Cranky Pants Rant for Saturday

As I have mentioned (more than a few times), I love Craig's List. I check in on the listings for LA/NY/Chicago several times a day and I answer any writing jobs/gigs ads that look interesting. And while I have to earn a living, I also like to have fun so if a job that doesn't pay anything sounds intriguing, I'll answer the ad.  (This drives certain people in my life absolutely bonkers.)

Lately, there have been a lot of job offers out there for people who want a ghost-writer to finish a book that's "in pieces" and "not yet written down."  And that's okay, if a "writer" wants to hire someone to transcribe their thoughts, organize them and then "flesh them out," and they can find someone to do that, God love them both.  But the thing is, these writers who have imagined how great their books will be, as soon as they're written, are always in a rush.  ("Must be done by first of September.")  Well, okay--they want their book out there before the Christmas rush. Understandable.

But here's where I don't quite get their logic.  On the one hand they'll say, "Great gig for college students or stay-at-home moms" and on the other they'll request the following:  Sign a non-disclosure agreement, provide three references, provide links to your books.  MUST HAVE PUBLISHED A BEST SELLER. 

First of all--references?  What, from three people who read your book and liked it?  Must have published a best seller.  I am not exaggerating for effect. I have seen that phrase.  More than once.

And the ads always contain misspellings too...

Sigh.

More Praise for Women Crime Writers

It may surprise people who know my fiction that I really have a taste for "cozies." I am very fond of the "Hamish Macbeth" series by M.C. Beaton (aka Marion Chesney). A new one is coming out next February and I can't wait. Oddly enough, I really don't like her "Agatha Raisin" books.  They're just a little bit too "twee" for me.

I am a huge fan of Ellis Peters (aka Edith Pargeter) who wrote under half a dozen pseudonyms (some of them male) and wrote dozens of books.  She was also known as a scholar and a translator. Before I knew her as the author of the Brother Cadfael novels, I had read her "Brothers of Gwynedd" quartet, brilliant historical fiction.  In addition to almost 20 novels about Cadfael,  former Crusader-turned-monk, she wrote 13 novels featuring Inspector George Felse. I have not yet had the pleasure of reading those and look forward to it.

In Praise of Women Crime Writers

I am a member of the LA branch of Sisters in Crime (SinC) although I think I'm currently behind on my dues. I love the organization for the warm welcome they gave me and for the sense of community they provide. They're celebrating their 25th anniversary next month at Bouchercon and while I can't be there, I CAN participate in their blog challenge in praise of women crime writers.  (If you want to participate yourself, get the info here.)

Sharyn McCrumb's  "Appalachian Ballad" novels feature a recurring cast of characters (wonderful characters), stories that combine a crime in the past with one in the present, and a lovely sense of place. My favorite is probably  The Rosewood Casket.  She also writes a series about a character named Elizabeth McPherson, which is totally different in style.

Five more authors I recommend:  Kelli Stanley (who has two series going, one set in ancient Rome, one set in 1940s San Francisco); Carol O'Connell (her series heroine Kathy Mallory compares very favorably to Lisbeth Salander, if you liked The Millennium Trilogy, you'll like her books); Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (aka Carolyn Keene) The mother of both Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and the author who turned me into a lifelong mystery reader; Liza Cody (big fan of her Anna Lee series); Josephine Tey (her books are really timeless and there just aren't enough of them.)

Reader's Digest Wants Your Life

My parents were omnivorous readers and among the magazines that came into our house via subscription was Reader's Digest.  Don't mock, your parents probably had a subscription to Reader's Digest  too. It sat in the bathroom more often than on the coffee table with Time and Newsweek and EQMM, and Family Circle and McCalls. Long before USA Today mastered the art of the micro-article, they offered short, pithy articles on every topic under the sun.  (For some reason I seem to remember a lot of stories about plucky survivors of animal attacks, but that might just be selective memory.)

Reader's Digest is hosting a "Your Life" contest in which the best 150-word story posted on their Facebook page will win $25,000 and publication. Deadline is November 1st.  Details here.

Chuck Wendig Made Me Do It

I sat out last week's fiction challenge but this week, Chuck was back with one that was irresistible.  Guns. In a thousand words or less.  'Happiness is a warm gun," I thought, having just viewed Red on Netflix. And this nasty little story percolated up from the dismal swamp that is my imagination.

Check out Chuck Wendig's Terrible Minds blog  ("Must Love Guns") to see the other stories inspired by the prompt.

And here's my story:

GUN CONTROL

All the girls have a gimmick.

Charla’s got the snake, an albino ball python she raised as a pet right out of the egg. Ball pythons can live to be 30, so Slinky’s got another 15 good years left as a performer. Not Charla though. Nobody wants to look at a 40-year-old’s saggy tits.

Not that she’ll even make it to 30 the way she hits the pipe.

Rada shtick is “the dirty girl.” She never washes her ya-ya during the week, so by the weekend she’s built up a powerful stink. Men line up to dip their fingers in the poisoned honey of her rancid cunt, fumble all over themselves to pad her thong with their hard-earned cash.

Easy cum, easy go.

We’re not supposed to touch the customers unless we take them upstairs but Rada pays JoJo a cut and he looks the other way. Probably dips his fingers himself now and again. Probably considers it one of the perks of the job.

Mel’s gimmick is the body paint, which she mixes up special with little glittery bits thrown in so that when she peels down, she looks like that blue girl from the X-Men, the one who used to be married to John Stamos.
JoJo thought it was too weird at first but she convinced him to let her try it out and sure enough, the geeks from the university can’t get enough of her.

She’s so popular one of the girls over at the Pink Velvet tried to copy her style for awhile.

When she didn’t cease and desist after JoJo asked her politely, he sent Yusef to pay her a visit. Yusef thinks we’re all whores anyway so there wasn’t a lot of talking involved in their conversation.

She doesn’t dance any more. I think that’s a mistake. There are some real freaks out there, men who would enjoy looking a girl whose breasts have been sliced off. She could have made some serious money.

Some women have no imagination.

Men don’t come to a titty bar just to gawp at flesh. They can do that at home without the cover charge and the watered-down drinks. Even the paid porn sites have plenty of freebies, pictures and video clips and fetish trappings. When you’re at home, you can just rub one out when you get the urge. You can’t do that at a club.

Sure, some men have tried it here, but a quick word from Yusef usually convinced them to take it outside, or at least to the men’s room.

I think men come to the club as a way of convincing themselves—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that they’re still the dominant sex on the planet.

And what’s the one thing men like playing with even more than their dicks?

Guns.

Men love guns.

That’s my gimmick.

I can’t dance for shit but the men love the guns.

I come out on stage like gun-whore Barbie, wrapped in bandoliers and strapped with holsters in all sorts of interesting places.

I writhe around for awhile and then fellate a Desert Eagle—always a crowd pleaser—and then finish off by firing a pair of Colt .45s hanging on either side of my g-string.

The crowd always goes nuts at that point.

They think I’m using blanks.

They’re wrong.

If they even notice the little puffs of powdered concrete when the bullets hit the back wall, they think it’s part of the show.

JoJo thinks I’m a crazy bitch and he’s right about that, but I’m the star attraction.

The audience eats it up.

Of course they do. It feels dangerous in a safe way, like fucking a crack whore while wearing a condom.

They’ll never see it coming whe day I aim to kill.

I’ll take Yusef out first—he’s the only one who might be fast enough to stop me.

The others? It’ll be just like target practice, only more fun.

My daddy taught me two things in life—how to give a decent blowjob and how to handle a gun.

“Gun control,” he used to tell me, “is hitting what you aim for.”

I was daddy’s good girl.

Getting Lucky with Google Alerts

I love Google Alerts.  I love having digests of news stories on topics of interest delivered to my email in box every day.  Sometimes the alerts are short-term, reminders so I won't forget an upcoming event (a book publication date) or  way of researching a specific project. What I love about Google Alerts is that even if you're careful about defining and refining your search terms, you can get some bizarro results.

Right now I have a Google Alert on Grimm, the upcoming NBC television series.  I don't watch a lot of television and I'm always missing shows that sound interesting because I forgot they were on. And if they're not on Hulu or CastTv, I'm cooked. And don't tell me to DV-R them.  To do that, you have to know when they're on in the first place.  Hence the Google Alert.

So I get my Grimm Google Alert today and it includes this news story roundup from August 9, 1911, an account of various goings on at the time, including a speech by a suffragette named Miss Harriet Grimm.  She stopped speaking when a dog fight erupted up the street, realizing that no one was listening to her.  (She had a sense of humor about it.)  I hope Miss Grimm lived to cast her first ballot.

Mystery Lovers' Kitchen Shrimp in Coconut-Lime Glaze

I love food.

I love mysteries.

I love blogs that talk about mysteries and food.  One of my favorites is the Mystery Lovers' Kitchen site where today's post is for this delectable-sounding Shrimp in Colonut-Lime Glaze.  Fire up your grill.
And thanks MJ!

Stowaway--a short story inspired by Poe

This story was inspired by Bete Noire Magazine's call for submissions for their In Poe's Shadow anthology.

STOWAWAY


P. Ross Spero saw it coming. The economic collapse. The failure of the infrastructure. The extreme weather events due to global warming. The pandemics emerging from deforested land. The water wars.

He saw it all coming when everyone else turned their heads in denial.
While the pundits pontificated and the politicians waffled and the aid workers and the doctors and the military were overwhelmed by quantum disasters, P. Ross Spero analyzed and planned and took action.

When he began building the space ship, his escape vehicle from planet Earth, people called him paranoid and they laughed at him. People who had made fortunes investing in his companies—the robo-tech and bleeding-edge genetics and the nano-everything—wondered if Spero had lost his mind.

Two years into what he called “the Prospero Project,” people weren’t jeering any more. What had looked like eccentricity, even madness, now looked like prescience.

The space ark only had room for 1000 people and there was a waiting list of 8000, all of whom had put down a non-refundable payment of two million dollars to assure their place in the queue.

Spero had hand-picked 150 of the passengers—people he thought would be useful in establishing his new colony on Mars. There were male-female pairs of scientists and farmers and engineers and doctors, teachers and construction workers. He even had two attorneys, one a specialist in family law, the other with expertise in contracts.

Spero had selected another 50 people to propagate the arts—musicians and dancers, actors and novelists, poets and painters and artisans. They, like the other “experts,” got what amounted to a “golden ticket” for the ride.

The fee for their passage was minimal—a mere $1500. Three women, all of them beauty queens, none of them older than 21, were offered totally free passage in return for agreements granting Spero exclusive sexual rights for a period of ten years.

Spero was not an ugly man and he was known to be a generous lover, so the three women eagerly signed on, packing sexy underwear in the small duffel bags they were allowed to bring onboard.

None of these “economy class” passengers were gay. Spero only wanted colonists who would procreate and populate his new domain. He made a few exceptions for First Class passengers, but only for a price and only for a few.

The ship was mostly automated, run by an extremely complex computer program overseen by a flight crew of 10 recruited from the remnants of NASA and eight other decimated space programs.

The five-man security team was all ex-military and all had proven themselves under fire.

The crew members counted themselves lucky. Not only were they not being charged for their passage to Mars, they were being paid for their work.
Their jobs also came with a guarantee of their own homestead. The ship’s co-pilot had already made a connection with a cute history teacher and was happily planning her post-voyage life.

The paying passengers had all forked over a hefty price for their cramped berths and uncomfortable quarters. Used to luxury and excess, they now gladly shared tiny cabins and drank recycled water and ate food that was reclaimed from their body waste.

The journey to Mars was not a pleasure cruise. Although Spero had insisted on psychological as well as medical screens for all prospective passengers, there were inevitably some problems.

Most of the passengers suffered from a mild form of claustrophobia. The ship’s doctor prescribed drugs and sessions on the huge observation deck where the giant window offered a view that seemed to encompass the whole galaxy.

That worked for most people but halfway through the voyage, a software engineer from Bangalore had tried to break through the observation deck window with an explosive device cobbled together out of cleaning products and leftover electrical parts.

When security arrived, he fled to the maintenance bay, managed to open a garbage chute, and ejected himself into space.

Part of his boot lodged in the airlock as it hissed shut, amputating Sunil’s left foot above the ankle. The two men who witnessed his death--a former Navy SEAL and an ex-SAS officer—had seen much worse but were still unnerved.
They’d reported the incident in the driest possible military jargon and then sneaked a couple of hits of bootleg booze the ship’s doctor was brewing in sick bay.

Spero, loved jargon. Throwing it around made him feel manly. Almost from the start of the journey, he’d taken to wearing custom-fitted quasi-military garb that made him look like a Third World dictator.

Nobody told him that though. No one wanted to risk igniting his increasingly volatile temper.

Spero’s always larger-than-life personality had begun to decay into something more disturbing. He spent hours on his computer, designing and redesigning the cities he planned to build on Mars after his terra-forming machines had done their work so the atmosphere would support life on the surface of the planet.

He described his architectural style as “future Gothic,” and thought that was a good thing.

The architects he’d brought along to implement his plans soon agreed that his grandiose schemes were just one symptom of his growing mania and made comparisons to the monumental architectural monstrosities designed by Albert Speer for Adolf Hitler.

They were careful not to express these opinions out loud, or even in whispers. The ship was wired with audio and video devices and the feeds all came into Spero’s private quarters.

The Prospero used a high-transfer orbit, burning fuel recklessly to shorten the transit time from the Earth to Mars, cutting the voyage’s duration to 130 days, half the time a more conservative route would have taken.

Even so, two and a third months crammed together in such close quarters is a very, very long time for people who are not used to suffering silently; a long and stressful time. There were no servants aboard the Prospero, no under-class assigned to cater to the passengers’ whims and fancies.
Tempers flared.

There were suspicious accidents, falls in the artificial gravity that should have been survivable but weren’t, incidents with tools slipping and mechanical failures that looked more like sabotage.

When the first murder occurred, Spero and his security team dealt with it discreetly, drugging the killer before dumping him out like so much refuse. He’d still been alive.

But not for long.

When the second murder occurred, a fight over a woman, Spero took more forceful action. He told his security men to film the execution and beam it to every device aboard the ship.

He ordered them to make the punishment messy and memorable.
They obliged.

The accused killer was locked inside an airlock while the oxygen was replaced by a vacuum. The result was viscerally impressive.

The lawyers had argued for a trial but Spero had already decided that his new colony would be a monarchy and the operative legal system would be the Napoleonic Code.

In other words, guilty until proven innocent.

Not everyone was happy with this decision, but since the only weapons aboard the ship were in the hands of Spero’s loyal security team, there were few objections to the policy.

Some of the passengers briefly considered rebellion, but they were of a class that had always paid others to fight their wars for them and they had no idea how to go about it themselves.

It was almost as if they had had violence bred out of them.
Still, resentment simmered just below the surface.

When the red planet first appeared in the observation window, visible to the naked eye, a palpable sense of relief spread through the ship.
What the passengers didn’t know, and what Spero hadn’t told them, was that there was no margin for error on landing. They’d sacrificed so much fuel for speed that if they missed their landing, there would be no go-around.
Fortunately, the landing was textbook. There was a jolt and a shudder and that was it. It was almost an anti-climax.

In celebration of their arrival, Spero threw a party. He produced a secret stash of liquor and freeze-dried meats and fruits, candies and confections, and all manner of delicacies for the new colonists to feast upon.
He encouraged the passengers to dress up for the fête, which was held on the observation deck.

The shutters on the window were wide open, providing all a fine view of the Martian landscape.

Spero even opened up his own suite of apartments, including his inner sanctum, a black-draped bedroom that had a window overlooking the red rocks of their new home. As the sun set on the rocks, it cast a bloody light into the room, giving everything a macabre glow.

While the other passengers had been granted limited luggage, Spero had furnished his suite lavishly with antiques and treasures. All of the furniture, including an exquisite 19th century clock, was made of a black hardwood that was long-since extinct.

His bedroom was luxurious in the extreme but not many wanted to spend more than a few minutes there.

There was something…vaguely repellant…about the over-the-top opulence of Spero’s quarters. Something just a little…sick. Spero’s guests took a quick tour and then retreated to the festivities on the observation deck
The party was a welcome relief for the passengers after so much austerity.
One of the musicians wrote a piece to commemorate the landing and dubbed it “Spero’s Symphony.” Artists endeared themselves to the celebrants by improvising masks both fantastical and grotesque for the party.

The wine and liquor flowed freely and inhibitions were shed just as freely. One of the wealthier passengers, an entrepreneur who’d made a fortune as an electronics recycler in Korea, hooked up with the flight engineer and retired to the ship’s library, which had been painted a soothing blue.

A performance artist and a computer programmer joined forces to produce a holographic puppet show of such stunning invention that they set it on a loop so everyone in the room could have a chance to experience it.

There was dancing and singing and all manner of unrestrained revelry.
In fact, everyone was having such a good time that when two security men dragged in the tall gaunt figure wearing the oxygen mask, at first no one even noticed.

“Stowaway,” the security men reported to Spero, who was more amused than annoyed.

He strolled up to the figure and smiled.

“Welcome to Mars,” he said. “You owe me $50 million for your ticket.”
A few of Spero’s sycophants laughed.
The security men did not.

“Don’t get too close,” the ex-SEAL warned but Spero had been drinking for hours and had lost all sense of situational awareness.

It came as a total surprise to him when the Stowaway suddenly lunged and plunged a small knife into his belly.

Spero fell to the deck, blood pumping from the wound.

The two security men fell on the Stowaway, wrenching off the oxygen mask to get a look at his face.

What they saw made them recoil.

Blood covered his face in Rorschach-like patches.

“Oh my God,” said one of the First Class passengers. “What is that?”
“Looks like some sort of Zaire-Ebola-Marburg strain,” said the ship’s doctor who’d had a whole lot of champagne too. “Nasty stuff. You bleed out of pores.”
She finished off her champagne in one swallow.
“Is it contagious?” the passenger asked.

“Oh yes,” said the doctor, caught in a drunken space between fatalism and dark humor, “close personal contact is one way it spreads.”
She peered at the Stowaway blearily, watching closely as he struggled to shake off his captors.

“It has a one-hundred percent mortality rate,” the doctor added helpfully.
The horrified passenger backed away from the doctor, turned around and ran for the door.

The Stowaway spat in the faces of the men who held him and they let him loose and didn’t follow as he began a circuit of the huge room. It was almost as if he were herding everyone to the exits, like a rancher urging cattle into a chute leading to the slaughter house.

The exodus was not orderly; it was more like a battlefield rout.
One of the lawyers was trampled by the panicked passengers when he fell against a door. The only person who turned back to help him was an agronomist who had successfully concealed his sexual preference.

The first colonists died within two hours, bleeding from every orifice in their bodies.

A media magnate attempted to leave the ship in an environmental suit but with no shelter from the extremes of heat and cold and the too-thin atmosphere, he was dead before sunrise.

He died bloody, his face a mask of red.

The fatalistic doctor was the last to die. She had stayed on the observation deck, toasting her impending doom with the last of Spero’s very good champagne.

When the electricity went out she was glad because it meant she wouldn’t have to look at her own blood leaking out of her pores.
She didn’t notice when the heating grid failed and it began to get cold. Her body was already beginning to shut down.

Hearing is the last sense to fade and so the doctor heard Spero’s ebony clock strike twelve. It took her a moment to realize the clock was still working because it was an analogue timepiece and not digital. Soon after that, the doctor was no longer capable of rational thought.

And soon after that she died in the cold and the dark with nothing but death as her companion.

A short story for Thursday--Kaidan

I am putting together my second collection of short stories, Toxic Reality (due in September), going through them one last time before turning them over to my editor Joy Sillesen of StonyHill Productions.

I'm enjoying the process, although weeding out stories that ... aren't quite there ... has been like killing my children. I wrote this story for Dark Valentine's "Dark Water" fiction frenzy in the spring. I still like it.

KAIDAN

They made a mistake when they took Chika.

Her name meant “near and dear” and so she was to Akihiro Tsukimoto. They had known each other since childhood and now, when both were in the winter of their lives, she remained his most trusted confidante, his closest companion, and his only friend.

Unlike Hiro, whose bones were brittle and whose hair was iron gray, Chika seemed ageless, as supple in her tenth decade as she’d been as a fry. And she was beautiful, her coloration still vivid. She was black, red, and white, a Showa Sanshoku, one of the first of her kind and given to Hiro’s father by Emperor Showa himself.

His father had given Chika to Hiro on his tenth birthday, the same day he’d taken his life in the old samurai way. A gift given for a gift taken away. Only Chika had seen Hiro cry and she kept his secrets.

It would not have been easy to abduct Chika. She was large for her breed, nearly 60 centimeters in length and heavy. Hiro hoped they hadn’t hurt her when they took her from the pond that had been her home for nearly a century. He was sure they’d been tempted to just club her over the head but knew they hadn’t because they’d sent him video of Chika swimming in a tank that was filled with murky water and much too small.

The ransom demand had come with the first video. The kidnappers wanted money and nothing more, which told Hiro he was dealing with amateurs and not a rival. They had to be skilled amateurs to have circumvented his state-of-the-art security system but their lack of imagination and ambition struck him as pathetic. It had been a bold move to take the only thing on earth Hiro loved and if the thieves had followed up their strike with a decisive blow, he would have respected them.

They would still have had to die, but he would have given them a swift and honorable death. Their own cowardice had sealed their doom and earned them a much more unpleasant fate.

Akihiro Tsukimoto was one of the most powerful “senior advisors” in Tokyo’s biggest crime syndicate. He had many “younger brothers” who would be happy to earn a favor from him. It was only a matter of time before Chika was back home and the thieves were in his hands. And then…and then there would be vengeance.

Koi are omnivores. He would feed them to Chika one bloody chunk at a time.

What's in a name?

You say "plucot" and I say..."black velvet apricot."

My local supermarket has been loaded with new breeds and crosses and mixes of fruit this summer. If it's not new varieties of apples, it's forty-nine different versions of melons. (There's an "orange-fleshed honeydew" that's pretty tasty and the lushly delicious "Sugar Kiss" cross is the best melon ever.)

Stone fruits are in season now, so there are three varieties of cherries on offer, including "Royal Anne," which I've only ever seen canned in syrup. And there are all sorts of peaches and plums (including the "Dinosaur Heart" with its greeny-bronze skin and dark red flesh). Yesterday they put out the "black apricots." They're beautiful things. Dark purple like Damson plums or Concord grapes, they are faintly fuzzy like peaches and apricots. They're a 50/50 cross between plums and apricots and the plum genes overwhelm the apricot. It's a delicious fruit, but if you're a fan of apricot-ness, it's probably not for you. On the other hand, there's something called a "white apricot." Can't wait to try it.

Monday Flash Fiction

Chuck Wendig's flash fiction challenge this week is "The Flea Market" and I couldn't resist tackling the topic.

Here's my story--1000 words (minus title)

The Picker

Maybe she had a knack, or maybe she had an eye, or maybe Jeannie was just lucky. But she could go to a yard sale with her best friend Maribeth and Maribeth would walk away with a used copy of the one John Grisham novel she hadn’t read and Jeannie would have paid a quarter for a pair of vintage copper earrings signed Matisse-Renoir that she later sold on eBay for $69.
Jeannie had been buying and selling online for ten years as a hobby. The extra cash paid for little luxuries—a massage here, a new pair of shoes there—and came in handy to cover unexpected emergencies like when the Honda’s fuel pump died.
Her husband, who didn’t have what he called “the gypsy gene,” made fun of her for haunting flea markets and rummage sales and yard sales.
Then Tim lost his job and what had been a hobby suddenly became an economic necessity because nobody was hiring 54-year-old ex-grocery store managers and Jeannie only worked part-time at a company that was laying people off and unlikely to give her more hours.
Jeannie began planning her weekends around yard and estate sales, using a “hit list” Tim compiled from ads in The Pennysaver and on Craig’s List. Tim also handled “fulfillment,” turning their garage into a shipping department and buying bubble wrap and mailing tape in bulk.
Tim, who’d really been a very good manager, also created spread sheets and mailing lists and tracking programs to see which items consistently sold for the best prices. Then he created a website and a newsletter to sell to past customers without having to share the profits with eBay.
He opened a Twitter account and created a page on Facebook and threw himself into social media marketing like he was a lonely teenager. He was working 13-hour days seven days a week and he was loving it.
Tim had been so stressed out by his job the last few years that it had been like living with a ghost. Jeannie had been lonely. Now that they had a shared interest it had rekindled the spark in their marriage, a spark Jeannie had thought was dead.
And best of all, while they weren’t making a fortune, they were keeping their heads above water without having to dip into their savings. And every once in awhile, Jeannie would come across something really valuable, like the horrendously ugly china doodad that turned out to be a highly prized mid-century collectible that they sold on Antiques Roadshow for $35,000.
Score.
People approached Jeannie with offers to pay her finder’s fees for a first look at the items she “picked up.” That proved to be a lucrative second income stream and she and Tim discussed the possibility of her taking early retirement and just working from home. The idea was appealing but in the end, Jeannie didn’t want to give up her health insurance. She had high blood pressure and her medicine was expensive.
Still, once the idea had been floated out there, Jeannie couldn’t get it out of her head. She began ranging farther and farther afield in her buying trips. She visited pawn shops and consignment stores off the beaten track. She paid a volunteer at Goodwill to keep an eye out for certain items. She made the rounds of flea markets with computer-generated “wish lists.”
If Tim was busy, she’d go with Maribeth and afterwards, they’d get their nails done or hit the Souplantation for lunch.
Maribeth was absolutely hopeless at spotting “finds” but she loved shopping for bargains and Jeannie enjoyed her company so it was a win/win all around.
Until the Friday that Maribeth spotted the ring in a clutter of junk jewelry piled in a box on a table.
Maribeth was like a magpie—she loved bright, shiny things and the ring was big and garish, with a large blue stone in the center and four clear stones framing its square setting.
She immediately pulled the ring out of the pile, untangling it from the cheap gilt snake chains and the hook from a broken chandelier earring.
It was much too big for Maribeth’s ring finger, so she slid it onto her thumb and modeled it for Jeannie.
“Isn’t it pretty?” Maribeth asked. Jeannie was on the verge of dismissing the bauble with a good-natured jibe at her friend’s poor taste when she took a second look.
What she’d mistakenly thought were rhinestones glittered with a completely gemlike fire. The little diamonds were mere chips but the blue stone—that was worth something.
“Let me see that,” she said casually, holding out her hand.
Maribeth handed it over just as casually, turning her attention back to the pile of bling, looking for another treasure.
Jeannie studied the ring. The gems were set in rose gold in an ornate Victorian design. She estimated the size to be around an 8, which was large for a woman’s ring. She looked inside the ring for an inscription, but the band was worn smooth.
“How much?” she asked the vendor.
“Ten dollars,” he said.
Jeannie scrunched up her face and turned to Maribeth. “Ten dollars seems a bit pricey,” she said, “for a piece of second-hand costume jewelry.”
Maribeth thought about it for a minute. “Okay,” she agreed and put down a brightly colored plastic bangle bracelet that Jeannie’s practiced eye told her was a Lea Stein original.
On their way out of the flea market, Jeannie feigned a bathroom emergency and left Maribeth browsing through handbags as she doubled back to the seller with the Victorian ring.
“I’d like to buy that ring for my friend,” she explained to the vendor, who wasn’t interested. “And that bracelet too,” she said, pointing to the bangle.
“Five dollars,” he said.
“Will you take three?” she countered.
“Four,” he responded.
She tucked her purchases into her handbag and rejoined Maribeth.
“How about lunch?” she asked her best friend. “My treat.”
The ring sold for $10,000.

Photograph of ring by Asif Akbar.

A Numbers Game

There's a seasonal rhythm to the freelance work I do. It gets busy in May and in September and in January because I'm prepping my clients for the big film markets--Cannes and American Film Market and the Berlinale. Hollywood is dead in August (there's a crime story title) and again from Thanksgiving to the New Year. This year the summer slow-down started early, which has left me with a lot of free time. You know what they say about the devil finding work for idle hands...

I should have been working on my novel--my self-imposed deadline is my birthday in mid-September--but instead I've been writing short stories. A lot of them, as it turns out. If you count the two a week I write for NoHo Noir, I have written 16 short stories this month, or one every two days. I haven't been that productive in years.

Patti Abbott's questions about a short story writer's process have me thinking about what was different this month. Part of it was simply that I had more time. While I don't have a traditional "day job," I still have to meet my monthly nut and that means stringing together income from a number of sources--the book reviews, the story reports, the editing gigs.

Another factor was fear. Like everyone else in the country, I've been frustrated by the debt ceiling debate. I don't care what side of the debate you're on, it's been surreal (in Suze Orman's words) watching the country's elected representatives posture and pontificate without regard to how their actions affect real people.

I've seen my projected Social Security payout figures and assuming I hold off drawing checks until I'm 70 or so, the pay might just cover my rent if I move to Panama. In theory, America celebrates the entrepreneur, but in reality, self-employed people get double-taxed, without the benefits of paid vacation and sick time. The upside is you don't have to deal with office politics; the downside is if you don't work, you don't get paid. And so this month I embarked on a submission frenzy--writing to prompts, writing to markets, writing just because an idea entered my head. I even went back to old notebooks filled with "half-baked" stories and finished them.

Remember Heinlein's rules of writing? The first one is, "You must write." The second one is, "You must finish what you write." This month I was all over that.

Now I just have to do it again next month. And work on that novel.

Winners/Clarity of Night Contest

There were 102 entries in this fiction challenge hosted by Jason Evans of "Clarity of Night." All the stories were inspired by a photograph he posted and could be no longer than 250 words.
The winners are now posted here. There were a number of really strong stories. Among my favorites were Col Bury's Till Death Do Us Part; Sandra Cormier's The Palace; Simon Kewin's I Saw Hearts but You Saw Stars; and James R. Tomlinson's story. James is no relation, but I'd love to claim him as kin. He's a fixture in these contests and if memory serves, won the last one.
Jason Evans posted his own story and it's pretty breathtaking. Read it here.
You can read my entry here.

Flash Fiction With Unicorns

Chuck Wendig over at Terrible Minds is hosting a flash fiction challenge this week. The topic is ... unicorns. One thousand words. Sounded good to me. This is what I came up with:

At the end of the rainbow

Anybody who was anyone knew that the best place to buy pure-bred unicorns was Amber Rainbow Starwood Farms outside of Albany, New York.
Starwood had been in business for more than two decades and boasted breeding stock directly descended from Silverhorn Trefoil, the first silver unicorn ever bred in captivity.
Starwood unicorns were known for their pure bloodlines, their amazing variety of colors (hence “Rainbow”), and their longevity.

The average lifespan of a Starwood unicorn was 25 years; almost twice that of animals bred from other stables. The secret to the elongated lifespan was a germline mutation introduced to the breed via some phooka cells. Other breeders who tried to replicate their success with genetic engineering ended up with still-born foals and dwarf animals.
They kept trying, though.
Although Starwood’s main source of income were sales of “classic” unicorns, the breeder also offered the adorable “mini-unis” the size of a standard poodle, and “flunies” (flying unicorns) cross-bred with pegasii imported from Spain.
The flunies were beautiful creatures, but delicate. They often suffered from congenital defects in their joints and leg bones. Stress fractures in their wings were not uncommon and almost impossible to predict.
Watching a flying unicorn fall out of the sky was both heart-breaking and horrifying.
When the mated pair of flunies plunged to their deaths during the half-time show at the Super Bowl, their terrible fate was captured by hundreds of cell phone cameras and uploaded to YouTube within hours of the event.
The video that got the most play was posted by Uli Schlicting, a German tourist who’d won his tickets in a contest sponsored by Facebook.
Uli didn’t really like American football but his partner Erich was mad for it, and so the tickets had been a birthday present for him.
Uli had been filming the half-time show when the mare, a pink flunie named Rose Dawnrider, suddenly lurched to the side. Her right wing had collapsed like an inside out umbrella, throwing all her weight on her left wing, which sheared clean off under the strain.
The YouTube video was hideously clear. Uli followed the mare all the way down, the sensitive microphone built into his camera catching her screams.
He captured the impact as she hit the football field and exploded like a watermelon dropped from a high-rise.
Moments later, Uli had pointed his camera back into the sky as her mate, known as Impossible Blue for his rare pale blue coat, tucked his wings flat against his back and dove after her, hitting the ground so hard he left a crater.
Unicorns mate for life.
***
Cody Lomax must have watched the video a hundred times and every time he watched it, he got angrier.
A card-carrying member of PETA and the World Wildlife Federation, Cody had contributed to countless campaigns, signed petitions, written emails, tweeted entreaties, and generally made his voice known in the cause of animal rights.
After watching the video he knew he could not stand by and let unicorn exploitation continue. He knew he couldn’t salve his conscience by writing a check or volunteering to answer phones at a charity pledge-a-thon. He knew this time he was going to have to take direct action.
He opened a new twitter account @CAUGHT (Concerned About Unicorns Getting Horrible Treatment), and created the hashtag #fluniecrash and began “following” every animal rights organization and activist in the twitterverse. Within three hours he was up to 1245 followers himself.
Amber Rainbow Starwood Farms’ website was hit with a denial of service attack not long after that, a cyber shot-across-the-bow that Cody couldn’t claim credit for but admired.
The owners of Starwood counter-punched with a shrewd advertising campaign that was heavy on cuddly pictures of “cornies,” baby unicorns with blunted horns that would fall out when their spiraled adult horns grew in.
The message of these ads was “We at Starwood Farms care about our unicorns and are grieving over the loss of these beautiful animals.”
Cody didn’t believe it for a minute.
As long as they continued to breed unicorns, the potential for exploitation was there.
They would simply have to be stopped.
Cody considered killing the owners but realized there was a flaw in that plan. The owners had relatives and had surely made a will leaving the farm and the stock to someone. For all he knew, the new owners might be worse.
The only way to really shut the place down was to kill their stud, Midnight Moon.
A full brother to the legendary racing uni Moonmadness, sired by Moondancer, Midnight Moon was pure black with a pearl-white horn and shock-white mane and tail. He stood 17 hands high, which was big for a horse and gigantic for the smaller-boned unicorns.
He did a lot of research into the most painless and humane way to accomplish his task and finally decided shooting him would be the most efficient method. Problem was, the most direct path to the unicorn’s brain was underneath the horn.
Cody figured he would aim for the unicorn’s eyes.
It wasn’t a bad plan as plans go. And it might even have worked if Cody had been lucky. But despite his devotion to the rights of unicorns large and small, Cody had never actually owned one.
He therefore didn’t know what all uni owners learn the first day they bring one home—unicorns are the most territorial creatures on earth.
They really, really, really don’t like it when someone invades their space.
The touch of a unicorn horn can heal any wound on earth except for one made by its own horn.
Cody was gored to death within two minutes of entering Midnight Moon’s stall.
The security camera captured the whole thing.
The video went viral within a day of being uploaded to YouTube.

Unicorn image: Tokidoki

Envy--not just a sin any more!

My aunt and uncle own an apple farm, Jim's Apples. (The farm is named for my late Uncle Jim who mocked customers who wanted to buy Red Delicious apples and often refused to sell them.)
The orchard specializes in heirloom varieties of the fruit and feature apples you never heard of. My favorite is the Arkansas Black, which is darker than a winesap and deeply delicious.
I shop at three different supermarkets here in L.A. and they all feature varieties I'd never heard of when I was growing up. (There were Red Delicious, which I liked, Golden Delicious, which I didn't, and Granny Smith apples. My mother and grandmothers made pies and applesauce out of the Granny Smith apples, along with a southern delicacy called "Fried Apples"--ambrosial with pork chops.)
When I moved to L.A. I branched out in Pink Ladies and Cameos (a cross between Red Delicious and Golden Delicious) and Jazz.
I was still barely scratching the surface though. Just to give you an idea of how many different apples are grown for the table, check out this Wikipedia listing.
Yesterday I stumbled across the Envy Apple, a variety developed in New Zealand by crossing a Braeburn (not my favorite apple) with a Royal Gala (never had one). The result is ... the world's best apple.
Seriously.
It is crisp. It is sweet without being cloying.It's juicy.
It doesn't start turning brown for hours.
And it's beautiful.
There are a lot of red and gold apples out there, but Envy has pure colors and a wonderful scent.
They're not cheap. My supermarket sucked me in by offering them at $1.99 a pound (that's cheap in L.A.) but they now run $2.99. And they're big apples, heavy, so a pound is around two apples.
But--did I mention they are the tastiest apples in the world?

New Clarity of Night Contest

Jason Evans at Clarity of Night has a summer fiction challenge: Elementals. Contest is open until July 20, or until Jason receives 95 stories. At that point, he'll post a 12-hour countdown.

I've entered the last couple of challenges and enjoyed writing to specific word counts from a photo prompt. I think it's a great exercise. For more info, go here.

Megan Abbott's The End of Everything

Megan Abbott’s new book, The End of Everything, is a strong story about family secrets and misunderstandings and a girl who doesn’t really know what’s going on. Abbott underplays a lot of things and the most haunting; the most visceral moments in the book are very low-key.

When her best friend Evie is kidnapped, 13-year-old Lizzie Hood launches her own investigation into the crime, uncovering a series of lies that change everything she thought she knew about herself and her friendship with Evie.

As always in Abbott’s work, the characters are strong and realistic. Her view of teenage life is not unsympathetic but utterly without sentiment. When Lizzie starts hanging out with a couple of toxic teens who have their own theories about who might have taken Evie and even her own mother seems to be relishing the drama a little too much, it confirms our worst fears about suburban schadenfreude.

The plot is laced with a suppressed violence that’s almost poetic and ratchets up the intensity without being obvious. Lizzie’s imagined scenario about a character standing outside Evie’s house, smoking and dreaming, is beautifully written.

Abbott never overstates anything, never overdoes the emotion or lets anything get melodramatic. Lizzie is not a particularly credible narrator—she’s always remembering things slightly different from the way they happened—but that works for the kind of story this is.

There’s a lot going on here beneath the surface and in the shadows—the concept of “shadow” is important here, both explicitly and implicitly—and the consequences of both intentions and actions have weight.

Nominally a YA novel, The End of Everything occupies territory somewhere north of the paranormal fantasies and dystopian dramas that clutter the genre. It’s the kind of book that reminds us that labels on fiction are meaningless.

*****

Interview with Megan Abbott here.

More on L.A. Nocturne...

Review of L.A. Nocturne here. By someone I don't even know!!

Brotherly Love

There are times I think that being a freelancer is just another way to say "I'm a workaholic." Without the security of a day job to pay my bills, I keep a constant running count of cash flow in my head (as well as in Microsoft Money). My goal is always to have the next month's rent in the bank by the 15th of the month. If I don't, I kick into a higher gear, take on some editing gigs, write some book reviews for paying sites, scour the internet for paying markets for short stories, check my amazon sales stats obsessively. (I know, that last one is not particularly productive but I find it soothing.)

When I'm in "get the rent" mode, I am a machine. I can work most people under the table. Except my brother.

My brother makes me look like a sloth. He's an attorney, a sole practitioner based in northern Virginia. He's so busy it's a wonder his head doesn't explode. And on top of that, he has a family and two cats. I know how busy he is so outside of copying him on every single email I send out with a link to a story, I don't ask him to read everything I write. But he does. Which makes me happier than I can tell you.

He may not always like my stories, but he reads them. And when I sent him the story I'm submitting to the Machine of Death 2 anthology (there's still time to submit, see guidelines here), he vetted it for proper courtroom procedure. (I've been called for jury duty twice but never served, and everything else I know about the judicial system I learned from watching trials on TV.) It's a much better story now. I got lucky with my family. I know a lot of people who didn't.

So this is a shout-out to my brother. Thanks Rob.

L.A. Nocturne

I just sold my first copy L.A. Nocturne in the UK. Very exciting.

My second fiction collection: Toxic Reality & Other Tales will be out at the end of the summer. Joy Sillesen of StonyHill Productions is designing the cover and editing and formatting the text. Her striking covers for L.A. Nocturne and Fairy Story have been a big part of their success. They really stand out.

I know I judge a book by its cover, and figure everyone else does too.

It's a numbers game

I am lately obsessed with numbers--my weight (lower is better), my followers on twitter (higher is better) and two lists of things have attracted my attention. I've been adding movies to my NetFlix database so the AI can make recommendations (they keep telling me I'll really, really, really like Speed, and I so don't believe them). I have close to two thousand films listed.

Meanwhile, over at GoodReads, I'm trying to fill out my list of books because I'm now obsessed with listing EVERY SINGLE BOOK I EVER READ. And that is a really large number. I've read several books a week since I was a kid and that hasn't changed. (Except nowadays, people PAY me to read books) I've only got 671 books listed on my GoodReads shelf. Around a quarter of what I listed for movies. (And it's not that I am ashamed of admitting I've read a lot of crap. I read Gothic novels as a teen, and moved on to romance. I read every vampire book ever written except the The Shiny Metal Grin.

I just can't remember every author. I went through my mother's Nero Wolfe books and her Agatha Christies and kept going. Robert Barnard and Liza Cody and more.

But what this enumeration exercise has done is remind me of all the writers I stopped reading but who haven't stopped writing. Why didn't I read all the George Chesbro novels about Mongo? (Because they started getting really odd and fanciful around number 7.) What about all those Elvis Cole books I haven't read? This is definitely a summer to catch up with old friends. And then I'll list the books on my GoodReads shelf.

The Mother of Crawly Things

Today is my friend Berkeley Hunt's birthday. As a writer, she is steeped in Star Trek and Lovecraft, and true crime and classic literature. The distillation of those influences is the essence of this incredibly creepy story, which originally ran in Astonishing Adventures Magazine.

Celebrate Berkeley's birthday by reading her story:

The Mother of Crawly Things

By Berkeley Hunt


Her brother Kevin could put curses on people. Maddie found this out when she was six and caught him eating the chocolate bunny out of her Easter basket. She hadn’t touched it herself because Kevin told her that if the real Easter Bunny saw her take so much as a bite, he would take back the basket and everything in it.
Their mom yelled at Kevin and held back his allowance. That was when he told Maddie he was an acolyte of the Devil and could put curses on people. At first Maddie thought he said “Coke Lite of the Devil,” and that didn’t sound scary at all. Besides, Kevin lied about lots of things. Like that he was the carnation of someone named Hitler and she should scream HEIL, which was German, when he said to. Mom had put a stop to that fast.
The curse Kevin put on her was that she wouldn't like any of Easter dinner. It was hard to believe. The smell of baking ham, sweet and smoky, already filled the dingy little house. It would come out of the oven glazed with yellow pineapple and be set on the table beside green beans in a nest of French’s Fried Onions, the yams she didn’t have to eat if she didn’t want to and all the crescent rolls she could eat. Best of all would be dessert, strawberry pie drowned in syrup redder than Christmas.
But Kevin was 14, a creature that lived in neither the child nor the grownup world but in the murk between. He shared his bedroom with resin monsters out of movies Mom wouldn't even let Maddie see: Alien and Predator and something that had bat wings and a beard and mustache made of twisting green tentacles. He could drive the car, too. Twice now he and his friends had backed it out of the garage and parked it around the corner to make Mom think it was stolen. When she called the police Kevin listened in on the other line and laughed so hard that snot shot out of his nose.
So when he cursed her she stood fast. He hogged the remote and sent her hate-stares all afternoon then did an about-face and let her have his Mountain Dew. He'd even remembered that her fingers weren’t very strong; when he handed it over the can was already open. Maybe the curse was already working, because the Mountain Dew didn’t taste as good as it usually did. And when she sat down to eat the food smells enveloped her like a giant, steamy fart. Her stomach turned itself inside-out and bile, thin and stinging, erupted from her throat and drenched the mashed potatoes.
That made Maddie a believer. Kevin began demanding her dollar-a-week allowance and taking her share of the candy and sodas Mom sometimes bought. By the time she was eight she was forking over all her desserts and doing most of his chores, too. When Mom wasn’t home he even made her mow the lawn with their bulky old mower, a machine whose rusted steel teeth could cut off a toe if she wasn’t careful. All this to keep him from cursing her with flunking a grade or being called a retard and getting beaten up after school every day for the rest of her life.
That was also the year that he totaled the car and Mom couldn't afford to get another one. After awhile she asked Maddie not to accept any more rides from her friends' moms and dads because there was no way to return the favor. Speaking very gently but very gravely too, Mom told her that it was better that Maddie not have anyone to sleep over, either.
Maddie didn’t dare ask why not. She knew it had something to do with the fact that Kevin was 16 now and had tried to give her a dollar if she’d walk around the house without even her panties on. Which meant Maddie couldn't stay at any of her friends' houses, either. No climbing into the other kids' SUVs for trips to the mall and no slumber parties. She might as well be a retard; by the time the year was up she'd be every bit as hated as one.
Even though he didn't curse her, Kevin didn't exactly leave her alone, either. Maddie had a pet snail she'd rescued from the poison in the neighbor-lady's garden and named Jasmine, after her favorite Disney princess. Right after she refused to take his dollar Kevin informed her--with a toothy grin-- that the French ate snails. After cooking them, of course. That's when he whipped his hand from behind his back. He was wearing a ratty old oven mitt and Jasmine was lying right in the center.
Her shell was caved in, her once-pale and glistening snail-skin red and black with angry lines from the old backyard barbecue grill. Maddie cried until her stomach roiled and she thought she might throw up, just like the Easter Sunday when Kevin first put a curse on her.
Mom grounded Kevin. The next day she bought Maddie an ant farm. The day after that, someone took the lid off the ant farm and the day after that ants were all over the kitchen, circling the sugar and flour canisters and tracking their way up the fridge. Naturally her brother was the one who ran for the Raid can and sprayed it everywhere.
The one thing Kevin couldn't stand was crawly things.
Maddie managed to save nine of the ants by inviting them to crawl their way onto her fingertips, then hurrying outside. Deep in the corner of the tiny backyard, behind the disassembled sides of a rusty dog crate and a rabbit hutch whose floor was a solid mass of prehistoric droppings she let them go, hoping that whatever watched over little crawly things would watch over them.
Hoping so hard and so desperately that it amounted to a prayer. One without words, almost without consciousness, fed by horror at what had been done to Jasmine and what was being done to her. To what god or devil, benevolent, malevolent or indifferent, Maddie didn't know. Not until later, after the shrieking stopped and the night was quiet again.
That was after midnight, when kids and grownups alike were supposed to be dead to the world. "Get out! Get OUT!" The screams were high and hysterical and thrilling, because the screams were Kevin's. Maddie ran to his room just as fast as she could, just in time to see the mother of all crawly things slice through the air over her brother’s bed. Big as a grapefruit, it paused as if deliberating. Then it strafed Kevin, just like one of the fighter planes in the Nazi movies he liked. Nose-first it went, right through his tousled, greasy hair.
"IS IT OFF-IS IT OFF-IS IT OFF?" His fingers did a frantic, combing dance and a ragged thumbnail opened up a pimple, ripe for the squeezing. It spat reddy-yellow pus and the Mother of Crawly Things left his hair for the shelf ruled by the bat-winged, tentacle-faced thing.

“KILL it, you stupid …!” Kevin shrilled. Maddie only stood, frozen not with fear but with fascination. The Mother of Crawly Things alighted atop Tentacle-Face, fixing her brother with eyes like round black stones.
Kevin rolled awkwardly out of bed, scooping up a pair of tighty not-so-whities from the floor. He let fly, snapping them the same way he used to snap towels at Maddie. This time all that happened was that Tentacle-Face hit the floor with a crunch and chunks of painted resin, big and small, shot away in all directions. Better yet, even though Kevin was now spewing the Ess-word—and the Eff-Word too—he sounded exactly like a third grader bawling on the playground.

That's when the Mother of Crawly Things took off for a leisurely circle of the room. Whether it really paused in the air in front of Maddie as if showing itself to her or whether Kevin's bawling somehow heightened Maddie's senses she could never afterwards remember. But what she did recall was that one instant it had the enormous white head and shark-like eyes of a potato bug, the next a pale, snaily face and eyes on stalks. Its body was worm-red and segmented, then an iridescent beetle green. It had no legs at all, then six, then hundreds and hundreds. In their moment of communion she thanked it with all her heart.
Then it was gone, sailing over Maddie’s head on wings that belonged now to a dragonfly, now to a moth. Gone, even though the neighborhood was a rough one and the window was shut and the metal bars that overlaid it locked against the night.
Kevin’s bawling had slowed to an irregular hitching and whimpering and still, somehow, their mother hadn’t heard and come running. His nose ran; spit and snot bubbled at the corners of his mouth. His pajama bottoms—none too clean when he first put them on—were wet with fresh pee. When Maddie left she made a point of looking him deliberately up and down, the look one gives a retard.
She woke the next morning to Mom singing in the kitchen. The air smelled like waffles and her choice of toppings: Blueberries or maple syrup and butter. Mere steps away, the door to Kevin’s room was ajar. Maddie gave a careful push and peered it.
The old shag carpet had been trampled flat, as if by millions and millions of tiny feet. A yellow garden spider with one leg missing was trying to extract itself from one of the worn loops. A furry black caterpillar used its many front legs to drag its mashed back end. The old barbecue grill lay across another patch of rug, one gooey as if from the progress of hundreds of snails. Bits of wing and carapace and jaw littered the bed, so many that Kevin’s empty pillow was smashed flat beneath their weight.
Maddie closed the door on the vacant room and headed for the kitchen. She loved waffles.

Photograph of stag beetle courtesy of Eyyedg.

Want to know what editors really want?

Then check out Jim Harrington's ongoing series Six Questions for...
Here's the schedule for July:

7/04—Six Questions for Kyle J Smith, Editor-in-Chief, weasel and gun: variety magazine
7/07—Six Questions for Lorie Lewis Ham, Publisher, Kings River Life
7/11—Six Questions for Rycke Foreman, Executive Chef, 69 Flavors of Paranoia
7/14—Six Questions for John Carr Walker, Editor/Publisher, Trachodon
7/18—Six Questions for Cheryl Anne Gardner, Contributing Editor, Apocrypha & Abstractions
7/21—Six Questions for Greg Dybec, Editor, Fix it Broken
7/25—Six Questions for Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom, Editor, Melusine
7/28—Six Questions for Shawn and Justin Maddey, Founding Editors, Barge Press

Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski

If you can get past the unlikely contrivances that set up the story, you'll be sucked into a character-driven thrill ride that will have you preordering the sequel as soon as you turn the last page.

FUN AND GAMES balances the quirky story with characters that seem real--paging Lindsay Lohan for the role of Lane--and sympathetic. The mystery about what sent Charlie fleeing from Philadelphia interests us but so does the question of who wants Lane dead and why.

A lot of the fun of the story--at least for people who actually live in Los Angeles--is the sense of authenticity. The plot plays out like a mash-up of John Ridley's EVERYBODY SMOKES IN HELL and Elmore Leonard's GET SHORTY. The characters have history and context and their lives are complicated. Sometimes this is tragic--as with Charlie--and sometimes it's hilarious, with the suburban dad who calls himself FACTBOY having to seclude himself in public bathrooms to stay in contact with his client--while his vacationing wife and children get antsy.

The client is an intriguing character herself. We know absolutely nothing about her but it's fascinating to watch her unravel as she has to invent more and more narratives to cover the scenarios that unfold when her plan goes FUBAR. We're not the only one horrified by her total lack of compassion--even second in command can't believe she's so cold-blooded.

Both Lane and Charlie are terrifically damaged people. The writer gives us their internal dialogue so that we are invested in their survival. It's funny that most of Lane's survival skills were learned while making various cheap action movies.

Charlie is almost ridiculously resilient but at the end, he's still standing. We don't know exactly what's going to happen to him when he wakes up from the sedative the EMT administers at the end, but since we know that there are two more books in the series, we can only assume he survives and thrives in some way.

Lane and Charlie have a good run of it, and the writer makes their survival pretty plausible just as he makes the bad guys' ability to track them seem pretty likely. It's a little too fortunate that Charlie has the skillset he does (and his backstory is actually kind of murky--the writer should have just made him an ex-cop instead of some sort of consultant whose role was violent but nebulous).

Charlie is a good man who lives with a terrible burden of guilt. He and Lane are a lot alike and he realizes it. When she confesses her own guilt (as she has to her secret boyfriend), he doesn't offer absolution but he can offer understanding.

The book contains some good action and the finale in the Hunter house is a particularly strong setpiece. The novel is steeped in noir tropes (and great quotes from movies ranging from COBRA to KISS KISS BANG BANG) and the twists of the plot do not disappoint.

Adventures in Children's Publishing

Publishers are always creating new categories ("Urban Fantasy" and "New Weird" for example), but YA (Young Adult) has been around for awhile. My teen years coincided with the heyday of S.E. Hinton, but even then I chafed at the idea of there being a separate category of books for teenagers and those for adults. I was reading mysteries and horror and sci fi but I was also reading history (my father was a Civil War buff) and popular science and "literature" for school.

These days, the YA category is probably the hottest thing out there, though, and keepng abreast of publishing trends means knowing what's going on in the YA category. Adventures in Children's Publishing is a great website for that. And they give away books. Who doesn't love free books? Check them out.

The Circus of Brass and Bone

The Circus of Brass and Bone is a wildly imaginative post-apocalyptic steam punk series written by Abra Staffin Wiebe. You may know her as a fictionista or you may know her as the keeper of one of the most useful market lists around, but you need to know her as the author of this fantastic online series.

The tagline is, "After the collapse of civilization, the show goes on." The story is up to episode 12 (the others are archived), new episodes appear every week. The fiction is free, but donations are gratefully accepted. (All funds go to pay her mother's medical bills.)

Check out the stories, hit the donate button, and prepare to be transported into a fantastic world.

Not Your Usual NoHo Noir

It's not easy being an Armenian gangster's daughter.

If you've been following the series so far, you will remember that Nick is an undercover FBI agent investigating Rouzan's father. He knows that she's not involved in the life like her brother is, but he's using her to get close to her father and ... it's working.

Nick's an ambitious guy. He'll do whatever it takes to get ahead. But never let it be said he doesn't enjoy his work. Nick was introduced in the episode entitled "Full Service." Here's his picture courtesy of Mark Satchwill.

You can see why Rouzan fell for him. Enjoy this Saturday's and come back tomorrow for more noir!

Fourth of July

This is my entry into the Beach House Noir fiction challenge over at Do Some Damage. I worked as an au pair one summer when I was a teenager and although the two little girls I looked after were darling, once was enough.

The Fourth of July

Ali hadn’t wanted the fucking job in the first place but her mother had insisted. “You can’t sit around the house all summer,” she’d said, pretending like she was worried Ali would be bored when really, she just didn’t want Ali around the house when Dean came over.
Her mother still looked good for 35 but Dean was 28 and Ali was 16 and her mom could do the math.
“A summer at the beach, working as an au pair sounds better than bagging groceries at Ralphs doesn’t it?” her mom coaxed.
She’d pronounced the French phrase like “ow pear,” which Ali knew was wrong because she’d seen a TV movie about an au pair who fell in love with the guy she worked for.
There was no fucking way Ali was gonna fall for Eliot Cubbison who was a 40-something finance guy going bald and soft.
Besides, au pair was just a fancy way of saying “full-time babysitter.”
Still, the money was pretty good and her mother was right about it being better than bagging groceries.
Ali had done that the summer before. One of her co-workers had been a ‘tard with a crush on her. She’d complained to the manager that he kept showing her his dick. The manager told her to quit teasing the boy or find somewhere else to work.
She’d stuck it out until late August. The manager had stiffed her on her last paycheck.
She’d gone back to the store at closing time a week later and cut little slits in all the plastic-wrapped packages of steak.
So au pair it was.
The job started June 15th and by the week of July 4th, Ali was so fucking over it.
There was a Mrs. Eliot somewhere but she hadn’t joined the family at the beach house.
Lucky her, Ali thought after three weeks with the kids. Nine-year-old Daniel was a mean little bully and his five-year-old sister Megan was an annoying little tattle-tale, a sibling dynamic that was guaranteed to produce strife.
What Eliot had described as a “private beach” turned out to be a remote patch of sand in the middle of fucking nowhere. Ali hadn’t expected Jersey Shore, but this beach was so deserted Ali half expected to come across the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand.
She was guaranteed one day off a week, but since the house was so isolated, and there was no car for her to use—Eliot had made it clear she wouldn’t be driving his Mercedes—she was essentially a prisoner.
Eliot spent most of his time on the deck with his laptop. Monitoring the movement of other people’s money. The kids had been taught not to bother daddy when he was working so they were under Ali’s feet the whole fucking day.
Eliot entertained every night, but his guests were all his age and he made it clear to Ali that she wasn’t welcome.
The kids weren’t welcome either, except in the roles their father assigned to them. He always brought Megan out in her shortie pajamas just before bedtime and paraded her around in a show of fatherly love that made Ali want to puke. Then he’d kiss his daughter on the forehead and hand her over to Ali before the kid realized she was being dismissed and started to wail.
Daniel’s role was a little more complicated.
Eliot had taught the little boy how to make pina coladas, complete with the juggling bottles and flashy moves and a little umbrella to top off the glass.
The guests thought it was adorable and laughed indulgently when Daniel sampled the drinks himself.
On July 4th, Eliot told Ali he was going to take everyone to see the fireworks once it got dark and then took off with a vague promise to return before dinner.
Megan had whined and sulked and Daniel had badgered and taunted her into a tantrum and by mid-afternoon, Ali was exhausted by the effort of playing referee.
She was lounging in a deck chair watching Megan make sand castles when Daniel appeared at her side with a tray holding a fishbowl-sized pina colada and a bag of over-priced, organic potato chips.
“I thought you might want a snack,” he said.
“I’m sorry for picking on Megan,” he added. “Please don’t tell my dad.”
Ali looked at Daniel skeptically, trying to figure out the little fucker’s angle.
Why not?” she finally asked.
“Because he won’t take us to the fireworks,” he said.
The idea of being stuck at home one more night made Ali shudder.
“I won’t tell your dad,” she said and reached for the drink.
It went down as easy as a Jamba Juice smoothie.
***
Three hours later she woke up with the beginnings of a wicked sunburn and the sense that something was terribly wrong. Two guys in suits stood over her, studying her like a lab specimen.
“Have a good nap?” one of them inquired pleasantly.
She sat up in the deck chair and noticed a crowd of people standing around a small square of beached marked off with crime scene tape.
“What’s going on?” she asked. The two men exchanged glances. The one who’d spoken to her answered.
“You tell us Ali.”
Ali saw Daniel standing with Eliot, the man’s arms around the boy’s shoulders, hugging him. She did not see Megan.
“I don’t understand,” Ali whispered, beginning to get a bad, bad feeling.
“That makes two of us,” the man said. “You tell me what kind of person ties a little girl’s hands and feet with seaweed then buries her up to her neck to drown as the tide comes in."
"No,” Ali said.
“Did you tell her it was a game?”
“It wasn’t me,” she said. “It was Daniel.”
She saw the look of disgust that crossed the man’s face.
“You sent Daniel to his room for being bad, don’t you remember?”
“No,” Ali said, "no I didn't."
As if he'd do anything I told him to.
But then she looked at Daniel putting on a show for the scrum of solicitous adults and she saw how it would go.
She was so fucking fucked.

The Western as Noir

Screenwriter S. Craig Zahler's novel A Congregation of Jackals, is so compelling but bleak that it shares kinship with the Nordic Noir genre of mysteries.

In many ways, this novel reminds us of classic western films like High Noon and the contemporary western Bad Day at Black Rock with a little detour through Deadwood. There are bad guys who are truly bad and good guys who once weren’t and they’re all on a collision course at a wedding. The writer takes his time setting things up and by the time the actual confrontation occurs, it’s almost as mythic as the gunfight at the OK Corral.

The characters are strong. A man named Oswell is the heart and soul of the story and much of it is told through his eyes and in his voice. We tend to expect that he is the one who will die in Montana, though, because he is the one with the most to lose. (The story is a little on the predictable side.)

Some of the characters seem to be a little “quirky” and some aren’t really necessary, but the writer is going for something kind of epic here and that means he’s painting on a broad canvas.

There are some really nice moments between Beatrice and her father, including a scene where he tells her he’s saved all his life to make sure that when she gets pregnant, she’ll have a doctor’s care. There’s clearly love between these characters and we know that he would die for her without hesitation. (We just hope he won’t have to.)

The writer gets major points for populating his West with a multi-cultural cast. There are blacks, there are Asians, and there are Native Americans. Adding these characters adds to the authenticity of the mix. A lot of the ethnic characters don’t fare too well—there’s a messenger named PICKLES who has the misfortune of knowing way too much about Quinlan’s plans—but they add “color” to the goings on.

There are some interesting subplots, like the connection between the Sheriff and the condescending widow. Their original antagonism melts into something else in true romantic drama tradition. There are some little bits of plot that feel completely contrived though, especially the weird encounter Dicky has with the blind man in the hotel.

The author tries hard to get the flavor of the times, often resorting to grandiloquent language (some of which isn’t used quite right). He never quite gets into LITTLE BIG MAN territory, though. On the other hand, it’s clear he’s done a lot of research into the period and there are period touches that really sell the reality of the story and its backdrop.

Some of the detail is astonishing and original—like a description of snake spines woven into the hair of the Appanuqi chief, who walks a leashed and grotesquely tortured Mexican like a pet. The scenes with the Indians—including the massacre that is the “inciting incident” for the whole revenge quest—are tough to read and would be even tougher on screen. The violent way that Quinlan takes over the tribe, beating and humiliating the chief, is only a prelude to what will happen later.

Arthur and his unnamed twin are evil forces of nature and we almost fear them more than we fear Quinlan. (Quinlan feels like he was modeled after Quantrill, the marauding outlaw who terrorized the West after the end of the Civil War.)

The story builds to a shattering climax that isn’t truly original and isn’t particularly surprising. (We always knew Oswell was a dead man walking.) The story-telling, though, is absorbing and while the narrative is a bit predictable and a little derivative, we are carried along. The ending is DIRE.

L.A. Banks Auction

You may not know L.A. Banks' books. If not, you're in for a treat. She writes in a number of different genres, but the novels I love are her urban fantasies. She has a couple of series--vampire huntress, dark avenger--and they are not your cookie cutter UF titles with the tramp-stamped heroines and the dreamy vampires. This lady can write.

If you do know her work, you may have heard that the author (real name Leslie Esdaile) has been diagnosed with late-stage adrenal cancer. Her medical bills are already astronomical and rising. Leslie's friends have organized an eBay auction on her behalf. The auction will begin next Tuesday and run for 10 days. Go here for more information.

Shouldn't Take More Than a Few Hours

I've been a full-time freelance writer for 20 years. In the last four years, I've found a lot of work on Craig's List. A lot of that work is grossly underpaid (there's a surprise) but even the gigs that pay decently often have unrealistic expectations attached.
Mostly those expectations have to do with time-frame. Either the client (who has been sitting on the idea for, oh, a decade or so) wants something done by the weekend; or the client grossly underestimates the amount of time a project will take.
"Should take no more than a few hours" is a phrase that's popping up more and more.
Today it came up in an ad for writing 50 "job descriptions" complete with photos that had to be sourced. Seriously? Even if these job descriptions only take three minutes apiece, that's 150 minutes.
I think the problem is that secretly, most people think they could write if only they had the time. No one ever says, "I could do that heart transplant if I had a couple of extra hours," but people always say, "I'm a pretty good writer."
My feeling? If you can write it yourself, do so. But if you can't, don't devalue my work by telling me it's something I can just toss off.

Step Away From the Netflix

I share a household NetFlix account with someone whose movie tastes are WILDLY divergent from mine. Last night I was in the mood to watch something and all the suggestions that came up were based on his ratings of 800 or so movies. So we finally separated our ratings and queues, which still left me looking for a movie. But first...I needed to input a few ratings to get the ball rolling. That was last night. Less than 24 hours later I have ratings for 1504 movies and counting. Now I'm kind of obsessed with it. And annoyed that a lot of the movies I've seen (bad martial arts movies, for example) are not in Netflix.
Seriously, where is Loren Avedon's King of the Kickboxers? Filmed in Thailand with Billy Blanks of Tai Bo fame, the always reliable Don Stroud and Sherrie Rose?
Where is the terrific Disney adventure The Fighting Prince of Donegal? Ii think I saw the movie on the Sunday Disney show at some point but I remember it being full of derring-do. I like my historical shows a little darker these days--I can't believe tonight is the second-to-last episode of Game of Thrones for the season--but at the time, it was terrific.

So many blogs, so little time

I admire people who can blog day in and day out. Clearly, I don't have that discipline. But I really like browsing the blogs. I found this one, Historical Tapestry, by accident and it's going to be a place I hit up often:
One of my long-time projects is a historical mystery and part of the problem is that I can't bring myself to just ... make stuff up. I have been researching it off and on for several years now, and the section of my bookcase devoted to research is not several shelves deep, with Welsh-English dictionaries, books on weapons, books on food, books on clothing. You get the idea. Reading this excellent blog will be another excellent way to fritter writing time away. Because you know, there can never be too many ways to avoid actually sitting down and writing.

Yes--the return of shameless self-promotion

Mark Satchwill, my partner in crime at NoHo Noir, has been sick for a few weeks so various artists have been filling in for him. Joanne Renaud stepped in for him today, and the illustration is fantastic.
The story's a long one for me, more than 2000 words, mostly because to get to the part I really wanted to tell, I had to explain some things.
And of course there's a place where I switched character names. The CMS we use on the patch.com site is pretty wonky and I don't have administrator privileges so I can't go in and fix things.
This story is a result of a character rebelling against fate. I'd planned to kill Mary off and right up to the last moment when she's discovered, I fully intended to do that. But then, I just couldn't. And now this whole mother/daughter thing is happening.
One last detail. The artwork you see behind the characters? It's real art that's on the walls at the offices of CAA (Creative Artists Agency). Someone put a photo of it up at Flickr, which is where Joanne saw it. Is it not the ugliest piece of corporate art you've ever seen?
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story.