A book promo doohickey success story

Merit Badges Cap with Pop Tarts: A Still Life

Took an emergency early AM bike ride over to the grocery store today and ran into this guy. If you’re like me, if you’ve lived your whole life in the same town, he’s one of those guys you see now and again, guy you knew pretty well back in high school, guy you see coming out of the dry cleaners maybe, pumping gas next to you.

 Nice day, so we stood on the verge of the parking lot for a minute catching up. Usual shit, bragging on our kids and such. His kid just graduated, too, and is looking for work. I got to puff out my chest a bit, tell him how the Daja hopped a plane for Florida Monday afternoon, the day after she snagged her diploma, how she was down pow-wowing with her new employer, hitting the ground running, helping them set up their PR push around some major swimwear industry deal in Miami that’s coming up in July. Jesus, two days out of college and my kid is getting ready to go to Miami to hang out with international designers and swimsuit models. I’m on the wrong side of fifty and getting ready to crank out an article on Treasury’s new tangible asset depreciation regs. One of us played our cards wrong.

 Then he asked, “What’s with the hat?”

 I’m usually wearing a cap of some sort – keeps the sun out of my eyes and protects my scalp, seeing as how the SPF afforded by my current hairline is best expressed with negative integers. But this one features a reversed question mark centered in an orange circle – the irony merit badge. It’s a book promo Kevin Fenton sent me a couple years back when his marvelous debut novel, Merit Badges, was published. (I recently opined on both Kevin and his book at length, if you want to take a gander.)

 So I gave him the elevator speech about the book, about Kevin.

 “Good book?” he asked. “I’m always looking for something to read.”

 That surprised me a little because back when I actually knew the guy, back in high school, he wasn’t what you’d call the literary type. One of my jock friends.

 “Excellent book,” I said. “Best thing I’ve read the last few years.” 

 He had me text him the title so he’d remember to look it up.

 The moral of the story? These book promos, pick the right one, I guess they can work. That, and send Dan free shit.

 Oh, the bike ride? Before you get too carried away imagining my virtues, the emergeny was this. I was out of Pop Tarts.

Cheating on my novels at the short fiction whorehouse

Hey, if I’m going to blog about short fiction, I’m at least going to pimp my book.

I wrote a novel before I ever wrote a short story. Didn’t know any better. Didn’t know any writer folk, didn’t know about e-zines like Crimefactory or kick-ass publications like Needle, didn’t know that short stories were even a thing, at least in crime fiction. Then I got sucked into a flash fiction contest, and that was fun, and pretty soon I’d done a mess of those.

And I like that niche, the challenge of creating an actual narrative arc, a complete tale, and shoehorning it in to a thousand words or so. Keeps things tight, teaches you to write down to the bones. But there is also something artificial about that limit. It’s like a plant growing in a pot. The story can only get so big.

Lately, I’ve been on a bit of a short fiction binge. Just had a piece up at Shotgun Honey (although, truth be told, that story is now baked into a novel I’m trying to get cleaned up), finished another that’s going to be in Needle soon, but you can listen to the audio here if you like, wrote another that’s going in Tom Pluck’s next charity anthology, and yet another that just scratched an itch that Chuck Wendig gave me. All in the last few weeks. The Shotgun Honey piece is flash length, but the rest of them are whatever length they needed to be. The rest of them grew in the wild, no pots.

But this whole batch of shorts, there’s also something else about them. They weren’t written because of a flash fiction challenge somewhere. They were written because I felt like writing them. And that’s a new impulse for me.

So why this burst of short fiction, and why now? I had a little twitter exchange with Matt McBride yesterday, he of Frank Sinatra in a Blender fame, in which I noted that 2K words on a novel was a pretty good day, but that, when I write a short story, I tend to finish the first draft in one sitting, no matter how long it is. And, with this last batch, those first drafts have been in the 5-6K range. That’s a lot of words to crank out all at once, at least for me, but, in one case at least, I cranked them out in about three hours. Christ, that’s better than 30 words a minute. OK, I type faster than that, but when you throw in tea and bathroom breaks, not a lot faster.

So what’s the difference? I think it’s this. With a short story, even a longish one, when you start, you’re almost done. At least as compared to a novel. For me, with a novel, there tends to a burst at the beginning. I blow through the first 20K words or so at breakneck speed. But then I start looking at the odometer, start realizing that I still have another 60 to 80k words to go. All of a sudden I want to stop for gas, go to the bathroom, buy snacks, hit a Waffle House, do anything to break up the monotony of the road. And novels don’t come with GPS, or at least mine don’t. I know I’m going to get lost once or twice, going to head down some dead end that’s going to cost me a couple thousand words somewhere along the line. The characters get on my nerves, sitting in the back, asking if we’re there yet. So the writing settles in to that steady succession of 1K or 2K days. I just keep doing the work, stacking the word count, trusting the process. Finally, I turn that corner, get into the home stretch. That’s when I’ll put the hammer down again, have another 5 or 6K day, the end so close I can taste it, and I just can’t wait to get there.

But with a short story, the finish line is always this side of the horizon. Finishing is easy. And finishing feels good.

I see a danger there, though. I could get addicted to finishing. So addicted that the tough slog of novel writing might start to seem too tough. All the highs of writing short fiction – the quick finish, the comparatively quick feedback from readers and the ego stroking that provides – all of that could push novel writing to the back burner. Or all the way off the stove.

I think that happened a little here. I got well in to one novel, but realized I was spinning my wheels, that I had to drop it, at least for a while. I have another novel, one I finished the first draft off quite a while ago. I was most of the way through with a major overhaul on that one. I know everything I have to do to wrap it up, but I was tired of it. Bored with it. Frankly, a little pissed at it.

Compared to the first-date thrill of drafting something new – and especially the one-night-stand thrill of writing a short, where you’re not only stepping out with a new idea, but you know damn well you’re going to have its pants off and be swapping bodily fluids by day’s end – compared to that, the long, monogamous slug of novel writing had lost its allure. I’m ready now, though. I’ve been through a Kama Sutra’s worth of erotic monkeyshines with my short fiction over the past few weeks. Enough so that I now kinda miss the richer rewards of a longer relationship. So as soon as I post this, I’m going back to work on finishing that overhaul.

So is that what short fiction is? A writing mistress or, really, a writing bordello? Someplace I can stop off for a quickie when I need a cheap thrill? I dunno. But I do know this. My first novel? The one I wrote before I’d written any short fiction? When I got bored with that one, when I needed a break, I didn’t write anything. Sometimes for weeks at a time. Sometimes for months. You’re not a writer if you don’t write. So, I guess if you have to step out on your novel, short fiction is better than abstinence.

This ain’t no place for chastity. If you’re feeling stuck, get out there and whore around a little.

Exit Interview – a graphic flash fiction story

Some of you already know the ridiculously talented Kat McNally as the artistic genius behind my Santa Noir holiday cards. But, know her or not, today you are in for a treat.

A little ways back, she e-mailed to ask if she could turn one of the stories in Old School into one of these graphic novel type dealios all the cool kids like so much, some kind of project at her fancy pants art school, MICA, from whence she now has graduated with a butt-ton of well-deserved honors. Cute, I thought. She wants to make a comic book. Today, she gave me a little present – all five panels framed up to hang in my office. And this comic thing? This ain’t Archie.

The story she picked is Exit Interview, a touching tale of paternal devotion I whipped up a while back for a Do Some Damage flash fiction thing. You can read that here, if you like. Although if you really want to do me a solid, you can buy the whole damn book.  Following is Ms. Mac’s version, in all its gory. Er, eh, glory

.

Pretty hot shit, no? If you liked it, drop a comment, give Ms. Mac some love. Maybe she’ll do it again. ‘Course she’s out of school now, been hired on to be art director at some hot-shot outfit. No more homework. So I’ll probably have to pay her next time.

Shit. Somebody this good is going to be expensive.

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Wax Fruit – a story inspired by Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds

Regular readers may recall something from my recent post about Chuck Wendig’s riveting novel Blackbirds:

But I couldn’t help but ask myself what Miriam I would write. And I end up with a psychic Emily Dickinson, a woman trying to avoid the world not by moving through it too quickly to be touched, but by withdrawing from it entirely. A woman damned not to touch or be touched by anyone, ever. Not much of a story there, though, except the story in her own head. The thing is, done right, that’s a story I would read.

Turns out that’s not just a story I would read, it’s one I would write. Don’t worry, I checked with Chuck first, asked if it would bother him if I riffed on his Blackbirds’ theme a bit, and he thought it would be cool. So I did.

Had to ask myself why, first, though. Not like I don’t have my own stuff to do. I came up with a few reasons. First, I’ve been on a bit of a short fiction binge lately and I knew this was a short story. Second, I have my own idea for a horror/crime mashup novel that I’ve been struggling with, partly because I haven’t really writting in that genre before, so this was a way for me to mess around with it without oppressive novel stakes weighing down the process. Third, there’s just that thing that happens – where an idea, all on it’s lonesome, starts putting on weight. Story gravity I guess. The thought I had about a Miriam hiding from the world did that. And once an idea does that, if I don’t write it, then it’s just gonna bug me until I do.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with. Chuck, thanks for letting me play in your sandbox. I hope I remembered to bury all my turds.

 

 

Wax Fruit

Wax fruit. That’s what popped into my head.

When I was a kid, I remember one of my friends telling me how her little brother took a a bite out of a piece of wax fruit from her mother’s centerpiece. I remembered the centerpiece, an ornate brass bowel in the middle of their dining room table laden with fake apples, pears, weird rubbery grapes, silk leaves sticking out here and there. I remember wondering about her brother, if maybe the kid had some kind of problem. That centerpiece, it was fine as decoration, as an object d’art, but it didn’t look like food, like anything anybody would want to eat.

And my father didn’t look like anything I wanted to kiss.

He looked better than usual. Usually, unless you caught him first thing in the morning, his hair was a little unruly. It had a wave to it, and it’s not like he thought about it much, not like he was the mirror-checking type, the pocket comb type. Now his hair was in first-thing-in-the-morning shape, locked down for the duration. Locked down for all eternity.

Peaceful. That’s what everybody kept telling me. He looks so peaceful.

I thought he looked dead. Dead and not at all like anything I wanted to kiss.

But that was the deal, the societal expectation. That’s what this whole thing was about, expectations. Somebody dies, we dress their pickled corpse up in their good clothes, we stick them in an upholstered box, we park that up front in the rented facsimile of a living room and we tell each other they look peaceful because we’re hoping they are, hoping they’re traipsing lightly through some imagined Elysium when, in our hearts, each and every one of us knows they’re like cold cuts somebody left out of the fridge. That the bacteria that are going to turn them into worm fodder are already at work, no matter how much formaldehyde we pump into their veins. They are just bad meat.   

I sound like a bad daughter calling him that. But I was a good daughter, the best daughter. Because he was the best father, and now he was gone and I wanted to be anywhere but here. I wanted to be alone somewhere. I wanted to weep and gnash my teeth and rend my garments. I wanted to read all the e-mails he’d sent me, look at our pictures, ride my bike out the trail to that spot by the old railroad bridge where we used to go, sit on the rock under that huge willow where I could talk to him without having to use my dumb filter, where he would talk to me like I was an actual human being, not like I was a kid or a pupil or a responsibility. Or a freak. Talk to me like my thoughts and feelings and wants were as real and deserving of consideration as his own. 

Mostly, I just didn’t want him dead.

One-car accident, that was the official story, but there had been some whisperings that maybe he’d had a little to drink. I wanted to know. Accidents happen. Accidents are the stuff of life. Hell, every one of us is an improbable genetic accident at the end of a thousand-generation chromosomal crap shot, a billion-to-one shot (billions to one, actually, if you want me to do the math for you, and I can).  Every day we’re tight-rope walking through a world of chaos and violence and disease where anything – some psycho stranger, a soccer mom on her smart phone behind the wheel of her minivan, a virus, some cell with bad programming that starts dividing into a cancer – where anything could pick us off at any time. Gets to where a girl doesn’t want to step outside.

So accident. I could live with accident. But if he was drunk, then he didn’t care, not about me, not as much as I thought he did. Because you don’t do that. When you win that billion-to-one crap shoot, when you get to walk in this world and feel the sun and eat cheeseburgers and watch Monty Python, you don’t just piss it all away. You don’t shove your chips into the middle of the table, go all in on some scotch and a ten-year-old Ford. You don’t do that. Not to your daughter. Not if you really love her.

I needed him to love me, and now he couldn’t.

I walked to the front of the room because that’s what they expected. I knelt on the red cushion on the brass kneeler because that’s what they expected. I made the sign of the cross as a pantomimed obeisance to a god I did not believe in because that’s what they expected. And then I bent forward to press my lips to a piece of wax fruit.

And I saw it all. Not just saw it, lived it. My father, my perfectly sober, loving father, starting into the curve out on Blackberry Road, wipers going, sluicing the rain off the windshield, NPR on the radio, the Ford right at the speed limit, an irritated glance into the rear-view as the brights hit it, an SUV of some kind coming up behind him, coming up way too fast, weaving a little, Dad tapping the brakes, slowing down, the SUV jinking left, going to pass him on the curve, just clipping the left rear of the Ford, just enough, the tires losing their grip, Dad panicking as the car starts to slide, the tires hydroplaning. Then it was just physics. The car gets sideways, the wheels stop being levers rotating around a central fulcrum to translate power into motion and instead become fulcrums themselves, points of resistance, and the car flips over. And over. And over.

Dad didn’t think much during the flipping, too much to process. Airbags going off, glass breaking, metal tearing and twisting and crunching, that last bounding flip where the car really went airborne, and then the crushing, violent halt as it hit the trunk of the oak roof-first, horseshoeing the frame. The airbags had shot their wad by then, and they don’t put airbags in the roof anyway. Dad was a little sideways in his seat at that point, so his head hit the roof at a slight angle.

You hear your neck break, it turns out. And it’s pretty loud.

Instantaneous, that’s what they’d told me. He didn’t suffer. That’s what they’d said. I know better now. He suffered. Everybody suffers.

Not pain, not in his case, and not long, not by the minutes and hours and days and weeks calibrations we use to govern our lives. But death has its own clock, and that bastard runs slow.

The car stopped on its side wrapped around the tree, the driver’s side pointed up, the rain coming in through the broken window, falling on my father’s face. One drop fell right by the top of his nose, right at the edge of the eyebrow and trickled slowly down. It itched. He wanted to wipe it away, but couldn’t, of course. More than anything, he wanted to wipe that drop of water away. He thought of so many things, and for those brief seconds, I was able to feel his life from the inside, all the things he never told me, never wanted me to know, his secrets, his shames, and it made me so sad, sad that he thought he couldn’t tell me, that I wouldn’t understand, that I wouldn’t forgive, sad because seeing him in that moment, seeing him entire in his flaws and weaknesses and regrets, that just made him more human, more decent, more perfect.

And then I felt him do what he always did. He pulled himself together, focused, decided that he would go out on his own terms. That, even if he couldn’t wipe that damn drop of water off of his cheek (and it truly was driving him mad, as if his brain, no longer receiving any signals from anywhere else, had focused all its sensory processing power on this one fucking drop of water, turning the itch into a screaming torture), that even if he couldn’t do that, he wasn’t going to die with his brain just racing randomly through its inventory. He was going to think about what he wanted to think about.  As his vision grayed and narrowed and then blinked out entirely, he thought about me. And his last thought was this: I’m sorry baby. I’m so sorry.

His last conscious thought anyway. After that was the fear. It’s always the fear. Don’t ask me to explain it. Because there aren’t words for it. Why would there be? I’m the only person who has ever felt it and lived.

He wasn’t thinking about what he saw, not anymore. But I was. The SUV had stopped, brake lights on. A black Cadillac Escalade. The driver never got out. Just before my father’s eyes dimmed entirely, the brake lights went off and the truck pulled away.

Vanity plates. DLLRBILL.

 

*

 

I guess I screamed. I guess I fainted. I don’t remember that part. This vision business was new to me, first time it had happened. I remember coming to. I was on my back, all these feet around me, a couple different people saying to step back, give her some air, all the while they joined the crowd pressing in. Then my Aunt Julie knelt down next to me, asked me if I was OK, stroked my face.

I’ll spare you the gory details – cancer, tubes coming out of every orifice, a fine and caring mind reduced to raw animal madness by inexorable pain. And the fear again. Always the fear. But Aunt Julie touching me was just the beginning. More hands touching me, grabbing my arms, trying to help me up. A heart attack; an old man who had no business trying to clean his own gutters falling from a ladder; a friend of my father’s who never had the nerve to come out of the closet dying from AIDS, his wife, also infected now, watching with hateful eyes from the chair next to the bed. Deaths and dates – fifty- two years next Friday, this October 22^nd, six years from now on a rainy Tuesday in April. And the fear, the eviscerating, soul-ripping fear.

I guess I screamed again, passed out again. Because the next time I woke up I was in the hospital.

 

*

 

Fluorescent lights, the white ceiling, that antiseptic smell, not being sure where I was. Tried to move my arms, couldn’t. I looked down. The sleeve of a hospital gown, an IV, restraints. I’m a bright girl, I put two-and-two together. I’m actually pretty good at math.

Voices, talking about me. I kept my eyes closed. I figured it was best if I just held still and listened.

“It was just too much for her, Doctor Meyers, I’m sure.” My Aunt Julie. “She and her father were very close.”

Doctor Meyers. My shrink. Convenient, I guess, that I already had one. You see, I’m weird. Ask anybody.

Objectively, anybody is right, if you go with the secondary definition anyway. The secondary definition of weird is odd or unusual. Every year, 300,000 or so kids take the SAT; 0.0003 percent of them get a perfect score. Out of that handful, I’m betting most of them are wondering if they were perfect, have to wait for their score to see. Now, if they got a perfect score, then they knew they kicked ass, but one or two questions had to be gnawing at them, had to have them guessing. I wasn’t guessing. I knew my score was perfect. Hell, I knew it would be when I sat down to take the damn thing.

That puts me dead center in odd or unusual territory. Come to think of it, now that I am communing with the dying, I guess I fit the primary definition, too: involving or suggesting the supernatural, unearthly or uncanny. Swell.

I know. You’re thinking gee, that’s tough. You’re a genius. Boo hoo for you. I don’t expect you to get it. Frankly, I don’t expect most people to get much. But you try being a genius some time, a genius and a teen-aged girl that would still like to have friends, maybe date a boy, that has to pretend to give a shit when the lunch table starts in on American Idol, that has to pass half of her thoughts through a dumb-filter before she utters them just to fit in, you try that for a few years and see if you don’t end up blabbing to a shrink.

Doctor Meyers talking. “This is a pretty extreme episode. A psychotic break would be the popular term. I haven’t seen her since she left for school. Have you seen any evidence of drug use?”

“Heather? Oh heavens no. She’s been such a good girl. I mean she’s at Yale.”

“Kids use drugs, even at Yale.”

“Not Heather.”

“Has she said anything about hallucinations?”

“No, no. Nothing like that.”

“She kept screaming not to touch her. We had to put her in restraints. She’s sedated now, but she should be awake any time. She was saying some pretty strange things.”

“What sort of strange things?”

“Hard to make sense of most of it. She kept telling me to stop taking the stairs.”

“What?”

“Six floors here. It’s hard for me to get in much exercise, so I take the stairs when I can. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it to her.” A rustling noise, the two of them moving toward the door. “OK, I have to check on a few other patients, but I’ll be back in a bit.”

The stairs. I remembered now. I saw a middle-aged woman, white coat, reading a clipboard. She was hungry, thinking about lunch, missed a step. April 6, 2007, 11:17 am.

That was today, unless I’d been out longer than I thought.

 

*

 

I opened my eyes, turned my head. Aunt Julie saw me, walked to the edge of the bed, went to take my hand. I tried to jerk it away, remembering the horrid vortex of her pain-maddened brain. Restraints. I forgot. She wrapped her hand around my clenched fist and I braced myself for the vision. Nothing. I relaxed my hand, took hers. So whatever it was, it was over. And whatever it was, it wasn’t magic, I wasn’t seeing visions. I missed my Dad was all, probably missed him more than I should because, let’s face it, I depended on him more than most people. By 18, most people have friends. I just had him. And with people whispering about him maybe being drunk, I guess I needed an explanation bad enough that I invented one. Brains were funny things. I knew that. I’ve done the reading. And mine was funnier than most. So psychotic break, ok, I can live with that. Beats the hell out of suddenly being forced to experience the death of any human that I touched.

“You gave us a good scare,” she said.

“I guess. What happened?”

“You passed out honey. You were a little agitated, so they just want to check you out, make sure you’re OK.”

“The restraints seem a tad over the top.”

“I’m sure they’ll take those off right away.”

A voice over the PA, an alarmed voice. “Code Blue. We need a crash cart and trauma team to the east stairwell stat.”

I closed my eyes a moment, then opened them.

“What time is it?”

Aunt Julie looked at her watch. “11:18.”

 

*

 

Let’s skip ahead a few years. I hate it when people don’t get to the point. They ramble on, they think you’re interested, and most of the time you can already tell what they’re going to say and you wouldn’t have wanted to hear their bullshit to begin with, even if they kept it short. And here I am weighing you down with navel gazing.

You can’t stop it. Death, I mean. That’s point number one. Trust me, after Doctor Meyers, I tried. You can tell people all you want. You can tell them when and where and how,  but it’s all going to happen anyway. And you’re going to end up staying in the hospital for almost six months because people are pretty sure you are out of your fucking mind. They are also starting to think you’re a witch because people are dying, just like you said. But they can’t explain it, so it can’t be real. So they can’t call you a witch. They can’t take you out and burn you.

They get real careful about touching you, though.

And I got real careful about touching them. Because I don’t want to know, that’s one thing. I’m not going to get into a whole philosophical discourse here, but trust me when I tell you that it takes a little something out of life when everyone you know is walking around with an expiration date stamped on their forehead.

And I don’t like dying. Dying sucks. That’s point number two. You’re going to have to trust me on this, too. Take the worst experience you’ve ever been through, I don’t care what it is. Say that compound complex fracture you got in seventh grade when you and your idiot friends had watched a little too much of the X Games and you tried to jump your bike off the garage roof. Take that experience, make that the largest whole number you can think of, multiply that using scientific notation with the same number as the exponent, and you aren’t even half way there.

Dying sucks, and every time I touch somebody, I die. I just live through it.  Everybody else, they just have to do that shit once. And they don’t have to live knowing what ‘s coming.

So touching people? That was out. I adjusted.

I don’t leave the house. I’m the Emily Dickinson of Sugar Grove, Illinois. Got everything I need right here.

God bless the internet. That’s where we geniuses hang out, turn off our dumb filters, have our little pre-frontal orgies. I know, the dumb shits are out there, too. I mean, Jesus, have you seen Twitter? But we’ve got our own little secret clubs, bulletin boards you can only hack your way into if you spend your spare time beating Mensa members at Scrabble in your third language. I can order my groceries, take out, Netflix, whatever.

But what about human contact, you ask. 

OK, I can touch a few people. Because the dying thing only happens the first time. So if I’ve touched you already, then, if I like you, come on over. I spend a lot of time with Aunt Julie. But she’s only got seven years, two months, four days, seven hours and twenty six seconds left on the clock, and the last couple of months aren’t going to be any fun for anybody.

There was a guy from my high school, nice enough guy, decent looking, bright enough that I can leave the dumb filter most of the way off. Already touched me. He was the heart attack guy at Dad’s wake – fifty-two years off at the time, forty-seven and change now. I saw him for a while. Lost my virginity to him. But it’s kind of hard to have a relationship with someone who won’t leave the house, I get that. He’s moved on, pretty much. I guess we’re fuck buddies. That’s the term right? I’m a little behind on my slang, seeing as how I don’t commune with anything like a broad spectrum of humanity anymore. And he’s the last real live lover I’m ever going to have. But you know what else you can order on the web? A vibrator.

You can also make a damn good living.

 

*

See, my fuck buddy may be the last lover I’m going to have, but he was not the first. The first was math. Numbers, they can touch me in happy places he couldn’t reach if he had the prick off of a blue whale.

That part about me being weird? I guess my parents figured that out pretty early on, but the whole thing came to a head in third grade. Teacher kept assigning story problems for math homework, you know the kind. If a car travels for 13 minutes at 60 miles an hour, how far does it go, that sort of thing. Seemed to me, the way we were taught to solve these was wasteful, having to do the same calculations over and over again, so I came up with my own system – a set of equations with placeholders for the values so that I could solve for any missing value just by plugging in the data that was given. Turns out that was algebra, turns out we weren’t going to get to that for a few years, turns out most kids don’t come up with it on their own. I guess most kids avoid it like the plague even when someone else shows it to them,

The weird part didn’t sit with mom very well. She wanted me to sew and cook and shit. But then, a lot of things didn’t sit well with her. She took off when I was 11.

But numbers, numbers hold the secrets to the universe. The world is full of patterns, once you translate the varied sensory input into measureable systems. Things that seem random and chaotic are revealed as elegant and predictable.

Even things like financial markets.

They call us quants. Math geeks who can take look at a few zillion bits of data concerning stocks, commodities, futures, derivatives, look at all that information and translate that chaos into patterns. And then we can look at those patterns and give  you odds on which ones are predictive. It’s not a perfect science, of course, but some of us are pretty good at it. I’m real good. 

The $500,000 in life insurance from my dad? It’s been five years now, and I’ve turned that in to almost $10 million. Bullshit, you’re saying. That’s better than an 80 percent rate of return. Nobody gets that. But you can. You can if you’re trading your own money and you don’t have to follow any of the rules that banks and brokers and hedge funds have to follow. You can if you’re willing to leverage the shit out of your bets when you think you have a good one. Of course, that means you’re going all in, putting everything on the line. Who cares? The house is paid off, it’s worth a little better than $300 grand. If I lose it all and have to start over, I take a mortgage and play it careful until I’ve got the stakes to get back in the game. What else am I going to do? Go dancing?

Get those kinds of results, though, and you’re going to attract some attention. Even if you’re just trading your own money. 

Around here, that attention is going to belong to F. William Forest.

 

*

 

It started with e-mails. Mr. Forest would like to take you to lunch blah blah blah. I ignored them. Then phone calls – I checked him out, I knew his numbers, all of them. I didn’t answer. Then letters. Then certified letters.

Then one day the door bell rang. I only answered because I was expecting lunch – delivery from the Thai place I liked – and there he stood, F. William Forest, Chicago’s billionaire investment genius in all his Armanied glory, all by his lonesome, all the way out in East Bumblefuck to see little ol’ me. I think I was supposed to be stunned into submission.

High wattage smile. “Heather Wells,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“I’m …”

I cut him off. “I know who you are.”

The big smile again, a little of-course-you-do shrug.

“I do hope you’ll forgive my persistence.”

“Persistence, stupidity. Po-ta-to, po-tah-to.”

He laughed. “My God, it is refreshing to meet somebody who doesn’t want to kiss my ass.”  He put out his hand. “My friends call me Bill. I’m hoping to make you one of them.”

I just looked at his hand. I didn’t say anything. He left it outstretched.

“I’ve checked you out, Heather. At first just about the trading, but when I check someone out, I’m thorough. So I’ve heard about this other nonsense, and I’m not afraid to touch you.”

I was looking around, looking at anything but him. You’re supposed to look people in the eyes when they are talking to you, I know, but that’s always been uncomfortable for me, even before this whole death thing, and now, now it’s a little too much like touching someone. I can feel that connection trying to happen. I don’t know if it actually will if I hold someone’s eyes, but I know I’m not going to find out. So I was looking around. It’s a nice yard, trees and shit, saw a squirrel run across the lawn, saw Forest’s car, gray Audi A8. I guess Forest had traded up. Of course he had, guy like him doesn’t keep an Escalade for six years. He kept the vanity plate, though. DLLRBILL.

So I took his hand. I had to watch this bastard die, even if that meant I had to die again to see it.

 

*

 

My kitchen, my hand, my knife, my face right there, my body right up against his. His blood, his $2,000 dollar suit, his yellow tie. The same suit and tie he’d worn to my door.  A ripping feeling in his chest, a tearing feeling, the flood of secrets – a big flood, a long flood, one unmitigated by any regret or shame or conscience, but my father’s death was in there. Not a headline, not above the fold, not even front page news, but in there. Back with the cheated on wives and cheated on mistresses and cheated on business partners. And the kiddie porn. Lots of kiddie porn. He pulls a trigger, a gun barks. Then the fear. Always the fear.

And the time. Seven minutes from now.

He was here to kill me. He was going to die, and I was going to die with him. I could live with that.

I came out the other side. I didn’t scream or pass out. I didn’t do that anymore.

He watched my face. I may not pass out anymore, but when you are coming back from the dead, a poker face is a bit much to ask.

“So you do know about your father,” he said. “When I started checking you out, it was just about your trading, but then I heard the name. Rang a bell. And I heard the stories, all this psychic stuff. So I was afraid you might know. And that is not the sort of risk I’m in the habit of leaving unmitigated. Let’s step inside, shall we? Some business should not be conducted out of doors.”

            He was holding a pistol, must have pulled it while I was in the vision. A small, flat silvery automatic of some kind.

“We could go to the kitchen I guess,” I said. “I was going to make some tea.”

“Tea would be nice.”

 

*

 

Some number tricks are easy. Take counting. Seven minutes is 420 seconds. And if you count like this – 1 tick, 2 tick, 3 tick – you stay right on track. I could do that. I could do that in my head, do that and carry on a conversation, no problem.

I filled the kettle, put it on the stove, stood next to it. The knife rack was on the other side of the counter, but the knife I’d used that morning on the cantaloupe, it was big enough, and it was still next to the stove, on the counting board, the dish towel over it. I’d meant to stick it in the dishwasher. Sometimes it pays to be a slob.

223 tick, 224 tick, 225 tick . . .

“I don’t suppose you’d like to talk trading for a bit. You’re results really are, well, breath taking.”

“Seems pretty easy to me. I can’t help it if you’re a dumb fuck.”

He laughed again. “You really aren’t much of an ass kisser, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t like to touch people.”

275 tick, 276 tick, 277  tick . . .

I leaned back, putting my hands on the edge of the counter behind me, the knife just an inch or two out of my reach.

“Pity, would have given us a topic of conversation, given me a reason to wait for tea. You’re sure you won’t reconsider?”

301 tick, 302 tick, 303 tick . . .

“Since you put it like that, what do you want to know?”

“You have some IT here, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Am I going to find what I need on it?”

“No kiddie porn, if that’s what you mean.” His face reddened, he took a step toward me.

 “When I see someone die, I see a lot,” I said.

“Kiddie porn is not what I mean.”

“Didn’t figure.”

368 tick, 369 tick, 370 tick . . .

“I mean trading algorithms and such. Do you have any security that’s going to give me trouble?”

“The security is mostly web-facing. But it won’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because I do it all in my head. I only use the software to execute trades.”

“Bullshit.”

“Like I said, I can’t help it if you’re a dumb fuck.”

391 tick, 392 tick, 393 tick . . .

The tea kettle whistled, seemed to startle him a little, another half step toward me, his eyes turning to the stove.

And then the doorbell rang.

My hand flashed to the knife as he half turned to the door. I clamped my left hand down on his right wrist, tried to push the gun aside as I drove the knife up just under his ribs and started yanking it back and forth. His arm gave a little. I could just feel a tremulous vibration in the knife handle as the ruined chambers of his heart fluttered against the blade.

A gunshot, a burning pain in my left thigh, the fear in his eyes.

418 tick, 419 tick . . .

“420, mother fucker,” I said. I don’t think he understood. We both collapsed.

The front door flew open, the guy that delivered for the Thai place rushed into the kitchen.

“Jesus Christ!” 

He knelt down, felt for a pulse on Forest’s neck, got nothing, then grabbed the dish towel I had knocked to the floor and went for my thigh.

“Don’t,” I said. I reached up to stop him, going for the shirt sleeve that was folded halfway up his forearm.  I touched skin, just a sliver, but still, skin. That’s all it took.

Nothing. Not a thing.

One data point. Hard to call that a predictive pattern, but here’s hoping.

 

*

            I get out now, not a lot, but out. I’ve got a new fuck buddy – one of my genius friends from the ‘Net, physics professor in at the U of C. It’s nice. After we fuck, we talk, make math jokes.  You know, like what does a quant wear for New Year’s Eve? Fibonacci Sequins. Yeah, I know, cheap pun. Cracks me up every time, though. Sometimes he stays over. Sometimes he’ll come out for the weekend and we don’t even fuck at all. I have no idea when he’s going to die and that scares me a little. The only person I can say for sure that I’ve ever loved was my father, but I think maybe I love this guy. I’m taking that as a good thing.

            I’m still a little twitchy about touching people. I’ve got 213 data points now, 213 touches. You’d be surprised how many times you touch people, even when you try not to. Anyway, we’re way beyond a predictive pattern, pretty much in dead solid lock territory. But I’ve died 18 times and I don’t like touching people.  So sue me.

            I don’t have visions anymore. Well, maybe one.

            I was cleaning out the attic, hadn’t been up there in forever, found a box of old books. I can’t remember not being able to read, but I still liked it when my Dad read to me. Especially Black Beauty. I remember sitting in his lap, in the big leather chair next to the fireplace, the wood floor reflecting the wavering orange glow, just the one light on over the chair, his soft deep voice telling me the story, my head resting on his chest, hearing his heart, feeling safe and warm and normal and like somebody’s little girl.

            When I pulled Black Beauty out of the box, I lived my father’s death again, but just the good part, just him holding my image in his mind. I think he was saying goodbye.

            So maybe this is a ghost story. Maybe it’s a love story, I don’t know. I don’t how it ends anymore, and I can live with that.

Some thoughts on getting the fat out, and I’m not talking editing

Looks like even liberty loving Tea Party types might need a little help on the obesity front

Most guys my age worry that they aren’t the man they used to be. My problem is that, a few months ago, I was at least 120 percent of the man I ought to be, probably more like 130 percent. Thanks to my treadmill desk and a little more attention to my diet, I’ve whittled myself down some, but I still have a ways to go.

 So I’ve been paying a little more attention to all this obesity business. Here are a few interesting things I’ve heard of late.

 One is the insidious nature of labor saving devices and how they contribute to our increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Twenty years ago, self-propelled lawn mowers counted for less than 10 percent of the lawnmower sales, now they are account for more than 70 percent. Lawn tractors used to be unusual for yards less than a quarter acre, now they are fairly ubiquitous. In 1970, snow blowers were luxury items, now they are a fixture in most suburban homes.  And there are numerous little things, like how we used to crank our car windows up and down, used to have to get out of the car and open and close our garage doors, used to have to cross the room to change the channel on the TV, used to get up and walk a couple doors down at the office to check with a colleague instead of sending an e-mail. Food processors versus knives, even power toothbrushes versus the manual variety. One researcher I heard on the radio said that his research indicates that cumulative effect of labor saving devices means that the average American burns about 1.7 fewer pounds worth of calories than they did in 1970.

 Back in the 1970s, the “change back from your dollar” meal that McDonald’s used to advertise – a cheeseburger, regular fries (which was smaller than their small fries are now) and a Coke –  was 710 calories. Now, if you get a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, large fries and a large Coke, you’re looking at 1,463 calories.

Government subsidies on corn and sugar, which are substantial, help to make sugared foods or those made with high-fructose corn syrup cheaper, which, relatively speaking, makes healthier fruits and vegetables more expensive. And food deserts exacerbate food issues for the poor. Food deserts occur because large grocery stores tend not to locate in low income urban areas. So residents there have to rely on small convenience stores for food purchases, which stores generally stock no or few fresh fruits and vegetables, and only at significantly higher costs than at the closest grocery stores. In one test, less than half of urban poor eight graders could identify pictures of broccoli or cauliflower, and less than one in ten had ever tasted either.

So what do to? Some public health advocates propose taxing unhealthy foods and using the revenue generated to subsidize healthy foods. The best target for such a tax? Sugar-sweetened drinks. They are among the biggest contributors to weight gain, especially among the young. One leading obesity researcher proposes a penny an ounce tax on any sugar-sweetened drink, with all revenue generated going to subsidize domestic production of healthier foods and their equitable distribution into all neighborhoods. He points out that research shows the decreases in cigarette smoking are most closely linked to cost – as federal, state and local taxes on tobacco have ramped up the price of cigarettes, consumption has declined.

My initial reaction to ideas like this is no. The whole nanny state thing. I don’t need the government telling me what to eat, or how much of it. If it get fat (and I did) that’s my business and my problem. Except, of course, it isn’t just my problem.

Obesity is a key contributor to several of our most common and most expensive chronic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and many cancers. And it causes a host of other health problems, like the rapidly increasing number of joint replacements, many of which stem from the damage to knees and hips from hauling around too much weight for too many years. Those are key factors in our national crisis of exploding health care costs.  

In 2010, total spending on health care by federal, state and local governments topped $1 trillion dollars. In 2000, it was only a little over $500 billion. If you are a taxpayer, my fat ass is your problem.

And you can throw in lost productivity due to obesity. One recent study puts that number at more than $73 billion dollars annually. If you are an employer, my fat ass is your problem, too.

OK, I’m all for personal responsibility. That’s why I’m writing this blog post at my treadmill desk going 2.3 MPH. Too many people, though, treat personal liberty more like a fetish than a political philosophy. Liberty has always had limits. Being a society has always meant that government plays a role in your life. To say otherwise isn’t to be a patriot, it is to be an anarchist.

So I’m all for liberty. But I’m also all for facing facts. In 1970, about 5 percent of American children were obese. Now, more than 20 percent cross that threshold. We are at risk of seeing the first generation of Americans with a shorter life expectancy than their parents. We, not just individually, but as a nation, have a problem. We can go broke paying for it and whining about our precious liberty or we can try to address it.

I’m for the latter.

What is writing worth?

Over at Terribleminds today, Chuck Wendig holds forth on the privilege of being a writer. And I’ve got no quarrel with Chuck’s perspective. Compared to some jobs I’ve had – shoveling gravel, cook at a Pizza Hut, night-crew grocery stocker, selling women’s shoes – writing is a pretty cushy deal. Hell, when my grandfather came over from Ireland, alone and 17, his first job was dispatching cows at one of the slaughterhouses on Chicago’s south side, a dark, stinking hell slick with blood and entrails, the sort of place made famous by Sinclair Lewis in The Jungle. They’d lead a beast in and he’d hit it over the head with the sledgehammer. Then another, then another. That was before he joined the army and headed off the bloodier hell hole of trenches of WWI because that was the quickest way to become a citizen. And then he became a Chicago cop, just in time for Prohibition and all that Al Capone business.  So yeah, writing? Even my day job writing about taxes and business crap? Things could be worse.

What I wonder about sometimes is does it matter. I mean my day job? I do that right, then maybe one accounting firm picks up a little more business than another. Little hard to puff the old chest out about that too much. My wife? When our son was diagnosed with Autism, she saw what a difference some of his therapists made, so she quit her job at IBM, went back to school, became an Occupational Therapist, and now she spends her days working with kids born with varying disabilities that interfere with their ability to do even simple things that the rest of us take for granted. So I do my job right, and some bean counting firm somewhere makes a little more coin than some other one. She does her job right, and maybe a kid ties his shoes for the first time, writes her name for the first time, is able to feed himself for the first time.

My old man, he was a doctor, and a damn good one. On a pretty regular basis, death would walk in his office door and he’s kick its ass and throw it right back out again.

So yeah, I make a good living, I provide for my family, but it’s hard to see how I’m contributing much to the societal good, at least on the day job side.

But my other writing, my fiction writing? Maybe that’s another deal. 

See, a little ways back, I got this box in the mail, a few books I’d ordered through Amazon. Blackbirds by Chuck, Dead Harvest by Chris F. Holm, and The Next One to Fall by Hilary Davidson. Just finished the last of them. Not the best couple of weeks in the world around here for various reasons, work and personal, but I knew that every night I could have a little drink and climb into the tub, and crack open a good book, and all that bad shit would go away for awhile. No matter what else happened, I knew I had that, that the end of the day would be a good end of the day. Sometimes the best part of the day.

I haven’t had Chuck’s success, or Chris’s, or Hilary’s. But I do have one book out there. And who knows, maybe somewhere, somebody’s week sucked. Maybe they have one of those back-breaking, soul-sucking jobs I’ve been lucky enough to avoid, and their weeks always suck. And maybe for a couple of nights, they came home and read my book and that made things a little better for a while. That may not be the balm from Gilead that makes the wounded whole, but that ain’t bad.

 

 

 

A writer you should know

I first met Kevin Fenton in 1977, late August maybe, beginning of September.  We were both freshman at Beloit College.

I don’t remember the exact circumstances. We lived on the same floor of the same dorm, so I guess I probably ran into him early on. He was visually memorable. Largish fellow; my height or so; broad shoulders; carrying a bit of weight; round, lumpy Irish head. His walked in a bear-like shambling amble. His sartorial inclinations were, well, haphazard. But it is the hair I remember most.

As a disclaimer, this was the seventies. Unfortunate tonsorial choices were the norm. Hair-wise, I was still recovering from four years of military school, had been growing my hair out from its mandated crew cut all summer, but I was still well shy of anything approaching the style of the time. But Kevin? His hair had been growing for a while. Maybe forever.

We’re not talking long, straight, hanging down to the middle of your back hair here, not Bob Seger hair, not Leon Russell hair. We’re talking a rambling, gravity defying brown halo of chaos that enveloped his noggin and environs in an Einsteinian nebula of keratin and, for all I knew, small birds. Kevin is very stylishly coifed nowadays. Nice head of hair, Romneyesque even, where I’ve resorted to the camouflaging almost-shaven look of the patternly bald.

Weird time, those first few weeks of freshman year, everybody posing, preening, trying out their away-from-home personas in their first real chance at personal reinvention away from those witnesses to their pasts who could call them on their bullshit. I was going for some creative/intellectual thing, affecting a distanced reserve, mostly because, while I’m the equivalent of a party animal online, in person, I’m actually kind of shy. And I was amusing myself by dissecting the costumes of personality inside which my dorm mates were hiding. The devil-may-care party boys who were sheltering their insecurities behind beer cans and bongs, the femme fatale upstairs who was, I think, playing the same game as me, the jocks still trading on already fading high school glories.

But I never could figure out what Kevin was up to. Probably because he wasn’t up to anything. He was, and remains, one of the most relentlessly authentic people I know.

Also turned out he was one smart bastard. This wild-haired dude who looked like he dressed in the dark, at a thrift shop, he had read everything I’d read and a mess of shit I hadn’t, used words in conversation that I had to look up (that had never happened before) and had buttressed most of what he said with actual thought before he said it. The rest of us were just running our mouths, throwing verbal effluvium at the walls to see if anything would stick. This dude was dropping science.

I don’t suspect many people noticed, though, because Kevin didn’t say much.

He stuttered, that was one of the other things I noticed at first. A fair bit those first few weeks, and I guess that’s how it goes with stuttering – the stress of new environments can bring it on. Not much at all, really, by the end of the semester. But he wasn’t one of those guys that felt the need to be in the center of every conversation, that had to opine on every issue, that needed your attention. He wasn’t anti-social. He just wasn’t in your face.

I noticed the science, though, because Kevin and I talked quite a bit. For me, he was that friend you make at college, the one that you want to be alone with so you can stop pretending to be somebody else and just exhale.

I left Beloit after my sophomore year. Kevin and I stayed in touch for a while – he stood up in my wedding in 1980. We wrote letters, real ones, back in the days before e-mail and Facebook.

But we lost touch, lost touch for quite a while.

In 2003 I was in Kansas City on business and my wife told me Kevin had called. I had a moment of that weird guilt you feel when somebody you’d drifted apart from, somebody who had been as close to you as anyone at one time, when that person is the one who cares enough to reach out first, to take that risk of re-establishing contact. But I was also thrilled. I called Kevin from my hotel room, we talked for awhile, got back in the touch.

And here’s what I’ve learned since. He’s still a smart bastard. And he still isn’t in your face about it. 

I knew Kevin was a hell of a writer – knew that thirty-some years ago at Beloit. But a few years back he let me read the manuscript of his novel, Merit Badges, and I was stunned by the depth of his gift, by his insight, by the unfailing honesty of his emotional compass, and by the grace and economy of his prose. I spend most of my time reading and writing genre stuff, but a book like Kevin’s reminds me of what literature can be. It can be more than a story, more than an entertainment. It can be transcendent and revelatory and enriching.

Lately, though, I’ve been catching up with a few other things Kevin’s written, some of his mental flotsam bobbing around on the interwebs. Here’s what else I’ve learned. When someone is a smart bastard, a really smart bastard, they get smarter and smarter as the years go by. 

Do yourselves a favor. Go read this. And this. And then go buy Kevin’s book. If you’ve got room in your reading diet for the random shit I throw up here, then you really out to squeeze in a few things that are better for you.

Kevin, if you’re reading, then yeah. I know. This thing should have stewed for a while. It needs a good editing, another draft or two. But who has time? I’m busy tweeting and acting like an ass on Facebook. Give me any shit about it and I’m posting the picture. You know which one..