RULES TO WRITING_RAYMOND CHANDLER, GHOST, HERE

*
{"If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."
— Ernest Hemingway.}

Raymond Chandler, ghost, here.


I'm substituting for Roland who is laid out with that migraine still. To hurt like that and still have to work a weekend he was supposed to be off.

Hemingway and I are going to pay his supervisor a visit later on tonight. We'll be bringing the ghost of Lovecraft with us. We'll explain some things to him.

Speaking of Hemingway, I don't know if I totally agree with those words of his I quoted earlier.

But they occur to me as I think of the star-crossed love of Alice Wentworth, the Victorian ghoul, and Victor Standish.

The pair remind me of a young Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in my BLUE DAHLIA.

You, who visit Roland's blog, think Victor's and Alice's love affair is fiction. Alas, it is not. Fiction, unlike truth, must be logical.

And as Alice Wentworth keeps saying : Their love breaks the chain of reason.

Reason you say? Yes, and good fiction must obey the RULES.

Let me tell you the SECRET RULES TO WRITING FICTION :

Rules. Most struggling writers think there are mysterious magic rules out there that if followed will insure success.

There aren't. But I'll give them to you, anyway.

Rule #1 :
The most durable thing in writing is style. I had mine. Hemingway had his. We're both imitated.

Be inspired by your favorite authors but leave them be. Keep the original. Lose the copy. Be yourself. But a self that grows each day.

Rule #2 :
Unlike the age of Jane Austin, this age is not remote. It is as intimate as a lonely heart and as intense as the bill collector over your phone.

Do not cliche your words. Brutality is not strength. Flipness is not wit. Do not mistake cool for character, attitude for competence.

It is not funny that a man is killed. But it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

Rule #3 :
It's the journey, the struggles of the hero that grab the reader and keep him turning the pages. Make the hero sweat. But let him get the girl. Even Victor will get -- no, I won't go there. I can't.

Rule #4 :
Pull your nose from the computer keyboard and live life -- don't just write about it. Tasting each drink, feeling each breeze, touching the soft skin of the woman who loves you and only you.

God, I hope Victor does that with Alice ...

if only for a moment.

Sorry, you don't need to read an old ghost's keening.

Rule #5 :
Remember that human nature has learned nothing over the centuries, yet has forgotten nothing either. Men do things for reasons.

Your characters, if they are to be believed, must do so, too. You cannot shove them into actions that your prior words would not imply they would take.

Yet human nature is fickle : a man who is steel in the fires of adversity will melt at the glance of a pair of ice blue eyes. Eyes like Alice has ....

Sorry ... that ... that is all I have the heart for.

I will sit out on Roland's terrace now and look out as the night fog slips away from the bordering bayou.

The rains are over. The fields are still green.

And with my ghost eyes I will look out over the vastness of America to the Hollywood Hills and see snow on the high mountains.

The fur stores will be advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen year-old virgins will be doing a land-office business. In Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees will be beginning to bloom.

And none of that will matter ... for I know how it must end for Victor and Alice.

The French have a saying that to say good-bye is to die a little. They are right. I am a ghost, and I thought I was past feeling dead inside. I was wrong.

I think I will always see Victor walking down lonely streets, leaning against the grimy bricks of shadowy dead-end alleys, saddened but never quite defeated.

Down those mean streets Victor went who was not himself mean, who was neither tarnished nor afraid ... only mortal -- who loved too well ... and not at all wisely.
***
Why not LIKE the kid's AMAZON author page? You wouldn't want a visit from Lovecraft's ghost would you? www.amazon.com/author/rolandyeomans
*
This is a standard publicity photo taken to promote a film role. As stated by film production expert Eve Light Honathaner in The Complete Film Production Handbook, (Focal Press, 2001 p. 211.):

"Publicity photos (star headshots) have traditionally not been copyrighted. Since they are disseminated to the public, they are generally considered public domain, and therefore clearance by the studio that produced them is not necessary."

Nancy Wolff, includes a similar explanation:

"There is a vast body of photographs, including but not limited to publicity stills, that have no notice as to who may have created them." (The Professional Photographer's Legal Handbook By Nancy E. Wolff, Allworth Communications, 2007, p. 55.)--Wikiwatcher1 (talk) 09:35, 15 December 2009 (UTC)****

NIGHT OF THE LIVING UNREAD the sequel!

*

NIGHT OF THE LIVING UNREAD the sequel :

New York City. The town of undead dreams and shattered illusions.

My very first agent. The biggest in publishing, mind you.

And here I was -- in his elegant, spacious ... and much too dark office.

At night.

What was up with that?

Actually, I knew. Courtesy of Raymond Chandler. His ghost really.

He had hated agents in life. Now, in undeath, he hated them even more. Bloodsuckers he called them.

Literally.

Now, was that type casting or what?

Aaron Bael smiled at me. His charm was colder than his eyes, and they were glitttering chips of dry ice.

With his much too long fingers, he patted my manuscript. "Odd term you use in here. 'Revenants' not the more popular, enticing 'Vampires.'"

I nervously toyed with the ball bearing in my left hand and kept from chewing my thick toothpick with an effort of will.

"In my novels, there's nothing sexy, sparkly, or warm about the reanimated dead. How could there be? Humans are their meals not their friends."

Bael nodded. "Just so. And your prose is quite good. Too good not to make large sales."

His smile dropped like a lead weight. "We cannot allow that."

A blur to my left. Fangs at my throat. Fetid breath in my face.

His not-so-lovely assistant. My thumb and forefinger shot the ball bearing into her open, snarling mouth. She hunched over choking.

Living or undead, the gag reflex will not be denied.

I whipped the thick toothpick out of my mouth and jabbed it deep into the back of her left hand still on my shoulder.

She squealed in a wet husk, then thumped bonelessly to the thick carpet like a puppet with the strings cut. She didn't move.

She was as dead as something like her could get.

Popping out of my chair, I backed up, keeping my face to Bael. "Research. Gotta love it."

He flicked an uneasy look to my manuscript. "There really is a lost acupuncture point?"

I nodded. It was the chi in the blood that animated the revenants not the oxygen. Dam the flow of chi in their bodies, and they were short-circuited : dead.

"Yes, and thanks to Tommy's Middle East tour of duty I know it."

His eyes became as flat and soulless as a snake's -- but without as much warmth. "Your precious "League of Five" friend. Well, I have a friend, too."

His canines grew longer. "As I recall, you were quite taken with Miss Lupa, my secretary, and her mini-skirt."

His office door burst open. A snarling she-wolf shambled in, her black business suit hanging from her in tatters.

Reaching slowly into my jacket's inside pocket, I forced a smile. "Honey, your legs were prettier without the fur."

Bael sneered at my hand under my jacket. "You're carrying a gun in New York City?"

I shook my head. "Only criminals get to do that."

I brought out the magnesium flare. "Meet my best-est buddy, Mr. Sunshine-in-a-Stick."

I snapped its end off to bring it to blazing life. Its red glare filled the office. And the same ultraviolet light that burns from the Sun seared the flesh from Bael's screaming, writhing body.

The stench filled the spacious room, making acid bile burn up my throat and into my mouth.

Miss Lupa had seen better days, too.

The ultraviolet light had tricked her body into a "false dawn" dress-down to humanity. But she was caught mid-way, her body changing in spurts to the surges in the flare.

She writhed on the carpet in agony. I couldn't leave her like this.

Thanks to Chandler's ghost, I didn't have to.

I walked gingerly around the still-smoldering Bael and his simply still assistant. I went to the back of the agent's desk to the middle drawer. I pulled it out.

"Only criminals get to do that," I whispered, pulling out the automatic.

Silver bullets in the clip Chandler had assured me. I chambered a round into the barrel.

I walked back to stand over Lupa. She snarled at me, spittle flying from her sharp teeth.

"How many screaming humans have you killed that were helpless to fight back?," I sighed.

"N-Not enough," husked Lupa.

"One was too many," I said low and double-tapped her.

(Unlike politicians, movies sometimes told the truth.)

She stopped wiggling. I looked over to Bael and his assistant. How many dreamers
had they shot down,

not because their work wouldn't sell,

but because it would?

A pounding shook the heavy entrance wooden doors. I went quiet and cold inside.

The zombie security guards Chandler had told me about. I smiled bitterly. No problem.

They only ate brains.

And obviously, no one who opened a can of whup-ass on revenants and ferals simply for being rejected had any of those.
*
Movie Art from Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Due to a failure to include a copyright notice on the 1968 print, all images from this film are in the public domain.
***

NO GRAVES IN THE SHADOWLANDS_Ghost of Raymond Chandler here

A long time ago in a blogverse far away ...

I wrote a blog serial, GHOST OF A CHANCE,

Its first chapter: http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/07/chapter-one-living-in-crosshairs.html

where I found myself on the run in my own prose universe. Each post depicted a page from the seared journal that the ghost of Mark Twain found, the only clue to my ultimate fate.

Here is a post from GHOST OF A CHANCE written by the ghost of Raymond Chandler with a few tips for writers of any age:



{"If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."
— Ernest Hemingway.}

Chandler here. Raymond Chandler. Or rather his ghost.

I started with that quote from Hemingway because it was too damned appropriate not to.

Some of you are dropping in, expecting to read something from Roland. He’s been on the run in the Shadowlands, falsely accused of the murder of Hemingway’s ghost.

The same ghost who has been laughing up his sleeve here in Roland’s apartment, pontificating on how to write good literature. Apparently, he forgot how to live a good life or be a good friend.

No, he was too jealous of how the ghost of Marlene Dietrich felt about Roland.

He’s been rubbing his hands in pure joy as the ghosts closed in for revenge and others in the darkness bayed at the kid’s heels, seeking to tear the secret of how to kill ghosts from him.

Now, where is Hemingway? On his way to Hell if there's any justice. But there isn't.

Word in the Shadowlands is that he is just walking aimlessly into the darkness, his eyes deep holes into nothingness.

I only have the cold comfort that I knocked him on his arrogant ghost-butt. How did a Hollywood hack like me do that? Easy. I cheated.

I surprised him. I walked into Roland's apartment looking clean, neat, and sober, smiling my best "ain't we chums?" smile. Then, I let him have it with the blackjack in my fist.

He went down hard. Not hard enough.

"Good news, boxer," I grunted. "Word in the Shadowlands is that Roland's dead. Died in the arms of Marlene."

His eyes fought to focus. "Is she --"

"Yeah, hero. She's dead, too. Killed by the one who poisoned you. I hope you're --"

I didn't get the chance to finish. The most godawful yowling came from the head of Roland's bed. Then, I saw her -

Gypsy, his ghost cat, all covered in sand. I could have sworn she hadn't been there when I first came in.

Her head was reared back, her eyes full of tears. Hell, his cat was crying. Crying.

And Gypsy howled like her guts were being cut out of her. I can hear it still. It seemed to go on forever.

I pray to God I never hear such a sound again. She stopped abruptly and looked at me with eyes gone sick and insane.

Then she just slowly faded away into the darkness like an old photograph left out too long in the sun. I shivered. And I knew. I knew.

I would never see his cat again.

I turned to Hemingway as he struggled to his feet, and I managed to get out the words. "Roland trusted you."

My grief and anger were battling so inside my heart, it felt as if I was standing outside myself. "You hid in his apartment, knowing he was being blamed for your murder, knowing he was being hunted by things that would make a pit bull puke."

I realized I was literally shaking with my anger. "You could have stopped this. You should have."

He turned hollow eyes to me. "Right on both counts."

And with that he walked out through Roland's door. And I knew something else. I would never see him again either.

So here I am, sitting in the dark at Roland's laptop. What do I write that would express just what the kid meant to me? It's all too fresh. I - I can't.

There are no graves in the Shadowlands. No place where I can lay one black rose. To die there is to disappear utterly both body and spirit. But I have to do something. Something.

What I will do is reach out to you, his friends. He wrote to you, trying as best he could to help you write better.

So that is what I'll do. Just a short post. I don't have a long one in me.

Besides, I'm not sure how delicate this thing is -- if tears on the keyboard will short something out or not.

All right. I'm a big boy. I can do this.

Where to start?

Rules. Most struggling writers think there are mysterious magic rules out there that if followed will insure success.

There aren't. But I'll give them to you, anyway.

Rule #1 :
The most durable thing in writing is style. I had mine. Hemingway had his. We're both imitated.

Be inspired by your favorite authors but leave them be. Keep the original. Lose the copy. Be yourself. But a self that grows each day.

Rule #2 :
Unlike the age of Jane Austin, this age is not remote. It is as intimate as a lonely heart and as intense as the bill collector over your phone.

Do not cliche your words. Brutality is not strength. Flipness is not wit. Do not mistake cool for character, attitude for competence.

It is not funny that a man is killed. But it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

Rule #3 :
It's the journey, the struggles of the hero that grab the reader and keep him turning the pages. Make the hero sweat. But let him get the girl. Even Roland -- no, I won't go there. I can't.

Rule #4 :
Pull your nose from the computer keyboard and live life -- don't just write about it. Tasting each drink, feeling each breeze, touching the soft skin of the woman who loves you and only you.

God, I hope Roland did that with Marlene ...

if only for a moment.

Sorry, you don't need to read an old ghost's keening.

Rule #5 :
Remember that human nature has learned nothing over the centuries, yet has forgotten nothing either. Men do things for reasons.

Your characters, if they are to be believed, must do so, too. You cannot shove them into actions that your prior words would not imply they would take.

Yet human nature is fickle : a man who is steel in the fires of adversity will melt at the glance of a pair of ice blue eyes. Eyes like Marlene had ....

Sorry ... that ... that is all I have the heart for.

I will sit out on Roland's terrace now and look out as the night fog slips away from the bordering bayou.

The rains are over. The fields are green.

And with my ghost eyes I will look out over the vastness of America to the Hollywood Hills and see snow on the high mountains.

The fur stores will be advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen year-old virgins will be doing a land-office business. In Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees will be beginning to bloom.

And none of that will matter ... for my friend is dead.

The French have a saying that to say good-bye is to die a little. They are right. I am a ghost, and I thought I was past feeling dead inside. I was wrong.

I think I will always see him driving down lonely roads, sitting in lonely rooms, saddened but never quite defeated.

Down those mean streets he went who was not himself mean, who was neither tarnished nor afraid ... only mortal.

I will miss you, my friend.
****
He liked this prayer, so I will end with it:

WHY DO YOU BLOG? Ghost of RAYMOND CHANDLER here

{"All men who read

escape from something else into

what lies behind the printed page;

the quality of the dream may be argued,

but its release has become a functional necessity."

- Raymond Chandler.}

The effort to keep from thinking of the things only the dead know sometimes reduces me to the mental age of seven.

It suddenly seems the things by which we live are the distant flashes of lightning in a dark sunset.

I think Clemens is hoping to distract my sorrow by asking me to help the visitors to Roland's blog out.

It seems some of you are unclear on how to make your blog popular.

Join the club. If writers really knew the key to drawing droves of followers, they'd have swollen bank accounts ... and keep it to themselves.

Human nature is like that. But I'm a ghost so I'll share what I know on how to write well ... on your blog ... in your novel.

First though : A good title is one of the keys to a successful blog. A beautifully jarring picture in your header draws the reader in. Now, to the meat of my thoughts :

1.) A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

In other words, you must write, then re-write. Sit back, mull it over, re-read your post, then polish the rough spots.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

It's not about ability either. Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

Which leads me to ask :

2.) Why do you blog?

A) For approval?

You're going to get precious little of that from editors.

You'd better try developing a thick skin now. And what if you get it? Will it teach you as much as one sharp but accurate criticism? You know the answer to that one.

B) To use as a form of Writers Anonymous?

If you talk so much about writing, about queries, about summaries, about agents that you don't write, don't blog.

If you visit so many blogs that you have scant time to do any real writing, don't blog.

Writers write.

Do I sound harsh? Maybe it's because when I was alive I stayed up all night, writing letters to friends,

when I could have been actually writing a novel worthy of being dedicated to my beloved wife.

Don't be me. Learn from me. Like Clemens says :

Life is a coin. You can spend it any way you want.

But you can only spend it once. Spend it wisely.

3.)" From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away."

Which is my wry way of saying : Let there be more than mere style to your blog -- let there be substance as well.

Cotton candy may be good for a lark. But if you want people to come back to your blog time after time, serve steak.

The challenge of blogging is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

Write to have people feel at home, and they'll return to relax when the world presses in on them.

And make no mistake : The streets out there in America are dark with something more than night.

Be a flame of friendship and of what wisdom your bruises have bought you.

4.) There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

Have your blog serve you. Once you find yourself serving it, being a slave to its deadlines. Revolt.

Leonardo da Vinci frittered precious years away,

designing intricate, short-lived party favors for princes.

Imagine if he had used that time painting masterpieces that would have lasted centuries?

5.) One last thing -- Forget your blog for a moment :

it is all about the story :

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man.

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

The story is the man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.

He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion in your story. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder."

Finally, write your blog on subjects you'd like to read if you were stumbling upon it like a stranger.

Be there for your fellow writers. Sometimes it's a dark world out there for people whom you think haven't a care in the world.

Be a light for those people. Be a hero.

DID YOUR GENRE PICK YOU?_H. P. LOVECRAFT, GHOST

{"Men of broader intellect know
that there is no sharp distinction
betwixt the real and the unreal."

- H. P. Lovecraft.}


Ah, you say. The ghost of H. P. Lovecraft.
Now, he will tell us if what he wrote was true.

Short-sighted mortals. I dare not say. I can not say.

I will but put forth this : my imagination was too stunted,

my words too feeble to paint what lies beyond.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life,

and that our vain presence on this terraqueous globe is itself

the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Then, what brings me to Roland's blog?


I was wandering Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders,
where many have passed but none returned,

where walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,

and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those
who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.

Abruptly, the ghosts of Clemens, Raymond Chandler, Will Rogers, and Ernest Hemingway (all heavily armed) made their cautious way to me.

And well they should have been careful, for I am no longer altogether ... human.

I watched them from the shadows with some amusement. They stepped warily around shards of marble that thrust up from the misty ground.

The shards gave the illusion of ancient bones of some grotesque corpse protruding from an ill-made grave.

The ruins projected a diseased aura as if the very stones were cursed.

Clemens approached me. "You can roll around in your horrors like they were catnip for all I care, Lovecraft. But you owe Roland."

"Indeed I do. What would you suggest?"

"Write a piece for his ... computer newspaper."

"How quaint. On what exactly, Clemens?"

"Why the blue blazes you chose to write what you did."

"It chose me, Clemens."

"Then, write that. And try to remember what it meant to be human while you're doing it."

I fought down the gibbering darkness. "You are lucky I owe Roland, ghost."
***
So I am here. Why did I come? I came because of my lost childhood :

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth;

For when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts,

and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night

with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens,

of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas,

of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone,

and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates

into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Enough of me. I ask : Did your genre pick you?

I know mine did.

My reason for writing stories

is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly the

fragmentary impressions of wonder which are conveyed to me by certain
ideas and images encountered in art and literature.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -

one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve the
illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations

of time, space, and natural law which forever
imprison us

and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion,

and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,

so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law
or cosmic alienage or "outsideness"

without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

As to how I write a story - there is no one way. The following set of rules might be deduced from my average procedure :

1.) Prepare a chronological order of events.

2.) Prepare the narrative order of those events if you are beginning in the middle or the end.

3.) Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically.

4.) Revise the entire text, paying attention to vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, proportioning of parts, niceties, and convincingness of transitions.

5.) One last note : Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion.

Imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail

which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion
of the strange reality of the unreal.

Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning

apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.

**And so now I ask you again :

Did you pick your genre, or did it pick you?

Why has this genre captured you?

Do have a blueprint you follow when you write your story or novel? Let me know. The remnant of humanity still clinging to me is interested.

And remember :

"Pleasure is wonder —

the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral;

the past in the present; the infinite in the finite;

these are to me the springs of delight and beauty."
***

RULES TO WRITING_RAYMOND CHANDLER, GHOST, HERE

{"If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."
— Ernest Hemingway.}

Raymond Chandler, ghost, here.

I don't know if I totally agree with those words of Hemingway.

But they occur to me as I think of the star-crossed love of Alice Wentworth, the Victorian ghoul, and Victor Standish.

The pair remind me of a young Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in my BLUE DAHLIA.

You, who visit Roland's blog, think their love affair is fiction. Alas, it is not. Fiction, unlike truth, must be logical.

And as Alice Wentworth keeps saying : Their love breaks the chain of reason.

Reason you say? Yes, and good fiction must obey the RULES.

Let me tell you the SECRET RULES TO WRITING FICTION :

Rules. Most struggling writers think there are mysterious magic rules out there that if followed will insure success.

There aren't. But I'll give them to you, anyway.

Rule #1 :
The most durable thing in writing is style. I had mine. Hemingway had his. We're both imitated.

Be inspired by your favorite authors but leave them be. Keep the original. Lose the copy. Be yourself. But a self that grows each day.

Rule #2 :
Unlike the age of Jane Austin, this age is not remote. It is as intimate as a lonely heart and as intense as the bill collector over your phone.

Do not cliche your words. Brutality is not strength. Flipness is not wit. Do not mistake cool for character, attitude for competence.

It is not funny that a man is killed. But it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

Rule #3 :
It's the journey, the struggles of the hero that grab the reader and keep him turning the pages. Make the hero sweat. But let him get the girl. Even Victor will get -- no, I won't go there. I can't.

Rule #4 :
Pull your nose from the computer keyboard and live life -- don't just write about it. Tasting each drink, feeling each breeze, touching the soft skin of the woman who loves you and only you.

God, I hope Victor does that with Alice ...

if only for a moment.

Sorry, you don't need to read an old ghost's keening.

Rule #5 :
Remember that human nature has learned nothing over the centuries, yet has forgotten nothing either. Men do things for reasons.

Your characters, if they are to be believed, must do so, too. You cannot shove them into actions that your prior words would not imply they would take.

Yet human nature is fickle : a man who is steel in the fires of adversity will melt at the glance of a pair of ice blue eyes. Eyes like Alice has ....

Sorry ... that ... that is all I have the heart for.

I will sit out on Roland's terrace now and look out as the night fog slips away from the bordering bayou.

The rains are over. The fields are still green.

And with my ghost eyes I will look out over the vastness of America to the Hollywood Hills and see snow on the high mountains.

The fur stores will be advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen year-old virgins will be doing a land-office business. In Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees will be beginning to bloom.

And none of that will matter ... for I know how it must end for Victor and Alice.

The French have a saying that to say good-bye is to die a little. They are right. I am a ghost, and I thought I was past feeling dead inside. I was wrong.

I think I will always see Victor walking down lonely streets, leaning against the grimy bricks of shadowy dead-end alleys, saddened but never quite defeated.

Down those mean streets Victor went who was not himself mean, who was neither tarnished nor afraid ... only mortal -- who loved too well ... and not at all wisely.
****

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

Samuel Clemens, ghost, here.

So there I was, regaling Roland with my wit in my ghost chair

while he was muttering on his air mattress

something about 3 O'Clock in the morning.

"Why, so it," I laughed. "We ghosts are at our best this time of night, don't you know?"

"That makes one of us," Roland sighed.

"I hate a man who goes to sleep at once; there is a sort of indefinable something about it which is not exactly an insult,

and yet is an insolence. I get to feeling very lonely, with no company but an undigested dinner.

"Ghosts can't eat, sir."

"But I remember some fine meals, son.

Why you are frittering your life away just sleeping like a log. I don't mean a brisk, fresh, green log, but an old dead, soggy rotten one, that never turns over or gives a yelp."

"I was a happy, soggy log."

"You know, young fella, there are reams of culture-starved souls who would kill to get the gems of wisdom I am heaping upon you here.

Why, I bet you didn't get onto Chandler about his "the meaning of words" article he wrote for you!"

"He let me sleep."

"I am wounded I say. Wounded! Ah, hi there, Gertrude."

I whispered down to Roland. "Mind your P's and Q's. Gerdy is always a mite raw-boned on the anniversary of her death."

To prove my point, she glared at me. "That is MISS Stein to you, buffoon."

"That's Mr. Buffon to you, gal."

She just upped and ignored me, pinning poor Roland to the carpet with those steely blues of hers.

"I read Chandler's drivel of last night."

She wiped her mouth as if the memory tasted bad. "Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens

and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean.

But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean

and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one."

I looked at Roland with a raised eyebrow, "Suddenly, I am very afraid, son."

"Why?," he asked.

"I actually understood that."
***

WE WRITE AS WE LIVE ... ALONE

Ghost of RAYMOND CHANDLER here

WE WRITE

AS WE LIVE …

ALONE.

Roland is still sleeping on the floor in the cool vacant apartment lent him. I have snatched his electronic gadget and come here to his stifling apartment to talk of writing.

I’ve just finished a book I took down from his shelf, POINT OF NO RETURN by John P. Marquand. Strange that such good writing should leave me with so little feeling of having read anything of any importance.

A man has no right to write that well and in the end say so little.

Who cares about the people who always say, do, think, and wear the right thing … and yet are vaguely conscious that it is only the right thing because people of money say it is.

So many modern books are like that :

sad but not too sad, romantic in a lifeless way, beautifully detailed observations ... and the total effect of a steel engraving with no color at all. I guess God must have made such writers on a wet Sunday.

I look at such books and ask, ‘Where is the heart, the soul, the marrow in the bone?’

Certainly, not in the dialogue of those books.

The dialogue. That is where they usually go wrong.

If the dialogue is not peppered with the profanity of truth, of life as it is truly felt, then you paint in grays.

Take out the real in a novel, and you neuter Chekov into the artificiality of Mansfield. Better to drink water than near-beer. So many authors know the lyrics but not the music.

Dialogue done well renders life to a novel. In Dostoyevsky, there is such a burning trueness to the prose that it changes you as you read.

We write to express ourselves, to record the reactions of our personalities to the world in which we live. Every writer dips his brush into his own soul and paints his own nature into his prose.

We look into the mirror, but we do not see the person others see. No. To others we are not ourselves but an actor in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

In like manner, so is our prose. Others read into the mirror of our words what they know of themselves. Only if our words strike the tuning fork of their souls will they keep on turning the pages.

How do each of you try to make each page in your novel real enough to strike that tuning fork? Tell me. I am a curious ghost.

Yours most sincerely,

Raymond Chandler

***

As I read Roland's adventures of Victor Standish, it occurred to me that he could be played by that Taylor Lautner young man. See? Even ghosts can dream :

DEATH and MADNESS

{"Men of broader intellect know
that there is no sharp distinction
betwixt the real and the unreal."

- H. P. Lovecraft.}


Ah, you say. The ghost of H. P. Lovecraft.
Now, he will tell us if what he wrote was true.

Short-sighted mortals. I dare not say. I can not say.

I will but put forth this : my imagination was too stunted,

my words too feeble to paint what lies beyond.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life,

and that our vain presence on this terraqueous globe is itself

the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.


Then, what brings me to Roland's blog?


I was wandering Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders,
where many have passed but none returned,

where walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,

and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those
who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.

Abruptly, the ghosts of Samuel Clemens, Raymond Chandler, Will Rogers, and Ernest Hemingway (all heavily armed) made their cautious way to me.

And well they should have been careful,

for I am no longer altogether ... human.

I watched them from the shadows with some amusement. They stepped warily around shards of marble that thrust up from the misty ground.

The shards gave the illusion of ancient bones of some grotesque corpse protruding from an ill-made grave.

The ruins projected a diseased aura as if the very stones were cursed.

Clemens approached me. "You can roll around in your horrors like they were catnip for all I care, Lovecraft. But you owe Roland."

"Indeed I do. What would you suggest?"

"Write a piece for his ... computer newspaper."

"How quaint. On what exactly, Clemens?"

"Why the blue blazes you chose to write what you did."

"It chose me, Clemens."

"Then, write that. And try to remember what it meant to be human while you're doing it."

I fought down the gibbering darkness. "You are lucky I owe DreamSinger, ghost."
***
So I am here. Why did I come? I came because of my lost childhood :

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth;

For when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts,

and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night

with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens,

of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas,

of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone,

and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates

into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Enough of me. I ask : Did your genre pick you?

I know mine did.

My reason for writing stories

is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly the

fragmentary impressions of wonder which are conveyed to me by certain
ideas and images encountered in art and literature.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -

one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve the
illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations

of time, space, and natural law which forever
imprison us

and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion,

and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,

so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law
or cosmic alienage or "outsideness"

without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

As to how I write a story - there is no one way. The following set of rules might be deduced from my average procedure :

1.) Prepare a chronological order of events.

2.) Prepare the narrative order of those events if you are beginning in the middle or the end.

3.) Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically.

4.) Revise the entire text, paying attention to vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, proportioning of parts, niceties, and convincingness of transitions.

5.) One last note : Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion.

Imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail

which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion
of the strange reality of the unreal.

Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning

apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.

**And so now I ask you again :

Did you pick your genre, or did it pick you?

Why has this genre captured you?

Do you have a blueprint you follow when you write your story or novel? Let me know. The remnant of humanity still clinging to me is interested.

And remember :

"Pleasure is wonder —

the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral;

the past in the present; the infinite in the finite;

these are to me the springs of delight and beauty."
***
Now, Clemens would have me insert this photo to keep a pledge to Laila Knight. Since, I, in my own way, am an old world gentleman. Here it is :

***

THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDERING ... YOUR BOOK

Light drifted as a red fog in front of my eyes. I blinked them with an effort.

Consciousness teased me at the edge of the dark of my mind. I tried to move my hands. They were thick, heavy ... far from me ... not my hands at all it seemed.

"Son, you awake with all the clarity of a hot rock," softly laughed a familiar voice.

Raymond Chandler.

With that realization, I finally opened them. I groaned without words.

Chandler was holding my dented copy of THE PASSAGE that the ghost of Mark Twain had taken to show Ernest Hemingway in the Shadowlands. Gypsy, my ghost cat, thumped off my air mattress and onto his lap.

Chandler shook his head at me and gestured to the vacant apartment I was having to live in until repairs were made to my new apartment.

"At least you don't feel crowded."

In his ghost chair by my air mattress, Chandler made room for Gypsy by tossing the big book to the floor. "Don't worry, Roland. I only came to return this travesty of prose. Not to belabor the obvious."

"Ah, Mr. Hemingway ..."

"You know how prone to depression that old boxer is. He's still wandering the Shadowlands, muttering about million dollar book and movie deals."

"I take it you didn't like THE PASSAGE either."

He sat back in his plush leather ghost chair, scratching behind Gypsy's twitching ears. "What's to like?"

He filled his pipe with tobacco. "It is grim and depressing without any true sense of tragedy. You have to care about the people life mangles for there to be tragedy. And it's clear that Cronin doesn't care for his people so we end up not caring either."

He lit his pipe. "No, he just plays with his characters like a child with toy soldiers. And who cares when a toy soldier dies? A personality doesn't die ... just a pawn."

He bent down, picked up the book, flipped the pages for a bit then read : "He could no longer envision his parents' faces. This had been the first thing to go, leaving him in just a matter of days."

He looked at me, more sad than angry. "I had an uncle in Omaha, a minor and crooked (if I'm any judge of character) politician."

His eyes looked off into the shadows, becoming sadder. "As a very small boy I used to spend a part of the summer with him all the way up to the fall."

His voice softened with the remembrance of long ago seasons. "I remember the oak trees and the high wooden sidewalks beside the dirt roads ... and the heat and the fireflies and a lot of other strange insects and the gathering of wild grapes in the fall to make wine ... and once in a while a dead man floating down the muddy river."

He looked into the burning bowl of his pipe silently for long moments then turned back to me. "I remember all that. And Cronin writes that a man forgets the faces of each parent, dead at different times, after ... a few days? I regard his two sentences as disgraces to English prose ... and to the human heart."

His lips twisted into a bitter smile. "But he is a highly praised author while I am but a forgotten hack."

"As long as I'm alive you won't be forgotten, sir."

"You're not getting any younger, Roland."

"Gee, thanks, sir. You have any other reason to visit besides showering me with rays of sunshine?"

"The McGuffin."

"What?"

"Exactly."

"You've lost me."

He smiled crooked. "Not that hard to do so, son."

"I can see you've been talking to all my ex-girl friends."

I covered a half-yawn. "What is this McGuffin? And please don't say 'exactly.'"

He smiled wide around his pipe. "It was the hitch in Hitchcock."

"He made films. He didn't write books."

"Ah, Roland, each novel is a film. Every author is its director. You get to choose the angle of the reader's view of each scene. You choose the lighting, the stars, the script. Your film can be a work of genius."

He made a sour grimace. "Or it can be THE PASSAGE."

"You're singing to the choir, sir. You haven't said what the McGuffin is."

"It's the tagline to your book, Roland. The thing that grabs the attention of the agent and the reader ... and is just as meaningless as all the false fronts to the buildings on a movie set."

He smiled at my frown. "It's what Cronin was trying to use but failed. A McGuffin is a plot element that snares the viewer, drives the plot along, and essentially is not what the movie or novel is about at all."

"I don't understand."

Chandler chuckled. "Take Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS. A spy drama about Nazi agents and a plot to use the evils of uranium. A woman is sent to spy on her old boy friend, a Nazi. Surprises, suspense, and thrills ensue. But the essence of the movie is about two men trying to prove they love the girl. Who does she believe? And why?"

Chandler stabbed at me with his pipe. "That's where Cronin failed. You have to stay with the girl to care. She has to be center stage most of the time. Cronin spends so much time on backstory for characters who stray off the stage, the reader loses focus and attachement."

He stroked Gypsy absently. "Hell, you have to chew a third of the way through his book before you get to characters who stay awhile. Most readers will throw down the book long before then."

He leaned forward, still gesturing with his pipe. "Take NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Hitchcock himself says it contains his emptiest, most nonexistent McGuffin. Halfway through the film, the hero, cursed with being mistaken for a deadly American agent, finds out only his enemy is an importer and exporter of govenment secrets."

Chandler sat back. "That's all the hero gets for his explanation. But you in the audience don't care ... because by then you care for the hero, for his apparently doomed love for a beautiful, deadly girl."

I nodded. "It's like what my mother told me : "Life is staying with the one you brought. Loyalty."

Chandler nodded back. "Yes, tell your epic story. But tell it through the eyes of someone the audience can stick their hopes, worries, and heart on."

His long face shone with the light of a teacher. "The McGuffin is your tagline, son. But it will be your strong characters placed in jeopardy as they struggle for their heart's desire that will sweep your readers along."

He thumped his pipe on the book in his lap as Gypsy wrinkled her nose at the trailing smoke.

"These days movies and books are just McGuffins ... the idea without structure or characters to care about. Or worse, a tease, like a shill crying out at a carnival, promising one thing and delivering quite another."

Chandler sighed, "PSYCHO. Now, we know what it is about. But first viewers of the film thought it was about a stolen $40,000."

He smiled knowingly. "That robbery was only to get us into the Bates motel and a lovely young girl in jeopardy. In bloodier and sloppier fashion, the same could be said of FROM DUSK TO DAWN."

Chandler looked from me into Gypsy's heavy-lidded eyes. "The author is a magician, son. You distract with your McGuffin to hit your reader out of the blue with a sudden surprise and delight."

He blew out his cheeks. "But if the magician bores the audience to sleep with too much distraction, they are all nodding off when he pulls the rabbit out of the hat."

I smiled big. "You know, sir, you're the one who taught me how to write dialogue. And now this."

"How much are you paying me?," he smiled crookedly.

"Ah, nothing."

"I'm worth twice that." He grinned and disappeared.
************
Do you care about the rider in this trailer?

CHANDLER HERE_{GHOST OF A CHANCE Overture to the last chapters}_NO GRAVES IN THE SHADOWLANDS

{"If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."
— Ernest Hemingway.}

Chandler here. Raymond Chandler. Or rather his ghost.

I started with that quote from Hemingway because it was too damned appropriate not to.

Samuel Clemens and I are tying up the last chapters to the end of Roland's tale.

If you're wondering where Roland is the next few chapters will tell you.

As you've already read he'd been on the run in the Shadowlands, falsely accused of the murder of Hemingway’s ghost.

The same ghost who had been laughing up his sleeve in Roland’s apartment for a week, pontificating on how to write good literature.

Apparently, he forgot how to live a good life or be a good friend.

No, the truth was worse. He was too jealous of how the ghost of Marlene Dietrich felt about Roland. Today, ironically, is Marlene's birthday.

Hemingway had been rubbing his hands in pure joy as the ghosts closed in for revenge and others in the darkness bayed at the kid’s heels,

seeking to tear the secret of how to kill ghosts from him.

Now, where is Hemingway? On his way to Hell if there's any justice. But there isn't.

Word in the Shadowlands is that he is just walking aimlessly into the darkness, his eyes deep holes into nothingness.

I only have the cold comfort that I knocked him on his arrogant ghost-butt. How did a Hollywood hack like me do that? Easy. I cheated.

I surprised him. I walked into Roland's apartment looking clean, neat, and sober, smiling my best "ain't we chums?" smile. Then, I let him have it with the blackjack in my fist.

He went down hard. Not hard enough.

"Good news, boxer," I grunted. "Word in the Shadowlands is that Roland's dead. Died in the arms of Marlene."

His eyes fought to focus. "Is she --"

"Yeah, hero. She's dead, too. Killed by the one who poisoned you. I hope you're --"

I didn't get the chance to finish. The most godawful yowling came from the head of Roland's bed. Then, I saw her -

Gypsy, his cat, all covered in sand. I could have sworn she hadn't been there when I first came in.

Her head was reared back, her eyes full of tears. Hell, his cat was crying. Crying.

And Gypsy howled like her guts were being cut out of her. I can hear it still. It seemed to go on forever.

I pray to God I never hear such a sound again. She stopped abruptly and looked at me with eyes gone sick and insane.

Then she just slowly faded away into the darkness like an old photograph left out too long in the sun. I shivered. And I knew. I knew.

I would never see his cat again.

I turned to Hemingway as he struggled to his feet, and I managed to get out the words. "Roland trusted you."

My grief and anger were battling so inside my heart, it felt as if I was standing outside myself. "You hid in his apartment, knowing he was being blamed for your murder, knowing he was being hunted by things that would make a pit bull puke."

I realized I was literally shaking with my anger. "You could have stopped this. You should have."

He turned hollow eyes to me. "Right on both counts."

And with that he walked out through Roland's door. And I knew something else. I would never see him again either.

So here I am, sitting in the dark at Roland's laptop. What do I write that would express just what the kid meant to me? It's all too fresh. I - I can't.

There are no graves in the Shadowlands. No place where I can lay one black rose. To die there is to disappear utterly both body and spirit. But I have to do something. Something.

I will sit out on Roland's terrace and look out as the night fog slips away from the bordering bayou.

The rains are over. The fields this far south are still green.

And with my ghost eyes I will look out over the vastness of America to the Hollywood Hills and see snow on the high mountains.

The fur stores will be advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen year-old virgins will be doing a land-office business. In Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees will be slumbering waiting for spring to bloom.

And none of that will matter ... for my friend is dead.

The French have a saying that to say good-bye is to die a little. They are right. I am a ghost, and I thought I was past feeling dead inside. I was wrong.

I think I will always see him driving down lonely roads, sitting in lonely rooms, saddened but never quite defeated.

Down those mean streets he went who was not himself mean, who was neither tarnished nor afraid ... only mortal.
****

THE BAD NEWS ABOUT GOOD GUYS

{VICTOR STANDISH ALERT! :

Victor has been spotted with his ghoul friend, Alice, at MUSINGS OF A PALIINDROME :

http://musingsofapalindrome.blogspot.com/ }

Good guys are boring?," I asked some days back.

Nickie, my co-worker, nodded sagely. "Yep. Boooooring."

We'd been talking my disenchantment with Sookie in the TRUE BLOOD novels.

Bill, her first lover, had suffered near death twice for her, but she is attracked to sociopath vampire, Eric.

"Vampire Bill is boring while Eric is just bad and sexy."

"Uh, he tore apart a guy who was just trying to escape being chained in his cellar.

And then, he got upset when the man's blood ruined his hair's highlighting."

Nickie giggled, "That was so cute."

"What if the guy had been your kid brother? Still cute?"

"Oh that guy was a jerk. He had it coming."

"And the two little children Eric looked down as munchies toward the end of season two? Did they have it coming?"

"Oh, you're as boring as vampire Bill." And Nickie hurried off to try saving LEGEND OF THE SEEKER.


Our conversation got me thinking on how difficult it is to write a non-boring hero or heroine. But being good boring?

Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, once wrote : Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.

I don't know about you, but that's pretty much how it's been for me.

So Niki and actors who moan that good guys are boring don't really mean boring in the obvious sense.

As writers we have to look at heroes through the reader's eyes. And what do they want of their heroes?


To live vicariously through them.

And who wants to suffer through routine living second-hand? We get enough of that up close and personal.

Our failure with heroes is that we make them routine.

What do the readers want from the hero of the novel they're reading?

To live dangerously and to have fun through them by :

Dialogue :

How often have you been stung in a situation, only to come up with the perfect comeback HOURS after the fact?


Think CON-AIR when

Cameron Poe says to agent Larkin :

"Sorry boss, but there's only two men I trust. One of them's me. The other's not you."


Or with Robert B. Parker when Spenser says :

"...You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me."

Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?"
"Hell, no," I said. "Everyone else does."

— Robert B. Parker (The Widening Gyre)

Or when Spenser walks into a TV station's boardroom to see three lawyers sitting on a couch beside one another.

"Which one of you speaks no evil?," I asked. (A Savage Place)

{Side-bar} :

University professor turned writer, Robert B. Parker, had thought-provoking things to say about writers, literature, and life :


“It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write;

he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.”


"Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits.

If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.”


“The advantage of writing a series is that it probably replicates,

for lack of a better word, real life more than most fiction

because most people have a history and know people and come and go and you have a chance to play with the characters and not just the protagonist.

It gives you the opportunity to develop--

lapsing back into academe for a moment--a whole fictive world. Gee, I love saying that now, just keeping my hand in. Fictive world!.”


"I sit down every day and write five pages on my computer.

At some point I found that not outlining worked better than outlining. The outline had become something of a limitation more than it was a support.

When I did the Raymond Chandler book, Poodle Springs, which was in the late eighties, I was trying to do it as Chandler did it,

and since Chandler didn't outline then I thought I won't outline.

If you read Chandler closely you can see that he didn't outline. What the hell happened to that chauffeur in THE BIG SLEEP?

I would recommend to the beginning writer that they should outline because they probably don't have enough self-confidence yet.

But I've been writing now since 1971 and I know that I can think it up. I know it will come."

"It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way."



But I digress ...


What, besides saying snappy dialogue, do readers want to do through their heroes?

To do the extraordinary.

Even if it is in ordinary circumstances. Spit in the eye of the bully. Tweak the nose of a snobbish boss.

Take this scenario :

A tired stone mason sits at a bar run by one of his few friends. Another man sits down beside him. He never looks at our hero, but he pushes a thick manila envelope over to him.

He whispers, "Ten thousand now. Ten thousand after she's dead."

He gets up and slowly walks away. Our hero hurriedly opens the envelope. Sure enough there is the money. And a blown-up photo of a woman from her driver's license.

Our hero gets up to follow the man to see if he can get the license plate number of his car to give to the police. The man is already outside -- getting into a police car.

What does our hero do? What would you do? And so starts the Dean Koontz novel, THE GOOD GUY. (Hey, the title even fits in with my own title of this post.)


There is a hero inside all of us ... if we only know where to look. There is a magentism to your hero of your novel ... if you know where to look. And where is that?

In your heart, friend. In your heart.
***
And in the spirit of this post and the holidays :

FIELDS OF THE NIGHT

Among scars, I am the fresh wound,

Among days, the one that never comes,

Among the bones you find on the beach
the one that sings was mine.

- Lisa Mueller


Fields of the night.

When that midnight of the soul blankets us in the silent, still hours, we explore them.

Some fields are deep valleys. Others are hills winding up into the mists of memory.

Anne Gallagher has written an insightful post on the writer's advice to write what you know :

http://piedmontwriter.blogspot.com/2010/11/write-what-you-know.html

What I know.

I know a good friend was buried today,

a victim of this city's callousness and unconcern. This city has a way of burying its mistakes.

But life mishandled is much like a snake grabbed roughly by the tail. It has a way of turning around and biting you for your arrogance.

The guilty in this case will, soon or late, find that out.

What I know.

Like Raymond Chandler knew his Los Angeles, I know this city in which I live.

Its sprawling expanse cups a beautiful rippling lake which it poisons daily with the petro-chemical plants bordering it much like Mordor did Middle Earth.

If you look up, an eye-aching blue sky will take your breath away. In more ways than one.

It has absorbed the poisonous fumes from endless stacks for so long, breathing the air in a course of the day is like smoking four cigarettes.

City and state politicians swear all is safe. The national newspapers cite the city as capitol of Cancer Alley which runs along the Gulf Coast.

The city is a strange meld of something Tennessee Williams and Upton Sinclair might have written in a joint affair --

emphasis on Tennessee Williams.

One of my older friends was once the "disciplinarian" of the local Hells Angels. And so I have seen a side of the city few have. He was also once a E.M.T. for the one ambulance service here.

Often he told me of dragging into the center, covered in blood, too weary from the many calls to immediately clean up.

He would turn on the TV in the break room and hear the local news proclaim the police stating that all was normal.

He laughed, "I suddenly knew their definition for normal : four car accidents, two shootings, and one fatality."

I have a Non-Aggression Pact with the city.

I don't mess with it. And it considers me too small to notice.

It still possesses great beauty. But like ugly scars criss-crossing a beautiful woman's face, progress slashes away at it.

Terrible poverty and bleak living conditions often within blocks of opulent mansions. The poor turning upon themselves. The oblivious rich attending sprawling, ornate churches.

Business owners committing suicide on the premises of the local casinos after having lost all. Silence on the TV and on the radio.

Jokes among the citizens that the logo of the local TV news is the three monkeys covering eyes, ears, and mouth. The Plants and the casinos feed the city's treasuries.

The city fathers deny that the Cancer rates, ruined lives, and closed businesses even exist.

Then why stay?

It is the city in which I spent my teenage years. All the friends I made, I made here. Here is where I grew to know my mother as one adult knows another.

(If you are wondering : not this city but New Orleans was where I spent my days with Katherine.)

This is the city in which my best friend lives. The common people here have a zest for living that I have seldom met elsewhere. If they hate you, you know it. If they are your friend, they always have your back -- even when it would be smart to look the other way.

They live large. Broad, bold strokes for them. No small, mean snipes. The city loves Mardi Gras so much that it has found a way to have two of them every year.

No ambushes from smiling faces. And the last time I checked, the powerful eat the helpless in every city in every state.

And in a few minutes, you can drive to great expanses of wildernesses.

In fact, one of the last great American wildernesses is only minutes from here : the Creole Nature Trail. { for a more detailed description of it from me go to http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/03/last-exit-to-eden.html. }

Drive it long enough, and you can catch the faint breath of the ocean.

It is like the Great Mystery reminding me this land had once been a clean wilderness, where the waves came in, creamed up to the shore, and their breath smelled of something besides dead birds and fresh-spilled oil.


Now, tonight I sit on the terrace of my apartment, bordering a small rippling bayou,

watching the egrets gracefully settle into the tree branches and beer bottles float listlessly while listening to the voice of the city.


In the distance, the banshee wails of police sirens and ambulances. The night is never silent long here.

In the darkness, somebody is always runing and somebody else is trying to catch him. I look into the blackness

and know somewhere out there, people are hungry, sick, forlorn, desperate with fear or loneliness.

And others are shaken by sobs or anger. Mankind is not very kind.

It is a city no worse than others. A city filled with hope, pride, and ambition. But mostly, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

This is the city that I know.


And to end the night,

here is the haunting melody ADIEMUS set to the all-too fragile beauty of the world, defiant to its impending destruction by the selfish, blind hand of Man :

AGENT REJECTION_ROH MORGON'S MONSTER MASH entry Part I

Here's my entry into Roh Morgon's MONSTER MASH BLOGFEST :

http://www.rohmorgon.com/blog/?p=898


AGENT REJECTION :

New York City. My very first agent. The biggest in publishing, mind you.

And here I was -- in his elegant, spacious ... and much too dark office.

At night.

What was up with that?

Actually, I knew. Courtesy of Raymond Chandler. His ghost really.

He had hated agents in life. Now, in undeath, he hated them even more. Bloodsuckers he called them.

Literally.

Now, was that type casting or what?

Aaron Bael smiled at me. His charm was colder than his eyes, and they were glitttering chips of dry ice.

With his much too long fingers, he patted my manuscript. "Odd term you use in here. 'Revenants' not the more popular, enticing 'Vampires.'"

I nervously toyed with the ball bearing in my left hand and kept from chewing my thick toothpick with an effort of will.

"In my novels, there's nothing sexy, sparkly, or warm about the reanimated dead. How could there be? Humans are their meals not their friends."

Bael nodded. "Just so. And your prose is quite good. Too good not to make large sales."

His smile dropped like a lead weight. "We cannot allow that."

A blur to my left. Fangs at my throat. Fetid breath in my face.

His not-so-lovely assistant. My thumb and forefinger shot the ball bearing into her open, snarling mouth. She hunched over choking.

Living or undead, the gag reflex will not be denied.

I whipped the thick toothpick out of my mouth and jabbed it deep into the back of her left hand still on my shoulder.

She squealed in a wet husk, then thumped bonelessly to the thick carpet like a puppet with the strings cut. She didn't move.

She was as dead as something like her could get.

Popping out of my chair, I backed up, keeping my face to Bael. "Research. Gotta love it."

He flicked an uneasy look to my manuscript. "There really is a lost acupuncture point?"

I nodded. It was the chi in the blood that animated the revenants not the oxygen. Dam the flow of chi in their bodies, and they were short-circuited : dead.

"Yes, and thanks to Tommy's Middle East tour of duty I know it."

His eyes became as flat and soulless as a snake's -- but without as much warmth. "Your precious "League of Five" friend. Well, I have a friend, too."

His canines grew longer. "As I recall, you were quite taken with Miss Lupa, my secretary, and her mini-skirt."

His office door burst open. A snarling she-wolf shambled in, her black business suit hanging from her in tatters.

Reaching slowly into my jacket's inside pocket, I forced a smile. "Honey, your legs were prettier without the fur."

Bael sneered at my hand under my jacket. "You're carrying a gun in New York City?"

I shook my head. "Only criminals get to do that."

I brought out the magnesium flare. "Meet my best-est buddy, Mr. Sunshine-in-a-Stick."

I snapped its end off to bring it to blazing life. Its red glare filled the office. And the same ultraviolet light that burns from the Sun seared the flesh from Bael's screaming, writhing body.

The stench filled the spacious room, making acid bile burn up my throat and into my mouth.

Miss Lupa had seen better days, too.

The ultraviolet light had tricked her body into a "false dawn" dress-down to humanity. But she was caught mid-way, her body changing in spurts to the surges in the flare.

She writhed on the carpet in agony. I couldn't leave her like this.

Thanks to Chandler's ghost, I didn't have to.

I walked gingerly around the still-smoldering Bael and his simply still assistant. I went to the back of the agent's desk to the middle drawer. I pulled it out.

"Only criminals get to do that," I whispered, pulling out the automatic.

Silver bullets in the clip Chandler had assured me. I chambered a round into the barrel.

I walked back to stand over Lupa. She snarled at me, spittle flying from her sharp teeth.

"How many screaming humans have you killed that were helpless to fight back?," I sighed.

"N-Not enough," husked Lupa.

"One was too many," I said low and double-tapped her.

(Unlike politicians, movies sometimes told the truth.)

She stopped wiggling. I looked over to Bael and his assistant. How many dreamers
had they shot down,

not because their work wouldn't sell,

but because it would?

A pounding shook the heavy entrance wooden doors. I went quiet and cold inside.

The zombie security guards Chandler had told me about. I smiled bitterly. No problem.

They only ate brains.

And obviously, no one who opened a can of whoop-ass on revenants and ferals simply for being rejected had any of those.

***

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 28_ALONE IN HELL

***

Elliot Grace had the most clever celebration for hitting 100 followers. I even made it into the post, along with a cast of dozens of fellow bloggers.

Check it out :

http://elliot-grace.blogspot.com/

***

{"We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call;

no way out,

just the upstairs window to look out of

while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it."

- Tennessee Williams.}

{Only I, Samuel Clemens, ghost, am left "alive" to tell the tale.

Roland's strange journal tells what happened after he walked through the cursed Door of Nasah to save McCord,

a fictional character he had breathed to life, from the death in Hell he had written for the man.

Typing these words that I read in Roland's journal, I have come to realize that there are more kinds of Hell than one . Let Roland's words carry on from here ...}



Chicken Little was wrong. The sky wasn't falling. It was on fire.


The sky was midnight black. The clouds were rolling tumbleweeds of flame that howled and crackled with the fury of the seething inferno at their hearts.


If it hadn't been for the illumination of their passing overhead, I wouldn't have been able to see the black sands upon which I stood, hunched over from the buffeting of the hurricane-like winds.


I was on a small rise in an endless horizon of black, steaming sand. There were round humps scattered randomly on the floor of Hell.

In my novel I had called this place "Kol Basar," ancient Hebrew for "the end of all flesh." I had left it for the reader to decide if it were truly hell or not.

I saw all this in a flash. Flames burst from the sands upon which I stood. The other sands merely steamed. I leapt and hit the sands in a roll.

No good. Wherever I hit the sands, they burst into flames. Damn. It seemed my body ignited the sands. The fedora tumbled from my head and flared into a tiny explosion of flame.

Bogey's trenchcoat. It didn't burn.

I bounded to my feet, more flames shooting up from where I now stood. I threw down Marlene's saber and fumbled off the trenchcoat in wild fear, flinging it onto the sands in front of me.

No flames.

Snatching up the saber, I jumped on the trenchcoat. No flames shot from beneath my feet or the trenchcoat. I gushed a huge sigh of relief.

I beat out the flames on my jeans with protesting, seared hands. I straightened slowly. Safe. For the moment.

Then, I saw something impossible.

I saw Gypsy, my cat.

She was off to my left, all wavering like some desert mirage.

I started to call out to her, but a split in the very fabric of reality zippered in front of her before I could.

She bounded through the portal. I looked beyond it and into the world past it. I stiffened.

The ghost of Ernest Hemingway.

He was in my apartment -- and very not dead, for a ghost, that is. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his jaw.

The ghost of Raymond Chandler was standing over him, a blackjack in his right hand. Gypsy leapt to my bed. The portal suddenly closed.

And in that moment, I heard Gypsy howl as if she had been gutted. What the? What had just happened?

{Samuel Clemens here. To find out what Gypsy had been doing in Hell and why she was wailing go to these two posts :

1.) http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/07/gypsys-tale-you-call-this-safe.html

2.) http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/08/chandler-hereghost-of-chance-overtureno.html }

I started to go towards where the portal had been. I placed a foot on black, steaming sand -- and froze in sudden fear of my stupidity.

No flames. I frowned.

My bent notepad jutted painfully into me from my pocket. What had I written? That I would become as tough, as strong, and as fast as whatever I met here.

The mother of Gypsy and daughter of Bast, Mesmer, had told me Gypsy was no ordinary cat. I made a face. I tapped an unburnt foot on the sands of Hell.

Not ordinary? You think?

A horse's scream of utter pain pierced the strange night from behind me. I turned.

I had expected to see another endless horizon of smoldering black sand. Not for the first time, I had been wrong.


A city.


A strange walled city, appearing like something older than Troy, more cursed than Sodom.


Odd runes were etched large in the cracked marble of its towering walls.

Looking at it sent icy prickles just under my scalp as if I remembered it from those nightmares I had flung from memory upon awakening.


I shivered.


A terrible shrill wailing pierced through the howl of the hellstorm. I looked up.


Huge flying boulders, aflame with electric blue energies, angled towards the sands beyond me from up high in the midnight sky.

I ducked instinctively, then laughed at myself. It was obvious they were going to miss me.


But not by much. Their impact staggered me from the reflected force of the strikes. Hell certainly wasn't turning out to be boring.


I made a face. Not that I had expected it to be. Truth in advertising and all.


The horse screamed again. It had come from within that strange city. I picked up Bogey's trenchcoat and hurriedly put it on.


Another wail of agony from the horse. I bent and picked up a steaming fistful of black hellsand with my left hand.

I twirled Marlene's saber in anger. Somebody was going to do some regretting besides me for a change.


I headed to the cracked marble walls of Hell.
***