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Three Act Structure in Screenplays, Stories, and Books Why It Is Necessary If You Want to Write Well-crafted Fiction Lisa Mason #writer #screenwriter #storywriter #novelwriter #publishedwriter #moviecritic #storycritic #novelcritic #fiction #structure

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Beginning, middle, and end.

The three act structure.

Sounds simple?

It should be. Storytellers sitting around a campfire in a prehistoric cave followed this natural progression of a story. You, the writer, should too. You, the reader or viewer, should look for that. If you’re having problems liking a film, story, or book, the first suspect is a writer who doesn’t understand three-act structure and doesn’t shape her/his material to follow it.

This is why Quentin Tarantino’s film, “Pulp Fiction,” profane and violent and experimentally plotted as it is, works. Even though plots are left in mid-stream to be finished later and a number of “chapters” are labeled, the film rigorously follows three-act structure.

And this is why Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, “Once Upon a Time….in Hollywood,” is in my opinion a failure. Aside from the fact that the film leads the viewer on a manipulative mind-tease about the real-life horrific, brutal, senseless murders of Sharon Tate, her unborn baby, and six other people (and the many other objections I have), first and foremost, it is a meandering mess.

This is why “Captain Marvel,” which I analyzed in detail here and on my Patreon page, earned worldwide box office of over a billion dollars. Because the screenwriter rigorously followed the three-act structure, even with a complex plot with a lot science fictional material happening, plus a moving personal story.

Beginning, middle, and end.

Many storytellers do this naturally, but if you’re struggling with a piece, look first to this problem.

Sounds simple, but what do I mean, exactly?

Many how-to-write experts will tell you to start with “an inciting incident.” An action-packed opening that draws the reader in, wanting to know more.

That’s good advice, as far as it goes. Five bad beginnings, as I saw in a recent how-to-write article, are (1) having your character dreaming some action sequence and then waking up to find, well, it was all a dream, (2) a description of the weather, (3) a description of an impossibly gorgeous character, (4) having your impossibly gorgeous character look at herself or himself in a mirror (5) having a character furiously being chased through a woods, precariously climbing a mountain, or whatever.

In good hands, any of these may work (Gone With The Wind springs to mind, “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom noticed that” and then Mitchell goes on for the first entire page to describe Scarlett’s looks), but you don’t want to tempt fate.

But wait, isn’t the inciting incident supposed to be exciting?

In a writing workshop I attended years ago, the teacher read the action-packed opening scene of a mountaineer scaling a treacherous mountain, slipping, falling, continuing to climb. The problem? It was boring! Boring because we readers didn’t connect with the character.

I’ve seen this same problem in many, many YA books.

Whatever ordeal or ordinary situation you put your character through in the inciting incident, you must make the character believable and sympathetic. You must connect the reader to the character in an emotional way so that the reader cares what happens next—to the character, first most, not necessarily the plot.

Even in a prologue—like in Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen—that skips ahead to a later point in the plot, you must connect to the characters to the reader in a sympathetic way.

I’ve often told writers seeking advice, you have no plot without character.

But the beginning is just that—a set up of characters, time, place, and yes the initial glimmerings of a plot.

The beginning should take up about a quarter of your screenplay, story, or novel during which you should plant plot points of what is to come later. I always admire a good setup and good plot points that are then later “paid off.”

You reach the end of Act One, and initiate Act Two with a surprising plot twist that sends the action spinning in an unexpected direction. Take all your characters set up in Act One and send them on a quest, into a war zone, into betrayal by a lover, into a problematic marriage, into capture by hostile aliens.

The choice is yours, but make it a doozy.

To read the rest of the February Writing Tip, about Act Two and Act Three, friends, readers, and fans, please join my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206 and help me after the Attack. I’ve posted delightful new stories and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes and health tips, and more exclusively for my heroic patrons! I’m offering a critique of your writing sample on Tier Five.

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February Story: The Sixty-Third Anniversary of Hysteria Published in Full Spectrum 5 (Bantam-Doubleday-Dell) Lisa Mason #SFWApro #SFWAauthor #fantasywriter #historicalfantasy #Surrealistartists #womenartists #Jungianpsychology #premonition

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This is an ebook adaptation of Lisa Mason’s novelette, “The Sixty-Third Anniversary of Hysteria,” published in Full Spectrum 5 (Bantam). A Postscript and a list of Research Sources follow.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Bast Book

Copyright 2012 by Lisa Mason.

All rights reserved.

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bast Books ebook edition published March 2012

Praise for Books by Lisa Mason

Strange Ladies: 7 Stories

“Offers everything you could possibly want, from more traditional science fiction and fantasy tropes to thought-provoking explorations of gender issues and pleasing postmodern humor…This is a must-read collection.”

—The San Francisco Review of Books

“Lisa Mason might just be the female Phillip K. Dick. Like Dick, Mason’s stories are far more than just sci-fi tales, they are brimming with insight into human consciousness and the social condition….a sci-fi collection of excellent quality….you won’t want to miss it.”

—The Book Brothers Review Blog

“Fantastic book of short stories….Recommended.”

—Reader Review

“I’m quite impressed, not only by the writing, which gleams and sparkles, but also by [Lisa Mason’s] versatility . . . Mason is a wordsmith . . . her modern take on Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland is a hilarious gem! [This collection] sparkles, whirls, and fizzes. Mason is clearly a writer to follow!”

—Amazing Stories

Summer of Love, A Time Travel

A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of the Year

A Philip K. Dick Award Finalist

“Remarkable. . . .a whole array of beautifully portrayed characters along the spectrum from outright heroism to villainy. . . .not what you expected of a book with flowers in its hair. . . the intellect on display within these psychedelically packaged pages is clear-sighted, witty, and wise.”

—Locus Magazine

“A fine novel packed with vivid detail, colorful characters, and genuine insight.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Captures the moment perfectly and offers a tantalizing glimpse of its wonderful and terrible consequences.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Brilliantly crafted. . . .An engrossing tale spun round a very clever concept.”

—Katharine Kerr, author of Days of Air and Darkness

“Just imagine The Terminator in love beads, set in the Haight-Ashbury ‘hood of 1967.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Mason has an astonishing gift. Her characters almost walk off the page. And the story is as significant as anyone could wish. This book will surely be on the prize ballots.”

—Analog

“A priority purchase.”

—Library Journal

The Gilded Age, A Time Travel

A New York Times Notable Book

A New York Public Library Recommended Book

“A winning mixture of intelligence and passion.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Should both leave the reader wanting more and solidify Mason’s position as one of the most interesting writers in science fiction.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Rollicking. . .Dazzling. . .Mason’s characters are just as endearing as her world.”

—Locus Magazine

“Graceful prose. . . A complex and satisfying plot.”

—Library Journal

Celestial Girl, The Omnibus Edition (A Lily Modjeska Mystery)

Passionate Historical Romantic Suspense

5 Stars “I really enjoyed the story and would love to read a sequel! I enjoy living in the 21st century, but this book made me want to visit the Victorian era. The characters were brought to life, a delight to read about. The tasteful sex scenes were very racy….Good Job!”

—Reader Review

The Garden of Abracadabra

“So refreshing! This is Stephanie Plum in the world of Harry Potter.”

—Goodreads Reader

“Fun and enjoyable urban fantasy….I want to read more!”

—Reader Review

“I love the writing style and am hungry for more!”

—Goodreads Reader

The Sixty-third Anniversary of Hysteria

Diary

6 May 1941. We’ve arrived at last after months in Casablanca, which I once remembered fondly & now loathe. Sold all my good white linen bed sheets for Moslem shrouds to raise money for our sea passage. The Faithful must meet their Maker wrapt in the colour of purity, but I would’ve slept on straw, on mud, on a bed of nails to leave Africa.

Every day we were in danger. Everyone knows B.B. supported the Loyalists in Spain & wrote editorials for La Revolution Surrealiste & corresponded with Trotsky, for godssake. Fascists in every bar & café. Nazis, too, now that Rommel has taken over the Occupation & his officers carouse their days away. The Soviets will make mincemeat of you within the year, B.B. told anyone who would listen. Didn’t care a fig who listened in. Every night I feared the knock on our door, which thankfully never came.

As for our sea passage, I have little to record. I was sick, B.B. was sick. Everyone sick & absolutely grey with fear. We sailed on a Union Oil tanker, The Montebello. A favorite sport of Nazi U-boats, torpedoing a merchant ship with refugees aboard. No more than a rifle or two to defend us, should we be attacked. Every day the radio told of another sinking–in the Atlantic, in the Caribbean, & all hands lost. Nazi U-boats take no prisoners, save no survivors bobbing amongst the waves. I began to wonder what it must be like to drown. Your hair streaming up into sunlit waters, your feet plunging into blackness below. The fearsome struggle to breathe–would it be swift or slow? Would you notice fish? When would they start nibbling at the lobes of your ears?

I had to set this journal aside. Force myself to stop conjuring up horrors.

When we hobbled ashore at Tampico, I fell on my knees & kissed the beach. I mean literally. B.B. laughing & lurching about on his sea legs. I can still taste the sand on my lips. Filthy, but marvelous. The marvelous taste of our deliverance.

Nothing but the shirts on our backs & two little bags between us. We haven’t got a penny.

It’s completely true what Breton says of our destination.

Mexico is the Surrealist place par excellence. The land blazes with a savage golden light. A tiger light. The jungle spreads its tendrils to the very edge of town & the leaves of certain palms possess a clarified green the like of which I’ve never seen in Britain nor in Europe, save perhaps Tuscany. Blossoms have their wanton way in every window box, on every street corner, through every crevice in the ancient stone walls. Brick & mortar are no match for the lusty thrust of Life. I love the lascivious pinks, the regal purples. I spied a scarlet that actually throbbed, as if the colour of blood was pulsing from a newly opened wound. The natives wear their modernity lightly. As if civilization is but a garment to be donned or disposed of at one’s will.

I should like to feel that unencumbered of my past.

Thanks to the small refugee stipend paid to us by the Mexican government, we have found an apartment on Gabino Barreda, near the Monument to the Revolution (B.B. likes that, a poetic touch). Three horrid little rooms in a decaying stucco tenement. Plaster crumbling off the walls, scorpions in the kitchen. Other vermin, too, I fear. Mother would faint dead away at the sight of the pit in the floor that passes for our indoor plumbing. There is an alcove off the bedroom, though, which has light nearly all day & a terrace overlooking the street, which is delightfully picturesque. B.B. says I may take it for my art studio. The landlady (upon whom B.B. has worked his usual masculine charms) came by with two white, blue-eyed kittens, brushstrokes of fawn on nose & paw. She says they are Sealpoint Siamese such as I have not seen since Mother’s house in London.

Enchanting & I wept, realising how much I’ve left behind. How much the war has taken from us. The simple pleasure of kittens.

How can I not be happy?

Mexico City

“To the late Doctor Sigmund Freud,” says Gunther, raising his shot glass in a toast.

“To the great and monstrous Id,” says Enrique.

“To the Sixty-third Anniversary of Hysteria,” says Wolfie.

“Hear, hear,” adds B.B., a bit anemically. Poor man, he is not well.

Cheers ring out all round. Nora raises her glass as a courtesy, too weary to cheer. Tequila spills over her fingers, stinging the cut on her thumb she’d got unpacking B.B.’s papers. He needed everything ready by morning so he could start work on his new play. While he’d slept like the dead, she had labored long into the night. Their two bags no longer seeming so little or so sparse of belongings.

Nora knows these three merry fellows from Paris during her café days. Gunther and Wolfie are a pair of Hungarians, Enrique a Greek. Now they are all displaced Surrealists. A new nationality of their own. The tropical climate suits them, Nora is pleased to see. Gunther has grown positively stout on rice and beans, Wolfie sports an alarming mustache, and Enrique, well. Enrique is ever Enrique, a sly smile wrapped around a cigarette. Now he wears a jaunty straw hat and a white linen shirt, having retired his black Basque beret to a drawer along with his black wool scarf.

Exiles in Mexico City they all are, this ragged gang of painters, poets, and pundits. They’ve fled from everyplace a Nazi boot has kicked in a door or threatened to. Hungarians and Swedes, Austrians and Russians, British and Spanish and French. The Mexicans and Peruvians–Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Cesar Moro–serve as centers of gravity for these wayward comets. If not for the war, half these visionaries and rabble-rousers would scarcely be on speaking terms with the other half. But the war, now safely far behind them on the Continent, has taught strange and marvelous tricks to a pack of aging mongrels.

Gunther flings tequila into his throat, chases away the sting with a gulp of black beer. B.B., always one to follow suit around his comrades, flings a shot and gulps, as well, though flamboyant gestures do not become him. Never a robust man, B.B. has weathered the war rather badly. He has been leached and winnowed into something peevish and frail, his finely made face worn-out with worry. His hair has ebbed to the top of his skull, exposing the enigmatic dome of his forehead. Ever the intellectual, B.B. has assumed such an intense introspective air that people pause around him, even when he’s liquored up, and await an oracle.

“To Freud? How passé.” A woman’s voice, ironic, incisive, cuts through the male bombast and swoops into Nora’s eager ear. “Still stuck on nasty old Sigmund, what a pity.”

Valencia sweeps into the parlour of her house, smiling in her ironic way. She plucks the shot glass from Nora’s hand, offers a tumbler rimmed in salt. “Try this instead, cherie. Lime and tonic, with crushed ice. A much better way to sample tequila for the first time. We are not barbarians like Gunther and your poor old B.B.”

Nora, a little nervous, reacquaints herself with another famous face from the Paris days. Valencia, always towering, has transformed herself here into an Amazon queen, voluptuous and formidable. She wears her fiery chestnut hair in an unkempt mane that tumbles around her face and down her shoulders. Her bold Spanish features are much as Nora recalls. The huge dark eyes, the left one slightly askew. The rapier snout of a conquistador. Bee-stung lips of a shady lady. Altogether a splendid face, if not exactly pretty.

“Valencia, hello again,” Nora says, taking the tumbler. “Thanks ever so. You look marvelous.”

“You, too, cherie. Though a little frazzled around the edges, eh? Still, ever our English beauty. Drink up.”

Nora plucks at her threadbare blouse, abashed. You never could tell if Valencia was taking aim or only skewering your own self-doubts. If Valencia is an Amazon, Nora is a fairy-queen. Queen of the gnats. So petite and unassuming, few ever notice her, despite her pretty face and lustrous sable curls. The war has worn her down, too. She is much too thin, much too pale. Bad food, days brooding belowdecks, and despair have bleached all the colour from her English cheeks. Fleeing Fascism is fashionable only in theory. This she has learned the hard way.

Nora slides the tart taste of lime down her throat. Thirsty, so very thirsty. For refreshment. For friendship. Mexico City sits at the top of the world. They say the air is always bone-dry.

They say the Kahlo-Rivera circle is an arid place, too, harboring much public animosity toward correspondents of Trotsky like B.B. Not that Nora ever wrote to the famous revolutionary herself. She’s just an artist. But she shall surely be painted by the same brush by Frida and Diego.

Suddenly B.B. is at her side, gripping her elbow. Solicitous, fatherly, though of course they are lovers, he takes her tumbler. “I don’t think she should,” he says to Valencia.

Who regards his gesture with narrowed, glinting eyes. Tigress eyes.

“You are having a drop yourself, B.B.,” Valencia observes.

“Yes, but I am ever the drunkard. Whereas my little Nora hasn’t touched drink in ages, not the whole time we were exiled in Casablanca.” He sets her tumbler on a side table. And that’s that, in B.B.’s scheme of things. “Be so good as to tell me what is wrong with Freud, Madam Valencia?”

“Hah! Tell me what is right about Freud.”

She sweeps Nora under her arm, reclaiming the tumbler as she goes and restoring it to Nora’s hand. “You must come and see my art studio, cherie.”

Nora shrugs and rolls her eyes at B.B., who is scowling. What can she do, swept away by a force of nature?

Valencia and her husband Renato own a house on Via del Rosa Moreno, five blocks west of Nora and B.B.’s apartment. No horrid little rooms or crumbling plaster for Valencia. Renato has money. The place is a palace. Whitewashed ceilings, Moroccan arches, great expanses of floor paved in terra cotta tile. There is an interior garden with a fountain. Valencia’s art studio, which opens onto the garden, has an adobe fireplace and native grotesqueries displayed on the walls. There is an Olinala jaguar mask with genuine fangs. A Michoacán devil mask, post-Cortez, bearing a striking resemblance to a Satan of Catholic inspiration. A Tlacozotitlan bat mask, a jungle nightmare held aloft by carved wood wings.

Nora is dazzled. But then Valencia has always dazzled everyone. They met among the clique surrounding Andre Breton and Yves Tanguy. Valencia slept with the great men, one after another. Breton himself had noticed her since she, sloe-eyed and slender then, was the sort of femme-enfant he craved like candy. Plus, she possessed unbeatable cachet: Valencia was a budding Surrealist artist. She painted interior landscapes. The shadows of the subconscious mind whirled and writhed across her haunting canvases.

Nora had been awed by Valencia then, too, and not a little envious. She had slept with too many of the less-than-great men, with the too-beautiful poet who wound up preferring gin and boys, and she was still painting competent Italian countrysides. Olive trees and Etruscan ruins, what rot. Nora hadn’t yet discovered how to paint past her eye. How to explore the depths of pure imagination.

Now Valencia is the great woman with whom lesser men are privileged to dine in Mexico City. For the great men like Breton and Tanguy have had the means and connections to escape the ravages of Europe in New York City. In the years since Paris, Valencia has become well-known in Surrealist circles, if not to the larger public. Peggy Guggenheim shows her paintings at Guggenheim Jeune Gallery. Valencia has collectors. Not many, but enthusiastic. And rich.

Among the canvases stacked in the studio, Nora spies a painting of a sphinx. She stoops for a closer look. Not the Egyptian monument nor the ripe she-beasts of Louis XIV statuary, but a vixenish creature with tabby-cat’s paws and a child’s face. The creature crouches in a decaying mansion, toying with a human jawbone, broken eggshells, a tidbit of bloody meat.

Something jars Nora, gazing at this strange image. Something takes her back to Mother’s house, the great rooms deserted. Everyone had gone to church, and a cousin, a rawboned boy fifteen years to her ten, stood towering over her. There were eggs. Eggs she’d dropped on the floor beneath her knees, and a whitish scum smeared across the tiles. A whitish scum lingering in her mouth.

No, that didn’t happen. You were dreaming, darling, Mother said when she stammered out her story. Cousin came with us to church. Cook must have dropped the eggs.

“Valencia, this is smashing,” she says, shaken. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Is this a new direction for you?”

Valencia starts to answer, then presses her finger to her lips, for now the men are strolling into the art studio, laughing and bickering. Tequila fumes rise off them, an alcoholic miasma. Nora bites back her words, cut off from further conversation. Well, but of course, it’s a party. B.B. hooks his elbow around her neck, as he often does, dangling his forearm across her collarbone. His hand hanging over her heart.

“So, Valencia, my dear, have you seen much of Frida and Diego lately?” Gunther says.

“No, not much at all. Watch your step, gentlemen, that canvas took me four months of heart-wrenching work. Rivera is in poor health, you know. Frida attends to his every need, as if he were still a little boy in his nappies.”

The men trade uneasy glances. Some of them revere Rivera, some despise him, but all consider the internationally famous, famously charming, and charismatic artist to be some kind of deity visiting this poor mundane world at his leisure. Valencia’s gibe makes them fidget, Nora observes, even if they suspect it’s true. Yet who can object? Valencia knows Kahlo and Rivera better than any of them. She is–what is the American expression?–she is in the know.

“Come now, ma belle, Valencia,” says B.B. Ah, Nora thinks, here it comes. “You have not set out for us your objections to Doctor Freud. The greatest analyst of the human mind in our times.”

“Oh, my, haven’t I?” A wink for Nora. And a little twisting motion with her fingers beside her lip, as if she were a Spanish gentleman adjusting his mustache. Very disconcerting to the gentlemen present.

“You have not,” B.B. asserts, assuming his lordly professorial air. Though he’s weaving on his feet.

“Well, to start, Freud hated women,” Valencia says, laughing as though this is quite a joke.

“Oh, that is not true, Valencia,” Gunther says. “The great doctor spent hours and hours with his madwomen.”

“Didn’t he, though,” says Enrique with his sly smile.

“You are all absurd,” B.B. says in such a commanding, condescending tone that he silences everyone. “It is Freud, madam, who first explicated the existence and causes of l’amour fou attitudes passionelles. The supreme means of ecstatic expression at which you women are so adept.” At that, he peers at the painting of the sphinx.

“Ah, Hysteria,” Valencia says. “The divine madness of women.”

“To the Sixty-third Anniversary of Hysteria,” Wolfie says, less clearly, and raises another toast of tequila. He cradles the bottle in the crook of his arm.

“Now, Wolfie,” Valencia begins. Taking aim, indeed. “Do you wish to live forever in the shadow of Breton? As for me, I’m still annoyed by the Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria. An event rather in questionable taste, even for Surrealists, don’t you think? How like Breton, publishing photographs of those poor lunatics at Salpetriere Hospital. As an artistic statement! All of them women, of course, in psychotic fugue and various stages of undress. You’d rather have your women mad than freethinking, eh, B.B.?”

Nora waits, breathless, for her lover’s answer.

“I agree, the quality of the photographs was rather poor,” he replies in a mild tone. “But Breton’s lack of talent as a publisher is not the point. Come now, admit it, Valencia. Sigmund Freud was the first man in history to truly understand women.”

“And what did Freud understand, pray tell?”

“Why, that women are the link to the subconscious mind.”

“Whose subconscious mind?” Valencia says. She clarifies, “The subconscious mind of whom?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Valencia,” B.B. says. “Freud exalts Woman. She is the link to the Id of the Artist. To the darkness. To the lurking dirtiness. She disturbs the Poet, and She compels him. She penetrates his every inhibition. She unleashes his forbidden desires, oh yes. She is the key, the trigger, the perfumed bomb. She is that onto which his passions may be projected. She is his fantasy, and his fantasy fulfilled.”

“A blank slate, is that what you mean, B.B.? An empty vessel with no thoughts or talents of her own?”

“She is my Muse,” B.B. says. He squeezes Nora’s neck so tightly she winces in pain.

“Dear old B.B. So dependent on women, after all.” Her glinting eyes turn to Nora. “And what about you, cherie? Is he your key, your trigger? How does he compel you when you paint your vision?”

Nora blushes. She has no answer.

“As for me,” Valencia declares, “I am my Muse.”

Diary

22 June 1941. V. has changed my life. We see each other nearly every day. Teacher, soul-sister, friend. Muse, indeed, for she challenges me to look beyond the surface of the world. To look deep within myself & my imagination. To view our Art as a Calling & a Quest, not merely decoration for the rich.

Gossipmonger, too. V. is filled with talk about things going on everywhere. A spider tugging at each strand of her web for juicy morsels. How I adore it! She claims Kahlo has such a mustache on her lip from pleasing Rivera too much. You know what I mean. Certain prostitutes on the Rue de G develop the same problem, she says, with a twist of her imaginary mustache. I don’t know if this could possibly be true, but it makes for an awfully nasty rumor. Kahlo is a tragic figure, of course, with her grievous injury & her beautiful tortured paintings & having to cater to Rivera with his temper & his mistresses. Yet as much as I do truly pity her, I find her theatrical & intimidating & have not sought out her company, nor she mine. In any case, B.B. disapproves of her & Diego, but that’s politics.

V. studies a Swiss psychoanalyst, one Carl Jung. Once Freud’s disciple, Jung was cast out of his circle over theoretical/political dissension. V. adores Jung almost as much as she despises Freud. Jung is on to something when he talks about the subconscious, V. says. Rather than the repository of eroticism & primitivism (as Freud would have it), the subconscious (for Jung) is the repository of occult wisdom & magical powers. “Magical powers” being a metaphor for one’s inner strengths & talents. Jung does not actually believe magical powers exist, does he?

Like Freud, Jung believes the subconscious is essentially female. Intuition feminine, too. If this is so, then Woman is not only erotic, but also occult.

V. is deeply moved by these ideas. I’m much taken, too, but not quite sure what to believe. (I read V.’s books in her art studio. Don’t dare bring them home, should B.B. find them & throw them in the trash.)

Yesterday at the market V. & I found a plant with strange, egg-like fruit. We didn’t know what it was, had never seen such a thing before. V. told me to run & fetch my brushes & bring them to her studio, which I did, posthaste. We placed the plant in her garden & arranged my brushes around it. V. claimed the light of the full moon would fall upon everything & the Alchemical Egg would bless my brushes with creative power. Together we composed & then recited an incantation & danced like dervishes & drank a liter of red wine, all of which I found quite amusing. V. assured me this is not frivolous, this is inspiration. This is Magic. Lord, I will try anything to overcome this block of mine.

On my way home I found a tiny bird’s nest which had fallen to the pavement. A sticky little ball of twigs & spider silk & tucked inside, an egg no larger than a gumdrop. I picked the nest up & placed it in the crotch of a lemon tree next to the sidewalk. The very moment I did this, mother hummingbird flitted up & hovered, as if in thanks, blinking at me with her tiny beady bird eyes. I prayed: Oh Alchemical Egg, give birth to Me.

Silly, I know, but there you are & I was so happy, thinking this is a very good omen.

Started pencil sketches for a new painting tonight. My first work in Mexico City: a woman curled up inside of an egg.

Mexico City

Nora is exhausted by the time she arrives home from the advertising agency. The downtown bus was running late, she’s been running a fever for a week, there is nothing decent in the cupboard for dinner, and, to top it off, B.B. is in a foul mood again.

“Where have you been?” he snaps as she drags in the door.

“At work, of course,” she snaps back.

“At Valencia’s again,” he says. On principle, he cannot object to her friendship with the great Surrealist Artist, but he chafes at her devotion to her friend just the same.

“At work,” she repeats. “And at Valencia’s,” softening her tone, for what is the use of quarreling with B.B.? “I wanted to visit the cats.”

Nora could not afford to keep the Siamese kittens, who have transformed themselves into sleek little chocolate-cheeked panthers. Valencia, who is such a cat lover that friends have nicknamed her Felina, gladly them took in, but it’s discouraging. Nora cannot afford to keep cats. Nora cannot afford much more than their rent, rice, and beans. She cannot afford new shoes. She lines the insides of her once-fine Italian leather pumps with newspaper. She cannot afford a new blouse. She washes perspiration stains out of the weary old cotton with lye soap and a scrub brush. The advertising agency is pleased with her projects, simple but energetic pen-and-ink drawings extolling the virtues of aspirin and hair tonic, but they only pay for piecework, which amounts to little.

B.B., on the other hand, does not work in any gainful way. After losing his family’s house and land in Vienna to the Nazis, he has been paralyzed with grief though–Nora reminds herself–he never worked in any gainful way before then, either. He is unable to face the daily stringency of reporting to an office. He feels he does not speak Spanish well enough to translate or write for a local newspaper.

In any case, he’s started the new play. How can I write for a newspaper, he wants to know, if I’m to write the new play? Sometimes Nora thinks B.B. would be content to live in the streets and beg for food, all for the sake of the new play. Still, the play is his salvation. Everything he lives for. If not for the play, he tells her, I would have hanged myself a year ago.

This frightens her, this talk of hanging himself. Nora has loved B.B. for years. She reveres him. He was a great man, a poet and a playwright respected in Paris, in all of Europe, by Breton himself, an entire decade before she met him. She, his young lover, cannot possibly allow B.B. to live in the streets and beg for food. Let alone hang himself.

Still, there is the troublesome fact that he has written nothing significant in the year after their exile and flight. Oh, a page or two since the day she unpacked his papers upon arriving in Mexico City. She must be patient, she tells herself. He’s returning to his work, thanks to her. You‘re all I have left in the world, he tells her. You are my Muse.

“Did you get cigarettes? Tequila?” he growls now. Tobacco and booze fuel him. He must have cigarettes and tequila if he is to write the new play.

“I forgot we were out.”

Nora has hidden cigarettes in her little art studio for herself, for the hard-won moments when she can be there, painting. Her secret stash, which she refuses to share. Having to work has considerably slowed progress on her new painting. Yet Nora goes to the advertising agency and takes in sewing when she can because she would not be content to live in the streets and beg for food. She must at least have rice and beans. At the least the apartment on Gabino Barreda. She can do without new shoes and new blouses, but she must have paint. She must have canvases.

“Well, give me some money,” he says, “and I’ll go fetch everything.”

She gives him the last of her money for the week, and he goes out in search of cigarettes and tequila. She washes her hands and her face in the washbasin in the corner. Still mopping her neck with a towel, she drifts to his desk.

His work is put away, as usual, or covered up with a sheet of blank paper. He has not felt ready to show her the play, he says, and she respects that, the fragility of a new creation. She twinges with guilt at violating his orders not to disturb his things, but she’s not disturbing anything, she’s merely peeking. She picks up his ashtray, which needs emptying, anyway, and observes he has left a sheet of paper in his typewriter. Out of carelessness, his hangover, or deliberately, she cannot be sure. There, on the half-typed page she reads:

JUSTINE

I beg you, Master! Please, not again, I cannot bear it!

MASTER

(chaining her left ankle to the bedpost)

Yes, again, my little love. One day you will beg me for it.

Nora goes to the kitchen, puts rice on to boil. She heats oil in the skillet and fries the last of the curling tortillas. Hot grease spatters her hands. She feels nothing. Nothing but the anger in her heart. When B.B. strolls in with his cigarettes and tequila, she bangs the skillet down and stomps out to the living room.

“So. The new play,” she says, tapping her toe, crossing her arms, tucking her grease-spattered hands into her armpits. “You are rewriting Marquis de Sade? A new Sade play?”

“I told you to stay away from my desk,” he says mildly.

Ah. Deliberately, then.

“What are you thinking, B.B.? Where is the audience for a new Sade play? Who gives a damn about Sade when Hitler has chained up all of Europe? When he lusts for Russia, for Africa? For the whole world?”

The radio and the newspapers are filled with the news. Hitler’s troops invade Russia! The Wehrmacht deploys two hundred divisions! Aimed at Leningrad, at Moscow, at the Ukraine. The Soviet army stumbles in chaos. Bombs decimate hundreds of Soviet aircraft on the ground. The planes hadn’t even had time to take off. The Stalin Line lies in ruins, Stalin himself is in a stupor.

“On the contrary, the times are exactly right for Sade,” he says, pouring out a shot. His hands shake and he spills tequila on the table. He laps the liquor up like a dog. “Hitler violates in the realm of politics and suppresses the personal.”

“Well! That is hardly a Surrealist revolutionary statement, B.B. That is bloody monstrous.”

“Monstrous! Yes! Exactly right, my little Nora! My play shall prove that violation in the realm of the personal will liberate our politics. When the common man sets out to explore the extremes of his fantasies, his exploration causes his society to become a more liberated and tolerant place.”

“And why, pray, is that?”

“Because the common man need not sublimate his desires and act out those sublimations and suppressions against his fellow citizen, his coworker, and his comrade.”

Nora does not know how to refute this theory.

B.B. grins at her silence. “Marquis de Sade was a great sexual revolutionary, fully conversant with his subconscious mind. A man who penetrated his secret obsessions without the benefit of Freudian psychoanalysis. Breton greatly admires Sade, you know. He says the man was a Surrealist, a pre-Surrealist. I cannot wait to show him my manuscript!”

“Sade and Freud and Breton,” she says. “Such cozy bedfellows. Comrades in despising and degrading women.”

“Oh, I see,” B.B. says coldly.

“You see what?”

“Madam Valencia’s influence has begun to confuse you. Sade, of all men, believed in the liberation of Woman. He believed Woman should be freed of her maternity, of her domesticity. Is that what you really want, Nora? Babies and housework?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers. This is only too true. She fled the bourgeois life long ago, searching for something more.

“No, you don’t, nor should you. Because you are an Artist, my little Nora. Do you really serve me so much? Do I demand a brilliant dinner? A spotless household? Heirs bouncing on my knee? No. I free you, Nora. I give you the key to your freedom so you may pursue your Art.”

The anger in her heart flares hotter. “Dear me, I didn’t realize you held the key to my prison.”

“Of course I do. Men always hold the key. Sade understood this.”

“Sade,” she says, “was a madman.”

“His prose style is exquisite,” B.B. says mildly.

After their rustic dinner, B.B. insists on making love. Nora resists at first, then gulps lime-and-tequila, and lies down on their bed. She does not fear B.B. She may be petite, but she’s stronger than him in many ways and much younger. He has never physically harmed her. She is certain he would never try. Yet she wants to know–how has he changed, if Sade is on his mind? What liberation will he bring her, if the liberation of Woman is the object of his creative inquiry?

But he is tender and respectful, as always, and she is both relieved and inexplicably disappointed. B.B. does not live his Art. His Art does not authenticate his life, his relationship with her, or his reckoning with the world. His Art is no Calling. It’s an entertainment. An entertainment no one will be entertained by. Especially her.

As he strives for his climax, she runs her fingertips down the slope of his back. The little knobs of his spine are so delicate. For a moment she believes she could crush them, like eggshells, with her thumbs.

To read the rest of this fascinating story, discover what momentous event Nora dreams of, discover her disastrous relationship with B.B., and read the Postscript about the real artists the story is based on and the sources I consulted, friends, readers, and fans, please join my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206 and help me after the Attack. I’ve posted delightful new stories and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes and health tips, and more exclusively for my heroic patrons! I’m even offering a critique of your writing sample per each submission.

Visit me at www.lisamason.com for all my books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, blogs, roundtables, adorable cat pictures, forthcoming works, fine art and bespoke jewelry by my husband Tom Robinson, worldwide links, and more!

February Excerpt of CHROME, the new speculative novel by Lisa Mason #SFWApro #SFWAauthor #CHROME #sciencefiction #speculativefiction #publishednovel #geneticengineering #CRISPRtechnology #murdermystery #noirstyle

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2019 by Lisa Mason.

Cover, colophon, and art copyright 2019 by Tom Robinson.

All rights reserved.

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bast Books Ebook Edition published July 9, 2019.

Bast Books Print Edition published August 13, 2019.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address:

Bast Books

Bastbooks@aol.com

Thank you for your readership! Visit Lisa Mason at her Official Web Site for her books, ebooks, screenplays, stories, interviews, blogs, cute pet pictures, and more. Enjoy!

February, 2020 Excerpt

6

An Invite to the No-Tell Motel

That last whiskey at Club Namib had not been required. He squints his thin-lidded eyes against dawn’s glimmer. Rubs his high, distinguished forehead with a shapely cold hand. Instead of calming his nerves, that last whiskey had kept him awake all night. Fitful. Jittery.

First sunlight pierces the bedroom curtains, and he lurches up. He’s exhausted from Jamboree. From the terrible confrontation. From the sleepless night. He taps his Tatt and winks Elfie Syrus.

As a high-ranking Servitor, he’s facing a big Blend Day ahead. Meetings with the visiting Emirk corporate executive, responding to her demands, her agenda. A public appearance later at the Quarterly Hearing, which will be viewed on the Instrumentality by everyone on the Earth, the Moon, and Chrome.

Gravely important work to be done.

But he must know. He must find out.

What has she heard?

Elfie Syrus works the five a.m. to noon shift at the Chrome City Police Department. At the Main Station downtown. She fetches coffee for the cops, flirts outrageously. She enters data in the database, sees and hears all kinds of confidential information. She keeps her big eyes and bigger ears wide open. She has to walk through the security wickets going in and out, of course, but like every born gossip she has an extraordinary memory, mostly accurate, for the nitty-gritty.

She opens his wink at once. Giggles when he proposes that she meet him for breakfast at their usual rendezvous, the No-Tell Motel. This charming rent-by-the-hour dive lies ten blocks behind the Capitol Building where the neighborhood turns from grand governmental avenues and destination eateries to seedy bars, massage parlors, and establishments like the No-Tell.

“Oh, I’ve got the inside scoop, honey,” she squeaks in her irritating way, “and plenty of it.”

He may be a cold blood, but the human half of him feels an icy shock.

He widens the wink, preparing himself for the ordeal of having to see her in the flesh. Elfie’s icon stands before him. He would much prefer simply to transfer credits to her bank account in exchange for her chatter.

But Elfie wants more.

An elephant shrew, Elfie is reasonably more attractive than the moles who populate the staff in menial positions at the Chrome City Police Main Station. Chubby little mole women with tiny eyes and shapeless faces. Elfie’s got large pink ears and bright brown oval eyes that blend well with her Polynesian human ancestors, call girls sold to Emirk by a disgruntled pimp back in the day. She’s got a long, narrow nose and silky chestnut hair. She’s got nice legs.

He could do worse for a police informant.

He hisses in exasperation when she whispers the things she wants him to do to her at the No-Tell Motel. Elfie has found herself in an enviable position, demanding an hour of rough sex, together with his credits, in exchange for what comes to her naturally.

But why? She must like the danger and excitement of mating with a manimal like him. A Blend who could grievously harm her, kill her, with one ill-placed kiss.

He closes the wink, taps off his Tatt. Goes to groom and dress. An important Blend Day ahead. A lot of responsibility. A lot of exposure. Exposure on the Instrumentality.

Elfie is a fool. One day, he just may kill her when she squeaks.

7

Witness

Dawnlight streams over Chrome’s stark horizon in streaks of pink and gold as Terralina Rustabrin mourns Blend Day. Chromian life is so unfair. So wicked and mean. And there’s nothing she can do but live her life as a tortoise Blend and die. And she will die no matter how well or poorly she lives. So what’s the point? What’s the point of anything?

She has pulled her head and limbs into her carapace. Barricaded herself inside and .fastened the hinges tight. Her head protrudes from the peach-colored wall of her mobile studio apartment—the wall behind her neck—and each of her stubby arms and legs protrude from the peach-colored side walls.

She’s the original outside-inside girl. Or is it the other way around?

She masticates a breakfast salad. It’s a tasty salad, dressed with olive oil and vinegar. Sprinkled with the twenty-four spice mix she likes. Baby lettuce, cactus pads, corn kernels, dandelion leaves. Tiny white meal worms squirm deliciously over the lettuce. Everything grown in a Vat, well, what food isn’t grown in a Vat on Chrome? What food isn’t a GMO? Chromians themselves are genetically modified organisms, too, so why should they care how engineered their food is?

Chrome-grown, the Blends like to say.

The meal worms should make her happy, but they don’t. They don’t.

Who can care about this tear-stained life? Chromian life is a joke. A cruel joke. Why was Terralina born?

Fifty short years after the creation of Chrome, the Tweakers or the Twitchers had populated the Emirk laboratories with chimeric people embodying the characteristics—physical, mental, and behavioral—of the creatures they were genetically blended with. They were kept in cages, of course, since they were experimental subjects and no longer, strictly speaking, human beings.

To what purpose? Everyone on Earth wanted to know. Why do this?

To improve and enhance Earth’s weary, diseased, pollution-riddled, and resentful workforce with the vitality, natural talents, docility, and diversity of the animal kingdom, came Emirk’s confident reply.

Creating a Better You! became the corporate slogan.

A good purpose?

Noble, even?

The CEO of Emirk Corporation, standing before a gigantic World Eye, had announced the exciting news at a shareholders’ meeting. The Eye displayed an artistic animation of beefy bull boys hauling rocks out of a quarry, hippopotami girls pirouetting on pink ballet toeshoes. Everyone had applauded.

The descendents of the first fifty years’ of experimental populations are now, two hundred years later, heirs to the random genetic chances of good old-fashioned bonking-and-babies.

That’s how Terralina Rustabrin was born.

To read the rest of this excerpt of CHROME and discover what crime Terralina is a witness to, friends, readers, and fans, please join my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206 and help me after the Attack. I’ve posted delightful new stories and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes and health tips, and more exclusively for my heroic patrons! I’m offering a critique of your writing sample per each submission.

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Critical Review of “Once Upon a Time….in Hollywood” Lisa Mason #moviecritic #screenwriter #writer #brutalmurdertease #teaser #unsatisfactory #meandering #soso #dontwasteyourtime

I wrote a brief review on Facebook immediately after Tom and I viewed the movie. This was in December, 2019. I kind of enjoyed the movie, but didn’t want to see it again, and sent it back to Netflix. I gave it a passing grade—not the “loved it” best movie of the year, as so many viewers have.

Now, as of late January 2020, this movie gotten a glowing review by a long-time movie critic at The New Yorker, won the Golden Globe Award (in various categories), the SAG awards in various categories, and is slated to win Oscars (again, in various categories). The “various categories” include really important ones like “Best Picture,” “Best Actor,” “Best Supporting Actor,” and “Best Screenplay.”

But I’ve since read other critics’ thoughts, read the reactions of people I respect on Facebook, thought more about what I viewed (as I said above, we only saw the film once, not multiple times, as at least one laudatory critic has recommended), and I have more to say.

Ir’s bunk.

To see why I object so strenuously to this movie, please join my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206. Friends, readers, and fans, help me after the Attack. I’ve posted delightful new stories and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes and health tips, and more exclusively for my heroic patrons! I’m offering a critique of your writing sample per submission.

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Happy Chinese New Year! What a Difference the Internet Makes But is that Good? Lisa Mason #writer #NewYear #LunarNewYear #YearoftheRat #Rat #Chinesefood #videos #Internet #personalservice

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Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Happy Lunar New Year!

Actually, I’m not so sure how happy this new lunar year will be—it is the Year of the Rat. If you were born in 1972, 1960, or 1948, you’re a Rat. (Sorry.)

The ancient Chinese alchemists have a lot of good things to say about the Year of the Rat and Rat people—happy, sociable, industrious, prosperous—but I don’t know. Rats are also vermin, notorious historical vectors of bubonic and pneumonic plague throughout the world.

But Gung Hay Fat Choy, just the same!

Are you eating Chinese food for the Lunar New Year?

I love good Chinese food, but we hadn’t eaten it in over a decade. Why? Back then, we had a wonderful Chinese restaurant a pleasant leafy walk away from our home. They had everything we wanted—shrimp for me, vegetarian for Tom. Their vegetarian eggrolls were so superb, our blue mink Tonkinese cat, Luna, stole an eggroll out of the carton left carelessly open on the kitchen countertop and dragged it into the living room. We were watching a movie and I thought—well, I thought she had a rat. I didn’t let her eat the roll, for fear the food would make her sick, and had to throw it away.

That’s how good their veggie eggrolls were.

We were watching a movie—I can’t remember what—because next door to the excellent Chinese restaurant was a video rental store. We got to know the proprietor and the staff at the Chinese restaurant—they had a wonderful aquarium in the front with colorful koi carp that you could watch while you waiting for your food—and we also got to know the staff in the video rental store. It was a big retail space and they placed the movies face out, so we could see what the selections were. They had a huge selection of old movies and of National Geographic and nature movies. We called these latter movies “bug shows” even when the film was about tigers in India. We loved the “bug shows” and loved finding old movies we hadn’t yet seen. The staff had recommendations about new films and would call us up on each of our birthdays, “Happy Birthday from Captain Video. You have a free movie today!”

We didn’t always eat Chinese take-out on movie night but when we did, it was an entirely pleasant experience. And we when didn’t get Chinese, going to the video store was always a pleasant experience.

I miss those experiences.

I remember when Captain Video announced the store was closing down. We were worried about the staff who were about to be unemployed, asked if they would be okay. Some had spouses who worked, some migrated to other stores in the area. And I remember when the wonderful Chinese restaurant went out of business after the proprietor died. It was sad.

After all the video rental stores within a pleasant walking distance away from our home closed down—Captain Video, Silver Screen, Video Room—we eventually got a Netflix DVD account. And peruse the DVD movie selections at our wonderful local library. They’ve got some good ones. Netflix is wonderful, delivering the DVDs to us on the release date and receiving them back a day after we drop them off in the mail. But we don’t meet and get to know anyone who works at Netflix. The suggestions based on our previous choices are on the Netflix website. That’s good. But we don’t meet any people.

A decade later, I found a Chinese restaurant on Piedmont Avenue that has a wonderful menu—shrimp for me, vegetarian for Tom. Not walkable, but they deliver. So I ordered a Chinese dinner for the Lunar New Year. They said they would deliver in 45 minutes. The delivery man was here in 20 minutes flat. Tom went to the door and tipped him well and wished him Gung Hay Fat Choy. The food was super-fresh and expertly cooked.

It was a wonderful Lunar New Year, movies delivered to our doorstep, freshly cooked food delivered to our doorstep, Athena, our baby doll cat, was totally uninterested in the vegetarian eggrolls, yet everyone had a great time. But no people. At Netflix and at the Chinese restaurant, people did their jobs, but invisibly. Maybe the next time we order Chinese, the same delivery man will deliver and Tom will make friends with him. We can only hope.

Friends, readers, and fans, please join my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206 and help me after the Attack. I’ve posted delightful new stories and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes and health tips, and more exclusively for my heroic patrons! I’m even offering a critique of your writing sample per each submission.

Visit me at www.lisamason.com for all my books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, blogs, roundtables, adorable cat pictures, forthcoming works, fine art and bespoke jewelry by my husband Tom Robinson, worldwide links, and more!

 

Say What? Hearing and Hearing Aids Lisa Mason #writer #medical #hearing #hearingaids #sciencefictionandfantasywriter

Last week, the city informed us that a construction crew would be working on the street outside our home to install a new sewer device to the existing pipes. (It’s an old street.) The crew would start banging and jack-hammering early in the morning.

That night, before I went to bed, I inserted my ear plugs. I have these soft foam ear plugs. You kind of squish them in your fingers, shove the narrowed point into your ear canal, and allow the foam to expand. Tom uses hard plastic ear plugs (very effective), which I can’t bring myself to insert in my ear.

I hate anything inserted in my ear, especially something hard like a hard plastic ear plug or, maybe some day, a hearing aid.

I’m of the age (over forty) when vendors of products that are supposed to appeal to, or be required by people who are getting on in years send all kinds of advertisements by snail mail or email. One of those products is hearing aids. I also see ads in Via, the magazine published by the AAA Auto Club, which I belong to, and Popular Science, which Tom gets at our library, and even Scientific American, which our neighbor gives us when he’s done reading. Do print magazines assume that their readership is comprised mostly of people who are getting on in years and might consider hearing aids? It would seem so.

Before Christmas of last year, I received one snail mail, a large fancy embossed envelope, which offered me a free Christmas ham if I would come into the conference room of a local hotel, get a free hearing test, and listen to a pitch for their hearing aids.

Aside from the fact that I don’t eat ham, I was not enticed by the prospect of a free hearing test. A test is an ordeal designed to prove you’re inadequate. When I was a child, I always hated hearing tests. You listened to a soft tone and told the tester whether you could hear it. Or not.

Today, my hearing isn’t worse than two or three decades ago. My hearing is just as bad as it always was.

When I was a child, I suffered recurring severe earaches. I have a vivid memory of lying in bed and reaching my forefinger in my ear, finding the canal crusty with the medicinal drops my mother was administering to me. The memory makes me shudder.

When I was a child, I also hated—HATED—milk, butter, cheese, anything dairy. The conventional wisdom was—and it still probably is—that children need to drink milk to build strong bones and teeth. That was the health gospel.

My mother strived mightily to get me to drink milk, flavoring the loathsome greasy liquid with chocolate powder or strawberry powder, pouring it in my cereal, cooking with it. As soon as I was old enough to sneak downstairs to the kitchen before my parents woke up, I rinsed my cereal bowl in milk, deposited a few flakes of cereal in there, and placed the bowl in the sink. Same for my milk glass. My mother was annoyed that I didn’t wash my breakfast dishes, but it was a ploy on my part. A fake-out.

Decades later, I discovered from a book called Mad Cowboy about the cattle-raising industry, that earaches (among other ailments) in young children are a symptom of dairy intolerance.

Today we know that various vegetables, beans, fish, whole grains, and calcium-fortified juices provide more than enough calcium to build strong bones in children and adults without dairy.

When I became a vegetarian in college, I developed a taste for cheese and yogurt. That was before there were the wonderful vegetarian meat- substitutes, like Morningstar Farms products, that we have today. Before I learned to cook vegetables and vegetarian dishes. Cheese, yogurt, and soybeans were all we vegetarians had for protein and calcium. But I never drank milk, not even fat-free milk.

And my hearing? From my twenties on, I’ve always found it difficult to sit across the table from a companion in a café or restaurant and hear what he or she is saying, especially when there’s background noise. In rooms with high ceilings, like cafés and restaurants, grocery stores, and offices, I have to ask, “Say that again?” I have trouble understanding people with heavy accents, any kind of accent. It’s embarrassing. I know I get a blank look on my face and the speaker thinks I’m dense.

Sometimes I have to listen carefully to the dialog in movies, especially when the movie has too-loud background music or noise. But in the quiet of our living room, I have no trouble hearing my husband when we have a conversation. And I have no trouble hearing Athena when she meows, asking me for something to eat.

So if you meet me in a restaurant, café, convention, or party, don’t be shy. Lean close and shout in my ear.

The noise in the street last week from the city construction crew wasn’t bad at all. Or maybe my foam ear plugs worked better than I’d hoped. The crew did a great job of installing a high-tech grate that they can remove for maintenance. Hooray for the city.

So how about you? Do you have a hearing impediment? Do you wear hearing aids? How do you like (or dislike) them?

Friends, readers, and fans, please join my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206 and help me after the Attack. I’ve posted delightful new stories and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes and health tips, and more exclusively for my heroic patrons! I’m even offering a critique of your writing sample per each submission.

Visit me at www.lisamason.com for all my books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, blogs, roundtables, adorable cat pictures, forthcoming works, fine art and bespoke jewelry by my husband Tom Robinson, worldwide links, and more!

Pain and Pain Pills: My Story Adapted From My Forthcoming Memoir Sticks & Stones Will Break My Bones Lisa Mason #writer #memoir #violentattack #criminalattack #surgery #anesthetic # pain #painpills #opioids

Pain and Pain Pills: My Story

I’ve been putting off posting this story for eighteen months. Why? I haven’t felt ready to tell it. I feel ready now. Sort of. I’ve been putting off posting this story for the last week. I’ve got good excuses: wrapping up end of the year business, initiating start of the year business.

So here goes.

From the moment I woke up in the Recovery Room of a Big Urban Hospital in July 2018, I was all fired up on writing a memoir tentatively titled, “Sticks & Stones Will Break My Bones.” Lying on a gurney, my head swirling with the powerful aftermath of the general anesthetic, I got the title, a book outline, chapter titles, topics I needed to research (and have since researched for the most part), and a statement I wanted to make about the facts of the Attack, facts from the official police report and, later, the preliminary hearing. I wanted to make a statement about where we, as an American society founded on the principles of free debate and free speech, stand today.

The project sprang whole into my head. I was so fired up, I wanted to write complete a draft in a month. Typical me—always asking impossible things of myself. When I got home from the Big Urban Hospital in three days (that’s another story in the memoir), I asked my husband to set up my laptop on my bed. Which he did. In the few waking hours I had at that time, I sketched out the memoir as I’d envisioned it. When I was able to get up out of bed and sit on my Internet chair, I downloaded much of the research, plus bought books relevant to the topics I wanted to cover.

Now it’s eighteen months later and various factors have cooled my ardor to write the memoir, including people’s attitudes and interactions on Facebook. I’ve copied those interactions off the Internet for future illustrative use (with the names changed, the exact words edited). These attitudes and interactions constitute proof positive of the statement I wanted to make.

The facts are the facts.

But the virulence of these attitudes and interactions, the times we’re living in, have considerably slowed my pace. It may be that writing the memoir has depressed me. It may be that not being able to walk, to move the way I used to, has depressed me. What me, depressed? In any case, I’ve got several new stories to write and publish, and several new novels to finish up several of my series which are presently incomplete. I can’t afford to be depressed.

So now is the time to go back to the beginning and tell the story of my pain and the pain killers while those memories are still kicking around in my brain. My story is relevant today because, of the many crises in this country, my story has to do with the opioid crisis. National Geographic Magazine ran an article in January 2020 issue, “A World of Pain” by Yudhijit Bhattachartee with the subtitle, “Scientists are unraveling the mysteries of pain and exploring new ways to treat it.”

So here goes: To catch you up, if you haven’t been following my story.

On July 11, 2018, a sunny afternoon with the dog walkers, moms with strollers, bicyclists, and joggers everywhere, a man burst out of the flowering bushes at East 12th Street and Lake Merritt Boulevard and confronted me as I was power-walking on the sidewalk.

He tried to beat me up, I fended him off, then he shoved me into the street in front of two lanes of oncoming traffic. I shuffled my feet to avoid crashing into the cars, but the impact of his shove made me lose my balance, and I fell hard on street curb, fracturing my right hip in three places and breaking my thigh.

The police apprehended the Attacker, I identified him, then I was taken by an ambulance to a Big Urban Hospital, where I underwent three hours’ of surgery under general anesthetic. (There’s much more to it, but that’s another story.)

I was anxious to get out of the Big Urban Hospital as soon as possible. I was aware of the deadly hospital infection which plagues all hospitals regardless of their best efforts. Three months before, a former editor of mine and a renowned writer in Philadelphia had gone into a hospital for a minor procedure and died, shockingly, unexpectedly, in two days’ time of a massive infection.

On the third day after the surgery, I was running a fever of 102 degrees. I refused more fluids by IV, demanded to be released. The surgeon discharged me, and I was sent home with a walker and a big brown paper bag of pills.

Before I left, a nurse sat me down on the side of the bed and went over the single-spaced one-page printout with me, detailing instructions about taking the pills and what they were for. Most of the pills seemed ridiculous to me and not on point with what was ailing me. When I got home, I threw them all away except one.

This was the bottle of sixty hydrocodone pills, to be taken every four hours for pain. The printout had the same instructions as the label on the bottle, and as the nurse had lectured me.

For the rest of the story about my experience with pain pills, join me on my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206 and help me after the Attack. I’ve posted delightful new stories and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes and health tips, and more!

Visit me at www.lisamason.com for all my books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, blogs, roundtables, adorable cat pictures, forthcoming works, fine art and bespoke jewelry by my husband Tom Robinson, worldwide links, and more!

Courtesy by Lisa Mason #politeness #courtesy #helpingpeople #rudemeantimes #writer #novels #stories

Three years ago, when I was crossing the large parking lot of my market with a full cart of groceries, I noticed a diminutive, white-haired woman struggling with her cart.

I pushed my cart next to my car, then rushed across the lot to her. I asked her if she needed some help, she said yes, and I took the cart from her, pushing it to her car, which she pointed out to me. She opened the trunk, I lifted her groceries in, she thanked me, then I pushed her cart to a cart stall.

As I walked back to my car, several people smiled at me and said, “Good for you.”

It wasn’t a big deal. She clearly needed help, I provided help. Of all my family members (and there are not many of them), I most loved my maternal Grandma Mary. I appreciate and respect Little Old Ladies.

Five years ago, I went to New York City to attend the Author-Editors Reception of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (which has since been discontinued by SFWA). I booked the Super Shuttle to and from JFK Airport to my mid-Manhattan hotel.

The Super Shuttle promised no more than ten passengers, but our driver packed in at least twenty. The Shuttle stopped at every airline terminal—there are dozens. Plus JFK was a mess, with construction and detours everywhere. A passenger said, “Hey man, we’ve been here over an hour and we’re still not fucking out of the airport!”

The return trip was no better with passengers threatening to sue if they didn’t catch their flight in time. When I came home, I told husband Tom, “I’ll never take Super Shuttle again. All the private cabs have a standard fee from the airport. It’s worth every penny.”

I’m not surprised that Super Shuttle has shuttered recently.

On the incoming trip, I got on the Shuttle with a man who had been on the same jet from San Francisco. We sat side by side with our carryon bags behind the driver, exchanged business cards, and struck up a conversation which lasted all of the miserable six hours the Shuttle took to get from JFK to my hotel. He turned out to be a computer security specialist en route to a lecture he was going to give to a board of a big bank. He was very curious about my writing career. He regaled me with stories about the computer hacks he helped resolve, I regaled him with stories about where I get my fiction ideas, research, and publishing.

The driver, while he wasn’t furiously beeping his horn, hopping sidewalks (literally) to get around trucks and traffic jams, and making U-turns, was fascinated, listening to us. And told us so when we got out at last at our respective hotels.

I was quite stiff, after sitting for six hours on a Shuttle seat. I had a large traveling handbag and my carryon bag on straps over my shoulders. The computer specialist (he was a large man) disembarked first, and then I stood with my bags at the precipice disembarking from the Shuttle. The drop from the Shuttle doorstep to the street was at least two feet, maybe three. I’m not tiny at five foot six, neither am I huge. And the drop loomed before me. The computer specialist stood chatting with the driver. I suppose if I’d asked him, he would have helped me down from the Shuttle. But I didn’t. And he didn’t.

As I sort of fell down to the street, I felt keenly disappointed that, after six hours of conversation, he didn’t think to help me off the damn Shuttle.

Husband Tom is always gracious. He always holds open doors for people, men or women, and has been rewarded with his share of women snapping, “I can open the door myself.” To which he says nothing or “You’re welcome.” He helps neighbors who are moving in, carried a large television set into our elderly neighbor’s living room. He always walks on the street side when he and I are strolling on the sidewalk, opens doors for me (which I appreciate), and helped me in and out of my car a year ago when I was unable after the Attack. Tom is courteous to me, to everyone. He is a gentleman.

Many more years ago, I went to New York City, this time to meet my book editor at Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. Tom (another Tom) took me to lunch at a restaurant, all scarlet Art Deco décor, the entrance of which was accessible only by a heavy revolving glass door. We had a discussion about how a gentleman should handle a revolving door. If memory serves, Tom Dupree, the editor, was of the opinion that a gentleman should enter the revolving door first to set the door in motion, and the lady should follow. That way she didn’t have to push the heavy glass, but only enter the door and walk through. I thought that was an excellent suggestion.

We’re living in rude, mean times, during which total strangers assault one with profanity. Everyday courtesy is not just a gesture of gentility, a sign of respect of men toward women, of the younger toward the older, but of everyday kindness. If and when I’m eighty years old and need help pushing my shopping cart across the parking lot, I hope someone will be there. In meantime, as long as I’m able, I’m here to help. I don’t think twice.

Join me on my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206 and help me after the Attack. I’ve posted delightful new stories and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes and health tips, and more!

Visit me at www.lisamason.com for all my books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, blogs, roundtables, adorable cat pictures, forthcoming works, fine art and bespoke jewelry by my husband Tom Robinson, worldwide links, and more!

Daughter of the Tao published in Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn Anthology (HarperPrism) Lisa Mason #writer #fantasywriter #historicalwriter #fantasy #historicalfantasy #Chinesefantasy #ChineseNewYear #1890simmigration #childrensslavery #prostitution #p

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I.

Dragon

Sing Lin skips down Fish Alley, seeking fresh shrimp for Master’s supper.

She swings her wicker shopping basket with a frivolous hand, her young heart bobbing with innocent joy. The city air is ripe with the odors of raw sea creatures and sandalwood incense, of the mouthwatering scent of peanut oil smoking in someone’s hot wok.

A mooie jai just doesn’t skip down the streets of Tangrenbu, not on most days. Certainly not on a day as fresh and crisp as this, with sunlight sparkling high above and a cool west wind from the sea. A day which Cook would have gladly savored for himself.

A lucky day.

But Cook has injured himself. His ankle has swollen up like a bundle of newspapers left out in a night rain. Cook took a wrong step into a pothole on Jasmine Avenue, and now he cannot step at all.

Cook had seized her skinny arm as Sing Lin had knelt over the wash basin, scrubbing the sheets for Master’s bed. He flung her to her feet and said, “Here, you lazy girl, go get two pounds shrimp for Master’s supper, and make quick.”

“Yes, Cook,” she murmured.

Sing Lin had washed her hands and face, and retied her queue, and smoothed the wrinkles from her black cotton sahm. And she set out with Cook’s coins and her wicker shopping basket, her young heart bobbing with innocent joy. Shrimp is double good luck because, first, here she is, out of the house in such a long time. And because, second, Master will let Cook give her one spicy fried shrimp with her usual supper of boiled rice and greens. “You the shrimp girl, anyway,” Cook joked in his dour way. “Master bought you for ten pieces of gold, plus five pounds shrimp.”

Two more skips and a hop and a jump, and Sing Lin finds herself among the peddlers of Fish Alley. They are, one and all, clad in blue-denim sahms. Yet all are not alike in the throng of blue tunics and trousers, a truth that even Sing Lin’s eyes can discern. The ones wearing jaunty felt fedoras have taken to the new ways of the city. The ones in embroidered satin caps have not. And the ones who cannot escape their lot in life no matter where they flee to wear the flat straw cone of peasantry. They are, one and all, men. There is not a woman in sight, unless Sing Lin peeks at her own reflection in a shop window, and even she’s not a woman, not yet.

Master employs many men just like the fish peddlers in his drayage business along the waterfront. Once she overheard him talking to Cook. They are not, of course, human beings, Master had said. They are oxen to be led by a ring through the nose. Later, lying on her straw pallet in the pantry, Sing Lin had wondered for a long time what Master must think of her.

Now she glimpses the longing and the bitterness in the fish peddlers’ eyes and something else, something strange and disturbing. Anxiety casts a shadow on her happiness, and she is only too aware she does not belong here. After all, a mooie jai just doesn’t skip down the streets of Tangrenbu. It’s not a proper thing. Not on any day.

Fish Alley is not really much of an alley, and certainly not at all an actual street on which horses and wagons travel as they do on other city streets. It is only a mean, narrow passage permitting pedestrian traffic from east to west and back again. Ancient shacks line its gutters, tenements abandoned long ago by fortune-seekers, their claims staked out now by landlords and merchants like Master. Within these shacks dwell the peddlers and the draymen of Tangrenbu, men tripled up to a room, drifting in and out of the city with the fickle tides of bust or boom.

The clapboard walls are covered over with bulletins, strips of red rice paper announcing the news near and far in bold, black slashes of calligraphy. Sing Lin spies a t’ai chi adorning a lintel, a little circle comprised of two teardrops, one red, one black, with a spot of each color in the opposite drop. The t’ai chi is triple good luck, that’s what Cook says. First, for the red, which is yang, thus fiery and excitable, and, second, for the black, which is yin, thus cool and restful. And third for the spots, which rouse restfulness into excitement, and calm excitement into rest.

Oh! A t’ai chi!

Sing Lin is positively glowing with good luck.

She strolls among straw baskets bulging with the sea’s bounty. There are speckled black oysters tossed on handfuls of dank seaweed. Mottled green crabs with their slow, pinching claws. And shrimp, of course, translucent blue and sooty like ill-made glass before they spill into the wok and cook up clean and deliciously pink. She pauses before a basket of salmon, lovely lithe creatures paved in silvery scales. Some of the fish are still flopping. The air is tainted with their brackishness and the smell of their blood. Sing Lin’s heart catches at the sight of the salmon struggling in their death throes.

“Hey, you little girl. Why such a sad face?”

Sing Lin turns, startled. A girl? A girl! Another girl! Whoever sees a girl in Tangrenbu? Yet it’s true, another girl stands beside her. In a black cotton sahm just like hers, a wicker shopping basket slung over her arm, ‘her queue wound around her head in an ebony crown. She is taller than Sing Lin by a handspan and very skinny. Her face is as round as the moon, her eyes almond-shaped slivers of mischief, her skin as flawless as a piece of polished ivory. Her laughing mouth quirks to the left as if she would tell you things you didn’t especially want to hear, but she’ll insist on telling you anyway. Around her neck she’s strung a black silk cord which holds, on the end of it, a tiny t’ai chi. Little shadows pool beneath the high bones of her flat cheeks.

The fish peddlers stare at her—Sing Lin can’t help but notice–as if she is a two-headed, five-legged pig.

“Well? I’m waiting for your answer,” she says. Ah. A little empress she is.

“I’m. . . .I’m sorry the pretty fishes must die.”

The girl mimics weeping and a face full of sorrow, then grins. “Your heart is too soft, little girl. Salmon is delicious! It will put some meat on those matchsticks you call your arms and legs.” She widens her eyes and drops her mouth, the very picture of scandalized disbelief. “Don’t tell me your master is so cruel he never lets a little girl like you ever taste salmon.”

Sing Lin stares down, ashamed. Her big bony toes bulge out of her straw sandals. Peasant toes. She is not someone who tastes salmon, but then–she lifts her chin–she doesn’t want to admit that to this bossy girl. “Sometimes Master gives me spicy fried shrimp with my rice and greens.”

“You mean one little shrimp, don’t you?” At Sing Lin’s abashed nod, the girl throws back her head and laughs, a sound like the tinkling of a silver bell.

The fish peddlers murmur. Sing Lin is only too aware of their eyes. “Don’t laugh like that,” she mutters. “They’re all looking.”

“Ho! Let them look. Come over here into the shade with me, if you’re so worried.”

The girl takes her arm and draws her into the shadows beneath a balcony. The balcony has a great curved railing painted the rich velvety yellow of an egg yolk. “I am Kwai Yin.”

“I am Sing Lin.”

“You are mooie jai?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too.”

The language they once spoke in the old country is as vast as the ancient land from which it had sprung. There are so many dialects that Sing Lin, a girl from the north, would have trouble understanding Kwai Yin, a girl from the south, if they spoke in their mother tongues. So they twist their tongues around another language altogether. The pigeon language of the new country. Of Tangrenbu.

“Where’s your master’s cook, anyway?” Kwai Yin says, looking her up and down. “What’s a girl like you doing, gadding about Fish Alley?”

“Cook stepped into a pothole. Now he can’t take a step!” Sing Lin suppresses a giggle, nervous and not a little awed. This bossy girl, a mooie jai, too? And her master lets her taste salmon? What else does her master let her do? “What’re you doing, gadding about Fish Alley?”

“Shopping, of course.” As if such a pastime for a mooie jai is nothing.

Which it is not. Not in Tangrenbu.

Sing Lin is bursting with questions, but her throat clenches. The balcony may shield them from the sun and from the fish peddlers’ eyes, but affords no relief from the stink of a bin filled with offal. She spies fish heads and fish fins and husked shrimp shells, the flat little mitt of a manta that wandered into some fisherman’s net. Sing Lin wrinkles her nose, presses fingers to her throat. “Oh, let’s go someplace else!”

But Kwai Yin peers into the bin, avid with curiosity. “Wait, wait. Look there!”

And there, next to the manta, lies another dead little creature, speckled gray, serpentine like an eel. But it is not an eel. It has four fragile legs, each tipped with a foot, and stubby toes, and claws as thick as darning needles. In the way that a sea horse resembles a horse, the tiny head resembles that of an ox. There are bovine ears and round eyes, a broad snout with flaring nostrils. The jaws hang slack, baring fangs that would have given your finger a nasty bite.

“Poor thing,” Sing Lin murmurs. “What is it?”

“Your heart is way too soft,” Kwai Yin says. “That is lung.”

“What is lung?”

“It’s a dragon. Did you ever see such a lousy little dragon?”

“A dragon! That’s a dragon?”

“I know, it was so tiny and weak. Thrown away with the fish heads. The sea must be awfully full of poisons these days.”

Sing Lin eyes the creature. “But there’s no such thing as a dragon. Not really.”

Kwai Yin whips around, her eyes flashing. “Then what is that, I ask you? It is lung, the dragon, I’m telling you, one of the four Fabulous Creatures. Usually he’s bigger and stronger than ten oxen. And his roar! Usually his roar shakes the rooftops off castles. Usually he’s handsome and powerful and brave. Ignorant girl, don’t you know anything about the four Fabulous Creatures?”

Sing Lin shakes her head. Yet she will not stare at her toes, not now. She’s eager to learn. “Please tell me.”

“They are the Dragon, the Phoenix, the Unicorn, and the Tortoise,” Kwai Yin says in her imperious way, counting out the creatures on her fingers. “My Teacher taught me this, and many other things.” She adds in a voice not quite so proud, “I had a Teacher once, you know.”

She pulls Sing Lin away from the vile bin. Angling down from the balcony is buttress of iron scrollwork, which reaches halfway to the street. Kwai Yin slings her basket handles over her head, and leaps up, and seizes the scrollwork in her fist. She walks her feet up the wall, hooks her leg over the buttress, and straddles it, flushed and triumphant. Mounted on her perch, she leans down and holds out her hand. “Come on up. Let’s get some fresh air.”

Sing Lin slings her basket handles over her head, too, and leaps up, and seizes Kwai Yin’s hand. She walks up the wall, too. Kwai Yin pulls her onto the buttress, and they climb up onto the cool stone floor of the balcony. They sit with their legs sticking out beneath the egg-yolk yellow railing and dangle their feet, gazing down at Fish Alley.

Sing Lin is tingling with excitement and also with anxiety. She’s never done such a bold thing, climbing up on a stranger’s balcony. She glances over her shoulder. “What if the man who lives here comes home and finds us?”

“What if, you silly girl? Do you think he’s an ogre who will eat us?” She grabs Sing Lin’s arm and pretends she’s chewing on it, which makes Sing Lin laugh. “Stop being afraid of things that don’t matter. Now, listen. My Teacher said, the four Fabulous Creatures are manifestations of the Tao. Just loaded with so much luck you can’t even believe it.”

Sing Lin peers down at the little dead dragon. How could that could be lucky?

“They are rare and flighty things, the four Fabulous Creatures. You just don’t see a Fabulous Creature every day of the week.”

“I’ve never seen a dragon in my whole life. Not even a little one like that.”

Kwai Yin bobs her head. “Me, neither. My Teacher said, if ever you see a Fabulous Creature in the world, it means that the Tao is near. That the magic of the Tao will touch you.”

Sing Lin shivers with delight. “Magic!”

“Yes, but just look at that lousy little dragon. I see no Tao in Tangrenbu. I see no magic for mooie jai like you and me.”

Sing Lin does not want to be so easily discouraged. “But maybe magic will come!”

“Maybe.” Kwai Yin shrugs. “When did you come to Tangrenbu?”

“In the Year of the Tiger. The Swallow brought me here.”

There was a time when Sing Lin could not speak of that time at all. Of how her father sold her to a slaver in the seaport. Who sold her to the master of a clipper-ship named for a quick-winged bird. It didn’t seem right that a ship with a lovely name like the Swallow was a notorious slave ship, but so it was, carrying illegal human cargo from the old country to the new.

How grateful she’d been when they dragged her out of steerage and off the hellish ship into the cold sunlight of Tangrenbu. Grateful when they stripped off the filthy rags she’d worn for weeks. Grateful still when they stood her up, naked, on an auction block, and an auctioneer displayed her to a crowd of merchants. Grateful at last to go to Master for ten pieces of gold, plus five pounds shrimp. She is mooie jai, fated to serve at Master’s beck and call. She is grateful for one spicy fried shrimp with her boiled rice and greens.

She can say no more about the Swallow. What’s done is done.

“Oh ho, in the Year of the Tiger,” Kwai Yin is saying, her tone as tart as green oranges. “And how many celestial creatures did you count before the Tiger?”

Now Sing Lin grins. She likes this game of recounting the celestial creatures. She may not know anything about the four Fabulous Creatures, but the twelve celestial creatures, the creatures each of whom who rules over each year, these she knows well. Cook often asks her to recount the celestial creatures, too, and suddenly she realizes he has asked her this so she will remember how old she is. “I remember the Year of the Dog, but only a little because I was little.”

“Go on.”

“Then came the Boar, the Rat, and the Ox. Then the Tiger.”

“So you were five years old when your father sold you?”

Sing Lin says nothing. She cannot even say “yes,” though it’s true. “What about you?”

“Well, I can recount two more celestial creatures than you,” Kwai Yin says in her haughty way. “I saw the Monkey and the Rooster come and go long before the Year of the Dog.”

“Oh!” Sing Lin is delighted. Kwai Yin is two years older than her. Like a sister!

But Kwai Yin is stern, quizzing her further. “And after the Year of the Tiger?”

Sing Lin thinks carefully. “After the Tiger came the Hare.”

“Yes.”

“After the Hare came the Dragon.” She doesn’t want to look at the little dead dragon. “After the Dragon came the Snake. Oh, I’m afraid of snakes.”

“Now that is something to be afraid of. Once I picked up a sack of rice shipped in from the old country. And there, coiled underneath the sack, was the prettiest little piece of string, the color of a shining emerald. And do you know what that pretty little string was? It was a bamboo viper, the most deadliest snake in the whole world! If my master himself hadn’t pulled me away and killed it, I wouldn’t be here at all, talking to you.” She smiles at Sing Lin’s wide eyes. “Go on.”

“After the Snake came the Year of the Horse,” Sing Lin says cautiously. “Now it is the Year of the Ram.”

“Correct. And the new year coming?”

“The new year coming is the Year of the Monkey. I like the Monkey. He’s the Trickster. He likes to play games.” She improvises. “He’s the protector of bossy girls.”

“Yes, yes, very good.” Kwai Yin rewards her with a squeeze of her hand. “I was born in the Year of Monkey.”

“Then the new year coming will be your best lucky year!”

“Ho! Lots of luck, but who knows what kind.” A door suddenly bangs behind them. Kwai Yin cocks her head. “Oops, I hear the ogre. We better go!”

She swings herself over the railing, slides down the scrollwork, and leaps to the street–very much like a monkey. Sing Lin follows, clumsy with panic, banging her elbow hard on a strut of iron. There will be a bruise she will have to explain to Cook.

“Come on!” Kwai Yin says.

The girls dash away from the ogre, who is only a withered old man leaning over the yellow railing of his balcony with a perplexed look. They come to a breathless halt where the alley empties out onto Jasmine Avenue. A horse and hansom clatter by, and people stride by, too, clad in denim sahms or in the grand sweeping robes of merchants. Men, all of them men.

Men who stare at two mooie jai.

The girls press themselves against the wall of a dry goods shop, both alarmed, both trying to become invisible.

“I have seen twelve celestial animals come and go,” Kwai Yin says, shrinking from the traffic, her manner no longer so bold. “That’s why my master makes me eat salmon.”

“Makes you!”

“Yes. Till my belly can hold no more, and sometimes I feel a little sick.”

Sing Lin cannot picture this tall, skinny girl eating so much salmon. For one thing, such rich meals have added no meat to the matchsticks she calls her arms and legs. Sing Lin should be glad Kwai Yin can feast so well on rich food her master insists that she eat. But her heart catches, like when she saw the salmon fishes dying. “Why does your master make you eat salmon till you’re sick?”

Kwai Yin says, cold and grim, “Because I must grow fat before I go to meet my fate.”

II

Phoenix

Sing Lin skips back to Master’s house, carrying two pounds of shrimp in her wicker basket and a handful of copper coins in change. More coins than you might think. After meeting Kwai Yin, she’s started feeling bolder herself. She smiled sweetly at the shrimp vendor instead of casting her eyes down and, in return, he gave her a very good price and a very nice smile of his own.

Cook, taking his ease in the servants’ quarters, his swollen ankle propped up on a cushion, counts out the coins. He glances up at her, startled, and parts his thin lips, revealing two fence rows of teeth stained brown by tobacco. Cook’s rendition of a smile. “Very good, girl. I tell Master you not so lazy, after all.”

“Thank you, Cook. Is there any other thing you wish?”

A tough little knotty man, like an oft-tied leather shoestring, Cook regards the whole world as if deciding how to skin and gut and slice and boil it. Sing Lin averts her eyes from him and keeps her own mouth from smiling. She’s fresh and rosy-cheeked, her hair disheveled from the sea wind, she’s unaccountably happy, and she knows Cook notices this. She knows he is speculating just exactly how she came up with the extra coins and is deciding whether or not he approves of her cleverness.

He doles out another dime from his leather purse.

Late sunlight slants over the western hills, casting long shadows over Tangrenbu. But the day is not yet done.

“Yes, another thing. Go to the sweetmeats shop and buy some sugar plums for Master’s dessert. And a coconut candy for you. But just one. And bring back change.”

“Yes, Cook.”

“And, for goodness sake, put something over your sahm.”

Cook lurches to his feet, and takes off his jacket, and pulls the garment over her shoulders. “Tuck up your hair, take a hat.” He knots her queue into a coil at the nape of her neck, jams his slouch hat over her head. The hat is way too big and smells of Cook’s sweat and his suety hair oil. She giggles, already too warm beneath the jacket and hat. Cook shakes his finger at her. “No laugh. You must pass for a boy. I made a mistake earlier today. I cannot send a girl like you alone into Tangrenbu.”

“Cook, why are there no mothers in Tangrenbu? Why no girls?”

He yanks the jacket over her scrawny chest. “The governors of the new country have passed laws. These laws say we cannot bring our wives or our daughters from the old country to Tangrenbu.”

“Why?”

“Because we came here to work and make a new life, but the governors and the people who live here do not want us to stay and make a new life after the work is done.”

Why?”

“You’re too old to ask why, why, why like a baby child.”

“But why?”

He buttons up the jacket all the way, from her neck to her thigh. “The governors fear us. If we cannot bring our families to Tangrenbu, the governors hope we will return to the old country when the work is done. But many of us cannot return. I cannot return to my wife and daughter. After all my work in Tangrenbu, I cannot save the fare for my sea passage. It would be better for me to make a new life here with my family and pay for their fare. I very much want that. But if I have no fare for myself, have can I provide fare for them?”

Sing Lin ponders that. “Cannot stay, yet cannot go. Cannot go back to family, cannot bring family here to settle down. Like a fish caught in a net, thrashing about.” She thinks of the dead dragon, but decides not to tell Cook about it. Beneath the tough nutshell of his face, she can discern the kernel of his sorrow.

“Yes. And so here we men must stay alone, in Tangrenbu. And here in Tangrenbu, there are only mooie jai and–” But now Cook claps his jaws shut.

Sing Lin is puzzled and a little frightened. “And who else, Cook?”

“And daughters of joy.”

That sounds lovely to Sing Lin’s ears. She’s reminded of Kwai Yin, of her own joy today. “Oh, I should like to meet a daughter of joy.”

“No, no! Never, never meet a daughter of joy.” Cook frowns and dark shapes move in his eyes. “You listen to me, girl. You must never go to Soot Alley. Never go to Bleak Place.”

One time, in the Year of the Snake, Sing Lin had walked with Cook past Bleak Place. It was a dreadful dark alley in a labyrinth of many such alleys in Tangrenbu. She recalls the strange, birdlike cries she’d heard when they passed by. She recalls how they’d seen men dragging something out of one of the shacks. A burlap sack that might have held the corpse of a large dog. How the men had tossed the sack onto the flatbed of a garbage wagon, and how Cook had made her hurry.

“Never, never go to those places,” Cook says and darkness moves in his voice. “For that is where the daughters of joy are kept hidden. You sabe?”

She isn’t sure if she understands, but she says, “I sabe.”

And she sets out for sugar plums for Master’s dessert, plus one coconut candy for herself. She brings back the coins in change, which Cook takes, along with the candy. He splits the candy in two, giving her half, and pops the other half in his mouth. No matter. Half a coconut candy is well worth another taste of freedom.

*   *   *

To discover what Kwai Yin’s terrible fate is, Sing’s danger, Tao Magic, and the rest of the Four Fabulous Creatures, visit my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206 for the full story of “Daughter of the Tao” and become a patron. Help me recover from the Attack and get access to delightful new and previously published stories, writing tips, book excerpts, movie reviews, original healthy recipes, and more!

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January 2020 Story “Daughter of the Tao” Published in Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn anthology; The Introduction Lisa Mason #writer #fantasywriter #historicalwriter #fantasy #historicalfantasy #Chinesefantasy #ChineseNewYear #1890simmigration #children

Just in time for the Chinese New Year on January 25, 2020.

In 1996, the (now-late) editor, writer, and my dear friend, Janet Berliner had a hot streak. She wrangled excellent deals for three anthologies with Big Publishers, for which she commissioned me to contribute stories, including a story for this anthology, Peter S, Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn.

Yes, that Peter S. Beagle who wrote The Last Unicorn, which got made into a successful fantasy animated movie in 1982. Peter and Jan had been friends going way back.

The gorgeous hardcover anthology was published by HarperPrism (a division of HarperCollins) in 1996, then also in a mass paperback edition, and in several foreign countries.

Jan’s proposal to me (once again) could not have come at a better time. I’d recently finished The Gilded Age, a time travel which takes place in 1895 and in 2395, as well as Celestial Girl, A Lily Modjeska Mystery, a four mini-book series and a passionate historical mystery which takes place exclusively in 1895. I was conversant in the Chinese presence in America and ancient Chinese mythology.

The project was ably suited (once again) to my resources at hand. I wanted to write about a Chinese unicorn, not the conventional European mythical creature, but I first started with the Thames and Hudson beautiful large-format paperback, Unicorn, which, lavishly illustrated, covers just about all of the European mythology. Then, too, the dependable J.E. Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols, which covers symbols and their meanings among all cultures worldwide. Yes, there’s an extensive entry for unicorn.

But I specifically wanted a Chinese unicorn, and so I turned to C.A.S. Williams’ Outlines of Chinese Symbolism & Art Motives. The Chinese unicorn has a specially nuanced meaning, a “Dragon Horse,” and is one the Four Celestial Creatures. You’ll have to read the story to find out what the other Creatures are. No other author in the anthology had a Chinese unicorn! And other authors included Charles de Lint, Karen Joy Fowler, Robert Sheckley, and Ellen Kushner.

Here’s what one reader had to say about “Daughter of the Tao”:

5.0 out of 5 stars

A beautiful novella!

“The characters in this little book jumped off the page and you really cared what happened to them. It is a rare talent that can do that so well! This was a compelling tale of a girl sold into slavery as her culture allowed. I found myself hooked from the very first page as I followed her through the twists and turns of her life. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a character-based story with a touch of magic and fantasy to it!”

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