The Final Stage Commences

From time to time the missus says, "You're starting to look like your self-portrait." This is the self-portrait she means. I'm waiting to start two major projects -- the place mats and the illustrations for Swill -- so I figured I may as well start another large-scale print. This should be fairly horrific by the time I'm done.

So today I did the last advance plotting I'm going to do before beginning the novel. If I find elements I need to track as I go along, I'll be sure and do so. But right now I've got a nice fat stack of file cards in a clip and they tell me that I've got a novel to write.

(The fact that most of those cards were written in felt pen by Walter Jon Williams is a thrill -- hey, everybody! The best plotter in SF helped me plot my novel! So if it sucks, it's pretty much his fault. And if it's any good, well, I suppose the benefit accrues to his name as well. That only seems fair. Except to the roomful of skilled and gifted imaginations that did most of the work. I just stood back and said, "Yeah, that's fucking brilliant," and "No, he/she wouldn't do that," and "Oh, shit, there's this whole other thaaang I never told you bout." Actually, that's what I was doing today. Adding them thaaangs. And for the record, EF Kelley was the one who saved the goddamned novel.)

Anyway.

The main changes are to ditch most of the, "but it really happened!" stuff, to simplify the elements in order to unify the motives behind events, and to increase the cohesion and sense of connection between events.

In other words, I've decided that this is primarily a work of adventure fantasy rather than a thinly-disguised autobiography. I've been schooled on the plot and I think it will show. The elements that were most important to me during the mid-stages of creation will all be there, but they won't be as strident and overwhelming. Rather, they're like bay leafs in the stew. Yeah, you've got to have that flavor -- but you don't want to have your guests biting down on bay leafs.

When I was at Taos Toolbox, I was told that I need to rewrite the novel -- but that I need to rewrite it once and then send it out. And that is what I'm going to do.

Viable Paradise

My first venture into the exciting world of hypernurbs. When Galactus throws a teaparty...

So I'm probably not going to be doing a lot of blogging this next week. I'm off to attend the Viable Paradise writer's workshop on Martha's Vineyard. Seven pro writers and editors, twenty-seven other neophyte writers, and me.

Due to a combination of class deadlines and general paralysis, I am nowhere near as prepared as I would have liked to have been. My query letter is flabby, I have no synopsis, my outlines need work... but fuckit. They aren't expecting me to spring the damned novel on them anyway.

I am frightened of the trip, I'm looking forward to the workshop. It'll all be fine. I'm certain that once I'm actually in the process I'll feel great. It's the anticipation that's killing me.

So now I have to cut my hair, then head downtown and have a copy of the current draft of the novel spiral-bound.

I'll do one set of edits on it on the flight in, then go over it again on the flight home, then do at least two chapters of revision a day until it's all done. At that point it'll just be a matter of sending it through Homework Club for the final polish.

And at that point I'll be working on the next volume with the Monday night krew. That's going to be tricky. I've finished the first volume, I have a solid outline of the third, but for the second all I have is a bunch of scenes that have already been written (yeah, I've written a couple of drafts of volume two already -- but things have changed so much that most of that work is going to be discarded), and a list of all the shit that needs to happen. I need to organize this into a real plot.

I suspect that what I learn at Viable Paradise will help me with that.

The Kicker

So here's the answer to two questions. The first is, "What do you mean you use your art as inspiration for the novel?" The above image was done before I wrote the following scene. When I need a bit of landscape or a creature, I look to my art.

The second question is, "Can he write fight scenes?" Well, I'll let you answer that one.

And again, looking at the weird-ass formatting on my cut-and-paste, I hate Word.

The thing standing on the top of the ridge looked like a piece of architecture to me, a twenty-foot arch shaped like an inverted V, a bone-white shape outlined against the light of the sky. I saw the crown of teeth that projected at its top, the jaw-shaped protrusions that it stood on. It had no eyes, no mouth. Nothing but bone and teeth.

Eyeless though it was I knew it stared at us and as I stared back I hated it. The wrongness of it filled me with rage. I wanted to take it in my hands and pull it apart like a wishbone, I wanted to smash it with a rock. I hated that it was bigger than me. I hated the way it stood so still. I knew I’d hate it even more if I saw it move.

It moved. Crown and feet rigid, the columnar legs connecting them flexed with a whippy stiffness that made me think of fishing poles. It took two steps and leaned forward, its off-center balance that of a gyroscope. It slid down the scree as if on skis, its toothy crown bobbing as it came.

Gar launched himself uphill, scrambled around to its right, and Pike went the other way, flanked it. The Deacon drew his pistol and shot at the thing’s crown.

As he fired, the bone thing snapped its crown down at Gar and the ghost bullet curved past it and hit the slope. There was a bang and a flash and then an avalanche of broken bones came rolling down the slope at all of us.

Pike bit at the thing’s toothy foot and it kicked him, sent him flying. When Pike hit the ground he let out a howl that sounded like a scream and went on and on.

The avalanche hit Gar and the bone thing; Gar scrambled and managed to stay on top of the debris. The bone thing caught it like a wave and rode it downhill. The Deacon took aim but before he could fire the avalanche caught him, sent him sprawling, half-buried him.

The thing pulled back one foot and aimed the big tooth at its end at the Deacon. Without thinking I jumped for its other foot, grabbed it and heaved. The weight made my feet sink into the loose ground. The creature tipped until I thought for sure it was going to topple.

It didn’t.

Gar was dancing around, barking furiously, and Pike still screamed. The bone thing whipped around and snapped its foot at me. I ducked, then grabbed the foot. It kicked again and sent me flying. Its legs flexed jointlessly as it came for me. The crown of teeth at its apex snapped down. I rolled to one side and felt the impact as it smacked into the ground, then drew itself up to its full height. It pulled back a leg to kick at me again.

There was a report from the Deacon’s gun and a flash at the thing’s crown. It froze, balanced on one foot. Gar dashed in, fastened his jaws onto the thing’s foot and growled as he jerked his head back and forth. Two more shots and the bone at the thing’s apex cracked; two more and it split in two. As the halves fell away a fire poured out of the break in the bone and left a stray soul the size of a basketball hanging in the air.

With a sputtering noise red petals of flame peeled back, curled up and turned into worms of black ash as the soul sank to the ground. In the end nothing was left of it but a fist-sized piece of ash that crumbled and blew away.

The Deacon was still buried up to his waist, face bruised and cut. He grinned and gestured with his pistol.

“You see that, boy? You see that?”

So How's The Novel Doing?

Another of my late-period nudes. When I first began studying drawing, I went through three consecutive semesters of life-drawing. I got to the point where I was pretty good -- I've done a number of drawings that have been mistaken for photographs and most of them came from that period.

I don't have any of those. One night when the missus and I were just friends, I brought a portfolio of my best drawings over to show to her, since she was my pal the sculptor. On the way home I waited for a bus with my portfolio leaning against the sign pole. When the bus came I went to grab it and it wasn't there.

Anyway, since then I haven't put in the sheer time necessary to do really accurate life drawings, and as a result I hated what little life drawing I did. But now I'm looking back at this stuff and, as in yesterday's piece, the keyword for me is charming. Yes, it's badly lacking in accurate anatomy and the niceties of observation. But now I think there's something really sweet about it.

This one was particularly embarrassing for me to draw because it fairly clearly shows that I found the model attractive. I've always had an easy time drawing women who didn't have a particular appeal for me, especially your lean dancer/gymnast types. I've felt as if there's something wrong about drawing a woman you find attractive...

... what a load of horseshit. I never thought Renoir or Rubens or even Frazetta were sleazebags because of the erotic content of their work -- why should I feel that way about myself? Oh, well. Growing up is hard to do.

The novel is doing quite well, actually. Right now the structure is all in place and no major changes need to be made. I'm more than halfway through the first round of pure line edits, aka draft four -- I just finished chapter twenty today. And I'm eight chapters into the second round of line edits, aka draft five.

The reason for this is that I'm powering through my last draft by myself, then submitting that to the writer's groups, then doing a further revision based on the criticisms I receive.

The Monday night group should be starting up any minute now; I can hardly wait. They'll take forty pages a week -- and I'm gonna be a sleaze and make those pages eleven-point type. I've been taking that from Al for years. Now I shall have my revenge.

The Homework Club, on the other hand, has a fifteen-page maximum. So it's pretty much one, maybe two chapters a week. Which will drive me nuts, but these guys are pros.

There's something weird happening in the Homework Club, though. It's as though we've hit some kind of critical mass and all of a sudden it seems as if all of us are moving up to the next level. I'm seeing it in the edits and the work that the others are submitting and I'm feeling it in my own writing process.

It's interesting. Up until now I've regarded the process of revision as one of perfecting the work. Now this is a subtle difference but an important one -- now I feel as if my job is to prepare the work for the reader.

For instance, I've mentioned that I try and fully experience the scenes I write in as many senses as possible, and then describe it in writing. Previously I would have worked hard to bring those visions to the page as completely as possible. Now I find myself throwing out one beautiful detail after another because they are of no use to the reader. If it doesn't help the reader get the story, it doesn't belong on the page.

It's amazing, the amount of verbiage needed to lubricate an ideas passage from thought to prose. Getting rid of those words feels great.

Up until now, my revisions have always added material -- because my problem was incompleteness. But the story of the novel is now complete. So now revision is partially a matter of trimming the excess. I'm losing one page in twenty or so. Probably a bit more than that.

And by working on more than one part of the novel at the same time, I'm finding that I can hold the whole thing in my head, which allows me to find places where information is duplicated, places where hints should be dropped, etc.

I'm also realizing that what I'm doing stems very directly from my experiences writing short fiction and scripts. I've learned techniques of compression from writing short fiction -- say what you will about my stuff, it's typically very, very conceptually dense. And scripts have taught me clarity -- when you write a script, it's part of someone's job and you're doing everyone a favor if you make it fucking difficult to misunderstand.

The result is something that is both rich in information and easy to read. Which pleases me no end.

What's really exciting is that as each chapter goes by, I think to myself, "And this is where it really kicks in." It is far from a pure action novel -- the lead character doesn't get into a fight until more than a third of the way through the book and he spends two chapters in the hospital as a result of that fight -- but the plot keeps twisting and going deeper. The excitement builds continuously.

It doesn't have a narrative arc -- it's a right triangle, straight up forty-five degrees from the base to the apex. There was a while where it was like a hammock, tight at the ends and saggy in the middle. No more; you could launch a rocket off this thing.

I go through phases of thinking it's just a hack fantasy/horror novel, but that's not true. It's focused more strongly on prose and character than anything else -- it's just that those characters live in a fantastic world. No good guys, no bad guys, just people who succeed and fail at being able to live with one another and themselves. Yeah, it has the same story bones underlying it as every other fiction -- but I think it's something that hasn't been seen before.

Despite its mainstream/literary qualities, its focus on social realism and convincing pictures of mental illness, drug use, and the life of the artist, I'm bringing in everything from After Man-style speculative evolution, surrealism, quest fantasy, comic-book superpowers, a view of the afterlife that's intended to be convincing enough to support a cult, a haunted house story, and genuinely visionary moments -- and everything latches together, flows smoothly, and makes perfect sense in context.

I'm feeling pretty proud right now. But don't worry. Give me another month or two and I'll be back to excoriating myself for my creative inadequacies.

I promise.

Mildly Petulant, No Sign Of Frenzy: And Some Thoughts On The Upcoming Novel

Here's an example of the tailpieces I've been doing for Swill. There are one or two that need to be replaced but they're pretty much done. I think they add something to the sauce.

This is just crazy, isn't it? I've recently the full run of Weirdo magazine -- R. Crumb's long-running Mad-modeled humor anthology and a high point of Western culture, you slaggardly gobnards, I'd start pimping it but I'd get out names like Peter Bagge and Aline Kominsky-Crumb and then wake up in the middle of the night going, "Oh, shit, what about Elinor Norflus? How could I forget about Elinor Norflus?" -- but the qualities that give this one a Wierdo feel are totally the product of an Illustrator algorithm. I had nothing to do with those scratchy little lines -- I just picked them out.

Before I start barging around today's blog post, I've got a confession to make. I've been sucking lately. Doing a lot of work that has not proven to be anything I'd care to show to the public.

I'm going to try something different, something involving self-promotion. I'm going to go to a local store that sells bones and dried insects and stuffed animals and so on and ask them to sell me a bunch of their detritus. I'll bring a presentation folder to leave with them and a portfolio so I can show them my paleo art.

I will ask them if they'd be willing to sell me a bunch of detritus. The broken, the shop-worn, the stray bits and pieces. Trash I can scan in on my new scanner. In fact, now that I think of it I'm going to try and scan in as many different objects and so on as I can. Today I go to get the glass for my scanner.

Because I need to bust out. There's so much that's already been done on the magazine and here I am freezing up. I need to break free of this crap and start cranking out the pages. Bim bam boom. So a fresh and crazy dose of source material should hopefully get me going again. I'll call it a different series and do more of the Rorschach Dreams when they come to me. Right now obeying those rules is producing bad work.

I've also been thinking a lot about volume two of the novel. It's a bit problematic at this stage and here's why.

Right now, what I've got for the second and third volumes of the novel is as follows. Third volume, an outline and a rough draft of the beginning.

For the second volume, the one I need to work on next, I've got a number of scenes written along with the rough draft of the climax. So I know where I'm going and I know roughly what I need to do to get there. This book needs to provide the linkage between what I've done and what I know for sure I'm going to do.

It's all a mess right now. I've decided to try experimenting with conventional, structured outlining techniques I learned in multimedia courses.

I'm going to figure out each plot line, figure out exactly what needs to happen to bring them to their proper stage of ferment by the end of the book, and then look at all those lists together and start weaving them. Put 'em on post-it notes, clear off some wall space and use filing cards and pushpins...

I hope it works.

I hope it works.

On Reading My Novel For The First Time

Behold! The miracle of lack of inspiration, followed by a quick 'Fill up the damned page, already.' Color helps...

Well, it's been a while since I posted. Not to go into it but it's starting to seem as if you can track my manic and depressive states by observing the frequency with which I blog...

Anyway.

I finally heard back from another reader on the novel. She was quite enthusiastic. It was really encouraging -- it seemed as though what I was trying for was coming through. Among other things, I'm deliberately attempting to write a very masculine work that doesn't crap on women -- one of the central themes is that of masculine identity in a post-feminist society. She said she thought of it as a feminist novel. I very consciously visualized the scenes as I wrote. I could have storyboarded them. She told me that she could see the scenes as she read. Cool! It went on like that for some time. Frankly, I ate it up with a spoon. I'm developing an unseemly fondness for praise.

Her criticisms were quite useful -- the main one was something I'd been planning to do (compress chapters two and three into one chapter and dump most of the characters introduced there) and the other was something I'd set up to do and then forgotten about (make the events of the story dovetail with the desires of the lead character). She also gave me some sparse but very good line edits.

So I read the thing myself. It was the first time I'd sat down and gone through the current version. I have more work to do than I thought -- two of the main characters are a lot less sympathetic than I intended, among other things. But it's a pretty decent read.

This is going to sound like rampant egotism, but I was really disappointed. It was very good -- a solid, fast-paced adventure story. It was well-written. It had some thematic depth. Some real invention. I honestly think it's better than most genre fiction.

But it wasn't great.

That's just pathetic -- finding myself tore up because I haven't written a classic work of literature. Well, that isn't really what I was aiming for -- but I want to produce something that will be a (god help me) minor classic in its own little niche. A great fantasy that has some real resonance. But there we go. We dream in fire and work in clay...

On the other hand, this is just the first volume and while it's a satisfying read on its own, it is just the introduction to the situation. It will get deeper as it goes along. Most of what I'm trying for comes later -- I'm gonna try and tear the reader's heart out in volume two and nurse them back to life in volume three.

We shall see. We shall see.

A Tiny Piece Of Paper That Says The Party's Over

Well, here's a stand-alone section of the novel that's pretty close to straight autobiography. Ah, Santa Cruz in the eighties...
(I really shouldn't have to say Copyright 2008 by Sean Craven, right? But I'm saying it anyway.)

“This isn’t going to be a thing, right?” I heard James say to Dierdre. “I’m not up for a real party.”

“I know it’s been a long day,” Dierdre said. “We’ll shoo everyone out by ten, okay?”

That was bullshit right there. In Dierdre and James’ circle their house was referred to as the Lounge because that was where people went after work. Lulu and Willy’s presence had been putting a damper on things but now that they were out of the living room Dierdre was anxious to get back to normal. There was no way this was going to be a quiet little gathering.

The fridge was full of beer and there was a stack of Dierdre’s famous mix discs next to the stereo by the time Duane and Katie showed up with a friend in tow. They were both painters but as a couple they had one of your classic opposites-attract dynamics. Duane was big, crass, loud, and brilliant, a caveman savant. Katie was extremely shy, very quiet, and polite in a way that made you want to watch your manners not out of guilt but because it was nice to be polite. Their guest was wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and the long mouse-brown hair on his scalp and face had a coarse, kinky texture that was distinctly pubic; poor bastard looked like a scrotum on a stick.

“Hey, Matt, I want you to meet Sky,” Duane said.

I took Sky’s extended hand, which felt like a bundle of chopsticks wrapped in pudding skin.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

Sky gave me a weak smile.

“I ran into Sky when I was at the farmer’s market,” Duane said, “and he told me that I was totally full of shit with my brown rice diet.”

“The human body was not intended to digest cooked foods,” Sky said. His voice was just barely audible, and he pronounced each syllable completely separately from the others – ‘in-ten-ded.’ I was worried that he might not live through the conversation. “Grains are especially unhealthy. Everything you put into your body is a mind-altering drug, and grains have a very low frequency of vibration.”

“Now I’m only eating harm-free food,” Duane said. “It so fucking rocks, man, you’ve got to get in on this.”

“Mushrooms and other fungi are particularly excellent,” Sky said. “The mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the actual organism. They are a gift, a beautiful gift of love.”

“Man, isn’t that just fucking wonderful?” Duane said. “Everyone should live on nothing but gifts of fucking love.” He tore the cap off a bottle of Lone Star and sucked down half of it while Sky smiled indulgently at him. Duane belched moistly at me, wiped his mouth with a meaty bristle-coated paw and said, “You’ve got to do it, man. You need more fucking love in your life.”

“I ate a single scarlet waxy-cap mushroom yesterday,” Sky said, “and the vibrations made me so high. So high.” He closed his eyes in blissful reminiscence. “I could think etherically and I knew that all thoughts are vibrations and all is thought.”

“I didn’t know scarlet waxy-caps were psychedelic,” I said.

He opened his moist, pale eyes, smiled up at me, and patiently repeated himself. “Everything you put in your body makes you high.”

“I’ve been doing some paintings about this shit,” said Duane. “They’re fucking huge. Insane colors, straight out of the tube. Lots of palette knife. You got to see them.” He poured the rest of his beer down his throat. “They’re gonna be my next show, man. Spread the fucking word.”

I gave him a thumbs up and drifted away, keeping an ear out for a conversational opening. Out in the living room I had a rare opportunity to see women having a nerd-off.

“How can you say that?” Dierdra said. “Fuck Elvis, Chuck Berry invented rock and roll!”

“I ain’t sayin Chuck Berry ain’t important,” Lulu said, “But he’s dull. And the whole idea that rock was something that just sprang out of nowhere is bullshit. Gimme some Little Richard or Fats Domino. I mean, what about Louis Jordan and the Frogman? New Orleans rhythm and blues was a fully developed musical style with a solid tradition a long time before rock showed up and it’s a lot more fun than Elvis or Chuck.”

“I always liked Jerry Lee Lewis,” said Katie. “He’s got the original creepy rock star sex god thing. So hot.”

Finding out that quiet, demure Katie had a thing for Jerry Lee Lewis finished my beer for me so I went back into the kitchen, where Willy and Steve were sitting at the table, talking about the van.

Steve had been James’ neighbor before he and Dierdre had moved in together, and had recently gotten James a job with him at a print shop. Steve had a strong-boned Mediterranean profile and a very bad attitude about his infinitely regressing series of former girlfriends. You sort of had to watch your step around him if you wanted to avoid giving offence.

“I’ve always had a fantasy of living in that kind of enclosed space,” Steve said, “like a boat or a Winnebago. Have everything set up just right, make it a real machine for living.”

“It’s a total shithole but it feels like home,” Willy said. “It’ll be nice to be able to fuck without having to sneak around and make it seem like nothing’s happening. Man, I remember when public sex was kinky instead of fuckin desperate. I’m sick of bathrooms and couches and fuckin hand jobs under a blanket while everyone’s watching TV.”

That was lovely image. Jesus. Now on top of everything else I had to wonder about Lulu and Willy having ninja sex all over the house. For once the thought of my stinking, repulsive room was a source of relief. What kind of pervert could fuck in that hellhole? I pulled a beer out of the fridge and cracked it. I tilted the bottle, opened my throat, gulped until the beer was gone, and pitched the empty into the rapidly-filling recycling bin.

There were already too many people for me to handle so when the doorbell rang again I went to my room. I was mulling over the fact that no one cared enough to check on poor me when there was a knock on the door.

“Hello?” I said.

Dierdre came in. “They won’t go away,” she said. “I try and hint and they just don’t want to get it, and James is exhausted and they won’t go away.”

“So you were wondering,” I said. Here we go again.

“It’s really good stuff,” Dierdre said. “Not speedy at all.”

“Oh all right,” I said and held out my hand.

Dierdre gave me a square of paper. It was thick, coarse blotter about three-eights of an inch on a side and it had a blue hieroglyphic eye of Horus printed on it. I popped it in my mouth and felt the queasy tingle of excitement that I always got the instant acid entered my body.

“Thanks a lot,” Dierdre said. “I really owe you for this.”

“No sweat,” I said which was of course total bullshit. No sleep at all that night, twelve hours of my various injuries screaming at me while I was in a psychedelic state, and while I was going through the most intense part of the passage I’d be all alone. But Deirdre asked me to do it.

“So are you going to wait until you’re peaking, or come out now, or what?”

“I’ll give it half an hour,” I said. “That way I’ll be able to sort of make myself present before I get all, you know. Like that.”

“Cool,” Dierdre said. “When you come out, I’ll put on some Residents. That’ll help chase them off.” And then she left.

I was already feeling better. I had a purpose, a point. A reason to exist. I was going to make everybody out there want to go home.

I made some preparations for the trip. I cleaned a pile of pot and put a new screen in my bong. I selected a thick stack of picture books to look through and hallucinate over, lots of D’s – Dulac, Dali, Druillet. I selected some discs of chamber and ambient music, Bach and Eno, Pachelbel and Jarre. Sonic tranquilizers. I cleared the detritus from a path leading from the bed to the door. I’d make Dierdre give me a measure of dark rum or whiskey for the comedown.

I looked at my jeans for a second, testing the acid. The light and dark threads of the denim were throbbing slightly but there was no sense of significance to it, no message from the cosmos. I went into the living room and stood by the stereo and listened in on Dierdre and Lulu.

“Maybe we could clear a space out in the garage and you could set up a little studio there. We’ve got some old blankets you could use for soundproofing,” Dierdre said.

“Well, I dunno,” Lulu said. “We could think about it, I guess.”

“Oh, come on,” Dierdre said, then turned to me. “You’re doing it again.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Looming and lurking.” She turned back to Lulu. “So what are you going to do, keep recording out on the street?”

“Well, yeah,” Lulu said. “If we change the way we record now, we’d have to go back and do everything else over again. You got to have sonic consistency.” A quick acid shiver ran up into my cortex as the rush started to hit and it told me a secret. Lulu was lying. There was truth in what she said but she knew she was lying when she said it.

I looked around, and heard Sky talking about his scarlet waxy-cap again.

“…and I could feel the vibrations of the mushroom just lifting me up,” he said.

James ran a hand through his hair. “So what exactly do you mean by vibrations? Is this some kind of string theory stuff or a spiritual thing or what?”

Sky held his hands up. “The vibrations are the most essential part of anything,” he said. “Really, all we are is a collection of vibrations.”

“Fucking A,” Duane said.

A jolt of volts chewed their way up my spine and the world got brighter, crisper, so clearly focused it was confusing. Now was the time. I stopped lurking and loomed right over them.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

Duane turned to me and lifted his bushy eyebrows. “Huh?”

“It’s… I don’t know how to say it, but it seems like you’re missing out on the point of eating things.”

Sky looked at me with a half-smile. Diet freaks are like theologians; no matter how ridiculous their statements they’ve heard all the arguments and have their responses all lined up. You have to use a lateral approach if you want to breach their defences.

“I mean, the mycelium didn’t give you that scarlet waxy-cap. You took it, as was your fundamental right as a gathering animal. You shouldn’t be brown-nosing the natural world for allowing you to fulfill your role in the ecology.”

“The world is a gift --”

“Tell it to the airborne pathogens your bold and noble immune system is slaughtering as we speak. You know why we treat cows and chickens and pigs and sheep the way we do?”

“Man, you’re getting kind of loud.” Duane said that to me. Duane! James just smiled and pulled back a little to take everything in.

I leaned at Duane instead of Sky. “We don’t just kill them and eat them. We make them live in tiny cages that physically deform them. We make them live in shit, we feed them shit, and we pump them full of antibiotics so it doesn’t kill them.”

Sky still had that half-smile, but it was losing juice.

“That isn’t just cruelty. That’s the monstrous cruelty of the victor. Those horrible stupid brutes are the enemy, man, the enemy. Every time you bite into a hamburger you’re striking a blow, furthering the destiny of mankind. I mean, you don’t hear people talking about Nazis and the Taliban and so on in terms of avoiding harm, do you? You ever hear of cruelty-free warfare? Why should we treat cows any better than we treat Nazis?”

“Dude, that’s crazy talk,” Duane said.

“I am legally and clinically sane and I can get it in writing,” I said and pumped my fist in the air. “Apex predator! Apex predator!”

“You’re on something, right?” Duane said.

“I’d say a pussy-assed hundred micrograms of Switzerland’s gift to civilization, one of those candy raver disco doses,” I said. “A sad speed substitute, just enough to keep a glow-stick baby dancing all night. I believe I might need a little more to push me over the top.”

“Live it up,” Duane said. “Hey, let’s find Katie, okay? It’s getting kind of late.”

Sky nodded. I decided it was time to go find Deirdre and pry an appropriate dosage out of her. Back into the living room, assuming I could find it.

Everything seemed to be painted onto a series of screens or clear plastic overlays, every object in my field of vision flat and still arranged, according to the pure and perfect laws of perspective. I could feel every trace of injury throbbing, and every fiber of muscle in my body testing its cartilage connection to the skeletal scaffolding. Okay, the dose was probably more than a hundred mikes. But still.

Dierdre looked at me and grinned and then put an old slab of vinyl on the turntable. Out of the speaker came the sounds of a possessed toy piano. It was the Diskomo/Goosebumps EP by the Residents, the Goosebumps side. Goosebumps is a collection of nursery rhymes that the Residents set to music that they composed and played entirely on instruments purchased from Toys ‘R’ Us. It’s an avant-garde classic just choking with giggles and menace.

Dierdre grabbed me by the arm. She was grinning, red lips bone teeth green eyes all gleaming up at me, tiny incandescent bulb highlights scumbled onto the glossy surfaces like flecks of titanium white, forming her face in abstract.

“They’re starting to leave,” she said. “Keep it up and I’ll be able to get James in bed before he starts getting pissy.”

“Dosage inadequate,” I said. “This is what you give to a guy in a Cat-in-the-Hat hat or a fifteen year old girl with a pacifier on a necklace. I’m not seeing anything interesting aside from the luminous shell of your charming face. Discomo.” Discomo was on the other side of Goosebumps. It was faux-Innuit folk music set to a disco beat, and does mankind boast any more glorious creation?

“Okay, but you go talk to Steve and Naomi,” Dierdre said. “I think he’s hitting on her, and she’s, well, Jesus.” She tightened her grip on my arm and hissed up at me. “Steve and Naomi! Will two more hits be okay?”

I said, “Adequate if not optimal,” aimed myself at the unsuspecting pair and loomed over them. “Hey, Naomi,” I said, feeling every tooth in my mouth vibrating.

“Matt!” she said. “Where have you been all night?”

“I hear you got dosed,” Steve said.

“Ohmigod,” Naomi said, “ohmigod. Are you okay? Do you need some juice? Is this music freaking you out?” I wistfully contemplated the notion of Naomi taking care of me for the rest of the evening, my head pillowed against a soft thigh while her glossy black curls tickled my face and her Minnie Mouse voice droned me into a state of egoless bliss. The thought pissed me off. She and Steve did, in fact, have a bit of a couple look to them.

“I’m doing fine,” I said. “It’s a pretty minimal dose, just enough to make me feel a little spooky around the edges.” God damn that dapper little bastard. Some men are bad for women, and they get to be bad for women over and over again.

Then I looked at Steve, watched his mouth opening and closing in slow motion like some grisly marine organism (Teeth! Teeth are freaky! It’s like you can see part of someone’s skeleton! What if the whole thing starts to crawl through the opening?) and I sensed the pages of a health awareness article in Reader’s Digest flashing by like a calendar in a Grandma’s house movie and Steve was a good person he needed to be careful if you don’t have your health –

I set my hand on his arm very gently so I wouldn’t hurt him. Poor thing.

“Dude,” I said, “how’s you’re blood sugar?”

When he blinked at me the blink stuttered. He should spend some time practicing in front of a mirror… “Huh?”

“I just suddenly started to worry about you,” I said, and turned to Naomi. “Health is very important.”

She nodded, curving her neck more than was seemly, pulling it out like taffy. Ah, youth.

“But Steve,” I said while I helped him hold his arm still. “Really, I’m concerned. Do you have a family history of diabetes?”

“What the fuck?”

“Yes, that’s the family part. But what about the diabetes?”

Steve sighed, the wind in his sails. “No, I don’t have a family history of diabetes.”

He took an arm away from me just when I was starting to get a grip on it and looked at the strap thing for time measurement that was between the hand and the arm. The spot between the hand and the arm was a swivel, a joint, a something that you could bend. On purpose.

Steve’s mouth opened some more. “Jesus, it’s getting kind of…”

“Wrist! That’s the word I was looking for. Wrists are the bendy part,” I said. “Please, for my sake keep an eye on your pee. If ants start gathering around your urine then you’ve got —” I felt a hand on my arm. I let it drag me into the hall.

“You total bastard,” Dierdre said, grinning. More teeth. It’s like everyone has them. Who came up with that? She handed me another couple of hits. “God, you are a total bastard. I think you can go to your room now.” I popped the little paper squares into my mouth with the fine certainty that I was making a mistake. “You know what I think is that the acid just gives you an excuse.”

“That’s not true. I’m a very nice person when you haven’t crammed me full of your filthy devil chemicals,” I said. “I’m going to need some rum in about eight hours.”

“You know where it is. Help yourself. G’night.”

Going into my room it struck me that eight hours was a long time. I paused for an absent moment and swirled the semi-liquid wood pulp around my mouth.

What was I going to do until then?

Hey, Kids! Free Novel!

This was one of the images that developed into the cover for the first issue of Swill. It's assembled entirely out of inkblots. Gonna do a series of these as prints and I'm gonna call them Rorschach Dreams.

So I'm looking for a few brave readers. I've been turning it over in my mind and I've decided that it would be a good idea for me to try and get the opinions of a few fresh readers before I launch into the next revision of the book. I'm not going to be doing a serious, major rewrite -- but I need a fresh set of eyes to make sure that things are entertaining, understandable, consistent, etc, etc.

If you'd be interested let me know and I'll send you a copy of the manuscript. Of course if dozens and dozens of people express an interest I won't be able to send out copies to everyone -- but the first five people who are willing to at least try and read the book will get a bound hardcopy.

Here's how it starts out.

Far overhead millions of souls swarm in incandescent clouds that drift and cast a light that shifts and wanders, one moment so bright that I feel the heat of it, the next so dark I can’t see my fingers on the fretboard of my bass. Their voices, massed and distant, form a hum that throbs and makes my bones itch. The sound is faint but penetrating; I can hear it through the music in my headphones, hear it all through me.

Beyond the clouds the sky is a dead black membrane stretched tight as a ripe boil. I can feel it as though it’s part of my own body, taut and heavy and delicate. Every so often a ripple runs through it and nausea twists my belly as a painful sweat breaks out on my forehead.

The van, a bronze Econoline, is parked deep in the canyons. A few souls have drifted away from the clouds and found us. They drift around the van in slow loops, occasionally swirling close, drawn by the music. For safety’s sake Lulu has us plugged directly into the laptop, bass and guitar with no amplification at all, so it isn’t the sound of the music that’s pulled them – it’s the music itself, the act of playing. They hear it transmitted through our souls, the souls of the living.

We’ve set up where we can’t be seen from a distance, where whatever sound we make won’t carry. My work boots are planted in ground made of tiny bones that crunch like gravel underfoot. Around us are great skulls both human and animal, ranging from waist-high domes nosing up from the surface like sprouting mushrooms to foothills and then mountains rising until they frame canyons with cliffs that sweep up for thousands of feet.

This is the Limbus and these are the Bonelands and we came here to rock.

If anyone's interested, let me know. This offer will run through December; I intend to begin the rewrite in February.

To receive a copy of this novel, go to my profile to find my email contact information. Send me a request for a copy and your preferred file format (.doc, .rtf, PDF) and I'll shoot it off to you; I'll send hard copies to the first five people who request them.

For more information on the novel, go here.

Cross Your Fingers...

Why is this man smiling?
Tune in tomorrow and find out!

Well, I typed a whole bunch of words yesterday but the five most important to me were 'the end' and 'to be continued.' After four years I've finished what I think is probably going maybe to be if I'm lucky a solid version of the first volume of the damned novel. The first chapters of this version are dated July 3, 2008 and the current draft is just over ninety-four thousand words. I've got a suspicion that the Monday night mob are going to tell me that some of it seems rushed and that I need to describe the settings more thoroughly.

Even if they don't, I still think that's the case. But I'm done enough to be able to look at the whole thing. I went through it and read each fiftieth page and thought about what had happened over the course of those fifty pages that had led the characters to this moment in the story. The manuscript is three-hundred and thirty-two pages long. It's a novel, all right. But is it a good novel?

Keep your fingers crossed.

One question that's starting to concern me is whether or not I should serialize the novel on-line. I'm not at all concerned about potential loss of individual sales. What I'm wondering is whether or not it will affect my chances of selling the book to a publisher. Gonna have to do some research.

Anyway, I'm going to let it sit for a while and focus on art for a couple of months before going back and doing a line edit, and then I'm going to be giving out reading copies.

(By the way, if anyone is interested in being a reader please feel free to let me know; put The Ghost Rockers into the title of your email and I'll get back to you -- the first ten people are in.)

After I get feedback on those I'll do one last edit and start looking for an agent. And while I work on those edits I'll also be starting to get into the next volume -- by developing one while finishing the other I'll be able to keep the continuity tighter.

The novel is very thoroughly plotted from the events leading to the end of the next volume on -- but the immediate future of things is entirely up in the air. I have no idea what's going to happen next -- which is another reason why I'll be working on that issue at the same time I'm reviewing the previous events.

It's a pretty odd piece of work -- it's hard to tell if it's a roast fantasy with a buddy soap opera stuffing or a confessional autobiography frosted with horror. There's a good bit of social realism and some fireworks and a few decent monsters and some tunes and fried egg-cheese-and-bologna sandwiches for Pete's sake.

Boy do I hope it doesn't suck. I mean, anything this big and loud and ridiculous -- it is just five inches to the left of being one of those things with a map and a glossary, if that, all kinds of ghosts and creatures and historical anachronisms and so on -- so of course it sucks.

But does it suck properly?

Anomalocaris Canadensis 4: Full shapes.

Well, nearly full shapes. I need to figure out an approach for the claws/teeth/creepy pointy things on the front grabbers/jaws/things with creepy pointy things all over them. And as an aside, my earlier statement that the tail fins were hardened? It was moon talk.

Here we go with the next state of Anomalocaris. Time to start studying color techniques for Illustrator...

Oh, and the novel seems to be back on track. I'd guess I'm about four to six weeks away from finishing this draft of volume one! Look out -- jump back!

Speculative Biology of the Limbus Part One: A Desperate, Pathetic Plea for Thoughts and Inspiration

Another linoleum cut, this one based on a dried piranha I picked up at a flea market.

I'm asking for some inspiration regarding a certain element of the novel. Even if I don't get any response I'm sure that just laying it out will give me a chance to think about things in a different way.

So here's the official Spoiler Warning! If you might want to read the novel at some point, be warned that you're getting inside information here. My own thought is that if knowing this stuff ruins the reading experience for you than I haven't written a good enough book -- but others are more sensitive to these things than I am.

One of the most difficult aspects of writing the novel has been the ongoing process of conceiving the... Well, in this story it's a facet of the afterlife but you can think of it as Fairyland, Oz, Middle Earth, the Enchanted Forest, the Monster Zone.

It's called the Limbus. I chose the name after searching randomly through the dictionary. I needed a name for the place between life and the real afterlife, the place where souls got a chance to let go of their attachments to life before moving on.

Later I found out that in Medieval theology the Limbus was a place between Heaven and Hell, while in biology a limbus is an indeterminate area of tissue between two organs. This was interesting because if you put those two concepts together, well, that's what the Limbus is in the novel.

(For the record, my official position is to deny the existence of souls and the afterlife and any type of Easter Bunny stuff at all. My honest position is a lot spookier and more complicated and will be the subject of an upcoming essay.

But for the novel I'm proposing an unusual version of life after death that plays into cultural expectations and messes with them at the same time...)

Anyway. The Limbus is just a part of the natural world, of the cycle of life energies that extends far beyond our perceived existence. And it originated as part of the Earth before it grew into the Limbus.

It started out as a farm in Florida and the first sign that it was becoming something other than a patch of land was when the living things both plant and animal began to change.

In the Limbus organisms can change shape to match the desires and fears they have for their bodies. This notion was originally in place to allow for some metamorphoses on the parts of the lead characters but then I realized that if that was a natural law of the land it would affect the plants and animals in the Limbus as well.

Another aspect of the Limbus is that time passes there much more quickly than it does on Earth and the difference in rates is continually increasing.

I put those two things together and realized that I had inadvertantly dunked chocolate into peanut butter and the result was an environment where Lamarckian evolution (a discredited model of evolution based on the idea of purposeful change) would take place while the characters were watching -- where the ecology as well as the species would change drastically over the course of the novel in a way that would support the story.

So here's the question: What kinds of animals would evolve out of the population living on a subistance farm in Florida in the early eighteen-hundreds?

I'll post further information on the environment next time but here's a taste of what I've got down so far and frankly I'm thinking my imagination is a bit lame.


A hill of monstrous animal bodies joined together in a single mass as though they’re devouring each other or are locked in coitus or both. Pressed in between a wingless rooster ten feet tall with scimitar spurs and a hog with the legs of a racehorse and jaws like an alligator I see a familiar shape. It’s human. I wonder if it’s someone I know.

And:

Then the sound of a branch snapping came from the woods. I looked over and saw that a tree was shaking; the motion died. Then I saw a treetop pull away from me. There was another snap and the tree lashed back into place. I saw something reddish-brown in the treetops.

As I got closer I could hear chewing sounds, see more of the animals. I shouldn’t have approached them but I could not for the life of me figure out what they were. They had the heads of cattle, horns neatly curled in front of their ears. A beautiful dark roan with white bellies and white stripes at the haunches, they were six feet at the shoulder with another three feet of neck; their backs sloped sharply, rear legs distinctly shorter than their forelegs. Long tufted tails whipped at insects; they looked like cows trying to be giraffes.

I stood still and watched them feed, wrapping their long prehensile tongues around small branches and pulling them loose from the tree. There was a surge in the music and I snapped back into consciousness and started backing away.

There was a snort from the brush in front of me, deep and powerful, and a clot of dirt and grass arched through the air. I’d been looking up and the bull was close to the ground. Built like a pig with a narrow muzzle made for grubbing in the dirt, it was far more massive than the cows, thick neck holding a head easily two feet across. One horn hooked down below its jaw and it dug it into the dirt and threw another clod into the air. The other horn curved out and forward, more than a yard long. The bull was sideways to me; it glanced at me, arched its back and shook its head.

And:

“Just give me your story, son, and I’ll decide if I think you’re lying. But half a moment.” He stuck the fingers of his free hand in his mouth and whistled loud, one short, one long, one short. I heard the sound of something big galloping towards us.

It was a dog, a fox-faced yellow dog the size of a quarter horse. His long bushy tail curled up over his back. He had a saddle and blanket on its back but no bridle.

And:

The watercourse was broken up by huge boulders and overhung by trees. They had white trunks and broad hand-shaped leaves, their trunks almost hand-shaped as well with a broad mass laying on the ground and fingers a couple of feet thick thrust up from one edge, the opposite edge rooted in the ground. I had no idea what they were; some kind of sycamore?

And:

Something that looked like a dragonfly with soft droopy wings and a body loosely dangled between them was working a cascade of tiny pale-yellow blossoms on a tree; it was at least three inches long and as bulky as a mouse. With a buzz and thwap it was dropped from the air by a beetle as long as my hand and as thick as a cigar. It folded its wings under their green cases and began to loudly munch the nectar-eating dragonfly.

And:

As I got in the water I noticed the water-skimmers at the water’s edge. Like the other insects I’d seen this trip they were oversized, too big to skim the water. Instead, they stuck close to the shore and waded. I’d bet real American dollars that there was some extra oxygen in the air if the bugs were getting this big.

And:

The Deacon’s new dogs didn’t look the same as Tap. One had a saddle, one loaded with gear, they were gray as ash with just a sandy hint of yellow over the ribs. They were longer and rangier than Tap had been, easily six feet at the shoulder but still narrow enough to straddle, their fur sleek and close to the body. Their paws were broader, the toes spread wide as if for gripping, and they had the easy lope of a Rhodesian ridgeback.

But it was their demeanor that had the real difference. I didn’t look in their eyes, didn’t look directly at them. They returned the favor and pretended I wasn’t there. They weren’t interested in me at the moment and I knew better than to approach animals of that temperament. They had the vibe of a bad Doberman along with the skittish wildness of a wolf cross. They were one-man dogs — for as long as that man could maintain dominance.


So there's a taste of it. I'll have more on the environment tomorrow. Yeah, this is definitely a fantasy novel -- but there are aspects of it that I'm treating as if they were Golden Age science fiction, where an admittedly unscientific premise is given a dose of rigorous speculation...

What the hell am I doing, anyway?

A Lazy Day, Then Back To Fiction

I have a distinct suspicion that I'm not gonna get much done today. I am burnt out from my recent bout of productivity and it's Saturday and I've been in this mood lately.

The missus is going away this afternoon and there's no band practice tonight. But my music buddy is going to a pinball expo with a mutual pal and I may tag along. I have the iPod that was left here on Thursday so I will be seeing him.

I'm anxious to get back to the fiction. I've got the start of one story for New Voices in Fiction. That one may or may not fly -- I'm conducting an experiment in writing something based on the virtues of olde school cyberpunk -- how dense? how fast? I'm getting a kick out of taking the exposition that I normally try and avoid and making it the core of the work. And in a weird way it's a Hunter S. Thompson tribute -- honestly, I read his stuff as heroic fantasy or adventure fiction anyway.

It may well wind up unreadable, though. In which case I've got other options, like the short story I need to edit.

The main job I've got ahead of me is restarting the novel. The last submission I made to the writer's group was received with great sorrow. The consensus was that the narrative flow which had been running from the start evaporated.

Of course I hadn't been in prime fettle when I wrote that material but it still bums me out to hit this bump. In previous drafts I had this happen all the time but this one was moving along just fine until now.

I have realized that the section in front of me needs a different kind of treatment than I'd given it. It's actually going to be a story inside the bigger story and it is more along the lines of traditional adventure stuff than I've had so far in the book. It's Western-flavored with a taste of post-apocolyptic mutant future novels like Heiro's Journey by Sterling Lanier. I need to take a breath and think it through before I start.

Also, there's a speculative component to it that I'm thinking of posting about. It's a fantasy but it's influenced by science fiction and because of that the element of speculative evolution has come into play...

Anyway. It's seven-thirty so the missus ought to be up. Y'all have as nice a day as possible under the circumstances.

The Damned Novel, part Four.

I'm getting sick of this image and yet here it is again. At least I've got something to bitch about.

So at that point I started writing the last volume. And I got a good ways into it and trashed what I'd done.

Twice.

What had happened was that I'd set up some situations and characters that weren't gelling. Large chunks of classical and Scandinavian mythology were crowding their way into a one-room unfurnished cosmos.

So I tried something that had blocked me every time I'd tried it before. I sat down and started working on an outline.

There's a dispute regarding outlining and both sides of it are dead right -- in a limited way. The outliners say that it's stupid to start a trip if you don't know where you're going. The free writers say that outlining is for hacks. There are even rumors that some people will mentally outline a story and then claim they'd written it without a plot. I ain't got the balls for that.

My position has come to be an ecumenical one. I free wrote at first but then when I was totally, utterly at sea I sat down, reread everything, took notes, and made a list of all the dangling plot threads. Then I figured out how to tie them all together.

And then I had a solid outline for the third volume. At which point I realized that I'd save myself a hell of a lot of revision if I went back to the beginning and made the first and second volumes line up with everything that was going to follow.

More than two hundred manuscript pages of notes and outlines later I started in on the job. This was the point at which the setting and characters really congealed; the mythological characters were transformed into my characters, the workings of the fantastic elements became thoroughly locked into the story...

I just hit the sixty-thousand word mark this week; I'm aiming for a hundred, since I read on John Scalzi's blog that Tor likes their manuscripts to weigh in at a hundred thousand words. Fine with me; that's about the length the work seems to want. Volume three is solidly outlined; volume two has a solid ending but the story still needs some massage.

When the first volume's done I'll give it one more massage (compress chapters two and three into one chapter, finesse the details foreshadowing Matt's metamorphosis...) and then send it out to fresh readers. After that it'll be one last line edit and off to the rounds of agents and publishers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you say. But what's it about?

It's about rock and roll. It's about what it means to be working class in America. It's about art and artists. It's about friendship, especially the friendships between men and women. It's about both mental illness and visionary spirituality.

It's about the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. It's about love and anger and self-destruction and how people need each other, help each other, and use each other -- and how these categories tend to have blurry margins. It's about the nitty-gritty details of drug use and cleaning toilets. It's about uninsured trips to the emergency room.

It's about life after death -- and how the afterlife is affected by the population boom. It's about monsters and roaring ghosts, farm animals and parents who are becoming quite strange under the influence of Lamarckian evolution. It's about the cosmic being whose duodenum is Heaven's waiting room. It's all about the valve.

But it turns out that if you ignore all the knobs and doohickeys the story itself is an old and familiar one.

"A troubled young man falls in with roguish and unpredictable companions. Through them he leaves his old world behind and travels to a new one, a world full of visions and wonders. While in this world he finds love, undergoes transformations, gains strange powers and in the end uses them to save both worlds."

One Last Thing...

The Damned Novel, part Three.

Here's one of the original images that I composited for the scratch draft cover. I'll probably recreate the whole thing in color for the next reader's draft.

Things were getting more and more awkward, more and more cumbersome. What the hell was going on? Characters from myth began showing up and just standing around, blocking the flow.

And whenever I tried outlining it just kept me from being productive. It didn't work. Nothing added up properly -- lots of individual scenes worked and they didn't go anywhere.

So I decided to take a break from writing and printed up what I'd done and passed it out to the writer's group and some pals of mine.

But the manuscript was too cumbersome. I split it in half, had the halves bound separately at the copy shop.

And while neither was an entirely complete story, the two halves each had their own distinct narrative line with a solid start and end. The second volume was weak in the middle but the first actually read like a novel.

I was writing a trilogy. God help me, a fantasy trilogy. Tolkien casts a long shadow.

To Be Continued...

The Damned Novel, part Two.

So as I worked the novel became more and more autobiographical. I lost sight of what I was doing and started to think I'd finished it long before that was the case.

And the writing was a bitch. As I mentioned in the first post, I found that if I was writing other things it screwed with the novel. And I'd frequently get to a place where I was stuck, had no idea where to go next. My mom, Zoe Bishop, died during this time and that didn't help in the short run.

As an aside, after her death I helped my sister and her husband clean out her house. And when I saw her work space I realized that she was a serious writer-in-training. She never told me... That was a bit of a shock.

(Rest in peace, Mom. Next weekend when the missus is out of town I'll get a pack of Kools and some Budweiser and toast your memory.)

As I struggled with the story I found that a good way to get past the sticking points was to just have something happen. It was the old Chandler approach -- if things get dull have two men come through the door with pistols.

Not only did that give the individual slow spots a little excitement, it also gave me questions. What is that snake thing? Who's the Deacon? How does the Limbus work? What is the anatomy of a soul?

Questions are the heart of story. What if? Why?

I also began sticking figures from classical and Scandinavian mythology into the works on a similar basis. And when I did that they insisted on bringing the other characters from their dramas with them. The novel began to drift away from autobiography into fantasy.

And the damned thing kept growing...

To Be Continued.

Lulu's Daddy

This post is for my internet buddy
Rory Harper
and his daughter
Rachael
Be as strong as you have to, as good as you can, and live while you've got the chance.

So I walked home. It took me more than an hour. When I got there my feet felt as though they were made of cheese if cheese could blister. Lulu was already there. Her laptop was out and the two-octave portable keyboard she used for her synth programming was plugged into it.

“Where have you been?”

“Work. Willy gave me a ride in and then ditched me. What are you doing home now?”

“I went in early and skipped lunch because we were gone talk, remember?” Lulu frowned. “So you walked home? You should have come and got me and we could have rode the bus together. Even if you’d waited until I got off we’d have been home at the same time.”

I dropped my knapsack at the end of the couch and collapsed in the armchair.

“You sit there,” Lulu said. Rather, she told me and I was tired enough to let her. She left for the kitchen and came back with a glass of water.

“Here you go.”

All of a sudden I felt something wet on my face; I touched it and then tasted my fingers. Tears. I wasn’t sobbing; I didn’t know where they came from. It wasn’t like I was crying, more like I was bleeding from my eyes.

It was just that everyone was being so nice to me. Dierdre taking me to the hospital, Willy teaching me to play blues, Rob giving me a bike and letting me work full time. And now this from Lulu.


What the fuck was wrong with these people? Didn’t they know me at all? What I’d done, what I was…

I had no idea what to do with this. Nice things shouldn’t happen to me.

Lulu lit a cigarette, sat still and watched me until I was calm again and the tears had stopped.

“Matty?” Her voice was small, so quiet I could hear a little gurgle from her lungs.

“Yeah?”

“Deacon said.” She looked away and took a drag that burnt her cigarette down to the butt, then coughed and swallowed. When she spoke again her voice was clear. “I ain’t never heard you sing. You know how to harmonize?”

I shook my head. “I used to do vocals but you couldn’t really call it singing.”

“I want to hear you,” she said and turned the laptop on. I noticed she didn’t have it plugged in; the thought of why plugging in was a bad idea raised the hairs on my arm.

“Matty, would you sing for me a little?”

“I dunno, Lulu. It’s been a long time and I ain’t in good shape.”

“Don’t you want to drink some of that water, get your throat ready?”

I shook my head and picked up the glass, cleared my throat and took a sip. Lulu started playing the keyboard, simple chords, cycling through synth patches. First it was a church organ, then a Farfisa electric organ, then a grand piano. She finally settled on a honky-tonk piano, sharp little jangly notes with no sustain. My mind put in a walking bass line behind it; there was something familiar about the chord progression. I’d heard it when I was a kid. The lyrics were on the tip of my tongue, just out of reach.

“Let me call up the lyrics for you.” Lulu started pecking away at the laptop.

“Waitaminute,” I said. Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-got to Hangtown. Hangtown fry – I hate oysters, can’t stand seafood… Hangtown was Placerville. In wonder they gazed down on old Placerville. “Actually I can get by without ‘em. I think.”

Lulu nodded and kept playing the chords, watching me, and I cleared my throat, waited for the jumping-on point and launched into it.

D’ja ever hear tell of Sweet Betsy from Pike
who crossed the wide prairie with her lover Ike
with two yoke of cattle, a big yellow dog
a tall Shanghai rooster and an old spotted hog.


CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LULU’S DADDY

“Fuck this, I sound like shit. Sorry, Lulu.”

“Did I tell you to stop? Cause I don’t remember that part.” Lulu sighed and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “You’re trying too hard is your problem. Don’t suck up all that air before you start, it makes you like a balloon. You don’t sing by deflating. Just take a half-breath and use your guts to power it, that way you got control. Like this.”

Lulu sat up straight and tilted her head back, took in a comfortably shallow breath. She sang a tone in that strange voice of hers, no words, quiet at first, then louder and louder, varying the volume and tone with deliberacy and control until she hit a harmonic with the room and it resonated and made every loose object in the place buzz. At the height of it she stopped cold, the breath in her lungs gone. She sighed and smiled at me, a loose comfortable smile I’d never seen from her before.

The room felt different; it smelled different. Cleaner. It was as though there’d been something lurking close and she’d scared it off with Lulu power.

“Try it like that,” she said.

As if.

One evening quite early they stopped on the Platte
‘twas near by the road on a green shady flat
where Betsy, sore-footed, lay down in repose
while Ike gazed in wonder on the Pike County rose

“You’re on-key, you know. You got a natural ear. But you got to treat singing like you was talking; singing is just talking in key.” The country in her voice was getting thicker; you could hear the hills and mountains when she talked.

The wagon broke down with a terrible crash
And out on the prairie rolled all kinds of trash
A few little baby clothes done up with care
‘twas rather suspicious but all on the square

Lulu stopped playing.

“How come you’re all squeaky-like?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“Matty, you got a real nice baritone and you pitch it high. You’re trying to sound like a little kid and it ain’t working. Sing like a man which you ought to because you are. You hear how you crack on those high notes? Try going low instead.”

The rooster ran off and the cattle all died
one morning the last piece of bacon was fried
poor Ike was discouraged so Betsy got mad
the dog drooped its tail and looked wondrously sad

And at that point my voice sounded like I was really singing. Fuck if I knew how that happened; it was Lulu more than me. Pitching my voice low worked and was easy on my throat but it made the base of my tongue hurt; okay, maybe I was a man but it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do it on purpose!

Lulu was smiling differently now; it was the smug smile she had back when she had on her face when she was recording my bass, the one she got at the end when she was pleased with herself for getting something that worked out of me.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“I just needed to know,” she said. “You ever do any harmonizing?”

“Fuck no. That shit’s hard.” I shook my head. “Lulu?”

She caught the tentative tone in my voice and the smile vanished. “Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I guess.”

“It’s about the Deacon. He said something to me that’s been hanging on the edge of my mind.”

Lulu looked positively grim at this.

“He asked me if you’d told me about your father.”

“God damn it.” Lulu punched the power button on her laptop and looked at the French doors. “Shit. The van’s gone.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go to my room.”

Lulu put her hands over her eyes and her hair drifted down over her face. She stayed like that for so long that I started to get up as quietly as I could.

“No, don’t you do that.” She sighed deeply with a gurgle and started coughing. I pushed my water toward her and went to the kitchen to fetch her a paper towel.

“Should I pound you on the back?”

Lulu shook her head with a great deal of vigor, still coughing. Finally she brought something up and spat it into the paper towel, took a peek and seemed unhappy with it before she folded the paper towel in fourths and set it on the coffee table. She reached into her purse for her inhaler and took a long drag.

When she caught her breath she pulled out her cigarettes.

“So the Deacon said that?”

I nodded.

“Shit.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Well what the hell else were you going to do?” She lit her cigarette and took a long drag, then exhaled sharply through her nose. “It ain’t your fault. I just don’t like thinking about it.” She took another drag. “Deacon asked me why I came after you; I said you were a friend to me and Willy. Wanted to know if I trusted you.”

“Oh.”

There was a nice long pause after that.

“Ain’t you going to ask?”

“Ask what?”

“What I told him.”

“If you said yes then you’d tell me. If you said no you wouldn’t want to answer. So what’s the point of me coming at you?”

Lulu’s face relaxed a little. “I’d give you a kiss on the forehead, I could reach it. I told him of course I did and so would anyone, told him there was no meanness or guile in you.”

“So you lied.” Or were delusional.

“Just stop that, it makes me tired.” She curled her legs under herself and drew her arms in and it made me think of a pill bug curling up. “I never talk about my daddy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Will you cut it out, you are the I’m-sorriest creature I have ever laid eyes on. You didn’t do nothing so stop taking it out on ever one else.” The ash on her cigarette was an inch long and when she waved her hand at me it gave way and drifted to the floor.

Lulu looked at the red cat clock and my eyes followed; it was going to be a while before anyone else was home. I could tell whatever she had to say choked her. I sat back and put on my listening face and waited; after a while she opened her mouth and shut it again.

“Listen, Lulu. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t feel like it. Maybe you could try showing me some harmony.”

She sighed again. “Well now you got me thinking about it so I may as well tell you. But I never told this to no-one.”

“Not even Willy?”

“Willy is my sweetie-pie but that don’t mean he needs to know ever little thing. He’s got an edge to him and I guess I like to keep that edge away from where it hurts.” Lulu stretched, then settled down again. “You know I never even met my mama. Daddy kept pictures of her and I’d sneak into his drawers to look at them but he never showed them to me. I think if I asked he would have but I never wanted to ask. I thought it might make him sad.”


I leaned back and put my feet up on top of the coffee table; Lulu had the air of someone settling in for the long haul. I may as well be comfortable. And I knew whatever she told me I was going to have to keep to myself; this was private.

“She didn’t look nothing like me. I always thought she looked like one of those pictures of angels you see in church. I took after Daddy, little and dark. So it was me and him and Grandma. You know how it is when you’re a kid. All you remember of those years is bits and scraps but I remember my daddy singing me to sleep.”

Her voice rose up, soft and clear and pretty.

Hush little baby don’t say a word
Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird

“The first real memory I have, I was lying in bed. Grandma had gotten a telephone call, and she was scared. I knew it was my daddy but she didn’t want to tell me about it so she sent me to bed early. I pulled my quilt around me and cried. I did it soft as I could so Grandma wouldn’t hear. I just wanted my daddy to sing me to sleep the way he always did.

“That’s when I heard him tolling me.”

“Tolling?”

“You know, when you call to something and bring it to you. I did it to you to bring you home. Like tolling a bell to call people to supper or church or what have you.”

Lulu stubbed her cigarette out and lit another.

“So I heard my daddy and I followed his voice. Hours I was walking up the mountainside at night. Sometimes I come awake at night and I can still see the way the trees moved against the moon, feel the way briars snatched at my bare little legs. But I had to keep going. My daddy was calling out for me and he was scared. He’d never been scared before.

“I heard the sirens before I saw the lights and then I heard the voices of all those gathered at the mine. I had heard of the mine but I’d never been there before. My daddy’s voice was still faint and I knew the hardest part was still ahead. But it was like a dream in a way; no one was looking for me so no one saw me, they only looked where I wasn’t. I crept behind and I crept under and as I followed my daddy’s voice I heard serious men speaking and what they said I did not want to hear.

“There had been a cave-in and I knew that’s where my daddy was and that was where I had to go. I found a cage with a door on it and when I touched the door I felt like my daddy and I knew which buttons to push, how to get it where I needed to go. But I was still startled when the cage dropped down into the earth.

“There were more men at the bottom and I still don’t know how I got through that crowd without being seen. I found my way around them and slipped into a gap no grown man could have fit into.

“I had to climb like a lizard and squirm like a snake and by the time I’d got through whatever the briars had left of my nightie had been taken by the rocks. I was sorely scratched and bruised and cold, bitter cold, and I felt the nearness of death in my chest.”

Lulu coughed and spat into the paper towel again and looked critically at her cigarette before gently stubbing it out and balancing it on the edge of the ashtray. Saving it for later.

“Then I saw a gleam of light and as I drew close it got brighter and brighter until I drug myself into a hollow lit by balls of fire floating in the air and singing like they do; they were each one singing something different and spoiling the music.”

“Souls,” I said.

“First time I seen ‘em. And the first time I seen something else.

“It was a man all dressed in black sitting on the rocks shaking his head like he didn’t know what to do. When I crawled into the hollow I knocked some rocks loose and he turned to the sound and saw me.

“He said, ‘Child, what are you doing here?’” and right away took off his coat and put it around my filthy-dirty little body and picked me right up and held me shivering in his arms.”

“Was it --”

Lulu nodded. “It was the Deacon.”


CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AN EMPTY GRAVE, AN UNBROKEN CIRCLE

“It smelled like the air was just another kind of stone, still and ancient. It was the smell of underground and I hope never to smell it again.

“The dark man said, ‘Listen,’ and I did. I heard the souls singing. The sound scared me, but worse than that it made me sad.

“‘Someone got hurt,’ I said, and the man nodded.

“‘That’s good listening,’ he said. ‘Do you hear anyone you know?’

“I listened harder, and the voices split apart, each soft note going on and on. There was one--”

Lulu tipped her head back, and started to breath out. Softly at first, then louder, she sang a single note. It was a man’s tenor voice, and it went on and on. It was the sound of someone lost in the worst way, someone using their last breath to say “I can’t leave her, I can’t leave her.” It went on and on and it made me feel like someone had their hand on my heart, digging their fingers in. When Lulu finally stopped it wasn’t because she was running out of air.

“I started crying and crying,” she said. “The Deacon just held on to me, tried to keep me warm.

“‘That’s my daddy,’ I said to him. ‘My daddy’s lost.’

“‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s why I need you to help me.’

“I tried to get loose to look for my daddy but the Deacon held me back. ‘You can’t go fetch him,’ he said. ‘You have to toll him to you.’

“‘Daddy!’ I called out, ‘come here Daddy!’ and the man shook his head.

“‘‘You got to sing,’ he said to me. “Your daddy needs to see you before he goes.”

“I started to sing Hush Little Baby, but my voice sounded weak and thin. It didn’t echo against the walls; it broke on them. I started crying again.

“‘You can’t just sing with your voice,’ the Deacon said. ‘You got to sing with the soul God gave you.’

“When I was able to stop crying I heard my daddy again and a song he would sing me came into my mind, the saddest, bravest song I knew.”

When she opened up the song was familiar and as much as I wanted to respect what had happened to her I couldn’t help but sing along, my voice under hers lifting up and holding down. For that moment I felt entirely outside myself. There was nothing but music.

will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by
there’s a better home a-waiting
in the sky, Lord, in the sky

“That was when my real life started,” Lulu said. “It was as though I’d never sung before or as though I’d never done anything else. All of my sorrows and worries and love, all of the strength my daddy had given me came out in song. It moved through me and echoed through the tunnel as if it was a stone throat. It went shivering into the rock around us and I knew where my daddy was, I knew there were men around him.

“They were crushed. My daddy was little but he seemed so strong to me and it shocked me to learn that something as senseless as rock could crush that strength. We are all so little and here for such a short while.

“The souls were angry and scared and they kept circling around each other, moving through the rock, crying out and trying to get back into their ruined bodies. They were angry because they knew this wasn’t something that had happened to them; it was something that had been done to them. I’ve tried not to think about this, tried not to dwell on it but I do know that when something like that happens in a mine somebody knew about it ahead of time and let it happen because sometimes killing is the cheaper way to go. Coal has blood on it and blood will not wash away.”

When she said that I felt a killing rage at the thought of suits and wallets and bookkeeping and saw a machine that took people in at one end and pushed money out the other with a valve at the bottom where the blood drains out. If I could lay hands on whoever had made that choice…

But this wasn’t my tragedy and I thought of the blood I couldn’t wash off of my own hands. I ate the anger, choked it down, sat still and listened hard.

“Daddy heard me and for an instant I thought my heart was broken because he didn’t fly right to me. He went to the others and made them listen, one at a time. Then when they had all found the way he came to me, rising through the stone, and my heart lifted with him. I knew he came to me last because he wanted to hold onto me now that his time had come, he wanted one last… He wanted to take a memory of me with him.

“One by one all those souls let go of what had been done to them and they rose as well and burst like slow fireworks, sparks peeling off the little suns until they were gone, each spark a living thing in itself bright and burning and joyously going forth, singing now in harmony as they went.

“That was when I knew what songs were for.

“When each soul was done and had vanished, something small and dark at its core dropped to the ground and the Deacon patiently gathered them up.

“‘Thank you,’ the Deacon said. Even in the new light he was in shadow. ‘You helped your Daddy and his friends on their way. I could never have done that.’

“I wasn’t paying much attention, I was watching my daddy loop and dip and sing in front of me. He kissed me on the forehead, and then he blossomed like a burning rose and moved on.”

Lulu parted her bangs; I’d never seen her forehead. “Look,” she said.

There was a white circle on her forehead, the edge of it fringed like the rays of an old-fashioned drawing of the sun. She let her hair fall back in place.

“I bet that burn on your back turns out the same,” she said. “That kiss warmed me right up. I stopped shivering and after all I’d been through I fell asleep. When I woke up I was in my bed; Grandma came in all worried and asked where I’d been. There was mud and coal dust on the sheets but no footprints on the floor. She asked me and asked me what had happened.” Lulu picked up her pack of cigarettes and started tapping it against the arm of the chair. “How can you even start to tell someone who’ll never know for sure that you’re telling the truth?”

Then her voice got cold, hard and flat like a metal strap. “We had a service for my daddy in the church. Grandma somehow paid for a stone but Daddy didn’t rest in a grave. They left the bodies where they lay. It would have cost too much to dig them out.”

The cat clock ticked into the silence for minutes before I spoke.

“Lulu, I’m so —”

She raised her hand, one finger upright. “You got nothing to be sorry for. I told you!”

Right, right, right. “Sorry, I won’t…”

Shit.

“This is not a joke,” Lulu said and I heard a rough edge to her voice; her throat was tight.

“I know,” I said. Then I tried to bite at the tail of my next words as they slipped out of my mouth. “I’m sorry.”

Lulu looked at me with no expression for a second and then started laughing. So I started laughing and by the time we were done Lulu had started hacking away again and my ribs and belly hurt.

“Lulu, I wish with all my heart that had never happened to your dad. I wish you hadn’t had to go through that. I wish there was something I could do.”

Lulu tilted her head. “Do you really mean that.” She made it a statement, not a question.

I nodded.

“Then I got to tell you some more.” She picked up the extinguished butt from the ashtray and lit it again.

“Can I ask you a question?”

She nodded.

“What was the Deacon doing there?”

That was when Lulu finally broke and started sobbing, curled up with her face pressed against her knees, rocking back and forth. It shocked me; it wasn’t like her, it seemed to make her toughness, her drive into a lie. I wanted to hug her and let her cry against my shoulder but when I reached for her she pulled back in a way that let me know she didn’t want to be touched. I could not comfort her; I had nothing to offer.

But everything passes and so did Lulu’s tears. I brought her another paper towel and when she was composed again she cleared her throat.