WHY ZOMBIES?

*

Candilynn Fite

http://cfitewrite.blogspot.com/

pointed out that the CDC had a

PREPARE FOR THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE announcement last year.

I still have it on my sidebar actually.

Zombies seem the next big thing. Alice Wentworth is eagerly awaiting for the craze to turn to ghouls. She could just eat up her new fans ... literally.

Why are we attracted to monsters?

No, I’m not talking about our love life. Ah, maybe I am. But that’s another post entirely.

We are drawn to monsters in our entertainment. Hannibal Lector. Dexter. Edward of TWILIGHT infamy, sparkles and all.

It is the allure of the forbidden. Hence the cover of the first TWILIGHT : outstretched hands holding a bright red apple. The eternal battle : “What I knew was right” vs. “What I wanted.”

We search for the humanity in the attractive monster : yes, he does terrible things, but never to me.

Samuel McCord chides the ghoul, Alice Wentworth, that Victor is basically a Walking Happy Meal to her. Bella is the same thing to Edward.

Should she have chosen Jacob, she would have had to walk on eggshells never to make him angry to escape the scars another mortal woman received who had the misfortune to love a werewolf.

In the latest TWILIGHT trailer, Bella said while alive she was too ordinary. Now, that she is an undead predator, she feels special. Bella has issues.

Sure, vampires are sexy. And what a compliment that a sexy man wants your company when he could just as easily have you for dinner.

Our attraction to sexy vampires can be understood.

A vampire Megan Fox would be hard to refuse a nibble on the neck, if sips were all she planned to take. But the ghoul, Megan Fox, is hardly sexy when she develops an appetite for bad, and ultimately, good boys in JENNIFER’S BODY.

Vampires are the ultimate Bad Boy in many urban fantasies today.

Many women want to believe that the right woman could tame even a blood-thirsty monster … at least enough to be the ultimate protector, provider, and lover.

As a former counselor, I cannot stress enough how unrealistic and dangerous that is.

But it sells books.

It just isn’t true to the male nature. But it is a wish that is understandable since most of those novels are written by women –

Who have to guess at the nature of males as men have to with the nature of females.

But then there is our puzzling fascination with zombies.

Zombies embody an “all consuming evil” (pun intended.) A malevolent evil with no mercy, regard, or compassion … only hunger.

Worse.

If you are only infected instead of ingested, you become one of the hungry dead yourself! No sense of family, friend, or even of yourself.

And you develop terrible table manners!

Zombies are not unlike a force of Nature … and Nature has become unsettlingly dangerous these past months as we remember Japan, New Zealand, and Katrina.

So perhaps we are drawn to the zombie movie because the zombie reflects the all-too-real terrors in our newspaper headlines. Just as you cannot reason with a zombie, threaten its family or its further living … the same can be said of a terrorist.

Terrorists keep on coming until you kill them. The same can be said for the deranged killer who stalks into a schoolroom and begins to open fire with automatic weapons.

Zombies provide similar evils … but non-threatening since they could never exist. We can work out our fears of terrorists, muggers, and insane gunmen in the dark of the movie theater.

We can ask ourselves what would we do in a Zombie Apocalypse, who would we take with us, what we would take, and where would we go. In the unspoken thoughts of our minds, we translate that into a Nuclear War/Natural Disaster Apocalypse.

We identify with the survivors in the zombie movies. We want to believe that we would survive in such a crucible. And deep down that supports our fearful hope that we would survive should Nature, Nuclear War, or terrorism reign over our landscape.

Who would have thought it?

Zombies as therapy!

*this image & the film, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, are in the public domain.

Source: Due to the filmmakers' neglect of the (former) requirement to put proper notice on copies of their work, this image & the film it's from are in the public domain

Don't forget about GHOST OF A CHANCE: (Now #41 on Amazon's 100 Best Selling Angel Novels!)
http://www.amazon.com/GHOST-OF-A-CHANCE-ebook/dp/B0097Z99YM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1347238534&sr=1-1&keywords=ghost+of+a+chance+roland+yeomans

***

ZOMBIES AS THERAPY!

Why are we attracted to monsters?

No, I’m not talking about our love life. Ah, maybe I am. But that’s another post entirely.

We are drawn to monsters in our entertainment. Hannibal Lector. Dexter. Edward of TWILIGHT infamy, sparkles and all.

It is the allure of the forbidden. Hence the cover of the first TWILIGHT : outstretched hands holding a bright red apple. The eternal battle : “What I knew was right” vs. “What I wanted.”

We search for the humanity in the attractive monster : yes, he does terrible things, but never to me.

Samuel McCord chides the ghoul, Alice Wentworth, that Victor is basically a Walking Happy Meal to her. Bella is the same thing to Edward.

Should she have chosen Jacob, she would have had to walk on eggshells never to make him angry to escape the scars another mortal woman received who had the misfortune to love a werewolf.

Sure, vampires are sexy. And what a compliment that a sexy man wants your company when he could just as easily have you for dinner.

Our attraction to sexy vampires can be understood.

A vampire Megan Fox would be hard to refuse a nibble on the neck, if sips were all she planned to take. But the ghoul, Megan Fox, is hardly sexy when she develops an appetite for bad, and ultimately, good boys in JENNIFER’S BODY.

Vampires are the ultimate Bad Boy in many urban fantasies today.

Many women want to believe that the right woman could tame even a blood-thirsty monster … at least enough to be the ultimate protector, provider, and lover.

As a former counselor, I cannot stress enough how unrealistic and dangerous that is.

But it sells books.

It just isn’t true to the male nature. But it is a wish that is understandable since most of those novels are written by women –

Who have to guess at the nature of males as men have to with the nature of females.

But then there is our puzzling fascination with zombies.

Zombies embody an “all consuming evil” (pun intended.) A malevolent evil with no mercy, regard, or compassion … only hunger.

Worse.

If you are only infected instead of ingested, you become one of the hungry dead yourself! No sense of family, friend, or even of yourself.

And you develop terrible table manners!

Zombies are not unlike a force of Nature … and Nature has become unsettlingly dangerous these past months as we remember Japan, New Zealand, and Katrina.

So perhaps we are drawn to the zombie movie because the zombie reflects the all-too-real terrors in our newspaper headlines. Just as you cannot reason with a zombie, threaten its family or its further living … the same can be said of a terrorist.

Terrorists keep on coming until you kill them. The same can be said for the deranged killer who stalks into a schoolroom and begins to open fire with automatic weapons.

Zombies provide similar evils … but non-threatening since they could never exist. We can work out our fears of terrorists, muggers, and insane gunmen in the dark of the movie theater.

We can ask ourselves what would we do in a Zombie Apocalypse, who would we take with us, what we would take, and where would we go. In the unspoken thoughts of our minds, we translate that into a Nuclear War/Natural Disaster Apocalypse.

We identify with the survivors in the zombie movies. We want to believe that we would survive in such a crucible. And deep down that supports our fearful hope that we would survive should Nature, Nuclear War, or terrorism reign over our landscape.

Who would have thought it?

Zombies as therapy!

***

SECRETS ONLY THE DEAD MAY KNOW_3rd entry RULE OF THREE blogfest

http://jc-martin.com/fighterwriter/2011/10/ren3-round-3-prompts-pay-it-forward-blogfest-and-upcoming-book-trailer/


There is the dark born of midnight.

There is the Dark born of souls having consumed themselves.

That Dark is midwife to a never-ending hunger for the souls of others. That Dark resides in Renaissance, a nexus between our world and many others.

Three heroes are all that stand between that Hunger and this world. Listen to the 600 words of one of them, the one who understands that Hunger the most : the Victorian ghoul, Alice Wentworth …


There are sounds only the dead may utter. Secrets only the dead may know. Still I do not comprehend why Victor insisted on walking blithely into this ambush.

Not as the living do the dead see : one moment frozen after another. It is why we are distanced from the hearts of the living.

Except for Victor Standish.

My Victor, of the gypsy laugh and poet’s heart. Our love breaks the chain of reason. But deep in my dry bones, I know that love will one night break my heart … as I eat his.

This frozen moment may spare us that …

I see Renaissance’s mayor thrust Maija into the onrushing hungry soul-echoes.

“Ningyo whore! My father’s race cast yours out of their dimension. Did you think I would ally myself with you? Come, Citizens, feast!”

As Maija tumbles to the floor, he laughs, “All you touch you can drain. All that is water you control. They are ghosts, filth. Now, you die.”

Thunder rumbles as Captain McCord growls, “You first.”

His strange Colt bellows. I clutch my ears as if the sound itself would kill me. I watch as the Mayor grabs his chest. I have never seen the like. With the swirling of an open drain he seems to spin into nothingness.

McCord yells, “Maija, they are echoes of life but life still. They shape themselves from mist. What is mist but ….”

She smiles like a released demon, “Water!”

Even I, who live off the flesh of the living, am sickened by the atrocities she inflicts on the screaming soul-echoes.

Victor laughs, “Boy, you guys picked the wrong dance partners!”

The survivors laugh themselves as they turn to one who appears helpless. My Victor helpless? Never! Not while I stand by his side.

They halt as I flow to them. They thought me ghoul. Fools. Not ghoul. Not ghost. Not revenant. I am unique.

Shaped by my mother’s mishandling of voodoo to make me a zombie, I became Other … when Victor’s mother took me for hers.

My hunger is about to be satisfied. I stiffen as Victor smiles. This is why he walked into certain death … to feed the one he … loves. Tears burn my eyes.

I am loved.

I turn hotly to them and speak words only the dead may hear. “I am not ghoul, leeches. What am I?”

I feel my lips pull up in a Cheshire grin. “I am the far end of the graveyard where the nettles grow. I am the Jester in the Theater of Bone. I AM HELL TO PAY!”

I sweep over them like the Death that took the first-born in Egypt. I flick undead eyes to McCord. He had been speaking to me as well to let me know I could … eat them. So I do.

His strange Colt bellows. Maija laughs hellishly. The soul-echoes scream.

I eat.

Suddenly, ball bearings, washed in the Waterfall of Eden, pepper the air behind me. A blur of movement. I smile. Victor is twirling in what he calls, in his quaint way,

a Full Arabian Cartwheel. He lands lightly behind me as three soul-echoes learn that acupressure can kill the undead.

He laughs like a gypsy. “Alice, you have to watch that lovely … behind of yours.”

I give Victor one of his winks. “Why ever should I do that? You watch it enough for the two of us.”

He smiles wide and kisses me. I wait with dread heart for his lips to flinch from my cold ones. But they do not.

Not even a little.
***
Alice, being a gracious Victorian ghoul, used all 4 prompts in her narration :

•The impending misfortune foreshadowed in the 1st set of prompts comes to pass, but one or more characters laugh at it.

•Betrayal is in the air.

•Relationships unravel or strengthen.

•A long-kept secret is revealed

***

THE WALKING DEAD makes me ask WHY ZOMBIES?

My fascination, and many others', with THE WALKING DEAD

makes me ask,

WHY ZOMBIES?

The undead.

They captivate us.

The appeal to vampires is obvious :

even Bram Stoker, who coined the term "undead," painted Dracula as sexy and seductive (at least in London).

Don't get me started on the "sparkly" ones.

While most vampires are etched as lovely, though deadly, predators, what is up with our fascination with zombies?

They are Id's brought to hungry life : only appetite, no morals or guidelines. And terrible table manners.

Why are we so obsessed with zombies? They are not seductive, not appealing, what with body parts missing or rotting away as you watch.

Zombies symbolize those threats like actual skin-eating diseases,

terrorist bombs,

and natural disasters like the promised California SuperStorm that will someday in the future dump ten FEET of rain over 30 days.

Zombies symbolize our fears of death that will not be reasoned or threatened away.

Does immersing ourselves in zombie movies give us an illusion of some measure of control over death, cancer, and other all-too-real threats in our modern lives?

Seeing teens surrounded in a cabin by milling, moaning zombies, we know that soon those pretty girls will be either eaten or transformed into eternally hungry zombies.

And in a sense, we, the viewer, have become with them Death in our imaginations : unstoppable, forces of nature, unthinking.

But the zombie is never at rest : like a shark, it must continually shamble in search of prey or it will die.

Then, take little Karen Cooper (please, you take her 'cuz me and Victor want nothing to do with the little munchkin), from the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD :

Newly undead, the zombie girl happily starts to feast on her father's arm, then lay waste to her mother with a trowel of all things. There is something deeply unsettling about seeing an innocent child turn to a flesh-eating monster in front of your eyes.

Which is why I used the Zombie Playground picture in yesterday's post :

http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2011/10/walking-dead-meets-victor-standish.html


This, for me, is the worst facet of becoming a zombie : it robs you of your identity, of your sense of self.

Is our fascination with zombies an extension of 21st century Man's self-loathing? Or do we place ourselves in the roles of the survivors?

What would we do in their place? We revel in their violence against those shambling things which are already dead. We can mutilate and destroy with no regret, no remorse.

Or is it that zombies offer us the ultimate crucible : that arena which hones our characters and our souls into something better or into something infinitely worse than zombies -- a knowing evil against our brothers?

I already know what Victor Standish thinks about this. But don't be too sure you know. Remember his "ghoul friend," Alice. What do you think?
***

LOVE SEES UNDER THE MASK_friday's romantic entry

The iron tongue of midnight tolls hauntingly beyond my apartment terrace.


The meandering bayou betrays its existence only by the wavering reflection of the almost full moon.


The night-cloaked owl keeps asking its one word question. “WHO?”


Who are we? Who will ever love us?


Francine and Denise gives us the prompt FIRST LOVE to spark this Friday’s romantic post.

http://fridaynightwriters.blogspot.com/


Victor Standish’s lonely heart bleeds the ink that this post is needing. As the story begins, midnight is tolling, too. By the crypt of Marie Laveau.


He has just met the Victorian ghoul, Alice Wentworth, for the first time. Her stomach growling for his flesh, she hesitates to feast on this lonely-eyed teen. She asks what brings him to her graveyard.



I hitched myself up on a marble slab and patted the place next to me. “Pull up a seat. It’s a long story.”


She flowed like mist beside me. I reached out and softly took her left hand. Saying a silent prayer, I rolled my eyes into the back of my head and pressed her hand against my heart. Maybe I could do a type of encore of what had happened in front of Marie Laveau’s crypt.


Sometimes in life you get more than you ask for.


I stiffened as a swirling sea of her emptiness, her loneliness, her joy at being in touch with another hurt spirit swept me up. And I drew her into me,


into my memories of burnt out ends of smoky days laced with pain and struggle, of the withered leaves of others’ masquerades, of the tiny thousand misunderstandings and clumsy gropings of my heart to the life-hardened hearts of others.


The autumn world of my days on the streets came rising up over the dark horizon of my regrets. Lost friends, mocking enemies, the haunted, loving eyes of Mother. The snap of the neck that cost me Suze and brought the mysterious undead Captain Sam into my life.


The yellowed papers of memory curled up around us from Detroit, to Cleveland, to Boston, to that strange bus ride to New Orleans.


The light of relief and hope shot through the black shutters of fear and loneliness as images of me wandering lost through the madness that was Meilori’s. Dim figures of Billie Holliday and Daniel Webster wavered before us like shimmering mirages of fear.


My sort of betrayal by Elu, my being an unwilling teaching aid for Strasser, Toya’s hot jealousy, my losing everything as I decided that for Captain Sam to live I had to die.


The cry of Alice’s lonely heart calling out to me as she struggled to escape her own private hell. Her spooky entrance into my life. My confusion. My own loneliness reaching out to hers.


The circle completing its circuit. Resurfacing from the waters of shared spirits as I gently pulled her hand from my chest. Our fingers parting. The shiver of separation as her pale face looked at me haunted.


I shivered as our union shattered left me soul-cold. Alice was shivering as well. My head was spinning. Something was wrong with my heart.


It wasn’t empty anymore.


What had I done to me?


Maybe you couldn’t see, really see, into someone without it changing you. And you couldn’t show them the you that you really were without the two of you never being the same anymore.


I looked into her strange neon blue eyes. My changed heart skipped a beat. She was looking … looking at me as if she was feeling the same. Her eyelids lowered slightly. Her hand softened around mine. She squeezed it soft. So soft.


A wild thought came to me.


I grabbed all the courage and desperation I had stored in my bruised heart and decided to go for it.


I brought her cold, cold hand up to my lips and kissed it. Her fingers were quivering. Or was that my lips?


Alice’s lower lip trembled. “How could you?”


“C-Could I what?”


She took her hand from mine and softly traced the line of one of Strasser’s cuts on my left cheek. “Turn out so special?”

***

THIS IS RENAISSANCE? Rule of THREE blogfest entry

Damyanti and Stuart H. Nager

originated this whole thing; Lisa and JC were invited to join them after the concept was done.

JC was the last to join in, as she was on her honeymoon and it took awhile for her to connect.

They DID contribute, but they did not create the blogfest nor the idea of Renaissance.

That was already established: stories done within the same mythical town, RENAISSANCE.

{Sorry for the earlier misunderstanding. Oh, so there's no misunderstanding again -- I am not competing for the prizes. Like Victor Standish, I race for the pure joy of it.}

http://jc-martin.com/fighterwriter/2011/09/rule-of-three-blogfest-1st-set-of-prompts/

I especially find it interesting since all of my novels exist in the same mythic universe, too.

And so to join in the festivities with my 600 word entry, I have selected THREE of my heroes --

Ouch! All right, Alice : two heroes and One HEROINE to fend for themselves in the eerie community of RENAISSANCE.


"This is Renaissance?,” said Victor Standish, his face puckering as if he had bitten into a pickle.


He had a point. I had brought us to the woods bordering the Country Club, a modest monument to the greed and prejudice of the White Man only a little less large than a football field. I made a pickle-face myself.

White Man?

I had been spending too much time with my Apache blood-brother, Elu. I eyed the black mists curling and creaming in the night air like an unspoken fear trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness. A trick of the polluted air, the moon of blood leered down upon its reflection on the black waters of the bordering lake.

That same moon struck fire from the silver trimming to Alice Wentworth’s black Gothic Lolita dress. “It does not seem proper to slip unnoticed into the ballroom.”

I smiled. Alice might be a ghoul, but she was a prim and proper Victorian ghoul. Victor winked at her.

“It’ll be fun.”

She frowned like a disapproving librarian. “Of course to you it will be fun. It is underhanded and sly.”

He laughed, “That’s me, all right.”

He looked puzzled up at me. “Captain Sam, why couldn’t we travel by bus here?”

I nodded to the west, “ The Schiavona Desert is that way, home of the native affrit.”

Victor went pale. “Merde.”

Alice whispered, “Who are the affrit?”

“Demons,” he whispered back.

Alice strangely long fingers went to her mouth. “Oh, my!”

Victor pointed east. “There?”

“A once-lush forest, the Culdee.”

Victor swallowed hard. “Once?”

“A meteor slammed into it. An Old One was slumbering in its center.”

I met Victor’s widening eyes. “The impact awakened it.”

Victor waved a shaky hand. “Bus rides are too bumpy anyway.”

Alice quavered, “What he said.”

While they were distracted, I folded space like a tablecloth. My head went light. The marrow in my bones became acid. But we were inside without being molested by any … surprises.

I had brought us to a modest drawing room the size of Missouri. Rubies and diamonds sparkled on ivory throats and wrists like drippings from the sea. The graceless noise of the latest pop music was interlaced with the rise and fall of empty conversation and brittle laughter.

I looked at the ebb and tide of desire upon wealth, greed upon opportunity. The social elite milling through the room seemed to be talking against a darkness that pressed in on them or pressed to escape from within.

“This part of Renaissance used to be a ghost town,” I said low.

Victor eyed a portly businessman slipping off his wedding ring as he approached a girl hardly old enough to be a cheerleader with a dress just as short.

“It’s plain to see decency sure died here.”

A voice sneered to my left, “It is only the superficial qualities that entice. Man’s deeper nature always is rancid in some fashion. Isn’t that right, Captain McCord?”

I turned to the Mayor with no desire to argue morality with a creature without any. “Tell our hostess that we’re here.”

Alice frowned, “We were invited specifically?”

Victor winked at her. “Could you say that last word again. Your British accent makes it sound so sexy.”

She sighed, “For once forget your hormones. This is obviously a trap if we were asked for with the good Captain.”

A velvet voice without any hint of humanity laughed, “Oh, how good of you three to come so meekly to your deaths.”

Alice squeaked, “Maija.”

Victor groaned, “Alice, I hate it when you’re right.”
***

ZOMBIES AS THERAPY!

Why are we attracted to monsters?

No, I’m not talking about our love life. Ah, maybe I am. But that’s another post entirely.

We are drawn to monsters in our entertainment. Hannibal Lector. Dexter. Edward of TWILIGHT infamy, sparkles and all.

It is the allure of the forbidden. Hence the cover of the first TWILIGHT : outstretched hands holding a bright red apple. The eternal battle : “What I knew was right” vs. “What I wanted.”

We search for the humanity in the attractive monster : yes, he does terrible things, but never to me.

Samuel McCord chides the ghoul, Alice Wentworth, that Victor is basically a Walking Happy Meal to her. Bella is the same thing to Edward.

Should she have chosen Jacob, she would have had to walk on eggshells never to make him angry to escape the scars another mortal woman received who had the misfortune to love a werewolf.

Sure, vampires are sexy. And what a compliment that a sexy man wants your company when he could just as easily have you for dinner.

Our attraction to sexy vampires can be understood.

A vampire Megan Fox would be hard to refuse a nibble on the neck, if sips were all she planned to take. But the ghoul, Megan Fox, is hardly sexy when she develops an appetite for bad, and ultimately, good boys in JENNIFER’S BODY.

Vampires are the ultimate Bad Boy in many urban fantasies today.

Many women want to believe that the right woman could tame even a blood-thirsty monster … at least enough to be the ultimate protector, provider, and lover.

As a former counselor, I cannot stress enough how unrealistic and dangerous that is.

But it sells books.

It just isn’t true to the male nature. But it is a wish that is understandable since most of those novels are written by women –

Who have to guess at the nature of males as men have to with the nature of females.

But then there is our puzzling fascination with zombies.

Zombies embody an “all consuming evil” (pun intended.) A malevolent evil with no mercy, regard, or compassion … only hunger.

Worse.

If you are only infected instead of ingested, you become one of the hungry dead yourself! No sense of family, friend, or even of yourself.

And you develop terrible table manners!

Zombies are not unlike a force of Nature … and Nature has become unsettlingly dangerous these past months as we remember Japan, New Zealand, and Katrina.

So perhaps we are drawn to the zombie movie because the zombie reflects the all-too-real terrors in our newspaper headlines. Just as you cannot reason with a zombie, threaten its family or its further living … the same can be said of a terrorist.

Terrorists keep on coming until you kill them. The same can be said for the deranged killer who stalks into a schoolroom and begins to open fire with automatic weapons.

Zombies provide similar evils … but non-threatening since they could never exist. We can work out our fears of terrorists, muggers, and insane gunmen in the dark of the movie theater.

We can ask ourselves what would we do in a Zombie Apocalypse, who would we take with us, what we would take, and where would we go. In the unspoken thoughts of our minds, we translate that into a Nuclear War/Natural Disaster Apocalypse.

We identify with the survivors in the zombie movies. We want to believe that we would survive in such a crucible. And deep down that supports our fearful hope that we would survive should Nature, Nuclear War, or terrorism reign over our landscape.

Who would have thought it?

Zombies as therapy!

***

WRITE THE VICTOR STANDISH WAY

Victor Standish here. Where's Roland you ask?

Well, he's a bit under the weather.

In fact, he says he's so under the weather that he's got the bends!

As to where Roland is, he's so ill

even he doesn't quite know,

except that it is somewhere in the vicinity of the backend of an 8 ball.

So being his bud, here I am.


But what do I know about writing? Hey, I'm Victor Standish, and I live on the streets of the French Quarter by knowing plenty.

Including how to write.

Quit snickering, Alice.


Think about it :

what you need to write well you already know just from living.

I.) Like Elu, my Apache grouch of a teacher, would say :

A.) To master yourself is the 1st step in mastering story-telling.

B.) In other words : life skills are story skills.

C.) You don't have to take lessons like with tennis to survive on the streets.

D.) But what you do need to know :

1.) Mind your surroundings before they mind you.

2.) Be aware of the pattern of predators before you become prey.

3.) Routes of escape : spot the exit soon as you slip through the front door.

E.) Put those details into your story, and it will seem real.

(But it won't be real ...)

II.) Good story telling seems real but isn't :

A.) It's Compressed

1.) Unlike life, a good story is compressed.
The interesting stuff is linked 1-2-3 ... with all the boring stuff left out.

2.) Unlike life, a good story makes sense.

a.) If your life is like mine (and I feel sorry for you if it is) then most days are filled with things that flat don't make sense.

b.) A good story has to make sense if you want your reader to stay with you ...

those three ghosts promised at the beginning of THE CHRISTMAS CAROL had darn well better show up.

3.) Unlike life, a good story is focused :

Target on those happenings that are important to your hero. Ouch! OK, Alice ... or to your heroine, too.

a.) Focus in a good story leaves out all those irritating things that don't push the story forward.

b.) No hands (or details) pushing sideways on my stalled car, please.

B.) All reality doesn't contain truth -- I mean, listen to those politicians.

1.) But your story has to ring with truth in order
to sell it as real to your reader.

2.) And it must fit the story type you're writing :

You don't try to fit an eagle in a parakeet cage or a pit bull in a terrier's doghouse.

3.) Knowing what size canvas you need is what prose painting is all about.
It'd be hard to write about the air war in WWI through the eyes of a soldier who spends the story in the trenches, coughing up nerve gas.

III.) Good story telling first depends on you having a good story that grabs the reader and won't let him go.

FOR EXAMPLE --

A.) Some woman in Wal-Mart cut in front of me in the 20 item line. And get this : she had 21 items. (Yawn.)

B.) Some crazy lady in Wal-Mart pulled a gun on me and took all my money, then she shot the clerk as she ran away. She turned to me as she flew out of the door, and you'll never guess what she yelled at me.

1.) That's a story that you NEED to tell.

2.) More importantly, that's a story people WANT to hear and to know what happened next.

IV.) A good story is closure.

A.) Closure -- yeah, that funny sounding word you adults use all the time when the pain hurts too bad to get your mind around it.

B.) You want to know Victor Standish's definition of closure (even though, like Huck Finn, I don't do school)? :

Closure is just a kid-glove way of saying "making the equation come out right."

You know, X + 5B = 3Y ("Unsupervised Politician + Lots of Money = Theft.)

C.) Finding a meaningful outcome for rape, murder,

or a mother abandoning her son in mean city after mean city.

You know, like that.

V.) A good story doesn't necessarily have a happy outcome ...

Just a way of living with it

or

Dying because of it.

(I've seen some people who could only find closure in the grave.)

A.) Sometimes tears are the only way to finish the story, the moment, the situation.

B.) Sometimes tears are the only answer to the equation of life.

VI.) But life, like a math test, always has new problems to solve.

A.) And so does the good story.

B.) The closure of it only leads the reader in search of another connection, another good story.

C.) Seeing the road going on for some or all of the main characters leaves the reader feeling as if she had dropped in on the events of real people

with real lives that go on over the horizon.

VII.) Leave them hungry for more ...

Speaking of hungry, I hear growling ...

Ah, Alice, is that your stomach growling?

Alice? Alice!

Don't look at my fingers like that.

Sure, you're a ghoul. But you're my ghoul FRIEND.

What do you mean I wouldn't miss one little finger?

Hey, Roland! Quick! Where's the roughest street around here? Fast!

Damn. I bet Harry Potter never had problems like this!
***

Love theme for Captain Sam and his lost love, Meilori :

A KNIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS

A KNIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS by Victor Vasnetsov has long been a favorite painting of mine.

It speaks to me now.

This morning I queried an agent for my Urban Fantasy, FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE.

Thirty minutes, yes that's right, thirty minutes later,

she said she would have to pass as she has recently SOLD an Urban Fantasy SERIES set in post Katrina New Orleans.


A colorful metaphor came to mind and a dense fogbank of depression rolled across my chest.

Someone else was going to publish a New Orleans Urban Fantasy set after Katrina before me --

if ever I would be picked by an agent and then a publisher.

But I told myself that four agents had asked me to send them my novel : two asked for partials and two for complete manuscripts. That said something positive, didn't it?

I sat in front of my computer brooding when Vasnetsov's painting appeared in my mind's eye.

I was at the crossroads. Did I choose the path of my fears? Or did I choose the path of my beliefs?

Following my fears would lead me nowhere I wanted to go. Choosing to believe in myself had seen me out of a burning home, dragging my 80 pound unconscious Elk hound across a blazing floor,

my own face and hands badly burned.

In fact, believing in myself had led me through so many dark valleys, I couldn't picture them all.

This unknown writer might have lived through Katrina on the streets of New Orleans as I had. But he/she didn't have my voice, my perceptions, and my take on human nature.

It takes more than details to paint a moving picture of a locale. I saw the ragged edge of New Orleans during Katrina through my own filter of meaning and worldview.

Then the soft voice of my protagonist, Samuel McCord, seemed to whisper a reminder that the man who cleared leather first in a gunfight wasn't always the one to hit his target and live.

Besides, the adventures of my undead Texas Ranger, cursed with the blood of Death in his veins, aren't limited to just New Orleans of 2005. I have finished two earlier novels already --

You can buy them on Amazon and read them on your computer or your Kindle. I have many more in various stages of completion:

RITES OF PASSAGE -

My Kindle historical fantasy details the haunted voyage of the DEMETER in 1853 from New Orleans, its destination Paris, a city it never reaches.

A fantasy TITANIC, it details how McCord's blood mingles with the blood of the angel of death and his first meeting with the great love of his life, the immortal Meilori Shinseen, and with DayStar, the being fated to be his life-long enemy.

ADRIFT IN THE TIME STREAM -

the sequel to RITES where the DEMETER finds itself becalmed in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, where every door to the ship leads to a different time, a different place. And McCord must learn how to tap into the power of his altered blood to bend the fabric of time to save those he can. This dark historical fantasy you can also buy from Amazon.

IN A WORLD OF SHADOWS -

describes the prison breakout of Oscar Wilde from Reading Goal and the literal Hell which ensues.

Of course it is McCord who does the deed, aided by his life-long friend Samuel Langhorn Clemens {Mark Twain}, the two having met Wilde during his American tour of the West in 1882.

And the adventures that follow Wilde's rescue give birth to Twain's famous saying : "No good deed goes unpunished." I have completed the synopsis and first three chapters of this fantasy.

HITLER's HERO -

set in 1929 Venice, it details the adventures of a reluctant McCord, Father Renfield, and Meilori attempting to derail a plot by Heinrich Himmler to switch souls with the Fuhrer based on a strange verse handwritten by Wagner himself on the composer's original notes for THE FLYING DUTCHMAN. I have completed the synopsis and first chapter of this fantasy.

FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE -

I have completed this Urban Fantasy,

detailing McCord's struggle with politicians, revenant empires, and his lifelong enemy, DayStar, closing in for a final revenge on the days following Hurricane Katrina.

CREOLE KNIGHTS ELEGY -

NOCTURNE's sequel that details the encroaching war between the American and European revenant empires

as McCord deals with a New Orleans struggling to survive the aftermath of Katrina and DayStar setting into motion his grand scheme to destroy the species of Man.

McCord must rescue the Angel of Death herself from the clutches of his lifelong enemy, DayStar, in the realm some call Hell. This urban fantasy is already completed.

THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH -

is a Young Adult fantasy told through the eyes of ten year old abandoned Viktor Standish as he is befriended by McCord and the Ranger's undead circle of friends in the days prior to Hurricane Katrina.

Picture it as AUNTIE MAME meets HARRY DRESDEN meets JANE EYRE. This YA urban fantasy is also completed.

VICTOR'S NOT JUST MY NAME -

The adventures of Victor Standish and his Victorian "ghoul friend" continues as Victor battles evolved raptors, Empress Theodora, the ghost of President John Adams, and the revenge of the Old Ones for his killing of one of their hybrid children. I am half-finished with this YA urban fantasy.

So, all in all, the scope of Captain Samuel McCord's adventures

spans over two hundred years, criss-crosses the major continents, and delves into the arcane reality of most of the world's diverse mythologies.

So I am going to follow the path of belief in myself. I truly feel that whatever publisher decides to pick up my series will more than get their money's worth.

And speaking of Cowboys clashing with genres :

MIDNIGHT AT THE CRYPT OF MARIE LAVEAU

Some of my new friends have asked me how Victor first met the Victorian ghoul, Alice Wentworth.

It began at the crypt of Marie Laveau at midnight days before Hurricane Katrina.

Victor is there because he has believed the lie that for his hero, Sam McCord, to live, he must die. And he has heard the whispered rumors that to visit Marie Laveau's crypt at midnight was to die :



Once again, I was alone.

I looked around. I didn’t know what I expected to see. It was a cemetery at night. Cue the spooky music. I snorted at myself. I was playing it tough because I was scared spitless.

I had been in New Orleans long enough to know some of the legends.

Marie Laveau had ruled as absolute Voodoo Queen during most of the 1800’s. Voodoo might sound silly now. But back then, brrr.

It reached into politics and pockets, being a cold-blooded business. And Marie Laveau was reported to have been a cold-blooded business woman. She was one of the few women of color to own pieces of property – expensive places.

But Voodoo was first and foremost a religion. One you didn’t cross. Like I was crossing it now.

I looked around St. Louis Cemetery. Which crypt was Marie Laveau’s? And how far away was midnight?

I remembered they called this place the City of the Dead. Catchy name. But not anything you’d dance to … unless it was to the danse macabre.

Damn, this place was quiet. I walked softly. There. To my right. A crypt with a dozen X’s carved into its stone face. And wreaths of flowers hanging from all four corners.

Gris-Gris.

That’s what they called the flowers and other things left at her tomb. I snorted. I bet I was the biggest gris-gris ever left at her tomb.

I stumbled. My head was suddenly even lighter than it had been earlier tonight when Meilori’s blossomed like a tower out of Hell. What was wrong with me?

I needed to sit down. I walked over to what I took to be Marie Laveau’s crypt and sat down with my back pressed to its marred face. I had a hard time believing how much had happened in just a few hours.

I had gone from being sure I was dead to feeling hope for the first time in years. I had felt wanted with a chance of an adopted family. My eyes grew hot and wet. Stupid. I had been stupid. Homes were for other kids. Not me.

My head spun. What was going on? Maybe it was being surrounded by all this death. Death seemed to stalk our family. Every boyfriend Mother got seemed to die in some terrible way.

I smiled bitterly. I had the answer. Mother was the Angel of Death. Yeah, she just couldn’t take me on her rounds. That was the reason she dumped me all the time.

I snorted at myself. Yeah, right. Mother’s boyfriends turned up dead all the time because they were the ultimate bad boys – the only ones Mother seemed attracted to. I smiled sour. Lucky me.

Yeah that was the name for me all right : Lucky.

I squeezed shut my eyes to keep from crying. I was Victor Standish, damn it! Tears were for little boys not me.

I pressed my back harder against the tomb of Marie Laveau. Midnight was heavy in the humid air. Fingers of black fog weaved around me as if to leech the life from me.

Was this how dying began at midnight here?

Like I cared. So close. I had been so close to a home. I could feel the tears coming. No.

I was not going to cry. I wasn't. I looked up at the dim stars. They blurred and bled down my cheeks.

O.K. I lied. I was crying.

After years of scuffling alone on the streets, I had finally found a friend. A creepy friend to be sure. But a friend.

Now, to save his life as he had saved mine, I had to die. No more Captain Sam and his eerie way of knowing my thoughts. Sure, he was undead. But who said friends had to be perfect?

My head spun slowly like a demon drunk on too much unholy water. What was going on? A voice. I was hearing a voice inside my head.

Now, this was weird. Way weird. Had I become a supernatural radio picking up the signal of the thoughts of one the ghosts buried here?

Why not? It would fit right in with all the other strange stuff that was happening tonight.

It was a girl’s voice. She sounded British. A bit like a much younger Ada Byron.

Her words suddenly filled my head :

“I am hungry. So hungry. It was stupid of me to try to eat this squealing rat.

No good. I am hungry ... hungry for the flesh of man.

And hungrier for something else. Love.

I feel tears bleed from my dead eyes. I will find flesh to tear and rend. I always do.

But love? Never. Never will there be love for the thing that I have become.

My nose prickles. My stomach coils and growls. Flesh.

Tender, moist flesh. It has come to me. I smile. I didn't even have to place a call to pizza delivery. Besides, the last one had too much fat, not enough meat.

I frown. I smell ... tears? They are common in my graveyard. But not at night. Who comes in the night to my cemetery to cry?

I sniff. A male human. A boy. I stiffen. Once I had been a girl. What had been my name?

Alice. Though now my name is Death, once it had been Alice.

Once. So very long ago. I smile cruelly. I will punish this fool for reminding me of my heart's lonely prison.

I shall woo him with poetry before I rend his flesh. I flow through the fungus-smeared wall of my crypt.

How will his flesh taste?”

What the hell had that been? How will his flesh taste? His? Crap. She meant me.

My flesh.

I stiffened. Something all misty was oozing out of the tomb in front of me. It slowly took shape. I frowned. What the?

It was a girl. She looked to be my age : thirteen. But she was dressed up in a black Victorian style dress. She was kinda pretty ... if you were into undead girls.

Deep inside I suddenly knew. She was the girl I had just heard inside my head. And I knew how you died at midnight here.

She spoke as if her vocal chords were all rusty :

"Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold:

Her skin was as white as leprosy,

The Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,

Who thicks man's blood with cold."

I jutted my right forefinger at her. "Coleridge! The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner."

She took a step towards me, and leaves crackled under her foot. Crap. There went my hope that she was just a ghost.

She smiled. Red-smeared sharp teeth. And then, I remembered what she said about that half-eaten rat.

Oh, great. A ghoul. Oh, why hadn’t I asked Captain Sam more about Webster?

All right, Victor. Think. Think!

I caught my reflection in a marble crypt. I was so skinny. That was it! Skinny.

She wanted meat. O.K. I would give her meat. I fumbled in my head just where St. Louis Cemetery was. A rough map of places to avoid popped into my head.

I smiled wide. The Snowman and his hit women, Ice and Easy.

They had much more meat to them than a scrawny street kid like me.

She brushed back a stray lock of fine-spun gold from her electric blue eyes. "You are not afraid?"

"Oh, I'm scared shitless."

She giggled and studied me. "But you see a way out for you, do you?"

I stumbled to my feet, spreading out my hands. "Hey, I'm Victor Standish. I always have a plan."

Those eyes seemed to be suddenly seeing me as more than a meal. "I am ... Alice, Victor. And just what is this plan of yours?"

I winked at her. "How would you like to add drug dealers to your diet, Alice?"

She glided to me faster than I thought she could, looping her arm through my right one. "I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

I remembered how lonely she had sounded in my head, and I patted her cold, cold hand. "I think so, too."

I looked up at the face of shadows in the full moon. I smiled wide. I wasn't by myself anymore.

Looking at those blood-smeared teeth, I knew I would never be alone.

I'd always have the shivers.
***

M is for MAYHEM, VOODOO STYLE for Wendy T. Ryan's Blogarversary!

Join the fun :

http://waitingforpublication.blogspot.com/p/blogaversary-blogfest-sign-up.html

{Excerpt from the third volume in the Saga of Victor Standish, SOMETIMES THERE'S NO VICTOR} [496 words]

(Victor and Alice have been flicked back to the year 1826 by the eerie supernatural entity, DayStar, like you or I would brush away knats) :

The blood moon leered down on Alice and me through thick, silent mists snaking above us. The mists were the only things silent across the grassy courtyard.

Drums beat wild rhythms as rocking black men chanted, their wide eyes glazed over. In the shadows of the huge bonfire, black dancers wheeled about, long machetes flashing in their fists.

I was so scared it felt like my skin was about to leap off me and do the Mambo with my skeleton. I knew where we were from pictures in that book on voodoo in early New Orleans :

Congo Square, across Rampart Street from the French Quarter. But a very primitive French Quarter.

I reached out and took Alice’s ice-cold right hand. My heart calmed. With her at my side, I could take on monsters.

With the musk of sweat, alcohol, and hate heavy in the humid night air, Alice whispered in that odd British accent of hers, “Victor, we are in serious jeopardy here.”

Now, when a flesh-eating ghoul says she’s afraid, even a mongrel like me knows that life has just hit a new high in low-down.

The drums suddenly stopped. And every wild eye turned to us.

I winked at her. “You think?”

A tall woman, her black face glowing with deadly grace, spoke soft, yet it carried out across the dancers and slithering snakes on the grass.

But none of them equaled the boa across her shoulders.

“You two do not belong here.”

Alice murmured, “Look at Marie Laveau, Victor. She is such a striking woman.”

I grinned crooked, “Even without the snake.”

A small, crooked old man limped to us. “She be right.”

He turned to Alice, his voice gaining an edge. “’Specially you, nzumbe.”

I stiffened. “That’s Myth Nzumbe to you, Fright Face.”

Alice lips got tight. “Is everything a jest to you, Victor?”

I gave her icy hand a squeeze.

“Never you, Alice. But you can’t let monsters see you sweat.”

Alice rose a prim and proper eyebrow. “I never sweat.”

The old man limped closer. “You be half-dead, now, Miss Nzumbe. Soon you be all dead.”

I shook my head. “Don’t count on it, Legba.”

He stepped back an inch. “You know me?”

“I know of you.”

“Then, you knows how powerful I be. I be the origin of life!”

I snorted. “Get real. That would be Elohim. And I’m pretty sure you’re not Him.”

Legba husked, “So sure are you?”

I nodded to the squirming reptiles on the grass.

“Pretty sure. He’s not real fond of snakes.”

He cackled, “But Erzulie is, and she be right behind you, boy. Erzulie, loa of Love and Death.”

I turned to face the tall black woman with scars on her face and smiled,

“That’s a new look for you, Mother.”

“No, child. ‘Dis face be veeery old. And you be in bad trouble.”

I winked at her and copied her accent, “Dat be an veery old story, Mother.”

***

G is for G.A.S._what every C.A.R. needs

We talked about C.A.R. a few days ago ...

C ..... Conflict

A ..... Action

R ..... Resolution

Using C.A.R. will get you a good story.

But you don't want a good story ...

You want a GREAT story.

To get that great story, your C.A.R. needs G.A.S.

G ..... Goal

A ..... Adversary

S ..... Sex

GOAL :

1.) Goals in great stories are not anemic ...

A.) Primal

Any goal in a great story is primal, high stakes, CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT!

Love to a loveless man. Food for children to a mother in a world turned upside down. Revenge to a man robbed unjustly of everything that made life worth living.

B.) IDENTIFIABLE

The reader must see herself in that goal. We all yearn to belong. We all have been mocked and snubbed. We all feel alone in some form or fashion.

Once you have the reader looking out of the MC's eyes, you have her hooked into rooting for her to win ... because if the MC wins, a part of your reader wins, too.

In becoming the MC, the readers become more than they are, experiencing things in a way they might never experience any other way. Each of us is an on-going equation striving to answer itself. Reading is one way we do that.

C.) POSSIBLE

You're switching channels on the TV and stumble across an announcer going crazy. You pause. The horse in the back of the race has just pulled ahead ... one horse ... three horses at a gallop ... two more. Now, there is only the lead horse.

The runt pulls ahead only to fall behind. The runt closes just a bit. The jockey on the lead horse spurs his mount ahead. The runt stumbles. Your heart goes into your mouth. Then, somehow, the runt reaches into its last strength and pulls even. The two race like that for long, agonizing moments.

Then, the runt pulls ahead by a nose, winning the race.

You had no money on the race, but you feel like cheering. Maybe you do cheer. We all root for the underdog ... remember that in your writing.


ADVERSARY :

1.) "Oh," you say, "you mean antagonist."

Pardon me? Did I say antagonist? Antagonist is for ivory tower discussions of Jame Fennimore Cooper.

I'm talking Adversay, buddy!

Eric Northman, who, when you try to escape his cellar, tears out your throat with his teeth. Then, when your spurting blood ruins his highlighting dye job, repeatedly kicks your corpse for good measure.

We don't need no stinking antagonists! "You wanna mess with me? Here, let me introduce you to my little friend!"

2.) IMPOSSIBLE ODDS : (Remember the Underdog Principle)

Remember Jodie Foster going to interview Hannibal Lector for the first time? Then, he escapes. Who would you have bet cash money on in the real world?

Little Harry Potter versus Lord Voldemort :

Hagrid to Harry: "Some say he died. Codswallop, in my opinion. Dunno if he had enough human left in him to die."

"We bow to each other, Harry," said Voldemort, bending a little, but keeping his snakelike face upturned to Harry. "Come, the niceties will be observed.... Dumbledore would like you to show manners.... Bow to death, Harry...."

3.) ROADBLOCK

The best adversary directly roadblocks your MC from her/his goal in a way that is threatening and nearly unbeatable.

He/She is always one step ahead of your MC. Your heroine is swimming against the current, getting nowhere ... but at the end, the reader realizes the MC has also been getting stronger, wiser. The adversary has learned nothing because everything seems to be in her/his corner, necessitating no growth.

SEX :

1.) Romance is all very well and good. But come on. Picture Eric Northman from TRUE BLOOD. Romance or sex?

For most readers, romance is just good table manners for sex. Witty talk is all fine. Flirting is fun because it delays the pleasure. But the goal is always in the backs of the minds of the readers in the exchange of words and actions.

I get around that somewhat with Samuel McCord because he is from both the era of the Revolutionary War and the Old West. And Victor Standish, for all his bluster and brass, is a 13 year old boy, struggling with his first love.

2.) Tension is the key to making music with violins and smitten hearts.

You have happy characters? Look around. You have no readers. Angst is the magnet for readers.

Tension is everything. Look at Bella and Edward ... who are the King and Queen of delayed gratification. A goal easily gotten is cheaply held.

Remember the underdog runt of a racehorse?

Victor Standish loves Alice Wentworth, the ghoul. And she loves him. She also has almost surrendered to her hunger for his flesh three times in the first novel. He knows she hungers for his flesh nearly as much as his heart.

But Victor, who in the past has so often bet his life for food and shelter, has no problem betting it for love ... something he has been without all his days.

Victor knows. Alice knows. All who care for them know : Alice will one day lose the battle to keep from eating Victor alive.

To lose his life for the love he never had? "Fair trade," Victor thinks.

And who are we to say different -- we who throw our lives away for so much less?

Whatever the tension ... it must be for most of the novel. Only at the end may it be released ... but only for a time. For in real life, there is no "happy ever after."
***

WITH HELL AT MY HEELS_my RACE TO 200 BLOG CONTEST entry

Join the excitement! Enter J.C. Martin's RACE TO 200 BLOG CONTEST :

http://jc-martin.com/fighterwriter/2011/02/08/announcing-the-race-to-200-blogfes/

My entry is an excerpt from VICTOR'S NOT JUST MY NAME that springs from this former post :
http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2011/01/death-speaks-every-tongue.html

{The Soyoko, evolved raptors, thought to amuse themselves by placing a stolen baby in the arms of the starving ghoul, Alice, to see just how long she could hold out against her hunger before consuming the baby.

They made two mistakes : they hurt the girl Victor loved, and they didn't kill him before they did it.

Victor, tapping the power of his mother's blood, has transported Alice, the baby, and himself to the dark streets of the French Quarter. He is still learning his powers, however, and has brought along most of the Soyoko, too.}


Alice held the crying baby close to her. Her determined eyes said she would keep the baby safe no matter what.

In her odd British accent, Alice husked, “We are dead.”

“No. I’m dead. You get the baby to Meilori’s.”

“What?”

“Tell Captain Sam I’m coming in hot. And I’m coming in with hell at my heels.”

“No!,” screamed Alice.

Too late.

I was already running towards the narrow alleyway. As I passed a raptor, blinking its eyes at its change in surroundings, I slapped it on the scaled cheek.

“Wake up, Sunshine! You guys want me? You’re gonna have to catch me!”

I was the best there was at parkour, free running.

I darted into the alleyway. The trick was to kick into the wall, not try to climb it. Angeline Jolie had guide-wires. All I had were tough toes.

I wall-ran up both walls on either side of me. One foot pushing me up a few inches at a time. The raptors screamed in anger and disbelief. I laughed over my shoulders as I hit the top of the tallest building with a palm spin.

“You never heard of fast food?”

Cowards. I knew what to expect. A raptor was waiting for me on the roof closest to Meilori’s.

I spun on my palms, kicking the nose of the waiting raptor and sending me onto the roof farthest from the jazz club.

I raced across it, not slowing a bit as I reached the edge. My legs were strong. I could do Olympic-quality jumps.

I did one to the top of the building caddy-corner to mine. Hiking my knees up for momentum, I hit the roof in a roll and kept on racing.

Movement all around me. I was surrounded by hissing, grasping raptors. I ran to the brick wall to my right. I wall-spun it, flipping up and over and behind the pack of Soyoko.

I spun, taking off in the other direction. A raptor leapt right at me. I bent, grabbed my right ankle and swept right through his legs, bowling him over.

I laughed. They howled. I was so dead. And I’d never felt more alive.

From building to building I bounded as they scrambled after me. Laughing, I leapt from the roof’s edge to the graveled one below. I hit with a fluid roll, picking up bloodied stone and throwing it directly behind me.

It hit the raptor inches from me in the eyes. It screamed. I laughed again. They hurt Alice. I damn well would rub their noses in that mistake.

I leapt off to the building far below me. Shit. It was a long-ass fall. I hit hard with a roll. I smiled as I heard splintering bones of idiot raptors who had tried to follow.

There. Right below me. More idiots. Human ones. Stripping a car.

I konged like a gorilla over the wall’s railing right onto the vandalized car.

“What the fuck?”

I laughed, “Great last words.”

The raptors were on them. And I was down the street still laughing. That storefront.

Was this Orleans Street? That tree ahead of me. I charged it. I felt the hot breath of the raptor on my neck.

I wall ran up the tree, spinning up and over behind the lunging raptor. I landed easy, kicking it in the butt to slam its head hard into the trunk.

Movement to my right.

Jean Lafitte and his brother, Pierre. They might have been ghosts, but their swords looked sharp.

“Run, Little Man. Pierre and I have told these brutes : Pirate Alley is ours!”

Raptors screamed as they were run through. I smiled wide. Sometimes it helped to have friends in ghoulish places.

Or not.

A knife slashed towards my eyes. I ducked down, doing the Parkour roll right between legs in a frilly hoop skirt.

Delphine LaLaurie.

The French Quarter’s Jill the Ripper. Her knife bloody from the tortured bodies of her slaves, she looked at me with insane eyes.

“I worship blood and screams.”

I jerked my thumb over my shoulder to the sound of clawed feet on pavement. “Get ready for a religious experience!”

I raced down the dark street, at whose end was St. Louis Cathedral and the spotlighted courtyard statue of Jesus, casting long shadows of waiting arms for me.

To welcome me to death …

or to safety?

I laughed. What matter? I was Victor Standish, and the only sure thing was that I would not quit. Ever.
***
Below are some of the parkour moves Victor Standish uses in evading the Soyoko.

Fast forward to midway to see a street athelete scaling up two walls in an alleyway as Victor did.

***
Some of you have emailed me, asking just who is this BOND group? So here is the answer, along with the tune, EXPLOSIVE, that could be used for the soundtrack of this entry, too :

JUST KISS ALREADY BLOGFEST_THE COLOR OF LOVE IS ... BLOOD

Go here for more kissing madness :

http://www.write-brained.com/2011/01/just-kiss-already-blogfest.html

This Valentine's Day scene is an excerpt from THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH. It is just after midnight at the crypt of Marie Laveau. Victor has met the ghoul, Alice Wentworth, for the first time. He has so far avoided becoming a late night snack. She asks him how he got the slashes on his face.



I hitched myself up on a marble slab and patted the place next to me. “Pull up a

seat. It’s a long story.”

She flowed like mist up beside me. I reached out and softly took her left hand. Saying a silent prayer, I rolled my eyes into the back of my head and pressed her hand against my heart.

Maybe I could do a type of encore of what had happened in front of Marie Laveau’s crypt.

Sometimes in life you get more than you ask for.

I stiffened as a swirling sea of her emptiness, her loneliness, her joy at being in touch with another hurt spirit swept me up. And I drew her into me, into my memories of burnt out ends of smoky days laced with pain and strife, of the withered leaves of others’s masquerades, of the tiny thousand misunderstandings and clumsy gropings of my heart to the life-hardened hearts of others.

The autumn world of my days on the streets came rising up over the dark horizon of my regrets. Lost friends, mocking enemies, the haunted, loving eyes of Mother. The glittering, insane eyes of Baboon Face and his goon friends. The snap of the neck that cost me Suze and brought the mysterious undead Captain Sam into my life.

The yellowed papers of recollection curled up around us from Detroit, to Cleveland, to Boston, to that strange bus ride to New Orleans.

The light of relief and hope shot through the black shutters of fear and loneliness as images of me wandering lost through the madness that was Meilori’s. Dim figures of Billie Holliday and Daniel Webster wavered before us like shimmering mirages of fear. My sort of betrayal by Elu, my being an unwilling teaching aid for Strasser, Toya’s hot jealousy, my losing everything as I decided that for Captain Sam to live I had to die.

The cry of her anguished heart calling out to me as she struggled to escape her own private hell. Her spooky entrance into my life. My confusion. My own loneliness reaching out to hers.

The circle completing its circuit. Resurfacing from the waters of shared spirits as I gently pulled her hand from my chest. Our fingers parting. The shiver of separation as her pale face looked at me haunted.

I shivered as our union shattered left me soul-cold. Alice was shivering as well. My head was spinning. Something was wrong with my heart.

It wasn’t empty anymore.

What had I done to me?

Maybe you couldn’t see, really see, into someone without it changing you. And you couldn’t show them the you that you really were without the two of you never being the same anymore.

I looked into her strange neon blue eyes. My changed heart skipped a beat. She was looking … looking at me as if she was feeling the same. Her eyelids lowered slightly. Her hand softened around mine. She squeezed it soft. So soft. Yet so cold. But not as cold as loneliness.

A wild thought came to me.

I grabbed all the courage and desperation I had stored in my bruised heart and decided to go for it.

I brought her cold, cold hand up to my own cold lips and kissed it. Her fingers were quivering. Or was that my lips?

Alice’s lower lip trembled. “How could you?”

“C-Could I what?”

She took her hand from mine and softly traced the line of one of Strasser’s cuts on my left cheek, kissing me on the lips even softer. “Turn out so special.”

***

WHY ZOMBIES?

The undead.

They captivate us.

The appeal to vampires is obvious :

even Bram Stoker, who coined the term "undead," painted Dracula as sexy and seductive (at least in London).

Don't get me started on the "sparkly" ones.

While most vampires are etched as lovely, though deadly, predators, what is up with our fascination with zombies?

They are Id's brought to hungry life : only appetite, no morals or guidelines. And terrible table manners.

Why are we so obsessed with zombies? They are not seductive, not appealing, what with body parts missing or rotting away as you watch.

Zombies symbolize those threats like actual skin-eating diseases,

terrorist bombs,

and natural disasters like the promised California SuperStorm that will someday in the future dump ten FEET of rain over 30 days.

Zombies symbolize our fears of death that will not be reasoned or threatened away.

Does immersing ourselves in zombie movies give us an illusion of some measure of control over death, cancer, and other all-too-real threats in our modern lives?

Seeing teens surrounded in a cabin by milling, moaning zombies, we know that soon those pretty girls will be either eaten or transformed into eternally hungry zombies.

And in a sense, we, the viewer, have become with them Death in our imaginations : unstoppable, forces of nature, unthinking.

But the zombie is never at rest : like a shark, it must continually shamble in search of prey or it will die.

Then, take little Karen Cooper (please, you take her 'cuz me and Victor want nothing to do with the little munchkin), from the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD :

Newly undead, the zombie girl happily starts to feast on her father's arm, then lay waste to her mother with a trowel of all things. There is something deeply unsettling about seeing an innocent child turn to a flesh-eating monster in front of your eyes.

Which is why I chose the Zombie Playground picture in Misty's contest :
http://mistydawnwaters.blogspot.com/2010/12/um-so-yeah-im-doing-blogfest.html#comment-form

This, for me, is the worst facet of becoming a zombie : it robs you of your identity, of your sense of self.

Is our fascination with zombies an extension of 21st century Man's self-loathing? Or do we place ourselves in the roles of the survivors?

What would we do in their place? We revel in their violence against those shambling things which are already dead. We can mutilate and destroy with no regret, no remorse.

Or is it that zombies offer us the ultimate crucible : that arena which hones our characters and our souls into something better or into something infinitely worse than zombies -- a knowing evil against our brothers?

I already know what Victor Standish thinks about this. But don't be too sure you know. Remember his "ghoul friend," Alice. What do you think?
***

DEATH SPEAKS EVERY TONGUE

For those of you wondering what kind of week Victor Standish has been having ...

Here is his encoutner with evolved raptors who have kidnapped Alice, torturing her with keeping a baby safe from them, while fighting her own hunger for its flesh from my WIP chapter, DEATH SPEAKS EVERY TONGUE :


I was so scared that the only reason I didn't piss in my pants was that every opening in my body had shrunk to the size of a pepper seed.

I was looking at something Dore or Dali might have painted in an opium high or inside an insane ward. Shafts of marble thrust up from the swampy mire in front of the altar.

They looked like nothing so much as the ancient bones of some Greek god's corpse jutting out from a lousy-made grave. The ruins seemed to breathe a diseased air as if the very stones were cursed.

Perhaps they were the only survivors of some fabled land destroyed by the great flood. A land so old that there remained no legend, no myth, to whisper its name.

Rock that had been cut and shaped before the first stones of Memphis had been placed beside the Nile. But somehow I knew the Soyoko knew the name for that cursed land, for their racial memory spanned ice ages.

The smell in the darkness was terrible. Heavy musk. Nose-wrinkling tang of ammonia. Stomach-turning stench of rotting flesh.

Amazing how much you can see in just a few heartbeats. Alice holding a whimpering baby in her arms. Her shaking with hunger, yet her neon eyes frantic with the need to protect the baby from the Soyoko.

Towering over her, the enormous, glowing gem of deepest night called by the Soyoko, the Black Stone.

What the Black Stone truly is no Soyoko will tell. Only that they, who are cold and rigid in their spirits, hold it sacred ... and in fear so intense it more truthfully could be called terror.

Elu only knows that they have polished it for thousands of summers with the finely ground dust of the crushed skulls of their human prey.

They have lovingly, yet fearfully, bathed it in the blood of their most prized victims. They have done so for so many centuries that now it shines with a glow that seems to burn from its depths. And the light pulses. Pulses with the beat of the closest heart to it.

With so many hearts in this cavern where Mother had transported me, it cast a strange strobe-light effect from Hell on all who were here.

The madly pounding Soyoko, holding with their scaled legs the high drums made of bone and human flesh.

More scurrying Soyoko than I could count or see because of the constantly shifting shadows. Evolved raptors Sam called them.

They had lost the tails but gained length and muscle in their arms. They sure hadn’t lost any teeth. Gained a few hundred it seemed to me.

Mother, in a fit of anger, casting me here in the middle of the nest had rattled them. Like Apaches, they loved to ambush. And like Apaches, they hated to be on the receiving end.

Hissing and barking oddly, they scurried all around me. Using their long, sharp claws, they scaled up the walls and …. Crap. They were running along the stone ceiling above me. How did they do that?

The drummers, who had stopped at my arrival, now were picking up the weird pounding. The primitive music throbbed down into the very marrow of my bones.

Good. It would give my shivers something to dance to.

Their slit eyes reflected the pulsating glow of the Black Stone they both worshipped and feared.

On a high stone shelf above them sat a slowly swaying female. Double crap. She was swaying to the beat of my heart. She flicked sneering eyes from the shivering Alice to me.

She studied me, her head first slowly cocking to one side then to the other. I matched her head cocking, move for move. She hissed her displeasure. I smiled my skull-smile that said I already knew I was dead meat so expect me to spit in your eye, thank you very much.

I both heard and saw the Sokoyo begin to circle me. They formed groups of three’s. I smiled wider. For once, Hollywood had gotten it right.

The female saw me smile and fast held up her right claw. “Hold!”

The word had not been spoken in English, but I still understood it. I smiled wide and bitter. I was Death’s son. And I should have remembered that Death spoke every language.

“Why?,” hissed the lead drummer.

The female husked, “Know you not that smile? It is the smile of the Last Wolf. This one must be his cub.”

I smiled even more bitter. They called Captain Sam “the Last Wolf?” Why not?

“So, R’lyth?,” grunted the drummer.

R’lyth gave me a flesh-eating smile. “Things have grown more interesting.”

She turned to me and spoke in heavy-hissing English. “This flesh-eater is your mate?”

Alice stiffened at the words, looking at me with neon-eyes that seemed as if they expected to flinch at my next words.

I nodded, looking, not at the sadistic raptor, but into Alice’s neon eyes. “Yes.”

Alice rasped, “I l-love you, Victor. Now, run. Run!”

R’lyth smiled, showing all her razor teeth. “Ah, that fleshling delusion called love. I will test this love of yours, cub.”

“Standish,” I said loud. “The name’s Victor Standish, Sunshine.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I make a pact, The Standish. Your life for your mate’s. What say you?”

Alice called out, “No, Victor. You run. You hear me? Run!”

I looked at Alice. I had been dead while breathing before her. I had laughed at death because a part of me had wanted it all to end. Now, I wanted it to last always.

Captain Sam said there was a price tag to everything, both good and bad. I turned to the silently studying R’lyth.

“Fair trade,” I said loud.

“No!,” sobbed Alice.

The raptors swarmed at me in a wave of teeth and claws. I leapt over the lunging raptor in front of me, bounded three feet to my right off his back, and wall-ran up the stone, twirling over their outraged heads in a full Arabian cartwheel.

I laughed, “But I never said I would make it easy!”
***
This was the tune running through my head as I wrote this scene :