Short Fiction – Page 11

The Ick Factor

September 21, 2009 by John 12 Comments

The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in any genre. It raises important questions about what it means to be human, and it leaves them dangling in the air, just daring the audience to answer them. And it does so in the context of a science-fiction, summer-blockbuster, mock-documentary-cum-action film which should be a natural draw for audiences across the board.

Which may sound like a recommendation. You need to see it if you haven’t already, right? But, uh, well… No.

Why not? Because of the ick factor: surgical close-ups; exploding bodies; individual and societal violence (and threat of same)… Some people might even be put off just by the, well, icky appearance of the aliens, who look like viscous love children of THE alien from the Aliens films and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

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Hauntings

August 28, 2009 by John 11 Comments

From whiskey river (first stanza):

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripèd bag,
or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.

And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it’s much too small, because she won’t
curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.

But you do not wake up a month from then, two months,
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh,
God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters, —
mothers and fathers don’t die.

And if you have said, “For heaven’s sake, must you always be
kissing a person?”
Or, “I do wish to gracious you’d stop tapping on the window
with your thimble!”
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you’re busy
having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, “I’m sorry, mother.”

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.

Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.

Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.

(Edna St. Vincent Millay)

…and:

How I Became a Ghost

It was all about objects, their objections
expressed through a certain solidity.

My house for example still moves
through me, moves me.
When I tried to reverse the process
I kept dropping things, kept finding myself
in the basement.

Windows became more than
usually problematic.
I wanted to break them
which didn’t work, though for awhile

I had more success with the lake.

The phone worked for a long time
though when I answered
often nobody was there.

Bats crashed into me at night,
but then didn’t anymore.

The rings vanished from my hand,
the pond.

I stopped feeling the wind.

One day the closets were empty.

Another day the mirrors were.

(Leslie Harrison [source])

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The Ill-Behaved Hat

July 9, 2009 by John 7 Comments

I don’t often like to quote at length from another work. This is almost too good, though — too apt for Running After My Hat. It’s from “The Tramp’s Tale,” one of Czech author Karel Capek‘s Nine Tales for Children. The man who’s telling this story has interrupted a court proceeding (which is where “the judge” comes from) in such a way that he is about to exonerate a condemned man.

“My hat,” said the man. “Oh, what a lot of trouble it’s been! It’s already a year now since I was walking along the street and the wind wind suddenly took my hat. I gave somebody my suitcase, I didn’t even know who it was, and off I went running after my hat. But my hat was very badly behaved and it rolled along over the bridge to Sychrov and from Sychrov to Zálesí and then to Rtyni and through Kostelec to Zbecník and all through Hronov to Náchod and from there on as far as the border with Prussia. I went on after it; I nearly had it there but I was stopped by the border guard who wanted to know what I was running after and I told him I was running after my hat. Before I had finished explaining this to him the hat was away again with the dust. So I found somewhere to sleep and set off after my hat again in Prussia in the morning through Levín and Chudoba, oh the water was very bad there… ”

“Wait,” said the judge. “This is a court of law, not a geography lecture.”

“I’ll cut the story short, then,” said the unkown man. “In Chudoba I learned that my hat had been there and drunk a glass of water, bought itself a walking stick and then got on a train and went to Svídnice. I, of course, went after it. In Svídnice my naughty hat spent the night in a hotel without even paying the bill and then went off somewhere without saying where. After asking lots of people, I learned that it had been seen in Cracow, and was even making plans to marry a widow. So I went off to Cracow after it.”

“And why did you chase after your hat in this way?” the judge asked.

“Well,” said the man, “that hat was still new, and not only that, but I’d put my return railway ticket from Svatonovice to Starkoš under its band. It was because of that return ticket, sir.”

“Ah,” said the judge, “now I understand.”

“I didn’t want to have to buy my ticket all over again,” said the man. “Now, where was I? Ah yes, I was on my way to Cracow. So I arrived in Cracow, but by then my naughty hat had travelled on to Warsaw, first class and pretending to be a diplomat.”

“That was dishonest,” exclaimed the judge.

“That’s why I told the police about it,” said the man, “and they sent a telegram from Cracow to Warsaw saying it should be arrested. But by then my hat had got itself a fur coat as it was nearly winter, grown a beard, and travelled on to Moscow.”

“And what did it do in Moscow?” the judge asked.

“Well, what would a hat do in Moscow,” said the man. “It got involved in politics, the blighter, and became a journalist. Then it got it into its head that it would take over the government, but then the Russians arrested it and condemned it to death by firing squad; but as soon as they got it against the wall where it was to be shot there was a gust of wind and the vagabond began to roll along the street, slipped through between the soldiers’ legs and rolled off all the way through Russia as far as Novocherkask. There it put on the lambskin cap and became an ataman of the cossacks on the Don. I was still chasing after it and finally caught up with it; and then, the blighter, he whistled to his cossack friends and told them to shoot me.”

“And what happened then?” the judge asked, anxious to hear more.

“What happened then,” the stranger said, “is that I told them that we’re not afraid of cossacks: ‘We cut them into slices and we eat them with our soup!’ And that frightened the cossacks so much that they let me go. Meanwhile though, my good-for-nothing hat had jumped onto a horse and galloped off to the east. And, of course, I went after it. At Oranienburg it got onto a train and went on to Omsk and right the way across Siberia, but in Irkutsk I lost its trail; it seems it somehow came into some money while it was there, but then it was attacked by some robbers who took it all from him again and it was lucky to escape with its life. In Blagovyeshchensko I came across my hat in the street, but it was clever enough to escape from me again and rolled off all the way through Manchuria as far as the Sea of China. On the coast, there, I caught up with it because it was afraid of water.”

“So you finally caught your hat there?” the judge asked.

“If only!” the stranger replied. “I ran after it all along the coast, but just as I was about to catch it the wind changed and my hat went bowling off towards the west again. I went after it and chased it all the way through China and Turkestan, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a sedan chair, sometimes on horseback and sometimes on a camel until, in the city of Tashkent, he got on a train and went back Oranienburg. From there it went to Kharkov and Odessa, then to Hungary, then, back in Czechoslovakia, it rolled along into Olomouc, then Ceská Trebová, then Týnište then finally back here to Prague. And here I finally caught it, just five minutes ago in the square as it was about to go into a resaurant for some dumplings and sauce. So, here it is.”

And he showed them all the hat; it was beaten and tatty, but there was nothing else about it to suggest it was such a complete rascal.

Oh, I love the idea of a rascally hat!

(Read the whole thing here, for now — in all its diacritically correct glory.)

Paying Attention to Your Sense of Play

May 23, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I’d already written this post’s title. And I almost began the body of it with these words: “Sometimes, you just have to”—

But, nah. I don’t think everyone, not even every writer, “just has to” do almost anything, much less experience the sort of off-the-wall moment I did one afternoon, years ago. And even less than that, to actually follow up on it.

This was back in the days when I was living on my savings and trying to Be a Fulltime Writer. (If you notice the contradiction in terms there, on either side of the and, you’re not the only one.) I was reading the paper one day after lunch. It had been a productive morning writing session, and I was feeling a bit burnt-out but still not quite ready to toss away the afternoon on something other than writing. Just, y’know, not necessarily that writing — what I was working on every day.

So I was reading the paper, as I said, and my attention was caught by the Ann Landers advice column on the page opposite the comics. “Dear Ann Landers,” it began (they all began that way). “I was a closet smoker who went through a pack a day for 20 years and tried to quit dozens of times. I failed because I felt as if I was depriving myself of a great deal of pleasure even though I knew in my heart that cigarettes were killing me…”

To this point, a fairly conventional letter. Yet even as you read of this guy’s struggle with the Tobacco Demon, you could sense, lurking in the wings, a but. You could sense he wasn’t writing to seek advice. He was writing to offer it.

And so he did.

Something about the solution he came up with just suddenly struck me as bizarre. Flat-out hilarious, even. I’d been a smoker myself, and the thought that I might actually employ this solution back then, on the occasions when I’d most wanted a cigarette, just, well, it just unhinged me.

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Paying Attention to What It Means to Write

March 25, 2009 by John 8 Comments

An epic-fantasy computer game which The Missus and I play every now and then lets your character acquire any of a variety of cool, vaguely medieval-magic weapons. One property which some of these weapons have is called “vampiric regeneration”; while I’m hazy on the details, I think this means (for example) that if you shoot an opponent with an arrow of vampiric regeneration, his or her strength goes down and your own goes up.

Which, in a roundabout sort of way, is the theme of this post.

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably seen a bumper sticker or shirt which reads, “Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.” Maybe somebody who worries about that prospect has given you one.

(And maybe you’ve repaid them by doing just that, you vindictive little sneak.)

I don’t know, though. Unless you’re doing non-fiction (or more or less non-fictional “memoir”), putting real people in your work not only risks getting first-hand lessons about libel or defamation; it also is just duller than making up your own characters.

Okay, at some level you can’t help “creating” characters who resemble real people — some (most?) of them people you don’t even know. Say you’re sitting in an airport bar, absolutely savoring the interminable freaking wait for your plane’s spare part to be FedExed from Bangalore and feeling murderous about the world in general. Suddenly on the other end of the bar some horse’s ass breaks into song and you realize: He’s singing along with the commercial jingle on the bar TV. At the top of his lungs. You notice that his hairline is receding almost to the point that it’s simpler to say his head is ballooning, and that he’s blinkingblinkingblinking the optical semaphore which says, repeatedly, New contact lenses at work. Mentally you turn back the clock to view this yoyo at age 16. You take pleasure in giving him some grotesque skin condition. You invent a bully who’s tormented him since first grade and is now the student-government president, assigning him menial tasks at pep rallies (like mopping up the gym floor after the sweating masses have left). You picture his first kiss, with the Homecoming Queen at that — or rather, with the Homecoming Queen’s yearbook picture.

Yeah. That’ll show him. That’ll teach him to have been interesting, here and now, to you, a writer armed with the deadliest of weapons: a vampiric imagination.

Not that I know anybody like that guy myself, of course. And if I did, not that I’d ever reward such a flaming idiot by committing his picture to the Web’s permanent page. No. (No.)

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Paying Attention to I-Don’t-Know-What

February 24, 2009 by John 4 Comments

When telling people about my flipping back and forth from technical writing to fiction, I usually say I went for five years without writing anything at all.

That’s not exactly true. Truth is, after about four years I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t have anything specific I meant to write, but just sitting around — I wasn’t, really, but you know what I mean — was starting to make me a little crazy.

So I told The Missus I meant to get up early the next morning and I did. Staggered to the computer, bleary-eyed, with a cup of tea in hand. Opened the word processor. Let my hands hover over the keyboard and typed:

It’s 1927, late on a mid-June morning.

A few things about this very brief sentence:

I just about never write in the present tense. From the first word, I was already surprising myself.
What the hell did — do — I know about 1927? My only connection to that year remains tenuous: my dad had been three years old then. But I had no stories about his life as a little kid that I was preparing to channel. (Really, I had no such stories at all.)
The morning on which I wrote those words was not in mid-June, and the time was certainly earlier than later. But we’d been wallowing in one of those weeks of high heat and humidity which periodically drag their lazy way through North Florida regardless of season. And that environmental influence, in retrospect, certainly had something to do with that first sentence and what followed.

The story which came out of that brief fling with an early-morning routine — it lasted maybe a week, maybe two — is called “The Running Boy.” I never finished it; got a little over 6,000 words into it and just ran out of steam. Not abandoned by the Muse, not tired of the story itself. Just plain tired. (I hadn’t adjusted my bedtime to allow for the early morning schedule, instead counting on the adrenaline rush of writing again to carry me through a day on four hours’ sleep. Say it with me: Duh.)

But “The Running Boy” continued to interest me for a number of reasons (some of them hinted at in that opening sentence).

The plot itself — or rather, the thing-which-the-plot-seemed-to-be-about, what Hitchcock used to call the MacGuffin — caught me completely unawares. I wish I knew how it turned out.

I experimented (again, no idea why) with writing dialect. While I often give my characters characteristic rhythms of speech and other little verbal tics of their own, what I’ve got of “The Running Boy” represents my only attempt to give characters what you might call accents. And I don’t think it’s too heavy-handed. (We’re not talking Joel Chandler Harris here.)

The story has three main characters — probably two too many for a short story. But while it lasted, I had great fun working out their relationships. (In the back of my mind, they’re continuing their adventures with one another somewhere.)

Finally, the genre is one which I’d never seriously attempted. At that, the genre itself was a sort of MacGuffin; “The Running Boy” — at least its first 6K words — has even less to do with the genre than it does with, say, computers and the Internet. The story more or less announces its genre within the first few paragraphs and then more or less forgets it; the point, as it happens, seems to have been the characters after all.

Anyway, for what it’s worth — and for the sake of whatever my mind thought itself to be achieving — here are the first 1700+ words of “The Running Boy.” (I haven’t edited this at all, just copied-‘n’-pasted it from the document, so it doesn’t take long to make me cringe at stuff I wish I’d rewritten.)

Enjoy!

Paying Attention to Bits of Everyday Life

January 31, 2009 by John 6 Comments

When writing-related blogs ask their writing audience when, exactly, they “knew” they were writers, the answer most commonly offered is: I’ve always wanted to write.

Not so, in my case. Up until seventh grade, I had no such ambition, although teachers and family members had often complimented me on my writing. (I remember one grandmother — this was probably when I was around ten years old — chuckling in her grandmotherly way at something I’d said. Then she stopped for a moment, looked at me, and said, It’s not so much what you say, Johnny. It’s how you say it. Obviously, I never forgot that moment.)

In high school, one of the teachers I became friends with was Mr. Hanlon, who taught trig, physics, and calculus. He kept telling me I needed to consider a career in engineering.

No, I’d say, engineering didn’t interest me. I wanted to be a writer.

A look of almost-mock horror would flash across his face. “A writer?” he’d exclaim. “What about engineering?!?”

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Paying Attention to Meaning

January 14, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.

Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?

I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.

They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.

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Paying Attention to Action — or Is It Character?

December 30, 2008 by John 4 Comments

I’ve written here before (here and here) about the terrors of newly-published-authordom — particularly, when the bad reviews land in your mailbox.

But sometimes, even a bad review contains a nugget you cling to when the whole damned thing threatens to come unraveled, when your spirit sags and you wonder why you’re even bothering to continue.

In my case, that nugget for Crossed Wires appeared in a review which on the whole was not particularly flattering. (This was the review referring to “occasional patches of arty prose.” Which was true — which was why it rankled so much!) Specifically — I’m going on memory here but think it’s pretty close to the real wording — it said: “The action scenes are winners, some of them quite funny.”

The reason this comment stuck with me wasn’t the “quite funny” part. That’s something people had been telling me for years about (much of) my writing; while it was nice to know that a stranger concurred, I more or less just nodded to myself at that point — because I was still savoring the first half of the sentence.

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Line Burners

December 8, 2008 by John 3 Comments

You’ve probably encountered references to NaNoWriMo here, at least in the comments — the so-called “(Inter)National Novel Writing Month” of November. This project encourages people who want to write fiction to, well, do it; everyone who signs up agrees to try writing a complete 50,000-word novel over the course of the thirty days.

(There’s no penalty for not succeeding, and “winners” — anyone who meets the 50K target — don’t win much more than the approbation of peers and a cool badge to display on their Web sites. A few NaNoWriMo participants, however, have gone on to publish what they started and finished there.)

If you do the NaNoWriMo math, dividing 50,000 words by 30 days, you get the average number of words to be written each day: a little over 1,666. It’s a pretty ambitious schedule for people with otherwise busy lives (day jobs, families and other relationships, keeping up with current events, hobbies, and so on). And yet, as I’m finding, there’s a writing challenge even harder — for me — to keep up with. It’s called Burning Lines.

Here’s how it started, with an exchange of comments on Kate Lord Brown’s What Kate Did Next blog. (Kate’s next post actually announced the start of the project.)

Years ago, I’d participated online in what we then called a “round-robin” story. The idea was to enlist, oh, a dozen people or so in a community writing project. We worked up a schedule of rotation: Writer 1, then Writer 2, and so on; each writer, in turn, would add a new installment to the end of a story begun by Writer 1. No deadline for each installment, as I recall, but it was understood that we’d have day to consider and post each one. So it unfolded in a stately pace (as it now seems), over the course of however long it took.

The Burning Lines project adds a whole ‘nother layer to the experience — a layer of… excitement? mania? fear? chaos? disorientation? all the above?

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