Episode 11- Alien Bloodhound

If you have the cash to spare to help us out with the Alien Diaries Anthology, head on over to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1078742786/the-alien-diaries-translation-project and donate will you?

*****

"Sorry.  I think I have the wrong house,"  I said.

"You got that right."

I know exactly what he said, but it still sounded like I'm going to kick your ass.

"I'll be going," I said.

I had the right address. It really just never occurred to me she'd have another guy over for the night.  Maybe if I'd called her sometime during the last week or two I would have known better.

The red-bearded guy slammed the door in my face, but I thought he called me a dumb ass when he did.  It wasn't what he said, really, it was the inflection in his voice that pissed me off.

But it would be bad to have it out with him.  The neighbors might remember that when the police or Homeland Security came looking for me.  I was sure they'd get around to Adele eventually.  They'd be talking to everybody I knew.  So I knew it was better to duck out.  Especially with a dead E.T. stuffed in the  garbage bag in my trunk.

Instead I pounded on the door and then waited.

His face was red as his beard when he opened the door.  It might have been just the porch light or the fact that I was tired, but he looked a lot angrier than when he last opened the door.

"Adele home?"  I said.  "I just remembered I got the right place."

"Why don't you just get lost?" he said.

"I'm a friend of Adele's.  Her regular friend.  I need to talk to her."

"We're sleeping," he said.

Big bang as the door slammed shut again.

We're sleeping?  He could have said I'm sleeping or she's sleeping, but he had to say we're sleeping.  I hammered on the door three more times.  A part of my brain knew she had a doorbell, but another part knew with absolute certainty that I should be pounding on something.

The door opened again.  This time the red bearded guy held his fist up, squeezed tightly shut to show me he knew how to do it.

"You're starting to piss me off," he said.

"Is she here?  I really need to talk to her."

"It's three o'clock in the morning, asshole."

"We're both writers.  We're up all hours of the night.  We talk a lot.  She writes stuff for my magazines."

"She never said anything about you," he said.

He could punch my ticket.  I knew that.  He knew that.  He had a weightlifter's arms and chest.  Thick neck like a football player.  I weigh about one sixty.  Each of his legs looked to weigh that.  But he was starting to look more confused than angry.

"What's it about?"

"Writer stuff," I said.  "I'm her publisher."

"You're her boss?"

"Yeah, like that."

"Shit," he said.

We both heard her muffled footsteps coming down the hallway behind him at the same time.  He turned his head.  Stepped off to the side a little as Adele pushed her way between him and the door jam.

Some women look great when you wake them up in the middle of the night.  Some look like they've been run over.  I'd hate to know what they say about men.  Adele was in the "looks even better when she crawls out of bed than when she lays down in the first place" category.  Mid-thirties.  Short blond hair tinged blue.  Wearing a fluffy white robe with a monogram from the hotel we stole it from.  Kind of tacky and maybe it came with the room, but I like to think it was the diamond thief in me showing through.

"You could have called first," she said.  "This is a little awkward."

"It's important.  Really, it is.  Private business," I said jerking my chin toward the red bearded guy.

"I don't think so," he said.

Adele turned on the serious porch light.  The halogen one.  The one that almost blinded me.  The one they turn on you when you're caught making a prison break.

"What's in it for me?"  she asked.

"I need somebody to take over the company.  Got a lead on a story that I'm going track down.  Iffy but spectacular if I can pull it off.  But I can't run the company and follow the story at the same time."

"You want me to take over the company?  What do I get out of that except more work?"

She pushed past red beard, came at me eye-to-eye.  Hands on her hips.

"That's between us,"  I said.  "We work it out just the two of us or we don't do it.  I need to do this quickly or find someone else."

The other guy wasn't happy and he wasn't poetic.

"Bullshit," he said.  "We don't have to listen this."

"You don't have to listen to this," she told him.  "Pack up and go home.  My career is calling."

"That's bullshit, too.  This guy shows up in the middle of the night and you're throwing me out for him?  I thought we had something going on?"

Adele didn't like the fact I'd show'd up without calling.  Wasn't happy about that at all.  But I could tell by her thin smile that she was getting into the idea of tossing the other guy out.

"We did," she said.  "But it's time for me to get back to work.  Maybe I'll call you when I'm done."

"Maybe?  Maybe?  This is bullshit, Adele, and you know it."

As loudly as he stomped down the hallway, I just knew he'd been practicing it since childhood.

"Men are such whiners," she said as she let me in and steered me to the kitchen .

"Where'd you meet this guy?"

"Used to be married to him."

"You're kidding, right?"

"How much do I get paid for taking over the company?" she asked.

"Much as you want to pay yourself.  I want you to buy the company, not promote you.  Not some of the stock- all of the stock.  You'll be both the owner and publisher.  You'll finally be totally  in charge."

She thought about it for awhile.  Pulled her robe tighter and fired up her coffee maker.  The only light in the kitchen was one she'd turned on over the sink.  It was like a movie image.  Like the cameraman had asked for the light to be right over her so the audience could see  how it lit her hair and transformed it from blond to gold.

"How much?  What's the price.  And Leonard?"

The last part, the and Leonard part, she shouted.

"What?" came his answer from a few feet down the hallway.

"Don't eavesdrop.  It's rude.  I want to hear the door slam on your way out and don't try slamming from the inside or I'll have my publisher shoot you."

Silence for a moment, then, "This is bullshit.  I mean it."

The front door slammed shut thirty seconds later.

"How much?" she asked again.

"I don't carry a gun.  You know that."

"How much?  And he doesn't know that."

"Much cash as you can get me tonight.  Minimum fifteen grand."

Her eyes got bigger.  She turned and poured each of us a cup of coffee.

"I don't have that much cash lying around."

"Bullshit," I said.  "You've got twenty in that urn in your living room.  You know, the one where you keep your dad's ashes.  Money's folded up in a sandwich bag with the ashes on top to hide it."

We both sat down at the kitchen table with our coffee.  We were quiet.  She was thinking, I was hoping.

"How'd you know about that?"  she said.

"You shouldn't drink and play strip poker."

"I told you about it when I was drunk?"

"Yes, you did."

"What else did I say?"

"Let's get  back to how much you're going to pay me."

Finally, she said, "You're in big trouble, aren't you?"

"Yes.  I'm in big trouble."

"How big?"

"I've got a dead alien in my trunk, Adele."

"Cool."

"I'm serious."

"For real?" she asked.

"For real," I said.

She blew across the top of the hot liquid for a few seconds, then took a long sip.

"The only way I'll buy the publishing company is if we write it up now with you having no interest or say so or any association with the company the second we ink the deal and I give you the check."

"Cash," I said.

"You are in deep, aren't you?"

"I really am serious, Adele.  I've got a dead alien in my trunk and I watched three UFO's shoot down three Air Force planes in a little over five to ten seconds after they noticed them."

"Where'd you get the alien?" she asked.

"I ran into him or her or whatever it is with the car."

"Of course," she said.

"It was foggy."

She ran her finger along the edge of her coffee cup.

"I don't want to know you after we do this," she said.

"You won't," I said.

It's the wrong thing to say to a woman you wake up at three in the morning.

I was still thinking about that when I was walking to my car.  It really didn't seem important anymore when I looked down the street and something hovering over the rooftops four or five intersections down from where I was standing.  Iridescent gray.  Smaller than the three ships I'd seen earlier.  Spinning like  an extraterrestrial gyroscope.

It's tracking the thing in my trunk, I thought.

Going Backward to Meet the Future

All smart people know that you must go backward to move forward.

No one really knows why.

It's enough to acknowledge it.

Art Bell and his successor George Noorey (of Coast to Coast A.M. fame) are both fascinated by time travel.  As a sophisticate of the Inner Lodge of Wowness, I confess that Time Travel is cool stuff.  Shadow People are a major yawn next to Time Travel.  Rod creatures and Chupacabras don't even compare.

Why is time travel so cool?

It's easy enough to understand.  As Immanuel Kant or his third cousin pointed out on more than one occasion, "Oh to go back to where I could wear a hat like that and get away with it."

As a writer, I find it very interesting.

It is the key to all human relationships, I believe.  The need to go back.  The need to restore things to the way they were.  To go forward is to know that you are making a choice that could be wrong.  Ending up with someone that may not be right.

To go forward is to get old.

Grim but true.

And if it's true that fashions cycle back into popularity, think of the trouble we'll all be in before too long.

To be able to travel back into the past means that the past is still there.  That it's not gone forever, that we always have options to change what we did and start fresh.

But it's confusing, so I'm asking you, as a writer, do you use time travel in your stories?  If not, would you?

If you don't know the answer, I'll have to ask the  kid in the picture.

Imagine the answer I'll get.

Spring Issue of White Cat Magazine is Online!

We'll be working all day and into the evening to post the Spring Edition of White Cat Magazine.  So if you have time, stop on over and read the new stories.

The winner of our April Fool's Flash Fiction contest is Alex Hughes whose story Cartoon Bastard Clouds has rather a surprise ending to put it mildly.

We have a marvelously off-kilter story by the always entertaining Marissa Lingen titled Dinosaurs of the Southern Dust Bowl.

If you enjoy end of the world stories (and who doesn't), there's always the intriguing Centralia, by the British writer Tony Haynes.

Dystopic science fiction is represented in fine form by the sharp-edged short story Breaking the Ice, by the Australian writer Robert N. Stephenson.

We also have an eerie ghost story Tryst by Brian K. Lowe that our editors just loved.

There'll be more going up later tonight, but til then- enjoy!

Oops.  Got to go.  It looks like she needs help with her typewriter.

Sex and the Writer- Part One of Five

Our sexuality empowers our writing.  


Family members hate to hear writers discuss such things.  Ever see a child recoil at the thought of their parents having sex?  So if you're going to read this series of posts, please don't tell your family.

Our readers don't like to think about it, either.  It's okay if our characters are sexually attractive or charismatic, but not you and I.  We're the storytellers.  We're supposed to be the trusted narrators of their stories, not vicarious participants.  

"I wish they'd take writer's pictures off of their books," one reader told me.  "It spoils my image of their characters."

Now that's odd, I thought.  We write the stories, but they don't like to think of us in the stories.  That's especially true when it comes to sex.  We'll take a closer look at this phenomena in the next post.

After that, we'll explore the complex relationship between sexuality and creativity.  I won't look at sterile, stilted surveys and studies, but I will be exploring why only sexually driven writers can create intensely engaging fiction.  I'm not talking about creating sex scenes, I'm talking about the ability to create powerful fiction.

What about the great social fiction that has nothing to do with sex?

It might be a great topic, but it's not our topic.  But to deal with the question tangentially, I believe only writers who are intensely sexual can create powerful social fiction.  Our creative power comes from our sexuality.  Social tensions, if you really examine, are strongly rooted in out sexuality.

It's a complex topic, but let me start you off with something to think about- when you write your story, have you ever considered the image your reader has of you, the writer?  Are you good looking- as a narrator?  Are you a man or a woman? Are you powerful?  Are you ruthless?  Are you lonely?  Remember, I'm talking about the way you come across to your readers, not your characters.

Think about it- who are you (as a narrator) to your readers?  Who do they imagine you to be?

Real People Are Better than Characters

Cute dog isn't it?

I love dogs- we have five of them.  But none of them ride in fire engine trucks and look that clean.  They fight.  They trash the house if we're gone too long.  They don't get along with the cats.  You get the picture.

Fact is, he little guy in the picture is a fake.  Just like a lot of characters.

Stereotypes are okay as a kind of short-hand for throw-away characters.  They're easy to write and and easy to source. You can almost buy them online.  The evil business person.  The average person fighting against the system.  Or my all-time favorite.  The  "elements re-assembled"  character.

The stereotyped character draws from a list of prearranged character attributes which you can actually find in the various books that Writers Digest sells.  The idea is that it's hard work to create an original character.  A writer would actually have to think and everything.  And you might fail.  The emotional trauma of failure might be painful.  The stereotyped character relieves you of that burden.

The "elements-assembled" character is a Mix-Match creation.  To hide the fact that our characters are two-dimensional stereotypes, we take the character "parts" and arrange them in unconventional ways.
With luck, the patchwork characters will be considered original.  This applies to character mannerisms as well.  For example, instead of having a tobacco-chewing man (ugh) we write a tobacco-chewing woman (ugh) character.  Isn't that creative?  Isn't that original?

Or, instead of having a powerful, evil businessman, we create a powerful, evil businesswoman.

Who knew that creativity was so easy?!  Switch gender roles or switch personal habits and we instantly have an original character!

On the other hand, this might explain why more readers are reading less.  They know that writers don't actually study real people anymore, they study fictional characters.  They base their law enforcement characters on characters they've seen on CSI.  Or Law and Order.  Or.... you get the point.

After all, "Avatar" made millions and millions of dollars for its creators, and there isn't one character in the entire movie that's not a stereotype or recycled character.  So why should a writer study real people?  Why try to really analyze the human condition and potential to create characters that are more compelling?

Think of it this way- movie studios and TV production groups have an awful lot more to invest in their stories.  It's your mind against their computer animated graphics and music scores.  Ever notice how much they spend on music scores for movies?  It's because the music creates most of the mood, not the script.  Their writers can't pull it off without music and sound effects. 

Fiction writers don't have a choice.  We actually have to make it happen in the reader's mind without music, without special effects, and without actors.  Movie studios have hundreds of millions of dollars invested.  Fiction writers, if we're lucky, have a decent laptop.

So we have to work a lot harder to make our readers really believe that our characters are real.  We might actually have to pay attention to real people to learn how to make believable characters.

Or we could keep on turning out two dimensional characters like the dog in the picture.

Electrocuting the Clowns- The Boyer Free Edition

Yes, it's the David Boyer-Free Edition.  All proceeds from sales of this eBook Boyer-Free edition will go toward fighting plagiarizing publishers.

"Electrocuting the Clowns" was the story Boyer plagiarized from me and then had nominated for a Stoker Award- even though he'd stolen the story!  But we're making progress in the fight.

Not only has the Horror Writers Association written to Deputy Attorney General Tom Irons to prosecute Boyer under Consumer Fraud Laws and the National Writers Union spearheaded this weekend a new letter writing campaign to the Indiana Attorney General's Office, Consumer Fraud Division, but Brian Keene has brought this matter to the attention of thousands of writers who have then been contacting the Indiana AG.

So in the meantime I've begun publishing "Boyer-Free" editions of my short stories on Kindle to help  collect money to continue the fight against plagiarizing publishers.  Every dime goes to pay the lawyers and researchers who are helping us fight these creeps.

Consider buying these stories a donation to fight literary cancer.

New Fiction by Vesper

Vesper (the wonderfully talented and intellectually gifted Cora Pop) is a well known presence in the blogging world through her blog Chick with a Quill. Today we’re proud to present a short story by her that, although it exceeds our normal lengths, was such an intriguing read that our editors couldn’t pass it up. It’s called “It came from Planet Mars.”

She hails from Dollard des Ormeaux, Quebec, which is not so very far from my favorite town in all the world- Montreal. I lived in Toronto for six years and Montreal for six months, and during that time I came to love the imaginative scope of Canadian writers.

When you read Cora’s story, you’ll see why. Click here to read it.