Madison, After

New Encaustic Blog

2010-10-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

I'm posting over at The Hive Encaustic--my blog for visual art, some writing, massive jitters and general twinges. See my studio, read about my cat and wish me luck in the treacherous waters of encaustic art. If you don't know what encaustic art is, here's your chance.

The Hive Encaustic

Off Course the Novel

2010-07-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's time for another post… But you know, sometimes, how you just get tired of your own voice? Like that.

Off Course
I started a new novel which I am stoked about. It's called Off Course. It's about a magical device that transports people out of this world in a big flash of light. The device has fallen into the hands of a brother-sister team of criminals who have been disappearing wealthy men with the device for years. But now a quasi-governmental agency has learned about the device and believes it is a powerful weapon. They recruit a retired former agent to get close to the sister and steal the device. When the sister uses it on the agent and accidentally transports herself with him, the two of them find themselves not dead but in another world. Unfortunately, the device doesn't work in the reverse. They can't get back unless they learn the secret of the device and the reason it came to be in the girl's possession. Cue living rocks, shifting landscape, tribes of people with mysterious secret powers. Oh, and all the men she sent there earlier, many of whom would like to wring her neck.

If you think it sounds like fun, let me tell you. It is painless. Fun will be if it writes as well as it has through the first nine chapters and the rewrites aren't some bitchly epic that takes years to complete. That would be fun.

What am I liking right now? Mmm, I like Robert Crais and Jennifer Wiener (she's so cool). I like the show True Blood and want to watch it all the time. The books, not so much but maybe that's just me. I like Swiss cheese. I like recording my dreams in the morning and reading them later when they're like dreams someone else had. I like getting my heart rate up into the 140's especially since it's not recommended for my age…but then the Professor just does it for me like that sometimes. And Zinfandel. Like that too.

Notes on Rejection

2010-06-04T12:05:00.001-07:00

Thought for the day: Rejection. Oh god not that again. Thought I'd write this while I'm still thrilled with my story live on Spinetingler. What, you haven't heard? Go here now and read it. The Professor, a discerning reader who very often has a pained look on his face when he is forced to read my light and airy para-whatsit stories, said he spent an enjoyable lunch time reading The Red Tent. And thanked me.* Special note: He did not wonder aloud in my hearing why I don't write more things like that. Good man.

Full disclosure: Before I start this thoughtful teaching moment (note sarcasm) let me say that The Red Tent had very few rejections. It was worse. The magazine that accepted it first went belly-up, became a Dead Market, was not sleeping, a few weeks before TRT's publication date. I was crushed and did not send the story out again for years. I thought I had personally killed the magazine with my haunted tale of ice and snow (the fact that it is an homage to a certain Raymond Carver story might have been bad juju. But yes, I meant to do it. Why the hell not? I can't think of another sport that is more consumed with pride, desire and self-interest than mountain climbing. And So Much Water So Close To Home is a nearly perfect story, as the several movie adaptations demonstrate. It felt like there was enough water in that pool for my characters to swim too). When I sent it out again to the beautiful people at Spinetingler, I heard back in about 24 hours. You can imagine how I felt. I had probably just received non-interest for the umpteenth time from the literary 'zine I love to hate the most (…and still submit to every year, why?).

Why. Because anger/embarrassment/humiliation/disappointment/self-doubt/self-loathing is so much fun? Those are the good points! At the core of each rejection is my Secret Voice reminding me yet again that I'm not any good and never been any good and, at my age, never will be any good.

Some days that is certainly true.

Other days I write like an angel, decide to quit my day job and babble crazy-ass plot twists to the Professor or anyone else who happens to be around.

But most days what I do is decide it doesn't matter how old I am, what editors say, what new expression of boredom crosses my family members' faces. Fuck 'em all.

That's the mantra, the answer, the word. And as a result I am occasionally blessed with those days when writing is easy and the universe touches me on the crown of the head with all good things on the page.

Someone please remind me of this when I hear back from two places that have my stuff!

Beadie and The Blesser

2010-05-02T11:18:00.001-07:00

My house blesser, Nick Fortunato, was asleep. His earbuds hung out of his ears and Sweet Dreams by the Eurhythmics escaped like little balloon squeaks from his collar.

"The topic today is…" Happy Hour's leader, Robert, stared around the room trying to decide if we were worthy. "Your higher power."

At that moment the coffee house door flew open. Wind and rain blew into the room, followed by a long-legged redhead in a blue dress. She hesitated in the doorway with damp leaves sweeping past her. Skinny. Four inch heels.

"Someone get the door," said Robert.

Happy Hour met at Palio Cafe after it had closed for the night. The hours were clearly posted. It was no accident that Beadie Watts just happened to wander off the street on this bitch of a night. The only question was why.

Well, hell. I stood up. "My name is Veronica and I'm an alcoholic."

A chorus of hi, Veronica.

"And all I want to say is that some of us don't have a higher power. I'm not a believer. I'm Veronica."

Someone in the back yelled, "He believes in you!"

I sat down.

"Nice, Ronnie." Beadie perched on the edge of my table and crossed a slithery leg. "I heard you were on the wagon."

"I heard you weren't," I said.

Beadie shrugged. "I could stop drinking this minute."

"Still in the biz?" The last I heard, she was into custom built homes. River rock, gold-plated faucets. When the market was hot, she moved a lot of bricks. But it had been two years since anything in this town had been hot, including the men. It was a down market.

Custom homes used to be like printing money. Everyone wanted a new house if they could afford it. No ghoulies or ghosties, cold spots or bad smells. In fact, a blessing certificate by a licensed and bonded house blesser wasn't even required.

It's a loophole in the law. Supposedly, new homes don't have bad spirits and evil presences. But anyone who's seen a plumber's ass knows that bad spirits arrive from just about anywhere.

Or so I've heard. I don't feel the spirits myself. But since my market is REO properties and foreclosures, my listings have that lived-in look. State law says each one has to be blessed by a guy like Nick. At my expense.

"Is that Fortunato?" asked Beadie, surprised. "My, my, my. You and him?"

"There's no me and him." Unfortunately. "We work together."

"Wish I'd known."

I glanced at Nick, slumped against the nearest wall in a doughnut coma. Dark, lean, pale and, so help me god, beautiful. He'd been sober a month. Because these sensitive types are always going into rehab or quitting the business, a good one can be hard to find. Nick was very good.

Beadie popped open her clutch, removed a business card and wrote something on the back. "Do me one for old times? Take Fortunato and go here. He'll know what to do, and you can have the listing when he's done."

I took the card. Ravensview Drive. "If it's new, why do you need a blesser?"

But she was headed for the door.

Fortunato woke up as the meeting ended. He looked at me and sighed. "Better give me the card."

I fished Beadie's card from my pocket and handed it over. I stopped asking how he knew these things. He just did.

The place on Ravensview was cherry. High end. Three million. My teeth ached as we pulled into the circular drive and parked. "Tennis courts. Riding stable. I'm going to kill that bitch."

"Underwater." Nick made a choking sound and climbed out of the car.

"Probably. Are you sick?"

"It's bad. I can't go in there." He disappeared into the shrubbery and began to retch. He did that around dead bodies.

"Could you not find a corpse for once?" I headed for the front entrance. "Third time this month. Fuck head."

"Master bath," he called after me. "Underwater."

That's where I found her. Beadie was a shadow of blue tinged flesh sunk deep in the marble tub. Her kit rested on the floor next to her purse—rubber tubing, a spoon, gold lighter and a used syringe. Her dress hung from a towel rack. Heated towel rack. Nice fixtures, except for the dead junkie real estate agent floating in the bath.

"Oh, Beadie." I'd never hated her that much. I took a seat on the brushed steel bidet and called 911.

Nick sat on the curb, a pile of mashed butts on the pavement between his boots. "You okay?"

The cops were loading the body bag into the van.

"She came to Happy Hour tonight. She looked good— I can't believe it. The detective said she'd been dead since yesterday."

"You had a ghostly visitation." Nick got to his feet. "Not being able to tell the quick from the dead is pretty bad, Ronnie. Maybe you should take a class or something."

"She used us."

"She was looking for something."

He headed into the house. Now that Beadie was gone, he felt fine. In the foyer, he struck a match off his boot, lit a cigarette, and pulled a fir branch from his back pocket. I made to follow him but he held up his hand.

"Let me do my job. That's how she wanted it."

It didn't take long. Never does. I felt a breeze scented with Opium (like that wasn't a clue) and all the windows in the great room rattled. She was gone.

Nick came down the hall, whistling. He'd lost the green tinge to his skin.

"What happened to you?"

"Nothing." He blushed. "Nice lady. Friendly."

"I can't believe it. You had sex with a ghost."

"Some of them want to use me." He shrugged and headed for the door. "She said to say thanks."

"Fuck head." I followed Nick outside.
---------------
Thanks to Pattie Abbott

Human Trials, Part Four

2010-04-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

First of all, the cat is all right. Let's get that said immediately. Marzi, my little ten month old orange and white male kitten is all right. He lived.

I have some cats. Cats being what they are, you only see three or four of them at a time. So that's how many cats I have. Three or four. Marzi, Andy, Spot and Edie and their mother Dru (oops, five) joined Achilles, Naomi and Cloudy last summer (is that eight?). I blame the idiots who do not neuter their cats and then ABANDON THEM IN OUR DRIVEWAY. Thanks to economic downturn, we couldn't off the strays—the shelters were full. So, here we are. All of us.

For anyone who thinks this is excessive, you are so correct! But we are four (semi) adults who live in the country and the cats are indoor/outdoor varietals. It only gets really hairy around feeding time. I have my bee suit and whip. We make it work.

Andy is a puffy-haired gray male with a lolloping walk and a whisker for trouble. He is a well-known hooligan. If I have an appliance—oven, Cuisinart, coffee grinder, washing machine, electric toothbrush—the cat is all over it, in it or eating it. Many's the time Andy has hopped into the clothes dryer when my back is turned. I scoop him out and shut the door.

Not so last night. I threw in my wet socks and workout clothes, turned to look for Andy who was clamoring for half-and-half in the kitchen. I turned back, shut the door, started the dryer and left the room.

There was a clumping sound, like shoes in the dryer. I don't want to say how long I ignored it before going back to check. It was a, hmmm, I don't remember putting shoes in there feeling. I opened the door and saw Marzi's limp body fall to the bottom of the dryer. Not moving.

I'm not proud. I screamed and ran. The Professor didn't understand what I was screaming about, as if "Marzi! Dead! Dryer! Omigod! Omigod! Marzi! Dead! Dryer!" didn't make complete sense. By the time he got to the dryer, the cat was up and wobbling away. They tell me he was fluffier than usual.

I didn't think it was possible, but after a couple of hours hiding under the coffee table and trying to get as close to the gravitational center of the earth as possible, I was all right. And Marzi is fine. No broken bones or anything. I said his nose looked too pink this morning and the Professor, bless his little cotton socks, offered to roll me up in a rug and take me to the psychiatrist.

To celebrate having lived another day without becoming a cat murderer, here is Part Four of Human Trials. People are different; killing them in fiction doesn't seem so bad.

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Human Trials, Part Four

Monday

The beauty of the drug was that Richard only had to find one perfect girl.

Sal explained it over beers one night, months earlier. Time distortion was still theoretical at that point and no one knew if the drug would actually create the effect. Everyone at the lab joked about Dr. Mack. Who gave funding to such a whack job?

But Sal believed it might work. Or maybe he just saw future opportunities. Of a financial nature.

"Ever wanted to relive the best fuck of your life?" asked Sal. "Think about it."

"Like virtual reality?"

"Virtual nothing! It's the real deal, Richard. You are there."

Richard paused for a sip of beer, gathering his thoughts. Already, there was a girl. "Does it affect other people?"

Sal shook his head. "Unknown. It's supposed to create a distortion envelope around the subject's body. Like it's Thursday in the world, but Wednesday for you. But we've talked about making it a bigger event with a higher dosage."

"Make it Wednesday in a whole room?"

"Make the whole planet Wednesday, Richard. Or any day you like."

The last time Richard saw Sal in the hall before he died he was too busy to talk. "Gotta run, Rich. Remember that thing we talked about? It's going very well. Know what I'm saying? You won't fucking believe it."

"Wednesday?" Richard asked.

Sal laughed, already moving down the hall. "Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday."

Richard wondered what day it had been when Sal had injected a planet-sized dose into his arm and blown the top of his head off.

In the confusion before the cops arrived, Richard stepped into the booth and grabbed a handful of vials from a cooler. Two empty vials were next to a syringe on the table and Sal's remains were on the floor. Hard to associate the guy with whom he'd shared a few beers to the thing on the floor with a lower jaw and not much more above the collar.

Two empty vials; that was Sal's mistake. All Richard wanted was to replay the events of one night in one crappy little neighborhood. Make it Friday again. You didn't need to mainline a gallon of the stuff to do that.

And he already had the girl.

Human Trials, Part Three

2010-04-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

Here's another section of Connie. It's back story. As a standalone blog post, there isn't much depth. But as part of the story, it works as a quiet section. More Richard tomorrow.
-----
The idea for X came to me complete and fully formed after watching all three Back to the Future movies. I was nine months pregnant, the weather was hot and dry, and the sunset was a burning pyre in the kitchen window through which I could make out the shadowy outlines of Portland's tallest buildings. I could no longer eat or drink or sleep.

It materialized like a constellation of stars. I knew instantly what it was and why it would work, although I couldn't explain where it had come from. One moment it wasn't there and the next it was. I sketched the equation as my water broke and the salty aquarium inside me flooded the kitchen floor.

I spent the next eight years writing grants and more grants, most of which passed me by. All I needed was one. I suffered through part-time jobs and academic appointments, pointless research for other scientists and countless students with their own petty agendas.

Each day I dropped Jennifer at a little pink house and retrieved her each night. In between those time posts, I wasn't a mother or a wife. I was a needle carrying an invisible thread, raising stitch after stitch until someone, somewhere, could see what I saw.

My marriage dwindled to two separate trenches in our futon mattress. My husband found a girlfriend. As he packed his bags, I calculated the impact of losing him. No loss, really. To my work. That was the week I made the first cut for the National Research Foundation's two-year grant. A month later, I had the money in hand and hired Sal. I don't recall thinking about Jim after that except on weekends, when he had Jennifer.

So X was worth, approximately, eight years of time, one marriage, my academic credibility, the lives of 2,548 white mice, and now Sal.

Human Trials, Part Two

2010-04-22T14:55:00.000-07:00

I meant to post this yesterday, but I got distracted by White-nose syndrome, a disease that is devastating bat populations. It is slowly spreading west from it's first reported location in New York. Now they say it is in Missouri. Bat mortality rates are 80 to 100%. Speculation is that if the disease isn't controlled it could extirpate whole bat species. Want to learn more, go to Bat Conservation International. I'll post some photos when I can.

For now, here is part two of Human Trials. New point of view character is Richard.

------
Monday: God does it this way too.

Richard drove to work on Monday, his normal route taking him within a block of the girl's crappy apartment complex. The bus stop where he picked her up on Friday was in front of the Minit Mart where he bought a cup of coffee every morning. It would be wrong if he didn't stop today.

Richard hadn't been careful, picking up a neighborhood girl. If he'd planned ahead instead of acting on impulse he wouldn't be so damned jumpy. But he always acted on impulse.

Across the street was the Pizza Hut where he occasionally stopped for take-out. Two blocks up was the Thriftway where they had both shopped, maybe even passing one another in the aisles, she with tampons and orange juice in her cart, he with frozen dinners. He'd seen the receipts in her wallet and almost crapped his pants. Local.

How stupid could you get?

When he arrived at work, Richard logged in and checked his e-mail. His boss wasn't in her cubicle, although he saw her jacket slung over the back of her chair. A meeting. There had been a lot of meetings since Sal Preciado died in the observation booth last week. The worst of the blood spatter was still there, fused like black glue to the safety glass. Maintenance would need razor blades to get it off.

The official story was that Sal shot himself. Most of the office drones believed it. Old Sal eating his gun was the worst thing they could imagine.

But Richard had been first on the scene after Connie Mack started screaming, and he never bought the suicide story. Her grinding, mechanical shrieks had wafted into his office through the cold air return. Richard went downstairs to the lab level to investigate and found Connie screaming into the safety glass while Sal's brains dribbled to the floor.

Sal and Connie had been working on a vaccine for several years. Richard didn't understand the chemistry behind it, but he processed the invoices and he understood that a great deal of money had been thrown at this project.

"Did you hear?" Jill from HR stopped at his desk. She was a cheerful, tuna-sandwich-and-cookies sort of woman with a pear-shaped bottom that Richard found inoffensive. "She-boss has been called upstairs."

"Are we in trouble?"

"Someone is." Jill wrinkled her nose. "One of the experiments is missing."

"Missing how?" He cracked his knuckles. "The mice got out? The computers crashed?"

"No, the stuff. The drug. The vaccine. It's gone. They're pretty sure Sal took it before he died, but Dr. Mack is convinced someone in the building took it. I heard She-boss and Mack having it out. Pretty nasty stuff."

Richard minimized his e-mail and rolled his shoulders. "It had to be Sal. No one else around here knew what they were doing in the lab."

"Did you know what they were doing, Richard? I bet you didn't know anymore than the rest of us." Jill giggled, a sound he hated. He visualized squeezing her spongy middle until the giggles wheezed out of her. Oblivious, Jill made a few other conversational gambits but he turned away and she finally took the hint.

Human Trials

2010-04-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

This week I'm going to serialize an old short story called Human Trials. I love this piece because it's ambitious, not particularly literary, and the idea itself was electrifying back in 2003 when I first wrote it. I was emerging from the long incubation of motherhood about this time, and the piece is full of constant parenting touchstones. Needless to say, my worst years as a mother were yet to come...I just didn't know it yet. This is one of two pieces that convinced me I needed to get my MFA. Not because the writing is particularly good, but because I was so passionate about the story. It was my olive branch, proof of dry land.

I'll post it in sections this week.

----------
Human Trials: Part One

10cc administered at 8 a.m.

Trials of X on animal subjects are a joke. Half the mice continued their minuscule, unplanned existences, while the other half went into convulsions and died. I was surprised at the death rate, but we couldn't be sure of dosages. My assistant, Sal, macerated their tiny brains and we went on.

Our grant funds included a full range of animal testing, including rhesus monkey trials. Dogs if we want them. Three years ago, we were throwing everything into the work plan, including animals. But it doesn't work if they can't tell you what time they think it is. Or what day.

Sal and I took my daughter, Jennifer, to the zoo and watched the various monkey breeds in their cages. I couldn't see any sign the animals could differentiate between now and then, past and present, today and yesterday. My eight-year-old daughter exhibits a more finely developed sense of the linear nature of time than a monkey, but I couldn't test her.

Yet it had to be a human trial. When Jennifer went to her father's for the summer and I was free for two months, I decided to self-inject a low dose of X.

I'd been thinking a great deal about time and memory and how some memories seem to be written deeply into the brain, while others evaporate like mist, leaving only that tip-of-the-tongue feeling.

One memory stood out for me. Not long after Jennifer was born, I remember putting her down for a nap. It was high summer. The sheer white curtains puffed over the bassinet on a breeze scented with jasmine and barbecue. That's all. An insignificant memory, yet so vivid I could almost close my eyes and feel hot wind on my skin, or reach out and touch my daughter's newly wrought skull.

I think, in essence, that memory is what X is all about.

The day I planned to start the trial, I walked into the lab to find Sal locked in the booth. It's a glass-enclosed observation booth where we keep monitoring equipment, take private calls and eat our lunch. Its chief virtue is that it's soundproof and can be locked from the inside.

"The effects are localized, Connie," he said. His voice came out of the speaker system, rattled with electronic distortion. "But I'm experiencing…something."

"When did you do it? And how much?" I went to the door and tried the handle. Locked. I walked around to the front of the booth. Sal sat at the table, splay-legged, his arms flopped on the table. His color was more pasty than usual and his eyes had a loose, liquid quality I couldn't identify.

A blood streaked syringe sat on the tray next to his elbow.

"Ten cc's an hour ago. I've created the effect twice. I think it works, Connie."

"Unlock the door, Sal."

"Can't do it. I said the effect is localized, but it's strong. I'm not sure I can control it."

"Of course you can control it. Control your thoughts."

He laughed and shook his head. "It turns out I was never very good at that."

MyNoReMo: Story Five

2010-04-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

Working title: Rapid Onset

This one features the real secret of time travel, a loving tribute to Back to the Future and one badass serial killer. I started it ages ago, before grad school. I shelved it because there's no "genre" in grad school, silly woman. It occurred to me this thing would scorch the horror zines with its undeniable coolness. Reason to believe, people!

But it feels so extreme. The serial killer is horrible. The scientist lady and her Tom Sizemore-like assistant are dull until the assistant's head explodes. It's out of control as though I never once said no to death and destruction. Someone's going to read all the mayhem and say this woman is not a lyrical novelist.

The thing is I am, a little, tiny, itty bitty bit, still trying to suck up to lyrical novelists. You know who I mean—the ones with working wives. (I did not say that! Bad!) See, I'm still angry about it. Four years after grad school. If I were a lyrical novelist writing about horses and rivers and other western things (not cowboy western, I mean western like a sad trailer house filled with vodka and waitresses) true mayhem would out me as a secret genre infiltrator. And I couldn't go to the reunions.

And yet…mayhem is fun. Lowdown, booglerizing fun. The kind of fun you don't want people to remind you of too often. Or when they do, they say, "Girl, those shoes. You could kill a zombie six different ways with those." And you feel okay.

MyNoReMo: Story Four

2010-04-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

Working title: Sgt Fury and the Zombie in the Bathroom.

Catchy title, eh? The source for this idea was a story I wrote for a zombie anthology last year which got swiftly kicked back to me because A) It was told from a middle-aged woman's pov and who wants that; B) The rag was in the UK, holy ground for SF, and the editor didn't mind reminding me of this at length. So anyhoo, I saw a way to refit the story: a teenage boy takes a job at a diner because he sees this beautiful chick on roller skates who looks exactly like ValkYra, a girl he and his best friend have created in their graphic novel. The girl has no interest in him or his friend, but they don't mind being worshipful. Based on son Cheech's best friend from second grade (and maybe some Cheech too).

One afternoon at the diner, a customer makes some very disturbing noises in the locked stall of the public loo. He's just been infected with a prion disease that turns people into zombies. It's more like full-blown dementia but you can't blame people for freaking the hell out because it happens so fast. Mayhem results, trashing the diner. What's the boy's name, you may ask? Brendan Tierney. And the girl? Keisha. Those of you who know (about three actual living people) will recognize these names as characters in MA.

Here's an image of Sgt. Fury, since I'm not sure how he's going to fit into the story yet:
And here's a later reincarnation, Nick Fury, who looks like he's feeling a post apocalyptic world:
I have a lot of this story in the can, thanks to the earlier version and I've been happy to reconnect with my character, Tierney, as a young pup. His mom calls him "BrenDAN!". I'm not going to say this story has the most interest for me, especially since I started seeing my Killer cop from Story 3 as Johnny Depp from The Ninth Gate. Imagine him tramping through The Canyon, trying to remember what he did during those long-ago college days that would catch him up now, as a grown man. But Tierney as a kid, fighting zombies...

MyNoReMo: Story Three

2010-04-03T15:15:00.001-07:00

Story Three
Working title: Assassin's Guild

Reading Philip K. Dick biographies (because I can't read the novels, all right? I just can't) put me in mind of the ultimate Reed College paranoia game that seemed to flourish during spring terms on campus. If you haven't been there, you just don't know. The Professor and I can still drive on, say, any east-west street in southeast Portland at a certain time of year, and during a lull in the conversation, I know we're both back at Reed. It's not the fall we remember with the pretty weather and the optimistic new classes, but spring when renewal and flowers and baby birds seem like a joke next to incompletes and finals and hangovers.

In the spring, it's not sunny but it's not cold, nobody is thrilled to see you anymore, the drug of choice is some anti-social speed derivative, half the people in your dorm never leave their rooms, at least one had an abortion (you hear her crying), another is taking LSD every day (you hear him crying), and the rest are playing D & D. All they serve is sheet cake in the Commons; you go and sit for hours in the infirmary because something hurts, you're just not sure what, and your boyfriend's thesis on Walter Pater (for which he will receive the coveted AA) is making the sophomore biology major down the hall look very, very, very delicious. And you haven't gone to French class in a month.

Okay, the story's not about that. It's about a paranoid game called Assassin. Who knew everyone in every college plays Assassin? Called Killer at Reed, all I ever knew about it was one skinny, terrified math major who found himself walking alone to the mail room. "Just walk with me, okay? If I'm not alone, they can't kill me." "Who's going to kill you?" "I don't know."

This article in Wikipedia will tell you everything you want to know about Killer, but make special note of where they talk about umps and cops.

So picture this, a dead body killed with Nerf darts. Our heroine, a detective on the case, has no clues except a phone number in the cell phone. It belongs to a man who has been a cop in Killer games for twenty years. Down on his luck, seen it all, probably has cats. He doesn't know who the killer is but he can guess. How do you catch a Killer killer gone rogue? With a clothes pin.

MyNoReMo: Story Two

2010-04-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

Story Two
Working Title: That Story I Always Wanted to Write About Pod People and School Shootings.

Except what if it's the teacher who does the shooting? And what if the adults act crazy but aren't? And it's really the evil children? Admit it, haven't you always wanted to write about this? Think Ghost Story meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I've read Ghost Story many times. After I saw the movie, I couldn't picture Ricky Hawthorne as anyone but Fred Astaire. The author, Peter Straub, internalized the lessons of HP Lovecraft in such a delicate yet persistent way: the surface comforts and predictability of the regular world is only a thin and rather fragile veneer over the rotten secrets of the past. And the past is an engine of destruction that these old men have been avoiding for years.

The best part of all is when the evil thing is trapped in the body of the child and the younger guy (okay, been a few years since I read it and I don't remember the dude's name) drives cross country with the child bound and gagged in the back seat. It was an innocent time.

And then there are pod people stories ("That's not my mother! It killed my mother!"). As a parent, it's not so hard to believe. I once called daughter Chichi a vampire whore when I was at the absolute limit of my ability to understand her. She looked at me with empty eyes, an utterly alien creature with no human feelings. Brrr! She blames me for that now, BTW.

So the story would be a kind of Children of the Corn homage, except the Dad suspects it's his wife who is crazy. Until the end.

I have about four pages and an image of the husband and wife staring into one another's eyes and seeing nothing. I suspect this story will devolve into mayhem at the end, and I will feel unclean. Or stupid. Or possibly both.

I don't know about this one. Am I feeling it?

MyNoReMo: Story 1

2010-04-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Working title: Little Man

A Mormon lady discovers an actual horny little gnome dogging her steps. Is it a homunculus created by her erring husband? Is it her imagination? Or is it… real? Inspiration for this comes from an amazing 1973 Kim Darby movie called "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark." I'd barely learned to sleep without a nightlight in 1973, so I was very, very afraid. Tiny wicked little people torment a slightly crackers wife, and no one else can see them but her. A later and less inspired variant featured an evil voodoo doll which ended when the woman threw the doll into a microwave. After it dings, she opens the door and the evil spirit jumps into her.

What is it about dolls that come to life? My kids Cheech and Chichi (not their real names) had a stuffed panda bear they attacked with scissors because it was EVIL. They also had two identical Linnea dolls, one who was good and one they set on fire. In this photo Linnea has no face and that might have been part of the problem.

As a kid I was tormented by the China Doll story, which second grade girls probably still whisper to one another on the school bus. Late at night, in the dark, I would wonder why no adults knew about the very real dangers posed by dolls. I became a writer firstly to add to the wealth of knowledge about King Arthur, but secondly to warn everyone about those crazy, flesh shredding dolls.

The version I heard as a kid:
http://library.thinkquest.org/J0111082/html/Activities/ghoststories.htm#chinadoll

Here's the adult version:
http://scarystorez.wetpaint.com/page/the+china+doll

I have an early story idea about the REAL China doll, but after the initial shock value, there wasn't any place to go with the idea. It waits for another doll-fueled moment of terror in my life.

Little Man celebrates this neighbor of mine who is all about kicking some serious homunculous ass. I have five pages done, and some ideas for making Barbara the homunculous queen at the end.

Good idea?

MyNoReMo

2010-03-31T10:59:00.000-07:00

Accept the challenge and weep. While some people are revising their nearly perfect novels in April—revision being another word for reading more dusty old books about historic personages—some people will be forging ahead into the unknown. Yes, creativity, the piquant soup of the empty screen, the doubt, the wretchedness, the glory….

I've spent the last twenty years in dystopic dyspepsia, using my own blood for red ink. But now Madison, After is finished. Done. All 290 pages of zombies, flying saucers, teen sex, and cold canned chili. One last flogging by my critique partners on Saturday (and entering their tiny changes on Sunday) and I will be relieved. Then I boot the novel out the door to collect rejections from people who refuse to see the good in a can of ten-year old pears. It's in there, baby, it's in there.

(Note to agents: the revision took exactly seven months, during which time I was in Nepal for three weeks. It's not like I spent twenty Earth years on MA, though my crit group may measure time differently. BTW it's an awesome book and you really should request it.)

Anyways, here's what I'm doing in April—all new crap no one has ever seen before.

My plan is to post notes on each of my six exciting new story ideas, choose three to work on by the end of the week, and…finish them in April. By finish, I don't mean submission-ready, because that's not realistic for a distracted and distracting dame like myself. Clash of the Titans is coming out and there might be popcorn. Or someone nice (aka The Professor) could cook meatloaf one of these days. And a friend is going to A Dangerous Place in April and there might be some candle light vigils to attend when the guy is clapped in chains and thrown in a tiger cage. At the very least, some CNN interviews. Here's his picture:

Bye, friend!
PS. This was sent out on your birthday party invitation and people still showed up, why?)

That's the plan for the fiendish sport of MyNoReMo, or in my case MyStoReMo.

Cats, a lot of cats

2010-03-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

Reason to believe...in Switzerland. From Lou Reed to 149 cats in one article, check out this link and say meow. I am well on my way to needing my own attorney, but as I like to say: I only have three cats at a time. The rest are outside or under the couch.

Not being a cat person by nature, I've watched my disintegration into a multi-cat housing authority with amazement and disbelief. Their main attractions are the softness of their fur and the satisfying architecture of their forms. And they purr. And they have those vacant eyes, like the blonde girls at the gym who only show up for the tanning beds. Dogs have a certain self-serving cunning that makes them about like your average four year old (I have a black lab and a border collie, both genius dogs). Cats just aren't like that. We have one, Marzi, who wakes up every morning like it's the first day of the rest of his life. I see him sometimes, wandering outside, completely lost. A fluffy white and orange cat on the edge of forever.

I could go on, but I really shouldn't. If you want to do some real good in the world, give to no-kill cat shelters and make it possible for those shelters to accommodate more cats, especially those who get dumped by the side of the road (and make their way to my house). Please. And vote in a health care plan that has psychiatric counseling for people who talk baby-talk to their cats. Ban the word "cute" from the English language. Limit cat condo furniture--that stuff is awful. And send me some aspirin.

Madison, chapter 1a

2010-02-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

I really hope the improvements are recognizable....

Chapter One, part one

Our farm workers came from all over, wherever the wind blew them. Refugee camps, other farms, places where everyone had died but them. They'd all had jobs Before—stockbrokers, salesmen and housewives. Once we even had an airline pilot. They came and went, blown away by the same wind after a day, a week, a month. I wasn't supposed to know their names.

Except for one. He was called Tierney and he had a book.

"Do you know how to read?" I asked during lunch one day when Dad wasn't looking. It was my job to carry drinking water to all the migrants, and as I ladled water into his bowl I tried to catch the title.

He closed the book. "Do you?"

Tierney was like any stranger who came to the valley to work for Dad. Thin and threadbare. But I liked his eyes when he looked at me. Blue.

Dad came out of the barn and stopped in his tracks when he saw me talking to Tierney. "Madison!"

I turned my back on Dad, ignoring him. "I learned how. What's the book called?"

Tierney held it up. "It's a dictionary."

"Madison, what does it take?" yelled Dad. "An engraved invitation?"

Whatever that was. Sighing, I carried the bucket to the next person. The next day, Tierney had another book, a battered old thing, curved from being carried in his back pocket. The rest of the crew played cards or napped but Tierney opened his book and turned the pages at regular intervals. His eyes tracked back and forth across the pages. Reading.

Dad saw me watching him and scowled. Tierney reading a book was bad enough. But the fact that I'd talked to him about the book was probably enough to get him fired. Dad didn't trust migrants and he hated books, even though he had once been a lawyer and you had to be able to read for that. He especially hated the idea that I might consort with a migrant.

Dad called the end of lunch and everyone headed back to the fields. He turned to me, hands on hips. "You're done here. Go help your mother."

"Stepmother."

"Mother." Dad humphed and stomped away.

"That woman is not my mother!" I yelled after him.

He hitched a step but kept walking. A year ago he might have marched back and slapped me for that, but now that I was seventeen, he had to watch himself. I was worth something now; I was marriageable.

Dad wasn't always a bad guy. It was June, a time of intense worry for all of us, but especially for him. The new plants were up but the weather was cool and rainy. Maybe too rainy. A lot of people depended on Dad for growing food and keeping our community on the good side of the local warlord, Pinkus. When Dad was a lawyer and there was still a government, he got Pinkus's brother out of jail. No one ever forgot a good turn, but Dad said there was a time limit on returned favors.

I'd noticed there was no time limit on bad turns. Dad reminded me of that every day.

My stepmother, Margo, waited for me in the kitchen as I carried the lunch things inside. Like a vulture, she cocked a beady eye at me as though she hoped I'd die so she could peck out my intestines.

"Were you talking to that migrant again?" she asked. "You know how your father feels."

"Why don't you tell me how he feels, Margo, since you know everything."

"Does someone have too much free time on her hands?" She grabbed my ear and gave it a fierce twist. The woman knew how to not leave a mark.

I grabbed her wrist and squeezed until she squeaked. "Touch me again and I'll break your arm."

She rubbed her wrist, two spots of bright color in her cheeks. "Be careful, girl, or you'll end up demented like your mother. I'll see to it personally."

She gathered her work basket and headed out the door.

As soon as she was gone, I sat down and put my hand to my ear. It was hot and ached deeply, as though all the little swirls and bones inside had been shaken loose. I wished the nasty old bitch hadn't mentioned my mother.

Mom hadn't been anything like Margo. I never got how Dad could marry that woman only weeks after Mom died. It was like, what, Mom was so pretty and smart that he couldn't wait to shack up with a mean old toad like Margo?

For instance, Mom used to post my stories and pictures on the kitchen wall when I was kid, and she always reminded me I could do anything I wanted. I loved books about Ancient Egypt and wanted to be an archaeologist. Do it, she would say. The end of the world was no barrier if it was what I really wanted.

Right before the thing happened and she died, she encouraged me to organize a dig at the old Chandler house with some of the other valley kids. The house had been vacant for ten years and no one cared what happened to it. Most of the furniture, dishes and useful stuff had been taken by other people years ago, but there was still a lot of interesting stuff like shopping receipts, medicine bottles, toys.

I assembled my crew. We worked in grids, collecting artifacts. Mom helped us set up a sifter to catch pottery shards and she gave us a notebook so we could record our finds. We dated our collection by strata. The top layer was leaves, dirt and animal droppings, and it was by far the deepest layer. The next was detritus of furniture, dishes and clothes, stuff that had gotten broken and left behind when people first cleaned out the house. Below that we got to items the Chandler family had used. My friend Andrew found a diamond earring.

We did this for almost a week before Dad found out about it. Well, there was more to it than that. Dad was tracking a demented person, a Dim, up our road. It headed for the Chandler house as if it knew exactly where it was going. Before Dad could stop it, the Dim came through the front door, naked, bloody, and mostly starved. It had been almost a year since we'd had any demented in the valley. Dims are not dangerous unless you touch their blood, so what does Dad do? Shot it through the head, right in front of us. The blood flew everywhere. Mom was helping us that day and she got most of it on her face when Dad opened fire. That's how it happened to her.

The valley council had a big meeting and decided to burn the Chandler place. All of us kids were grounded to our home farms, but I got it the worst. Dad made it very plain that I wasn't going anywhere, ever. He gave my bike to my brothers, Chris and Riley. Everyone watched me after that. I couldn't walk to the end of the driveway without some neighbor asking what I thought I was doing, did my father know where I was?

I asked Dad, after everything was over, Mom's funeral and all, why the Dim had gone directly to the Chandler house, almost as though it had purpose. It didn't fit what we knew about the infection. Dad got angry and lectured me for three hours about my responsibility to the family, especially now that Mom was gone. Code for Look What You Did to Your Mother.

But I thought about it for a long time. The demented don't eat, care for themselves, or communicate. They don't appear to think or have any memories. They don't seek shelter. They stumble around until they starve to death, or some jerk like Dad shoots them. But this one came directly to the Chandler house and walked right through the front door. He may have even turned the door knob. I thought about that a lot, actually. The way the knob shook and slowly turned.

I had two theories on the subject. One was that the guy wasn't demented; he was just an ordinary crazy human being. Plenty of crazy around here. The other theory was that some Dims have a shred of memory left in their destroyed brains. Maybe a tiny thought had guided him to this particular house, out of all the others. Could he have been Mr. Chandler, returning home?

In either case, the creature should not have been shot. I vowed not to kill any demented unless I had to, and to protect them from people like Dad. Like I should have protected Mom before he shot her too.

Cat-born Parasites

2010-02-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

Hey, been a while. I have fifteen minutes before I go to my new doctor, perfect time to post something. My old and revered doctor left suddenly and with no forwarding address. It must have been the scabies and ringworm from last summer's invasion of the alien skin-sucking cat-born hell parasites. He probably thought it would only get worse, and he was right about that. So I'm entertaining a fearless new doctor today.

But with Jupiter and some other heavenly body conjuncting, this is supposed to be an awesome month for me. New short stories are cooking in the brain pan, Madison is out toddling into the mailboxes of busy, busy agents. Question: I always hear other writers in the forums at Absolute Write talk about how they get these nearly instantaneous responses to their e-mail queries. What gives? I am haunting the inbox a little obsessively as I wait.

Rewrites on the novel were very consuming. I spent nearly all my free time napping with a pillow over my head trying to avoid opening the file. Once I got going, I only had one rule: rip the stupid out. I'll post a revised first chapter later and you can see whether I succeeded. There are still issues with the manuscript, as of course there will be until the end of time, but I am reasonably confident that it is as done as three long years can make it.

This week's short story stats:
0 submissions / 0 responses / 2 submissions out there
2 stories accepted but not live / 8 accepted and live

Miscellany:
1 not done yet--biographical essay
2 short story starts
2 short story rewrites in progress
3 ideas for new novel (whoa, Nellie!)

More rewrites. And more and more

2010-01-06T16:58:00.000-08:00

Here it is, January already, and the calendar has ticked over, reminding me to create a new folder and start dropping my weekly Madison rewrites into a sector that has a new year. Shall we call it draft three?

This is what I like about my rewrites:
-- Ctrl X all those dumb bits that make me cringe.
-- Ctrl V all those wait-a-minute bits from earlier drafts that made a lot more sense than I remembered.

This is what I dislike:
-- My life, novel writing for the ages.
-- Will it never end, dear god?
-- I've lost track.
-- I'm slashing plot points now.
-- Yoo hoo! Mr. Scrap Man! Want a novel?

From 310 pages, I'm down to 283. As diets go, I'm not going to impress anyone with an 8% loss. But there is a lot of clutter gone, all the junk I threw in the sink and hid in the closets. I thought I might need those old thrift store golf clubs and a third coffee grinder with a cracked lid. Turns out it was just there to make me cringe.

You know how with short stories, you write everything like a crow gathering shiny bits. Then you reread it and pick your battle. It's a short story, dude, not opera. Once the excess is gone, you might (sometimes in a blue moon, doesn't happen often) see that the 100 words left behind really do represent everything you meant to say back when you were using 1000 words to say it.

On a bloated, ocean liner scale, novel rewrites might function the same way. I've just never spent so long rewriting a novel before. Heavenly days, it's been a long time.

In the furthermore department, it isn't raining. At the moment. I'm off my bike for…I'm not sure how long. Until I miss it again. I love the bike. Her name is Argenta, she's two years old. I bought her with the proceeds of an ill-advised art sale, a very nice abstract painting from 1958, one of Lee's I rescued from the dustbin of history. I shouldn't have parted with it. But the bike has been nice.

Except I'm a bored with biking. It has all the stress of driving and none of the mindlessness of walking. Fall down, you break something, get hit, you die. Also, I never have any sense of improving on the hills. Someone passed me on the Linn Avenue hill once going oh, eight miles an hour, and she said, "It never gets any easier, you just go faster." Now that's a real philosophical statement, one that gives a girl pause. It NEVER gets any easier? Who cares about going faster? That's what downhill is for.

So I'm walking again.

The Blesser on Sniplits

2009-12-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

My paranormal short story, The Blesser, is live as a podcast on Sniplits. Here's the link:
http://www.sniplits.com/storiesbytitle.jsp#

The reader is great, I'm listening to it right now. It costs $1.08--a bargain for a story that goes on for 34 minutes and has dozens and dozens of swear words.
--K

Home from Nepal

2009-12-18T09:56:00.001-08:00

The trip to Nepal was awesome, life-changing. Life-threatening, actually. We returned to Christmas in full swing, and it is a struggle to remember what's important. Well, that's a good question. What is important? I lean toward these words: authenticity, risk, commitment. Considering the lives of others in a third world country is a multi-layered knot—what's best for them, what's best for me, who gets to decide? In the end, I appreciate those who can answer questions with thoughtfulness and compassion because I can barely address them in my own life. What kind of life do I make for myself now? If I could do one thing, let it be done with authenticity, risk and commitment. I'm trying to do this with my writing, which is like breaking open lines of text to release the intention.

The Nepal trip was so much about reflection and finding one's true…path, rhythm, beliefs. Those words that sum up what we are, inside and out. The next time I go, it really will be all about dancing. Swear.

The meme of Evan Lewis

2009-10-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

I have no idea what memed is, Evan Lewis, you sneaky reprobate. Memed can't be a word one would toss onto a Scrabble board. But there it is and here I am.

So what have I been doing until the moment Dave, er, Evan, memed me? I haven't been posting here, so I must have been doing something, right?

1) Basically, I've been dodging the whole Facebook question for the last month. A lot of people have tried to friend me and I've belayed their friendliness until I come up with a position statement about Facebook. As in, How Facebook Fits into My Life.

2) I went to a party where there was dancing. Much fun was had by me. In fact it was an awesome, sweaty, inebriated time, the likes of which I haven't had in at least three years.

3) Going to Nepal in November. Much planning and salting away of funds. I bought a pair of very lovely Asolo boots for the adventure. And I hope to experience more awesome, sweaty, inebriated times while wearing these pretty little things.

4) Research on Civil War-era gunshot wounds.

5) Dealing with pets, dealing with ringworm and pets, dealing with the skin and fur of several mammal species including humans, all of whom had various itchy things afflicting them. Dealing with pet therapy, pet accomodations, pet birth control, pet loss, pet gain. Talking to the Humane Society about Cat #701.

In a nutshell, that's what I've been doing until this meming thing happened to me. Why, Evan, why?

Q&A
Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?
Saltines in bed. Or saltines in the bath when reading critique partners' work.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
I hate reading my old comments later, like my college text of Aeschylus. As if I had an opinion at eighteen. Or more likely, as if I could have a better opinion now. In addition, I'm unlikely to do volunteer proofreading; I do enough of that already for my critique partners.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears?
Dog-ear, baby. I want the book to know I'm there.

Laying the book flat open?
I have two library books lying just so right now. I know it's bad. In library materials, however, an unmolested book is an unloved book. I like opening a book that has a hint of an old lady's perfume clinging to the pages. Once I checked out a copy of Dracula that had tiny smears of bitter chocolate in the margins of the pages. Children's book should be battered from repeated readings, pages bleary, the spines utterly broken. I can't imagine a greater compliment to an author than to autograph a well-loved, much read book. For my own materials, I have reader copies and shelf copies. I'm not to be trusted with a book I like.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?
There's a difference?

Hard copy or audiobooks?
All of it. In both ears and the eyes as well.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?
I have to stop on a dime. I have kids and cats.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?
There are no unfamiliar words. I've heard them all.

What are you currently reading?
House of Lost Souls by F.G. Cottam (excellent first novel), Muddy Tracks by some new age guy (not recommending this much), Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller (awesomeness, complete brilliance). On tape: Kate Wilhelm. I have a Tanith Lee at the top of the pile but the premise reminds me of a particular first season episode of Star Trek TNG. My life will be more pleasant if I never have to see the episode again, or think those thoughts. So maybe not this Tanith Lee.

What is the last book you bought?
I think it was a cookbook by Ferran Adria. Obviously not for me.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?
Usually two by the bed, an audio book at work and another in the kitchen. Don't want to miss anything.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?
I love to read in bed and sadly that means nighttime reading. If I could, I'd be there all day long.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?
Geez, don't get me started. I mean it, don't ask me about series books. I might give my opinion about the waste of paper and breath and time and all those dead trees and why no one edits anymore and the hours I'll never get back trying to remember what happened in volume three and the erosion of my intellect when I realize how many brain cells got burned when I read volume four. If you can't say it one book, why, god, why write sixteen? The only exception is Dorothy L. Sayers. Rebus. That chick in the UK.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?
They are ALL beautiful to me. Jane Eyre, The Things They Carried, Sherlock Holmes (series, K. Shut up!), Jane Austen, The Haunting of Hill House, Snowcrash, Red Square and Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith, The Day of the Triffids, Flowers From the Storm by Laura Kinsale, anything Ron Carlson. Howl's Moving Castle, Harry Potter, LOTR, Dracula. All James M. Cain, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Michael Chabon, David Mitchell. Don't forget Joss Whedon, Francis Ford Coppola. Pick it up, read it, pass it on.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)
They are alpha by author right now (not my idea). I used to have them by color.

Happy now, Dave, er, Evan? I need a new box of saltines and a chapter of Davy, please.

Weekend at The Burrow

2009-08-31T16:00:00.000-07:00

Here's what I did this weekend. Dumped the Yolas for an outing with family, including ex, only to have ex bail at the last minute, followed by number two child. That left me and number one, who was happy to go see District 9, making it the first movie I've seen since HP Last. And what a fine little parable it was too. Really liked the aliens and the dude, and they both started out so unlikeable. I went home clutching my skull because there was so much I'd never seen before. I watched Johnny Mnemmmowwinc (sic) the night before and was hypersensitive to how much useless junk I've stuffed in the old mental closet over the years. Some of it is leaking. Anyway District 9. Of course it's too much. I love too much. Cloverfield—I loved that too.

Next, a pound of beeswax for $10. This, you non-wax people, is a good deal. The craft store I frequent to my great shame gives out a 40% off coupon with each purchase. It keeps me going back every week for another pound of wax. Also bought a Krupps thermos at Value Village (next to the Sausage Kitchen, home of the best, the only, the driest, the least sweet pepperoni in the world, bar none) for number two child who (accidentally) exploded my Melitta divorce settlement ceramic coffee pot that I loved almost more than life itself. I forgive because I'm the one who broke a Fiestaware chocolate pot from the 1940's. Knocked it right off the counter, the radioactive glaze breaking into a thousand guilty pieces. The thing was worth more than the current value of my car.

Sunday I prepped boards and wrote Madison and watched Angel. Yes, it's not over. Netflix has had to ship disks to me from Hawaii because some other middle aged woman in Oregon is sitting on Season Five. I'm administering the last episodes like laudanum, one drop at a time. After a load of really inferior episodes early in the season, these final five are worth the wait. I blanked on what the bad episodes were about and the only one that came to mind was a reprise of the stupid werewolf. I don't know why werewolves have to exist in the same universe as vampires. Is it in the contract?

A fabulous weekend, with time at the end to sweep the floor, run a load of wash and have a glass of wine while R grilled.

Oh, I just got an update from the MFA program where I got my entirely useless terminal degree, so I'll try to blog later about the shivers of ickiness I feel when one of these drops into my inbox. Brrr.

Passionate and Dangerous

2009-08-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

Whaddaweekend here at Madison World. First, I'm going to pass over Saturday completely, except to say I had a glass of wine at the Big Pond with R and that made everything all right again. Finally finished book two in the wasted space trilogy. It's a blessing I can't remember dude's name or where he lives because oh my god, one volume would have been enough already! How many trees, dude? How many hours will I never get back—at my age, they are numbered and I have to be careful with them. But that's Saturday again and I said I wasn't going to talk about Saturday. Started an encyclopedic compendium of vampire literature wherein I learn that Madame Blavatsky was a better writer than John Polidori. Despite this injustice, one might wish that Madame had died at age twenty-six and John gone on to an illustrious career of table-rapping. I have a little thing for the passionate deaths of the tumble-locked boys of the Romantic pen. Check out the death section of Shelley's bio in Wikipedia. They say John offed himself with prussic acid, which Wiki tells me is the shmancy name for hydrogen cyanide. That would have looked good on Madame.

So I don't know if I'm going to get through the vampire bookie thingie. I used to love the undead creatures of the night, back in the day when they were the maligned and forgotten denizens of late night television, i.e. The Night Stalker. They are just too too everywhere you want to be right now, and little girls want to play with them, and we're back to dangerous and forbidden sex—what is this, the 1950's? As a mom, I am all about dangerous sex. As a lady of mature years (and by mature, I mean fit, nowhere near fifty, and popping with new ideas) I am even more all about dangerous sex. That is, one might say (by one I mean I) the motto of my life. But still, guys, you think the glittery-skinned, vegetarian saltpeter Tweelight is actually going to tamp those unruly passions? See death of Shelley above.

I've got the Dennis Lehane historical going on the cd player. (Almost said "toaster" but that term is dead to me now.) The reader does good accents, but he has a kind of happy, storybook voice that makes the book sound like a bible story. Note to Lehane: don't DO that. Speaking of audio, what about that Jonathan Davis? He read Snowcrash and mmmm, I like to visit the audiobook once a year or so just to hear him say "Hiro Protagonist". He may also have done the voice mail system for DHL. What would you call a woman who sent all her old toner cartridges back to Xerox via DHL just to hear that guy's voice? Target audience.

OC Arch Bridge etc

2009-08-13T16:41:00.000-07:00

Yola is blogging this week, which sucks the will to live from her love slaves. No postie from me here at Madison world, but then I decided to drop in to mention that five or six pieces sold out of the show. I arrive at Winestock with my hand over my eyes—"the light, the light!" It's so weird. I still think all the pieces are too dark, except for the new one above the bar which is too colorful. But the lovely small one with heavy wax texture sold. Think I know who bought it, John.

What am I reading? Book Two in the whatsit trilogy by what's his name. Honestly, people, do you want me to talk about why trilogies AGAIN? That's five names I can't remember: The trilogy's name, the names of each separate volume and because I'm pissed, the author's.

I finished The City and The City. Liked it a lot, though not for the reasons China Mieville probably expected. He's done a fine job of world building. It was absolutely fascinating, dreamlike, believable. Where he lost me was the plot, though it's one of those rare books that finished better than it started. But I read the whole thing and here I am, still wondering if it's possible to have two interlaced cities existing in the same location. It reminded me of Toni Morrison—her description of a black city and a white city, both recognizable to their inhabitants but invisible to the others. And he did this very well.

A photo of the lovely Oregon City Arch Bridge that I ride my bike over once or twice a day depending on, well, stuff, okay? Sometimes it's cold in the morning. The Oregon Department of Transportation is considering closing the bridge for repairs for two years. It's enough to make a rational woman come to blows with one of those non-biking, tie-wearing government bureaucrats. Riding this bridge is the best part of my day. Some very good people including OC mayor Alice Norris and our own bike-riding commissioner Lynn Peterson are working toward a compromise.

Art Update

2009-08-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

How weird is this, people? Or person, since I'm pretty sure no one is reading this blog but me (and that's my fault, okay? I'm shy). In six days, I made twenty times more money off art than I ever have off writing. Two pieces have sold out of my show. All right, yes, my dad bought one—but it was real small and he was going to buy something anyway. The other one sold to—I think—friends, though they haven't 'fessed up.

On the one hand, I'm completely charmed. It's like magic. Melt some wax and smear it on a board and I've discovered this thing called encaustic. Who knew there was an actual name for it? And that it was 2000 years old? Though I worked hard and addressed a ton of technical issues in my rush to hang a show in a month, I never lost my sense of joyful disaster. It was not fun exactly, but it was completely absorbing. I still think about it all the time.

On the other hand, I have an MFA in writing, I've published several short stories. I have a novel I'm in the middle of rewriting. I write, that's my identity. So WTF? Let me repeat that: WTF?

Here's the thing. My brother, Jason and I, were constantly drawing, sculpting in clay and sometimes steel, and making vitrified porcelain enamel panels and tiles. Other projects as needed, though not so much painting. Jason was two years younger and his work always looked so precise and contained. To my eye, it looked really good. My work was wobbly and all over. I drew a lot of castles and horses. Our parents seemed to praise his work more than mine, and I eventually stopped doing art stuff. So years later, my brother is gone (a long story, for another time) and I'm having a glass of wine with the parents. By then I've been to Reed and pretty much set myself on the path that will eventually lead to my making $25 per story (whoo). One of the parents asks, inevitably, "why writing?" I reply, "Jason was so gifted visually. He was the one who had the talent." Their mouths drop open in unison. After stuttering, one of them says, "No, K, you were the one with the talent."

Note to other parents out there: Tell your kid before they become English majors at rigorous private colleges.

As I write the above story, I realize that I am still a kid, living in the world where if one kid has something it automatically means the other kid doesn't. Why couldn't both artists' kids have talent? As a child I couldn't fathom such a thing. It was an either/or. So I chose writing, which meant never doing visual art again.

Is everyone like this? Or have I been wrong-headed all my life?

Anyway, I still want to sell my book. I thought of this cool way to up-tension the whole thing. More about that later. In the meantime, someone I know just sold to Ellery Queen. No cheap rag there!

Revision/Rewritten image

2009-08-04T10:29:00.001-07:00

Here's a scan of a draft work on paper, where I was testing the materials and playing with my handwriting. There is only a small amount of wax on this. Mostly it is chalk and oil-based pencil, written, erased, rewritten and erased. The paint is black board paint. It has a velvety texture and very quickly isn't black anymore if you use chalk on it.

The text itself is a section from a short story called Lucky .003. During the course of the project, I tried all kinds of text. E-mails from friends and my replies, pieces of the current novel. Casual writing wasn't nearly as interesting as it was when I first opened the e-mail. The novel was way too stressful to play with. But the short stories had very condensed sentences with many nouns, and that worked best. This piece, for instance, is a list of stuff the story's protagonist finds in the desert sand. The word cat jumps out at me right now, which is much too specific.

I couldn't use dialogue, especially dialogue that was supposed to be funny. It all became a sad jumble of botched intentions. My favorite text was something I found on the last day, an unfinished description of my grandmother's house and neighborhood. I only did one piece with that text but I learned that using what I had visually rather than textually may solve some of the problems I had with the story idea.

This scan probably looks like a hot mess to most people. To me, it's a process piece and looks okay.

Returning to the true gen

2009-08-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

I've been busy this last three weeks trying to avoid my public profile. Why?

Ringworm—my daughter has it. Imagine a bi-polar artistic type on a 108 degree day with a spot of ringworm on her posterior—Welcome to Hell.
The heat—I like it and I don't like it. I only rode the bike twice last week. I'll ride today, and hope the vehicular insanity sharing the road with me has cooled down. Car drivers are nuts in the heat. Last night I saw a guy in a Suburban towing a boat (I don't know for boats, but this looked like the kind that eight people could have cocktails on comfortably) driving up and down our country road, making U-turns whenever and going really fast. I'm sure inside his a/c splendor he couldn't smell his frying brake pads. Garth Brooks was probably involved.
Art. The show opened on Saturday, another really hot day. I've been using beeswax on the panels which has the melting point of a friendly kiss. I'm concerned the panels will melt, run down the walls and become, if possible, even uglier than they are in their pristine state. I'm probably not the best judge of this work. To anyone who asks I declare that I'm not an artist. But my parents are/were both artists, which is like getting a jump start on what's cool, especially if you happen to like abstract art. Which I do. So there are some formal conventions that I can manage. Think monkey playing dress-up. But color is a complete mystery. I kept reaching for the tube of dark, dark blue because it was so dang pretty. Anyways, the show is up and live. Demonstrating yet again that I've wasted my life tilting at windmills, I spent Sunday reworking two more panels only to have R tell me he liked the original versions better. After that I took my paints and gave them to my daughter. No mo' visuals. One of the pieces I worked on Sunday was "Boat" which is based on e-mails between John F and Cheryl M. And I really do like it better now, so take that.
Met with the Yolas on Saturday and I'm happy to report they are all well, despite the fact that we haven't met as a group in about 500 years. The domain name has to be renewed--big $7. Is it worth it? No one seems to have the time to maintain a web presence (other than Dave who is so fiendish it really is like making a devil's pact—doubt me, check out the Yola Blog). The week I blog is different, of course.
Angel Season 5—have pity on me. I don't have television, right? I'm sure I've mentioned this. Years after Buffy finished I decided to watch. Now Angel. I've endured two dismal seasons, two pretty good seasons and here I am, finally, season 5. Spike. Need I say more? And Netflix, bless their little cotton socks, has a long wait notice on Disk 2. Started Dollhouse Season 1. I'm finally liking Eliza Dushku. She's older, her round face looks vulnerable, maybe a little worn.
What else? I got scammed by a fourteen year old wanker from the UK through my Paypal account. I haven't come up with suitable retribution yet. Maybe he'll be struck by lightening while I think of something.
Not writing. It isn't just blog silence for the last three weeks. It's been a complete blackout for all the literary arts. I didn't realize until this week that my twitchy, jumpy, skin crawlies was not-writing-related. Visual art doesn't sub for writing, though it has some trance-like qualities. The good drugs come from the keyboard.

A few little words

2009-07-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick update because I'm not inspired enough to write an entire paranoid, Toaster-Oven inspired post today. So I'm logging in with three things: Yola is posting this week on Yolawriters' blog. This version of the old gal is the one whose ring requires kissing. Her boots might want a little attention too.

My story is live on On The Premises, featuring a miracle of editing by Tarl. Thanks to those guys, especially the prompt payment!

In getting Madison ready for some submission or other, my old critique guru Dave Lewis completely re-designed page one. This is an example of the kind of thinking you just can't do for yourself:

------------------------
Our farm workers came from all over, wherever the wind blew them. Refugee camps, other farms, places where everyone had died but them. They'd all had jobs Before—stockbrokers, salesmen and housewives. Once we even had an airline pilot. They came and went, blown away by the same vague wind after a day, a week, a month. I got used to not remembering their names.

Except for Tierney. He was first one I ever saw with a book.
I was working during lunch, going from worker to worker and ladling water into their bowls. When Dad wasn't looking, I carried the bucket to Tierney and pretended I hadn't already brought him water that day. "Do you know how to read?"

Other than the book, he was just another stranger who'd come to the valley to work for Dad. But I liked his eyes when he glanced at me. Blue. He closed the book. "Do you?"

Dad came back from the barn. "Madison!"

"I learned how. What's the book called?"

He held it up. "It's a dictionary."
--------------------------------- end

Dave is that good. Check out earlier weeks of Yola for his fine hand.

And finally, I've had some new Madison ideas lately. Yes, I realize the novel is finished, but there continue to be issues that I know aren't resolved. Maybe I've been a little fearful. If I go into sequel mode (just pretend I didn't say that word, sequel. Sequel, sequel, sequel) I'd be an idiot to ride into that sunset as blind as I rode into this one.

Oh, right, the art show. Let's just be quiet about that for now. I'm shopping at Art Media today. That right, not Office Depot where they have beautiful, cheap paper and printer supplies. No, an art store where they have gesso, acrylic medium and rabbit glue. Who knows what this stuff is? Why is it so expensive? Everything about this project screams of pain.

Why I'm not a Visual Artist

2009-07-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

A big BTW, On The Premises is the magazine which picked up The Moon Dreams of Water and lauded it with an Honorable Mention. They pay real money and do real editing and best of all, they are a writer's dream of promptness. Highly recommend.

So, I was hanging out with my dad at Winestock last night. He's a sculptor with an amazing work ethic. Visit Lee's artwork here, if you are so inclined. We often discuss the differences between our two art forms—me with text, him with visual.

We talked about an artist's crisis of self confidence. Since it's daily life for me, I always thought it had to do with how little exposure I've had. The theory being that the more you publish the easier it is to have people read and judge your work, and the more objective you can be about it. No published writers have self confidence problems, right?

I'd never heard my dad talk about a crisis of confidence before. He's a mature artist and sells work all the time. I assumed it didn't happen to him.

Anyways, we discussed two issues. The first was how do you cope during a crisis of confidence. The second, more nebulous, what does it feel like when you can't cope? What saves you?

Unlike writers who can shut off the computer and stuff manuscripts out of sight in a drawer, visual artists can't always escape their work. My dad, for instance, has huge sculptures all around the place. And from every era of his life too. But even during dark times, he lives with the art. I think he has a mechanism, rather like my being able to read Stephanie Myers or watch Vin Diesel movies. He turns off critical functioning and simply stops looking.

Here's an example. Fortunately he doesn't read blogs, so I'm safe telling this story. For months he kept matches in a Christmas cookie tin with a really ugly Santa on it. I wondered if it had sentimental value or there was some sophisticated design element that I simply wasn't getting. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and asked him why he kept it. Didn't it bother him as an artist? He looked me like I was insane and said it didn't have a design on it at all. Imagery like that, ugly and mass produced, isn't really art so he doesn't see it. It's just a tin holding his matches.

Okay, that's part one of the conversation, how to cope. Part two is more complicated and I'm just going to lay out the problem. What happens when you can't cope with your own work? When you can't stop judging yourself and every piece of your work looks cowardly, needy, unfinished, and amateurish? When those little flaws you thought supported or balanced your PERFECT idea have taken over the piece like some kind of virulent mold? When you can't even see your idea in that rancid stew, and very possibly your first draft dashed off on a napkin was the only thing worth keeping?

Imagine if you will, taking these deformed tadpole ideas and hanging them on a white wall, in front of big windows, where women in $400 shoes walk by and peer in, and couples in beige enter with their wallets aglow? Sometimes there are openings where hundreds of these people and all their critical friends troop past your work and say…nothing at all. What are they thinking? Are they comparing it to last year's show? Do they see that spot where the paint dripped? Oh, God, I can't fix it.

The idea of exposing yourself to the world in this frame of mind makes me weak, nauseous, hollow, panicked, and crazy. Hell on earth, people! And that's why I'm not a visual artist.

I do not know how Lee copes. He says he continues to see something of interest in his work during these times. And we both agreed that no matter how bad it gets, being an artist is the most interesting and absorbing thing anyone can do. I'd call it a career, but writing/making art really isn't a career. It's an occasionally profitable entry in the DSM.

I think—don't quote me on this since you know I'm not overly exposed in the word game—hypnotism might come in handy as a coping mechanism. Or a monstrous ego. Or extremely developed marketing skills. Lee says that falling back on training and craft and skill doesn't hurt either.

Or chocolate and television.

The secret reason for this post is that in August guess what? I'll be making visual art and hanging it on walls in a public place where people not related to me will see it. In a wine-soaked moment, my evil bad self volunteered for this torture. Winestock in OC starting August 1.

Atmosphere Is Not Plot

2009-07-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

Things have been quiet in the mailbox lately which has given me a lot of time to ponder. I heard back on one contest, where I received an honorable mention and the story will get published. Nice. My Duotrope stats can crawl out of the basement. AND I doubled my writing income for 2009. I was so worried I wouldn't be able to afford a Mocha Frappuccino this summer.

I'm almost done with my AA short story. I have a theory that everyone has to write about rehab/AA, the apocalypse and time travel once in their lives. I really like my AA story, but I can tell you right now I've invested too much time in the voice at the expense of pacing. Why do I do it? Because I'm so f-ing in love with my own powers of creation. My lead character is Ronnie, a down on her luck real estate agent who meets a guy who reminds her of her dead ex-boyfriend. I suppose dead means ex, right? Dead boyfriend.

Characters as big and brassy as Ronnie chafe in the short story format. The page count goes up to accommodate the snappy dialogue and huge sections of plot are buried to keep the page count down. It's happened before. In another story, about this lonely slacker dude, I focused the first draft almost exclusively on his slacker voice. I massively rewrote to achieve a balance but other readers still felt I'd undersold the plot. I didn't actually care what other readers thought. In the end, however, I caved and it didn't take much to make it work. There was only one tiny change I wouldn't have made.

Here's where I could go off on a rant about the sanctity of the author's intent, how it really was my story and no one edited Jack Kerouac like that. Yes, all true. I had put some serious hours into the slacker dude story and I had also let it rest for five or six months. That's enough time for me to be objective again. But it got rejected twice in its finished form and when it was finally picked up, I was happy to make the suggested revisions because I could see the reward at the end of the tunnel. Fame and fortune, here I am.

But this experience, and the fact that I will have the same experience again with Ronnie, has caused me to ponder. What have I really learned about myself? How can I write faster, edit more effectively, and let go of cuteness sooner?

Stop me if you've heard this before:

Planning the plot ahead of time REALLY helps. If I know I have to hit certain marks at certain times, I can maintain a reasonable pace.
Know the goal. If my goal is to create a character sketch with dialogue, stick with that goal. In other words, know what shape I want the piece to take. This has more to do with voice and tone than plot.
Atmosphere is not plot. It really isn't. No, no, no.

More about atmosphere, in which I return inevitably to Lovecraft: In his short stories, atmosphere is what the plot grows out of. It's never a sunny day in Lovecraft. He asks a question in the beginning of each story, a question which is inevitably bound to the setting and atmosphere. One of the benefits of writing the same story over and over again until you DIE is that you eventually get this right.

Cuteness. I really don't have a solution to cuteness or to my shameless love of my own creative awesomeness except surgery or amnesia. Maybe both. Cut out my brain and make me forget I ever wrote that story.

How Long Do Tires Last?

2009-06-23T14:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a question that came up recently in a Madison rewrite and reminded me of a similar question in Earth Abides. How long do rubber tires take to decompose? How long are they usable?

Naturally, these are two different questions.
1. How long does rubber exist as a discrete compound?
2. How long do rubber tires hold air and maintain their integrity?

The guys at Tire Tech Information present findings from several manufacturers. To quote:

"How many years will tires last before aging out? Unfortunately it's impossible to predict when tires should be replaced based on their calendar age alone."

Many things contribute to the wear of tires including usage, environmental conditions, sunlight and pollution. For instance, going at top speed may wear out the tires, but not using them at all may also damage them. Living near the ocean is bad for tires, but so is living in places with lots of air pollution. I would guess that driving or parking near industrial areas would be bad for tires. You should see the cars driven by paper mill employees in my town. Hardly a lick of paint is left on the hoods of these cars. Imagine what it does to the rest of the vehicle.

The British Rubber Manufacturers' recommendations as quoted by Tire Tech:

"Environmental conditions like exposure to sunlight and coastal climates, as well as poor storage and infrequent use, accelerate the aging process. In ideal conditions, a tyre may have a life expectancy that exceeds ten years from its date of manufacture. However, such conditions are rare."

In Madison, usable tires are hard to find but still available. This is Oregon, one of the sweetest climates for automobiles. No salt on the roads, no excessive heat. Very little sunshine (not today, thank goodness). So I push for the upper end of tire usability—ten years and a little after.

Since bicycle tires aren't as heavily bonded to other materials, are easier to maintain, and their use isn't as extreme, I would guess they last more than ten years.

Rubber itself lasts a very long time. In fact, we don't know exactly how long it lasts or when it decomposes, since we've only been throwing it in our landfills for a little over a hundred years. This is a good reminder when visualizing what's left in the PA world. Evidently, tires will be breeding mosquitoes in ditches and junkyards forever. Think about the reefs that were supposedly "stabilized" with old tires. The stupid things are still there after decades, grinding away all life. Go here to read what recyclers say about tires.

I had a very kind and thoughtful rejection from an agent today—timely too, if anyone's paying attention. It's given me a lot to think about, and I may have more to say such things later. In the meantime, Yola is holding forth on her blog, cracking the whip and being generally disgraceful. Go kiss the ring and debase yourself in whatever way you think she'd like.

Revision or Why I Keep So Many Drafts

2009-06-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

Revision.
Everyone has ideas, but good ones…oh, they come from the source. Like most writers, I have ideas that exist in all their platonic beauty on the upper shelf, where I can't quite reach them. We love to talk about where ideas come from, but it's harder to talk about how and why the final object comes out looking so plain when the idea is still sitting on the shelf glowing. I have short stories that take years to complete. Maybe I'm waiting for the moment the idea loses its power over me so that I can focus on what's good enough about the story.

Anyway, we're not going to talk about the idea triumvirate—getting them, keeping them, letting them go. What I'd like to resolve for myself is how revision can support a good idea or kill it. Also known as Why I Keep So Many Drafts.

I'm going to use the first paragraphs of Madison as an example. As I've said before, I wrote this novel in a white heat last summer. It shows.

From June 28, 2008:
Cooksey wasn't memorable except for the fact he could read. The first time I noticed him we were all on lunch break and he had a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire open on his lap.

I walked over. "Do you think it's an apt comparison?"

He looked up at me, one more stringy-haired, beat stranger who'd come to the valley to work for my dad. "Have you read it?"

"Saw the movie."

"Madison!" yelled Dad. He never liked us talking to the migrants.

What did I know, as the author that you can't see in the text? This is a PA world and there are no movies. Madison is the most popular baby name for 2008. Madison is a girl. At this point I didn't know who Cooksey was or why Dad was so grouchy about migrants. What was the most important thing about this for me? Madison is curious, mouthy, a little rebellious. I was working on her voice.

-----------------
From September 1, 2008, the first time my critique group saw it:

In a world with no television, people ought to be reading. That was my opinion. Yet I never saw anyone do it until a migrant named Tierney pulled out a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and started to read it during lunch break.

I carried the water bucket over to him. "Do you think it's an apt comparison?"

He looked up, one more stringy-haired, beat stranger who'd come to the valley to work for Dad. "Have you read it?"

"Saw the movie."

"Madison!" yelled Dad. He never liked us talking to the migrants.

The lead male has a new name. I use Cooksey for another character in the book so it's not lost. Still love the name. And honestly? Even now I'm not sure I like Tierney. It has an ambiguous pronunciation and it's Irish which seems like overkill since my last name is too. I just don't know.

I'm still married to the book in this version. What did I like about it? I had in mind an old Everyman edition, cloth cover, red, with gold lettering. Foxed pages. In my childhood home the Everymans were on the highest, dustiest shelf. It would probably be among the last books you'd burn if you were freezing to death. Also, it reminded me of my father, a little personal Easter egg for him so he'd know I'd been paying attention as a child.

The movie thing—well, I knew it was going to be a joke later on when readers understood there hadn't been a film industry in ten years. What I liked about it was Madison's punchy, ironic yet juvenile response. That was the essence I wanted when I wrote the line and the reason I kept it through two drafts (that or laziness).

Beat is still here, beat in the original beatnik sense, which I imagined might make a comeback in a PA world. And if it didn't, I was going to make it come back by using it 500 times throughout the novel. I was riding that dead horse but good.

What's good? "I carried the water bucket over to him." This action raises a lot of questions. It's the first tool we see in the book. And M. is doing something besides running her mouth.

What's bad? "That was my opinion." If there's one thing you don't need in a first person narrative, that would be it. But I'm still voice building so I forgive myself. Notice I kept the equally pedantic line about an apt comparison. I'm in love with my PA world and I'm writing too much. But M's smart and that's important to me—and her. The line is a place-holder for the perfect smart question that will arrive as if by magic from my crit partners.

--------------
From January 31, 2009:

The first time I saw anyone read a book on the farm was when a man named Tierney pulled out a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire during lunch break.

When Dad wasn't looking, I carried the water bucket over to him. "Do you know how to read?"

He wasn't much, just one more stringy-haired stranger who'd come to the valley looking for work. "Do you?"

"Madison!" yelled Dad. He never liked me talking to men.

"I learned." I ladled water into Tierney's bowl and went to the next person.

This is very close to a final version. I've still got the Everyman in the first para, but I've removed the preachy opening line, the movie reference, and beat. I feel like M is responding to something she might actually see in her life—a guy a reading—and she's asking a question she might really want to know the answer to.

By now, I have finished writing the novel and I don't feel like I have to prove anything on the first page. Just tell the story.

Also, I switched out the word migrant. I hit that word hard in the next para, so I don't care about making a point here. What's important to me is M's tiny act of rebellion—she says something to Tierney after dad calls her off.

-------------

From April or May 2009:

The first time I saw anyone read on the farm was when a man named Tierney pulled a book from his back pocket during lunch break.

When Dad wasn't looking, I carried the water bucket over to him. "Do you know how to read?"

He wasn't much to look at, another stranger who'd come to the valley looking for work. But I liked his eyes. Blue. "Do you?"

Dad came back from the barn. "Madison!" He didn't like me talking to the help, especially men.

"I learned how." I ladled water into Tierney's bowl. "What's the book called?"

He uncurled the paper cover. "It's a dictionary."

"Madison, what does it take?" yelled Dad. "An engraved invitation?"

Dictionary. I carried the bucket to the next person. I'd never seen one of those.

The Everyman is gone. No one cares but me anyway. Even my father probably won't care—he'll be too busy wondering why Dad in my book is such a loudmouth.

Blue eyes, no stringy hair. He's the romantic lead, okay? Other people have to fall in love with him too, especially the author. When I made this change, I built up the romance in the rest of the book. Maybe I was swallowing a bitter pill, but there have to be BIG motivations for these people.

Now we see that Dad was away and has just come back—when the cat's away the mice will play. Tierney has a bowl for his water, not a cup. What kind of place is this? And the big change—a dictionary. I still may be a little enamored of this idea so don't be surprised if I cut it later. Books are rare in this world, reading isn't taught. For an educated man like Tierney, a dictionary might be a precious object. Words themselves might be precious. And how many times have we all tossed aside some battered paperback Websters in this world? Think about paperbacks and plastic water bottles and Styrofoam takeout containers. Might they have value in a PA world?

And over all, this little scene has two more lines of dialogue. It's more of a conversation now and it lasts a tiny bit longer. I am trusting these people to do and say what they want to advance the story.

Have I preserved the idea through all these rewrites? Yes and no. Madison is not exactly a mouthy smartass in this last iteration. I haven't rung any PA bells. Instead, I've established a few key elements that I hope will grow in the rest of the story:

There is something off about this reality.
Tierney is attractive.
Madison is curious and bold.
Dad gets angry a little too quickly.
It's a farm.

One idea is started and completed: That's a book. Do you read? Yes, I learned how.

Lesson over. What am I reading? I finished The Sparrow. What a book! I highly recommend it. I'm now reading the third Moe Prager. It's just, yeah. I love Reed Farrell Coleman. I love the idea of RFC. I adore Moe. But, hmm.

HP Lovecraft, Spatial Explicity

2009-06-11T16:24:00.000-07:00

Here's something I never thought I'd do in public: discuss HP Lovecraft.

I was driven to do this because I just finished The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. It is a big, attractive hardcover release about vampires. These are your worm-like, Klaus Kinski / 'Salem's Lot vampires. Klaus is insanely beautiful AND does a good Nosferatu. Not everyone can do that.

(CUT long para describing the three species of vampires and their complete literary history)

The Strain is another telling of the Bram Stoker classic. Think of it as CSI Dracula. I couldn't put it down until, oh, about half way through when it turns into Hot Zone Dracula. One infection after another. No surprise that the vampires are going to get ahead of the silly humans, right? Still, there are some nice touches in the book.

What does this have to do with Lovecraft? The evil nemesis is named Eldritch. By using this fine old Lovecraft word, I believe the authors were trying to summon the idea of The Old Ones, and apply it to their equally old master vampire. But by starting with the Dracula story I, the reader, could not shake my preconceptions of previous vampire masters from other novels and movies. In this I was not disappointed. The new boss was the same as the old.

So this got me thinking about why the Lovecraft reference didn't work in this context, and I came up with two conclusions. The first is the most obvious: By giving the vampire master in The Strain so many walk-ons, he was scary but he certainly wasn't mysterious or unknown. The second observation is that Lovecraft fiction is always spatially explicit. More about that in a minute.

How do you know when you're reading Lovecraft?
Others can summarize far better, but I recognize HPL when I read about the existence of a horror from beyond that influences and feeds upon human society, yet remains mostly hidden until some bright guy follows a thread that leads to ultimate knowledge. This knowledge includes the futility and meaningless of human life in the face of this indestructible force. After the revelation, our bright guy is insane.

(CUT self-serving para about how serial killer porn is a form of HPL.)

In the viral model of vampire lit, vampires quickly overwhelm their host community, they're lurking on every threshold and chaos reigns but vampires are for the most part visible and easy to kill. Even the master can be killed. A call to arms results in a final cleansing, and even if some survive, we still have the refuge of daylight. It's essentially hopeful, and so is The Strain (despite the fact the authors are promising two more of these books). I would not say that Lovecraft is hopeful, except for the notion that knowledge of the true nature of the world is always better than ignorance.

Let's look at this spatial, geographical issue. In Lovecraft there is another world, an unsafe world, cocooned within ours. Maybe it's underground, in sub-basements. Maybe it's in some twisted streets in a bad part of town that you could swear weren't there yesterday. Maybe it's Antarctica—inaccessible to most but very much a part of our world. But in each story, it's a real place and the evil inhabits it.

A modern author who owns the Lovecraft geography is Peter Straub. Sometimes it is just a scent, while in other novels he dives in. But it is always present, a delicate awareness of place that exists outside our daily awareness. Straub is probably the only author who's given me dreams. Note I didn't say bad dreams. Just dreams… because I want to find those places too.

Anne Rice does good geography and atmosphere, but it is not hidden or unknown. Like her vampires, the places are normal because the vampires make them normal. The Strain attempts to define territory by using the subway system under the ruins of the World Trade Center, and making a point about how vampires are drawn to places of tragedy and evil. But the geography was predictable. Nasty, but not inhuman. The chance the authors had to inculcate that place with powerful evil was lost, even though they had modern tragedy at their finger tips.

Another guy who does great spatial evil is Mikal Gilmore in Shot in the Heart. Every place he talks about has a dreamy, Lovecraftian sense of disorientation. I'm familiar with many of the Oregon locations. They are truly haunted for me now, as if the tragedy had been present all along and I just hadn't seen it.

From a writer's point of view, setting does half the work of characterization. Say the words Derry, Carpathia, Crouch End. You know where you are. The Eldritch name set me up to expect perilous dis-location, when The Strain is a more traditional vampire story.

Who is my favorite vampire of all time? The terrifying and dangerously sexy Gary Oldman. Every girl needs a guy like that to lure her away from hearth and home.

Done and Doneness

2009-06-04T11:36:00.000-07:00

Another week of checking the inbox 50 times a day. I'm beginning to train myself off the blogs and back to the NYT site. Yesterday I scrolled through the book section and read the BEA article. Small steps, right?

I added another five submissions to the seven that were already out. Since they were all on my list, not spontaneous screams in the wilderness, I feel a restful sense of accomplishment. I've gotten three rejections, two extremely timely and the other within the limits posted on the web site.

In re: Madison. Don't get me wrong, I may be temporarily finished with revision but it still needs attention. Because I'm so invested in it, the world, the characters, the direction of the novel, I find that revision is like peeling an onion. The more I revise, the more is revealed. I had a moment when I realized something I wrote six months ago is a great idea that could—without much tweaking—change the entire novel into exactly what I wanted it to be. It's so cool. Since I can't remember what I thought I was saying when I originally wrote it, I don't know if I was trying for this, or if my subconscious snuck one in.

Met with the Yolas on Saturday and they pointed out some motivational issues. Now that's the kind of thing I should have caught before I decided the novel was done! Madison is not complicated structurally, but it does seem like a hydra. Or Whac-a-Mole. Nail one thing down, another pops up. Put like this I don't know if it will ever be done done.

So let's talk about doneness.

Every writing/editing/agenting site rails on about not submitting until a project is done. Although this is very good advice, and not always easy to follow, I struggle with the definition:

Done is what, exactly? Is it two complete drafts and a polish? After the last read, the novel stands? Okay, I know the answer to this question, but it's important to note that done is a relative thing, shifting its definition from day to day. Even a first draft can be a done thing when it demonstrates the scope and depth of an idea. Not a done novel, but certainly a done idea.

Then there are times when everything looks like crap and the concept of a finished product is as alien as fish on the moon.

Finally there's trust. You simply have to get up one morning and decide that the only person you are going to trust with the big stuff is yourself. Am I a good enough writer? Does this novel do what I want? You are the only one who can—or should—answer these questions. Done is when you say it's done.

I can go back and forth about it. Because writers need readers. Too much critiquing from your worthy writing partners can suck the life out of almost anything. If it can be killed, they'll kill it. Maybe someone suggests you have zombies on the first page which is not a bad idea, all books should. Just not YOUR book. Maybe you see the confusion on their little faces and realize you have been writing in Sanskrit this whole time. But a good group will engage at both the idea level and the grammatical level. Hence the notes about Madison and motivation, a kickable offense but not one that's hard to fix.

So, is Madison done? Two drafts, a polish and a read by others would indicate that by most standards it's sort of done. But I still have an uneasy feeling about it, like I left the stove on. Maybe because I did a very (for me) risky thing. I left a lot of questions unanswered. I didn't hang an HEA on it. Not that the characters haven't earned it. Maybe it's the unfinished nature of the world, or the fact that so many people die. I just don't think an HEA is a fair summation of the experience. For me or them. (By the way, I'm not saying the main characters don't get what they want in the end. They do, all of them.)

Still, I don't entirely trust my judgment about the ending. Maybe I will someday. This is where I say Madison is done as far as everyone else is concerned, but not for me. Not yet.

What am I reading? I made it to page 160 of The Sparrow. It's the kind of book where a lot is happening but when I look at the page number, I realize I've barely cracked it. Maybe I'm getting a little crush on Emilio Sandoz. He's real cute. Love is a beautiful thing.

Dispatches from the Toaster-Oven

2009-05-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

The plasma shield is firmly in place over my inbox again. Who keeps doing this to me? I have seven story submissions out in the world. Two are contests. I never do contests, and here's why:

Contests cost money.
Stay-at-home-moms always win.
I was never good at standardized tests.
Waiting for the results is so much fun.

These contests were at least free, which is how I got suckered into it. It's not like I haven't won contests in the past. Winning, sadly, gave me an inflated sense of my own accomplishment that was inversely equal to the sense of failure I got from losing other contests. I quit contests about the time I stopped financing a certain high tone literary 'zine with my contest submissions. Reading fee, anyone?

Another submission out right now is just like a contest, as there is only one slot in the issue. Did I know it was a last man standing sort of thing? Probably. But I sent it during one of those times that seem to creep up on me when I realized, idiot, you don't have anything out there in the world. Better send something somewhere RIGHT NOW. I wonder if this happens to other writers, this brown-colored boredom with one's Duotrope stats that can suddenly erupt into a full-blown career emergency.

And you'd think, with such a casual beginning, the submission would maintain a kind of easy impact on the psyche. "Did I submit this old thing to that old magazine? I forgot all about it! Now you're sending this little ol' check to moi?"

That never happens to me. I'm much more likely to have the submission grow in the dark like a mushroom until it is the only thing I can think about, night or day. While my friend is discussing supreme court justices over dinner, I've got a frozen smile fixed in place and I'm thinking, "Why won't he shut up and realize I'm waiting for an e-mail? The contest is over in FIVE DAYS and if I can't check my mail RIGHT NOW I'm going to DIE."

One might be tempted to suggest that the Toaster-Oven People have completely taken over at this point.

Anyway, what am I reading? Just finished The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks. Lest you think I hate all science fiction trilogies (starting with the concept of trilogies) let me tell you, this is a good, readable piece of popular literature. The tone is William Gibson lite: quiet, observant, meticulous. The ideas are easy to grasp but complex and resonant. I liked both Gabriel and Michael as characters. I saw their motivation, understood their goals. Maya, who is a very engaging construct, seemed in some ways the least developed. She had a life before she was drawn back into the role of a harlequin. She seemed to switch over too easily. I wondered what impacts her normal life had on her harlequin life. Just my opinion. Maybe the story is more about Gabriel anyway. The fact that I have to ask who the main character is. . . well, anyhow, I really liked it.

Now I'm starting The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. No comments yet, though something tells me there might be religious overtones.

This has been fun but I really need to check my e-mail.

Food Supply after the Apocalypse

2009-05-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

I did a little trolling last night for food references. My daughter, while eating sliced pepperoni out of a bag, said that she didn't worry about not having pepperoni after the apocalypse because, "This packaged s**t will last forever." Maybe she's right; we know from Lost that Saltines last at least fifteen years, and everyone has heard that Twinkies are indestructible.

But what do we really know about our food supply? The following are some references I gleaned from various places. Warning: this is a long post.

Let's start with canned goods.

From an undisclosed web site:
"Canned food has a shelf life of at least two years from the date of processing. Canned food retains its safety and nutritional value well beyond two years, but it may have some variation in quality, such as a change of color and texture. Canning is a high-heat process that renders the food commercially sterile. Food safety is not an issue in products kept on the shelf or in the pantry for long periods of time. In fact, canned food has an almost indefinite shelf life at moderate temperatures (75° F and below). Canned food as old as 100 years has been found in sunken ships and it is still microbiologically safe! We don't recommend keeping canned food for 100 years, but if the can is intact, not dented or bulging, it is edible."

Of course I don't know about the can of creamed corn I found in a rural cabin when I was nine. That was pure evil.

Here's the link to whole article: http://76.205.182.70/cpca/Planning_and_Preparedness/Individual_and_Family_Preparedness/Food_and_Water/Shelf_Life_Info.pdf

If the food in cans is still good, how about the way we eat now? How do our current eating habits prepare us for the PA world? This from Answers.com:

"Americans are more likely to recognize food products than the specific ingredients in the seemingly endless array of products on supermarket shelves (some supermarkets stock over forty thousand different items). Fast-food outlets—a McDonald's, Taco Bell, or a Subway sandwich shop—are more recognizable than a steer, hog, chicken, or a bushel of wheat.

"By the end of the twentieth century, the U.S. was unable to visualize the source of its food supply from an agricultural perspective, that is, in terms of basic food groups, because a majority no longer live on farms. Instead, food had become an endless array of food products typically found on supermarket shelves, especially those that stock over forty thousand individual items. Most such foods are processed and packaged, and few are sold in bulk as was common sixty years ago. Nearly all were shipped from distant places, packaged in large containers, transported to huge warehouse storage facilities close to cities and metropolises, and trucked from there to be unpacked and displayed on supermarket shelves.

"Consumers were working more, earning more, and willing to pay more for convenience and for appliances like the microwave, which made convenience foods more convenient. By the end of the twentieth century, only one in three U.S. consumers said their food budget was a primary consideration in food purchases, while the other two said service and convenience topped their list."

Only one in three. Here's a link to the whole article: http://www.answers.com/topic/food-supply-food-shortages

Wikipedia article on food supply systems:
"However, conventional food systems are largely based on the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels, which is necessary for mechanized agriculture, the manufacture or collection of chemical fertilizers, the processing of food products, and the packaging of the foods. Industrialized agriculture, due to its reliance on economies of scale to reduce production costs, often leads to the compromising of local, regional, or even global ecosystems through fertilizer runoff, nonpoint source pollution, and greenhouse gas emission. Also, the need to reduce production costs in an increasingly global market can cause production of foods to be moved to areas where economic costs (labor, taxes, etc.) are lower or environmental regulations are more lax, which are usually further from consumer markets."

More stats for the curious: Who goes hungry in the U.S. now?

From Bread for the World:

35.5 million people—including 12.6 million children—live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents more than one in ten households in the United States (10.9 percent).
4.0 percent of U.S. households experience hunger. Some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. 11.1 million people, including 430 thousand children, live in these homes.
6.9 percent of U.S. households are at risk of hunger. Members of these households have lower quality diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they cannot always afford the food they need. 24.4 million people, including 12.2 million children, live in these homes.

Wikipedia article on the food supply. Read the section on dictatorships and kleptocracies for the political causes of food insecurity and links to poverty.

What does it mean?
In my PA world (this is fiction, you know), in the absence of devastating nuclear or other global catastrophes, the capacity to grow food still exists, much as it did before. We are faced with a diminished human population which, in the near term, means that the existing food supply—canned and dry goods—are enough for a while. I don't know how long. Because all distribution networks have been interrupted, the food re-supply stops. In every community, especially in rural areas where some form of agriculture used to exist, people will attempt to grow food again almost immediately. With varying results. Old fossil-fuel-based farming methods no longer exist, so there would be a return to animal and human-based methods. This limits field size, but may increase diversity of crops. I don't know how long it would take for a community to be able to grow enough food to support itself—maybe three to five years, in temperate locations with decent rainfall. Maybe not in Scottsdale or Nome, Alaska. With intact communities who develop some farming success, I would guess that trade opportunities would grow as well. And with farming success and trade opportunities come the many ways other people can exploit and control the food source.

This where Madison, After begins. Ten years after the apocalypse, in a rural setting.

What I haven't been able to source is how long the US's existing food supply would last for our current population, if all distribution suddenly stopped. Two weeks? Three weeks? Longer? I'm not sure it can be calculated, given the different decay rates of perishables. If someone knows, please drop me a note.

Dentistry PA

2009-05-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

This is a quick update from the rewrite wars. Madison is well, though she enters a dark place. As I go more deeply into this draft, I've noticed two important changes I am compelled to make.

I am emphasizing certain themes that seemed too trivial or obvious during earlier drafts. The example I'm thinking of is the role of women in the PA world. The other is Madison's attitude toward marriage. I understood both internally, but I felt if I hit the themes too hard in the beginning, I would be preaching. And there were other things about Madison and her world that I did not know and needed to explore. But going back to it, I can seed these issues lightly.
Madison is dealing with more difficult situations. Sometimes it's tighter, more confrontational dialogue. Because I know more about the whole story, I can point conflict in the right direction. In the example I mentioned earlier, it is to have Madison do something almost unforgiveable, for which she feels no remorse. The scene has always been in the novel, but now I'm shaving away the soft parts and letting it stand as it is. I want to show that she has given up her humanity in order to save her family. I love the scene and I hope it works.

Anyway, I'm heading into the home stretch. It's as good as I've ever seen it.

While I slave away, here are some notes from my dental appointment yesterday! I know, who cares, right? Except the whole teeth-in-the-PA-world thing bothers me a great deal. Most writers don't address it. Why would they? Unless you're writing Marathon Man 2050, you don't want to go there. Harry Turtledove is almost the only guy who mentions teeth, and he said something about dental health not being good in the primitive alternates. Is he right? I asked my hygienist. Disclaimer: these are my notes and whatever I got wrong is not the fault of my wonderful and intelligent dental health professional. I spent most of my time shuddering and climbing the walls during the appointment.

PA Dentistry

In a world without soda and fruit juice and very little, if any, sugar, teeth would have much less decay. People who had a lot of fillings and dental work Pre-A would still be vulnerable to splits and breaks in their teeth. Fillings can weaken the teeth because tooth is extracted and refilled, thus compromising tooth integrity. Fillings, bridge work and crowns could also fall out. People born PA would not have the exposure to soda and juice and their teeth would be much stronger with very little, if any, decay. There would be fewer breaks, almost no cavities. I forgot to ask about wisdom teeth.

On the other hand, periodontal issues are much more dependent on a person's genetics. Perio disease (gingivitis, periodontitis, both chronic and aggressive) is plaque growing and spreading below the gum line. A person's genetic predisposition would not be helped or altered by the environment. As plaque grows and spreads under the gum line, it causes inflammation, swelling and bleeding and inflammatory response, where the body turns on itself, and the issues that support teeth are destroyed. Bone and tooth loss results.

Also of interest, your gums are extremely sensitive to stress and hormonal changes.
Enjoy!

Bye to Harry

2009-05-07T16:57:00.000-07:00

Work has taken over more of my life than usual. I'm thinking about it at home which cuts into my Madison time. Advancement of the week: I realized two characters needed to be combined into one. It made me consider the way support characters help the lead characters achieve their goals. This is not always obvious during early drafts. Sometimes you need six months and a glass of wine to see it. More in a minute.

Firstly, though, Harry. This week I read a book about addiction, called, what else, Addiction, One Patient, One Doctor, One Year. It was pretty good, though the guy is in love with his profession and not nearly curious enough about his patients. After that, I read an Earl Emerson single title which deserves a post of its own. I'm a big EE fan, especially the genre stuff. I've never met EE but the worst thing that could happen is that EE might find out a fan, me, doesn't like his most recent. Let's just say he's not being well-served by his career choices. When all this was done and I'd hurled Earl, there was Harry Turtledove. I finished it. Here are a couple of observations:

Weapons in a PA world. He is very thorough in his research, painstaking about the function and use of guns. I appreciate this.

Visualization. He's got a very good eye for buildings, rubble, and vehicles. So much of PA is imagining what these things look like after 1, 20, 130 years. The other part is imagining how people adapt and rebuild. He's good at this.

Bored out of my mind. Yet. . . everything is spelled out in big letters in this story. There is no real conflict, I was never afraid for these characters. Then there is the small matter of an over-determined father-daughter relationship. Could almost be a little creepy.

Uninformed reader. I was looking for a photo of Harry so I could stick pins in it. There's no photo on the jacket. That's when I discovered the words "Young Adult" in the blurb. It explains so much—the dull conversation, the weird focus on muskets, the way he hammered every point as if there might be a test later. I get it, he was writing down. I take back all the nasty things I said about the guy. It's a fine YA novel. It's funny, it presents some good ideas. It's not Cormac McCarthy scary.

Why does knowing it is a YA novel suddenly make all my earlier complaints meaningless? YA could be something else. It could be Snowcrash. Any age, any speed, any gender.

Had I the world enough and time, I'd demonstrate my new trick, courtesy of Edittorrent. It's really cool.

7. Madison and her plot

2009-04-24T12:17:00.000-07:00

What am I reading? Mary Robeson, One DOA, One on the Way. Calling this woman the queen of snark is only half the truth. She's also an amazing short story writer. When she writes a novel, look out. The world is on fire.

The trouble with Harry. Harry Turtledove is still sitting on the floor next to my bed, under Sherlock Holmes, volumes one and two, next to the complete Lovecraft. No, I haven't finished it yet!

Madison. Grrr. While my life is grinding to a halt around Madison and her perils of Pauline existence, let me show this photo of my daily load. The pale yellow one wards off the toaster oven people, but all the rest are to keep me vibrating at a lower level. And believe me, Madison and I really need it.

I'm editing ahead of this blog, probably as far as page 250. At page 200, I had a Big Plot Reveal. I was sweating the rewrites because the entire novel hangs on the BPR. If it didn't work, nothing was going to work. Genre fiction isn't given to unpredictability and this BPR is bughouse nuts. Readers were going to love it or hate it. No middle ground.

The BPR seemed to work! My critique group, Yolawriters, didn't offer to rip up the pages and light them on fire. I was bemused, becalmed, behooved. And okay, a little bewitched by my own awesome plotting ability. It's a gift. Some people are just born with it.

So, being awesome, I pushed off other plot problems to a later time. You know, like page 250? That's where I am today, stuck in a vortex of indecision, having rewritten the Big Romantic Reveal every day this week. When I write it the new way, the BRR is a knife plunged in the heart. It's operatic. It's staggering and heartbreaking. When I rewrite it the old way, it works okay, kinda slow but okay, and the rest of the novel follows the outline like well-trained soldiers. But the novel feels. . . joyless. There, I said it, yeah people. When I follow the outline, the novel is a joyless, post-apocalyptic wasteland.

While I start a massive rewrite of the last 50 pages, let's remember Madison from a simpler time.

6.2 The action scene I was afraid of

2009-04-14T13:24:00.000-07:00

Finally, the rest of the chapter. I was caught in a vortex of web issues while my critique partners and I got Yola Writers on line. It's not finished, though my page is at least representational.

What am I reading? Something wretched and ooky. I'm ashamed to admit it. Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain. I picked it up because it's set in Portland and. . . well, the Lives of the Artists had bummed me out so badly I needed this. Isn't there more than one woman in the entire world who is worthy of consideration, Calvin? Though Sweetheart hits the thriller marks like clockwork, there is something interesting about Archie. It may help that I haven't read the first one in the series, and I can invest extra time imagining what happened during the ten days he was the captive of the serial killer. If I'm going to read a thriller, it's usually Nicci French.

Rejections. Yes, I finally got one from Strange Horizons. It was personalized and brief, but I savored the sting. This will bring my Duotrope stats down to average. Sadly.

I was afraid of posting this chapter, all right? It's the action scene. I feel it and I love it, but I know I'm not adding anything new to the world of action. Moving people around on paper is hard enough--how many times can you say "he stood up" or "she got in the car" without wanting to switch to poetry? It's text filler that readers don't really see and yet adds to the feeling of things happening in a real-life sort of way. It's important to do it right. Then imagine accelerating it in a car chase or a life and death situation where every word matters and people are dying out there. There are writers who do this incredibly well. I spent a week thinking I was not one of those writers and then I re-read this bit and found myself tearing through it without editing. It got a little tense for me.

-------------------

Tierney emptied the cardboard boxes of cans and one by one slid the cans between the seat and the back wall of the truck cab. The last dozen or so he returned to a box and loaded in the back of the truck. He tucked the ammo under the driver's seat, the two hand guns in the glove box, and threw our extra clothes on top of the hidden cans.

"It won't stand up to a real search," he said. "But it might buy us a little time."

"Search by who? I haven't seen a checkpoint in days."

"People live away from the cities."

"Well, I hope they're more talkative than you."

We left the dead city behind us. The weather stayed cold and rain beaded on the windshield, only to be dispersed by windshield wipers scraping across the glass. Tierney turned on the heat and a warm, dusty breeze blew over my feet. For a while I was happy. Other than the occasional downed tree or snarl of branches and mud, there was very little garbage in the road.

At noon, Tierney slowed down as a checkpoint came into view. It was the usual (ubiquitous, Madison) collection of cars piled on top of one another. Two moss-encrusted trailers were squatting to one side, smoke curling from the top of one. When we stopped the truck I smelled sewage.

"Gross. No outhouse."

"Stay in the truck."

"I know the drill. I got it, okay?" I slumped in my seat.

A man stepped out of the trailer. He wore buckskin trousers and shoes carved out of wood. He had a beard and a shot gun.

"Got business here?" he yelled.

"Passing through." Tierney climbed out and slammed the door. He stretched his arms and rolled his neck, as though driving up to a strange checkpoint was something he did everyday. I don't know, maybe he did. But by now I knew him well enough to see the faint tension in his shoulders, the way he kept his back angled toward the truck.

The man walked through the mud toward us. Another bearded guy came out of the trailer wearing the same wooden shoes and buckskin clothing. He carried a short, blunt truncheon.

"Well, now," said the first one. "No vee-hickles been this way in. . . what would you say, Joe?"

"Three years, Moon. Three years." The second man had something wrong with his face under his beard.

"That's right. I remember an old Chevy with the power winch. Whatever happened to that guy?"

"Expect he was just passing through too." This appeared to be a matter of some amusement. The two weird beards broke up laughing and scuffed the dirt with their matching shoes.

Tierney put his hands in jeans pockets, still casual. "I have some barter for our passage through your checkpoint. What's the country like up ahead?"

Barter seemed to put them all on an even footing. The first guy leaned his shot gun against a car and started gesturing. Tierney nodded. My feet were cold and I wondered how to turn on the truck so I could have heat again. And that's when I noticed weird beard number two standing next to my door making a roll-down-your-window-please motion with his index finger.

"You speak?" he asked.

I rolled down my window part way. "What kind of question is that? Do I look mute to you?"

The man cracked a smile and his beard split around an open wound on his jaw. It was red and pulsing with crazy, cauliflower growth. Not a wound, a disease. The discharge oozed into his hair and dried in a matted icicle.

"Fiesty little thing, aint you?"

I started to roll up the window, but he jammed his truncheon between the glass and the frame. "Hey, buddy, this your woman?"

Tierney glanced back. "Yes. Not for trade."

He slowly removed the truncheon. "Got everything you need then, don't you?"

"Joe, get the cargo," said the first one. They took the extra cans and jugs of water. The lifted the tarp off the mounted gun and talked about it for a long time. --The gun was useless without ammo. --No one was making ammo like that anymore. --All the munitions depots had been emptied years ago. --This thing was one big collector's item.

But they decided to take it any. "All it's good for is scaring a body," said the guy with the wound.

"You would know," I said under my breath.

Tierney got back in the truck. "I told you not to talk to anyone."

"Oh, please. He talked first."

The beards waved us through the barricade. Tierney adjusted his rear view window and tapped the fuel gauge. "Easy does it, sugar pie."

"I know you aren't talking to me."

"Always give your ride a name." He shifted up "First rule of auto mechanics."

"That must be why none of them run anymore." I rubbed my feet together under the steady stream of heat. The road opened up on the other side of the checkpoint, clear and for the most part smooth. It curved around natural stone pillars on the right which formed a great cliff that rose in perfectly carved blocks. On the left was an enormous river, easily twice as wide as the Willamette.

"Did you see that one guy's face?" I asked.

"Cancer. We used to be able to treat it."

I didn't answer. It was easier for me to accept than it was for people who had been adults Before. I grew up knowing you didn't survive cancer and any injury could be fatal. We had to put down horses and cows all the time. There were no veterinarians. Hell, I'd only met one doctor in my entire life and I'd never eaten a pill. For Dad it had been a constant source of hope and disappointment. Who could we trade with for penicillin? A friend of a friend heard a guy had three pills for barter. Someone heard about a cache of pills in an old house—were the pills any good after ten years? On it went, endlessly grubbing after the old life. Tierney was closer to Jayden's age than Dad's, but I bet he'd trade the truck and everything in it for aspirin pills.

The landscape was beautiful but I couldn't stop thinking about the checkpoint. Something wasn't right. The weird beards had good leather clothes and wooden shoes, evidence that they were capable independents. Tanning and sewing hides were common skills where I came from. Everyone sewed, but only a few people made shoes. Being a shoemaker was like being an electrician or an iron monger—you could call yourself god and name your price. While I could see the weird beards stitching together deer hides, I just couldn't imagine them carving wooden shoes.

"Tierney, did that checkpoint seem odd to you?"

He cut a glance at me and I saw the watchful look was still very present in his face. Every nerve seemed taut. "Check the hand guns, Madison."

There were five shots left in Dad's gun and one left in the gun Tierney took off the dead family. We had no extra ammo except for the large gauge belt Tierney had taken from the mounted gun. I thought longingly of Dad's workbench in the garage where he made bullets. I'd never bothered to pay any attention.

"They need to be cleaned," I said.

Tierney nodded. "Just be ready. It's probably nothing."

We didn't have long to wait. We rounded a corner and came upon a pile of boulders blocking the road. Tierney braked and we went skidding and sliding into the rocks, coming to a stop in a cloud of dust and burning grease. He'd managed to bank the truck into the rocks sideways, crunching my door but not damaging the front of the truck. I sucked my tongue and tasted blood but was otherwise okay.

Tierney cut the engine. "Stay here."

"Because that worked so well last time."

Tierney opened the glove box and slid the smaller gun across the seat to me while he stuffed Dad's gun into his jacket. I took the gun and sighed. "You might be surprised what a good shot I am, Tierney."

"All you need is one bullet, right?"

Right. The new boots were still wet. I put on the wingtips and slipped out Tierney's side. It was quiet except for birdsong and wind in the trees. Tierney climbed the nearest boulders and tried to make his way around the blockage. I went to the cliff and looked down. A graveyard of vehicles lay below. The oldest were rusted out hulks, but the newest seemed to be wagons that were nothing but kindling, recognizable only by their long wooden yokes. No bones. How did wagons go over without taking draft animals with them? I wondered which of the wrecks below had been the old Chevy with the electric winch.

Tierney came back, frowning. "We might be able to get by if we hold very close to the edge."

"People don't seem to have much luck with that." I showed him the wrecks below. "Maybe we should go back and find another way."

Small stones trickled over the boulders. We looked up. A child of about ten stood on top of a rock, thin and straight. She wore a buckskin dress over bare legs, her feet in a pair of neat wooden clogs. Her mouth was twisted around a red cauliflower tumor like the guy at the checkpoint.

"Oh, my god," I said aloud.

Tierney touched my arm. Another one, a woman this time, same tumor. Except—

"Her teeth," I whispered. They had been pushed out of her cheek by the growth of the tumor. I couldn't imagine how she still lived.

Like a game of hide and seek after It yells Olly-Olly-Oxen-Free, they came out of the rocks, one at a time. Women and children mostly, but a few men as well. Not all of them had the tumor, but so many did. They watched us, dumb and hungry, as though under some kind enchantment.

The pressure on my arm increased. "Get in the truck."

"We have to help them," I said.

"Not enough bullets." He pulled my arm. As I stepped backwards, the spell broke and the tumor people began clattering down the rocks. Some yelled, others made a gurgling ululation that was horrible to hear.

I climbed in the driver's door. Teirney followed and slammed the door as the first of the creatures swarmed over the truck. He started Sugar Pie and she leapt forward.

"Good girl," I said.

Most of them fell away to clatter over the rocks again. I knew what they did now. The cars tried to get by the boulders and fell off the cliff. Or were pushed. It was a horrible trap.

"Seat belt and tray tables, Madison!"

He aimed the truck at a narrow piece of blue sky that hovered between the boulders and the edge of the cliff. We bounced and grinded our way over the rocks, metal screaming.

On my side I saw people pouring down the hillside toward us. Dozens of them. The children's tumors were damp red fists on their faces, nothing compared to the women's full-blown cauliflowers. The men at least had beards.

The first group hurled themselves against Sweetie Pie, gurgling and howling. We lurched to the left, and I saw the bottom of the cliff outside Tierney's window. Fiercely reefing the wheel, Tierney tried to keep us on the ledge, but a man had thrown himself on the hood of the truck, spread-eagled, and smeared his tumor against the windshield. Then another man. I heard wooden shoes clattering in the bed of the truck.

The truck ground to a stop and the lurching started again—they were pushing against us, trying to tip us over.

Tierney slid Dad's gun across the seat to me. "Not until you have to."

A woman with half her jaw consumed scraped her fingers down my window, her eyes crazy. I could send a bullet through the glass and into the roof of her mouth, but that would bring all the rest of them in through the broken window.

Tierney threw the truck into reverse and we flew backwards, the people in the truck bed went sprawling. One went over the cliff. The first guy on the hood fishtailed off but the other guy stayed on by his fingernails.

"We can't go back!" I yelled.

"Got a better idea?"

He stopped, shifted up and started forward again. The people were swarming again, the guy on the hood had a rock in his hand and had started to lift it. Tierney reefed the wheel right and Sweetie Pie flew into the boulders. I closed my eyes for impact. But apart from screeching metal and bone-jarring bouncing, Sweetie Pie took to the rocks. Tierney had found a way.

A sharp turn on the wheel sent the guy with the rock sliding off. The people in the back began to jump. My last look in the rearview mirror showed them scrambling over the rocks, still coming. We bounced free moments later. Tierney guided the truck back to the old road, which was now mostly clear.

I eased my finger off the trigger and tried to calm my breathing, but I couldn't take my eyes off the smears on the windshield.

The road lead through a village of trailers and cooking fires. Tierney kept his foot on the gas and we bulled past. I never got more than an impression of laundry hanging out to dry, a bent and rusty children's swing set, a garden, and a fenced pasture with horses and cows. A few people looked up from their work, pointing their fingers. They'd probably never seen anyone get through the trap before.

In a moment, we were beyond the village and climbing around another cliff. The road was chucked and crumbled, but Tierney kept his foot on the floor.

"What were they going to do to us?" I asked.

"Probably looking for a doctor," he said. "Medical supplies. Barter."

I wasn't sure. Lots of people had died on the edge of that cliff, I was sure of it. These people didn't trade. I wondered how the weird beards at the checkpoint had notified the rest of the village without telephones. Then I remembered their eerie vocalization. It was probably audible for quite a distance.

"We were lucky," I said.

Tierney tapped the gas gauge. "That was skill, sweetheart. Luck will be finding gas sometime in the next twenty miles."

Nothing yet, but planning to send

2009-04-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to say that I've been in the dark place where it gets hard to breathe. Yes, work. There will be more Madison. What am I reading? Lives of the Artists by Calvin Tomkins. Oh, don't get me started! I made it through Hirst and Schnabel without choking anyone. Next up: Koons. Can she do it. . . survive the trifecta of overheated egos, the Everest of excess? Still sawing away at the Turtledove too. It's not bad. There's nothing offensive in it. But I forget that I'm reading it. That's a bad sign for one of us, me or Harry.

The plasma shield is still firmly in place over my inbox--no incoming rejections. I have one coming from an actual publisher, submitted on actual paper. Those rejections are worst somehow. Maybe it's the object quality.

I wish I had more to blather about today. Until I get those rejections or read a book I really like. I've almost forgotten what that feels like.
--K

6. Madison in Portland

2009-03-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

What am I reading? It Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies. Almost as compelling as the reviews said it whttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifould be. I knew it was a marriage meltdown book and expected a sack of confession, but have been surprised at how engaging the story really is. I find the narrator, who identifies herself as a WASP and natters on for pages about Maine, china patterns and William Morris wallpaper, so personally irritating that she's become an almost perfect anti-heroine. I am at the point, heavily foreshadowed, where the poet husband is about to dump her for the French chick. Also need to mention The Chysalids by John Wyndham-where has this guy been all my life? Next week, a Harry Turtledove novel. My first. I'm notorious for not finishing bad science fiction (don't ask me how much PKD I've read). I have hope for the Turtledove-great premise and fantastic cover.

I haven't posted any Madison for two weeks thanks to a wave of paranoia about intellectual property on a couple of writers' sites. Yes, the paranoid ones have a point. No, I'm not going to change my methods. Why? I received two more agent rejections last week. One was from TriadaUSA that arrived two hours after submission. The other was from The Writers House. Both were very polite and I have to say, their promptness places them well ahead of the curve.

Anyway a couple of "good" rejections reminds me that I can't guard my work from the world. My critique group, Yola writers, met yesterday to show their usual fine work. They kicked my ass over chapter twelve. My new marketing scheme is to glide along on their coattails.

Below is part of chapter six. It ends when they reach a check point manned by some ZZ Top-looking dudes. It needs some work from my other persona, editor me. I'll post the rest as I feel it.
------------------
Chapter Six

Tierney seemed to know, if not the layout of this exclusionary unit, at least what was likely to be found in one. He drove to a loading area in another building and backed the truck into the dock. Inside was a black cave with ceilings that rose the entire height of the building. Tierney scuffled off into the darkness while I stood in the last square of light peering after him.

"What if there are more dead in there?"

"Then don't come in."

"What if there are more crazy people?"

"Use your staple remover."

I heard dragging sounds on the cement floor and the tuneless sound of Tierney whistling. A minute later he came back with a cardboard box and dropped it.

"There are, I think, two more of these. Load this in the truck while I get them."

I peeled back the soft, dusty cardboard. Inside were cans and cans of food. Pears, beans, corn. All ten years old. "We're can't eat this stuff. It's poison."

He came back with another box. "This is how your friend managed to survive for so long."

"I don't think that's all she ate."

"I know how to check cans, Madison. We'll be okay." We loaded the boxes in the back of the truck and drew a tarp over everything. By then it was late afternoon, the light slanting from the west. I didn't want to camp anywhere near the exclusionary unit, so I was relieved when Tierney started the truck.

We drove for another hour, mostly on roads that ran close to the highway until wrecks and trees forced us back to the highway again.

"We'll be going east from here," said Tierney. First words he'd spoken since Canterbury.

"I thought we were going to Portland."

"We're in Portland."

He drove onto an overpass. Since the bridge in Oregon City, he'd avoided them. We'd seen so many collapsed and broken spans since then, roads that went nowhere. I braced my feet on the floor, expecting at any second to have the pavement drop out from under to me. To my surprise, Tierney pulled over and parked between a three-car pile up and a jack-knifed truck, at the highest point in the overpass.

I got out and walked to the railing. The wind was sharp and metal groaned all around us. I saw five deer wandering along a parking lot across the concrete canyon, nibbling on new grass that swelled out of the buckled pavement. Old buildings peeked out of vine-covered mounds.

"I could use some firewood."

"Up here?" I sighed. There was grass and a few weeds growing in the cracks of the overpass, but all the trees were down there, on the ground. I hoped he didn't want to burn bones.

Tierney was hauling stuff out of the truck. He seemed unconcerned that I would try to run off again, and about that he was correct. I kicked a piece of plastic as I walked, part of some car I couldn't identify, and wondered why I didn't try harder to get away.

I went toward the far end of the overpass, following the decline to a greater concentration of wrecked cars. As the road turned west, I realized the overpass fed into a second highway below. I leaned over the railing and looked down. Below me was another car canyon, choked and congested with wrecks, stretching into the sunset. In the fading light, everything I saw looked black and every vehicle appeared to be partially sunk in the asphalt. Their bumpers floated on the road surface and their car doors hung open like oars in still, black water. To my right, a black train had tumbled off its tracks to hang above the highway on a concrete guard rail. Beyond that, canyon walls of burnt tree snags poked through a fury of new growth. Further down the canyon, great buildings crumbled and gaped, birds flying in and out of their broken windows.

This had to be Portland, or what was left of it.

I walked back to camp empty-handed to find Tierney bent over a wisp of flame he had coaxed from a pile of twigs and dried grass. He added a chair leg.

"What happened to the city?" I asked.

"Fire-bombed." Tierney put another leg on the fire. I wondered where he'd gotten chair parts, and why the wood hadn't burned along with everything else.

"Who did it?"

"We did." He sat on an old tire and opened a tin of beans. I was hungry in spite of the fact that the food was half my age and probably chock full of poison. He nestled the tin in the fire. "It used to be a beautiful place."

"I don't know who you mean by we. I had nothing to do with that."

No response from Tierney. He opened another tin.

"So, where are we going?"

"East for a while."

"Any place specific, or are we just wandering aimlessly?"

"You ask a lot of questions."

"That's because you don't say anything." I got up and walked to the trailer of the jack-knifed truck. Inside I saw a jumble of dark shapes. As my eyes adjusted, I realized it was furniture. Okay good, one mystery solved. I climbed up on the deck, sucked in my breath and walked into the darkness far enough to grab a couple of chairs. I threw them off the back where they splintered on impact.

I gathered the pieces and carried them back to the fire.

"Thanks." Tierney added a leg and went back to stirring the first can of beans with the lone spoon we'd taken from the farm house days ago.

I sat down on the nearest tire. "What were you Before, Tierney?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Are you kidding me? Can't I know something about you?" I felt a stray raindrop on my forehead and looked up. The clouds had come almost within touching distance. Another drop splatted on my head. "I can't eat in the rain!"

I stomped off to a car that I'd picked out earlier-no bodies or bones-and locked myself in. By the time I was hungry enough to eat poisoned canned food, the rain was coming down in buckets and Tierney had taken the cans into the truck. I spent the night huddled under coats in the back seat, hungry, listening to the rain and smelling mouse piss. I hoped I wasn't lying in a puddle of it, although I wondered if on some level it wasn't justice for my bad temper. Tierney wasn't a bad guy and he didn't ask to be saddled with the kid who shot Pinkus.

Toward dawn, the rain slacked off and I remembered I'd left my new boots in the back of the truck. They'd be soaked. I almost felt like crying.

When it was fully light, I put on my coats and got out of the car. The pavement was wet with oily rainbows. The ubiquitous (a word worth remembering) odor of burning rubber seemed to be stronger today. Probably from the city.

Tierney had built up the fire with more chair parts and sat next to it reading a book. He grunted something at me and handed me a can of pears, barely looking up from his reading. I sat on a wet tire and watched his eyes flicking across the page. The grizzle on his cheeks never seemed to grow, and he never shaved. I pondered the problem of men's facial hair. All the men of a certain age had full beards, but not this guy. Maybe it was a product of his beat life, where there were no frills, not even a decent beard.

"What is that?"

"A book." He unrolled the pages he held, holding the soft cover up for me to read. Mickey Spillane. A man in a hat held a flaming gun on a woman in a skin tight red dress. She had notably big boobs. Not likely I would have come across a big boob book like that in Dad's library, but it didn't surprise me that Tierney had one.

"I thought you read smart books."

"This is a smart book. You should try it."

"It's good you're improving your mind, Tierney. Maybe you won't have to be a migrant all your life."

"So I can be a useless know-it-all like you?"

"I'm not. . ." I paused to consider. "A know it all."

"You're a migrant too. Don't kid yourself. There's nothing else out here."

He went back to his book. After eating, I went to find a place to pee. Micturate, I reminded myself, micturate. I might be the only person for a hundred miles who knew the word so I better use it. After that, I took my new boots from the back of the truck, shucked out the laces and propped them before the fire with their tongues hanging out to dry.

When he finished reading, Tierney hauled all the stuff out of the truck. He filled the gas tank from the bottles of fuel he found yesterday, unbolted the gun from the mount and removed the ammo. He laid the gun on its side in the back of the truck, wrapped in a blue plastic tarp.

5. What's an Exclusionary Unit?

2009-03-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

This has been such a long week. . . lots of domestic disturbances. . . no bike riding. So here is another chapter full of my Frankenstein attempts to create action. It's funny how leaden and lumbering language gets when you are trying to talk about things happening quickly. Amid magazine rejections (oh, there were some!)I managed to get almost done with a short story. I've reworked this chapter a lot because there are some historical reveals and that made me crazy during first draft. I honestly didn't know what happened to Madison's world, but I didn't want to break stride to do world-building. I could pretend that she simply didn't know, and that worked well enough until I started asking people to read later drafts. I confess, I don't do outlines. Nothing kills desire like boredom, right? Besides, what was important to me was the tone and voice of the novel. More stuff to do: Yes, in my spare time, I need to promote this blog. But feel me on the rejections. Ouch! Who wouldn't shut the door for a few days?

----------------------
Chapter Five

The next morning, I crawled out of the hay and folded my coats. I was alone in the loft. Tierney's bed had been kicked apart and his coats were gone. I hobbled to the old house, barefoot, looking for Tierney. Wherever he was, he had my damn shoes.

The wringer-washer was in a corner of the back porch, and I took a moment to turn the crank and examine the old split rollers. It was dusty but seemed to work. A thing like this was worth, oh, it might be worth two suckling pigs, or a portion of slaughtered hog. A woman might trade a half-pound of coffee for it. It certainly would earn its worth many times over in time saved. I couldn't let it sit by for someone else to find.

I carried it to the truck and loaded it carefully. After that, I went out into the weeds far from the truck to do my business. No toothbrush, no soap, no water, no paper scraps. And I was barefoot. By the time I hobbled to the truck again, I was in a sour mood and Tierney was heaving the wringer-washer off the side of the truck.

"Are you crazy? Stop that!"

"It's not coming." He stood on the truck bed next to the gun with its fat belt of ammo. A tendon bunched in his jaw like a horse that had set his teeth against a bit.

"Do you have any idea what a thing like this is worth?" I walked around the truck and found the washer. The top had come off. I bent down and looked at the two parts, touching a spot of fresh metal. "You broke it!"

"Good." Tierney jumped off the truck. "You won't be doing any laundry where you're going."

"You're an idiot, Tierney."

"Need some shoes?" He reached into the back of the truck and held up my wingtips, tied together by their laces. I reached for them but he yanked them away and tossed them on the truck's front seat.

"It was worth a ham, Tierney." I got in the truck. "Think about that. Maybe two hams."

###

Slow going. The pavement was buckled and frost-heaved as we made our way north. The last people who drove these roads were probably the looters who had cleaned out the house, and that was a very a long time ago. In low spots, streams ran over the road and Tierney paused to estimate the depth before bouncing through the water. He took a road that lead us down the far side of the ridge, and it meandered through a housing development. The yards and streets were crowded with wrecked furniture and fallen trees, but only two or three places had burned. Tierney drove through the neighborhood once and circled back.

"What are we doing?"

No answer. He stopped the truck next to a tangle of brush and vines that had once been someone's yard. I saw a moss-covered skull under a branch, the jaw crushed. We got out of the truck and he gave me a handful of rags.

"Stuff these in your shoes."

"How generous." I jammed the rags in the toes and put them on. They still didn't fit. I followed him around the first house and in the back door. While he rummaged through the kitchen, I searched the rest of the place, pretending I was an archaeologist who had just opened an ancient site. What happened to the family who lived here? It was hard to tell because successive groups of people had come later, making a fire in the living room and using the bathroom floor and the hallway leading to the bathroom as a toilet. The stench was blistering. The family must have owned a lot of pink toilet paper because bunches of it peeped through the excrement, still vividly pink. For once, I didn't want to go upstairs.

Tierney scored a package of pasta. We went on to the next house.

All together we searched ten houses. In some ways they were all the same, furred and peeling walls, mushrooms sprouting from the swampy carpets, utterly destroyed furniture. But Tierney found something in every house. He looked behind stoves and on top of cupboards. He removed drawers and searched inside for things that got pushed to the back. In one place he found three ramen noodle packages.

I looked for shoes and books with no luck. Books were popular for starting fires with the waves of squatters who came after. Or maybe the family themselves had burned the books in the first long winter, trying to keep warm. And shoes were gold anyway. You never saw a corpse with shoes.

In one place we found five bodies all laying on a bed, the covers pulled up to their jawbones. The mother lay on her side, facing two smaller bodies, and the dad's mummified fingers cupped a handgun. All had small holes in their skulls. They had been dead a long time, but not ten years. I looked around the room and saw an oil lamp with a rag wick and soot stains flaring up the side of the wall. The window was sealed with carpeting. This family had lived for some time in the world as it is now, but had decided not to anymore.

Tierney tucked the gun into his belt and closed the door softly. At the front door, he picked up a shard of pottery from the yard and carved a number 5 into the door wood.

"What's that for?" I asked.

"It's a sign to others there are dead in this house."

"There are dead in all the houses. You didn't mark the doors."

"These people were from our time. They were survivors."

In a way I understood. It's not that the other dead, the Demented and the people killed right after, weren't important. They were the ones who built the houses, made deevees, wrote books. May they rest in peace. But they'd gotten off easy—no First Winter for them. They hadn't spent the last ten years hoping that it would stop raining so the beans would grow. Anyway, I was sad about the family in the last house. I couldn't shake the memory of our winters, and wondered if Dad had ever thought about finishing things that way.

Tierney went to the next house, and I sat on the curb near the truck. He came out with a frying pan and an empty plastic jug. I gathered firewood while he carried the jug down the hill and into the woods. I watched him go, thinking I had the wingtips, he'd left the keys in the truck, and all the junk he'd just gathered was sitting three feet away.

I thought about it too long. He came back with a jug of mossy water and set it down next to the wood I'd gathered. "There's a lot of water in your country."

"Too much. This wood's not going to light."

He had a lighter in his pocket and with a few pieces of paper, he managed to get the smallest twigs to smoke, then flame. "I've seen places that haven't had rain in ten years. The rivers are dry and the groundwater is used up. Everything is dead."

"How do the people live?"

"They don't."

He blew on the flame and added more twigs. When he got a good fire going, he nestled the pan in the coals and heated water for soup. We ate two packages of ramen noodles and drank the salty pan water. Neither of us spoke.

We drove through the remainder of the afternoon, weaving around dead cars and fallen trees. Sometimes I had to drag branches out of the way, sometimes it was armchairs. Once it was a busted-up merry-go-round with all the animals gray and peeled lying in the road as if they'd been shot.

We came to a wide, long road, a highway. Tierney stopped before driving out on to it. It was dense with cars. If I narrowed my eyes I could almost pretend I was looking at a moving highway from a movie. With open eyes I saw piles of rags and bits of broken stuff and nothing moved but the wind.

"You want to drive on that?"

Tierney tapped the gas gauge. From where I sat it looked like we were down to a quarter of tank. "I'm tired of driving in the trees."

"And this is so much better."

"Maybe we can find some fuel."

I sighed and he put the truck in gear. Traveling with Tierney was like not going anywhere; all he did was look for more stuff. But we did travel a little faster on the highway. From time to time he ran over bones, and after the first time I felt them pop under the tires I didn't mind so much.

Late in the afternoon, the sun came out, casting weak spears of light from the clouds. The cars looked rusty and derelict in the sun. As we got closer to Portland, there were more obstacles, and Tierney had to stop and back track around them. I started seeing signs over the old green interstate signs, hand-painted in black. "Canterbury."

"What's Canterbury?"

Tierney eased around a three-car pileup. "Probably a refugee camp."

"Can we go?"

"No."

Toward dusk, Tierney pulled off the highway, turned left and drove onto an overpass. At the top, he stopped, got out and walked the length of the overpass, checking each car and truck. Same thing I'd seen him do all day in the houses. Now it was cars. I sat and watched him, wishing I had something to read.

He stopped to look at one car, opening the driver's side door and leaning inside. He walked to the passenger door and then the back doors, opening each. Finally he waved to me. It was a rusty, nasty old thing on the outside, but inside the upholstery was dry and smelled like plastic. There were no bones.

"German engineering," said Tierney.

"Whatever that means." It was almost better when Tierney didn't talk.

We bedded down for the night in the car, me in the far back curled up under my wool jacket, and Tierney in front. Before we settled in, Tierney took the wingtips, tied their laces together and looped them through his belt. I lay awake wondering how far I'd get out there, barefoot with all the broken glass and old bones. I could have gone any time, but I lay there thinking about it instead.

The next morning I had to do my personal business behind a stalled truck on the overpass. Again in my bare feet. Tierney could do it over the side, another injustice of the world. I walked back to our truck, cold and angry. Day two had begun.

"Where are we going today?"

"Portland."

"Same as yesterday." I climbed into the truck. "But we never seem to get there."

Tierney gave me the wingtips and I rearranged the rags inside before putting them on. Having shoes made a difference. If I had a shot at escaping today, I'd take it.

We drove down into the highway graveyard again, circling and back-tracking and pushing between cars. Occasionally I got out to shift a small object that we couldn't drive over. Sometimes we both had to get out. The closer we got to Portland, the more panic I saw in the arrangement of the derelict cars. People had been ramming each other, driving over the highway dividers and coming down on top of other traffic. A lot of bodies were in these cars.

Once I saw a small sedan with all the windows rolled up tight. A slight steaminess framed two people in the back seat, who were turned around and looking out the window. Their skin, though desiccated as old apples, was still in place. Even their dark prune eyes were open and staring. One of them had a string of pearls. Their skeletonized finger bones still rested on the back of the seat. Although the car's gas flap was open, the car hadn't been looted, not even for shoes.

Tierney honked the horn. What were two more dead bodies? I did my job and we moved on.

Tierney stopped often to look for fuel. Whenever he saw a gas flap that wasn't open, he'd thread a piece of tubing into the tank. Sometimes he would get a few drops of rusty looking fluid in his water jug which he would distill into another jar. I would sit and watch him as the day went on.

"You aren't going to find much," I told him. "And what you find won't be any good."

"Did I ask for your opinion?"

"No, but you could certainly use it."

He made some irritating sound. Good to know he hated me as much as I hated him.

In the afternoon he found one untouched gas flap in the middle of a massive accident. Other scavengers had missed it because you couldn't tell one jumble of steel from the next. Tierney threaded his tube into the tank, sucked on the other end and quickly dunked it into the jug as bright pink fluid began to flow.

Tierney waved me out of the truck. "Look for more containers, Madison. Clean ones."

I grabbed up all the water bottles I could find in the road, carried them back. The gasoline was flowing quickly. "More. Bigger."

"Only two hands!" Even when he had what he wanted he was still rude.

We were close to an on-ramp, so I wandered between the oncoming vehicles, looking inside. Almost every car had coffee cups with lids or water bottles, but I never got used to opening the cars and reaching over dead bodies. The smell after all this time was faint, organic but not altogether unpleasant. Sometimes the act of opening a car door was enough to make a skeleton disarticulate itself all over the road.

I reached for one water bottle and came away with a bony hand still attached. I screamed and threw it away, then stood for a moment catching my breath. That's when I saw buildings on the other side of the ramp, behind a parking lot circled in razor wire. I could just read the lettering on a billboard-sized sign:

"Canterbury Exclusion Unit #0493."

This was it. Although it was cobbled together from a shopping mall, it had an official look. Refugees could be inside, or some form of government. Maybe someone could help me get home.

Tierney was many car lengths back, still hunched over his tube. I started walking quickly. Once off the ramp, I broke into a shuffling run, keeping cars, trees and utility poles between me and Tierney, in case he happened to look up. There was no entrance in the front. Razor wire enclosed a parking lot and nothing moved inside but leaves and bits of paper.

Now that I was closer I saw shacks on the roof of the largest building. Too small for houses, possibly guard towers where soldiers waited all day for people to shoot at. I watched the shacks for a moment, wondering which bothered me more—Tierney catching up with me or the possibility of getting shot. After a few seconds, I hurried on.

The entrance to the place was on the far side of the complex. I was relieved to put the width of the building between myself and Tierney. The doors were steel reinforced and tightly closed. I tried the buzzer first, leaning on it a couple of times and feeling a faint vibration on the other side of the door. After a few seconds, I tried the door knob and it opened with a dry squeak.

Inside was illuminated by a green-tinged glow coming from boxes high on the walls, very faint but enough to cast light in the place. Weak solar was still working, somewhere. The second thing was the shivering scent of old, old decay, as though I'd just opened an abandoned refrigerator.

"Hello?" I called out and was immediately sorry. My voice echoed and swelled, coming back louder than before.

Something, somewhere, slid across the concrete floor.

I froze, fighting the blind impulse to run for the door. Instead I held my breath and listened. After a moment I breathed again, and went forward. I was in some kind of waiting area. Two plastic chairs stood outside a glass-framed office. Inside the office, I saw filing cabinets, a desk of papers, a soda machine that looked--amazingly--plugged in and lit up.

Beyond the office was a long wall bisected with another door, locked from this side with a complicated bolt system. The organic smell was worse close to this door. Undisturbed.

As I turned toward the office, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and heard the dragging sound again.

A person lurched into view, wild-haired, tall but without a beard. He or she—it—dragged one leg as it shambled out of the gloom, arms out stretched. It wore the remnants of a uniform with a bit of needlework over the breast pocket.

"They're all here." The voice was cracked and hazed, but still feminine. "Check the records."

"Who's here?" I asked.

The woman stopped a few feet away from me, but her smell made the rest of the trip. She reeked of death and mildew, something like a dead cow I once found floating in the creek, long dead and stewed in water. I stepped backwards, my body knowing before my brain that no one could smell like that and be sane.

"Want to see?" she asked and began to laugh.

I turned to the door I'd come in, but lost a shoe and stumbled. Like an animal, the woman was on me, reaching for my neck. I wrenched away, pushing her off balance, and ran to the office, locking the door with her on the other side. She raised fists crenellated with yellow fingernails and pounded against the glass.

The glass shivered with each blow and wouldn't hold long. I searched the room for a weapon, turning out desk drawers and going through cabinets. There was nothing but dust and old papers, and one small thing made of plastic and metal. It fit in the palm of my hand, a thing with four opposing teeth encased in a rigid plastic grip, like the mouth of a snake. When I squeezed it, the teeth came together, making a small clacking sound. I didn't know what it was supposed to do, and it wasn't much use now, but at that moment it was all I had.

The creature hurled a chair through the window, and the glass exploded into the room, sending shards flying across the desk. The woman climbed through the window, over the spears of glass still jutting from the window frame. Her thigh hooked a shard and the tip plunged into her. She kicked herself free and came on. I pushed the chair between us, she swept it aside. I grabbed an old keyboard and thwacked the side of her head. As she reeled, I caught her lower lip between the teeth of the little tool I'd found.

The creature howled from the pain and shook her head, shaking me with it. I felt blood and warm breath on my hand. Was she Demented? Or just crazy? I squeezed harder, released the tool and took another bite on the creature's cheek. She grabbed for my neck, nails tangling in my hair.

And then a gunshot rang out. The creature exhaled once and dropped to the floor, my tool still in her flesh. Tierney stood in the other side of the window, holding Dad's gun.

"Did she bite you?"

"I bit her." I bent down and retrieved my little tool, which I was now oddly fond of. "She was crazy, not Demented. You didn't have to blast her."

"Let me see that." He took my tool. "A staple remover. I will say this, you have your moments."

In the faint glow, I could read the name on her breast pocket. Denise. She wore a pair of decent-looking boots.

"My size." I removed the boots, gagging at the warm, gassy odor. Tierney reached for them but I held on, knotting the laces together. "Oh, no, you don't. These are mine. I earned them. What is this place?"

"What the sign says. An exclusionary unit. Want to see?" He went to the inner door I'd seen earlier. He shifted the bolts and pulled it wide, spilling a little of our green light into the darkness. He propped open the door with a little metal foot attached to the lower edge of the door. "Take a good look, Madison."

I got up reluctantly and walked over. The first thing I saw was metal prison bars reaching from the floor up into the darkness above. On the other side of the bars, where the light barely reached, I saw bones. I had to look for a long time to be certain of what I was seeing. I'd seen bones before but never had I seen so many. It was a sea of bones and tangled cloth, four or five feet thick and crowded against the bars. I saw hundreds of skulls, some still covered with tufts of hair, and I saw long bones and rib cages, thousands and thousands of them. At our feet, millions of tiny bones were scattered on the floor like broken beads, as though these people had died reaching through the bars.

"Demented," said Tierney. "There are thousands of units like this all over the country. Every city had them. There were so many infected that managing the disease overwhelmed the hospitals, and this was all we could do. Forty percent of the population was symptomatic in the first year. Who knows how many since? We no longer have any way of tracking it."

I pictured the Demented crushed in here, trampled underfoot, all of them finally dying as close to the door as possible. Was it any more or less humane than shooting them on sight or wrapping them in concertina wire until they cut themselves to bits?

"I don't remember much about Before," I said. "No one talks about it."

"Can you see why?" He let the door fall shut. "It's enough to dream about it every night."

Tierney went to search the office, stepping over Denise like so much trash. I went outside where it was cool and smelled of rain. June 23rd by my reckoning. Summer was still a month away. I looked at gray buildings with broken signs, loot spilled out the doors and left to blow away. In a few minutes I got my breathing under control, a few minutes after that the shaking stopped.

When he came out, Tierney handed me a can of soda. I took it and felt the tension in the metal sides. It was still cold. I couldn't remember the last time I had one. Tierney worked the ring for me and the can popped, releasing a mist of sparkles. I drank until the fizz hurt my mouth.

"It's wonderful." I passed him the can.

"The taste that beats the others cold." He took a small sip and passed it back. "Might be the last one in the world."

4. Madison On the Road

2009-03-02T12:54:00.000-08:00

This has been a long week, and I'm late posting this chapter. I sold a short story to Spinetingler Magazine this week. The editor was incredibly nice about the story, and it reminded me how much I like to write (and sell) short stories. They can be little puzzles, satisfying to play with, pretty to hold. Anyway, I started writing a new one immediately about an alcoholic paranormal house inspector. An idea just begging to be written, right? So I drifted on Chapter Four because I knew the edits would be difficult. I wanted to change the tone, develop Madison's reaction to her father's death and explore Tierney's reasons for dragging her off on an adventure. He doesn't see her as anything but a troublesome kid at this point. Concurrently, I'm getting Chapter Eleven ready for my critique group next weekend. This is where he begins to see her as something more. I enjoyed playing Before and After with these two chapters. Maybe "enjoy" is the wrong word. I'm struggling with rewrites, and not just with the novel. I edited a short story recently and a friend said, "Oh, I finally see what you mean!" I had been dicking around with this thing for six months, and he'd read it three other times. I have to wonder if there's something blocking my blood-brain barrier that I can't make the story arc clearer in earlier drafts. The weather today is very pretty. Wasn't it supposed to rain?

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Chapter Four

Jayden was screaming, a grinding keen that rose above the random gunfire and revving engines like a serenade to the end of the world. George struggled to his feet, wiped the blood off his bald skull, and made his way to her. As the soldiers swarmed Pinkus's body, I saw the two of them hurrying across the lawn to their house.

Pinkus's men had broken ranks and scattered. Several of them were stumbling down the center of the road, guns abandoned. Infected. Dad always said it happened in the blink of an eye. As I watched, one of their own men lifted a rifle and fired, paused, fired again. The Demented soldiers dropped, one by one.

I used the hem of my dress to wipe the blood off Dad's face and closed his eyes. I felt nothing about having just killed a man. My very first. I was furious at Dad. What lunatic makes shooting a Demented woman his last living act? I hated the way Dad had been hell-bent on destroying Dims, without even stopping to consider whether he was right to do it.

First Mom, now Dad. Even if he was wrong, he shouldn't have died like this, so far from home. His body needed to layed out properly. He needed to be buried. I looked around for help, but the fighting had moved down the street and I was for the moment all alone.

Dad was dead. He shouldn't be dead.

I heard an engine and I looked up to see a chopped-up truck with a gun in the back hurtling toward me. It screeched to stop three feet from Dad, and a man leaned out the driver's side window. It was Tierney.

"Fifty soldiers are headed this way right now, Madison. You need to come with me. "

"My father's dead."

"I know. I'm sorry." He winced. "There's nothing we can do for him now."

"I'm not leaving him in the middle of the street! People won't know where he is."

"He'd want—" Tierney sighed and pushed open the truck door. Already I could hear rumbling engines in the distance. "All right. Take his feet."

Tierney placed his arms under Dad's shoulders and I grasped his ankles. Together we dragged him to the nearest sidewalk, Dad's head lolling on the ground.

"Thanks. My sister's house is right over there."

"This is far enough. Come on, Madison." The engines were close, probably one street over. Tierney held open the truck door.

I looked at Dad, lying among last fall's wet leaves, his shooting hand on his chest. My eyes were warm and prickly.

Tierney reached out and grasped the back of my neck, pushing me toward the truck. "Cry later."

I climbed over to the passenger's side. The engine thrummed and throbbed like a winded horse. I couldn't remember being in a truck that was on before. Tierney pushed my blood-soaked skirts off his seat and slammed the door. "You're a mess. You better not be infected."

He did something with a lever and the truck lurched forward. Butterflies exploded in my stomach. "You're going too fast!"

"Shut up!"

I tried to see Dad one last time, but he was already out of sight. As we passed Jayden's house, smoke was pouring out the front door and flames were shooting through the roof. Pinkus's body was gone. I hoped Jayden and George got the kids out in time.

"My boots are in there," I said. "My book too."

"Gone now." Gunfire burst behind us, one shot pinging our tail gate. Tierney grabbed my hair, pressing my head to the seat. "And stay there."

He reefed furiously on the wheel and floored the gas. "Okay, is there any way out of this town?"

"Where are we?" From the floor of the truck, all I could see was the torn seat filled with little crumbs of foam rubber.

Screeching tires and more gunfire. Tierney stomped on a pedal so hard his leg was straight. I sat up in time to see a huge damn thing, a truck or something, bearing down on us.

"Yow!" Tierney tore around a car barricade, shaving paint off both sides of our truck.

"Left, left, left!" I said. "Now straight."

We dove down a hill that was so steep my butterflies got butterflies. At the bottom, he swerved toward the river and floored it. He cranked the wheel right, more screeching tires. Suddenly a bridge loomed over our heads. We bounced over small chunks of concrete that had fallen onto the road and I looked up to see white sections of sky in the gaps where the concrete chunks had once been.

I saw Tierney measure the distance up the ramp to the top of the span. The nasty big truck was on our tail again.

"No," I said. "We're not. . . We can't. . . No one uses that bridge!"

"We're dead already, aren't we?" Tierney stepped on the pedal and the truck almost lifted off the road. "Or at least you are."

Pinkus. "Good point."

At the top of the ramp, Tierney cut our speed to edge around a car barricade. We passed within inches of a totem pole of skulls. Someone's red hair bleached almost pink caressed my side view mirror. Beyond the barricade, more random cars dotted the road, but those looked like they'd stopped functioning while their occupants were trying to get somewhere. Doors and trunks stood open, looted in the years since the bad thing happened that made all the cars stop.

I heard the massive stuttering of the big truck engine as it pushed its way through the barricade. Cars teetered and fell, glancing off the truck as it continued up the ramp after us.

"Hang on," said Tierney.

Up the ramp and onto the bridge. I'd never been so far off the ground in my life. On our right side, the river was a low-bellied snake creeping into a gray landscape. On the left, I saw Oregon City cloaked in smoke and crowned by concrete spears of another bridge that had long since crumbled away.

Tierney zigged and zagged across the roadway, avoiding cars, and other stuff—televisions, furniture, piles of laundry that might be skeletons. This had to be what flying felt like. I reached for the door handle, the dashboard, anything to keep me from bouncing out of the truck.

At mid-span, Tierney stepped on the brakes and we came to a stop just before the road fell out from under us. For the next thirty feet there was nothing but a wicker basket of road and empty air, bisected by steel beams. I saw the river churning between the holes in the bridge.

Behind us, the big truck kept coming.

"We're going to fall! We have to go back."

"Right." To my horror, Tierney threw our truck into reverse, driving backward the way we'd come. Toward the bigger truck. I watched us getting too close, within shooting range. Guys standing on the truck bed raised their guns. I counted ten of them. At the last possible second, Tierney threw the truck forward, aiming for the left side of the bridge, going faster than ever. The broken road yawned in front of us and I screamed.

As we breached the hole, I saw what Tierney had seen—a slender ledge of asphalt, lacy and insubstantial but just wide enough to hold us. Cutting sparks off the side of the truck, the ledge crumbling behind us, we flew.

"I love this truck!" shouted Tierney.

We touched down on the other side and I whirled around to see the big truck braking at the edge of the hole, blue smoke boiling from its wheels. It almost stopped. Then as if a tailwind had come up, the front wheels rolled over the edge and rested for a moment in the netting of exposed steel beams, before the metal yielded like tired rope and the truck began to fall, surging and bucking. Some guys jumped clear, others didn't. The truck, sections of bridge and people tumbled in a mass toward the water.

Under us, the entire bridge shook. Tierney struggled to hold the wheel and keep us from hurtling into the railing. We sideswiped a refrigerator. Suddenly I saw tree branches in the road and Tierney eased to a stop. We were on the other side of the river.

We sat breathing hard. Tierney slowly unwrapped his fingers from the wheel. I looked back toward the river, trying to catch a glimpse of what had happened to the big truck, but trees blocked the view.

We were in a town, on a highway. It had once been only minutes from Oregon City by the bridge, but now it might as well be on the moon. Trees had been falling over the roads for years and no one had logged them out, making the highway impassable from both direction. If anyone had ever lived here, they were all gone now.

For the next hour, Tierney and I took turns hauling branches off the road. Sometimes we could drive forward a mile or so, other times peeling off one set of branches only revealed a denser nest beyond. Mostly we had no choice but to turn around and try another route.

The terrain was steep and dotted by houses that had been mounted on posts driven into the hillside. Most had collapsed, belching boards and wet carpeting down the slopes. The houses which still stood creaked and swayed in the breeze, ready to let go at any moment.

Tierney worked his way higher and higher on the ridge until he found a road that followed the crest through land that had once been farmed. Squared-off orchards and the occasional house could still be seen amongst forests of saplings.

Finally he found a place he liked, a house and barn set off the road. Both structures were still standing, though the house had a limb lying across the roof. Grass and shrubs grew three feet tall in the front yard and the driveway had a thin smoke of cottonwood fluff over it. No tracks in the fluff. Tierney pulled over, turned off the engine. We sat and watched the place for a while.

"Anyone left around here heard the truck and knows where we are," I pointed out. It was a lonely place but not sad, not like the housing development filled with old bones in Oregon City. This place looked the way our valley would have looked if we'd all died ten years ago. Empty and left to itself.

"Do you have to argue every point with me?"

"I'm trying to be helpful."

"Well, you're not."

After a few more irritating minutes when absolutely nothing moved, Tierney started the engine and guided the truck through the field and behind the barn, leaving the house's yard and driveway undisturbed. We climbed out.

"I'll check the barn. Stay here."

"The hell I'll stay here."

"Madison—"

I gave him a look—you aren't my father. He sighed and started out, edging toward the barn door. I followed more gingerly, my feet sore from hauling branches.

Inside, the barn was dark and dusty and smelled of animals. I wandered around and looked at stuff while Tierney climbed the hay loft. There wasn't much. The feed grain was gone, the animal fodder (must have been cows) was so old and dry it looked like formed dust. I saw a wooden hay scale and a broken hoe handle. Not much else.

"Nothing," said Tierney when he came down.

"No Dims?"

Tierney gave me a look—don't push me.

We went to the house after checking a garden shed and pump house. The back porch smelled of soap and apples, and the first thing I saw was an old wringer-washer on the floor, something I'd wanted for years. It had a hand crank and didn't need electricity. With the truck, we could get it home easily.

Newspapers and broken glass covered the floor. Tierney booted the glass aside for me as he went. Looters had been here. There wasn't a house standing that hadn't been looted down to the floor boards in the last ten years. The cupboards hung open on broken hinges, the refrigerator shelves and ice cube trays were cast around the room. Tierney went through it all systematically, sifting and sorting but not finding much except a single old spoon.

I turned on the faucet and got rust. Dead mouse in the sink.

The house must have been owned by an old person. The living room furniture had the kind of scratchy upholstery that inspired women to crochet doilies. I counted twenty doilies in all. Even the looters hadn't bothered with this stuff, although I would have taken the rag rug.

Upstairs were two bedrooms. The tree branch had punctured the roof in the larger of the two rooms, creating a perilous maze of branches, dirt, rain-rotted wallboard and small scurrying animals. The looters had probably seen this room and decided the whole upstairs was a loss. The other room was undisturbed, the bed neatly made. The closet was stuffed with winter clothes, and had a funny chemical smell.

"Mothballs," said Tierney.

Together we examined the coats, sweaters and suits. Both men and women's things, all with buttons and zippers that actually worked. Tierney took some shirts and left the rest. I needed something to wear that wasn't blood-soaked (don't think about Dad) and finally settled on a man's trousers and blue shirt. I found a red reindeer sweater with shiny metal bits, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. But a sweater like that could be seen for miles, and there was no way I could take it with me. I folded it carefully and tucked in the far back of the closet, in case I ever got back here. I set aside some wool jackets and pillows aside to take with me.

I dropped my dress on the floor and put on my new things. I used a blue sash to belt up the trousers, then tied the loose ends of the shirt around my waist. I found a pair of men's wingtip shoes in the closet and dragged them out. No one left shoes behind.

Tierney waited for me on the back porch with a bucket of water. He passed me a battered metal drinking cup.

"Found the well. Thought you might want to. . . the blood and everything."

"Thank you." I drank and then plunged my hands into the bucket. I dried myself with one of the wool coats and when I was done, he dropped four strawberries into my hand, nice big ones. I fell on them, suddenly starved. They were sweet and juicy and I ate them, stems and all. "Oh, those are good."

"Thought we'd sleep in the hay loft," he said.

"Okay. I found some pillows." My throat tightened up like a string purse. I was about to spend the night with a complete male stranger and all I could say was okay, I found some pillows?

"Tomorrow we're going to need food and water, so we'll get an early start."

"We should be back to the valley by afternoon. I don't mind fasting until then. Besides, there might be more berries around here."

"Madison." Long silence. "We're not going back to the valley."

"Oh, yes, we are." I glared at him. "We have to get back to the valley as soon as possible."

"Not happening." Perfectly calm, he took the pillows out of my arms and stepped off the porch, heading for the barn.

"You have some place else to go? Now that you have a truck and a gun?" I slipped my feet into the wingtips and clumped after him. "And where would that be, anyway?"

When I got inside, I heard Tierney walking around in the hayloft overhead. He leaned over the ledge and said, "As far away from Pinkus as possible."

"Pinkus is dead." I removed the shoes, which were hopelessly big and slippery on my feet. It was evening. The sun was down and the cold damp air of spring was rising from the ground. I hoped someone had found Dad and brought him inside. I hoped Jayden and the girls were all right.

Tierney climbed down the ladder. "You can go up now."

"Just let me go home, Tierney. Swear to god, I will be no further trouble to you."

He sighed. I couldn't see his face in the gray light, but I could imagine his squint eyed look of exasperation. "I wish I could but it's just not possible."

"You can't make me go with you. You don't own me."

He reached down and grabbed the wingtips. "Then I'll own these."

"Give them back!"

He turned around and walked toward the loft. "Come along, Madison."

"My father died today!" I yelled after him. "He was a good man. He gave you a job and you left him dead in the street!"

"Are we telling the truth tonight, Madison?" He turned, his voice harsh. "Here's the truth. Your father is the only reason I came back for you at all. There's a war going on right now because you murdered the most powerful man for two hundred miles. You think your family wants to see you now? Their only chance of surviving this mess is if they never see you again. Think about someone else for once."

My eyes stung. I made my way to the ladder and reached for the first rung. My hands grasped the wood without strength, like meat. I stood there, dumb and useless, too tired to fight anymore. He was right—the whole thing wouldn't have happened if I had done what Dad wanted from the beginning.

"Madison." I heard his leather coat creak very close to me. "That was good shooting. You saved a man's life."

"The wrong man." I swallowed, tamping the lump in my throat, and climbed the ladder to the loft. Tierney had scraped the last bunches of hay into two separate mounds. I took the one closest to the cobweb-draped window and bundled under the wool coat. Beneath my head was the faint clean linen scent of the pillow. Someone had washed this pillowcase long ago, before there was any Gant or Pinkus.

Tierney followed a few minutes later. "You all right?"

"Sure, never better." Damned if I let Tierney know how I felt. Damned if I ever forgot the hurt that filled my body as if every bone had been crushed. The migrant was right about one thing—cry later.

3. Chaos in OC

2009-02-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

I worked on Chapter Three obsessively this week. The next few chapters all seem to live in a gray area between interesting writing and plot-building action. The story is most yoked to its genre predecessors when I have to make characters do things that I don't, in the real world, know anything about. Read it and see what I mean. I asked my daughter to take some photos of Oregon City as it is now, and I'll try to get those uploaded soon. The land that time forgot, our OC. A great place for the apocalypse. The sun is shining though it is still cold and still winter, and I haven't had enough coffee. More editing after I caffeinate.
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Chapter Three

Jayden's house was the biggest place in Oregon City. It stood three stories high on the edge of a bluff. From the top floors you could see across the river, and on a clear day, almost as far as Portland.

The bluff was shaped like a folded paper fan, with the ridges rising from the river's edge, where the courthouse and government office buildings stood. Most of these were empty, burned out or flooded. A ninety-foot solar-powered elevator carried people from the bluff to the river. Jayden's husband had it running perfectly, but like everything in this town, no one was allowed to use it because the wrong people might find out there was electricity.

Jayden met us on the front steps wearing a turquoise dress shot with silver threads. She squealed when she saw us, waving an armload of bangles. She looked plump, sleek and well maintained, life in town suiting her down to her little silver slippers. The fact that she was so much like Mom, with her clothes and jewelry, always made me feel uneasy in my own skin.

Jayden had always been Dad's favorite and they hugged a long time, with more squealing on my sister's part. When it was my turn for a hug, she gathered me up in clouds of scent.

"I hope you're looking for a husband, Madison!" Her voice rang like a bell. My cheeks flushed red hot, and I forced myself not to look at Tierney. Though I couldn't imagine why it mattered what he thought about anything.

Jayden continued, oblivious. "You've come to the right place. We're having a very special guest for dinner tonight. Won't that be fun?"

While she sent her servants to unload the cart and take Pilot to the stables, Tierney dropped his pack on the curb and pulled out a book. He handed it to me. "Remember what I said."

I took the book and slipped it under my jacket to examine later, in private. No one had ever given me a book before. "Thanks."

The last I saw of him, he was walking down the hill in the rain, heading north.

Jayden stopped shouting directions to look at Tierney. "Who was that?"

"No one," said Dad. "A migrant. Let's go in."

After coffee and brunch, we left Dad and George in the breakfast room. Jayden took me to my room and tossed an armful of dresses on the bed. "Something will fit, I'm sure. The pink silk would look wonderful with your complexion, Madison."

She fluttered out and down the hall without waiting for my answer. I shut the door, pushed the mounds of pink and blue and yellow onto the floor, and sat on the edge of the bed to look at Tierney's book. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I slept through the afternoon, only waking when Jayden's two daughters came in and bounced on my bed. I slipped the book under my pillow and got up to examine my sister's dresses. My nieces squealed at each dress, demonstrating a preference for sequins, bows and flounces that had to be genetic.

"Doesn't anyone want to wear pants and have adventures anymore?" I asked them.

The girls shook their heads. "Wear the pink one, Aunt Madison!"

I chose one that made me look least idiotic and ripped a handful of fluttery stuff off the bodice in a great shred. The dress fit and didn't look half bad, a long clingy blue thing with lace sleeves. Jayden hadn't provided shoes but I couldn't wear my Danner boots with the dress, so I put on fresh socks and called it good.

"We still get our share of Dims," Jayden's husband, George, was saying as I entered the living room and took a seat on a stiff little settee in the corner. "Why just last week we took out a nest of them down by the river. How many was that, Travis?"

"I believe it was fourteen," said Travis. He sat on the sofa next to Dad, holding a tiny cordial glass in his red fist. "I put down half of them myself."

Jayden's house was full of beautiful things, carpets, crystal, painted screens and scrolled furniture, all of it taken in trade for George's work. When we were kids Jayden used to spend hours decorating the tiny rooms in her doll house. Her life wasn't so different now, the rooms were bigger, that was all.

"My brother here is too modest. You put down ten at least," said George.

"Well, you put down nine."

I cleared my throat. "I thought you said fourteen. Now it's nineteen dead people?"

Across the room Dad scowled at me. "Forgive my daughter, gentlemen."

"Ah, Madison!" Jayden's cheeks were flushed to match her rose colored puff of a dress. "Please say good evening to Mr. Pinkus. I know you've heard about my sister, Mr. Pinkus."

Pinkus? There was Dad looking uncomfortable and George and Travis, both looking starchy. Another man sat before the fireplace, mostly hidden in the wing chair. He leaned forward and I saw Pinkus's familiar, almost colorless blue eyes. He held a cane made of gnarled wood with a gold nugget mounted on top.

"Come here, young lady. Let me get a look at you." I got up and walked to him. He took my hand and held it feverishly tight. I felt spots of sweat on his skin. He was in his sixties, with a gray beard and the pink cheeks of a man who liked his hooch. "So this is the one who gave my nephew the black eye. Quite a shiner, young lady."

"I used a book, sir."

"Resourceful." He tightened his grip on my hand. "Of course we don't have much use for books where I come from. I told my nephew a dozen times to stay away from literate women. Nothing but trouble. But that boy will not be moved. Can't stand in the way of true love, can we gentlemen?" He laughed and bowed his head to Jayden. "And ladies, of course."

I escaped to my corner. The men went on to talk about looters and migrants, but I was busy rubbing my palm on the sofa cushion and didn't pay much attention. It was the same conversation men had whenever they got together. Where were the migrants coming from, what were they saying about conditions in other parts of the country? How well armed were the looters? What happened to them when they were caught?

Yet there was an undercurrent in the room, and it was more than just Pinkus's remark about true love, nauseating as that was. Jayden kept hitting her little crystal glass of spirits. Pinkus repositioned his chair to look at me, as though unwilling to let me out of his sight. George's hand had a slight tremor when he reached for the decanter. Dad watched every glance, his drink untouched.

The conversation changed. George tapped his fingers on his belly and talked about how none of the solar panels in Oregon City worked anymore. "Oregon City never gets enough sun. I keep trying, Mr. Pinkus, but I just can't make it work with all this rain. Don't know how we'll survive another winter."

I'd heard George make this statement many times over the years, the same woeful look on his face. But this room alone had steady electric lights glowing in three lamps and a chandelier. Clearly the solar was working just fine in Oregon City.

Pinkus glanced at the lights, as though he was in on the joke too. "We get enough rain, don't we? I hope you don't have to burn any of this fine furniture for heat, George. Or your wife's lovely gowns."

Jayden jumped up. "I'll see to dinner. Madison, will you help?"

Once the living room doors were closed, she rushed me past two of Pinkus's bodyguards who were stationed next to the front door. "We need to gather some herbs, guys. Won't be a minute!"

I peeled off my socks and followed her out to the front yard in my bare feet. And what I saw almost made me fall over. Six automobiles rumbled at the curb, the lead car a long white limousine. The others were chopped together monsters with guns and grenade launchers mounted to their roofs. I'd never seen so many cars in one place. Soldiers lounged against their rigs, guns at their hips.

For a moment, I couldn't catch my breath.

"Here's the mint, down here. Help me." Jayden pulled me into a crouch next to her. "Happy now? They arrived while you were napping."

"What's going on?"

"It's your bridal party. Or should I say army?" She snapped off a branch of rosemary. "You made quite an impression on Pinkus's nephew."

"Gant?"

"Pinkus is here to get you and he's not going to trade. If you don't go, Pinkus said he'll burn us out, kill Dad and take George." Like Mom, Jayden had a vein of steel deep inside her frivolous self. I saw it now, toughening the lines of her face. She lowered her voice. "It's over, Madison. You're going with him, and you're going to marry Gant. The best thing you can do for us is to go peacefully. Don't make Dad have to protect you. Because he'll die, Madison."

"I'm not marrying Gant."

"You should have thought of that yesterday!" She stood up in a swirl of pink and waved to Pinkus's soldiers. In the house, I pulled on my socks and followed Jayden into the kitchen. As we entered one of the servants gasped and dropped a china gravy boat on the tile floor.

The atmosphere in the kitchen went silent.

"It's all right," said Jayden. "We're going to be fine."

I looked at the hand painted porcelain that had just exploded on the floor, and at the white faces of the cook and two maids. Clearly they thought the situation was a long way from fine.

George stuck his head in the kitchen. "Everything okay, hon?"

"Just fine. Nothing to worry about."

I swept up the broken glass and carried it to the dustbin on the back porch. I looked across the back yard to the stone fence at the edge of the bluff. Beyond that, the sky was golden. The rain was over. Next door, I saw a flash of glass in the office building that had been converted into the Oregon City militia's guard house. Men with guns were scooting along the bluff, positioning themselves behind the fine old houses.

Was Jayden right? Had Pinkus come for me?

All we had--valley or Oregon City--were a few bullets and some farm tools. We survived in the valley because Dad grew vegetables for Pinkus and traded on their past friendship. Oregon City survived because of the inhospitality of the geography. You couldn't assault the bluff from the river and you couldn't come over the hilltop without an army to back you up.

"So you're the young lady who blackened my nephew's eye. . . ."

I hurried back inside, heart racing.

Jayden shooed me toward the living room. "Madison, will you please announce dinner to our guests?"

And I probably would have done it. I was thinking about the frozen smile on my sister's face which looked one or two chips away from falling off, and how George was boring as all hell, but he was a husband, father and an electrician. If I lived here, I'd probably get to like him. I might even learn to tolerate Travis, as long as I didn't have to marry him. These weren't bad people.

But as I passed through the hall, I looked out the rippled glass window and saw a lone figure wobble between two buildings across the street. Her arms were outstretched in the same way Mr. Chandler's had been, all those years ago. She tipped from side to side and as though she couldn't remember how to walk and each step was an effort.

She was small and ragged, no bigger than a child. Her hair was a dirty gray toque and her mouth was open in a perpetual dry hole. She wore a torn skirt and frayed sweater, clothes of the person she'd been before the infection. I couldn't imagine how she'd stumbled through town without someone shooting her full of holes.

I moved without thinking, reaching for the door knob and flying down the porch steps before the bodyguards could react. By now the Demented woman had stepped onto the sidewalk and was headed into the street. Pinkus's guys hadn't seen her yet, but they saw me.

"It's the girl," said one, raising his rifle. "She's doing a runner."

I hurried across the street, holding up my arms. "Don't shoot!"

The Demented woman wobbled into view and the first soldier raised the alarm. "Dim! On the corner. Dim!"

She came toward me, her eyes cloudy. Did they blink? Could they? I choked back sudden fear—I'd never been this close to a Dim before. Even I could see she was completely absent inside her mad skull. Maybe Dad was right; they weren't people anymore.

"Put your guns down!" I turned to face the soldiers, placing my body between the woman and the front line of soldiers, all of whom had their weapons raised.

The stand off lasted a second, probably less. The woman pushed against me, showing more strength than I had thought her capable of. I stumbled out of her way and she continued to wobble across the street. At that moment, Dad stepped off Jayden's lawn, calling my name.

"Madison, stand down!" He walked toward me.

"Stop right there!" shouted a soldier.

Dad took three more steps and a rifle cracked. Dad froze in place. He seemed to hang in the moment, completely still. And then a seep of blood colored his teeth and bubbled through his lips.

"Dad?" I ran forward and got to him as he fell to his knees. I saw blood pulsing inside his coat next to his heart. The infected woman must have kept moving because Dad's eyes tracked her movement behind me. And he raised a handgun I didn't know he had, aiming it over my shoulder. I screamed as he fired.

The woman's head exploded, spraying a wall of blood and tissue behind her into the soldiers' faces. The first line reeled backwards, hands to their faces, sweeping the stuff out of their eyes and mouths. The line behind them peeled away as though the first bunch were already infected.

I looked at Dad but he was gone, slumped to the ground. His eyes were filled with white sky.

"Dad, you son of a bitch," I put my hands on his bloody chest as if there was some way to push the life back into him. "She wasn't going to hurt anyone."

Militia from the guard house filled the street and poured over the lawns, guns out. They prodded Pinkus's unnerved soldiers back toward their vehicles. The men who'd taken the most blood spray in their faces had dropped their weapons and were running away, half crazy or infected.

Above the chaos, I heard Jayden's screaming for George. She stood on the street, half way to Dad, but staring back toward the house. I followed her line of vision and saw George kneeling on the lawn, hands behind his head. Pinkus stood behind him, one hand cradling George's throat, the other pressing a gun to his temple.

"Attention!" shouted Pinkus. The militia stopped in their tracks and it was silent on the street. "All I want is the girl. We have no business with the rest of you."

Dad's gun lay in a pool of blood next to his hand. I palmed it and wiped it on his sleeve. While everyone else was looking at Pinkus, I lifted the gun, sighted, held my breath. I'd trained on this piece and if there was one thing Dad always believed in teaching us, even when school days were over, it was what to do with a gun.

"Now I don't want to hurt your electrician, but unless I get what I want—"

I squeezed the trigger. The blast was huge, keen as an arrow. Pinkus flopped backwards like a slaughtered hog, hand to his throat. George fell in the other direction, free.

All of us valley kids could shoot.

2. Madison leaves home

2009-02-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

This chapter is short. I spent most of the weekend revising Chapter Ten, which really needed it. This one needs work too, considering I could barely read my notes. I may tweak this chapter in situ, or play around with blogging tools, or add more to my disclaimer paragraph (which I'm doing now, talk about procrastination). I was visiting my best friend in Chicago (hey, C!) where the weather was very warm. The break from Oregon's endless cold explains why I got as little done as I did. But then, who knew you could go to Chicago for a vacation paradise? And who knew Oregon could stay this cold for so long? I saw about a thousand geese migrating over my house today and I saw some leaf buds too, but that does not mean it's spring. BTW, howdy to my first follower, a man with a gun who shares more than just a name with Davy Crockett.

--------------
Chapter Two

I awoke in the dark with Dad holding a lantern in my face. "Get up."

"It's not morning." I pulled the blankets over my ears.

"I'm not asking again." He walked out, banging the door. I sat up, shivering in the cold. A sliver of gray light came through a gap in the curtain, but certainly not enough to be called morning. I pulled on jeans and sweaters and went downstairs.

Dad was cleaning his shotgun at the kitchen table and Aunt Margo stood at the stove pouring hot water over coffee grounds. Coffee was one of the things we traded for aggressively. Every year, three pigs were slaughtered for coffee barter. Pinkus had connections in Mexico. Dad was talking about adding another pig to the deal because by September we were using grounds two days in a row. We were all wild about coffee in the valley.

"What's going on?" I asked, getting my cup from the cupboard. "Something happen?"

"I'm taking you to your sister's."

Margo dropped the coffee pot lid. It clanked and crashed against the stove.

I turned to Dad. "The hell you are."

He slid a shell into the gun. No reply.

"Is this about Gant? That wasn't my fault. You were there!"

Margo carried her cup to the table and sat down, folding her hands as if she were about to pray. "You run around here like a wild animal. It's not decent. No wonder men want to—"

"So you're going to marry me off like a crate of vegetables because some jerk touched me?" Not waiting for an answer, I pushed away from the table and watched them scramble to save their coffee.

"Pack your things!" Dad yelled after me.

Upstairs, I flopped on my bed. So it would be Travis. I was going to be an electrician's wife.

Chris and Riley were still sleeping when I threw my bag into the pony cart. I was sorry not to say goodbye. We were seven miles from Oregon City, but the boys only made the trip every few months. I could well be married by the time I saw them again. Cracks of sunlight slanted through the clouds and mist rose like a sigh from the cornfield.

Aunt Margo stood in the screen door and shivered. "At least it's daylight."

"I don't know why we have to leave so early," I said. "Jayden won't even be awake when we get there."

Dad dropped a sack of potatoes into the cart. "I'm not losing a whole day over you, Madison. We're leaving now and that's final."

Tierney walked over from the barn carrying a gray bundle. He nodded to Dad and tossed his things into the cart. I wanted to ask why he was coming with us, but Dad was one question away from losing his temper. I could always tell, since I was the one who usually put him over the limit.

"You be home as soon as you can, William," said Margo. She gave me a last look and slammed the screen door. With Dad and Tierney walking next to the horse and me following the cart, we left the farm and headed north to Oregon City. I didn't look back.

The first mile or so we walked through valley land. Every inch of it was under cultivation, hay, corn, vegetables, stock. As we walked by the homes of our neighbors Dad would click his tongue if there was no smoke coming out of the chimney or whistle under his breath if there was. If I hated Dad and thought he was a tyrant, I can only imagine what these people thought of him.

The track started up the hill, the cart's bicycle tires digging into the chucked road bed. We rose through a dense forest. I could still glimpse the walls and roofs of the houses that remained standing, but no one lived in them anymore and each year the trees and shrubs grew higher and closer. I could imagine walking up this hill and not knowing there had ever been houses and barns in these woods.

As we climbed out of the valley, Dad and Tierney shouldered their guns. On top of the hill, the forest yielded to what had once been housing developments, but this area was unprotected and no one lived here. Blackberry vines clambered over the walls and roofs of the places left standing, creating green hummocks with the occasional broken window revealing a dark and forgotten interior. The mounds reminded me of Sleeping Beauty's castle where all the inhabitants were under a hundred-year spell. I used to dream about sneaking up here on my own to explore.

"Did you come through Oregon City when you arrived?" Dad asked Tierney.

"I came over from the river. I turned inland at the first checkpoint."

"New Era Road. I know the place." Dad was silent for a moment. "After this blows over, I hope you'll think about coming back. You're a solid farmhand."

"Thank you." Tierney laughed in a way that didn't sound as though he found anything humorous about it. "A solid farmhand."

"I was a lawyer Before," said Dad. Tierney didn't respond.

Where streams had broken over the road surface, we guided the horse through small canyons in the red clay. Pilot was used to this terrain, but the extra care we had to give him made Dad uneasy. Tierney went ahead with his rifle and watched the bushes while Dad and I walked with Pilot.

"I thought the Demented were all dead around here," I said.

"There's always more. It's an infectious disease."

"But they aren't dangerous."

"Their blood is."

"So that's why you shoot them full of holes? To let the blood out?"

Dad tugged on Pilot's bridle, making his head jerk in surprise. "We're not discussing it."

We turned into an empty grid of streets. I remembered houses had once stood here, but the Oregon City militia had burned everything when Dims overran the area. Thousands of old bones filled the ditches.

Up ahead, Tierney walked by one forlorn skeleton that had died curled on its side in the middle of the road. Tierney checked out the bits of bone that poked through the moss-covered rags. It looked the size of a kid. Closer to Oregon City there was an effort to bury the Demented but out here, they were just left to rot.

"I think someone ought to bury these people," I said.

"They aren't people," said Dad.

"Then what are they?"

He made some kind of grunting noise that didn't sound like human language.

"Is the whole world like this?" I asked.

Tierney looked back at me. "Most places are a lot worse."

"No more talking, Madison," said Dad.

The wind turned cold and heavy clouds boiled over the sky. I smelled rain in the air. We were closer to Oregon City now, in an area that used to be part of the city but was now just more ruins. A church, a school, a shopping center. Barriers of old rusted out cars stacked three and four high blocked the roads. Dad walked Pilot over crumbling sidewalks to get around them.

When we started seeing skulls on fence posts, I knew we were close to the checkpoint. I never understood why people did it--nailing bodies to the sides of buildings or hanging them from trees. If it was supposed to warn other Dims to stay away, it showed a basic misunderstanding of Demented 101. Scarecrows didn't work on crows either. Yet all checkpoints looked like bone yards, and the ones going into Independent Canby were worst of all.

The entrance to Oregon City was marked by three pyramids of mossy skulls in front of an old store. It was just beginning to rain as we arrived, and we hustled under the awning to stay dry while Dad took out his identity papers.

"William Rodgers," said the main guy, reading Dad's card. He was bulky under his canvas coat, though I couldn't tell if he was carrying firearms or just fat. He had gristly brown hair all over his face but none on his head. They had furniture spread around the parking lot and smoke poured out of the engine block of one old car. I smelled meat cooking. Barbecue.

His friend was a tall, rangy dude who saw me and never looked away. "And who might you be?"

"Eleanor Roosevelt."

Tierney made a genuine laughing sound.

"You look like an Eleanor," said the tall dude. "Ellie."

"Madison!" yelled Dad. "Give the man your I.D."

I handed him my social security card and the tall dude mouthed the name printed on the surface, which did not say Eleanor Roosevelt. Since I was born Before, my card was official. My brothers were born After so they carried hand-written birth certificates. Oregon City was the only place that cared if you were the person your papers said you were. In a place like Independent Canby, all they wanted to know was whether you were Demented or not.

The tall dude handed back our cards. "Where you folks going?"

"George O'Malley's residence. His wife is my daughter," said Dad.

"Thought I recognized you." The first man, gristly guy, pointed toward Pilot and the cart. "What you got there?"

He and Dad walked into the rain and threw back the tarp. Tall dude leaned against the wall next to me.

"So, how old are you?"

"Ask my father, moron."

His lips peeled back from his broken teeth. "You don't want to talk to me like that."

"Whoa, whoa," said Tierney. "This one's just up from the country, hasn't learned her manners. Apologize, Madison."

"I will not."

Tierney grabbed my arm and yanked me away from the wall and out into the rain. "Go to your father."

"It's pouring!"

"Go to your father."

By then Dad was staring at me, so I shrugged and went. Tierney and the tall dude were yucking it up in no time. I hated all of them.

"That man has about fifty pounds of shooting iron on him," Tierney said when we were on the road again. His voice was barely audible over the drumming rain.

"So what."

"You aren't going to last an hour with people like this unless you keep your mouth shut."

I looked at Tierney. He was tall, thin like all migrants, with bunches of hard muscle filling out his arms and shoulders. He wore torn clothes and busted-down boots. His cracked leather jacket was zipped to his neck and slick with rain. His hair, if it was ever clean or dry, would be blond. He looked as old as Dad, but all migrants looked old because of their hard lives. He could be any age.

"Maybe I don't want to last an hour," I said. "Maybe I don't even want to last five minutes."

"If you understood anything, you'd know what a stupid thing you just said."

"Go to hell, migrant."

"Tierney," shouted Dad. "What do you know about photovoltaic cells?"

They walked on chatting about solar while the rain poured out of the sky.

1.5 The rest of chapter one

2009-02-01T11:40:00.000-08:00

I'm going out of town for a few days and decided to post this ahead of schedule. Chapter One has now been rewritten about three times: once for my critique group, once for an agent submission, and again for this post. I'm always amazed by the gap between what I see in my mind and what is readable on the page. Letting text rest for a few months is the only way to rewrite. I can't tell you how many clever lines I scrubbed during this last rewrite. And there are still a few left that should come out.

When the novel first appeared to me, I was so obsessed with Madison's voice that I had to play it big. I used to say amen every day for her voice. Now of course it annoys me, all her opinions and judgments. I'm hoping her voice carries through the edits, despite my need as the author to construct a narrative that I can live with. We both live here, Madison and I.

That's all I've got today! Here's the text:

Chapter One, Part Two

I washed the dishes and made the bread dough and then went up to my room to find a book.

Our house used to be full of books when Mom was alive. Dad's law books, Mom's art books, all my grandparents' books. Our library survived First Winter when everyone else we knew burned their books for heat. It wasn't until Aunt Margo moved in that Dad developed his lunatic hatred of learning. I hid as many books as I could in my closet and watched Margot spend the first few days of her honeymoon hauling the rest out to the woodpile for the migrants to burn on their cooking fires.

I continued to learn on my own even after the book purge. I taught myself French, including the talking part. Every summer I set myself to learn two Shakespeare plays. I also tried to teach my two brothers to read. Chris and Riley were born After, so they never went to school. By the time they were old enough, Dad had ruled on the subject of education and they never had a chance.

I had some success with Riley. He learned the alphabet and could write his own name, but Chris was far too wiggly to sit still that long. Neither of them displayed the least curiosity about what was inside a book. Since I was kind of foggy about math, I never gave that a try. Maybe one of them had scientific aptitude, but no one will ever know. Thanks, Dad.

Because we moved to the farm while I was still a baby, we were better prepared than most when the lights went out and diseases began to kill so many people. We were far from the city in a part of the world where we got more rain rather than less. Soon we were feeding a dozen other families. One of the first guys who turned up for work was George, an electrician who built solar panels in the old days. In a very little time he married my older sister, Jayden, and installed solar on almost every house in the valley.

Solar wasn't a lot of electricity—usually only enough to run the refrigerator for a few hours a day—but my brothers were constantly plugging in old things, appliances and electric toothbrushes to see what they did. One day they tried a deevee machine in a computer laptop and it worked. Until Dad found out, we watched deevees every day, whenever we could sneak away from work. We watched Star Wars and The Simpsons, and my brothers did good barter with other valley kids for disks. Because they didn't burn, everyone had stacks of them in their houses.

We took all kinds of things in trade for viewing time. Toys, books, food, if someone's mother happened to be a good cook. I wanted to trade for clothes, but if you were caught wearing something that wasn't yours, the adults would know immediately there was an alternative economy going on somewhere. The whole thing depended on silence.

Sometimes when we were watching deevees, my brothers asked me what it was like in the old days. Were there yellow people like Homer Simpson? Was Darth Vader real? What was it like to fly in a space ship? To my brothers there was no difference between cars, airplanes and space ships. In the seven years between when I was born and when they were born, the world had changed so much that all Before stuff looked like magic.

On less charitable days, I suspected my brothers were like dogs, color-blind and unable to recognize themselves in the mirror. Maybe I was getting like that myself.

###

I took my book outside to Mom's Lexus. It was parked between the trailers and the chicken shed, hidden from the strawberry field or other places Margot was likely to go. But to get there, I had to walk past three of Pinkus's men, including his nephew, Gant. They were cleaning their firearms on a picnic table, lunching on hooch and deer sausage while they worked. I said hey on my way to the car but Gant stared at me, saying nothing.

The Lexus had been parked since it ran out of fuel. The tires were gone but almost everything else was still intact, including Mom's purse which sat on the floor next to the driver's seat, full of her pictures and credit cards.

It was a nice place to sit and read. I stretched out in the back seat and propped the book on my chest. It was an encyclopedia and I was trying to read carefully, so when the door flew open and Gant leaned into the car, I was caught off guard.

"The boss's daughter, all by herself." Gant propped one heavy black boot on the floor of the Lexus. He wore a black leather vest and long shredded blue jeans. His biceps were puckered with scars.

Gant was in charge of all the soldiers that Pinkus had stationed on our farm. His father was the guy Dad got out of jail all those years ago, but like his uncle, Gant wasn't grateful for past good deeds. Staying out of jail hadn't kept Gant's father alive anyway; he'd died of blood poisoning during the first winter. Since Pinkus had no children of his own, Gant was Pinkus's heir, though it didn't mean they had any love for another. Dad didn't have to tell me to stay out of Gant's way.

I sat up, closing the encyclopedia. "Shove off, Gant."

"Mind if I sit down? Thanks." He climbed in, bringing the reek of hooch with him. He had a narrow, beaky face and close-cropped hair.

"What do you want?"

"To talk to you, Madison. That's all."

"My father won't like it. I'm not kidding, Gant."

Gant laughed and walked his fingers across the upholstery to my leg. His fingers climbed up my thigh and kept walking. "It doesn't matter if your father likes it or not. I like it."

I twisted away from him but he slid across the seat, forcing me against the door. "I'll scream. Swear to god."

"Go ahead. If you don't make me happy, Uncle Pinkus will hear about it. Do you want your dad to swing on the end of a rope? Think about it."

"Guess I'd better make you-" I swung my book at his face. "-happy."

It connected with his jaw and he snarled as he pawed it away. I reached for the door handle and he caught me by the arm, yanking me close. His lips crawled over my neck and when I looked in his eyes, I saw a black mark on his iris as though someone had taken a tiny slice out of his eye.

"That's better," he said and touched my boob.

Suddenly the door on my side flew open, and the book-reading migrant, Tierney, looked inside.

"Your dad's asking for you, girl."

For a moment, Gant's grip on my boob got tighter, then he pushed me toward Tierney. I climbed out, shaking.

"Go to your dad," said Tierney. "And don't look back."

Dad stood at the corner of the chicken shed, his face so white it was almost green.

Behind me, windshield glass shattered.

###

Of all of us kids, I was the one who had expectations. If the world hadn't gone to hell, I'd be in college, preferably some place far from here. Both my parents went to school, Mom in New York and Dad in California. Those were just names now, places I would be as unlikely to see as fly to the moon.

What was much more likely, in fact inevitable, was that I would get married very soon.

My sister, Jayden, had married well. I remembered a lot of back-slapping between George and Dad the night they worked out the deal for Jayden. Their marriage kept George in Oregon City where he could maintain everyone's solar, and in exchange my sister was the best-dressed woman in town. She worried all the time about George getting kidnapped by Pinkus or someone like him, but Oregon City had a militia and so far even Pinkus would rather barter for George's services than kidnap him. Thanks to George, Oregon City had electric streetlights, but of course they could never use them, or bad people would know they had them. That's new world logic for you, right there.

George had a brother, Travis. He was about thirty and acted like he was sitting on a tack whenever we were alone together. Dad talked about me marrying Travis, but I couldn't seriously consider spending the rest of my life with a man whose great passion was copper wiring.

I wondered how much longer I could hold off marriage. Sometimes I'd catch Dad looking at me as though weighing barter credits in his mind. Like I was pumpkin on the vine and he needed the field for something else.

###

Dad didn't come home for dinner but we had a houseful of people just the same. Aunt Margo, Aunt Gayle and Uncle Edward, their two kids, Sue-Lynn and her kids, Christine and her grandbaby, James. I was run off my feet dealing with all the children so I didn't notice until almost dark how weird the adults were acting.

They were all sitting around the dining room table when I brought four-year old Kayla in to her mom, Sue-Lynn. She was spitting mad she couldn't keep up with the big kids who were playing hide and seek. She was so tired from trying she could barely keep her eyes open.

All the adults shut up as we walked in.

"What?" I asked.

Aunt Margo looked like she'd been crying and Gayle was patting her hand.

"Your skirt, Madison," said Gayle. "It's not decent."

I 'd hitched it up to my knees to chase kids. "You'd think you all never saw legs before." I poured myself a glass of water from the pitcher on the sideboard. "What happened to that pig Gant? Dad send him back to Pinkus?"

No answer. Margo had her lips folded so tight they looked like cracked cement. Uncle Edward tapped his cane on the floor. Sue-Lynn kissed the top of Kayla's head and didn't look at me. Gayle gave me a flat, unblinking stare.

"What? Somebody die?"

"Go bring the children inside now, Madison," said Aunt Margo. "Now."

I stomped out and slammed the door. A year ago I would have said, "You can't order me around! You aren't my mother!" Not anymore. I guess that's what being eighteen has taught me—they can order me around. Mom had been dead for three years, the aunts have taken over and there's no use fighting it.

I wasn't in any hurry to get back in the house after that. The kids were still playing hide and seek, so I played It until I found them all, and by then it was full dark and Dad was home.

Twelve families lived in the valley, plus single people like Misch and Mrs. Hammett and Jorge. At any time, there were ten to twenty migrants living in the various barns, working in the fields by day and cooking dinner over campfires by night. So even though the valley was a big place, no one was ever more than a few minutes away from another person. For kids, it was great. You were never alone and almost never bored.

When there was trouble, all the families and migrants would hunker down at our farm. It didn't happen so much now that most of the Demented were dead, but every once in a while there'd be some reason we needed to pull together. Dad said we were only doing as well as we were because of geography. Directly north of us was Oregon City and south was Independent Canby, Pinkus's country. Pinkus owned the river between Oregon City and Salem, and even though that was sixty miles of territory, there was hardly anyone left alive. He controlled it with his army of men like Gant.

I wasn't sure why the families were gathering tonight. There hadn't been any infected around the valley in weeks. The migrants we had were decent enough. I couldn't think of any reason for Dad to come home with Sue-Lynn's husband, Cal, and Christine's husband, Pete, and all of them go in the dining room and close the door.

Finally, we located Riley and I shooed them toward the house, game over.

"It's better in the dark!" said Chris. "Five more minutes?"

"You don't even know what a minute is," I said. "Get in the house."

"A minute is sixty hours," said Riley. "Am I right?"

"When I'm playing hide and seek with you, it certainly feels like it."

They ran inside and I saw a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. Something shifted in the shadows next to the pump house.

"Hello?" I called. No answer. I heard gravel scraping against a boot and then silence. At the back door, I saw a big square thing lying by the doormat. My encyclopedia.

1. Madison, After chapter one

2009-01-31T18:20:00.001-08:00

I started Madison, After in June 2008 and finished the first draft in November, not bad for a 300 page novel. Writing about a post-apocalyptic world is very seductive and this novel was one of the most absorbing things I've ever done. Anyone with writer's block should try it. Read (or re-read) The Stand by Stephen King, then just imagine yourself dealing with food and water at a most basic level. I'll post a list of books I read during the first draft, things as old and diverse as Earth Abides by George R. Stewart and Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham to the non-fiction collection The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. I would also like to know what other people read in this strange little sub-genre.

You won't see it except in very general plot terms, but the inspiration for this novel was NOT the end of the world. It was a Victoria Holt novel called On the Night of the Seventh Moon. If you are under 40, there's no reason you've seen this book. It's an entirely wacked gothic romance from the 1960's with an underaged heroine, a dangerous man, and a mysterious setting. I loved this book when I was a kid, and when I came across a copy a few years ago, I found I still loved it. But for such different reasons! A friend and I kicked around the notion of rewriting it for a modern audience, but the story couldn't work without the virginal, trusting 18 year old narrator. For reasons of my own (being the mother of one) I was more comfortable writing it as a young adult/crossover novel. If anyone reads this genre, you know the label is anything but a limitation. And the end of the world stuff? It just seemed like a really good idea.

I'll try to post a chapter a week as I rewrite. Comment freely--or rather, with some tact. Mindful of the fact that the author is a complete wuss. Here goes---

Chapter One

The first time I saw anyone read a book on the farm was when a man named Tierney pulled out a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire during lunch break.

When Dad wasn't looking, I carried the water bucket over to him. "Do you know how to read?"

He wasn't much, just one more stringy-haired stranger who'd come to the valley looking for work. "Do you?"

"Madison!" yelled Dad. He never liked me talking to men.

"I learned." I ladled water into Tierney's bowl and went to the next person.

Our farm workers came from all over. Migrants. Pinkus sent men from Independent Canby, but all they did was sit in their trailers, eat our food and watch us work. During harvest, when we could certainly use more help, we had as many as five of Pinkus's guys on site, making Dad crazier than usual. What did Pinkus think we were going to do with our crop of green beans? Sneak off in the night without paying tribute?

The migrants who actually did a job of work came from wherever the wind blew them. Refugee camps, cities, other farms. They'd all had other jobs Before—stockbrokers, salesmen and housewives. Once we even had an airline pilot. They came and went, blown away by the same vague wind after a day, a week, a month. I got used to not learning their names.

Except for this guy. The next time I saw him, he had a book of poems. It was a battered old thing, curved from being carried in his back pocket. The rest of the crew was playing cards, whittling, napping. At the end of lunch break, Tierney stuffed the book into his pocket, and Dad frowned. Tierney reading on his breaks was probably enough for Dad to think about firing him. Dad had a poor view of learning, even though he had once been a lawyer and you had to have a lot of college for that job.

Dad saw me staring at Tierney. "Are you planning to eat next year, Madison?"

"I don't know. What are we having?" I smiled and he glared. That was Dad, always angry about something. He used to scare me but at age eighteen, there wasn't much he could do to me.

"Quit daydreaming and help your mother."

"Stepmother."

"Mother."

"She's not my mother."

Dad humphed and stomped off. I could do that forever and he knew it. Mother, stepmother, mother, she's not my mother, yes she is. No, yes, no, yes. No.

The workers went back to the fields and I carried the water jug and ladle to the house. It was June, a time of intense worry for Dad. The new plants were up but the weather was still cool and rainy. A lot of people depended on Dad growing food and for keeping our community on the good side of Pinkus. When Dad was a lawyer and there was still a government, he got Pinkus's brother out of jail. No one ever forgot a good turn, but Dad said there was a time limit on returned favors.

My stepmother, Margo, and her sister Gayle were in the kitchen. They both looked up as I walked in, identical sour-puss expressions on their faces.

"Were you talking to that migrant again?" asked Aunt Margo. "You know how your father feels."

"He made it very clear." I put the ladle in the sink. There was no point arguing; she would only repeat everything I said to Dad.

"I think someone has a little too much free time," said Gayle. She used to be the family disappointment: she'd been a hairdresser Before. But since they weren't training any more beauticians and people still needed their hair cut, the tables turned for Aunt Gayle. She now had the barterable skill and Margo's only skill had been to marry Dad a week after my mom died.

"Wash up the lunch dishes, please," said Margo. "Then feed the sourdough and make the batter. After that you can join us at the strawberry field. No reading, Madison."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

As soon as they were out the door, I sneaked a glass of apple brandy. Times like these, I reflected on how being a slave was not on my top ten list of things I wanted to do when I grew up. Every kid had those lists, right? Being a farmer wasn't on my list either. What I wanted was to be an archaeologist with a specialty in Egyptology. In light of what happened in the last ten years, however, I would focus on the late American epoch.

A couple of years ago, I organized a dig at the old Chandler house with some of the other valley kids. Mrs. Chandler and her children had been the first in the valley to get infected, before anyone really knew what it was. The house had been vacant ever since.

I had my crew working in grids, collecting artifacts. We set up a sifter to catch bone chips and pottery shards and had a methodology for recording our finds. Most of the furniture, dishes and useful stuff had been taken by other valley families, but there were lots of clues about what the last days of the Chandler family had been like. Shopping receipts, medicine bottles, toys. We dated our findings by strata. The top layer was leaves, dirt and animal droppings deposited after the looters did their business, and it was by far the deepest layer. The next was detritus of broken furniture and dishes, stuff the looters dropped. Below that we got to items the Chandlers had used. My friend Andrew found a diamond earring.

We did this for almost a week before Dad discovered us and made us stop. Well, there was more to it than that. Dad was tracking an infected person, a Demented, up our road. It was headed for the Chandler house as if it knew exactly where it was going. Before Dad could stop it, the Demented came through the front door, naked, bloody, mostly starved, scaring all of us. It had been almost a year since we'd had one in the valley. The Demented are not dangerous unless you touch their blood, so what does Dad do? Shot it through the head, right in front of us. The blood flew everywhere.

The valley council had a big meeting and decided to burn the Chandler house. All of us kids were grounded to our home farms, but I got it the worst. Dad made it very plain that I wasn't going anywhere, ever. He stopped home-schooling me and gave my bike to my brother Chris. Whenever I was allowed off the farm, I went to my sister Jayden's house in Oregon City which was worse than prison. Everyone watched me after that. I couldn't walk to the end of the driveway, either at home or at Jayden's, without some neighbor asking what I thought I was doing, did my father know where I was?

I asked Dad, after I got over being so pissed off, why the Demented had gone directly to the Chandler house, almost as though it had purpose. It didn't fit what we knew about the infection. Naturally Dad got angry and wouldn't answer.

But I thought about this for a long time. The Demented don't eat, care for themselves, or communicate. They don't appear to think at all. They stumble around until they starve to death, or some jerk like Dad shoots them. Everyone says the Dims don't remember their past and or care about sheltering themselves. But this one came directly to the Chandler house, walked right through the front door.

I had two theories on the subject. One was that the guy wasn't Demented; he was just an ordinary crazy human being who wanted a place to hide. Plenty of people went crazy without being Demented. The other theory was that Dims have a shred of memory left in their destroyed brains. This man had a tiny thought that had guided him to the house. He was Mr. Chandler, returning home after all this time.

In either case, the creature should not have been shot. I vowed not to kill any Demented unless I had to, and to protect them from people like Dad if I could.