Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 48

Raena Zacari & Jessica Jones

When I was writing the Templar novels, I didn’t read much beyond magazines and Facebook, because I didn’t want to subconsciously borrow anything from sources that weren’t already in my head. For the same reason, I didn’t watch much that I wasn’t already familiar with. Because of that, I missed Jessica Jones when it first aired.

Now, working my way through Jessica’s first season on Netflix, I am amazed by the similarities between the Templars’ heroine Raena and Jessica. There’s the physical things: the black hair and the black eyes, the slim body, but Jessica is a paler shade than Raena.

The part that astounds me is their relationships with their exes.  Both Raena and Jessica have escaped from deadly, controlling men who will stop at literally nothing to get “their” women back.  Both women start out terrified:  Jessica is as fluttery as a trapped sparrow; Raena makes herself so ill that she nearly dies.  In both cases, their first instinct is to run as fast and as far away as they can.

Both of them stall when they realize what their exes will do to the friends left behind.  Raena has already rescued her girlfriend Ariel from Thallian once.  She knows Ariel will not survive a second encounter.

The parallels were driven home to me when Kilgrave tells Jessica that he never realized how much he loved her until she left him to die.  She was the first thing he had ever wanted and couldn’t have, so he’s going to threaten everything, everyone, until she sacrifices herself to protect them and comes back to him.

I got chills. That speech echoes what Raena tells everyone who tries to get her to hide during her flight from Thallian:  he will not stop, until he has me back.  No one is safe. It takes her a while to accept that there is no one who can stop Thallian but Raena herself. From that point on, she is hunting him, rather than vice versa.

In No More Heroes, the third book of the trilogy, Raena talks with Jim, one of Thallian’s sons, about his father. Raena says that Thallian lived alone in a galaxy full of ghosts.  No one was ever real to him.  Jim points out that Raena, at least, was real.  Thallian was willing to sacrifice all his brothers, all his sons, to get her back.

Raena says, “I was only ever real to him after I ran from him.”  She was the only thing — having her was the only thing — that ever made Thallian feel alive.

It gives me goosebumps to see my characters reflected on the TV.

My Bloody Valentine

Image borrowed from Wily Writers.

I’ve been writing stories about my magical monster hunter Alondra DeCourval for many years.  Her adventures have appeared most recently in Fright Mare: Women Write Horror, where she met a possessed doll in Tokyo, and nEvermore!: Tales of Murder, Mystery, and the Macabre, in which she unravels an ancient vendetta in Venice.

In Instant City, she walked with a vampire in Golden Gate Park. In the first Haunted Mansion Project book, she wrestled with ghosts.  She’s practiced alchemy in Prague and befriended a fox spirit in Ueno Park and made the ultimate sacrifice in New Orleans.

The only story that’s been podcasted was a dark “Valentine” that appeared on Wily Writers.  You can read it or listen to it here.

An excerpt:

Alondra had never done this kind of magic before. It felt awful, dirty. Her head ached from the concentration it took. Still, she sat in the quaint café, drinking peppermint tea. Teeth gritted, she traced sigils for summoning in the moisture her glass left on the birch tabletop.

She’d never been to Oslo before, spoke almost no Norwegian, but that hadn’t posed a problem. Scandinavians all spoke lovely English. It shamed her to not have more vocabulary. She’d scarcely prepared for the trip and didn’t know how long before her quarry moved on.

And he traveled a lot. Alondra wasn’t sure if he fled something or searched for something. Not that it mattered. She didn’t want to know more about him than his regular habits in this place. She needed to know enough to find him. Meet him. Get him alone and kill him.

Star Wars fan theories

In November, I was invited to contribute to a new Star War fan community on Wattpad in advance of the release of The Force Awakens. For whatever reason, the community never really gelled.

My chief contribution was to pull together topics for discussion. I had a lot of fun collecting up my favorite fan theories, which I’ll recap here.

In the comments, please let me know your favorite fan theory or video.

Regarding the Prequels

This is a fascinating analysis of why the three prequels failed: http://mythicscribes.com/analysis/star-wars-prequels/ Did you watch the movies in order from 1-6 or did you start with A New Hope? How do you think that altered how you feel about the prequels?

It’s time to remake the prequels, based around this fan theory: http://www.gamesradar.com/george-lucas-nearly-wrote-perfect-prequel-trilogy-he-just-didnt-seem-notice/

Have you seen the theory that Jar Jar Binks is a secret Sith Master? It makes a terrifying amount of sense. http://laughingsquid.com/in-depth-explanation-of-a-theory-about-how-jar-jar-binks-may-actually-be-a-sith-master/

A new fan theory: What if Padme wasn’t in love with Anakin? What if she was spying on him for the Jedi? https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/11/04/the-biggest-problem-with-the-jar-j

The Original Trilogy

Do you believe that R2 and Chewbacca are the secret leaders of the Rebel Alliance? This is one of my favorite fan theories ever: http://km-515.livejournal.com/746.html

Bring tissues! Obi-Wan remembers what really happened to Vader as he tells Luke about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN74bOubUug

Gizmodo had a recap of the economic analysis of how building two Death Stars bankrupted the Empire: http://gizmodo.com/economist-the-destruction-of-two-death-stars-bankrupte-1746082150

The first really good (I mean REALLY good) fan film was Troops, a mashup of Cops and Stormtroopers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvswNDAAZCU

This is my favorite video of stormtroopers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZSXpm4NKUo

The Force Awakens

JJ Abrams had the same reaction to meeting John Williams that I would have. This gives me even more hope for The Force Awakens! http://www.wired.com/2015/11/star-wars-force-awakens-jj-abrams-interview/

Have you seen the new fan-made trailer for The Force Awakens? We finally get to see Luke! The Force Awakens is barely 2 weeks away. http://epicstream.com/videos/This-Star-Wars-The-Force-Awakens-Super-Trailer-Features-Luke-Skywalker

Have you seen the most recent international trailer? This may be the last one we see before The Force Awakens next week: http://io9.com/this-the-force-awakens-trailer-is-probably-your-last-hi-1747287133

What’s Luke’s story in The Force Awakens? Possible spoilers: http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Star-Wars-5-Educated-Guesses-Luke-Skywalker-Big-Secret-97737-p5.html

Have you seen the new featurette about Rey? It gives a little bit of background on her character, but I apologize for the sound quality. There doesn’t seem to be a good version on the web: http://comicbook.com/2015/11/28/star-wars-the-force-awakens-behind-the-scenes-with-daisy-ridley-/

This has a great discussion of Rey, Mary Sues, and the Hero’s Journey: http://www.scannain.com/opinion-piece/girls-explain-star-wars-to-you

What if Rey was not hidden on Jakku for her protection, but to keep her isolated? http://www.theferrett.com/ferrettworks/2016/01/the-case-for-rey-palpatine/

Who is your favorite TFA character? Mine is Finn — for all these reasons: http://the-toast.net/2016/01/07/finn-is-the-best-character-in-star-wars-the-force-awakens/

 

Raena’s Foremothers: Alice

One of the primary physical models for Raena Zacari in my space opera novels was Alice in the Resident Evil movies.

At 5’9″, Milla Jovovich is much taller than Raena, but her slender dancer’s body is the perfect equivalent. Jovovich studied ballet, which inspires her extensions, kicks, and jumps as she fights.  Thanks to the wire work, there’s a fair amount of acrobatics thrown in, too. Alice is a joy to watch, even as she’s fighting monsters for her life.

Alice was once head of security at the Umbrella Corporation’s Hive facility, until she decided what they were creating was too dangerous. Things fell apart when she got foiled leaking their secrets to the outside world.

When the first Resident Evil movie begins, Alice’s mind has been wiped and she’s trying to piece together who she was and what has been done to her.  In terms of the story, Alice is an accessory, not the star.  She spends a lot of time cowering behind Michelle Rodriguez and the other soldiers.  Only at the end, when she’s faced with the mutated dobermans, do you see her switch on and step up.

I like Resident Evil: Apocalypse the best of the series.  Our first sight of Alice is when she wakes up in a tiny white towel, screaming and tearing electrodes for her hair. (There’s a similar scene in Kill By Numbers, but it was written — and published — almost twenty years earlier.)  Barefoot, in a stolen bathrobe, Alice steals a shotgun from a cop car and strides out into a city that’s been destroyed by the plague unleashed by the Umbrella Corporation. You know from the start that Alice is badass.

It’s clear that Alice has a whole history and a complicated — if fractured — inner life.  She doesn’t speak at all until 27 minutes into Apocalypse, when she flies through the church’s stained glass window on a motorcycle and commands the cops to “Move!” before working through a chain of weaponry to kill the monsters lurking inside the church.

Jovovich’s Alice has a self-aware sense of humor that I adore.  You can see it in Apocalypse when she steps out of the shadows of the school cafeteria with a fire blanket to protect the little girl.  Alice doesn’t stop to think; she just throws herself forward to protect those that she can.

Alice has been infected on a “massive scale” by the Umbrella Corporation’s T-virus.  The whole movie is a set up for the fight at the end, where Alice is pitted against the Nemesis monster.  She’s got to keep moving, keep dodging, keep kicking or spinning, because if the Nemesis catches her, she’s done.  It will break her.

The same can be said for Raena.  Because she is small of statue, she has to make up in speed what she lacks in mass.

By Resident Evil: Extinction, the third movie in the franchise, the world has ended and Alice is alone.  She knows that the Umbrella Corporation has a satellite tracking her.  She’s determined not to be recaptured by them — even as an Umbrella doctor thaws clone after clone of Alice, only to watch them fail the physical tests that set her apart. The dead clones are discarded in a heap in a culvert, but Alice’s own powers have grown exponentially. She burns all the zombie crows out of the sky with her mind, then dispatches super zombies in Las Vegas with a wicked scissor kick. (Wish I could have found a photo of that!)  She’s amazing to watch because she’s mutated so far that she no longer has human limitations.

Resident Evil: Afterlife starts with an army of Alice’s clones attacking the Umbrella installation in the heart of Tokyo.  The affection between the clones and the amusement with which they watch each other work is fun to see.

While there are clones of Raena in The Dangerous Type, they don’t ever mature enough to be a fighting force.

For that matter, Raena is never more than human in my books.  She has doubts and fears, gets injured and needs time to heal.  But she was created (or in her case, trained) by the inescapable evil she turns against, hunts down, and fights to the death.  Alice’s justified paranoid and desperate anger are echoed in Raena. They both rock black catsuits, too.

I should have thanked Milla Jovovich in my books.

You can study Alice in the Resident Evil box set available on Amazon.

My other Raena’s Foremothers essays so far are:

Aeon Flux

Jeri Cale

Pvt. Vasquez

Sarah Connor

Molly Millions

Doctor Cyn Sharpe

Zoe Washburne

Martha Allard

Princess Leia

What strong female characters have inspired your characters?

 

Creating Nonbinary Characters

When I started creating the characters for the Templar novels, I knew I wanted the crew of the Veracity to include a variety of different sorts of people. Mykah, the human captain with his topiary facial hair, came to me first. His blue-furred Haru girlfriend came easily, too. The other two characters — Haoun and Vezali – were inspired by an iguana and an coconut octopus at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.  One of the things I wanted to do with my nonhuman characters was to defy expectations.

In The Dangerous Type, Vezali’s translator has a metal-inflected voice. The other crew members on the Veracity use female pronouns to refer to Vezali, so Raena does, too. In the second book, Raena comments on the high-pitched girlish voice of Vezali’s new translator.

The new translator gave her a high-pitched girlish voice, which Raena guessed must be pleasing to Vezali’s auditory system, wherever it was. Otherwise, Vezali was clearly clever enough to adjust it to any pitch she wanted, even though it was based on Templar technology.

It’s not until deep into Kill By Numbers that Raena and Vezali actually talk about Vezali’s gender:

“When I was younger,” Vezali said, “I fathered children. Now I’m between gender. The translator would call it gynandromorph. You can think of it as neutral. Someday I’ll become female.”

Raena nodded. “I’ve thought of you as ‘she,’” she apologized. “I judged you on the pitch of your voice and I’m sorry.”

“‘She’ is fine,” Vezali said. “Some of my favorite people are she. I’m honored to have them count me in their company.”

What I meant to show was that Vezali is so comfortable in zir identity that it doesn’t matter if others fit zir a gender construct that is familiar to them. My intent was to explore Vezali’s “other” POV in the final book.

Standing outside the gender binary would have given Vezali a different perspective on Raena’s relationship with Haoun. Ze could have commented on news events in the galaxy with a different set of eyes. I was looking forward to exploring how the lack of gender constraints would color zir observations.

Vezali unslung zir translator from around zir waist and wound its belt over the handle by the hatch, so Kavanaugh could find it before he picked zir up. Ze opened the Veracity’s hatch and looked down into the frothing ocean below. Not the most inviting place ze had ever swum. Still, ze’d volunteered for this. Ze retracted zir eyestalk, clutched the gun case close to zir body, and dove out of the open hatch.

The water closed over zir. Ze gave zirself time to adjust to the temperature and the flavor of the water, allowing zirself to drift on the currents. As far as ze could see in every direction, the ocean was empty. Perhaps that made sense. The more polluted waters would be closer to the surface. The leviathans would prefer the cleaner depths, where their prey survived.

Ze turned zirself over and headed down into the darkness.

After reading a couple of scenes from Vezali’s point of view, my editor said no. He’d let me get away with Raena’s bisexuality, the complicated sisterhood between Raena and her former mistress Ariel, and the explorations of masochism and power, he drew the line at nonstandard pronouns. He thought ze/zir made the Vezali scenes hard to read. They were certainly harder to write, because my pen kept defaulting to her.

As I argued for keeping the point of view, my editor pointed out that Vezali had already said ze didn’t mind the female pronoun. As zir creator, I think ze was being honest when ze said ze didn’t mind, but that was when she/her were placed on zir by people who didn’t know better. In Vezali’s own thoughts, ze wouldn’t fit zirself into someone else’s gender constructs.

I couldn’t figure out how to make the point of view work without the pronouns, so I gave up the fight.  I cut all the scenes from Vezali’s point of view.

In the end, No More Heroes still came in 10,000 words over its target. I understood that I was going to need to cut something. Still, I am sad that I didn’t get to explore Vezali’s character more. My hope is that, as soon as I figure out a plot, ze will have her own short story.

In the meantime, here’s one of the longer scenes I cut from No More Heroes. What do you think? Is it hard to read with the nonstandard pronouns or do you settle into the rhythm before long?

Since Vezali was the junior engineer on this trip, ze was assigned to take the night watch. There really wasn’t anything ze needed to do, other than make sure the newly refurbished engine didn’t act up, so ze spent the time trying to figure out the Outrider robots.

Ze’d never handled one of them herself, but ze had studied the recordings Mellix made of the Outriders. While the Veracity had hidden out with Mellix in the Tohatchi asteroid belt, Vezali watched the recordings over and over. Ze was awestruck by the way the androids knit themselves back together, using the magnetic tentacles that they could extrude at will from their necks and other joints.

That kind of tech — self-healing machines — amazed zir. Ze hadn’t known the Templars had tech that could do that, to say nothing of making it small enough that it could walk around or complicated enough that it could breathe and sweat and pass for a human.

But even more puzzling: if you could make robots that could look human, could you also make robots that looked like any other species in the galaxy? Was it more likely that the Templars’ robots only mimicked humans — or that there were other camouflaged robots at work in the galaxy even now, doing who knows what?

It boggled Vezali’s mind that the Templars would use such radical robot tech to deal in drugs whose sole purpose seemed to be to undermine planetary governments. It seemed so specific, so trivial.

What if, back in the days of the War, the Templars been playing a longer game, trying to topple the Emperor — or even the Empire itself? Vezali wasn’t an expert on the Empire like Coni. It was history before ze was born, but zir impression of it was that most humans hadn’t particularly liked living under its tyranny, which is why so many fled to the border worlds in the first place. Maybe the Empire would have collapsed on its own, even without the Messiah drug or the aftermath of the Templar genocide.

The Templars were an old race, so old that no one really understood what all they could do or even why they did the things they did. No one spoke Templar, which was a language of colors, and very few could read it. Which was why the Templars had developed the translator devices in the first place.

Like all the other Templar tech that ze’d taken apart in zir life, Vezali understood roughly how the translators worked. Why they worked was more puzzling. There were layers of science the rest of the galaxy just hadn’t unraveled yet.

Which brought her back to the Outrider robots. They all looked identical, Raena said. Spread across decades, she’d seen four of them. Now there were apparently others, peddling the Messiah drug around the galaxy. Since Raena had shown the Outriders’ face to the galaxy in the clip of Mellix’s documentary that was being shown again and again on every channel, would the robots change their appearance? If everyone knew what they looked like now, how could they possibly travel around to sell their poison? If they traveled though a gate or landed at a spaceport, if they passed a security camera or appeared at a commuter market, wouldn’t everyone recognize them? Wouldn’t anyone turn them in on sight?

With the Templars gone and unable to direct the Outriders, why were the robots bothering to sell the Messiah drug at all? Was it simply that it had been their final command from the Templars? Or was there an actual self-directed purpose behind their actions?

Vezali kept picking at the questions, but there were no satisfactory answers. It didn’t make sense. The whole thing didn’t make sense: from the way the drug worked to what it did in the real world to people who never came in contact with it, to the cleverly made but rigidly used robots. People often shrugged at this point and cursed Templar tech. Vezali didn’t accept that. There was a reason. There had to be. Ze just didn’t have enough data to understand what it was yet.

With Vezali, I wanted to explore friendship between a human woman and a creature so alien that they have nothing, not even their genders, in common.  Vezali’s coloration changes with her mood, but Raena can’t read it.  Vezali has no expressions that Raena can decipher. Their interactions are reliant on a piece of machinery that may not correctly convey Vezali’s emotions. Even so, they come to enjoy each other’s company and think of each other as friends.

I am looking forward to spending more time with them.

Fright Mare: Women Write Horror

Women write horror and have written it since before Mary Shelley wrote FRANKENSTEIN. This anthology is to highlight the fact women write great horror and to kill the fallacy that they aren’t in some way up to standard.

Edited by Billie Sue Mosiman, Fright Mare includes stories by Elizabeth Massie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kathy Ptacek, Lucy Taylor, and Loren Rhoads, as well as Rose Blackthorn,Tonia Brown, Mara Buck, Raven Dane, Sarah Doebereiner, K C Grifant, Morgan Griffith, Amy Grech, CW LaSart, Hillary Lyon, K L Nappier, Mary Ann Peden-Coviello, Marie Victoria Robertson,and Lorraine Versini.

Lock the door and windows, put on a light, and remember, it’s not real. It’s not real. Midnight awaits, monsters scheme to take you away, the strange and weird wait in the shadows, but it’s not real. Is it?

Now available for pre-order at Amazon in paperback or Kindle at a special price. The book comes out on February 5 to celebrate Women in Horror Month.

***

This book includes my latest Alondra story, “Sakura Time.”  Inspired by a trip I took to Japan that focused on meeting Japanese art doll makers, “Sakura Time” was my attempt to write a Japanese ghost story like The Ring or Dark Water.

The story contains characters I introduced in “The Fox and the Foreigner,” which was published in Not One of Us #38 in October 2007. That story was long-listed for the British Science Association Award in January 2008.

Morbid Curiosity Book Club Selection

This Wednesday, January 27, 2016, my book of cemetery travel essays will be the topic of discussion at the Morbid Curiosity Book Club in Toronto.  The club meets at the BAKA Cafe Gallery Lounge on 2256 Bloor St West, Toronto, Ontario (map) at 7:30 PM.

Organizer Alma Sinan, a longtime member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, describes the group as “a different sort of book club, for those of us who are interested in cemeteries, gravestones, mourning customs, and death and dying.”

She encourages guests to join them for coffee and conversation. The cost is free, but Alma asks that you purchase something from the cafe in appreciation for them allowing us to host the meeting there.

You can link up with the Book Club and check out their upcoming selections on Meetup.com.

I’m so honored by this!  This is the second time Wish You Were Here has been chosen as a book club selection.  I love the idea that my work inspires people to talk about cemeteries.

If you’re nowhere near Toronto, you can still read along with the book club. Here’s a description of Wish You Were Here:

Almost every tourist destination has a graveyard. You go to Yosemite National Park: there’s a graveyard. You go to Maui: graveyards everywhere you look. The Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park: both graveyards. The number one tourist destination in Michigan has three cemeteries. America’s best-preserved Gold Rush ghost town has five. Gettysburg is a National Park because it has a graveyard. Some graveyards are even tourist destinations in themselves: the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague, the colonial burying grounds of Boston, and Kennedy’s eternal flame in Arlington National Cemetery. Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery ranks in the top five tourist sites of Paris.

Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel contains 35 graveyard travel essays, which visit more than 50 cemeteries, churchyards, and grave sites across the globe.

Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel is available from Amazon or CreateSpace. Autographed and inscribed copies can be ordered directly from me through my bookshop.

 

First Lines

Back in the Livejournal days, there was a meme that encouraged writers to list the first lines of their works in progress.  The point was to talk about your hopes for the projects and to give yourself a little public accountability.

In that spirit, these are the things I have on my plate at the moment:

As Above, So Below:  “Lorelei licked the last traces of soul from her lips, then smoothed the knee-length hobble dress over her thighs.”

I want to revise our succubus novel for a second edition, to be published by Automatism Press in April.  I don’t know if the book will change very much, but I want to smooth it over one last time, then add blurbs and a chapter from the sequel. The title may change to Lost Angels to better match the sequel’s title.

Angelus Rose:  “Morning in LA dawned brown, just the way Lorelei liked it.”

The sequel to As Above will come out in Fall 2016, also on Automatism.  The book is done in a rough first draft, but Brian and I need to whip it into shape. This is the succubus novel that sets LA on fire.

Unnamed Lorelei story: “He was the most beautiful mortal Lorelei had ever seen.”

I had so much fun writing about Lorelei meeting Jimmy Page on the eve of Led Zeppelin’s first American tour for Dana Fredsti’s Demon Lovers anthology!  I’ve wanted to write another succubus and rock’n’roll story for a while. David Bowie’s death inspired me to write down what I’ve always thought about him.  I can’t wait to really dive into this one.

“The Assassin’s Mirror”:  “Raena Zacari stood in the doorway of the War Crimes Monument, looking across the vast, dimly lit space.”

In this new short story, the heroine of my space opera novels takes Haoun, her lizard boyfriend, to visit her mother’s grave in the monument to the human agents of the Human-Templar War.  I want to look at survivor’s guilt and the weight of the prejudices of the past.

The Death of Memory: “As the elevator rose past the twelfth floor, Alondra DeCourval shivered inside her black dress.”

I’m finishing the overhaul of the original Alondra novel, now that I’m putting it back out for submission.  The subplot needs a final smoothing over, then it’s good to go. Alondra solves her brother’s murder.

The nonfiction:

Death’s Garden Revisited: “Twenty years ago, I was given a box of miscellaneous cemetery photos.”

I’ve been gathering up essays for the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries.  The new essays are going up every Friday on CemeteryTravel.com.  I hope to publish the new edition early in 2017.

The Pioneer Cemeteries of the San Francisco Bay Area: “Somehow I ended up living in a city with no active cemeteries.”

I’ve been working on this project for years,  but it keeps getting pushed to the back burner by all the fiction.  This has to be the year I finally get the proposal written up and start looking for a home for it.  This is my compendium of all the Gold Rush graveyards in the area.  No one else seems to want to write this book, so I’m going to have to buckle down and do it.

Writing in Cafes: “I started writing in cafes in the early 90s.”

I had a brainstorm about this book up in Calistoga over the holidays.  I hope to start updating it regularly on Wattpad again.

So that’s what I’ve got ahead of me this year.  Mostly I’m finishing the Raena short story and working on Angelus Rose, for now, but the rest is looming.

All you writers, consider yourself tagged.  What are you working on now?  Want to share the first lines?

Borderlands Books’ Second Open Mic this Friday

Borderlands Bookstore celebrates its sponsors with its second Sponsors’ Open Mic Night this Friday, January 22, at 7:00 pm.

From the Borderlands newsletter:  “Borderlands’ sponsors are an intelligent, talented, and diverse group of people, and many of them are writers!  We’re hosting another Open Mic Night for sponsors, giving them a chance to share short stories, flash fiction, an excerpt from a longer work — almost any type of writing, in any genre.  You never know what’s coming up next.  Come by to check out your talented friends and fellow customers!”

This event is open to the general public, but only sponsors will read. Participants include:

1.    MC Greg Roensch who’ll start the evening off by reading a short piece.

2.    Loren Rhoads – I’m going to read an action scene from No More Heroes.

3.    Laurel Anne Hill – She’s the author of the award-winning Heroes Arise and a whole passel of stories in theBard in the Hand series.

4.    Louis Evans 

5.    Jean Butterfield 

6.    Betsy Streeter  – She’s the author of Silverwood, a time travel YA that’s been described as “The Incredibles meets Doctor Who meets MacGyver.”

7.    Igor Teper – He’s a short story writer who’s been published in Asimov’s and a whole lot more.

Borderlands Cafe is located beside the bookstore at 870 Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Call for details: (415) 970-6998 or visit www.borderlands-books.com.

My Life with Bowie

David Bowie’s music was central to my writing and my life. I was in high school when one of my friends gave me The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars as a birthday present. The first novel I wrote (with Martha Allard, sprawled on her bedroom floor with our spiral-bound notebooks) was an homage to Ziggy.

The year that MTV started, I was in community college. Out in the country, my parents couldn’t get cable, but one of the neighbors had a satellite dish. They hired me to sit with their elderly mother, who had dementia. After I put her to bed, I would watch MTV by the hour, waiting to see David Bowie on it.

When I went away to Clarion, I took two cassettes with me. One was a Bowie mixtape I called Stardust Paradise. Listening to it over and over, I pulled some of my favorite scenes out of the unfinished Ziggy novel and wrote a story around them. That story, “Mothflame,” was published in Not One of Us, before being reprinted in my Ashes & Rust chapbook.

One of the first big stadium shows I saw was Bowie at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan in September of 1987. I didn’t love the Let’s Dance album, but he was amazing. He sang “Time” duing the encore, which was hilarious because he’d spent the evening checking his digital watch. We could see the glow each time it lit up, even in the nosebleed seats. Someone helpfully put the setlist online for me.

I didn’t see Bowie perform again until the year he traveled with Nine Inch Nails.  A friend treated me to tickets to the Shoreline Amphitheater show for my birthday. It was weird to see Bowie in the daylight. The audience was so young and clueless that once Bowie launched into “The Man Who Sold the World,” one of the kids behind me wondered why he was covering a Nirvana song.

I saw every movie Bowie featured in, including Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence many more times than was healthy. His turn as Nicola Tesla in The Prestige is my favorite. I like what he says about trying to change the world more than once.

Of all Bowie’s music, Diamond Dogs is my favorite album.  His “Candidate” has been on repeat more times in my life than you would be happy to know. One of my unpublished stories is about time-traveling back to 1974 to see his concert tour inspired by George Orwell’s 1984. Apologies for the video quality, but here’s the live version from that era:

And here is the demo version, also one of my personal favorites:

Inspired by Bowie’s death and my long and complicated relationship with his music, I am getting ready to start a new story about him.  I think it will revolve around this song: