Susan T. Creations

I wrote Destiny for the 2005 SLO NightWriters Short Fiction Contest. Every story has to begin with the same opening line. That year’s opener was, “Keening, high-pitched, the sound grows in intensity…” The challenge was to build a tale that incorporated the opener into a seamless beginning, middle, end story in 500 words or less. With a “Wow” factor. In present tense, no less. I had never written short fiction before; in fact, I had just published my first suspense novel, weighing in at 487 nail-biting pages. So, I didn’t hold out much hope of crafting a successful short-short. Still, when I heard the opening line, a sequel to a story I’d written years ago popped into my head almost fully formed. To my surprise, the story was a finalist in the contest.

                                                                    Destiny

            Keening, high-pitched, the sound grows in intensity, wakes J’npaire – again.

            “Shut up, Drea!”

            He glares at the stone shelves holding his Encasement Collection, twenty-three in all. The golden filigree ball holding Drea’s essence spirals in the deep niche. Once, that pleased J’npaire. During the glorious Encasement fight, he’d feared she might defeat him. He’d not known a woman’s will could be so strong. Would Drea’s body prove the same? The others had lived only six lightcycles. She’ll last eight, he had guessed, amused as her spirit fought on.

            No pleasure left, now. Twenty-nine lightcycles and still Drea shreds his nerves with needlesharp wails.

            J’npaire rises, stalks to the shelf. Takes Drea into alabaster-pale hands, holds her at eye level. Sparks glint from gold; aurora energy swirls within the ball. Staccato anger erupts.

            “Stop, Drea. This is your destiny. Be still!”

            The ball twists out of his hand, onto the floor. J’npaire narrows his eyes. Immutable law; the fight ends when the body erases. Therefore, even after twenty-nine lightcycles, she still lives. He will have to erase her himself.

            He powers up his air-raft, floats from the bluelit room, slips through the concealing drift filter. The colorless rocklight of Below has brightened to wakecycle, but these old tunnels are deserted. At Drea’s entombment niche he grabs his Excavator, erases just enough rock to crawl through. His face twists, senses rebelling at the odor hissing into the tunnel.      

J’npaire crawls into the tomb, lights a torch. All is as he left it: Drea’s raft canted against the far wall, her meager possessions spread below like altar offerings; Drea motionless, one arm folded upon her breast, the other flung onto a halo of white hair. No longer beautiful, this Drea: pale face bloated, blackened; flesh slipping from delicate bones; oozing liquids forming a slick pool beneath her. Erased. Very much erased.

            J’npaire’s heart pounds. Horror scritches his scalp. This cannot be. No one can fight for life where none remains. Shuddering, he steps back toward the entrance, lifts the excavator, points it at Drea.

            Her head turns. Ruined eyes open, probe deep to touch his buried essence. Her keening wail crescendos, rides the necrotic air. J’npaire cringes, curls his arms over his head. The Excavator accidentally fires, sweeping the stone ceiling. Fissures widen; stone rumbles, breaks apart. J’npaire screams into the roar of avalanching rock, throws himself toward the back wall.

Silence resettles. Massive stone overseals the tomb. Wailing himself, J’npaire bloodies his fingers, struggling to shift immovable rock. The Excavator, his only escape, lies crushed beneath the boulders. Finally he sits, empty inside. Destiny: starvation, suffocation, erasure. His and Drea’s. She has defeated him. J’npaire turns his head, looks at her. Beneath closed eyes, a faint smile curves Drea’s melting lips.

            In J’npaire’s sanctuary, the filigree ball spirals in ever decreasing circles. The keening wail winds down into a sigh. In deep silence, bluelight glimmers off lacy gold as, at long last, Drea lies inert.

This little piece took first place in the Lillian Dean First Page Competition for Short Story Category in 2007 at the Central Coast Writer’s Conference. This competition judges literary works on the merits of its first 250 words only. I wrote the story originally for the SLO NightWriters Annual Short Story Contest, but decided it was eventually going to go longer than the 500-word limit. It never made the NIghtWriters contest, but I entered the first page of it in the Lillian Dean Competition and won first place! And only my third year at the conference. The story isn’t quite finished yet, but the beginning is truly a hoot. Enjoy!

RUDLEY’S RAGE

Keening, high-pitched, the sound grows in intensity. Rudley’s wail catches Kamma’s attention. She walks onto the balcony and looks up, shielding her eyes with a cerise-gloved hand. He clings to the flagpole tip like a Popsicle to its stick, fair skin frying in white-hot incandescence. Given his bare-and-buck state, she’s grateful that solid shadow fattens his rebar limbs into a concealing barrier. Or perhaps she’s simply been lucky enough to stop at just the right angle.

“Rudley! Are you coming down from there?”

The hairy head rises, eyes screwed shut against piercing sun-glare.

“Not until Missa leaves.”

“She’s not, and you know it. You’re being ridiculous.”

“That’s my constitutional right.”

The disembodied reply rings in the dense, hot air, but Kamma doesn’t hear. Movement catches her eye; she swivels her head to watch an eagle ride the thermals around Rudley’s perch. Damn, but they’re high up now. With so many applicants, Domicile keeps shifting floors and adding units, boosting First-Comers closer to the stratosphere. Pretty soon, as Missa claims, they’ll need oxygen masks just to enjoy the view.

She glances over the railing and down, her fingers clutching the scardey-handle.

“You’re drawing a crowd,” she tells Rudley. “I can see cameras down there, and telescopes. Want a robe?”

Silence. She looks back up. Rudley’s eyes are still closed; white bird-juice drips off his nose. The eagle has landed.

Here’s my second official rant

Prepositional Endings

As in: She sidled past the group Joe was talking to.

I read a lot, at least two books a week, and I see this horror in almost every tome I open. What is with today’s writers? And our educators? Doesn’t anyone teach proper English usage anymore? The worst part of it – after the fact that the writer hasn’t actually learned his or her craft – is that we’ve become so used to seeing and hearing this egregious usage, it feels right. It sounds right. We no longer see it as a total grammatical snafu. And writing (or saying) it properly sounds awkward and wrong: She sidled past the group to whom Joe was talking. No one talks like that anymore; we’re way too indolent.

I think this whole thing started because people were too lazy to figure out the whole who-whom thing. So they simply did an end run around it by sticking the preposition at the end of the sentence. I ask you, how much intelligence does this show? How many English classes did someone have to skip before this brilliant epiphany struck? Let me state this clearly: Two wrongs do not make a right, no matter how many people take up the preposition-at-the-end chant.

Okay, I can hear you saying, “Yeah, but if we start writing it right, readers will say, ‘Huh?’ We’ll confuse the heck out of them. They’ll hate it. They’ll hate us and our writing.” Well, I could say, “So what?” But I won’t. As much as I hate to admit it, you would have a valid point – valid in our lazy-daisy, instant gratification, you-expect-me-to-actually-think? society. (Which doesn’t at all make it a truly valid point, but at least it’s worth a line or two of ink.)

But following the incredibly dumb madding crowd isn’t the answer. Trading your principles (I’m assuming we all have some, right?) for readership isn’t, either. But a little creativity is. Some judicious re-phrasing – She saw Joe talking to the group of investors. She sidled past them, hoping they wouldn’t see her. – and you have depth and interest and mystery instead of an addlepated, grammatically incorrect sentence.

So, no more laziness. No more bowing to dumber-than-a-doornail convention. You can write it right and still please your audience. Still be read. Still be lauded. And even maybe get paid for good writing! And I’m still waiting to hear your writing peeves. Email them to me: susantwriter@yahoo.com and spout off!

I took a trip a couple of weeks ago, to visit my son for his birthday. As he lives in Buffalo, New York and I’m on California’s Central Coast, it’s a nine-to-eleven-hour journey of rushing for connections mixed with sitting for hours in airports. Fun times, especially if you don’t have a laptop to keep you occupied. And you finish reading your book in record time. And nothing goes right from the get-go.

Under such circumstances, most people would go into high-stress resistance mode, which includes carping, complaining, pacing, sighing, grunting, and even yelling at the poor employees behind airline counters who have no more control over things than passengers do. But going postal isn’t a writer’s style. We’re above all that, right? Being a writer lifts us from mundane reactions, because everything that happens is grist for our story-mill. Every interruption, delay, time crunch or reversal of fortune is not a tragedy in the making, it’s simply an opportunity to add to our “stash” of ideas, another line or six added to the trusty-dusty notebook (traditional or electronic) in which we jot down our triggers for inspiration.

To wit: I am not a morning person. Still, obedient traveler that I am, I arrived at the airport at the airline-advised ungodly hour of 4:00 am, the requisite two hours in advance of flight time, only to discover the terminal hadn’t yet opened for the day! (No joke, this really happened.) Did I get upset? Of course not (not much, anyway). I just imagined what Janet Evanovich or Joan Hess would do with such a situation, and aha! Into my notebook it went, an idea sparker for that humorous story I’ve been contemplating attempting. The fact that the plane then developed mechanical problems and takeoff was delayed for almost two hours past the original 6:00 am departure time only added to the farce.

And so it went, for the entire trip. Every setback – missed connections, lost luggage, lack of email access, a minor car accident, my mother ending up in the hospital (she’s fine now) – it’s all fodder to feed my imagination. It’s all part of the “What if…” process: What if my protagonist missed the plane? What if the antagonist lost her luggage? What if the cops had an accident on the way to the 911 call? What if the meeting place hadn’t opened yet? What if, what if?

With the holidays - and the traveling it often entails - coming up, be sure you don’t miss out on opportunities to add to your idea stash. The everyday events of travel – by car, boat, bike, train or plane – that drive most people up the wall offer limitless opportunities to us as writers. Each missed alarm, wrong turn, person encountered, traffic jam, or late arrival can make its appearance – as is or disguised in some form – somewhere in your work, if you remember to jot them down. Each travel event, humorous or serious, can trigger an idea for a solution, a situation, a scene, a character, or even a complete article, story or novel. Fiction may be stranger (and possibly neater) than truth, but it’s life’s messy realities that trigger our story ideas. And if we remember to write it all down, we’ll never run out of ideas.

Notebooks ready? Happy traveling!

Official Pet Peeves (OPP)

By: The Official Self-Appointed Pet Peeve Judge
(and no, you can’t have my job!)

My First Official Pet Peeve

TRY AND: as in, “He will try and make it to the meeting on time.”

Okay, this one tops my list. I see red whenever I encounter it. My blood pressure rises. I have trouble breathing. Smoke shoots out my ears.

An overreaction? I don’t think so. This is an egregious error. As writers, we have the responsibility to know our own language. And we should be smart enough to use it properly, especially if we can figure out how to use today’s technology to crank out our … opuses? Opi? Well, you get my drift. It’s not like the old days when anyone with a pencil sharpener could jot down a few hundred thousand words or so. I mean, if we can figure out not only how to open the box the computer comes in (let’s not even discuss the printer and other indispensable adjuncts!), but also to get the computer out of the maze in which it nestles, and then hook it up sans directions of any kind (except for maybe a confusing picture or two, or a bewildering sentence written by someone who’s never heard of English before), we should be able to write a grammatically correct sentence.

Let me make this clear: try and is not only ungrammatical, it’s illogical. By its very nature it’s impossible to try and do anything. You either try to do it (and thereby succeed or fail) or you simply go ahead and do it. No “try and” about it. I suppose, to be fair, if it’s used as part of dialog, I’d be willing to overlook it once or twice. People do have a tendency to be sloppy about grammar and verb conjugations, et al, when they talk. But within the body of the prose? No. Never. Those guilty of such trespass on erudite sensibilities will be sentenced to an eternity of nails-screeching-on-blackboard torture. Therefore, remember: it’s “try to” or “do” only, never “try and.”

So, now it’s your turn. What are your pet peeves? What, in the world of writing, makes you see red, raises your blood pressure, makes steam come out your ears? I may be self-appointed but I’m not greedy – I’ll share space with anyone whose peeve measures up. What, tell you the criteria that makes a peeve “official”? Oh, I’d never make it that easy for you.

So, unless you want to continue hearing my pet peeve rants (and I’ve got a thousand of them), email me your entries at: susantwriter@yahoo.com

In order to make ends meet, I’ve  been typing manuscripts for an acquaintance who loves to write. She is not anywhere close to the twenty-first century; all her manuscripts are written by hand, in pencil. Luckily, she has excellent penmanship even if the pencil is at times a bit difficult to see.

This writer is very prolific. In the three years I have known her, she has POD published over thirty books. She hand-writes faster than I can type. She never seems to run out of ideas, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. But it’s not all a bed of roses.

When I started typing for her, she wasn’t very good. Rank beginner, that’s where I placed her skill level. Therefore, I was looking forward to watching her grow as a writer. After all, if you spend most of your time writing, you have to improve, right?  That’s what I thought, anyway; the very act of constant writing would result in experimenting with different and better ways of putting words together. But that’s not the case. Her thirtieth book is no better than her first book. She expresses herself in the same, stilted way, uses the same favorite words and phrases constantly, holds onto the same awkward sentence structures, and makes the same mistakes over and over again. Rank beginner, still.

After I got over my astonishment, I began to wonder why there’s been no improvement in her work; no growth in word usage, no development in style, no freshness of expression, no advancement of theme, no depth of exploration. As I got to know her better on a personal level, the answer finally hit me: She doesn’t read. She’s a television watcher who eschews fiction. She watches travelogues, history programs and some science if it resembles travelogues. She has forgotten how words look on the printed page, seems ignorant of the interplay between story concept and dramatic tension. She is totally unaware of how other writers express ideas, how they play with sentence structure to lead a reader deeper and deeper into a story, how they use words to entice, entrance and captivate their reading audience.

I’m a natural-born reader. I read everything I can get my eyes on, even the fine print on cereal boxes. It’s a dry week for me if I haven’t finished at least two books. So I’ve never had any problem with the notion of reading being important for writers. But I don’t think I ever until now realized just why - beyond knowing what’s out there so I don’t duplicate it - reading is so inextricably woven into good writing. Each time we read, we absorb alternate ways of viewing our world. We discover new ways of putting words together and turning phrases to bewitch our readers. With every word, every sentence we read, we analyze - on a subconscious level - what works and what doesn’t, so that when we sit down in front of our piece of paper (computer) and pick up our pencil (keyboard) we don’t duplicate the mistakes any more than the successes of someone else. Reading is what turns the spotlight onto the path, so that we can see our way to developing our own unique vision and style.

Good writing doesn’t just happen in classes, critique groups or through solitary midnight angst. The ground is being prepared everytime we open a book, periodical or newspaper and start to read. Reading is the fertilizer we need to grow as writers. Without it, whatever seeds of talent we possess may sprout, but they will stagnate in the seedling stage. They will never reach, stretch or grow into the full maturity of vivid, exciting, compelling writing. And with that, I’m out of here. There’s a new J.D. Robb mystery calling to me. Gotta go fertilize!

Can one be one’s own spirit guide? I ask, but the answer is as the wind, a fleeting sense of motion, caressing fingers of reply glimpsed from the corner of my soul’s-eye.

Silence, my constant companion, hand-mate of isolation as I await the sound, the picture, the word, the touch of the guide with whom my heart longs to connect. In meditation I seek, through the distance of eternity: harmony, joy, peace, fulfillment, balance.

In silence I write, my head filled with the multitudes peopling my imagination: voices unheard knocking at my soul; fingers unfelt stroking through the essence of my life. In isolation, I am never alone. My being is crowded with the stories that layer my existence. Sometimes, I am lost even to myself. My spirit guides, I know not where.

Solitude is only bearable with God. “How still is he who knows the truth of what he speaks.” (A Course in Miracles)

Listen to the silence. Listen to the voice that is without sound. That is where the answers lie.

The fabric of reality… We create reality, but what exactly is it we create? What, indeed, is reality? Is it matter? It is energy? Are either real?

Quantum physics says that matter is merely a local condensation in the field (the field being an omnipresent entity). Perhaps, then, we are merely Universal Dewdrops, beautiful, insubstantial, ephemeral drops of Cosmic Condensation.

Or ponder this definition of reality: matter is energy reduced to the point of visibility, reduced to limitations, become finite. That would make energy matter expanded to limitlessness, to infinity. Yin and Yang. Equal and Opposite. A flipped coin.

“In the beginning there were no words, yet heaven and earth arose (Tao #1)

It was a vision, a dream, that gave form to energy, that gave matter to reality. Perhaps, then, Reality is Energy focusing on its own Dreams.

Dream Big.

Realization is not a noun; it is a verb - the act of making real.

What is reality? What is it not? How often we think of realization as a noun, as something we have, rather than as a verb, as something we do. How often we limit the limitlessness of our being.
By the very act of being alive, we are realizing - bringing into reality - the world around us. What a disservice it is to realize passively! To let reality evolve without our conscious input, without our conscious direction. What irony to then complain about the end product of our own apathy.

What a world we could have if everyone actively realized their being! Imagine the result of life’s essence brought to fruition through active realization. Could we perhaps create the Biblical “Paradise on Earth”? Could we create everlasting joy and peace and beauty?

Could we dis-create war and hatred and poverty?

Is that not the heart of creativity? Realization … bringing into being that which is not, that which could never be without us.

Heaven is not where we find it. Heaven is where we create it. Where we realize it.

Incorporate your dreams … bring them into being … give them corporeal form.

Realize life!