Month: February 2015

Cold Blood

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Chuck’s challenge this week: The four-part story, part 1. That means it’s time to buckle up, because I’ll be taking on stories started by other authors and extending them in my own twisted ways, and they’ll be taking my creations into new and exciting directions of their own.

It was a bunch of fun last time it happened, so I’ve got high hopes this time, too!

So, how do you go about writing the beginning of a story that you won’t be able to write the ending to? Lots of unanswered questions, lots of plants (no, not that kind of plant), lots of hints at what might have come before, but not a lot of concrete. At least, I think that’s a good way to go about it. At any rate, that’s what I’ve tried to do here.

Enjoy, and if you’re here from the challenge and thinking of using this story stem, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

 

Cold Blood

Cold.

The weather reports had called for cold, but that was the first thing Lem could process, and the only thing, for that matter. Despite the sleeping bag her legs were snarled in, the stocking cap smushing down her short hair, and the two hoodies she had layered up the night before, the cold had seeped into her toes and her fingers in the night, and she could barely feel them.

She sat up, and a crack of thunder sounded in her skull. Too much whiskey the night before; yes, that had been a mistake. And not a drop of water around before bed, either. All the water in their flasks had frozen. Was still frozen, she discovered, turning a heavy flask over. It would have been funny, if her head hadn’t felt like it was tearing into two halves down the middle. She poked Mark to wake him up.

But Mark wasn’t there.

His sleeping bag had been right next to hers when she passed out, but now it was rolled up and neatly secured with paracord in the corner of the tent. Next to it sat Mark’s pack, which was also arranged and collected and ready to depart. But no Mark.

She peeked her head out of the tent — sucking in a sharp icy breath, because god help her, it was even colder outside — and looked around. There, the ring of stones around the pile of ash from last night’s fire. There, the funny little outcropping of trees that Mark had said looked like a bunch of aliens dancing around a maypole. There, the dusty trail leading off into the woods. In the distance, the burbling sounds of the river. But no Mark.

Lem cleared her throat, sending another shockwave through her pounding head, and stumbled out into the grey morning. She tried to call for Mark, but her voice was hoarse and tiny in the predawn mist. It wasn’t unlike him to go for a little explore before she was awake, but something felt off. The sleeping bag, his pack. He hadn’t lit a fire. And he’d had as much to drink as she had, if not more. By rights, he should be the one sprawling on the ground in the tent, unable to shake the fog out of his head. She called out once more, Mark’s name issuing out in a great cloud of vapor. Three crows exploded out of a nearby bush and went flapping off into the sky, cawing at one another and at her pitilessly as the grey swallowed them up.

An hour later, Lem had built a fire and thrown a few sausages in the pan, figuring that when Mark returned she could have a bit of breakfast ready. She’d thawed out a canteen and chugged a good quart of water, and that had helped, too. But the hour had come and gone: she had gathered kindling, listened to the thick sizzle of the gristly meat, and then devoured them herself, all without seeing or hearing any sign of Mark. It was only when she was cleaning up from the meager meal that she started to get uneasy.

Not at the thought of being alone in the wild; she carried a gun and was well-trained in its use. That had been her father’s insistence when she took up hiking, and she dutifully loaded it before every expedition, even though she had never had cause to use it. Nor was she uneasy at Mark’s absence; he liked the solitude of the woods even more than she did, and he would be back soon enough with some clumsy excuse about forgetting to leave a note, and they’d kiss and laugh over it and that would be the end. It was the cold, she realized. The sun was up now, casting long, skeletal shadows through the trees, but it was getting colder. Unseasonable was not the word. The chill was unnatural.

She chuckled at herself as she thought it, and went to pack away her mess kit back in her pack, and that was when she spotted it. It was frozen solid but unmistakable, dark crimson in the dust, glittering with the scattered sunshine; A tiny disk of blood that looked like it might have frozen before it hit the ground.

She bent to examine it, the vapor of her breath seeming to melt its surface just a little, tiny droplets condensing on the angry red ice. Now that she’d spotted this tiny pool, the next one seemed to catch light at the edge of her vision. She rose and walked toward the new spot, and then she saw the next patch of ice… and the next, leading toward that strange snarled copse of trees.

For a fleeting moment, she thought of her gun. Her tent was only thirty feet away, just as far from her now as the weird interwoven trees that had caught Mark’s fancy the night before. It would take only a moment to retrieve it. Then came a sound that made ice of the blood suddenly surging through her veins. The cracking of a twig underfoot, but not under her foot. Under another foot entirely, just beyond the edge of the trees encircling the clearing.

To Extremes

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This week’s prompt is “an emotion and its opposite.” Now, the obvious one is love/hate, and that would be an easy one to explore. As a writer, I swing back and forth between loving and hating my work like the tides. Hell, I swing back and forth between loving and hating the craft. But love/hate is obvious.

No, the dichotomy that seems most apt to me is confidence/doubt. These two phases, like the peaks and troughs of a ray of ultraviolet light, alternate with alarming alacrity (triple alliteration bonus, whee).

One minute, I feel at home in the me who is on this adventure. I know what I’m doing. I’m staying smart, looking sharp, making good decisions. Every new bit of text is a good one. Every cut makes perfect sense. Every edit improves the whole. There is no shaking me off the course I’m on as I work inexorably toward writing the best inaugural novel that’s ever been written.

Then the light goes out, and I remember that I’m miles deep in an unfamiliar jungle with the dark rustle of foreboding creatures of the night on all sides of me. That bit of dialogue I thought was scorchingly clever the first time around seems a bit hackneyed upon further review. The character arc I’ve worked so hard to create feels like a flamingo on roller skates; all awkward angles and feathers crashing everywhere. The cut that felt so necessary when I made it now looks like a gaping wound, and the patient is bleeding out.

Then I stop working for a while, and by the time I come back to the novel, I feel like I could drive nails with my forehead again.

Do any other writers suffer from the same up-and-down, hot-and-cold, bulletproof-then-made-of-glass feeling? Do all of them? I have a hard time believing that my sentiments on writing are unique, but by the same token, not every writer can be so schizophrenic.

In fairness, though, the ride is pretty fun. There’s something to be said for riding the roller coaster til you throw up the oversized cotton candy you just horked down while you were waiting in line. Then wiping the pink fizz from your lips and lining up for another turn. Some might call that crazy.

No, that would be me. I’d call that crazy. I’m too old for that sharknado. But the writing, okay. I can handle the swings of that ride.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Stakes and the Blarg

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Boy, oh boy, do I love a good stake. Charred crust, pink and bloody in the middle, melt-in-your-mouth flavor, rancid farts for the rest of the night…

What? Oh. STAKES.

Woo! Vampire hunters and silver crosses and garlic and…

Huh? Ugh. Okay, fine. Just stakes.

I guess there’s a lot to be said about stakes in writing, but today I’ve got the stakes of writing on the brain. Not least of which because I’m passively reading a book called The Right to Write by Julia Cameron. (“Passive” reading is my pleasant euphemism for “book-I’m-reading-on-the-toilet.”) And… well, for starters, I don’t think I’m this book’s target audience. Each chapter is essentially its own workshop and meditation on some aspect of the writing process, and much of it is the kind of rah-rah-rah-you-can-do-it stuff that would be more at home in a literal cheerleading squad than in a book aimed at burgeoning authors. For another, the tone of the book is through-and-through the sort of hippy-dippy, peace-and-love drivel that can give you a toothache if you swallow too much of it. It’s all “writing is a gift” and “the story speaks through me” and “anybody and everybody is a writer at heart”. Then there’s a lot of meditation on the sun rising over her private valley and rumination on her horses as they watch her through the kitchen window, and that’s about when I really want to induce vomiting so I don’t choke on her privilege. Now, okay, those ideas are lovely and all, but it’s all too Kumbayyah for me to ingest in anything other than the tiniest bites.

I don’t need that. I enjoy writing enough in its own right that I don’t need somebody pushing me to do it or ensuring me that it’s okay for me to do it. Whether or not anybody is truly “cut out” for writing is irrelevant, as any list of bestselling books will tell you. Horrible writers still write. This book is aimed at convincing somebody who’s perhaps too timid to leap into the pond that he might, in fact, have something worth writing about in his mind. It’s designed to invite you into the world of writing one baby-step at a time, by writing first about things in your house, then in the news, then about your family, and blah blah blah. If you’re a sometime reader of my blarg, it’s pretty obvious that I do that stuff on my own already.

That said, there’s something comforting in the way she puts her ideas forth.  And even among the platitudes and smug self-righteousness, there are gems of wisdom, little kernels of edible advice embedded in the stew of saccharine crap.

The one on my mind has to do with stakes, and what she has to say about it is this. When novice writers (and sometimes experienced writers, too) sit down to do their capital-W Writing — be it their novel or screenplay or short story or news article or whatever — there is this inescapable sense of pressure and dread surrounding the act. Because it has to be perfect. If I write something crappy, that’s all anybody will ever remember. It’s all I will ever remember. Inability to achieve that perfection and to get all the things exactly right is paralyzing; it can lock up the mental faculties like a bit of chain snarled in the spokes of your bicycle. And this is a fear that I’m on a first-name basis with. (Its name is Todd. Like all horrible things.)

The well-hidden reciprocal of that fear is the fact that so many of us, writers and non-writers alike, engage in writing every day in which we feel no pressure at all to perform at some elevated level. These are your e-mails to colleagues about whatever projects you’re working on, your text messages to your spouse about what you need to pick up at the grocery store on the way home. Okay, it’s not Writing, but they are still words that you form for the purpose of communicating an idea to somebody else… and that’s writing, innit?

The trick, then, is to capture that free, unfazed, not-even-aware-of-any-kind-of-pressure feeling associated with e-mails and apply it to your capital-W Writing, to leap into your manuscript with the same abandon with which you fire off a scathing comment on a message board or a snarky response to your sister’s joke about your mom. It’s hard to do, but I’ve felt flashes of it when working on my novel.

It almost made me mad when I realized it. While I was having a chuckle at all the peace-love-dope sentiment in her book about writing, Cameron had thrown a literary dart and pinned my Id-Writer to the corkboard like a doomed insect. In her suggestion that writing doesn’t have to be this big deal that a lot of people (myself certainly among them) make it out to be, she had explained away the entire r’aison d’etre for this blarg. This is my low-stakes writing. It doesn’t matter what I write here; what matters is simply that I write. That I break apart the dam of mud and sticks clogging up the river of my faculties. That I pull the release valve on the hot-water heater of my brain. That I let the toddler out into the yard to run around in circles and scream its head off so that the adult in my Ego-Writer can get some peace.

This, then, is why we read; this is why it’s important to engage critically even when the subject matter seems like a laugh. You never know when the river of sharknado is going to belch up a hunk of gold. I’m going to keep reading Cameron’s book, even though it irks me, and even though I will no doubt find myself rolling my eyes like a hamster on a wheel at its pithy sayings. Much as it gives me the chuckles, there may just be a few more juicy tidbits in its pages.

Also, it was a gift, and I’d feel really bad about tossing it.

Thanks, sis.

No, not that sister. The other one.

Thanks.

The Fifty-Year Sequel

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Apparently, some fifty years after penning the one-off novel that would rumble the foundations of the literary world and haunt the nightmares of eighth-graders for years hence, Harper Lee has penned a sequel.

Maybe not a sequel, so much. According to the press releases I’ve seen, it’s a new story that features several of the same characters as To Kill A Mockingbird, not least of which are Scout and Atticus.

I’m of two minds about this.

On the one hand, it’s fantastic. Scout and her world are so beloved, not just by lovers of literature, but by people who in some cases have never read another book, that to see her gracing the pages of another story tickles me in places I maybe shouldn’t talk about.

On the other hand, I’m apprehensive. Already, the hype machine is surging to life, heralding the release of this new novel, Go Set a Watchman. It seems that Harper Lee wrote this novel before Mockingbird, which is interesting in its own right. Then, Mockingbird took flight and Watchman sat on a dusty shelf for all these years. Unfortunately, with Mockingbird being what it is — a staple of the American literary canon, an adored favorite of kids and adults alike, a harsh but hopeful look at so many issues of its time — Watchman now has to contend with some frankly unfair levels of expectation.

Imagine if J.K. Rowling vanished from the face of the earth for thirty years and then materialized in a cloud of smoke and thunder to bestow on us an untold story of Harry, Hermione, and Ron as adults — and, oh yeah, she actually wrote it when she was in high school and has just been hiding it from us all this time. Imagine the shockwave produced as fans broke the sound barrier to line up for their copies. Imagine the poor bedraggled fibers of the internet sparking and fizzing out as every e-reader in existence simultaneously tried to purchase this book. (Or, hell, we’ll probably be reading books through implants directly into the brain stem by that time, who knows.)

I’m really excited about the new novel, but I almost wish that it could have been released under a pseudonym (of course, then, who would buy it) or that it could have been released back when it was originally written, or just after Mockingbird (of course, then, it wouldn’t be nearly the big deal that it is). This book is going to be subject to so much scrutiny and analysis and comparison to the original that its pages may literally spontaneously combust from the magnification of so many critical lenses. And I think that’s kind of awesome, because literature is important to our world in that way. Things always mean things, and this book will mean a lot to a lot of people. But I also think that’s kind of sad, because every story deserves the chance to stand on its own and be appreciated for what it is, and this story will never have the chance to do that. Like a rhinoceros born into captivity, it will never know the free, mud-stomping whimsy of the wild, never feel the thunder of the plains under its feet. All its meals are pre-determined, and it will be bathed for all of its existence by caring and well-meaning caretakers dressed all in khaki while bemused families gawp at it from behind their strollers and fannypacks.

The Crater Devil

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Chuck’s challenge this week: The Subgenre Blender. I drew Cryptozoology and the Wild West.

We kind of laugh nowadays at the stories of monsters often glimpsed but never seen, of creatures that seem to defy nature and terrorize people and animals in the dwindling remote parts of the world. But there was a time (before the internet) when stories like these might have been taken much more seriously. People still believe in Bigfoot, not because the evidence is so compelling and widespread, but because nobody was around to debunk it on a widespread scale before the myth could take hold in people’s minds and hearts.

Imagine what it would have been like in the old west, when there was no internet and barely any newspapers, and you could come to a town and hear stories — believed by an entire town — of a mythical monster that lives out in the mountains.

You might believe it. You might even be willing to spend a lot of money to get famous proving it.

Here’s “The Crater Devil”.

 

 

The Crater Devil

“The Crater Devil?” Luke spoke through a bushy mustache in a voice like honey poured over gravel. “Sure, I’ve heard of it.”

The barkeep set down two shotglasses of whiskey in front of the unlikely pair. The mahogany liquid steamed as it sloshed over onto the lacquered bar. Luke tossed his shot back in one great gulp.

Leonard sipped at his whiskey, wincing mightily at every taste. The liquor made him sweat, though the afternoon was quite cool. “Heard of it, of course. But you’ve never seen it.”

“I don’t think anybody around these parts has seen it.” Luke chuckled. “But we know the stories. And I’ve heard it. That was enough.”

Everybody had heard the stories. Way off in the mountains, past parts unreachable by wagon and only barely traversible on foot, in a great crater two miles wide if it was a foot, was a lake filled with crystal blue water. Nothing green grew for miles around the crater, no animals would drink from its waters. And in that crater, lurking in those waters or prowling the peaks all around, was the Devil. Elverton MacLeod had set out to explore the crater decades ago, and was widely spoken of as the first human victim of the beast.

Depending on who was doing the telling, the Devil looked something like a man, but stood three times as tall, all red-skinned and covered with coarse black hair. Or it had the body of a man and the head of a bull. Or it was a great lizard with legs thick as tree trunks and razor sharp teeth. Or it was an albino coyote with haunting red eyes that howled like a starving child. Nobody telling stories about the Crater Devil seemed to be particularly reliable, so the details were always changing as the stories got passed from one ear to the next. What didn’t change, though, were the Devil’s horrible, piercing, bone-chilling red eyes. The devil could fix you with its gaze from two hundred yards away, and once you were caught, you were stuck. Couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t even think until the Devil either took you or left you. Those who were left would stumble back into town days later, delirious and panicked; hence the varying reports on the creature’s appearance. Those who were taken were never seen again.

Leonard licked his lips and leaned in to whisper in Luke’s ear, too low to be overheard by anybody eavesdropping — which nobody was — “I’m going to find it.”

Luke measured Leonard with a pass of his heavily lidded brown eyes. The man was thinner than a railway line, with an eager face and an untidy mass of blonde hair pulled back and tied with twine. He might have been the nuttiest son of a bitch Luke had ever laid eyes on. A scientist, he claimed. “And you want me to … do what, exactly?”

“Look at me,” Leonard said. “I’m a scientist, not a frontiersman. I wouldn’t last the night out there by myself. You, on the other hand… Besides. Your friends told me you’d know where to find it.”

Sucking his teeth and eyeing the bottom of his empty glass, Luke blew out a heavy sigh. Leonard signaled the barkeep for another round. In silence, Luke pondered while the portly man brought the drinks around. Then he lifted his glass and eyed Leonard over its gleaming rim. “And what’s in it for me?”

This time it was Leonard, a grin splitting his face, who threw back his shot of whiskey. In him, it caused a terrible fit of coughing and wheezing. Finally he gave his response in a hoarse whisper. “If we can document the Devil, we’ll both be rich beyond our wildest dreams.”

Luke sneered and showed Leonard his back, so Leonard added in a noncommittal voice, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars in advance.”

******

Elverton MacLeod turned his face skyward, letting the cooling drizzle smear the grime embedded in the deep crevices of his forehead and cheeks. Full moon coming on behind the clouds. Monster hunters and fame seekers would be out and about. Time to hitch up the wagon.

******

The horses had been abandoned when they started tugging against their harnesses halfway up an unnamed trail that cut between two mountains. The trail itself tapered off to bare rocks and weeds not a hundred yards on, so Luke and Leonard trudged up the craggy face of the mountain one behind the other. Leonard kept tossing nervous glances at the cliff faces around them while Luke chuckled, his broad shoulders trembling silently.

“Nothing to be afraid of ’round these parts,” he said. “‘Cept the Devil, of course.”

On the ridge off to their left was an outcropping of rock that jutted toward the sky like a great angry finger. A darkness under one of its stones seemed to shrink with sudden movement.

“Did you see that?” Leonard said, pointing wildly. He produced a dusty pair of binoculars and mashed them against his face.

Luke shook his head and kept churning his legs. They were traversing the face sideways now, and the footing was too uncertain to be looking at every little thing the weird little scientist jumped at.

The binoculars fogged over almost immediately in the cool mist that was falling, but Leonard was almost certain there was a dark shape behind the rocks that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

******

The two specks were picking their way across the south face of the mountain, making slow but steady progress. They’d reach the crater in a few hours. Then the smaller speck stopped and looked in his direction. Elverton shrunk backwards against the rock face, melding with its shadow. He wouldn’t be seen, but he’d lose time while the man kept his eyes turned toward the rocks. The hides had to be secured to the wagons, the lamps had to be lit…

As he watched, the man’s backward glances grew less and less frequent, until the two specks disappeared around a bend in the crags. With unnatural grace, Elverton scrambled away along his secret path back to the crater.

******

In the twilight, the crater exploded with color. The still water of its surface caught the jagged peaks of the ridge opposite, inverted them and flung them back skyward again over the sickly grey sky. The drizzle had grown into a light rain and turned the stones underfoot into slick little traps, hungry to turn their ankles as they picked their way down toward the crater. The far face of the basin was covered in shadow, and the rock faces that curved down toward the crater’s edge were striated with darkness.

Even in the growing darkness, the scientist’s eyes were alight with fervor. A faint, reverent whisper escaped from him: “This is it!” They had reached the level ground at the bottom of the basin, not fifty feet from the water’s edge. “Keep watch,” he told Luke, as Leonard unshouldered his pack and began to set up a camera on a tripod, unfolding its spindly legs and trying to make it stand level on the loose stones.

Dutifully, Luke swiveled his eyes across the lake, wondering how long the funny little man was going to keep him waiting out here.

******

The two men had stopped in the perfect place. The darkness would hide him until he was almost upon them. Elverton threw the stitched sheet of red-painted leathers over his head, hoisted his trundle, and wheeled it slowly toward them.

******

Leonard was dancing around like an unstrung marionette, looking through the camera, testing the flash powder, holding his hands up to frame various aspects of the landscape. A waste, Luke thought. He wouldn’t see a damned thing out here as it was, and the shadows were only getting deeper. Luke found a stone big enough to park his butt and parked it, absently rolling a cigarette.

Then the canyon exploded in noise.

It sounded as if an ox had been shot through the throat and was gurgling and groaning its life out, but loud enough to shake the walls of the basin and reverberate in their bones. Leonard fell over, sending stones clattering. Luke’s cigarette fell from his lip and he froze.

Swaying toward them, a hundred yards off, were a pair of searing orange orbs, bright and terrible against the dark. Leonard had recovered and ran for his camera, but the terrible howl broke loose once more and he crashed into the tripod, pulling it over with him.

“Luke?” Leonard shouted, his voice two octaves higher than normal. “Get your gun!”

The legs of the tripod had tangled in his coat and Leonard kept tripping and stumbling, getting halfway to his feet before thumping to the ground again. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw the Crater Demon lurching toward them, the details of its appearance only suggested in its silhouette; it was the size of a large horse but it moved like a lizard, its crimson hide the color of blood behind its burning eyes. The sudden moisture at Leonard’s thigh did not come from the rain-soaked stones he kept stumbling on.

“Luke?!”

The Demon was no longer looking at Leonard. It had turned its attention fully on Luke, who still sat, motionless, his hand still curled toward his lip as if he were still holding his cigarette. His eyes were wide and sightless, his face wet with tears, but he did not stir as the beast slithered toward him.

“LUKE!”

Then the Demon howled again and Leonard’s reason fled faster than he did. He abandoned his camera and his binoculars and bag and ran as fast as his legs could carry him back up the path out of the canyon, and he did not stop running until he was back in the town, dehydrated, delirious, and babbling about a horrible red beast that had devoured his partner whole on the spot.

******

“Shit, Elvy.” Luke shoved the mass of hides off him, and Elverton collapsed next to him in a cackling fit. He spun the little wooden crank and the beast’s howl echoed from the tiny box, but disconnected from the amplifying horn, it sounded hollow and tiny. “You coulda gone easy when you knocked me off the rock. Damn near twisted my ankle.” Grabbing one of the lanterns off of the mask of the beast, Luke got to his feet and began picking through Leonard’s bag. The binoculars were intact, and there were a handful of gizmos in there whose purpose he could only guess at. More interesting to Luke was the wad of cash at the bottom.

“Did you see his face?” Elverton hooted.

Luke shook his head. He wondered if Elvy wasn’t losing his mind a little bit after all these years living in the wilderness, but the payoff more than made up for it. “Over four hundred dollars in here, man.”

“And that camera’s got to be worth a few hundred more,” Elverton said. “Think he’ll come back?”

Luke shook his head. “He pissed himself. He ain’t coming back. Neither should I, after the stories he’s gonna tell. Not for a while.”

“Next town over?”

Luke grinned. There was a pretty waitress at the saloon in Huskerville. Time to go fishing again. “Next town over.”