R. Lee Smith's Blog, page 23

Interspecies Relations Part Two

More from my Confluence 2003 Short Story Entry!

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INTERSPECIES RELATIONS part 2

Hannah blew out a sigh and sank to the floor even as Nix stretched to its full height and washed its faceted eyes.  Hannah leaned back on her hands to see past the preening Tharku and scrutinized the heap of boxes and furnishings thoughtfully provided through various sponsorships.  The Ikea people had been very generous; it was amazing how well their furniture accommodated alien anatomy.

“I should begin to arrange the settlements?  Yes?”  Nix took a tentative step towards the ungainly heap of their shared belongings and wrung its feeler-hands.

Hannah sighed again.  “Don’t worry about it tonight, Nix.  All we need is something to eat and someplace to sleep.  We’ve got the whole rest of our lives to figure out where to put the sofa.”

“Ah.  Good.  Yes?  Good.”  Nix bounded off through the house in that curiously graceful leaping stride of the Tharku, presumably to find the bedroom.

Hannah peered through the curtains flanking the front door, where the Tharku ambassador and one of the presidential aides were addressing the press.  She was half-tempted to open the door a crack and try to make out what they were saying. She doubted it was the truth:  My fellow Americans, today the citizens of two worlds witness the union of a mail delivery girl and an alien emissary because they had the extreme misfortune to get stuck in a broken elevator for six hours, unchaperoned in an enclosed space, past the hour of midnight, so that they were already married according to the customs of the Tharku and it would be diplomatically disastrous to begin the first contact with an alien race with a messy divorce.

Hannah pushed herself off the floor and began to paw desolately through the few cardboard boxes that came from her old apartment until her hip started ringing.  She spilled her entire box of socks before she remembered the little cell phone she’d been given, just until the heat from the press died down and she could get her old one back.  Funny, she didn’t think anyone had this number yet.  Not without some trepidation, she answered it.

“My daughter gets married to a giant Martian cockroach and I learn about it for the first time by watching it on the news?!”

Hannah sank back to the floor, wishing she had great big faceted eyes she could wash with wearied resignation.  “Hi, Mom.”

And Now For Something Completely Different

Greetings, ya’ll. (They tell me that’s how I’m supposed to talk now that I live in the midwest.) Now that my last run-on snippet from Pool has concluded, I find myself faced with the looming spectre of Nothing New to Post. Normally, I would simply toss out a little taste of whatever I happen to be writing on at the moment, but I am beginning to have a problem with that. Oh, I’m still writing on Pool ( for the moment), but I confess that I am increasingly uncomfortable with posting previews of a work that will not likely see the light of publicated day for a year. In a story that relies so heavily on a build-up of tension, I really can’t afford to lose the element of surprise. So…no more from Pool, is I guess what I’m telling you. At least, not until I’m a lot closer to done with it.

How close am I to done with it? Well, that’s the next thing. Not very. As some of you know, I underwent surgery last September, which I naively thought would give me lots of time afterwards to lie around, nibble on bon-bons and write while I recover. This did not happen. Even before I arrived home from the hospital, two of my sisters each came to an independant crisis which required a major move–one of them from the midwest back to Oregon and the other from New York here to the midwest. So back into the car I rolled, book in hand, believing I would get SO much writing done on the road (mind you, this is still only a few days out of surgery). This did not happen. The siblings were safely relocated, but Pool’s page count barely budged and I returned home barely able to maintain an upright position. Around about the time I started to feel well enough to sit up at the computer for hours at a stretch again, the holidays hit and seeing as how this was the first year following the loss of my mother, it hit kinda extra hard. So here it is, February of 2014, and I am finally able to sit down and devote myself once more to Pool. Except that along comes my sister Cris, who reminds me that I will be attending the RT Convention in a few months and wouldn’t it be a neat thing if I had, say, a hundred copies of something or another to pass out in the Freebie Room? Now, I don’t give a hundred copies of a  700-page book away for free, but as it turns out, I have this little novella I’ve been tinkering at off and on and it would do great as a sampler for the R Lee Smith writing style, but it needs to be finished, edited, printed and shipped before the Con and THAT means I need to work on it.

But working on The Land of the Beautiful Dead means more than just not working on Pool. It also means cutting back on the time I spend ham-fistedly attempting to socially medialize myself since, believe it or not, blogging does not come naturally to me and participating in the writers’ blog hops takes a disproportionately huge chunk of my time every week. So that’s got to stop. At least for the foreseeable future.

However! I do not wish for my cessation of hoppery to mean another ominous span of radio silence like what all happened back in December. So I have been wracking my brains trying to think of something I can post regularly to keep my readers reading without my having to do a lot of writing. And I think I can do it.

Back in 2003, back when my publishing career amounted to a half-dozen short stories that appeared in such timeless periodicals as Dagger of the Mind and Dark Desires (No, you probably won’t have heard of them), and one short story published in Hustler (my contributor’s copy was stolen out of my mailbox. He denies it, but I suspect my brother. I never even got to see my story in print. *sad face*), I entered the Confluence Short Story Writing Contest. The rules were these (as near as I can remember; it was over ten years ago): Entries must be less than 4000 words in length; Content must be “PG-rated” and suitable for all audiences, as winners were to be published in the program book at that year’s Confluence Sci-Fi convention; Entries MUST reflect the contest’s theme, which that year was, “The Alien Wore Fishnet Stockings”. Three winners would be chosen from the submissions by a panel of judges, two of which would receive a gift card of some sort (memory tells me it might have been Olive Garden or something), with a Grand Prize of five hundred dollars awarded to the best story.

So I wrote a story and sent it in. Now, keep in mind that I had exactly no experience with a ‘real’ submission process, although I thought I did. When I sent stories off to Dark Desires, for example, I would receive a phone call later in the week from the guy printing the magazine out in his garage, and he would tell me that he got the story and we’d discuss anything that needed discussing and it was all very friendly and casual. Even when I submitted my story to Hustler, I got a letter in the mail a few weeks later from someone telling me the story had already been read by everyone in the office and how funny it was and here’s your money, you’ll get a contributor’s copy in the mail (which I never did, Gary). My stories weren’t always accepted, obviously, but even when they came back to me, they came back with a friendly rejection letter and I honestly thought the whole world worked like that.

I sent my story in two weeks before the deadline and waited. The deadline came and went, but no one called me to tell me they had received it. No one wrote me a letter, acceptance, rejection or otherwise. Complete radio silence.

A few weeks went by and my bewilderment began to turn to apprehension. Was it really that bad? Could a story even be so bad that no one bothers to tell you how much it sucked? And then a new thought: What if they never got it? What if they lost it? I pictured a table piled high with manuscripts and my own modest offering slipping away behind a filing cabinet, never to be seen again, its genius doomed to go unappreciated until the end of time or the cleaning lady scooped it up and chucked it out with the rest of the trash. O horror! As days continued to pass, the idea that my submission had been lost continued to build in me until I could not stand it anymore. I dug out my contest rules and did something so unprofessional, I’m cringing as I confess it: I emailed them and asked if they had read my story. I did not ask if they would please attach it to the refrigerator with little magnets once they did find it, perhaps adorned with stickers and gold stars, but I think it was probably assumed.

To my (past) relief and (present) surprise, I actually got an answer to this attention-begging tactic. I was told yes, they had received it and read it. O happy day! Then I was told not to tell anyone (whoops), because they really shouldn’t be telling me, but I had won the Grand Prize. Five hundred dollars for a single short story was more than I had ever imagined at that time. Even Hustler only gave me a hundred (and the contributor’s copy which absolutely did not end up beneath my brother’s mattress, right? Right). Buoyed by this tremendous success (my story was potentially read by two or even three thousand people at a science-fiction convention!), I began to think seriously about scrapping the whole short-story-in-fanzines approach and writing a novel. I had this idea for one about a woman who was abducted by bat-people…

Anyhoo, all of this is an unnecessarily convuluted way of saying here is my 2003 Confluence Short Story Writing Contest Grand Prize Winning story, Interspecies Relations, which I will be posting here once a week, roughly half a page at a time. Since I have no plans at this time to ever publish it anywhere else (I really don’t do PG-ratings), only you, dear readers, and whoever read their Confluence program book back in 2003, will ever see this story. Enjoy!

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INTER-SPECIES RELATIONS (part 1)

Hannah Fuller stood at the side of her newlywed spouse and tried to ignore the clamor of what seemed like a thousand news reporters and Secret Service agents as she fished out the key to the front door of her brand new home.  Her mate-for-life clicked its mandibles nervously when the first key wouldn’t turn, but the next one got it and the door opened.  Hannah started forward.

There was a complex pattern of chirps, and an androgynous, faintly tinny-sounding voice emanated from the translator clipped to her mate’s collar:  “Wait.”

“What’s the matter, Nix?”  Besides the army of press hounds gnashing their teeth behind us, I mean.  Hannah refused to look at them, but she wanted very much to be out of their range, and the sooner the better.

X’sizza’’ryk’n’a’’a’nix waved its antenna in an oddly evocative gesture of apology.  “This is our new home,” said the translator as the Tharku whistled and chirped.  “Should not we be carried across its outer access?  Yes?”

The thought of trying to heft the eight-foot alien momentarily staggered Hannah’s weary imagination.  Ever perceptive of her moods, Nix immediately wrung its sensitive feeler-hands and started waving its hooked foreclaws anxiously.  “It is the custom to be carried?  Yes?  Or bad luck follows?  I have studied the customs of your people and I would not offend my wife.”  Nix bobbed its head in great distress.

Hannah patted Nix’s thorax amid a strobe of flashbulbs.

“It’s okay, Nix, let’s just think about it for a sec.”

The human bent her head while the Tharku rotated its left eye back at the cameras.  “Why don’t you lift me over and I’ll try to…pull you in.  Okay?”

“Yes.  Acceptable.”  The translator’s perfect neutrality belied the obvious relief seen in swaying antenna.  A moment later, Nix’s strong feeler-hands closed gingerly around Hannah’s waist and she was thumped down in the echoing interior of her new home.  She braced herself against the wall and pulled as hard as she could as her spouse gave a little hop and let itself be propelled into the foyer.  Then they both turned and slammed away the news crews with a satisfying bang.

Weekend Writer Warrior 2/1

The Weekend Writing Warriors blog hop is a weekly event in which writers are invited to share eight sentences from one of their works for other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment on. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s 8 comes from Pool and finally concludes that scene that started way back in the first week of January, which means I have to do something different, starting tomorrow. Whatever will it be…?

 

“Just thought I’d mention it,” John called casually, still herding Norah back to the car. “In case you all think it might be fun to dress up in your mom’s sheets and play ghost tonight.”

“John!” she gasped, appalled.

“Ukpatiga kungiuk,” the older sister spat, disgusted. She took her little sister’s hand and headed back up the road. “You’re going to wish they were only ghosts up there. You’re all going to die. And no one will ever find anything but your chewed-up bones.”

Sunday Sneak Peek

Sneak Peek Sunday is a weekly blog hop in which writers are challenged to post six paragraphs, no more and no less, from a published work or work in progress and then invite other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s Sneak Peek is once again from Pool, as we learn more of the history of the mountain and the mine where Norah and her friends are staying. This scene will conclude with next week’s WeWriWa, which means I have to find something else to post. I have something a little special in mind…

 

“That is weird,” Norah said slowly, carefully. “But what makes you so sure it wasn’t, like, bears or…?”

The girl looked at her contemptuously. “That’s the thing about you people,” she said. “You always say, ‘Where’s the proof?’ just like it’s not all around you. There were sixty, seventy people up at there! How many bears do you think got hungry that night? Or maybe you think the bears buried the bodies?”

“It might have been claim-jumpers,” John said suddenly, behind her. She hadn’t heard him come up.

Now the girl sneered openly. “Luqi, yeah, claim-jumpers. Except that Hodel didn’t have a claim, he had a whole stupid mine, so jumping that might have been a little pointless, and plus, like I said, only the bodies were gone. Hodel’s cashbox was still in the paymaster’s office and there was lots of money and other stuff just lying around.”

“Yeah, whatever. Come on, Norah.” John slipped an arm around her and pulled her firmly away. “But maybe I should mention before we go that bears are a distinct possibility up there, and just so you know, I’m pretty inclined to shoot first and investigate later if I think I hear one.”

Norah looked apologetically backwards, but the sisters didn’t notice her at all. The older one was glaring at John’s back while the younger merely looked fretful.

Weekend Writer Warrior 1/25

The Weekend Writing Warriors blog hop is a weekly event in which writers are invited to share eight sentences from one of their works for other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment on. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s 8 comes from Pool, and while I feverishly work on that (and am not at all noodling around on Jurassic Park Builder), I will be running snippets from the same scene until the scene ends. Enjoy!

“Tore up to hell,” the older emphasized. “Doors and windows busted in, tents ripped, and blood everywhere—”

“Everywhere.”

“But no bodies.” The older sister waited a beat to make sure Norah caught the significance of this, then grimly went on, “Of course, the proper authorities knew exactly what had happened, and after they finished arresting and hanging all the uppity Indians and confiscating all the loose money from the dead men, they closed up the mine and wrote to Hodel’s son to tell him what had happened. Oddly enough,” she said sarcastically, “old Junior didn’t want to come back, not even to sell off the property. But he kept it. And now you have it.”

Sunday Sneak Peek 1/19

Sneak Peek Sunday is a weekly blog hop in which writers are challenged to post six paragraphs, no more and no less, from a published work or work in progress and then invite other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s Sneak Peek is from Pool, continuing the scene I left off after yesterday’s WeWriWa and continuing until the scene ends, I guess. Why mess with a good thing?

            Norah drew back, surprised and a little hurt, since she had been listening in fascination and without any sign, she was sure, of doubt.

“Even Hodel’s own son ran away,” the girl was saying, and paused to give Norah an imperious sniff. “I guess that’s who you got the land from and all. And then, one day…I don’t remember which exact day it was, but you can look it up in the records if you don’t believe me…everyone disappeared.”

“How?”

“No one knows,” said the younger one.

“No one does,” the older girl agreed. “Hodel used to send his flunkies down here for stock for his company store once a week, and when the week went out and no one came down, folks got curious. They got some white guys to go on up there and check things out, and when they got there, they found the whole camp empty. Iperainnarpok.”

“But tore up,” said the young one.

Weekend Writer Warriors 1/18

The Weekend Writing Warriors blog hop is a weekly event in which writers are invited to share eight sentences from one of their works for other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment on. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s 8 comes from Pool, continuing the scene in town where Norah and her friends meet up with some of the locals and learn a little history about the mountain where they are staying. This scene began last WeWriWa and continued through the following Sunday Sneak Peek and will probably keep continuing until I run out of scene.

Her sister nodded. “The mine was only open maybe a year and Richard Hodel managed to kill off something like two hundred miners, most of them Naiaksit. Indians. Huvamiak. Who cares, right?” Another toss of her hair. “He was an evil man, so no one was really surprised when people started to leave. They’d tell people they heard stuff way down in the mine, or that people were getting dragged off and later they’d find these bones, human bones, kipkark, all chewed on, but nobody believed them, just like you don’t believe me,” she added.

 

Sneak Peek Sunday

Sneak Peek Sunday is a weekly blog hop in which writers are challenged to post six paragraphs, no more and no less, from a published work or work in progress and then invite other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s Sneak Peek is from Pool, continuing the snippet I ran on yesterday’s WeWriWa, wherein Norah and her friends get a little more colorful local history on the mountain and the mine where they are staying.

            “Is it bears?” Norah asked.

The girl tossed one shoulder in a shrug. “Some of it could be, I guess. We got enough bears around here. But bears didn’t cause what happened at the mine in 1898.”

She paused again to scrutinize Norah’s face while her little sister cringed back and wrung her hands.

“Richard Hodel was a tonrar, an evil man,” she declared, once she was satisfied with Norah’s level of interest and sincerity. “He bought up as much land as he could wrap his claws around. Whatever he couldn’t buy for pennies, he just stole, killing all the Naiaksit who wouldn’t let him run them off their land. When he built the mine on Mount Isaac, people were glad, because they knew it was only a matter of time before the mountain ate him.”

“The mountain—?”

“Ate him,” the younger sister said softly. Her eyes were huge.

Weekend Warrior Writers 1/11/14

The Weekend Writing Warriors blog hop is a weekly event in which writers are invited to share eight sentences from one of their works for other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment on. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s 8 comes from Pool, wherein I offer up a little more history on the mountain where Norah and her friends are staying.

            The older girl studied her intently, but apparently found no offense, no matter how hard she looked for it. She didn’t thaw any, but she did unlock just a little. “It’s not the only bad place in those mountains, that’s all I’m saying,” she said. “White people keep going up there and they keep disappearing. Nobody finds their bones in five years or even fifty, you know? When they disappear up there, they disappear for good. And no one knows what’s doing it. Tireksorpok, yeah? It’s all unseen.”

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Come back for tomorrow’s Sneak Peek Sunday to read more from this scene!

Sunday Sneak Peek 1/5/14

Sneak Peek Sunday is a weekly blog hop in which writers are challenged to post six paragraphs, no more and no less, from a published work or work in progress and then invite other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s Sneak Peek is from Pool, my current work-in-progress. To set the scene, my heroine and her friends have spent their first night in the abandoned mine she has inherited and are beginning the clean up…

Norah rested her hands on the desktop and bent her head. “I don’t know what you want me to say and I don’t know why I have to say anything anyway. I’m sorry he doesn’t meet your standards of what makes a good boyfriend. You have my permission not to date him.”

“Okay, okay! I just—What the hell is this?”

Norah looked up. Hayley was looking down. She had swept the corner clean around the impressive bulk of the safe and out toward the middle of the room as she’d been talking and had uncovered part of a dark stain, invisible beneath the dust, but black against the floorboards.

“Ink?” Norah guessed, but even as she said it, her eyes moved to the inkwell on the desk. The reservoir was the size of a bottlecap. The bottle from which it was supplied could have held another ounce or two, but it was powdered. It would have taken the contents of several bottles to make the stain…and Hayley was uncovering more and more of it.

“It has to be ink,” Norah insisted, but her stomach didn’t believe her and neither did Hayley.

Sweeping faster, Hayley uncovered the whole stain and stood slowly back from it. It dominated the room, stretching from its narrowest edge past the desk almost to the door, where it spread out in a great pool…with a pale impression at its center that, with a little imagination, might have been a man’s upper body and outstretched arm.