Write Early and Write Often

Novelist Stephanie Draven has created a literary contest for young women inspired by her upcoming trilogy of novels about Cleopatra's daughter Cleopatra Selene. There are two categories--Teen for writers 13-18) and Young Women (19-22), with cash and other prizes for the winners. Go here for more information.

Writer/illustrator Joanne Renaud will be one of the judges. A fan of historical fiction, Renaud illustrated Stephanie Draven's story "The Threshing Floor" in the debut issue of Dark Valentine Magazine.

Just Another Day in Paradise--now on Kindle!

If you've gone through the process of posting a book on amazon.com, you know it can be...an ordeal. Thanks to my awesome publisher G. Wells Taylor, though, Just Another Day in Paradise is available in a Kindle edition less than a week after it was published. To celebrate, I'm offering another free sample story below. I hope you enjoy it. The illustration is by Joanne Renaud, my friend and colleague at Dark Valentine Maqazine.


BROKEN DREAMS

The old woman who’d lived in 206 had been a happy person, not sour and bitter like so many of the people who lived in the apartment building Marisol managed. She’d never trapped anyone in the elevator with a rambling self-absorbed monologue. She’d never scolded the children who ran back and forth in the hallways because they had nowhere else to play. She’d always been nice to Marisol, not like some of the tenants, who saw her as the enemy because she was the one who had to post the three-day pay-or-quit notices when they were late with their rent.

The old woman had always paid her rent on time. Although she was on a fixed income, she had no problem living within her means. She was a vegan who ate soups and pasta and salads. She didn’t drink coffee, didn’t smoke cigarettes, didn’t touch alcohol.

She had a computer but not a television set. The only telephone she used was a cheap princess phone she’d picked up at a yard sale some time in the 80s. She wrote a lot of letters in an elegant script she’d learned at a fancy private school. Her parents had been wealthy and thought educating their only child was money well spent. She had loved her parents very much.

She read voraciously, borrowing books from the library—five or ten at a time. She never went to the movies. She told Marisol once that the last time she’d seen a film, Kennedy had been president. She didn’t remember what the movie was but did remember she hadn’t thought it was worth the money, even then.

The old woman had known she was ill, but unlike every other sick person Marisol had ever known, she was not eager to waste anyone’s time with a recitation of her troubles or an accounting of her aches and pains. It was only near the end that her body betrayed her, and Marisol would sometimes see her hunching over in the hallway, defeated by her pain.

Knowing her death was near; the old woman had made preparations. There had been discreet deliveries of envelopes filled with cash to people the old woman had cared about. In addition to the cash, the envelopes had contained lovely handwritten notes that spoke of her gratitude for their friendship and her hope that the gifts would be welcome.

Marisol had gotten one of the envelopes. There had been ten thousand dollars in it. The note had made her cry.

The old woman had left behind few possessions. She had never been someone who needed “stuff” in her life. She had been a teacher on the Yavapai-Apache reservation in Arizona, but had left when the tribe began building casinos. She disapproved of gambling. She’d joined the Peace Corps at 50 and spent time among the inhabitants of the Brazilian shanty towns known as favelas. Once, in a rare moment of melancholy, she had told Marisol that in some parts of Brazil, infant mortality was so high that people sometimes brought a tiny coffin as a gift to a child’s christening. That was the saddest thing Marisol had ever heard.

The old woman had not wanted to rot. The Neptune Society took care of everything. Her ashes were scattered at sea while one of her young actress friends sobbed her way through lines from The Tempest, the verses about suffering a sea-change into something rich and strange. The old woman had wanted a party afterward and had paid for it in advance.

There’d been a lot of booze, even though the old lady wasn’t a drinker herself. There was more than a little pot (all her old hippie friends came baked). And there were lots and lots of pastries from the Moroccan bakery around the corner. The Muslim owner of the bakery had come with his shy wife, who wore the headscarf and was skittish among all the strangers. The baker and his wife had gotten envelopes too and put the money away for the education of their unborn child. Both the money and the child were blessings from Allah they believed, and they included the old woman in their prayers.

Marisol’s boyfriend Lee had gotten drunk at the party and then he’d gotten mean. Lee hadn’t liked the old lady. He ran into her sometimes when he was rolling in from a gig, coming to Marisol for food or sex. He told Marisol that the old lady looked at him like she was judging him, like she knew everything there was to know about him and wasn’t impressed.

That wasn’t the old lady’s way, Marisol knew, but she also knew the old lady was no fool. When the envelope of cash was delivered to Marisol, the note inside had included a postscript suggesting, in the nicest way possible, that she not mention the financial windfall to Lee. Marisol had taken the advice and hidden the money in the one place she knew for sure he would never look—under the kitchen sink where she stored cleaning supplies.

The old woman had died in the hospital after collapsing near the pool on her way to post a letter. Marisol saw her fall and called 911. Two days after she died the apartment owners called Marisol and told her to clear out 206 and get it ready to show to new tenants.

There wasn’t much to clean up. The old woman had been tidy. There was hardly any food in the fridge, and just the usual clutter of bathroom stuff. She had used Jergens hand lotion, Marisol noticed. Her mother had used Jergens, and the cherry almond scent always took her back to her childhood. Marisol had loved her mother and still missed her.

In the bedroom, Marisol stripped the mattress and decided to keep the sheets for herself. They were well worn but pure cotton and felt comfy and clean in her hands. Over the bed was a dream catcher, an authentic one made of sinew and willow hoop, decorated with rough-carved totem animals of stone.

The thing caught her fancy, so she took it and hung it up over her own bed. She slept alone, as she often did, and her dreams were sweet.

Lee was in a bad mood when he got back from his gig at some club in Fresno or Modesto or Bakersfield—some dusty town that wasn’t L.A. Marisol couldn’t keep them straight.

The gig hadn’t gone well. Lee’s band had opened for a band people had actually heard of and the audience was vocal about wanting Lee and the others to get out of the way so real musicians could take the stage. The girl he’d had his eye on hooked up with the drummer instead of him and wasn’t interested in a three-some. Lee had spent most of his share of their pay-day buying junk food and booze to fuel him up for the return trip.

Marisol was bone tired when Lee showed up. She’d tried to get some food into him but he’d said he wasn’t hungry. At least not for food. When she told him she was too exhausted to have sex with him, he called her names and stomped out of her apartment.

She was already in bed when he returned and she regretted—not for the first time—that Lee had his own key to her place. He was so blind drunk that even before he stumbled into her bedroom and flopped down next to her she could smell the alcohol stink on him. And then he moaned and vomited. She managed to roll him over so he spewed on the floor instead of her bed but the stench made her gag.

“You’re cleaning that up Lee,” she warned as she fled to the bathroom, so disgusted she was afraid she might puke too. Cursing, Lee stumbled off to the kitchen for some paper towels and spray cleaner. Marisol was just rinsing out her mouth when she heard a roar from the kitchen, and remembered too late that she had stashed the old woman’s money under the sink with the SOS pads and the Bon Ami powder and the spray-bottle of Clorox Clean-up.

Lee came back into the bedroom brandishing the envelope of money in one hand and the Clorox bottle in the other. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, whipping her face with the envelope, giving her a paper cut. She tried to think of some excuse, some placating lie she could tell him but nothing came to her, so she just stood there mutely as he began spraying the Clorox at her in blinding bursts. She begged him to stop and he did, only to attack her with his fists, punctuating each blow with an incoherent grunt of rage.

Marisol made a desperate break for the door as he paused for breath. He lunged at her and because he was drunk, misjudged the distance and hit his head on the wall. Dazed, he reflexively grabbed for something to steady himself. His fingers caught in a strand of the dream catcher, breaking it. He slid onto the bed face down and laid there, unmoving, a carved bead of turquoise caught in his hand.

Without stopping to collect her purse or shoes, Marisol ran out of the apartment, wearing only the t-shirt and shorts she slept in. She spent the night in her car, which she never locked because it was such a piece of junk that anyone who stole it would be doing her a favor.

Upstairs, in Marisol’s bedroom, Lee’s drunken stupor passed into natural sleep and he snored. And he dreamed. And one by one, every nightmare the broken dream catcher had ever captured dripped out of it and into Lee’s sleeping mind.

Like most bullies, Lee was a coward to the core and when he became conscious of the horrors attacking him in his sleep and realized he couldn’t wake up, his mind snapped and his heart stopped and he … died of fear.

When Marisol ventured back into her apartment the next day, she found Lee stone dead, a look of terror frozen on his face. She found the broken dream catcher still clutched in his fingers. Just the one strand had come loose, but it had been enough.

Lee had been a big fan of the movie Pulp Fiction, but he’d never heard of a pulp writer named Cornell Woolrich who once wrote, “First you dream and then you die.” Marisol had read a couple of Woolrich’s books in an English class she took at junior college. She was thinking she might take the old lady’s money and spend it to finish her associate degree. She’d gotten good grades in school. And she thought maybe she’d like to be a paralegal. Or a CSI tech, like the ones on TV. That sounded like a job that would be recession-proof. People never stop dying.

Lee had had a bad heart she told the paramedics when they came to pick up the body. She knew they would find drugs in his system if they did an autopsy and no one would question his cause of death.

She repaired the dream catcher and hung it back up over her bed.

She slept alone and her dreams were sweet.

Totally Unsolicited Testimonial

I grea up in a Southern household, which means that we drank iced tea with every meal. My mother always had a big pitcher of it chilling in the fridge. It wasn't sweetened--my father was a diabetic--but I loved "sweet tea," that peculiarly Southern concoction where sugar is one of the main ingredients. Arizona Ice Tea does a nice "Southern sweet tea" variant, although the only place I've ever been able to find it is in the cooler case in gas station food stores.

These days, I tend to avoid sweetened teas for the same reason I don't drink soda very much--the bottles are just delivery systems for sugar. But, I still have a hankering sometimes. Diet teas are mostly nasty--with chemical aftertastes that make you wonder just what is in there besides tea and water. (And really, I can't get my thrifty grandmother's voice out of my head when I look at the prices of tea bags versus the prices of a SINGLE bottle of already-made tea.)

But now I have discovered Sweet Leaf Tea's DIET sweet tea. And it's really good. So good in fact that the first time I drank one, I had to look at the label again to make sure I wasn't quaffing the real deal. I don't know anyone at Sweet Leaf. They didn't send me any bottles. But I am happy to spread the word.

Fiction on the Bleeding Edge...

New dark fiction over at Dark Valentine Magazine. "Bleeding Edge" by Robert Alden. Illustration is by Marie Zeleny--Marzel. This is number 16 of the month-long Fall Fiction Frenzy. Read it here.

Kill the Bat-Man

Or at least critique him... A new book, Gotham City 14 Miles collects 14 essays about the 1960s "Batman" TV series. The book critically examines the show, in an effort to determine its weight and worth in current pop culture. PRE-ORDER IT NOW at all comic shops!!!

I don't know the guys who put this together (one of the essayists is a friend of a friend) but the idea of the collection appeals to me. Burgess Meredith as the Penguin; Frank Gorshin as the Riddler, Cesar Romero as the Joker. With all due respect to those who came after...these are the actors who defined those roles. (Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker transcended the role, so he's i a category all his own.)

So you like it dark?

You thought Liam Neeson ruled in Taken? Embrace the bad-ass awesomeness that is Dwayne Johnson playing an anti-hero in Faster. See the new trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vePC5C6MsM. It'll make you forget about The Tooth Fairy. (No, I'm not going to link to that title. I'm going to pretend it never happened.)

Auld Lang Syne

I had a landmark high school reunion this summer and have been looking at the pictures posted by my former classmates on Facebook. I did not attend, but thanks to the wonders of social networking, I was able to catch up with everyone. It was wonderful to get back in touch with people I cared about back then and see how their lives have been.

But every time I read an update from the guys organizing the event, the germ of this story took firmer root. I finally succumbed and wrote it. Just in time to squeeze it into Just Another Day in Paradise.

I hope you enjoy it. (And in case you're wondering, I did go to the prom--with an interesting boy who became an interesting man.)

AULD LANG SYNE

I got a few jealous looks when I signed in. It’s possible some of the women working the registration desk remembered me but I doubted it. Back in high school I’d had lank brown hair, bad skin and had carried an extra 30 pounds. I’d spent my four miserable years at Woodrow Wilson High School dreaming of better times to come. And they had. I looked good for my age.

I spotted Alicia Cooper almost at once. Alicia Womack, that is. Everyone had expected her to marry Tommy Womack and she had. They’d been king and queen at our senior prom.

I hadn’t gone to the prom. I wasn’t asked. I’d spent that night sobbing in my room while my poor mother tried desperately to distract me with homemade vanilla milkshakes and offers of shopping trips. I was inconsolable. But I drank two of the milkshakes. I did things like that in those days.

I never really thought I’d come to a reunion but as the years slipped by, the notion of making an appearance at my 50th began to seem attractive. I’d long ago lost touch with everybody, but the reunion committee had set up a group on Facebook, so I was able to get all the information I needed. I sent in my reservation, made my travel plans, and bought a new dress.

A cocktail party at the Sheraton was just the first of many activities planned over the weekend. The banquet room was decorated with huge black and white photographs blown up from our senior yearbook pictures. There were black borders around the edges of those who’d died. The only one I remembered was a girl who’d been in a car crash two days before graduation; hit by a drunk driver on his way back from a lost weekend in Myrtle Beach.
I drifted around the ballroom, staying at the edge of the knots of couples and just observed. A few people glanced my way and smiled, inviting me to join their conversation but I kept moving.

I saw Anne Todd and her husband talking to Harvey and Henrietta Martorelli. I’d liked Anne. She’d been nice to me in a way that didn’t feel like charity. She’d aged gracefully and the way she and her husband stood shoulder to shoulder told me that she was loved. I was glad. As for Harvey and Henrietta? They looked more like siblings than spouses; both had evolved into sexless, blocky creatures with the same graying skin and thinning hair. Henrietta had been in my honors history and English classes. She’d been an earnest grade-grubber. Her brothers had all gone to Yale and she had the GPA and SAT scores to qualify but back then, Yale didn’t accept women, so she’d settled for Bryn Mawr instead.

Finn Johnson had come with a woman half his age. His hair had turned white but it was full and he wore it longish, much as he had back in high school when he was our resident bad-ass, sneaking cigarettes in the rest room and taking shop and auto mechanics instead of calculus and biology. Nobody thought he’d amount to much, not even me. He had joined the Marines a week after graduation and five years later was part of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the first American combat soldiers sent to Vietnam.

Finn came home with a case of PTSD, an addiction to heroin and a 600-page manuscript in his duffel. That book, Chrome-Plated Dream, was the best-selling book of 1970, beating Jonathan Livingston Seagull by approximately 10 million copies.

Finn knew how to make an entrance and by the time he reached the bar, a little buzz had gone around the room. Tommy Womack was looking at him with the feral gaze of an alpha male who’s just sensed a challenge. The women were looking at him too, perhaps thinking about lost opportunities, perhaps wondering if Finn needed the little blue pills the way their husbands did.

I caught Alicia looking too. Back in high school, she could have had him. She could have had anyone she wanted with her pale skin and her auburn hair. She had the figure of a beauty queen when the rest of us were still stuffing our bras with Kleenex. In fact, she had been a beauty queen, snagging the title of Miss Talbot County when she was 16 and reigning over the Talbot County Fair that fall.

Alicia had not aged well. Her hair was now the color of white zinfandel, a pink candy floss that only ever really looked good on Lucille Ball. That porcelain skin was ravaged with deep ruts like a dirt road after a hard rain. Her boobs had sagged and her decision to wear something low cut had been a mistake. Despite the deep décolletage, the dress was matronly and designed to hide her thick waist and heavy bottom. She wasn’t truly fat but it wasn’t going to be long before she would need more than Spanx to fit into a size 16. Keeping the weight down after menopause is a bitch. But then, so was Alicia.

I saw her eyeing the platters of hors d’oeuvres being circulated, saw her decide against tasting even one as she looked over at Tommy holding court with Rob Dennehy and Nelson Brandt and Tad Grainger, his former teammates on the Woodrow Wilson Bulldogs. They were all glancing at Finn’s arm candy and trying not to drool. I’d always thought of the school’s football players as the Woodrow Wilson Woodies, and it didn’t surprise me that they were all still horndogs.

Tommy looked good. He’d gone bald, but with style, shaving his head like Yul Brynner and embracing the inevitable. His suit was tailored, not off the rack, and his shoes looked handmade. Tommy Womack had done well for himself. He’d taken over his father-in-law’s business and turned it into a multi-state franchise. That he was still married to Alicia told me that either he was very discreet about his affairs or Alicia had an iron-clad pre-nup. He wasn’t even glancing in her direction as she stood alone, smiling stiffly, looking around vaguely for someone to come up and talk to her.

Bird-like Cindy Renfrew-Cheung patted her arm fondly as she passed by on her way to refresh her drink and Alicia recoiled slightly. She and Cindy had never run with the same crowd in high school and Alicia probably didn’t even know her name.

Cindy had been a free spirit, a good-time girl who had to drop out for a year when she got pregnant. During that year, she taught herself Fortran and COBOL. By the time Fortran 66 was released, she’d created ALLI; a programming language meant for kids that she’d named after her daughter, Allison. Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, the inventor of COBOL, was Alli’s godmother.

Cindy was now on her third husband, a Hong Kong businessman 23 years her junior. I’d overheard her telling someone that Gordon Cheung was in Singapore on business and that she’d brought her daughter along as her “date.” It wasn’t hard to spot Alli Renfrew; she was a 40-ish version of her mother and just as lively. All the waiters were flirting with her, even the gay ones.

Alicia’s eyes followed Cindy as she trotted across the room in three-inch heels as if she were still a teenager, her turquoise Vera Wang a bright spot among all the little (and not so little) black dresses. Alicia’s own shoes were sensible low heels, made more for comfort than style.

I saw Alicia head for the bathroom and followed, pushing open the door soundlessly. The overhead lighting was harsh, falling on Alicia’s dyed hair like a spotlight; revealing a patch of naked pink skin on the top of her head.

“Hello Alicia,” I said as I came up behind her. She spun around, startled. She hadn’t heard me come in as she rummaged in her bag for her lipstick. It was a deep burgundy red that was all wrong with the hair.

“Hello,” she answered. Seeing no reason to engage in any further conversation, she turned back to the mirror to fix her lipstick. And then she gasped.

Because of course, I no longer cast a reflection; hadn’t since I was 23 years old and turned into a vampire.

“Who are you?” she managed to stammer and I gave her points for that. Most people usually say “What are you?”

I smiled, showing my fangs, which terrified her. “Suzy Wisnicki,” I said. “Remember me?”

She looked at me, at my golden hair and my clear skin and my slender body and saw no trace of the mousy fat girl she’d tormented so long ago. She didn’t recognize me but she remembered my name. The memory made her go pale. Alicia had been a mean girl before the term was ever coined. She’d reveled in her beauty and the power of her popularity. She had hurt people just for fun.

I could see all her emotions flickering across her face and not one of them was shame.

“But you’re young,” she finally managed to say and that made me smile wider.
“Yes,” I said. And then I bit her. Her blood tasted of nicotine and diet pills and diabetes. It tasted nasty, so I rinsed my mouth out at the sink before leaving her on the floor.

I paid a maid to post an “out of order” sign on the door. She was only too happy to help after I looked deeply into her eyes. Later, she would remember nothing.

No one saw me leave the hotel except the valet who delivered my car. I tipped him well. I was feeling good.

Alicia would rise in a couple of hours. Immortal like me.

But unlike me, she would live the rest of her very long life in the shell of a wrinkled old woman. Vampirism is a youth culture. I gave her six months before she walked into the light.