Storytellersunplugged

This post is late–well, later than I like, anyway–because I am currently under internet radio silence while I try to rewrite Corambis for a March 31st deadline.  I check my mail (and icanhascheezburger) once a day, and other than that, I am head down in the book. And yesterday, I did not say to myself, Self, today is February 28th and it’s a leap year, so tomorrow is February 29th. And, Self, do we remember what the 29th means?

Nope. Did not happen.  This is, in other words, a completely improvised post. With real-time typing and everything.  Kids, don’t try this at home. I am a trained professional.

Not that you’d know it by the way I flail and thrash and kvetch through this rewrite.

That’s the thing about writing. It doesn’t get easier with practice. It gets harder. The more you know about writing, the more excruciatingly aware you become of your mistakes and the flaws in your process and everything else separating you from the perfection you strive for. Innocent confidence may be weak, as Richard Sennett says, but I have to admit I have some nostalgia for it. Not a lot of nostalgia, mind you, because along with the innocent confidence comes the arrogance and the know-it-all-ness and the general behaving like an asshole and the boatloads and boatloads of future embarrassment, but when you don’t know everything that can go wrong, when you trust your own infallibility, you can damn the torpedoes and run full speed ahead and enjoy it. (And get blown out of the water, but that’s another story.)

Or, to put it another way, you don’t have to think so damn much.

But the better you get as a writer, the more your improvement is a result of thinking about what you’re doing, both in the moment (grammar, punctuation, phrasing, word repetition and whether it’s a bug or a feature in this particular instance, etc. etc.) and from the perspective outside your own real-time typing experience, in which you’re considering what has happened in the story and what’s going to happen in the story, and what this current scene can do to carry a theme through, to echo and foreshadow, to plant clues for future revelations, to provide payoff for previously planted clues, to balance with the scenes on other side, to provide character development, plot development, world development, all the ten thousand and sixty-five tiny intricately meshing cogs that, in theory, work together to make a story.

And, of course, to make the end product look seamless. Sprezzatura, the Renaissance Italian courtiers called it: the art of doing something incredibly difficult and making it look easy. I’m completely abrogating sprezzatura here, of course, because I’m telling the world how hard it all is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the book itself had better have sprezzatura; my angst and misery and crises of faith (there have been several) will be invisible.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think I knew what I was doing all along. And that’s the magic trick.

Shazam.

Wayne Allen Sallee

I had thought about calling this month’s entry “Butcher’s Raindance.” Sounds like a good story title, right? Even though I have no idea what it might be about…yet. Is it a ritual done by a serial killer, the dance being the way he sanitizes his crime scenes? Is it a song by an emo band (or whatever kind of music genre my oldest niece listens to these days), which, now that I’ve typed that, I realize I’d give up that route right now.

Butcher’s Raindance is the name of the floor-cleaning product used by Cardinal Cleaning twice a week at the printing plant where I work. A splash of blue in the mop bucket. There’s a Sundance product, I assume more of a disinfectant, but I’m really not keen on writing Butcher Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Call my silly. But the other product gave me two words that are enigmatic when slapped together, and I have it set aside in my commonplace book to use one day. The title above it is “The Brides of Science.”

Back in the day, Mort Castle offered me a chance to write a chapter for the Writer’s Digest book ON WRITING HORROR. It was already titled “Mirror, Mirror” and the point of discussion was where does a writer NOT get his ideas? Mort, being the wandering sage he is, had chosen me because I could come up with anything from that day’s news to simple scenes of the different levels of hierarchy in the citizens of Chicago, chain smoking executives bumping past the accordion man wearing shorts in November, or the preacher talking about the evils of tobacco and trying to convert shoppers at Old Navy on Washington Boulevard. I also added to the images, taking the “mirror” to be the bus or elevated train window, or even one’s own mirror seen first thing in the morning or the last thing at night.

Well, I’ve got this thing about my story titles. Certainly some images such as I describe above get my mind thinking, but I always, always, need a title before I write a story. I might know the ending line, but I cannot truly squeeze out a good opening line unless I have that title. One of most well-received cop stories, “In The Shank Of The Night,” is an example of where I had the title in my journal. When asked about it, I refer people to an overlooked Dean Martin song, “In The Cool, Cool, Cool Of The Evening.” In the shank of the night, if the doin’s are right, you can tell them I’ll be there. Yet “The Brides of Science” has been around for longer than “Shank”, which was published in 2005 in SEX CRIMES. I wrote a story called “Bumpy Face,” after learning it was slang for a cheap of cheap booze in a beveled pint bottle sold in the Loop. It took me five years to realize what or who Bumpy Face was, at times I even sunk to the point of thinking it might be a mutated hamster. Instead it became a story about an alcoholic and his daughter and statements given to the police. Looks like I’m ready to beat that gap in time with “Brides.” Hell, even my novel, THE HOLY TERROR, was a short story, a nice polack phrase from my childhood was that a kid could be a real holy terror. Peggy Nadramia from GRUE magazine sent it back, telling me that the story had all the elements for a novel. “For You, The Living” by Roadkill Press. A line from “Monster Mash.”

I’m a big short fiction reader, I suspicion it is more because I commute by bus or train instead of the fact that I write short fiction. So, if I have a collection by various authors, I will choose by title than by author or page length. Next to me on my desk, I have a copy of HELL IN THE HEARTLAND, which has stories, including one by me with a title I truly dislike, all written by Illinois authors and set in our state of five month long winters. Looking at the table of contents, I’d likely read “Wet Dog Perfume” by Michael Penkas first. The title stands out. The next book I have here is HIGH COTTON, a collection by Joe R. Lansdale, his ownself. How the hell to choose, right? Mind you, I’ve read many of these stories over the past decade, but sometimes you gotta re-read something simply because you need a reminder of how screwed up the world is through another writer’s eyes. I’d choose “Not From Detroit” right off the bat, just for the quickness of the title, followed by “Tight Little Stitches On A Dead Man’s Back,” because that story could mean so many different things.

Do any of the collected authors here have similar problems with titles? I don’t always use a title that comes back to be a phrase in the story, such as I did with the Bumpy Face image. I have a story about a nice doctor in my old polack neighborhood of Humboldt Park who becomes a vampire, and he chooses to end the suffering of many of his patients by biting them in turn. Most were invalids, or in wheelchairs, and I played on their chronic pain being gone in their new lives, therefore keeping Chicago–or at least the Polish neighborhoods–free from a plague of vampires. The story is called “Skin of My Birthright,” and I simply despise it! I could think of nothing better, nothing that wouldn’t smack of yet another typical vampire story, and, frankly, I have no freaking idea what the title even means!

But where the hell does the title of my essay figure into things, you say? Well, recently someone was screwing around at my parents’ 49th anniversary party and was going to beknight my father. In doing so, he sniffed the familiar odor of my father’s hair, and there you have it, Sir Brylcreem.

I’ll eventually write something using that title, possibly a nonfiction piece for KENTUCKY EXPLORER, my father’s home state. Until that time, I need to figure out what “Butcher’s Raindance” will be about…

Your chattel,

Wayne

Imagine, if you will, a movie.

A really dreadful movie.

A movie wherein no cut in the trailer lasts more than three seconds, wherein explosions and car chases and wirework kung fu abound. A movie that doesn’t go more than five minutes in between action sequences, in part to hide the fact that you could fit the plot summary in that apocryphal fly’s navel next to a producer’s heart, all the sincerity in Hollywood, and three medium-sized caroway seeds.

Got a mental picture of that movie? Good. Now take a mental picture of the reviews of that movie, at least the ones that don’t include the word “AWSUM!!!” Five bucks says somewhere in there, you find the following phrase evoked as a perjorative:

“Video game”.

And man, that pisses me off.

“Written like a video game” has become the lazy movie reviewer’s shorthand for “bad and full of things that explode.” If it’s fast, loud, and primarily action-driven, it gets slapped with the “video game” label, generally by a reviewer whose most recent interaction with video games came when he accidentally wrapped the cord on his Intellivision controller around his kid brother’s neck.

OK, maybe that’s being a bit unkind, but the underlying truth is there. Games, and in many cases specifically game writing, are constantly being compared to movies and in every instance dismissed as inferior. As a working game writer, I find this infuriating. Not because I think every line of dialogue I’ve written, every “arrgh” and “yargh” and “He’s up on the roof!” is pure unvarnished gold, but because when I do game writing, I do game writing, and having my work and the work of all of my peers dismissed out of hand on a false premise really gets the old Hulk muscles working.

What’s that, you say? False premise? But surely it’s not a false premise. Games are just…games. Their storylines, characters, and writing can’t hold a candle to movies like The Godfather and The Seventh Seal[1].

Well, no, not when you put it that way, and that’s part of the problem.

As Roger Ebert so famously noted, games aren’t great movies. To this, I can only say “no kidding” (hey, it’s a family blog, or I’d be saying something a hell of a lot more emphatic). Furthermore, I’d like to point out that Copelia makes a lousy NFL highlight film, The Faerie Queene is a piss-poor haiku, and, in the words of Bioware Austin lead writer Daniel Erickson, Citizen Kane is a craptacular ballet. Video games make lousy movies for one very simple reason: They Are Not Movies. Dismissing them for what they are not is illogical, nonsensical, and lazy.

Unconvinced? Let’s look at the basics. Movies generally run between ninety minutes and two and a half hours. They are a passive media, wherein the only audience participation you’re likely to see involves someone drunkenly throwing toast at Tim Curry’s cinematic avatar and doing the Timewarp on cue. They are also rigid in their presentation; what’s filmed and on the reel is what the movie is. For all that the audience at a slasher flick might yell “Don’t go down in the basement!”, if that’s the way it’s filmed, the nubile young babysitter is still going to wander down into the root cellar for her messy appointment in her own personal Samara, and that’s just the way that it goes.

Standard console or PC video games, on the other hand, get pillaged in reviews if they come in under eight hours of gameplay. They are immersive and interactive, with player choice being absolutely meaningful every step of the way. That, after all, is what makes it a game – players making difficult and meaningful choices, and dealing with or being rewarded for having made those choices.

In game design, we call this “hunting the unknown fun,” but that’s neither here nor there. What does matter is that even the most cursory examination reveals that movies are games are two entirely different beasts. Why, then, are games constantly pilloried for not being movies?

Part of it is that movies are seen as being the closest thing to video games, which is, of course, hooey. Part of it is cinema’s cultural dominance as a media form, where by dint of omnipresence, box office and ease of use, it’s become the default media for discussion, the prism through which everything else gets viewed. As a result, everything else suffers by contrast, because movies automatically have the home-field advantage in any comparative discussion.

What that means, though, is that when you’re looking at game writing in that way, you’re trying to fix a busted carburetor with an oil gauge and a cheese grater. Game writing, by definition, needs to take into account the player and his actions. It needs to allow the player to be the protagonist, and to support the immersive experience of play. And it needs to be understood in that context, as part of the gameplay experience, and not as a movie where the player occasionally waggles the joystick once in a while. This has to be understood, otherwise, you’re shortchanging yourself and the game, and neither of you deserves that kind of treatment.

Now bear in mind that I’m not saying that all game writing is brilliant and misunderstood, the fourteen year old emo kid of the artistic world just waiting in the corner for someone to give it a hug. Hell, I’m not even saying most of it is; Sturgeon’s Law holds for game writing as well. God knows I’m sick unto death of hard-bitten space marines and gruff unshaven ex-mercenaries and the third-act reverse where the bad guy captures you and takes away all your hard-earned inventory. Then again, one of the reasons I’m sick of that stuff is because they were movie clichés before they got transplanted into games without any adaptation to the new medium. Or, to put it another way, when the bad guys capture Indiana Jones and go through his pockets onscreen, it doesn’t provoke an angry response from me because I haven’t invested hours and hours of time filling those pockets with stuff that I can on some level consider to be mine. That’s my stuff you’re taking, not Indy’s, without letting me do anything about, and you’re doing it in a medium that’s all about what I can in fact do. That’s where the cracks start to show, the seams in the movie narrative model pasted over immersive gameplay.

Give us your poor and hungry, movies, but your tired we can do without; we’re still in the process of inventing our own tropes and conceits and language of storytelling, and the pure cinema elements plunked down reflexively can sometimes be stumbling blocks in that necessary and ongoing process.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to have a useful discussion about what is good game writing and what isn’t if the default definition of “good game writing” is “like a movie” and the default description for “bad movie” is “like a video game.” You might as well constantly downgrade a burger joint for its failure to serve sushi.

Instead, we need to get to a place where we understand storytelling in games well enough to discuss intelligently and well. We need to figure out what good game writing is within the context of games, and not simply try to cram them into a movie-shaped box. Movies are great…at being movies. Video games aren’t, nor should they be. Deep down, you knew that already.

And that movie we were talking about up top? It’s a movie, and by all accounts, it sounds like it would make a lousy game.

[1] Whether they can hold a candle to Godfather 3 is a question that gets asked a lot less frequently. The logic behind this argument is that video games haven’t matched the crème de la crème of movies in providing a suitably Aristotelian experience, with the comparison then made between the best film has to offer and the middle-to-bottom of gaming’s barrel. I suppose it could be turned on its head easily enough; if anyone wants to compare the writing in Glitter and Good Luck Chuck with, say, that of Grim Fandango or BioShock, I’ll take that action in a heartbeat.

By Janet Berliner

Since I, too, just finished and turned in a novel, I considered writing about post-book depression, but as two of my fellows have already well covered that issue this month, I decided to find something new.

A few weeks ago, I saw the movie “Talk to Me,” the story of Washington, D.C. DJ Ralph “Petey” Greene, an ex-con who became a popular talk show host and community activist in the 1960s. Where I was raised, we had no television, and given my dysfunctional background, radio and books were pretty much my only friends. One of my first paid writing gigs was for SABC, South African Broadcasting Company. One of the first celebrities I met in America was the infamous Don Imus.

In the late 1980s, Laurie Harper employed me to guide her through a final restructuring and rewrite of her book: Don Sherwood: The Life and Times of the World’s Greatest Disc Jockey. Her husband, Hap, was the first man to do airborne traffic reports from a plane, which he did for the radio station that employed Don Sherwood, with whom he had worked for a lot of years. Many of Sherwood’s fans were Hap’s fans, too. Through him, Laurie had the connections for the interviews. She soon found out that doing the research for such a book was only the beginning of a complex project and employed me as her editor.

What follows is as much as anything about the making of a biography. We decided, given her close deadline, that I would move into her townhouse and stay there until the book was done. And so it began. “Why you?” I asked her. “You didn’t know him. You were hardly alive when he was ‘The Greatest.’”

“Da Vinci did not have to attend the last supper to paint it,” she said. We were off and running.

Some quick background: In the fifties and sixties, a disc jockey by the name of Don Sherwood became a surrogate member of almost every family in the San Francisco Bay Area. His was the voice that woke them in the mornings, his were the jokes they laughed at, his the antics they followed in every newspaper in town. His fans had kept his memory alive since his death; they were ready for a celebration of Don’s reign as king of the airwaves. There was to be a bash at the San Francisco Fairmont on his birthday, September 7th, and all of the people who knew and loved him–as well as many of those whose careers got off the ground because of him–would be there. MacLeren Park would be dedicated to him and become Sherwood Forest, with a “bring your own shovel” tree planting. All kinds of other Sherwood-style fun and games would dot the period in-between.

Laurie’s purpose was to create a fascinating book, one unlike the dime-a-dozen celebrity biographies; it was to be different … special … particularly for those who lived in the Bay Area, but also for anyone interested the effects of fame and fandom.

Laurie Harper was a bright and beautiful young woman in her thirties for whom this book became much more than a chronicle of Don Sherwood’s escapades. In 1985, she was establishing the Sebastian Literary Agency. She had written one book–A Taste For Life–but she was definitely not looking for another book to write when she innocently asked the Sherwood family if anyone was assigned the biography. She didn’t even know who Don Sherwood was until she met and married Hap Harper, who at that time still did the airborne traffic watch on KSFO. She knew enough to be fascinated by the fact that she and Hap ran into Sherwood fans everywhere they went. She was a little girl during his heyday in the fifties and sixties, and Don hadn’t been on the radio for years, yet his fans’ love for him had not diminished.

She began to wonder what had lent this man his power and charisma, what had turned him into a legend in an industry where you’re lucky if people remember you two weeks after you’re gone.

“I did what I would have told any other writer in my “stable” to do,” she said. “I read How to Write a Biography. It was immediately clear, however, that in death, as in life, Don was not going to fit neatly into a standard structure, so I threw the book away.”

She went back to basics and asked herself for whom she was writing this book, what they wanted to know, what she wanted to know. Without knowing the story or the players, she began a random series of interviews–she had never seen him, heard him, read a single article about him. She met with: “You’re too young to understand what he was all about”; “You’ll never pull it off”; “You’ll quit.”Who could resist such a challenge? Not Laurie Harper!”

I didn’t write a thing for over two years. While running my agency, I interviewed people and followed leads during the evening, on weekends and holidays. Don’s old engineer, a wonderful man named Charlie Smith, gave me a bunch of tapes from the radio shows and I listened to them over and over.

“The Sherwood family, still skeptical, nonetheless gave me boxes of newspaper clippings–with hardly a date on anything. I spent months reading everything, trying to piece together what went with what, unable to tell what had happened, when, and how significant it was in the scheme of Don’s life. I taped and transcribed interviews, set up my files and working system, and wondered if all the bits and pieces, parallels and contradictions, would ever come together.”

By then, Laurie was developing an inner sense about the man–at least about the man everyone else thought Don was. But she was concerned about finding out who he was to himself and knew she wouldn’t feel satisfied until she began to see things from his perspective.

“I needed to make the connections between his private life and his public life, his professional victories and his personal losses.”

Don’s childhood was marked by his mother’s emotional, and sometimes physical, abuse. His father abandoned them and his Aunt Marie tried to balance things by smothering him. His school and teenage years were filled with rebellion, and his early marriages and frequent unemployment showed him to be a naive romantic. Then he hit it big on radio and television, and his quick wit, sharp tongue, imaginative escapades and devil-may-care attitude, at least publicly, masked any inner pain he might have been feeling.Patterns had begun to form, giving Laurie a path to follow.”After two years, there had at last come a point where I felt I knew what everyone else knew. It was time to try to fill in the blanks by writing. At first I dealt purely with the chronology of it all. Then I became the one person who knew more about Don than anyone. He had no one single person with whom he shared everything in his life, so everyone was learning new things about him. People were being brought together, reliving the era, beginning to really talk about things that had happened.

Having been a chronicler with all the distance in the world, Laurie suddenly developed a tendency to romanticize, to become sentimental. Again and again she had to force herself to step back and ask: how did Don see this? What did it mean to him? What would he say about it?

“I began to think about what it might feel like to see my own life all laid out like that, with someone else connecting the dots and drawing the conclusions. I began wondering about the patterns in my life, the choices I’d made, the values I’d based them on. That was when I realized that, underlying all Don’s fun and games, was a serious personal philosophy. The more I learned about it, the more I admired him. The most surprising feeling of all was realizing that I had become his friend, which shocked me after having spent so much time with people who had been hurt by him.”Don Sherwood was an alcoholic, a manic-depressive. It wasn’t until emphysema cornered him that he began the emotional task of making amends for allowing his personal demons to wreak havoc on family and friends.This is dealt with in the last third of the book and is the most powerful part of the biography. Here, the readers, get to the core of Don Sherwood the performer, and Danny Cohelan the man. For those already part of the fan club, this would confirm their love of the man; if not, this is where they would forgive him his weaknesses and take him into their hearts.”I couldn’t help but join The Club. The Sherwood attitude is contagious. He believed that each of us should control our own destiny, that we shouldn’t make deals with life, shouldn’t compromise who we are and what we want.”

In the course of her travels with Sherwood, Laurie met many fascinating people, many warm and wonderful ones–the family, talented DJs, and professionals who were a critical part of Don’s success. And the fans.Always the fans–a clan united by the man who sparked their imaginations, made them laugh, think and cry.

“It is a great sadness that Don never found the joy he gave others. Today we have support groups and organizations to help us deal with alcoholism and dysfunctional families. Those were either not yet available or not yet fully recognized when Don needed them. Maybe–probably–he wouldn’t have listened to them. But I can’t help wondering where “the world’s greatest disc jockey” would be today if he knew then what we know now.”

We worked together almost around the clock. Most of the time we were in accord. When we weren’t, we almost came to blows. I went to “my” room and packed more than once. When we were done, we collapsed onto the carpet and cried together.

Later, months later, I asked Laurie how she’d felt as she’d waited to see the results of her labors?

“I am thrilled that Don’s story turned out to be every bit as important and fascinating as I thought it would be and that I was able to find the right choice at the right time to tell Don Sherwood’s story. That was the hardest part, I think–admitting that I had the right to my own voice in all of this–that I wasn’t simply supposed to be a chronicler.”

Robin, Don Sherwood’s daughter, said, “It’s the book Dad would have wanted.”

What more could any biographer–any writer–want?

My lesson was this: Writing a retrospective brings with it memories, awareness, insights. Mostly it reconfirms that hindsight is the true harbinger of wisdom. I hope this piece has piqued some interest. As the book is no longer widely available, I can put any interested reader in touch with Laurie, who still has some copies she can sell.

—Janet Berliner

                For me, one of the finest moments of writing comes when crashing through the wall.

                Or cracking open a Faberge egg to find what’s inside is far more valuable than what is glittery and sweet on the outside.

                Or . . . after a long spell of grappling with nothingness, of putting down laborious word after laborious phrase . . . finally bursting into the open with passage after passage of stuff that we think is grand and sweeping and mind-changing.  Like a dam breaking, if only for a spell.  Like the allies breaking out of hedgerow country.

                Okay, no one is breaking Faberge eggs . . . just notional eggs.  The point being, of course, that writer’s block is not real.  It is a conscious decision not to write what we think is good stuff.  I love that feeling of hitting that gusher, that well of black gold that bubbles up and froths, when you can’t get the words down fast enough.   But . . .

                . . .there are those other times, far more frequent times.  Those times when pulling the words out is excruciating.  But to carry one of these horrid little metaphors forward, if I do not hit a gusher, then I certainly do not a hit dry well.  There’s always something down there.

                Try this.

                Type a quote.  It doesn’t have to be an enduring quote, a quotable quote.  Something you heard on the street.

                “It was so loud, it made my ears itch.”

                “All those people up in New York on the streets . . . like maggots.  I couldn’t stand it.”

                And go from there.

                One of my favorite quotes is this one that follows.  I use it in speeches and I cite the author often, although he is not its originator.

                “Conan, what is best in life?”

                “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women.”

                I love that snippet of dialogue.  Now I know that it wasn’t the author Robert E. Howard who came up with it, nor was it Oliver Stone and John Milius, two outstanding screenwriters.   It was Ghengis Khan  . . . or according to some unknown chronicler, it was.

                But what description, attitude, power.

                And what a vehicle for launching into a speech, providing a metaphor for . . . well, for most anything.  It’s an attention-grabber, and it serves to introduce people to Robert E. Howard.  I can vouch that people sit up for it, whether the topic is human resource management or stamp-collecting.

                Of all the quotes I might have reached for, that one always circles back around to me for some reason.  Its barbarism, tinged with fantasy, has tickled my fancy for more than two decades since big Arnold played the Sumerian.  His best role, in my opinion.  He was born to it.

                Now, I admit that the quote itself does not give rise to anything in the mind, perhaps, other than a visceral negative reaction, a sneered quip: “anti-intellectualism of the worst sort.”  For me, it gains what power it might have from the mental remembrance of that evening long ago when I finally saw the barbarian sitting stolid and cross-legged – simple in his thinking, eager for bloodlust, a killing machine, and a showman for the masses.

                The smell of sour sweat, well-worn leather from animals unmentionable, a gourd filled with viscous foul-smelling liquid, obscene “trophies” from conquered opponents, feathers and bones and rotting flesh.  Shiny oiled bodies.  Steel glinting in firelight.

                Tales of conquest.

                Words to quicken the blood of even the most staid of human resource managers.

                Perhaps not the most uplifting of words and phrases, but words to lead the mind and fire the imagination.  Words leading to better words . . . and still better words.   And so I type a quote, and I think of that quote, and I ponder the source and the circumstance.  And I let the words flow.  And soon, the dam breaks, and I have something of worth if not worthy.

                Hmm, perhaps not today.   But usually.

                Try it, and let me know how it works for you.  Here’s one:

                “And in the morning, I’ll be sober.”

by Alex

I always tell the students in my writing workshops that if they’re not writing down the dreams they have, every morning, they’re working way too hard.

I’m starting to do interviews about THE PRICE, which comes out this week, and I got that question yesterday: “Where did the story come from?” And because you tend to forget how you started your last book, and pretty much everything else about it, when you’re tearing your hair out over the new one, I had a moment of, “What the hell?” And my mind was scrambling for some intelligent thing to say about my thematic obsession with the secret deals that we make with ourselves about the things we want, but what came out of my mouth instead was, “I dreamed it.”

Which shocked me speechless for a second, and then I remembered. That’s right. It did start with a dream. A series of dreams, actually.

I love that about interviews… they teach you so much about what you’ve written and why you wrote it.

I didn’t dream the whole book, or even the whole idea of the book, which I understand happens to people all the time – and I believe it. But certainly I dreamed the seed that grew into the book.

This is an extremely sad story, but this is what happened (in real life). A friend of mine and his wife had just had their first child, and she was born with a hole in her heart. She lived the whole of her two months of life in the children’s ward of a Boston hospital, and her parents moved into the hospital to be with her. When she died, her parents were too distraught to come home to all the unused baby furniture and clothes, so a bunch of their friends packed everything up for them, and because I have a huge attic, we put it all upstairs in my house. That night I started having dreams of a beautiful little five-year old girl who was not alive but not dead, either – somewhere in between. And that was the beginning of the book – that little girl haunting me in my dreams.

Now, who’s to say why it was that little dream girl who crystallized all the rest of that heartbreaking real-life situation into a book? No one would read the dreams I had and recognize them as the book that came out of that, which really isn’t about that little girl at all, important though she is in it. Maybe I needed to feel the girl first because I don’t have a child of my own and I needed to put myself in the position of her parents to write the book I was going to write.

But there are certain dreams you have that are just so vivid that you KNOW they’re the start of a book. I don’t know if this is true of all authors or artists but it is true of many of the writers, musicians and painters I know: your dreams work just as hard on your ideas as you do at your desk in waking life. And particularly as a writer of the supernatural, I depend on those dream images to give a certain unreality to real-life situations – and to give a certain inevitability to my unreal situations.

I know that this new book is finally clicking into place because I’m starting to dream it, or rather dream I’m in it, and let me tell you, it’s a relief to have my subconscious take over for me, because I was getting tired of doing all the work myself.

I meet a lot of people who say they don’t dream. Well, that’s impossible – dreaming is a vital life function. What they mean is they don’t remember their dreams. Since dreams are so elusive, you need to actively court them to keep them on the surface long enough for you to remember. I’ve kept a dream journal since I was fifteen or sixteen. The more you write them down – even just a word or a feeling that you remember - the more they will start to stay with you. And this sounds strange, but it really works - if you wake up from a dream that you can’t remember, but you know you were just dreaming - try rolling gently back into the position you were actually sleeping in. Many times the entire dream will pop right back into your head, like magic. I don’t know how that happens, but it works like a charm.

And I swear, if you don’t keep that pad and pen, or tape recorder if you prefer, right next to your bed, you will not remember as much. Your dreams seem to need to KNOW that you are committed to remembering them, or they won’t let you remember.

In fact, if I get on a kick of writing every dream I remember down, then I remember pages and pages of dreams, six or seven a night – so many it would start to cut into my work time if I wrote them down.

So you have to find a balance. Or maybe I could get my dreams to do entire books for me if I wrote all that stuff down. Who knows? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

So of course my questions for the day are – Do you remember your dreams? Can you share an example of a book or story that came from a dream? And do you have any tips about dreamwork in general? And for bonus points - have you ever had precognitive dreams?

Alexandra Sokoloff

Watch THE PRICE book trailer!

First, I’d like to thank James Moore for covering my ass on the 23rd of last month. As always, his contribution was excellent. It’s pretty much a given that anything with Mr. Moore’s name on the byline will be good. If you haven’ had the opportunity to read one of his novels you’re denying yourself a treat.

Of course I happen to think all of the essays you’ll find here are good. Storytellers Unplugged is a cornucopia of advice and insight from an eclectic group of publishing pros. SU’s talent pool is such a deep one I often wonder why the hell Joe and David bother to keep me around.

Sometimes I think it’s out of a misguided sense of loyalty, since I have been here since the begining. Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly cynical, I decide they’ve kept me around as a perfect example of just how unsuccessful a person can be in this business.

Only three days ago, after receiving a fresh bit of bad career news, I seriously considered saying to hell with the whole frustrating business. Surely I could find a more enjoyable and lucrative pastime. Collecting and recycling soda cans for instance.

I almost emailed Joe and Dave my resignation from Storytellers Unplugged, even after I decided (perhaps for the millionth time) to stick with the writing thing for a while longer. Compared to the other, infinitely more accomplished members of SU, what did I have to offer?

That is the question that has kept me awake and at my computer until five in the damn morning.

But I have finally figured it out. I have realized that there is one facet of this business where I have always excelled.

I am a magnificent failure.

I’ve been doing this for almost two decades now, and though I have found some limited success in the past eight years, I have still failed at my ultimate goal, not to become the next Big Name in the genre, but simply to achieve mass market success and earn enough with my writing to make it my only job.

I may or may not meet that goal eventually. It may happen in the next couple of years, or maybe in the next couple of decades, if I can continue to stick it out. It may never happen. Writers who are able to support themselves with their craft are the exception rather than the rule. However, every writer who has ever put pen to paper (or fingertip to keyboard) has failed.

Failing is the first lesson every aspiring professional writer learns. Every professional storyteller, from those names displayed on the bestsellers rack to the rows upon rows of midlisters shelved at your local Hastings, began their career by failing.

There are lessons to learn in failure, and the most important is how to keep going in spite of the frustration and disappointment, how to learn from your mistakes, both in your craft and in your business, how to stack up each failure until, standing upon them, you may some day be able to reach your ultimate goal.

You learn to keep on trying.

If I can keep doing it, so can you.

Brian Knight

by Richard Steinberg

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t,” Mark Twain

The Duke Of Oy is not only the best writer I’ve ever read (no exaggeration) but is also great looking, charming, intelligent, funny, profound, and oft times the only friend I’ve had that always stuck around.  All women want him, all men want to be him; cute little birdies and magnificent rainbows escorted him in pacific glory along a path of ease and comfort and plenty; while flights of angels sing him to his rest.

A few years ago, he showed me something he’d recently written and asked me for my opinion.  It was poetry in prose; magnificent, evocative, stunningly transcending.  And wholly not a part of the overall project it belonged to. 

It was a jarring moment. What should I say to him?  He was a New York Times and international best-selling novelist.  He was published in 19 languages and 32 countries around the world.  A very recognizable, internationally famous actress once had sex with him because she’d liked one of his books so much! 

Maybe I was wrong; it was brilliantly executed, if wholly not germane to anything that came before or afterwards.  The prose and technique were first rate, even if there was no connection between this piece and the rest of the novel.  And everyone else who’d seen it had praised its glory to the Gods . . . even if they were uniformly hard pressed to say what it was about or how it made the overall book (which had struggled to maintain pace and pith to that point) better.  So, gritting my soul, I did that only thing I could do.

I killed him.

It wasn’t an easy thing to do.  Right up until he breathed his last, Duke proclaimed the quality of his words/work, that the world was wrong for its gradual abandonment of him and his gift.  That the literary universe which still proclaimed his greatness was jealous of him and therefore out to stop him.

As he struggled valiantly against his inevitable end – still writing the best, the finest lines in the land that fewer and fewer would ever see – I cradled his soul in my arms and drew him close.  A light kiss, a gentle brush of the clouds away from his eyes one last time, and then I choked the last of his life away.

A mercy, not a murder.

When R.C. Jones and I decided to tag-team on the subject of putting fact in your fiction, and why you must, on occasion, paint with colors of fiction your too stark facts, that killing came flooding back to me for the first time in years.  For, in his way, The Duke Of Oy is the perfect example of what we’re talking about.

A man as consumed by his talent as so many others are by their technique.

We hear the too common refrain all the time:  “If they don’t understand what I’m saying, that’s their problem, not mine!  My book, my vision, your fault!”

And the people who not only say this – loud and long – but breathe and believe it with all their heart, are absolutely right.  It’s the reader’s responsibility to understand the creative typist or amateur fictioneer.

But if that pithy quote-meister – as fellow Storyteller Stan Ridgley once referred to them in an ugly Georgetown restaurant with incredible food – has ambitions to be published as a Professional Writer (capitalized out of respect) then they are absolutely wrong.

As R.C. wrote on the 19th:  “Readers learn much from literature. It provides answers to many questions most readers might not even think to wonder about until it is brought to their attention by a story.”

It is the job of the professional writer to accurately communicate – with meaning and emotion – the message they have for their readers.  Some times, that message is simply: “have a good time while you read this.”  Sometimes it’s deeper and can be life affecting: “this is why I believe the theft of a child’s innocence and sense of personal well being is the greatest crime in the universe.”

But is the professional writer required to communicate that message only in a three dimensional universe well ordered by the rules we know so well?

No.

Two of the greatest stories I’ve ever read, go to great lengths to make this point.  The Voyage Of The Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt and a substantially different piece:  Shall The Dust Praise Thee by Damon Knight stand as clarion calls to the professional writer.  They, as fine representatives of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and alternative reality stories, proclaim loudly and proudly:

“Let your mind run wild!  Free yourself from conventionalities!  Create worlds only you can fathom . . . then bring your readers inside and share that understanding with them.”

Rules.

Few of us like them, many of us rebel against them, but we all must concede one thing about them.  In all worlds at all times, there are rules.  While gravity might be the dominant rule of the world we live in, it might not even exist in the worlds we would create.

But unless your characters are simply floating aimlessly there must be rules, be order – even if that order makes no initial sense – so that your readers are able to put their feet down and observe/absorb your new world.

In The Voyage of the Space Beagle, van Vogt crafts a universe contained within a single ship of scientists out exploring the furthest reaches of the universe.  And every life they encounter – no matter how incomprehensible, threatening, or mystifying – has its own set of rules. 

Perhaps the creature that can easily move through walls, pass their “hand” through or into human bodies best represents this.  It is a being of pure creative fantasy, whose horror comes from our coming to understand its universe; the rules that govern its behavior and actions with the same dark dispassion that gravity does so much of ours.

It is in that created fantasy of an alternative reality within which van Vogt suspends our rules, then adheres to his new rule-set carefully and fully.

“To suspend all rules is not liberation but imprisonment.  Where there are no rules, how can one be free,” Algernon Blackwood

Which brings us to Shall the Dust Praise Thee?

Obviously, when you make God the central physical and emotional character of a story, all rules and bets are off.  There is nothing the Deity can not do (by generally accepted agreement) and therefore it would appear at first blush that you can do, say, or depict anything you want in any way you want.

But, again, this is the dividing line between the creative typist/amateur writer and the professional.  For it lies with the professional to know that their readers MUST be able to understand the actions of their lead and propelling character.  

Even when that character is a being well removed from true understanding.

Perhaps especially then.

In the story, after considering the problem for millennia, God has reached the conclusion – and who can blame him/her/it – that mankind cannot be saved.  It’s reap-the-whirlwind time boys and girls!  Apocalypse Now without the benefit of retakes.

But when God arrives on the planet to carry out this urban renewal program, he discovers a desolate, destroyed world.  God didn’t do it, but someone did.  Who?  How?  Why?

Eventually God finds these answers and is stunned.  But what stuns the Divinity even more is a sign, a figurative message in a bottle addressed directly to God.

“We were here. Where were You?”

I neither endorse nor reject Damon Knight’s vision, nor do I ask you to . . . without reading and considering it.  I present it only for the significantly less than cosmic purpose of illustrating a point.

In fiction, even God has to play by the rules.  The author’s rules.  Rules that must make sense, however nonsensically they are applied or however ridiculous they might seem.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman was as dystopian and fantastical as its creator, Harlan Ellison.  But the message of this remarkable novella – that I am never sure whether or not I like – is one that is crafted around a set of rules.

Even if rebellion against those rules is the point.

Which brings us back to the killing – my killing, to be honest – of The Duke of Oy.

When he was me, those qualities that made him/us a notable writer were talent and imagination.  They were also the qualities that led to his/our professional downfall.  Because talent combined with imagination is nothing more than limitless nothingness.  A thing you might sense or remember having once sensed, but can’t recall the specifics or the reason you’re even recalling it now.

But talent combined with imagination – strengthened by purpose and structure – can topple, then rebuild, universes.

As for Duke, well . . . he’s gone but with me always.  Which I suppose means that he had some structure and purpose after all.

Hmm . . .

Imagine that?

Believe!

A week and a half ago, I got an e-mail from my friends at Paradox Entertainment. Among other things, they own the rights to the complete library of Robert E. Howard’s works, and I edited an Age of Conan line of novels for them and Ace Books in the past.

Last year, I wrote a novelization of a film based on one of their other properties: Mutant Chronicles. This is based on a roleplaying game—and board game, collectible card game, and miniatures game—I worked on back in the early ’90s. The film was stuck in development for over a decade, but now it’s actually been shot and is nearly done.

When I got the assignment, all I had to go on to write the book was a copy of the latest draft of the script and a book full of stills taken during the shoot. Having worked with the original games for so many years, I knew the background well, but the world of the film and that of the game didn’t match up perfectly, so I had to take some liberties in interpreting all the material and synthesizing it into something that could contain both the games and the film.

I turned the book in last April. Last week, Paradox arranged for a few private showings of a just-about-final cut of the film to show to their partners and prospective licensees. They also flew me out West Hollywood to see what they’d done.

Paradox had told me that the director (Simon Hunter) had altered the script in a few key spots. This made sense to me. As a writer, I outline my original books and then often come up with better ideas on the fly while I’m actually writing them. The same sort of thing happens in film, and it’s better for the director and his team to work on making the best film they can rather than slavishly follow a script.

I got to watch the film twice in two days. I brought my laptop into the private screening room with me and typed furiously as the action played out on the screen. The film was much as I had imagined it would be, only better.

The imagination is a fuzzy thing, as is language. When I wrote the first draft of the novelization, I had to guess at how a lot of things might look, so I painted the background details in broad strokes, allowing the theoretical reader’s imagination to fill in the details.

Film doesn’t allow for such freedom. You don’t imagine the monsters. You see them.

Seeing something I’d already thoroughly pictured in my head—even with the aid of the still—shown in vivid color on a wall-sized screen was surreal. It was like meeting an old friend and figuring out just how she’d changed over the intervening years.

I understand that most novelizations are written with the writer never seeing the film before finishing the book, and I’d fully expected this experience myself. Most deals for such books, though, are licenses the publisher takes out to capitalize on the excitement around the film. In this case, the people who owned the property hired me on, not the publisher.

Because of that, they care a great deal more about the book than a publisher would. After all, their relationship with the book and the film will go on for many years, unlimited by any license. That, and the fact that the president of Paradox ran the company that originally published the Mutant Chronicles games too, so many years ago.

That’s why they went to the expense to fly me out to make sure I could get the book as right as I possibly could. They care about this thing they’ve created and what it’s morphed into. They respect the time and effort they’ve put into it, and they want to make sure the fans of the film and the book get the best experiences from them that they can.

And that’s why I went out there too.

–Justine Musk

So here’s the thing.

I sat down yesterday to write my essay for this site. I had a topic. I had a sense of where the piece would start, where it would end up, and how it might go in-between. But when it came game-time, I realized:

I got nuthin’.

Could be I’m a bit burned-out – and maybe I could have essayed about that, except Elizabeth Bear already said everything I would want to say about that point in your writing when the writing becomes about not writing. It is time to refuel, wander the poppy fields and watch the comets in the sky. Time to let my mind turn over a few times, shake itself out, do a little yoga. I wouldn’t say I’m blocked, exactly. I’ve got stuff to work on, and I’m excited about all of it. But I also just finished a four hundred pound novel that I’ve been carrying around for a while. My muscles are sore. It’s a good kind of sore. But like I said:

I got nuthin’.

So I give you instead a novel excerpt. This is what happens around page 60 of LORD OF BONES, sequel to my first novel BLOODANGEL. The books are contemporary, urban fantasy shot through with currents of horror. I like to think this chapter is one of them.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Next month we shall return to our regular programming.

A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN

(excerpt from LORD OF BONES, Roc/Penguin, July ’08)

In truth, the surfer had noticed something earlier that morning, although he put it out of his mind right after.

There had been one wave. One perfect wave. He saw it on the horizon and thought it must be some kind of heavenly gift, because this was one of those times when the sea wasn’t up to anything much; surfers saw you getting out of your truck with your board over your shoulder and greeted you with the dreaded, Hey, mate, should have been here yesterday. He agreed with them – he should have been here yesterday, meant to be here yesterday, except his girlfriend’s mother arrived early and threw his plans to hell.

But then this wave came out of nowhere, and he eyed and measured the moments and paddled out for it and man met wave in perfect salt-spray communion. He became more and less than a man, flowing out of the water and the board beneath his feet. The sea swept him high. He crouched and carved through this world of blue-green streaming wonder, salt on his lips and in his eyes, and he felt his heart roar along with the ocean.

Someone else was in the wave with him.

He registered it in pieces. The shadow rising inside the wall of water. The slithering touch across his shoulders, thick wet whisper in his ear. The sense of presence which had nothing to do with the sea, slipping through the spray and light. Riding the sea. Riding him.

Then it was gone.

So that was the first thing. Perhaps it was a warning. It might have helped him, saved him, if he had heeded it as such: a sign that the world was not quite right today. Better to get off the water, detach himself from his board, spend the day on the sand with his girlfriend in her fetching white bikini, her skin smelling of coconut oil, the icebox packed with beer and roast beef sandwiches and ice cream, part of her strategy to lure him away from the waves for at least a little bit, so she could spend quality time with him instead of her Peter Carey novel.

But he was a water baby grown into an ocean prince. The sea was his home. This presence he had sensed had nothing to do with the ocean. It came from somewhere else entirely. So he dismissed it as some odd, fleeting phenomenon, a trick of the light and the mind. Believing in it would be like believing in a ghost, and, despite what many in his family considered to be his highly flaky, New Age kind of nature, he was much too practical for that.

So he straddled his board, and floated, and meditated on the beauty of the day.

He was thirty-seven, lean and leathered from a lifetime spent outdoors. His long, straight hair had turned grey by the time he was twenty-five, silver ten years later. Around his neck he wore a tiger’s eye for luck and guidance, a shark’s tooth for power and virility.

Sunlight on his shoulders, sunwarmed water sweeping round his dangling legs. In the near-distance, Bondi Beach curved like a thick golden smile into the sea. Music and voices floated over to him – British and German tourists – but it was quieter here, on the south side, where rip currents made life more hazardous. He was a strong swimmer, always had been. He and the sea understood one another. He had survived a near-drowning experience as a child, an encounter with a tiger shark as a teen. The sea demanded his awe. Twice it could have killed him, but it chose to let him go. He loved it for that.

So when the shadow came up beneath him, he noticed it first with a sense of detachment. He thought, Shark?, and drew his legs onto the board, but it didn’t really move like a shark – rising and expanding, a blooming darkness in the water– and that was when he felt coldness along his spine and in his belly, because of the wrongness, because there was nothing in the ocean that should look or move like that.

And then the thing turned over.

Turned over slowly, slowly enough for him to realize there was a shape, a body to it, and he realized he was going to see its face as the water swelled and streamed beneath him and the board rose up, and a whimper escaped him and too late he thought to close his eyes because the face, the deep lipless pit of the mouth and rows on rows of teeth, the small ashy glints of countless eyes and they were all gazing straight at him, and he saw the intelligence in them, and he saw the black streaming limbs floating up towards him, leisurely, as if this thing had all the time in the world, and the surfboard flipped over with that same insolent laziness and he was in the water, thrashing, cold smooth blackness folding over him, hands skating across his body and latching on his calves, and he thrashed at the surface of the water and spat out salty water and screamed, not even screaming words, his mind had gone beyond words, and then he was screaming down through the water, watching the river of bubbles of his life force escaping from his wide frozen mouth as he felt himself pulled down, down, to where the sunlight filtered out completely and all warmth vanished and there was nothing but the cold and the dark.

Absorbed in her novel, Hilary looked up because she thought she heard something: a cry familiar yet odd, which had nothing to do with a sunny Sydney day at the beach.

Johnny? she thought. Except that couldn’t have been him.

And her mind circled back to a recurring nightmare: a great white somehow getting past the shark net and honing straight on Johnny. It was a fear which Johnny himself liked to laugh at. “That’s ‘cause you’re from Canada,” he would tell her. “You know how people here will assume Canadians get attacked by, like, bears and shit? It’s the same thing.”

“Canadians do get attacked by bears,” she said defensively. “I mean, every once in a while.”

“Every once in a while.”

“It does happen.”

“You know someone personally who’s been attacked by a bear? You know even a friend of a friend who got eaten by a bear?”

“There are shark attacks in the news. I read about them.”

“They’re in the news,” he said reasonably, “because they are news. If there was anything ordinary about them, they wouldn’t exactly be news, now would they?”

And he gave her that grin, that broad white grin flashing against his tanned face, deep lines radiating out from his eyes. All that man is, is a child grown older, Hilary’s mother had sniffed, but then Johnny had turned that same smile on her, called her ma’am and held open doors and asked what kind of wine she liked so he could go buy a bottle before putting the chicken and corn on the grill. A child grown older, Hilary’s mother had repeated, before relenting a little. But he’s got nice manners, that one. And he seems to treat you well. You seem happy.

Hilary stood up in the sand, scanning the water, twisting the small diamond ring along her finger.

She saw surfers in the distance, bobbing in the bright blue as they waited for waves that didn’t seem to be coming. They were too far away to see if one might be Johnny. The cry lingered in her mind, uneasily, like a dream you couldn’t remember enough to figure out why it disturbed you.

And then, along the stretch of water directly in front of her, she saw his silver head break the surface.

See, she thought, you were just being silly…but no denying the weakness in her knees, the long sigh escaping her.

Still.

Something odd about the way his face and torso were just…rising from the surface like that. Something odd, too, about the way the little kids acted. Busy with their pails and shovels and castle-building, they saw him coming and broke, scattering up the sand, one of them yelling “Mama! Mama!”

Water streaming off his body, that silver hair he was so proud of slicked along his head and shoulders. She saw he was naked. He had gone into the water in blue-and-white boardshorts and was coming out nude, just the tiger’s-eye necklace circling his throat, and the black leather cord with the shark’s tooth falling between his nipples, as unconcerned about his genitals swinging freely between his carved-out thighs as if emerging from the shower with only herself to witness.

Then his eyes locked on hers, and he came towards her in a way that seemed much too fluid, and he gave her a grin, white jagged teeth inside that tanned skin, and it was not the grin, the teeth, she remembered.

And Hilary felt, in that moment, the first unhinging of her sanity.

He was right in front of her and he smelled of seaweed and something else, something that made her remember her father’s coffin beneath a weight of roses, and he took her wrist in her hand. His grip was too tight and too hot. He brought her gently to the ground and knelt in front of her, the both of them on her oversized red towel, and he said, “What’s my name?”

“What—“

“What’s my name?”

“Johnny.”

He cocked his head. “Maybe we can think of something else. Where do I go?”

She stared at him.

His eyes were like sun-scorched discs of violet. No man had eyes like that. Those were not Johnny’s eyes. Johnny’s eyes were blue, like faded denim. This man’s pupils were like small black pits she could see all the way down into, to where things slithered at the bottom. The hot grip on her wrist, the dripping nakedness, were repulsive to her, and she tried to squirm away but he pulled her closer.

“Where do I go?” he said. “Where is the heart?”

“The heart?”

“The heart of things. The center. I have people waiting and I mustn’t be late.” Again, the grin. “It’s rude.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

It was very hard to get the words out.

She said, “What happened to Johnny? My Johnny?”

“Oh.” Casual flick of his head. “That one’s gone.” He lowered his face to hers, breathed in deep, his nostrils quivering. She was aware of her own long body, exposed in the white bikini. She felt very cold. The sun seemed to have gone away. Maybe that’s why she was trembling?

“Ahhhh,” he said, and smacked his lips. She caught again the sharp white teeth. Cannibal teeth, she thought. Didn’t cannibals file their teeth like that? And this person, this thing, who was not Johnny even though he was in Johnny’s body, rocked back his head and rolled it along his shoulders and said, “It’s good to be back. It is.” Then the scorched-out eyes leveled with hers and she tried to look away but he touched her jaw with his other hand and guided her face back to his. Once again she was spiraling into the black void of those pinprick pupils, pinpricks that widened and deepened as if to take her in and swallow her down. For a moment she thought he would kiss her and she felt, again, that odd freewheeling feeling of a mind coming loose, the first bricks tumbling out of a wall. “Look at you, little thing,” said the Johnny-thing, “I guess we could have some fun,” and he was tugging her to her feet, and she wanted to scream but her voice was snuffed out and she wanted to run yet felt herself padding after him, as he hummed and sang, as the beach stretched away on either side and surfers waited for waves and sunbathing tourists went about their day. As if it was any other.