The Veil Between Worlds: Internet and Meatspace Edition

You’d think I would have learned something from that three day break in Internet service I endured in August, but...yeah, it’s an old story. Let’s see if I can tease a fresh lesson from this.

Of all the things that could go wrong, this was optimal. Whatever node in my router that connects to the Internet burned out. We still had printer and scanner functions across our home network, but no Facebook, e-mail, etc. None of that evil, evil social media we’re told is so evil by the news media posting links in our social media. 

I don’t understand the hate, myself. As we used to say Down South to complaining people complaining once again (or when someone simply wanted to be dismissive), “Sounds like a personal problem to me.” My Facebook page is the very occasional, very surface-personal update (“It’s a beautiful morning! The writing went well last night! It’s an anniversary! Happy Birthday to you!”) interspersed with recycled memes that are PG-13 at worst, and, with very few exceptions that are often later deleted, studiously avoid “current events” as defined by the mass media, among other controversies.

I will go out of my way to make things as cheery as possible, with just enough humor, some mildly dark, but mostly silly, to keep it funny. As I see it, there are plenty of other places to go if you’re in need of feeling angry and sad. 

For the same reason, I dial back on the profanity. As much as I cuss in real life (it’s an extraordinarily difficult habit to break), it seems 90% of everyone who posts to the Weird World Web writes like a precocious 11-year-old girl who just saw her first Quentin Tarrantino movie and naturally mistakes the nonstop verbal coarseness for toughness and sophistication. This cohort includes content creators for major news media outlets, in which the “reporters” seem especially anxious to let their readers know they’re “down,” as in, “really cool, Daddy-O. Check me out, a fresh-faced, soft-handed child of the upper-middle class talking like an urban lumpenproletariat.”

Which is all to say, most people would probably hate my Facebook page, and I honestly count on the mainstream media never taking notice of what I do. I don’t write for most people, and if you look around at the more successful writers, musicians, and artists, the best ones never did. They created for themselves, and people either got it or didn’t. Sometimes it took time to catch on. The story of the artist Van Gogh, who was famously unappreciated in his lifetime, comes to mind.

Everything is a niche, and thank God. What I look to do is build an audience who as tired of all the ugliness as I am, but smart enough to know not to complain too loudly about it. No, what we’ll do is build our own little oases of like-minded folk and take it from there.

Don’t drink and Internet, kids.

Every now and then I wonder why I bother posting on Facebook. I’ve noticed a lot of people have fallen away over the years. (At least half a dozen were rude enough to die on me.) It’s just me and the silly memes and the occasional update. 

I just like too many of the people on my Friends list. There are a few whose Likes I actively court, because I like to think I made them smile. A reaction from them makes me feel like I’ve done something good. I’m weird like that.

Anyway, once I got back online it turns out that not only was I not missed, I didn’t miss anything.

It’s just as well. This is the point in which most authors crow about all the work they got done, but, again, I’m not most authors. I caught up on some reading on my tablet, though. I’ve been putting away entire rows of e-novels this summer.

The bottom line is I’ve had to rethink what the heck I’m doing on social media. I can’t see giving it up—it’s too handy for keeping up with the people I care about on there—but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t flex my opinions more. Take a few stands.

I feel a day is coming when I will have no choice but to take a stand on something. So I’ll just have to keep thinking about it, then. Maybe make a few minor moves. I’d like to do this on my own, on my own time, than be forced into  it.

My favorite vendor’s table from the Potato Festival on 7 September this year. 

It’s even worse with Twitter. As much as I enjoy reading the threads in the snobs-vs.-the-slobs Twitter wars—I’m proud to say I was following GamerGate since the Zoe Post got people asking questions—the bulk of my own Twitter experience is spent retweeting other people’s Tweets promoting their latest video, blogpost, book, etc. On a really good day, I’ve got a blogpost of my own to promote. My traffic from Twitter is zero to negligible, but I feel like I should stay in the habit in case this changes.

I smile and shake my head to read about people losing their jobs for posts they made on Twitter when they were in high school. The kindergarten tattletale culture of the New Secular Inquisition looking for bad opinions and bad attitudes and bad words and “hate speech,” etc., over years of social media posts is a hateful thing, but, c’mon. You went to kindergarten. You remember that ugly, smirking fatso following other kids around looking to catch them in something so she could go tell the teacher and get them in trouble. Social media gave them a vector with which to expand their careers.

So don’t give them anything to catch you with. Go to the chan boards if you feel the need to express yourself in a manner most “edgy.” Be sure to get yourself a VPN first, if you’re crazy enough to post. 

I’m content to lurk, myself. It’s one of my favorite diversions. My audience, for the most part, though, are even more blessedly sheltered than I am. I still wouldn’t know how to explain what GamerGate was to them, or chan board culture, and who needs to know that badly, anyway?

Ironically, my core online audience is closer to the normies in meatspace going about their business than those whose entire life is spent in cyberspace, fighting the latest war of attitudes. I love irony in my diet, so it works for everyone.

And that’s all I’ve got until next time. Here’s a photo of a kitten sleeping next to my wife’s homemade witch broom on the table on our porch, which makes more sense than anything I’ve just written so far here.

Psychic Bath Bombs in the Language Center

“Words mean things until they don’t” edition, composed in the spirit of George Carlin, the best language arts teacher anyone ever knew. WARNING: I’m wading into issues from the online culture wars on this one. Time to flex.

THE HEAT IS ON: Baked, fried, blazed, etc.: In the 1970s, high school students smoked marijuana to get “fried.” For the last 20 years or so—I wouldn’t know when this changed, only when I saw the first reference—the term for cannabis intoxication has been “baked.” It does seem healthier. Baked is always better than fried, right? Well, not if you’re on a keto diet...anyway, to “wake and bake,” to smoke immediately after rolling out of bed for the day, sings a cheerful rhyme. 

Furthering the cooking metaphor, to say one is flambéed would mesh nicely with the other word for intoxication, blazed.  For all we know some bourgie kids in a gentrifying neighborhood are already using that for their slang to distinguish them from the commoners.

Maybe we should call marijuana dispensaries “baking supply stores.”

CLOWNTOWN PRONOUNS: I’m a blissfully aged old man who has led a blissfully sheltered existence. Although I’ve seen more than most, it’s enough to know how fortunate I am for what fashionable madness I’ve managed to avoid. One hundred miles from the nearest interstate highway, in a small town surrounded by many square miles of farms and ranches, I see all I need to see of the world on this 26-inch monitor.

It’s only been in the last few years, not even the last ten, that I’ve read of this much mocked and derided (yet still bizarrely accommodated) phenomenon of “genderfluid” people who have special pronouns they insist you use for them. A young woman of my acquaintance whose work takes her to Denver described separate encounters with two such creatures, so I know they exist outside of Internet clickbait/ rage-reading. How widespread this actually is, however, remains to be seen. I know some newspapers like the Los Angeles Times make a point of “respecting  the pronouns” but no one respects the media much these days, if they read it at all, so there.

The pronouns in question for the pathological narcissist who wishes to make everything about them (that’s all this is, after all) are often “they/ them,” as if to acknowledge the legion of annoyances these people are capable of creating if you are foolish enough to engage with them. In other cases—but I suspect they’re extremely rare—you get oddities like “xir” or “zir.”

The funniest thing about all this is that to use anyone’s pronouns, one has to be talking to someone else about the pronoun’d person in question. Unless you’re writing for a blog, newspaper, etc., the only person who would know which pronouns you’re using is the person you’re talking to about the special needs nuisance with the pronouns. “Special needs nuisance with the pronouns” is a bit harsh, so I’ll use the more accurate, “that pathological narcissist.” 

That is, if I must talk about this person at all. Narcissists thrive on attention, even (and sometimes especially) negative attention. It’s best to not even let on that you’re annoyed.

The sensible course of action when approached by the kind of person who introduces him or herself as, “Hi, I’m ________, and these are my pronouns” is to say, “Pleased to meet you, ________. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really have to take this call. See you around!” Then ghost out of there to take that imaginary phone call. And by “ghost,” I mean, “go home.” Back to your hotel room, or into your car driving far, far away.

What are you doing in a place where people like this are roaming loose, anyway? That’s on you, son. 

“When you’ve got vocabulary peculiar to your in-group, it’s fun for the in-group, but drives off the normies. One word or many words, it doesn’t matter. You end up looking like a bunch of propeller-hat nerds with decoder rings whispering over comic books in a backyard treehouse.” Or these people.

MEMBERSHIP BADGES AND DECODER RINGS FOR PUTATIVE GROWNUPS: Certain words have become useful markers for identifying someone’s political attitudes. The left has quite a few of them. To avoid a bunch of quotation marks littering the page, I’ll put what few I can think of in bullet-list form:

• problematic
• systemic
• intersectional
• cissexist (“cis”-anything, another neologism from this decade)
• supremacy
• dismantle
• decolonize

I wonder if all these are going the way of “male chauvinism,” a phrase that was often used by the “women’s libbers” in the early 1970s. After much overuse “male chauvinism” became a ridiculous, meaningless phrase associated with ridiculous people who could do nothing but complain. Feminism had to re-brand to survive as a serious movement in the public eye. A big part of that was ditching that strange, clinical-sounding term that blamed men for everything. 

That, and the bra-burning. Yes, kids, I’m old enough to remember when feminism nearly died of its own silliness in the 1970s. We’re seeing the same thing happening today among the modern left with the above words. They’re killing themselves with their own vocabulary, and it’s not gone unnoticed that there are often disingenuous amendments of meaning among their lexicon. Consider the evolution of the word “racist,” for instance, and how it’s now impossible to be racist towards one group because of the amended meaning. These people will tell you it’s always been thus, too, when you know it hasn’t. I did not use the modifier “disingenuous” because I’m biased.

Meanwhile, it’s harder to peg people on the right side of the aisle. If they deliberately employ politically incorrect terms for groups of people and their ideologies, that’s one thing. There is one, and only one word, though, that let’s you know you’re among the hardcore: “degeneracy.” It’s an apt descriptor for what they see about them in popular and social culture—and although it is just one word, it would be good of them to dial it back. 

When you’ve got vocabulary peculiar to your in-group, it’s fun for the in-group, but drives off the normies. One word or many words, it doesn’t matter. You end up looking like a bunch of propeller-hat nerds with decoder rings whispering over comic books in a backyard treehouse. Or worse. “Oh, look, it’s the old people complaining about ‘degeneracy’ again.” “Oh, my goodness, what now? Did someone see a cartoon they didn’t like?”

A brilliant MS Paint-created meme, the text of which employs the most commonly used words and phrases by people of a certain political persuasion.

Do What You Can at Every Age

Nothing’s over until you say it’s over. Or your death from other causes.

I was startled to see how old songwriter and bandleader Ric Ocasek was when he died Sunday. Seventy-five is more than twice as many years as many entertainers live, and certainly more than most of us. 

What seemed even more out of place, though, was his age was more in line with the surviving Beatles and Rolling Stones, not someone who created and defined the New Wave sound of the late 1970s. Then the arithmetic hit me.

It was precisely 40 years ago at the time of this writing that The Cars’ first two albums were in everyone’s dorm room at the University of South Carolina, and played at least once all the way through at all the house parties I attended. If Ocasek was 75 when he died, that means he was 35 years old when he and his band were riding high on Candy-O. The recording for The Cars’ eponymously titled first album began in 1977, when Ocasek was 33. This means he and his band didn’t get their recording contract until he was 32 at youngest, if that.

This is yet another one of those deals in which you had to be there in that time frame to understand how significant this was. In the 1970s, by age 30, you were settled. You were married, in a good money-making career, or you were a loser. Your chance for a “late start,” Mr. Late Bloomer, was long past. This social convention persisted clear through the 1980s.

Moreover, if you were a musician, and you were 33 years old and still playing guitar and singing and bandleading without a recording contract, you’d better be leading one of your town’s best—and I mean best—cover bands available for school dances and weddings.

It no doubt helped that Ocasek and the rest of the band were the type of pale, unlined young men who looked far younger than they were, but it’s still no small thing that Ocasek could be even 28 years old and not running a cover band, but developing his own sound. 

For my money, Ric Ocasek and The Cars invented that brief shining moment in the late 1970s known as New Wave. To which I quickly add, no one else sounded like them (well, maybe Split Enz, bless them). Compounding the irony is that, for as pale and twee and Ocasek and company looked, they brought a necessary masculine energy back to music that was sorely missed in those days when disco dominated everything.

If you could only imagine what it was like hearing The Cars’ or Elvis Costello’s first albums in the pits of the Disco Era. In the middle of the desert, wishing for a death that never comes, and behold the dark-haired, nattily dressed skinny dudes — as opposed to the stringy-haired skinny dudes wearing nothing more than ratty jeans and the roll of socks they stuffed down ‘em — driving up in a beer truck, offering you a frosty cold bottle and a ride out.

Anyway, the point is, don’t think you’ve failed because you’re 20-something this or even 30-something that and you haven’t done whatever Big Thing you want to be remembered for yet. You have to keep pushing. Of course, there’s a meme for authors who didn’t publish until they were in their 50s and later, which is the club I’m in. Up and at ‘em, brothers and sisters. This might very well be the day. Or not. Doesn’t matter, so long as you’re here for it.

Return of the Grownup

As they say, “Big, if true.” 

Coming of age in South Carolina, I noticed the different ways people pronounced “adult.” It was a tight spectrum. On one end were the people who pronounced it “AH-dult,” with an almost Bostonian nasality to the stressed short “a” sound. The effect was similar to hearing something hit the floor hard on one edge, then falling over with a soft thud. People who talked like this tended to be varying degrees of smug, pretentious and condescending, as opposed to those who sounded the word as “uh-DULT” or like the word “addled” with a hard “t” in place of the final “d.” 

This came to mind as I listened to a young man tell me about a writer and public speaker whose line “clean your room” is often mocked in the media. The words “adult” or “grownup” never came up, but this is precisely what it’s about. We’re going on two generations of children who haven’t had to do anything in the line of chores, or even basic self-maintenance. After all this time, they finally hear a reason for why they’re supposed to make up their beds, for why they must pick up after themselves, other than, “Because I said so/ I will have your father inflict physical violence upon you if you don’t.” 

Order begets order. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.” It’s a shame that adults of the past felt the need to assert their authority  over explaining to their children why we did all those chores in the first place. I see a lot of blame for the destruction of the “family unit,” but take it from someone who grew up on the bubble of working class/ extreme lower-middle class in 1970s South Carolina: most of the families I knew, and mine especially, weren’t models of anything we wanted to emulate. 

It never fails to appall this former believer when I reflect how many times I heard 1 Corinthians 13  read aloud—and it seemed not one damned believer understood what was said. However you translate that key word, there was very little done for charity or love. It was all done because someone else made you do it,  and told you to like it.

Many of us upon growing up didn’t have the heart to treat our children thus, myself included. Most of us on the bubble of the working-class, lower middle-class in South Carolina didn’t remember our parents and grandparents as happy people. It made no sense to want to live like them, doing things because I done tole you to, that’s why.

Mom and Dad may have lived together but it was clear they barely tolerated each other. Cultural influences surely didn’t help, but in many regards the family unit did a fine job of destroying itself.  

Main Street Monte Vista by stormlight. I love the apocalyptic vibe here, but don’t miss the rainbow over the Dairy Queen at left.

I follow several traditional art pages on Facebook, and while I share the admins’ disgust with the debased aesthetics of art and architecture post-World War I, I would add that there were good reasons the public was so willing to throw over beauty and skill for style and attitude. Namely, there were no reasons to keep it.

The great cathedrals weren’t built for peasants like them or myself. Those lovely, imposing edifices were no more than lovely, imposing reminders that we were ruled. Most of my fellow peasants understood this at a most basic level, even if they didn’t think in those precise terms. All these nice paintings and buildings and whatnot were for the consumption of the Good People. Those very same people working us long hours for low wages and even less respect.

I would clarify that it was not contempt with which traditional aesthetics were cast off. It was indifference. Most people reject the tangles of metal that pass for modern sculpture as ugly and pointless, but they seem strangely apropos in front of the glass-paneled skyscrapers where they’re generally found. Who is that guy on the horse in the park to them?

Yes, it’s a shame they’re taking all the representational art down, erasing history, and so on. But no one feels so connected to that history that they’re willing to fight for it. Why should they? I repeat: Who is that guy on the horse in the park to them? What do they owe him?

From left to right, the respective flags of fast food franchises, CGI-infused Hollywood extravaganzas, etc.; and yuppie mountaineers, deluxe snow skiing, legal marijuana. For most people, that is. Your mileage may vary.

A case could be made for the practicality of our contemporaries. Yes, we miss the good old days when painters could paint realistically and with an unabashed bias for beauty, when even the working class houses had a certain charm, certainly more than the haze-gray, slat-sided boxes with no windows on one side, but what are you going to do? Choosing the practical attitude over one informed by sentimental longing is a definitively adult position. “Reals before feels,” as some might put it.

I’ll call it right here, then: what we’re suffering from is a perverse form of “adulthood” as framed by lazy people. Most people are, in case you haven’t noticed.

This big, charmless block of concrete with slits for windows is a medical clinic. We know this because someone was kind enough to have MEDICAL CLINIC installed in big, raised steel letters on the side. As a practical matter from the perspective of a functioning elder adult, they have a fine staff (they diagnosed my cancer) and I’m grateful they’re there.

Back to my original point of curiosity, that some young men are expressing interest in motivational speakers who encourage them to bring order to their rooms, and by extension, their lives....well, let’s hope a lot more young men catch on to the message. Of particular note is these men boast of their accomplishments online, from new personal bests in physical training to books read, while “hiding their power levels” among the “normies.” On one hand, one is led to wonder how many of these posters on the chan boards are telling the truth versus plumping their curricula vitae. On the other, many may simply be exaggerating while still doing better than most, while the great majority lurks—and lift weights, reads, and meditates to set themselves apart from common herd-animal humanity.

They’re keeping their talk within their peer groups. No one need suspect anything...unless someone takes notice someone is healthier, fitter, and far more focused. Which could happen. These days, the most obvious rebels are the ones who aren’t fat and out of shape, who don’t have tattoos, piercings, or grotesque ear gauges, who dress neatly and carry themselves well. In short, as young men were expected to be 60 years ago.

We have indeed come to a point in which everything old is new again. Again, I don’t know how widespread this general trend is, or whether it will go beyond chan board/ underground status. It’s a piece of good news, though, so I’ll take it.

All photographs Copyright © 2019 Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

“Be Who You Are at Every Age”

Random thoughts as I approach my fifty-eighth birthday.

Every now and then I’ll make a remark on Facebook referencing my age, which is old. The last time I did it I got this in response:

Who said we’re old? For shame. ‘Old’ is only a state of mind, a perception, a figment of our imagination. We might all be turning corners, but we’re still learning far greater truths. That ain’t old.

I don’t see any shame in being old. The shame is in dying young. Also, my prostate cancer and failing eyes, my slowness to heal from simple bruises, etc., aren’t figments of anyone’s imagination. Those are the metaphorical corners I’ve turned, all of them amplifying that Greatest Truth of Them All, which is entropy. Ordered systems fall to disorder. People and things wear out, break down, fall apart, rust, decay, rot. If you’re lucky, you live long enough to experience some things along the way.

This kitten will shed her cuteness to grow into a full grown cat before meeting whatever ends befall feral cats. If she’s lucky. It’s sad to contemplate, but a photo of my old self right now would be simply horrifying.

We’re all raging against the dying of the light. Some of us rage longer than others. I’m not merely resigned, I’m happy to be out of the mating game, that I no longer have to impress comely young maidens with my wit and charm, that I no longer have to jockey for Most Interesting Man in the Room status with other men, that I’ve done the marriage thing and my children are grown, etc. All I’ve got to do is what I’ve wanted to do all along, and that’s read stuff and write stuff. 

I’m old. Fifty-eight is two steps away from 60, and 60 is elderly. It’s already 23 years out from 35, which is when most people in the U.S. count as the beginning of middle-aged. I haven’t been middle-aged in a while. I’m old. I remember hearing The Beatles on A.M. radio when they were a working band. I saw the last episodes of the original Star Trek when it was on broadcast television. That’s half a century ago. Very last century, at that.

Aside from finishing the books I want to write, my hope is to maintain good health so I can see what happens in 2025, when whomever comes after Donald Trump takes office as President of the United States. We’re in a fascinating period of demographic, political, and cultural transition and I’m curious to see what’s next. I’m entertained as it is by everyone’s overreactions to the Punch ‘n’ Judy show that passes for political theater these days. It’s only going to get better.

I’d also like to live long enough to see at least one grandchild. And, no, you hysterical ninnies, I don’t fear for the future of my children or grandchildren, regardless of “climate change” or whatever popular phony eschatology is being peddled at the moment. As has been pointed out by others, if you’re here today, it’s because you’ve got ancestors who survived all the great catastrophes of history, from the last Ice Age to the Bronze Age Collapse to the Fall of Rome, the Great Mortality (a.k.a. the Black Death), the Hundred Years War, etc., etc. 

My children are fairly savvy, far more than I ever was. Barring the usual unfortunate accidents, they’ll find a way around whatever history throws at them.

Meanwhile, I relish what days I have, the sunrises and sunsets and phases of the moon I still can see. If I don’t pack my days with ceaseless activity it’s because I know nothing matters whether I do it or don’t. As my favorite quote from John Lennon goes, “Time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted.”

I would like to finish this last novel, though. So, then....

Pulling the Curtains

The encircling mountains
harden into blue
then jagged black
as this high valley 
rolls away from the sun

as greens fade to gray
the feral cats on my porch
begin their slow walks
to wherever 
they will be
in the night

I undo the sashes holding
the curtains in their orderly halves
to draw them together
before the big picture windows

I’ve begun a habit of saying
Farewell and good night
to each day by its name and date
in honor of all the babies born
all things begun and ended

I want attention paid
even if it’s only mine

It brings nothing and no one back
soothes no one’s pain
even aggravates mine
to think of all the time 
I still waste each day
while so many others 
have been denied
my options

I name the day and bid it good night
then pull the curtains
I’ll keep doing this until I get it right
or a better idea.

From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2019 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

The Dead of September

What a delightfully ironic title, a beautiful jumping-off point! Quick, while it still seems like a good idea....

And so we enter into that final third of the year I call the Chute. Labor Day is at the top of the slide. New Year’s Day and the gray abyss of January and February are at the bottom. It’s the most happening part of the year, the one we spent the other two-thirds climbing up from. The oppressive heat of summer is easing. School is back in session, and the excitement of high school football beneath the Friday night lights—the only form of America’s best sport worth watching—is in the air. There’s also professional football and college ball if you’re into that. 

Thank God for artist Evelyn Sprouse-Rowe and her tireless attention to the glass surfaces of the San Luis Valley.

Of course, Halloween, and more Halloween, until, finally, it’s Halloween. The memes about pumpkin spice this, that, and the other began showing up on my Facebook timeline as early as three weeks ago. With some effort, you can shoehorn some autumn in between Halloween and Thanksgiving before Christmas overwhelms everything—and then abruptly leaves us alone in the gray, freezing gloom.

Ironically, Old Spice still smells lively and fresh after all these years.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s an old complaint of mine, brought up by my perception of the year having moved way too fast. We’ll lay it to rest here. No, really. This is it. 

So what’s up? Well, it was a busy month with my novel in progress, The Wrong Kind of Dead....

Big weekend in Tater Town. Our spuds were coffee’d up and ready to roll.

I’ve been trying all summer long to describe what I’ve been doing. Frankly, I feared people would freak when they learned I’d stopped forward progress at Chapter 25, page 221, to go back and rewrite Chapters 2 and 5.

What happened was I’d realized my supporting cast had no supporting background to justify any kind of emotional reaction to what I had coming next. My flashback in Chapter 5 describing How Agnes Met Elyssa and Later Went On To Meet Derek was too lightly sketched, and did nothing to promote a proper understanding of their relationships to one another. 

While Agnes is a Frankensteinian creation of pieces of six women I’ve known across the years who somehow came to life one night in my Colorado Springs basement office, Elyssa was her Manic Pixie Dream Teen Sidekick with a Dark Side. This was entertaining enough to get her through that last part of Grace Among the Dead, where she and Agnes appeared midway through to complicate the Dead Silencer’s life. But the fact remained that I somehow had a 19-year-old woman overseeing the affairs of the camp’s women, many of whom were older. Even Brother Christopher, Derek Grace’s taciturn, no-nonsense 20-year-old in charge of the camp’s young men, defers to this slender girl not yet out of her teens. How does that happen?

Elyssa Marie Godwin had to make her bones and the people around her have to know about it. Therein hangs the saga of an older sister and dutiful daughter who didn’t mind taking care of the people in her life, but wished she wasn’t taken for granted. Who was slightly more mature than her peers for what her circumstances forced her into, and took a dim view of the usual teenage tomfoolery, but was tolerant. Perhaps too tolerant. Elyssa used to put up with a lot. This was the world she lived in, these were the people of that world. What else could she do?

Then that world ended in blood and horror and Elyssa was alone. She met a woman 16 years older who still had people she was responsible for, but was alone, all the same—and doing what she could on her terms as best she could in a world always working against her. My 19-year-old semi-outsider who spent her senior year of high school online so she could take care of her injured mother, now had someone to model herself on. 

The New Weird Order is ugly and mean, but she is not taken for granted. Here, she means something to the people who mean something to her. Elyssa hates and fears the living dead to the extent she prefers Agnes and Derek to do the fighting, yet she loves where she’s at what she does in a way she never knew possible in her old life. This love makes her fierce, and earns the reverence of those around her.

My wife made this. If I were to do this over again I’d have Agnes’ hair up and her big, owlish driving glasses on. In all the stories I’ve written over the years I generally avoided even thinking about what my characters looked like. Now I have to know how tall they are, their favored manner of dress, all that jazz, even if I don’t mention it outright in the narrative

Of course, show don’t tell, and all that. So I’m breaking my rule of no chapters over 10-12 pages long five-fold by showing how Elyssa comes into her own. Before one wonders if I’m getting a little too far into The Talking Too Much Dead territory, I remind the reader that the reputation Elyssa makes for herself is during the fall of civilization at the cold dead hands of the risen dead. I have an opportunity to do two things absolutely necessary for a superior zombie post-apocalypse reading experience.

First, I’m taking the opportunity to tell a tale of the fall of civilization before the hordes of the living dead. This was what Fear the Walking Dead was supposed to be about until it went off the rails by the third or fourth episode. It’s a hard fact of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, whether it’s zombies or nukes or an alien invasion, that the most interesting parts of all that are when everything familiar begins falling apart. 

At best, it’s done slowly. You notice little things out of order. Awful things happening all around you getting ignored, then downplayed by the media. The military is moving large amounts of materiel from their bases. Some personnel disappear under new orders, others are left behind, others who had separated from the military are called back into service—for mass burial duty. Which goes wrong.

And then it’s a matter of sitting around waiting for the power to go out. You know it’s going out, and that when it goes out it’s going out for the last time. This is while you’re waiting for whomever shows first, the living dead hungry for your living flesh, or roving gangs of the living seeking that and everything else.

Secondly, I’m establishing characters with history and personality whom we will get upset for should anything happen to them. That’s all.

Imagine all this with no people. Just random dead lying under cars or squatting behind corners looking to grab your ankle and pull it into its mouth. That car coming down the road? Marauders. If you can’t escape or hold them off, be sure to save your last bullets or grenade to take you and your people out, because it will be a most prolonged and painful end for all if you’re captured.

For my part, I’m enjoying writing about women trying to make their way in world that’s become seriously, no-kidding-this-time hostile to their freedoms. This is my chance to show the pinch-faced ideologues how it’s done. As in, “with heart,” which is something such people don’t have, so they won’t understand it. It’ll just be loads of fun watching their heads explode when Agnes and Elyssa emerge as heroes all the more-or-less happy, well-adjusted people of both sexes enjoy, because these ladies aren’t doing anything to prove anything in the name of anything. They’re just getting by the best they can until they reach Abundant Life, and meet Brother Christopher and his crew, and eventually Derek Grace.

Craziest of all for me is writing in third person past tense as opposed to my usual first person present. It’s a sweet shift of gears, although I still don’t understand the problems people have with the most common (because effective) setup for action-adventure stories.

Anyway, I’m almost through this, and doing minimal edits along the way so I can get back to Chapter 25 and start the process towards everyone’s Darkest Hour. Who will survive? I can’t tell you, only that I intend it to hurt when the person that falls, falls.

It’s okay, he’s just looking for...food.