The Skull in Uncle Rego's Closet - A #FridayFlash

The skull smells like cleaning fluid, the pine oil kind that Mama uses on the kitchen floor. It weighs a little more than the soccer ball Uncle Rego gave me last year for my eleventh birthday. The yellow-white color almost matches the ivory of the old piano in the shed, the one Papa promises to fix up for Mama one day. One day when he works a single job instead of three.

Uncle Rego says the skull belongs to our great-grandmother. He says he brought it back from Sonora on one of his trips. The rest of the bones, he says, had to wait. Too hard to get them across the border, he says. And then the broken leg. And then he stopped going back to Mexico because things were bad in Sonora.
I’ve stolen Uncle Rego’s skull three times now.

The first time I left it on the back porch, assuming it would be gone in the morning. Uncle Rego found it when he came home, stumbling more than usual with the heavy reek of cigarettes and tequila clinging to his clothing. He merely wrapped the skull in the folds of his shirt and staggered to his room in the basement, muttering in Spanish.

The second time, I tried harder. I took the skull into the yard and placed it near the small rock garden Mama loves. She’s the one who found the skull the second time, but a day or to passed before she noticed, possibly because it blended in so well with the stones.

“Mateo,” she said. “This isn’t something to play with.”

This time, I did better. I buried the skull in the soft garden dirt next to Mama’s peppers and tomatoes. I buried it deep—as deep as I could before my arms began to burn and sag like rubber bands. Not that it is hidden, exactly, just deep. Deep enough, I hope.

When Mama comes into my room, I tell from the sour frown and lines on her face she wants to know where it is. Uncle Rego cries out every few minutes from his room.

“Where is it this time, Mateo?” she asks. Her arms cross her chest.

What scares me, more than anything, is how white Mama’s face gets when I tell her about the headless woman who throws pebbles at my bedroom window most nights. I tell her the skull is hers, and she just wants it back. I tell her I don’t think the skull belonged to Great-Grandma, and ask if Rego knows who the headless woman is. Mama just cries, folds me toward her chest, and rocks back and forth, saying, “hush, hush.”

WIP Wednesday: Slowing to a Trickle

Between Max's autoimmune issues, baby Elliot, and trying to wrangle Owen/my job/maintain a relationship with my wife... and other things, I haven't been writing as much as I'd like.

I have given a character a gun. Said character has decided to use the gun rather than call the police. See, he doesn't think the police will believe what he has to tell them (his wife might be held captive in a farmhouse/organized crime compound/possible religious cult). It doesn't help his case that it is three in the morning, he's covered in mud, blood, and cow shit, and a little high.

This could get interesting...

And it's all part of No Good Deed, a crime/thriller novella.

More soon.

“Why Write a Series? Don’t You Have Enough on Your Plate?"

A guest post from Barry Napier...

I asked myself this question roughly one hundred times as I was about halfway through the first draft of Everything Theory: Cold Compass.  Honestly, the first answer that came to mind was the fact that I simply wanted to put myself into an overly ambitious project and see it through.  The second (and honestly most important) answer was this: because the characters of the story were demanding it.

At first, I had never intended Everything Theory to become a series.  It was going to be a nice little one-off story with the potential for other books that tied into the same universe with the same characters. I certainly had no intentions of the books taking up about 90% of my writing time.  But as I made my way through the first book of the series, Cold Compass, I realized that these characters—primarily Gabe, the central character—had a lot more going on than could be covered in one book.

I assumed I could probably get three books out of Gabe, his back story, his father’s sordid history, and the shadow organization that connects it all: CSAR.  I made a few plot maps and was ready to tackle a trilogy.  Then I ended up introducing the villain of Cold Compass, a mysterious figure named Garrison Sleet.  And as I delved more into who/what he might be, it started to appear as if a trilogy might not cover the entire story, either.

So as it stands, I have a 5-book series on my hands.  It is all mapped out and fits rather well (although it appears that Book 4 might be pretty lengthy).  Book 1 has been released, and Book 2 is a few editing sessions away from being wrapped up.  I am currently taking a slight break from the Everything Theory books to give myself a break (or maybe it’s the characters that needed a break) from the twists, turns, and conspiracies.

So…why write a series?  Because sometimes the writer is just the conduit; it’s the characters within the story that are really producing the words.

To learn more about Barry, his Everything Theory books and other works, visit him at his online home: www.barrynapierwriting.wordpress.com.

The Digital Gold Rush and Plagiarism

In light of the recent kerfluffle at Amazon.com over plagiarized erotica (thanks to the good posters at Kindle Boards for bringing this to my attention), I've been doing some thinking.

Dangerous, that thinking thing.

A number of author's were angered--incensed--that stories were stolen from free-to-read websites and sold for profit on Amazon. Yes, it stinks. But it won't go away. Not ever.

Plagiarism has a long and healthy history in the world of content creation. In Shakespeare's time, an actor was only given his lines on tiny slips of paper which contained his lines and cues for fear the plays would be stolen. Modern technology has only made the process easier.

It's a digital gold rush.

Thank goodness Wikipedia is back today, because I'm quoting directly:

"A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers to an area that has had a dramatic discovery of gold."

I'm speaking of content gold, here. Follow my logic:

1. Many authors post on Kindle Boards about how lucritive erotica can be. 
2. Plagiarizer goes to the web and trawls for free stories (and there are a ridiculous number of them out there--in any genre).
3. Ctrl+C then Ctrl+V and a few formatting moments and voila, a book. 

If you are going to point hombres to gold, you better be ready for the rush. And every gold rush in the history of the U.S. has brought a shit-storm of criminal activity.

Some of the sites (Literotica in particular) don't appear to be publications in the traditional sense (meaning they don't reject most of their submissions and just about anyone can post). Countless similar sites exist in other genres, from fan fiction to poetry. While this isn't a case of people stealing stories from Newsweek or Fantasy and Science Fiction, it is still theft.

I'm not a fan of plagiarism and piracy; no author should be. (I've been a target of plagiarism in the past, remember?) But I'm not stupid, either. You put your content out there in today's wide-open wild west, and poachers are probably going to strip the juiciest bits like digital vultures on a rotting digital 'possum. Are we ever going to stop them? No. Not ever.

What can an author do?

Know the risks of posting online and take those you feel comfortable with. Most of all, get paid for your writing. If the Literotica scandal has shown these erotica writers anything, it's that there's a market for their words.

Publish them yourself and get paid. It's not a dirty thing to accept compensation for your work. If you don't, somebody else might.

The Travelling Theatrical Tour: On Dreaming the Impossible

(a guest post by Cate Gardner)

Thank you to Aaron for allowing me to invade his blog so that I can celebrate the release of my book, Theatre of Curious Acts. Aaron is one of my favourite online folk and I thought an apt subject for his blog would be 'On Dreaming the Seemingly Impossible' for as Aaron's recent publication in Shimmer proves, perseverance pays off…

Clarkesworld (insert magazine of your choice here) will never accept one of my stories. I fully expect they won't - most of the time. This isn't a case of doubting whether my stories are good enough, it's about a market that thousands of writers target and, which only accepts twelve a year from the slush pile.

Despite this fact, every time I send them a story I think 'this is the one'.

It never is, of course.

Does receiving a rejection from Clarkesworld bother me? Heck no, I just sent a story to one of the top magazines in the speculative fiction business. I dared to dream.

If rejections get you down, and hey we all have our moments, try to remember that every other writer out there, that one you just twittered, that other who just wrote a Facebook update that left you gasping with envy, they got a rejection yesterday or they'll get one tomorrow. You're not alone. Rejections are part of the business, but their partner is a wonderful thing called hope. What was just rejected goes out into the world with fresh hope.

And you know some of those writers who've had stories accepted by or already published by Clarkesworld, well they didn't think they'd make it in either. Now I need to go check if seven days have passed since I last subbed to Clarkesworld.

*

Theatre of Curious Acts is available at all good online bookstores.

Daniel Cole wants the world to  end.

Returned home from the Great War, his parents and brother in their graves, Daniel walks a ghost world. When players in a theatre show lure Daniel and his friends, fellow soldiers, into a surreal otherworld they find themselves trapped on an apocalyptic path. A pirate ship waits to ferry some of them to the end of the world.

Already broken by war, these men are now the world's only hope in the greatest battle of all.

More information is available at www.categardner.net