Yes, It Is All My Fault!

[Free flash fiction in honor of the holiday for your enjoyment. Hope your VD went well!]

There was a knock at Alexandra Wright-Phillip’s bedroom door. Alex left her other two friends to their sorting on the floor rug and got up to answer it.

“Hi, Kas.”

“Hello, ladies! Gym class was grand, I got 33 just from them. Check it, my box is full!” Kasturi gave a gleeful shake of her crinkly pink shoebox.

“Oh stuff it, Kas, we all have full boxes. This school is so very friendly, after all,” said Charity Horne from her spot on the rug, surrounded by untidy piles of little cards.

Tamisha Jones was too busy counting to herself to greet Kasturi. Her cards were sorted by size, color, and shape so that each stack was perfectly aligned.

Alexandra waved her inside. “Hurry and catch up, Kas. My mom is at her steam-room aerobics class until 6, so we’d better be done and cleaned up by then.”

Kasturi Patil shrugged off her coat and tossed it with the others on the bed, then took the spot on the rug that would complete their little circle and began counting her shoebox contents.

*

“Misha, what’s our total?”

“1024.”

“Wow, we are totally empowered!” Kasturi clapped her hands as she said this.

Charity rolled her eyes and said, “How many did we miss?”

Tamisha looked back at her paper before she replied. “256, according to the latest school enrollment.”

Alex nodded firmly. “That’s close enough for what we need. Have you all made your choices for the ritual?”

The others all held up a single card they had each set aside from the larger stacks.

“Then let’s begin.”

Alexandra reached under her bed and pulled out a book. It looked like a diary, but old; the edges were yellow, paper peeling back from the posterboard covers. She’d showed it to the girls last week when she’d told them about the ritual, and how she’d found it while looking for a book on her mom’s bookshelf. She’d used that and her mom’s old yearbooks to convince her friends to go along with the plan for today.

She’d marked the correct page beforehand, so she could open right to it. She did so and directed the others to pile all their cards into a large mound in the middle. “Now I’ll start, and then we go around the circle and you do what I do, just like we talked about.”

She didn’t wait for them to agree but picked up the card she’d set aside and showed it to them. “Sweets to the sweet,” she read from the front where the words were spelled out in candy dots on the icing of a huge cupcake. She turned it over. “Best wishes to one of my favorite students, Mrs. Tilsen.”

“Hey, that’s what she wrote on mine!” Kas actually looked upset.

“Quiet, idiot, that’s what she wrote on everyone’s, don’t screw up the ritual!” hissed Charity.

Alex ignored them both as she positioned the card against her finger, then slid the edge rapidly past her skin. She grimaced but didn’t make a sound from the sting of the papercut, and squeezed her finger hard to make the blood well up. “Approval is important.” She smeared it across both sides of the card, then held it up to show everyone again.

“I want to be popular.” With that she dropped the stained valentine into a bowl she’d set next to the heap of cards, and nodded to Charity on her left.

Char sighed, and held up her card. “Be my valentine.” She read from the simple white script angled across a red heart, then flipped it over. “It’s just signed ‘Heidi’. Heidi hates me.” She didn’t even flinch as she cut herself and said “Appearances are important.” She mashed her bloody finger especially hard against Heidi’s signature before throwing the card in the bowl. “I want to be popular.”

“I will forever be true.” Tamisha looked a little sad as she read from the back, “Bestest friends forevers! Love, Alina.” She looked up at the others. “Since I was 5 years, 3 months, and 17 days old, when her folks moved next door from overseas. It’s been fun, but she won’t ever be anything other than what she is.” Misha cut herself and watched the seepage of red appear with detached interest. “Ambition is important.” She placed a neat fingerprint in the same position on either side and lay the card gently down on the stack in the bowl. “I want to be popular.”

Kasturi made a face. “I hate blood, ladies.” She picked up her card without further protest, and smiled as she read first the front, “You stole my heart,” then the back: “Hey let’s hang out and play again soon! Love Jeremy.” She learned forward and whispered, “He was my first kiss, three months ago when we were playing house.”

Charity hissed, “We know. You’ve told us 57 times since then.”

Kas tossed her hair and said, “Now who’s interrupting, Char? Anyway, adoration is important.” She whimpered as the sharp card edge slit her finger. She looked away from the wound as she marked the sides, then completed the stack in the bowl. “I want to be popular!”

Alex picked up the lighter she’d set next to the bowl and caught the edges of the bloody cards on fire. They sat quietly watching until the smoke had filled the room enough to set them all coughing.

Alexandra got up to open the window. “That should be good, thanks. See you all at school tomorrow, oh and don’t forget to wash your hands on the way out. I don’t want you getting blood all over Mom’s stuff.” Alex made scooting motions with her hands as she pulled bandaids from her pocket and handed them out. She put hers on, then started her ceiling fan to let the smoke out.

The rest of sixth grade was much better after that.

The question of how far down the rabbit hole to fall, when working on a creative project, is rather an interesting one. The possibilities are legion for hacking, warping, and weirding the mental processes to create art. However, an artist of whatever stripe often runs up against their own self-boundaries, in such explorations. Sometimes they’re self-imposed limits that should probably be pushed against; other times they might be coping mechanisms for biochemicals that really need to remain at certain levels, thankyouverymuch. Finding the line between what to give to yourself and what to give to that art can be difficult; even for how many artists have gone before, there just aren’t universal roadmaps for making good, deep, provocative art and staying “sane”.

So where do the compromises come in? There’s a wide range of individual choices. We’ve all heard stories of the people who ultimately lost themselves — either the qualities that made their work stand out or their life itself — to the imbalance between care of self and creation of art. And if you aren’t willing to take at least some risks with your own psyche, you’re likely to have a shallow or surface-level artistic end-result.

For me, it’s usually about finding the balance point that allows me to push forward. If I’m going to be doing some crazy internal meanderings, delving into the Shadow self, finding the locked-box memories that are still raw with emotion and creative potential and dragging them out for a look…then if at all possible, other areas in my life should be as stable and least-disruptive as can be. If everything else in my life is chaos, or my own internal landscape is unstable, and I’ve already considered and rejected taking a creative break for whatever reason, then it might be better to steer toward the more “brain candy” level projects. I can keep creating but not get so locked up into my work that I lose myself in the rest of the instabilities. It’s why I don’t believe in the myth that every work must be a Masterpiece For the Ages. Heck, even the master painters of the Renaissance and other eras still took portrait commissions to pay the bills, it wasn’t all frescos and finery.

Sure, they were Really Good portraits, and taking a brain candy creation path during stressful times isn’t license to avoid doing the best work you can, either. But hey, if all you get written during a rough time is a silly zombie story (to pick an Entirely Random Example), you still maintained the creative drive so that it’s available for “more serious” work later. That is definitely good work done.

And when you do give yourself the opportunities and stability to peer into the abyss…how far will you look? How deep can you go and still come back to yourself, or at least a version of you that creates and with whom you can live?

One of the very common ways we humans learn things, from infanthood on, is an “engineering mindset”: we first break things down into enough component parts that we can gain a measure of understanding about the parts and how they work, then the cycle moves to the phase of putting the pieces back together to see what they now make (which is never quite the same as what it was, of course), then testing and studying and learning from the more complex concept. Physical, mental, emotional, even philosophical learnings can all follow this path of knowledge acquisition (not the only path available, but the one we’re discussing here).

Since the explosion of scientific progress from the Renaissance onward, it seems as if scientists have been engaged on a nice little run of reductionist scientific methods. This is not being criticized in and of itself; as anyone can see, we’ve exponentially increased our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world and universe we inhabit, in numerous different knowledge areas. My theory is that we are at or incredibly near the point where in order to make further large leaps in greater understanding we need a long period of interdisciplinary scientific explorations, where multi-discipline groups aren’t just allowed but actively encouraged, and a trend of larger-picture learnings is actively sought (and funded).

I think there are already the first signs of this trend now visible in some of the scientifically and technologically innovative research fields. I hope the rest of the 21st century brings the start of the synergistic renaissance. What do you think?

She awoke with the last dream image still in her mind — an empty street, all the buildings along both sides with their doors standing wide into the road, irregularly spaced night lamps illuminating a light mist. More open doors. She knew her subconscious would eventually get its full message through; the obvious interpretation was that it was time for another adventure outside, but it didn’t hurt to wait and confirm such intuition. Reading more would help shift mental gears, and thankfully it seemed like there was nothing currently stopping her from enjoying her book.

The prose was delightfully vivid, and she was enjoying the interweaving of metaphor around jailer and prisoner, parent and child, insanity and the fight for sanity, the power exchange and attempts at same. She caught herself staring through the words after reading the scene with the first escape attempt, her fingers absently stroking the smooth page as her thoughts took her back through the street of open doors. She closed her eyes briefly to erase the image, and returned to the text. After a while she set the book aside. It was engaging her interest but not enough to banish her dream, and she could not ignore the rumblings of her stomach any longer. With a little sigh and a last pat on the cover of the closed thriller, she arose from her couch and went to the kitchen.

She was definitely in the mood for violently chopping vegetables, and not of a mind to wait long for food, so stir-fry was an easy choice. She started a single serving of rice in the cooker, then pulled out a strip steak, an onion, a red and an orange bell pepper, and a bag of fresh-frozen green beans. The slicing and dicing was as viscerally satisfying as it always was, and she found herself humming as she combined the ingredients with her favorite custom sauce blend in the hot skillet. She didn’t recognize the tune, but that had happened before. Just as she felt the stir-fry was ready, she heard the clicking sound of the rice cooker completing its cycle.

Dinner preparations always helped repair her mood, especially when the timing worked out just right. She carefully arranged a perfect circle of pristine white rice on a dark blue dinner plate, and then scattered two scoops of the colorful skillet contents across the top. That, chopsticks, and a simple clear glass of water were all she carried with her to the table in the dining area that filled one end of the kitchen.

After her satiating meal, she did the necessary clean-up — putting the leftovers into a storage container in the refrigerator for lunch tomorrow, rinsing the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher, giving a quick wipe with a sponge to the counters and stovetop. She decided a dirty martini with her after-dinner reading would complete her evening nicely, and retrieved the appropriate glass from its place next to the cereal bowls in the cabinet. She set the glass on the kitchen counter and went to the refrigerator for the jar of olives. As her fingers closed around the cool cylinder hidden behind other bottles in the door compartment, she brushed something hard under what felt like a piece of tape, and her eyes widened for a brief moment in disbelief. She pulled out the olive jar and turned it around to confirm her suspicion: the key was taped to the back, over the nutrition label so the tape would hold.

One corner of the tape had peeled back where it went too far onto the glass, and her fingers played with the curled edge for a bit before she peeled off the key, taking bits of the label with it. She ran her fingers over the key’s surface but stopped when she encountered the sticky tape residue. Washing it was the first priority then; half a minute at the sink with soap and water and a good rinse were sufficient.

She thought for a moment about having her drink before trying the door, but decided it would make a better end to her adventure than a beginning. She left the glass on the counter to remind herself, but returned the olive jar to its place so it could remain properly chilled. She thought about leaving the key on the counter while she changed clothes, but that had failed her at least once before, so she kept it folded into her palm.

Now dressed more appropriately for the outdoors, she checked the window in the door to ensure that no one was near, but the visible area was as deserted as usual. She tried the key in the door lock. It slid in easily and turned smoothly on the first try, also not a given from past attempts. She didn’t hesitate as she turned the knob.

The door opened onto a shadowed path, made darker by the presence of full night. A cone of light from a street lamp at the end of the way seemed to show that she was down a short alley off a larger road. A brief burst of wind carried a crumpled piece of paper past her ankle. She moved to where she could see the main road better, and wasn’t surprised to find it was the street from her dream. More discarded paper littered the roadscape than she remembered, and there were less lights here, but those were minor variations in detail.

Here, unlike her dream, all the doors were firmly shut.

If you are interested in writing, editing, the publishing industry, speculative fiction, writers talking about writing, and other tidbits involving politics, the world around us, or semi-random well-written observations, then check out the following links:

Making Light — The online webspace for Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (and guest bloggers). Excellent resource: current information and essays about most of the above-listed points.

Tor.com — I’m only on the newsletter version of this so I don’t get over to the site every day, but the largest spec-fic publisher in the US has a wide selection of quality authors blogging regularly or occasionally on their website, as well as other enticing features for visitors such as free stories!

Storytellers Unplugged — I’ve mentioned these folks before. It’s a shared writers’ blog that features an author for each day of the month, blogging monthly about whatever comes to their minds about writing, writing process, publishing, and related topics. They seem to have mostly speculative fiction and horror writers blogging for them so anyone interested in those fields specifically might especially want to take a look.

(crossposted from Words Words Words)

Among the many and ongoing interesting discussions at our home, we’ve been talking about the concept we’re calling “internal logic” for a character. Internal logic here means that, among other things: an action that to an outside observer appears irrational, wrong, or evil, from the internal viewpoint of the character will be a justified, logical, and right action to make. It’s a useful thing to examine for most characters, but especially helpful in creating believable antagonists in a story.

Tolkien got around the need to deeply explore this by creating a world where evil really did exist, and some creatures did things because they were bad evil things to do. In this sort of scenario, you don’t have to worry too much about internal consistency for a antagonist’s actions as long as you have the formula “evil is good”. Unfortunately, Tolkien’s many imitators have generally not done as well as he did, and these days most people who encounter the Evil Overlord stereotype are likely to assign a label of “campy” “trite” or “overdone” to whichever story has the latest iteration of the trope.

Another loophole to spending a lot of time with discovering a character’s internal logic is the “Rendezvous with Rama” effect. For those of you who haven’t read or don’t remember the original story *spoiler alert skip to the next paragraph* an alien ship passes through our solar system, refuels from our sun, and departs. We send a ship out from Earth to explore the large alien ship, see lots of really interesting things, and learn nothing much about the aliens who created the ship. It’s the ultimate story in creating aliens with very alien motives that have little to nothing to do with humans except in passing.*end of spoilers*

Similarly, in Steve’s book Issola, the Jenoine are massively powerful and very alien, doing things that from the view of both the reader and the characters are hard to understand. Since that’s rather the point, we don’t really need to understand further about the Jenoine’s internal viewpoint.

With both of these examples, the unfathomability is the point of both the alien ship and the Jenoine. With characters that come closer to human-like actions and understandings, internal logic considerations become more of a factor. The world from the outside-looking-in and the inside-looking-out are often far different for people, and even for non-POV characters you might need to know something about their internal motivations. So how do you depict this?

One of my own characters tends to organize their environment in ways that to my first impressions seem counter-intuitive. It’s not a way that I would organize things, and sometimes doesn’t seem to make logical sense from my perspective. However, when I ask myself “why would [said character] arrange their things in that way?” I nearly always have an answer that comes to mind that makes sense from the viewpoint and life experiences of the character. Even if the internal explanation for the room arrangement doesn’t make it directly onto the written page, the fact that I as the writer understand why the character does a certain thing means that it’s more likely to reflect that knowledge in little bits of characterization throughout the story that will bring that understanding to the reader.

Read the rest of the entry where Steve shares his thoughts over on our household blog, Words Words Words. You can comment either here or there.

Here are a couple of gems of quotes from the Grand Master of English:

“That he is mad, ’tis true; ’tis true ’tis pity; And pity ’tis ’tis true.”

-Hamlet, II,ii

“That that is is.”

-Twelfth Night, IV,ii

Tell me some of your favorite quirky word repetition quotes like these in the comments!  Feel free to branch out from the Bard in your search.

She fumed as she was thrown out of the story abruptly.  These interruptions were beginning to be intolerable.  She had planned to be reading for the afternoon, and now had several empty hours to fill again.  Usually the lack of windows in her rooms didn’t bother her; she was as uninterested in looking out of them as she was in anyone having an easy line of sight into her home.  At this moment, she’d likely be smashing the glass.  With a last frustrated glare at the firmly-closed book cover, she rose from the couch and left her sitting room to check the door in the main room.

Locked, as it usually was, and no key readily available.  The viewing window set into the door at eye-level was no help either.  There was no one out there to see regardless of which angle she peered from.  She dropped back the dark blue curtain covering the door’s window and spent a few moments absently stroking the edge of the velvety fabric as she thought.  When no brilliant epiphanies ignited her mind for the wishing of them, she decided to work off some of her irritation with exercise.  A session with the free weights should tire her out enough that a shower and nap might follow nicely after.

Her exercise area was at the opposite end of the large main room from the door, angled in such a way that someone working out could easily view the media screen on the left wall.  She didn’t load anything to watch.  The exercise mat was clean; she always wiped it down carefully after each session.  Her weights were on a rack against the wall, and her innate design preferences were evident here.  The weights themselves were neatly aligned in the rack and evenly spaced with each other, but there appeared to be neither increasing nor decreasing organization along the shelves in terms of relative weight.  She selected a pair of twenty-pound hand weights from where they lay next to a two-pound barbell plate and set them down at right angles to one corner of the mat.  She stripped down to her bra and the thin linen pants she was wearing, draping the rest of her clothes on a rod she’d attached to the back wall for just that purpose.

Maybe after her nap she’d be able to read again.  The image of her door standing open, her rooms empty, kept appearing in her mind as she worked up a thin sweat.  She tried to manipulate the image to view it from different angles, but it remained stubbornly static.  Empty rooms; an open door.

If she couldn’t read, she’d find where the key was.  Perhaps it was time to venture outside again after all.

In contemplating various areas surrounding the creation of a series character (instead of one that exists within the pages of a single story), we end up having some fairly interesting discussions here at the Dream Café.  One of the most recent conversations involved an observed trend among a few of the writers we enjoy reading, that of creating a character in one story that then appears in an otherwise unrelated story later on.  (Note that this is subtly different from the concept of a character having more than one series of stories.)

We came up with several examples which I’ll discuss, but I encourage anyone reading to mention their own examples in the comments of anything we didn’t cover here.  Nathan suggested that the intersection of Isaac Asimov’s Robot and Empire series (referenced vaguely to avoid spoilers) is one example of this story-hopping idea.  I think that Dean Koontz comes close to this in his Christopher Snow series, which is set in the same world of, and references some of the events that happen in, his previous novel Watchers.  (To my knowledge there is no actual character overlap between the two, but I admit I haven’t read all of the Snow novels.)

Nathan also suggested the “Fizban the Fabulous/Paladine” character from the Dragonlance series, where a clumsy-but-likable wizard also happens to be a major lawful good deity.  Heinlein has some interesting character and story intersections when he introduces the food-processor-effect of the “World as Myth” concept.

The character Enoch Root from Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon is a closer reflection of the story-hopping character, with Root possessing an elixir of life that allows him to resurrect and be present in different times and places.  Root influences other characters around him toward actions of importance on surrounding events, as well as resurrecting a couple of other characters with his elixir.

A well-documented and analyzed example is Stephen King’s Randall Flagg.  He appears in nine novels, including The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, and the Dark Tower series.  While in those series he plays a major antagonist, and more minor roles in other appearances, his role as a sower of chaos, dissension, and destruction remains a constant theme.  The character doesn’t always keep the same name but often (though not always) will use the initials R.F.

For a third and yet again different take from Stephenson and King on the story-hopping character idea, we can look at Devera from Steven Brust’s body of work.  Devera appears in every published Brust novel, both the series and the stand-alone novels.  She is always a secondary character, a reality-walker with a very fluid definition of time, and usually appears as a brown-eyed pre-pubescent girl.  In several novels the mention of her is obscure or vague, while in others she has a more active though still secondary role.  However, the most active role she takes in the novels (The Phoenix Guards, Taltos) is that of a messenger, passing information along at a key plot point.  The rest of the time she seems more an observer than an active player.

It seems like it would be difficult to have a recurring character, especially in unrelated stories, and not have that “grow old” for the reader after a while.  While I think the ones I’ve mentioned do a better job of retaining interest in seeing the character show up again (especially Devera) I also recognize that is at least in part a subjective assessment, so opinions on the success of interest retention may vary.  What do you think?  I know the idea of a story-hopping character delights me in theory, but actually doing so with ongoing viability seems a daunting reality.  What are some other examples of this or something similar that you’ve encountered?  I stuck with literary examples here but you can feel free to branch out into other media.

Steve and I were talking yesterday about his irritation at the “writer as protagonist” that often shows up in fiction. One of the most famous examples of this (and arguably the single biggest reason for the popularity of the trope) is Stephen King. It can be seen in his earlier works such as The Shining or Salem’s Lot, and continues to show up in several of his works throughout his bibliography (The Dark Half, Secret Windows, Lisey’s Story). Dean Koontz, another huge name in the horror genre, has also written stories (such as Lightning or Mr. Murder) which feature a writer in the main character role. Nor is this trend limited to horror; Kurt Vonnegut and Charles de Lint are two of several authors in the sff genre who have placed writer characters in starring story roles. I’m not as well-read in the more literary fiction end of the spectrum, but I’d be very surprised if a similar pattern wasn’t present there as well. (Feel free to mention and discuss other examples in the comments.)

I’m still a bit unclear on exactly why Steve gets so irritated by writer-protagonists — hopefully he’ll clarify his position a bit more in comments, hehe. I remember from our last chat that he feels like having a writer as a protagonist in a story you’re writing creates too many situations where you are tempted to be clever, or clever-seeming, possibly even superseding the priorities of the story. I think he said it’s the difference between an author being clever in how they tell a story, versus using a technique that says “hey, look at me being clever over here”.

I suppose I can see that point; certainly some of the more forgettable stories I’ve read with writers in the lead role felt rather like what Steve describes. On another hand, some of the more interesting examples of the trope do play around with some neat ideas. Koontz’s Odd Thomas books reference the unreliability of a writer narrator throughout the stories, making references to editing and eliding events even as he tells the tale. de Lint uses writer characters as he does other artists and musicians in his Newford stories, where the act of creative generation unlocks hidden magics in the surrounding world. Vonnegut’s writers don’t seem to be able to self-referentially change the story due to their own writing; I get the impression, reading some of his quasi-auto-biographical fiction works, that his characters are often writers because Vonnegut himself is one. However, Vonnegut didn’t always do the writer-character-as-avatar for himself. I’ve read several references to his famous Kilgore Trout being a poke at Theodore Sturgeon, which amuses me to consider.

Looking at King’s extensive bibliography and publishing history, I’m struck with another thought that’s occurred to me before. So many of his writer characters struggle with aspects of their craft–even to several of them blocked on writing, alcoholics, or otherwise engaged in unstable and self-damaging behaviors–which fascinates me when compared with the fact that, since 1974, there has only been one year that King didn’t publish one or more finished pieces. It doesn’t seem from his observable public output that King, the person, suffers from much in the way of writer’s blocks or dangerous instability preventing his writing. Did much of the potential for that self-destruction get sublimated and exorcised into the more troubled writer-protagonists of his stories?

What do you think about this trope of the writer-as-protagonist? Do you like it? Does it irritate you when you encounter it? Are there similar metaphoric parallels in other artistic disciplines, for you other creative types out there? Let’s discuss!