Killing off a character and genre requirements.

Is there a right way or a wrong way to kill off a character? One of the great moral questions of the ages.

Of course not. When John Wayne dies at the end of ‘Cowboys,’ or when we discover that Bruce Willis has been dead right from the start, (“I see dead people…” –Haley Joel Osmont,) as in ‘Sixth Sense,’ in my opinion that was exactly the right thing to do from the plot’s perspective.

…and how the writer dealt with it was sheer genius.

Not every story needs to have a recently-deceased protag, and in the western genre in general, a living protagonist is preferable. It leads to a more romantic conclusion, and it allows for justice to be dealt to the antagonist. You need someone to ride off into the sunset. You need what the Navy calls ‘a warm body.’ Almost anyone will do. They just have to be awake and able to sit a horse.

The real question, I think, is in how many genre requirements we might successfully dispense with. In a romance, could a person be in love with a ghost? I would have to say yes, and in fact I seem to recall that it’s been done before. Do they have to be in love? Must they kiss at some point in the book? A romance where no one loved or pined for someone would be a pretty hard sell. I think it might be universally reviled. Love, or ‘romance,’ a word much misunderstood by males in a general sense, is the real protagonist in a romance. The characters are pretty symbolic in a Freudian way. They are plastic figures in a doll house, limited only by the imagination of the child playing with them. But certain things are expected of them by the readers.

In writing history, could we dispense with certain facts? I would have to say yes, as in ‘Heaven Is Too Far Away,’ I basically took known history and personalized it. Tucker is a fictional character. He has a lot of opinions, but couldn’t possibly have known much of what he states in the memoir except from the perspective of hindsight. It’s just another way of telling the story, or rather a story, of WW I, and what it ultimately did to a lot of people who otherwise started off in a kind of innocence. Can a WW I book be about innocence? Yeah, in some small way it can. Of course, in a much larger way it is about the loss of that innocence. There is a big dose of cynicism running through that book. That cynicism is the result of Tucker’s experiences at a young and impressionable age. Don’t forget he comes from a certain specific background. In a very human way, his experiences are unique.


In my books and stories I have killed off characters by means of bombs, rockets, missiles, machine guns, small arms, grenades, knives, swords, bows and arrows, giant mutant salamanders, they’ve been killed by guillotine and by disemboweling…the list goes on but my mind wanders. On the plus side, they seem to fall in love a lot. Some of them have quite a few friends and family. They care about each other for one reason or another. In spite of what’s been said above, I’m fairly gentle with characters—I’ve seen worse. What we write says a lot about us, that’s for sure. Fiction is a condensation of our views on the world, isn’t it? It’s a different way of saying things that maybe need to be said.

The most interesting characters are the ones that develop into someone different over the course of a story. I find the novel a lot easier to do that with. There’s simply more room inside of it. It really doesn’t matter what the genre is. A protagonist will always be challenged, irrespective of genre. The writer will also be challenged, no matter what the genre. It’s part of the game.

Lest this become all too generalized in terms of the typical blog post, let me also say that science fiction as a genre is about more than just ‘the literature of ideas.’

Science fiction should and must ask the great hypothetical moral questions. We should be the first ones doing that, if it is our job to look at society and technology and to try to extrapolate what might be just around the corner.

Here’s a quick example. Let us assume that some little girl born in our lifetimes will live forever. Let us also assume that she is just the first, and that whatever treatment she had will over time become available to the vast majority of humans. After three generations, the last of the untreated, surely the most miserable of humankind down through the ages, for they at least will know that they could have been saved, (except it was just too expensive, or it came slightly too late,) will die off. They will all be gone, and everyone born after that will be essentially immortal barring accident, murder, suicide, or war.

Let us assume as a baseline moral premise that abortion is immoral and that the use of condoms is immoral under any and all circumstances. This is not a moral question. It is a moral conclusion, one drawn or held by fairly large numbers of people.

Would family planning or any form of contraception, however we might choose to define it or what we might include in the category, still be immoral under the new set of human circumstances?

To kill someone, is to take the remainder of their lives, one assumption might be that an immortal life has more ‘intrinsic value,’ for want of a better term, than a life of a mere seventy or eighty years.

Which is worse, i.e., less moral?

Should we outlaw birth control and abortion, and simply dispose of excess humanity by warring over matters of speculative theological opinion? Should we try to maintain stable population numbers, barely fluctuating statistically, in order to manage societal resources? The questions are tougher to answer than to formulate. An immortal world is one where all moral questions have to be asked again.

Another genre requirement for science fiction is some discernable scientific extrapolation. This is considered to be near term, as what the world might look like in five thousand years is considered by some to be inconceivable.

If I want to keep writing science fiction, then I had better start asking some tough questions. It’s a requirement of the genre—like love in a romance, or ‘justice’ in a western.

Other than that, I shall answer all of your questions for fifty cents. (Each.)

Working with Pete. A short story.

Pete and I stood by the big board where work orders were pinned up. They’re all on a computer, but we aren’t allowed to touch it for some reason. So they get printed out and pinned up on a wall.

“We can’t do that one.” He muttered, afraid someone would hear him. “We’re still waiting for the materials.”

“Right. Forty lengths of titanium angle.”

“Was it forty?” He gaped. “I thought it was four.”

“No matter.” I shrugged. “We can’t do it today anyway.”

“Why not?” He asked very astutely.

“We don’t have the materials.”

“Ah.” He thought as deeply as he could.

“Well, what about this one?” He pointed.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Let’s just grab one and get out of here before Fuckhead comes along.”

Just at that exact moment, Fuckhead, our immediate supervisor here on the station, stepped around the corner with a blank look on his face.

“Oh, there you are.” Coming from a man who normally set my teeth on edge, this was welcome news.

“Yes. Here we are.” I said it brightly; and chipper, too.

If he knew I loathed him, it would just lessen my displeasure.

“I need you guys to go over and fix loading dock four.” Assistant Commodore Bradley McGoohan was a didact and a pedant, which Pete would interpret as something that hung around the neck.

“Okay.” I was hoping to shut him off.

He’s not really in the military, although he might have been in the Space Cadets when he was younger.

“There’s the closer for the access hatch on the bulkhead in Bay Nine.” Pete mentally reviewed it out loud. “Then there’s the leaking seals on door thirteen-twenty-two-A, or the porthole replacement in personnel and administration.”

“No. I need you guys to go over and fix loading dock four,” McGoohan informed me, ignoring Pete altogether, which makes him either smarter or a whole lot smarter than I am.

“The guy from the other side called.” Give Pete an ‘A’ for persistence. “He was asking about the door to the recycling area. And don’t forget the broken lock on that toilet stall in the bachelor’s quarters.”

“We don’t really have enough materials for the job.” Bradley fixed me with a glance.

“Why not?”

“Because we only have about four lengths, and we need forty.”

“How in the hell did that happen?” His voice rose and the beginnings of a dull red flush crept up his neck.

Craning his neck a little and peering up in mystification, Pete waited for my answer along with the boss.

Pete was lead hand, due to having about five minutes more seniority than I do. Old Pete was in charge of ordering materials for the door and hatch repairs on the space station. His last name starts with a ‘D’ and mine with a ‘J,’ so he is senior man. He disembarked first. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

“I don’t know.” I tried to subdue a pained expression.

“That’s okay. Some idiot probably just read four point zero when it really said forty.” Then he turned to Pete. “And you were supposed to be looking after her.”

McGoohan turned and did the one thing he was good at and went away.

“So…what do you want us to do?” Pete asked rather plaintively, and the boss-man spun around like a figure skater.

“I need you to go over and fix loading dock four!”

Bradley, unlike me, doesn’t take a whole lot of brain-dead, can’t be bothered-to-wake-up, why shouldn’t I point a loaded gun at your kid’s head, I checked and it’s not loaded, applied stupidness, gross ignorance, carelessness, just plain nonsense and applied idiocy from Pete.

That’s my job and he doesn’t cut my grass, as the saying goes.

“He wants us to go over and fix loading dock four,” I added reasonably enough to good old Pete.

“But why?”

“Because it’s broken,” Bradley and I said simultaneously, and both at once, with mutually reinforcing degrees of peevishness on both of our parts.

Pete was having a good day, at least so far. The important thing was that someone had made a decision and thank God it wasn’t him.

When Pete started using his head around here, things began to get really scary.

***

Left to our own devices, Pete managed to bang his head, and snag his helmet faceplate on the top of the hatchway. Since he’s eight inches shorter than I am, that’s a unique accomplishment, although our one-third gee status might be a partial excuse. He’s only been here three months, after all. I resolved to keep fingers and toes clear of pretty much everything for the rest of the day, or in other words to stick to standard operating procedure.

***

“Don’t put grease on those threads, Pete.”

“No, it’s too tight.”

I grabbed his arm.

“It’s an oxygen bottle, Pete. It will blow up.”

“Oh. Right. It’s a good thing you remembered!”

Pete yanked up his tool pouch by the buckle on the end of the strap and oddly enough, everything fell out.

“Aww, fff…” About then, Melanie, one of the scientists growing space-dope, local jargon for dope manufactured in space, walked past.

“Hi, Melanie!” She accidentally kicked a hex-driver, lost for days now, the length of the corridor.

In the low-gee of the station, the thing bounced and clattered its way up the curving floor panels and disappeared from sight about thirty metres away. The station is a big doughnut, and so is Pete, rather fittingly. Actually, the station is a pair of big doughnuts, with a spindle and some braces holding them together. It’s just like some long and interminably boring space movie which turned out to be all too accurate, insofar as the interminable part went.

***

Pete opened up the service bug, while on some insane impulse I went around the side and opened up the first tool bin. A handful of tools fell in a leisurely manner to the deck, although I managed to grab an open-ended wrench on the way past.

The door opened and Pete started climbing out, the vehicle lurched forwards, and poor old Pete was hanging half in and half out.

“Whoa!” He squawked while desperately trying to disengage the power system.

The vehicle juddered to a stop, as Pete had accidentally jammed full power to it at about the same time he applied full emergency braking. Admittedly, this is not easy, what with only one foot in the vehicle and the controls well separated inside the cabin in order to prevent such incidents, which are very hard on the machine. The machine was exactly three-point-one centimetres from the heavily dented back wall of the hangar bay, or about average for a Monday.

“I just wanted to check and make sure my saw is in there.”

“It’s not.”

He nodded sagely.

“I knew that.” He turned and climbed back in.

“You are often pretty much half-right about such things.”

“Yeah.”

It’s hard to out-think someone who is truly stupid, but after the last three months, I was getting pretty good at it.

I was standing well off to one side, having anticipated this part of our morning routine, and so I wasn’t harmed or even crushed.

“I guess you forgot to snap the lid on my toolbox.” He informed me matter-of-factly. “That’s okay. You can pick all that up and load the bug while I go have a shit.”

“Would you like me to put the saw in there?” I asked courteously, which he takes at face value.

“Naw, we’re not going to need it.”

“I think Jerry’s done.” I said it in sheer bliss. “Today’s paper is probably still in there.”

My daily survival largely depended on using reverse psychology of a paranoid-schizophrenic nature to assign simple tasks to Peter that he might safely attempt without killing anyone but himself. This would be a big loss to his long-suffering wife back on Earth. Thank God. I figured out a winning strategy in time to save myself. As I recall, Pete sent me to get the work-completion form signed while he packed up all of his tools, (mine were already secured, because I don’t let him near them,) but the day before is ancient history to a guy like Pete. And it takes Pete a long time to have a shit.

To a guy like Pete, what happened yesterday stays in yesterday, and every day was like his birthday and Christmas, all wrapped up in a fresh box of strawberry douche-filled chocolates.

He climbed in and back out of the bug several times, in anticipation of a blissful half an hour or forty-five minutes alone with the paper.

***

The reader may think I am being a little hard on Pete, who is after all not here to defend himself. Bear in mind, I had plenty of time to observe the gentleman and I learned not to take my eye off of him for a minute, or even a second. (Unless he was safely taking a shit or something like that.)

***

“Whoa, Jeez.”

Whack!

“The other reverse, Pete.”

“Oh, no! Argh.” He gasped.

Clang!

“The other left, Pete.”

It looked like the door could be closed when we returned, and there was no harm in leaving it open all day. We could just hammer the tracks back into position. We hovered there uncertainly for a while, and Pete discussed with me why it wasn’t necessary to put in a report.

Then it was off to work.

***

The loading bay door is fairly large, but about forty lengths of titanium angle would have been enough, after straightening out the external sheathing, to have braced and reframed the thing, and quite frankly I was sure I could fix it if only left alone for half a minute. But I’m never too sure if I will live through the day. There were other problems, too.

“How are we going to do this?” He looked at me, as I knew he would.

Let’s face it. I’m the only one out there.

That’s the big drawback with being lowest in seniority. You don’t get any overtime unless it’s the shittiest job in the world, and you are expendable on a whim. In that sense, it really is no different from any other highly-skilled job back home in any type of construction, fabrication, or service industry.

Oh, yeah. they also stick you with a guy like Pete, who killed his last partner, although they don’t talk about it much when I’m around. No one wanted Pete for their helper, so they made him a lead hand and put him in charge of training me. Not that he hasn’t been doing a good job of that, and you have to admit it kind of kills two birds with one stone, um, sooner or later.

“We stick a big ‘out of service’ sign on it, and then we go back and tell Fuckhead to get on the horn and order forty lengths of titanium angle.”

“Four. But don’t worry, we can’t do it anyway.”

“Why not?” I was sure he would get to the bottom of something or other soon enough.

“That’s irrelevant, and anyway I’m not taking his shit. Besides, we can’t order it, because some things are better left unsaid.”

“It probably was my fault. I just wasn’t thinking.”

“You sure weren’t!” He grinned. “You know I’m no good at writing up estimates. Anyway, I guess we’d better get out there.”

Pete loves to work. I will give him that. It sure beats sitting there writing up estimates and accident reports.

‘A man defiles himself by his actions,’ Pete once said. ‘And every mind leaves its footprints upon its works.’

“We can’t, Pete.” I sighed deeply.

“Why not?” He stared in sheer disbelief at my attitude.

“Because it’s break-time in fifteen minutes, Pete.” I pointed at the dashboard clock. “By the time we get our gloves on, and you hook up your oxygen bottle…”

“Right.” He reached for the door handle. “So it’s one of them kind of days. The curse is upon you, you’re on the rag and I now I’ll just have to try and show some sensitivity.”

***

They say life is pretty boring on the station. Not much to do there, but read, listen to music, or watch TV. After a day with Pete, I always found that locking myself into my cabin was pure bliss.

The really strange thing about him was that he wasn’t such a bad person. If you didn’t actually have to work with Pete, he was a sweetheart of a man. He was friendly, and thoughtful, and courteous, and got along well with everybody. I never did figure out where he learned the highly advanced skills in pure time wasting, but that might have had something to do, deep in the turgid recesses of the subconscious mind, (which was the only kind he had,) with the hourly rate.

Sitting there watching Pete make a boiling hot cup of soup in zero gravity was always fun.

Since he wasn’t looking, I flipped my visor down and shut off the radio. Let Pete scream all he wants. I can sleep on break…it’s in the contract.

It sure didn’t take long, what with the low cabin-pressure and high-powered microwave oven, more usually used to heat and soften sticks of pressure-repair putty. Technically speaking this shouldn’t be contaminated with organic materials. What happens is, the sterile putty is also an organic compound, and any uncooked little microorganisms tend to feast on it with relish.

Oddly enough, we didn’t have any disposable wipes, as Pete had ordered me to remove them from the cabin yesterday, as ‘they were just taking up space.’

As the reader may be aware, this contamination weakens the structural bond with the material to be repaired…but I digress.

Anyway, Pete never listened to one single word I ever said, which is a helpful thing to know.

I screwed his oxygen connector into place while he was fiddling with the knobs on the AM/FM radio in the dash, his own installation. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the wire to the antenna came off again because he is simply too smart to tighten it up with a wrench. He’s had the radio in and out ten or eleven times trying to figure out why it won’t go. I never said I was a saint.

I have my own tunes in my suit.

***

We never worked alone anywhere on the station, inside or out. This was a safety regulation, and there was also a stiffly-worded subsection in our contracts.

To watch Pete extend EXWOP, our 'extensible working platform,' (a ladder in other words,) similar to the one on top of a terrestrial fire truck, without actually puncturing the sidewall of the station was always a joy. At times like that the safest place to be was out of the repair bug and snug in the vastness of empty space anyway. As Pete was fond of pointing out, its un-lubricated ball bearings made the ladder and its work-platform sticky on the rollers…it kind of hung up, and it needed to be maneuvered with authority, according to Pete.

“Oh, God!” Pete gasped, all too close in my helmet. “Is that Sergeant Peacock?”

“Yes. I believe that’s his office right there.”

The round, red face at the window was shrieking some commentary and showing two big fists…no doubt we would be notified, which means that I will be notified, and Pete will have another proud accomplishment to write home about.


***

“Okay, so I’ll just go up there and start taking the fasteners out.”

“And what do I do? Float around and screw the dog?” Pete spluttered.

Pete is nothing of not a man of actions, lots and lots of actions.

I watched in disbelief. It’s not that his next trick was a new one on me, but because I had seen it fifty times before. Frankly, it really is fascinating.

Poor old Pete was spinning, around, and around, and around.

“Ahhhhh! Pull the plug, pull the plug!”

I took a moment and turned the volume down on my suit while I considered the gravity of the situation.

Poor old Pete shouted and shouted, and we were running out of cord, and I don’t know, for whatever reason I just sort of reached over and yanked the cord out of the receptacle. Slowly, Peter rotated to a stop, cursing and swearing like a trooper.

“You should have reminded me.” He ignored my advice to clip himself to the ladder, which is what all the little clips and clamps are actually for. “Argh, argh, argh.”

“It’s got a lot of torque, Pete.” I agreed, referring to the wrench. “About the same as yesterday, I reckon.”

He struggled helplessly as I tried to unwind, untie and untangle about a hundred metres of electrical cord from him.

“Yeah!” Pete was still mystified as to exactly how I made him do that to himself again. “Maybe even a little more!”

My mistake was to tell him this one time that I was pulling the Jedi mind trick on him. That was early in our career, and now I don’t fuck around with his head. It’s a full-time job just trying to survive around him. Pete needs to keep his wit about him.

Pete was fit to be tied at my sheer incompetence and lack of respect for his authority over me and his role as my teacher in the training program he had patiently worked out for me over so very many long minutes seated upon the toilet while eating an apple. Having heard such things from Pete before, I took it all with a grain of arsenic. His mercurial pout, visible only to himself in reflection from his helmet faceplate, quickly faded like a plumber’s curse in the shine and glare of his butt-cleavage. (I mean the plumber, not Pete.)

***

After climbing to the extended work platform, I snapped myself on good and had those nasty old bolts out of there in jig time. I didn’t lose a one either, every one was accounted for in my pouch, and with the velcro strip safely fastened.

“You know they can’t pressurize that chamber until we fix this door.”

“Ah! I was wondering why the rush, but then I thought of Christmas.”

“It will be Easter in another week or so.” He noted it as if for the record.

“No, no. I thought of Christmas,” I replied calmly. “It’s a big job, after all.”

“Yeah! Some asshole drove a fork-bug halfway through it, and now it doesn’t work at all. That’s why they called us. For some reason, when a door gets broken, they always call us.”

“We probably will need that fork-bug, once we get these panels off.”

“Want me to go get it?” Sheer joy was invisible on his homely mug, as I started to remove the bolts from another panel.

I was temporarily holding them in place with just two bolts, and about three turns of the threads.

“No, Pete. We’ll let the bug-lift guy do it, or we’ll have the union and the safety people all over us, er, again.”

Pete was real quiet for a couple of minutes, so I just let him be.

“Yeah, them workplace safety incident report forms are a bugger.” He reached this conclusion after thinking it through in a fairly linear fashion for him.

But it was not to last.

***

“How the fuck did that get in there?” Pete threw the saw out into space.

Pete was in one of his moods, all of a sudden. He bounced off the open tool-bin, inches above the magnetic running boards of the service-bug. These are meant to walk on, but he never bothers to charge the suit batteries.

“Ahh!” I grabbed him to prevent him from sailing off to the moon or Jupiter or whatever.

“Fuck! We’ll have to use the God-damned torch to cut the angle.” Flecks of spittle appeared on the inside of his faceplate…

“It’s lunch time, Pete!” I slapped him on the arm. “We’ll get it later. Anyhow we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The hoses are still cut from last time.”

“Oh. Oh, right!” Then he glared at me. “That took some real thinking.”

And let’s face it, I was the only one out there.

***

“Some days, it just don’t seem worth it,” Pete said.

We sat in the truck, I mean, ‘space-truck,’ eating our lunch, and as usual, for some reason, his absolutely must be composed of watercress, and cucumbers, and alfalfa sprouts, and a lot of stuff it’s actually pretty hard to get around here. It has to be the most luxurious, and expensive and almost unobtainable foods, otherwise the poor guy simply can’t hold anything down. I don’t want to know how he does it, and have never inquired.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Any day you live through is a good one.”

“That’s easy for you to say—you’ve always got some kind of a woman problem.”

***

After lunch, he stood at the top of the ladder and emptied his tool belt by throwing literally every tool in it at me as he searched in vain for his tape measure, sitting right there on the work bench back at the shop. Strangely enough, it hadn’t been there when I went to get the saw to cut out the broken framing, so Pete must have taken it off of his belt and put it there so he wouldn’t forget it while he had a shit…and then after a while it was break time again.

***

“So, what do you think?” Pete considers his art superior to that of Salvador Dali.

It’s distorted enough, and God knows it is idiosyncratic.

“Looks like we really did something today.”

“Well, fuck you then. I don’t care.”

***

Following his normal pattern, Pete bolted for the showers a half an hour early, leaving me to write up the reports, which after all is a good thing because like many astro-mechanical engineers I can actually spell.

“So what do you think?” Fuckhead came around the corner the moment I put my feet up on the desk, which is actually in the contract too.

“We need forty lengths of titanium angle, and maybe five sheets of the neo-aluminum sheathing, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to ground the bug for a bit of maintenance.”

“How was Pete today?” He asked obscurely, but I knew what he meant.

“Fine.”

“It’s only another three months.”

***

After a quick shower, I grabbed a pair of easy-meals from the dispenser and locked myself in my cubicle until tomorrow. I flipped on the TV, and uttered a deep sigh of resignation, drained of all thoughts and emotions.

I cracked a beer from the mini-fridge and took a big slug.

It’s just so good to be home sometimes.

***

Photos: NASA, Wiki Commons, Pulblic Domain.

The voice on the other end of the line.

“Tyrell?”

“Yes?” He didn’t recognize the voice.

It was one of those rare moments of propinquity. The phone hadn’t actually rung yet. That had happened once or twice with people before. He was just thinking about a girl, Cindy, but this was not Cindy. It was just that he was going to be a little late for work. He really should phone in to let them know.

“I’m here for you, Tyrell.” It was a young woman. “I just want you to know that.”

“Ha, ha, ha.” Tyrell wasn't particularly amused. “Well. That’s good to know.”

Holding his breath, he waited on the line impatiently.

“Do you hear me?” 

Maddeningly, he still had no idea who it was.

“Yeah, I’m here. Sure. And if you don’t mind my asking…”

“I’m here for you.” Then she was gone.

“Huh!” Tyrell stood staring off into space and shaking his head gently.

Who in the hell was that?

***

Tyrell stood at the bus stop, holding a brown cardboard coffee cup, warming his hands and hoping against hope that the bus was on time. Carefully peeling back the tab, he had a little sip, but snapped it down again. He preferred to have some of the coffee left when he got to his desk. The trip itself was a good twenty-five minutes at the best of times.

Late as he was, everyone else had pretty much all gone before, and he was alone for once.

He wished he still smoked, but perished the thought quickly. The phone in a kiosk a few metres away began to ring, cracking the morning calm with its shrill, insistent note.

He looked around in annoyance. There was no one nearby or anything.

"What’s that all about?” It was a complaint to the world in general.

It was best not to get too involved, he knew that. The phone rang for the fourth or fifth time.

Surely, it couldn’t go on for too long…still it rang.

“Shit.” He stumbled to the booth.

He would tell them there was no one there. He grabbed it with a sense of futility, certain it would be a hang-up. Someone was wasting someone’s time. Today started off well enough, in spite of waking up twenty minutes late. This was just an added irritation.

“Hello?”

“I just want you to know it will be all right.”

“What? Who is this? I think you might have the wrong number—”

There was nothing but a buzz on the line.

***

So. He had a friend. A secret admirer! He grinned ruefully at the thought. No, it had to be something so much worse than that, considering the way his luck was going lately. She had to be a lunatic, in every sense of the word.

“Oh, wow.” He didn't have time to deal with it, and she couldn’t really be talking to him.

Although she had his number…it could be anyone named Tyrell. That didn’t seem too logical for some reason. Mind you, with a person like that, it didn’t have to be logical. Bizarre thoughts revolved around and around. What was up with her?

It was a troubled young man who booted up the computer and cracked open the first of the client files he was auditing this otherwise fine November morning.

"Tyrell?"

He could hear it as clear as a bell inside his head.

Oh, God! Now he was doing it to himself.

***

The voice on the phone was oddly familiar. Maybe he was just over-analyzing. The strange girl’s voice had some haunting quality. That was the weird part. He could almost accept that some woman might get hold of his number, but now that he thought about it, she seemed too young to be predatory, at least in that sense. Money? Was she after money? How did she hope to get it? Didn’t they usually just break in? Or pick your pocket? She really ought to try picking me up in a bar, he thought.

For the rest of the day, he would be distracted. With the pressure of work, he really didn’t need it right now.

“Tyrell!”

“Ah-ah-ah!” Tyrell lurched up out of his seat as if stung.

“It’s for you.” Mister Evans was there, holding the phone and standing in the door of his cubicle.

***

“Hello?” he asked, standing there beside Mister Evans, impatient to get his desk phone back.

“Tyrell, I just want you to know—”

“I don’t want to know!” he blurted and hung up abruptly.

His heart rate went shooting up and the boss-man was looking shocked.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“What’s going on?” Who was that? Not one of our clients, I hope.”

“I have no idea!” Tyrell told him. “She’s been calling me, and calling me, and I have no idea what it’s about!”

“She keeps calling you? Why would she keep calling you? What does she say?”

“She’s insane,” snorted Tyrell.

“Is she threatening you? Maybe we should call the police.” Nigel Evans was a pretty good guy to work for.

“No, she’s not threatening me,” said Tyrell. “Let’s forget it. They would never catch her anyway.”

“But what is she saying?” Evans was all insatiable curiousity.

For all Tyrell knew, this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him.

“She says it’s going to be all right,” groaned Tyrell.

He would be a laughing-stock for sure, and maybe that was what it was about, as Nigel’s face cracked wide open in the biggest grin Tyrell had ever seen on him.

***

“Something wonderful is going to happen,” came Sid Rushton’s voice, overly loud, and half the cafeteria cracked up.

The story, predictably enough, was all over the building by lunchtime. Tyrell, shy enough at the best of times, blushed beet red and focused with all his might on the coleslaw and a few cold, sodden french fries, all covered in congealing ketchup.

“They’ll get over it,” nodded Raphael, his only major acquaintance in the building.

“Anyway, she’ll probably figure it out sooner or later and maybe her hubby or whatever deserves it!”

“What do you mean?’ asked Tyrell, looking up momentarily into his friend’s sardonic blue eyes.

“Well, she’s obviously doing it for a reason,” suggested Raphael. “She’s just missed a digit on the phone number.”

“But why keep calling?” asked Tyrell.

“She’s got it on the top of the list, and she keeps hitting speed-dial,” said Raphael. “Next time she calls, just tell her. It’s too simple, really.”

“I suppose you’re right,” sighed Tyrell. “I don’t know, but that call at the bus stop. That one creeps me out.”

Raphael didn’t have too much to say about that.

“Maybe she’s hot. I wouldn’t rule it out. She must want you pretty bad.”

***

The phone was ringing, and everyone was looking at him.

“I’m not answering it!” he said, and they all laughed.

Still, the unit bolted to the cafeteria wall was ringing, and ringing, and ringing…

“Aw, no,” grumbled Tyrell as that damned Sid Rushton got up and sauntered over with a big grin on his face.

He picked up the handset and appeared to be listening intently. His eyes stabbed Tyrell.

“It’s for you!” he shouted the length of the room, almost collapsing in hysterical giggles on the floor.

But this one was clearly a prank as his perpetual side-kick, Sam Kennich, held up a sleek black cellular phone unit and laughed as hard as his co-conspirator.

“Oh, man,” said Tyrell, holding his head in his hands.

***

A woman screamed and some kid fell onto the tracks and the trolley was coming and Tyrell didn’t even think about it.

“I'm here for you...” The words rang in his head and all was a roaring as he dove the few yards and grabbed him.

With a monumental heave, Tyrell tossed the kid into his mother’s arms and with a clang the thing was upon him. There was one half second of shock and awe and pain and then merciful blackness.

***

“Unbelievable,” observed Doctor Sheridan Daniel Delorme. “The man stepped in front of a trolley to save a child, and look what we have here.”

“You’ll be fine,” the woman at his side assured him.

“Some kind of miracle,” he added. “It is a privilege to see this.”

The joke didn’t get too far. There were a couple of dutiful chuckles, but that was okay, the effort had been made.

“The man shouldn’t have made it this far, but apparently he took a lucky bounce, according to eye-witnesses.”

Machines clicked and hissed and sucked and pumped while they waited.

“Wow. I don’t know.” He ran through the facts in his head.

His hands were all ready to go.

Doctor Delorme took a deep breath. In a quickly acquired habit they had come to know, he engaged all the operating room staff with a long look. A ring of shining eyes looked back at him in a kind of worship. They, at least, had no doubts.

“Looks like we’re committed now.” They all laughed.

It was like he was still learning his trade some days, but confidence had gotten him this far; and a kind of cheerful acceptance. If he couldn’t do it then no one else could either. In which case it didn’t matter anyway. Thank God for those hands and those eyes.

“All righty then! Let’s see if we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

Doctor Delorme went to work, as his mentor Doctor Amy Cardiff looked on.

“I’m here for you. I just want you to know that.”


(Photo: Morguefile.)






Story as Movement.

Never would I presume to tell another writer how to write a story.

I can only try and explain how I write my own, which may be entirely useless to another writer who may not think in the same exact terms. As for why, I think it just works for me.

When I started off, I must have known something about storytelling. Yet I knew absolutely little about writing, the style, the punctuation, the layout, the format, and virtually nothing about the writing industry or even the craft of writing.

I did know something. I learned it in a strange and surprising way. Back in the ‘80s, my mom had a certain make of VCR, and on the remote was this button. It was fast forward, but the pictures stayed onscreen while it scrolled through at a high rate of speed. There was no sound, just the swishing of tape going onto the plastic reel.

What I saw was movement. There were people coming out of buildings and going down streets. There were people getting in and out of cars, driving places, standing in rooms while other people came and went. People would yell and wave their arms around. They shot at each other, and ran back and forth. In some strange way, you could even follow the basic plot. Just like an old silent film, but without the chalkboard with cues to the audience and short bits of what passed for dialogue back then. There wasn’t even a honky-tonk piano player to give it emphasis, or to tell me what emotions to feel.

I learned a lot about storytelling by watching television. As a kid I watched uncritically, as an adult my needs changed but TV and film really didn’t. What bothered me most was things that simply weren’t possible, or not logical, or even just unlikely. Fiction, whether on the printed page or on a screen, static or moving, requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Unlike real life, in some way it has to make sense—it has to hang together long enough for the reader to buy into the illusion.

Once past that point, anything is possible. When I began to supply the next line of dialogue before the actors even spoke, and when I started nailing it a good percentage of the time, that is when I became critical of TV. It was when I read a book, and found something wrong with it, that’s when I started to get the idea that maybe I could write a book, or that maybe I should become a writer.

My storytelling is cinematic. It involves a whole lot of different perspectives on a common scene. It results in one character being featured, and in the next paragraph some other character advances the story. In a weird way, head-hopping, both in separate chapters and in the same scene involving multiple characters, is a kind of movement—we move the reader from one point of view to the next. It often happens quite quickly. I know there are ‘rules’ in writing. Our craft involves breaking every rule that we are competent to break…if we can pull it off successfully.

If we were to take one of my books and make it into a movie, it would be easy to create the scenes from the point of view of film, or motion. As for TV, much of that is kind of static—it’s a lot of people standing or sitting around in a room setting up jokes and gags. That’s why the camera cuts back and forth for people’s reactions. It is a kind of artificial movement. That’s true of almost any situation comedy we might care to name. An action-situation comedy simply doesn’t exist. You have to go to adventure-drama to find anything where figures move against bigger landscapes and backdrops.

Think in terms of film. The director has to set up the conflict. He almost has to show the shadowy murderer stalking the unwary victim. That has to be shown from several different points of view. The camera keeps moving, rather than just sit on top of a building, watching the whole chase in one big, panoramic long-shot that never cuts to a different scene, time or place.

Because the readers have seen more films, TV shows, plays or videos than I ever will, I think it’s safe to trust their perceptions.

Remember the big scene in the opening of ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ directed by David Lean, where Omar Sharif comes riding across the desert, and the bloody thing takes like eight minutes or something God-awful like that?

We really can’t get away with writing like that. It only takes one line, doesn’t it?

“Omar Sharif rides towards the camera for eight minutes from far way across the desert.”

No one wants to take eight minutes to read such a scene or time it on a stopwatch before going on to the next bit. Film has sound, movement, colour, and music, and all we have as writers is the written word, fixed on the page.

Story is movement, among other things.

  (Photo: Morguefile.)

Quality Control in Independent Publishing: Standard Operating Procedure.

(Author photo.)





















I just published ‘Horse Catcher,’ a science fiction adventure set 12,000 years in the future. Standard operating procedure is to wait, let it go through for Premium Distribution on Smashwords, and when it’s in the pipeline for iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Diesel Books, etc., modify the file slightly and convert it to HTML on my desktop. The changes are to front matter only. The variance is in minor details like taking out ‘published by Smashwords.’ I wait to publish it on Amazon. By publishing it on a Friday morning, with a little luck it pops up in the new titles during prime time Friday night.


We also wait because then we know from Smashwords’ own auto and human vetters that the formatting is okay. It’s quality control for the formatting.

Comprene vous?

When I looked at the Smashwords dashboard recently, ‘The Game,’ a science fiction short story had in fact been approved for Premium Distribution. At that point, I tweeted a link and felt comfortable about doing it. That story can now be uploaded to Amazon. I have three or four accounts, SW, Amazon, Createspace, and Lulu, where I do exclusively POD paperbacks. This takes advantage of any traffic generated by the Lulu store.

I also make paperbacks through Createspace, which automatically distribute through Amazon, in several different countries. I only use free distribution channels. I have the option of paying a fee for each title; and then the books would be available to brick and mortar bookstores through Ingram’s (as I recall.) The challenges are several. I have fifteen titles, each would require a fee, and so far the covers aren’t really up to the standards of modern professional publishing. It’s a matter of conjecture as to whether such products would generate orders. However, even a small order might cover the fee. Assuming the fee is thirty bucks, and assuming I did ten titles, the reader can understand my reluctance.

C’est la vie.

In terms of covers, the free Createspace templates are limited in terms of layout and design. The spine and back cover are equally important in selling to customers when they hold the book in their hand—which they are not going to do when buying from Amazon. However, if disappointed by the product when they actually receive it, there are forums where they can disparage it. It just takes longer, and you do get a few sales.

More default fonts would be welcome, and the ability to right-justify text on back cover copy would be nice. Createspace wants customers to avail themselves of paid services, including cover design, as I can certainly understand.

Merde.

Right now, I have the interior file of ‘The Paranoid Cat and other tales,’ all ready to go. I still need to reduce the size of the text on the present marketing image, as what I have now will impinge upon the cropping or trim area of the physical product. The proof of ‘Time-storm’ got hung up because it was sent via DHL, and unlike the post office, they can’t get into the mailboxes in the lobby. But we’ll try and track that down. I like to look the physical product over before clicking on ‘approve proof.’ It’s a matter of confidence when promoting the paperback. We’ve done some quality control. Also, before approving the proof, I plan on updating the cover image, as now the e-book image has been upgraded.

Over the next month I should be able to get caught up on one or two things, including making some more new paperbacks, and hopefully figure out what to write next.

I just tried the Apple iStore widgetmaker on my blogspot blog and it doesn’t appear to work, so I took it off again. It looked okay, but the links didn’t work, and this may require some troubleshooting.

***

I got the ‘Time-Storm’ proof copy today. It looks like this is the second shipment. One of the neighbours told me there was something stuck on the front door, but I never come in that way. Createspace says in their e-mail, ‘if you get a second one keep it,’ and that’s fine.

N’est pas?

Proofing involves a pencil and a piece of paper beside the bed. I get a glass of milk, some cookies and I just start reading. Things to look for include the drop-down to chapter titles, correct number of blank pages, and broken lines in the text as well as typos and stylistic concerns.

I’m just finishing up reading Edward Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ (the actual title is longer, but you get the idea,) and then I have four pulp thrillers to read, including Tony Hillerman, Len Deighton, and one or two others.

My next project is still so secret, even I don’t know what it is. Hopefully someone will enlighten me.

I haven’t written much in the last couple of weeks except blog posts. I’m done editing ‘Horse Catcher,’ and I have this feeling like I’m not really doing my job. It’s okay at first, but at some point it’s all talk and no action. It’s sort of irresponsible, isn’t it?

“Talk the talk and walk the walk,’ to counterfeit a phrase.

C’est dommage.

Sooner later I have to stop faking it. But I have another novel, ‘The Art of Murder,’ coming out on November 1, so at least it looks like I’m doing something. The book has been re-written five or six times. It’s been sitting for a month. As soon as I cracked it open, I began making little changes again.

I suppose that’s inevitable, really, but I still have a month until deadline. There’s nothing here I can’t handle. What’s really interesting is the contrast between editing ‘Horse Catcher,’ written back in 2008, and editing ‘The Art of Murder,’ which I wrote over the summer.

You can learn a hell of a lot about writing fiction in three or four years of effort and application. ‘Art of Murder’ is my ninth novel. ‘Horse Catcher’ was my sixth, and I have no more unpublished novels. From here on in, I’m writing fresh material.

***

I’ve been getting out of the house a bit lately and I think that’s good.

It’s a nice time of year, and a little appreciation for the outside world is okay as far as that goes.

But if this is a vacation, then I’m wasting that too.

Au revoir!