Category: Uncategorized

And not liking the way my chest feels.

It seems like these days there’s a revolution going on everywhere, and one seems to be in books — at least with the borders debacle in book distribution.

Go here, http://nakedreaderpress.wordpress.com/

Read.

There will be some thoughts from me on this, later.

When I was very little and very sickly, before I learned how to read much less write, I spent the time I was kept alone, indoors, while recovering from some dread awfuls, making lego houses. It came naturally, after that, to make up stories about the people who lived in the lego houses.

After a while, learning and listening to adults became a mission of finding facts and “how things work” to incorporate into my stories. Some of the story lines and some of the characters have been with me in one form or another since then.

Needless to say I started writing stories as soon as I could write for a long time without discomfort – about six. But the “untamed” story lines, the ones that I told myself, continued in the background. And some of these people became as real to me as my best friends.

Right here I want it to be perfectly clear I don’t hear voices and I don’t see things. Having just watched Harvey, this is an important distinction to make. The only way I see things others don’t is if my fever is through the roof (and then mostly I see cartoon characters. Don’t ask. Tom and Jerry, yep) or if I take anything morphine-based, which seems to have a disproportionate effect on me, which is why I don’t take it unless the pain is truly unbearable. (Unbearable – can’t stop either crying or throwing up JUST from the pain.) Then I see Tom and Jerry speaking Latin to each other. (You wish I was joking. You’re just jealous because you don’t have the high class hallucinations we published authors get. Comes with the SFWA card, I swear.)

This is not auditory or visual or any of that type of input. I’ve HEARD some writers have those. I’ve read The Evolution Of The Bicameral Mind. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

My storylines and characters exist in the same space as the “constant internal narration.” If you have no clue what I’m talking about, you’ve never stepped back and thought about it. There is a voice, always, inside your head telling you who you are. That voice sometimes takes on multiple tones and allows you to debate things with yourself. “No, I shouldn’t go to the store, because” “But I need to go to the store.” Etc. there’s also the times it replays arguments you had, or conversations where you’re not sure you got your point across. The story lines and characters are sort of like that, only these conversations never happened in the real world. Yet, it has the same feel. I.e., I can’t just change a character or what he/she says, just like I can’t just change what my mom told me when I was three. I’ve always figured it’s because my subconscious is a MUCH better writer than I am and creates this stuff without asking me about it. Usually I find the characteristics that bugged me about a character or a situation are needed – at least if these characters/situations are in an actual story (more on that later.)

From what I’ve found, I’m not unique in this. Most, if not all writers, have this going on in their heads. Some with one world, some with several, some with a world that’s much like our own, some with wildly alien lands. Some writers even have the full blown auditory/visual thing going.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this. Most of us who have this in ANY degree think we’re completely alone and possibly insane. My first clue I was not totally alone was when I read an interview with Rex Stout, when someone asked him how Nero Wolfe was doing, and Stout was able to give him the exact place Wolfe was, what he was reading, etc. as though Nero lived next door. After that, I became a member of a tightly knit writers’ group and found I wasn’t alone.

I still have the two or three “primitive” and hyper extended story lines going on in my head, but these days I tend to shove them to the back. I’ve learned to put my peculiarity in service of my art, and I USE that in the service of my writing. If a character never comes alive – and yes, I’ve had those – and the scenes don’t start playing themselves out in my head – including scenes I’d NEVER put in the book but which explain actions in the book – then the book is very difficult to write. To date I’ve done three that way, and I’m not going to tell you which, because I don’t think you can tell. It was just hell to write. And I have had one set of books in which only ONE character came to life. The others were “placers”. This is strikingly obvious and reviewers have noted it.

In addition, I have stories that come to my head by means of a fully formed character wanting to discuss things. This is why walking, ironing and repetitive tasks are ideal for coming up with story ideas. The mind goes somewhere else.

Again, I assume – and it’s the only explanation I can come up with – that as a result of my boring, lonely childhood my mind learned to amuse itself by playing chess between my conscious and my subconscious. My subconscious sets up the board, as it were, and throws up these situations and creatures for the conscious to play with. This is also not a bad analogy by the way on how to control it, survive it and use it.

So, why am I telling you this? Well… there are several reasons.

First of all, there is a huge possible trap for new writers who are of the type I am – people who want to write because the stories won’t leave them alone.

If you think of your world as pretty toys, spun out by your subconscious to amuse YOU particularly, you’ll understand how fascinating these stories are to the people who created them. Most of them, once they become hyperextended over years partake a lot of the characteristics of soaps, or even Lost (coff.) People die. People come back to life. Bizarre and purposeless stuff happens. But because these are designed to catch YOU and they are aimed specifically at you, you’ll remain fascinated. If your particular angle is sex, your plots will have tons of sex. Mine had/has tons and tons of medical details – because I grew up in a family with a lot of doctors and absorbed a lot of the interest, even if I never wanted to do it myself. These days mine also have a ton of start up businesses, economics and new inventions, because those subjects fascinate me.

For new writers, who are afraid to talk to anyone about it, the danger is that they will get caught in the first world they (subconsciously) created and which to them is so immensely fascinating. ANYONE who has been in a writers’ group for any time knows the “eternal beginner” who writes story after story after story in a world that is obviously NOT commercial by anyone else’s standards – a world that’s so targeted or so icky or so bizarre that you know no one else will ever buy it. But the writer remains trapped. If you read Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett, and examine the dromes, these are something like it. The dream catches you to feed the dream. If you go on in it, you’ll never be published (more on why this is important later) and you and the drome will eventually die together.

The type of writer who does this type of story usually has ABSOLUTELY no control over them, either. You start noticing after a while, that their stories partake this dream-like and formless quality and it’s not unusual, if you approach them, to be told that “it happened that way.” That means they’re being used by the subconscious, instead of using it. It’s one of the many ways potentially great authors die on the vine.

Worse, with the advent of self publishing as economically feasible and THE way to get in, a lot of these writers will churn out endless novels that two people read, and go quietly insane, never understanding why they don’t sell more.

So what can you do about it?

1– (Sorry to use Pratchett as a guide here, but the man presumably knows what this is like.) Always remember which voice is yours, there inside your head. This is very important because it’s easy to become fascinated by a character and let it take over. I wonder how many of the cases of “possession” or personality disorders are just that.

Remember that your mind is yours. For whatever reason, you created this mechanism to cope with reality. Perhaps like me you were just bored and lonely. Or perhaps, like others, the situation was unbearable and you escaped it.

You might not even remember the circumstances, but do, please, remember, you are you — the other “voices” are just stories wanting to be told.

2- Seize the story, instead of the other way around. Yes, okay, people getting complex operations to repair bizarre injuries might be endlessly fascinating to you. Understand it’s not fascinating to most people. Your world might marry high tech and a neolithic society, because at the time you created it you had clue zero how that stuff worked. Understand you can’t use it that way in a story, unless you explain it. Then deliberately intervene. “No, it didn’t happen that way, it happened this way.” Give the story form, shape it (studying stories that worked commercially helps, here) and write it as a commercial story. You’ll find this helps too. Once it’s out there, in commercial form, it will cease to obsess you. Though you’ll probably get others and have to write them too…

3- Take a clue from stories about possession (I believe a lot of them centered on this type of mechanism) and bring in more devils to drive out that one devil. Weirdly, this does work. By conjuring up a lot of different stories (not in the same world) it divides your subconscious’ ability to create lures for you. That means each story line will be SLIGHTLY less fascinating to you, personally, and you’ll take better control of it.

4 – Publish it. Eric Flint has been known to say that if you’re not crazy when you become a writer, you’ll be by the time you’re a professional. He says this is not so much because we have to work with imagination at a level kids do, but because we live such solitary isolated lives, in which weird thoughts and ideas can seem perfectly plausible. It is the same with your world. You must expose it to the sunshine of other people’s minds. All the unpublished, cherished, obsessed upon worlds I know grow in “ick” factor. It’s the nature of the beast to make itself even more targeted and push more buttons. Which means “more insane” and also “would cause more readers to run screaming into the night” And, UNFORTUNATELY more importantly “will distort my sense of reality till I start reacting oddly to real life.” You must make it passable enough for other people to read. And this will allow you to control you own obsessions and move on.

As writers, we’re creatures who shape dreams. To some extent these dreams also shape our lives. We must walk that fine line every day. I hope this will help people stay on it, without falling into either side.

My body let me down again, which means I had a blinding type of headache all afternoon yesterday, leading to almost no work done in the afternoon. So instead of taking the day off and enjoying myself, I’ll be here and writing, probably all day. Ah well. At least I enjoy writing. Mostly I’m changing the last five chapters, so that … well… so it ends completely different.

A few, random, passing notes:

Older boy is upset because he can’t “read” my fingers as I type.

Havey cat is upset because I won’t stop typing and pet him.

It’s such a lovely day today I’m tempted to go write outside, if I can figure out a place.

My friend Tedd Roberts kindly agreed to do a post to help you with your research while I’m working on finishing the book.

My good friend Sarah Hoyt asked me to do a special crossover between her blog “According to Hoyt” and “The Lab Rats’ Guide to the Brain” at Teddy’s RatLab For those of you joining us for the world outside the lab, I am Tedd Roberts, a professional researcher in the field of Neuroscience, and an apprentice SF writer. As a Ph.D. I talk to a number of writers and give advice – some requested, some gratuitous (grin!) about getting the science right in Science Fiction. Over in Teddy’s RatLab I am working on “The Lab Rats’ Guide” as a way to describe the basics of brain science in an informal way, without losing the accuracy of the science.

After all, *some* brain science in TV and Movies is just laughable. What? You’re not laughing? Well, trust me, the doctors, scientists and students who watch and read are laughing; that is, when they aren’t hanging their collective heads in shame.

I’m sure you’ve seen it – the brain probe that is long enough to stick out the other side of the skull, yet somehow it never seems to do any damage when inserted into the back of the brain. The outer space doctor emoting over “The engram has wrapped itself around the neocortex and we’ll never get it out!”

Right. Sure. And the engines, they canna take ennimore, Cap’n. Yup, a whole university’s worth of professors is shaking their heads over that one.

So – as a writer, or as a reader, what are you supposed to do? Read a scientific paper?

In a word? No.

My advice, don’t do it. “That way lies danger young apprentice.” Scientific papers *really* aren’t written for nonscientists. They are full of phrases like “Under conditions of altered physiological constituents of the interstitial fluid, we determined a significant 5% increase in intracellular osmolality.” Now, if you’re a scientist you can read that and figure out that when the liquid outside a cell is salty, the liquid inside a cell gets a little bit salty, too. Scientific writing is *stilted*. It uses a very rigorous style that is meant to convey certain facts in a manner such that other scientists will know to look at the information in a certain way.

I have a colleague that says “Scientists only really only know how to write about 20 sentences. They just have to learn how to use those same sentences over and over until they run out of results to include in a paper.” He should know, he’s written over 150 articles for scientific journals, and they all use the same basic construction. Only another scientist, schooled in the same art of manuscript preparation can truly wring all of the essential facts out of a scientific paper.

“Psst, hey Boss?”

“Yes, Ratley, what is it?”

“What about scientific magazines? The Grad Students keep leaving them lying around in the lab. Surely they’re not so bad!”

“That’s true, Ratley, but sometimes I think those magazines are edited by Ratfink. Somehow, people seem to get impressions about science that the scientists themselves never intended. Unfortunately, the better public science magazines are still scientific journals, and the articles can still be hard to understand.”

[Oh, sorry folks, Ratley is my assistant. He showed up in the lab one day, and asked for a job. Who better to handle lab rats, than … a Lab Rat? I introduced him and the other LabRats a couple of days ago over at the Guide. Oh, and yes, I’m translating. When Ratley speaks, most people just hear “squeak.”]

Back on track. I’m sure you’ve seen them on the newsstand, Magazines with Science or Scientific in the title. There are two high quality “public” journals (“Science” and “Nature”) that publish new or important results with broad appeal. Manuscripts are typically submitted to a board of editors, who then send them to be read and reviewed by other scientists in the appropriate field before the editors will consider publishing. If an article passes this “peer review” and is also considered to be of interest to persons other than just those who study that exact phenomenon, then the magazine will consider publishing it. These magazines are considered “public” because scientists and knowledgeable people from many different scientific fields read them. There are other magazines that take science seriously, such as “Scientific American,” either by inviting scientists to write articles for the general public, or having their own writers interview scientists before writing an article. However getting an article to be understandable by the public requires someone that can *write* first, and the science comes second – sometimes without even talking to scientists. It is very rare that a scientist is such a great communicator that they can write Sunday Supplement articles on science that anybody can understand – the late Carl Sagan was one, and the Science Fiction and Fact author Isaac Asimov was another. The hazard in writing an article so that anyone can understand it, is that you might lose the science along the way.

So, “hard science” is … hard, and “easy science” may not be science at all. Is there a middle ground? Sure. If you are serious about including science, and in particular brain science, in your writing, consider taking a couple of courses at your local community college. Often there are classes in physiology, neuroscience or psychology for non-majors – you may even find one taught by the same professor that teaches a university course to PhDs. Take the survey courses, learn the language. It may not help you understand The New England Journal of Medicine, but it can certainly help with Scientific American. The other thing it will help with is …

Ask a scientist.

“Ya want I should call Ratley and get some help in here, Teddy?”

“No, Ratso. I think I can handle this one.”

“Are ya sure? Da emails have been pilin’ up ever since ya posted dat blog on da Internet”

“No.” (pant) “I can handle it.” (heave) “Man, that’s heavy. How many more sacks of mail? Oh, heck no. Yeah, Ratso, call the guys in here, we’ve got to sort through all of this stuff.”

“Hey, Boss. You’ve got more fan mail.”

“No Ratley, not fan mail. More questions, but I can’t figure out how they got my address. Do you know? Ratfink ?”

(Ratfink leans on a mail sack, whistling)

“Ratfink? You *do* know! You did this, didn’t you!”

“Sure. You know folks, Teddy here will be *glad* to answer your questions, just email him at…”

“No, Ratfink. Don’t you dare, or no cheese.”

“Aw.”

You’ve probably figured out by now that if you *really* want to get a better understanding of the brain, who better to ask than a real brain scientist? There are a bunch of us out there that are fans of *whatever* fiction genre you might choose. Science Fiction is a favorite, and there are quite a few scientists that write as well. Many years ago at a very large scientific conference, one professor had a booth selling (and signing!) his mystery books. They were quite good, and appealing to scientists and nonscientists as well. However, we scientists are not always the best at *writing* fiction, but we sure can tell when the science is wrong. There are over 30,000 people attending the Society for Neuroscience meeting each year, and if you mention “Spock’s Brain” or “The Matrix” they will laugh, but at the same time they will speak well of “Memento.”

Need help finding a scientist? Just ask on whichever bulletin board you frequent. Ask the local medical school or university, find out who teaches the night classes in Biology, Chemistry or Physics at the local community college. Ask someone you know.

Getting the science right is *worth* it. You owe it to the readers. You’ll find that many if not most scientists will appreciate it – but be sure to explain to them that The Story comes first. You aren’t writing a Ph.D. dissertation. They’ll understand.

And who knows? You might find out that you’ve gained a whole bunch of new fans!

No, it’s not as alarming as it sounds. I just didn’t get QUITE to the point I wanted yesterday because all of a sudden at about nine thirty pm I felt like someone had yanked the rug out from under me, and barely managed to stumble the twelve feet or so to my bed.

I woke up at five am and thought I’d done myself violence pushing yesterday. I.e. I thought I was worse again, and I could not sleep. But I took an aspirin and had some warm tea and went back to sleep for two and a half hours. I woke feeling more like myself than I have in months. So now I shall have some coffee and write.

WHY is it that writing takes it out of me so profoundly. You’d think “soft job, indoors, sitting” would mean no great effort, right? However, not only does it tire me more than say painting walls, but (and this is weird) if I work a whole day and push hard, I lose weight more so than if I’d been doing violent, physical labor. This is one of the mysteries of the universe.

Does anyone else out there sometimes have trouble remembering they live in a body? No? Only me?

Well, I do have that problem. Sometimes it’s really big and in your face as problems go. Like the first time an agent wanted to see all of my manuscript and I decided I had to fix it from the inside out. At the same time, my son, Marsh, was in charge of feeding pre-school fish. We were supposed to go up every day and feed the fish. Let’s just say that his whining, pleading and begging didn’t get through to me until the work was done. And then I REMEMBERED. Let’s just say those fish were called “Schrodinger” fish for the longest time. While running to the school, kid by the hand, I wondered if the fish were waves or particles… er… I mean, dead or alive. They turned out to be alive, but, you know, I didn’t know fish could look so HAPPY to see you. No, seriously.

There have also been times when I’m on the home stretch of a novel and everything finally looks right, and I’m coasting on it, and I finish it and realize I’ve been working for twenty four hours, and can’t remember if I’ve eaten.

What is this a propos de? Well… this book that was due in October has been delayed mostly because of the stupid body. Sometime at World Fantasy I caught what I thought was “perfectly normal” con crud. Only once I kicked it (about a week) I got to work for about a week, and then it came back. I’d think it was something permanent and specific to me, only I know a bunch of people who have been doing the same, including my family.

The problem is this. If you work in an office, yeah, you drag yourself in, you work. In those one or two days a month you can’t do it, you stay home in bed and watch soaps.

This is fine. I know that Victorian ladies of my age spent most of their time being invalids, and I know the reason – I think. On the shady side of forty is when we first realize we are no longer the energizer bunny.

I do try to force myself to work. I even manage to, sometimes, but here is the problem. I’ve now finished this book – A Fatal Stain – twice. Only the first was wrong, and the second was profoundly wrong.

Why you ask? Well, because it’s a funny light book. Now, when I’m feeling like this – and this illness isn’t bad, and it’s more attenuated every time it visits. It’s mostly tiredness. GREAT tiredness, stomach upset, mild upper respiratory – it’s easy to push through on tragic work, or even serious one. But light hearted and funny? No. That takes being “in the voice.”

I wasn’t those first two times. Worse, every time I get sick for however many days, when I come back I need to work up to the voice again. Which when you feel tired and still out of sorts is kind of hard to do. Then I hit the voice, get into it, fix/work/write a good chunk… and the next day I wake up half dead. And if I force it then, the plot twists under my fingers. Let’s just say neither child kidnaping nor people burning alive are funny, okay, and be done with it.

So that brings us to today. I’m this (holds up fingers) close and thought I’d have finished it this week, only Tuesday I was feeling so so, so I went for a walk to wake up and er… Yesterday I did nothing but sleep.

Today I feel like I could go for a walk. Yeah, I hear you yell “Don’t do it Sarah!” I won’t. I’m going to have some more coffee, then sit down and try to finish this. I THINK I can do it by close of business tomorrow. I hope so, as I’d like to go up to Denver on Saturday and hit the museums and stuff.

So, what I want you to do is to keep good thoughts coming in my direction, so that I don’t have to struggle with the stupid body and can actually get done this time.

Think, think, think. :)

Lately, partly because I’ve been trying to kick off whatever bug has got me since November – it keeps coming back – and because when I’m tired or sick I can’t read fiction, I’ve been reading books on the proto- Indo-European culture.

Now, you go back long enough and it’s like reading tea leaves. Oh, okay, not tea leaves. Horse’s teeth and grave sculptures. However, through all this, it is possible to get a picture – vague and confusing though it is – of our most distant ancestors.

I’m not going to play psychologist, but themes emerge from what we can salvage of the very oldest tales: sacrifice and loss, love – often not eros, but agape or family love – blood and death.

Pratchett in a lot of his books says if you go back far enough you find that almost all the old stories are about the blood. I’ll add to that. The oldest stories are about blood, death and rebirth.

I think this is part of the reason that vampires are so popular, but that’s a side line I cannot pursue right now.

One of the things that surprised me is how the themes that echoed through the oldest fragments of legends we can find are the same themes we find again and again in science fiction and fantasy: twins; quests; bringing something magical/healing back; finding who you are.

Part of this, I think, is that humans are not like other animals creatures that live in a certain way because of instinct. Humans are domesticated creatures, as much as our dogs or our cats, but we domesticate ourselves. We are at the same time Fluffy who wants to pee on the sofa and the human who stands over her and tells her no. Only the human is often embodied in a myth.

Of course a lot of us believers get a lot of our morality from religion. But that’s an overt morality. It declares itself. It says “this you shall do” and “this you shall not do” and “here you shall go” and “here you shall not.”

Useful, of course, but it’s rather like the choke chain or the owner literally standing over you to prevent you from going on the sofa. The other part is more important – you don’t go on the sofa because you know you shouldn’t. You know you shouldn’t, because you’ve internalized the experience.

I was thinking about this and it all got tied up with different generations of science fiction and fantasy. Our myths are very much part of what we think the world should be. And what we think the world should be is both fed by and feeds the myth in our head that keeps us acting the way we think humans should act.

As I said, you find a lot of the themes of our oldest myths in fantastic literature… Until, that is fantastic literature decided its more important part was not dreaming of the future – or fantastic lands – but the last part of its name “literature”. It decided its most important function was to astonish the world. In doing so, it lost track of that “what humanity should be” and of reaching back into the sense of what humanity – or our branch of it – was and has been since we’ve had words and long before we had writing.

And so the self sacrifice was lost, and the discovery, and the sense of wonder. Instead we got either purposeless rambles, or people telling us life was brutish and nasty and then you die.

This is I think, an attempt to “count coup”, i.e. to claim to be superior to the vast uncounted multitude of our ancestors who first clawed their way to civilization and to an idea that there might be something better hereafter. And I think in that attempt we – as writers and as a civilization – only make ourselves mental and moral midgets.

Do you ever get to the end of a short story – or worse, a novel – and go “and your point was?” Worse, do you ever get to the end of a short story – or worse a novel – and go “Uh… I followed these characters around for this long for you to either twist them beyond recognition and/or kill them? Do you ever get the impression the author veered away from the ending that could and should have been to go in search of a glitter in the weeds of disappointment and bitterness?
No, I’m not saying that happy endings or happy-go-lucky stories are the only ones worth telling. Why in heck would I? If you’ve read me, you know well that’s not my attitude. But even in the nastiest of settings it is possible to be caring, to be a hero, to fight on. Even in difficult – particularly in difficult situations – it is important to remind others of what it means to be human.
Why would a bad ending be considered more mature or deeper than a happy one, or one where the character acted honorably?

Still battling mystery, partly due to serious case of crud. I can’t think of anything non-fictiony to write, sorry, so here is a bit from A Fatal Stain:

Mind you, I didn’t leave the door unlocked on purpose – not as such. But it wasn’t a big deal, because this wasn’t a bad area of Goldport. Oh, okay, so my friend Ben thought that downtown Goldport near the college was a slum and that gangs fought in the street in front of my house every day. But Goldport was never a big town, though it had achieved a somewhat large and definitely rowdy population during the gold boom. That had left its echo in places named Goldpan Alley and Three shots street, and the Leather and Lace hotel up the street which was a bed and breakfast on the site of a famous brothel.

The gold bust had left the town deserted, its fine Victorian buildings falling to pieces, until UC Goldport had moved to town, and brought with it a boom in tech and other white collar jobs.

Goldport was so white bread it was a wonder no one had ever tried to spread butter an inch thick all over it. Even downtown Goldport was as safe as suburbs in larger cities. If gangs fought on the street in front of my house it would be The Paperclips versus The Calculators. They’d be hauling some serious numbers and glaring daggers at each other. They could do serious damage with the edges of their sharpened, gold mastercards.

But of course Cas thought otherwise and there was no point arguing. After all he saw whatever crime there was in town – and for him even a single crime would be too much. If murders didn’t happen, he’d upgrade graffitti to serious crime status.

“I’m sorry.” I gave him something approaching a contrite smile – at least if my acting abilities were up to snuff – while I looked at the table.

It started innocently. At the time we were living in the small mountain town of Manitou Springs. There were the two of us, (of course) our two sons and four cats. So the logical thing for my younger son to ask for, for his fourth birthday, was… two hamsters.

In a sign our lunacy was too far gone, we then named them Butterscotch and Fudge. And then – such our folly – we put them in an aquarium on the back porch. An aquarium covered only by fine mesh net.

Oh, yeah, one more thing – these hamsters were both female.

The cats left the hamsters curiously unmolested, but the hamsters clearly felt that they lived under hostile conditions.

In the dark of night, they would screech in their little aquarium like tribbles in heat. And in the summer – such our folly – we left the back-porch windows open. So their call went out to the world at large and – I only surmise this, but it’s almost certain – all over the rodent world little signs sprang up written in whatever it is rodents write in saying “Free the Aquarium Two.” And “No Mercy For the Captors.” Rodent students organized protests and there would have been rodent demonstrations at our door step save for the fact that at least one of our cats was the great calico huntress.

Squashed, ignored, desperate, digested the surviving neighboring rodents resorted to extreme measures.

His name was Jean Pierre and he was born in the yard of a neighborhood French family, from which he learned protest songs, a disdain for the establishment, and a tendency to smoke really stinky cigarettes.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started as so many things did with Pete, our oldest cat. You name a cat Petronius the Arbiter, you get what’s coming to you. In this case, it probably wasn’t so much his fault. Pete was getting old. He was fifteen or so, and he caught a cold. As those of you in multiple cat households know, you really can’t have them all together when they are sick. So we locked Pete in the powder room in the attic where we tempted his fading appetite with truly stinky tuna.

Now, to get the action in this story, a little description of the locale must intrude. Manitou Springs looks like a village in an early twentieth century comic, with buildings perched at erratic intervals on the mountain side. Our house was near the top of one of the hills. Our garden was seventeen steps up from the street. The house itself was three floors high and my office was on the third floor. The only doors into the house were on the bottom floor, and we only used the front one, because the back porch one stuck. One of my boys had a door to a second floor porch, but to get to his room you had to walk through his brother’s room AND a bathroom.

The third floor itself, up a narrow staircase, consisted of small powder room, on the left (with a door.) Dan’s office, on the right, without a door (just a railing dividing it from the top of the stairs. And then my office, through the door straight ahead and taking up the entire front of the house. (Not as luxurious as that sounds, since most of it had sloping ceilings. It might explain something about my early writing, that I continuously walked into the side of the ceiling. HARD. To the point of giving myself near-concussion.

On that day, I was running up into my office, to get mail to take out, when I heard the oddest of sounds coming from behind the door of the powder room. It sounded like… an animal choking. I panicked. Pete was getting to be middle aged and a little odd, and I thought he was choking. I screamed for my husband, whose cat Pete was, because if Pete was having seizures, he was more likely to be calm with dan dealing with him.

As Dan came running up the stairs, I threw the door open and…

There was a small, mad-looking squirrel cornered by Pete and making the tcha-tcha-tcha sounds which I believe are French squirrel for “you’ll never take me alive, nom d’un nom.”

So… Dan and I stood stunned in the doorway (not the least of which because a rodent had survived for minutes in a room with Pete.) We stared a moment too long. The squirrel ran between our legs and … into my office, where he holed up behind the printer, singing the Marseillese in squirrel. “Allons squirrels de la patrie” – or, in other words,(Squirrel languages being less diferentiated) tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha.

After running in circles a while, we closed the door on Pete, got the phone, leafed madly through the yellow pages (yes, it was that long ago) and called Animal Control.

Most of them just hung up on us. They knew Manitou had a problem with rodents. Though they seemed to think the problem was endemic plague. And then a bright boy told us “Just leave the front door open and a path to the front door, and he’ll go straight out of it.” Now, this would make perfect sense if the path to the front door weren’t: Down the stairs (ignoring Dan’s office, which we couldn’t block) down a zigzagging corridor. Down another set of stairs (with railings we couldn’t block) past the entrance to the library (no door) and THEN out the door. But we were desperate. And Dan had a window in his office. We thought… Block the stairs. Open the window in Dan’s office. Take screen out. Get out of the way.

So… We didn’t of course realize that this was a special squirrel.

At first it seemed like everything would work. Spying his way clear, the squirrel bolted out of my office and to… Dan’s desk. Where he took advantage of a tiny hole in the back and holed up in a drawer saying tcha tcha tcha * (*translation “I am your worst nightmare, you oppressors of innocent rodents.”)

We called animal control again. One of them took pity on us and told us he wouldn’t handle it, but since the squirrel had probably got in through a hole in the roof, anyway, how about we call his friend who replaces missing roof tiles and has been known to capture the occasional wild animal. At that point, frankly, we’d have called Bezelbub and Sons, Animal Control and Soul Collection. There was something about a possibly rabid squirrel in a house with kids and cats that made our blood run cold. That the squirrel seem to be singing protest songs from inside our desk file drawer just made it even scarier. For all we knew he was collecting our account numbers to pass to the squirrel resistence.

So we called the roof repairman, who was an almost peternaturaly laid back man. We tell him that the squirrel is holed up in the file drawer, that he’s been singing protest songs and that we’re fairly sure we caught a faint wiff of galoises. He didn’t even look like we should be committed. He didn’t even ask us if the squirrel was wearing a beret. Instead, he said, “We’ll get him out,” in the tone of a man who has encountered the Rodent Liberation Front.

For his first attempt, he opened the drawer a little, holding a trap at the ready. He said this often worked. But Jean-Pierre wasn’t JUST any squirrel. Instead of falling for the trap of the oppressor, he holed up further in the drawer, a little mad eye (not that squirrel have any other kind of eye) peeking over “accounts receivable” and his defiant tcha tcha tcha echoing throughout the house.

The unflappable rodent-controller sighed and said “Well, this is more risky, but I have some sleeping gas. I’ll just pump it into the drawer. He’ll be out like a light in no time.”

So he started pumping gas into the drawer. But Jean-Pierre had clearly trained for this eventuality by snorting a little bit of sleeping gas every day.

Once the normal dosage. Tcha, tcha, tcha!

Twice the normal dosage. Tcha, Tcha, tcha!

Three times the normal dosage. I laugh in the face of your puny sleeping gas.

At that point the would-be captor opened the drawer just a little. Taking advantage of this, Jean-Pierre ran out through the opening and into the tinier opening of the drawer above it. Where he holed up saying “Never go up against a squirrel when desks are on the line!”

By now the unflappable man was thoroughly flapped. “I’ve never seen a squirrel do this before,” he said. “It’s like he’s a commando squirrel or something.”

To which Jean-Pierre replied Tcha Tcha Tcha (squirrel for “make my day.”)_

“I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before. I’m afraid of hurting him, but if I give him more gas, I’ll kill him.”

We said okay and fine. Without saying a word – because by then he knew Jean-Pierre understood human English – the man made a little lasso. Then he quickly opened the drawer with one hand, while lassoing Jean-Pierre with the other.

To everyone’s surprise – but PARTICULARLY Jean-Pierre’s – it worked. And, faster than Jean Pierre could formulate curses profane enough, the rodent-catcher threw him a little carrier and shut the door on him.

Our kids, of course, being ours and therefore of dubious sanity, wanted to see the squirrel before the man repatriated him in another neighborhood.

I’ll never forget the squirrel standing inside the cage, looking at us in unquenchable fury. I swear he was holding up his little squirrel fist and singing We shall overcome. Za, Rodentia! (Tcha, tcha, tcha.)

The punch line to this is that a couple of years later, we moved to the neighborhood to which Jean-Pierre, or, as the kids call him, super squirrel, had been relocated.

The very first night, I hear our less-than-bright cat, Euclid, make the sort of meowing sounds that mean that he’s scared of something. I run downstairs. Euclid is staring out the dining room window. And there – in the dark of night (since when are squirrels nocturn?) is a clearly elderly and bedraggled squirrel, dancing along the fence, taunting our cat, singing tcha, tcha, tcha.*

*Allons Squirrels de la patrie……

*A Guest Post by the indomitable Kate Paulk*

I’ve already devoted a fair amount of pixels to my rather less than orthodox view of Vlad III Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula (his choice of name, based on his letters). In The Allure of Evil (http://madgeniusclub.blogspot.com/2011/02/allure-of-evil.html) posted to the Mad Genius Club I talked about the phenomenon of the person who serves good but does evil and how that concept applies to Vlad. The Kindness of Cruelty (http://nakedreaderpress.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-kindness-of-cruelty/) posted to Naked Reader Press, is about Vlad’s world and the way that impacted his decisions. Over at Kate’s Corner (my blog), The Man Behind The Monster (http://www.katepaulk.com/writing/the-man-behind-the-monster/) covers how I portrayed Vlad the man and some of the decisions that I needed to make while I was writing Impaler.

That makes it sound easy, doesn’t it? Of course, the fact that I could ramble for days over various aspects of Vlad’s life, times, and likely beliefs and actions doesn’t help matters. Researching someone that deeply tends to bring them to life, and make them part of you in that odd writer-specific way that lets a writer channel someone’s personality enough to depict them in words.

One aspect of Impaler that’s going to get interest is that most people immediately associate Vlad with the Bram Stoker creation – and of course, vampirism (please don’t go giving me counter-examples from Romania or from non-Western cultures. I know I’m speaking within a particular cultural framework. It just happens to be the one where Impaler stands a chance of selling a few copies (and yes, I’d love it to sell way more than a few copies)).

The identification of Vlad with Stoker’s Dracula (please ignore the movie for the moment – I’m talking about the book) is so strong it’s next to impossible to write a Vlad story without invoking the vampire mythos in some form even though if he’d ever run into any vampires he would have staked them through the heart – eventually. It takes a while for a stake to get that far in an impalement.

Possibly the biggest conceit in Impaler is the way I’ve handled the Vlad-as-vampire mythos: what modern readers would identify as vampirism – the need to drink fresh blood, preferably human blood – is something Vlad sees as a curse imposed on him by Mehmed II (also known as Mehmed the Conquerer, although Vlad is never that polite: Vlad usually refers to Mehmed as “Mehmed, may he rot in Hell”). The backstory for this is hinted at when Vlad’s oldest son Mihnea asks if the curse can be passed on to his children, a prospect that horrifies Vlad. There are other hints: mention of relatives who died young because of a mysterious wasting disease.

My theory here – which may or may not hold as medical science advances – is the existence of an inheritable auto-immune disorder with results that resemble anemia on steroids, combined with Vlad’s unpredictable and often berserker temper. Of course, I’ve boosted the effects of fresh blood – which could be a psycho-somatic response, too. For the purposes of the novel, it works. Vlad sees himself as cursed, and believes he may be permitted to atone for the sins the curse drives him to commit if he uses the curse in God’s service.

Traditionally, of course, the vampire is an inherently profane creature, unable to abide sacred ground or the sight of a holy symbol (this would make it horribly uncomfortable for Islamic vampires when the moon is a crescent, but the question of which holy symbol will chase off which vampire is its own post – to quote from a movie I never saw but has at least one memorable line which I read in the Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman compilation Ghastly Beyond Belief (http://www.amazon.com/Ghastly-Beyond-Belief-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0099368307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297301881&sr=1-1), with a Jewish vampire saying to a cross-waving peasant girl, “Oy, yoy, have you got the wrong vampire!” Anyway…).

Vlad is deeply religious, although I’ve taken a few liberties with just how he deals with religion. In his first reign, he clearly favored his native Orthodox faith, and scared the crap out of visiting Roman clerics – to whom he was somewhat hostile, as he presumably saw them as imposing foreign mores on his people. During his time in Hungary, he was offered freedom and a wife if he converted to Roman Christianity. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Matthias’s offer came with the unspoken “or spend the rest of your life in my prisons” – he’d already betrayed Vlad once, and had no reason to assume he’d be safe if Vlad wasn’t securely attached to him by something stronger than a sworn oath (which, incidentally, I haven’t found any evidence of Vlad breaking. His contemporaries treated sworn and signed oaths as inconveniences, but he seemed to attach a good deal of importance to keeping his promises – perhaps because he was betrayed so often by so many people he should have been able to trust). At any rate, when Vlad left Hungary to try to recapture Wallachia, he had a Hungarian wife who was also Matthias’s cousin.

I took the view that in that position, having converted for political reasons, he’d maintain the appearance of Roman practice (it wasn’t commonly known as Catholicism at this time), and probably support both branches of Christianity. Also, being familiar with both branches, I considered it likely that he’d recognize them as fundamentally similar, and that they needed to come to some kind of accommodation if the much greater threat of the Mohammedan Ottoman Empire was to be defeated. Vlad – correctly – recognized that if Europe’s Christian powers didn’t unite to stop the Ottoman advance, there would be no part of Europe safe from them. The fact that his country was one of the most likely Ottoman targets no doubt sharpened his perception of the risk, as did the well-known tendency of the Ottoman Sultans to foment wars of succession and other instability in realms they’d targeted.

The accuracy of his concern is proved by two pieces of history: within 100 years of Vlad’s death the Ottoman Empire had conquered Hungary; and less than 50 years after his death the Pope fled Rome ahead of an Ottoman invasion that was stopped only because of Mehmed II’s death and the battle for succession between his surviving heirs. By that time, Wallachia was a vassal-state of the Ottoman Empire, and remained one until the 1800s.

One of the other substantial twists on the vampire mythos in Impaler is that there are no fangs. Vlad might need blood, but he doesn’t gnaw on people’s necks to get it. Actually, he prefers to get it in the middle of a battle, but since he can’t really be slicing and dicing his many enemies every few days, he has to use other methods – principally volunteers: something that makes him intensely uncomfortable.

I find it difficult to imagine most vampires of fiction having any difficulty with someone offering them blood (this has changed somewhat in the last few decades as vampires have morphed from the always evil undead predator to sparkly sex symbols – a change I devoutly hope will not be permanent), much less preferring not to know who donated it.

Ultimately, while he’s technically a vampire (he needs to drink human blood if he wants to survive), Vlad is without doubt not your mother’s vampire. And, no, I don’t want or need to know why your mother keeps a vampire.