September 1, 2009

The Walk of Shame

By Avery

Liz eased onto her feet. The sheet, which had wound its way around her foot sometime during the long night’s thrashings, trailed her like a train. She shook it off with impatience, more mindful of her body’s nagging soreness than the ridiculous irony of the image.

He had left before she had awoken. The room was a shambles, his belongings scattered across the floor as if abandoned in hasty disgust. In the bright morning sunshine the electric surge that had filled Liz’s heart at the apex of their encounter seemed all but drained away. She felt small, weak and exposed.

“Oh. You’ve awakened.” Frank stood there, hair mussed, clothes disheveled. He avoided her eyes as he gestured to the far corner. “Your dress is over there.”

“Thank you,” was all she could manage. Liz picked up the soft black garment, puddled it on the floor at her feet and then stepped in, aware of the odd pull of tightened muscles across her back. She struggled with the sleeves for a few moments, wondering if he was watching, wondering if he was aware of the toll their riotous night had taken on her. If he knew he made no attempt to assist her as she fumbled with the buttons. After a few moments of struggling she abandoned the top two, leaving a gaping V at the top of her shoulders, followed by a series of odd bulges and gaps where she had incorrectly fastened the fabric. She turned back to Frank and forced a small smile. “Better?”

Frank’s eyes, hooded with guilt, shifted to the door. “I have work.”

Liz started to nod, but then shook her head. “No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I will not.” She stamped her foot. An aching throb traced up her leg. Was there anywhere on her body their transgressions had not touched? Liz caught the warning arch of his eyebrow, the downward tug of his mouth and altered her tone. “How can you act this way? After last night–?”

“I am busy, that’s all. I told you, I have work to do.”

“And you don’t have time enough to spare me a moment now that your conquest is complete? Have you checked me off of your list, yet?” He didn’t answer and Liz choked back the lump in her throat. “How can you be this way?”

“I am not being any way,” Frank said. He ran his hand through his hair, tousling it even further. “I do not have time for this.”

“And I have no inclination to allow you to leave without admitting last night was special. You… My body… Touched everywhere. Your hands traced the most intimate parts of me. Last night we connected as no others have. Admit that, and I will leave you alone.”

“Of course!” Frank shouted. “Of course it was intimate. I was there! I was! But it is no longer last night. It is tomorrow.”

“I see.” Liz fought the tears that threatened to overspill. “It is tomorrow, and you have work to do.”

“Marvelous; you’ve got it. That is only what I have been telling you for the past five minutes.”

“Then do not let me keep you one second longer.”

He slid from the room like a scolded child, his shamed relief staining the air. Liz limped past the gurney to the window. The leaded panes mimicked the tracery of stitches across her face, the fine, careful lines Frank had sewn all over her body. He had made her. From castaway corpses to single being, he had made her, infused her with this life, and then cast her aside. She pressed her forehead against the glass until it hurt, staring out at a world she would never enter, straining away from the world she would never leave.

“You’re a bastard, Frank,” she whispered. “You’re a bastard.”

16 Comments | posted in fantasy, flash fiction, Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Bride, horror

August 17, 2009

You Want to Know About Heroes?

By Avery

This is a reposting of a “blog” entry I did for a Red Room contest about heroes. Of course, I couldn’t let the dark side not have a representative. Apparently, they didn’t want to hear from the dark side. Sigh.

Hee hee.

**************

I can shatter bone. With no more effort than it takes you to grab a pencil, I can pulverize your femur. With a flex of my quads I can leap to the top of your house, and with a swipe of my arm, I can topple it. As a child you gazed with longing at candy-colored comic books, wishing to be all that I already am.

They cry. All night. Voices in the dark, shouting, screaming, pleading. They scurry across the earth, unable or unwilling to pry themselves from the role of victim. “It’s too hard,” they say. “It’s too hard. Help me.”

I did, at first. To shut them up, to win myself a decent night’s sleep. I saved the first one. A sweet-bodied guy with shining chestnut hair and eyes to match. As I convinced his assailants they had chosen the wrong victim, he took in the carnage I wrought with those dark, wide eyes. After the electric terror faded, after the sting of being rescued by a chick had eased from them, I found those eyes were the same as the rest of him–sweet and grateful. I let him thank me. All night. He eventually dozed off, but the screams kept coming. I stared into the blackness and wished for them to stop. The sirens echoed their wails–one passing so near it started my boy out of his exhaustion. He rolled onto his side, blinked those stupid doe eyes at me and said, “Aren’t you going to help them?”

I got up fast, was out of there before the shape of my head had smoothed from the pillow. I left him lounging in bed, confident that now he was safe, his hero was going out to save the rest of the world.

I went and got a drink.

Then another.

Then another.

Behind me, some bastard at the pool table smacked his girlfriend in the face for sloshing his beer. I let him.

There were other times I felt more generous. Times when a rapist was found mangled and stuffed in a trash can. Times when a serial killer stopped killing and the cops thought they’d somehow lucked out and managed to jail him on unrelated charges. But for each of those times there were scores where I heard, and did nothing. Times when I just didn’t feel like getting involved.

I can still hear them. Despite the four window air conditioners I have running at full-tilt, despite the music I play so loud it throbs my eardrums and gives me vertigo, I can still hear them screaming for me. I turn up the volume, and pray for sleep.

So, what do you think of me now, kids? Do I fit inside your hard-lined squares of colorful ink? Do my words fill in the bubbles?

Am I your hero, or what?

11 Comments | posted in Uncategorized

August 11, 2009

A Post A Month? Bad Form!

By Avery

The laxness of my recent postings (and visitings) is shaming me. I’ve always been a one-track-minder, able to focus intensely and exhaustively–but only on one thing at a time. You want me to chew gum? I’ll chew gum. I’ll chew the crap out of it. Just don’t ask me to walk while doing it.

This post is short–painfully so. And largely without purpose, except to apologize for the lateness, to promise that I have been doing good things in the writing arena whilst away, and to stress my sincere hope for returning to regular posting as soon as I master the multitasker role.

I am on facebook, where the brevity and immediacy of contact is easier for me to handle at this point in time. So, if you’re there, stop by and say, “Hey.” I also have a twitter account, but if you think these updates are sad…

Until next time (when I hope to have better, more interesting things on which to expound), be good, enjoy the remnants of summer, and write and read happy!

8 Comments | posted in Uncategorized

June 15, 2009

Pencils Down

By Avery

I don’t remember much from the time my mother fell suddenly, gravely ill a few years ago. I don’t know if my brain, sensing imminent meltdown, scrapped the majority of the unpleasant details, or rather if the predictable monotony of tiled hospital hallways, harsh lights and rows of uncomfortable wooden chairs simply lent itself to melding events into one long, indistinguishable haze. Either way, the days did indeed bleed into what now seems a single, ageless track of sunlight from horizon to horizon. One of the few individual events I can recall is sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, feeling detached from everything around me, idly fingering random scraps of paper that my mother had allowed to accumulate on her “desk.” One piece lay separate from the rest–either from earning some elevated rank in the hierarchy of chores, or ostracized by the distasteful quality of its nature–its edges curling in as if to protect my mother’s perfect, swooping script. The note said, “Bleach tub handles.”

It struck me then–as it does again now as a friend’s father lay on an operating table, his life teetering on the edge of devastation–the potential absurdity of a final note such as that. There was my mother, mostly dead, struggling for what little life she had left in her body, and the final message she left to us all was that the fucking shower knobs had some mildew. While I can smile at it now, I can assure you at the time those words made me confused, angry, sad and horrified. But now, after having gained a bit of distance from the situation, I’m starting to think it wouldn’t have been such a final goodbye. For her, anyway.

We go through lives with the expectation of reaching very old age. We live our lives drowning in a sea of tomorrows, of laters, of getting-around-to-its. For those of us who will dodge sudden death, we will weave a tapestry of our existence for as long as we can, until someone comes along and says our work is nearly finished and soon it will be time to put it down forever. Once those words reach our ears, we’ll look back at the long, interlocking threads of our lives and begin to knot off the frayed edges. But for every one loose end secured, a thousand more will catch in the breeze, mocking our attempts to seize them. Reading all the classics, learning how to surf, eating escargot just once–those once trivial wishes, made monumental with the approaching end, will never come to fruition, and so our tapestry will remain ragged, undone. And the worst is, we will be fully aware of this. We will look at our amalgamation of lazy days (the very ones we are already apathetically conscious of) and wish to have filled them with greater things, thread-knotting things, tapestry-finishing things. We know this just as we know most of our little monkey brains will acknowledge the truth of this, and continue sleeping in, slacking off and ignoring the Jeopardy countdown song playing in the background. It is a disheartening thought.

In contrast, take my mother. Fine, talking one minute, on the floor the next. Her list of tomorrows was still–to her, anyway–full of potential, stretched interminably in front of her. Those damn shower handles would be tackled at some point, as well as all the other things she’d planned to do. Had she died then, she would have left her tapestry balled on the floor, frayed and unfinished, and she would have given exactly two shits. The rest of us would have stared at that stupid little piece of paper, trying to glean some sort of mystical, hidden message from its dearth of letters, but she would have slipped away thinking everything was still in place to be finished before the big finale. And that almost seems the kinder path, kinder, at least, than being handed a ticking alarm clock and sent away to do the best one can with the remaining hours.

After reading the note that day, I almost went into the bathroom to clean those knobs, to bleach the fuck out of them so when she got home it would be taken care of. I didn’t. A spell hung over that scrap of yellow paper with its official green lines and red margins. It felt in that moment that if I set screwdriver to those knobs, if I squirted one ounce of Tilex, the thread holding her to the planet would snap and that frayed remnant would be the one to finish off the raw edge left undone by that piece of paper. I put the note back on the table, just where I had found it, and went to go see if my dad needed anything. Spell or not, my mother did recover–against the most tremendous of odds–and those fucking knobs finally got their comeuppance.

***********

To my dear, dear friend, I send out well-wishes and healing thoughts for your dad. May his tapestry continue to grow by yards and miles in the years to come.

16 Comments | posted in death, life, loose ends, sickness

June 3, 2009

Lightening Up

By Avery


A week ago I was at a nearby antique store. It’s a pretty cool place, located inside a monstrous old factory. The rows of antiques flow from massive room to massive room, the walls dematerializing from sheetrock to exposed brick as the spaces become less “done” and truer to their history. The aisles loop around, taking shoppers back from the final, huge warehouse space and back into human-scaled territory. I followed the u-turn of rows–like a rainbow slumped on its side–to a veritable pot of gold. Around the corner I found waiting for me a used book section consisting with numbers of science fiction and fantasy rivaling that of any new book store. And these weren’t just some grandad’s old, beat-up collection of seventies serial sci-fi (although that category was represented), there were tons of modern authors like Gaiman, Williams, Salvatore, Hamilton, Harris and Reynolds. Every category from steampunk to high fantasy had a representative in attendance. I ended up grabbing an armful of two-dollar bargains, seizing the opportunity to both expand my bookshelves and explore some new-to-me urban fantasy. I also picked up a Philip K. Dick complete collection (I’ve been dying to read the real Minority Report), and a handful of random, easy-on-the-brain fantasy titles, including a new Redwall book from Brian Jacques (I have a thing for mice and squirrels with swords).

In all, the selection I chose was fluffier than the usual–nice, short, fun books. And that made me start thinking about the term “Summer Reading” and why we feel compelled to lighten our mental load during the hot months. Does it have something to do with our old schooltime habits? Tossing our proverbial pencils in the air as the last bell rings and turning to more leisurely pursuits? Or is it embedded in our need to shed the heavy weight of winter? As our parkas, boots and sweaters are peeled off, as our diets become leafier and infused with flavors of citrus, do we continue to jettison of all things bulky and cumbersome? As soon as March has a firm hold on us, the tables at the bookstores entitled “Beach Reads” come creeping into the center aisles. I don’t go anywhere near the beach during the summer (despite the fact I live a mere twenty minutes away–it has something to do with heat, sharks and sand sticking to my sunscreen like Shake-n-Bake), but I nevertheless gravitate towards this pile of printed matter like a bird towards the equator. I like to think it’s my inner Peter Pan calling the shots, the little girl who used to sit on the lush grass and read under the shade of a giant tulip poplar insisting I take some time to run through the sprinkler just for the heck of it. It’s hard to deny her that urge; the pure, uncomplicated enjoyment of the shade, a nice swing, and a good book is hard to match.

Summer inspires much in all of us: a compulsion to try our hands at gardening, a yearning to put match to charcoal–and if you’re from the Eastern Shore a desire to sit at a table covered in newspaper and pound the shit out of crabs while eating corn and guzzling beer. But, most of all, I think summer reminds us to find the fun in life, if only one chapter at a time.

9 Comments | posted in books, fantasy, reading, sci fi, summer

May 7, 2009

Mixing Fantasy and Reality

By Avery

When I was little, I hated those squat, rainbow-hued My Little Pony toys. I was a huge fan of horses (yeah, what twelve-year-old girl isn’t?) and I had a collection of sixty-odd Breyer horses. You know those horses–prancing Morgans, preening Tennessee Walkers and galloping Arabians, each perfectly detailed and accurate down to the grooves in its hooves. I used to play with them by the hour, using Barbie as an accessory. In most little girls’ worlds Barbie was the main character and the horses would have been pets. But not me. Barbs was second-string, there to advance the plot, if at all. Most of the time my horses had human-free adventures. My pretend Mustang herd galloped across the open plain (the green shag carpeting of my bedroom floor), made friendships, were hunted, trapped and escaped back to freedom. And there was no place in that scenario for short-legged pink ponies with purple hair and stars on their asses. As much as I enjoyed fantasy, it had no place among my “reality.”

And yet that kid eventually grew up into the chick who digs blending modern life with the fantastical. I’m not sure how or when it happened. Maybe it had something to do with overdosing on too many sword and sorcery tales. Quite possibly Joss Whedon had a significant hand in the deal. Then again, maybe it was growing up to discover the enticing mysteries of adulthood were nothing more than chains which would tether me to a daily reality that was far less than mythic. In the midst of work, finances, housecleaning and insipid routines, I think I realized everyday life lacked the mystical quality my childhood held. Toadstools were only a sign of a fungus in my lawn, rainbows meant that it had finally stopped raining, and lightening bugs were just insects trying to get their freak on. And that loss of the “what-if” portion of my imagination must have had an impact, because somewhere in my mid-twenties I ditched the mainstream novels I had been planning and went genre.

While the mundane details of my daily life still exist on a grand scale, I now have an alter-existence where the strange, wondrous and mystical happens in the modern world. It’s like gaining back a lost bit of my childhood, a forgotten piece of me.

My horse collection is in my niece’s possession, now. But, I can still see every one of my old friends in my mind. And the next time I let the herd roam free, you can bet there’ll be some pink, yellow, and blue rumps mixed in with the rest.

12 Comments | posted in contemporary, fantasy, modern, writing

April 17, 2009

My Bizarre Evening, or the New Small Town Highlander Rule

By Avery


Last night, Salisbury University was hosting the last event of its children’s literature festival, an evening with Holly Black. The shebang started with a movie at four-thirty. After that, the timeline got sketchy, but there was to be a reception/signing and Holly speaking on the creative process at some point. Since I had already seen the movie (and, as I’ve confessed before, I have a packed-movie-theatre-squeamishness that probably goes back to Outbreak), I decided to pass and just show up later. The Architect got home from work right before I left and decided to join me, work clothes and all.

Mistake number one.

We walk into the event room, me and my stupid punky hair and the Architect still in his business jacket. My goal was simple; introduce myself to Holly, maybe get in a moment of small chitchat, then go listen to her speak about writing. The movie ended as we arrived, the lights had been turned back on and parents and children were milling about, checking out the author’s table. One by one, heads started prairie-dogging in our direction. I looked behind me, to see if Holly was about to enter. No. I turn back to find a woman and her two kids standing in front of me, her eyes darting from the snappily-dressed Architect to me.

“Are you the author?”

Chairs in the audience creaked as I opened my mouth to reply. “Uhh, no. She’s much cooler than I am. Besides, you’ll probably know when she gets here because…” I motion towards the mini-stage with its spotlit podium. The lady thanked me with a smile and departed.

“You missed a shot in the limelight,” bellows a man overhearing this exchange.

Big mouth (oh, I do love my big-ol-mouth) shoots back, “No thanks, I’m waiting for my own.” What follows is a seemingly innocuous exchange about what I do, what I write, blah, blah, blah. But, by now people are outright staring. I nudge the Architect and say, “I think we’d better sit down.”

We sit, only to find out the reception/signing thing is happening after they screen some animated short film that won the British version of an Oscar this year. While we deliberate leaving for twenty minutes to check out the campus versus watching, the lady with the kids comes back by.

“Would you sign their books?”

Holyfuckcrapwhere’dthiscomefrom? “But, I’m not the author, I’m not even published, yet.”

The nice lady goes on to say she’s with a program for the county’s at-risk children and the kids heard I was a writer, too, and wanted my autograph. I make a joke to the girl nearest me holding out her Spiderwick Chronicles book about how she’s stocking a lot of faith in the fact that I will eventually be published. She nods solemnly and I take the book, offering to sign the very back of her book, because she needs to save the front for Holly. I sign both books, talk to the kids and their guardian. All the while, a nasty, gloating little voice in my head whispers, “This is what it’s going to be like.” A rush of adrenaline sends my stomach to the tips of my boot, while my growing mortification at both the outcome of this event and my own unwelcome interior jubilation turn my face an unattractive shade of magenta.

The movie thankfully starts and eyes peel away from me to the screen. A few minutes in, the Architect spots the same lady spot Holly. She must have convinced Ms. Black to go outside for photos, because they all exit the room together. The Architect whispers, “Now’s your chance to actually talk to her.” After a moment’s hesitation, I go out into the hallway (this, by the way, is so not like me. My sister had to convince me to even go in the first place, and made sure to insist I didn’t hide in a corner when I did).

This is the point in the evening where I do meet Holly Black. She’s nice. She likes my hair. Her comment turns into me telling her that people thought I was her, but I don’t get to get any further because more moms have noticed she’s outside and she quickly becomes swarmed. I cede my position to some wide-eyed kid being prodded forward by her mother. Finally, her escort pulls the plug and drags Holly away. But not before–oh no, not before–one of the other ladies with an at-risk kid asks me to sign her ward’s book. In-Front-Of-The-Author. I bend down to explain that Holly is the author and he should go to her, but the kid’s doe-eyed, holding out the damn book. So, I sign the back of Ms. Black’s book in front of her. Like a big-ol-ass.

I go back in, whisper the events to the Architect. I sit for about two minutes, then feel the need to get out, as far out as possible. I retreat with a growing sense of sleaziness and shame, wondering just how many of those who hadn’t witnessed this strange encounter in its entirety would go home talking of the crazy girl impersonating Holly and signing books for impressionable, innocent children.

The Architect maintains I did nothing wrong. My sister–bless her misanthropic self–thinks it’s hysterical. She thinks I’m okay as long as no one goes holding a little thing in front of my heart to measure how much it’s shrunk (a little Grinchy humor). I think–well, I think I probably shouldn’t go out. Bad Things happen when I do. And in this small town, I should have known better. It’s easy to seize power, to claim fame, because nothing much happens here.

And there should have been only one punkish, darkly inclined fantasy writer in the room that night. The ‘bury can’t wrap its collective head around two.

I never got to hear Holly speak, or have her sign my copy of Tithe, which is too bad because when I was learning how to write a pitch/query, I studied the back of that book for days; it’s got all kinds of pointy, grabby hooks.

I’m tending to blame this whole event on my mother. Hating how tall I was when I was younger, my mother would tell me, “You’re the first person they see. Walk into a room like you own it.” It’s a great lesson, really. But the only problem is, when you walk into a room like you own it, sometimes people are inclined to believe you actually do.

16 Comments | posted in holly black, lecture., salisibury, university

April 14, 2009

Read With Kids Challenge

By Avery


The good folks over at RIF (Reading is Fundamental) just sent me an email regarding this year’s Read With Kids Challenge. The mission is simple–get adults to spend time reading with children. The goal is huge–log 5 million collective minutes spent reading with kids from now (well, April 1. I’m a little late) until June 30. Log your time individually, or with a team of three or more adults, and not only do you enrich a child’s life (sweet), you’re entered to win a trip to Disney World (double sweet). Also, the winning team gets to choose both a featured RIF program and a school in their community to win a special children’s book collection. The sweetness doesn’t stop!

One of my favorite moments from my vacation in Florida this past Christmas? Lying side-by-side with my niece on her bed as she quietly read one of the books I’d given her (A Little Princess, my favorite when I was her age), and I read mine. Every once in a while I’d tell her to stop and read out loud the sentence she was on. She got a kick out of that. Of course, I occasionally had to skip a sentence or two when she did the same to me–can’t always play totally fair with the young ones when propriety is at stake.

I’ve already spouted on about the need for child literacy, and since most of you who pop by here are writers, I’ll spare the lecture. But, if you’ve got a little carpet crawler, monkey-bar-maniac or other wee (insert cute diminutive) available, snap ’em up and get to readin’.

Have no tots with which to share the book bug? You can always send money.

RIF needs that, too.

11 Comments | posted in children, education, learning, literature, Read with kids, reading, reading is fundamental, RIF

April 10, 2009

Just because

By Avery

I’m not one to post pictures of my cats, but I was cleaning out the camera roll on my phone and came across this one, which always makes me chuckle.

7 Comments | posted in Uncategorized

April 6, 2009

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Reviews

By Avery

I finally got my reviews from the two Amazon expert reviewers which came along with my advancing to stage two of the ABNA. First off, many thanks to those two individuals. I know it must have been difficult plowing through all those excerpts and writing reviews on each. I appreciate your dedication to this award and even more so your feeback on my work.

As far as the reviews themselves go, I’m fairly happy with them. No one said I should find another job or walk away from the keyboard, and I’m fairly certain neither of them clawed out their eyes after reading my excerpt. I already know–gods do I know–I’m a dense writer. I don’t think I can change that without changing everything about myself and my style. Plus, I’m of the opinion–stop me if I’m wrong–the issue of density is on a sliding scale when it comes to fantasy and sci-fi. I also was aware I was entering a mainstream contest with a borderline horror story, and that many people would be uncomfortable with some of the content of my novel. Not a big deal. I’m not mainstream about my life and my work reflects that.

Having said that, I am taking into consideration that I might want to move my prologue a bit deeper into the story, but I’m still not sure. Is is fairer to tell people up front that some nasty things go on in my book, or should I just let them get sucked into the relative safety of Resonance and Quinn’s story, then sock them with the really dark stuff once they’re trapped? I don’t know. I suppose if it’s a point of selling the book versus shelving it, I’ll have to be sneaky about the cringe factor.

Anyway, I’m posting my feeback below, if anyone wants to see what the reviewers of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award had to say about Resonance :

ABNA Expert Reviewer
Intriguing but dense

Resonance is the unusual name of an unusual girl. She is the tattooed, blue-haired twenty-something who is forced to register at the local college by her mother as the condition of Resonance continuing to live at home. This is the normal part of this excerpt. Before you arrive at Resonance’s story, however, you learn about a murderer named Arhreton who is busy tattooing a woman named Not, apparently for the last time after twenty years of brutality. Another character is Quinn, who works at a funeral home and is a key player in a lot of magical goings-on.

The plot is intriguing, with lots of interesting action. The supernatural elements were a little hard to follow, though, because of the dense writing style. I had to re-read many passages just to understand what was happening.

It’s a skilled effort by the author, but the story needs a little clarity and simplicity.

ABNA Expert Reviewer

This fantasy novel opened with a blood sacrifice which was a definite turn-off in my opinion. Despite my distaste for the plot as it developed, the excerpt was well-written and certainly stood out from the crowd of other entries in the competition.

I did find myself more interested in the story once Resonance and Quinn met one another- here again the strong writing overcame my reservations about the plot itself. I do believe this might work out into an interesting book, but am concerned that other readers will share my dislike of the opening. Perhaps reworking that element into the narrative at a later point would make this work more appealing to a wider audience.

For better or worse, there they are. Like I said, I’m still pretty happy with how this all turned out. And again, my thanks to those two reviewers for their honest input.

16 Comments | posted in ABNA, amazon breakthrough novel award, excerpt, novel, review