MyNoReMo: Story Five

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

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

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

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

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?