Finally over the blockage.

Went to see Jack the Giant Slayer yesterday with Linda because I just couldn't get anywhere with the manuscript.  I gave up again.

The movie was O.K.  I get the sense that a whole lot of money is being spent on these fantasies that don't need to be spent.  They could squeeze two or three good movies out of these overblown spectacles with just a little cleverness.

The lead actress was gorgeous, and I was convinced she was older than the callow young lad who plays the lead.  But no, just that in the mid-teens to early twenties, the girls often seem more mature to me.


So, back to writing.  I was well and thoroughly blocked.  Hasn't happened since my latest very prolific streak.  This was turning into a second wasted week.  Finally decided last night that I would simply rewrite the problem chapter from scratch, without reference to the earlier words.

But I was worried, because I wasn't feeling the story and if I'm not feeling the story, the words won't come.

Apparently, I needn't have worried.  I woke up at 6:00 in the morning and had the beginning already.  Once again my subconscious has said, "You're not done, bub."  Apparently, I was feeling the story after all.

Once I have the beginning, the rest usually comes easy, and sure enough, a couple of hours later I finally had a serviceable chapter.  The previously written material suddenly took on a clear order and I was done.

An interesting thing is happening.  The original manuscript had a bulky beginning that was about 40% of the book before the main protagonists show up and then a kind of lighter tone sets in for the rest of the book.

It didn't work.

Linda rewrote that beginning and cut about 70% of it.

I've been going back to the original bulky beginning of SOMETIMES A DRAGON and interspersing that information as flashbacks.

What interesting to me is the flashbacks are going from the latest to the earliest.  What would make more sense and what usually happens with flashbacks is that you would go from the earliest to the latest.

But somehow it makes an intuitive sense in the book to reverse that.  So that the more dramatic moments, which happen early in the story, will be reintroduced later in the story.

I love this kind of theoretical stuff.  Even though I have no idea what I'm doing.

Simpatico.

I had a couple from St. Louis in Pegasus Books yesterday.   The woman, especially, really liked the store.   I mean, really, really liked the store.

She proceeded to catch all the things I was doing, all the differences from other stores, all the cool things I thought I was trying to do.

In other words, she really "got" it.

It's very validating when someone you've never met actually seems to understand what you've done and what you're trying to do.

In talking to her, I learned she'd worked in bookstores, was a huge reader, and basically was simpatico with me in many ways.

There are a lot of subtleties in what I'm trying to do -- things that I know I'm doing but I don't really expect other people to catch.

She went through the store and seemed to catch lots of them.

Kind of reminds me of one of my readers, Martha, who seems to catch all the really cool lines in my stories -- the cool little bits.  The same little bits that I think are cool.  Again, it's very reaffirming.  That it's not just all in my head.

I call her my simpatico reader.

So maybe both my store and my stories will only appeal to a small group, but that small group will "get" it?  Most won't be simpatico,  just as a matter of course.  But a few will be?

I can live with that.

The wealthy got weathier.

After watching the stock market rise of the last two months, all  I can think of is that some of the rich people in the country have just gotten much richer in a short time.

So can we expect a little trickle down?   Huh?  Can we?

Not holding my breath.

**********

Bank of the Cascades is out from under?  Nice that everyone exhibited such kindness and patience with them, and were willing to extend a helping hand.

You know, just like the banks did for all their debtors....

**********

Met my first writer's block in a while last week.  Hit a chapter I just couldn't get past.

I set it aside to work on this week, so today is a bit of test.

If nothing else, I'll apply the 5 minute rule and see what happens.   (Do a task for 5 minutes and more often than not, you'll just keep going.)

**********

I keep wondering -- of course -- whether anyone actually likes DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL.

But, well, I thought it was pretty good.  Really.  I can't answer to how other people react.

I have to trust my own instincts, because there really isn't anything else I can do.




DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL (4).

 
CHAPTER 4.


As he drove up Mt. Hood Pass, the thick forests of the Cascade Mountains reminded Terrill of the old Black Forest of his youth.  He was comfortable with the shadows, the darkness in the rocks and streams.   Once, upon arriving in the Northwest, he had experimented by bundling up and walking the Pacific Crest Trail in daytime just to see if he could do it.  He had gone for miles, evading sunlit areas, hopping from shadow to shadow.  He loved the rain and the thick growth.
He had never been east of the summit.
At the height of the pass, the trees changed -- it seemed within seconds -- from thick fir forests with heavy underbrush, to larger and more expansive Ponderosa pines, with little undergrowth.
The air became dry, fragrant with the smells of needles and bitterbrush.  The sun seemed brighter, and lower to the earth. 
He almost turned around.  He could do nothing to bring the girl, Jamie, back. What would he accomplish by putting himself in danger?  In the rear view mirror he saw the comfortable slate gray skies overhanging the Willamette Valley, with the dotted trails of rain clouds.  Ahead he saw brightness and danger.
The High Desert -- a part of the Great American Basin -- was something he'd purposely avoided by flying over by airplane every time he needed to travel.  East of Bend, he knew, were miles and miles of lava rock slopes, filled with low scraggly Juniper trees and dry, wooded sagebrush.  He felt exposed just thinking about it.
Vampires thrived in the visceral fluids of men and of the earth.  In the darkness and the cover of the cities, in dark and rainy forests and mountains.  They avoided the sparseness of small towns where a person might be immediately missed and a stranger immediately suspected.  Above all, a vampire avoided the sun and exposure to the sky.
He pulled over to the side of the road. 
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked himself out loud.
He could turn around, head further north, into the Olympic National Park and on to the equally rainy Seattle area.  It wasn't too late.

"Were are you from?" Jamie asked.  It was after their first lovemaking session.  She had started off stiff and uncomfortable, but his need had been great and he ignored her discomfort at first.  Then something had switched inside him, and he slowed and tried to bring her along with him.  That had never happened before.  He took what he needed and wanted from humans, without care if they liked it.
But he had to admit; it had been a more satisfying experience somehow when she had climaxed with him.  Or -- at least pretended to.  She was a whore, he reminded himself.
"Nowhere and everywhere."
"That's too bad," she said.  She frowned.
"Why?" he asked.  Most people were intrigued by his answer, envious of his world-weary traveller pose.  She seemed almost to pity him.
"I love Bend, my hometown.   It's the best of all worlds.  It has everything I've ever wanted."
"Yet -- here you are, in Portland."
"Only for awhile.  As soon as...."
"As soon as what?"
"I have a couple of things I have to work out.  There is.... someone... I need distance from.  But eventually, I'll go back.  I know it."
He watched her face as she was speaking, and her enthusiasm was irresistible.   He grabbed her and slid her underneath him, while she laughed.  
"You should visit sometime.  I think you'd like it there!"
"I like it right here, right now."

 The summit of the Mt. Hood pass was half in shadow and half in light.  He pulled out onto the highway and drove down into the light. 
 Half the trees were orange, seemingly dead.  Pine beetles, Terrill thought, thinking he’d read something about it in the Oregonian.  The dryness didn’t make him any more comfortable.  The mountain lakes were bright blue, and the roads to them paved with red cinder.  He kept to the main highway, drove through the quaint tourist town of Sisters, and on into Bend.
He’d become practiced at finding the local motels where he could pass unnoticed.  Not too fancy, not too seedy.  Not too new, or too old.  Bland and slightly downhill of their peak, that’s what he preferred.
It was still hours until dark.  This late in the winter, he’d be able to venture out after around 4:00 P.M. as long as he wore his hat and gloves and long scarves wrapped nearly around his face.  He was a couple hours early, so he drove around, exploring the town.  It didn’t take him more than hour to drive the main roads.
Finally, he judged it dark enough to pull up to the motel office overhang and hopped out.  He rented a queen size, with microwave and refrigerator and paid for a week.
He checked into his room and then consulted the yellow pages for the nearest independent butcher.  He got back in the car.  He ordered several pounds of steak, and drove back to the motel.  He ate the meat raw, licking the butcher paper clean of blood.
The blandness of the blood brought back the memory of his feeding on Jamie.  He hadn’t wanted that.  Especially after trying for decades not to kill another human.  Especially not her.  He had really liked her, perhaps more than any other mortal woman in his long existence.
He felt defeated, sick, and the raw meat did little to make him feel satiated.  He wouldn’t feel satiated ever again, not if he could help it.  He would starve first.
So he told himself.
But the memory of waking up, staring into an empty mirror, and feeling the old blood lust was overpowering.  Even as he sank his teeth into her neck, he’d been aware of the wrongness.  Even as he drained her, he had known he was killing her.
He couldn’t stop.
Never again would he trust himself to seek comfort in another human being.  No, that wasn’t right.  He wasn’t human.
He was a monster.   He had always been a monster.  He would always be a monster.  


https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/289646


 

Don't buy it in the first place.

I can't believe how often I disagree with the common wisdom of bookstores.

There's a lead article in the Shelf Awareness site about how "Don't fall in love with your inventory."

About how you need to be ruthless in your "turns" and "returns."

Well, here's an even better idea.  Don't buy it in the first place if you don't think it's good enough to keep.

So, if you buy a classic book, it stays a classic book.  If you buy a cult book, it stays a cult book.  If you by a quirky book, it stays a quirky book.

More to the point, if the book has worthwhile content, it stays worthwhile content.  Even bestsellers have some longevity, if the book is worthwhile.

I think running a comic store is great training for a general bookstore.  We don't get to return anything.  Not only that, but most of what we have has a limited shelf life.

The shelf life of even the slowest moving book is incredibly luxurious compared to almost any comic. 

The returns system seems destructive and wasteful and stupid and people fall back on it, but at the same time the system takes a slice of you with every return and it's time consuming and complex and again -- it let's stupid and thoughtless people think they can get away with being stupid and thoughtless.

Instead, think about every book you buy.  Is this a keeper?  This book I want in my store?

Yes, even  "Am I in love with this book?"

So much smarter than the idiot above who spends all his time thinking about how to get rid of books he shouldn't have bought in the first place.

Onward and upward -- or at least sideways.

I'm guessing that I got turned down by Adsense because they think I'm a word aggregator -- not realizing that it's all me own words.  I wouldn't believe it either...

So, back to the writing of books.  I want to wrap up the current rewrites soon so I can get started on something new.  I think it's important to be writing something new.  Not so much that I need new material -- I've got four books lines up in various stages of completion -- but because I want to keep the creative spark going.

Right now, I'm thinking about continuing my fantasy series, which I'm calling the Lore series, after the name of the main character.

I'm thinking that the fantasy backstory of the first book is most likely to be fleshed out by writing the second book, and the back story of the second book by the writing of the third book.  It may turn into one big book, since a 200K novel isn't out of bounds these days for fantasy. 

I have an image in my head of a fully complete, fully written, fully rewritten fantasy series.  My trilogy, if you will.

It was a trilogy that got me started down this path.



DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL (3)

 
CHAPTER 3.


She had wanted him to find her, Carlan was sure of it.  Signing in with her own name.  Had she suspected there was something wrong?  Was it a cry for help?
"You knew her?" One of the techs asked.  It was quiet in the motel room, the shuffling sound of the plastic sleeves they wore on their feet, the occasional squeak of plastic gloves.
She was open to the world, naked.  There was little blood, she looked pale and lovely.  Peaceful.  Peaceful at last.
"She was like this when you found her?" 
"We untangled her from the bedspread.  We're thinking whoever killed her knew her, because they carefully covered her up.  They crossed her arms across her chest."
Carlan shook his head.  She didn't know anyone in Portland.  Why had she come here?  What was she doing in a seedy motel?  Why had she left him?  He'd taken care of her for years -- she had wanted for nothing.  That last time, he'd even offered to marry her.  
Damn her and her obstinacy.  What had gotten into her?  
He wanted to lie down beside her, lay his head on her chest.  He struggled for a moment to contain his impulse, turning away from the tech. 
Someone opened the curtains and the room flooded with light.  Everyone in the room seemed to flinch.  Carlan put his hand up, and turned away.  He was looking down on Jamie again, her eyes seemed to be staring at him.  Accusing him.  It was his fault she was here.  His fault she was dead.
She looked tiny, deflated.  He always called her "Short Stuff," but she had been a dynamo in a small package.  Now she looked like she'd been soaked in bleach -- the color drained from her.
"Close the damn curtains."  The voice was commanding, and as soon as the room dimmed again, Carlan saw a very large fat man in the doorway.  The guy had a huge bald head, and small narrowed eyes which surveyed the motel room, landing on Carlan.
"Who are you?"'
"Richard Carlan.  Bend Police."
"What's your interest in her?"
"I dated her for a while.  I was asked by her family to find her."
"How long you been in town?"
"I drove over the pass this morning..."
The big cop stared at him.  They both knew that the boyfriend or husband was always the primary suspect.  Finally, a big beefy hand was extended, "Detective Brosterhouse."
Carlan shook the hand.  His eyes went back to Jamie.  
"Why is there no blood?"
"Yeah, well, you're not going to believe this."  The old cop leaned over and gently turned Jamie's head, revealing two deep punctures in her neck. 
"So you're thinking?"  
"I'm not thinking anything, Mr. Carlan.  I'd say she was probably killed and drained somewhere else, but the lab guys tell me every other indicator is that she was killed here.  So I don't know what to think."
Carlan was trying to act professional, like it was any other crime scene, any other murder he'd seen.  But...it was Jamie.  His Jamie.  
She looked utterly defenseless on the floor, her nakedness ... he closed his eyes.
 "Can't..." he faltered.  "Can't you cover her up?"
Brosterhouse nodded to the tech, who flipped one of the wings of the blanket over her.
Just like that, she was gone.  Forever.
He'd find the person who did this and kill him.  She was his -- no one else's.  She'd run away from him, but it was all a misunderstanding.  Things had gotten messy, complicated.  He'd struck out, but he hadn't meant any of it.
She hadn't given him a chance to explain, to apologize, to make up.
Brosterhouse was watching him.  He struggled to keep his face impassive.
"The only real mystery here," the Portland cop said,  “is where's the blood?  Other than that -- it's obvious she was a working girl."
Carlan's face flushed, and his jaw clenched.  He couldn't help it.  Brosterhouse nodded his head as if confirming something to himself. 
"I'm willing to let you help us," Brosterhouse said.  "But you need to check with me before you do anything, got it?  Meanwhile, give me the number to your station in Bend."
Carlan rattled off the number.  They were going to check on him, he knew.  They'd find that she had a restraining order on him.  That would've once been embarrassing, but with Jamie dead, he didn't care.
He hadn't left Bend until 6:00 A.M., but he’d have to find proof of that.  Forensics  had already announced she had died somewhere between midnight and dawn.
With or without the help of the Portland cops, he was going to find whoever did this.  He was going to make the murderer pay.   His heart was gone, his anger at Jamie gone.  He wanted whoever had done this to feel the same thing.
Whoever had murdered Jamie must have family, friends.  He'd find the murderer.  But more, he'd find who the murderer loved most and...
"We're ready to move her now," the forensics guy said to Brosterhouse.  
The big cop waved Carlan out of the room.  They stood to one side of the door on the landing as the body was loaded onto the gurney and wheeled from the motel room. 
“Wait.”
“What is it?” Brosterhouse asked.  There was a tone there that suggested he was expecting Carlan to confess or something.
“Let me see her again.”
“She’s gone, pal.  I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“No…I need to see something.”
Brosterhouse hesitated.  Then went over to the gurney and unzipped the body bag.  Carlan leaned over.  He tried not to look at her face, but stared at her mangled neck. 
“She’s missing a necklace, a silver crucifix.  Her mother gave it to her.”  Unbidden and unwanted the image came to him of the last time he’d seen her  -- her battered face, her bloody fingers holding the crucifix as if it would protect her from his blows.  He felt a moment of doubt, then his hunger for revenge returned.
“Whoever killed her took it.”

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/289646

Refused adsense.

Well, that was interesting.

I was refused adsense for the blog.  I have no idea why.

I've gone 6 years without it, so I suppose I'll just keep going.  But not knowing the reason why, that is pretty frustrating, and apparently not having any real recourse.

Here I am, creating nothing but original content.  Not even trying to get more clicks, and they refuse me.  Weird.

It reminds me of when I applied for an Upper Deck account 20 years ago, when I was the biggest card retailer east of the Cascades in Oregon, maybe the third or fourth card dealer in all of Oregon, and was selling tons of cards.

Never could get an answer why.

Meanwhile, three of my customers had accounts.

I worked around it.  I'm still thriving, Upper Deck is anything but thriving.

Shakes my confidence in Google.  If they are that hidebound, they've got problem already.  I think when you create a system that won't give answers, that has no appeal, you are going to piss off a whole lot of people with that kind of arrogance.

People like the idea of fairness and justice, and this isn't that. 

It may take awhile, but any big company can turn into AT & T if they aren't responsive.


The Crazy in the Creative.

Woke up last night dreaming of a cross country trip with my family, with a swimming pool in the back seat of the car.

I had a Facebook page which was completely different that which exists.  For a couple of moments after waking up I was confused -- what is real and what is false?

Which was what I think feeling crazy might feel like.

Then I thought, what is writing except seeing things that aren't really there?

Do creative types have crazier illusions than non-creative types, if they're crazy?  Or is the crazy always there, and the creative types are just a little closer,  more in tune with the crazy?

I had all this much more thought out last night at 3:30 in the morning --

Internal pressure.

I spent most of yesterday drowsing.  I'm thinking I had a fever.

Managed to get 3000 words down on the rewrite of SOMETIMES A DRAGON. 

I think putting DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL online somehow released the pressure I was under.  Why?  What pressure?

I have no idea, I just know that I immediately got sick and immediately slowed down on the writing. Writing pressure is all internal.  No one's urging me or begging more or expecting me to produce.

But it seems to be pressure, nevertheless.

Cutting half my words takes balls, I think.



So far I've cut SOMETIMES A DRAGON by 50%.  At that rate, I'll have about 35K words left.  I'm thinking, I need at least 50K words for an online book.

I might be able to stretch it by 5K by being more verbose.  I might be able to put maybe 5K back in.

But it probably still necessitates that I do some fresh writing.  I have one idea--the "Lady" that the main villain is  mooning over never really makes an appearance -- so I can add a past experience, and bring in some sort of conclusion toward the end.

But first, I'll get this draft down and see what it is.  I often end up at a higher word count than I think I will.  I'm thinking that I probably won't be cutting quite as much from here on...

I figure most of the cutting is in these first 100 pages.  As usual, most of the structural problems are toward the beginning.

Linda did a lot of cutting in the first 50 pages when she did a rewrite.  I thought she cut through the Gordian Knot pretty well, so I followed her blueprint.   If I do say so myself, I think it takes a certain maturity to be able to let go of up to half of my precious words.

I'm really liking it so far -- I'm in that Honeymoon phase that seems to be a necessity while you're actively writing.  The time for doubts is when you're done.

Why do I love this problem book so much?

Well, that was cool.

I was trying to fit the pieces of SOMETIMES A DRAGON into a coherent story, and I was having trouble.  So I sat around all day just sort of nudging my subconscious every once in a while.  I finally sat down in late in the evening to try to write a chapter, and it all just sort of came together.

I don't know if it actually works, or whether anyone will want to read it.  But I've figured out new motivations for some of the characters, new histories, for which I can use much of the same writing.

So for instance, I have a scene where the shapeshifter narrator is a broom  (Yes, he's a broom.)  And when the creatures from the vats try to take it away form the Old Man, he freaks out.

So now, in the rewrite, I'm making the narrator less present in every scene.  So why does the Old Man freak out?  Well, I've established that the Old Man has had his brain fried, but he's trying desperately to remember the name of the Master.  The One True Name.  So I have it that he's carved the name into the broom -- and that's why he's freaked out.

Actually works better as a motivation.  But everything else in the scene is exactly the same.

It's a little bit like being creative with leftovers.  All have all these pieces but they don't make a meal.  Except if I recombine them.

It is a very creative process in some ways.  It isn't what you would come up with if you had nothing but fresh ingredients, but it has its own appeal. 

Or another way to put it, it's as if I had filmed a whole bunch of material -- artfully lit, beautifully acted, but the story was either too distant or too cutesy, too romantic or too formal.  All at the same time.

So a different editor comes along and combines all the scenes in a whole different way.  Same footage, but different slant.

What's kind of cool about this is that if I had tried to do it earlier, I wouldn't have known what to do.  I wouldn't have been ruthless enough.  It would have seemed insurmountable.

Now, I have enough faith in my subconscious, that if I think about it long enough, I certain that I'll come up with solutions.  It's about the characters -- why they do things and why we care.

So out goes the whole science background -- it wasn't necessary, and felt anachronistic.

Out goes a whole bunch of cutesy scenes.  Out go overly romantic scenes.  There still way more of these scenes than I'm comfortable with, frankly, but a lot less than before.

Out goes the shape-changing main narrator, who was in every scene.  I cut him back to only three manifestations, and put the rest of the book into a more general 3rd person.

Out goes the main character who seems to be all powerful but without much motivation.The main character is not quite so all powerful and now we know his motivation.

And so on and so forth.

Instead, it's a less ambitious book but a much more readable one, I think.  Much more involved in character's motivations -- that's the simple lesson I think I've learned in the last year.  You only care about the characters if you understand and sympathize why they do what they do and say what they say.

I love all the writing in this book.  SOMETIMES A DRAGON is like the troublesome child I just can't help loving no matter what he or she does.  Objectively, I have no idea why I like this book so much.  Sure, some of it is because I was falling in love when I wrote it.  But most of it is because this is the first book I wrote without regard as to whether anyone else would like it.

So I see all the warts, all the faults, and I still love it.

I'm trying to fix it, so that others will love it too.

I would have thought that I would hate doing this.  I've often expressed my dislike for rewriting.  But this is more like well, Re-----writing.  That is -- writing something that already existed.  It feels more like writing.  It takes just as much time.  That is, I could write something completely new in the same time span.

So I'd better like this book, if I'm going to expend that kind of energy on it.

I'm trying not to overthink it, but to feel it.

I also have kind of decided that not everything needs to be explained.  Like a poem, a story can have things that aren't explained if they FEEL right.  I mean, you can't be blatant.  But not everything has to be spelled out.  (One of the problems with writer's group critique for instance is that they always notice what they don't know -- which is weird anyway because you can't know everything in individual chapters.)

Finally, I'm roughly 40% of the way through the old draft, and I've cut about 50% of the material.  But...from here on out, I think the story is fairly straight forward, so I'm only expecting to cut maybe 25% of the material.

It's going to be a small book, around 50,000 words, but that's all right, I think.  Maybe not for a paperbook, but O.K. for an ebook.  Besides, I've decided to quit worrying about length, because it usually seems to get to the right length without my trying.

DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL, (2).

 
CHAPTER 2.


"So what's your name?" the girl asked. 
"Really?  Do people really ever give you a real name?"
"No," she admitted.  "But I can tell something about them by the name they give me."
"Then...my name is Ted."
She looked sad.  Genuinely sad.  Like she cared, for a stranger she'd met in a bar -- a meal ticket, a 'John.'  
Curious, he asked.  "What does that tell you?"
"You want to be ordinary.  You want to stay home and watch T.V., eat at McDonalds, gain fifty pounds and live out your life."
She eyed his lean, tall frame, his impeccably tailored suit, his razor sharp haircut, his manicured nails.  He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties in age, but he felt so much older.
"Everything you aren't..."

He slept less than an hour.  Forty-five minutes to be exact.  He woke snarling, his jaw extended, his fangs exposed, his claws unfurled.
There was knocking at the back car window, and he could see the outline of a head, wearing a hat he recognized as a policeman's cap.   He calmed himself.  In a thousand years, he had never been able to restrain that first impulse after discovery  -- to kill, to feed.  It was only in the last few centuries he'd been able to control it at all.
He breathed deeply, as the knocking increased in force and tempo.  He gauged the height of the sun, the slant of the rays, the distance he needed to maintain.  He positioned himself about halfway down the back seat from the window, and reached over and hit the button.  He retracted his hand just in time, as the window opened automatically.
The light hit the first quarter of the seat full on -- the next quarter was in the shade, but still burned.  He slid over about an inch, and it was tolerable.
"This is a non-parking zone," the cop said.  He was beefy, red-faced.  Exactly the type of prey Terrill had always preferred.  Someone who could, on a good day and with immense luck, actually hurt him.  It had never happened, of course.  Never would.
"I was getting way too sleepy last night," Terrill said.  "I decided it might be safer to pull over and get some rest."
The policeman had a studied skepticism, probably met every response by every citizen with the same attitude.  It made the guilty squirm, no doubt.  Terrill kept his face bland, and the cop finally shrugged.  So far, so good.
"Well, that's a good idea, sir.  I applaud you for it.  But you need to move along."
"Thanks.  I will."  It was a rare sunny day in the fall in Portland.  Terrill had gravitated to the coastal Northwest America because such days were unusual.  The rain and clouds, the fogs and the mists -- all were perfect for him.
Terrill didn't move -- couldn't move.  Climbing into the front seat would necessitate him moving into the direct sunlight.  He busied himself with straightening his clothes, smoothing his hair, smiling at the cop.
"May I see your driver's license and registration?"
While the policeman had been thinking about his next move, Terrill reached into his pockets and put on his gloves.  He angled himself over the seat, trying not to look too awkward.  The angle was wrong and he struggled with the latch, his sleeve rode up his forearm and he felt the sharp pain of long dead flesh exposed to sunlight.  Finally, he snatched the registration and fell back into shadow, and the pain immediately subsided and healed.  He handed the documents over to the cop carefully, making sure to be covered every inch.
Meanwhile, he casually looked around at the neighborhood.  Policemen always attracted attention.  There would be people watching this, from the sides of their eyes, glad it wasn't them who was stopped.  He practiced the attack in his mind.  Reaching out and grabbing the head, twisting the neck before the man could make a sound, leveraging the body swiftly through the window, closing the window and scrambling over the seat and driving away.
He reached into the light and opened the window the last couple of inches.  Again the sleeve exposed a part of his arm, and he grimaced at the pain.  The cop was still examining the papers.
Terrill waited for the words, “Would you please step outside, sir?”
Ironically, fully opening the window seemed to reassure the cop, as if by opening the window, he'd exposed himself.  The cop handed him back his papers, even going so far as to reach in enough for Terrill to take them without extending himself again.
"Have a good day."
"Thank you.  I will." 
Terrill maneuvered himself over the console and plopped into the driver's seat, but not before his right cheek was exposed to the full light for a second.  It sizzled and smoked.  He put his glove to his face, and looked back at the policeman, who was looking at the traffic instead.
He started the car and started to put it into gear.
“One more thing,” the cop said. 
Terrill almost pulled away, because the cop had that warning tone in his voice again.
“You need to have your rearview mirror unobstructed.”
The mirror was covered casually with one of Terrill’s many hats.  Terrill reached up and removed it, hoping the cop wasn’t looking directly in the mirror.  But the cop had already lost interest and was waving him on.
Terrill eased into traffic.  He headed east on Burnside Street, and looked in the mirror to see that the cop was following him.  He kept heading east, finally reaching the airport and turning into the parking lot, while the police car kept going.
Terrill sat back and closed his eyes.
Time to leave town?  He always left town after a kill. 
He'd stayed in Portland longer than anywhere else.   Twenty years of drinking cow's blood and that of an occasional stray dog.  Twenty years of existing peacefully among humans.
Damn her.  Why had she woken him like that?  What had made her suspect him?  And why couldn't he have had that second to think, to pause, before he killed her?
'Jamie Howe' she had written on the motel registration.  A small town girl, too honest to even lie for one evening, except to her John, and even there she caught him looking and shrugged at him with a wistful smile.
He pulled out his phone and looked her up.  There was a Jamie Lee Howe from Bend, just the other side of the Cascade Mountain range.  Without thinking, he pulled out of the parking lot and headed southeast toward Mount Hood.
He had sworn he would never kill again.  But he had.  He was still vampire, not human.  All he could do now was try to make up for it somehow, to make amends to the girl’s family and friends.  To rebuild what little shreds of humanity he still contained by learning all he could about Jamie Lee Howe.  Who was she and how had she ended up in the bed of a vampire?

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/289646

President Robert E. Lee

Woke up with this little story in my head. I'll never write it because it would require way too much research:


"President Robert E. Lee looked out his office windows over the graves at Arlington Cemetery.  Buried there, at his insistence,  were soldiers of both sides of the War Between the States.

After the rout at Gettysburg, when the Federalist forces had unexpectedly collapsed and the the loyalist army had marched into the capital, he'd given his estate to the government. They'd let him keep his corner office for visits.

He was due back at the White House the next day. He'd spent the morning idly perusing a stack of Lincoln papers on the corner.  The tyrant had fled to Canada, but he continued to spew useless Abolitionist propaganda, which was about to become moot with the passage of the 13th Amendment.

Lee's Gettysburg address had turned the tide of opinion, and his words were emblazoned over the arches at the entrance of the cemetery.

"Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation. Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that the Federal Government shall not impose it's will on the people without their consent."

  Upon winning his third term, he come up with the plan of buying out the slaveowners with federal subsidies. It was going to be a tough battle to get the southern states to ratify the amendment, but Lee had never been more popular. He was confident he could get it done."

A walking cliche.

When did it come to this?

If I'm not working  -- or not writing ---- I feel guilty.  Guilty.

For god's sake, give myself a break, he said. 

**********

Maybe it's inevitable that old white guys become cranks.  It's experience after all.

But do we have to become conservative cranks?  I hope not.  Not so far.

Woodward is the latest example of someone who you can see has been so swallowed by his ego that when he is challenged, he goes running to the safety of the conservative media, who will treat him like a star.  Hannity?   Really?

**********

My Facebook is interesting -- most of my old high school classmates seem to be on the conservative side, most of my young comic store followers on the liberal side.  Guess who's going to have more clout in the future?

**********

Got a cold, and so I've not gotten anything done for a couple days.  Tried working yesterday and I was twirling and not hearing and standing stumped and nothing penetrated and two plus two was -------------------four.  (Got the right answer, just took forever to get there.)

So I went home.

***********

I tell you, I'm a walking cliche.

Stayed away from the internet for years -- don't need it, don't have time for it.

Once I was introduced to blogging, well you guessed it, I've written every day for 6 and a half years or so.

Facebook.  Don't need and don't have time for it.

Once I was introduced to Facebook, guess who's checking it every ten minutes?

Social media is perfect for me, the loner who likes to have contact with just a smidgeon of commitment.

I often tell people at the store "I don't do video games -- online games."   But it isn't because I don't think I'll like it.  I suspect, actually, I'd like it a lot.  Best not to try that cocaine for the first time...



Stupidest reason to rewrite a problem book?

Stupidest reason to spend months of my life on a problem book?

Because I like the title:  SOMETIMES A DRAGON.

I can't let this title go to waste.

I'm about 20% of the way in, and I'm realizing that I need to jettison about  2/3rds the book -- which makes it no longer a book.

So I have to reinvent the book.  Write entire new sections.

I have some ideas.

When I started thinking about it, I realized that I have three couples in love -- one of which the story is old and sad, one of which is new an exciting, and another somewhere in the middle.

So, my idea is to contrast the three stories and alternate them.  In the original book, the new love predominates, by far.  But much of what I wrote is pretty sappy.  (Hey, I was in love.)  Most of what Linda wrote is, well, even more sappy.  (Hey, she was in love.)  So, I have to tone that down a little for public consumption.

But I like going back to the older romance because it's darker and has more fantasy elements that I like.

So...more or less, I'm writing a whole new book.

But I can do that.

What an interesting new world we live in.

The whole ebook thing has been an extremely interesting process to me.

Getting the covers done has been really satisfying.  The covers are hand-selected, or even created from my own ideas.  I really like that.

I like the looks of the books on the e-readers.  They look like real books to me.  They're easy to read.

I'm slowly....oh, so slowly....realizing that I'll need to get an ebook reader someday for my own use.

It's a bit of the Wild West out there, and I'm only a couple of miles west of St. Louis right now, but I'm taking my time, exploring the terrain.  Looking for guides. 

What an interesting new world we live in.

Lingering blog threads.

Since this blog started as a bubble blog way back, I always pay attention to the local housing.

Housing prices went up in Bend?  Why do I feel this is manipulated by artificial shortages created by bureaucratic bungling and real estate manuvering?  And not by a rise in local employment and consumer confidence?

A couple other lingering threads from way back toward the beginning of this blog.

Early on, I wondered if Bend could really count on telecommuting tech people from large companies.  (Since we weren't likely to get the companies themselves.)  Turns out, according to the new Yahoo CEO, maybe not so much.  She's ordered them back to the fold, or quit.

Rumor was, many of them were indeed more or less forgotten, as I suspected.  But unlike the result I mused on back then -- that they would fall behind in their careers, the result seems to have been that they just kept collecting their paychecks.

Then Farhad Manjoo of Slate pops up an says, not so fast, that this telecommuting is a good idea.  Well, that just confirms it.  You can't go wrong by doing exactly the opposite of whatever Farhood Manjoo says you should do.  Farhad Manjoo is an idiot.   So that's another lingering thing I've noticed writing this blog. I notice how often the same columnist is wrong.  How do columnists who are wrong every time keep getting hired?

Another thread I've returned to over and over again, is questioning why Barnes and Noble is committing retail suicide.  That the ebook reader they created was unlikely to be the winning platform, that they were distracting customers from books, and so on.

Turns out, the platform reader is not doing so hot, the bookstores are actually profitable, and if the former owner of the company can take the bricks and mortars private, and shed the tech, that he thinks he can may be able to have a viable company.

I agree.  I mean, I really think bookstores are still viable if you try.

So two things I figured were kind of weird have quietly been confirmed.

Interesting, no one pops up and says, "Hey, that really was a dumb idea.  What were we thinking?"

These ideas -- which defy common sense on the face of it -- have instead died sort of whimpering deaths, don't pay any attention to how stupid they were type deaths.

But writing about them on this blog has made me notice.  Gives me a bit of continuity to tap into.

I may have been wrong about a few things, but for some reason I don't seem to be noticing those....

Posting DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL twice a week.

As I mentioned, I'm going to post a chapter of DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL, twice a week.  A chapter on Tuesday and a chapter on Friday.

Meanwhile, the whole book is for sale at 2.99 on Smashwords, and I would greatly appreciate if a few of you will buy it.  I know how many are selling though I don't know who's buying.  Or not buying...

Meanwhile, I'll be working on finished NEARLY HUMAN as well as DEVILTREE, both of which I have covers for.

My next new effort, I'm thinking now, will be the second book in the LORE series, which is my straightout fantasy, THE RELUCTANT WIZARD of which is the first.

Woke up this morning with a sore throat -- which is me all over.  Finish a task, get sick.

DEATH OF AN IMMORTAL. (1)

 
Chapter 1.


Terrill awoke to an empty mirror.  Empty but for the bland motel décor, the tousled bed with its too many pillows and overstuffed bedspread, innocuous framed pictures of leaves on the walls.
Empty though the mirror was right in front of his face. She probably thought he was dead.  Sometimes when he slept, he forgot to mimic the motions of breathing.  She was probably just trying to see if his breath would fog the mirror. Oh, god.  Why had she done this?  The part of him that was human struggled to control the part of him that was immortal.  No!  His mind shouted.  Leave her be!
The vampiric instincts were in full command, the same instincts that had kept him alive for a millennium.  The small vessel of empathy he’d managed to fill drip by drip in recent years disappeared in an overpowering blood lust, his fangs fully extended, dripping with the venom that would paralyze her.
The little white hand holding the mirror looked bloodless, though Terrill had yet to take her blood.  The female was naked and pale in fright from head to toe.  Her eyes were wide, her pupils dilated, her breast quivering.  No predator could have passed up such a pure victim.  Terrell instantly flushed with the rush of the hunt, his sleepiness evaporating in a surge of hunger.
Again his mind fought against the overwhelming urges.  Don’t do it!  Let her go!  Let her live, damn you!
She screamed, dropping the mirror to the floor with a crash.  It shattered.  Seven years of bad luck – or in Terrill’s case, seven hundred years.  In the case of the girl, not even seven seconds of bad luck.  She made it halfway across the room before Terrill flew out of the bed and sank his fangs into her neck.
Don’t…oh, god.  It was so good.  He had missed this so much.  Why did she wake him?  Why did she excite the monster inside him?  His mind was screaming Stop!
Now it was too late.  Once a vampire started feeding, he couldn’t stop until it was finished.
She was dead in seconds.
He saw himself in her dying eyes – the only way he could ever see his reflection.  He hadn’t seen himself in twenty years.  It didn’t matter; he looked the same  -- sharp saturnine features, eyes glowing in lust, frowning in his hunger, black hair immaculate even in his wild feeding.
He laid her lifeless body gently to the floor.  Guilt wrapped around his shoulders like an old familiar shawl.  He nearly staggered.  Inside he felt the savage rush, the exhilaration he hadn’t felt in a very long time.  But the thinking part of him, the part to which he’d sacrificed the last twenty years, was sickened.  It was gone; all the effort had come to nothing.  He was the soulless creature he’d always been.  Nothing could change that.
Joy.  That was the name she’d given him.  When she signed into the motel, she had used the name Jamie.  She should have stuck to Jamie – a prettier name, a name that was real.  Just as she should’ve stuck to her hometown origins, gotten a job as a waitress, attended community college, met a nice stupid boy – who knows where she would have ended up.
Not here. Not dead.
The scream still hung in the air, and Terrill extended his hearing to the neighbors on either side and to the street outside.  Nothing.  The people who inhabited this seedy motel were no doubt used to screams in the night -- used to ignoring them.
Quiet as a tomb.
He took a shower, got dressed and left.  It was considerate of him, to close the door quietly, walking softly down the rickety stairs, and out into the empty street.  He was always considerate.

He made it to the end of the block.  The streetlamp was at half strength, flickering.  There was a false dawn on the horizon, but real dawn would soon follow, within the hour, thirty-four minutes to be exact.    Terrill could calculate this timing nearly to the second.
He turned back, made his way to the top of the landing -- his senses were on alert.  There was no one about -- no one awake or watching.  He slipped back into the room.
She lay at an unnatural tangle -- arms akimbo overhead, her legs drawn up behind her.  He straightened her body, smoothed her hair.  He took the heavy bedspread and tucked her inside.  He closed her frightened eyes. 
At the last second, he took the necklace from the table by the bed.  The crucifix burned into his hand before he put it into his pocket.  Even there, it was as if he could feel its power.  Why?  He didn’t know.  He just knew that he needed some part of her to come with him, and the crucifix was important to her.
He kissed her on the forehead, and left the room in the same manner as before.  There was a glimmering of dawn.  The skin on his face felt taut, as if preparing for the pain.  His car was three blocks away. 
He made it just in time.
The windows were tinted to just the right level of shade -- he could see the light of dawn, he could even drive, but the burning -- the hellfire -- was held at bay.  He crawled into the back seat and closed his eyes.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/289646