#the girl who gets way too invested in hypothetic kindness turtles

[readbookywooks]

It was the clock. It was very big, and occupied a space between two curving wooden staircases covered with carvings of things that normal men only see after a heavy session on something illegal. It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the kind of deliberate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life. It was the kind of sound that suggested very pointedly that in some hypothetical hourglass, somewhere, another few grains of sand had dropped out from under you. Needless to say, the weight on the pendulum was knife-edged and razor sharp. Something tapped him in the small of the back. He turned angrily. 'Look, you son of a suitcase, I told you —' It wasn't the Luggage. It was a young woman – silver haired, silver eyed, rather taken aback. 'Oh,' said Rincewind. 'Um. Hallo?' 'Are you alive?' she said. It was the kind of voice associated with beach umbrellas, suntan oil and long cool drinks. 'Well, I hope so,' said Rincewind, wondering if his glands were having a good time wherever they were. 'Sometimes I'm not so sure. What is this place?' 'This is the house of Death,' she said. 'Ah,' said Rincewind. He ran a tongue over his dry lips. Well, nice to meet you, I think I ought to be getting along —' She clapped her hands. 'Oh, you mustn't go!' she said. We don't often have living people here. Dead people are so boring, don't you think?' 'Uh, yes,' Rincewind agreed fervently, eyeing the doorway. 'Not much conversation, I imagine.' 'It's always “When I was alive — ” and “We really knew how to breathe in my day — ”,' she said, laying a small white hand on his arm and smiling at him. They're always so set in their ways, too. No fun at all. So formal.' 'Stiff?' suggested Rincewind. She was propelling him towards an archway. 'Absolutely. What's your name? My name is Ysabell.' 'Um, Rincewind. Excuse me, but if this is the house of Death, what are you doing here? You don't look dead to me.' 'Oh, I live here.' She looked intently at him. 'I say, you haven't come to rescue your lost love, have you? That always annoys daddy, he says it's a good job he never sleeps because if he did he'd be kept awake by the tramp, tramp, tramp of young heroes coming down here to carry back a lot of silly girls, he says.' 'Goes on a lot, does it?' said Rincewind weakly, as they walked along a black-hung corridor. 'All the time. I think it's very romantic. Only when you leave, it's very important not to look back.' 'Why not?' She shrugged. 'I don't know. Perhaps the view isn't very good. Are you a hero, actually?' 'Um, no. Not as such. Not at all, really. Even less than that, in fact. I just came to look for a friend of mine,' he said wretchedly. 'I suppose you haven't seen him? Little fat man, talks a lot, wears eyeglasses, funny sort of clothes?' As he spoke he was aware that he may have missed something vital. He shut his eyes and tried to recall the last few minutes of conversation. Then it hit him like a sandbag. 'Daddy?' She looked down demurely. 'Adopted, actually,' she said. 'He found me when I was a little girl, he says. It was all rather sad.' She brightened. 'But come and meet him – he's got his friends in tonight, I'm sure hell be interested to see you. He doesn't meet many people socially. Nor do I, actually,' she added. 'Sorry,' said Rincewind. 'Have I got it right? We're talking about Death, yes? Tall, thin, empty eye-sockets, handy in the scythe department?' She sighed. 'Yes. His looks are against him, I'm afraid.' While it was true that, as has already been indicated, Rincewind was to magic what a bicycle is to a bumblebee, he nevertheless retained one privilege available to practitioners of the art, which was that at the point of death it would be Death himself who turned up to claim him (instead of delegating the job to a lesser mythological anthropomorphic personification, as is usually the case). Owing largely to inefficiency Rincewind had consistently failed to die at the right time, and if there is one thing that Death does not like it is unpunctuality. 'Look, I expect my friend has just wandered off somewhere,' he said. 'He's always doing that, story of his life, nice to have met you, must be going —' But she had already stopped in front of a tall door padded with purple velvet. There were voices on the other side – eldritch voices, the sort of voices that mere typography will remain totally unable to convey until someone can make a linotype machine with echo-reverb and, possibly, a typeface that looks like something said by a slug. This is what the voices were saying: WOULD YOU MIND EXPLAINING THAT AGAIN? Well, if you return anything except a trump, South will be able to get in his two ruffs, losing only one Turtle, one Elephant and one Major Arcana, then —' 'That's Twoflower!' hissed Rincewind. 'I'd know that voice anywhere!' JUST A MINUTE – PESTILENCE IS SOUTH? 'Oh, come on, Mort, He explained that. What if Famine had played a – what was it – a trump return!' It was a breathy, wet voice, practically contagious all by itself. 'Ah, then you'd only be able to ruff one Turtle instead of two,' said Twoflower enthusiastically. 'But if War had chosen a trump lead originally, then the contract would have gone two down?' 'Exactly!' I DIDN'T QUITE FOLLOW THAT. TELL ME ABOUT PSYCHIC BIDS AGAIN, I THOUGHT I WAS GETTING THE HANG OF THAT. It was a heavy, hollow voice, like two large lumps of lead smashing together. 'That's when you make a bid primarily to deceive your opponents, but of course it might cause problems for your partner —' Twoflower's voice rambled on in its enthusiastic way. Rincewind looked blankly at Ysabell as words like rebiddable suit', 'double finesse' and 'grand slam' floated through the velvet. 'Do you understand any of that?' she asked. 'Not a word,' he said. 'It sounds awfully complicated.' On the other side of the door the heavy voice said: 'DID YOU SAY HUMANS PLAY THIS FOR FUN?' 'Some of them get to be very good at it, yes. I'm only an amateur, I'm afraid.' BUT THEY ONLY LIVE EIGHTY OR NINETY YEARS! 'You should know, Mort,' said a voice that Rincewind hadn't heard before and certainly never wanted to hear again, especially after dark. 'It's certainly very – intriguing.' DEAL AGAIN AND LET'S SEE IF I'VE GOT THE HANG OF IT. 'Do you think perhaps we should go in?' said Ysabell. A voice behind the door said, I BID . . . THE KNAVE OF TERRAPINS. 'No, sorry, I'm sure you're wrong, let's have a look at your —' Ysabell pushed the door open. It was, in fact, a rather pleasant study, perhaps a little on the sombre side, possibly created on a bad day by an interior designer who had a headache and a craving for putting large hourglasses on every flat surface and also a lot of large, fat, yellow and extremely runny candles he wanted to get rid of. The Death of the Disc was a traditionalist who prided himself on his personal service and spent most of the time being depressed because this was not appreciated. He would point out that no-one feared death itself, just pain and separation and oblivion, and that it was quite unreasonable to take against someone just because he had empty eye-sockets and a quiet pride in his work. He still used a scythe, he'd point out, while the Deaths of other worlds had long ago invested in combined harvesters. Death sat at one side of a black baize table in the centre of the room, arguing with Famine, War and Pestilence. Twoflower was the only one to look up and notice Rincewind. 'Hey, how did you get here?' he said. 'Well, some say the Creator took a handful – oh, I see, well, it's hard to explain but I —' 'Have you got the Luggage?' The wooden box pushed past Rincewind and settled down in front of its owner, who opened its lid and rummaged around inside until he came up with a small, leatherbound book which he handed to War, who was hammering the table with a mailed fist. 'It's :Nosehinger on the Laws of Contract:,' he said. It's quite good, there's a lot in it about double finessing and how to —' Death snatched the book with a bony hand and flipped through the pages, quite oblivious to the presence of the two men. RIGHT, he said, PESTILENCE, OPEN ANOTHER PACK OF CARDS. I'M GOING TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS IF IT KILLS ME, FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING OF COURSE. Rincewind grabbed Twoflower and pulled him out of the room: As they jogged down the corridor with the Luggage galloping behind them he said: 'What was all that about?' 'Well, they've got lots of time and I thought they might enjoy it,' panted Twoflower. 'What, playing with cards?' 'It's a special kind of playing,' said Twoflower. 'It's called—' he hesitated. Language wasn't his strong point. 'In your language it's called a thing you put across a river, for example,' he concluded, 'I think.' 'Aqueduct?' hazarded Rincewind. 'Fishing line? Weir? Dam?' 'Yes, possibly.' They reached the hallway, where the big clock still shaved the seconds off the lives of the world. 'And how long do you think that'll keep them occupied?' Twoflower paused. 'I'm not sure,' he said thoughtfully. Probably until the last trump – what an amazing clock. . .' 'Don't try to buy it,' Rincewind advised. 'I don't think they'd appreciate it around here.' 'Where is here, exactly?' said Twoflower, beckoning the Luggage and opening its lid. Rincewind looked around. The hall was dark and deserted, its tall narrow windows whorled with ice. He looked down. There was the faint blue line stretching away from his ankle. Now he could see that Twoflower had one too. 'We're sort of informally dead,' he said. It was the best he could manage. 'Oh.' Twoflower continued to rummage. 'Doesn't that worry you?' 'Well, things tend to work out in the end, don't you think? Anyway, I'm a firm believer in reincarnation. What would you like to come back as?' 'I don't want to go,' said Rincewind firmly. 'Come on, let's get out of – oh, no. Not that.' Twoflower had produced a box from the depths of the Luggage. It was large and black and had a handle on one side and a little round window in front and a strap so that Twoflower could put it around his neck, which he did. There was a time when Rincewind had quite liked the iconoscope. He believed, against all experience, that the world was fundamentally understandable, and that if he could only equip himself with the right mental toolbox he could take the back off and see how it worked. He was, of course, dead wrong. The iconoscope didn't take pictures by letting light fall onto specially treated paper, as he had surmised, but by the far simpler method of imprisoning a small demon with a good eye for colour and a speedy hand with a paintbrush. He had been very upset to find that out. 'You haven't got time to take pictures!' he hissed. 'It won't take long,' said Twoflower firmly, and rapped on the side of the box. A tiny door flew open and the imp poked his head out. 'Bloody hell,' it said. 'Where are we?' 'It doesn't matter,' said Twoflower. The clock first, I think.' The demon squinted. 'Poor light,' he said. Three bloody years at f8, if you ask me.' He slammed the door shut. A second later there was the tiny scraping noise of his stool being dragged up to his easel. Rincewind gritted his teeth. 'You don't need to take pictures, you can just remember it!' he shouted.

#LightFantastic

[tanmath3-blog]

Paul Michael Anderson is a new friend and writer to me. I am enjoying getting to know him. He has a delightful sense of humor and makes me laugh. He is passionate about his writing and his life. He loves his wife and daughter and I loved to hear him talk about them. He tells me that he is boring but I doubt that to be the case. I haven’t read his stories yet but have added his book Bones Are Made To Be Broken to my to be read pile. If you haven’t met him you are missing out on a really great guy. Please check him and his books out and say hello. Please welcome Paul Michael Anderson to Roadie Notes……

    1. How old were you when you first wrote your first story? I have no idea, really; I’ve always written something. My first published piece, ever, was when I was eighteen–a music review, I think. I started out as a journalist, in college. My first published fictional story was called “The Migration of Birds” in a small digest called BLACK INK HORROR, back in 2008.

2. How many books have you written?

I’ve dallied around with novels, but I’ve focused for the past few years on short fiction. My book BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN is a kind-of “best-of” collection of the past five years.

3. Anything you won’t write about?

Not that I can think of—I won’t write anything that exploits a stereotype or a child or a woman, though, but those types of “stories” don’t interest me much, anyway. Horror, which I tend to traffic in, only works when the reader can place him or herself in that situation and relate to the reactions of the participants. You can’t do that when the characters—both good and bad guys—are one-sided or used to push forth a noxious ideology. Stories need to be populated with real people, whether they be victims or heroes or villains, and there’s a whole ball of virtues and flaws in each one. I’ve written about fairly heady subjects—abuse, neglect, the breaking-down of marriages and relationships—but while those things, when dealt with head-on, are controversial in and of themselves, I keep the focus on the people and how they adapt to those situations. I guess that’s the difference between exploration and exploitation—exploration cares about the people and how they adapt; exploitation cares about the controversial subjects and what they do with people.

4. Tell me about you. Age (if you don’t mind answering), married, kids, do you have another job etc…

I’m in my mid-thirties, with a wife and five-year-old daughter. I’ve taught English and journalism for the past ten years (it’s what I went to college for, natch), and I enjoy the hell out of it.

5. What’s your favorite book you have written?

I have stories that are my favorites right NOW, but that’s like picking your favorite kid for all time and not just being proud of a particular current achievement. Right, in print, I’m loving a story I wrote called “All That You Leave Behind”, which you can find closing both my book and the anthology LOST SIGNALS, edited by Max Booth III and Lori Michelle for Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing; as a parent, I’m terrified of a whole bunch of stuff relating to my child and being a parent, etc. That story asked the what-if of picking up the pieces after a miscarriage and brought in parallel universes.

In the pipeline, I wrote a Lovecraftian-esque novelette called “I Can Give You Life” that I’m digging because I had to stretch a little (I don’t tend to write Lovecraft and, also, I set the story during a non-specific time in the late-1950s in Northern Virginia) that’ll be showing up in a year or so. Another story, “How I Became a Cryptid from a 1980s Horror Movie” will be showing up in SPACE & TIME magazine early next year—I love it because it’s so goddamned weird (a guy is cursed to being a sentient lake and it only goes downhill from there).

6. Who or what inspired you to write?

I like telling stories and getting a reaction, a connection, with an audience; I’ll be elucidating on some point in the classroom, or connecting a concept to an anecdote and I try to make the students laugh because, if they laugh, they’re absorbing the concept, at least on a minimal level that I can use as leverage to go deeper.

But, reading books like THE TALISMAN by Stephen King & Peter Straub or ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE by Eddie Little or FIRST BLOOD by David Morrell had me cock my head at a young age and go, “THAT seems like a good job.”

7. What do you like to do for fun?

I’m a horrendously boring mid-thirties parent. All the out-of-control, nihilistic wild stuff I got out of my system when I was in my teens and early twenties. Hell, my only vices are coffee and cigarettes.

Saying all that, if I’m by myself, I love cruising bookstores and junk shops and thrift stories. I love reading and playing my guitar and doodling. With my kid…hell, doing whatever a five-year-old girl who likes to pretend she’s a “vampire princess pony with FROZEN powers, Daddy” decides to do.

8. Any traditions you do when you finish a book?

Not really; I wrote, in the introduction to BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN, that writing is a job to me—not much different from when I was a landscaper or waiter or reporter. I mean, there’s sentiment in what I do and if I’m not feeling anything about a scene or a conflict, then I can’t expect a reader to, so I’m emotionally invested in the writing. But, at the same time, it’s a job and, when I finish, I save, I print, I shut down the computer, and go back to my life as a parent and husband. I have routines—I always have coffee on-hand when writing; I always listen to a certain mix of music—but I try not to be overly superstitious about the whole thing because, to me, that makes it all mystical and hokey and, really, it’s me using a muscle—a muscle with some talent (I hope) but it’s still me at the controls and, ultimately, me responsible for something good or bad.

9. Where do you write? Quiet or music?

When I was fucking around with writing—liking the idea of being a writer but not putting in the hard work of doing the writing—I had an office, but, not long before I found out my wife was pregnant, I chucked it in favor of writing in more populated areas of the house—the bedroom, the kitchen, etc. I didn’t want to put myself away from others because it’s others that I was writing about. Consequently—this was in mid-2010—I began selling a metric shit-tonne (to accurately measure in Canadian terms) of work.

Currently, I write in my kitchen, after my daughter goes to bed and while my wife surfs Netflix or prepares for the next day. I set my laptop up on the table, get my coffee, have a cigarette (outside), and get to work. I have a mix of two Foo Fighters’s albums—WASTING LIGHT and their ST. CECILIA ep, totaling about 70 minutes of hard rock—that I listen to with headphones. It’s pretty low-tech. If I’m revising, I have a physical marked copy on a stand that I refer to, but I’m pretty minimalist and mobile. I can write pretty much anywhere as long as I have headphones, music, and a computer. And coffee, too.

10. Anything you would change about your writing?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sure. Of course. Writers, like any creative type, can be neurotic, self-doubting mental cases, and I’m no exception. When I’m reviewing the previous day’s work—some call it “fractal editing” but I have no idea if that’s the right term, and couldn’t care less—I’ll find myself wishing, goddammit, why couldn’t I put down exactly what I saw in my head? How could I miss this detail? Why didn’t I know this word?

But then I simply delete and revise and try again.

I wish I wrote faster, I guess. I, when on a hot streak, can lay down between 2k-3k, but that’s on a hot streak. I have writer’s laze, I guess; I might be working on something but, at 9:45, when my daughter’s finally asleep, I’ll find myself thinking, “Man, I just want to zone on Facebook, or watch this movie with my wife, or—shit—I have to get these dishes washed,” and I have to fight that. I don’t always win that battle, which is annoying.

11. What is your dream? Famous writer?

In a business-sense, I dream of making enough to sustain myself and not put publishers in the red; I already mostly do that, so, y’know, achievement unlocked and all that. I dream of making a reader react on a deep level to some situation I write about—make a parent cry at the end of “All That You Leave Behind” or a sibling gasp at the situation in “The Agonizing Guilt of Relief (Last Days of a Ready-Made Victim)”—but make them unable to stop reading. I can manage that, sometimes.

I don’t worry about fame, and I don’t say this in a hipster-sort-of-way. I want to make a living and, right now, writing’s a nice supplement (my income this year is paying for Christmas and some light house remodeling, for example). If I get “known” for it, cool, but that wouldn’t stop me. I’d write and tell stories even if no one was listening. At the end of the day, you want to make a reader pick up your story, but, at the beginning of that day, that hypothetical reader shouldn’t mean shit to you. At the beginning of the day, you write for yourself because it makes you feel good and you want to follow the thread of whatever popped into your head. If you keep true to that concept at the beginning of the day, that hypothetical reader will stay with you at the end of the day.

12. Where do you live?

Northern Virginia, currently, but I’ve lived all over the Eastern Seaboard. I’m a city kid, but have been hiding out in the small towns of the Shenandoah Valley.

13. Pets?

Two dogs, three cats, and one turtle. All rescues. The dogs and one of the cats came from the local Humane Society, while the other two cats were strays and the turtle was a very-late hatching my daughter found in the front garden. They’re all neurotic as hell.

14. What’s your favorite thing about writing?

In the moment of actually telling a story, I love that frisson when the words and the concepts and the action come together beautifully and I knew I couldn’t have put something better and that’s okay because what you put down was good enough. There’s a moment, in the title novella for my collection (I wrote the novella specifically for the book; it’s one of two original pieces) that pops into my head. The novella isn’t supernatural and the horror comes, for me, at the idea of things spiraling out of control. It takes place in the fall of 1991 and concerns itself with a single mother trying to make ends meet in the city. She hides how she feels from her son and her ex-husband, whom she sees when they do the pick-up/drop-off of custody visits, and takes to cutting. She hides the marks, out of shame, but there’s a moment, where she slips up, and this stranger sees it, and looks at the mother differently. The moment pauses, elongates, becomes torturous. This moment reverberates throughout the entire story.

I think that’s neat.

15. What is coming next for you?

I have a handful of stories coming out in various places over the next year or so. I wrote an essay for StephenKingRevisited.com about one of the books whenever Richard Chizmar gets around to finishing said book. My author bio says I’m working on my first novel and that’s true-ish; I’m working on a psychological horror novel tentatively titled BETTER PEOPLE and we’ll see where that goes.

    My bio: Paul Michael Anderson is a short story writer and editor. A teacher and sometime-journalist, he lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter. You can visit him at his website The Nothing-Space (paulmichaelanderson.wordpress.com) or follow him on Twitter, where he posts under the inspired handle of @p_m_anderson.

    You can connect with Paul Michael Anderson here:

BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN: http://www.darkregions.com/books/new-releases/bones-are-made-to-be-broken-by-paul-michael-anderson

Twitter: https://twitter.com/P_M_Anderson

Website: https://paulmichaelanderson.wordpress.com/

Some of Paul Michael Anderson’s books:

Getting personal with Paul Michael Anderson Paul Michael Anderson is a new friend and writer to me. I am enjoying getting to know him.