On the Road Again

The hiatus in this blog came to an end as we packed up and moved from Cambridge back to the old haunts in Connecticut—to the home we’d lived in for 13 years. Yes, the real estate market has been sour, but if there hadn’t been bad news in trying to sell our house there’d have been no news at all.

Till this past few days. We think we have a buyer and that we'll be moving on by summertime. More on that later, but in the meantime I realized I’d been rather prolific in writing over the past year. Must’ve been due to being cloistered in a 20th-floor apartment in a strange city. Breaking news: “The Case of the Checkered Murder,” a satire, will be carried by MysteryAuthors.com next month. A murder mystery surrounding my Newark detective, called “The Bone Yard” will appear in Big Pulp in June, and “Paper Cut” will be carried by them in 2009.

Maybe being circumscribed by four walls with little to do was good for me. Maybe it was good for Rodolfo in La Boheme. It’s the starving artist syndrome—although I’ve been poor and rich is better. Being accepted by editors is best for the soul, however.

Who Was This Author, Illustrator, Naturalist?

I love a good mystery and I found one in Holling Clancy Holling. Holling was a writer/illustrator you could sink deeply into. Certainly more than the vanity children’s books written today by celebrities. Yet, nowhere could I find a single source of all the books he wrote, published or illustrated. No biography exceeded a handful of bare facts about his life. His work has remained in print for more than six decades—and yet, so little information is out there.

Over a period of two months I diligently tracked down all available info to get insights—and sometime just raw facts—about HCH. After a lengthy exchange of e-mails, UCLA's archivists proved too busy to answer my query, but a kind librarian in Jackson Co., Mich.—Holling's home—provided a wealth of info and an obit. Other individuals were also helpful. The article has now gone to the American Book Collectors of Children's Literature for their fall 2008 newsletter. You can read a blog posting of it at http://wordtrip.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=201873&sid=1f8a86880ffca1858fe21b1b44d4c8e9#201873.

It was interesting how some university librarians/archivists were so “busy”, while under different circumstances others (notably UConn and the U. of Iowa) have been angels at putting their collections online for the public. Yes, I remember the good ones when they ask for annual support. Support your librarians, the unsung heros of writers everywhere!

Uninvited Attentions, Unreal Relationships

If you believe affection is purely a thing of the heart, that you’d never fall in love with someone who had evil intentions, then stop right here. My chief character in a new story wished he had stopped before uncovering layers of hypocrisy and unnatural love. This is “Modern Love,” just published by Short Fiction World (http://shortfictionworld.com/Content_Mgr/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=40). The story’s longer and more thoughtful than pieces I’ve recently published.

Some readers might think this story is self-consciously smug. But, it also has something to say about hypocrisy, government and unnatural love. Untold millions of calls have been recorded by the National Security Agency without court approval. Further, in relation to “Modern Love,” last year over 4,000 people in New York were wire-tapped by city, state and federal authorities. It leads one to ponder relationships.

The themes of pretty-ugly appearances and unnatural reality are seen repeatedly in New York’s neighborhood “worlds”, in the characters’ camouflage, and in Marcela’s joke about comic-book heroes and her talk of trust. Appearances are not reality.

Chad Plunk, SFW editor, said, “We debated for some time publishing a story with anal sex as a key component, but ultimately the imagery of a defense contractor and the media literally sharing the CIA’s ass won out.” That was my thought entirely, but in an un-ironic, non-scatological vein.

Food for Thought—and Starving People

It’s ingrained in humans’ DNA to play games, and over the millennia this has evolved to…solitaire, Tetris, and other time-killing games played out to while away boredom. But—here’s an elegant idea—what if each game resulted in giving food to very hungry people?

That’s the practice behind http://freerice.com. The New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/magazine/09wwln-consumed-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=freerice.com&st=nyt&oref=slogin) hipped me to FreeRice, and in the first five minutes I’d donated 600 grains of rice (supported by corporate advertisers) to the United Nations food program.

Check it out. You’re going to be tested—but no one will criticize you if you’ve forgotten what retiary means (net-like) in the multiple-choice answers. FreeRice presents the player with a word and four choices as to the meaning. Click, learn the right answer and get another word. Correct answers lead to a higher score and harder words.

P.S. I’m up to just 46 points, so excuse me if I leave you now to go back to FreeRice.

“Last Person on Earth Until There Was a Knock on the Door”

This science fiction premise has become a cliché. So how do you give this plotting device a twist? Being the last person on earth may be more common than thought when the subject is comatose and unable to cry to the outside world for help. The ultimate question then may be, “Can anybody hear me?”

A few readers called “Last Man on Earth” terrifying. It’s posted at Every day Fiction (http://www.everydayfiction.com/the-last-person-on-earth-by-walter-giersbach/). You tell me. Maybe it’s my odd sense of the ridiculous, but I wrote the story in an ironic vein. It’s less about death than about nurses who knock on the doors of comatose patients, doctors who flout mortality with their vices, and the hubris of scientific dogma. But my thanks go to some scientist who used the metaphor of Christmas tree lights blinking off in the brain. Now that’s ironic!

This is my third short story EDF has published, so I feel a great deal of appreciation for editors Jordan Lapp and Camille Gooderham Campbell and Webmaster Steven Smethurst.

Ghost of a Valentine

I was fascinated by the first successful face transplant, on Nov. 31, 2005, when a 38-year-old French woman received—literally—a new outlook on life. As reported by Time magazine’s Jeffrey Kluger, “No surgery quite crosses the existential line the way transplant surgery does. Create a single chimeric human with the tissues of another and the very sense of self goes wobbly.” My interest was more in the poetry of undying love than in Gray’s Anatomy, asking if the face is a reflection of the person within. That’s the thesis behind “Ghost of a Valentine,” at http://www.everydayfiction.com/ghost-of-a-valentine-by-walter-giersbach/

News items like this make me run to the PC. William Gibson (Spook Country) grabbed me last week when he wrote, “She remembered [him] describing Stockholm syndrome, the fondness and loyalty one could supposedly come to feel for even the most brutal captor.... America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11.”

Great concept! This has taken me into writing a mystery about a wealthy, educated career woman apparently disappears. Going missing, however, isn’t murder. It turns out that with all the achievement and wealth, she escapes from her “kidnappers” of parents, boyfriend, career, and education.

Other idea-generators have included a feature in the China Post surmising that most cubicle rats have “office spouses”" (every editor was outraged at this one), a blog from numerologists worrying about the number 11 (below, sold to Bewildering Stories), a news item about Chinese studying how magnets make it possible to “read” a hidden newspaper (“Magnetic Resonance,” waiting for an acceptance), and a psychologist describing Capgras syndrome, in which a family member becomes unrecognizable (sold to Mouth Full of Bullets).

Amazing how ideas can be transformed into fiction. Grab them, jot them down, shaken them up, let them ferment--and then see what comes out of the bottle.

Food Fantasies

There seems to be a natural affinity between fiction and food. Comestibles and condiments mix well with horror and homelife. “Face in the Tree” trades on one such affection gone wrong over a love of barbecue. You can read it at http://www.southernfriedweirdness.blogspot.com/. Hope you enjoy this bit of foolishness—and remember that the recipe for vengeance calls for different kinds of ingredients.

Someone mentioned that I could double the submissions potential of food fantasy by submitting the stories to Food TV. If they ever start featuring fiction along with the fajitas, maybe Bobby Flay will review it.