Writing exercise:

Write about a character that has one of the following occupations: a. Parrot Trainer b. Clock Radio Salesman c. CEO d. Writer of vampire fiction e. Plumber

I originally thought I would be all cheeky and make the subject matter all dark and noir-ish. But it didn’t really turn out like that. Perhaps the brothers in question are just too cheery and shiny to really twist in such a fashion? This may be a good example of how video games are a unique art unto themselves, not easily translated into other medium. Further proof can be found in nearly every video-game-to-movie adaptation.

Avoiding the names was pretty awkward.

Either way, oof, not sure I want to post this. It’s kind of embarrassing. Oh well. That’s what this blog is for. Wouldn’t be the first time. About 530 words of fail. Maybe I should have gone with parrot trainer.

Brothers

Jane Peach’s hand shook, but she kept her fingers locked around her cigarette. Her wet hair plastered her head, dripping shampoo onto her robe and the expensive new carpet. She didn’t notice. Her gaze flickered between the street beyond the front window and the bathroom door, just barely visible through the master bedroom. She’d sealed the crack at the bottom of the door with towels, but she had no idea how long that would hold.

The whine of squeaky brakes tore Jane’s attention back to the street. A battered green and red van came to a halt at the curb. The logo on the side of the van declared, “Jumpman Plumbing.” Two men, one tall and thin, the other short and round, climbed from the vehicle and hurried up the sidewalk. They both wore overalls, the tall one in green, the short one in red. They wore matching caps emblazoned with stylized Js.

Jane jumped up and ran to the door, flinging it open as the visitors approached. The two men nodded, their mouths grim lines beneath heavy mustaches.

The fat one stepped forward and gently took Jane’s hand. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

“I…yes,” Jane answered. “I’m a little…I called for a pest control service…”

The tall one smirked. The fat one cleared his throat. “Yes, well,” he said. “If it’s pests in plumbing, the Jumpman Brothers deal with it. Union rules.” They exchanged glances.

Jane decided she didn’t really care. She hugged herself, tightening the robe. “Okay, whatever. Come on in.”

The various tools dangling from their belts clanged against the walls and doorways as she led them through the living room and to the bathroom. In other circumstances, Jane would have winced and clenched her fists at every ding and scratch, but she put it all out of mind. She took a long drag on the cigarette and pointed at the bathroom door.

“In there,” she said. “I was in the middle of my shower, and…” she shivered, “they just sort of…showed up…”

The short Jumpman nodded. “What did they look like, Mrs. Peach?”

Jane took another long inhalation of smoke. “You know, I stopped smoking five years ago,” she said. “For the kid.” She gestured to a framed picture of the Peach family on the wall.

“It’s okay,” the tall one said. “We see this sort of thing all the time.”

Jane nodded. “Yeah, sure. They looked like little…like little mushrooms.” The Jumpman brothers looked at each other. They each gently took Jane’s arms and lead her from the bedroom.

“Mushrooms, you say?” the short one said.

“With legs,” she whispered. “And, I think maybe eyes. I didn’t stick around very long to see.”

“Perfectly understandable,” the tall Jumpman said.

“It’s completely fine,” the shorter brother said. “We’ve dealt with these before.” He looked around and waved his brother toward the guest bathroom down the hall. “You just leave that door sealed up,” he said. “We’ll take it from here.”

Jane frowned as the two plumbers, faces resolute, marched toward the front bathroom. “But…but the…they’re in the other bathroom…”

“Don’t worry, princess, we’ll take care of it,” called the brother in green. “Your castle will be good as new in no time!”

#

Fresh new rejection letter! Quick one, too. Yay!

Saw Wall·E. It’s quite good, though I think Monsters, Inc and The Incredibles are still the best of the Pixar bunch. Wall·E seemed almost too short. I could have stood to watch the little guy roaming around on the dead Earth for a little while longer. I felt disappointed when it turned out there were still humans alive. I wanted to see robots still carrying out the programs of a civilization long dead, but gradually learning to overcome that and create a society of their own. There’s potent metaphor there.

Or maybe I’m just weird.

(I always misspell weird and villain. For some reason it bugs the hell out of me that the i comes second. Perhaps I use the words weird and villain too much.)

Hellboy is out! And Dark Knight this weekend! Gah! Too much going on!

Moving on…I have joined the ranks of Twitter. It’s sort of a strange (ha! eat that, weird!) combination of message board and chat room. I have added a feed over there to the right. What’s really cool is that there are a number of writers and artists whose work I admire on Twitter, and you can chat with them a little, as we are all simultaneously bored at work. But it’s a lot more relaxed and casual than a chat room. It’s interesting.

If anyone out there uses it, feel free to follow me, and I’ll make sure to follow back.

Writing-wise, I am feeling the tug of several directions at once. I’d like to write a western, but I’d also like to explore my superheroes some more, which is really what I should be doing. I also have a couple of other stories smoldering as well. It’s hard to choose just one when so many are calling. It would help if I actually got back to work. I’ve also got a number of pending critiques due to the writing group.

I had somewhere I wanted to submit my robot librarian story, but it appears they’ve closed to open submissions. Oh, well. It was pretty much going to be a shot for the moon anyway. My second choice appears to be in the process of switching over to a flash market, so that’s out; the story is about 500 words too long for flash. I have one more spot I’ve got bookmarked at home that I’ll try tonight.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, you should head over to A Thousand Faces and read the current issue, which contains several excellent stories. It’ll only be up for a couple more weeks before the next edition. After that you’ll have to order it.

This weekend, Hellboy II! I’m a huge fan of the Hellboy comics, and the films have done a pretty decent job of adapting them. There are some pretty big differences, but the core of the character is largely intact.

(One thing about the movies that bugs me is the whole “secret” aspect of Hellboy and the BPRD. In the comics there’s no secret; HB was featured on the cover of TIME shortly after he was found, and the rest is history. Pretty much everyone knows him, and no one bats an eyelash when this big red demon shows up to help them out. It’s great. But I digress, as usual.)

I am a bad person because I haven’t had a chance to see Wall·E yet.

I quite liked Hancock, but it’s not perfect.

I didn’t like the direction at all. The entire movie consists primarily of close-ups, and it just got old and noticeable after a little while. Add in the little bit of shakiness they gave it and I felt like I was watching an episode of NYPD Blue. It didn’t kill the movie for me, but it was a little irritating when I let myself think about it. Looking over Peter Berg’s resume, it looks like he’s worked a lot on television over the past few years, and it kind of shows.

Glancing over some of the reviews, it seems the critics wanted a much different movie from what they got. They all seem to like the first half of the film, then got thrown by the “big twist.”

The huge turn in the movie was actually very heavily foreshadowed. I don’t get why critics didn’t see it coming. It does take the movie in a different direction, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The original premise of the movie (”What if Superman were a dick?”) is a bit gimmicky and I doubt it would have carried a whole film. At the same time, it’s a bit unfortunate that the turn they took 1) created more questions than answers, 2) provided a (partial) origin story when they really didn’t need one at all, and 3) robbed time from developing potential villains. The basic idea was fine, but it was perhaps not so well executed. The movie could have easily been half an hour longer.

But really, it was a pretty entertaining movie. It’s worth checking out. It’s nice having a superhero movie that isn’t somebody staring in awe at their own hands for an hour.

It’s interesting how versatile the Western genre and the Western Hero archetype can be. You can put them in space, of course, and that’s been done very well on numerous occasions, from Outland to Cowboy Bebop and Firefly. I still have a bit of an itch to write one of those. But you can also do a lot of fun stuff with westerns right here on Earth. Western comics were big back in the ’50s, when nobody was really making superhero books, and of course that was their heyday on the big and small screens.

I wonder, has anyone done a western underwater?

Westerns have kind of made a comeback recently, with some fantastic movies and a few comics. I’m loving the new Lone Ranger comic, and I hear Zorro is quite good as well (both from Dynamite). There’s the fun Daisy Cutter series from Viper, one of which I picked up at a Free Comic Book Day a year or two ago. DC has Jonah Hex, supposedly one of their best titles at the moment. Marvel has a history of old western comics, like the Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, and Kid-Colt (sensing a theme here?), that they don’t really use anymore. It’s good stuff.

So here’s mine, the Dallas Damsel. No doubt her adventures will include aliens and steam-driven robots and mad scientists. Making her a red head kind of feels cliche, or at least wrong. I may change that. I dunno.

This was my first writing prompt of the month, and as I was chugging through it I realized I was revisiting my time traveling supervillain. I wrote a couple of little exercises about him a while back, then totally forgot about his existence. I changed his name (though I’m sure I’m not the first to use “Epoch” for a time-hopping bad guy), but otherwise he’s very similar, even hanging out with the same incompetent henchman. I realized when I reached the end that I should have written it from an entirely different point of view, which would have allowed for a really great ending and actually explained why Epoch was there to kill her to begin with. Oh well.

Prompt: Create a story using

• one of these settings: Luau, western bar, funeral, big city, construction site

• One of these people: comic book villain, DJ, poet, damsel in distress, business tycoon

• And one of these things/objects: nail polish, magic door knob, cancer, samurai sword, banana

(I played it a little loose with the requirements. About 600 words.)

The Dallas Damsel, 1876

The boss waxed intellectual again. I kept my gun trained on the Dallas Damsel. She was slight of frame, but the Damsel had been a renowned hero of her time, fighting off any number of threats, from bandits and brigands to the Old West equivalents of, well, us. Rumor had it the Graxians had invaded a hundred years before they’d invaded in the ‘70s, and that she’d averted the assault. I wasn’t going to underestimate her, no matter how good she smelled.

“So this is how I imagine the conversation,” Epoch said. He paced across creaky saloon floorboards, waving his pistol. “Dave Grohl says, ‘So, Rivers, we can have you on this tour, you know I love you guys. But I saw your last show. It was like staring at a photo for an hour. We need you guys to really rock out. Move around a little. I used to play with Nirvana. That guy blew his own head off. You can’t bring that weak sauce in here.’ This is what Grohl says.”

I glanced at the two men we hired after popping into this town from a hundred and thirty years in the future. They barely speak English, so they don’t really know what the boss is talking about even when he’s not making 21^st-century pop culture references. But they shouldn’t care—they’re getting paid a lot of money.

Even they looked confused. The Dallas Damsel’s eyes narrowed. She’s not looking at me, but I can tell she’s judging the distance. Any moment now she’ll make her move. Will I mind? She’s gorgeous. Is her hair naturally that red?

“And, as much as I love Weezer, Grohl would be right,” Epoch continued. “Anyway, when you hang with the big boys, you can’t screw around.” He spun and fired. The Damsel gasped, then staggered back against the bar, gripping her shoulder. To her credit, she did not cry out. I have to admit I jumped a little—the boss usually wasn’t so vicious.

“Boys is right,” she growled. She leapt at me faster than I could follow, faster than I remember any of the dozen heroes I’d been pummeled by over the years. She twisted around behind me, then wrapped one hand around my throat as her other arm guided my gun hand.

“Thank you, ma’am!” I croaked.

I squawked in pain as she clamped down on my fingers, forcing me to squeeze the trigger. Even in these extreme circumstances, her aim was impeccable. The metal band around Epoch’s wrist shattered with a shower of sparks.

“Shit! Damn it!” he cried. He raised his pistol toward my head, and I had no doubt he was willing to fire through my skull to get to his hated enemy. But temporal physics kicked in, and Epoch flickered and vanished from our space-time continuum.

“Well isn’t that fancy,” the Damsel whispered in her adorable accent. “Figured those things were important. Guess I was right.” Her fingers tightened on my throat, her own blood running off her fingertips like too much nail polish. The smell of her hair overwhelmed my senses. The two hired thugs looked uncertainly at each other, then sprinted for the door. Typical.

The Dallas Damsel twisted her leg between mine, and we tumbled to the floor. She hammered my arm against the floor, once to send my gun skittering away, again to shatter my own temporal anchor. I heard a snap, dim but crisp. The irresistible tug of the infinite wrenched at my body and mind, and as her dusty world whirl pooled away, the Dallas Damsel smiled and wiggled her fingers in farewell.

Looks like some of my friends and family got around to checking out my little mystery story over at Every Day Fiction, because it has suddenly leapt into not one but two of the Top Stories categories there. They recently revised their Top Stories lists to cover only the Top 10, but in several different categories. “Crush” fell out, but “Aftershocks” has hopped up to the low tiers of their “Current” and “By Rating.” I’m trying to think of a way to get more quote marks in this paragraph, but I’m not sure it’s possible.

I have been quite lazy of late, but I will get back to work. New prompt contest this month, so maybe I’ll get something mildly interesting posted up here soon. I also still need to submit a couple of stories I have laying around. But it’s been at least a month since I wrote them, so now when I look at them I hate them. It’s hard to work up enthusiasm for stories when you do that.

Jens brought something up over his blog that’s been on my mind lately: casualty figures. He’s referring to the infamous Black Death that devastated Europe, killing millions.

For the story I’m working on, yesterday I stopped by the library and picked up An Ordinary Man, the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, who, during the mid-’90s Rawandan genocide, harbored over 1,200 people from the massacres going on in the streets right outside his doors. (I haven’t seen it, but the film Hotel Rawanda was about this.) The raw numbers he provides about the slaughter are staggering: 800,000 people killed, mostly by machete, in 100 days. Nazis would have envied the efficiency, if not the lack of bureaucracy. 8,000 people per day, by hand.

In fiction, especially science fiction, you see numbers like this all the time. Millions killed at the push of a button. Whole planets destroyed in the blink of an eye. Biological weaponry that wipes out whole species. Massive battles that kill hundreds of thousands of people in an afternoon.

It seems like, and I’m certainly not excluding myself from this, as writers we tend to throw these sorts of events out there for dramatic purposes. These things certainly happen, throughout history. But something we sometimes miss is the impact these sorts of things have. Alderaan explodes and an old man gets a headache.

(Not that it hasn’t been done well; most of the Ender’s Game books, for example, are all about a kid coping with events he triggers in the first novel.)

Just a few years ago, the sudden death of 3,000 people dramatically altered the political and economic landscape for millions of people, and our grandchildren will likely still be suffering the effects. Just something to keep in mind.

But at the same time, you don’t want to get too heavy-handed with it. You probably don’t want your story to turn into a ham-fisted morality tale about the Evils That Man Wrought. You want your story to be focused on, whatever, the kid and his best friend the talking cheeseburger. It’s a tricky line to walk.

And, as Jens says, it’s impossible to really wrap your head around the numbers. Even the people who’ve experienced it have trouble describing these events. And this is one of those areas where modern psychology utterly fails to explain human behavior.

I guess my point is really just to be careful with these mass slaughters; as plot devices they’re often simultaneously overused and underused.

Well, the Story Each Day contest is done, finished Sunday, actually. I wrote 11 of the 14 days, just shy of 7,000 words. I’m pretty happy with the results, both for myself and the group as a whole. In fact, of the people who really put the work in, I was the only one who didn’t make the 14-story goal! Congrats to everyone involved.

The biggest thing that came of it for me was what I began on Day 12. That’s a story that’s been floating around in my brain for about 10 years. I’ve started putting some more thought into it, and I may look around for some books, do the research, and expand on it. I’ve already written some more on it, and I can’t decide whether it needs to be a novel or not.

That means it probably does need to be a novel. Sigh.

Currently reading: Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz

I feel especially fortunate that I got to see him in concert just a few months ago (I got to see him at a taping of Jay Leno a couple years ago, too, but that hardly counts). The guy was a legend.

I’m sure he’s somewhere smiling up at us.

So this weekend is the official Can’t Stop the Serenity weekend, when Browncoats around the world get together and put on charity screenings of Serenity. Everything raised goes to Equality Now, Joss Whedon’s favorite charity. If you’ve never been to one, I highly recommend it. Even if you’re alone, you’ll find yourself among friends.

Tim Minear will be here for the Dallas screening. It will be awesome. This will be my third, and I enjoy myself every time. Last year Jane Espenson attended it with us, and she’s very cool.

I keep promising to talk about The Incredible Hulk, but really, I don’t have that much to say about it. I enjoyed it a great deal, and in general it’s better than the Ang Lee version that came out a few years ago. There are some great action scenes (including the closest thing we’ll probably ever get to a match-up between Captain America and the Hulk), and the drama going on between the action is way more entertaining than it was in the 2003 movie. It’s hard to say if it was as good as Iron Man, simply by virtue of the fact that Tony Stark is by his very nature a charming and likable guy, whereas that Banner fella is always kind of a downer. But overall I’d say it’s pretty close.