The Explosion
During the months of March and April, acquaintances and family members
expressed concern over the warning signs of increasing structural instability
in Ms. Gail Wooding. On the evening of 15 April, while frying potatoes for her
family’s dinner, Ms. Wooding was observed by her daughter to go through an
entire roll of paper towels while exclaiming over the intense heat of the
kitchen. Marie initiated operations to move her homework to a suitable location
after filing unanswered complaints and misgivings to local management. These
operations were interrupted in progress by an explosion event in the vicinity
of the stove. This concussive release of methane was observed to come from Ms.
Wooding as she fanned herself furiously with a dish towel.

“Mom! You are so fucking gross!” observed Marie. Moments later her mother
violently dissipated in an act of spontaneous resummation. The subsequent
collapse of Ms. Wooding into roughly one hundred and five barrels of human
liquid compound caused the daughter to expeditiously move her educational
activities to higher land.

The Spill
Immediately after the meltdown event, paramedics on the scene moved a live web
camera feed previously attached to the ceiling above Ms Wooding’s bed to the
kitchen area to monitor the ongoing spill on a twenty four hour basis. All
attempts to put a cap on what remains of Ms Wooding, and re-coop losses from
web site pay per view subscriptions have so far met with failure.

The Dog
Peeves, the family dog, was observed to voluntarily take the initiative in the
skimming operations, lapping up some of what remained of Ms. Wooding, while
pending the approval of local emergency authorities to evaluate the scene. The
earnest skimming efforts of Peeves may have contributed in some part to the
lessened impact of the flood on the local household habitat known to support a
variety of wildlife, including cockroaches, silverfish and an endangered
species of pygmy land crabs.

The Son
“It was wicked!” exclaimed Wooding’s son Ed. “I mean like – dude!” Ed has held
the office of family son and male heir exclusively for the past decade,
starting with his conception into office in early May of 2001 by Mr. Wooding
and Ms. Wooding. Several attempts to provide a suitable placement for the
office of second son ended in failure, possibly due to the onset of hormonal
changes and an eventual fall off of reproductive interest in Mr. Wooding by
Mrs. Wooding.

The Media
“My friends, you won’t believe what they’re up to now,” declared talk show host
Rush Humbug on Tuesday’s radio broadcast. “This is mind boggling, it shows how
desperate the Obama socialists are getting, folks, this so called menopausal
myth. It’s all being blamed on hormonal warming. Hormonal warming is a liberal
lie. There is no such thing as hormonal warming. There is no evidence of hormonal
warming, and there is no reputable scientist you can name that believes in
hormonal warming. I’ll say it again, my friends, there is no such thing as
female menopause, never has been, never will be. This is just another example
of the far left liberal environmental whackos, and the Obama White House agenda
conspiring with feminazis and the state run liberal media, trying yet again to
convince you to buy their crackpot theories. People – its getting crazy out
there, the absence of critical thinking on this. If Obama really cared about
this situation he’d appoint the dog as The Menopausal Czar. Does he? No!”

Personal Intimates
“You could have busted my nuts, when I heard this!” stated Sheila Wyman, Ms.
Wooding’s secret lesbian lover with whom she had been carrying on a torrid five
year affair, unknown to Mr. Wooding. “Some nights she was on fire. What bakes
my noodle is that all this time I thought it was me getting her hot.”

Mr. Cabot Paddington, who has been secretly running both Ms. Wooding and Ms.
Wyman as covert CIA death squad assassins declined to comment on the
spontaneous resummation of Ms. Wooding, only to say it was not work related.

“I drilled some relief wells into that honey’s big ass every chance I got, when
her man warn’t around.” said blues icon Hound Dog Redman in a Rolling Stone
interview. “I was her back door man. But the bitch, she was trouble. She
couldn’t get enough of that devil stick, and that’s what done ‘er in. I’m
tellin’ ya. This whole thing, it’s just ate up.”

The Authorities
Life insurance underwriters, Skrewiz, Widdow and Children released an official
statement that they will seriously consider all sustainable claims related to
this incident. So far no payments have been given out. The firm of Skrewiz,
Widdow and Children is disputing the claim that Ms. Walling’s demise is
connected with her sudden conversion into water, ruling it as an event of
“willful negligence”.

“There is no actual evidence that Ms. Wooding is in fact deceased. No body has
been produced.” Said the firm in a press release.

The Husband
As barrels of Ms. Wooding flooded into the street and damaged lawn grass
habitats in the adjoining houses, converting them into reeking wetlands,
neighboring residents assaulted Mr. Wooding with their complaints and several
have threatened class action lawsuits. Mr. Wooding rebutted the findings of
civil engineers that vast plumes possibly as far ranging as 22 miles of Ms.
Wooding may be hidden under the foundations of the house. “My wife Gail is
entirely on the surface of the kitchen,” stated Mr. Wooding. “There are no
hidden plumes or reservoirs of her anywhere. I would be the first to inform you
if there were.” Mr. Wooding believes the rapid use of dispersants as well as
the efforts of Peeves the Dog have reduced the buoyancy of Ms. Wooding and
prevented his wife’s further spread.

“We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives,” Said an
emotionally exhausted Mr. Wooding. “But there’s no one who wants this over more
than I do. I would like my wife back.”

C. Sanchez-Garcia

The following was originally posted on the Oh Get a Grip blog back when we were posting about every week.  This was my post the week after I was roughed up by the ladies at the eXcessica blog after making some snarky remarks about an anthology of theirs.  It does have some useful advice regarding crits worth repeating.  Anyway, its always enjoyable to see a guy grovel a little too.

****

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

When I was a little kid and the world was full of haints and taints and
supernatural wonders, there was this game called “Bloody Mary”. The way it works,
you have a darkened room and a mirror, then you and your friends are supposed
to look in the mirror and chant “Bloody Mary” three times and a blood soaked
girl ghost with an embittered attitude will appear. Never worked for me. Later
on I tried “Pamela Anderson” and “Sybil Danning” and that didn’t work either.

Ah!

But that was before the age of “Google Alerts”! Now let’s play the Bloody Mary
game again and see how this goes.

To wit:

As some of us know, a couple of weeks back I really stepped barefoot into a
big, fragrant, steaming pile when I made some uncalled for snarky remarks about
a book called “Alison’s Wonderland” –

Alison’s Wonderland
Alison’s Wonderland
Alison’s Wonderland

which was edited by Alison Tyler

Alison Tyler
Alison Tyler
Alison Tyler

and has a nice story called “David” by Kristina Lloyd

“David” by Kristina Lloyd
“David” by Kristina Lloyd
“David” by Kristina Lloyd

and a pretty hot story called “Managers and Mermen” by Donna George Storey

“Managers and Mermen” by Donna George Storey
“Managers and Mermen” by Donna George Storey
“Managers and Mermen” by Donna George Storey

and a good retelling of the Billy goats gruff story called “The Three Billys”
by Sommer Marsden

“The Three Billys” by Sommer Marsden
“The Three Billys” by Sommer Marsden
“The Three Billys” by Sommer Marsden

and

“Sleeping With Beauty” by Allison Wonderland
“Sleeping With Beauty” by Allison Wonderland
“Sleeping With Beauty” by Allison Wonderland

which reminded me a little of the Anne Roquelaire trilogy and a really good
story “Unveiling His Muse” by the great Portia Da Costa,

“Unveiling His Muse” by Portia Da Costa
“Unveiling His Muse” by Portia Da Costa
“Unveiling His Muse” by Portia Da Costa

the first one of her stories I’d ever read though not the last, and some other
authors whose stories I also enjoyed, whose wounded feelings and sharp
reproaches appeared on the eXcessica

eXcessica
eXcessica
eXcessica

books blog which you can read here:

http://excessica.com/blog/index.php/2010/08/12/never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover-or-its-scene/

I won’t recap my snarky remarks since I would like to leave this post with my
ass and my face in their original places, and they don’t bear repeating anyway.
I said dumb stuff.

Wait.

Paranoia.

Holy moly.

I may be saying dumb stuff at this very effing moment without realizing it or
be about to say dumb stuff without realizing it.

Hey – let’s do this:

I will make a preemptive apology in case it’s needed for anything insensitive I
may say at any time in the immediate future:

I’m sorry.

I’m really really sorry. (fill in the blank)

And my point is, if any of you eXcessica folks show up here in my mirror please
say hi. Write something on the wall so I know you’re around. I like you. I like
your stuff. I was also much chastened when Lisabet pointed out that many or
most of the writers I miffed are in fact regular contributors at my scene ERWA,
some of them with a much greater contribution there than me. So I really
stepped on my dick every way you look at it.

Having said that, I am unrepentant of my comment that Alison’s Wonderland has a
very cool cover. It just does. Okay? You sure? It has a really nice looking
cover art and I don’t give a shit who knows it. There I’ve said it. Get over
it.

What haunted me about my remarks afterward as I explained to Lisabet when I was
weeping on her maternal cyber-shoulder, was that I was entirely tone deaf to
the way I was coming across. This will seem astounding to any writers reading
this, since the accumulated effect of words is the magic we aspire to perfect,
but it had never occurred to me in a zillion years that what I was saying was
offensive to anybody or that Bloody Google would suddenly show up in the mirror
and punch four more holes in my nose. I was actually trying to express
something like what Sommer Marsden

Sommer Marsden
Sommer Marsden
Sommer Marsden

Said in the eXcessica blog –

eXcessica blog
eXcessica blog
eXcessica blog

– which is what I should have said which was something like “we are all
different but great, look at how many groovy flavors of writing there are”.
Which was what I thought it was coming out like but it wasn’t . . . like that
is what I meant it wasn’t . . . but that it’s not . . . . Do you know what I
mean?

It didn’t come out that way. Looking back on it, well, yeah. I get that. But
not at the time.

What can I say.

I’m a guy.

My remarks were not constructive criticism, since there was nothing to construct.
Constructive criticism is what we offer when we are attempting to guide the
inquisitive seeker into better paths, so we hope. Constructive criticism is
what we wish we’d had more of when we were younger if we’d been listening.
Which most of us weren’t. Real world, constructive criticism is what we offer
when someone offers us a manuscript for a critique. Giving critiques to the
work of peers, at least when it is asked for, is how we improve our own work.
It’s how we learn to read as a writer, which is an essential skill. It’s how we
express and repay our gratitude for the generosity of those writers who took on
our early incoherent junk as we were learning our chops and helped us improve.
Constructive criticism is what Lisabet has given me, and still does, on those
many occasions when I’ve sent her something half baked and she’s told me
plainly what works and what doesn’t, and 90% of the time I go with what she
says. She’s honest. I listen. Also I like her. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere
past my first year without her and each and every year since. She has more
faith than I do.

What she said of me, of digging deeper, this is what she does for me too.
Neither of us go for the nits. That’s why God made spell checkers. She deals
with story. She deals with character. She tells me when that is working or
failing, because she knows by now I’ll tear down a story and rebuild it several
times before I’m happy with it. I’ve torn out whole middle sections of stories
when she said something wasn’t working. That’s what you need to hear. That’s
love. Thank you Lisabet. Ever and ever.

Here’s the real problem. When is criticism useful or even wanted?

I come from a unique background. I have had an unusually extravagant exposure
to bullshit compared to the average person. As a consequence my relationship
with truth is . . . . well . . . antagonistic. If I have to choose between
speaking the truth and making someone happy – truth will get heaved overboard
to lighten the load, pretty much every time. The exception is the person who
really loves truth. The one who really wants to know. In that case to speak is
a great honor and a kind of sacred thing. A spiritual act. And even then you’d
still better be careful you’re being helpful and not being a jerk. This begs
the question “What is humility?”

After a life time of passionate, lunatic spiritual searching I’ve got very
little wisdom to show for it. But I’ve got one or two tattered gems.

“Listen friends,” he whispered, with a wave of his hand. “It’s okay. Come, come
see.” He hunched down and waited. Reluctantly, they leaned in. He silently
scanned the little crowd and saw only skepticism. In a low voice he said –

“I’m going to tell you something spiritual I know for sure is true.”

Here we go.

Humility as it relates to truth has nothing to do with pride. It is unrelated
to true pride. Even the pride of an artist or a writer. Humility in its most
useful and plain form is simply this:

The acquired discipline and skill of seeing yourself as you really are.

That’s it.

Humility is the ability to see yourself very plainly, no better or worse,
without playing any games with yourself. It sounds ridiculous. But this is a
very difficult, almost impossible thing to actually do in real life. You can
spend your whole life trying to master this one point, to see yourself as you
really are with no tricks. The ego plays tricks on you all the way. Writing can
be a tool for exploring this, but what we find, what I find, is that my ego
gets very involved in my writing. Ego is what kills rock stars. Ego is what
kills creativity. But ego has a lot to do with what gets your ass in front of
the keyboard day after day when nobody reads your stuff. It keeps you going.
It’s your devil and your cheer leader.

Anyway, as Sommer Marsden would say, this is turning into “a long ass blog”.

“a long ass blog”
“a long ass blog”
“a long ass blog”

My point is this. Constructive criticism is criticism with kindness and
purpose. Friend to friend. BUT – it should be asked for. Boundaries and
specifics agreed on. And you had better be really sure you want it.

Otherwise, tell me what you want to hear and we’ll just go with that and that
way everybody wins.

I think.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

You learn the most from writers who are considerably better than you are and you learn a lot from writers who are worse than you are. But if I were able to go back in time and meet someone I’d probably choose William Shakespeare, not the least because he spoke pretty good English so you can have a beer with him, but also I’d want to pepper him with questions about craft. Among other things I’d want him to show me how to cut a feather quill and write with it and ask him – considering how expensive paper is, do you revise, Will? Do you write drafts? Do you rewrite? Yes? How many times? Do you write asymmetrically like I do, or front to back with an outline? I don’t have to ask him where he got his ideas, because the fact is I already know the answer to that.

He used the Tarot Spread and The Jazz Riff.

One of the finest craft books I’ve studied, and I’ve studied quite a few, is a book specifically about erotic writing by the venerable Susie Bright of “Best American Erotica” fame, called “How to Write a Dirty Story”. If you’ve never read a book on erotica craft and want to try just one, try this one. Its full of scholarly analysis, feminism, business wisdom and nuts and bolts exercises that truly work. I’m going to explain a couple of her exercises plus one of my own invention based on something I read in Stephen King’s book on craft “On Writing”.

Attend.

Could You Would You?

When men are sitting around in public places as I am at this moment pecking away in the back of my favorite coffee shop we play a game in our heads which I’m very sure women play too. You see a hot looking woman walk by in summer clothes, tiny shorts and flips flops, brasserie optional and your eyes follow her and imagine her naked. You ask yourself – If you could fuck her would you do it? The key word being “Could”. Meaning if you could fuck her without totally destroying your marriage, breaking the heart of a good spouse who loves you, causing your kid to hate you with contempt and losing your job and good name just so you can stick your selfish little dick in there and hammer her a good one for a couple of minutes until you get off – yeah, meaning something like that maybe – would you? You survey the room, imagine a perfect world of no consequences and – that woman? No. That woman there? Boy Howdy. And twice on Sunday. How about that one? The interesting question is to explore what kind of woman turns you on and why they do.

Suzie Bright takes this game a little further and asks you to play with your fantasies and write them down in a series of three scenarios. You should stop reading this, get some paper and a pen and work this out.because if you take this craft exercise seriously this is definitely worth your time.

You still sitting there, bub?

G’wan, find a pen, get out of here. Scat.

Okay now –

Ms Bright writes:

“Give yourself two minutes to answer each question. When your time is up, stop, even if you haven’t finished your sentence:

1. Write down an erotic fantasy about a sexual experience you would have in a minute if it were offered to you, no questions asked. It should be about something you would have no reservations or conditions about doing in real life.
2. Write down an erotic fantasy about a sexual experience you would have only under certain conditions. You could give yourself up whole heartedly under these conditions, but otherwise not at all.
3. Write down an erotic fantasy that is completely satisfying to you in your imagination but that you could not do either because it is physically impossible or something you could never bring yourself to do in real life. But in your imagination it is completely fulfilling.

I actually got a decent story from number 2 – would maybe do if you could. My fantasy was that I would like to experience sex and orgasm as a woman in a woman’s body to see how it differs from the male experience of excitement and release, but only if I could magically be a man again afterward. That became “The Happy Resurrection of Gregor Samsa”, Franz Kafka’s character from “The Metamorphosis” who awoke to find himself changed into ” a monstrous vermin”, usually depicted as a huge cockroach. I imagined the Samsa-cockroach awakening now incarnated as a woman and then looking for sex. Lisabet helped me get the female sensations right with that one.

The Character Splits (Tarot Card Spread) Exercise

Another exercise that Susie Bright explains in detail, though I will not, is “The Character Splits Exercise”. I’ve also written about this on the ERWA blog as the “Found Story”.

Natural evolution has preserved life for 3 billion years in this world by incorporating random elements into the genetic mix, using sex to combine random genetics into constantly changing and adapting life forms. If God wants one thing for you in this world – it’s to get laid. Then you die. This is how organic life responds to contingency, say, mega-volcanoes and big ass asteroids. You can write stories this way too.

Susie Bright describes the Character Splits exercise:

Take five scraps of paper and write one name on each, the name of a family member or a close friend:

1. Lisabet
2. Renee
3. Jack
4. >Maria
5. Uncle Tony

Take five scraps of paper in a separate pile and name five famous people:

1. Yoko Ono
2. Brad Pitt
3. Justin Bieber
4. Ernest Hemingway
5. Count Dracula

Finally in a third pile take five scraps of paper naming simple events of the day:

1. Showering
2. Eating Breakfast
3. Walking the dog
4. Waiting in a line
5. Paying bills

Pick an element at random from each pile and combine them. Say, Lisabet and Brad Pitt and Showering. (In my way of thinking this is like drawing card images from a Tarot deck and combining them and then listening to your intuition to see what story they suggest)

Take this scrap pile of elements and compose it into an erotic fantasy, Say Lisabet getting it on with Brad Pitt in the shower, that’s an easy one, or Yoko Ono running into Count Dracula one evening while walking the dog and having a tryst in the bushes. What would Yoko Ono and Count Dracula talk about in the afterglow? Do you really prefer virgins? Did you really split up the Beatles?

Your people. Your mundane activities. Your tarot cards. The key is to draw on random elements you normally wouldn’t be thinking of and combining them into something that would not have occurred to you. You can do this with stories too. Take down a book of fairy tales, a book of war stories and maybe a book of poetry, things that have nothing to do with each other, rip random paragraphs from each and shuffle them and challenge yourself to turn them into something. The key is challenge.

The Jazz Riff

Modern jazz bands often have a front man who noodles off some kind of a spontaneous melody for a few measures and tosses it to the next player who noodles around off it, then tosses it to the next player and the next. So you have a central melody interpreted on different instruments by different styles.

Stephen King wrote a wonderful craft book and autobiography called “On Writing” in which he offers encouragement to us wanna-bes and some very practical tricks of the trade. One of the things he explains in detail that I absolutely took to heart is the lost art of “pastiche”, the literary version of a jazz riff. When he was starting out he would take a paragraph from a favorite writer, some paragraph he especially loved and would copy it out it out with a pencil – not a keyboard – with a pencil slowly, so he could mouth the sounds of those words. So he could FEEL those words. So he could think in his head with that sound and that feeling. To BE that writer for a little while. Word for word I’ve patiently copied paragraphs on stacks of yellow legal pads from Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter and Vladimir Nabokov, verbal high wire walkers who can knock you on your ass with a single phrase. Trying to hear them in my head, trying to get that sound and keep it for myself. Trying to love words the way they do. I don;t understand writer’s who don;t love language. If you want to improve yourself as a writer, don;t worry about style, learn to love words. Read poetry. Listen for the music. Pastiche the music. Play the notes along with poets you love. When writing an action scene I take down my Robert E Howard and his punchy fast moving descriptions of skulls being “split to the teeth” with battle axes. I want that sound. When writing a sex scene I fill my head with Anais Nin. Dialogue, I consult my Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard. Not for their words which belong to them – for their music.

When I get stuck I have a copy of John Updike or Angela Carter in easy reach, crack it open at random with my thumbs and riff off of the first thing I see:

“She sits in a chair covered in moth-ravaged burgundy, at the low round table and distributes the cards; sometimes the lark sings but often remains a sullen mound of drab feathers.” “The Lady of the House of Love” Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories)

And I might go: “Nixie sat sullenly in the moth chewed chair, humped like a storm bedraggled raven, a sulking, sullen mound of feathers.” Once I get that first sentence going the rest often follows. But you only get to do that if you love words and sentences. Love is the thing, always.

Nixie had decided definitely on the young goth boy standing in the shadows at
the end of the bar, partly because of the irritation she felt for his showy and
pretentious imitation of her kind of which he clearly knew nothing.

Again.

Nixie had decided grimly upon the young goth boy standing at the end of the
bar, in shadow, partly out of insulted rage at his ignorant imitation of her
kind of which he clearly knew nothing.

Again.

The young goth boy at the end of the bar, all in black caught Nixie’s eye ,
partly out of a predatory rage at the imitation of her kind.

Maybe.  I dunno.

Again.

Nixie had decided on the young goth boy at the end of the bar, drawn by his
pretentious imitation of her kind.

I’m pastiching this sentence by F Scott Fitzgerald (“This Side of Paradise”)
that goes “Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would be
the only boy entering from St Regis.” I got this from a book I’m studying called
“Copy and Compose”, which is an old out-of-print manual of rhetoric focusing on
the variations of sentence structure and their aesthetic effects. For a narrative writer, this is the equivalent of sitting in your room practicing your
scales. I’ve been studying this book to train my ear for sound and
language. In case you’re wondering the Fitzgerald sentence is an example of
“The Complex Sentence/Afterthought With Subordinator and Punctuation”. Yes sir,
that’s just what it is too. No doubt about it.  The sound of words is important to me.  It should be to you.  Action for instance:

Grimacing menacingly Nixie took the Bible in her right hand, reached back and threw it through the window which broke with a crash.

How about this instead:

She seized the heavy Bible on the dressing stand and shook it at
the sun defiantly – “Ich sehe Dich
in leuchtender Sonne – “

A thick hot odor. Smoke.

” –
und komme zu Dir!”

The Bible smashed through the window. Glass and wood exploded in
the cold gust of clear morning air.  The
bare blaze of the sun caught her. 

Much better I think,  Strong verbs without many adverbs.  Short punchy sentences. One syllable words that go bam-bam-bam.   I don’t tell anything about her throwing the Bible at the window glass.  The window explodes and your imagination fills in the blanks.  That gives it more emotional power because it belongs to you when you fill in the blanks.

I love words and sentences and paragraphs. This is my medicine for melancholy.

Of all the young men in black, standing in and out of shadows, Nixie chose the
young goth boy at the end of the bar, exactly because he was trying so
idealistically in his way to imitate her kind, of which he was clearly
ignorant.

Now it’s getting so far off the rails.

Again.

Nixie’s discerning eye went straight to the young man in the shadows at the end
of the bar, pretending to be a vampire. Of all the people she might choose, his
disappointment in the last instant of his life in discovering the drab reality
of his fantasy, finding in the end only a plain looking girl in simple clothes
bending over him; his disillusionment, if not revelation, would be delicious.

I dunno.  You can get pretty tangled up with this stuff.

Am I wrong – or is this a distinctly male way of writing? Women writing romance tend to be more flowery and descriptive and men tend to be more sparse.  Am I wrong on this?

I just want to write well. There will always be the
challenge and beauty of language, and the struggle to master language like a
musician mastering his instrument. There’s so much out there I want to learn.  If God or genetics gave you something you can do well, why
wouldn’t you do it?

When I’ve got something to write, I write. The rest of the time I’m learning to
write.   Being a blogger here and on Oh Get a Grip (since 2009!) is an interesting opportunity for me because it forces me to write on demand. 

I have to come up with something two Wednesdays a month.

Each Wednesday is on a predetermined theme.

Think about that.   If you have a writer’s group you should try this.  A schedule.  A theme.  On OGG whenever possible I try to write a short story as my blog piece.  Most of the time I cough up some kind of hairball, but some of them have, with a little polishing, been published.  A few of them are not bad at all.  Writing to a schedule makes you show up at the keyboard.  Writing to a theme is how my old literary heroes, the pulp fiction writers (I consider myself a modern pulp fiction writer) earned a living more or less writing for pulps like “Weird Tales”, “Argosy” and “Black Mask”.  

Robert Frost once described writing free verse as “playing tennis without the net”.  Most people like playing tennis without a net and they write free verse and dislike verse forms.  But writing within boundaries of form or theme, playing with the net up, is like doing a cross word puzzle, it forces you to think a certain way and there is a great satisfaction when you pull it off.

So how do you come with a story idea on demand?  I use a method I learned from my interest in Kaballah and tarot cards

I’m not convinced that tarot cards represent anything synchronistic or magical, I think they represent a combining of random elements.  But, we have evolved in such a way that we instinctively make order out of randomness.  Our unconscious mind looks for patterns,  Tarot cards by design have strong but undefined imagery that when presented the unconscious makes order of.  You draw cards, you look at them, feel the movement of intuition and the cards begin to tell you a story.  This is that inner part of the mind working for you.

Here’s how I wrote a story called “Miss Mercy” for the Oh Get a Grip blog on the week
when the theme was “food and sex”.  This story was later published by Bryant Literary Review and Mammoth’s Quick And Dirty (not bad for a blog post).   

Here’s
where the story came from. Real world, I have no experiences with food and sex.
Food and my pathetic sex life have simply never crossed paths. So using only
what is available, I just don’t have anything to say on that subject, but
Wednesday is coming. (Schedule!  Theme!) 

What to do? 

I had been reading an anthology called “Alien
Sex” and there was a short story called “Oral” by Richard Christian Matheson,
son of Richard Matheson, (one of my literary heroes and influences). “Oral”
basically gives a first person, present point of view describing a person
drinking a glass of water in tremendous detail. That’s it.  But it gave me an idea for an interesting
experiment, a creative challenge, to tell a story of physical sensations
completely in dialogue without narration. I had never read a story like this,
and it seemed like a fun challenge. So I tried my best. The title came from
an article about groupies written by Frank Zappa a long time ago. One of the
groupies he knew back in the day was a girl the guys called “Miss Mercy”, god knows why. I stumbled into these little
tarot cards in my environment, picked them up and arranged them into something.

So let’s go back to pastiche and see how the random elements could maybe work with that.

When I’m in practicing mode, I consult a book on writing practice called “A
Writers Book of Days” by Judith Reeves. It gives you these little themes or
phrases, one for each day of the year and you just jump off of the phrase and
go with it. This is also good discipline, because it forces you to learn
flexibility. Like compositional Yoga poses. You can liken it to being a musician in a
band that jams a lot, and the lead guy creates this riff and then tosses it to
you and you play your solo off it.

Flipping through to today’s date, I find today’s topic for practice is the
phrase “avenues of escape”. So that’s tarot card number two, the first tarot
card being the pastiche riff on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Let’s mess with it.

So, Fitzgerald’s line is “Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even
though he would be the only boy entering from St Regis.” That plus
“avenues of escape”.

Which becomes:

Nixie had decided on the young Goth man standing at the bar, because
he was self consciously dressed in imitation of a vampire. She had almost never met a vampire other than herself, and was sure any practical killer would never advertise his condition any more than a wolf would advertise itself among a flock of sleeping sheep.

Someone had left a half finished bottle of Becks on a table. She picked it up
and padded up silently behind the Goth boy.  She set the bottle down with a
sharp rap on the wood of the bar top. He turned at the sound and she caught his eye. “I’ve been watching you,” she said. “So I’m
thinking, you know, why do you dress so dark and sad like this? Are you
Hamlet? Are you sad?”

“Where‘re you from?” said the  Goth boy.

She noticed, with a small wave of disgust, he had rouged his lips bright
scarlet and darkened his eyes with kohl. “Bavaria.”

“That’s where Hitler’s from, right?”

Her eyes flashed. “No. It is not right.” She smiled, showing teeth. “So then,
why do you dress like that? Do you think you look very interesting that way?”

“You must think I look interesting.”

“Jah, you know, I think you’re the only interesting man here. So why do you
hide your beauty?”

“Because I love death.”

“Oh. So. That’s it, then. You love death. Does death love you?”

“What?”

“Why do you love death?  Please tell me.”

“Because this world is ugly. I want to escape from it. I think death is where
peace and beauty lie. The real world lies beyond. We’ll escape from this world
into pure freedom of spirit.”

“So with death, we can escape and fly away,” she gestured, waggling her
fingertips, “from this wicked, wicked world.”

“Yes.”

She pretended to take a swig of beer and set the bottle down. She leaned in
close, covering the distance between them and reached under the crotch of his
black silk dress pants. She caressed him there, felt him swell, saw his eyes
become hard. She nodded her head towards the back door. “Come escape with me. I’ll show you something beautiful. Something you have never seen.
Come.” She stepped away, and waited. The man took a step towards her. “Let’s
get out of this place.. Come with me, because I’m the goddess of fate.” She held open the back door
and the young man stepped through into the dark, deserted parking lot.

And so it goes. Found stuff.

Of all the stupid fucks sitting at laptops in the Starbucks, Nixie choose the
oldish man with the beard because he smelled funny and walked funny and looked
lonesome and needy and could be lured outside to an easy kill, and she didn’t
feel like working that hard tonight anyway. She padded quietly up behind him
and


She padded quietly up

No

She padded up

No

She padded up quietly

Hmnn.

up quietly

quietly up

up quietly

She padded up quietly behind him and slapped him soundly upside the head.  “So what it is you’re writing now, shiesekopf, why are you still doing this?  No one will read it.”

“Because ‘I love death’?”

“Oh shut up.”

C. Sanchez-Garcia

(I’m writing this at a time when I’m determined to be published in Weird Tales magazine, the Valhalla of my literary heroes.  Wish me luck.)

The door is being held open by a polite old lady waiting for her family to
catch up. I slip into the lobby and the popcorn smell passes over me like
mosquito fogger, while I lean against a fluted pillar and look down at my
shoes. My shoes actually appear to be spinning. I’d put my head between my
knees but it would embarrass my kid who is ecstatic and already negotiating in
my ear for the Blue Ray disc when it comes out. Not for nothing is this film
genre nicknamed “queasy cam”. The effect of the movie “Cloverfield” on me is
not so much horror or empathy for its long suffering characters as . . . car
sickness. I feel like a James Bond martini – shaken but not stirred.

Cloverfield is more or less about an alien invasion by some hulkingly gigantic,
rarely viewed sort of monster knocking sky scrapers over. It’s filmed by the
protagonist using a hand held video camera, such as you might pick up for a
hundred bucks at Sam’s Club. He does this while running for his life, grieving
for his girlfriend and being oppressed by stern jawed military types Who Are
Gettin’ It Done Mister. Sort of like Godzilla on an amateur budget. The frame
is constantly swinging wildly in different directions, just like your own home
movies, while dodging deafening, strobe light explosions. Two hours of this and
you’ll ralph your Skizzles or maybe have an epileptic seizure.

Queasy Cam is that greasy area where fiction collides with reality TV. The
first Queasy Cam was a movie about ten years ago called the “Blair Witch
Project” (BWP). I have a lot of respect for the BWP. It is one of an elite few
scary movies that managed to genuinely disturb me. The power of the BWP back in
its halcyon days was that for a while no one knew if it was a documentary or
fiction. Controversies raged over it on the evening news. There were grim web
sites like this one devoted to it:

http://www.blairwitch.com/

The premise was that several cans of film had been recovered in an
archeological dig of an old colonial era house in an isolated area of the Black
Forest Hills near Burkittsville Maryland. The film turns out to be hand held
camera footage made in real time by three film students who vanished without a
trace in the woods one year previously. We see these doomed kids film
themselves over a period of five days as they run out of food, smokes and
eventually lose their map after becoming hopelessly lost in the woods (“This is
America! People do not get lost in the fucking woods anymore!” wails one of
them.). None of these kids are getting any sleep either, as the forest at night
is becoming more and more alive with odd laughter, whispers, snapping twigs and
occasional distant screams. And then – they’re gone. Just like that. And I’ll
tell you what – the last two minutes of their camera footage is the most subtly
frightening element I have ever seen in a horror movie, and I mean flat out.

BWP project has the power to get in your head if you watch it under the right
circumstances. When my wife and I saw it in the theater she left angry. Why did
I take her to see this amateurish, slapped together piece of shit? Could we get
our money back? A few months later I rented the video to see it again, and left
it out and went to bed. She had ironing to do, nothing to watch, so she put it
on, alone late at night while the house was asleep. After the first hour she
was jumping at shadows and whimpering. She was too freaked out to sleep. The
magic was humming.

I’ve been thinking a lot about haunted houses these days. The BWP is in fact a
haunted house movie, though it takes place in the woods. So is “Alien” and
“Solaris” though they take place on space ships far from home. A house is that
place where you’re supposed to be safe from the world. Its family and sanity
and personal. When something unknown invades that space its disturbing right
down to the part of the brain we inherited from reptiles. It’s the ultimate
invasion. Especially when its someone you know who is going off the rails. The
thing about BWP, when you’re not sure what you’re watching, is that it is
deeply disturbing to think that the world you thought you knew and understood
can really be so different from what’s really going on out there, and what’s
out there can make this world disintegrate right out from under you.

I hope someday to write a really excellent horror story. As an apprentice
writer I think I’ve come close once or twice, but never really gotten it. Not
yet. So when I see something like BWP that succeeds in making me squirm, in
making me think to myself “Son of a bitch, this isn’t fun anymore!”; a scary
movie that is to other scary movies what eating small Thailand chilies raw is to
Taco Bell, I ask myself – how do the magicians do their tricks? How did they
get to me?

Sigmund Freud doesn’t always get the credit he deserves, but he made some
critical discoveries that relate to what we do here as writers. Freud observed
that the subconscious does not know the difference between fantasy and reality.

Stop. Think. Conjure on it.

That’s an amazing observation.

That is the white-hot core of the art to which we aspire. One more time, O
Friends of the Inner Sanctum –

The subconscious mind does not know the difference between reality and fantasy.

It’s easy to prove. The subconscious governs many non-voluntary functions. Such
as boners and wetties, for instance. Someone reads something erotic, or has a
sexual fantasy. If the magic is working, the man gets hard and urgent. The
woman gets wet. But there’s no one there, the act of copulation is in the
imagination, but the subconscious doesn’t know or care. As far as the
subconscious is concerned baby – You’re Gettin’ Some.

The vicarious experience of fear is the same. Something threatening is
happening and the subconscious thinks you’re in danger. So the technical
problem is, how do you get in someone’s head? How do you convey to the
subconscious the experience of mortal danger and horror?

When you study the masters, like Edgar Allen Poe, you find that Poe worked very
hard at constructing atmosphere and description, the dream like experience of a
nightmare unfolding around you. There’s not a lot of action in his stories
compared to, say, “Cloverfield” with its harried camera man. His best tales,
such as “Masque of the Red Death” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, are
structurally very simple stories, little more than vignettes. Instead, Poe
devotes himself to the patient creation of the story’s environment, the slow
drip drip drip of escalating dread. Both of these are haunted house stories,
and he describes everything right down to the rugs and curtains in tremendous
detail and ominous language. It’s all about making you feel like you’re there
and when the Very Bad Thing happens you’d better run.

The other thing I’ve discovered about horror (and the news is not good) is
that, like erotic fiction, it’s a very personal thing. What gets the machinery
moving in my subconscious will not always be what works for others for reasons
outside my control. The erotic stories which have excited me in the past tend
to be the odd stuff, about human beings in collision with each other. Likewise
horror is very personal. It requires the suspension of disbelief, and a
willingness to be reminded that security and life and love are illusions that
can vanish in a day or an instant.

There is this wonderful film shot on Market Street in San Francisco in 1906.
You can see it here:

http://www.google.com/#q=Youtube+Market+Street+San+Francisco+1906&hl=en&prmd=iv&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=fQHHTILVHIWclgfQoPjOAg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDQQqwQwAQ&fp=54c71a5494d194d9

or by googling “Youtube Market Street San Francisco 1906”.

Take a minute now to look it over.

In 1906 one of the Miles Brothers, who owned a photography studio by that name
on Market Street, stood in the cabin of a trolley car with a brand new
invention that was taking the country into a new age, the movie camera. As he
leaned the wooden box camera out the front window of the street car and turned
the hand crank, the lens caught the daily flow of a typical ride from one end
of the street to the far end of the other, about a three mile trip on a fine
spring day right after a good rain. Newspaper boys mugging for the camera.
Horse drawn carts crossing fearlessly in front of the trolley car. A few open
top automobiles. Other Trolleys scuttling like roaches on each side. Ladies in
voluminous dresses. Men standing in doorways of shops, smoking, chatting and
watching the world go by.

A film historian did some investigating through old newspapers and weather
reports of the day and discovered the exact date this film was made. It was
filmed about April 15th of 1906. The film was then developed and sent on a
train to New York City to have some copies made. That is why the film survived.

Most of the people watching the trolley car and its Blair Witch style cameraman
ride by in real time, the news boys, the pretty ladies in dresses, the working
men making deliveries – in three days two out of every three of the people
you’re seeing, man and boy, woman and child, those people are going to be dead.
Three days. Many of them will have died roasting to death while trapped in
rubble. Three days after the film was made, while the only copy was in transit,
the great earthquake and fire struck. That is the part about life that our
subconscious understands and we don’t.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

I think being the mortal lover of a vampire would be like being somebody’s pet goat.

Baby goats are very cute. As they get older they get less cute. They start to smell gamey, get creepy looking eyes, act stubborn and ornery, and look more and more like food. All your happy little goat life, the human who owns you is very nice to you, feeds you, hugs and pets you, plays with you. Then one fateful day, he comes up to you with something shiny in his hand and he’s suddenly not very nice to you. No, not very nice at all.

We’ll come back to that, but first let’s talk about the rules of Stoker Poker.

Writing vampire stories is a lot like starting a poker game, you announce the rules before you start, Five Card Stud, jacks wild. You can do this, but you can’t do that. Bram Stoker vampires are not Stephanie Meyer vampires. Meyer’s vampires sparkle charmingly in sunlight, and pose and sulk like unemployed Abercrombie and Fitch models. Stoker’s vampires burn up in sunlight, sometimes explosively. A stake in the heart is terminal. Not big on garlic. They can snack on a human, or drain them to death in a single draft according to mood and need. By Stoker Rules, to “turn” a human (beginning with Mina Harker) you have to deliberately give them vampiric blood to drink, just biting them is not enough. In some mythos such as Lingqvist’s “Let The Right One In” just being bitten, dead or alive, is all it takes. “Sookie Stackhouse” vampires are made according to Stoker Rules, “Anita Blake” vampires are Stoker Rules, more or less, and so are Anne Rice vampires. Stoker Rules vampires are usually intensely erotic on the outside but only as a means to an end. Eroticism is bait for the hook. Once they get you alone – you stay fucked.

I approached the relationship between my Bavarian vampire girl Nixie and her lover Dan with Stoker Rules. Deal the cards. Play the cards you’re dealt. Seven Stud, Stoker Rules.

In the story “The Lady and the Unicorn”, things begin with Nixie telling the story to the reader as she walks down a lonely dirt road at night in the dark. Like an exquisite bloodhound she is trailing her runaway mortal lover’s scent in the air and has almost caught up with him.

“. . . He left me during the day in a trail of strewn clothes and broken dishes all through our little house. And other things also, which he left behind and I have brought with me in a little gym bag I carry in my hand as I walk down the dirt road following his scent. Because of what is carried in this bag, I know he loves me still. He could not have left behind a sweeter valentine. . . .”

Ooo! A valentine! What can it be?  Perfume? Godiva chocolates? Fruit flavored condoms? Much later in the story, Nixie shows us the kind of valentine Daniel left behind for her:

” . . . I move in close to him, touching him again – and oh the joy to feel him against me, the heat of him – still holding my bag, but stepping close enough for my breasts to aggressively brush up against him. I’m trying to get him to put his arms around me, but he steps back and I feel his fear. “Why?” I say.

“I got to know if you’re all right.”

“No – why did you not want to be there, alone? You were afraid.”

He looks down, ashamed. And afraid.

“Why, my love? Why were you afraid?”

“I thought you might be looking for me.”

“Of course I was looking for you,” I say soft and slow, feeling the bag in my hand grow heavy. “Why would I not look for you? Why would you not want me to find you alone? I’m still your woman. Don’t you want to be alone with me?”

“I thought. . .” He is really sweating it now. It is miserable to see. “I thought you’d be pissed.”

Whispering. “Why would I pissed? Hmn. Now, let me think.”

He only looks at me with those angry frightened eyes, and I wish I were blind. This is not the Daniel I came to find.

“Why would I be pissed, kuschelbaer?” He is looking at the bag now. He knows. “Oh, I wanted to give you these. Look what I found beside my little bed.” I put the bag on the ground, unzip it and reach in. One in each hand, I show him. A hammer in one hand, I show him. A sharpened piece of wooden broom handle in the other, I show him. I hold them out to him. “Is this why I would be pissed at you? You think?”

“Dammit Nixie!”

I thrust them out to him. “What are these? What are these?”

He turns away. He can’t look at me, but I am trembling now. I can’t stop myself or what I feel. “What is this?” I shake them at him. I stamp my feet. I know I’m ruining everything, and I can’t help it. I love him so terribly I want to bite his nose. “Is it a sexy new game you want to play? You can dress up and be the fearless Mr. Van Helsing, jah? And I will be sexy little Miss Lucy, in my nightgown in my toy coffin, and you will climb in with the hammer and the stake, yes? – and we will play and do the rinky-tink together and have some fun, jah? Would you like to maybe do that now? Now is a good time. Let’s play Van Helsing – “

“Shut up! Shut up!”

Now he is almost crying and I am almost crying too. I shake them at him, screaming“What were you thinking?”

I hate this, to be so cruel to him. I try to calm myself and remember what it really means, finding there the hammer and the stake discarded beside my bed. “You couldn’t do it, could you?”

“I couldn’t do it. God help me, I couldn’t do it.”

I hate myself for doing this, but this is the road I must lead him down, until he is tame again. “Why?” Softly I speak, because I would be his lover again and he is almost mine. “Why not?”

He shakes his head.

“I want to hear it. Please say it. Say for it for me, please. Why couldn’t you kill me in my sleep?”

“Because I couldn’t. I love you. God forgive me.”

“Why God forgive you? What’s wrong with being in love with me?”

“Nordchen, I love you with all my soul and I always will. But. But, you need. . . that is. Somebody needs to . . . you need to be put down.”

So there it is. There’s the dynamic. Each one in this relationship has a hold over the other. Each is deadly in their element. Each is vulnerable out of their element. At night, if you’re Daniel and she takes a notion to kill you, she’s going to haul off and kill you and there’s not a damn thing you can do that would stop her. She’s been killing people for a hundred years and she’s good at it. You will die at her leisure. But in the daytime, she is helpless. At your mercy. She sleeps in the same room as you and she has placed herself willingly in your hands. No secret vault. No locked coffin. No gimmicks. You’re her lover, her man, she trusts you to behave yourself in the day as you trust her with your life at night. Its not the fearless vampire hunters who could kill her, she knows how to handle them. She’ll see them coming before they see her. Its you who could kill her. Lovers are supposed to trust each other, but this is trust on a special level. She trusts you with her life in the day. You trust her with your life in the night.

It’s not so obvious in the stories, but when Daniel has sex with Nixie, his semen has an unusual composition that replaces the need for blood. I made this part of the deal in order to set up a moral dilemma. This always seemed like an intriguing sexual fantasy to me, one that was never explored by other writers. What if you were a man with unique semen that could replace a lady vampire’s need to steal blood from the living? Maybe a small harem of lady vampires? Oh, baby. For a lady vampire who doesn’t want to kill, this could be very liberating. So as long as she’s keeping you happy and keeping you coming, she doesn’t need to hunt. This is the unspoken theme under the surface of the story “Singing In The Dark”, in which Nixie struggles with her urge to attack a man in a rail yard at night. Daniel’s been fucking her regularly for a year and keeping her off the streets, so the practical need for blood isn’t the problem. But what Nixie has discovered is that she is addicted, beyond blood, to the need to kill. For its own sake.

A vampire is a serial killer with style. Nixie is a specific creature, she has a specific nature that goes with being that creature. What she discovers about herself is that she is addicted to the act itself of killing prey. She needs to roam the night and hunt and experience death because this is who she is and who she must be. Daniel’s semen has replaced her need for blood, but not her bloodlust.

Now this is a moral problem for Daniel, when he realizes this is her nature and she can’t change it. That makes him morally responsible. If your lover, the passionate love of your life, is sneaking out at night and killing people, shouldn’t you turn her in? Or “put her down” as he says. Even if the wolf loves you, don’t you have an obligation to your fellow sheep to deliver them from her? But the wolf loves you. Trusts you with her life. What are your moral responsibilities when she comes home one night covered with blood and tells you its pigs blood? You want to believe her, but isn’t that blood on your hands also? For some reason this never seems to come up much in vampire romances. You’re harboring a skilled serial killer who is perfectly capable of turning on you. And you know it. You’re responsible for keeping her in business. Wouldn’t that be a problem? It’d scare shit out of me.

Its hard for Nixie too, because the fact is loving one goat very much makes you not want to kill goats. Part of her wants to kill people, but now a new part of her doesn’t. So she’s in great turmoil over what has become a dual nature. This is why she says to the reader in Lady and the Unicorn, that for one of her kind to fall in love is a disaster, a fatal catastrophe. It is a crippling experience for a predator to fall in love with its prey. This is also why in “Singing in the Dark” she practically slaps the man in the railyard to death as she yells philosophical questions at him, deciding his fate. His fate is in fact her fate, to live or to die based on his proof of innocence.

So this character dynamics business has more than one level. There’s the more obvious “I love you, please don’t kill me.” And then there’s the one under the surface, of a higher or more universal moral question. It can get as twisted as you want to make it.

Somehow the idea of a vampire lover, or any non-human lover is very romantic and erotic. Why? Why is it not in fact a huge pain in the ass? I asked this question to Charlane Harris, author of the hugely popular Sookie Stackhouse novels which became HBO’s “Trueblood” series. She didn’t know. And you’d think she’d know, because this has made her a very rich writer. She doesn’t. I asked Dacre Stoker, author of the international best seller “Dracula: The Undead”. He didn’t know either.

I think this is something hard wired into us as human beings, because its so ancient. In the old stories of Greek mythology the gods and goddesses very often came to earth and took mortal lovers into their beds, and when they wouldn’t cooperate they just raped them, resulting in semi-divine children such as Perseus and Hercules. Jesus Christ no less was the offspring of a mysterious relationship between God almighty and the otherwise Virgin Mary. In 1978 in the movies Superman flew with Lois Lane above the clouds and set women’s hearts a flutter all around the world. Nobody seems to be able to explain it, but it’s a part of being human somehow. To be chosen from the common herd of goats by the gods or the supernatural sets you apart, it means you must be somebody special.

Everyone wants to be special.

Especially if the gods and goddesses like to eat goats.

The Lonely Prince by C. Sanchez-Garcia

Once upon a time there was a wealthy and handsome Prince. As his last dying wish the King asked the Prince to find a beautiful Princess and be married and have children. The Prince traveled to the Kingdom of Whiz and asked the Princess Margarita to marry him. Now Princess Margarita was the most clever and beautiful woman in all the world, without peer. “Fuck you!” she said I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last asshole Prince on earth. I’d rather marry a magic frog!”

The King died and the Prince became the new king, but still the lonely Prince had no wife. So the poor, unmarried Prince spent all his time and his money any way he wanted and went hunting and fishing with his friends as often as he pleased and took yoga and gourmet cooking classes, and studied American literature and poetry and made wild love with hundreds of exciting and interesting women from all over the world and lived happily ever after.

The End

* * * * *

The Lonely Prince by Daddys Bad Grrrl w/ C. Sanchez-Garcia

1ce tme ts lonly Prnz. Like OMFG KG – “new BFF”
Hello? ((!!!)) :-O PrnzS Mrgrta PILTF shld mrry.

W2HU? sd Prnz. LOL!

STFU sd PrnzS. FO! >:-P

WTF?? U2 sd Prnz. FTS! 🙁

Prnz hptt evr afr. No Prbm.

Th N

* * * * *

The Lonely Prince by Ernest Hemingway and C. Sanchez-Garcia

The prince stood outside the King’s chamber. He knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again. He  could feel the King on the other side of the door.  He’s in there all right, thought the Prince. The King opened the door and the Prince went in.

“You must get married.” said the King.

“I want to be a bull fighter.” said the Prince.

“There aren’t any bull fighters’ anymore.” said the King.

“Who must I marry?”

“There is a Princess in the Kingdom of whiz. She’s all right.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” said the Prince.

The Prince left and the King shut the door after him.

In the Kingdom of whiz the Prince was introduced to Margarita. It had been a hot day. He had walked. It had been a good walk and he was not ashamed. The Princess was in her room with her chambermaid. “What do you want, bright boy?” said the Princess.

“He stinks.” Said the Chambermaid.

“She says you stink, bright boy.” Said the Princess.

“My father says I should be married.” Said the Prince. “You have a sweet can.”

“Bright boy is just full of bright ideas, ain’t he Molly?” Said the Princess.

“He’s not. He’s dumb.” said the chambermaid.

“She says you’re dumb, bright boy.” said the Princess.

The Prince shrugged. He lit a cigarette, but did not offer one. He waited for her.

“I am having an affair with a bull fighter.” said the Princess.

“Juan Belmonte.”

“He’s a good kid.” said the prince.

“He stinks too. All men stink.” said the Chambermaid

“So tell me, bright boy. Why the hell would I marry you?” said the Princess.

“You might be good with a husband.” said the Prince.

“I wouldn’t.” said the Princess.

“If that’s the way you want it.” said the Prince. “It’s all right.”

“You think its all right?” Said the Princess. “He thinks its all right.”

“He stinks.” said the Chambermaid.

“You’re a funny guy, bright boy. Still think I have a nice can?” said the Princess.

“Sure,” said the Prince. “Why not?”

“Take off, bright boy. That’s the way I want it.” said the Princess.

“Okay.” said the Lonely Prince.

After the king died, the Prince took up fishing. He had no luck in him for the fishing. He was a Prince who fished off the Gulf in a yacht and had gone eighty days now without taking a fish. He went lion hunting in Africa and shot a 500 pound male on the third day. “Damn fine lion.” said the Prince over a whiskey and soda.

* * * * *

 The Lonely Prince by Ray Bradbury and C. Sanchez-Garcia

“Marriage!” cried the King. “Babies! Grandchildren clambering, clinging, dropping like ripe fruit!”

“But Dad. . . ” whined the Prince.

“Run! Feel! Dash! Live! Feel your life slipping through your fingers – feel it damn you.”

“But Dad – ”

“When I was your age, why I had conquered half the world!” The old King slapped his knotted oak knee with a mahogany hand. His ancient eyes glowed in his skull like a Jack A lantern. “The Princess of Whiz is waiting. No – pining! Go to her before her heart beats another beat!”

“I don’t see the rush.” said the Prince, with a sigh of October leaves blowing down midnight streets. “And I’m shy.”

The old king was no longer listening. Skinny skeleton fingers were snaking like spiders through a wooden steam trunk. “Ah! Ah ha!”

A magicians flourish.

Shoes.

A pair of ratty black sneakers dangled from his fingertips. “There you mayst behold child, the enchanted sneakers of Merlin. See! Wings for your feet. These are the shoes that bestow – invisibility!”

“Invisibility!”

“But to do so you must be naked! It will not make your clothes invisible, only you yourself.”

But could this be? To be invisible as midnight smoke, to pinch pretty girls bottoms, steal apple pies from farmer’s windows, steal the sleep from eyes of maids, sneak through windows like a succubus.

The Prince dropped his clothes, naked as the sun and naked as the moon. He tied on the sneakers and held up his hands waiting. “How do I look?”

The King spun like a top. “Where are you, child? Where have you gone? You’ve vanished! Oh, it reminds me of the old days!”

“I’m off, Father.” Said the naked and lonely Prince. The magic sneakers of Merlin carried him over hill and dale with the sound of green grass and the rush of summer running.

The Kingdom of Whiz – and there! The Princess’ open window. He climbed in.

She was there.

The Princess was alabaster and soft vanilla ice cream.

“It is I!” cried the Prince. “Come to sweep you off your feet and be my bride!

“You’re as naked as a rock!” She cried.

“You’re much deceived.” said the Prince. “I’m invisible. You can’t see me.”

“I see the white of your eye, the bats in your belfry, the lust in your heart. And – oh my.” The Princess gazed at his mighty organ. “You’re a loony. But you’re hung like a horse.”

“I’m invisible!” said the Prince, stamping his bare foot. “All you hear is my voice.”

“All right,” said the Princess doubtfully, but taking the measure of him with growing excitement. “What would make you visible?”

“Uh . . . a kiss!” His Father hadn’t said so yet the Prince felt it to be true. The Princess’s gaze stirred his manhood so fiercely the Universe seemed to crouch like a black cat.

“Is one kiss enough?”

“Try.” Said the Prince. He stepped to her and held out his arms. She touched her lips to his.

“I see your head.” she said. “But that’s all.”

The Prince became afraid. “Only my head?”

“I think I have to kiss you for each part to be visible.”

“Kiss my hand.” he said.

She kissed his hand.

“I see your arm!” She kissed his other hand, noting his mighty manhood had become extremely visible and had begun to radiate heat like a desert wind. “I see your other arm.” She kissed his chest. “I see your chest.” She dropped to her knees and clasped him around the waist. She kissed his leg with hummingbird lips. “There’s your leg.” With the rasp of a tigress tongue she kissed the other leg. “And there’s its fellow.”

“Don’t leave me this way.” he pleaded.

“It’s better to be invisible than only half visible.” She kissed his feet.

“Am I visible yet?” The Prince staggered, silver stars and crimson flowers bursting in his fevered brain. “I’m going to explode! Burst like lightning, all hell fire and fourth of July thunder!”

“Only the middle is left to be kissed.” she said. “Lay down over there and we’ll take care of it now.” He lay on the bed and the Princess dropped her clothes on the floor. She completed the process of restoring his visibility on the bed though she lingered much longer over the middle than the rest of his body. Complaining how the Prince kept undoing her work and becoming invisible she repeated the process over and over and lived happily ever after.

The End

My novella “The Color of the Moon” began about sixteen years ago on a yellow legal pad on the banks of
the Panama Canal, when I was still getting over a personal experience of obsession and haunting. I knew I wanted to find a way to put that experience into words, and I wanted to try my hand at writing fiction. Something exotic.

From the yellow pad to key board I wrote a fairly straight forward story set around the end of the Heian Period in
Japan, of a young Buddhist monk and itinerary musician – a “biwa-hoshi” – who meets a noble woman of the Imperial family. He gives her a private performance in a tea house, chanting the Heikyo-ku saga and playing on a biwa, a traditional Japanese lute, followed by naughty conversation and seduction by the noble woman only to find out later she is a ghost.

The End.

“The Color of the Moon” is what I think of as a “riff”. A riff is when you take a well known and traditional thing and spin it in a new direction. That might be Anne Rice taking “Sleeping Beauty” and turning it into a series of erotic BDSM novels, or Neil Gaiman taking “Snow White” and turning it into a vampire story. “Color of the Moon” is a riff on the most famous of all Japanese ghost stories “Mimi Nashi Hoichi” or “Hoichi the Earless”. This ancient ghost story is one of hundreds of “Kwaidan“, a tradition going back thousands of years. Known collectively as “kwaidanshu“, generations of Japanese kids learned the crusty old spook stories on “dark and
stormy” nights at their grandmother’s knee and passed them on to new generations in different forms. In recent years kwaidanshu have spread to American cinema in such movies as “The Ring” and “The Grudge”. The Ring is an American remake of  the Japanese film “Ring-Gu”, which is a modern Japanese retelling of “The Tale of Oyu”, an ancient story of a young woman who is cruelly drowned in a well and returns as an angry ghost. Like a Japanese equivalent of Shakespeare, kwaidanshu were preserved in elaborate Kabuki and Noh plays such as “Woman of the Snow” (a vampire story!), “Hoichi the Earless” of course, and the infamous “Tale of the Peony Lantern” which involves a sex scene with a decaying dead body.  Yeah.

Having written my brave little story, I wanted to check it against the historical facts, through a book called
“Kwaidan” written by Lafcadio Hearn over a hundred years ago. Hearn was a writer living in Japan , and along with treatises on mosquitoes, took an interest in collecting local folk stories. In 1998 Amazon was still in it s infancy and I ordered a copy, noting it had been reviewed by a lady in Miyazaki Japan who spoke good English, named Mire Uno. In those more innocent times email addresses were included with reviewer’s comments and I was able to
contact her easily. I told her about my project and that I would be interested in getting her take on it. This was before I had ever heard of the idea of “first readers”. It turned out that kwaidanshu were a hobby of hers. She collected traditional ghost stories and even had a web page in English devoted to them. Perfect! We made a deal. I edited the English on her web page and in return she agreed to look at my stuff.

Mire was a sharp critic but polite, Japanese folks are nothing if not polite. But she let me know, it would not do, it would not do. It was ignorant, unmitigated oushikuso! Gai-jin san, it will not do. It will not do. When does my little tea house tryst happen? Around a hundred years after the fall of the Minomoto dynasty, I figure about 1185 AD.

A tea house? Tea houses had not been invented in 1185. Partly because tea had not been invented.

The Japanese were just learning about tea from China, and it was regarded as an aphrodisiac (as what has not?) and reserved for males only of the highest rank. The Emperor or local feudal lords might indulge in a cup to put some wood in their ink brush before visiting their consorts, but not a woman, much less of mid level rank such as Lady Dainagon. And with a impoverished Biwa-Hoshi? Not in your dreams, gai-jin san. For a woman of even so-so rank, a peripheral member of the Imperial family in a backwater place, to be left alone in the company of someone regarded as below common would be scandalous. (Aie-ya! Oushikuso!) Impossible. It would like Princess Diana inviting a homeless man to spend the night in her room. It will not do. So how would they meet if this thing were done right?

Oh boy…

The woman would be ensconced behind a mizu screen, a partition made of reeds or silk. The Biwa-Hoshi would never be permitted to see her face and she would never see his. Ever. It would be an insult. There would also be an armed samurai hidden in the woodwork behind a screen or wall panel watching everything and his job is to deal harshly with insults. If the Biwa-Hoshi got even a little bit randy or suggestive, he was fully authorized to jump out, draw his blade and knock the guy’s fool head off without warning. Okay, and by the way, did I mention she can’t speak to the Biwa-Hoshi directly? That’s how far apart on the food chain they are. Another person, a personal attendant would sit next to the mizuscreen and play the part of a human telephone. Lady Dainagon would speak to the attendant, even if the Biwa-Hoshi is just a few feet away, and the Biwa-Hoshi would whisper his response to the attendant who would convey his words to the mystery woman behind the screen. Now – your job? With these historical obstacles – I, who had never written a sex scene before in my life, have to get these two people making the “Wind and The Rain” hot and heavy.

Here is the final version of the scene in the tea house, as published by Whisky Creek Press in 2007. They are alone, and Shoji has been summoned for the second night to play. The mystery woman is hidden behind a screen. He has never seen her, and she has found a way to get rid of the attendant for this night. As he entered the room , he has heard her voice for the first time singing a nursery song about an orphan girl, accompanying herself skillfully on a koto. The voice behind the screen addresses him, and he responds:

“August person,” he began timidly, “I am Shoji, the biwa hoshi of last night.”

“Who is your biwa?”

“My biwa is ‘Shoja’, the ‘Sound of the Temple Bell’.”

“My koto is ‘Tsuke-Kage’, and ‘Moon’s Shadow’ is delighted to meet ‘Sound of the Temple Bell’. As I am delighted to meet you.”

Shoji relaxed a little. “I enjoy your music more than my own,” he said. “I think you are the better musician.”

“That’s kind of you,” she said. “But I know you’re only being generous to me. Play something. Play from one of your stories.”

“Shall I play for you ‘The Battle of Dan No Ura’ ?”

“No!”

He was surprised at how emphatic she was.

“Rather we should play that one for you.” she said.

“I have this opportunity to thank you for your gift last night. I have not carried it with me, but I treasure it very much.”

“Thank you. I may have a better gift for you tonight.”

“A better gift is not possible.”

“Play ‘Kenreimon’in’,” she said “The story of the Emperor’s mother.”

He settled the biwa on his lap again. Glancing down he saw the words he had begun to paint on the bachi, the waka he had composed in the sand. He struck a chord on the biwa. He drew a slow rising arpeggio.

“This is the empress

Whom we compared to the moon

In earlier days

But no radiance brightens

The lonely mountain dwelling.”

As he continued in the ancient traditional, he saw her stir behind the screen. A few reeds were drawn down and
he knew she was watching him.

“Did I ever think to find myself dwelling

Deep in the mountains

Gazing at the moon on high

Far from the royal palace?

Wave flowers! In full bloom

On the surface of the pond

Blossoms have scattered

From the cherry trees

Along the water’s edge

That is you cuckoo – raising your voice

Seeking the fragrance for the flowering orange

Remembering someone you lost long ago?”

He saw her eyes watching him from behind the screen, welling with tears. He began the poem he had composed.

“In heaven flies one

Crane, leaving fences behind

Continuously

Remembering its loved kind.

Parting wind pierces the bone.”

There was a crash and breaking wood. The mizu screen was thrown down. “That is not how the song goes!” she shrieked.

He froze, staring at her. Though he knew it was only a dream, he still felt fear. He saw her for the first time. She jumped to her feet, tall and fierce, clutching the towering black koto upright to her chest. She wore an indigo kimono, with a field of golden butterflies, bound by a sash. Two ivory pins held her hair behind her head. Her strong beautiful face was aristocratic, arrogant, but bright with passion. It was the woman he had seen in the bucket water and her large eyes had pinked with tears.

“Don’t stop!” she screamed. “Why do you stop! I didn’t tell you to stop!” He continued.

“So it is when fate

Steals our hopes, the former
life

Lost but not forgotten

Comes to haunt us in our dreams

Though we never can return.”

She collapsed, still hugging the koto to her breast. She shook her head wildly. “No more. Please, no
more.”

* * * * *

So that was the pleasant tea house scene when Mire and I got done with it.

Along my journey from oushikuso, with Mire Uno as my scholarly guide, I began to really develop an appreciation for detail and the power of implied authenticity. Here’s another scene, near the end of the novella. Ichinori, an elder priest and exorcist has decided for reasons of personal glory to engage in a spiritual duel to the death with Lady Dainagon. Because of his contempt for women, ghosts or otherwise and court women especially, he completely underestimates what he’s up against. She traps him with birds and savagely brings him down:

* * * * *

He became numb to their deaths, their broken hollow bones, the smeared meat and gore that covered him from top to bottom. He only wanted it to stop. He tried to speak a mantra and a crow bit his lip, biting off a small piece of it. He hammered his fist on the hateful bird, and was shocked at the pleasure of seeing it die. Blood ran down his mouth and over his teeth. He crawled on his belly, wondering only when the steel would fall on his neck, ending this and leaving him in painless oblivion.

He felt dirt under his fingernails. The road. As he heaved himself forward a strong beak bit his crotch as if it would hold him there for the demon to come and kill him. He kicked out at it, screaming madly and tumbled forward into the free ground. He rolled onto his face, and his mouth was filled the taste of blood and sand. He smelled his clothes in the dim light, the stink of offal, feathers and blood. He vomited.

There were sounds approaching from behind, but he was too exhausted and revolted with himself to look.

“Demon.” he whispered to the dirt. “You have caused me to kill. Even if I die now, I will find you.”

He was aware of a pair of wooden komageta sandals standing in the road beside his face. Small feminine feet in white tabi socks. He smelled the scent of clove oil and saw the glint of the dying lamp shining off the polished tip of the wakizashi that dangled next to his nose.

“Damn you.” he hissed. “My spirit will find you in hell!”

The demon whore was breathing heavily above him, with either exertion or passion. The komageta sandals
scuffed angrily in the dirt and the wakizashi blade rose. He waited calmly, and prepared his spirit to receive death. Instead he heard it snick back into the saya in her sash. Her knees bent with a rustle of silk. The night breeze carried teasing strands of sweet scented hair into his face. Close to his ear he heard the demon’s soft, excited voice.

“Hell?”

* * * * *

Ursula K. LeGuin said something about scene description which I have never allowed myself to forget. To make a
background vivid it’s better to bring out one unique detail, like a drop of water on a leaf. If a man is in a railroad yard in the dead of night with a full moon over head, don’t just say it’s dark. We know that already. The way you make it dark, is by describing the moonlight glinting off a single piece of broken glass in the dirt. That makes it feel dark.

I write first for my own aesthetic pleasure. There are little historically correct touches here that still give me
pleasure to read sixteen years later. The oil lamp dying in the background, yet bright enough to gleam off the highly polished blade of Lady Dainagon’s wakizashi. The scent of clove oil on the menacing blade tip next to Ichinori’s nose. The wooden geta sandals in the road. The description of tabi socks. The rustle of fine silk. I just can’t get enough of that stuff. Details like this make this scene breathe for me even after all these years. I just hope it breathes for the reader too.

Thank you Mire Uno, wherever you are. Thank you thank you.

The original publication of “The Color fo the Moon” is still available for a pittance at Whisky Creek Torrid:
http://www.whiskeycreekpress.com/torrid/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=331

Or as a Kindle book at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Mortal-Engines-Color-Stories-Strange-ebook/dp/B004I5C1A0/

If you’re curious about Lady Dainogon before the events of The Color of the Moon, this week at the Oh Get a Grip blog, where the theme is “Fairy Tales”, I’ve composed a Japanese fairy tale in which she appears with ladies of the court , back in better days:

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-tale-of-kintoki-story-of-fairy-tale.html

And thank you for reading my stuff.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Saturday morning. 
Sitting in the backyard with a little espresso.  A notepad.  A pencil.  A pack of Biscoff cookies.  Thinking. 
The grass needs cutting, I’m thinking. 
I had that lucid dream again, I’m thinking.  It was the dream about the old house that
needs fixing but also the old house is haunted. 
It isn’t my house, but it may be the inside of my head.  And there was that room and the room was
filled with old shoes I’ve worn at different times in my life, even baby
shoes.  Shoes.  What do they mean, shoes?

The thing is I woke up inside the dream and could have had
dream sex with someone and it would have been okay that way and I didn’t.  The hell’s wrong with me?

A sip of coffee.  A
notebook.  A pencil.  Thinking.

A glance to the right, my little collection of carnivorous
plants in their pots in the sunshine, enjoying the morning.  At night they grow.  At night the insects come out.  The fly traps are beginning to go
dormant.  The tropical pitcher plants
have grown pitchers the size of beer bottles that are catching roaches
now.  They sink to the bottom and ferment
in a nasty soup for the plant’s nourishment.

How does the plant know there are roaches?

I don’t know if God exists. 
I don’t know what happens when we die. 
But when I look at a pitcher plant and the hapless roaches drowned in
its wells, I wonder.  How does it
know?  How does it know there are roaches
to be eaten and that roaches are good to eat?

It knows.

Plants know about the world they live in.  How do they know?  Is it all random selection, pure luck?  They don’t have brains or nervous systems
like we do, they don’t experience the world in the same way we do, but a
dandelion knows the wind blows.  They all
know the sun shines and for how long in a day. 
They know when the days get shorter and winter is coming.  They know there are animals that want to eat
them and they have each taken a position towards that reality.  They stab them and poison them.  They cut deals with them.  There are fruit vines with thorns that have
packed tiny indigestible seeds in sugary fruit. 
“Here,” says the plant, “don’t eat me, eat this instead.  Take my berry, package my seeds in your shit
and drop them where they’ll grow far away. 
This is better for both of us.” 
Pollen.  There are plants that
offer you these bribes – exchanging sex for food.  The oldest and most universal bargain there
is, man, beast and vegetable.  Feed me
and you can fuck me.   I give you
food.  You give me a place to put my dick.  Everybody has what they want.  Nobody has to die.

Random elements.

These random elements. 

Sex and death are God’s great tough love creations to drive
diversity and make sure life survives against asteroids and mega-volcanoes and
every other goddamnedist  thing the
universe does to our planet.  I believe
in science, I believe in natural selection. 
But there is this other mystery I can’t get around.

Carnivorous Plants. 
How do they know?

I think the plants, especially the hungry ones, have taught
me about God.  I don’t believe in God the
way I once did – but there’s something huge underneath all this that
knows.  Plants know. How do they
know?  Is it all by accident?  A flytrap’s trap leaves don’t snap closed in
the way people think; they don’t move together the way a bear trap does.  The leaves of the plant are actually warped
and suspended in an open concave shape. 
The plant shoots water hydro dynamically into the leaves to
counter-warp the shape into a convex form which instantly closes the space
between them.  It doesn’t use movement –
it uses geometry.  Geometry!  Geometry is much faster than movement. 

But a flytrap has a technical problem – how can it tell the
difference between a raindrop and an animal? 
Well, it knows animals move around.  Raindrops don’t.  Somehow it knows that.  So it invented a
motion detector.  How?

Arithmetic.

A Venus Flytrap can count to three.  One, two, three.  Snap.

A fly trap has three tiny spines standing up inside its trap
leaves.  When an animal touches one
spine, the plant feels it, the plant watches, but it waits.  When something touches two spines, it
knows.  When an animal touches three
spines – one, two, three then snap – water fills the leaves, the leaves change
their shape.   Geometry! Then they
squeeze.  They squeeze until they’re
airtight.  You can’t open them until the
plant does.

Random elements. 
Random elements.

To be in the center of the universe you have to be where the
random elements are mixing.

Sex and death.  I
don’t know if God is a god of love or not, when you look at nature it doesn’t
really look like it.  It looks as though
God is more about turnover.  Life
survives because of the mixing of random elements into an infinite variety of
new forms and no matter what happens to the world some of those forms are set
up ahead of the game to survive the new world they’re in.  That means everybody and everything has to fuck, mix their genes and have orgasms
and feel wonderful.  If there is a god
out there the only thing you can be really sure of is God wants you to get
laid.

And then you have to die. 
Everybody has to die.  You have to
clear your ass out of the way so the next generation with the new random mix of
genes can come marching through, get laid and die. 

What if . . . .?

. . .  what if – there
is only one fly trap? 

What if there has only ever been one fly trap in the history
of the world, divided and spread out over generations?  But its all the same one fly trap, making
these decisions as it goes along?  Maybe
a plant doesn’t experience time the same way we do.  Maybe . . .

. . .  what if –

. . .  what if a venus
flytrap is one vast colonial organism spread out laterally over
space-time?  It looks like a lot of
little plants, but it really isn’t?  What
if Time is one block, one dimension.  Not
an arrow.  What if – for a plant – time
exists like a loaf of bread?  You can
slice into it, experience different moments, but all those same moments exist
at the same time?  For a plant?  There is only one fly trap, exisiting
multidimensionally in all moments simultaneously?  Could humans exist like that?  Like brain cells scattered across the ages?

The Dalai Lama is what’s known in Tibetan Buddhism as a
“tulku”.  A tulku is an individual soul,
usually a great teacher, who, after death, chooses to return to incarnation in
order to continue his work teaching others. 
They just reincarnate over and over, their previous students search them
out and raise them and continue. 
Theoretically the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama is the same guy as the
first Dalai Lama.  The same guy has
returned fourteen times so far and picked up right where he left off before he
died.  That’s a tulku.  Death doesn’t even represent a career
change.  

What if a fly trap, or any plant, what if they’re all one
tulku spread out over infinite time?

What if  . . .

. . . .what if – human beings, all of us, are one Tulku
spread out over time, like flytraps? 
What if we are all one soul, the same soul, co-existing incarnationally,
over 6 billion life times but all here simultaneously?  Because we experience time as individuals,
instead of being spread out, experience it as an arrow instead of a loaf of
bread?  Maybe nobody else in nature does
that. 

What if you reading this are really me, but in a different
incarnation?  Maybe incarnated as a woman?

But what if . . . .

. . . .  but what if
someone found this out?  What would sex
be like for that person?

What if that person woke up, as though waking up inside of a
lucid dream, and realized that every person he met was actually himself/herself in a
different incarnation, spread out, traveling side by side with him?  What would that be like?

I pick up my notepad and pencil, wash down a cookie with a long swig of cold
coffee.  And begin.

           On the subway to
Battery Park, the woman in the black raincoat snuggled over and nudged Ron
gently but assertively in the ribs.  He
lowered his New York Times and looked at her.

           “Excuse me, sir,” she
said.  “Listen, if I should start
screaming?  Just wake me up.”

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Or:


“The Day Your Humble Servant hit the Big Time”

The old lady’s voice is buzzing in my ear giving me information I should be writing down.

The little cell phone beeps. Low battery.

It’s getting late and I’m pulled over to the side of the Raceway Gas station on the exit ramp for Gordon Highway near where I work and my heart is pounding.

Its Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 3:45 in the afternoon, rain is running down the window of the driver’s seat which I’m staring out of as the traffic whizzes by and something is seriously happening.

“Yeah . . . okay . . .” I nod my head vigorously, even though the voice on the other end of the cell phone can’t see me. “No kidding . . . shit – I mean – sorry! I mean wow. . . yeah. “

BEEP

I’m hearing something impossible this afternoon, something I absolutely never thought I’d hear in a million years.

“”Thursday. 7:30 . . . Is that. . . wait, no . . . Is that across from that little coffee shop? Yeah . . . I think I know. That’s on the hall to the auditorium, right? Okay. . . I was scared I was going to do the auditorium. I’m not . . . No, no wait, yeah but I . . .  yeah but . . . okay, but . . . well I like hearing you say that but. . .  I can’t fill an auditorium, lady, I don’t think so. . . uh huh . . . Thanks, but I really doubt that. . . .  uh uh . . .”

BEEP

“yeah . . . Well, that’s true. . . No, I’m really excited.  Anything I need to bring with me?  Yeah?  Okay, I can do that, definitely . . . whoa . . . Sure. . . I’ll be ready. Seven thirty. Okey-dokey.”

BEEP

“Looking forward to it. Okay, bye bye.”

BEEP

Excited, yeah.  Scared green is more like it.  This will be a debacle.  But still.

I get to read my shit.  Out loud.

The phone dies just as she hangs up. In the old days I would have considered that very spiritual to have the phone last just until she says goodbye. The will of God or something. The finger of fate.  Now I think of it as just batteries, held up maybe by interaction with air waves, or maybe Jungian synchronicity. Not so much god or angels or the Trumpet of Destiny calling my name.

Holy fuck.

I’m going to give a book reading at the Columbia Fucking County Library. The Jabez Auditorium.  Thursday. Seven thirty  and don’t be late.

Holy Moley.

This stuff just doesn’t happen to me. No way is this stuff supposed to happen to me ever. This is not life as I know it. I sit looking out the window for a long time, not thinking. Just breathing and watching the rain run down. I want to tell somebody – but wait a minute. They probably have me mixed up with somebody else, somebody good. We’re all gonna get burned, I just know it.  I need to keep this under wraps until it happens.

Holy fuck.

Me. A book reading.

How did the Columbia County Arts Board even find out I write stuff?

What if nobody shows up? I think the librarians will show up anyway. I think they have to or something. It must be them. It must be them, they’re always seeing me check out writing craft books and short story collections. I know who it is! Jesus – I know! It’s that librarian, the one with the tits and the British accent and the tight sweaters. I started showing off to her one afternoon when she was talking about local writers with me. Her tits got to me, I couldn’t stop myself.  I told her about meeting Dacre Stoker. I gave her my pen name and I’ll bet she looked it up. That’s what happened. She looked up my damn pen name. How many writers can there be in my little town? They were scrounging the very bottom of the barrel for just anybody to fill a slot  and sonuvabitch – that’s right where they found me.

Jesus H Christ on a tricycle.

I get to read my stuff – MY stuff! –  in front of people!  A couple of people at least.

Thank you god . . . thank you for every blessing.

Thursday night arrives and I shuffle in a side door and it’s raining again. There’s nobody milling around in the hallway. When Charlaine Harris was here, the hallway was packed to the walls and out to the sidewalk. Now I know for sure nobody’s going to show up for me, especially if it’s raining. I won’t be able to get a big enough crowd for a card game much less a book reading. As I come down the marble hallway, with my print outs in a plastic Kroger’s grocery bag – I’m such a class act – the British librarian with the dazzling chest and her signature tight sweater is there by the door to the auditorium watching for me.

” ‘ello!” she chirps up and smiles.

I remember from my street preaching days in Milwaukee, when I would stand on a plastic milk crate on a corner and get up a crowd. It’s not that hard. You look for that one face. That’s how you do it. You have to know your first sentence, and look for The Face. One friendly face and you sort of preach to that person. If Jugs here is in the crowd I’ll read to her until I get up to speed. That’s how I’ll do it.

Garce, you’re so full of shit. There’s nobody here. You’re going to speak from a podium like some pompous doofus to one person?  Really, real world, maybe there’ll be one more library worker, some hapless high school kid who can’t get out of it, and if I’m lucky there could be two, maybe three people tops sitting all in the back row of Jabez Auditorium, so that I have to ask them to sit up front or something, who came across my stuff somewhere, god knows how. We’ll all circle our chairs together for coffee and cookies and have a few laughs and go home.

Goddamn I’m nervous! Was it like this for Charlaine Harris? Is it like this for Ashley Lister when he reads his poetry in front of people?

She jiggles buoyantly alongside as she leads me to a glass door down the hall from the auditorium.  The Promised Land.

She opens the door and holds it for me. “After you.”

I go into the bright room and freeze in the doorway so suddenly her chest, which precedes her by a good six inches, crashes into my back.

The room is full. That’s not possible.

She turns towards me and I whisper to her “Who else is speaking tonight?”

“Just you.”

I shake my head, I can’t believe I heard her right. I should have brought a camera. Nobody is going to believe what I’m seeing without a picture. They need to see this. This is my time. This is my moment in the sun. Lisabet! I wish Lisabet could see me! There’s 20 rows of ten plush chairs. That makes 200 people sitting. And people standing against the wall. Where the hell did they get all these people?

I’m overcome and I can’t speak. My eyes water and I’m trying not to choke up. I look down at my pants to make sure this isn’t one of those goofy dreams where you show up to give a lecture and discover you’re naked.

Wait a minute.

Oh no. Oh hell no.

I know what’s going on now.  This is very bad.  Bad enough to make my life pass in front of my eyes.  And I stepped right into it.

These people, there’re not here to be nice to me. This is going to be some nutty fundo Christian group, some happy horseshit Baptist Bible Camp thing come here to lynch the pornographer, get the guy who writes naughty stories and hang the cringing little bastard high as a lesson to American youth.

I look at Double Dees for help but she looks truly happy for me and she’s blocking the doorway. As far as she’s concerned she shares my joy.

Okay.

I take a step towards the podium and the plastic grocery bag tips over and dumps my stuff all over the floor.

A young woman with an odd pale complexion jumps up and helps me gather my papers together in a pathetic wad, as if I’d dropped a baby on its head and there’re whispers and snickers. I bring my pile up to the podium which has this little desk light and a thin microphone. Who knew I’d need a microphone? Who knew there would be a crowd? Some of the printouts have gotten rainwater off the bag and the ink is running on my fingertips.

While people cough and wait, I wade frantically through the mess and gather up the kick off scene from Father Delmar’s diary that starts “The Dying Light”.  I should have stapled the shit.  Why didn’t I staple this shit . . . ?

“Good evening.” A soft feedback whine. “Thank you for coming here tonight. My name is C. Sanchez-Garcia. I’m a writer.  More or less.”

Applause. Oh my god. Oh my god. They like me.  They’re not here to lynch me.

I say some polite words, a couple of self deprecating jokes. The crowd is getting a little restless. Then I notice – there aren’t any men here. These are all women. Now I know I’m dreaming. It’s a lucid dream.

Hey –

If it’s a lucid dream I can screw with every woman in this room.

I know how to find out. I put my stuff down and raise my arms up and lift up on my toes. If it’s a lucid dream I can will myself to rise to the ceiling. Nothing happens. People are looking at me funny. I’m not naked and I can’t fly. Probably not a dream.. C’mon Garce, pull your shit together.

“How many of you here have read my stuff?”

Almost everybody’s hands go up.

Standing against the wall are some young ladies in prim looking green clothes. They’re the only women wearing skirts. Their skin has an odd pallor I can’t seem to place. Foreign students. One has a sort of Aunt Jemima checkered head scarf and the others have baseball caps. They raise their hands.

“Yes?” I point at one because I want to hear if she has an accent. I think they’re going to be from the Middle East.

“We read your book, the ‘Mortal Engines’ when we were at Girl Scout camp. The leader thought it was a car repair. We didn’t tell her it was a dirty book.’

Now that is rude. To hear it said right out loud like that. That’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. I won’t embarrass this girl with the funny accent, but I’m going to steer this thing towards some elevated conversation about the difference between cheap pornography and erotic literature. There is a difference.  I write respectable literature by golly.  They need to know that.

“I’m going to read a scene none of you will have read yet, it’s from a vampire novel in progress. This scene is from a chapter called “The Dying Light”. Ahem “I like writing with a fountain pen best. A fountain pen like this one suits me. . .’ I go on with that for a while. Then a couple of poems.

The rest of my stuff is a mess. The pages are out of order. I’ll do a question and answer now and wrap this up and shoot an email to Lisabet to celebrate my triumph. I want to get back to that dirty book question somehow. “We’ll take some questions now. Who wants to go first? First question?”

The librarian raises her arm and I gaze as her breasts shift and elevate heavenward. Now I know why romance writers like to use that stupid word “gaze”. Brother, I am gazing. “Yes?”

“Where do you get your ideas from?”

Ah ha ha, modest me chuckles. “I get them from different things. Some of the stories I don’t even remember where the ideas came from. You start out with a scene sometimes and build up.”

A young woman, maybe a college girl raises her arm. “No – she means where do you get your ideas for fuck scenes from?”

She’s being crude to shock me, or maybe show me that she’s on my side. I can’t tell which. She talks like I think. “What do you mean?”

“They get me off. They sound like the way people really fuck. Is that from your real life?”

Now, O Friends of The Inner Sanctum, my pathetic real world sex life wouldn’t fill up a tea cup, much less a novel. I open my mouth to confess this with thrilling and noble frankness but what comes out is “Oh yes. All of its real.”

I get this feeling.

It’s this feeling you get when you’re walking across a grassy lawn barefoot and your toes come down hard on something in the grass which is warm and gooey and pungent and very, very natural and it squishes right between your toes.

A moan goes over the room. Dozens of female hands shoot up into the air waving furiously. I pick one at random. “What about vampires? You fucked a vampire?”

“Yes,” I say to her. “I sure did. All night. It was fantastic.”

I’m hoping this sarcasm will make people laugh, but instead a Goth girl dressed in black I hadn’t noticed before jumps up and throws her head back defiantly. “I’m a vampire.”

Whoa. I glance over at the librarian but she is looking at me with something like feral heat in her eyes. She runs her tongue over her lips. I can make out the big nubs of her nipples poking against her sweater.

“Well,” I stammer, “I mean figuratively. Not literally. The vampire is a poetic metaphor for relationships that -“

“Fuck metaphors! I’m a vampire goddammit!”

Another woman jumps up. “Me too!”

“Listen, there isn’t any – “

A third woman jumps up. “My name is Natalie – and I’m a sex addict.” Everybody claps supportively. “And I’m a vampire. I pick up strangers and take them home. I fuck them and then suck out all their male psychic energy from their chakras when they cum. That’s how I steal the yang life force energy from stupid men.”

I look over at the librarian again, the one I was reading my Father Delmar stuff to over the heads of the crowd. She’s got her sweater off. What’s she doing with her blouse? Can she do that here?

“Wait!” I yell, shaking my head like a baby rattle. “How can you be a sex addict vampire?” There could be a story here someplace. I should be writing this down. I start fumbling in my shirt pocket for a pen.

The librarian’s blouse is gone and the bra is on its way. She steps up to the sex addict vampire girl who sucks people’s life energy out of their chakras – and shoves her down on to her chair. Her righteous Working Class breasts are out and they’re bigger than the British Empire. She straddles the poor girl who stares up at her stiff brown nipples in fascination and terror.

“You little ghost whispering tart -” yells the librarian “I’m a lesbian vampire sex addict!” She shoves the girls face between her breasts and for an instant every human being in that room including me wishes we were that girl. Then she fastens on the girl’s neck and the poor thing sags in her chair.

I start getting my papers but I’m shaking and a pile of them fall on the floor. I kick them away from me. Screw this, I’m getting the hell out of here.

The four foreign looking women standing against the wall – all of them like some weird chorus line – tear off their blouses and their underwear. They’re nude. Their skin is a strange bluish color I hadn’t noticed before. They tear off their baseball caps and big phallic antennae pop out. “We’re lesbian vampire sex addicts from the planet Venus! And you are all our human sex slaves!”

“Get them!” screams the librarian, spitting drops of blood into the air. The crowd mobs the four women, tearing the bunting from the wall and tying their arms behind their backs. “Bring me an encyclopedia!”

Girls dash out and come back with a couple of encyclopedias, and a big coffee table book of Ansel Adams photos. The topless librarian swats a Venusian Girl Scout on the ass with the Ansel Adams book and the girl whimpers and begs for more. The girls line up and begin spanking the Venusians asses with the heavy books. Their erect antennae waggle with pleasure as they scream their defiance for all earthlings.

I throw my stuff on the floor and run like a rabbit.

Outside the rain has stopped and distant sirens are approaching. There is a girl under the street lamp in a denim jacket waiting for me on the sidewalk. She’s short with a bright mane of silver hair glistening with rain and her hard blue eyes for the moment are smiling. “There you are,” she says with that thick German accent I know so well. “So then (‘zo zen’) how was it?”

“We need to go. We need to go now.”

“These Girls Scouts I met, they were there, jah?”

“They were from Venus.”

“Did they have cookies? Those nice little chocolate ones with the coconut?”

“There’s a Kroger’s down the road. I’ll get you any cookies you want. Or a Mounds bar. But we have to go now,”

She laces her arm in mine. “Let’s go, stud.”