Free Fiction Friday The Ugly One

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I took myself to Disneyland to see what all the fuss was about. I rode all the rides except for "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride." In the middle of  "It's a Small World," something went wrong and the little boats stopped dead in the water. It took about half an hour to fix and the whole time "It's a Small World After All" played around us.  Forget water boarding, playing that song more than a couple times in a row would qualifiy as an "enhanced interrogation" method. But the kids were delighted. You know how really little kids like to repeat things?  To this day even a few bars of "It's a Small World" will make me shudder.
And oddly, because there was no trauma associated with seeing Disney's The Little Mermaid, I feel the same way about Sebastian's sprightly "Under the Sea."  I read the original "Little Mermaid" when I was a kid and have always preferred the tragic version. When reading fairy tales I always knew when some bowdlerizing hand had been at work--forced happy endings, unexpected upturns in the hero or heroine's fortunes, a birth instead of a death. (I also noticed that blondes had more fun in fairy tales and that Snow White was the only princess with dark hair like mine. Years later, when I first encountered the literary criticism of Leslie Fiedler, I discovered that wasn't an accident.  Blondes are of the light, the human equivalent of "the shining ones." And then there are the others, those less favored. And those were the ones I was interested in.
(Fiedler is famous for his book Love and Death in the American Novel and  infamous for his commentary on homoeroticism in Huckleberry Finn--the essay is called something like "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in Huck Honey." He was a lit crit with all the right creds, but he was also a champion of genre fiction. Thank you Dr. Buford Jones for introducing me to him!  But I digress.)
It seemed to me, reading fairy tales that the ugly ones got a raw deal. Cinderella's stepsisters weren't just mean, they were ugly and not in the sense my grandmother meant when she would say, "Now don't be ugly."
Yes, they got to wear the pretty dresses and eat the good food but maybe they were mean because they were ugly and then, as now, "pretty" is often the only currency a woman has to spend. And then one day the idea for this story swam into my mind and I knew I had to write it.

                                   THE UGLY ONE
                                                   By Katherine Tomlinson

Liia was very young when she first realized she was different.

Her mother had suckled her but not nurtured her in any way and she found out that if it had not been for the intervention of her father, she would have been abandoned when her family and the school they swam with, moved on to warmer waters.

Liia’s difference was not her fault. Her mother had been exposed to toxic waste in the water and when she gave birth to 23 fry, all of them but Liia were dead. Liia’s mother tried to eat the dead fry but they were too toxic.

Her father had named her Liia, which means “miracle” and had protected her from predators until she was old enough to fend for herself.

Some months later, there was another batch of fry and from that came Liia’s seven sisters.

Seven lovely sisters with silver hair like their mother and beautiful, silver-blue tails.

Lia’s hair was moss-green and patchy. It had no luster, even in the sun, and her tail was the color of the boats they found on the bottom of the north sea before the rust took them. A dull, gun-metal gray that was often cloudy with “ick.”

She had lumpy tumors on her tail as well, tumors that disfigured.

She was a strong swimmer.

Then her father died, in a battle with the monster dog fish and after that her mother and sisters ignored her.

 She began reaching out to the lesser fishes, the ones that her kind dominated and fed on and used as slaves.

She gathered an army of electric eels and sea-going snakes and sharks. The sharks especially were on board with her plans and agenda.

Unlike many of her kind, she had taken pains to learn the language of the lesser fishes and so she could communicate with them and let them know that she would share the spoils with them.

Most of her school were pleasure-loving swim-abouts who weren’t really ready to defend themselves against a coordinated attack.

For there had never been such a coordinated attack in the history of the sea.

Liia’s school lived in the abandoned and coral-calcified remains of what had once been a Spanish galleon plying the lucrative route between spain and the new world, filled with looted Incan/Aztec gold. As a child, Liia had enjoyed playing with the golden fruits that had been plucked from a palace treasure garden and carried away, only to bloom on in the salty earth of the sea bed. She had loved the jewelry too, the pretty necklaces but her mother had taken them from her and told her she was so ugly she took the shine away.

And that was when Liia began to hate.

She planned her campaign on the treasure ship with military precision. She had the fishes scavenge whalebone and shark cartilage and she constructed massive cages.

She would lead the charge on a marlin, its spiny fin fully elongated.

First she would take a treasure bath.

Then she would supervise the executions. Her sisters and mother would be last, but they would be made to watch as the sharks and the ate the others.

Liia had no illusion about the loyalty of her allies. They were what they were and at some point they would likely fall upon her.

She would taste bitter she knew.

Bitter and ugly.

But her final thoughts would be of sweet revenge. And that would be enough.

Fever Dreams

I have spent most of the last week in bed, which would be great if the rest of that sentence involved a tall dark stranger and a hotel room in the South of France. Alas it has more to do with waking up at midnight with an atrophied tongue, a lump of fleshy stone as scaly as the bottom of fishing boat at the end of a season. Pretty much the only time I've left my cave of sheets and blankets is to rehydrate--chicken noodle soup has lost any appeal it ever had--and to make more slippery elm tea. If ever there was a substance that made you glad you've lost your sense of taste, it's slippery elm tea.
Orange Cat is delighted.
His goal in life is to sleep 23 and a half hours out of every day and the only reason he doesn't pursue this goal more fervently is that he gets lonely. There's no one to pet you while you sleep, or play with the laser pointer or tell you you're a good boy.
The only good thing about this whole cold/flu thing is the dreams.
I have been having big, huge, technicolor dreams.
Which is unusual.
I rarely remember my dreams.
I was not a kid who had nightmares. I can remember only one nightmare in my whole childhood and it was more a series of images that caused me anxiety than anything else.
Those anxiety dreams everyone has in college?
I had one.
Once.
And even as the dream was unspooling in the Cineplex of my mind--a narrative involving signing up for an advanced math class and never going and having to take a final in it--I was saying to myself, "You would never sign up for an advanced math class."
About a decade ago, following some event--probably 9/11--I had a series of truly awful dreams involving earthquakes and blood. In one I was roaming the halls of what I knew to be my high school in Richmond but it was in Burbank. Classes were in session and my mother turned a corner and told me I needed to tell everyone to get out, there was going to be a quake and the building was going to collapse. "They're not going to listen to me," I protested. "Tell them your mother said so," she said. "Tell them your mother is dead." Which at that point she had been for 15 years or so.
There was also a dream involving me asking my best friend to kill our two cats because they were hungry and we couldn't feed them.
I am mostly glad I don't remember my dreams.
But this week my dreams are so bizarre that they're notable. I was Brad Pitt and Anjelina Jolie's nanny in one. In another, I dreamt the whole plot of a story I've been working on. I remembered everything when I woke, but the distance from the bed to the nearest pencil was just too far. By the time I woke again, the story was long gone.
I'm about one day away from feeling completely human again and I hope to have a dream I can turn into a story like some of my friends do. But in the meantime, I am rereading George R. R. Martin's wonderful vampire novel, Fevre Dream. It's the first book of his I ever read. 

In case you missed the memo...

It's now legal for women to wear pants in France. Here's the story.
But sneakers are still ... so not acceptable.

I am following The Following

I don't watch a lot of TV. Mostly it's because as a freelancer who also writes on the side, I had to make a choice about how to spend my free time and writing won out over TV watching. (In other words, I'm not being a TV snob, I know there's good stuff out there.  And I am the first person to admit that a lot of what I do watch is totally silly.) But as someone who grew up with TV, I'm not often surprised. At least not by American television shows. The Following is a total surprise.
I expected to like it. Billed as dark. Starring Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy.
Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy. Every week in my living room. For free.
I'd seen Diner and Footloose and Tremors (he and Fred Ward were magic) but the moment I became a Kevin Bacon fan was during his one scene in JFK where he played a hustler named Willie O'Keefe who goes off on a rant. One of the reasons I really liked his bit was that he was doing a southern accent and HE GOT IT RIGHT. Bad southern accents make me nuts. You can see a really awful clip of the scene on YouTube. It's mesmerizing.

I do not think that word means what you think it does: Blurge

As I purged myself of various disgusting cold-produced effluvia last  night, the word that came to mind was "blurge."  And I began to wonder, as I often do when I have many things to do and not enough time to do them, if "blurge" is an actual word and if so, what it means.
As a matter of fact, it is a word and thanks to the Urban Dictionary, I now know what it means and will never use it again. A "blurge" is a blow job given by a woman who has just vomited.
I know, I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing that.
Who thinks this stuff up?

Book Review: Desert Hearts by Christine Pope

Desert Hearts is the sequel to Bad Vibrations, and the second in Christine Pope's "Sedona Trilogy" of romantic adventures. Set in that beautiful red-rocked city (whish the author clearly adores), Desert Hearts ups the ante in every direction and the stakes are nothing less than saving the world.

Psychic Persephone, the heroine of Bad Vibrations, is back, but this time the focus is on her friend Kara Swenson, whose book store is a hub for UFO enthusiasts (both locals and tourists). Kara is a geek--her dog's name is Gort and he is a terrific character--but working in a bookshop, even one she owns, was not how she expected life to turn out. She's feeling overwhelmed and under-loved when the book opens. And then a handsome, green-eyed stranger shows up and shakes up her life.

If you liked Bad Vibrations, you are going to love Desert Hearts, which can be read as a stand-alone. The characters are all back, including Jeff Makowski, an unkempt hacker who forms a deep attachment to Kara's sister Kiki, Lance the taciturn UFO hunter with a mysterious past, and Michael Lightfoot, who has seen a lot of odd things in his life and is fazed by none of it. This cast of characters is joined by a sexy Man in Black with a sense of humor, Kara's nosy neighbor who is very interested in her house guest, and various and assorted friends, colleagues and villains. The "world" of the story is fleshed out nicely, and the characters have context. We believe these people are friends. And Kara's relationship with her younger sister Kiki feels real and honest. They love each other, but they also know how to push each other's buttons, just like real siblings.

Everything is bigger in this book--the romance, the action, the tension. There are some truly scary scenes here and Pope does a fine job of balancing sex and suspense. (Let's just say Kara does not feel under-loved by the end of the book.) Whether you like romance with a dash of mystery and adventure, or like your adventure leavened with a little love, Desert Hearts is the book for you.

Wednesday Word Snoot: Silly Words

Courtesy of Graphican.com

You may remember that during the run-up to election 2012, Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of using "silly word games." I half-heard that news report and what I heard was "silly words."  That set off a train of thought that ended, as many of my trains of thought do, with a spot of Googling. (Search engines are the best thing to happen to procrastination since ... crossword puzzles. You can waste a lot of time Googling, as with completing crossword puzzles, but you almost always learn something.)
Who knew there was a linguist who's compiled a list of the "100 Silliest Words in English?"  Check it out here.  My favorite is "bloviate," which means to speak pompously or brag. Some of the words on the list are actually phrases, but let us not split hairs.
Writer's Digest has compiled a list of funny words to help writers write funnier stories. I'm not sure I see the innate hilarity of words like "bulgur" and "knickers," but a fair number of the words on the list not only sound funny but have obscure definitions (which they don't give, I guess assuming that writers will know what they mean). And extra points to you if you know what a "bumfuzzle" is. (If you don't, check it out at dictionary dot com.
Wikipedia has an entry on "Inherently funny words" that's extremely academic but has some interesting pop culture references, including one to a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where Joe Piscopo tells Commander Data that words ending in K are always funny.
But if you want to know what words are really inherently funny, it's best to have a little kid around. If you find them repeating a word or phrase, it's going to be because it tickled their fancy. (My sister, for reasons unknown to the rest of the family, thought the name "Gene Siskel" was hilarious and was prone to using it to punctuate sentences when she was a little girl.) Dr. Seuss was the master of silly words, and his word "grinch" is now a permanent part of the lexicon.
Wouldn't you love to invent a silly word that got adopted by everyone?