The Pegasus Rider

The Wall

2011-12-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

This is not a short story.

Yesterday I hit the wall. Writing a story a day was no less taxing than I expected it would be, and I simply ran out of gas. I could not think of a single plot line that was worth tackling yesterday, and even now my brain still hurts.

So that was the experiment for this year. I'll rest a bit, get my brain back into working order and begin turning it to the next project. I hope some of you have enjoyed the work this month.

Vacation Time

2011-12-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

The client, Abraham Jackson, stood behind the curtain and finished removing his clothes. He reached for the woollen breeches and pulled them on. They were loose and baggy and had no tie ... but there was a string, also, and it had been explained how to tighten the breeches around his waist. “Where am I going, exactly?” Abe asked.

“That’s hard to pinpoint,” answered the vendor, Garrett. “You can be pretty sure that it’ll be somewhere between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. And probably somewhere in Europe. It took me months to get the fibrillation that fine. I’d hate to muck with it.

“Do people complain?”

“Some. But hey, it’s time travel. It has a certain appeal no matter what past you see. It’s a damn sight different from Gulfport.”

Abe lifted the woollen robe off its hanger and pulled it on. “I gotta agree with that.”

“I have to ask if you have any second thoughts. Nothing meant by it, I just have to ask everyone.”

Pulling the curtain aside, Abe looked Garrett in the eye. “Are you kidding?”

“Sorry. Just a precaution.”

“Well forget it. I made up my mind after looking over your equipment. There isn’t enough amperage to hurt me, and if nothing happens, I’m not going to be surprised. And that check I gave you won’t clear.”

“No, no, I understand,” said Garrett. “We both understand, don’t we Jerry?”

Jerry was sitting quietly, his EMT tool box beside him, looking ready. Every time Garrett had a new client, Jerry did him the favor of being available. That didn’t include selling the clients however, and Jerry only grunted.

Abe pointed at Jerry; “And he’s here in case I hurt myself.”

“Yes. Please understand ... about half my clients come back hurt in some way. Time doesn’t pass here while you’re in the past. So you can stay there as long as you like. Most people give it a week or so, and find they can’t get comfortable in the rustic surroundings, or they get a little freaked out with the culture. Those that try to stay longer quit the moment they get really sick, or they break an arm or something. That’s why Jerry is here. He’ll take care of you when you come back.”

Abe nodded. “I see.”

“Don’t worry ... there’s probably no more chance of getting injured in fourteenth century France that roaming around downtown Houston – everyone’s bound to need medical attention every few months, even if it’s just for a cold. There’s no sense in you sitting around here waiting for me to call an ambulance ... especially since the trip just takes a couple of seconds from our end.”

“I’m sorry?” asked Abe. “You want to explain that again.”

“Surely. I told you ... time doesn’t pass here. You step in and the machine cycles you out and into the other time line. Then, when you want to come back, the machine cycles again and brings you back. From our perspective, you’re in, you’re out. The only thing that takes time is the machine cycling twice.”

“Do some people stay a long time?”

“We had one fellow come back at ninety-five years of age. How he survived that long, I can’t guess. He said he arrived just in time to learn Polish before getting a chance to sit down and talk to Copernicus. Then he spent years just building himself up to being an important doctor in a town called Konigsberg. Take my advice – if you try to stay, be a doctor. It’s an easy life, and if you stick to basic first aid you’ll build up a good reputation and when a patient goes sour on you most of the villagers will keep you from being lynched.”

“You sound like you’ve been.”

Garrett squared his shoulders and beamed. “Four months in Cadiz, Spain. I was too early to see Columbus or the Spanish Armada, but the sights were worth the trip. I had to come back, though – I was afraid I’d caught syphilis. Turned out to be a false alarm, eh Jerry?”

Jerry grunted.

“Shit, I hadn’t thought of disease,” said Abe.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ve got shots for most of the serious ones ... you could turn up during the Black Plague and you’d be fine. Be a pretty nasty vacation, though. I’d run for the hills just to stop yourself from having nightmares. If you’ve got a strong stomach, though, you could make a killing as a doctor ... end up living like a king.”

“And come back an old man.”

“Sorry, nothing I can do about that. Time keeps passing for you. You’ll get older. Those are the breaks. You’ll see a world you’ve never seen ... and come back to find your kids are still alive. Don’t wait too long and the people at the office won’t be shocked to find your hair’s gone grey over the weekend. ‘Course, you could come back and find you can’t go back to your old job.”

Abe laughed. “Maybe I should write a history, huh?”

“If you like. Nobody has yet.”

“Have you ever had anyone not come back?”

“I hate to talk about that.”

“Go on, don’t worry,” said Abe. “I’m committed.”

“Well, one fellow went through and the machine didn’t cycle again. He had that same chip in his arm that you had ... and I’ve tried the GPS to locate it, but apparently the transmitter in it was destroyed over the centuries. It must have been something that killed him instantly, so he didn’t have time to activate it.”

“I see.”

“Heck. The law of averages dictates ...”

“No, don’t say anything else. It’s not important. Just so long as I have enough warning to squeeze my wrist very hard –”

“The chip will be activated. That’s right.”

“Okay then. What do I do?”

Garrett put out his hand. “Shake my hand. You’re starting an amazing adventure.”

Abe grinned and they shook.

“Just move inside the box. Go ahead and lean on the sides, it won’t make any difference. The machine cycles everything inside, despatializing it and plopping it into the other time frame.” Garrett waved his hand. “Sorry, that’s not very scientific. It all particle physics and it isn’t easy to explain. Take my word for it ... you and the air with you are going together at the same time.”

“Cool,” said Abe.

“I’m just going to close the box and the machine will start to cycle. You’ll hear an escape of air, and a quiet whirring, and then there’s going to be a hell of a flash. Don’t worry about closing your eyes ... the flash is your brain cells interpreting the new data. It isn’t coming through your vision. Ready?”

Abe climbed two stairs and went though the box’s entrance. “Hit me.”

“It’ll be quite gentle. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

Inspired, Abe answered, “I’ll see you in a few months.”

Garrett grinned, and gave a sharp, approving nod of his head. He moved to a console and activated the machine. The door closed, and for twenty seconds it cycled.

It didn’t cycle again.

Letting out a big breath of air, Garrett shrugged and looked at Jerry. “Why do they always think they’re going to come back?”

“I don’t know,” said Jerry. “Let’s get a beer.”

Hitting

2011-12-12T22:23:00.002-07:00

The other player’s stick blade slipped neatly into the slot of Norman’s skate, and Norman crashed onto the ice.

The ref didn’t call it.

For a second, Norman heard the player’s laughter as he sped away.

Getting up from the ice was not Norman’s best thing. He tucked his legs under him and failed on his first try ... he fancied he could hear his father shouting at him to get up, from the board way across the rink, but that was probably just Norman knowing his father would be yelling. A blur of skaters went past him, on their way back to the other side’s net, and Norman finally climbed to his feet – just in time to get blindsided from the back, and dumped on the ice again.

It was the same player. Norman saw the blue helmet with yellow flecks. He didn’t know the other player, or any of the other team. They were in Thornecliffe, playing at an outside rink, and Norman’s team was losing.

Norman got to his feet and got back to his place on the blue line. He was a defenseman. He knew what that meant. He was a no talent loser. The talent played on the forward line.

His father told him different. His father had been telling him different for six years, and now that Norman was twelve he was past telling. For awhile there, when he was nine, he nearly bought into it. And maybe, when it came to real hockey, being a defenseman did mean something. But in the league, Norman knew it was where they put you because they had to put you somewhere.

The puck came to him and he whipped it across the ice in the direction of the left wing. He didn’t try to play the puck ... that would have been a disaster. It would have just gotten taken away from him. He was done trying that game.

Now the coach was yelling at him and that was fine. The coach was always mad. His parents were always mad. Norman hated hockey and there was no way out of it, at least not for another season and a half.

He was bigger than most of the others, and that worked against him. Everyone said that if he could improve his stick handling and his skating and his balance and his shooting, he’d go far. They had been trying to make him go far for a long, long time. Norman didn’t want to go far.

The puck came again and Norman tried to back up to get it. He got his stick on it, and it slid down the board into the corner. Skating as best he could, he went for the corner, and sensed – or heard – someone coming up behind him.

A moment after he touched the puck, he felt himself slammed off it and into the boards. His helmet hit hard and for a moment he saw stars. Then he was on the ice, sliding on the boards, rolling onto his back.

The player with the blue and yellow helmet grinned, and called him, “Slowpoke.”

Dazed, Norman got to his feet. The other defenseman, Greg, swept by and took the puck, and the play was heading out into the middle ice again.

“GET GOING!” shouted the coach. Norman knew they meant him.

He got on his feet and started back across the ice. He knew he’d been boarded. Again, the penalty hadn’t been called. It was never called.

Norman had been feeling dull and uncaring, but now he had a mission. He didn’t care about the puck, or the ice. He was mad, now. He began picking up his feet more, following the pack, but not for the puck. He wanted to catch the player with the blue and yellow helmet in just the right place.

It took awhile. Norman ground his teeth together and skated in wide circles, waiting for his chance. The puck came past him and Norman fought to play it in the direction of his enemy. He didn’t care if he lost the puck now, so long as the puck got him right where Norman wanted to be.

When the chance came it was so perfect he couldn’t have hoped for a better set-up. Norman played the puck towards the right side boards, just past the red line, and blue-and-yellow went right for it. Then the right winger, Tony, came face to face with him and together they crossed sticks to get the puck. Norman didn’t care. All he could see was blue-and-yellow framed against the white boards.

Without hesitation, Norman dug his feet in, pushed with all he had and skated straight at his enemy. Norman tucked, and hit his target low, dead in the shoulders, crushing the player against the boards. The sharp, sickening impact was like music to Norman’s ears.

He kept his feet. He turned around, and skated away. No one was yelling at him. No one was making any sound. The kid wasn’t getting up off the ice.

Norman couldn’t see if there was blood. A ring of players surrounded the struck player and hid his view. He hoped there was blood.

The coaches were coming across the ice now in the shoes, slipping and sliding. Norman didn’t get to see what they did, because at that moment the ref came forward and braked with a hard stop.

“YOU!” the ref shouted. “GET off my ICE!”

Norman could see the man was really, really pissed. Fuck you, Norman thought. You should have called that penalty.

He started for the way off and passed a couple of the players on his own team. They weren’t angry, just confused. None of them were Norman’s friends. They were just other kids who were always disappointed that Norman couldn’t play better.

His father was there when Norman came off the ice. He wasn’t mad, either. He looked scared. Norman couldn’t see why. He looked back, and saw they were carrying the kid off the ice now.

“What did you do?” asked his father.

“Nuthin,” said Norman. He didn’t bother to explain. In his head, he thought, Carrying out justice.

Things got hard after that. Norman was pulled aside and into the community centre, where his mother watched over him. There was no friendly moment where his mother bought him a drink or something to chew on. She just watched him, like he was a bug. Norman was used to it.

He knew his father was talking to the coach. It was a long conversation. Norman began to think about taking off his skates. He knew he had to wait until he was told to.

His father came in and walked to Norman’s mother as though he was carrying two big suitcases. “The other boy has a concussion,” Norman’s father said, directly to Norman’s mother, as though Norman wasn’t there. “He lost two teeth. They don’t think it’s anything really serious. I talked to the boy’s father and thankfully there isn’t going to be any action. I asked if there was anything we could do and he said no. But he said he would call us if he learned anything else.”

“Oh good,” said Norman’s mother.

“As far as Norman goes –” ... and here Norman’s father at last acknowledged Norman’s existence with a look; “– he’s off the team. The coach doesn’t want anything more to do with him. So that’s it. A thousand bucks of hockey equipment down the fucking drain.”

“Ned,” corrected Norman’s mother.

“Sorry. I’m just pissed. Let’s go home.”

They told Norman to undo his skates and they collected everything to take it out to the car. Norman kept his head down, to hide his smile, that he couldn’t quite get under control. They weren’t watching him, and they didn’t see.

They were talking about how they could see the equipment somehow. Norman wasn’t listening. He was wondering what it would be like to have a Saturday that didn’t have a game he had to play, and didn’t have a practice he had to go to.

Stops

2011-12-11T17:11:00.000-07:00

The building had no elevator. It was five stories and the movers had maneuvered the sofa-bed up four of them. The stairs were narrow and inconsistent from floor to floor, so that as they made their way around each turn, it took figuring and a lot of shoving to make the piece of furniture go. “God help the poor bastards who have to take this out again,” said Brett as they passed the third floor. Later on, his comments towards the sofa-bed were less considerate.

Mark took the nature of his partner in stride. Brett was 52, thirty-one years older than Mark, and a little bit frightening at times. Brett was massive, quick to anger, indifferent to pain – both his own and Mark’s – and often impatient. What he did not have was endless energy, and that was where Mark beat him hands down. But because of it Mark had to do most of the leg work around the Furniture store’s warehouse.

Brett did all the driving. They spent most of their days in the truck, delivering or picking up, but they didn’t talk much. They didn’t listen to the radio much. Mark could start a conversation and Brett didn’t seem to mind, but their talking never seemed to go on very long.

Now they were making the last turn to bring it onto the fifth floor. The stairs made a tight bow around a bit of plastered wall. Brett was below, holding most of the weight on his shoulders, and Mark was squeaking the sofa-bed between the stair’s railing and the wall. Then suddenly Mark heard a grunt, and then a great wheeze, and the sofa-bed fell out of Mark’s hands.

Mark couldn’t see what happened. He could see the end of the sofa and that was all. “Brett?” he asked.

No answer.

Mark took a couple of steps down and squeezed around the corner of the couch, so he could look underneath it. Brett was upside down on the stairs, the couch pinning his hip, his legs pointed at Mark and his head out of sight.

“Brett, what’s wrong?”

He heard the answer with some trouble. “Come here,” Brett said.

There was all of fourteen inches between Brett’s legs, the sofa-bed and the wall. Mark bent forward, let himself fall into the hole, and caught himself on his arms without touching Brett’s legs. From there it was easy to snake the rest of the way through.

Brett was covered in sweat. His face was brick-red. “I think its ... a heart-attack,” said Brett. “I felt my arm just before ...” He caught his breath. “Call,” he managed.”

Checking around himself for his cell, Mark realized he’d left it in the truck. “I’ll be right back,” the younger kid said, and with that he was gone.

Brett tried to stop him, but he couldn’t shout. Helplessly, he listened to Mark run and jump down the stairs, until finally going out the inside front door, then the outside front door. Brett heard them close, one at a time.

He laid as still as he could, wishing he could get the sofa-bed off him, not daring to do it himself. He didn’t want anyone else, either, not unless they could both pick it up together. A long time passed. Brett chastized himself for getting into this trouble. He was mad at himself for being as old as he was.

Distantly, he heard an apartment buzzer ringing insistently. Mark had realized by now that the truck was locked, and that he couldn’t get back in the building. Brett heard Mark yelling. Then the downstairs door opened, and Mark started running up the stairs.

Brett heard the door open at the top of the stairs.

“Hello?” said someone, probably the client. It was a woman. “Did you need an ambulance?”

Brett did his best to be heard. “Yes,” he answered, biting off the word.

“I’ll call it,” said the woman.

The footsteps told Brett that Mark was nearly up up to the fourth floor. “Brett, I can’t get my phone,” he said.

“Someone else is calling,” said Brett. He felt a wave of nausea. Then he realized he couldn’t feel his legs.

Appearing, Mark moved to kneel on the steps, where he looked down at Brett. “Do you want me to do something?”

“No,” said Brett. “Just stay there and don’t do a ... fucking thing,” He barely breathed out the last words.

Mark swallowed. “Does it hurt?”

“Not as much as you’d think. I can’t feel that much now.”

“Oh,” said Mark, scared. “That’s not good.”

Brett whispered. “It is what it is, kid. Don’t ... don’t get worried about it.”

Neither spoke. A minute passed and the woman came again to the top of the stairs. “They’re on their way,” she said. “How are you?”

“He’s in a bad way,” answered Mark. “Find someone up there who can help me get this sofa off him!”

The woman paused, and said, “Okay.” She went away and the door above the movers closed.

“Kid, if you try to move this fucking thing off me, I’ll kill you.”

“We can’t leave it on you like this.”

Brett grinned. “Stop worryin’, I said. I can’t feel my left arm at all, and my right one’s just about dead. So am I, I think.”

Mark was really scared now. He’d broken into his own sweat. “Brett?”

“Don’t be a kid all your life, kid,” Brett told him. “It ain’t worth it.”

Then, like that, he was gone.

Mark blinked, and began to cry. It was shock, really ... he didn’t sob or break down. He didn’t take his eyes off Brett’s face, either. He’d never seen Brett look the way he did.

The door opened again and the woman’s voice came down. “No one’s home,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” answered Mark. Then he started, remembering it was what Brett had told him. Mark moved back, walking down the steps until he came to stand next to the fourth floor door. And there he waited. He thought about deciding not to go to university the autumn before. He thought about not starting the band with Fred and Roddy. He thought about ending it with Olivia, four months ago.

He’d decided how to stop being a kid before the paramedics arrived.

The Possibilities Are Endless

2011-12-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

Her mouth made a big round ‘O’ when he told her he’d never been fishing, and she insisted that that weekend they strike out. She arranged for a fishing rod for him, she bought him a sleeping bag, and Saturday morning, early, they packed up. They hiked up to the back-end of Boom Lake and picked a spot amid the trees, and set out their tent and their gear. She laid a huge blanket on the ground under the sky, and spread open their sleeping bags on top of it, and as the warmest part of the day passed, they christened the campsite with great sex.

They laid together naked in the woods, him on his back, her nestled in his shoulder. “So this is fishing, huh?” he asked.

“Yep,” she answered.

“I like this. It gives me ideas. Maybe this fall we could go hunting.”

“I’m up for that.”

“And then after Christmas, we could go skiing. And in the spring we could try some rafting and next summer some horseback riding.”

She grinned. “I’ll organize everything.”

They snuggled and kissed and watched the birds flit in the trees and listened to the rustle of grass along the lake shore.

“What’s the future going to be like?” she asked.

“You mean, after we’re married?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I’ve been thinking about that.” He made an arc in the air with his hand. “First thing, your parents get killed in a car accident.”

“At the same time?”

“No. First your father goes, and then the hearse with his corpse and your mother goes off a cliff.”

She thought about it. “That works for me. What next.”

“Well, next, my brother buys us a lottery ticket, which wins us ten million dollars ... but he’s been carrying the ticket around so long it’s too late for us to collect.”

She nodded. “Believable. And then?”

“Well, I get a job I don’t have to explain to your parents –”

“Because they’re dead.”

“Right. I make a little money, you get a job and get a little money, and then we have fourteen kids.”

“Only fourteen?”

“Well, you go menopausal at 38, so we have to stop.”

She counted it out in her head. “That’s an average of about 26.7 days between giving birth and the next conception.”

“That’s how I figured it out too,” he said.

“Crap. You got lucky it wasn’t one kid too many.”

He sighed. “It’s always one kid too many.”

“I’m not sure I’m into this future where I’m visibly pregnant sixty-two per cent of the time,” she said. “How about another future?”

“You want a reboot?”

“Will my parents still be dead?”

“If I’m predicting the future they will be,” he answered.

She tucked in closer to him and kissed his nipple. “Good. Start again.”

“Okay. Hm... okay, you start practicing the clarinet again.”

“I meant to do that.”

“See? We’re already in the future. You’re parents will probably be dead by the time we get back home tomorrow night. Can I go on?”

“Please.”

“As I was saying, you practice ... a LOT. All the time. I start to miss you, and we don’t have any children.”

“Hm.”

“Shut-up. You get really good at the clarinet and people start to take notice. You get a gig with an orchestra, and you start getting drunk with the girl violinists and half the time you’re doubling down in Vegas.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Working a steady job. Now, it happens in Vegas that you meet a manager of some kind, and you wind up doing a clarinet duet with Britney Spears and you become world famous and make millions of dollars.”

“I like that. And what do I do with that?”

“You start sleeping around with famous people.”

“Who?”

“Um, Michael Jackson.”

“Who’s dead.”

“And, uh, Amy Winehouse.”

“Interesting. And also dead.”

“Okay, Heath Ledger.”

“I’m sensing a pattern here.”

“Well, you’re in an experimental phase, this being the best chance you’ve had to examine your long-held latent necrophiliac tendencies.”

“And my lesbian tendencies also.”

“Obviously. You’re playing the field.”

“And apparently finding my partners there,” she observed.

“With a shovel,” he added. “These are deep relationships you’re having.”

She didn’t miss a beat. “And what are you doing all this time.”

“Suffering. Suffering horribly. I never see you and I’ve lost my job and there doesn’t seem to be any purpose at all.”

“I see.”

“I tell the girls I sleep with about it all the time. They’re very sympathetic.”

“They are.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But none of them are necrophiliacs and they hold no interest for me.”

“None at all.”

“Well, the cheerleader’s kind of cute, but no, really, just not my type.”

“Okay.”

“So I decide I’ve got to have you back. I start stalking the tour you’re on, going from city to city and selling drugs to enable me to overcome the staggering ticket prices. You don’t even remember I exist anymore ...”

“Am I still fucking dead bodies?”

“Sure, whatever you can dig up between giving massive drugs to your roadies in the hopes it will make their hearts stop. Oh, and between times you’re increasing the size of your girl scout uniform collection.”

“I’d never give that up,” she agreed.

“I felt certain of it. Anyway, one night I get lucky and the guard at the stage door is having a heart attack, being your intended lover that night ...”

“He’s good looking?”

“I hardly notice as I’m stepping over his twitching body.”

“Okay, you’re off the hook for that one.”

“I hide around the back stage, making my way to your dressing room door, and when I see you enter, and the three big hirelings you command go off to collect the guard’s recently demised body, I take my chance and burst into your dressing room.”

“And what happens?”

“You panic and reach for the gun you keep on your dresser –”

“For when my lovers aren’t quite dead?”

“Exactly,” he said. “And you shoot me dead with it. And at that moment you realize I’m the perfect man for you, and we live together happily ever after.”

“Good. That’s how I’d like it.”

She laughed, and he laughed, and for awhile they rested.

“Let’s go fishing,” she said. “Actual fishing.”

“Let’s lie right here instead.”

She sat up, and began pulling on his arm. “Come on, it won’t kill you.”

“That’s what you said when I came through the stage door.”

“I was lying then,” she said. “I’m telling the truth now.” She had some success at getting him on his feet.

“Wait!” he said. “I’ve had another vision of the future. You go fishing, and make the beds in the tent and fall asleep.”

She dragged his arm. “Come on, stupid.”

He put a hand to his forehead. “I see myself falling into the lake ... and being eaten by a fish ... except for my boots ...”

She handed him his fishing rod and he took hold of it. “This way.”

His voice could still be heard from the camp and they started towards the lake. “You fall in love with my left boot,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Yes. The two of you have four kids together ...”

It's Brown!

2011-12-09T15:12:00.000-07:00

Mary sat at the lab bench, her feet wrapped around her stool, surrounded by her brothers and her husband, all three leaning over her. They were afraid to speak to her. They were afraid to interrupt her. Mary peered in the microscope and at long last she finally said, “Uh huh.”

“The right balance?” asked her husband Tom.

“As near as I can tell,” she answered. “The viscosity is nearly perfect, the color looks right. And the source was extremely productive.”

“Extremely,” agreed her brother Graham.

“Double that,” added her brother Alfred.

“So with that, amino acid content is down, and the caloric expectation is just about twice what we might have hoped for. I think if the seasonal temperature stays about the same ... our efficiency should prove spectacular.”

“We’ll be rich,” said Tom.

“Well, yes.”

“Fifteen years,” said Alfred. “I can’t believe this took twenty-two years.”

“It was a genetic problem from the start,” said Mary. “It doesn’t happen over night. And the first five years were wasted from not understanding enough about the subject. We learned from that, however.” She ran her eyes over the glass apparatus, the books of notes, the burn marks on the wooden table ... signs of years and years of effort and research and disappointment. Step by step and year by year they had built the source, and sometimes at great cost. Three times they’d come close to losing everything.

But here it was now. Mary reached out and picked the full cubical bottle from the table. The tea-brown liquid flowed and rolled within, catching the light, glistening in it as no comparable formula had. It was the light and the way it shone through the bottle that was sure to make them millions.

She handed the bottle to Tom. He brought it close to his eyes and stared. “Amazing.”

Tom handed it to Graham, who handed it to Alfred. “Cost?” asked Alfred.

A hundred and fifty a bottle here in North America. Possibly twice that in Europe or Japan. We’ll have to contact our overseas distributor once he sees the result. He might suggest a higher sum, depending on market analysis.

“More than three hundred?”

“Boys, we have something that can’t be equalled – unless someone else is working on this right now, and I think we’re all sure they’re not. This is ground breaking. It’ll be at least a decade before someone copies it, and by they we’ll have sewn the market.” Mary grinned. “Just selling the process alone would be enough – they’ll scream blue murder in America once the supply starts.”

Alfred laughed.

“We could cut in some of the interest groups,” said Tom. “We have pretty hefty debts we could stand to take care of right now. Maybe Vermont would pay.”

Mary stood up, and took the bottle from Alfred. “To hell with Vermont.” She held the bottle up to the light, again enjoying the way it changed the liquid’s color.

“Let Vermont dare make maple syrup as good as this!”

The Poacher

2011-12-08T20:57:00.002-07:00

I had got a brace of pheasant in the Lord’s wood, and thought to be working my way out the way I come in when I ran across a ploughed field, and along the field a wood fence. I spied around me but saw no Hayward, and counting myself lucky I headed along the fence in quest of the lane I knew to be west of where I was. The sun was setting and I knew the way.

The young girl was sitting upon a stile, watching me come on, seeing me before I saw her. Her hips were swathed in a rag, and the shirt she wore was tied around her waist with a dirty sash. She was none too clean herself, but not being a man keen to ablutions either, that made little difference to me. I wondered at her intent, and would have asked her, but that her intent was made clear as she climbed down off the stile and came towards me, her eyes never leaving mine. I dropped my pheasants near a post, and leaned my bow, and together we laid down in the wheat that had grown wild next to the field, and knew each other better.

I know not what happened when I woke, to find myself whole, and the girl still beside me. Now there were two men, who looked alike to each other that I knew them brothers. My first thought was that my poaching had been discovered, but this was not their look. They rode no horse, or showed any sign of heraldry, but one had my pheasants and one had my bow. The one with my bow had gotten my knife, too, for I could see it clearly in his belt. The one with my bow spoke to the girl in an unfamiliar tongue, and the girl answered likewise, and I got from her way and from the man’s way that they were acquainted. I grasped my waist and found my pouch still there, and seeming all the coin that was in it, ten pieces in all. The man did not seem interested in my coin, and was not angry, nor was his brother when he said a word or two, but it was made clear to me that I should stand up and that I should walk with them.

We made our way together, all four of us, the girl ahead, towards the same lane I mentioned before. I had come to guess by then the girl was their sister, for they had ways about them that suggested as much, but though I had bedded her in the grass, and the brothers clearly knew it, they carried no malice for me.

When we come to the lane, that being the way into the Lord’s fiefdom, down the glen and to the little hamlet with its mill and villiens, the girl and the brothers grew quiet and fearful. We crossed it quickly, my thinking being that they were as feared of the Reeve as I. From that point we stole through the woods beyond the lane, the brothers on either side of me beckoning and pointing my way, and the girl ahead. I grew occupied with wondering our purpose, and with what should become of the game I stole, or my knife and bow.

By and by we came into the bottom of the valley, where all was tough grass and pond water, where none lived but cotters and worse, souls who lived off the Lord’s land but depended upon the labor they could gain there for livelihood. We came in time to a clearing where there were two hovels, hardly wider through the middle than I could stretch my arms wide. An old woman sat at the doorway of one on a stool, and the brother with my pheasants gave them to her, and she smiled and began to pluck them straight away. The other brother called and an old man stepped out, and this I knew was the father, and the old woman of course was the mother. The girl fetched water from a pond, pulling me along beside her until we came to one where there was movement in the water, a branch of the stream that was further on. What anyone thought of her and I going off alone I knew not, for they made no move towards it, and I could not understand the words they used to speak of it, if they even did speak of it, for I could not know that either.

When we came back with the water, the old woman had plucked the birds and a fire had been set and a clay pot sat resting in the fire. The girl beckoned me to pour the water into the pot, and it sizzled as it fell in. The girl stopped me from pouring all of it.

The old woman had my knife now, and she cut the bird to pieces and dropped it into the pot, and the young girl fetched wild turnips from all about, and the men smoked a weed through pipes they’d carved themselves, resting against a small circle of trees that were a bit above the hovels where it was driest. The one brother offered me the pipe, and I smoked it too, watching the women move about, trading it back and forth with the brother as the sun got lower in the sky.

We ate the bird and the soup in the twilight, from wooden bowls they had, picking the meat out with our hands and sipping the broth off as it cooled. The soup was flat and had hardly taste, but it was warm and filling, and they felt good enough to talk and tell stories and play with each other as people do around a fire.

As it grew full dark, and the fire died away, the brothers went to one hovel and the girl and I, and the father and mother, went to the other. All was dark inside, but the girl brought in a taper, lit by the fire, and showed me a place to sleep. It was upon a dry, greasy cloth, laid overtop straw and leaves and grass, against the wall. I crawled upon it and found it was restful, and turned to face the wall and sleep.

The girl laid beside me, and the father and mother upon another cloth in arm’s reach of us. I found I could not keep my eyes closed, as the girl pressed her body against mine. The moon rose, and a thin light came through the doorway, and presently I could see the dry clay walls inside, with nothing to mark them.

Then the girl began to fuss with me, pulling and moving me, impelling me to turn over, not letting me alone until I did. She pressed me until my back was to the wall, and her hands stole down the breeches to make her way. She arranged and nestled herself until she was beside me, and I in her, bedded like husband and wife.

And over her shoulder I saw the eye of her mother in the moonlight, staring at me but making no sound or movement to stop these goings on. For a moment I saw the girl’s father lift himself and look, but he took no notice of it and soon he was snoring. I closed my eyes against the mother’s gaze, as the girl humped against me, but I knew the mother did not close her eye against me. I know she went on watching, until the girl’s keening wail broke the night, and I had finished my last grunt. We were not disturbed, not by anyone, and the night passed thereafter uneventfully.

With the morning I rose, and climbed over the girl, my clothes tied up, and found the mother near the fire, making a tea with the water left from the night before. I approached her, to make a sign of some kind, and she stretched out her hand to me. I took her meaning at once, and found my pouch, and chose to give her four coins. She smiled, and pointed me to the door of the brothers’ hovel. There was my bow, newly strung, and my knife, oiled. My pheasants I did not miss. I nodded to the old woman, and collected them, and bowed to her. She wished me away with her hand.

I did not fear to make my way to the lane now, for I could not be caught as a poacher with no game. But I was happier than I’d been since I’d come, and knew I’d be happier when by the end of that day I had two other birds to bring home to my own family.

Shroom Cutting

2011-12-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

Ray and Todd stood next to each other. Their knives were in reach, on the prep table. Two five pound boxes of mushrooms waited.

It was their last chore for the evening. They’d grated cheese and crushed garlic; they’d created mounds of cut vegetables and tubs of salad dressing; they had separated the eyeballs from a host of squid and baked cheesecakes. It was all in a night’s work. And there was one thing left: ten pounds of mushrooms.

Behind them, the restaurant kitchen’s busy time had tapered off. The line cooks were collecting food from the cooler, filling up the containers, wiping down the cupboards, and still putting out a few plates. Ray and Todd paid them no notice.

“You cut yourself, you lose,” said Todd.

“Agreed,” answered Ray. “Your mushrooms have to be off the cupboard and wrapped –”

“— but not in the cooler,” finished Todd.

“Right.”

“Ready?”

Ray gave it a moment. “Go!” he shouted.

They both reached for the boxes, tearing the cardboard open with the bare hands and spilling a heap of mushrooms out onto the table. They snapped up their knives together, and together they snapped their first mushroom into the right position and started slicing.

The knives made a machine gun chatter on the table and the mushrooms were vivisected. Like lightning, reaching for the closest ones, they attacked the next mushroom and the next, in a series, and in a few seconds they’d each cut their way through the first five or six. They didn’t look at their knives. They didn’t look at the mushrooms. Their eyes were on the next mushroom in order, which quickly disappeared under the knife. Twin mounds of sliced mushrooms appeared in back of their left hands.

“Come on,” said one, “Pick it up, pick it up.”

“I got it I got it,” said the other rapidly, rattling through two mushrooms in succession. They sliced without words for a half a minute, and the first of the got through the initial tumble they’d made from the box. He slashed out with the knife, cut the box open, and more than half the remaining mushrooms rumbled out. One threatened to tumble off the table, but he snatched it and a moment later it was slices.

“Go, come on, you’re slow,” he said.

“You’re slow,” the other snapped, cutting his box open, snapping up a few strays on the edges and chopping them up.

“You’re gonna cut yourself,” said one.

“You are, you can’t hold that knife, you’re a fucking girl.”

“Choker,” said the first. “You were born a choker. You’re parents were chokers.”

The piles of sliced mushrooms were building up fast. The knives didn’t slow a wit. They moved like machines, slipping over the knuckles of the two chefs, who knew where the deadly blades were by feel and nothing else.

“You’re the choker,” said the other. “You’re going to choke any second now.”

They were going through the mushrooms faster than one a second now, nearing two a second, diminishing the hordes of whole mushrooms. The first laughed, and the second did too. It was dangerous and crazy. “We’re gonna lose a finger or something.”

“You’re going to lose a finger.”

“Careful, you’ll take yours off at the knuckle. Have to call you Stumpy.”

“You’re going to be Fingerless Todd. Everyone will point and say there goes Fingerless, he’s worthless at cutting mushrooms.”

“Don’t get clever Stumpy.”

“Don’t choke, Fingerless.”

They were getting way past halfway now, and it was getting harder. They both knew it was going to come down to who had more mushrooms in their box, or how far they had to reach for those last few mushrooms ... they tried to bunch their mushrooms together as they reached for them, tried to keep from knocking them further out of reach.

“Choke,” said one.

“You choke.”

“Ow!” shouted one, still cutting, still making slices.

“Did you cut yourself?”

“Why don’t you look?”

“You fucker, you’re faking.”

“Yes. Wanna look?”

“Cut yourself you bastard. Cut yourself and lose.”

“You cut yourself!”

The one laughed, high and crazy, knife blade banging and banging. The other couldn’t help himself either. For a minute they cut in silence and the mushrooms dwindled. They each in their turn reached for their boxes and dribbled out the last of the mushrooms on their sides of the table. Both Todd and Ray took two seconds to reign in the stragglers and collect the targets close together. They nimbly snatched each mushroom between index finger and thumb, set it in front of the knife with stem pointing at their bellies. Seven or eight cuts and the mushrooms were swept to the side, now making weaving ridges on the table, as the chefs pushed them off to make room for the next shrooms.

“Ten left,” said one.

“Nine,” said the other.

“Choke!” demanded one.

“You choke!”

“Three left.”

“LAST ONE!”

Ray made a grab for his plastic bucket and groped, tipping it as he brought it next to his cut mushrooms. Then they were both sweeping the slices together with both hands, loading them up and over the lips of the buckets. Ray was a little behind. He gathered together the last of his, picked up the few big bits on the counter and flicked them in, then spun for the plastic wrap dispenser. They each had one.

Todd had Ray cold. He pulled a skein of plastic out, spread it over the top of the bucket, and ran his hand down the serrated edge that cut the plastic just as Ray was still pulling on his own dispenser.

And Todd cut himself.

“OH SHIT,” shouted Todd, reaching for a paper towel and at once swaddling his index finger in it.

Ray heard him, saw the towel going around Todd’s finger and knew he’d won. He took his time finishing his mushrooms. And then he finished Todd’s.

“I told you you’d cut yourself,” said Ray.

“Yeah, yeah, shut up. How long did that take?”

Ray looked at the clock. “About six and a half minutes.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

They both thought for a moment. Then one said, “Let’s put this shit away and get a beer.”

Sightseeing

2011-12-06T11:27:00.002-07:00

The foggy veil lifted and it was possible to see something now. The Vlaxians drifted outwards from the middle of the vessel floor to the circle of windows, cackling with excitement as they did, anxious for a first glimpse of the weird, exotic landscape they’d paid to see.

The Master Guide Kaylon prodded his junior Prigg, saying, “Now.”

Prigg stood on cue, climbed to the guide’s platform and considered for a moment the nearly two hundred tourists gazing out at the contorted humps and gashes of mud amid a horizon of smashed vegetation. Giant holes were scooped into the mud, and everywhere they looked were the remains of hundreds of dead creatures – a small portion of the planet’s native inhabitants.

“Excuse me ... excuse me all,” called Prigg, his voice a little strained, a little cracked. He had no experience calling to order a crowd this large. The crowd came to attention anyway. The silence grew and fleshed out, though a few of the experienced travellers went on talking to their neighbours.

“While we reconstitute, this is a good time to talk about what you’ll be seeing and doing today,” he said. “You’ve all been given your tools,” he added, and a few of the Vlaxians lifted the metal sticks in their hands in answer. “I want to warn you, they’re not as precise as you might be expecting ... they can get frustrating at times, but don’t worry, that’s something everyone gets used to. The important thing is to have fun.

Prigg looked at his senior, hoping for some sign of approval. He got a quick glance and a hand wave, telling him to get on with it.

“Next thing,” said Prigg. “The native creatures won’t be able to tell you apart from themselves. The suits you have on will warn the creatures to avoid you or even try to hurt you, but as long as you don’t take off your breast-Coins, you’ll be all right.” Prigg held up a Coin for everyone to see – it was a wide brown disk, an inch thick and four inches across. “We’ll try about ten rotations today –”

He was interrupted by Kaylon, who gurgled testily. “Tell them to turn on the Coins.”

“Oh, right,” hissed Prigg. “Sorry, I meant to tell everyone that you need to turn on your Coins now. Hold them tight for about ten seconds, and when they glow orange they’ll be on. If anyone’s doesn’t come on, talk to a neighbour or someone else who might be able to help, and if there’s still a problem come up here in after and we’ll make sure it’s on before we disembark.”

The room was full of people chattering, now, eliciting sounds of happiness when their Coins came on as expected; some did have trouble, but it was almost always because they did not grip them tight enough, or long enough. A few salts in the room moved about and helped some of the greener vacationers.

“As I was saying,” continued Prigg. “We’ll be out for nine rotations today ...”

“Ten,” prompted Kaylon.

“Yes, ten rotations,” corrected Prigg. “Some of you are going to find that a long time. Remember that when you are resting, you’ll want to hide behind something. Remember always that the less you are seen by the native creatures, the better off you will be. They will try to hurt you, and though your Coin will keep you safe, it’s a fair warning that the native attempts to hurt you can sting quite a bit. Keep low, use the terrain and try to learn from your mistakes. You might try to watch some of the others who seem to be more confident, and you’ll probably find them ready to give some advice. Take it. It’s pretty hazardous out there, and we’d hate to find you’re not having a good time.”

He took a gasp, thinking he was doing pretty well. The eyes in the room were all watching him, waiting for his next words, and that felt good.

And then he realized he didn’t know what those next words were supposed to be. He looked at Kaylon, who put his hands together in the ‘killing’ gesture. “Right, right,” answered Prigg. “Some of you ... a lot of you, probably ... have never killed anything before, and so for you, today will be a new experience and probably a pretty strange one. There might be a tendency towards sympathy, and as some of you are noticing now that we’re almost completely reconstituted, the creatures themselves make quite a mess when they come apart.”

It was possible for those nearest the windows to see that the dead native creatures were often missing parts of their bodies, and that a brownish red liquid seemed to clot over their surfaces. It looked very messy.

“I first want to tell you, no one today needs to kill. You don’t need to feel any need to prove yourselves. If you just want to experience the environment, go ahead and do that without feeling any pressure to interact at all. Try to remember that for some of the people here, this is not their first adventure, and if they seem quite comfortable with the experience, it is probably because they have gone through what you’re feeling right now before. Take your time, take in the sights and move forward at your own speed.”

Prigg’s visage filled with a calming bubbles, and he emitted as much pheromone as he could to pacify some of the greeners. “Let me reassure you ... these creatures have been bent upon killing each other since this planet was stumbled upon several spans ago. When you land, you will appear to them as they will appear to you. They won’t hesitate to do you harm. Remembering this might help your consciences along. According to our sociologists, there are natives on the planet who do not partake in these activities, and you may rest assured you won’t see any of those today. You’ll only see those representatives of the species who are themselves killers.”

He paused. “Let me see ...”

“Sounds,” said Kaylon.

“I was getting to it,” answered Prigg, who regretted it at once. He looked away from Kaylon and continued, his voice cracking. “One last thing before we open the doors. It can get pretty loud out there. If any of you start to get uncomfortable with it, or you just want to come back and rest, tap your Coin four times and we’ll answer and pick you up. Hold it to your cavity like this.” Prigg held it near his head. “You’ll be able to hear us.”

He bit his proboscis, a bit angry at himself for snapping at Kaylon. “Okay. Best of luck to you. You also might take a few moments to read your guides before heading off, if you haven’t already. The ground is called a ‘battlefield,’ and its surrounded on both sides by networks of creviced earth called ‘trenches.’ Most of the noise will be made by things called ‘artillery,’ but you won’t see those today ... they are quite a long way off, farther than you’ll probably be able to travel. Those tools in your hands are called ‘rifles.’ It’s all a funny mix of words you’ve never heard before and probably won’t ever use again, but knowing what you’re seeing is half the fun. Now the doors are going to open in a few minutes ... if there are any of you still unable to get your Coins on, come on up and we’ll fix you.”

A few began to move forward, and the room shifted, the Vlaxians sorting themselves out between those looking over the things attached to their bodies, those reading their guides and those going straight for the yet-unopened doors.

Prigg looked at Kaylon and asked, “How was that?”

“Practice,” said Kaylon. “With a little more practice you’ll hit that mark.”

Three Boys

2011-12-05T17:14:00.002-07:00

They were three eleven year old boys. According to plan, they laid away in their cabin until they heard their camp counsellor’s snoring. They slipped out, packs and shoes in hand. They tip-toed over the cold wet ground along the path until they came to Kaylee Kamp’s great open field. As their feet touched grass, they stopped and put on their shoes. Then they ran full tilt across the field to the mess house, wary of being seen and keeping low.

They slipped in through a side window they’d found was left open all the time, boosting each other or giving a hand so they all got in. No one guarded the kitchen, and they plundered all they could fit into their packs, and all two dared carry. The eldest climbed into the loft, having learned that afternoon that someone stored a small pup tent there. Then the boys let themselves out the door towards the lake, and struck off.

For awhile, only twenty minutes, they followed a clear trail. Once the trail had taken them a good ways from the camp, they abandoned the trail and started into the thickest part of the woods. It was hard going, but they were determined. They crawled over logs and started to climb into the hills behind Kaylee Kamp, getting a better and better view of the lake as they went. The small trailblazers reached a low ridge that reached out from Gorman’s Peak – a 2,200 foot hill – and slipped down the other side. The lake disappeared, and the camp with it.

Not long after, they found a deer trail and began to make good time. They were cheerful, a little tired, but full of talk. They chattered about the trail, and pointed out stars and planets to one another, and talked about what space travel would be like someday. They fell into a lengthy discussion about what kinds of ship fuels might be invented. They debated the hazards of ion gas vs. anti-matter, and soon found themselves talking about the mutational possibilities of the latter, and how they themselves would handle being mutated beings.

They were not scared of the dark. They didn’t get lost. They did not trip and fall. They tripped, but it was only a little stumble and they didn’t mind. They were bone tired as the stars turned a tenth of a circle above them, but they did not quarrel or argue – they were all very happy.

When the first dim signs of sunrise shone in the east, they quit. One made sandwiches, and two built the tent, and they ate in the deep quiet of the dawn as it rose. They climbed in and collapsed in their clothes, warm and exhausted.

They did not sleep long. One climbed out and tottered a little way into the woods to relieve himself. He shouted at his friends, and they came out to do the same, each in his own direction. One by one they came back, and decided scientifically that it was just after nine. They would have been missed for two hours.

They ate quickly and packed their camp and started off again, running a little, filled with energy despite their little sleep. They laughed about being free from Chuckhead, or Mr. Chuck the counsellor, who had made their lives a living hell for nine days. They made guesses about how Chuckhead reacted when he found their bunks empty, and they mocked him and enjoyed that enthusiastically. They talked about the camp exploding, and wondered about the Mounties arriving, and who else might get called, and how long it would take before they began searching the woods and not the roads. They predicted their distance from Kaylee Kamp, and how much farther they’d be in an hour, and how much farther in three hours.

They did not see any animals. They did not get into any danger. The deer path changed direction and they abandoned it. They found their way blocked by creeks and rock falls and drops and they sprang or tottered or scrambled over each with ease. The day got very warm and they found a cool place by a pool, where the sky was blocked out by poplars and one big spruce. The ground was covered with grass and they saw little daddy-long-legs spiders that didn’t scare them. They spread out their coats and slept. They ate again, and nodded sagely that they couldn’t start a fire until it was dark and the smoke wouldn’t be seen. The forest made sounds around them and they laid and listened to the water tumbling into the pool. They felt it was the best time of their lives. They made fun of the other counsellors, and talked about how they hated their parents for sending them to Kaylee Kamp, and what they thought they would do someday when they were grown up and they didn’t have to go to bed when they were told.

The sun had gone far to the west when they started off again, tired now, but game for a few climbs, until they came to a high spur on the back side of Gorman’s Peak. They found a little crevice in the rocks, and cleared away some ground near a copse of fir trees. They used a small knife that one boy had smuggled into the camp, and had been able to keep secret from Chuckhead. They cut branches and covered the tent. They didn’t injure themselves. They got a couple of splinters, but they picked them out. They got a few cuts that bled a few drops, but they washed them in the stream that went nearby. As the sun began to set they slipped into a deep sleep, without talking. Hours and hours passed, and each rose in the night to pee into the night, eyes heavenward as they listened to the spattering sound they made on the rock.

That morning they remarked about how empty the woods were, and how they didn’t see a single thing. They talked about how there were no movie monsters in the woods, no hermits in cabins and no zombie graveyards. It was all trees and rocks, with streams and thousands of little insects. They were the only beings in this wide world.

They broke their rule and made a little fire, but there was not very much smoke and they only kept it long enough to cook the hotdogs they’d taken from the mess. They kicked it out and poured water over it from the stream and made sure it was dead by putting their hands into the ash. No fire started. It was really out.

They started to wonder where they were going, and decided they would pick one place and wait for all the people who were searching for them to find them. They agreed that if it didn’t happen in a week, they’d walk back the way they came. They could see Gorman’s Peak. They knew how to get back.

It began to rain a bit, but they all had slickers with them, because the camp insisted that every boy be ready for rain. They walked a bit and waited a bit under an overhang, and the rain stopped soon. The sun came out and it was dry. The boys were fine. They didn’t get sniffley noses.

It all ended when they came down an embankment and found themselves on a road. A Mountie was sitting on the hood of his car. The car had overheated and his partner had climbed down the other side of the road with a pop bottle to get water for the radiator. The Mountie was drinking a root beer, and didn’t see the boys. But as the three turned to climb up again, the scree shifted and the Mountie saw them.

There was a lot of shouting and excitement and people asking questions. There were examinations and tests and the boys were all poked and prodded and hurt in the interest of making sure they were all right. Then there came the angry parents, the angry questions, the concealed fear, the threats and, in the course of things, the long, sustained punishment.

And twenty years later the last part of the episode was all forgotten. It drained away into the distance of time like all unimportant things must. What remained was the distilled memory of two wonderful, unmatchable days, when three boys truly lived for the first time.

Waiting for the Rosa Lee

2011-12-04T15:02:00.000-07:00

Eugene stared out from the observation deck of Marsport RH-4 ... a name which the residents of the port naturally presumed designated it as the fourth ring of Hell. Most of the view was obscured by the freighter Rosa Lee, an 80,000 ton vessel that had approached for docking some four hours before. As the rings were bare minutes from setting a firm contact between ship and port, an explosion had taken place somewhere in the biolab aboard the Rosa Lee. As near as anyone could tell on RH-4, a deadly gas had been released, killing everyone on board.

“I don’t see that it’s moving,” said Jareth, standing next to Eugene, his hands flat against the polymer window, eyes squinting at the ship.

“It is moving. At two point six-four millimetres per minute.”

“And it’s ...?”

“Seventeen meters from point of contacting RH-4. Right now, I’d say its maybe thirty meters from us.”

Eugene calculated the number in his mind: seventeen hundred centimetres, probably less, divided by 264, that’s six with a remainder of 116, which gives point four with a remainder of 104, which gives point zero three, multiply by one thousand makes 643, nearly 644 minutes, or less than eleven hour before contact.

“So we’ve got, what –” said Jareth. “Ten hours?”

“Closer to eleven.”

“Big difference.”

Eugene shrugged.

There were efforts going on all over the station. The crew inside were all dead, but the explosion had affected no port facilities. Immediately a dozen teams had gone out to seize control of the ship and bring it under control. They had to cut their way in. From reports, they had been successful, had made their way past security points inside the ship and were right now in the captain’s offices and the Rosa Lee’s bridge. At best, so far, they’d been able to scratch their helmets and poke at a few buttons. In the worst possible way, the ship’s fundamental systems had apparently been jury-rigged six ways from Sunday. The programming was amateur and looked – again, according to the reports – like some smart cookie had invented a personalized operating system for the whole ship.

There hadn’t been much luck in getting the ship’s thrusters operational.

Eugene’s office had reached a level of shrieking squalor, to the point where he had chosen to get up from his desk, climb down four levels to the observation deck, and put his thoughts together.

From here, it didn’t look to him either that the Rosa Lee was moving. Two point six-four centimetres was awfully slow.

“So what,” said Jareth. “It bumps the port and causes some damage. We lose a couple weeks of peak efficiency. A few hundred billion coin.”

Eugene looked at Jareth, who didn’t turn to look back. They knew each other marginally. Eugene remembered that Jareth was in operations. He couldn’t remember if it was catering or housekeeping. A manager of some kind – ten or twenty people under him, it didn’t matter, what was important was that Jareth was non-technical. Eugene wondered how much he should tell him.

“It won’t be a bump. It’s going to tear through the port like tissue paper.”

“Huh?”

“A ship that big ... it won’t stop no matter what it hits. And all of RH-4 is 360,000 tons itself. Stretched over three miles of space. That ship out there will hit us, keep going, and wind up dragging the whole port behind it like a long string, like a cow flying through barbed wire. Couplings will break over the whole port and for those people not spewed into space, life support is going to evaporate and every interior will be space-cold in about ten to twenty seconds. Plus a minute or so for a few places. Those of us in our suits – and that will be everyone – who isn’t killed by the power shocks and the coupling breaks might hold enough air to find out if the Rosa Lee drags this port into orbit of if we’re destined to crash into the surface of Mars. But don’t worry ... if it’s the latter, we won’t have enough air to live until impact.”

Jareth was looking at Eugene now. His eyes were large, terrified saucers, the more so because he was the sort of layman who recognized the cool, calm exterior of a techie who’s telling the truth.

“Then we’re dead.”

“If those thrusters don’t fire in the next ...” he calculated; “639 minutes. Probably a few minutes less.”

“But ... if it’s moving so slowly ...”

“Makes no difference. It’s huge. I won’t go into it, but it has everything to do with mass and velocity and frictionless space. Anything you care about?”

Jareth shook his head.

“Sure. Worst thing is,” continued Eugene, “we’ve got nothing here that can push it back. We had the tremendous bad luck of the port being empty today. Every ship in dock is 6,000 tons or less.”

“God,” murmured Jareth.

“You should call your family.”

“Haven’t got one. No wife. No kids. My father hasn’t got contact rights for space ...” Jareth stared at the Rosa Lee. “He wouldn’t ...” He sniffed. “It doesn’t matter.”

Eugene nodded. “I’m 214 in the queue,” he said. “Ten minutes to tell my wife and kids everything I never got to tell them.”

“That’s not very long.”

“Longer than they got.” Eugene pointed at the Rosa Lee. “That crew got no time at all. Compared to them, I’m lucky.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Well, figure how it will be for their families. All you’d hear is that their brothers and sisters and parents and kids died in a weird accident. No last words of love. No chances to make apologies for bad decisions. No reassurances. Your family is dead. That’s all you get. Rest of your life you’d wonder if your wife that went to space really loved you. Or if your father ever forgave you. Or what their last wishes might be. Questions you’d never be able to answer.”

Jareth’s eyes were fixed on the ship. Eugene turned to look at it as well.

“I’ll tell my wife I was a fool,” Eugene said. “I wasn’t. This was the best thing I ever did. It was the only important thing I ever did. But I’ll tell her I was a fool anyway, and I’ll tell her I love her. I’ll probably cry. I won’t be able to help myself. I’ll try to pull it together to tell my son to concentrate on the things that make him happy, and not to listen too much to authorities, and to push himself towards doing something important like his old man. I’ll cry again. I’ll tell them both again that I love them. And then they’ll be gone.”

Eugene wiped his eye, and pressed his lips into a smile: “And if those thrusters fire, next time we get to talk we’ll all laugh at the big joke, and I’ll have to make a promise about giving this up in a year or so and we’ll all be glad the horror show wasn’t real.” He looked at his hands, as though in some way they were meant to fix everything, and couldn’t. “It will be the most important ten minutes of my life.”

Jareth said nothing.

Eugene clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink. I can’t make that call for probably three hours, and I don’t want to be sober for it. And you don’t want to be sober at all. Right?”

Jareth nodded. “All right. That will be all right.” But he didn’t move from the window. “I can’t see that it’s moving.”

Eugene nodded too, pulling Jareth away. “But it is.”

Being Done

2011-12-03T16:22:00.002-07:00

Charlie sat between crowd rails and benches and plastic pants, glaring at red garbage pails as high as his elbows. He sat with back against a chair’s back, screw heads on the plastic digging into his back, his feet wedged under a plastic table. His feet rested on a cracked, unfinished concrete floor. Above, a tin roof covering a dozen acres of discount store was partly obscured by the red and white plastic umbrella banged into the top of the plastic table.

His back was to the store. He shut out habitually the steady din of customers and labourers, and carts and check-outs and squalling children, and PA announcements and the sizzle and banging of the little shopping grill on his right … and beneath it all, the steady drone of conditioners and the buzzing of lights, and of cars grinding by on the snow outside, carried in through the thin walls. He was cold and miserable and still his winter coat and scarf and hat were piled on the table beside the umbrella pole. He had on only his gloves.

Jane appeared behind him and sat down. She did not look unhappy. Her shoulders were straight, her forehead was held high and her head was slightly tilted. She beamed.

“Well?” he asked.

She leaned in and grinned. “It’s there,” she said, as if it were a holy thing. “All of it.”

He felt a rush. “Really.”

Jane nodded.

“My god,” he said. “Oh my god.”

She laughed out loud, drawing attention, and stifled herself. She leaned across the table and hissed in pure joy, “Yes, ‘oh my god.’ Lots and lots and lots of money. Look!” She slid a little banking slip across the table.

Charlie looked at it. “Who would ever have believed it?”

“I would,” she answered. “I told you. I said you only had to stick with it, that someone would see that all those hours and nights on the computer weren’t a wasted effort. I said you just keep at it, and don’t worry about how much you’re getting done and on what days and for how long. You worried about that, not me. I knew it would all come out in the end.”

“It’s a good thing I worried. If I hadn’t worried, I wouldn’t have gotten it done.”

“Oh shut up. It is done. It’s all done and we’re here now and I love you.” She launched herself over the table, grasped his face with both hands and kissed him hard. He kissed back and then remembered where they were. They both did. Their faces glowed a little crimson, and she sat back down, grinning at him. “Damn I love you.”

He stared at the bank slip, looking at the numbers, all of them, one piled on top of the next. When he looked at her, she was chewing something, not looking at him, but at everyone else moving around them and grinning.

“This is so weird,” he said.

“What?”

“Well … I keep thinking I should do something. I should get up and howl, and you should howl, and we should make a big scene. But I don’t want to. And then I start thinking that I should talk about all the things I want to buy, but right now I can’t think of a one. A car I guess. Or a house. And yet that seems so stupid, so small. Like what kids think about. I don’t care what we drive. I don’t care where we live.”

She smiled, and shook her head, and said, “That’s my Charles. We are going to move. We are going to buy a car. I’m tired of the bus.”

“Oh sure,” he said. “But doesn’t it seem … a little dumb? Like that’s what we’re supposed to do because we’re supposed to do it? Like right now, we’re supposed to go out and get drunk, and do it with our friends and blah blah blah. But we don’t have friends and I don’t want to get drunk.”

“Charlie –”

“Seriously. Do you want to get drunk?”

She shook her head.

“So this is what I’m asking. What do we do? We have almost – shit, I can’t even say it out loud – we have all this money, and I’m thinking I’m just tired and maybe we could go home and order a pizza and watch some movie and crash. And tomorrow we could, I don’t know, go to a store? To get furniture? God … that just sounds awful. Wandering around some place looking at furniture and dealing with some jackass salesman –”

“Charlie, shut up.”

“I’ve never had money before. Ever. I’ve had … let me think, the most money I’ve ever had in my hands at one time was about 2,200 dollars. And that doesn’t go as far as you’d think. Once you pay rent and –”

“God, Charlie, will you please stop talking?” Jane put on her angry face and he closed his mouth. “I know all this about you. And you don’t have a thing to worry about. We are not going to go furniture shopping tomorrow. We are not going back to our place for a pizza. And we are not getting drunk. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.” Jane was the one person he always believed.

“Good. Then you can trust me. I’ve been preparing my whole life for this moment. I know exactly what to do. First thing, we do not go home. We go to a hotel. A nice one downtown. We get settled in our room, and then we start living there for about a month. Tomorrow, we clean out the car of anything that has sentimental value, and then we give the car to your sister. Then for a month we clean out everything that’s in our apartment that has sentimental value, and we give everything else away.”

“Everything?”

“Yes, everything.”

“Can we keep the red couch?”

“No. It’s old and the stuffing is drifting inside and the one arm was burnt by the iron three years ago and in case you’ve forgotten that couch gives you a headache when you sleep in it. The only thing you like about that couch is that its red. They make other red couches, Charlie. We’ll get one of those.”

He nodded, sniffed his nose and looked serious. “Okay. Okay, I can live with that.”

“When we get the apartment sorted out, we take all the sentimental things and we put them in storage. Then we give everything else away. We tell our crappy landlord to stuff his lease and we tell him to keep the deposit.”

“Why in storage.”

“We’re going to be busy looking for a place to live.”

“Ah. So, a house again.”

“Charlie, I really do love you, and without you we wouldn’t have a thing, but you are the stupidest person alive sometimes. No, we’re not looking for a house. We’re looking for a place.”

“Huh?”

“Do you want to live this city?”

“Gah. NO.”

“And you don’t care where we live, so long as there’s a computer, right?”

He nodded, and sighed. “Yeah. That’s right.”

“Okay. You said once that you thought it would be cool to live in the Maritimes.”

“Yeah. I used to look at real estate ads and they’d talk about acres with land next to the sea and ex-bed and breakfasts and forests and –”

“Have you ever been to the Maritimes?”

Charlie shook his head. “No.”

“Me either. So just in case we don’t like it, we’ll fly out there, have a look around for a few weeks, or months, and see how it feels. We’ll drive all over Nova Scotia and give it a really good glance over. And if we don’t like it, we’ll do the same thing somewhere else. And when we find a place that we really do like, we’ll buy some kind of place there and settle down. Sound good?”

“Jeez. You’re brilliant.”

“No, stupid, you’re brilliant. Are you ready to go?”

“Yes.” He stood up, and reached for his coat. “Can you promise me we’ll never set foot in a place like this again?”

“Swear to fucking god,” she said. Her coat was under Charlie’s and she dug it out. They both got dressed, pulling their heavy coats into place, tucking their hair under their hats.

Charlie flipped his scarf over his neck and stopped. He looked at Jane, holding onto his scarf with each of his hands balled up in a fist. “You know … I’ve never liked this scarf.”

“Leave it,” she said.

He felt an odd rush go through him. Still, it felt wrong, to leave something behind that inherently had value. He stripped the scarf off his neck, and let it fall on the plastic table. He let go of it … and felt lighter. Turning, he saw Jane was already on her way, not waiting for him, knowing he’d follow.

He took one look back, then went, quickening his steps.

Belinda and the Grid

2011-12-02T08:33:00.004-07:00

She laid on the bed, head towards the bottom, arms out, stretching. Samuel did not miss the display this made of her body, nor the obvious invitation. He resisted and finished taping the heavy iron bar to his shin, making sure it was flush with the leg and tight. He had finished already with his other leg.

“Is it going to be today?” Belinda asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Today.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“I did.” He broke off the tape, took his foot off the chair and hunted around for his pants. “I say it every day.”

“Then how do you know it will be today?”

He found his pants under the bed. He bent over, kissed Belinda on her forehead, looked into her eyes and said gravely, “It is going to be today.” He bent a little further and snagged his pants with a finger. They were a fine cut, gotten in the Old Country, but without any ethnic look about them. He started to pull them on over his heavy legs.

“Isn’t there another way?” she wheedled.

He stopped with his pants half-way up and sighed. “Again?”

She rolled over, propped herself on her elbows and gave him a good look at her breasts, framed in the grey silver nightgown she wore. She nodded.

“Okay.” He finished pulling his pants up, buckling them. “There are four ways to get off the grid.” He held up a finger. “One. You kill the right person. I’m not interested in killing anyone ... not again. Not now. I’m done with that. Okay?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

He reached for shorter iron bar on the dresser, that sat next to a partner, and held up two fingers for her. “Two. You steal, and you keep stealing, until you have enough to bribe the thugs. That’s all very well, but I’m not very good at stealing, and I’d get caught.”

Samuel began wrapping the tape around his forearm, fixing the iron bar in place behind his elbow. He was careful about just where it was, and as he taped it in place he gave room for his arm to bend normally.

“What’s the third thing?” she asked.

“Three,” he said, giving the same speech he always gave, and putting up the right number of fingers. “You swim. You swim for a long time, and you keep at it or else you’ll drown. I’m not a strong enough swimmer.”

He got the one bar in place, and started on its partner, putting it behind his other elbow.

“Finally, four. You do what I’m doing right now. You fight your way in, you pitch your case to the thugs, and they let you off.”

“How do you know they won’t just say no?”

He laughed. Then he chuckled a bit. “Oh, they won’t.”

“You haven’t even seen them one time.”

“I only need one time.”

“And then what.”

“Hey, babe – you want to give me three minutes and just shut up?”

She clapped her mouth closed and he shook his head. Belinda was a great girl. She had been a great good time for him. No question about it, if she wasn’t the most beautiful girl on the grid, she was one of the most beautiful three. He’d been lucky to have her. But he needed to be in the right head space, he had to get through that door and he had to get five minutes with the thugs. From there he’d be home free.

“You’re going to leave me,” Belinda pouted.

“I’m not going to leave you. I’m following the plan.”

“Which is?”

He slipped on a white silk shirt, and followed it with the crisp jacket that matched the pants. His carefully straightened the lines across his shoulders, turning this way and that too look in the mirror, to make sure there was no tell-tale bulge showing. Appearances were everything. He started tying his tie.

“What’s the plan?” she asked again.

“I tell you every day.”

“Tell me again. I like hearing it.”

“Okay. Get me my shoes, and I’ll tell you again.” He fastidiously fixed the tie, getting the right lift on it, knowing it would have to put up with a little abuse before it would be seen ... but that didn’t matter. Everyone looked a bit scuffled after getting through the door. They had to.

He sat down and watched her lithe body float to the shoes, and then fetch them for him. She stopped halfway and hefted her arm. “These are heavier.”

“Yes. I stepped on someone’s foot yesterday, and they hardly grimaced. And I lost a place in line. That’s not going to happen again.”

She knelt down and helped put on his left shoe.

“There’s no trouble. I get in to see a thug, he looks me over and hears what I’ve got to say, and then I’m off the grid. Right after that, I talk to some of the people I know who got off years before, and they set me up. Six months, and I’m set – I get myself named as a thug, and then I can do anything I want. I stamp your papers, and we’re together. Easy peasey.”

“What if you don’t come back?”

He smiled warmly, lifted her chin and gave her a warm, soft kiss. He let it last for awhile, and felt her give a little underneath it. It broke with a nice smack, and he smiled again. “Not come back for you, Belinda? A man would have to be crazy.”

She smiled, and fitted him with his other shoe.

He pulled on the cuffs of his jacket, cracked his neck a few times, tested the weight of his arms and felt satisfied. The big bruise on his thigh was almost gone, and his hand hardly showed any discoloration. It was going to be today. He felt certain.

He gave Belinda a last hug, felt her warm, sensuous body pressed into his and felt a pang of regret. It lasted through the last kiss, and through the last look he gave her as he went out the apartment’s outside door.

Then it was gone. Poor, sweet, lazy, dumb Belinda, he thought, conscious that this might be the last time he’d ever see her. He hoped it would be the last time.

Samuel straightened his straight lapels, started down the stairs and got his head straight.

Emily

2011-12-01T09:29:00.001-07:00

My Dearest Emily,

I write this letter hoping to find you in a better frame of mind than when last I saw you, to tell you that I am now thoroughly certain I have wronged you. There has been fighting during every one of the last four days, and I fear tomorrow will be the fifth. I have twice been caught in a warm place of the field, and this very morning when I write you a ball nicked the top of my knee, hardly hurting me. Still it has brought me a clarity I did not have that afternoon when last we spoke together, when I treated you awfully and said words I regret.

It must be that I have been wrong these many years, both in the lack of respect I have had for my father, and in the way I have treated many of my friends and family of our town. I had taken upon myself a belief of how the world was that led me into the situation where now I find myself, and it has come to no good. These past seven months have shown me the world at its worst and at its best, but I tell you Emily that I want to see no more of the world than what I've seen. I am ready to put the world from my eyes and come home.

Emily, I write now to say that I love you. I would that I had told you so that day when you asked. If I could have that day again I would say the words, and take it upon myself to provide for you and your kin, whatever the cost, without the distraction of the world. This I say to you, my love. I am ready, if you will still have me. To my mind home is all that I wish for, and there could be no home for me if you Emily were not there in it.

I have written my father and now he has at last this last week returned a letter to me. All is forgiven in his eyes and he has offered me the high land along Daedalus Creek should I return. There is a place there you will remember where oaks grow, that once we walked through. I propose to build a house upon that place, with a porch that would look out over the valley, and rooms for your mother and your brother should you wish. I can tell you true Emily that this war has broken me once and for all to the plow. I think there is no greater pleasure I could have than honest labor. I think there is no better work I would do than to bring life from this earth, having seen so much death be put into it.

If you can, soften your heart Emily. I beg please that you will answer this letter. There is movement now coming through the camp and I shall have to stop now and ready for the march ahead. I will put this letter into the best hands I can find, and pray tomorrow and every day after that it will find you well and in good spirits, and that it will reassure you at last that I am not the man who left you so poorly these many months ago.

Yours faithfully, Edmund Hoskins.

Sapping My Drive

2011-10-03T10:37:00.000-06:00

Most people who stop blogging do so because they run out of things to day ... and the estimates I've read suggest this happens after two to three years, even with people who are dedicated to the subject they've decided to take up. Two to three years may not encompass all they have to say, but it does tend to be the length of time it takes before the 'magic' of blogging wears off, when the actual writing about things liked gets annoying and, well, unrewarding.

My partner was saying on the weekend that blogging (this is not my only blog) is probably sapping my drive to write fiction because it gives me instant gratification, while the writing is a long drawn out process of editors who may, or may not, publish me. I sit down here and write something, and someone responds within an hour or two. I sit down to write a short story and then send it off ... and even when it goes well, seven months passes and I get a small check and not even a copy of the magazine. And there are no comments on the magazine at all. I never know if anyone liked the story or not.

For people who write a blog post and get no immediate response, and who feel bad about that, I understand the feeling. But where compared with the publishing industry, where you write and write and get little or no response for years at a time, a writer has to get over a few days, or even a few weeks, of disregard. If not, well, you'll be putting a shotgun in your mouth by the time six months passes.

Writing is an unforgiving, miserable business. When you compare it with being a musician, where an visceral response is gained within a few seconds of playing (positive or negative), writing is a waiting game. You hand the work over and you wait while it takes them time to read it. You can never be sure they've read everything - and so you can never be sure if their response includes the thrust and goal of what you were trying to say. You can't corner people with your writing. You can't push it very effectively at street corners. You can't noodle around with others to get a new effect. It is done alone, it is done slowly and it is done without much fanfare.

So the woman is right when she says blogging is sapping my writing; because this is a street corner where I can stand and shout and get response. Not so much on this particular blog ... I haven't put in the time and effort to build up a readership. I don't write here everyday. I've had a few false starts with the book I want to write, Yonder. Truth be told, a lot of writing IS false starts. It's something you get used to. You think, you work out the characters again, you make a few changes with the narrative or the amount of description, or you change the beginning or adapt modifications to events. Then you start again.

People who expect instant success or instant effectiveness in their writing don't make very good writers. J.D. Salinger wrote about his young self in Catcher in the Rye and then spent a very frustrating self-abusive forty years afterwards recognizing that he really wasn't much of a writer after all. He spent forty years proving CITR was an immortal fluke (truth be told, I don't think it's much of a book, but how can I argue with three generations of masturbating English professors?). I can't say exactly what Salinger's issue was, or why he couldn't write another book worth his salt. He obviously didn't know how.

Me, I'm not sure I know how either. That's not really important to me, and it couldn't have been to Salinger either. Note I said, forty years. That's not the kind of time you spend going on a lark. That's a lot of work under the bridge, for good or ill. He may have been crappy, but Salinger was dedicated. And at any rate, he was a much better writer, for all his failures, than the average schmoe.

One of the things that struck me odd with this blog, seeing the gratification comments about it written elsewhere, on other people's blogs, was the old saw about my being a frustrated, unsuccessful writer moaning in my brew. It is a solid standby for brothers-in-law, old teachers and employers, and virtually everyone else not very talented themselves to apply to virtually everyone who, unlike Salinger, spends forty years writing fiction without much to show for it. And I suppose I expected it. What strikes me odd about it, as I said, is that I would think the example of the writing itself would be evident in, well, the writing I'm producing right now.

See, it's hard for me to view myself in the "frustrated wanna-be writer" persona when quite obviously from the proof on the blog itself that I'm actually am a writer. I may not be a successful one, I may not have achieved everything I ever wanted in my life; I may not be famous like Salinger. But my being a writer can't possibly part of the issue. If I were a plumber, I'd probably be good at plumbing but still relatively unsuccessful because I am, at heart, lazy. I like long, relaxed afternoons without working my ass off. I like not writing unless I'm inclined to write. I like the rest of the world fucking off while I do whatever pleases me at a particular instance. If there is a reason I am not a household name as a writer, it is probably this. I am not busting my ass here.

No, see, if I were busting my ass, I wouldn't be wasting any time with these blogs. I'd be writing my novel. I wouldn't be writing about not being able to write, or explaining what I hope to do or how I hope to do it ... I'd have my back turned on everyone, and I'd be writing my novel. I wouldn't be playing games or mucking about with different pasttimes, or fucking away my evenings with the occasional video game or with graphic design. I would be writing my novel.

But I don't. So I would guess I'm not truly upset about my lack of success. I would guess that success at the price of my laziness and comfort isn't success for me. I'm a bit too zen. It might be fun to be rich and famous. I could probably get along with that. The instant gratification would be greater than a blog comment. I've had a few moments in the limelight and there's something to be said for it.

Truth be told, however, the gratification from here is enough, and if I write this novel, and the next one, and the one after that at a pace that suits me, it would suit me. I'd certainly like to have a novel published. Short stories have been nice, but a novel would be better.

Oh well. It will happen when it happens.

The Fear

2011-08-03T12:51:00.000-06:00

I feel I must apologize. For six days now I have had the next passages from the book Yonder fixed in my mind, ready to be written down, and still I don't write them. Even now, writing this, I find it easier to express my procrastinations rather than to write the material I ought to be writing. All I can say is that writing is an act of courage; it is faith that what will be written will be worth writing ... and if a writer does not feel worthy on this day, then it is better that he or she lay off the matter than go charging into something that will make the condition worse.

I have found from long years of writing that it is the worst feeling in the world to have written something that, afterwards, must be smashed or crumpled up, to be tossed away. It undermines my confidence to do that, and I've learned to carefully reserve my confidence to be applied to those moments which will not produce folly. "Another day," I tell myself. "Just another day and you'll feel up to it."

I can't say that will help every writer. And there does come a moment - particularly with a deadline - when a writer has to snap to it and dare to work. There are of course moments where once the hump is gotten over, the struggle is not as daunting as perceived ... but oh those days when it is every bit as awful as guessed at, followed by discouragement and even despair that one is anything like the writer one wants to be.

So I'm not blocked. I am, instead, a coward.

No sense in not admitting that. Truth will out, and the moment will come when I put off my yellow clothing and get back to work. I feel that day will be today, if not this moment. And if not today, then certainly tomorrow. Or the day after.

In the meantime, I've sent my work to another publisher, Coteau Books, having received a rejection from Arsenal Pulp Press on the weekend. Funny, but that has nothing to do with my writing mood. Arsenal was very decent about it, sending the standard form letter, etcetera, but doing so very quickly and not leaving it for six months. Any time a publisher sends anything back to you, rejection or otherwise, it is an act of respect. The vast majority of publishers will send you back jack shit, even when you include the SASE (which I did), because most publishers don't respect anyone not actually making them money.

But Arsenal is small, as is Coteau. They're Canadian publishers, and they will at least accept unsolicited manuscripts. I went through this with proposed agents last winter, before starting this blog, and of 25 agents I sent inquiries to, I heard back from exactly three. None wanted to see anything I'd written. I have long said about agents that the reality is that you have to be the married spouse of some brother or sister of the Agent's girlfriend or bookie. That's how it seems to work. I've had some very nasty dealings with agents over the last fifteen years and except for really needing one, I really hate that I really need one.

Okay, I need to concentrate on actually getting the next part of the book written. It doesn't hurt to stretch my fingers writing here now and then, but I'm not getting anywhere this way.

Yonder Day 3

2011-07-27T14:57:00.001-06:00

I am pleased. Today's scene (in yellow) rolled fairly well, pretty much as I had planned it, although I wasn't certain when I began just what Nathan was going to say to get under Azariah's skin. Granted, the 'coward' line is cliched, but it remains the sort of thing that one does not say. Since I envision Azariah being quite like Conan in his brooding condition, it's easy to imagine the kind of response one would get telling Conan he's a coward.

I want to reserve for the moment any discussion of what Nathan means by there being no "afterlife." It is meant to draw the curiousity of the reader, and throughout the novel I'd like to stave off explaining about the various elements until the novel itself explains them. I can say for the moment that the discussion of the "gramen," and the suggestion that a fight is coming, is a very central theme throughout the book. Azariah's childhood as a miller ought to be important later (though for the moment I don't see how) as is Nathan's father being a maker of pots. Hell, every prop and bit of information can be utilized as foreshadowing for something in the book ... all the writer has to do is keep this sort of thing in mind and then write towards it.

Getting my hand in with a quick description of a very fast fight ... there's meant to be a lot of fighting coming, and I admit that its something that concerns me. I'm anxious that every exchange like this is clear and concise, something the reader can picture and latch onto. Otherwise, the fighting scenes throughout the book are going to be the failure of the work.

Oh well. More tomorrow.

Yonder Day 2

2011-07-26T08:34:00.001-06:00

This may be an odd way to publish this, but I hate the format of a blog for a novel, so I am gathering the whole novel - as I write it - into this post. The latest addition to the novel will be highlight in yellow, and to enable people to follow along with comments about the novel I will date the parts. This way, if anyone feels a desire to read the novel from the beginning, they are not leaping from post to post.

For me, introducing Nathan at this point is introducing the conflict. I have given Azariah his own demons. My problem is to emphasize those demons without expressing directly to the reader what they are. I want the reader in the dark for now. By avoiding saying what exactly the conflict is I give it power in the reader's mind ... so long as in the long run I live up to the expectation. Obviously, Azariah can be worried whether or not the horse has been fed.

Heh heh. I have something in mind.

Mostly all I wanted to start with this passage was Nathan needling Azariah, which I've given a lot of thought to this last few weeks and which is the part of this chapter that worries me the most. Does it sound like needling? Does it work? Does it seem to be getting under Azariah's skin, or does the whole thing seem too constructed and obvious? There's never any easy answer to these questions. You trust that you can do the best you can for the first draft, and it is this sort of thing that's meant when an author talks about "getting some distance" on their work. The hope is that if a few months go by before looking at this again, I can read it as someone who didn't write it and recognize immediately if it flows or if it sounds trite, cliched or too 'clever clever.' My point here is that I'm thinking of that as I write it, but I'm also aware that I'm too close to the material to trust my instincts one way or the other. It may not have even occurred to the reader that there was any problem. But I won't know myself for some time after today.

So, plans are to write more tomorrow.

Yonder - All

2011-07-26T08:03:00.007-06:00

One
He upended his cup. He marked the wine as it spread, staining the wooden table, flowing into the cracks and then dripping beneath the floor. The act came of impulse. He did not care about the wine, there was more. He did not care about the cup. With his arm he swept it away, and the wine flask besides. The stoneware flask struck the stone floor and broke. The wooden cup bounced and came to a stop on its bottom.

Azariah put his head in his hands and wept.

It did no good. It did not wash him clean of his misery. It did not change his condition. It did not bring comfort. He grew aware of his elbows resting upon and damp table and lifted them, wiping them clean across the belly of his doublet. He stared helplessly over the table and into space. His gaze could not help turning to the parapet next to the table, to the town that spread out beneath the citadel he sat upon, and to the line of the road that curved from the high valley, past the town, and through the flat plains beyond. Dust hung in the air, obscuring the horizon, so that the brown of the plain mixed with the pale sky.

He could hear the panicked trundling of the untold hundreds who made their way away from the valley along the road. He watched the overloaded wagons and carts scurry along the ruts, wheels bouncing over things that had fallen from wagons that had gone before. Between the animals pulling these loads were other animals, driven sheep and goats, squawking chickens, heavily laden donkeys and mules. Here and there the occasional camel carried goods. No animal carried a rider ... every man, woman and elder child walked, trudging their way, shouting at their animals, fighting with them, beating them with sticks to drive them forward or dragging upon reins to keep them moving. Some ran from the road after livestock that sought its own direction. The faster refugees clumbered off the road and kicked up dust along the shoulders, screaming curses at their slower fellows, then having to slow or stop as something of value fell from their own vehicles that demanded attention. Then, with the road barred by a slow traveller, and the side barred by fools, the train would stumble to a forced halt that would carry its way for half a mile, backing up the road.

Azariah sat and watched as a fight broke out between two groups of men, children watching, women daring to step between the combatants and thrust aside or struck. Azariah was but a few hundred yards away, forty feet above the empty streets of the town, which had heard the news and had left in most part the day before.

Gramen were coming.

He did not care. He chose to let them come. It was not the refugees he wept for, nor the oncoming horde with its will to tear and destroy. They knew nothing. But he, Azariah, knew more than he wished to know.

A scream rose from the trap door that linked the roof of the citadel with the tower rooms below. He paid it no attention. It was not the first. He judged it would not be the last.

The fight had settled itself out, and now the participants gathered things together and heaved them up once more upon their carts. The women drew their veils back over their faces against the dust and again began their march, the children falling in behind them. A young girl carried a duck in her arms. A boy of fifteen led a donkey, his hand hooked around the animal’s bridle. A father with an infant on his shoulders, small hands clutched in his pater’s hair, dragged a loaded gig as an animal. The parade steadily moved forward.

Hands appeared upon the ladder that rose out of the trap door, and a lean, dark-tanned man climbed upwards and onto the roof of the citidel. He wore only a shirt and robe, the latter that reached only to his knees. His shins were bare, his feet shod in sandles that tied around his ankles. A belt hung over his shoulder and fixed on the belt was a short, curved blade with a hooked handle. Over his wrist was hooked a loop of hemp, and hanging from the hemp a flask of wine. Azariah did not watch him, but turned away.

Azariah knew him . His name was Nathan. They had travelled and killed together for past seven years, and still they did not particularly like each other. It was a circumstance that Nathan was apt to find amusing, and when not at a risk to his own life, a circumstance Nathan would exploit.

Seeing the cup laying on the stone, Nathan moved forward and scooped it up. He placed it on the parapet, uncorked the bottle and filled the cup. He gazed at the people below and smiled. He drained the cup, tilting it back into his mouth. He filled it again, turned about and sat on the stone edge, his back to the fall.

“Do you suppose it would help if they knew?” he asked.

Azariah did not answer.

“You are right,” said Nathan. “They wouldn’t understand, would they? They have their fantasy and it brings them comfort.” He paused. “As it once did us.”

“Do not speak of it,” warned Azariah.

Nathan sipped at the wine. He watched the scene. “They don’t look comforted.”

Moments passed, with neither one speaking.

“Perhaps if I were closer,” observed Nathan, “I could see that they were actually happy.”

“Be silent,” warned Azariah again.

"Were you, when it was before … were you happy?”

Azariah did not answer.

“I do not think I was happy,” said Nathan. “I think I believed … I am certain I did. I was told as a boy and from then I always believed. I am not certain that the belief brought me comfort. It did not make me happy.”

Azariah grumbled.

“You were told as a boy,” answered Nathan. “Like me, you believed. And it did not make you happy, like me. Isn’t that interesting?”

His fists on his knees, Azariah pressed his fingers tightly together. He considered his own sword, hanging from the belt around his waist, the tip in its scabbard resting on the stones.

Nathan finished his wine and poured himself more. “When the gramen come, I wonder. Will we fight them? Because you know, if we die, that will be the end. There won’t be an Afterlife. And that is why I wonder. If this is all we have, this here and now, will we still fight. If we had known all those years that there was no Last Kingdom, would we have become mercenaries? Would I know be a soft-footed shopkeeper, trimming my wares and setting them out for the customers in the morning, chasing my sons out of my workspace, resting with my wife in the glow of the fire at the end of the long day, as my father had planned for me? Would I have thought the road less desirable, would I have loved metal pots and kettles more, would I have applied myself in my apprenticeship instead of slipping away to the rivers and forests to practice my bow?”

He moved forward to Azariah’s table, and sat on the wall next to it, setting his feet where the wine had begun to dry in the warm day. “And you, my friend. What would you be doing now? I remember when we met, the confidence you had, the certainty of our becoming rich, of the enemies we’d slaughter together. And always the way you would laugh at death. Would you laugh at death now, Azariah? Knowing at last, for certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that death is for certain.”

Azariah sat bent over, his head inches above the edge of the table, his hands clenched over his knees, his breath growing heavy.

“What were you before, my friend?” asked Nathan. “A miller’s son, you said. Were you a quiet boy? Would you have grown to be another man? A humble mover of sacks? I don’t doubt it. But would you have been so foolhardy as you’ve become in your later days? Tell me, Azariah, you were a brave man. If you had known, before ... would you now be a coward?”

With a roar Azariah exploded to his feet. The sword came easily to his hand. He lunged with his arm to unbalance Nathan upon the wall, and swept the sword at him, to break his shoulder and send him reeling from the height.

But Nathan was not there. Azariah’s arm touched nothing. His sword, sweeping across, touched nothing. Then Azariah felt a blow land across his forehead – the pommel of Nathan’s sword. The hit clouded his vision, his sword swinging high and still hitting nothing. Another blow with the pommel fell upon the soft flesh beneath Azariah’s ribs. Then Nathan’s shoulder caught Azariah in the side, and Nathan’s foot behind Azariah’s heel brought him down to the ground, onto his back.

As Azariah’s vision cleared, he found his sword arm, hand still clutching his weapon, under Nathan’s foot. The point of Nathan’s scimitar rested delicately upon Azariah’s throat.

“On any day when you are not an ox,” said Nathan, “you would chance to kill me. But not on this day.”

Yonder, Chapter One

2011-07-25T14:29:00.004-06:00

Find the beginning of the novel here.

Here we have the beginning of the novel I am for now calling Yonder. The title fits marvelously, even into the first 500+ words above, and the stage being set. An horde is coming from yonder. The refugees are departing to yonder. The various events that Azariah finds himself in the midst of are moving apart from him, and at the same time he is possessed of some trouble that clearly he has no control over; so that too is a problem that might be described as 'yonder.'

I will confess, the title struck me as I was watching the dream/explanation for the motives behind Snape during Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. This book has nothing to do with that book, and it would be difficult to indentify why I latched onto that particular word at that particular time ... but inspiration can come from anywhere or anything. I once got a title from a PSA denouncing prostitution: Somebody's Daughter.

I'm unhappy with only one thing that I think requires some interjection somewhere in the above, and that is Azariah's size. In keeping with the templates set in other fantasy novels, I see him as my 'huge' character ... which I want to balance the novel opening with him weeping helplessly. I think cinematically that's a very strong image, and I confess to writing most of my novels with a cinematic bent.

The vision of the table, the wine, the expanding out to the town and the refuges, that's all camera-shot techniques. Even when I write I still think in movie frames.

I feel confident about at least the beginning of the book, and I hope to write five hundred words every day for as long as I have the structure in my head. For the present, I feel pretty certain of the first two chapters. I hope I can have the third and fourth mapped out in the next couple of weeks, which should carry me to around four weeks of continuous writing. After that, I might choke out or not ... I know where it ends and so on, but the reality of writing anything is that sometimes it doesn't pan out to being as interesting or as organized as you would hope.

In the meantime, it would be nice if my trials in this could be something other writers could relate to, and take ideas from. Please remember, this is all my first draft. I have not right now written the material that will appear in tomorrow's post.

Worth Writing

2011-07-13T13:46:00.001-06:00

Yesterday, the novel went off to Arsenal Pulp Press. There won't be any word from anyone for months, if at all.

On the brighter side, I think I've solved the plot problems - and the ending - of the novel I discussed here, almost a month ago. As I said before, the ending is the most important part, since you must know where you are going.

In all, I see six main characters now. I'm not going to talk about how they fit into the story today; I expect I may be writing some of it - or perhaps all of it - online, which I think would be interesting. At present I have a greater concern about it, that being that the story idea I now have may not be one that could be sold.

Whether or not you care about the marketable qualities of your writing is a matter that is best left up to you. Every professional writer must necessarily give consideration to it. As a young person it is all very well to preach about the ills of 'selling out' and the evils of compromising your artistic integrity for the sake of money, but as we know from getting older and having to buy our own food and pay for our own lodging, that compromise becomes more realistic. For seven years up until the great Recession of 2008/09 I wrote monthly articles for several magazines which all happened to go belly-up within a few months of one another. They had been paying me 30 cents a word, which was fairly nice, since it was a steady gig, but I have to confess that with a few exceptions, the work that was required was execreble. By that, I don't mean the writing was bad, I mean the content comprised of things I confess I have little or no interest in. Now and then I was entitled to produce a bit of humour, which was great fun and which gained me the greatest notariety among the readers, but the rest of it was all trade-focused and just boring as hell.

I have these last two years considered seriously if the money was worth working for a trade publication any time in the future. I wouldn't want to. And yet if I want to go on writing, and not working for trade magazines, then anything I want to write in the future had better appeal to someone willing to pay me money. As such, writing a novel that has no fiscal value is a questionable luxury.

The book I am now sending to publishers is, I am certain, very marketable. It's funny, it's dramatic, it has great, likeable characters and it follows a subject - music - that fascinates a wide-ranging audience. The book I am considering right now isn't funny at all; the characters would be largely unlikeable and the subject would be violence mixed with philosophical metaphysics. Moreover, the setting I have imagined is one associated with fantasy, the realm where people expect material that isn't heavy or introspective.

And still, great works are written by paying no attention to the rules whatsoever.

Consider Peckinpah's film, The Wild Bunch. For most people, not a traditional ending. A bit of a downer. For most people, the debate and discussion about the rigors and pointlessness of the outlaw life is a bit of a downer. I don't imagine the movie was an easy sell; I'm sure that Peckinpah had to shout, wave his arms, pull favors and extort wherever he could, particularly when cornered with his own premise. "They all what at the end?"

If you think you have a story that is unique, and which you have the ability to tell, and which you feel might affect the reader in such a manner as to make them sit up and think, the question is this ... are you prepared to starve, if necessary, in order to tell that story? Are you prepared to put the story over and above your own personal welfare, even if it means the possibility no one will ever read the story because it will never, ever get published?

Honestly?

Yes, I think it's worth writing. I don't think it matters that it can't be sold.

Thinking the way I do, however, it might explain why I haven't had a book published yet.

Not Writing

2011-07-11T14:30:00.000-06:00

Since I'm not writing, let's talk about not writing.

I've touched on the subject before, but one of the interesting things about not writing is that as a writer you can pretty much talk about not writing all day. As in, "Why am I not writing," and, "I need to be writing," and, "I'll feel better as soon as I start writing," and finally, "fuck it."

As a young writer I heard about writer's block and naturally interpreted every hesitation to write as some kind of potential problem that would stop me forever from being a writer. If I didn't write for as long as a month, I would be certain the spark had died in me ... since hundreds of TV and movie examples of writers seemed to have those writers getting freaked out and frustrated after what appeared to be onscreen for a very short time. Even now, it is a constant cliche to open a movie or a book with a writer (or some other compositional artist) who can't write. Lo and behold, as the story goes on, a new spark infects the writer's life and he or she begins writing like the possessed caricature the actual writer of the story probably wants to be.

It is certainly easier to write about someone who is able to write with fabulous ease, than to do so. The fantasy to write like that is, among writers, so pervasive that it's hard to think of a story about a writer who doesn't at some point become gifted with the genius of continuous wordspitting. In fact, why write about a writer if you're not going to write about the natural internal struggle that a writer experiences, AND it's cure?

For real life actual writers, the quest for this wonderful fantasy spark encourages them to do most anything. Another standard trope is the writer who quits work, leaves family, leaps into the wilderness and sets up a NON-electric writing implement in a rustic old cabin so they CANNOT be disturbed. This always amuses me. The cliche usually continues so that the clock is ticking, the birds are pecking at the window, the wind is blowing through windchimes conveniently located near the front door and so on. I wonder why the writer doesn't simply bury themselves in a bank vault somewhere, or build an impenetrable bomb/writing shelter in their back yard.

I can't relate, since I've long since gotten used to writing amidst fifty or sixty people either in the process of chattering on phones and calling out to one another, or in restaurants with waitresses periodically serving me coffee and cleaning up. I only need quiet when I'm editing, which means I'm fixing problems ... and the bedroom with the door closed seems to be sufficient for that.

The most important advice I can give anyone - the advice I forced myself to take - is that if you don't feel like writing, don't write. Seriously. It is going to be shit on the page anyway. You're wasting your time, you're undermining your confidence in your own writing and chances are you'd rather be out bullriding or para-sailing anyway. Go do that. Do enough of that and you'll start to feel a desire to write about it. Problem solved.

I've always said that writing is an input/output equation. If you are not putting out material, you're dry and you need more input. When you have enough input, you'll swell from everything you're holding inside and it will pour onto the page. It doesn't take a spark. You're just short on experiencing life.

Of course, if you rush out and experience life, and you still don't feel like writing, I suppose that must be telling you something. Nyet?

The Beginning of Pete's Garage

2011-07-05T13:24:00.000-06:00

After a week at work, my book, Pete's Garage, is being mailed out today to its first potential publisher: Anvil Press. The research I've done suggests it would be a good match - Canadian press, publishes fantasy and urban themes, accepts unsolicited manuscripts. Or so I hope.

I try not to get too worked up about it. Publishing in my experience has been entirely a crapshoot. For twelve years now I have occasionally been able to get something published through mailing out blind, and I continue to think that someday someone somewhere is going to read my book and recognize that I can, in fact, write. We'll see how this latest round goes. Part of what I want to do this time is keep track of having sent it on this blog, for posterity if for no other reason.

Frankly, I'd love it if I could be one of those nephews or cousins or daughters of publishing executives or business owners who could have their stuff published without any of this throwing my bread upon the waters necessity, but c'est la vie.

Because I am somewhat tense, I might just as well talk a bit about the project, just to get it out of my system. For those who might be interested, the novel begins thusly:

"I have had a few perfect things. A friend-infested dive a few blocks from home with good music and an open mic. A car that ran ten years without repairs. A bratwurst I ate for free on a downtown corner one winter when it was freezing, granted by a woman who had known Annie Lennox as a little girl. And a building. The one I found at the corner of Buford Road and Seventh Avenue, on the Jersey shore west of Staten Island. Once, it was a hotel. Now it was my hotel. A crumbling three-story shell, it was as much empty space as I could want."

I must admit, I have struggled with the Annie Lennox reference since the beginning. The book is about musicians and the lives around musicians, and a musical reference fits. Ms. Lennox must be as significant a past musical personality as any popular singer. And I did, in fact, once know a woman who had known Ms. Lennox as a little girl ... that was Katherine, who when I was 23 was 64 years old. It would make her 88 now, if she was still alive. 88 is my lucky number (if that's even relevant) so maybe that bodes well.

It was funny how we found out our older friend Katherine knew Ms. Lennox. We had Katherine over for dinner, and somehow had gotten onto the subject of musicians - this being back in '87, when my wife Michelle and I were in a choir with Katherine - and had mentioned Annie Lennox in passing. Katherine, who was as British as it is possible to be, perked and mentioned that she had known an 'Annie' with that last name years ago ... but Katherine did not listen to modern music in any sense of the word, and did not know who the Eurythmics were. But as chance would have it, we had a video of the Eurythmics on VHS and we popped it in to see. And sure enough, Katherine recognized "little Annie" instantly, as Katherine called her. She was astounded to see what Ms. Lennox had become - the video we played, I remember, was Missionary Man. But Katherine was pretty cool for what I thought of then as an 'old person.' Apparently, as a young girl Ms. Lennox had always been in love with music, which Katherine remembered very well, and she had trained to play the flute as a young girl. My wife's minor at that time was in flute, so it just seemed one of those moments with connections all over.

As a writer, I feel you have to take these things and put them together with an image that fits into your story. My main character, Pete, spent some time living on the street ... and although this is only alluded to in the story, I like the image of him desperately needing food and being given it by this vendor who - as it happens - has something to say that would really, really matter to Pete. There isn't any need to go into further detail. Anyone who read the novel, and who came again to this first chapter, would smile. That is enough for me.

The opening paragraph is thick with that. None of it is precisely explained in the opening, not even why he wants the hotel. By the end of the first chapter, you know how he bought it and what its for ... but I have no reason to tell the reader this right off. I want the reader to keep reading. My themes are all in place: music; comaraderie; overcoming hardship; and rebirth.

It's very important in the writing that the reader never sees any of this. So if you, the reader, didn't see it, then I am doing exactly what I'm supposed to. I'm trying to pull you into a story you haven't read so that you'll keep reading ... and so the theme can sneak up on you and grab you before you've realized you've finished the book and you're only now getting it.

I've been told that this is a good opening.

I hope the publishers think so.

Aids to Edit

2011-06-29T12:07:00.000-06:00

I've now been at the rewrite and edit of my novel for a week, which may not seem like a lot of time. I admit, I've only gotten as far as the first two chapters, mostly because chapter one was such a horror show. That's my opinion of it; others were far less critical.

The question is this: how do you know what is good, and what is not? How do you edit with any conviction that you are changing things for the better, if you do not know what 'better' is?

This is a question that used to haunt me a lot when I first started editing. I had been writing for years by then, without much concern about polishing anything. I did not yet believe there was any use in polishing, since I was a bad writer to begin with, and since I did not know how to be a better one. I imagine others find themselves in the same boat. The best I can do is offer this three-point advice.

Become a Better Writer

This is glib and will at first sight seem like completely useless advice. I can tell you honestly that in terms of application, it is not advice that you can sit down with this afternoon and apply. This afternoon, you're not going to be a better writer, and that's that.

In the long run, however, becoming a better writer begins with admitting - in all honesty - that you are probably not that great a writer at the moment. You may be good enough to impress your friends, the small collective of writers you meet with once a month or your teachers (if you are young enough to have teachers). I want to go on record by saying that the commendation by those sources is really worth nothing at all. Thirty years ago I was impressing my teachers and various workshops and outside groups with my writing ability - but I look back on that 'ability' now and I wonder how much of their praise was real, and how much was in consideration for my being young and having plenty of time to get better.

I think a lot of the latter. I did have a few persons who came into my life to tell me that I was never going to cut it. They were wrong, but not for what they were reading way back in 1981. Given the crap I was writing then (that some were gushing over), they were absolutely right. If I read someone's work today that looked like my work was then, I'd have been just as frank.

Part of the problem can be that if you have enough people singing your praises, you are not likely to work at improving yourself. So sit yourself down, recognize that the various elements of your writing could use work, and begin to work at them.

Let Others Read It

From the above, it may seem as though I am saying don't bother with the opinions of other people. I am not saying that at all. The effect your work has on others remains important - it will help you adjust your clarity and your delivery, things you can't really recognize without having feedback. A reader may have some help to offer you with regards to quality, but they are much more likely to give you the measure of your readability. If they aren't reading it, it isn't worth reading.

The problem with relying on others to tell you the quality of your work is that in all likelihood they're not a great writer either. There is an old saw about wanting to find just one good critic, someone who can tear your stuff apart the way you need to learn to tear into it yourself. Only thing is, that critic is busy writing, or tearing up his or her own stuff, and they don't have time for you. So abandon your dreams for meaningful criticism. I've been at this for 35 years and I have yet to meet anyone who can usefully rewrite a sentence for me, much less tell me how to better construct the paragraphs that will let chapter three effectively transition into chapter four. That mythical person you dream of having help you is YOU.

Where it comes to the appeal of your work, however, or in terms of technical issues with your work, then yes, have others read it. This book I am working on now revolves around musicians. I have spent a lot of time with musicians, and I have performed as a singer with musicians, but I am not one of them. Having musicians read my work, then, it greatly appreciated. They can tell me when I am missing my mark. They can give me little stories about music I can incorporate. They can't tell me how to write, but they can tell me WHAT to write.

People know what they like. If they are the sort of people you want reading your book, and they express like for it, you're on the right track. One of the most useless things I was ever told by my old creative writing teacher was that "I like it" isn't useful criticism. Bullshit. From other people, it is the ONLY criticism. If you can't get other people to like your stuff, it's time to take up another hobby.

Read

Everyone is familiar with the 12-step program's insistence that you acknowledge that there is a higher power. If you want to write, you could not do better than to acknowledge that there are better writers than you. Unless your initials are W.S., there will always be at least one better writer than you.

Here's a hint: most of them are not alive. People who talk about great living writers have about as much credibility as an onanist telling you about the quality of great porn. There may be a great writer living today, but chances are you won't find them amid all the crap that's being printed all around you. Dickens and Emerson were only two of tens of thousands of writers in their day, and in their day were not seen as truly remarkable and unusual. If we were to ask an English gentleman in 1850 to name the ten greatest living writers of his day, there's a very good chance that Dickens would not have made the list. Most of the time, the people who are alive now and picking writers who are living with them are making their choice based on esoteric, reflective emotional associations with those writers - and not upon their ultimate ability.

The best way to get perspective upon your own work is to read the work of writer who have stood the test of time; writers who lived in an age you are not living in now, and who yet communicate fluidly and meaningfully to you across the gulf of decades or centuries. It will aid you in recognizing the difference between what is important in your writing, and what is really important.

This last point I will speak about in greater detail; but the notes above should suffice. Now, I must go, I am meeting with a musician this afternoon to have him look over my work. I look forward to it.

Time To Write

2011-06-27T10:08:00.000-06:00

In the interest of concentrating on the rewrite for my novel Pete's Garage I have been digging a grave for distractions and projects so I have the time to work unrestrained. A large part of writing involves being able to say to others, even those one loves, "I can't go here, do this, get that, work on those things or show up for the thing because I will be writing. Sorry."

I'm never impressed when people tell me they do not have time to write. If you have time to eat and sleep and shower occasionally, you have time to sit and write. All the rest of your time, in other words, can be thrown out the window in favor of doing this thing which - it is assumed - you love to do. Are you clothed, fed and sheltered? Good, you have time to write.

If you find work wears you to the point where you can't be creative, then I have several suggestions for you: get up before work and write when you're still fresh; find a way to refresh yourself after work; quit your job and get one that doesn't destroy your creativity. If, as it happens, you've built your life around having an $85K career position that requires you work on bureaucratic projects on the weekends, and you have some fantasy that deep down inside that you'd like to write a book but you can't get around to it, it may be time to admit that your real fantasy is to earn $85K a year and that you're living it now. Writing, apparently, was never really that important to you. You're only hanging on to it as a kind of soother to suck on when you feel your life is going nowhere.

I am afraid I'm not the sort of blogger whose principle concern is that every reader who wants to be a writer feels better about themselves. There are, if you will look for them, groups of writers who hold regular events and readings who, for a few dollars, will serve as a support group to stroke you no matter what sort of material you churn out. I am not of that breed. I do not want the gentle reader to feel better about what he or she is writing. I want the gentle reader to do better.

I am in the process of slashing and burning half of my first chapter, which couldn't feel worse if I were feeding my right hand to wolves. But it has to be done. The writing is crap, it was crap when I first put it on the page three years ago and I've been deluded about it ever since, making excuses for not recognizing it for what it is and not fixing it. I look at the first ten pages and I think, "No wonder this was never published; I doubt anyone got as far as the second page."

I wish that was unduly harsh. It isn't. The book hasn't been published and the first ten pages ARE crap. Or rather, they were. I hope they are better now. They feel better.

I'm sorry, i was writing about taking the time to write and I let myself get distracted by the project. Forgive me, the project at the moment is taking up a lot of my brain and it' easy to slip back into it.

I am writing this blog sincerely to improve the reader as a writer, but that will never, ever happen if the reader cannot prioritize their life. If you find that you cannot surrender your usual evenings for the sake of writing, that should be telling you something - that you are, perhaps, not as romantically inclined to be a writer as you want to be. You are more in love with the idea of being a writer than you are actually in love with writing. This is very common.

When I was young and in school, I was told by who knows how many teachers that my chances of making it as a writer was 1 in a 1000. They did not know it, but they were being optomistic. I remember thinking to myself when quoted statistics like that that it was okay, I was that one. If the odds had been quoted at 1 in a million I would have been just as certain. I knew I was that one in a thousand because unlike every other person whom I knew would be competing against me, I wanted this. Not desperately, in the sense that I had to have it or my happiness would be impossible. But matter-of-factly, in that I was prepared to sacrifice continuously until I had it.

It is strange to think how much of my day, now, I spend writing. Three or four hours, at least, in one form or another, part for my job and part for my novel and part of it blogging. I do it like breathing air. I do it like sitting down across from the reader at a table and confessing this or that as though were having a coffee on a streetcorner or perched on a balcony above a forested glade. I argue, I reminesce, I propose some idea and I even hear the rejoiner to something I've said and answer. One thing I do not do is feel my time would be spent better doing something else. I don't have in my thoughts, as soon as I finish this chore I'll be free to do something more enjoyable. I don't rush through writing to be free of it. I love this. If I am restrained by anything it is the cramping feeling of my hands as the arthritis I've had since twenty begins its inexorable grip, or my head begins to pound from the energy expended. Then I have to rest, and stop thinking. I have to vacate the balcony for the solitude of the hotel suite, to eat, to distract my mind long enough to stop it thinking, and finally to sleep.

If you are young and being questioned if this is something you should 'waste' your time on, by all means waste your time. If you think yourself a writer, and you are doing anything else, then time is already being wasted, hour by hour and day by day, because you will not see your time for what it is: your slave, and not your master. There are years of time at your beck and call, if you will make them serve you. You have ten or twenty of them to spend writing the most awful stuff, and still you will have ten or twenty more to write things that are brilliant.

Get on with it.

Another Kick at the Publishing Cat

2011-06-21T07:51:00.000-06:00

These last few days I've been reorganizing my priorities, having made a decision to try one more kick at the cat regarding a novel I finished two and a half years ago. That novel is Pete's Garage, which is a story about a singer who lost his vocal cords in an accident years before buys an old hotel and transforms it into a practice studio for musicians. And strange things happen, as more than just ordinary musicians turn up.

The book is humor through and through, and was written from my memories of a place that used to exist in downtown Calgary called Connections. It was a crummy, ramshackle building where the soundproofing was bad and you could hear the band practicing in the next room over ... unless you were practicing too. The novel goes back - for me - to the days when virtually every friend I had was a musician.

I am not a musician, never have been. But I have generally liked them as people, probably because like me money has never been a priority for them. Mostly, Pete's Garage is a fantasy about how I sometimes think life might be like spent around musicians.

It follows some basic rules for writing. The characters and motivations are something I know and understand. The setting is simple, inward-looking and controlled ... virtually every scene happens within or immediately adjacent to the hotel. Therefore the hotel can really be anywhere. It's described as "... this side of Jersey Shore facing Arthur Kill," which I don't explain in the novel but can be placed somewhere across the thin strip of water from New York's Staten Island. But it could just as easily be in any big city.

I'll be talking here and there about getting it ready for sending out to publishers. It has gone the rounds before, but I'm not convinced its dead. I'm going to rework some of the first three chapters, pay out the cash and send it to probably twice as many publishers as I did before. It would be nice if finally someone were to pick it up and actually read it - and then want to publish it.

Ah, a writer's life. Soon there will be rejections once more.

Her Touch

2011-06-20T08:44:00.000-06:00

For years as a writer the only stories I had the ability the finish were short stories, and the longest one I had completed was only fifteen pages. I had written story arcs that were much, much longer, but I had never brought any of the novels I attempted to a conclusion, and it was beginning to bother me. I was in my early twenties and despite having consciously tried to write for ten years, I wasn't getting anything finished.

One of the problems was that I was writing novels which were insanely complex, with multiple story lines which were supposed to converge. Somehow they never did, and I would hit a writer's block and that would be as far as I could write. Finally I realized that finishing a novel was more important than writing whatever I wanted ... so I gave myself a task to write a SIMPLE novel which, even if it wasn't very good, I would at least be able to finish because it was two dimensional. I believed it would help teach me how to organize my thoughts right to a novel's conclusion ... and as it happened, it worked exactly like I expected it to.

I did start to see how to wrap up a story arc, and finishing the novel gave me confidence that was useful in finishing other novels. I confess, I have been thinking about it and I'm not sure which year I finished the novel in ... either '86 or '87. I know it was before '88, because that's the year I wrote Somebody's Daughter, which is, of course, another post altogether.

The novel wasn't a novel at all, it was really only a novella, just 35,000 words. I called it Her Touch. Very few people ever read it, and I wouldn't go around posting excerpts of it because, well, the writing it pretty bad. I wasn't a natural writer like some people manage to be. I have had to work and teach myself how to write, and this was something I wrote before I began to take Latin in university. Taking Latin was a huge leap forward for me ... but that's another post too.

Her Touch was a straight-up detective story. Two police detectives, Spears and Androssi, are investigating a serial killer who is murdering people in the doorways of apartments or houses just as they are entering. Usually the key is in the lock, the door is open and nothing has been stolen. They have all be killed by having their throat slit. There's no sign of any struggle. The cops learn that the victims know one another obliquely in a string of associations. A knows B who knows C who knows D, but in every case they are just loose acquaintances. Because of this Spears goes to a funeral of the latest victim to speak with the family and with anyone who might know the deceased. There he sees Ariana, a marvelously attractive woman who doesn't seem to know anyone. He does not get an opportunity to speak to her.

A few weeks later someone Spears has met at the funeral is killed. When Spears goes to that funeral, he sees Ariana again. The funeral is followed by a wake, which Ariana attends, and Spears decides to watch from outside. He sees Ariana leave with one of the family members and from that point on he and his partner begin to tail her.

There's no hard evidence against her, but Spears and Androssi are convinced that she is somehow involved. There's the usual arguments with the police captain (cliche, cliche) and after that the two cops begin to follow her on their free time. Because of the sporadic surveillance, the next victim dies and yes, it is the man Ariana picked up at the wake.

Now Spears and Androssi are convinced she is using the funerals to pick her next victims, intentionally choosing people who have little knowledge of the previous deceased. Naturally Spears and Androssi attend the next funeral and yes, Ariana is there. Only know she sees them, and she winks at Spears.

Both men start to ignore their other duties in order to catch her. They tag-team the surveillance. Androssi one night is following Ariana down a freeway when she starts to speed up. Not wanting to lose her, he follows, and they both begin to play a game on the freeway. She taunts him to go faster by slowing down and looking at him, and eventually this ends in a terrific wreck where Ariana is unharmed and Androssi is killed. (cliche, cliche)

At this point Spears loses it (cliche, cliche). He begins to put pressure on her, she plays games between him and her next victim - and Spears confronts the victim and the victim defends Ariana. Spears gets into trouble with his superiors who then take away his badge (cliche) and order him away from the woman. Spears ignores it, and follows Ariana as she takes her next victim into the country. Spears in turn is being followed by two other detectives.

Ariana kills her victim in an old shed on the edge of a wildlife park just minutes before Spears can stop her. He trails her through the park, surprises her, and they fight, rolling down a hill and into a stream. At this point, Spears has lost his perspective and intends to kill Ariana. He has his hands around her throat, strangling and drowning her, when he's shot and killed by the two detectives following him. The murders get pinned on Spears (there's never any evidence) and Ariana gets away scott free.

There's not much that's wrong with the plot besides the cliches, and I could probably write the novel now in about three months (took me a year the first time). I have it somewhere, but I wouldn't look at the original in writing it again. I'd write out the cliches (probably arrange it so that Androssi is the one to shoot Spears), but I'd keep the conclusion. No doubt, with more character build-up and at least another story line providing motivations for Spears' mental state, the book would probably come out at twice the length. I'd probably also add another story line for Ariana so that she didn't come off so wooden and distant. I don't think I'd give her a motive.

The point was that by forcing myself to write something very simple and two-dimensional, and ignoring the fact that I was writing cliches in order to get the novel to its conclusion, I did learn a lot about pacing, building to a climax, pulling the simple strands of the story together and ultimately writing a denoument. These are things I could not have gotten into my head writing the beginning five or six chapters of novel after novel. I began to see how the structure had to be circular, so that the problems the character has at the beginning must be involved and resolved by the end of the novel, to provide continuity throughout.

If you are finding yourself struggling to finish something, I suggest strongly that you set down your self-consciousness about the quality of your work and just concentrate on finishing the job at hand. Later, if you still like the novel, when you've learned more about how to write, you can go back and do the job properly.

Why Not Short Stories?

2011-06-17T09:11:00.000-06:00

The Gentle Reader will take note that most of what I speak about applies to novels, and not to short stories. A "short" story is one that is typically no more than 2,000 words, and at its best contains one, maybe two characters, a single setting and one resolution. The focus of the story is intended to highlight the sharpened facet of a theme, and to do it well, or in the very least to tell a tale that will be memorable to the reader. Traditionally, from Aesop to O. Henry, they tended to end in a moral; O. Henry employed the 'twist' ending, arguably better than anyone else up to his time. If you are unfamiliar with O. Henry, and you have an interest in avoiding cliches where the twist is used, I recommend him.

I used to write short stories, and had some luck with them. If you will do a lot of reader's theatre, where you have the opportunity to read aloud in a coffee shop or such, something about 1,200 words is good. Humor is better than something poignant, as it gets a crowd going. But humor is hard to write, and most short stories you will hear are rather unremarkable stories about people's families, or places they've traveled, or some moderately unusual thing they experienced which they decided to write out as a story. These are dull to read, and worse to sit and listen to read aloud, particularly if the writer doesn't have a performance voice. A monotonously written story read with a monotonous voice can equal 12 minutes of death.

I have very rarely heard a short story read aloud that I enjoyed that was not written by some master at least 50 years ago. For years I wrote them, but I've never especially enjoyed reading them. Those that I've written have little value, as short stories are not published and when they are, they usually don't make any money. I wrote a series of humorous stories for a magazine for several years that paid me a fair 30 cents a word, but that was because they had a trade angle - home renovations. They were not what could be called pure fiction.

I don't like reading short stories, as they end quickly and this means I must make the effort to start again with new characters. Somehow, I've never enjoyed starting anything. Most of the time, it takes ten or twenty pages for me to start to care about the characters, and by then, the short story is over.

Overall, I prefer the difficulty, the depth, the effort of writing a novel, even if many novels that I've started never saw an end. I am unsatisfied with characters in a short story; I want to give them a greater purpose, and let them talk as much as they wish. As such, it is very rare that a short story occurs to me that I take the time to write down. I would rather conjecture for several months about something I haven't started, than write something which I then forget about by the end of the day.

The Untitled Mess So Far

2011-06-16T12:51:00.000-06:00

So far I've restrained myself from talking about my general work, instead using one example from my past in order to outline some of the features regarding writing, and novel writing in particular. From time to time, however, I'd like to talk about work I haven't done yet, since development is an important part of being a writer. It is probably the least spoken element of writing, since writers in general do not like to talk about their work until it is accomplished.

I have experienced, in the past, a reluctance to continue projects that I have spoken about prior to writing. If something has only a chapter or two written, and I talk about it, there is a distinct lack of motivation for moving forward. It may be that, having given out the story, I feel less inclined to 'tell the story again.' It may be that the expression of the listener has convinced me subconsciously that it isn't worth continuing. Or it may be that once I've said the thing out loud, I've realized myself that it was never that great an idea.

I used to call this "killing the muse." For some ten years now I have rigidly kept to a practice of not talking about my best projects before writing out the first draft. Once the first draft is written, in toto, I have found there's no danger in talking about it. I do not feel kept from working on the second draft.

I think every writer likes to talk about their work, even the work they haven't finished yet. Writing can feel like having lightning in a bottle. I have this GREAT idea, and I want to tell everyone! I believe every writer feels that ... and I believe that most writers come to the same conclusion as me. Don't open the bottle, or else you will have only an empty bottle.

Still, there are ideas I have thought about for ages, which I think are good ideas, but which I doubt I will ever actually write. They occur to me, I turn them over and over in my mind, I structure out the characters and contemplate a workable theme. I think up an opening and organize a plot, but then I don't like that plot and I find myself organizing another. And another, and another. And the story never gets written.

There is one that I believe I have nailed down to some degree, but I still have yet to write a word. I also do not have a title, none of the characters are named and I don't have a theme beyond the least complicated sort, such as "don't die." And yet I have a setting I like, an opening, a general sense of how the characters will interact with each other and a good first climax. I don't have an ending, however, and you can't write a story without an ending. Believe me, if you don't know where you're going, you won't know how to get there and the story is going to wander horribly. I know many authors who say publically that they didn't know where their books were going when they started, that they "let the characters lead them" ... and yes, the books wander horribly. Generally, I don't finish them.

One day I'm going to be walking and an ending is going to hit me, and I may actually start writing.

The details aren't important. The idea centers around five jaded adventurers who find themselves in a town as it is being abandoned by the townsfolk, who are loading everything they have into carts to flee an oncoming army. The adventurers do not flee. They find a public house with a remaining inventory and contemplate the value of staying alive. They view cruelty differently, and upon catching a scout for the approaching army they interrogate him differently. They find a squad of forty humanoid invaders and dispatch them with some ease. They identify a significant arm of the approaching force in the distance, debate the logic of remaining, and then take note when a large, impossibly huge flying creature drops inconveniently close to them. This is more or less the pace of the novel as I imagine it.

In a sense, it robs some of the framework of The Wild Bunch, except that I don't see these characters suffering from a lack of education. Nor do I see them being motivated by the usual stuff, children and innocent people and friendships. I'd like to dig into a deeper theme about staying alive when its irrational to court death, but I haven't worked that out yet. And, as I said, I don't have an ending.

I'll keep the reader posted, however.

Necktie Unnecessary

2011-06-15T08:04:00.000-06:00

I identify four kinds of editing. The first is that with which everyone is familiar: the solemn, miserable grind of checking for spelling and grammatical mistakes, correcting the order of words, removing unwanted adverbs and adjectives, getting rid of colloquial phrases like "in fact" or "as far as I'm concerned' and so on - this last being something that clutters my first drafts like ten drunks in a back alley. It has to be done, but after years of doing it the dull process begins to be rather straightforward. I usually set aside a certain amount per day, depending on the length of the work and the approach of the deadline: about 3,000 words a day. That takes me about an hour and a half, or more depending on the amount of work needing to be done.

The second form of editing is continuity. This is a significant problem in a novel. It is important to remember when the hero hits the villain with his closed fist in chapter 12, that you put a high school ring on the hero's finger in chapter 3. It won't do to say early in the book that the character's father was a mailman, and then to have a stroke of inspiration late in the book where you reveal the character's father was a prison guard. Something has to be worked out, whether you pick one or the other, or give a reason for his father having once done both jobs.

Here another set of eyes on the volume can be a big help. You will tend to be wrapped up in the language and structure of the text, while someone who knows nothing about your novel will be more likely to see those continuity errors. Only, be sure it is someone who will squawk when something is wrong ... I've known too many readers who will simply assume there must be some reason for you making the mistake, when in fact you've just forgotten.

It's easy to take more than a year to write a novel, particularly if it is something you don't do a lot, and that increases the likelihood of continuity errors occurring. If it helps, write out a list of pertinent facts about the characters, without looking at the novel. Then you are more likely to write out the things that are actually important, rather than a reflective list of things you've already written. This will also help with the third kind of editing.

This would refer to the importance of getting rid of things that are not working. The reference may not turn everyone's crank, but I always liked the line Bill Murray had in the movie Tootsie, where he confesses that the solution to his play is to write the "necktie scene" without the necktie. This can be a difficult decision. We fall in love with characters, or sequences, or little in-jokes, and it turns out they just don't work in the story ... but we refuse to accept that, and we go on making the problem worse and worse, until finally we have our own personal Jar Jar Binks. It's easy to see why Lucas couldn't see past the disaster that character was; he was too close to the work.

I have been pushed to the point where I have removed up to three complete chapters from a work, recognizing that the book was going in the wrong direction. It can be very hard to throw out characters, or settings, or even certain themes when you realize the work is trying to do too many things, or that it is doing things the wrong way. But do it. Kill the character. Get rid of that section, no matter how beautiful it is with the girl and the high wire and the tutu that rips and sends her to her death. If it isn't working, it isn't working. You have to be prepared as a writer to stab your novel or story right in the heart if it has turned against you. Feeding it more time just makes it worse. The same is true of a composer, a painter, a sculptor or any artist. Cut out the bad and move on.

Remember, though, that once you have cut that out, you are going to create continuity errors with what's behind ... when you get rid of the priest from chapter 9, don't forget to remove the reference to him in chapter 14.

The fourth sort of editing is the worst. Yes, it hurts to kill chapters, and it can make it seem like the book is never going to be finished, but it is worse to finish a book and realize that it doesn't have enough. You've come up short and you haven't any idea how to fix it.

My first draft of Act of God, I realized that my lead character, the narrator, was a ripe asshole. I had written him as a cook, and had included the sardonic, often mean attitude most of the cooks I worked with had. He was intended as a little-educated, tough, disbelieving sort of runt, and when I found I'd managed that acceptably, I realized he was impossible to warm up to. The reader wasn't going to get past chapter three listening to this guy. I needed something to make him more likeable.

My solution for the second draft was to give him a disability. He would have a crippled leg that would counteract his irascible nature and give him a little sympathy. The new feature had to be worked into every moment and every aspect of the story, and as a result I had to throw out passages and a full chapter, necessitating the rewrite that would ultimately change the climax of the story in favor of the character's physical flaw. In turn, this changed the character himself, so that he became less cold and mean and a little more funny, even compassionate in some instances. Overall, it heightened the work completely ... but it was a long, difficult effort to rework the whole book to fit that one highly significant change. Worth it, yes, but not much fun at the time.

There you have it. Any English graduate can manage the first and second kinds of editing, but it takes a writer to recognize when three and four are required, and it takes a writer to get dirty up to the elbows and do it. Don't hesitate, and don't put it off ... it only takes a great deal of thought, patience, innovation and a willingness to cut like a surgeon.

Gettin' Shut o' Doin' Things Rather-more-or-less.

2011-06-14T08:27:00.001-06:00

Wow. It is not as though editing were the most interesting subject. In fact, for most editing is the worst part of writing, something most would rather not do - professional writers as a well as amateurs. One of the great things about having an editor is that they are willing to edit ... and where it comes to schlock material I write for magazines, I am happy to lean on them. Let me warn the gentle reader, however, that editors will edit anyway, no matter what you fix first. This is true everywhere.

If you have any artistic inclinations, you will want to edit your work. Here is where having a solid understanding in grammar is most helpful. Here also is where not being in love with every word you write is an absolute necessity. And here, finally, is where you will be broken on the rocks of your self-doubt.

For certainly the one thing that setting out to edit will cause to wither and die is your ego. If you don't find this to be true; if you don't find the need to question your value as an artist and as a person as you apply the red ink to your work; if editing is a breeze ... either you're not cutting enough, or you haven't learned to invest your being into your work. Editing is hard. It is self-abusive. It is taking something you've written in a moment of genius and recognizing in the cold light of day that it is all worthless. Writing is passion. Editing is passionless.

Some people can't do it. They can't bring themselves to cut a word of their work, or they can't bear the proof that their writing is clearly something loathsome that no one should ever read. There are thousands of would-be writers who never write anything but first drafts ... and because of that, they never write anything anyone would read. If you will be a writer, you will need to understand that editing does more than destroy your bad work. It leaves behind your good work. It allows the good work to breathe, to shine, to lift itself up from the ground and fly.

No matter how painful, think of editing in these terms: you are pulling a fast one over the reader. The reader overseeing your edited work doesn't know what you've thrown out; they see only the carefully crafted words you've polished and straightened out. As far as they know, this IS the way you write. It will seem to them to be effortless, for how can anything so beautiful not have been written that way from the first?

Ask yourself, do you question great works from the standpoint of what they must have been when the writer first set down the words, or do you make the assumption that the writer was just that smart? Consider the opening of Shakespeare's 57th sonnet:

"Being your slave, what should I do but tend
upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend;
nor services to do, till you require."

Do you truly believe these were the first words he set down when he began to write? Or do you realize the hours and nights he reviewed them with angst, again and again, questioning the use of every word, replacing them, changing them back, reordering them for the right meter, and so on? Being Shakespeare, we will never know. They may have been written in this way, as he was struck by the muse all at once, but I doubt it. Poetry is an editing hell. No one, ever, edits like a poet, if the poetry will be more than words, but music too.

It's strange to think of some poets editing. Anyone can imagine the effete Lord Byron burning the midnight oil over his poem Darkness, but can the reader imagine the gruff, military Kipling struggling to fit his words in order? Consider this from The 'Eathen, a favorite of mine:

"An' now the hugly bullets come peckin' through the dust,
An' no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must;
So, like a man in irons which isn't glad to go,
They moves 'em off by companies uncommon stiff an' slow."

No great writer has ever lived that did not write the same awful refuse you find yourself looking at in your own work. The difference between you and they is only their willingness to tear and shred their work to improve it, bring out what was good and cut off what was bad. You cannot do as they did without bearing down upon yourself just as hard. You may not want to face it, but every begger must ... and everything else that Kipling says.

To not edit is to not have appreciation for what you have written that is worthy of being shunt of all that you've written that ought to go. It is finishing the job. It is writing well.

Quality is a Dead Loss

2011-06-13T08:39:00.000-06:00

I was not happy with Saturday's post. I felt a little sluggish that day and I did not feel I'd done enough thinking and organizing before writing the post. It did not flow. It felt more intransigent than I would have liked. I don't think it caught the correct mood, or that it said what I wanted to say.

That's how it goes sometimes. We want to be better writers, but some days the mind is not as sharp as it could be. Some days we are distracted. Some days the words don't come. It doesn't matter how long you've written or how good you are, you're subject to your environment and your quality of being.

Thankfully, there's editing. That's a subject I want to get into this week, along with more about the setting, but for now I just want to reassure the reader that no matter how bad the stuff you've just written seems to be, within the hack and the blabber there remains the central nugget of what you were trying to say in the first place. Words can be changed, sentences restructured, new points added or old points wiped from existence. You are the god of your work. When things get real bad, don't hesitate to bring a flood and wash everything clean.

There is an agenda to editing, and an agenda to this blog, which I have yet to talk about it. If you will say that you want to be a better writer, then you are saying there is a difference between bad writing and good writing. But what is 'bad' writing? What is 'good' writing? Who gets to say?

Nothing could be easier. You do. You get to say. For ourselves, we all do. Anything you're willing to dedicate time to read, that gives you a sense of satisfaction or which compels you to sacrifice other things in order to spend time reading, that's good writing. People will attempt to assign all kinds of measures and dictates about good and bad writing. You will read some on this blog, since the need to find a formula that aids in determining between good and bad is a disease that all writers to some degree suffer from. The reason for that is obvious.

Unfortunately, you will never really know if you are a good writer. You cannot measure it by your willingness to read your own stuff, or by your sense of satisfaction. You are too invested. And so however you try to compare what you write with what you read, you won't be able to do it.

Of course, some writers simply assume a mantle of unquestioning ego regarding their writing. I know something about that. Having a big ego will get you past a lot of the criticism you'll receive, it will keep you writing and it will help with those saturdays when you feel all you can write is sludge. You'll attribute it to other things, like distraction and exhaustion.

Deep in your heart, however, you won't feel so sure.

I will leave the reader with a story from Kurt Vonnegut that he recounts in Foma, Granfalloons and Wampeters, a collection of stories, essays and speeches from those days when Vonnegut was virtually a god upon the American campus. In it he describes being on a bus, and seeing a woman reading one of his books. Vonnegut observed that the woman was near a point in the book where he'd written what he considered a very good joke, and he decided to wait until she came to that point. In fact, he remained on the bus well past his stop in order to see her reaction. But when she came to the joke, her face did not crack so much as a smile.

Vonnegut's point of the story is my point. You may think you're a genius, but the woman on the bus is just reading, for her, an ordinary story. She doesn't know who you are. She doesn't know how hard you're working. And all you can do is keep quiet about it, enjoy what empty adulation you do receive and know that you will never be the writer in someone else's head that you are in your own.

Try not to let that worry you. Try to write out what you can, try not to give too much importance to what others tell you to write or not write (as I did on Saturday) and try to enjoy what you're doing. It's all you've got. And when you try to be a better writer, and when you get advice about it, listen carefully, take from it what you can, and then go write whatever you want.

No matter what anybody says.

The Setting Well Traveled

2011-06-11T14:20:00.000-06:00

I still find myself writing what are essentially introductory posts to the various facets of writing. In this case, the matter of choosing a story's setting. I believe firmly that two rules here should be followed with absolute rigidity. Your story should either be set somewhere that you, the writer, are very familiar with, or it should be set somewhere that no one is familiar with.

One of the benefits of writing science fiction or fantasy is that the environment in which the story takes place can be of any nature, and no one can argue the rules or the 'truth' of that environment. The downside is that you're forced as a writer to create a completely alien universe where none of your readers can bring with them personal experience - and that is a lot of work. Most writers of sci fi or fantasy lighten the load by augmenting fantasy with elements of the real world. Here they immediately discover they are backed against the wall by the other truth. People may not know the planet Mars, and you may be able to set a mining camp there. But people do know mining camps and they do know miners ... so you had better know them too, or your story will be dead by the third page.

The setting is any frame in which the story takes place. It is critical for placing your reader into the story. The setting must be believable. It must feel 'real.' Characters play best when they are allowed to exist in situations where they belong. The place they live. The place they work. The social structure that most fits themselves. It may seem creative and imaginative to dump a mess of characters into an environment where they don't belong, but it is also a very, very overdone trope. Interloper A travels to Setting B and spends novel/film/play interacting with the setting as an interloper. Thing writes itself ... unfortunately. The story line taps into human feelings of discomfort when being pushed into strange environments, and the reader or viewer reacts with visceral understanding. And that is why as a theme it has been done to death.

Setting makes an excellent background for your story, and it can contribute in a thousand ways to the plot, the motivation or the impetus of your theme or your characters. However, setting makes a very poor character, or what is called a foil ... that is, a contrasting element in your story that enables your character to 'be' the character, revealing those things that as a writer you are writing the story to say. Setting as foil is transparent, it's dull, and it makes an easily forgettable story. When I say 'transparent,' I mean that the reader will very clearly see you, the puppet master, pulling the strings.

I am sorry, I am remiss in making this point clearly. I need to say that of course, your story CAN follow this trope. As a theme, it is sometimes described as 'man vs. nature,' though in truth that is a more complex structure than what would normally be employed, i.e., man is lost in an unfamiliar country. The gentle writer needs to know, however, that it is one hell of a steep hill to climb up in making your story a) interesting; b) innovative and c) remotely original. If I am to see or read another story about a man trapped on a desert island, it better have truly unique elements in it that challenge my previous experiences with stories of this type. The same is true for prison stories, alien planet stories, tourist in the third world stories and so on and so forth. Then again, you might be the person to write those unique elements - because you have been to prison, or you have been trapped on a desert island, or you have been to an alien planet.

If you haven't, however, and you think that writing yourself into an environment with which you have no experience would make a good story, stop. What is most interesting is that the writer must be, far more than the character, completely at home and unbelievably familiar with the alien environment in order to pull it off.

Have I gotten the whole point across yet? All right, one more try:

If you're thinking about writing a story like the one above, don't. Unless, of course, you really want to.

Julia Skayakovak

2011-06-10T06:11:00.002-06:00

Over the years I have written many characters with whom I have fallen in love. On the whole my writing tends to revolve around one woman and one man, with supporting characters. My women tend to be strong, capable, obstinate characters who resort to Machiavellian tools to achieve their agendas. My men tend to be somewhat capable survivors who are often in over their heads, but game. The conflicts that arise between these two personalities is one I have seen very little of, particularly where the woman is not sentimental and where the man is not ideological. My characters, as I’ve said, reflect facets of my personality, but they are never ‘me.’ They do not react as I would react, they do not approach problems as I would approach them, and they do not see the world as I see it. Nevertheless, I still love them.

For two decades I was possessed with this particular character whom I wrote into three separate books. The first book was never finished. The second I did finish, but it was awful and it has been lost now. The third book was the one I’ve mentioned already, Act of God.

The character at its inception possessed a number of questionable, young motivations which no respecting person my present age would have: beauty, murderous sadism, phenomenal amounts of ability ... the trope that would now be called a ‘Mary Sue.’ My inspiration had not been comics, but rather a desire to somehow make the notorious Carlos the Jackal into a woman character. It seems almost silly to write the words ‘international assassin’ in today’s world – terrorist would be more up-to-date – but that was the conception I originally had, lo about 1980.

Early on I settled on the name ‘Julia’ for its lyrical qualities and its associations with the conqueror Julius Caesar. Her last name was a composite of ‘skaya,’ the Czech word for ‘town,’ emphasizing her urban and thus modern characteristics; and ‘kovak,’ which has an imprecise meaning regarding stealth and capability. I could not know that Alan Moore was making the similar association (I assume) when he named his Rorschach character Walter Kovacs. I did not think that meant I needed to change the name of my character.
Being the terrible writer that I was in the 80’s, I wasn’t able to do her character justice in words. I could picture her in my head and how she ought to behave, but I couldn’t do better than to present the shallow outer shape. I did get an interesting break, however, that gave me a wider perception of what the character offered.

In mid ’86 I was at a job interview for an analyst’s position. I was fresh from working for the government as a statistical clerk and I hadn’t entered university yet. Before the job interview began I found myself in a conversation with another applicant. He went first. Then, after my interview, which didn’t go so well, I ran into him in the coffee shop downstairs and we continued our conversation. He told me his name was ‘Bob.’ I identified myself as a writer, and in answer to his query I told him about the book I was struggling with, which included Julia. I confessed that I wished I’d had more information about what went on behind closed doors with international intrigue, whereupon he explained that he could help with that.

We took a short walk to another building where he kept a small office for his own use. I realized quickly that he was obviously more likely to get the analyst’s job than I was. Once we were in his office, he locked us inside and began to explain that he had worked for C.S.I.S. for a number of years. That’s the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. After a little digging into his files, he produced a box which was full – coincidentally – of documents related to the movements of Carlos the Jackal from the mid 1970s and into the 80s. It was material that had been printed on a teletype machine ... old dot-matrix printing and so on. The pages made oblique descriptions of Carlos in Bulgaria, Carlos in Brazil, Carlos in Spain and so on. Now and then there were descriptions I did not understand that ‘Bob’ explained for me. Bombs had a tendency to go off in places Carlos had been seen in just a few hours prior.

I was engrossed, obviously. I was a bit worried, too. But after several hours of talking and reading, Bob closed the box, swore me to secrecy and let me out of the office. I never saw him again. I did not go looking to see him again.

I have always throught of that as a very odd moment in my life. Now and then I’ve had to convince myself that it really happened. Were the documents real, or were they some faked thing that Bob happened to have with him the day we met. Was C.S.I.S. watching me? Are they still watching me? I guess you have to decide how paranoid you’re going to be. I tend to believe that somehow the whole thing was a coincidental run-in between my writing and Bob’s unique conspiracy-fueled paranoia. I tend not to believe the documents were real. My subsequent investigations these last many years have convinced me that a lot of what I read that day was complete bullshit.

It was, all the same, terrific fuel for my creativity. If I had ever considered giving up on Julia prior to that meeting, afterwards I had to write something, eventually, that would suit the character. And as I’ve said, I eventually did.

Julia is not someone I would ever want to know personally. She did remain a terrorist and an assassin, but I washed the sadism out of her in favor for indifference, and replaced my original conceptions of her ideology with a sense of intense retribution. Not revenge in the ordinary sense, for wrongs done her, but the cold certainty that certain people’s lives should be brought to a literal end.

I suppose she deserves resurrection, and that will mean having to rewrite and restore the original book. It’s only been in the last two weeks I’ve realized I have to do that.

Ugliness

2011-06-09T09:08:00.000-06:00

The creative writing professor I had in university believed that all characters should be ugly. She considered beauty to be hideously boring, cliched, overused as a trait and therefore completely dismissible.

There's no question that ugliness is easier to describe. Split lips, Neanderthalic foreheads, scrubby hair, humps, club foots and general scrawniness are easier to envision than aquiline noses and high cheekbones. If you want your readers to clearly remember a character, remove the character's eye. The only thing is, most of us are no more especially ugly than we are especially beautiful. I personally am not astoundingly attractive, but I have no distinguishing characteristics that would describe easily just how I am plain-looking. If I were to write that I had bad skin, or a bulbous nose, or that I have a pear-like build, these things would be true ... but not in the degree that as a reader you'd be likely to picture. My skin is only lightly pockmarked. My nose is only a little bit bulbous. My stocky build isn't quite like a pear.

How much better for writing, however, that we exascerbate characteristics like this in order to make our characters more memorable and profound. We are expected to exaggerate. Writing is, after all, lying. Moreover, the description of the father's gut in chapter three will only serve to give a greater sense of growth when the father realizes his failing as a human being in chapter nine, vowing to give up his self-indulgence.

The tendency to exaggerate does not work both ways, however, for my professor from long ago had a point. Writers tend to make their attractive people - especially women - unnaturally attractive, so that every female denizen of the home and workplace embodies sexual perfection. It is natural that writers write out their fantasies; without fantasy, most writing would never happen. If you want to be taken seriously, however, and if you want to be published out of the porn industry, you will tone down the physical descriptions.

All right, but why?

We are all well-aware of our shortcomings. We may enjoy watching porn for its attractive, immoral participants, or reading about rich, attractive people, but in a world where there is so much of it on tap, it tends to roll over us like a wave upon the sand, quickly rolling off and leaving no special impact. To dig into a character is to tear up the sand and destroy the perfect image that was there before. Personal struggle is unpleasant and it is ugly; even if your character is beautiful at the start of your story, if he or she is to have any depth at all, it will be necessary to tear down the facade and reveal the unpleasant, uncomfortable truths about living. Beautiful people eat, shit, suffer and die just like everyone else, and those are the things that truly concern us all.

I like attractive characters in my stories, but I don't feel they have to be outlandishly attractive to be noticed. I don't particularly like physically ugly people in my stories - but people who are emotionally or behaviourally ugly fascinate me to no end. To wrap this up, if you have found yourself writing characters without flaws, or if you save your uncomfortable motivations for your villains, you must educate yourself. The division of characters between villains and good guys is stuff for old timey serials, not for legitimate writing. We are all ugly. We are all motivated by things we would not feel comfortable revealing to the general public - writers and non-writers alike.

And that is precisely why writers should write about it. To enable others to read it, and relate to it, and grow from it.

The Drivers

2011-06-08T08:22:00.000-06:00

We all know what a character is. We see enough movies, we read enough books, we have the concept thrown at us in school through representations from Shakespeare ... and of course our lives are filled with characters. There are small parts like the people who fill your coffee cup or exchange your money at the bank. There are extras like the others driving cars around us, or filling the queues and theatres, or crowding the square at New Year's. And there are those characters who pose as major supporting players in our lives.

A quintessential quality about reality is that at any time, for any reason, one of the extras can spontaneously be thrust into the role of major supporting player. Ten minutes ago, she was sitting next to you on a bus, without knowing anything about her. Now, she has just saved your life by a hair's breath, having her thigh cut open as she pushes you into the aisle just before the bus is hit by a car. She falls into the aisle next to you, crumpled metal and plastic all around you. You're tearing off your expensive suit jacket and pressing it into her thigh to staunch the blood as she starts to shake from shock. You're holding her hand and reassuring her ... and at that point it's time to find out who she is.

Sadly, writers find themselves casting around for some expression of what makes this woman tick, and they don't have it. A rather pathetic description of the woman's hair, size, eyes, age, ethnic background and so on is gorged out like the boxes on a tax form. Some expression of the woman's social connections is attempted and we find out she has a child - as though this is the only possible association this woman could have - or that she has a mother. Two paragraphs of description later we know nothing about her except a few physical descriptions we will forget immediately (because we will see her in our mind how we want to see her anyway) and a thoroughly dismissable family connection.

It is hard to explain what a writer can put there that isn't trite and useless to the reader. I can say that in those moments of stress, you as the passenger trying to save her life won't care about any of that. For you, there is blood everywhere and you are probably inadequate to the task of managing it. You will be hoping that help comes soon. You will be encouraging the woman to talk because you will want reassurance that she is still alive. You won't care what she says - unless it is something so out of the ordinary that you have to listen.

The problem comes from the rather clumsy set of priorities a writer has, in that first the idea of the bus crash is created, and then it comes down to personalities. Let me put it plain: plot does not drive character. Character drives plot. Logically, you should have the purpose of this woman set out in the story ahead of time. The bus crash is the best way you can think of to relay this character's contribution to the story - and therefore, you will have ahead of time the priorities you need to tell you what information the woman must relay before she falls unconscious or dies.

If a bus crash isn't the best way for her to relay it, then you shouldn't write that into your story.

Before setting out to write a story, you want to have two characters sorted out quite clearly in your mind. You should know how they will interact with each other. You should know what agenda both will have, and how those agendas will conflict with one another. The appearance of both characters will descend, therefore, from the agenda, and NOT from a momentary visual you got from sleeping, the television or some other source.

For example, if your first main character is a professor, and your second main character is a student who falls in love with him, the student's appearance will have a lot to do with whether the professor will make commit an act generally seen as amoral. The professor's appearance, and the professor's personality, will need to be something a student can fall in love with. Matters will be different if the characters are both the same sex, and they will be different if the authority figure is a man or a woman. The motivations behind the student's interest in an older authority figure will need to be expressed, as well as the motivations behind the professor's willingness - or lack thereof - to allow the advances of the student. The appearance of either will also depend upon which participant is the more aggressive. An aggressive student who is successful will look different than an aggressive student who is unsuccessful.

I have thus created the pattern and structure of the book, and I have a reasonable idea of what both characters must look like in order to make the book believable and accessible. Now I can start on the plot.

I will be writing more about character first, however ... as there is more to be said.

Do Not Suffer a Grammarian's Wrath

2011-06-07T08:08:00.001-06:00

While we are on the subject of grammar, I should make my case clear - or rather, I should have W. Somerset Maugham make my case clear:

"Only a few years ago, I was spending some weeks in London and had engaged as temporary secretary a young woman. She was shy, rather pretty, and absorbed in a love affair with a married man. I had written a book called Cakes and Ale and, the typescript arriving one Saturday morning, I asked her if she would be good enough to take it home and correct it over the week-end. I meant her only to make a note of mistakes in spelling that the typist might have made and point out errors occasioned by a hand-writing that is not always easy to decipher. But she was a conscientious young woman and she took me more literally than I intended. When she brought back the typescript on Monday morning it was accompanied by four foolscap sheets of corrections. I must confess that at the first glance I was a trifle vexed; but then I thought that it would be silly of me not to profit, if I could, by the trouble she had taken and sat me down to examine them. I suppose the young woman had taken a course at a secretarial college, and she had gone through my novel in the same methodical way as her masters had gone through her essays. The remarks that filled the four neat pages of foolscap were incisive and severe. I could not but surmise that the professor of English at the secretarial college did not mince matters. He took a marked line, there could be no doubt about that; and he did not allow that there might be two opinions about anything. His apt pupil would have nothing to do with a preposition at the end of a sentence. A mark of excalmation betokened her disapproval of a colloquial phrase. She had a feeling that you must not use the same word twice on a page and she was ready every time with a synonym to put in its place. If I had indulged myself in the luxury of a sentence of ten lines, she wrote: 'Clarify this. Better break it up into two or more periods.' When I had availded myself of the pleasant pause that is indicated by a semi-colon, she noted: 'A full stop'; and if I had ventured upon a colon she remarked stingingly: 'Obsolete.' But the harshest stroke of all was her comment on what I thought was rather a good joke: 'Are you sure of your facts?' Taking it all in all I am bound to conclude that the professor at her college would not have given me very high marks."

The above appears in Maugham's The Summing Up, which he wrote in 1938 at the age of 64. Cakes and Ale was written in 1930. Maugham's first success with writing was with Liza of Lambeth, which was published in 1897. Between those last two dates Maugham became an insanely successful playwrite and wrote a great many books, including The Razor's Edge, The Moon and Sixpence and Of Human Bondage.

As such, the complaints and perturbations of grammarians should not be taken too much to heart. The motivations behind such people have very little to do with the creativity of language, as their main focus is to put a straight-jacket on language, gag it and drop it into the sea. If you have been told by an English teacher, professor or expert on letters that you have no talent, congratulations. You have just proved that in 80 years, grammarians have not changed a bit.

There is one purpose for grammar, and that purpose is to make yourself understood. There is great sense in grammar in that one ought to know the placement of commas and other devices, if only to clarify examples such as "Eats, shoots and leaves," as the famous book sets out to solve. No question about it, knowing where paragraphs go is helpful. As is knowing virtually every other rule you can wrap your head around. It is a cliche, but it is a serviceable cliche: learn about grammar's rules, and THEN break them.

You will read things written by people who will tell you to reduce the number of ellipses, colons, semi-colons and dashes in your work. An editor will not turn you down for such things unless they are so abundant that its impossible to read what you're saying - so yes, try to keep them to a minimum. This does not mean that you should not use them. Use them sparingly. When you are wildly famous and successful, you can use them abundantly and to your heart's content ... but I'm guessing by then you won't want to.

Similar things can be said about the length and type of sentences, the old bugbear about prepositions, comma splices and so on and so forth. Sit down with a book and learn what they are, and learn how you are abusing them. And then, after you've come to a decision about it, throw away the book.

I repeat for emphasis. Be clear. Write in short, direct sentences. Reserve your long, developed sentences for when you feel comfortable, or even resolute, about saying a particular thing with a certain pomposity that fits with your character. Mix it up. But most of all be aware of the sentences you are writing. Know when you've written on and on in some absurd irrational sentence with no proper punctuation or clarity that leaves your reader unsure about what it was exactly that you were trying to say when you started the whole thing off. The more you know about your own writing, the clearer your writing will be. And the less guff you will have to take from so-called 'experts.'

Helping the Tortoise Along

2011-06-06T09:30:00.000-06:00

Aside from the matter of writing, there are other skills a writer can develop which can aid in the process of creation. There are three in particular which have helped me - which I would go so far as to say without which I would hardly be a writer.

The first and foremost is grammar. This is not a popular subject. I'd like to emphasize that a public school education doesn't provide enough knowledge about grammar, any more than the school band program provides enough knowledge about playing an instrument, or a school gym program giving enough for a competitive athlete. Athletes and musicians employ trainers and tutors ... but usually a writer will believe that he or she needs no special training to understand the structure or complexity of language. Understand that I am not speaking of the creative use of language, but of the very nature of the language itself. This is the tool. Knowing how the tool fits in your hand is a big part of mastering the craft.

My own success with grammar was not installed by the teaching of English, but through the Latin courses I took in university. As it happens, at present I cannot read Latin. I cannot translate it. I took Latin last about 21 years ago and it has all washed out of my brain. What has been left behind is the construction of the language itself. By understanding Latin - a much more systematic language than English - I gained much greater understanding of how words fitted together. I understood for the first time why our ancestors were taught Latin in school. It was something constantly made a joke about, teaching dead languages and all, whereas it should have been understood as a critical function of teaching grammar.

The second skill on my list would be typing. I am right now touch-typing this post, at about 45 wpm. That's the speed I write at when I am casually creating. When I am on fire, it is more like 60-65. If I push it, and I'm copying without thinking about the material, I can write 70-75. This is impressive for someone who failed typing in High School, when I could not manage better than 35 wpm, and at that with many, many errors.

I could understand the value of it, however, and even after that class I continued to work at it year after year, using a text book that I'd found in a used book store. Once someone has explained the principles to you, and given you a sense of what is important and what is not - something that can really be accomplished in an afternoon - everything else is just practice. And so I did, spending a few hours every once in awhile typing groups of letters and associating a particular finger with a particular key. Over time I improved, and with improvement I became more attuned to the typewriter itself - and of course the keyboard later on.

I get a little cranky when I read arguments about moving the letters around on the keyboard, and about how the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow people down, etcetera. Be that as it may, I have no desire to change the keyboard. I don't think about the letters as I type them. I couldn't tell you without actually looking which finger types what key. And I never look. I just type. A new keyboard would bollux me up completely. Sitting down and letting my fingers move is so natural, so comfortable, I can't imagine forcing myself to undergo four years of repatterning in order to learn someone else's keyboard. Do you know how much material I would have trouble keeping up with in four years?

While we're at it, this is the third thing that I'd mention as a needed skill. That would be this thing I'm working on right now, the computer. I started, ages ago, on a manual typewriter. That would have been the one my parents let me use back in 1976. I was blessed with an electric typewriter by 1980, when my grandmother past away and her's was brought into the house. I wasn't technically allowed to use it at will - my parents were scrupulous about that sort of thing - but I ignored them and used it anyway, every chance I got. By '83 I was staying up all night long, typing, and the electric typewriter was mine (mostly by default), and in my room. By '84 I'd moved out, without being given the typewriter (no support from my parents for my writing, ever) and writing long hand again. For twenty years I wrote all my first drafts out by hand. My mind moved at that pace, and I believed that long hand was the best way to write. It's only been about five years now that I've accepted that my drafts are better constructed by a computer.

I say this to explain that most of us start with simpler gadgets and promote ourselves up to more and more difficult machines. That is the age. When I hear about people who are still creating their documents on Notepad or Word Perfect, I am astounded. Microsoft Word is simply not that difficult to learn, and it provides benefits that have to be accessed. If you are not familiar with a computer at all, GET familiar. There are no excuses. Virtually anyone can teach you the basics, and a course through a local library is easy enough to join.

I suppose a fourth skill would be to continue training yourself in every kind of development even vaguely associated with writing, but that should be self-evident. The words themselves contain knowledge. It is best to be knowledgeable and competent in using these words.

Tortoise Speed

2011-06-05T17:40:00.002-06:00

Using your brain to write is like using a specific muscle; it must be exercised at least somewhat regularly if it is ever to be built up, and once built up, it must not be allowed to atrophy.

But what if every time you sit down to write the words don’t come. Or worse, what if everything sounds like something an insidious hack drunk on hack-writing potion would write at a hack-writing festival for hack lovers? I can assure the gentle reader that I know just what this feels like. The last thing you want to do is write, and writing is what you’ve set yourself to do everyday.

The dilemma can kill a writer completely.

I have a solution, but it will seem, well, wrong somehow. If you can’t write your own stuff, then don’t write your own stuff.

I am advocating a simple solution. Find a book that you love, take it down from the shelf, or rip it off the computer if need be, weight it open on your desk and begin copying it, word for word. If it is book you love, this should be easy ... so long as you can keep your eyes from just drifting forward, until you’re in your cumfiest chair reading. Seriously, write it out, just as the author wrote it out before you. At least one of two things should happen.

In the first place, you will, after spending enough time at it (twenty or thirty pages, perhaps spread out over several days), you’ll become more aware of the sentence structure and the pacing than you ever were before. One of the problems with equating your writing to someone else’s writing is that you’re familiar with their writing at rabbit speed compared to your own efforts, which you’re used to viewing at tortoise speed. If you slow someone else’s work down to a familiar speed, you’ll have a real comparison between your writing and someone else’s. You may start to notice that your writing only seems hackneyed because of the speed you’re reading it at. Readers won’t read it at your speed.

The other thing you may start to notice (and this may take longer, sixty or ninety pages, or never, depending on the author) is that not every word written on the page really belongs there. You may notice certain words get used more often that you’d have thought normal. And you may notice certain passages are, well, pretty worthless. You’ll notice this because you have to spend an hour or so writing it out, thinking, jeez, I wish this conversation-slash-descriptive passage were over.

DON’T allow yourself to jump ahead and only write out the good bits. Write everything out, as long as you can stand it. If you’ve got it in you, write out at least two hundred pages, no matter how long that takes. If you ever write a book, you’ll have to get used to writing two hundred pages or more. For the moment, I’m only asking that you write out someone else’s pages, someone who is supposedly already proven to be a good and respected writer.

If, after that’s done, you want to enlighten yourself still further, start copying out a BAD book. Something that is just awful, something that you would never, ever read in a million years. Find out how a book editor feels. And after you get to the point where you’re ready to kill kittens, start rewriting that book with impunity. Change the character’s names, change who kills who in scene three, change the story line and the writing completely. Just go with it.

Now, go back to your own writing. Tell me how different it feels.

Drowning You

2011-06-04T11:58:00.006-06:00

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Without question this is one of the most famous openings to a book ever written. Charles Dickens wrote it in 1859 in the manner of many of his books, as a weekly serial. For him and for his readers, the French Revolution which is the centerpiece of his novel A Tale of Two Cities occurred 70 years prior to his writing, which would correspond to the bombing of Pearl Harbor for us. In other words, an event distant enough that nearly every person who had experienced it themselves were dead, but near enough for living persons to still feel particularly keen about the event.

The novel is in most senses an ‘historical’ drama in that occurrences of history do measure in the novel, and Dickens wants to set the stage for those occurrences, and does so in the novel’s opening passages. He speaks about England and France, and about the conditions of both countries – briefly – at the year of the novel’s beginning, 1775. And it is only after all of this that the actual drama begins with the rushing of an English banker’s coach from London to the sea, setting in motion the love story between a French aristocrat and the daughter of an improperly identified French revolutionary. The general theme of the novel is, again and again, resurrection. Dr. Manette is resurrected from the Bastille, France is resurrected from its entombment under the Monarchy, the certain death of Charles d’Evremonde is resurrected so that it can continue and in the end Sidney Carton is resurrected from his utter worthlessness to something of a hero. There’s even a humorous scene with grave robbers in the middle of the novel, ‘resurrecting’ a body. It is generally supposed that the end is very sad, but in fact – read correctly – it is an astoundingly happy ending, and was recognized by audiences who made it the most successful play ever based on a Dickens’s novel in the 19th century.

Returning to the opening paragraph and its comma-splice mania that proves grammar isn’t everything if you understand when and how to break the rules; Dickens wants to put some very immediate ideas into the reader’s mind. In the first case, that disagreement about the period is rife and constant, and that he fully expects everyone to have an opinion about whether or not those were good times or bad. Dickens was a denizen of coffee shops, as all artists continue to be, and he was familiar with the thousands of ongoing arguments about the period (“noisiest authorities”) – as we are regarding the decisions surrounding the Second World War. He had heard the events referred to as wise, foolish, hopeless, hopeful and so on, without any resolution ever occurring among the debaters, and he wished to establish from the beginning that both were in every way absolutely right in that no one, clearly, had any real idea at all. This sets the stage beautifully for saying whatever he wants to say, while everyone else can go hang.

Moreover, in keeping with his theme of resurrection, he ends his series of oppositions with the emphasis upon the Heaven-slash-Other Way alternatives, and not by chance as people would reckon. Excellent writers do not, as is often asserted, do things by chance. It is emphasized again by repeating “good” and “evil” as opposed to good and bad. Dickens is announcing that, above all things, he is conveying a moral play, in which some of the characters will certainly be good in the sense of holy and redeemed, while others will certainly be evil in the sense of cast out and damned. With this one proviso: that the absolute nature of either is sullied in that the world is not fashioned of “superlative degrees,” but that it is made muddy. Charles d’Evremonde’s father is the extreme evil; Lucy Manette’s father is the extreme good (which is a statement of its own, I can tell you). And Lucy herself is rather lacking in damnable characteristics. But Charles and his twin Sidney are both as muddy as muddy gets, as is the truly interesting Madame Defarge and her not-necessarily-unique perception of the world. The events of good and bad that carry through the novel are painted in shades of gray, the same shades Dickens declares he’s going to use as his palette in the opening sentence.

From this and from my description of my own book I hope that the gentle reader begins to understand that from the first a novel must be more than an interesting series of sentences strung together to form a narrative. It is a work of intrinsic character, fashioned so that each part of the novel must influence and comment upon every other part of the novel, to elicit an emotional and intellectual response from the reader … to take the reader into a world and immerse them there until their former perception of truth or falsity is drowned out of them, leaving them awakened to something they did not previously understand. Most novels fail at this either by not having any conception of their purpose at all, or by drowning the reader so heavy handedly that the reader must fight back. What is required is the sort of sleepy somnambulance that one sinks into with pleasure and contentment, never realizing that the surface has passed over them long since and it is too far now to swim out before the last bubble of air escapes.

A Tale of Two Cities is not an easy book to read. It is heavy with description, dependent upon an understanding of people’s ideals in the time period and extremely dense in vocabulary and structure. Therefore many turn to an expurgated version, such as I read when I was in my teens. Having read the expurgated version, and having been quite young, I did not realize the content and purpose of the book and I was left with an empty, even angry feeling at the death of Sidney Carton. It was only by reading the correct book that my eyes were opened. Yet still I dreaded the end of the book, knowing what was coming, in spite of thoroughly enjoying the passages and their marvellous strength. Then I came to the end, and tightened up … only to be utterly surprised. As I read the last two pages of the book, I was crying – with happiness. It is something I can’t explain, even by assaying the last two pages word for word. It was a feeling. In confession, I admit that I’m a sensitive person, and I don’t imagine others would be likely to cry … but for me, I was changed by the ending of the book, and in my perception of things altogether. It is without question what I would consider to be among the best books ever written. And yet – a thing that does not surprise me – it is mostly ignored by the literary elite as a dismissible love story.

In a few days I shall write about themes, and about love. For now I am satisfied to warn the reader not to expect my response to the book’s end. I can’t promise that it will be “well worth it” if you read right to the end. It would have to strike you in just a particular way, I think. Still, if you feel you might get a sense of it from what I’ve written here, and tried the book, it would serve you well in some capacity, I’m sure.

The Rules of Reading Here

2011-06-03T08:21:00.000-06:00

In university I had a professor who kept office hours three times a week from 10 AM until 11. This was every week, year after year without fail, and as far as I know continues to do so. And while I was at university, and occasionally afterwards, I would make a point of seeing him once a week, sitting in his office full of books and drinking tea from cups that he never cleaned. Being very English, he would mock me for taking his cups down to the bathroom and rinsing them out. He came from Lincolnshire, and he must have had a bit of the coalminer in his blood.

The other thing he used to mock me for was my paltry reading experience. Dr. Baldwin, brilliant and funny, was without a doubt the most well-read fellow I've ever had a chance to know personally, and conversations inevitably included a long list of books that I ought to read, as he shot titles out like bullets. I never did get around to reading all the things he suggested. I bring it up because, well, lately I feel like him. I never seem to be able to have a conversation without making referencing some book I've read, and telling others they ought to do too.

Oh, not always. In truth, it comes up more with the young. I believe it takes time to read all the things that can or should be read, and that there isn't enough time in the first twenty years of life to a) read it; b) develop the vocabulary to understand it; and c) obtain the experience necessary to appreciate it.

In case the gentle reader hasn't guessed yet, I'm again putting off the post I mean to write about A Tale of Two Cities in fovour of discussing an often quoted proverb, "A Writer Reads." I do agree with this. It's important to see what others have done. As important as physically writing as much as possible is, to build up the habit and the focus necessary, it is just as important to discover and investigate what others have done with the process. A writer does not live in a vacuum.

I have heard people who say that they don't wish to read because it might influence them, or that it discourages them, or that they dislike reading something they wish they had written put on the page by someone else. Ridiculous, but there it is. Why shouldn't a writer be influenced? What can possibly be so pristine about a writer's style or focus to suggest that its good enough to be influenced by parents, teachers, peers and the unavoidable advertising media, but not other books of the writer's selection? You don't have to read every bit of trash, no, but for the love of sweet little red tomatoes, you can pick out works of literature you respect.

Yes, it is true that something brilliantly written can be discouraging ... and unfortunately, 'measuring up' is something writers and other artists seem compelled to do - with the proviso that if they fail to measure up, they often spiral into self-doubt and self-hate. So be it. If the gentle writer can't take a knock on the chin once in awhile, if their work can't be kicked into the dust by a better master of the art, and if they can't pick themselves up and decide to try harder, it is no great loss. Art has no time for the wounded self-pitying martyr ... that's a thing religion can tolerate, thus explaining why the literature in religion is so consistently second rate. Art wants its creators to go one better. And if we are not masters in every piece we write, we can yet be masters of one or two works that will last a dozen lifetimes. Oliver Goldsmith may have despaired that he was not Shakespeare - we can never know for sure - but that has little meaning to us as we sit down for a performance of She Stoops to Conquer or tuck into a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield.

Oh, you haven't read ol' Oliver? You should.

Yesterday, I said that I did not want this blog to devolve into endless discussions about who is and who is not good. Today I should like to add a collarary to that. On this blog, if I say it is good, it is. This 'truth' doesn't extend to your blog; it doesn't even extend as far as my dinner table. It carries no weight of any kind outside the framework of this little electronic frame. Elsewhere in the universe, literary works may have values of every level and measure. But here, in this particular realm, I will not quibble about using the words, "this work is good, and you should bloody read it."

Now, the gentle reader may, or may not, choose to take my advice. I certainly did not always take the advice of Dr. Baldwin. But I also did not stand in his office and tell him that he was an idiot for suggesting books to me. I did not do that because I was not an idiot. I came to his office; I sat drinking his tea; I recognized the dynamic.

And now you, O gentle reader, come and sit down in my office, of your own free will. I am sorry that I cannot offer you tea; it would be in clean cups, I assure you. Sadly, the circumstance of our meeting disallows it. Accept, if you will, what little hospitality I can offer. And in the meantime, please understand that if I make mention of some work in a positive way, I am advocating most strongly that you should read it, perhaps with my examination of the work in your mind. Perhaps, even with a book you read once upon a time and formerly despised, you may come away from the post about it with a fresh perspective.

Within the constant cat-calling that the lust for social popularity has created, there is a resistance to comprehension. People wave the things they enjoy like military flags, marching under this or that banner as if going to war, with little or no concern for the purpose behind any bit of art to which they themselves do not personally pledge allegiance. This I cannot tolerate here. I do not care about anybody's nationalism. Nor will I declare any work I appreciate under a banner of my own. If possible, I shall try to represent works here that I do not like along with works that I enjoy. I shall try to describe every work with only the intrinsic message of the work in mind. I shall hope that others learn the benefit of such efforts.

The Question of Taste

2011-06-02T09:52:00.001-06:00

I was going to write a post today deconstructing the opening to A Tale of Two Cities, but it occurs to me there ought to be a discussion about something else. After all, why A Tale of Two Cities and not Jane Eyre or The Great Gatsby?

I must confess I have particular tastes about the things I like, and the things I think are good, and it will be those tastes that are presented positively or negatively here. I must further confess that I have no interest in this blog being bogged down with discussions about who is good and who is not, or who is horribly overrated or who is horribly underrated. I am aware that it is impossible to expect people to appreciate my tastes ... but I don't want to hear about it when they don't. There are always dissenting opinions about every writer, just as the gentle reader who wishes to be a writer will stumble into criticism that has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual work you've produced. Oh, people will tell you it does ... but you must recognize that people bear grudges against certain subjects, and even certain words. You may never discover why this girl hated your short story, simply because she had a rather juvenile reaction to the swear word you included on page four ... but she won't want to tell you that, so she will lie about the weakness of your characters or indicate she thinks you write like a ten-year-old, and you will spend the next week fighting yourself about what could have been wrong.

Taste is positively the worst critic you will face, because taste needs no logic, it depends upon no level of ability or talent, and it will disparage as viciously and coldly as a knife in your back. At some point in your writing career you must learn to rise criticism you deem irrational, and do so without questioning your motives for doing so. It will do well, whenever you submit anything to anybody, to remember the source. Very often even the most reputable people are blind to their reasons for liking or disliking things.

It will fall on deaf eyes, but I will ask that the reader does not question what works I choose to discuss on this blog. Some will be classics, some will seem absurd and highly questionable; and some, I am certain, will be infamously despised or even hated. My tastes are wide and varying, including works going back to the beginning of writing itself and including works that are very recent. I enjoy works that appeal to literary snobs and works that appeal to the denizens of the gutter. I enjoy films, theatre, novels, short stories and poetry. I confess that I rarely read any fiction written later than 1960, because I find most modern novels to be formulaic, overly wordy and in general lacking in significant themes. I think this is also true of most novels produced before 1960, but since the bad novels have been weeded out by time, making it easier to find good novels from that time period, I am less apt to be disappointed when I reach the novel's climax.

In general, too, the grammar is better.

I like old movies and new movies. I like a good action film, I like an old musical, I like most things with a strong sexual theme, if the suspense is suspenseful I can enjoy a slow pace and I particularly like films that hang upon a deeply intellectual quandary. I can enjoy a very, very slow film if it is produced very, very well. I do not like bad films for the sake of camera angles, cinematography, lighting or any other technical innovation. I like films because they are written well. My only criteria for identifying a good film is in the script itself, and the performance of that script. If the spoken words do not ring well or ring true, I simply do not care if the movie was a technological triumph. As such, there are many 'great' films that I do not care for in the least, because they are considered to be 'great' because of the filmation, rather than the writing. I am a writer, not a technician, and I am therefore not moved by the wonders technicians can accomplish. If they support the writing, wonderful. But for me, visual wonders cannot replace writing. Now and then I can like a film because it is pretty. But I will never consider it a great film.

Theatre is perhaps the greatest disappointment, since I live in a part of the world - Bible Belt Canada - where everything that gets produced or presented for the stage is done poorly. I have never seen a play performed live which I would consider to have been a 'good' performance. Now and then, I've seen things performed adequately. The best performance I have ever seen live would be a presentation of Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer, which I adored for the libretto. I like opera, particularly when the story is brilliant. I have no interest at all in ballet, since it is not writing per se, but rather a lot of dumb show. Dumb in the sense of "unspoken." I do not understand, nor care for, the language of feet. It does not speak to me. Words speak to me. I am a writer.

Poetry that appeals to me, again, predates this era. I heartily love poetry that includes many stanzas, that rhymes or carries a rigorous meter, and that addresses concrete things. I cannot reproduce meter; it is simply beyond me and I respect deeply those people who can manage it. Because I cannot enjoy poetry that eschews meter, I do not write poetry myself. I did, when I was young, but being a toxic mess lacking any musicality, I don't discuss it and I don't attempt to improve upon it. I hate with a deep, deep passion 'poets' who have no comprehension whatsoever that meter even exists, while supposedly string words together into vague lists about no given subject whatsoever, and call it poetry. The worst thing about this species of sub-humanoid is their ever-stated argument that poetry doesn't have rules, and that it can't be judged or criticized because it simply 'is.' Bah.

There you have it. I'm afraid the gentle reader is not invited to comment with their own lists of what they like or dislike. Please comment, but do so in general terms. You will please note that in the above, with the single exception of the opera mentioned, in the paragraphs describing my tastes I have not included any example of a book, film, play or piece of poetry. I will therefore publish any comment that includes the mention of ONE opera - fair is fair. But I won't publish anything that mentions a specific work, today only. I'll let it go in the future. But if you wish to make a statement about taste, please leave your specific tastes out of it, as I have. Thank you.

I shall endeavor, as I write about various works produced by others, to give honest reasons for my opinions, and to not simply say, "I like this" or "I don't like that" as though the reader should automatically feel as I do. There are works I like for no reason whatsoever. I shall try not to make mention of them here.