My Vampire Climax Scene

Feel Free to steal it. I'll never write a vampire story.

Vampire: "Do you really think it will make any difference if you destroy me? My kind has always been. We will always be. And we will always hunt you."

Vampire Hunter: "And your kind has always been mistaken as to who is the hunter, and who is the hunted."

Over the years I have been witness to a sad situation, but recent trends have the potential to turn the sad into something tragic. Watching the slow decline of any human being in need of help, but not having the wherewithal to offer that help, can wear on the conscience of any feeling person, but to watch delusion bring human beings to the brink of self-destruction without the power to lend aid and comfort is maddening. The first step, as always, is to raise awareness. I am talking, of course, about liberals without guns. Many liberals grew up with guns, own them and know how to use them. However, many more underprivileged liberals grew up in households without guns. Many have never even held a gun. Such deprivation and unfamiliarity has led to attitudes that range from the squeamish to outright rejection of firearms of any type. For much of our history, these attitudes caused little harm. Most liberals were able to lead fairly normal lives, only being subjected to the occasional roughing up by authorities at protests or a light neck stomping for confusing a right-wing counter rally with the left-wing protest they originally sought. But the times, they are a’changin’. As violent Tea Party rhetoric heats political discourse to the boiling point, there emerge real threats to the physical wellbeing of liberals, threats for which they are completely unprepared. The “rogue individuals” impelled to act by this violent rhetoric, are “acting alone” but against little effective resistance. Unarmed liberals tend to run, scream, bleed and die when faced with a concrete expression of 2nd Amendment rights. This is where you can help. Won’t you please donate your lightly used revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, riot shotguns and assault rifles to Guns for Liberals™. All clean and well maintained firearms in good working order are acceptable. You may also wish to donate ammunition, and new, brand name ammo is greatly appreciated, but please, no reloads. (Not everyone is as conscientious about reloading as they perhaps should be) With your help, every women’s clinic, coffee house, Democratic election headquarters, food co-op and Unitarian church can become a liberal redoubt bristling with firepower. Can you really justify owning fourteen assault rifles and a veritable arsenal of handguns of every caliber and type when so many liberals must go without? Please find it in your heart to donate just one weapon to Guns for Liberals™ today. You may or may not regret it.

Cop Show Cliché

You’ve seen it a hundred times without questioning it. Maybe you’ve seen it so many times you no longer noticed it, but after you read this, it will jump out at you every week. A cop draws down on the bad guy with gun, or the bad guy draws on the cop, but however it comes about, we have a bad guy with a gun pointed at the cop, and a cop with a gun pointed at the bad guy, both caught in an apparent standoff. The cop usually says, “Drop it or I’ll shoot,” or the bad guy says something similar, as the tension builds with the passing seconds. Here’s my problem with that: no cop is going to put down his gun or offer the bad guy a couple of choices. He or she is going to shoot the guy. The police officer will not take the time to tell someone pointing a gun at his or her chest, “Put down the gun!” They will aim center mass and fire, they hope, before the bad guy does. To do anything else is contrary to their training and stupid beyond belief. So why do we keep seeing this scene over and over, even in “good” cop dramas? It’s an easy tension builder on which mediocre writers can rely. TV writers get a check whether they come up with a new way to do this scene or not. It’s an old stand-by, however unrealistic. But “realistic” cop dramas do it, too. Just once I’d like to see a bad guy pull his gun on a cop and say, “Drop it,” only to have the cop double-tap him in the chest and say, “Nope.” There are many plausible tense situations for police officers. Leaning on this weak and unrealistic premise is an early indicator of shitty writing throughout, with stilted dialog, cliché situations and stock characters aplenty. So when you see this scene, change the channel. Or read. You won’t find that kind of cliché standoff in many cop, crime or mystery novels. A decent editor somewhere would have cut it or rejected the manuscript. I don’t ask much from television: divert me from everyday life for a little while and make me laugh or cry or sit on the edge of my seat. Watching one more too-good-looking cop act like anything but a cop will not do any of the above.

Why do writers write?

1. Attention. A more mature aspiration in this regard would be the recognition and respect of critics and one’s peers. Most of us just want a lot of people to tell us how special we are.

2. If a male writer, to get laid. This is especially true if you teach in an MFA program in creative writing. Creative writing programs are full-up with dreamy eyed women still young enough to succumb to the purple-est of prose or naïve enough to be impressed by the short story collection you published seven years ago that sold 940 copies in hard cover, but is still listed on Amazon.

3. To indulge your most embarrassing fantasies. You’d be humiliated to tell your friends about the recurring daydream in which you, bare to the waist and armor pec-ed, slaughter a dozen men twice your size with your magical sword nicknamed “Big Hard One” and then make love to the harem of grateful, huge-breasted alien women you just saved from rape and ruin. But if you put it in a screenplay, suddenly people talk about you like you have a respectable job rather than wasting your day spinning spank material.

4. To go on an uninterrupted, book-length rant without having to answer annoying questions about your weak premises, faulty logic and questionable conclusions.

5. To publicly embarrass your family with plausible deniability. Of course the drunken whore who slept with her brother and stole his inheritance isn’t Aunt Betty. The character’s name was BETSY.

6. Because if we didn’t write, we’d have to work. I know we claim that writing is hard work, but can we really compare writing with hauling buckets of mortar up a ladder in the sun all day or gutting chickens on an assembly line for a living? No.

So why do YOU write?

Bill's Book Boot Camp

The book was going nowhere. I'd found other work and distractions for months and given my writer's group not a single page. I still claimed to be writing a novel, but it was all in my head and in cryptic notes on wrinkled scraps of paper. Well, not all. I had sixty or seventy manuscript pages. I have a few novel starts like that, all dying in their youth, never reaching a hundred pages. If I can get to hundred manuscript pages, I will finish a book. That seems to be the critical mass for me. But the last several attempts have fallen short of that goal.

Then my last writing teacher, my mentor, and the editor of Nadir's Fire, Bill Allen, invited me down to his west Texas home for a two week stint of writing. As soon as the work on the farm subsided for the season--including a two year effort on a new barn--I took the invitation.

And now my back is sore from sitting, and my mind is mush from the emotionally draining effort of writing or revising four to eight hours a day--and a novel is growing where a whithered stem had been.

There's simply nothing else to do up here. I'm on a 6,200 foot ridge in the Davis Mountains surrounded by choola cactus, mule deer, and west Texas misfits. Damn few misfits, however. I e-mail a lot, but that's an hour of my day, and I instant message one very special person, but I can take up only so much of her time. She has a life, and I have a job: finish a novel.

Bill assumes that I will write and he will review, advise and edit. But more important to the process than that is being treated as a professional writer, with all the attendant expectaions that I will produce, and at a high level. It's more than trying to please a teacher, it's living up to my own expectations for myself. I expect professionalsim from myself up here. Everyone in the area only knows me as a writer, not a carpenter or a farm hand or weightlifting coach. I'm Bill's writer friend. Wherever I go or whatever I do here, I'm a writer. So I act like one. I write. And my back hurts, and my eyes are sore, and my carpal tunnel acts up and I keep writing. My brain rebels and doesn't want to make up one more thing, but my fingers keep moving. Becasue I'm a writer up here and that's the expectation.

Bill will get his pages every morning. And when I leave, I will have my 100 pages and many more. And I will once again have earned with sweat the right to call myself a writer without qualification.

What DO you believe?

We atheists get that question a lot. Most people are incredulous that someone could not believe in God. Atheists are a tiny minority in the world, clutching reason as closely to our breasts as the faithful do God. I think maybe there is a gene that codes for faith or the need to worship, and some few of us are just born without it, like albinos, lacking the deity that allows us to walk in the crowd accepted and comforted.

What do I believe? I believe the unembellished, unambiguous truth is that we float through cold space, unique in the universe, short lived, in various states of denial of the irreducible fact that each of us, in our deaths, is alone.

While belief is as variable as individual human beings, human need is not, and staring at the flint-hard truth I just wrote, I know that what I need is pretty close to what all people, everywhere, have always needed: to feel that I am not alone, that I matter greatly to someone, that my life is not a flicker of candle light in a galaxy of suns.

I need stories that give me hope. A story that ends on a hopeless note is anathema to me, and to all but the most sneering and cynical critics. Hope cannot save anyone. But without it, why would we hang on long enough to see if someone might save us? Or that we can save ourselves.

And I need a warm hand to hold, a hand to squeeze mine when the winds of fate howl outside our door, a brush of lips on my ear and a whispered “everything will be all right.” A soft and lovely lie full of all the kindness and empathy of which we are capable in our best moments. And I will believe.

Real Love

I rarely put up another writers words in my blog posts, but this is perhaps the greatest love poem I have ever read. While we all hope never to be afforded the chance to demonstrate love in such a fashion, even the non-believers of us pray to find love so deep and sacrifice so unconditional.

Quarantine
by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking-they were both walking-north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.