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.
***

THE LAST HEYOKA in CALL ME TOMBS

My book page for CALL ME TOMBS has been re-done.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006NLANN4

Do you like it? Tell me what you think. And I will not be adverse to your gambling 99 cents on it! :-)

You'll get on the good side of Puppy .. which is always a safe place to be!

(Tombs and Puppy help save the world in END OF DAYS, too!
http://www.amazon.com/END-OF-DAYS-ebook/dp/B0082ZJD08/ref=pd_sim_kstore_4 )

CALL ME TOMBS


Voodoo in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania?

A mystic travel trailer that has a life of its own and takes its name too seriously?

A deadly, unbeatable worker of dark magic out to unravel the fabric of reality?

A Hellhound named Puppy?


All in a normal day for the last Lakota Heyoka,
Toomey Starks.


Accompanied by Puppy and a fiery, homicidal gypsy,

the Lakota Trickster snatches magic from the air and love from the shadows

to discover his destiny, save the world,

and survive the "help" of the Spirit of the Earth!


Just a normal day for the last Heyoka, Toomey Starks!

(THE RIVAL has hit #11 in Amazon's best-selling Zombie Love list. I didn't know there was such a list!)

For those of you who want to know what a Lakota Heyoka is:

KINDLE FIRE 2 POSSIBLY COMING THIS MONTH!

KINDLE FIRE 2 POSSIBLY COMING THIS MONTH!

http://www.examiner.com/article/kindle-fire-2-release-date-rumor-new-amazon-tablet-possibly-coming-this-month

Multiple reports are saying the new Kindle Fire 2 release date could come as soon as this month.

According to Pop Herald,

http://www.popherald.com/news_20120816_kindle_fire_2_fcc_filing-19505

the latest information is based on a new FCC filing by Harpers LLC that was uncovered just this week. Amazon traditionally uses the Harpers LLC name as a "front" company name for various FCC filings to prevent leaked rumors or news about new devices.

If Amazon launches the new Kindle Fire this month,

it would be a month earlier than they launched the original tablet last year.

The expected upgrades in the newest Kindle Fire 2 include a new processor, new display touchscreen technology and overall build for the device.

There are also rumors that it will include a completely new mobile operating system. That system will not offer Google products or services.

It is safe to say that Amazon will launch the Kindle Fire 2 tablet/s before the month of November to take advantage of the expected demand growth.

The original Kindle Fire with 7-inch display sports the tag price of $199,

so if the next Kindle Fire will still use the same form factor, then it might use the same pricing.

CAN READING HEAL?

*

"What wound did ever heal but by degrees?," wrote Shakespeare.

Plato wrote, "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

“If you would have me weep,
you must first of all feel grief yourself.”
~ Horace

1.) Each of these quotes made you reflect. IT MAY HAVE ALSO EXTENDED YOUR LIFE!

The world is gradually dividing into two populations.

Not the “haves” and “have-nots” of the political agitators. This is something much more precious than mere money: It’s those who learn and those who don’t.

In bald numbers, educated men live 14 years longer, on average, than uneducated men.

Educated women live 10 years longer, on average, than uneducated women.

But learning minds are not limited to those with degrees ... learning minds are merely those who read, reflect, and learn from the prose.

2.) READING AS VALIUM.

Reading is the best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce the stress levels by more than two thirds, according to new research.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5070874/Reading-can-help-reduce-stress.html

And it works better and faster than other methods to calm frazzled nerves such as listening to music, going for a walk or settling down with a cup of tea, research found.

Psychologists believe this is because the human mind has to concentrate on reading and the distraction of being taken into a literary world eases the tensions in muscles and the heart.

The research was carried out on a group of volunteers by consultancy Mindlab International at the University of Sussex.

Reading worked best, reducing stress levels by 68 per cent, said cognitive neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis.

Subjects only needed to read, silently, for six minutes to slow down the heart rate and ease tension in the muscles, he found. In fact it got subjects to stress levels lower than before they started.

Listening to music reduced the levels by 61 per cent, have a cup of tea of coffee lowered them by 54 per cent and taking a walk by 42 per cent.

Playing video games brought them down by 21 per cent from their highest level but still left the volunteers with heart rates above their starting point.

3.) PLATO NOT PROZAC:

The idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato.

But now book groups are proving that Shakespeare can be as beneficial as self-help guides. There is a rise in bibliotherapy.


Medical staff tell stories of the remarkable successes they've seen:

the neurological patient who sat in a group saying nothing for months, then after a reading of George Herbert's poem "The Flower"

("Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness?")

launched into a 10-minute monologue at the end of which he announced "I feel great."

The brain-damaged young man whose vocabulary significantly increased after he joined a book group;

the husband caring for his disabled wife whose exposure to poetry has proved not just a respite but a liberation.

To outsiders, the outcomes might seem small, but to the staff and patients concerned they're huge breakthroughs.

Judith Mawer of the Mersey Care Mental Health Trust explained,

focusing on a book is the decisive factor:

"People who don't respond to conventional therapy, or don't have access to it, can externalise their feelings by engaging with a fictional character, or be stimulated by the rhythms of poetry."

One particularly successful initiative has been reading poetry to and with dementia patients, some of whom have lost all sense of who and where they are but can recite the words of a poem learned at school 70 years ago.

"One sheds one's sicknesses in books," DH Lawrence once wrote.

Bibliotherapy, as it's called, is a fast-growing profession. A recent survey suggests that "over half of English library authorities are operating some form of bibliotherapy intervention.

Read the evocative words of Emmylou Harris from THE PEARL which touched the dark heart of a patient struggling with Cancer:

O the dragons are gonna fly tonight
They're circling low and inside tonight
It's another round in the losing fight
Out along the great divide tonight

We are aging soldiers in an ancient war
Seeking out some half remembered shore
We drink our fill and still we thirst for more
Asking if there's no heaven what is this hunger for?

Our path is worn our feet are poorly shod
We lift up our prayer against the odds
And fear the silence is the voice of God

And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah

Sorrow is constant and the joys are brief
The seasons come and bring no sweet relief
Time is a brutal but a careless theif
Who takes our lot but leaves behind the grief

It is the heart that kills us in the end
Just one more old broken bone that cannot mend
As it was now and ever shall be amen

And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah

So there'll be no guiding light for you and me
We are not sailors lost out on the sea
We were always headed toward eternity
Hoping for a glimpse of Gaililee

Like falling stars from the universe we are hurled
Down through the long loneliness of the world
Until we behold the pain become the pearl

Cryin´ Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah

And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
***
For the Cancer patient there was emotional healing to these words.

*{A photo of some of the leather bound volumes in one of my bookcases.}

TO THOSE NEVER TO BE PUBLISHED_ghost of EMILY DICKINSON

*

{"Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man."
~Emily Dickinson.}

That fabulous scamp of a gentlemen, Samuel Clemens, asked me to write in this "computer newspaper," as he calls it.

The dear somehow knew this date was important to me.

“Success is counted sweetest” was published anonymously in an anthology titled A Masque of Poets on this day in 1878,

the last of the handful of my poems published in my lifetime.

Though I remained firm in my decision that “My Barefoot-Rank is better,” this poem does reflect my continued mixed feelings about publishing:

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host

Who took the flag to-day

Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory!

As he, defeated, dying,

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

**
I wonder, struggling souls, what would it mean to you if you were never published?

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.

***
How long would you continue to write should publication elude you? Are the words burning within you to find life on the page?

For me, I never stopped writing :

HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Will you stop writing if the years pass, leaving you unpublished? Why? And if you would continue, why? This tender spirit would like to know.

Just walk out into the sable night, look up into the listening stars, and whisper your answer to the wayfaring winds. I am a ghost. I shall hear.

{THE LAST SHAMAN is #15 on Amazon's Best Selling Native American Fantasy list.}

*{Daguerreotype of the poet Emily Dickinson, taken circa 1848. (Original version.)

From the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers, Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database,

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

This applies to Australia, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.}

***

THE TUITION OF REJECTION & HOW TO PAY IT & STAY SANE

Eric Trant wrote an insightful post on rejection yesterday:

http://diggingwiththeworms.blogspot.com/2012/08/zen-in-face-of-rejection.html

It got me to thinking:

"Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are."

- Arthur Golden


Mr. Golden is the author of MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. In that novel, he has a passage that translates well to our dealing with rejection and waiting for an agent to accept us :

“From this experience I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there.

What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me?

What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me.

And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.”


The answer to me is that each day we dance. Perhaps not to the tune we would wish but to a melody circumstances demand of us. And sometimes it is very hard to keep from tripping over our own feet.

Let's think through rejections and see what they might mean :

1) You write badly.

Ouch. But often we get carried away with the Zen of writing, typing in the moment without a thought of how to be precise with our verbal blows. Sloppy writing is rejected writing.

*) Solution?

Go to the internet or the bookstore or the library. Take books by Hemingway, Chandler, Koonz, King, Updike, Vidal, and Bellows.

Read a chapter from each one. Study their use of specific words. How did they space their paragraphs? How did they convey emotion? { With dialogue, with detail, with what wasn't said?}

See if you can improve on a paragraph picked at random with eyes closed and stabbing forefinger. Can't? Welcome to the club.

Can? Then you've grown more than the writer you were before the rejection.

2) You plot with all the grace of a plodding horse with blinders :

All too often we start with the burst of a scene or of an opening hook. But we have no sense of direction or a map of where we take our hero.

Is it a journey that would entice a reader? Why? Where is the driving momentum that keeps the reader flipping the pages hurriedly?

*) Solution?

Take those same books you've bought or borrowed, looking for the map of their story. How? Look at the jacket blurbs.

Read the summations on the jacket flap. See the primal drives? See them being blocked? See the primal dangers? Read the first chapters. Read the last ones. Compare the two. How did the hero change? How did his/her world change?

Read the first paragraph. Read the last. See the novel's bookends of thought and transformation?

3) Cliche is your first, middle, and last name :

Cliches can creep up on us. If you ever catch yourself writing "like white on rice," lick your forefinger and stick it into a live socket.

That's what the agent reading those words wants to do with you.

Scum layers the top of the lake. The true game fish swirl around deep at the bottom. So it is with the imagination. We want to be writers.

Do we want to be deep-sea explorers? If we want to be offered representation by an agent, we do.

*) Solution?

Read the jacket blurbs again. Sound familiar? Yes, because the plots started out as original but have been copied and copied by TV and Hollywood until the stories are familair.

Throw a what if in your thinking. What if the hitman of your novel is different somehow?

How? Twist the plot on its ear. Your hitman is from the future. Why would someone travel from the future to kill people?

One reason : he hates his life, his world, and the girl who jilted him. So he is off killing his great-grandparents, those of his world's greatest leaders, and those of his girl.

Up the ante :

he falls in love with his own great-grandmother. Whoops. He becomes a bad joke.

The punchline : his own father arrives from the future to kill him. And it turns out that he's not all that wild about his own life up the time stream either. And he wants the hitman's new girl for himself.

4) Nothing is wrong with your novel.

You're just one query in a sea of millions of them. You just didn't wow the agent enough to impress her. Or she was too tired or too caught up with the flow of rejecting every email in front of her.

You query boat just got swamped in the storm of submissions.

*) Solution?

You do all of the above. You strive to grow each writing day into becoming a better author. You keep on submitting.

5) You weren't a good fit for that particular agent.

You failed to do your due diligence. Or you did, and their website hasn't been updated to accurately reflect the changes in their editorial attitude.

*) Solution?

You find more about the next agent before you query. Google not just webpages, agent query, or absolute write water cooler --

you type in the agent's name and follow with "interviews." Read as many interviews with that agent as possible.

You type in "blogs." Read the last ten posts of that agent's blog. Go the archive of her blog. Read the titles of her posts to see if there are any that speak to what you've written.

6) You asked for it :

Yes, you did. Me, too. How?

We became writers. The day we started down that path, we agreed to pay the toll at the gate. The toll? Getting rejected more times than we get accepted. Knowing that there is no promise that we ever will get accepted.

*) Solution?

Be Cortez.

When Cortez landed on the shores of the New World, he caught his men eyeing the ships and the horizon leading home.

He burned the ships.

We have to burn the ship. No retreat. No surrender. Only advance. Stumble. Fall. Get up. Walk on. Hack our way through the agent jungle.

Never surrender. Never give up. Only grow stronger. Grow better. Grow wiser.

Oh, and every now and then, bend down and give the person who's fallen along the way a hand back on his/her feet. Wink, smile, and say, "Hell of a trip, ain't it?"
***
And thinking about never surrendering, never giving up :

OSCAR WILDE VERSUS GORE VIDAL

*

{Read D.G. Hudson's fun reviews of LEGEND & END OF DAYS!

http://dghudson-rainwriting.blogspot.ca/2012/08/book-review-roland-yoemans-and-new.html }

I was writing in the dim interior of the haunted jazz club, Meilori's.

I heard a mellow yet deep voice to my right. "Dear boy, don't tell me you're still persisting to write?"

I looked up. Gore Vidal. Or rather his ghost, looking rather dapper as young as me.

He sat down, leaned next to me, reading what I had just written on THREE SPIRIT KNIGHT, and shook his head.

"My boy, half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President."

I smiled. "Let's hope it's the same half."

He slapped my arm. "You're stealing from me!"

"Steal from the best Oscar Wilde always said."

He leaned and scanned my laptop screen again, nodding. "You have your own distinct sytle. Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

I made a face. "And it's gotten me so far."

Gore raised a long forefinger in admonition. "I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on or move out.”

I nodded and sighed, "It's just that sometimes I get depressed."

Gore smiled sadly. "As do I, my boy. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too.

Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action:

you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

He tapped my laptop screen. "But words like those of your friends and you give me hope. How marvelous good books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

I asked, "What would be your advice to my writing friends, sir?"

He smiled wickedly, “Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”

He winked at me. “You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big.

It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account.

You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. The trick is to write one after another.”

He looked off into the bronze mists of Meilori's. “The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time.

Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise.

I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page.

Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences.

Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.”

A tall ghost sat down on the other side of me. Oscar Wilde. He laughed.

"Roland, as a young man in the South, you are in a splendid position to write great novels. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.”

Gore's eyebrow rose. "I said that!"

Oscar smiled wide. "As I have been quoted: if you are going to steal, steal from the best. Go on. Admit it. I'm your hero, Gore."

Gore gave Oscar a look that would have curdled vinegar. " Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me, thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."

Oscar pouted, "You think me nothing but a gossip."

Gore relented, "Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true."

Oscar laughed deeply, "Oh, the gossip about me is definitely true ... if it is bad."

Gore looked sadly at my laptop screen again. "It is all a waste, you know."

"What, sir?"

"Your striving for quality, for uniqueness. In the case of the new writers, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant,

we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books,

pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

I said, "People still read, sir."

Gore nodded grimly, "The fad of the moment is what they read. Not to think, not to reflect, but to be aroused."

Oscar shook his head firmly. “The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death.

The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.”

Gore grumbled, "You just stole my words again!"

Oscar nodded, "Because you seemed to have forgotten them. We writers exist to be the 300 Spartans in the tide of ignorance and hopelessness."

I raised an eyebrow. "I thought it was to be on the best seller list."

Oscar laughed, "That, too!"

*{As the restrictions on this collection expired in 1986, the Library of Congress believes this image is in the public domain.
However, the Carl Van Vechten estate has asked that use of Van Vechten's photographs "preserve the integrity" of his work, i.e,

that photographs not be colorized or cropped, and that proper credit is given to the photographer. Such has been respectfully done.}