DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 69

The Kittens.

There’s a house in your dreams, THE HOUSE.  It isn’t the same house, except it is.  Although sometimes it’s a submarine or a skyscraper, or, in my daughter’s case, a spaceship.  There is a story that has to be carried out, in this house.  Everything that happens there, you seem to be an outside observer, even when you’re in the dream.

I dream of the house from time to time.   I dreamed of it last night.  Over the last few years it hasn’t been the house so much as the basement that I dream of.  Last night it was the basement again, the cellar actually.   I was upstairs, and the person I was with said, “You have to go through the doors,” and I gave them a look that said, “You could be a little clearer, couldn’t you?” and he pointed out of the house at the cellar doors, painted red.  The house itself was unfinished, and I jumped out of the framed wall and onto the fresh dirt.

When I was inside the house, the doors were closed; when I came out, they were open.  My dreams have a lot of continuity problems at the best of times.

The stairs were those poured concrete ones, sharp along the edges, and oddly (but understandably) new.  The texture of the concrete wasn’t Swiss cheese or anything, but the bubbles in it were unpacked with dust or dirt.  How often do you see new concerete, so new that there are thin gray skins of concrete around the sides of the bubbles?  It seemed alien at the time.

At the foot of the stairs, around the left, was a hole in the wall.   Daylight shone in from above; there were also lights strung up along the ceiling, which was higher than it should have been: the place was cavernous and disappeared into a vanishing point, like an enormous mine tunnel lined with cement or like a sewer tunnel, only square.  It sloped downward and faded out of sight.  Here’s how these dreams usually go:  I have to go downwards into a series of basements, each of which leads to another basement, and there is something behind me, chasing me, and/or something ahead of me, horrific but not really fast-moving, which must be seen, because it must, and that’s all there is to it.

This time, someone sat at the foot of the stairs.  He was holding a kitten, in a towel.   An orange kitten, I don’t know what kind of towel.  He was dressed like he was out of The Gangs of New York, with suspenders and maybe a newsboy hat.   Maybe I just want there to have been a hat.  He said, “They don’t know anything but fear.  You have to be careful not to teach them any more fear.”  I came closer and the kitten struggled out of his arms and ran away.

Let me tell you what didn’t happen:  I didn’t go down the slope.  From time to time in the dream, I would know that I had gone down the slope.  There was something about a room full of computers, something urgent and plot-related. When I realized I was there, I undid it, so that I hadn’t gone down the slope.

Whatever it is that makes dreams, sometimes I struggle against it.  Considering that it’s another part of myself that makes dreams, maybe I shouldn’t.  There’s always this idea that your subconscious is right and your consciousness is wrong:  but what if that’s wrong?

I crawled over to the hole.  It was full of kittens, nests of kittens.  In cardboard shelters, surrounded by straw.  Old enough to have their eyes open and be cute rather than pitiful.  When I reached for them, they moved away.  But if I buried my hand in the straw and rustled it around, several pounced.  I caught one.   It was Siamese-looking, the same as a batch of cats we used to have on the farm.  I can’t remember feeling it with my hands, but I rubbed my face in its fur, which was soft, and now I have the feeling that it was my daughter’s hair.  I’m always rubbing my face in her hair, to feel it and smell it.  I can’t tell you what the cat smelled like.  Sometimes I can smell things in dreams, but only if I focus on it, and I wasn’t at the time.

I know the dream went on from there, but I don’t remember what happened.  Eventually I woke up.  And when I went to get my daughter up, she clenched her eyes shut, so I let her sleep a little longer.  First I kissed her head, though, because her hair is so soft.  People say the subconscious is smarter than you are, but I disagree.  We just have their own kinds of intelligence.  The subconscious wants to do the same things over and over.  Over and over again.

Help me, my subconscious says.  The kittens.

How to EXPLODE Someone Else’s Brains with the POWER OF YOUR MIND

(A story)

Daphne had been kicked out of her friend Nina’s house because Nina got grounded.  It happens, you get grounded.  Ugh!  It was so frustrating!  One minute they were playing video games and the next everyone was in tears.  In.  Tears.

It was so unfair, too.

None of the parents would believe JUST HOW EVIL Mrs. Barkone was.  NONE of them.  And just because Mrs. Barkone called Nina’s house and accused her of stealing that horrible boy’s lunchbox didn’t make it true.  Not at all.  And Daphne had proof, but Nina’s parents didn’t want to listen.  That was the problem.  Nobody wanted to listen.

And so, as Daphne stood at the sidewalk in front of Nina’s house waiting for her dad to come pick her up, she thought, I wish that Daphne’s parents’ brains would explode.  WHAM. WHAM. SPLATTER.  Just like that.  And then she bit her tongue. Literally.  Bit.  Her.  Tongue.  Until she tasted a little bit of blood in her mouth.  She spat it on the sidewalk–peh peh peh–but her mouth still tasted bad.

But wishing for things didn’t make them happen.  Or she would have wished a lot of things into happening.

Like Christmas every day.  Or Halloween.  Or her birthday.  Every day.  Her birthday.  Or summer.  If every day was summer then she could spend every day with her mom, on summer vacation.  Her stepmom wouldn’t let her cook.  Or a lot of things.  Her dad was the greatest, except for her mom, who was also the greatest.  Her stepmom was only just okay.  Her dad would be here any second to pick her up in his pickup truck.  He might be mad.  Not at her. He’d been planning to go shopping without her…maybe for a surprise!  Except really he just hated going shopping with her because she kept saying “I want this! And this! And this!!!”

Okay, really, she didn’t really want Nina’s parents’ brains to explode.  Except if they did maybe Nina would come and live over at her house, and that would be cool, except Mom probably wouldn’t want to have Nina over during the summer.   Mom wasn’t a “friends” kind of person.  But otherwise Mom was the best.

Daphne checked her watch.  Her mom gave it to her for Christmas, except it was also supposed to be for her birthday.   It was gold and kind of weird and grown-up-looking but that was cool.  Nobody weirder than Daphne.  Except for her friend Nina!  Dad still wasn’t here and it was almost lunch time.  And Daphne needed to take her medicine.  Every day at noon.  Or she would get too wound up.  And you didn’t want to see Daphne when she was too wound up!  No, ma’am!  Your head might explode!  Except she couldn’t take it out here.  She needed a glass of water.

What she should do, what she should really really do, was go back into Nina’s house and wait inside for her dad.   And while she was waiting for her dad, she would, on purpose, not take her medicine.  And then she would talk.   She would really really talk.  Everybody thought she was hyper, but they didn’t know what she was like when she didn’t take her medicine.  She would go inside Nina’s house and talk.  Until everyone’s heads exploded.  Except for Nina.  She would make Nina wear headphones so she wouldn’t hear THE FULL POWER OF DAPHNE’S WORDS.   And then Daphne would talk.  She would really really talk.

And let out all the words she was secretly thinking under all the words she normally said.  Yeah.  If she ever let all the real words out, that would do it.

WHAM! WHAM! SPLATTER!

Except nobody, not even Nina’s non-listening parents who listened to Mrs. Barkone instead of their own kid, deserved that.

Her dad’s pickup truck pulled up.  ”Nina got grounded,” she said as she climbed up the ladder into the seat.  ”Do you have all your stuff?” he said.  She had all her stuff.  And then she told her dad all about what happened.  Except she left out the parts with the exploding brains.

“Uh-huh,” was all her dad said.  ”Uh-huh.”

Mom once told her that she was like her dad.  Mom was so funny!  Dad was the best, but she wasn’t like her dad.  Not.  At.  All.

Afterword:  This is a De Kenyon story, in case you’re curious.  This tale comes from Ray and a couple of her friends.  Ugh, grounded!  It happens.

Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts #3

Now available at Amazon, Smashwords, Gumroad, and Kobo, with Apple and this time Barnes & Noble coming in hindmost this time.

Ep #1: blog, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Smashwords, Gumroad, Apple, and more.  Free at the blog, Kobo, and Smashwords links; the others will follow.

Ep #2: Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Gumroad, Apple, Kobo, and more.

 

 

“You don’t even know what Latitude and Longitude are!”

Ina exclaimed.

“I do so! Latitude is how much you’re allowed to get in trouble before you’re punished, and Longitude is how long you’re going to get in trouble if you get caught!”

With the invention of a serum that prevents most people infected with the zombie sickness from becoming raving cannibals, Victorian society finds itself in need of more standards:  to separate the infected from the whole, to  control when and how the infected can come into contact with the pure, to establish legal contracts, precedence, employment, and more, with regards to the walking dead.

The very backbone of the British Empire is its standards.

The middle daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, Alice Liddell, finds a certain lack of charm in the standards she must follow, with increasing strictness, day after day.  Wild and rebellious, she battles her father’s cold discipline, her mother’s striving to hide her middle-class origins, and the hollow madness of the world around her, in which the teetering Empire desperately pretends that nothing is, in fact, the matter.

Enter Mr. Charles Dodgson:  one of the chaste Dons of Oxford, married to his mathematics.  He charms Alice and her sisters, often taking them on walks and boat rides (chaperoned, of course), and telling them jokes and stories.  He is twenty-four when he first meets them.

And he is dead.

Turned in a tragic accident at Rugby, Charles uses the serum to keep him from the ordinary sort of madness that affects zombies.

But it doesn’t affect the elegant madness of his brain.

And one day, as he sees Alice struggle against the chains that constrict her, chains so similar to his own…

…one of his playful stories becomes something more.

Episode 3: In which Alice, her sisters, the Reverend Mr. Duckworth, and Mr. Dodgson boat up the Thames, and a story–the story–is begun.

 

Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts #1

Since I’m on episode #3 now, I’m going to start promulgating Ep #1 for free here and there, like a little fairy…

Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts #1

(Now free at Smashwords and Kobo; other sites in progress.)

Foreword

Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies came out in 2009.

I suspect the first day I so much as heard of it, I had the idea for this book in the back of my mind.  In 2011, I wrote the first draft for a NaNoWriMo project.

I have been terrified to do anything with it ever since.  The Alice books are my favorite books ever.  I have combed through The Annotated Alice more times than I can count.  I love the Tenniel illustrations.  I’ve poured over biographies (Morton Cohen’s Lewis Carroll:  A Biography is the one I drew on most strongly here), I’ve wondered at the missing diary pages, I’ve gasped at the thought of the real-life Alice running around with the Queen’s children, and I’ve goggled at the surrealness of Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot.  I debated with myself for hours over whether to attempt to use British spellings and grammar and whatnot (I decided against it for the time being but am working on it).

And the cover.

There’s an image I wanted to use.  A pair of them.  But I’ve had trouble getting good digital copies of the photographs at rates I can afford, so that may have to wait.

Both of the pictures are by Charles Dodgson, Lewis Carroll’s original.  The Dodo.

One picture’s from 1857.  I can’t seem to find the first picture that Dodgson took of the Liddell girls (in 1856), but there’s one from 1857 that captures what I want.  A little girl sits with her hands in her lap, staring at the camera.  She’s got this look on her face.  “Oh come on, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.” She’s no curly-haired, tame blonde thing.  She’s dark-haired and willful looking.  She’s trouble.

The other one’s from 1870, the last picture that Dodgson ever took of her.  An upper-class young woman slouches forward in the chair as if no effort of will could make her sit up straight again.  She glares at the camera, accusing it–of what, we’re not sure.  She’s eighteen and her mother wants her to sit for a portrait suitable for advertising her on the marriage market.  It’s the same year that Dodgson is writing Through the Looking-Glass, the same year the White Knight falls off his horse, endlessly, while escorting the fictional Alice towards her Queendom; inevitably, she leaves him behind.

I can’t escape the idea that there’s something intertwined between the life of the real Alice and the fictional one; that the books are a kind of instruction manual, a code–a message to a stubborn, willful upper-class girl about how to survive the madness of the Victorian era, with its standards and hypocrisies.

This isn’t a book about zombies running rampage over England (although they do a bit) or about Alice slaughtering her way through oncoming hordes.   Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t the story I meant to tell.  This is more of a teatime with zombies story, quite civilized, until it isn’t.

I apologize for the errors (they’re all my own, which is what makes them so terrifying) and hope that, in my retelling, I haven’t done the characters and people herein a disservice.

Chapter One

(1856; Age Four)

“Alice!  Hold still this instant!”

Mother pinched the top of her ear with sharp fingernails.  She was annoyed because the small side parlor hadn’t been dusted properly.  Edith was only a baby, but Ina had done her chores in half a moment, then refused to help even though she didn’t have as much to do, in addition to which Alice had been told to stay off the chairs, which meant that Alice had only dusted what she could reach from the floor and of course Mother always looked at things from such an incredible height that she never did see the places where Alice had cleaned.  Mother said that even the best kind of people ought to have responsibilities when Alice had protested that she wasn’t a maid.

“Ow!” she cried.  “Stop pinching me.”

“And shush.” Her mother picked up the brush.  “We’ll just have to hope that dust won’t show in the photograph when Mr. Dodgson comes to take your picture.  What were you thinking?”

“Ow-wow-wow!”  The harder her mother brushed her hair, the louder she shouted, until Ina and Edith had their hands over their ears.

“She won’t let you go until all the knots are out of your hair, Alice,” Ina said.  “It’s your punishment for not brushing it yourself.”  She sat in one of the pretty chairs with the flowers on the cushions with her legs crossed at the ankles and a book in her lap.

Alice rather thought that Ina needed a handful of mud put down her pockets, because she seemed so very older-sisterish and tidy, which must have been uncomfortable.

“What about Edith?  She has knots in her hair.”

“She’s only a baby,” Ina said, then turned the page in the heavy book.  Alice wasn’t allowed to read books by herself any longer; one accident two years ago, when she was quite younger than she was now, and Mother had flown into an unforgiving rage.

At any rate, none of them wanted to tell Father if anything should happen to one of the books, which meant that keeping Alice (and Edith) away from them was rather safer.

“Don’t worry about Edith’s hair, Alice,” her mother yanked the brush again.  “Worry about your own.”

“Why can’t Miss Prickett brush my hair?” Alice asked, speaking before she thought, as usual.  “She brushes better than you do.”

Ina’s eye flicked toward Alice while she turned another page.  Edith banged a wooden spoon on the leg of the chair, trying to crush the dust-motes that sparkled in the air.  In a second, Mother had taken the spoon from her, dumped Alice over her lap, and beat her several times with the spoon.

“Don’t…talk…to me…about…Miss Prickett!” her mother exclaimed.

Alice bit her lip.  Crying out now would only make things worse, because then she would be sent to explain herself to Father.

“Oh!” her mother cried.  “Even your underthings are brown with dust.  Alice!  What kind of manners is Miss Prickett teaching you?”  And then her mother hit her again.

Ina glanced at Alice again, and Alice understood that now was the time to submit to Mother without another word or whimper:  Miss Prickett was something precious, and not to be dragged into Mother’s attention more than necessary.

“It’s all my fault, Mother.  I’m rather wild, you know.”

Mother released her, brushing her skirts down for her.  “If you can’t behave, then I shall tell Miss Prickett that it is time that she was replaced with someone sterner.”

“Yes, Mother.  I shall be quite good.”

Mother nodded.

If Alice’s contriteness wasn’t entirely genuine, it wasn’t entirely false, either.  The children were all fond of Miss Prickett, even though Alice’s fondness tended to show itself as  pranks and teasing.

Mother was not one to cross.

—

Eventually, Mother left them in the hot parlor, which contained nothing that might muss their hair, with strict instructions not to move a muscle.  Alice couldn’t help pointing out that they would soon suffocate if they weren’t allowed to breathe, but her mother had ignored her and swept out of the room, her skirts brushing against the carpets and the furniture with a heavy swish that scattered Edith’s toys and the chess game that Ina had been trying to teach Alice when they had first been deposited in the room earlier that morning, before Alice’s escape, capture, re-desposit, and assignment of housework.

Alice paced around the parlor, looking into corners and behind chairs.

“What are you doing?” Ina asked.

“Looking.”

“Looking at what?”

“Everything.”  Alice was never allowed into the small parlor, which was rarely used.  Alice peered at the silhouettes and the paintings on the walls.  Dozens of stern faces looked down at her, intermixed with castles and churches.

Ina said primly, “Mother said we are all related to the people in this room, and we should always remember that our actions reflect upon them.  Their greatness reflects on us, so we should do our duty and reflect it back to them—oh, Edith.  Don’t put that in your mouth.”

Alice sighed, stomped over to Edith, and took the pawn away from her.  Edith burst into tears.

“Now see what you made me do,” she told Ina.

“I did no such thing.”

“You did, too.”  Alice grabbed the rest of the chess set and put it back on the sideboard while Edith howled.

“Give her a sweet,” Ina said.

Alice sat in one of the fancy chairs and crossed her arms over her chest.  “I don’t mind the sound of her crying.”  She looked at the ceiling, trying to see if there were any spiders she could capture and drop onto the back of Ina’s fancy chair.

Ina closed the book with a thump and picked up Edith.  “Don’t cry, little mouse.”  She pulled a tin of pastilles out of her pocket and gave one to Edith.  “Only one, now, or you’ll spoil your luncheon.”  Edith, well-trained, popped open her mouth and sucked contentedly.

Alice jumped out of her chair and stood next to Ina as she put Edith back on the floor in the middle of her overturned toys.  Alice opened her mouth like a small bird.

“Oh, Alice,” Ina said.

Alice sniffed and whimpered like a baby about to burst into tears and rubbed one fat finger under her eye, just like Edith would insist on doing.  Ina laughed and gave her a pastille.  “You are such a naughty little kitten,” she said.

Alice purred and rubbed her head against Ina’s arm, then set the chess pieces to right again.  “Will you play with me?”

“I’m reading,” Ina said.

“You’re always reading.  It’s dull.”

“It is not.”

“It’s dull for me.”

Ina sighed and closed the book, this time quietly, with her finger in between the pages to mark her place.  “All right.  I’ll tell you a story then.  But only a short one, and then you have to play with Edith and keep her amused and not let her fuss.”

“All right,” Alice said.  She sat on the floor next to Edith, puffing up twinkling clouds of dust, which would have made Mother unhappy, although Alice thought it rather clever of her, using her petticoats to dust the rugs.  She picked up the scattered toys and set them within Edith’s reach in rows, as though they were her audience at a play or her soldiers in a war.   Edith wiped out a row of them with one cruel gesture.

Ina announced, “The photographer, Mr. Dodgson, is a zombie.”

Alice squealed with delight.  “Oh!  Is he?”

Ina snorted.  “Yes.  And that’s the end of the story.  Remember, you promised.”

Alice gaped at her.  “That’s not a proper story.”

“It is, too.”

“No it isn’t!” Alice shouted.

Edith’s face screwed up.  “All right, hush.  Mother said that he was infected years and years ago, but nobody knew, because it was dormant.”

“What’s dormant?”

The corner of Ina’s mouth twitched.  “Hidden under a rug.  Door-mat.”

Alice leaned forward and slapped Ina on the leg.  “That’s not true.  Stop making up words.”

Ina pulled her stockinged leg out of Alice’s reach. “It’s a real word.”

“It is not.”

They sulked, with Ina reading and Alice setting up the toys again, until the door opened and Mother swept back into the room, knocking all the toys over again.  “Girls!  Mr. Dodgson is here.”

Alice groaned and started to set the toys aright.

“Up, please.  Off the floor,” Mother said.

Ina put her book on the little table beside her, and Alice jumped up and stood next to her.  Ina poked her in the side and pointed, and Alice bent over and picked up Edith, who opened her mouth and started crying.

“Give…her…a sweet,” Ina hissed.

“I don’t have any,” Alice whispered back.  “You have all the sweets, you selfish cow.  You give her one.”

The gentleman who had followed Mother into the room coughed softly into his glove, and the two girls looked up at him, leaving Edith to cry as she would.  Really, there was no stopping her for long, and the two of them had simply learned to ignore the noise unless adults were around.

Mr. Dodgson was very tall, taller than Father, and quite thin.  He had brown hair that was nearly as long as Alice’s (hers had been cut quite short after the hedgehog incident) and stopped near his chin.

“Are you a zombie?” she asked.

“Oh, Alice,” Ina moaned.

Mother reached towards Alice to get at her ear again, but Alice stepped behind Ina and switched Edith to her other side.  Edith was as fat as anything, probably from all the sweets that Ina had given her, and made a good shield against being pinched or poked.

The man coughed into his glove again, this time a little more loudly.  After a few seconds, he said, “I’m…afraid so.”

“You’re afraid of being a zombie?” Alice asked.  Edith was wiggling to get down, so she let the baby slither down to the floor and pick up a toy, which she chewed between bouts of sobbing.  As Mr. Dodgson was standing quite close to them, Alice noticed that his left leg was manacled to a heavy ball, which he apparently dragged behind him.  “Have you been press-ganged?”  She had heard all kinds of stories about people doing things they oughtn’t, then waking up the next morning to find themselves turned into zombies and press-ganged onto a ship with a heavy cannonball chained to their legs, so if they tried to escape they would sink over the side of the ship and be forced to walk along the bottom of the ocean for ever and ever, because zombies didn’t die, not unless they were spiked in the back of their heads with a horrific crunch!  Alice had always wanted to see a zombie spiked, but she supposed that Mother wouldn’t allow her to try it out on Mr. Dodgson, or not until after their pictures had been taken, at any rate.

“Ah, ah, ah, yes.  I mean, ah, um, no.”

She wasn’t sure whether he was laughing at her or not.  “Which is it?”  She took a deep breath to see if he smelled bad.   At any rate, something smelled bad, but it might have been Edith.

He giggled into his hand.

“Don’t do that,” Alice said.  “I don’t like it when people laugh at me instead of answering the question.”

He coughed, then lowered his hand.

“Oh, I’m a zombie,” he said.  “A perfectly tame zombie.  B-but I haven’t been press, ah, press-ganged.  I’m a terrible sailor.”

“You were press-ganged into taking pictures of us,” Alice declared.  “I’m sorry that your whole life has been ruined for nothing, because I don’t want to have my picture taken.  It’s dull.”

The man laughed deep down in his throat, making a half-gargling sound as Mother got Alice by the ear again, Alice having quite literally lowered her defenses.

“Ow!”

Mr. Dodgson said something about going outside because of the light, and Ina leaned over and whispered, “You’re in for it now.”

Alice kicked at Ina, but as Mother was dragging Alice by one arm into the hall, she missed.

“Come with me, girls,” Mother said.  “Let’s do finish this quickly, so Mr. Dodgson can get back to his…other tasks.”

Alice, stumbling along after her mother and twisting around to see behind her, said, “I thought you weren’t supposed to call zombies Mister any more.  In all the stories, they’re called the former Mister or arghhhh a zombie run!”

“That was before the serum that allows us to retain our presence of mind was invented, my dear Miss Alice,” Mr. Dodgson said, clearing his throat.  “Now, if one remains calm and refrains from eating anyone, one may retain the title of ‘Mister.’  However, if a zombie attempts to bite one, it’s quite proper to begin one’s address with a blood-curdling scream.”

Ina, with Edith on her hip, carefully closed the door behind them and stayed away from Mr. Dodgson’s iron ball, which he dragged behind him, making him walk with a lurch.

“Like this?”  Alice let out an earsplitting shriek that made him cover his ears and open his mouth in mock-horror.

“Indeed,” Mr. Dodgson said, as Mother nipped her ear sharply again.

—

Taking photographs wasn’t quite as bad as Ina had made it out to be.  Alice had suspected that Ina had been lying about one or two things, and, as it turned out, Alice wasn’t frozen as a statue for ever and ever, so there.  Mr. Dodgson made it seem like a game as he and Miss Prickett set up a carpet and a chair in the garden while Mother watched.

“Why can’t we take pictures inside, if we’re going to make it look as though we were inside anyhow?” Alice asked.  Mr. Dodgson had asked her to sit on a chair so he could try to focus the camera.  She kicked her legs back and forth.

“Alice,” her mother hissed.  “Sit still.”

“That’s a good question,” Mr. Dodgson said.  “The answer is that cameras are not nearly as good at seeing things as your eye is.  Your eye takes a picture with just a blink, like this.”  He blinked owlishly at them.

“I can blink faster than that,” Alice said, blinking dozens of times, her eyelids fluttering.

“Your eyes work better than mine, then,” Mr. Dodgson agreed solemnly.  “But even my eyes work faster than this camera.  In addition to being quite slow, it sees rather poorly in the dark, and even the bright daylight of the parlor is too dim for the poor thing.”

“It’s quite stupid, then.”  Alice glanced at her mother, but Mother had become bored with them and had wandered off, checking on the work the gardeners had done; some new roses had been put in, but they hadn’t been the ones she’d wanted, and she was working herself up to being quite cross at someone other than Alice, which was rarely a bad thing.

Mr. Dodgson leaned forward toward her, and she found herself taking a step backward.  He mightn’t look like a zombie, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t eat her.  He whispered, “Yes, but don’t tell the camera it is stupid.  If you get it to crying, I won’t be able to take a clear picture for a month.  It cries even more than your sister Edith.”  Then he leaned back.

“How did you become a zombie?” she asked.  “Have you eaten anyone?”

“Oh, no,” he reassured her.  “I have never eaten anyone, although I did have the misfortune to see someone eaten.”

“When was that?” Alice asked, leaning forward.

“At Rugby School,” he said.

Alice nodded.  She had once overheard her father saying that Rugby was nothing but a pack of beasts, although it was better than it had been, so very long ago.  “How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-four.”

She nodded again, because that was very old, and tallied with Father’s report of Rugby.

“And how did you become a zombie?” she pressed.

“Hm,” Mr. Dodgson said.  “I should be quite happy to tell you, on one condition.  The camera is all ready.  If you should sit in the chair like so, I will tell you that story.  While I am talking, that is the time it takes for the camera to blink.  As you recall, it does take a terribly long time, almost a full minute, for the camera to blink and take your picture.

“However, during the story, you must be terribly, terribly careful not to cry, for it is a very sad story, and if you should cry, well, that would ruin the picture and we should have to start all over again, and you might even get the camera to crying, and then who knows where we should end up.”

“Should I hold my breath?” Alice breathed until her chest felt like it would pop and held her breath with her cheeks puffed out.

Mr. Dodgson coughed into his hand again, and she scowled at him.  “No, no need to hold your breath.  Just breathe very shallowly, as though you were pretending to be dead.”

“Hmph,” Alice snorted, but she liked the idea very much: to pretend to be dead while listening to a zombie tell a story about how he was turned into a zombie.  “Do you breathe?”

“I do,” Mr. Dodgson confirmed, making some last few adjustments in the darkness of the cloth covering the back of the camera.  “But not as often as I used to.”

“Then press-ganged zombies would drown if they were thrown off a ship,” Alice exclaimed.

“Oh, no.  They simply would be unable to speak very well until they had come up to the surface again.  Now, let us begin the picture and the story.  Remember, it is vitally important that you make not a single change of facial expression until the story has finished.”  And then he removed the cap.

Here is the story that Mr. Dodgson told, as Alice sat in front of the camera and listened.  (Despite her mother’s complaints to the contrary, Alice did listen most of the time.  However, she was of the opinion that listening didn’t oblige her in any way to do what she was told.)

* * * * *

One day, as I was attending school in Rugby, I happened upon a dark hole in the middle of a field.  The hole hadn’t been there the day before, and, as you will see, it wasn’t there even an hour after I left it.

I was laying on my stomach over the hole and reaching my arm down with a stick to see if I could reach the bottom, when suddenly I saw a white rabbit running toward me.  My experience had previously been of rabbits doing the opposite: that is, running away as fast as possible.  “Curiouser and curiouser,” I cried.

The rabbit, apparently not even noticing I was there, ran bang-on into me and bounced backward, unable to take another step for fright.

I looked up to see what could have possibly scared it so.  Charging toward us was a maddened zombie, quite ready to eat any body it should happen upon, and it seemed only too glad to see both Mr. Rabbit and myself.

I jumped to my feet with only the stick as a weapon.  I swung the stick at the zombie as though it were a sword:  one, two, one, two!  However, the stick snapped in half, and I was left defenseless.  I stood my ground and dared the zombie to do its worst.

Just then, the rabbit gave a roar (if you have never heard a roaring rabbit, it is quite memorable) and attacked the zombie!  You see, the poor thing had been bitten earlier and was starting to turn into a zombie, no serum having been administered.

I took a step back and stumbled, almost falling down the hole.  The rabbit and the zombie wrestled for a few moments, the rabbit too light to do much damage, but the zombie unable to dislodge the rabbit from his throat.

Fortunately, the zombie took a step too close to the hole, and down they both went.  I went back to the school, and one of the other boys noticed that I was bleeding.  I went to the headmaster and told him the story of what had happened, but by then the hole was gone, and I taken to the doctor and given the serum before I should change into entirely the wrong sort of zombie, and do say you believe me, or else I should be terribly sad.

* * * * *

He had put the cap back on at some point during the story, but Alice hadn’t noticed.  As soon as he stopped talking, she took a deep breath—towards the end of the story, she’d been holding it.

“That was longer than a minute,” she said.

He gave her a little bow.  “I entirely agree, my dear, but I did so want to finish the story.  However, now I must go and develop the picture.”  He disappeared into the little tent.

Alice looked around her.  The black tent on the garden grass was sitting right where they usually set up their croquet game.  Mother was nowhere to be seen; Miss Prickett was working on a basket of torn things that were usually Alice’s fault, or so Miss Prickett claimed; and Ina was reading a book while Edith began to crawl off under the bushes.

“No, Edith,” Alice said.  “There might be rabbits under there.  Come away.”  She scooped up the little girl, then carried her over to Miss Prickett.  “You might take better care of her,” she said, and went looking for a stick.

If there were zombies about (and not the nice kind, like Mr. Dodgson), she would be the first to attack.  One couldn’t allow one’s friends to be bitten.  It simply wasn’t done.

—

Part 2 of The Queen of Stilled Hearts resumes in 1860, with the arrival of Queen Victoria for a royal visit, as well as a bout of croquet in which Alice loses her temper.  Now available at Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Gumroad, Kobo, and more.

—

The Man Who Ate Gene Wolfe: A Story

When I was a boy I lived in England and considered it the most ordinary place in the world.  It was America that I was fascinated with, if you can imagine that.  I thought that you could find anything in America.  Did you know that the Jolly Green Giant lives in America?  Most of you do not, because you are used to that kind of thing.  Everywhere you go in America, there is something wonderful to see.  Here you have creatures like the Blue Demon Horse, which fell on its creator and killed him.  In England such a thing never would have happened, because nobody would have thought to build a Blue Demon Horse in the first place, and it would have been destroyed if it had killed the hand that made it.  The English take our beliefs very seriously, in a way you Americans do not, and we are the poorer for it.

Being bored and growing up in England as I did, I retreated into my imagination, and because I did not grow up with video games or the Internet, I instead turned to reading books and comic books in my spare time.  Later on, I was also very interested in music, but that is another story.

I read many authors, and, when I found them especially good, I would read everything of theirs that I could, from the first words they had written until their last.  I would beg Mother for pocket money to buy books and comic books, which were a great deal cheaper then.  Sometimes I wonder–but, again, that is a different story.

I could tell you the names of dozens of authors that I read from beginning to end, but today I wish to speak of one particular one.  I think you know of whom I speak.

The first book of his that I read was a book with which I quickly became obsessed.  It is unnecessary to name the book; the fact that you are here, today, tells me that you, too, have had a similar experience, with one book or another of his.  Perhaps it was not even the first book of his you read; his are not books to simply read and  set aside, if you are to discover any particular pleasure in them.   All of us know of someone who had read one of his books through once and taken nothing more from it than a confusion of images, a kind of shimmering, incomprehensible dream.

But to read one of his books a second time–then you have begun to enter into the spirit of the thing.  One of his great gifts has been to show us that everything has meaning.  Perhaps you agree with him on the source and implications of that meaning; perhaps you do not.   Nevertheless, we had never been before given such a gift by a writer–unless it was in Chesterton or Borges, or some obscure French writer of whom no one has heard except the French and other, even more obscure writers.  Everything has meaning.   Think of it.   When someone is born, they are born already imbued with significance; every death has a purpose.   Meaning is not the same thing as destiny; otherwise, there would be only one story, and anyone who has ever written knows that all stories could have just as easily gone in a different direction.

God sees–or, rather, reads–the fall of every sparrow, as well as every sparrow that never fell.   Perhaps Heaven is merely the best of all worlds, and the reason for every suffering we experience is –but that, too, is a different story.

At any rate, although everything has meaning, it does not necessarily follow that any given event only has one meaning.  An event may have many meanings:  it may, for example, juxtapose Through the Looking-Glass and the idea of a technological crutch; it may combine Greek mythology along with South American.  And, while some would argue because of the transient nature of what we read into one of his stories–some of the earlier interpretations now seem dated indeed–I would say that the meaning itself is fixed, and it was never intended for our vision, but the vision of God.

What that word means, I cannot pretend to know.  But I learned to believe in it while reading that first book of his, not for the first time, nor even the tenth, but upon further study, in which I dissected the story, character by character, scene by scene, reference by reference.  The more deeply, the more fully I read, the more I realized that the meanings that I has so assiduously gleaned from his stories before were only flimsy veils before the true meaning of his story.

Did I understand the true meaning of his story–then, or ever?  I did not.  But I glimpsed it.

I have heard his stories called “irreducible,” the implication being that the meaning of the story is the story itself; that any map drawn of one of his stories must necessarily be as long as, if not longer than, the story itself; that, in order to characterize his stories with any accuracy, one must not comment upon them at all.

This is not true.

I mentioned earlier that I would read certain authors from beginning to end, from first word to last.  He has been one of them, and has perhaps been the greatest influence on my work, or at least an increasingly important influence on my work.  I still cannot say that I can understand his stories, but I feel that I can characterize them.

In consuming his words thoroughly and repeatedly, as I have, I feel that I have consumed the man himself.  Not literally, of course.  But I have, within myself, created a kind of icon of him, an eidolon.  A kind of small god, of the genus mentoris, an irreducible belief in the man himself.  My soul, despite not being any larger than it is, contains his, as well as the souls of other writers and mentors I have known.   If I were a topologist it would be an interesting conundrum–how something only so large can contain something, in toto, larger than itself, but, as I am a writer, I am used to containing worlds within my imagination; I am used to the map being as large as the territory, if not larger; I am used to working with infinities on a regular basis.

And so it is with confidence that I can say that his stories are as accurately read by the first-time reader as by the one who reads them for the thousandth:  a kind of shimmering, incomprehensible dream; that is, a direct experience of Mystery itself, which contains itself, and yet is larger than itself.  The more we discover his stories, the more we are lost; the more we consume of him, the more we are consumed.

And that is why I came to America, in the end.  Because of the monsters I expected, and have not failed, to find.

Tumi: Ritual Dagger Shovels

This was just too weird not to share.

Tumi

Incan ritual dagger-shovel, known as a Tumi, that was used to a) pry open/crack open ribs, b) shovel out innards.  Obviously, the one pictured here (from Wikipedia) is a recreation (P E R U) but it’s still disturbing.

The godlings on top of the tumi are named after the hero Tumi, aka Ñaylamp, who was sired by the mythic bird creature Ñaylamp and sprouted wings and turned into a bird.  This is why if you look closely, you can see the eyes on the tumi are shaped like birds.  The hands always seem to be folded in front, too.   I didn’t see anything saying why, but to me it looks like the guy’s going, “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

I need to come up with a story for this.  Tumi, son of Tumi, whose eyes were made of birds and who, upon his death, became Tumi again.  We worship him now by cutting out the tumis of sacrifices with this sacred shovel, whose bird-eyes aske pitifully for more, more, more…

I should probably do more research, though.

Incidentally, if you were possessed by demons or otherwise crazy, they might just take the  sacrifice shovel and trepanne your brain with it, too.

Scoop…scoop…scoop…

Fiction: Things You Must Not Think When Visiting Mme. Bientot

Welcome to the Containment Facility of The Criminal Currently Known as Mme. Bientot

No pictures, film, or sketches of any kind.  No Exceptions.
No metal, glass, or other shiny objects, including pens and eyeglasses.
Do not think of your name, any nicknames or aliases; do not think of the names of your parents, children, or other loved ones; do not think of their faces.
Do not think of your worst fear, or, in fact, any other fear; Mme. Bientot will subtly guide you in manner that increases your fear into madness and/or hysteria.
Do not think about Mme. Bientot’s face; she has been known to use mirrors, windows, the reflections from diamond earrings, and the multifaceted eyes of insects in order to escape.  We believe she may develop the ability to escape via photographs, film, and nightmares soon.
You may consider Mme. Bientot’s name, as it is a false one which changes weekly.
In articles, you may refer to her as “the criminal currently known as Mme. Bientot” or the italicized female pronoun she or her.
Do not, under any circumstances, refer to Mme. Bientot as a “monster” or “freak,” as such claims only give her power in a literal and radioactive fashion.
If she hisses, you must immediately look at the floor and back slowly out of the room.  While it may seem as though Mme. Bientot is completely and entirely restrained with no possibility of escape, this is not, and shall never be, the case.
Ignore the screams.
All persons who pass this sign are required to take a battery of blood and urine tests, including a pregnancy test, upon leaving.   No Exceptions.
Any person who is, or suspects they may be, pregnant may not enter.  All fetuses discovered upon leaving the area will be aborted, and the bodies (including the host’s) destroyed.
Partial fetuses will also be destroyed.
Any person claiming Mme. Bientot is unjustly imprisoned will be destroyed.
Nonreflective goggles (provided in the bin below) are strongly recommended, due to the sudden urge to impale pens, pencils, and even crayons in the eyes.
It should go without saying that any person feeling urges toward self-harm are strongly recommended to look at the floor and back slowly out of the room; unfortunately, we lose at least one person per month to suicide.  Know the Warning Signs.
You must not think upon the following subjects:  women, sex, childbirth, oral sex, homosexual relations (whether involving males or females), current political events especially of a violent or rebellious nature, people of races other than your own (as the case may be), people of genders other than your own, tranvestites, people of different classes other than your own (especially of lower classes), vampires, ghosts, hauntings, demons, angels, rapists, centaurs, psychologists, anal sex, repression, loneliness, depression, suicide, amusing photos of kittens who cannot spell correctly, religion, anti-religion, mermaids, harpies, mythological figures, bodily fluids (e.g., semen, feminine bodily secretions, mucous, vomit), internal organs, external organs (especially those related to reproduction and nutrition/excretion), the importance of laughing at jokes in which a man is horrifically turned into a female, the importance of laughing at jokes in which a white person is turned into a person of another race, the importance of laughing at jokes in which a heterosexual male is forced or tricked into behaving in a feminine or homosexual manner, the importance of sexual dominance, the importance of social dominance in matters religion and race, the importance of molding children to behave in accordance with current moral aspirations regardless of the evil this brings, the importance of repudiating new and/or unusual experiences as being “gay,” the importance of repudiating the existance of moral gray areas, the importance of mocking persons more concerned with ethics than morals, the importance of knowing one’s place in a heirarchy without ever naming this place “slavery,” the importance of possessing the appearance of strength and dominance while simultaneously yielding to one’s superiors, the belief in superiors, the belief in separate but equal treatment or “viva la difference,” the belief that the assignment of specializations (e.g., “jobs”) is the pinnacle of human development, the belief that the world is evil and shall soon be destroyed and replaced with a better world, a kinder world, a cleaner world, or no world at all; the belief that the world is good enough; any belief at all.  Our most successful visitors are often Buddhists, neuro-atypicals, or “shopoholic” coupon clippers/bargain shoppers.
While Mme. Bientot’s containment unit may appear empty, it is not.
While Mme. Bientot’s containment unit may appear occupied, that does not mean that she has not escaped.
While Mme. Bientot’s containment unit may appear to contain yourself or some variation of yourself (e.g., older, younger, of a different race, class, or gender), you must not think that you are in any way inside the containment unit yourself.  In some ways, this is the most important thought not to think of all.

 Thank you, and enjoy your visit.

 

Fiction: Things You Must Not Think When Visiting Mrs. Bientot

Welcome to the Containment Facility of The Criminal Currently Known as Mme. Bientot

No pictures, film, or sketches of any kind.  No Exceptions.
No metal, glass, or other shiny objects, including pens and eyeglasses.
Do not think of your name, any nicknames or aliases; do not think of the names of your parents, children, or other loved ones; do not think of their faces.
Do not think of your worst fear, or, in fact, any other fear; Mme. Bientot will subtly guide you in manner that increases your fear into madness and/or hysteria.
Do not think about Mme. Bientot’s face; she has been known to use mirrors, windows, the reflections from diamond earrings, and the multifaceted eyes of insects in order to escape.  We believe she may develop the ability to escape via photographs, film, and nightmares soon.
You may consider Mme. Bientot’s name, as it is a false one which changes weekly.
In articles, you may refer to her as “the criminal currently known as Mme. Bientot” or the italicized female pronoun she or her.
Do not, under any circumstances, refer to Mme. Bientot as a “monster” or “freak,” as such claims only give her power in a literal and radioactive fashion.
If she hisses, you must immediately look at the floor and back slowly out of the room.  While it may seem as though Mme. Bientot is completely and entirely restrained with no possibility of escape, this is not, and shall never be, the case.
Ignore the screams.
All persons who pass this sign are required to take a battery of blood and urine tests, including a pregnancy test, upon leaving.   No Exceptions.
Any person who is, or suspects they may be, pregnant may not enter.  All fetuses discovered upon leaving the area will be aborted, and the bodies (including the host’s) destroyed.
Partial fetuses will also be destroyed.
Any person claiming Mme. Bientot is unjustly imprisoned will be destroyed.
Nonreflective goggles (provided in the bin below) are strongly recommended, due to the sudden urge to impale pens, pencils, and even crayons in the eyes.
It should go without saying that any person feeling urges toward self-harm are strongly recommended to look at the floor and back slowly out of the room; unfortunately, we lose at least one person per month to suicide.  Know the Warning Signs.
You must not think upon the following subjects:  women, sex, childbirth, oral sex, homosexual relations (whether involving males or females), current political events especially of a violent or rebellious nature, people of races other than your own (as the case may be), people of genders other than your own, tranvestites, people of different classes other than your own (especially of lower classes), vampires, ghosts, hauntings, demons, angels, rapists, centaurs, psychologists, anal sex, repression, loneliness, depression, suicide, amusing photos of kittens who cannot spell correctly, religion, anti-religion, mermaids, harpies, mythological figures, bodily fluids (e.g., semen, feminine bodily secretions, mucous, vomit), internal organs, external organs (especially those related to reproduction and nutrition/excretion), the importance of laughing at jokes in which a man is horrifically turned into a female, the importance of laughing at jokes in which a white person is turned into a person of another race, the importance of laughing at jokes in which a heterosexual male is forced or tricked into behaving in a feminine or homosexual manner, the importance of sexual dominance, the importance of social dominance in matters religion and race, the importance of molding children to behave in accordance with current moral aspirations regardless of the evil this brings, the importance of repudiating new and/or unusual experiences as being “gay,” the importance of repudiating the existance of moral gray areas, the importance of mocking persons more concerned with ethics than morals, the importance of knowing one’s place in a heirarchy without ever naming this place “slavery,” the importance of possessing the appearance of strength and dominance while simultaneously yielding to one’s superiors, the belief in superiors, the belief in separate but equal treatment or “viva la difference,” the belief that the assignment of specializations (e.g., “jobs”) is the pinnacle of human development, the belief that the world is evil and shall soon be destroyed and replaced with a better world, a kinder world, a cleaner world, or no world at all; the belief that the world is good enough; any belief at all.  Our most successful visitors are often Buddhists, neuro-atypicals, or “shopoholic” coupon clippers/bargain shoppers.
While Mme. Bientot’s containment unit may appear empty, it is not.
While Mme. Bientot’s containment unit may appear occupied, that does not mean that she has not escaped.
While Mme. Bientot’s containment unit may appear to contain yourself or some variation of yourself (e.g., older, younger, of a different race, class, or gender), you must not think that you are in any way inside the containment unit yourself.  In some ways, this is the most important thought not to think of all.

 Thank you, and enjoy your visit.

 

Tentative Outline: Chez Moi

Title?  Tentative.

1.  Intro

Purpose:  Spend less money, spend less time cooking when you don’t want to, spend more time with the people you love.
Sweet spot:  finding the restaurants where you go when you don’t feel like cooking but don’t have a special reason to go out to eat.
Past vs. present:  We used to spend more time cooking rather than eating out, and more time eating together…but this time we’re not going to make ourselves miserable doing it.
Determining success:  nobody’s in tears and we spent less time/money than we would have at a restaurant.

2.  Determining your perfect fallback recipes

A flowchart to help you find out your top Chez Moi recipes for main dishes, side dishes, and desserts:  likability, adaptability, cost, time, and PITA factor
Creating a pantry list
Creating a menu for apathy nights: the regular menu
Advanced: Should you buy equipment?
Advanced:  Eating more healthfully

3.  Cooking like you just don’t care

Cooking on autopilot (crockpots, rice cookers, minimizing prep time)
Surplus cooking:  once a month vs. the double batch
Food prep and storage
Magically all better sauces
Eating:  picking your base rules for behavior (yours and your family’s) and getting through a crappy night
Advanced:  Kitchen slavery–how to make your family do the work for you
Advanced:  Throw it in the freezer–what raw materials to toss, and what to save for a day with ambition
Advanced:  What not to keep in the house to make at the apathy level

4.  Recipes (Apathy-level suggestions; the regular menu)

Suggested pantry list
Make it or buy it?  Cost vs. hassle
Pull it out of the fridge/cupboard (five minute or less with fridge and microwave)
Breakfast
Crock pot
Rice cooker
Freezable delights
Guilty pleasures:  questionable food proudly eaten solo
Baking (yes, baking–for those days when you’re stuck with an unprepared birthday or a @#$%ing bake sale)
Seasonal (grilling!)
Advanced:  Lunch at work

5.  Developing Chez Moi beyond the apathy level

Cooking and eating for fun, not fuel
Designing a cooking/eating space on a piecemeal budget
Identifying personal flavor profiles
Adding favorite meals and the special of the day
Cooking ahead
Experimenting
Cooking as a team
When people come over: what to find out first, what to make, how to adapt on the fly, how to force them to do your will (i.e., clean up the kitchen)
Deliberately inviting people to come over and trying to impress them (what were you thinking?!?)
Cooking parties

6.  Advanced recipes:  The Specials

Most common takeout and delivery
It looks like more work than it really is
Fancy restaurant foodie food
Ethnic crack
Cooking as therapy:  broth, bread, red sauce, pasta, and more.
Cooking party suggested menus

7.  Recipe index (by cooking time)

Marketing Brain

Right, this is a ramble.  I was going to put it up on Facebook instead, but…lemme get to that.

I wish I’d been posting about this kind of stuff more regularly, because now I have like this huge stack of thoughts, and it feels like to have the last thought make sense, I have to explain all the rest of the thoughts.  Maybe that isn’t the case.  At any rate, I’m going to justify this loose exploratory ramble by noting that I’m posting this on a Saturday.

Marketing brain.

I’m starting to see some weird generational things about the idea of selling your stuff.  People my age and older got raised to believe that there was a split between people who made stuff (from blue-collar workers on an assembly line to fine art) and the people who sold stuff (salespeople).

“I just make the widgets.”  ”I just want to be an artist.”  ”Location, location, location!”  ”What we need to do here is send out a bunch of flyers!”

There was a real split there, a belief in almost a right-brain/left-brain duality.

So now that we, as indie writers and publishers and all that, are trying to do both sides of this stuff, it feels like we’re doubling our work.  My guess is that a couple of generations from now, that won’t even be an issue; it’ll feel like it’s one and the same breath.  A lot of the process of selling stuff will be less exclusive (bookstore-like) and more automated (Amazon-like).  There will be jobs lost in the sales arena, not because people won’t be selling things, but because the makers will be more likely to be sellers, and the consumers won’t have a lot of problem interacting with them either as makers or sellers.  We’ll be excited to meet our favorite authors–not gobsmacked/flabbergasted–because we, too, will be people who make and do amazing things.

(Or maybe that’s just my dream, more people doing interesting things instead of pushing paper.  Not that contributing to a larger effort isn’t valuable.  But a lot of time gets wasted, a lot of lives.  Our important work–raising families, making things that interest us, understanding the world and sharing it with others–gets taken for granted, and weight is put on meetings, paperwork, routine.  Meh.  That’s my hope and my bias here:  less meh.  I forget where I read it:  but I’m loving this theory I heard that the more valuable your job is, the less you get paid…because “job satisfaction” is part of your pay.)

I really hope that kind of thing goes away, as more people make things and get used to the idea of spreading them through the world.   But for now, people (especially my age and up) have to think in terms of duality:  creation brain and marketing brain.

I focus more on creation brain.  I make stuff.  I shed content.*  I know how to package up that content pretty damn well.  And I get better at making and packaging and presenting as I go along.

Look at it. Just look at it.

However, I was talking to Becky Clark last weekend about marketing stuff and I kept saying that I don’t get marketing stuff…until we went to lay out our talk about indie publishing, and we kept getting in arguments over which thing went where.

I said figuring out your genre was marketing (and thus her job).  She said it wasn’t.  I said cover design is marketing.  Huh-uh, she said.  Blurbs?  Nooooo, that’s creation, she said with this puppy dog look on her face.  In the end we agreed to disagree, and while I think we’re having this talk organized as if there were a difference between creation and marketing, the real split is “stuff I want to talk more about vs. stuff Becky wants to talk more about.”  We’ll play to our strengths rather than to some kind of purity of concept.

My point being:  there really isn’t much of a difference between making something and selling it.  We’ve just decided there is, by pointing at the far ends of a spectrum instead of the huge range in the middle.

BUT.  One of the things that came out of our discussion was this idea that, if you’re going to be an indie writer, the main thing you gotta do is maintain control over your work.  (Side note: something that made me laugh out loud:  realizing that big publishing is just another arm of indie publishing, one tactic in an ocean full of them.)

This is simple to say but crrrrrazy in practice.

For instance:  not putting this post up on Facebook.  Oh, I’ll post the link to Facebook.  But I am not going to leave all this good stuff on someone else’s property.  I shouldn’t be leaving all this good stuff on someone else’s property, anyway.  I was talking to Becky about it, and I (rambling as usual) mentioned my friend Dave Hill:  he rarely puts anything up natively on a social media site.  He’s always putting up stuff that leads back to his blog.  Unless it’s a conversation–and then he uses social media to socialize.  Every time he mentions how his blog’s doing, how long it’s been up, etc., he has a solid block of followers.  He has a sales platform to be envied.  (Now, if I could just get him to put up some of the books he’s been writing as ebooks for sale…or maybe raising money with his comics podcast…)  Anyway, I decided that in this respect, I should be more like Dave.  I should keep control over my content.

For example, I’m writing a line-by-line analysis of Gene Wolfe’s “Fifth Head of Cerberus” on Twitter.  Why am I not doing that here?  I bet most of the people who come here haven’t the slightest idea that the airhead who writes about murderous bunnies for kids is obsessed yet usually overwhelmed by a guy who doesn’t think twice about putting the midpoint at the end of his books so you have to read the damn things twice.  (Guess what?  There’s a huge Alice reference in Fifth Head.  So cool.)

Another part of marketing brain that we creators struggle with:  ”content isn’t a virgin.”  I’ve had people ask me:  ”If I put something up for free, can I also sell it myself?”  Of course you can; content isn’t a virgin.  We get into this habit because we’ve split creation and selling into two arbitrary categories, and there are some people who don’t want non-virginal content (like a medieval prince, they want first rights).  Unless you’re trying to sell to those people as part of your indie publishing strategy, and unless you’ve given away rights stupidly to one of those people, the answer is yes, of course you can resell content.

Here’s yet another marketing brain idea that I struggled with recently (in fact, yesterday):  you don’t need to be an expert to turn ideas into content.  We’re so invested in the idea that you have to have a sales platform with a bunch of letters after your name that it’s hard for us to think in terms of knowing enough to write it, or write about it.

To people with the creative/marketing split, we think, “I can’t publish my own short stories.  How am I supposed to know if they’re good enough?”  We think, “Sure, people like when I talk about X (in person, on blogs, over social media), but why would I want to make money off that?  That’s just stuff that I give away for free.”

The thing that hit me a couple of days ago:  if I’m going to research something well enough to do it myself, I should be writing about it.  Duh, right?  So what am I researching?

Marketing.
How to make your house your favorite restaurant.
Whether or not I want to sell pr0n.
Minecraft, for a freelance project.
I’m also researching for worldbuilding on an astral plane–huh.  Now that I think about it, I’m always coming up with complete bug@#$% settings that I flail around in, and I’m trying to work out how to pull off those settings without freaking myself out every time.  ”How to write imaginary worlds that have nothing to do with medievalism.”  Purely imaginary worlds?  Hm…
A few dribs and drabs of last-minute Victorian/Alice stuff.

Anyway.  A long time ago, Becky tried to explain this to me, that what I should be doing is forcing other sites to take my research and pay me for it.  I didn’t get it.  Now I’m starting to see it.

Minimal Marketing:  How to create more and market less, for less money, and with less stress.
Chez Moi:  How to save money and time and spend more, better time with the people you love.
Sexy Stories:  Everything about writing and selling pr0n you were afraid to ask.
“Minecraft:  A Writer’s Reference”
“Purely Imaginary Worlds:  Tips for Building Realities that Aren’t Based on the Real”
Various Alice articles to put in with the ebooks and send to Alice sites to seduce people back to them…muahahaha…

More projects than I can ever accomplish.  What should I do?

Hah!  I’m an indie.  Whatever I want…as long as I finish it and sell it.

 

*I was talking to Doyce Testerman a while back and he was talking about how it was easier for him to write novels than short stories, because short stories were something that he could conceive of as being perfect.  I had to laugh:  I’m the other way around.  I shed short stories.  Okay, yeah, maybe I’d be better served by analyzing them and fixing them, but to me a short story (up to about 5K, say) is a snakeskin, something that I peel off because I have an itch to write.  Or (to completely switch metaphors here) short stories are like being a sumo wrestler.  You can’t really analyze from the sumo wrestler’s point of view until after the match.  It’s one big shove, most of the time.  Novels?  That’s where I overthink.