DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 73

What’s happening to the reader now? How about now?

I’ve been studying books this summer.  Books, short stories, even movies.  Let me tell you, the more I work on this the more I think that it’s the way to go.   So stop reading this stupid blog and go study a book!

How should I study it, you ask, because you’re smart and you ask the questions that I want you to ask.  (Every writer wants that audience.)

You know, I can tell you how I started, but really, it’s a bootstrappy, state-dependent kind of process, so it’s going to be different for you.  You can start where I started, although I can assure you that you’ll head elsewhere soon after.

What you do is read books.  Doesn’t matter what kind of books.  Just keep reading until you hit one where you’re like DAMN I AM SO JEALOUS.  Not one that you like, but one that makes you irrational.  One that you recommend to other people, one that makes you despair of ever being A Real Writer.  Or, scratch that, you could start with any book.  You could start with a horrible book.  It doesn’t actually matter; personally, I find it more enjoyable to work on books turn me green, because as I work, I slowly find out how to do it.  Ah, the power.

What you do is you go back to the beginning and start typing parts of the book in, OR outlining.  Or both.  Or some other technique that you’ve made up that makes you slow down and pay more attention to the book, to analyze it (and to absorb it on a less critical level while your brain is distracted by Shiny New Ideas).  Right now I’m outlining, except when I hit something that makes me go hm…, and then I type.  Sometimes I just type for the hell of it.  ”Ah, I already know what’s going on in this scene, but I don’t feel like being too terribly analytical today, so I’ll just type.”  It doesn’t matter.  Just throw yourself in.  You’ll know you’re headed in the right direction if a) your brain hurts, or b) you’re bouncing on your seat going “LOOKITLOOKIT.”

I’m working on The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch.  I have worked on many, many stories this summer.  I studied romances, I studied crime capers, I studied a James Patterson thriller.  I studied a buttload of short stories across genres.  There wasn’t a single story that was a waste of my time, even when I found out things like “this author is really weak at plotting” or “you can write a short story with only two real characters in it, and nobody will know the difference if you populate the character’s thoughts and dialogue with references to other people.”  I learned to see things the authors didn’t want me to see.

By the time  I got to Locke, I could handle typing things in without my brain hurting, and I could outline without breaking a sweat.  I worked on him for a while, found out some cool structure stuff (like how to write more than one time stream per chapter, and maybe how and when to write omniscient)…and then started seeing something different.

Scott Lynch dicks with the reader.

Constantly.

I’ll give you an example.

In short, the book’s about a con artist, Locke Lamora, in a fantasy world.  The city he lives is run by two groups, the official government (the Duke), and the unofficial criminal government (the Capa).  Someone’s been murdering the Capa’s men in particularly brutal ways; Locke goes to the Capa to pay him the weekly cut of his little gang’s takings, and sees the Capa torturing some of his other men, who should have been able to stop the latest killing but are claiming they have no memory of it.

This is a brutal torture scene.  Broken glass and a heavy canvas sack are involved.  There are two guys out of eight left.  The floor’s splattered with blood and everything reeks.  The Capa has the torterer work on the next-to-last guy while he questions the last guy.  The last guy doesn’t change his story:  none of them remember what happened that night.

The Capa goes down a list of things that might have caused them all to forget:  drinking, drugs both natural and magical, sorcery, and divine intervention.  The victim denies drinking or drugs, and the Capa says, “Oh, forgive me.  You weren’t enchanted by the gods themselves, were you?  They’re hard to miss.”

And then they move on, and the last guy gets thrown to something nasty under the boat where they are, and the rest of the scene is underscored by the thumps and scrapes against the wood.

See what I mean?  Dicking with the reader.  This happens in almost every chapter, if not every other scene.  Lynch tells you a) how things are going to fall out, b) why, and c) with what method.  He hasn’t, as far as I can tell, yet told us who was going to do it, although I can see the necessary pieces and parts laid down.  Of course everything must fall out the way it does, because of the groundwork that has been laid.

So I’ve begun reading to determine what’s happening to the reader at any given point.  Here the reader is being encouraged to ask certain questions–then having the questions answered misleadinginly.  Here the reader is being distracted by a torture scene in which Locke is worried that he’s next (because of course he’s been lying to the Capa about the take), and can’t see when the author throws in the method that the bad guy is using to get to his victims.  Here the author is letting the reader see that nothing has changed about Locke since the last time he had a major screwup.  Here everything goes smoothly for the character…all too smoothly, until there’s a gratuitous fight scene to distract the reader from the fact that it’s all too easy.  Here Locke patiently explains how he’s deceiving his victims…while behind the shadows, someone else is doing the same thing to him.

When I first read the book, I had no idea how it would come out–I just felt like the ending was surprising and inevitable, which is the way you want a book to come out.  Now that I’m studying the book, I can see that there was nothing really surprising about it–it was just that my main focus wasn’t on the details that would have told me how the book ended.  The details were there for my subconscious to absorb–but my consciousness was always distracted from those details, time after time, so that I wouldn’t give the ending away to myself too soon.

I don’t know that I’ve mastered the idea yet.  I’ll tell you when my brain stops hurting.  But something I do know is that you’ll never pick up on this kind of thing on a good writer unless you do something that breaks the spell of being purely a reader.  People say that if you want to be a writer, you have to read a lot of books.  Well, you can read as many books as you want, but you’ll never see this stuff on your own–because the writer is deliberately distracting you from it.

Pretty cool, eh?

New Kids’ Fiction: Exotics #3: The Subterranean Sanctuary

Mr. Hightower snorted.  “At any rate, it’s only you, dear Rachael, that we need, not these others. They can go.”

Returning home again after the terrible events at Xanadu House, Rachael Baptiste has learned not to trust humans…because they might be part of the Lighthouse Parents, a hostile group out to arrest and destroy the Exotics.

Her parents do nothing about argue.  Her Exotic friends pretend to be normal.  Her human friends hint that it might be better if the Exotics just disappeared.  And now the horrible Mr. Hightower wants her to spy for him…on her mom.

Rachael doesn’t know what she should do…but she knows that if she doesn’t keep an eye on Mr. Hightower and his group of Exotics, she won’t be able to stop them…

The third ebook in the Exotics series is available at Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Kobo, Apple, Powell’s, and more.  The POD will follow shortly.  You can read free chapters here.

 

How Dark Is Too Dark? A Personal Observation

I am so running behind this week, so I’m ripping off my newsletter article for my own blog.  I have copyright.  Stop looking at me…if you’d sign up for the newsletter, I’d feel so embarrassed about putting the same stuff in two different places that I’d never do it again.  Really.

Okay, not really.

—

So my husband Lee made me watch a couple of above-average movies over the last couple of weeks:  ”The Great Magician” (2011), a Chinese movie about a very cool magician.  This is a great, boyish movie:  you can just see two little kids coming up with this movie as they play pretend together.  A delightful movie set in 1920s China.  The other one was “Cockneys vs. Zombies” (2012)  This is a movie filled with Very Strong Language and Gore (and accents), for those of you who care about such things, and is best summed by by the phrase “hijinks ensue.”  This wasn’t so much a horror movie as it was a nutty-yet-gory lowbrow movie featuring vivid characters in the vein of “Attack the Block,” “Shaun of the Dead,” or the TV series “Misfits.”

In book news, I recommend The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentlemen Bastards #1) by Scott Lynch and the Emperor of Thorns by Mark Lawrence (this is the third and final of The Broken Empire series), but only if you a) enjoy high fantasy and b) are not easily shocked, dismayed, or appalled.  I’m not sure appalled is the word I want but it’s close.  A writer friend of mine ditched Locke Lamora 500 pages into the 700-page book, because she was appalled.  Fair enough.  Mark Lawrence’s book started out by putting Alex from A Clockwork Orange into a fantasy land and devolves from there.  I liked them both well enough to study them from a writer’s perspective, at any rate–not too dark for me.

On the other hand, I had to ditch a couple of books lately, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Jerome Charyn’s The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. I’m not telling you about these books to warn you off.  Quite the contrary.  They’re both fabulously written, amazing books.  However, they put me in a bad mood whenever I read them, so I decided to stop.  The more I think about books, the more I realize that how you feel as a reader when you read the book is the important thing.  If you want to slog through something because you’re the noble type who finishes everything you start, good for you, but I’ve decided to stop doing it.  Gone Girl made me hate everyone around me and question everyone’s motives, which got annoying very quickly, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson made me want to go rescue poor teenaged Emily Dickinson and tell her that her father was a manipulative bully and she ought to run away from home instead of justifying her horrible life by saying that her poetry was enough.  I like poetry well enough but no, actually, it isn’t.

Which raises the question:  Why did I enjoy the first two books and not the second two?  What, pray tell, is too dark?

Good question.  Off the cuff I’d say it must have something to do with finding a core of decency, kindness, and fellowship inside an awful world–as in, the first two books found it, and the second two didn’t.  Gone Girl seemed to be urgently telling me that people are horrible.  All of them.  Everywhere.  Emily wanted me to know that gosh darn it, Miss Dickinson had it hard, and made beautiful poetry while justifying pretty much all the abuse, manipulation, and injustice around her, even as she tried to (pointlessly) rebel against it.  Even though her life was lame, her poetry lives on, hurrah!

I wouldn’t call myself an optimist, but if your message is just “life sucks and then you die (or worse, keep living),” then I’m out.  I don’t need shiny happy bunnies hopping in endless fields to amuse me–but I do need something richer than a steady, bleak despair as a daily reading diet.

But.  All four books were so well-written that I encourage your to form your own opinion and tell me how crackpot mine is, at length.

 

Free Fiction Monday: Blind Spot

When everyone else looks at “The Mirror of the World Without You,” they see art–art that removes them from reality.  When Thomas looks at it, he sees technology…and danger to the artist behind it.  He offers Maxine a sweet deal to come and work for his VR company, but she refuses–she’d been used before.  But without his protection, who else will try to take possession of her?

“Oracle of Strangers” will be free here for one week only, but you can also buy a copy at B&N, Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, Powell’s and more.

—

Blind Spot

“I can’t see myself,” Thomas said, raising his hand to touch the Mirror. The reflected room behind him was pale gray and filled with a line of guests, each craning their necks to see around him. It was a terrible sight, and he smiled in delight even as his eyes filled with tears. His body grieved for the lack of himself, the knowledge of how little he mattered, even as he felt like crowing with joy.

“Sir.” The guard shook his head. “Don’t touch.” He’d been saying it through the whole opening, no doubt, to incredulous guests trying to touch the work of art or science or whatever it was. Keeping people far back enough from the frame so they didn’t spill wine on it when it clicked.

“How?” Thomas asked, knowing that the guard couldn’t answer the question, but unable to stop himself.

“Read the sign, sir,” the guard said.

Thomas laughed under his breath. It wasn’t what he’d wanted to know, but he bent toward the sign anyway; he would have seemed out of place otherwise.

Why can’t you see yourself in “The Mirror of the World without You”?

The sign explained, in language a ten-year-old could understand, that it wasn’t a mirror but a television. Cameras in the television screen itself—which had originally been part of a console gaming system—recorded the images that surrounded the screen and projected them.

The real trick was in the way the cameras removed the viewer’s image from the screen. The cameras didn’t just edit out the image of the viewer—which would have removed all people from the image—but placed a subtle pattern layer over all moving objects. The pattern was cued to align with the orientation of the eyes of each object, if it had any, and simulated the sensory data the eyes sent to the brain from the area directly over the optic nerve, or blind spot.

The brain saw the pattern, interpreted it as the eye’s blind spot, and filled it in with what it calculated to be the correct images. The brain, trained to compensate for its own shortcomings, erased anything coded with what seemed to be the same pattern, rendering it invisible.

It was essentially an optical illusion, if a very sophisticated one. It worked wonderfully. As Thomas finished reading the sign, he peeked at the Mirror out of the corner of his eye, trying to get a glimpse of himself. The cameras tracked his gaze quickly, but he was able to catch a white wisp that faded like a breath on glass. It was creepy.

The woman behind him was having a completely different reaction. She was standing with her hands on her hips and grinning, making faces at herself. “Nobody can see me! I can do whatever I want! Nyaaa!” She stuck her tongue out.

But of course Thomas and the other guests could still see her, both in real life and in the mirror; each person only failed to see themselves.

—

Thomas lingered near the Mirror for hours, watching people’s reactions. He saw a grown man collapse from the shock of it; he saw a small child start calling her mother’s name and crying, twisting her dress up in her hands as her mother struggled to push the dress back down, covering her stockings and underwear. He saw a young artist’s face light up as he opened the cover of a pad of paper and started sketching; the guard had to gently move him aside after asking him to step out of the way several times. He saw a woman with a recently-shaved head burst into laughter. Everyone’s reaction was different.

He wondered briefly about his own reaction of grief and realized that it had only inspired his resolve; he was determined to leave a legacy. To make the world a little different. A little less unforgiving.

The guard repeated himself, over and over, until he was hoarse: Read the sign. Don’t touch the exhibit. Please step aside, ma’am.

Thomas spotted her almost immediately when she arrived. Of all the people at the gala opening of the Sensation & Perception exhibit, she was the only one near the Mirror wearing blue jeans. She was a pretty black woman of thirty years or so; the kind of artist who had survived in the market for years now, and was more interested in other people’s reactions than in gathering flattery.

Or maybe she didn’t mind a little flattery. She caught Thomas looking at her steadily and with what he hoped was warmth but could look like anything, depending on her mood. She walked over to him, and said, “Let’s get a coffee.”

They passed the line at the cash bar (one of the great benefits to going to openings was hearing what drunk people had to say about art) and stopped at the barista. Thomas bought them two lattes; the girl didn’t look like she knew enough to make a decent espresso. They found a table that didn’t rock too much and sat. The building echoed in a way that it didn’t when it was full of people.

Maxine said, “Who sent you?”

“Nobody. I sent myself.”

“Well?” she asked. “Which is it?”

“I sent myself.” Thomas extended his hand. “Thomas Bertinelli, CEO of VitaRealSoft. I want to hire you.”

“So you can get your hands on that.” She nodded toward the end of the line to see the Mirror, which extended so far into the foyer that it almost mingled with the line for the cash bar.

“I want you,” Thomas said. He waved at the line. “That is only a small part of what you can do.”

“Maybe I like being independent.”

He pushed a card toward her. It was white and didn’t say any more than it had to. “If you need anything. If you’re interested.”

She pushed back her chair, which caught on the rough ceramic tiles and almost tipped over. “I was hoping you’d be interesting.”

“Please,” he said, gesturing toward the card. She picked it up, flipped it over a few times, then stuck it in her back pocket.

After a few moments, he threw away his latte and went back to stand at the periphery of the exhibit. The guard had changed. The woman looked familiar, like Thomas’s Korean calculus teacher from high school, only taller. The familiarity was only another optical illusion, another trick of the brain, but, working with VR as much as he did, he was used to that kind of thing.

—

The museum closed. Thomas waited until the streets cleared, taxi after taxi lined up to make a buck off people who didn’t want to risk their fancy dress on the subway. After that, it was a ghost town, the only people around being both hungry and best glimpsed out of the corner of an eye in order to avoid them. Thomas waited on a bench with his jacket pulled up. A man walked toward him; Thomas reached inside his coat and waited; the man walked away.

When Maxine left with the museum director an hour later, Thomas didn’t hesitate: he followed the two women.

The director headed toward a private parking garage, but Maxine shook her head and turned toward the subway entrance. She didn’t have any finery to protect and was probably bored with the director’s praise. Thomas followed Maxine, trying not to blink often. She didn’t spot him until they had almost entered a car—she made eye contact with him, then reached inside her purse without hurry but without blinking. A second later, she was gone.

Thomas scanned the area. She didn’t have to show herself, but she probably would; just to keep people from walking into her, which would give her away.

Following a hunch, Thomas got onto a nearby car just as the doors were about to close. There was a vaguely annoying old man getting onto the car in front of him. The man sat near the front, talking to himself. He reminded Thomas of someone, but he couldn’t put a finger on whom. The man sat near the front, and Thomas joined him.

There was a bang against the window as the train pulled out. Thomas saw the face of the man outside the window and laughed; it was a face to which he could definitely attach a name…and a rival software company’s name, as a matter of fact.

“We know illusions exist,” he told the old man. “Even when we can’t see through them. That’s where hunches come from. Our brains can’t admit they’re wrong, but they can give us a hint now and then.”

“Was it the smell?” The old man said. “I was careful not to use perfume.”

“You looked familiar,” Thomas said. “So did the guard. I worked it out. You projected something onto my eyes that changed you just enough that I filled in the rest for myself.”

The old man nodded. “Now what?”

“Work for me. Or hire me. Hire my whole company to work for you. You tell me what you want, I’ll make it happen.”

“I’ll think about it.” The old man turned toward the windows. His reflection was distorted, a smear of white across the window; Maxine had more work to do on the algorithms.

The car slowed, and Thomas stood. “I’ll leave you to your privacy. But I wouldn’t go home if I were you. Most people are short-sighted. They’ll what want you have, not what you are.”

“I hate this,” Maxine said. As the train jerked, he caught a glimpse of her in the window before the old man replaced her again. “I should post the algorithms and be done with it.”

She almost reminded him of someone he used to know—but it was gone, a trick of sensation, as interpreted by perception, his mind desperately looking for someone similar, someone he knew how to deal with or the right set of social rituals they could both take for granted. He bit his tongue, using the pain to chase the impression away. There was no one like her. She was the template, the first, and everyone like her would be an avatar of her, pale copies of a Goddess.

It wasn’t love, it was worship; he knew that.

He stepped out at the last second, grabbing a man who tried to get on the train as he was getting off.

“Hey!”

The man didn’t look familiar at all, but Thomas didn’t want to take any more chances than he had to. The man pulled a cell phone out of his leather jacket and dialed it. Thomas followed him; the man said, “Do you mind?” and edged away.

“Dynamic Visions, right?” Thomas named one of his competitors, another VR company. The man twitched and hurried away, going up the stairs.

Thomas got on the next train, checking for messages. As long as she had the card on her, it would contact him if any number of unusual things happened to her, but she might also have called and left a message.

Nothing.

—

When the phone rang, he didn’t bother to answer it, just told the cab driver to stop circling and let him out at the address. He paid the driver with a hundred. When he reached Maxine’s building, he flew out of the cab, kicked in the lock at the door, and ran upstairs.

13B was locked, with the smoke alarm just starting to shriek as he shouldered through the door. Smoke poured out at him, and he dropped to his knees and started crawling. He might have heard sirens, but the fire alarm was too loud to be sure. The alarm in the hallway joined the one in her apartment.

His eyes stung; his lungs burned. He wasn’t sure whether the pain in his head was from lack of oxygen or the noise. The closer he got to her bedroom, the hotter and smokier it was.

He found her in the bathroom in the tub, with her shirt off and her skin covered with running water and blood. Black flakes—skin—swirled around her, stuck to her bra. Her head was tipped to the side, and her mouth was starting to fill with water. He closed the door to keep the smoke out.

He pulled her out of the tub and wrapped her in towels; by the time he was done, the door handle was too hot to touch. He opened the bathroom window, but it was too small for either of them to fit through, and he closed it again. Hardly up to code.

Thomas shoved the cabinet out from under the sink, scattering rolls of toilet paper, and braced his shoulders against the opposite wall, which was hot enough to make him flinch for a second. He kicked the drywall under the sink until he’d punched through it, took out his knife and kicked it into the two-by-four support until he’d gouged it deep, then worked it out of the wood and did the same near the floor. He kicked the support until it splintered and snapped free, then used it to break through drywall and tile to the kitchenette on the opposite side.

There was just enough room for him to crawl through; he pulled Maxine after him, losing the towels in the wall and scraping off even more of her skin before she woke up, screamed, and worked her own way through.

They went out through the front door. The firemen picked her up and carried her downstairs and past her neighbors and into the ambulance. When they asked who he was he shook his head and said, “Nobody.”

Without the sirens, it would have been quiet. People seemed frozen as they watched the flames and the images therein. Familiar images, images from dreams.

—

Dynamic Vision copied the blind spot first. They might have reverse engineered it, but Thomas didn’t think so; it was just a little too soon.

After the attacks, badly burned, Maxine disappeared. Her agent knew how to contact her, but that was it.

VitaRealSoft came out with Déjà VR, the first virtual reality system that felt real. It was magical. It was like coming to a place you’d always dreamed of—familiar, yet subtly different from player to player.

“It’s almost like I’ve been here before,” people said. Trade secret.

Thomas Bertinelli married a beautiful blonde named Mary. She didn’t love him; he knew that. One interviewer asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”

He said, “My wife.”

The reporter looked at her and saw a piece of white trash with big boobs who looked like his ex, shrugged, and wrote something down about his muse. He didn’t see what Thomas saw, which was a Goddess.

 

 

Why We Quote Movies (maybe)

…or why we quote anything, really.

Dave Hill has this site, Wish I’d Said That (WIST), in which he collects quotes, so I should be really consulting him on this.  Dave, why do you quote things?  How do you choose the things you quote? But I have this feeling that he’d say something direct and logical, which is fine, but I want to say something indirect and illogical.

Obviously, we quote things that are quotable.  Either they’re short and quippy or they’re long but otherwise memorable.  We quote things because we want to quote them.  We quote them because we really hope that someone will get the reference.  An old friend of mine, Peter Smith, quoted on his Facebook page:

Let marrow, bone, and cleaver choose…

To which I responded correctly with:

While making feet for children’s shoes.

So now I have the song in my head, and memories of Peter in my head.  Good times.

But is that the fundamental reason why we quote things?  To remember them, to call up associations?

I want to be able to give a clear answer here, but I don’t know if there is one.  But follow me for a moment, and see if you don’t agree with this other idea I’ve had spinning around in my head, because since I’ve pulled it together it keeps cropping up.

1.  Many, if not most, words are ultimately based on a metaphor.

many (adj.)
Old English monig, manig ”many, many a, much,” from Proto-Germanic *managaz (cf. Old Saxon manag, Swedish mången, Old Frisian manich, Dutch menig, Old High German manag, German manch, Gothic manags), from PIE *menegh- ”copious” (cf. Old Church Slavonic munogu ”much, many,” Old Irish menicc, Welsh mynych ”frequent,” Old Irish magham ”gift“). Pronunciation altered by influence of any (see manifold).


metaphor (n.)
late 15c., from Middle French metaphore (Old French metafore, 13c.), and directly from Latin metaphora, from Greek metaphora ”a transfer,” especially of the sense of one word to a different word, literally “a carrying over,” from metapherein ”transfer, carry over; change, alter; to use a word in a strange sense,” from meta- ”over, across” (see meta-) + pherein ”to carry, bear” (see infer) (Online Etymology Dictionary).

2.  What we do, when we don’t have a word for something, is make a new word, based on a metaphor.

Some of the 2012 additions to Merriam Webster:

aha moment
bucket list
cloud computing
copernicium
earworm
energy drink
f-bomb
game changer
gassed
gastropub
man cave
mash-up
sexting
systemic risk
underwater

3.  Sometimes the ideas we want to communicate are too big for a single metaphor, either because they’re just too big, or because they’re conflicted, or meaningless without context (well, most metaphors are meaningless without context–could you really understand a mashup if you’ve never heard one?).

If you go here you’ll find a list of the top 100 movies on IMDB.  In case you’re rolling your eyes at this point, let me list some:

The Godfather
Schindler’s List
Raging Bull
The Shawshank Redepmption
Casablanca
One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest
Citizen Kane
Vertigo
The Wizard of Oz
Titanic
Lawrence of Arabia
Gone with the Wind
Sunset Blvd.
Godfather Part II
Psycho
On the Waterfront
Forrest Gump
The Sound of Music
West Side Story
Star Wars
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
2001:  A Space Odyssey
The Silence of the Lambs
Chinatown
The Bridge on the River Kwai

I typed that list out by hand, and it was tougher than it looked.  The movies I’d seen on this list (most of them) kept trying to overtake me as I was typing.  I still have “the heeeeeels are aliiiiiiiive” in my head, but I’m especially vulnerable to musicals.

If you can sum up any one of these movies as a single metaphor, you’re probably doing it wrong.

and so…

4.  When you quote a movie (or anything else), what you’re invoking isn’t that single line.

As you wish. (The Princess Bride)

I swear by my pretty floral bonnet, I will end you. (Firefly)

 

Off with their heads! (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

 

You’re invoking the entire work–the movie, book, or whatever.  You are taking something that can’t be said any shorter than the work itself, and calling up the entire work, and the implications of that work, by just bringing up one small part of it; the quote is a fractal part of the work, and can be used to recreate the work as a whole.

And more than that.

5.  For me, the easiest way to think about this is through poetry.

Poetry is bigger than metaphor–it contains multiple metaphors–and it has heightened, very patterned language.  The creation of patterns in poetry is deliberate–not necessarily formal, but deliberate.  Poetry starts with things we know how to talk about, like Wild Bill and roses and rolled-up trousers and red wheelbarrows in the rain.  Then it moves into things that we don’t know how to talk about, like death, love, despair, and how the brain works.  Often the poet won’t even bother to talk about the real “point” of the poem:  it’s created through patterns, and breaking of patterns, more than it is strictly through metaphors.  You can write poetry without metaphor, although poetry will tend to produce (excrete?) metaphor more often than not.  Human brains are such that they will find meaning in patterns, no matter what the pattern is, and poetry tends to be complex enough that multiple patterns can be found in them, intended or no.

This is why it’s so hard to sum up complex works.  It’s hard to find the one clear, compelling pattern in a work that someone new would enjoy.  It requires a different talent than just figuring out a working pattern in the first place, because new, unintended patterns emerge as you create the work.

6.  So in the end, we quote movies because we need to say something bigger than what we can otherwise invoke…and quoting the movie is the easiest way to do it.  When we say, “two by two, hands of blue,” we really are speaking poetry.

 

 

Free Fiction Monday: Oracle of Strangers

Didi can find anything she wants…except friendship.  Wherever she goes, strangers tell her how to locate anything, from the perfect pair of jeans to carrying out the perfect crime.  But love?  Friendship?  Her power can’t seem to handle things that most people find easy.

When her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend figures out Didi’s power, Didi gets ready to get used, because that’s what people do.  But it turns out there might be more to Jo than meets the eye…

“Oracle of Strangers” will be free here for one week only, but you can also buy a copy at B&N, Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, Powell’s and more.

—

The Oracle of Strangers

 

Jo brought the letter, holding it at arm’s length and tilting it from side to side, letting the gold leaf catch the fluorescent lights in the hallway. “Take a look at this, Didi.”

I jerked it out of her hand, hoping that she hadn’t held it for too long. I didn’t want her wrapped up in this. “Jo. I told you not to touch my mail.” I tried to shut my bedroom door, but she pushed her way in. She had no way of knowing I had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of signed first editions on my small pressboard bookshelf, or that I found all the wall art at thrift stores for a buck-fifty a pop. But it still creeped me out having her in here.

She snorted. “Didi, you’re crazy, you know that.”

I nodded and stared at the letter. It was addressed to me, all right. Heavy linen envelope. Bright gold on the address. The return address was on the back: Mail Recovery Center, 443 Fillmore Ave E, St Paul MN 55107-9607.

“I ain’t doing it,” I said, and stomped over to the trash can. My foot stomped the foot pedal, the lid popped up, and the letter dropped in. The lid closed with a clomp.

“What did you do that for?” Jo asked. She reached down for the lid, but I stepped in front of her. “Either get out of the way or tell me.”

“Job offer. In Minnesota. I ain’t going to take them up on it, that’s all.”

I didn’t see that it was any of her business, but that was Jo for you. Nosy, like she owned the place or was the master to my servant. She’d only been dating Marcus for a month. What she’d be like after a year I didn’t know. Ordering me to polish the damn silverware, probably.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” she asked.

“I did.”

She bent down again to get at the trash, and I said, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave that letter alone.”

“Good grief, Didi. I just want the stamp.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Despite my words, which sounded like I’d resigned to the inevitable, I turned around, pulled the plastic bag liner out of the trash, and tied up the top. The corners of the letter tried to poke through. I slipped on a pair of Marcus’s loafers and went out the door, down the stairs, and dumped it in the trash, shoving it under a bag that oozed. She didn’t follow me. Maybe it would keep her out of trouble, the thought of getting her hands dirty.

I grimaced. If there was one good thing you could say about Jo, it was that she didn’t mind getting her hands dirty.

—

She didn’t say anything about the letter, and neither did I. But I knew she was thinking about it. Couldn’t help it: The old incarnation of the Goddess is dead, and we want you to take her place.

She wouldn’t believe it. But she would want to know more. Wouldn’t be able to help it.

So, next day when she invited me to go downtown with her, I knew she wasn’t just shopping for shoes.

I went with her. Things were still tense with Marcus, six months after we broke up, and I knew that I was going to have to get along with his new girlfriend if I didn’t want to lose my place in the apartment. And although Jo was bossy, loud, and too curious for her own damn good, at least she wasn’t a grunt and a shrug in the hallway. She wasn’t jealous. We were never going to be friends, but maybe we could find peace.

Michigan Avenue ran with people. I watched my feet, keeping from running into people by instinct more than anything else. Jo had a bag from Nordstrom’s containing a pair of shoes that were going to hurt her feet and a bra that was too small and a top that would make her look fat and washed out.

But she also had a pair of jeans that fit perfectly. I’d picked them out for her, damn it.

“Help me pick something out,” she’d said.

I’d sighed but there was no help for it. Once somebody asked me to find something, I had to do it. It was like an itch in the back of my head. I didn’t go looking, I’d end up with migraines that put me down for days.

I wandered through the store. Jo trailed me with an armful of bad clothes. I let my eyes unfocus.

A pair of clerks slouched elegantly next to a manikin, trying to copy her arrogant plastic ways. “He left you?” one of them asked.

I turned left, listening.

“On the third,” the other one said.

I counted three racks, reached in, and pulled the first thing I touched off the rack. A pair of Paige boyfriend jeans, stretchy enough to be forgiving in the ass, that would get her laid Saturday night. I could feel the sex on them, heavy and squealing. Ugh. I shuddered and tossed them on top of the pile in her arms.

She looked at the tag. Of course they were on sale, forty-five bucks, and in her size.

After she tried them on, she said the words I dreaded the most: “I have to take you shopping with me more often.” And words I hadn’t heard before but dreaded as soon as they came out of her mouth: “What do you think about going to Vegas?” She was smarter than I’d thought. Nobody else had picked up on it that fast. Marcus hadn’t figured it out until I’d told him.

On the way back we stopped at NoMI for coffee and financiers, and she said, dabbing at her lips in a put-on kind of way that screamed dessert is all I can afford, “How did you do that?”

“What?” I said.

“I’m blonde and I’m dating your ex-boyfriend while you’re still living with him,” she said, “But don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m stupid. I’m cheap and I’m spoiled, but I can smell something on you. I read that letter.”

We had a table looking out onto the street with Chihuly glass overhead and the ooze of people below. If I went down there and focused on how to get rid of her, I’d hear the perfect crime detailed among overheard words. I’d never be caught.

“They’re crazy,” I said. “I used to work there as their database admin.”

“Who was that chick who died?”

“Look, they’re crazy,” I said. “They get half the lost mail in the United States. Be around that much lost stuff for that long, people get crazy. Extra crazy with crazy sauce. You ever hear of people going postal? Crazy.”

She poked her finger at her crumbs, crushing them onto her finger, then scraping them off with her teeth. “But who was the chick? That they called the goddess?”

I gritted my teeth. “Just some chick.”

But she knew I was lying. We paid up and left without her making a big deal about it, though. She wasn’t stupid, and she was patient, too. Shit.

—

We missed our station on the Blue as a mass of people got on the train, hustling us toward the back and “accidentally” keeping us there until the doors had closed. The people who were doing it, they didn’t know they were doing it. They didn’t know they were acting as the hands of fate.

“Hey!” Jo yelled. “Get the fuck out of the way!” She slung her Nordstrom’s bag onto her shoulder with her purse and started shoving.

People moved out of her way…as other people moved into her way. Strange how a reasonable number of people—no more than twenty—could act like a crowd of thousands, when need be.

Jo shoved and pushed as I huddled against the wall with my purse in front of me like a bludgeon. I knew where we were going. O’Hare. And from there, St. Paul.

—

I met the old goddess after a month on the job at the dead letter office, or the Mail Recovery Center, as the post office likes to call it. I was rebuilding their database and using a bag of lost mail to test it with, and my boss, Dick, came to me and said that she wanted one of the letters back.

“Didi, do you have the letter to May Smits in Topeka?”

I looked at him like he was nuts. “What?”

He repeated himself, louder and slower and with a filter of disgust. I asked too many questions, and he’d taken the attitude that either I was a troublemaker or a plain idiot. He couldn’t answer the simplest question without shaking his head sadly at my incompetence.

“I’m using it,” I said.

“She wants it,” he said, like that was supposed to answer everything.

“Who’s she?” I said.

He held out his hand. Stuck it right in my face. “Just hand it over, Kincaid.”

I supposed at the time that whoever she was had found out where it was supposed to go. I pulled open my drawer and flicked through my carefully-organized folders until I’d found it.

“You’re not supposed to keep mail in your desk.” He reached for the letter.

I pulled it out of his reach. “I want to see her,” I said. Really, I just wanted to get away from the code for a while, and I was curious. I still had the ability to be curious. Still do, more’s the pity.

“Fine. She’s been asking about you, anyway.”

He backed out of my cube, I logged out of my computer and closed the drawer, locking it so he couldn’t double back and take the mail. I followed him down the rows of cubes until we reached the mail room.

Oh Lord, the mailroom. Carts stacked twelve high with swaying white UNITED STATES POST OFFICE bins stuffed with white envelopes, manila envelopes, cardboard, priority mail letters with blue stripes, red stripes. Cheap gray bookshelves with rows and rows of envelopes and red tabs labeled with the alphabet. Stacks of mail bound together with blue plastic, rubber bands, binder clips. Everywhere red stamp marks, black stamp marks, postage due, dirt, wrinkles, stains. Unsorted mail. Sorted mail. And all the processes in between.

This was just the place where lost mail all got sorted. Never mind where it got stored.

Dick led me straight through the middle, into the thick of it, without mercy. Somehow I didn’t get crushed, and we slipped between a couple of bookcases full of hanging folders, into a dark corner I hadn’t noticed before. I rubbed my fingers on the envelope in my hand, for some reason suddenly glad that I had something to bring with me. An offering.

A hallway, more bookcases. The further we went, the more they were filled with books rather than envelopes or packages. Phone directories, Who’s Whos, even what looked like high school yearbooks. Cinderblock walls painted off-white. Fluorescent lights that made my head hurt and my eyes lose the sharpness of their focus. I felt a little sick to my stomach. A stained red clothbound copy of The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit appeared on the top shelves of bookcases far too often.

Finally, we reached the end of the hall. Seemed like it’d taken us hours to get there. A small office held a desk surrounded by crates and crates of mail and an old woman with shaggy gray hair, thick glasses on a gold chain, and a red, torn-up zit just under her chin. She just couldn’t leave it alone. She was squinting at a computer and sneaking sips out of an empty coffee mug. Dick took the mug. He turned around and refilled it from a pot on a hot plate behind her, replaced it in her hand.

She hadn’t seemed to notice either of us, but she said, “May Smits?” and held out her hand without looking up.

I handed her the letter.

She looked at the front, the back, the front again, and held it to her forehead. Smelled it. “She’s better off not knowing,” she said. She held it away from her body by the tips of her thumb and forefinger, and the letter burst into flame. Not just regular flame, but like it was flash paper. It was gone in a second, the last bit under her fingertips sparking on the way to the floor as she dropped it.

She wiped her hands on her dingy skirt, took a drink of the coffee, and kept typing.

Dick waited, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back against a bookshelf.

After five minutes or so, I cleared my throat, and she looked up at me, then back to her computer. Her fingers had been flying the entire time. My head was killing me, and I knew it was either find a place to sit or throw up on the books and cartons of mail.

I swallowed back vomit, hiked up my skirt, and sat on the floor with my legs curled up under me.

Suddenly the woman leaned back, stretched out her back against the back of her office chair—I must have heard a dozen cracks come out of her back—and said, “I found him.”

Dick sucked down breath. “Where is he?”

“You won’t like it,” she warned.

“Tell me.”

“He’s dead. Buried under the name of Theodore Dempsey in the Big Hollow Cemetery near Spring Green, Wisconsin. I could give you directions to the exact gravesite, but it’ll probably be easier to ask the groundskeepers.”

Dick let the breath out, falling a little forward over himself. His eyes drooped. “How did he get there?”

“I don’t know, Dick. I’m sorry. I don’t know the how, just there where.”

More breath hissed out of Dick, and I started to worry he was going to forget to breathe.

The woman turned in her chair toward me, extended a hand. “You’re Didi? Mary Cass, no relation to the Mama. Call me Mary.”

I stood up about as gracefully as a giraffe and took her hand. It was dry, soft, and bit up around the nails.

“What…?” I didn’t even know enough to ask her what I wanted to know.

“I find things,” she said. “I call it the oracle of strangers. Someone asks me a question, I get the answer out of random information. The harder the question, though, the more destructive getting the information is. And the more it costs.”

I stared at her, slack-jawed. She smiled at me and said, “It’s probably best if you leave.” She glanced at Dick, still huddled over on himself, then wrote something on the sticky side of a sticky note, folded it over, and handed it to me. My fingers touched hers for a second, and I dropped to my knees.

“Goddess,” I gasped. I had no idea why.

“Sorry,” she said. “I hate it when that happens.” She went back to typing.

After what could have been moments or could have been hours, I stuck the note in my pocket and shook Dick by the shoulder. “Time to go, boss.”

He looked at me with hell in his eyes, and I felt sorry for him.

“My son,” he said.

I nodded. We went back up the hallway and through the mailroom. This time it felt like the carts swerved around me on purpose. I walked a little easier, breathed a little freer. When I got back to my cube I read the note.

Go have a life, baby goddess. So it won’t be so bad when you’re stuck here like me.

My throat tightened so bad I couldn’t breathe.

—

Jo couldn’t get her phone to work until we were taxiing into the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. She called Marcus. She was pissed. I had tried to lose her a couple of times at O’Hare before the plane trip, but they wouldn’t let her go, and they weren’t as gentle with her as they were with me. She was getting quite the shiner.

“I’ve been kidnapped,” she told Marcus. After a pause, she added, “So has Didi. Minneapolis. I don’t know, we were just pushed onto the plane. No! They didn’t even check for tickets. Just pushed us onto the plane. I did. I tried to leave her there at O’Hare and they wouldn’t let me go. A woman punched me. Yes, I tried to contact security.” A longer pause. “I was going shopping with her when all hell broke loose. No, I didn’t tell her she had to move out. Good grief, don’t be so suspicious.”

She handed me the phone. People around us were starting to stare.

“Marcus?” I said.

“Hey, babe. What’s going on?”

“You know that thing with the—” I didn’t want to say anything over the phone, but I’d talked to him about it before, after we broke up, to let him know he didn’t have to let me stay in the apartment, that it was just my power finding me a place to stay. He said he’d understood but I still felt bad about it.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I’m sorry. She got caught in it, too. She was too close when the call came. The old one is dead and now they’re calling me back.”

I was trying to keep my voice down, but it wasn’t really helping. People’s ears were stretching out a mile to pick up what I was saying. Jo glared at me, well honestly she wasn’t glaring at me, she was glaring because she was pissed off was all.

“Will Jo be safe?”

“I’ll tell them I won’t do it unless they let her go. I promise.”

“You don’t have to do it.”

That stopped me. It almost sounded like he believed what I was saying, rather than just tolerating the talk of his crazy ex-girlfriend who was too fragile to be dumped, friendless and homeless, out onto the streets.

“Call work for me,” I said. “Tell them that there’s a family emergency, and I’ll explain it when I get back in a few days. Jennie knows what needs to be done on the database. Just tell her to keep it maintained for now, not to worry about the deadlines.”

“All right.”

I handed the phone back to Jo. “You believe her?” Then, “Yeah. Yeah. She just walked into a rack of clothes at Nordstrom’s and picked out an unbelievable pair of jeans, first try. On sale for…well, yeah. It’s just too fucking weird is all. Yeah. Love you. Bye.”

She looked at me. The plane was coming to a stop, the Southern flight attendant with straightened, dyed-red hair was saying something, and I was checking that I had my purse strapped across my body and that nothing had spilled out.

“You’re really something,” Jo said.

I tried to smile at her. “I’ll get you out of this.”

We stood up. For once, the people getting off the plane flowed out of the door smoothly, nobody holding things up by jerking an overfull carryon out of the overhead bins. No crying children.

Murmurs around me:

I need mother to try to understand…

Why would I go to the titty bar without you?…

Jo squeezed me around my shoulders. “We’ll both get out of this. Why would I want to give up my favorite shopping buddy?”

I sighed and wondered if all goddesses felt so used.

—

When the taxi pulled up in front of the Mail Recovery Center building, I could feel it. The place had been chaotic before, but this? The parking lot was a moonscape of craters; the signs for handicapped parking were shot up so bad you couldn’t recognize them as such except by specks of blue and white. The walls had got spray painted, and not with the kind of graffiti that has its own beauty to it. The paint even covered up the windows. The place was broken. A wasteland.

“Jesus,” Jo said.

“Wrong god,” I muttered under my breath.

She must have heard me, or else she just looked at my funny out of habit. She hefted her Nordstrom’s bag on her shoulder, like she was reminding herself why she was here. Those jeans. Those magical, sale-rack jeans. She had to defend me, or lose her shopping buddy.

We got out and Jo slammed the door. The driver drove off without asking for fare. I followed Jo’s stubborn march across the parking lot and up the three steps to the front door. The cement was crumbling away. The handle of the door was sticky, and I pulled my hand back, wiped it on my pants. Jo grabbed the handle, whipped the right-hand door open like she wanted to hurt it, and waited for me to go inside.

I hesitated.

“You want to try running?” she asked.

I shook my head. Now that I was here I didn’t know if I could leave.

The whole place was a question, the answer an itch in my skull.

I could feel it in me. I could put this all right. It’d take me the rest of my life, but I could. I went inside.

The speckled cream linoleum was dirty, covered with trash. Missing the industrial rugs to stamp your feet on when it snowed. Wanted posters hung cattycorner on the walls. The paneling on the front of the receptionist’s desk was cracked in places, streaked black from shoes kicking at it in frustration. Nobody was there, and wires lay on the top of the desk. No computer. No phone. No answers.

Jo shoved the door shut so hard it bounced twice. She stayed outside, her shape a dark shadow through the spraypaint. I felt abandoned.

When I was a little kid, I’d dreamed of being a detective. Ended up in computers instead. But—the craving to know had never left me. I’d been relieved to know my parents were getting a divorce and not yelling at each other to no purpose. I’d been relieved to hear Marcus say it was over, gently holding me by his hands. He’d felt like he couldn’t touch me and was sleeping with someone else, with Jo. I’d even been secretly relieved to hear the old goddess of finding lost shit was dead.

I could give that relief of just knowing to—everyone. Without me, people would never know what had happened to their damn mail. It seems so small, until you feel the weight come off you, when you finally know.

The old goddess had said, She’s better off not knowing. Bullshit. I’d never do that to somebody.

But the thought of being in that basement, with the flickering lights, dizzy all the time. So dedicated that I had to have people refill my coffee cup.

The lost letters called to me. My head hurt, and the graffiti shifted to say, save me.

Between having a purpose in life and hating getting railroaded into shit, I took one shaking step backward. Two. And backed into the door. Another step, and the door opened behind me, stiffly, as though I were trying to a handicapped-accessible door without pushing the button first. Resistant.

It didn’t want to let me go.

A woman in a blue postal uniform stepped out from the back hallway. I didn’t recognize her. She ran forward to me and grabbed my arm, trying to pull me further inside, I guess, but as soon as she touched me, she dropped to her knees.

Her eyes sparkled, and I saw a tear run down the groove between her cheek and nose. “Goddess.”

The door jerked open behind me. Jo was holding the door. She looked so pissed that she practically had fire shooting out of her eye sockets. “Leave her the fuck alone!” she shouted. “Get your hands off her!”

And then she grabbed my arm and tried to pull me out.

“Hang on,” I said. I glared at the clerk. “You have lost shit you want me to find? Don’t kidnap me, send me a fucking email. You want me? You want me?”

The woman in blue groveled, putting her face on the filthy floor. “Yes, Goddess.”

“Then let me telecommute. What do you think this is, the eighties?” I couldn’t believe what I was saying. My lips felt numb.

“You gotta think of the benefits, too,” Jo croaked. “Send her your salary offer. She ain’t doing this for free.” She looked at me. Her eyes were wild, they were white all the way around the edges. She was fighting the crazy, and goddamn if she wasn’t winning. Hadn’t called me a goddess once.

“That’s right,” I said. “Come on, Jo, let’s get out of here.”

I took another step back, Jo let go of the door, and we walked back down the stairs. A taxi was waiting for us, not the same one.

I got in, shaking.

“Where you headed?” the driver asked. Like they were actually letting me go.

“Airport,” Jo said. “Shit. No. Take us to the Mall of America first.”

“You got it,” he said.

I looked at her.

“I will try to respect you,” Jo said, patting my hand. She didn’t look awed or worshipful or shit like that. She hugged her Nordstrom’s bag to her chest. “But I’m getting some fucking Blahniks out of it first.”

I couldn’t stop smiling.

 

Writing a first impression.

I went to a wedding recently.   It was a good wedding, as those kinds of things go.  The couple got hitched, the bride was happy, there were no fist fights.  But I’m not here to write about the wedding, just about my first impression of one of the people I met there.

I saw her and went, “60-year-old woman in a prairie dress.”

That’s it.  I didn’t even have to talk to her to judge her, and judge her I did.  I think that says more about me than about her.

Let me unpack that prairie dress a little bit.  In the 80s, they were all the rage in South Dakota, and logically so.   They looked like someone took the dresses out of Little House on the Prairie and spraypainted lace on them.  Where I grew up, people deeply believe that “fancy” is just “plain” with unnecessary ornamentation on it.  Prairie dresses weren’t just a fashion but a philosophy.

Even I had a prairie dress.  It wasn’t so big through the shoulders as most of them were (and I took out the shoulder pads anyway).  It was blue on white and had lace that at least looked like it was made out of cotton, rather than that itchy plastic-looking stuff.  It wasn’t stiff fabric, it had a little swoosh to it.  I liked the dress…until my eyes got sick of seeing other people’s prairie dresses.  Over and over and over again, the same dresses, associated with the snobbish attitude that simpler was better–the kind of attitude that would say a crappy apple pie was better than a really great eclair, because an ee-clair is French and an apple pie was ‘Murican.  Real eyerolling stuff.  Eventually the fashion faded out until it was the people who had a real investment in the philosophy that were the only ones wearing it anymore.

In the 90s, I quit looking at the dress section in thrift stores, because that’s what you could find:  prairie dresses.  Ugly, awful brown and yellow prairie dresses that made you feel like you were five years old in church getting yelled at for not keeping your legs crossed, not an adult.  I wore a lot of black in the 90s. A lot of people wore black, and got rid of their prairie dresses.  C’est la vie.

So.  2013, and I see someone wearing a prairie dress.  To a wedding.

It’s blue and white and pink.  It has wide but not severe shoulders, and a modest amount of lace.

I see it and I judge the woman wearing it.  I go, “This person will judge me and hurt me, because I’m not like her.”  So, quickly, I judge her first.  Apparently, all I need to know about her is that prairie dress to tell me that she’s going to do to me what others have done.

—

Think about that process as a writer.

When you first describe someone, you’re not–or shouldn’t be, most of the time–writing an objective description.   Height, weight, hair color.   Usually, you’ll be writing from your character’s POV, either in first-person POV or a tight third-person POV, and you’ll have to write their snap judgment of the person they’re looking at.

A first impression isn’t really about the person your character is looking at, but about your character.  Their memories, their experiences.  In my case, it’s once bitten, twice shy.  I think I’m a relatively objective person, or at least able to see things from multiple perspectives, and then something like the prairie dress comes up and goes straight into some kind of primal hindbrain.

I think, really, in order to get a full sense of a character’s first impression, you may want to give the snap judgment–the “60-year-old woman in a prairie dress” version–followed be a few details to unpack that snap judgment, just like I did.

I tried for years to write descriptions of characters based on objective details.  It felt artificial.  ”No, no, you have to write the little, telling details,” people would tell me, and stare at me like it would somehow sink into my brain if they just spoke slower, louder, and put significant pauses in the conversation.  But of course trying to write those little, telling objective details felt artificial.  We don’t make first impressions based on little, telling objective details.  We make a first impression based on bias, prejudice, memory, and emotion.  We fail to notice things that don’t fit our worldview.  We stress things that tell us what we want to hear.

That I get.

—

It turns out the woman was nice.  At least, she and my daughter liked each other, which is usually good enough for me.  When Ray sees you, she sees the good in you.   That’s just her.  I tend not to see the goodness in people, as such; I tend to see people’s joy and pain, which is different.   More subjective.  Ray saw the goodness in this woman, and I saw that Ray and the woman enjoyed each other’s company, and now the dress is just a dress, mostly.  I can remember what I thought about the woman, how threatened I felt when I saw her–but it seems like thoughts from another person.  I have changed my mind.

She and Ray wandered along the path through the garden where the wedding was, drinking soda and talking to each other.  Ray’s getting tall.  I’m proud of her for seeing what I couldn’t.  Lee was walking next to me as the two of them were walking away and not noticing anything else in the world.

I joked, “I’ve just been ditched by our daughter.”  What I meant was, “There she goes, growing up, meeting people, not being influenced by me and my stupid prejudices.”

He looked at the two of them.   I forget how he said it.   It think it was something like, “Our daughter’s a cool kid.”  But I think he meant something similar, too.

 

New Cover: Exotics #2, Xanadu House

Now (or soon) available at B&N, Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, Powell’s and more. The print book will be available at Amazon.com and more.

Check it out!  I think this is going to work as a design – the cover here took much less time to put together than the first one.  If you want to read the sample chapters, head over to the De Kenyon website.

 

Writers and Drive

If I had it to do it all over again, if I could put a message in an envelope and send it back to my past self, I would pick one thing to change:  drive.

Here’s the thing.  When I was younger I was shy.  I’m not shy now.  I’m an introvert.  Say what you like about the flaws of personality tests, but they have, on occasion, changed the course of my life for the better.  When I first moved to Colorado Springs, after a disastrous stint temping at another business, I started working at Wells Fargo.  They hired me on full-time and I got to go to their training classes:  everything from diversity to the legalities as they apply to equity loans.  I like learning things the way some people will read the back of a cereal box.  I had fun.

One of the classes was a personality class, with a focus on getting along with people who aren’t the same as you.

This helped pretty much everyone who went through it.  It wasn’t Myers-Briggs (in which I’m an INTP, the architect/icon breaker, thank you very much) but it was close–True Colors.  I’m a green, which means I’m a rational/curious type.  A nerd (go figure).

Here are some of the things I learned that I still take with me:  I hate having people in my personal space…unless I’m exploring with them.  If you can’t explain it to me on a rational level, then it’s probably not worth my time–although I accept “because I want to/feel like it/I don’t know how to explain it” as perfectly rational responses.  I don’t have to go along to get along.  I don’t have to fit in.  It’s not my job (that’s blue and gold).  It’s okay to be me, and I’m supposed to be near the edge of things, messing around.

It was freeing.

Shortly after I went through that class, I started being more forward about chasing down learning opportunities.  I got a promotion, became a QA, pissed everyone off for judging their work against objective standards, learned how to do everyone’s jobs, worked on documenting everything…and, because I was doing what I was good at, I could expand into other dimensions that I wasn’t as good at.  Like sympathizing.  (I’m good at empathy but that’s different–watch me pick up an accent inadvertently around someone else, or start using the same hand gestures, or agreeing with someone else’s opinion after spending the day around them.)  Or standing closer than three feet to people.  Or giving out hugs.

It was like a hierarchy of personality traits:  first I satisfied my need to be myself, and then I could satisfy the needs of other people.  Instead of being “shy,” I could interact more with people.  And, because most of the people there had been through the same course, I could say, “I’m sorry, I’m being very green today, and I need some quiet time” and they’d let me have it.  They’d joke about it, but they’d let me have it.  And they could say the same to me, and expect me to respond at least at a basically appropriate level.

In the middle of all that, I discovered I had drive.

I’d been pissing around with writing for years, but hadn’t really done anything other than write poems and a few story fragments.  I’d determined that I wasn’t really (or at least primarily) a poet, and that I should be writing fiction.  And then I’d given up:  because learning a new form was hard, and complex, and I didn’t really know where to begin.  I’d write enough to keep my ego intact and leave it at that.

Then I discovered I wasn’t happy with “leaving it at that.”

In fact, the hell with “leaving it at that.”

My dream was to be a writer.  Why wasn’t I writing?  Why wasn’t I learning?  Why wasn’t I just giving myself over to my dream?   They tell you to follow your dreams, right?

Well, it turns out that drive makes other people uncomfortable.

The first time I left a room with people in it, having a conversation, in order to go write, was hard.   I felt like they were staring at me.  The conversation stopped.  I felt like I was abandoning my daughter.  I felt like I was wasting my time.  It took me an hour to write a hundred words, and that wasn’t the only night that I pissed away most of my time staring at a page or a screen and going, “What the hell am I doing here?”

But I felt better.  I felt more myself.  I felt more like I could function around other people.  I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.

However, people tried to keep me from writing, for whatever reasons:

“You know you’ll never make a living as a writer.  You need to come up with a backup plan, like being a substitute or marrying someone rich.  You know that women don’t write as well as men (yes, I got that one).  How are you going to balance being a writer and a mother?  Children are supposed to take up all your time.   How will you take care of your family?  I bet your house is dirty.  Wow, you sure are pushy about this stuff.  [Sigh] If only I had time to write…but I’m too busy with my real life (what, mine isn’t real?).   You obviously aren’t a success…you’re just writing genre fiction, after all.  Well, I haven’t heard of you.  How much money have you made?  Self publish?  Isn’t that for crazy people with pamphlets?  How many copies do you sell?  Is it enough to justify your decision to self-publish?  If I were you, I’d just give up, because obviously you’re not going to get published by a real publisher.  You sure have a lot of…aggressive energy.  Why don’t we just do what everyone wants to do?  Look, this is how everybody does it.  Why are you being so uncooperative?”

And so on.  I often find myself awash in a sea of defeatism, of people trying to sell me the benefits of being stuck in a rut, even among other writers.  Especially among other writers.

There are reasons.  I’ve tried to defuse other people’s dreams.  Yes, really.  I’ve caught myself at it.  Dreamers are like little birds that have to slam against a window hard enough to leave a print in the dust before they’ll try to stop flying through the damn window.  ”Look,” you say, “that’s a window, not a hole in the wall.  I support your ability to fly but Jesus do it somewhere else.”  And then the dreamer slams into the window.  Again.  It’s frustrating.  You want to shake them.  ”Why won’t you listen to me?!?”

But the longer dreamers throw themselves at windows, the less likely they are to be windows, and instead be holes in the wall for them that would be solid panes of glass for anybody else.  So I’m learning to keep my mouth shut when it comes to other dreamers, too.  It’s easy to be a hypocrite about this stuff, is what I’m saying.

So.  Here’s the letter to my sixteen-year-old self:

De,

You’re a nerd.  This turns out to be a good thing.  It’s your purpose in life, so don’t let people tell you that it’s not okay to be smart.  Also, you’re also a writer (yes, really).  You’ll have ups and downs, you’ll try things that don’t work out, but that’s okay.  You’re worried about not having anything worth writing about, too, which will also take care of itself.  The main thing is to not let anything stop you from putting in your time writing.  Write every day.  When people try to discourage you from writing every day, flip ‘em off.  They’re just being rude, so go be rude right back to them and write.  This too is part of your purpose in life.  Every day that you try something new in writing is a day that you’ll feel better and more confident about yourself.  Tell people you’re a writer.  You don’t need to have “success” to be a writer.  You just need to write.  It’s okay to be driven.  That’s the word you’re looking for, when people try to discourage you.  Say, “Thanks for the advice, but I really am driven to do this.”  They probably won’t get it, but that is also okay.  First you have to take care of yourself, and then you’ll be able to make things look tidy for the church ladies of the world.  You know what I mean.

Love,

De.

I was going to tell her not to go after that Creative Writing degree, because it turned out to be a lot of misinformation and dead ends, but…nah.  It’s all fuel for the fire.

Free Fiction Monday: In the Groves of Lord Satsuma

Even more than she wishes to destroy the celestial invaders who have killed her husband, wrecked her fields, and killed hundreds of her peasants, Lady Satsuma wishes to destroy the peasant who usurped his place, even over her own sons.

But now that they know that Heaven did not send the invaders, but that they simple come from the realms far from Earth, the people rush forth to attack the destroyers, instead of fleeing their strange, cutting ribbons.

A small victory brings the people joy, and they celebrate.  But the insolent peasant knows no limits to his “celebration.”

What will the Lady choose?  Justice, or revenge?

“In the Groves of Lord Satsuma” will be free here for one week only, but you can also buy a copy at B&N, Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, Powell’s and more.

—

In the Groves of Lord Satsuma

 

I watched from the gates of the manor, impeccably dressed in my finest robes, to honor those who fought.

The leader of the survivors, the despicable Hashimoto Kenta, who had forced his preference ahead of that of my sons, rode through the mikan groves, down the slope, across the bridge, and into the daikon fields, where a month ago he was whipped for being lazy and stirring up other workers to argue and fight. He screamed a garbled battle cry as he rode one of my lord’s horses and waived one of my lord’s swords. I prayed for his death.

As I hoped, the three celestial invaders rose up out of the fields with their long, insect legs dripping rich brown earth and dangling with rotted leaves. The daikon had been harvested just before the invaders came, which was a fortunate thing. The first invader stabbed at Hashimoto with a sharp forelimb, and red blood sprayed, although I could not identify whether the injury was his or the horse’s. I smiled.

But Hashimoto, that thief of thieves, wheeled my lord’s horse even as the men charged into the field behind him. He had told them many things, that they were strong, that they would be safe from the invaders because the gods were with them. That kind of nonsense.

Two of the invaders charged the men. One invader still tried to kill Hashimoto, tearing bloody gashes into the back of my lord’s horse, which reared. The horse leapt forward, knocking men aside, streaming blood, charging across the creek to safety with Hashimoto still on its back. The horse disappeared into the lowest of the trees, heavy and bright with fruit that we had not dared to pick, they were so close to the fields where the invaders lurked. I could not see if he lived or died. I hoped for death.

The three invaders lifted their torsos off the ground and began their dance. They lifted their metal ribbons from the ground and spun with them, raising their forelimbs in the air, spinning, and striking out with the ribbons. Where the ribbons touched, blood flowed and limbs sailed through the air, even heads. The white of bone glimmered through the mud, and men screamed.

Still, more of them swarmed out of the groves, raising swords, rakes, shovels, or fists. Peasants’ weapons. There were only three of the invaders. Yesterday, a traveling monk had convinced us that they had not been sent from heaven before he had died, ribbon-slashed through the gut, and today the men were able to fight with clear wills. There was hope in their shoulders as they attacked, even though their leader had abandoned them.

The men swarmed the nearest of the invaders, at least a dozen losing their lives within the first few blows, struck down like harvested rice under the ribbon. The survivors—including my eldest son—grabbed the invader’s legs and clung like children to their mothers. The invader lifted its feet and shook them, but the men tied themselves to its legs with leather thongs. Other men threw hooks over the invader’s long, sticklike belly, drawing hemp ropes over it and heaving downward.

The other two invaders abandoned their attackers and ran to help the third, dropping their ribbons, lest they kill their companion. They tried to use their legs to scrape the men off, but the captured attacker fell and was staked into the mud with ropes. Its limbs were cut off with axes, then its head.

The invaders pounced on the head, snatching it up. As soon as one of them had it, its long whiskers dragging on the ground, they ran off with it, leaving the men behind.

My sons both lived, but many other men died.

—

Late that night, my sons returned to the manor house, covered in mud and blood. When they are around me alone, they are humble, but among the fighters, they were arrogant and loud, acting the way small boys suppose that warriors must behave, with swagger and drunkenness.

I stood near the door of the great hall, watching them drink. Hashimoto sat in my lord’s chair, even though he was a peasant and a coward. He had told the men his horse had run off with him; he’d been struck by a branch of a mikan tree and knocked to the ground. He had the bruises to prove it.

But I knew the truth. I saw it in his eyes, his coward eyes. His eyes were flat and emotionless; I had at first suspected that he would be a brutal warrior in battle, but that was not the case. A cup to his lips, he glanced up at me; his nostrils flared, sniffing.

I had supposed myself protected by my sons. They saw me standing in the doorway and stood, walking toward me as quickly as their dignity would allow, and followed me through the corridors to the kitchen, where the cook was sweaty and cursing and the servants were searching for platters.

The servants cheered, and my sons embraced me.

“Mother,” Daitaro said. “The invaders are very small. Could you see?” He held two fingers the width of a grain of rice. He sounded very much like a little boy, even though he was certainly old enough to be a soldier. My heart was already beating hard at the thought of him, clinging to the leg of the invader.

“They looked very big to me,” I said.

“No, no,” Daitaro said. “They are very small. The large creatures are the invaders’ horses. The invaders are very small, like ants. Smaller than ants. We saw them falling out of the beast’s skull as the other invaders rescued them.”

“We still have to kill the mounts,” Daijiro said. Even though he was the younger of the two, he seemed the elder. He did not laugh or cry or smile, only frowned, even as a child. Even though he was young, his face was lined from frowning. But sometimes his frown had a curl to it that was as good as a gap-toothed grin on a peasant, and he had it now. “There are only two left. We can defeat them.”

One of my sons should have been the leader; they were the sons of the lord. Instead, a whipped peasant sat on my lord’s seat, and my sons followed him. But I could not bring myself to resent my sons.

—

After my sons returned to the feast, I went outside to pray to the oldest of the mikan trees, the home of the spirit of the grove. Even more than the men, it was the grove that had defended us. The trees are close together. Their thick leaves and heavy fruit wood blocked the invaders—their strange insects’ limbs were too long to slip through the trees and the branches tangled their metal ribbons so they could not attack.

I knelt before the oldest tree, whom I called Lord Satsuma. More than my dead husband, it was that tree that reigned over the prefecture and contained our pride. My husband had joked many times that if Lord Satsuma had ever cared to cast off his tree-form and appear to me as a man, I would have opened my legs for him in an instant. I offered up a prayer for the spirit of my husband, who had died trying to defend the peasants—including the current leader—from the invaders, along with our other soldiers.

Then I prayed to Lord Satsuma, offering him incense, a platter from the feast, and ribbons I had cut of my finest kimono and braided into a thick rope. I tied it around the base of the tree, honoring Lord Satsuma for saving my sons.

I heard a drunken laugh and the sound of piss from the front of the house. Hashimoto was outside relieving himself. After a few seconds, he stared out into the grove. I continued praying, turning back to the tree.

There was no sound behind me until his soft words tried to caress my ear: “You have called me here.”

I struggled to my feet, pulling my knife.

“I am no invader,” he laughed. He was a child trying to act like a great seducer of women, and it disgusted me.

Had it been any other man behind me, I would have said nothing. Or I would have flirted, if it were the kind of attention that I welcomed. My husband was dead, after all, and widows are known to crave comfort. But I was more afraid of him than I was of anyone or anything else, and where there is fear, there is anger; where there is anger, there is a certain lack of wisdom.

“You’re a peasant who was whipped for being a lazybones,” I said. “You’re a coward who fled from the fight today when other men died. You’re a usurper who sits in my husband’s seat and rides his horse while my sons server you.” I spat on the ground.

It was all true, all just. These were things that should have been said by my husband, laughing in the wastrel’s face, or my sons. But I was alone, and a woman. I should have said nothing. I should have walked calmly back to the house, before the demon struck.

He grabbed for my wrist, but I pulled it out of the way, then slashed him across the back of his hand. He growled—it was a pitiful, weak sound, and I laughed—and grabbed for me again. I knew the moment I turned to leave, he would grab my robes; I could not run.

I was not wise. I was angry. But what wisdom is it to allow your world to be threatened more by the men who would defend it than by the invaders at your door? What wisdom is it to submit to those who would hurt you, to keep them from hurting you worse?

I will not dignify his actions by describing them, as though I were a noble lady at court writing trysts in her pillow-book. I cut him again, but not enough. He caught me, took my knife, and had his way with me. Then he dragged me through the grove to the edge of the field and left me there for dead, or to be killed by the invaders, however it should happen to occur.

They say that women like me, powerless in life, become vengeful ghosts, as though that should be a comfort, that I will have justice in death where I had no power to find it in life.

I had no wish for such a justice. The vengeance of ghosts is tenuous at best, and they often attack the innocent, still too afraid in death to punish those who truly wronged them.

After some hours during which I knew nothing but fire and anger, I pulled myself up to my hands and knees and crawled across the bridge to the far side, to the edge of the field, and called for the invaders. No matter from what hell they came, no matter from what foreign land, all intelligent beings crave justice, that is, repayment for that which has harmed us, and today we had finally harmed them.

Justice is a kind of madness, I admit. All of us believe that the hurts we inflict are less than the hurts we receive; and so, when we receive the retribution which is our due, we think it far too severe, and seek our own justice in turn. Our craving for it knows no innocence, no evidence, no doubt. We know that our cravings are mad, yet we cannot stop them. We are all hungry ghosts when it comes to this, which is why we have judges, those who are separate from the cycle of justice, set above it. And yet they, too, are caught in this cycle, and become corrupt, swaying justice first this way and then that, often believing all the while they are being fair and even-handed. But having a judge, no matter how corrupt, is better than not having one, because the self’s craving for justice knows no bounds, but venal corruption has its limits.

I called for the invaders, and they came. They did not rise out of the mud at the edge of the field, as before; they had hidden themselves further away with the death of their third. Fearing a trap, they came slowly forward, turning their heads back and forth, back and forth, their long whiskers of flesh waving in the moonlight, until they were standing over me, and I could not see them, because I was too weak to keep my head raised to them.

I opened my robes and showed them what had been done to me. The blood was still flowing. I pointed up to the manor house and screamed. It was a pitiful sound, the mewling of a drowning kitten, and I fell forward when I was done, it exhausted me so. Their clawed limbs glistened where the wet, ashen mud covered them, were dull where the mud had dried, and glittered where the mud had flaked away.

I felt something brush against my head, move away, then brush by me again. It was a gentle touch, not tender in the way of lovers or mothers or those who care for you, but less harsh than what the leader had done to me. A long whisker from one of the creature’s heads fell in front of my face, mingling with my hair, and what looked like tiny bugs crawled off it and swarmed onto my face.

I did not move. I had, in my way, prayed to the invaders for help, and I would not now refuse it.

After a few moments, my wounds began to burn. Still I did not move, not even to look. A pain stabbed me deep in my belly, and I gasped and flinched; it was so much pain that I could not help myself. The pain faded, as did the burning. I felt weak, but less so than before.

Then a feeling of power flooded my body. I stood and stumbled, my muscles tossing me to and fro until I learned to move them as little as possible.

I looked up at the invaders, but they had disappeared. I looked down at myself. I was still covered in blood, but it no longer flowed from me, and when I brushed my hand across my breasts they felt whole again.

I felt the invaders crawling on me, and within me. I knew that it was time to go up to the house then. I could have resisted but did not.

I walked up the hill, through the grove, the place that was my home, even more than the house itself. I shifted my course a little so I would pass by Lord Satsuma.

I knew, without knowing how I knew, that he had been attacked, just as I had. The shadows that should have marked his presence were missing. Closer, and I smelled the mikan more and more strongly, the citrus almost stinging my nose, and the smell of fresh-cut wood.

The ribbon had been stripped from Lord Satsuma, and his trunk had been chopped through, causing him to topple into his serving-women, elegant old trees who had been with him from the first, according to family history. I suppose that while I was unconscious I had heard the sound of chopping and the thunderous crash of the tree and known what it meant.

I reached forth and put my hand on the twisting splinters of wood, where the tree had overbalanced and fallen before the last strokes could cut it through. The leader was no woodcutter, and it looked as though the tree had toppled right into him. Unfortunately, his body was not to be found.

Worse than what he had done to me was what he had done to my tree.

“This is my price,” I said. “Save Lord Satsuma, and I will do as you ask, and willingly.” I could not tell you why I did so. Was Lord Satsuma more important to me than my own sons? But it seemed as though he was. Men seemed transient and imperfect; it was the fall of the tree that seemed to hold the breaking of my world. I had long grown accustomed to the thought that while all the men I loved would pass, the tree at least would exist long after I was gone.

I felt them move down my arm and onto the trunk. Not all of them. But some of them. I waited a few moments, but nothing happened.

Then I walked toward the house. My robes were ruined, so I stripped them off, wearing only my blood-soaked nagajuban. The blood should be seen, I felt.

The servants screamed when they saw me, and the men ran toward me from the hall.

“A ghost!” someone shouted.

“Mother!”

I did not look. My eyes were fixed on Hashimoto, who had a ribbon of my kimono silk dangling from his waist. I raised my arm and pointed to him. “It was he who killed me,” I moaned.

He turned pale, and I cackled. It really was very funny. I staggered close to him, my hands limp at the wrists, as though I were a real ghost, back from the dead. If only I could have floated—laughter bubbled up again. I felt almost joyful.

My hand was not large enough to fit all the way around his neck, so I grabbed his coat and lifted him, the strength of the invaders helping me push him high into the air. My hair, covered now with the tiny forms of them, swarmed up my arm and covered his face.

He screamed in fear, then in anger, then in pain. Before he ran out of breath, he died. He turned into black dust and fell to the ground, leaving behind only bones, leather, and cloth. I dropped what was left of him with a dry clatter.

I heard the ringing of a sword being drawn and turned to look, too late. A bright strip of metal was flying toward me, and I felt myself flying through the air, striking a man in the chest, falling, rolling. My head had been cut off.

I blinked and did not die. My son Daitaro was standing with his sword dangling from his loose grasp. My body had fallen in front of him and was trying to find me, its hands patting the ground, reaching out. The blood flow stopped as I watched, crusting over with black. Daijiro drew his sword and aimed it at my back.

“Run,” I mouthed, but there was no sound.

Daijiro stepped on my back, crushing me to the ground, splaying my hands in front of me and my knees out sideways, like a frog’s. He raised his sword with both hands, but it was too late: the blackness swarmed up him, destroying him just as it had destroyed the leader. My body rose and reached toward me, settling me on my own shoulders. I blinked, breathed, and told my other son, Daitaro, “Go now, or die.”

He ran.

—

I am alone now in my lord’s manor, which has become surrounded by wild groves of mikan. The mounts of the celestial invaders bring bits of twisted metal that I drag up from the base of the hill. Slowly they create a tower which rises above the trees, which will (I have come to understand) someday return them to Heaven.

Lord Satsuma rises above all other trees. He is newly crowned; the old wood fell into black dust and was recreated as I watched. His fruit is both tart and sweet. I write poems about eternity. Time passes; the paper rots; but I do not seem to grow old.

Treasure hunters come looking for treasure, as they do at all haunted places, and I kill them or chase them off, as the mood strikes me. Sometimes I throw my head at them.

I know I should regret what I have done, but the madness of justice is still upon me, and I do not.