Found Poem: End Game

I've been looking for something tonight, pages of a story I misplaced, and found some old poems  instead. It's been a while since I've written a poem, but I actually published a few way back when. Not this one, though, written all the way back in 2000. And you know, I still like it. I found an old essay too, maybe I'll post it later.

End Game

Suddenly you notice how much

She's pulled away.
Friendly, but barely affectionate
Somewhat quiet
Somehow distant.

Finally the near silence makes you anxious

Until you convince yourself
That it's all part of an elaborate game
To draw your attention:
That old thing about
Absence making the heart grow fonder;
A way to make you worry
About losing her presence in your life;
Something to get you thinking about
What she really means to you;
Or just to drive you crazy.

Strangely, she never thought

About what you might think
Of her plans to revise
Her perceptions of you
Until a spiteful remark
Made her wonder
What you would get
If you got your way.
-srw


"How do I get you to feel what I feel for you? I will hold on to you like a fool till my hands go blue. But you don’t want to dance with me. You don’t want to dance with me" - Monarchy, You Don't Want To Dance With Me

Flash fiction V-Day

You know how it goes: 2000 words written in no more than 60 hours. To be frank, I wrote this story in 70 minutes. Hopefully it doesn't read like a story written in just over an hour, but it probably does. Edit: tied for 2nd, again, so maybe it doesn't read like it was written in an hour.

<-- All stories much incorporate this photo
and the words Imagine, Sob, & Initially.

Plus, the story is to have a Valentine's Day theme...not my favorite holiday, but I think I made it festive enough =)

Straight Through The Heart

When Ellie broke up with you three days before Valentine's Day, she'd said that she was worried about you. You were, in her words, unstable, if not worse. She looked sad as she said it, a portrait in angst, but she meant it. You were through. Forever. In a teeth-gritting way, you were glad you hadn't married her, because if she sincerely believed you were ill, she definitely wasn't going to live up to the 'in sickness and health' clause of traditional wedding vows.

Maybe it wouldn't have gone down that way if you hadn't been so honest with her. Your mother drilled honesty in all things into your head, and even as an adult who should know better, you found yourself still desperate to live up to parental expectations. So, when you realized that you and Ellie had a deep connection, you told her. Initially she seemed flattered, but as you elaborated, you began to notice that fear was creeping into her eyes.

The break up hardly came as a surprise a few days later. But that didn't mean it didn't hurt. Having your heart ripped out and stomped on, no one gets past that without a whimper or two. Without waking up with the desire to scream when they realize it's all real, not a nightmare that would soon dissolve away.

So, you learned two lessons. One: honesty is not the best policy. Two: when it comes right down to it, Ellie is a bitch. These two thoughts grappled in your mind like dogs fighting, and eventually you began to wonder if revenge was a better policy than honesty.

Revenge sat across from you as you sipped cold coffee and mechanically chewed toast that had been burned because you hadn't wanted to leave the toaster on the setting Ellie had preferred before she walked out on you. And revenge put its arm around your shoulder when you stood in the bathroom and contemplated suicide. The ring that you slipped out of your pocket then, as you thought about it being smeared red, sparkled in the light from the open window. The stone scored well in all the qualities you were supposed to look for, clarity, cut, color, and caret. Sitting in the palm of your hand, it represented 200 hours of listening to people complain. Jared's wouldn't take it back, you'd asked. Begged. Ranted. Been asked to leave the store. Snapping the ring box shut, you walked away from the straight razor, the clock radio close to the bathtub, the bottles of pills Ellie left behind. They'd wait patiently, if it came to that.

If the ring couldn't go back, and the hours it cost couldn't be unlived, and you couldn't unlive either, maybe you could perform alchemy instead. After you called into work, you hit the streets, looking for someone who could help you transform the ring into something different, something that you had more of a use for, considering you weren't going to be asking Ellie to marry you on Valentine's Day.

All the stores along the strip were dressed up like cheap whores, flashes of red everywhere you looked, and you could almost smell the cheap chocolate crammed into every one of them. It didn't matter. Your head was full of 1929, and cheap paper hearts weren't enough to lift your thoughts to the present. But even more, as you concentrated on the task at hand, you were able to ignore the thread that stretched out before you, leading back to Ellie.

It was the thread that had you thinking of revenge, of Lincoln Park, of Ellie...when she broke up with you, you assumed that the thread would snap, that cold and moiraeic, she'd take shears and cut through the fabric of a shared life. It wasn't a literal lifeline, you knew, you were pretty sure, but you'd still worried that the severing would leave you lifeless. It hadn't, and the thread hadn't broken either.

No, instead the trailing light still spooled out in the distance, leading back to wherever Ellie had gone to be a her again instead of half an us. For a while you tried to convince yourself that Ellie was right, and you were becoming unhinged, but you'd followed it again, the day after the jewelry store incident. And there, at the end of the line, she'd been, morosely sipping coffee in Starbucks. How could you have known she'd be there, if the link between you wasn't real? She wasn't such a creature of habit that finding her was more inevitable than chance.

If she hadn't immediately freaked out when you told her about the connection between you, it would have been nice to talk to her about what it all meant. Calmly, rationally, maybe the two of you could have gotten to the bottom of why you'd noticed, just a few weeks before, that a cord of light bound you both. You had your theories: maybe you were seeing beyond the weave of the world, and were noticing something that others couldn't; maybe it was like those people who promised to read your fortune and tell you the color of your aura...that could be an interesting new line of work, better than hearing customers whine, but so far you only saw it between you and Ellie; maybe it was a brain tumor, and if it was, it was pretty low of her to dump you when you were defenseless.

Another time, the next night? it was getting hard to recall the passage of time, but the Valentine's decorations everywhere still, not yet desperately proclaiming "50% off!" said it hadn't been as long as it felt, you followed the thread again, and found yourself standing outside a motel room, looking in through the windows like a peeping Tom. Ellie had been in there, dressed in a white robe you didn't remember, and she managed not to see you. It shouldn't have surprised you, not considering that she'd packed up all her things and left your apartment looking like the scene of a half completed robbery, but in a way it had. You'd assumed that she'd turn to her sister, but she'd ended up there instead. You walked away, hoping she wouldn't look out the window as you retreated.

She hadn't been sobbing. Instead, she'd been reading, and she looked...content. Maybe if Ellie had looked wounded too, you might have relented, but for her to seem fine...Revenge slipped an arm through the crook of your elbow and walked you home.

In the end it was an idiot you'd found on Craigslist that helped you forward your plans. It was hard to imagine that the police wouldn't have beat you to him after reading his ad, since it was unlikely that trading "anything" (and listing what that meant, which was the part you felt would interest the police) for a "good" ring was even legal, but he'd opened the door and welcomed you in, asking to see the ring before the draft from the winter crouching outside had even dissipated.

He'd jabbered about how much his girl was going to love the ring, but you weren't really listening to that beyond wondering if she would. Instead you interrogated him about the list of "anything" he'd mentioned in the ad. No, you weren't interested in the all-star hockey tickets, not the X-Box 360 setup, none of that. You wanted to know about the gun.

Oh, that, it was a beauty he claimed. Guns didn't strike you as beautiful so much as utilitarian, but you let him talk about it anyway. He'd bought it at a gun show after one/two/many TV shows about FBI agents convinced him that owning a glock would be so cool...but he'd never gotten around to learning how to shoot at a firing range.

A smarter man might have asked why you wanted a gun, perhaps recalling that there were waiting periods to buy them, but he wasn't that sort of guy. Instead he'd wrapped the gun up in a soft cloth bag, and handed it to you the moment the ring box dropped into his out stretched hand.

It was heavier in the pocket of your winter coat that you imagined it would be. LL Bean reinforced the pockets of their outerwear, so the weight wasn't a problem, but it made the gun feel very real as you walked back past the tarted up stores. Eventually you passed a newspaper machine and read the date: those desperate signs would be going up bright and early the next morning. That bothered you: if someone passing by had asked the date, you would have thought it was the 13th still. That meant you'd found the craigslist idiot just in time.

Why it had to be Valentine's wasn't something you'd completely worked out in your mind, but it just seemed fitting. Asking Ellie to marry you that day was going to bring you together forever, but she'd wrecked that. She didn't seem to know it, but you were still bound to her, and it was growing unbearable. The light between you hadn't dimmed, not even a little, and it was beginning to frighten you. What if it meant Ellie was your soulmate? A soulmate who didn't want you seemed like a special sort of hell, so you had to do the snipping yourself, and the gun seemed like the tool to get the job done.

You didn't want her to suffer, so it was good that you were a decent shot. Your dad had taught you to shoot when you were small, first with air rifle almost as long as you were tall, and then with live ammo around the time he taught you to drive. Once, straight through the heart, and she'd barely feel it. You didn't owe her much, but you did owe her that.


Waiting was the hard part. Joyful couples streamed the sidewalks, and you couldn't find Ellie then. Well, you could find her at any moment, but it didn't seem wise just then. So you waited, endured watching people kiss, walking by with roses tucked into the crooks of elbows, sharing a love you worried you'd never find again, not while you and Ellie retained an unwanted connection. By then you'd decided you didn't want it either, not if she didn't love you any more.

Eventually the crowds thinned as people went home to fuck. That's when you got in your car and followed Ellie's trail. A worry that following it by car would be hard crossed your mind, but it was no more distracting than GPS so you managed fine. To your surprise, you found yourself in the museum district. Dimly, you recalled hearing something about an Egyptian art exhibit, but you hadn't realized Ellie was interested in that.

You weren't so you barely noticed the art in the windows, samples meant to whet the art appetite, as you made your way to the windows outside the gift shop. Ellie was there, as you knew she would be. Her hand was about to touch a scarab beetle paperweight when something made her turn her head and look out.

Your fingers closed on the gun, ready to pull it out and end what lingered between you. You'd never fired on a living thing before, but this had to be considered self-defense the way she was making you suffer.

The light between you flared up as she continued to turn her head, as the gun came halfway out of your pocket. Her eyes met yours, and you said a little prayer, asking for forgiveness for what you were about to do.

And the cord snapped. There was a bright sparkle as the center was cut, and it quickly faded from both ends, racing back to you, to your centers. In seconds it was gone.

You jammed the gun into your pocket, turned, and walked away, leaving her to stare after you.

The End


"You don't just blurt love is a curse..." - The Tragically Hip, Love Is A First

flash fiction Xmas

As usual the flash fiction contests are 2000 or less words written in 60 hours, with three words and a photo for inspiration -->
(don't blame me, I didn't pick the picture) This time the words were:
Coolness
Winterize
Unpardonable
...and the story was also supposed to have a winter theme this round.

Christmas Eve With Timmy

I sat and stewed while Hermey the elf sang in the background. New Years was still over a week away, but I already had my resolution firmly in mind: I was never going to babysit on Christmas Eve again, no matter how cute or how desperate the person asking me was. All that got you was a bruised shin and a stupid hat.

Rubbing my shin, I thought back ruefully to how I'd gotten here. It all started just after lunch on a day that was otherwise shaping up to be peaceful. Little did I know then that the peace was about to be shattered.

I'd answered a knock at the door, hoping that it was someone dropping off a package for me since I wasn't going to be going home for Christmas this year. Instead, it was my neighbor, Ryan. He'd moved down the hall from me four months ago, I'll admit that I was instantly attracted to him. My heart fluttered a little bit when I saw him standing there because I had been trying for weeks to find a way to start a conversation with him that didn't seem completely contrived. So far I had failed.

It was only after I stared at him, wondering what I should say, that I noticed that he looked really upset. Without even having to think about it, words fell out of my mouth. "What's wrong?"

He bit his lip, which was adorable, and gave me a shy look. "I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm in a real bind. My brother and my nephew just got here yesterday, and my brother hurt himself."

"He did?" I asked, wondering why he decided to tell me. "How?"

Ryan sighed. "They're from Dallas, and the thought of winterizing a car is completely beyond him. Instead of covering the car last night when it snowed, he just left it. And he didn't have an ice scraper either when he wanted to go shopping, then decided not to come back up to ask for one... Long story short, his method of cleaning ice off the windshield involved a screwdriver, and now he needs stitches."

I winced. My mind shied away from all the possible ways one could have injured themselves with a screwdriver, since it probably wasn't very pretty. "Oh, that's terrible."

"Yeah... I'm going to be bringing him to the emergency room. The problem is my nephew." He looked away, his cheeks suddenly appealingly pink. "Look, I know that you don't know me, and I won't be upset if you say no, but do you think you could keep an eye on my nephew today so the kid doesn't have to spend the afternoon at the hospital too?"

"Uh..." I stammered, stalling for time. I was trying not to let on, but I was disappointed that our first real in-depth conversation just involved him asking me for a favor. "How old is he?"

"Timmy is six."

Timmy. That sounded like a name for a nice little boy. How bad could babysitting the little boy named Timmy be? Without much further thought, besides the fleeting one that maybe this would spark a friendship at least between Ryan and me, I found myself saying, "Sure. Bring him over."

Ryan's face lit up, and for a moment I was convinced that I had just made a very good move. He touched my arm, and I tried not to shiver. "Thank you, you don't know how much I appreciate this."

If I had been another sort of girl, I probably would've purred that I was sure he could think of a way to thank me, but that's not me. "No problem. I hope they get him fixed up quickly."

"I'm sure it's nothing a few stitches won't fix," he said over her shoulder. "I'll go get Timmy right now. Thanks again for doing this, Hannah."

**

A couple minutes later Ryan returned, this time accompanied by a little boy, and his brother. He looked a lot like Ryan and probably was nearly as attractive when he wasn't white with pain. Ryan looked down at the boy, and said, "Timmy, this is Hannah. She's going to watch you so you don't have to go to the hospital with us."

"Come on in," I said to Timmy, who immediately brushed past me. Looking up at Ryan, I asked, "Two questions. Is it okay if we leave the apartment? And do you have a number in case I need to reach you?" I handed him my own cell phone number.

He deferred to his brother, who mumbled something about not caring what Timmy and I did, before shrugging. "I guess you can go wherever. I'll give you a call when we're on our way back." He glanced down at the boy again. "Be good."

"Whatever," the boy muttered, steadily refusing to look at any of us.

**

Timmy sulked for ten minutes after they left, then gave me a calculating look. "I want coco."

"Sorry, I don't have any."

His look suggested that I'd just committed an unpardonable sin. "But Uncle Ryan promised me some!"

Deep breaths, I told myself, the kid doesn't know you, and his dad's hurt, so he's having a bad day. "Let's go buy some then."

"Where?"

"Starbucks?"

"We have those at home," he said in a way that suggested familiarity wasn't a plus.

"Oh. Well, there's a café near the mall, too," I suggested. "Famous for their coco, even." In a moderate, small town sort of way.

Timmy perked up. "Is Santa going to be at the mall?"

"I don't know, maybe."

"I wanna see him! Dad said we would, but he hurt himself like an idiot."

It felt like I should protest, but his father did strike me as sort of dumb. I mean a screwdriver, really? So I just ignored that. "If he's there, we can see Santa." It didn't seem like my idea of fun, but what else was I going to do with the kid?

**

Things seemed to go well enough...at least until we'd been served. "Do you like the coco?" I asked as we sat in the café.

"No, it's gross. Can we see Santa now?" Timmy asked, sliding off his chair.

Mortified that a waitress had overheard, I left a big tip before bolting out the door.

**

Two hours later I knew that bringing a kid to the mall on Christmas Eve was to pass an occasion in hell. Children were running all over the place, only to stop abruptly and make you trip over them as they chattered about the coolness of whatever had caught their shifting attention. I almost trampled six kids before we even got to fake North Pole at the far end of the mall.

Timmy's excitement had waned once he saw how long the line was, but we stoically joined it. Or, at least he was stoic about it - after an hour, I was beginning to whine like a toddler myself. "Timmy, are you sure you want to do this?"

"Yeah, I gotta!"

"You must have already sent a letter to Santa," I said, feeling both desperate and clever at the same time. "So he knows what you want."

"No, not this," Timmy insisted. For a moment I began to feel bad, and assumed that he was going to ask Santa to make his Dad feel better. That seemed rather sweet. "I only saw it here in the mall."

Oh. So much for sweet. I stared ahead a the seventy kids in front of us, and thought about throwing myself on the ground and kicking my feet like the little girl having a tantrum in front of the toy store was. "Oh, okay..."

Timmy was quiet for a while, but eventually he looked up at me. "How come you don't have kids?"

"Um...I'm not married."

"Do you at least have a boyfriend?" Timmy asked, and I could almost swear he gave me a pitying look.

"No."

I was trying to think of a subtle way of asking if his uncle was single when Timmy looked me up and down. "Because you're fat?"

"Jesus, Timmy."

"You shouldn't say that."

"We're giving out prizes!" a booming voice announced next to me, making me jump a foot. A man stood there holding the ugliest hat I'd ever seen. He gave it to Timmy. "Here you go!"

"Thanks," Timmy muttered.

"Wow, you won an ugly hat," I couldn't help but remark.

"You wear it," Timmy insisted.

"No."

Then the brat hauled off and kicked me in the shin. Hard.

"Ow!"

"Wear it!"

"For God's sake!" I jammed the hat on my head and grabbed him by the arm. "We're leaving."

"But Santa!"

"Forget Santa. I hope he brings you coal."

"You're mean," Timmy whined, looking over his shoulder as I pulled him through the mall. Santa faded into the distance, and I was happy to get the hell out of there. We'd wasted hours in the mall, and neither of us had anything much to show for it.

**

Later

I hadn't been naive enough to expect better behavior from Timmy when I got him back to my apartment, but I hadn't anticipated worse, either. While I set about making us soup and sandwiches, he trashed my living room.

I almost dropped the tray when I saw that he'd flung my laundry about, using it to redecorate. Seeing me, he pointed at my bike. "Guess you don't use this much."

"Why?" I asked, waving a hand at the mess.

He shrugged. "Bored."

"Put everything back!"

"Yeah, right." Timmy grabbed one of the sandwiches. "Are you getting paid? 'cause you suck at this."

"I'm never having children," I muttered, bending for my strewn clothes.

Timmy laughed. "Of course you're not. Who'd marry you?"

I took a deep breath and counted to three thousand. I started over when he toppled a bookcase.

**

Things did not improve. Defeated, I curled up in a chair and decided to ignore Timmy until they came back. I'd hidden the matches and knives by that point.

"Uncle Ryan!" Timmy shouted eventually, making me look up. Ryan was standing in the doorway, taking in the disaster zone my apartment had become.

"Timmy, go back to my place," he said, yanking Timmy out into the hall. Looking at me he said, "Sorry?"

"Oh, you better be," I snapped.

My pant leg rode up as I brushed past the bike and Ryan noticed the huge bruise already spreading on my shin. "Bookcase falling over do that?"

"No, your nephew kicked me," I said, only to remember I was still wearing the stupid hat. I yanked it off.

"Timmy can be a handful," Ryan said apologetically before beginning to pick up the things that used to live in my bookcase.

I looked up at him, incredulous. "A handful? You're a master of understatement."

"I know. I'm sorry." He did look contrite.

"His behavior is your brother's fault, not yours," I said grudgingly.

"It's just...the divorce has been rough on the kid."

I nodded like I knew what that was like. "Sure."

"They're going home on Tuesday," Ryan said, apparently trying to reassure me that Timmy wasn't going to be a permanent fixture.

"Oh." I wasn't supposed to say "good" but it was hard not to.

"So, um...do you have plans for Friday?"

"No."

"Want some?" he asked, giving me a hopeful look.

I took a moment to think it over. "Alright."

"Great, so it's a date." I half expected him to say something about how it didn't have to be, but he stood firm. I liked that.

"How often does your brother visit you?"

Ryan blinked, apparently not expecting that question.

"Once a year. I mostly visit him."

I nodded. I guess if things worked out, I could put up with Timmy once a year. Then a horrible thought hit me. "You're not Timmy's godparent, are you?"

"No, why?"

"Just wondering."

The End

 

"Too much to pay, no one to blame" - Junk Circuit, The Devil Wears A Crown 

Nanowrimo 2010

November was National Novel Writing Month, and I won for the second year in a row. I reached the word goal on Saturday. Yay! To make things more fun, three of my work friends were also doing it, so we had fun sort of competing with, sort of supporting each other through it. 50,000 sounds like a pretty daunting task for just thirty days, but it works out to less than 2,000 words a day, so it's only somewhat difficult, not impossible. As far as I know all four of us succeeded, so that's really nice too.

This year I wrote a sequel to the story I wrote last year. Well, not "wrote" since that implies it's finished, but I've been working on it since then. You need to keep in mind that the word goal for nanowrimo is set at 50,000 words, but the vast majority of published novels are twice that long. Anyway, I'm 3/4ths finished the story from last year, and knew how it would end, so it was easy to work on a sequel without knowing what happens in that middle bit.

In the first story, Pull, Caitlin makes her living pulling people who died young out of the afterlife, and the Manchester police ask her for her help: there's a serial killer on the lose, and they hope she can talk to the victims to get a lead on the elusive criminal. Oh, and she's in love with a guy in the afterlife who has no interest in being alive again. In the end the bad guy is caught...and Caitlin realizes that she's pregnant, which is something she and Kyler thought couldn't happen because the dead don't reproduce in the afterlife.

Push picks up six months later, with Kyler having crossed over to be with Caitlin and their upcoming baby (and Danny, her foster kid who has her gift). Learning to live after having been in the afterlife since dying at birth causes Kyler more than a little stress, and Caitlin and Danny are also learning to cope because of it. Caitlin herself gets an education in something she's never thought about before: what it's like for the people she's rescued to start their lives over.

Before long the police officer from the first story comes to ask Caitlin for help again: someone has been forcing people who were happily dead back into life. Caitlin agrees to return them to where they belong, but finds out that she can't. Things explode into new tragedy for one of the dead she couldn't help, and Caitlin finds herself sleuthing again, this time trying to figure out why someone like her would be "helping" people against their will.

Ultimately, I'd like to write this out as a trilogy (the next story, Hold, is going to be about the dead not being able to get into the afterlife...for some reason. I haven't thought it out too far yet. It'll upset Caitlin's belief that there are no ghosts, anyway!) and of course get them published. I learned recently that the average age of a novelist being published for the first time is 36, so that let's me angst a little less that I haven't finished a (publishable) novel quite yet. Apparently 12-year-old me deciding I should be published by age 30 was overly ambitious, lol.

"must keep writing if I'm to be better than everyone else" - Jets to Brazil, I Typed For Miles

Flash fiction May

I finally found the picture from May's contest...

The picture to the left and the words "Pandemic",
"Sanctuary," and "Spy" needed to be used to write a 2000 word or less story in sixty hours the weekend of May 14 - 16.

Silver Blues

I ran. My pursuer growled as he chased me, and this fueled my panic as I crashed through the undergrowth. There wasn't enough air to keep me from wheezing, and a stitch in my side burn hotter every step - at least until a tree root tripped me. I landed with a bone jarring impact, but it was soon forgotten when gray fur and sharp teeth boiled over me -


My scream still echoed in my ears as I sat upright amidst tangled sweat-soaked blankets. No neighbors shouted for me to keep it down, and only a full moon stared at me in disapproval. Moonlight or not, the hand that reached for a flashlight trembled in time with my still galloping pulse.

It was silly, I knew I was alone, but I still arched the light into every corner of the room, especially the ones were the sterile glow of the moon didn't reach. Spit dried in my mouth as the beam hit the bulletin board. It was the photo that did me in: a boy on a bike forever captured as he hung in mid-air. An image from before, one happy memory worn at curled, coffee-stained edges, half hidden among leaflets about disease prevention and flyers promising safe harbors.

Slipping out of bed I loosened a mirthless bark of laughter as I thought about that dull tease - sanctuary. Those flyers were old, all from the early days of the disaster. Sanctuary had been one of the first casualties of the blight.

As I stood there and contemplated hard liquor, it had been 270 days since the lupine flu had been discovered, and 241 days since it had been declared a pandemic by newscasters whose doll-like masks of nonchalance had begun to slip with a wildness about the eyes. One had to wonder how many of them were out there now, no longer constrained by studios or uniformly hideous hairstyles.

People, if they'd still dare to emerge from their hidey holes to converse, would have argued about precisely when humanity had teetered at the blink before going over in an Alice-like freefall into utter chaos. Part of this stemmed just from no longer having the primetime lineup to fix internal calendars to, but the rest was because we'd each descended into a private hell on our own schedule.

For me, it had been 63 days.

- Mom and Dad no longer kept up any pretense of being able to stand each other's company by the time the contest rolled around, so I'd been sent as family representative 275 days ago, accompanying Max as he competed in Paris. The appeal of BMX biking was beyond me, but that didn't stop me from cheering myself hoarse. Max won his class and the trip took on the air of a wholesome family film about trying one's hardest and being rewarded for it.

We didn't even realize anything was wrong until we got off the plane at Logan airport six days after we'd set out. Which isn't to say that the French media had covered things up, I simply didn't speak French. Instead Latin had fulfilled my college language requirement. Max used to tease me for not picking a more useful language, like his own barely passed high school Spanish, but the dead language had resonated with me. At the rate we're going, all of them will be dead soon...

Anyway, the airport. There hadn't been anyone there waiting. If you've ever been to Logan, you know it's usually teeming with frayed tempers and poor drivers, but no one greeted the new arrivals. I'd shivered taking in the tile and metal ghost town, at least until Max grabbed my arm and pointed at a TV that babbled on, unaware that it'd lacked an audience.

Men on screen howled as they were dragged to their execution by a foreign government. Given it was all going down in another language I didn't speak, I was grateful for a bulleted list that patiently explained that these were the men responsible for the theft, spies who'd broken into a lab and taken the first thing they could find that was valuable, dooming us all though no one had known it just yet -

A sound. I'd been pacing as my thoughts ran through the same worn grooves, but froze when I thought I heard something outside my apartment door...a canine snuffling, a doggy chuffing, a death threat. Neighbors might not have minded my scream, but had something else been listening? When it didn't repeat, I chanced moving to the chair, drawing up my knees as I sat, and wrapping my arms around them. It almost felt like a hug. Or I was forgetting what human contact was really like. Don't do, just think, I told myself, slipping back into the fractured past.

- Outside the airport there were signs of normalcy, taxis waiting. The driver of ours didn't speak as the tires ate the miles, and gave off the air of someone impatient to return to something more important. Through the windows of passing houses I saw entire families glued to TV sets, and worried about what had happened. What had the executed men done?

I think Max and I both expected our parents to stop fighting long enough to explain everything to us, but the house was empty when we finally got home. We checked every room. At last we discovered a note set on the table. All it said was, "Jessie, Max, take care of each other. Mom & Dad".

My brother's eyes had gone wide just then, and he looked to me for answers. I might have been an adult, twenty-five to his sixteen, but I felt no less Hansel and Gretel abandoned than he did. We never did see them again, and by day 94 we no longer expected to.

I have my theory, as grim as it is: they killed themselves before things got bad. It was a more logical explanation than thinking that a couple that couldn't go without bickering over breakfast had somehow decided to run away together. They'd both been government screws, and I'm sure they'd known which way the wind blew. Maybe I was wrong, and they were together somewhere, a cozy cabin, a white sand beach, laughing up their sleeves. But I doubted it.

Before newsmen no longer wore cheap suits, we all knew something about what happened. The lab those now headless spies had broken into in Babel had been birthed in the US before being outsourced like everything else. Bioweapon, a mistake, a plague waiting for just such an opportunity, no one knew that detail, but what followed? Yeah. Hard to escape that knowledge.

In the wake of the supposed swine flu the year before, preservationists prophylactically objected to the term lupine flu before the name even caught on, even with the clear presence of wolf in the deadly viral cocktail. Someone on talk radio jokingly dubbed it the "K-9 flu" and that's what stuck despite the minor inaccuracy. Back then it was almost funny, but that was when it seemed like the illness that the spies had unleashed was going to be combated with hand sanitizer, face masks (for the most paranoid of germaphobes), and that we'd tough it out as we waited to see how long companies took to produce a vaccine for this flu strain.

Of course, this was before anyone's neighbors grew excessively hairy and developed the disquieting propensity towards chasing prey by moonlight.

The first time Max and I saw the guy next door lope home with a bloodstained mouth (muzzle?) and glazed eyes was the last time either of us went anywhere on our own. Not that it helped in the end -

Snuffing again. Then scratching that reminded me of how joyfully our long dead husky has dug a labyrinth of holes in the backyard. If only it had been Blaze's ghost visiting me. My eyes flew to the door as I considered my options. A bat under my bed, pilfered from Max's little league days, and the gun, of course. I eyed the gun with a bitter resentment. It had been my grandfather's, but the silver bullets had not come with it. So, I'd covertly ordered some, but not covertly enough.

Would the door hold, I wondered as the scratching set up a tuneless percussion, long enough to grab the gun? It did, even though I nearly fumbled it. But then what? Shooting through the door would be foolish, weakening it. But how quickly could it burst though? They had a fluid grace, these wolves at my door. There was nothing to do but check that the gun was loaded. It was. I'd known that, but I'd still had to check. You understand.

- It had been Max's idea to keep moving, but I hadn't done that since ordering the bullets. Being nomadic had been a good strategy, as far as end of days planning went, but the only way to get the bullets was to freeze in place long enough for them to be delivered. And we did need them, that was becoming a surer necessity every day as wolves, wolves who used to be stockbrokers, housewives, and paper boys ripped through the populations of every town, both literally and blood-soaked, and in a figurative sense as the virus passed from person to person, or make that wolf to person...It was hard to know how many people shed their humanity every twenty-eight days because they still looked like us at times, but I think everyone got the sense that the world was drowning in fur, and we'd all soon be like them. Or dead.

People said, when people said anything, that silver bullets worked. But you couldn't pick them up at Wal-Mart or even a gun shop, as many as there still were scattered throughout the northeast. To get the bullets we'd had to order them through a mail-order company, and I more than half feared that a lupine mafia would get wind of our sin, and come for us.

In the end I lost Max to people, not to the wolves.

Turned out that the silver bullet seller's records had been compromised, supposedly without his knowledge or consent. It had been easy enough for the government to hack into things like that, especially with the Patriot Act, a declaration of martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus...we ordered bullets. They came for Max.

Conscription.

I guess they figured that anyone with the balls to hunt werewolves nee neighbors had balls enough to join the US military, even against their will, even if they were sixteen. I begged them to take me too, but lacking the necessary external gonads, they patted me on my pretty little head and promised me that he'd come home safe.

It's been 63 days, seven hours, and 26 minutes since then. And I'm here still, family to come home to. Please God, let him come home.

Behind the door the scratching became more frantic, and I knew that it was coming to a head. If I failed to act, Max would have nothing left, if he survived this unearthly draft. A sliver of wood gave way with a scream of protest, and through the jagged cut one xanthic eye gave me a baleful look, full of the promise of my red, wet death.

I fired.

The End

"We think the same things at the same time. We just can’t do anything about it." - Thom Yorke, Harrowdown Hill

Flash fiction Sept

This past weekend was the second Flash fiction contest, and results aren't in yet on voting, but I thought I'd post my story. If I can find the picture from May's contest, I'll post that story too.

Edit 9/23: Results are in, this story tied for second place.
Anyway, on Friday we were given three words (Auroras, Habitual, Cherished - any form of the words) and the above picture to include in our stories. We then had 60 hours to write a 2000 word or less story...mine came in at 1,999. Here's My story:



Osgood's Machine

"Ben, I need you to drive me to Aurora," Frankie said, not realizing he was about to ruin both our lives with his request that fated day off from school.

"Hmm?" I'd been in the middle of pouring imitation maple syrup onto a stack of microwave pancakes. No one else was home, and I'd failed home ec. "I thought we were going to go see a horror movie tonight."

He attacked his own pancakes with a knife. "I don't mean tonight, I mean today. Now."

"I don't know..." Aurora was way up in Maine, and even worse you had to drive through Alfred with its ridiculous 25 mile in hour speed limit. My dad had fumed about that when we brought Julianne up to the U-Maine campus in Gorham. "It's awfully far."

"Aww, come on, Ben. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important. It's not like I can drive myself," he pointed out. That was true, he was only fourteen.

"What the heck do you need all the way up there?" I asked, still not really considering whether or not I was actually going to make the trek. Frankie was a good friend, but we were talking about a trip of three and a half hours. Each way. I wouldn't admit it to him, but the thought of a long drive made me nervous because I'd only had my license nine months.

He wouldn't look at me, which was a bad sign. "I promised my grandpa Osgood that I'd get something for him there."

"Why would he ask you to do that? He ought to know you can't drive, so you'd have to rope someone else into it."

"Please?" Frankie was beginning to look a little desperate, and that worried me. Almost as if reading my mind, he said, "It's nothing illegal, but no one else is home today."

"Well great. I'm flattered that you asked because I'm home."

"Do you have anything better planned for the day?"

Not really. I was just glad to be out of school. The only reason I was talking to Frankie at nine in the morning was because he'd slept over the night before.

Against my better judgment, I found myself agreeing to the drive. "Maybe I should run it by my mom-"

"Don't. What's that saying, it's better to ask forgiveness than permission? She might say no."

That should have made me more cautious, but it didn't. Next thing I knew, we were piling into the 2000 Camry that was nominally my sister's, but really mine to use for the year because freshmen weren't supposed to have cars on campus.

"This thing really doesn't have a cd player?" Frankie asked, peering at the dashboard.

"Really. The radio's good, though." If it had really been my car, I'd of saved up for one.

A familiar voice began to coo as soon as he turned the radio on. "Give me faith. Give me joy, my boy, I will always-"

Frankie flicked the dial, and muttered, "Great, soccer Mom music." Over the next thirty seconds I heard parts of a dozen different songs, like an annoying game of Name That Tune. Eventually he stopped on something he didn't hate. "That's more like it." Frankie sang along with the guy rapping, "Late night sex, so wet, you're so tight..."

I cringed, imagining what Julianne would say if she heard those words coming out of the speakers of her car. She was majoring in Women's studies, and had lost her sense of humor.

The drive didn't seem to take as long as I thought it would, and I gradually came to realize that Frankie's habitual stream of talk was doing what he wanted: keeping me from asking what the hell we were doing. Eventually we stopped for gas (I made him pay) and there was a break in his chatter long enough for me to ask, "What exactly are we going to do in Aurora?"

"Uh, I told you, we need to get something," he said evasively.

"Yeah, I got that. What sort of something? And where?"

"It's in an impound lot."

"An impound lot?" I asked, growing alarmed. I'd seen movies that had junkyards in them, and they always seem to contain dogs with a taste for human flesh.

"Don't worry, Ben. My grandfather owns the lot. We won't get in any trouble."

"Is there a dog?" I asked, picturing one with teeth bared.

"Nah, he doesn't keep a dog."

"If this is his business, I don't see why he can't go and get whatever it is himself."

"He's not there right now."

"Oh yeah, where is he then?" I asked, feeling clever. What I didn't expect was what Frankie said next.

"Do you believe in time travel?"

I figured he was just changing the subject. I supposed that it didn't matter where his grandfather was, since we were almost to Aurora by that point anyway. "No, not really. I've read some stuff about how it's not really possible because of time paradoxes."

"But if it was real, when do you think you'd want to go in time?"

The idea of seeing myself in the future came to mind. Being forty, maybe, and seeing if my wife was hot, how many kids I had, and if Julianne ever became bearable to hang out with again. "A couple decades into the future, see how my life is turning out."

"There isn't a time in the past you'd like to revisit?"

"I don't know, maybe. There are a couple of Christmases when I was a kid that I wouldn't mind experiencing again. Why do you ask?" Even though I mostly had my eyes on the road, I could see his expression change. That desperation that had been on his face when he'd practically begged me to bring him up to Maine was back. "Are you all right, Man?"

"He's in 1956." Frankie said so quietly he was hard to hear.

"Whatever," I grumbled. "If you don't want to tell me what this secret mission is about, fine. But don't screw with me."

"I mean it," he insisted with an alarming intensity.

"Yeah, sure."

"When we get there, you'll see."

"What, are you going to show me his time machine?" I asked, starting to laugh. I stopped when I realized that I had accidentally hit on the right answer. "Oh God, don't tell me we've driven all this way so you can show me a fucking time machine."

For the longest time Frankie didn't say anything. Not for miles and miles. I thought about turning around the moment I realized that he had the crazy idea that his grandfather was able to time travel, but by that point Aurora was only ten or fifteen miles away.

Since Frankie wasn't talking, and I'm too prone to day dreaming – at least according to my dad, since he tells me to pay more attention every time we're in the car together – I let myself imagine what it'd be like if Frankie's grandfather really was in 1956 right then. I sort of knew what people dressed like back then, so I imagined him putting on a suit and stealing a hat from a hipster before getting into his fabulous machine. You know, so he'd blend in. I figured that all the women would look like Donna Reed, and everyone would whistle as they walked. The kids would be well scrubbed and wholesome, and you could pick out the bad guys by their slicked back hair and black leather jackets-

"There, up ahead." Frankie's voice sounded raspy, and I wished I'd bought a soda when we'd stopped for gas. His index finger pointed at a sign that said "Osgood's Salvage."

I pulled in, and there wasn't anyone around. "Where do we park?"

"Over by the office." So I did, and we were the only car there.

"So now what?" I asked, climbing out of the car. Peering into the yard, I realized that my sister's car looked a little out of place here. Most every other vehicle in the lot had been made before my parents were my age.

"We're looking for a car."

I followed him into the yard. "What sort of car? There are dozens here."

"It's the only one of its kind, he promised. It's a Hudson Hornet."

"A what?" I knew a fair amount about cars, but I'd never heard of that one before.

"A Hornet. They made 'em for a while during the fifties."

"Naturally. You said he hopped back to 1956, so that makes sense. Does he need a Dodge Charger to get to the late 60s?" I asked, thinking of old reruns I'd watched with my sister when we were little.

Frankie shook his head. "It doesn't work that way."

"Then how does it work?" I asked, trying to keep up with him as he walked by car after car. I had no idea what a Hornet looked like, so I was just looking for cars that might look like the old Chevy my aunt restored. Somehow, though, I didn't think it would be powder blue. Hornet sounded more like earth tones to me.

"Hey, there it is." Frankie said, point to a car a few hundred yards away. It stood next to an old VW microbus with yawning doors.

I grabbed his arm before he ran off. "If the car's here, and if it's his time machine, he can't be back in the 50s, can he?" I asked, hoping that he was going to laugh and tell me that the time machine thing had all been a big joke, and we were just supposed to take something out of the office here.

He went still. "If it's here, then he's back."

"Frankie, what are we supposed to take out of this 'time machine' exactly?"

Instead of answering, he pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket. "Him. He left me this letter, saying to let him out today, October 18th, 2010."

"Out of the car?"

"Out of the trunk. That's where you sit when you time travel."

Of course.

Frankie held something up. "He left me this key and this letter before he left six months ago."

"Great…" In another second or two we were standing at the rear of an unremarkable old car whose paint was coming off. Osgood's machine didn't look special. It was no Delorean, that was for sure.

I watched silently as Frankie unlocked the trunk, but I was standing back a ways so I couldn't see in at first, which is why I was surprised when he moaned "Oh no" and collapsed to his knees.

"Frankie?" I looked over the top of his lowered head. The inside of the trunk contained a whole mess of electronics. And a desiccated corpse curled on its side. "Is that…" I didn't finish. Of course it was grandpa Osgood.

"He must have gotten stuck in there," Frankie said before dry heaving. "No safety release thingie in old trunks."

I realized then that Frankie thought the dead man had been locked in the car for six months. That didn't make sense, though, not from what I'd learned at the museum and from watching CSI. It took a lot longer than that to make a mummy.

"It didn't work, oh God, poor Grandpa…" Frankie rocked back and forth, holding his head.

Looking past the body, I noticed two things in the trunk. The first was a newspaper, looking brand new, that said it was from October 1st, 1956. The other was a series of numbers that I eventually realized made up a date. The date was October 18th, 2000. He'd misdialed.

I dragged Frankie back to my car, and called the cops. It took hours before we could go home.

Officially the cause of death was listed as an accident, the basic assumption being he'd been trapped in there for six months. Which was fine, if you didn't think too hard about that misdialed date.

The End

"She's not the kind of girl who likes to tell the world about the way she feels about herself. She takes a little time in making up her mind." - Garbage, The Trick is To Keep Breathing

Overthinking

I'm a little disappointed that I can't find out the answer to the latest burning question I have for my novel: If a person claimed to be something like a psychic who could find people, what sort of business license would they need in the state of New Hampshire? I found out that if this was VA they'd be classified as a Fortune Teller...

But does anyone really care what sort of business license Caitlin needs in order to charge for bringing people back from the dead? Readers probably wouldn't stop me at a book signing and demand to know what sort of business the IRS classified hers as, would they? Supposing this book is eventually published and does well, would even one person who read it really want to know this detail?

Then why do I get so hung up on the tiniest details like this?! I think my muse is confused. Not always, since I'm over 70,000 words into this project (which in paperback form is 250-280 pages) since November 1st, but often enough to be frustrating. Stop spinning your wheels on the inconsequential, muse!*

* for the record, my muse isn't a chick like these. It's a dude, more like this.


"If you won't save me, please don't waste my time" - Oasis, Falling Down

Ayuh

I've been working on the scenes just prior to the climax of my novel lately. I still need to fill in the 30,000 or so words between where I left off before and the end, but it's going okay. I don't write in order anyway, so this isn't a big deal. Writing scenes one after another just doesn't work for me.

A lot of people misinterpret the classic writers' advice "Write what you know," to mean "only write about things you've experienced," which would make for a lot of dull books. What it really means is "do some research, Stupid." So I have been, ranging from topics like: When does the FBI get involved in a serial killer case? How long does it take to drown? Do lakes have under-ice currents? What would realistically cause a car to catch on fire, but NOT in a Hollywood movie-style explosion? You know, the basics. The one I'm having trouble with is "which ancient peoples believed that the body couldn't be [insert type of altering] if the person was to be allowed into the afterlife?" which is kind of frustrating, because I know I've read plenty of myths of that nature.

And beyond that, I've been pestering people to tell me what turns of phrases they've only heard when they visited New England. You'll note that I haven't asked fellow locals...because people are really bad figuring out regionalisms. Hell, I was 17 before I knew that "wicked" was a regionalism. That was just before Al Gore invented the internet, though. The reason that I've asked is because I'd like for the story to feel genuine to this area. Well, Manchester being the unlikely place for a serial killer aside, that is.

Here are things I need to work into the story:
- Ayuh (obviously). This is already something I had a minor character say, but of course most of the characters wouldn't. It's not like the majority of people use the expression daily.
- Down Cellar. To be kinder to readers, I won't interchangeably use cellar and basement although most of us do.
- Coffee Regular. Which, of course is coffee with cream and two sugars. I don't drink coffee, but even I know that!
- So don't I. Until recently, I never gave any thought to this being confusing. Of course people would know you were making a statement of agreement, right? Right??
- My ghouls. Which, of course, is something little kids yell when they reach the safe place while playing tag. This is another one I never thought about. "My goals," as someone pointed out, probably would make more sense.
- Quarter of [hour] - For reasons I can't fathom, some people from elsewhere find it difficult to determine if this means 15 minutes before or after the hour. I was taught, in school, to speak of time this way, so it seems completely obvious to me that time goes Hour, Quarter Past, Half Past, Quarter Of, but...
- Carriage. The thing with wheels you put your groceries in.
- Bubbler. A drinking fountain
- Breakdown lane - (?) people really call it a shoulder like the road signs do? I'll be damned. I'm also confounded that "sneakers" is supposed to be a regionalism too.
- Bulkie. A round sandwich roll.
- Hot dog rolls, New England style. These have raw sides so you can butter and toast them. And they're not labeled "New England Style" on the packages here - just hotdog rolls.
- Jimmies. Chocolate sprinkles for ice cream.
- All set. I actually knew that people in other regions don't use this expression because a comic did a bit on confusing a waitress by saying it when she asked if he needed something more.
- Seriously? Apparently it's used more here than away. And I do I know people who use it all. the. time.


"I want to hurt you bad, make you paranoid, and say the sweetest things." -Of Montreal, Gallery Piece

Nanowrimo 2009

As you may or may not know, November is National Novel Writing Month, more commonly known as NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It sounds like a daunting task, but thousands of people "win" every year, and I have twice myself.

This year's story is going pretty well. I've had this week off, so I've tried to make the most of it, knowing that things will get harder once I go back to work on Monday. It's been my goal to write 25,000 words by bedtime tomorrow, and given I'm up to 23,084 words, I'd say that's probably going to happen. This will leave me needing to only write 1100 words a day for the rest of the month instead of the usual 1667 people shoot for, and with some luck I might not need to worry about writing at all Thanksgiving Day or the day after (I'm one of those brave souls who "does" Black Friday with a friend every year) which has been a problem in the past.

I think things are going so well because I really like my story this year; hopefully I won't immediately jinx myself by saying that. I haven't won since 2006, because in 2007 I got the flu and then pneumonia in November so I didn't even try, and last year I scrambled for ideas and picked two that didn't have any real mileage to them. (my complete score since 2003 is 2 wins, 2 loses, and two years sitting out. come on lucky number 7!) This year I'm doing what I said back in June that I some day should - write a story about someone who can cross between life and death. The current story has little in common with the fragment I wrote down then, and somehow involves our heroine helping the police look for a serial killer, by crossing over to talk to his victims. Who knew that was going to happen?

Anyway, I'm having fun crafting an urban fantasy story that completely lacks vampires, werewolves, ghosts, fairies, and elves. Instead Caitlin is dealing with a teenage foster kid with the same ability as she has, the first person she saved who grew up to be her neurotic ex-boyfriend, and a guy who'd be perfect for her if only he'd ever been born. Oh, and of course the female detective who is trying to solve a string of murders with Caitlin's reluctant help. Not too complicated, right?


"Oh my God, I'm sitting on a time bomb. It's just a matter of time. I can't wait forever. Nothing lasts forever." - Educated Animals, Time Bomb

Getting Somewhere

Over the past few days I've gotten a fair amount written for that children's story I've complained about. Beyond point of view, the big problem tripping me up was trying to think of a reason why the ten-year-old protagonist's parents would let him go off for hours a day on his own in this day and age, since parents seem to keep much tighter reins on kids these days than they did when we were young. This was a huge stumbling block because the entire plot revolves around him having fantasy adventures. I finally thought of the perfect reason why his parents wouldn't be keeping tabs on him, and it has to do with that shopworn advice writers are always given, "write what you know": The ice storm.

The ice storm was an awful week for everyone, but can you imagine how much worse it would be if you had a child with autism to deal with, too? The kids I worked with would melt down if their routines were interrupted, and you can't get much more disruptive than having no power for nearly a week. I think the protagonist's parents would have their hands full with his younger brother, and real parents in that situation would probably be relieved if he and a friend were spending a lot of the daylight hours outside playing.

It's gratifying in a way to find a way to put a positive spin on one of the most uncomfortable weeks I've ever experienced too. In a way it makes it feel like it was a slightly worthwhile experience, because I feel like I can write about the miserable aftermath of that storm with some authority, as I'm sure a lot of other New Englanders can too. Of course, now I need to do some more research about the storm, but that's okay.

Does it sound odd to say that occasionally I'm grateful for writer's block? It might sound counter-intuitive, but sometimes it seems as if we struggle because we're waiting for the perfect inspiration that will make a story better, as if what we might have come to easily would be inferior to what was hard to get to. I think this new idea will make the setting far more realistic than when I intended to set the story earlier in the fall, which will provide a nice dichotomy to the fantasy elements.

I'm beginning to feel hope again that this story could be the one, and it's nice to feel hopeful about something. Maybe there's some merit to that whole one door closing another one opening thing after all... I don't think it's a coincidence that having mostly put aside some futile daydreams about something else was immediately followed by thinking of something that could be pivotal to the plot of this story.


"Given a chance I wanna be somebody. If for one dance I wanna be somebody. Open the door, it's gonna make you love me." - Kings of Leon, Be Somebody

Fangs & Claws

I swear, right here and now, that if I ever write a novel with vampires or werewolves in it, I will not bring them to the vet to have them fixed.

Why do so many women seem to prefer the wussiest of things that go bump in the night? Even if you leave aside the absurdity that is Edward Cullins, the most emo vampire ever, there are still tons of emasculated vampires and werewolves in literature and movies to contend with.

Let's look at True Blood, for example. Based on the Southern Vampire Mystery novels by Charlaine Harris, the show and books feature two vampires. One, Bill, is cowardly and pathetic. The other, Eric, is ruthless and dangerous, but also far more honest about his intentions towards and feelings about the heroine of the series, Sookie. Sooo many women love Bill and I can't understand it. When he's not a coward, he's a jerk. I'm really hoping that the show adhears to cannon at least enough to break up Sookie and Bill in the near future, because they're a terrible couple. Sookie and Eric, on the other hand, is far more interesting. Though there's been a lot more unresolved sexual tension between them in the books than resolved (except book 4. my favorite). But oh, the possibilities…

Of course, there's also the original wussy vampire, Louis, from Interview With The Vampire. Lestat is loathsome, but at least his inherent jerkiness is fully evident. With Louis you're lulled into thinking that he's a nice guy until he commits a monstrous act of indifference that gets two companions that he supposedly cares for destroyed. But many loved him anyway.

Then there's the Anita Blake books by Laurel Hamilton. Her werewolves were fixed at the vets, and her vampires only slightly more alarming. I read as many books as I did because I liked Anita, but her "men" were a sad lot indeed.

Vampires should have fangs, and werewolves should have claws. You should get the sense that the protagonist needs to be mindful that they might get bitten. Like Eric. Like Clay the werewolf in Kelley Armstrong's Otherworld books – he turned the protagonist, Elena, into a werewolf too when he bit her not long after they became engaged. Like Kisten in the Hollows series by Kim Harris – he was always edgy, right up until he died after not giving Rachel up to his leader.

What's even the point of having a character date a date a werewolf or vampire if he's going to be safe? It seems pointless to me. So I promise, I'll never do that to readers. Honest.


"They say it's all about to end...they say, they say" - Scars on Broadway, They Say

It Spills Out

I was five when my cousin Jimmy drowned in the creek behind our grandmother's house. My parents had a fierce argument about whether or not I was old enough to go to the funeral; it was ended when my father hissed that I wouldn't understand if I couldn't see the body for myself.

Two days later, wearing a stiff white dress and a bow in my dark hair, I stood looking down my dead cousin. It was the only time I'd ever seen him wearing a suit, and not wearing an impish smile.

Two years older than me, Jimmy had been leading me into trouble as soon as I could walk. My parents said it had been a blessing that I hadn't been with him that day, or the family would've been burying two children. Not "might have," but a firm declaration, which showed their disdain for my cousin's leadership even as they said not to speak ill of the dead.

After the funeral, I didn't see Jimmy again until Thanksgiving.


Back in 2000 I wrote an essay for a defunct non-fiction site, Thinkstream, called "Write Like Love." The point of the essay was to compare how it feels to be in love with how it feels to be in the thrall of a new story. All these years later, I still think that the dreamy surreal feelings are quite similar; in both cases you obsess to the point of distraction and feel filled up possibility. Not that I'm currently in love - I'm just suffering from a moderate and unwise infatuation. Nor at this very moment am I enthralled by any particular story, though I'd like to be.

Instead of rehashing that, I want to talk about the opening of this entry. I was minding my business on Saturday afternoon, just listening to music, when I needed to grab a pen because the above had suddenly taken up residence in my head. I do know what it is - it's a plot that's been bouncing around my head for years, about death being another place rather than a state of being. This fragment is yet another of my brain's insistent attempts to put word to page. I dutifully wrote this sketch down, but I'm not sure that I'll be paying it much attention, because I don't even know anything about the narrator. Not even her name.

It seems wiser to instead return to Islene (age 35, distant descendant of Hypnos, God of Dreams) and Jared (nearly age 30, distant descendant of Epiales, demon-God of Nightmares) and finally give their story the last third it's been missing for what feels like forever. When I started that story two and a half years ago, I thought it would eventually end, not be hung up at word 54,441 - for those of you wondering the average page of a novel is 250 words. They're supposed to save their sons, and end up together after defeating Gods with mere human determination, yet they linger. Starting a new story seems like it will take me even farther from them...

I have been writing fiction since I was six years old. In all this time it never occurred to me until this weekend to wonder what it must be like not to have stories living in your head. Would it be as awful as my gut insists, or would it be a relief not to have to deal with creativity that demands an outlet now now now? My instincts tip towards the former. Though writing has provided me with many frustrations over the years, I don't know if I'd be the same person without the stories, both those victoriously or half-heartedly completed, and the ones who were snuffed out as mere sparks. I suppose that if I'd never picked up a pencil for the first time and wrote about girls on islands with monkeys or animals with mixed up voices I might never know what I was missing, but I can't help think that a lack of stories would lead to some sort of emptiness inside, even if I didn't know how to fill it.


"It takes a lot of desperation to make a move ." - Malcolm Middleton, A Brighter Beat