruce Lee in the above paragraph, but the person who told me about it actually cited Jet Li. Uh oh, can't I learn new names, or references? Am I stuck in the past? Maybe I am.

Because I'm still writing.

Why we're all liars

Are you fucking kidding me?

Imagine this. I wait outside the front of my house for the postal carrier, pretending to trim the trees. When he or she comes by I say, “Hey, be careful. My neighbor is letting his dog wander loose, and it's a mean one.”

Or, I go down to the grocery store and stand by the entrance while I pretend to text my wife and ask what kind of cheese she wants me to get. When a customer with either darker skin or wearing some kind of religious clothing clears the checkout line I go up to the manager and say, “Excuse me, but that person just pulled some steaks out from underneath their coat.”

Or, I drive down to Brownsville, at the Mexican border, and I run around yelling, “The Mexicans are coming! The Mexicans are coming! Their tanks will be here in fifteen minutes!”

Or, I take a bus to Boston, Massachusetts, and run up and down the streets yelling, “The British are coming! The British are coming! They're worried about Trump taking power and they're going to invade!”

Now at what point did your disbelief give you pause?

A few days ago a man named Edgar Maddison Welch scared the hell out of some people and could have gotten those people and himself killed. The details are few and far between right now, but what's generally agreed on is this: He read some writings online that claimed a certain pizzeria was just a front that masked child abuse. He believed those writings strongly enough to arm himself and go down there. He fired his weapon inside the business, and later he was arrested.

Now, we haven't heard directly from him (and if he or his lawyer have any sense at all, we won't), but a couple of facts stand out.

1. He didn't go in shooting, wasn't focused on killing every adult in the building.
2. One phrase keeps being used over and over again, in quotes. Self-investigate. Again, we haven't heard from Welch's lawyers (by now he should have some), but whoever they are they haven't come forward to denounce this quote as false, and every time it's repeated it digs this man's grave a little deeper. A very specific grave.

Now I've stated my assumptions first. If any of them turn out to be false, then my conclusion is invalid for Mr Welch, but my point is still going to be valid.

I don't think he is a fanatic. We've seen a lot of fanatics lately, in this country and others, and they go in with guns blazing, intent on racking up as high a body count as they can. Blood is the goal for fanatics because as far as they're concerned they're the ones god chose to whip the whole world into shape, and when you're having that intimate a tea party with your spook of choice, blood is the only drink you serve.

So if he isn't a fanatic, what is he?

Naïve. A naïve fool.

If you just got an incredulous look on your face, please understand my terms. There's no pain or damage that a fanatic can inflict that a fool can't match. Anyone can inflict pain and shed blood. You. Me. Anyone.

Again, how did he wind up where he is now? He read a story online, something along the lines of the bait stories that leap out at you while you're waiting in line at the grocery store, and he went in there ready to shoot. If you claim he isn't a fool, show me what scale he used to judge that all the people in there were part of that conspiracy, and that's why he didn't mind driving them into a panic. Show me where he studied the architecture of the building to be sure that whatever point he fired that weapon at didn't have a brick wall or metal pipes or something else solid enough to shatter the round and send fragments into the crowd. You fire a rifle inside, you're gambling with your own life and with other's lives. He's a damn fool.

Go back to those example I gave you above. Some of them I think most of us would fall for, but they get progressively ridiculous. Now add a fact to each case. In the first, I've been feuding with my neighbor because his dog has been doing his business on my lawn. Second, I'm wearing a tee shirt that says 'God bless the KKK.' Third, I've set up a little stand by the side of the road, and it has a big banner that says, 'Anti-tank rockets, $500 dollars apiece.' Fourth, if anyone stops to listen to me explain my claim, I tell them that in order to get the whole story they'll need to buy my book, and I just happen to have a few copies with me. In other words, in each case I have a reason to lie that benefits me personally. Now does that fact give you pause, even in those cases that seemed straightforward?

Then put your pause function on speed-dial, because you're going to be using it. Everyone has a reason to lie. Why? It's fun to lie. Why the hell do you think I want to make my living doing it? Why do you think damn near everyone does it, every single day of their lives? It's free, it gets the liar some attention, and it's easy. Now I'm not talking about the simple lies that make a person's day easier. 'Damn, honey. I meant to unload the dishwasher but I forgot.' 'Honey, you know I would never forget your birthday. I had reservations for dinner but the boss says I have to work late.' Those are lies of convenience. They're a quick shot of bullshit to cover up mistakes, and so, we benefit from telling them. But the person who first claimed that J. Edgar Hoover liked long dresses and frilly undies? That friend of yours and mine who swears that their cousin's neighbor once popped her poodle in the microwave to dry it off? They get that moment when we fall for it, and that shared magic when a good story finds an audience. Storytelling is magical, and magic can be worked with truth or bullshit. That's the power of magic.

But please don't start believing in spirits to the point of handing over money to Madame Zelocka, who claims she has an urgent message from your-long departed Uncle Phil. Believe in fairies if you want to, but not to the point of hateful words for someone who doesn't. Don't be so ready to believe that hundreds of people can consciously work together to keep a secret, a secret that's spread all over the web. If you do, you're a fool. Not evil, but a fool.

Enough with the blogging. Let me get back to telling lies that I'll get paid for.

Back to writing.

To hell with you. I am the exception.

Coming toward the end of another year. Not the best one, true. But who knows what the future holds? Not me, says the flea.

Another Halloween has come and gone, which in itself should have prodded me to write. This year I played with an interpretation of Krampus, cuddly Santa's uglier, meaner big brother, as my costume. It still needs some tweaking, but I got a lot of comments on how cool it was, and one of the best complements you can get that special day of the year. 'Trick or trea –.' That's the golden moment when someone a third of your height looks up at you and forgets that the secret code phrase ends with a plea for goodies. That's when they look up at you and maybe see what you're trying to show them; the dark, special magic that our ancestors once wove by sharing stories over campfires. I might have inspired a budding young storyteller this October night. Or one of America's future serial killers. I take no responsibility either way.

Of course we also had the annual turkey massacre, which my wife and I celebrated with our traditional pasta. Let me sum it up thusly: Yum.

This entry's title needs some backstory. I haven't gone to many conventions lately, a trend I plan on breaking, soon. But there were a few I used to go to quite regularly, always finding some good panels where I could ask questions of people who have fought, and won, the same fight I'm in right now. The student learns from the master, so it is written.

Yet inevitably the master says or does something that makes the student yell, “Are you f---ing kidding me?” Or at least, that's what sometimes happens.

Was at a con once upon a time, went to a panel, someone asked a question. So far so good. Now I don't know if this lady, sitting among the other writers on the panel, who answered that question and most of the other questions just didn't get enough sleep the night before, if someone ran over her dog the day before she came to the con, or if she was just constipated. But that day her answers were the most condescending, pedantic, shallow, shovelful of crap I had ever heard at that con or any other gathering where the point was supposed to be to enlighten. Not only were we all told to not mind when our stories were rejected, we all had to parrot a neat little phrase back at this woman, like good, obedient schoolchildren. I am not the exception. Repeat after me, I am not the exception.

She was annoyed, because often when she edited for anthologies, people would send her stories that exceeded the requested word count, or were in a genre other than the one asked for. She was really upset when one of the attendees asked what the hell the traditional phrase, 'not what we're looking for at this time' meant, venting some of the frustration that builds up when your story doesn't make the cut and all you get is a vague, one-sentence reason on your e-mailed rejection slip and you can't get any useful information out of it. Just move on and send it somewhere else, was her answer. It's just rejection. It's nothing personal.

Let me tell you this, you reading these words I don't know where and I don't know when. You are the fucking exception, from the atoms that make up that very tip top fraction of your highest hair to that spark inside that you might call your soul. You are the cog in the machine that decides, you know what, today I'll see what happens if I start spinning in this other direction, and to hell with the machine. You are the crazy one who dreams. When someone tells you that you aren't, laugh at them, give them a single-finger salute, or if you have one handy, feel free to throw a bucket of warm piss on them. They've earned it.

Did she have a point? She had a piece of a point, I'll give her that. The woman is sharp, and knows her stuff. Does she know more than me? Oh hell yes. That doesn't mean that she had the right answer, or that if she did, that she provided it. 

Her point, her whole point, was about her, and her ego. The point she should have had, because she was addressing a bunch of frustrated people who had shelled out money to be in that room, was to not let that aching, enduring sting of rejection be the deciding factor. To take that rage and despair that always pops back up and channel it into hunting down another agent, or open anthology. To once again pound the damn keyboard to crank out yet another pitch.

Also, just send it somewhere else? If you've been at this a while then you know that there's no magical list of people sitting anxiously at their PC's with money burning holes in their bank accounts, waiting for quality (fill in your genre) stories. Are there some lists? Hell yes, and praise (fill in your deity) for that. These are often set up and maintained by other writers, some for free, some for pay. I've never heard of anyone getting rich or even just making a living from such a list. Nor do I expect to hear about one anytime soon.

Yeah, that bit of a point that she had. If you send a fantastic comedy story to someone who is reading for an anthology full of noir thrillers, you're going to get rejected. You might even annoy the editor so much that they remember your name and bite you in the ass later. Can you afford to take that chance? I have listened to enough editors to know that the only thing worse than sending them an e-mail asking if the word count they listed is a hard limit is not even asking and sending in a story that's larger than they asked for. If your submission is ten or thirty words over the limit, they PROBABLY won't care. But they decide that, not you. If that overworked editor is putting together a paying anthology or magazine issue and they've put out a general call for submissions, then they're probably going to get a thousand submissions, or more.

That means, if our anthology has room for ten stories, that almost a hundred times more stories will be rejected than will be accepted.

So yes, pay attention to what they ask for. Sticking out by breaking the rules is going to get your hard-written tale yanked out of the running. But don't stop sending things in. Send in stories that will pass through all the filters. That's what those requirements are.

But remember this. Ten of those hypothetical people who sent stories in, got into that book.

Who are those ten, then? Well by definition, they're the exceptions.

Have I made my point? If I haven't, let me pick up a hammer and make it. Saying 'I am not the exception' means accepting that 'I will not get picked.' The minute I accept that, I'll delete this blog, burn my computer with all my stories stored on it, and drill out the part of my brain that dreams. When that woman talked to me and everyone else in that room like we were nothing better than cogs, why did she do it? Because she was annoyed. What did she tell us? Don't get annoyed.

Okay. Let's check the horse's vital signs. It's dead, Jim.

The con in question took place a few years ago, and I've been mulling over whether the incident needed to be talked about ever since then. If she or anyone else recognizes themselves in the above anecdote and needs to tell their side of it, that's what the comments section is for. Ball's in your court.

Also, while putting this down I came up with some other points that might give everyone an idea of what it's like to be on the receiving end of all those submissions, and it may be next week's post. We'll see.

In the meantime, I am the exception, after all. I'll keep writing.

One of those moments in life that are all too rare

Every once in a while, a bunch of different events get scheduled in the same period. That's been the case these last two months. Right before A-kon I attended the wedding of some friends, and had just a few days to get ready for Dallas. A-kon was a success, and I've got an upcoming post detailing my adventures there. Hint: people lost their pants.

But last month, well last month I flew out to Nevada, put on a suit, and watched as my daughter walked up onto a stage, was handed a diploma, and then moved the tassel on her cap from one side to the other.

I'm proud of her. I'm happy that I was able to be there to witness her milestone achievement.

Nope. Those words don't do the moment justice.

Maybe I'm just getting old and sentimental (yeah, fuck you too), but I want to get this right. I want to put down in words how I feel, describing it well enough so that a thousand years from now when time-traveling bug-eyed aliens from Neptune browse the web, they'll find this post and say, “Okay, we understand.”

I was there when my daughter was born. She was tall and strong as a baby, and she only got taller and stronger as time went on. When she was, I think, five years old, she challenged something I was telling her, an event that found its way into the story I was then writing.

Her mother and I divorced when she was still young, and I had to sit down with her one day and tell her that when she came home from school that afternoon that I wasn't going to be there. That memory still hurts.

Through the years we've been separated by as little as a hundred miles and as much as the entire length of the country. Time went on, without all those day-to-day moments when life happens. That's a loss I can never make up.

But last month I hopped on a plane and flew to Nevada. The desert climate didn't faze me, but the elevation was murder. I spent a short day talking with her and getting as caught up as I could, and then I stood in line, then took a seat along with a thousand other parents, all of us waiting for our turn to witness for our children. There were signs forbidding horns, balloons, and big gaudy banners, and I saw dozens of each before the ceremony began. I should have brought some.

They didn't call the class up in alphabetical order, so everyone kept following along with the names as they were listed in the schedule, holding it up and carefully moving their finger down each line as the names were called out. (this all happened in a college auditorium, so I also should have brought some binoculars) Somewhere, deep down and propping up all that eagerness and enthusiasm, I don't think there was a person in that building that wasn't holding the door to their anxiety closet shut as hard as they could. I think we all shared a secret dread that the name we were waiting for would never be called. That someone would go through all the paperwork one last time and find some signature missing or some box not checked and say, “Whoops. Well at least we caught it before they tried to graduate.” Bet it was even worse for the ones waiting to be called.

I waited. Her boyfriend's family waited. Everyone waited.

They called her name. A thousand people watched her walk across that stage to get a handshake and a diploma, and none of them had a bigger smile or a more swollen chest than me. If I could have opened the roof of that building to shout to the whole world, 'Look at what my daughter has achieved,' I would have done it, and you would have heard it.

My daughter has graduated.

Still smiling about it. I'm happy to have written about it, too.