Madness

Percy sits poised on the edge of his chair in the kitchen, his 12-gauge shotgun at his side, loaded and primed. He gazes at the wall where the thing hangs. He calls it a thing because it's there to steal his soul.

It will soon lure him near, and he will pick up the receiver. A voice will enter his ear and move slowly into his brain. He will go mad and the voice will snatch away his soul and send it tumbling across the wires, where it will land and lay devoid of meaning. The soul will turn to dust and Percy will be eternally lost.

I just got a phone call from a spammer who hung up when I answered. I have no idea if the spammer (maybe it wasn't a spammer, but a scammer) connected with my soul. It was perhaps a long enough call to have achieved that. They know who we are now. We aren't safe. They can find us, even if we aren't in the phone book. They don't even need a phone book now. They just call us. We answer. We're victims, lost in a world owned by aliens. We need protection.

Once, the telephone was a marvelous new invention. I found no references to it in 1875. Two years later, Bell's masterpiece was the talk of America. Since then, the telephone has been one of the most useful tools in story-telling because it allows for conversation. And blackmail. Mostly blackmail.

Or threats. Or other scary stuff. Don't answer the phone!

Percy was right. Aim the shotgun, Percy ... and blow the damned thing to smithereens.

It's not like life at all

I recently read an allegory by Johanna Stoberock called "Pigs," about a group of children on an island that is the world's receptacle for all its trash. The kids gather the garbage and feed it to the pigs, who eat anything.

There are grown-ups on the island and a disadvantaged man named Amos. And a boy named Eddie. A few other interesting things and symbols you'd recognize.

The interesting part of the allegory, not unlike the fabled "Animal Farm" by Orwell, a thoughtful foresoother, is that it is one of those 'it's just like life' premises. Everything means something.

Like baseball, which somebody tried once to tell me was a lot like life. I wondered how that was and his answer was that, like life, some things are the product of luck.

Baseball, as a chameleon for life, is a horrible example. Unlike life, it's on a field with the parameters established. The rules are clear. The participants have been selected.
If you chose 18 people off the street and found enough to play a game, those who didn't decline because they don't know the rules, you'd start with the rules.

Inside that, you could project luck to some degree if you didn't factor in skill.

Skill is always better than luck.

Creative ways of describing the life experience are what makes literature enduring. All the way back to "Pilgrim's Progress" or "Alice," writers have found interesting ways of exploring the politics of their time, both social and economic. The Yellow Brick Road is not just a song.

But the pigs that eat everything also leave something behind, and the author of that book didn't mention it.

You can't leave out the parts that don't fit the narrative.

Hi, we love diversity

"It only serves to make sure we can separate ourselves according to our differences because after all, we're the same inside."

Barnes & Noble, that big fake library on the edge of your favorite shopping plaza, came up with a brilliant idea at the beginning of February. They took some 200-year-old books and colorized the characters on the front covers. By colorizing, they made white people brown.

Critics said it was 'literary blackface' and came equipped with the are-there-any-smart-people-in-the-room?

B-N said they were just celebrating Black History Month by turning Captain Ahab into Captain Crawdad in hopes that little pickaninny kids would roar in and take a gander at Herman Melville's classic tale about a black, er ... white whale.

The company maybe beefed up its overall sales by doing this but it's likely that was in spite of the ill-advised (stupid) decision. As one critic put it: Were there any people of color involved in the discussion? It's like, the way to prevent a bad idea from happening is to ask people who are inclined to have an alternate opinion.

As I said in my days in the newsroom: Somebody has to take the other side.

Still, B-N pulled out of the deal after of course producing a number of books that might get sold before they get shredded. Seeing Frankenstein's Monster turn black with envy knowing the contents of the book are still white as rice ... I mean, what kid wouldn't want a black Dracula as his role model? Drac didn't go black, but he was in the shadows at the time.

There are a lot of stupid ideas and not all of them should be left in the conference room. There are a lot of people who walk out of these conferences thinking, "Wow, we did society a service. We're about diversiity."

Um, don't try to fix what's not broken. Forcing people to be diverse is racist.

It just is.

All politics is local

A very long time ago, I wrote a smut novel about a young woman who decided to run for mayor of her city because the incumbent had been in office her entire life. The premise was that the young woman had no political party, no real political agenda and no reason to even begin the process.

She was just out of work and wanted the job.

I put a lot of dots in a row and came up with the idea that she'd have to win a primary in order to be taken seriously in the November election. As local stories go, there's not much separating that novel from a lot of real political scenarios across the country.

At times, teenagers are elected to run their cities, all of which contributes to the overall premise that government is gridlock and that the people who run government are just actors on a stage.

It's the stuff of legend, the corrupt senator who is trying to evade detection by somebody who knows that the senator can ill afford to watch his empire crumble on the backs of a few white lies that ended up in somebody's chemical discharge into Lake Watapinkus.

There is not much about that trope that intrigues me now. Politics isn't about corruption; politics is about political parties. Knowing what the party wants is what matters to the candidates.

It isn't a very interesting topic anymore. And to use the current political backdrop for nurturing fiction is at best amusing. I'd move on to something more sinister -- and if you can't find that inside your mind, you aren't paying attention.

The art of politics is about manipulation of money, fondling the data and projecting. The problems are that the money is hidden now and there aren't limits on who spends it or where it comes from. Nobody is being polled now and the polls are designed to make the political parties look good.

Even the most objective analysis of politics is based on guesswork.

That has nothing really to do with writing, does it? Dunno, what if she just needs the job?

Dracula, scarier than the movie

The fabled Bram Stoker novel "Dracula" has become the "Kleenex" for horror writing, and since it's likely nobody who knows the story has ever read the book, to say it's about the stereotype ... yeah, he's sort of the guy from the cartoon.

If you have no idea about the book, it was written in the late 1800s by the Irish novelist and from all I've learned, was considered great literature for its time, but a commercial flop. Several reasons for that, but the main was that Stoker's character was too damned compelling to ignore.

So everyone wrote their own version of it and as the new century turned into a form of technology with the advent of the motion picture, the character came to life. Stoker died broke. Everyone had stolen his story.

Sad that his own masterpiece sucked the blood out of his creation.

Bela Lugosi -- not the real Dracula

What's emerged since that 120 years is a pithy repetition of the vampire, a sullen creature with latent homosexual tendencies and an urge to overpower helpless females. God forbid, romance writers can't profit from that!

Dracula as a character is an asshole. He turns his solicitor Jonathan into a virtual prisoner and makes plans to spread the wealth of bloodsucking across all of London, not unlike that of the capitalist banker who ... oh, ever mind.

Stoker's work has been analyzed. It's pure genius. It's scary as hell. Read it. Stop inventing new forms of the original.

Here's an excerpt, which might deal with the Count and might not. It's early in the book from the log of a ship that crashes ashore in a brutal storm.

... and in the dimness of the night I saw it, Him! God, forgive me, but the mate was right to jump overboard. It was better to die like a man. To die like a sailor in blue water, no man can object. But I am captain, and I must not leave my ship. But I shall baffle this fiend or monster, for I shall tie my hands to the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and alone with them I shall tie that which He, It, dare not touch. And then, come good wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my honour as a captain.

What was IT, you ask ... 

Don't write a vampire novel. Respect the greatness of the original Vlad the Impaler.