Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #95, ShadowCity

World-building is the prime attraction of fantasy and fabulism. Skillful writers create worlds that are places of danger and adventure—places we want to live despite their threats—magical worlds full of adventure and possibility. Narnia, Middle Earth, Earthsea, Darkover, Avalon—the list is long. When a writer creates a world, he or she can also create the rules. Different races of beings, the existence of magic, religion, topography—everything is at the writer’s power. It is intoxicating. It was the lure that led me to create the world of ShadowCity.

ShadowCity was the third book I published—a novella, a fantasy story about a parallel world that exists in tandem with earth as a dark copy. The world, you come to understand, is a developing word—a site that is embryonic and waiting to take its place in the universe. It has a guardian, a young woman from earth named Jimena Chagall. The main character in the book, Scott Evard, was in love with her but her erratic lifestyle, drug use, and enigmatic disposition has split them up. He meets her by a river walking path near a bridge, a place where panhandlers hang out, begging money. She is thin and smells as if she has not bathed in several days. He gives her money and offers to take her to his apartment where she can rest and bathe. “You just want to see me naked,” she quips. “Like I haven’t seen you that way before,” he mutters. As he walks away, someone tries to murder her. Scott, a boxer in college, manages to save her and beat her assailant insensible. They call the police, who take her for questioning. Mark has a business meeting he has to attend and promises he will come to get her at the police station.

Jimena

When he does, she kills her assailant by removing the shadows from his room. The police think he has had a heart attack. Jimena fills him in on the aspect of her life he has never known about. She the guardian of a world but has neglected her duty. As a result of this, darkness has almost completely taken the forming world over. The evil has become so strong, the evil rulers of the world have sent a killer to Earth to murder Jimena. She realizes she has to go and try to correct things, though at this point it seems like a hopeless endeavor. She and Scott sleep together that night. She dresses and slips off, but Scott wakes up and follows her into a large shadow. He ends up in the parallel world.

The plot is intricate, but the world-building merits mention. The world, Jimena tells Scott, is a copy of Earth “all based on string theory” but too complicated to explain. It is a refuge for people who know darkness and loss:  those who have been harmed by the dark forces on Earth, and those who are themselves dominated by darkness. The latter have gotten the upper hand, and Jimena must right the situation.

But from the beginning, Scott notices her methods smack of darkness and cruelty. She buys a slave (Drya, a Maenad), tortures a woman, bullies and intimidates both enemies and friends. She captures a young woman warrior and promises Scott he will not let her people harm her for treason but ends up doing nothing to stop the girl from being hanged. When Scott chides her, she says he will not like everything she does but she must resort to such methods in order to set the situation right.

Drya

What Jimena does not understand is that in behaving as she does she is letting the darkness that threatens to engulf the world seep into her soul, weakening her. She is in danger of being overwhelmed by the very thing she is fighting.

What happens? You’ll have to get a copy and read it to find out. It is a fast-moving story of love, struggle, adventure, and magic. It explores, like Lord of the Rings and The Earthsea Trilogy, the nature of good and evil. You can order a copy here. It's a great read and an exploration of a fascinating world that exists as a shadow of our own world.

For other great titles, check out my Writer's Page.

Are vampire novels your thing? Read Sinfonia:  The First Notes on the Lute. A young woman's love of music is only matched by her love of human blood. See the video.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer #19: Horror Through the Ages, Horror.

I've talked about how I'm not a horror writer, but people are not consistent. I went through a phase where I wrote and published horror. I had done this before. One of my first stories, "The Snow Demon," was a horror story, and I had written a few others, but mainly my stories did not go along the lines of horrific supernatural. Then a streak of them came, and most of the tales were more traditional and "dark" horror. As for my aversion to that kind of writing—well, as Walt Whitman once said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself." Some of the stories were quite fascinating and interesting to compose.

A series of horror stories came from my pen (I write in longhand). The first one, "Dream Catcher," was about a serial killer with Satanic connections who goes after a young man's girlfriend (he has already killed her sister). His attempts to get at the girl are blocked because the young man possesses a dream catcher from a friend who is Native American and practices their ancient spirituality. Also, his girlfriend is a sculptor, and art communicates.

That's probably the best part of the story. An artist puts 

something of himself or herself into a

work of art. Any writer knows this. Margie, the girlfriend of Daniel, who narrates the story, has done a sculptured bust of Amy, her sister. So much of Margie is in the bust, and so much of Amy in Margie, that Daniel begins to have a recurrent dream. Amy is communicating through the statue, and which has captured so much of her soul—which has, like all good art, immortalized her. The dream catcher Daniel has facilitates this. He begins to see an old train signal tower, an anchor, and something having to do with Alabama.

All of the substance of the dream came from my home town. There is an old, fading, creepy train tower from the days when railroads hung lanterns out for signals so trains would not overlap on the tracks and crash into each other. Near-by is the Anchor Bar. And the street that runs just past this is Alabama Street. Daniel does not comprehend this, but eventually he recognizes the landscape and begins to investigate.

In the tower he finds a photo of Amy. It is surrounded by cryptic writing in  ancient languages. With the evidence he needs, Daniel climbs the narrow steel ladder to the street below.

Rail Tower near Alabama Street, Grand Rapids, MI

He is attacked by shadowy creature but manages but destroys it with the dream catcher. After that, Daniel confronts the killer himself, who has a gun. He hears voices. He has killed Amy as "tuition" (Daniel terms it this) so he can gain occult power from these higher powers he hears. Daniel is not impressed. He has the dream catcher. The killer scoffs at the dream catcher, calling it an "Injun charm." In reply, Daniel says, "This 'Injun charm' draws on power that was recognized and feared thousands of years before your ancestors or mine ever set foot on this land. Whatever two-bit magic you learned will collapse when it comes up against this."

The serial killer's gun won't work. He eventually flees. Daniel calls the police. At first they suspect him, but he tells them they will find the real culprit somewhere on Alabama Street. They find him hiding in a warehouse. Amy's murder is solved, as are the murders of three other women. The dream catcher has proved its potent magic.

But, as I've said before, horror is not my thing—at least not the type of horror I often encounter,where characters face unopposable evil. To me, such writing is simplistic. It strikes me rather like the classic cartoon Bambi vs. Godzilla, which is only about ten seconds long. You see Bambi grazing. He looks up to see Godzilla approaching. A shadow falls and then Godzilla's foot comes down and squishes Bambi. End of movie. This typifies a lot of horror. Where is the conflict, the complication, the plot twists—other than the protagonist fleeing from the monster and ending up in a box alley where he or she can't escape—or the woman in the fifties 

horror movie, Tarantula, who gets her skirt caught in 

the door of a car as the spider closes in on her?

In "Dream Catcher" evil is not ultimate because, unlike good, it is derivative. It has no existence in itself but is only the twisting of something good. It can exist, but when it runs up against its opposite—no, not it's opposite, the genuine thing of which is the perversion—no contest.

But the horror-writing phase went on for a while. More on this to come.

If you want to read "The Dream Catcher," here is a link to it. The Horror Zine, an award-winning online horror publication, is one of the very best and I highly recommend it.

I am promoting my science fiction story, Mother Huda. Based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm, taking place in a future where the peoples of India are the predominant race and cultural force on Earth, containing elements of sci-fi, fantasy and romance, it's a great read. Get a copy!   

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Characters Who Want Something

When I was first learning to write fiction, I came across a formula for organizing a story. Formulae, of course, can be dangerous, but this one held up pretty well. It came from the book Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver, and for the sake of simplicity he reduced it to an acronym:  WOA—Want, Obstacle, Action. A good story will have someone wanting something; there is an obstacle to the person getting what he or she wants. He or she will take action to get the thing. Cleaver added that the action the person takes to get what he or she wants will also reveal their character.

The book is a good book on writing, and the formula suggests an important thing. Characters have got to want something. In great literature (this is also true in film), the characters desire. Furthermore, their desire is not casual. They really, really, really want the thing. This, I think, is what makes some characters from literature enduring. A sampling will suffice to illustrate the point.

Let’s start early. Romeo. He wants Juliet. Does he want her just a little? He wants her a lot, so much that he immediately forgets

Rosalind, the girl who would not return his love and made him depressed. He is willing to risk a beating to talk to Juliet at a party off-limits to him and members of his family. Later on, he risks his very life to talk to her in the famous “balcony scene.” Eventually, he will marry her, knowing it will bring about retribution. He doesn’t care. He loves her. He wants to share her life. We all know how it ends.

Captain Ahab. He wants to kill Moby-Dick, the white whale 

who chewed off his leg. Does he have a casual desire to kill the whale? If he can get him, great, if not, well, there are lots of other whales in ocean? No. He is obsessed, fanatical, and willing to destroy his ship, his crew, and himself to even the score.

Ebenezer Scrooge wants money. He doesn’t want money just a little bit. His whole life is consumed with avarice, the desire to get money. When he is young, he does not marry the girl who loves him. She says a “golden idol” has replaced her. Scrooge complains about giving Bob Cratchit Christmas day off (and won’t give him a bit of coal to keep warm at his job). And he blows up with rage when men come to his door soliciting a contribution for the poor and destitute. “Let them die,” he says, “and reduce the surplus population!” 

Examples could be multiplied, but the point is that characters must want something and be willing to risk everything to get it. They will expend all their resources to overcome the obstacle standing between them and what they want:  the risk of death in an ancient feud for Romeo, the dangers of the sea and Moby-Dick’s skill at ripping whalers to bits (Ahab meets a British sea captain who has lost an arm to the same white whale); Scrooge faces the censure of a society that considers money-grubbing immoral, underpaying employees despicable, and indifference to the poor reprehensible. Their obsession to get past the obstacle and get what they so tenaciously want is what makes the characters absorbing. Without this desire, characters are dull and insipid. And without fascinating characters, you cannot have a good story.

I’ve tried make the characters in my novels obsessive and driven. In The Gallery Martin Rollins wants the love of Siobhan O’Conner and will risk fighting one of the undead to get her. Strange Brew has Andrew Cabot willing to travel time and face the dangers of the pre-segregation Southern USA to help Lybecca. In The Sorceress of the Northern Seas, Lybecca (long before she meets Andrew) fights and struggles to win power and dominance as a sorceress. None of these things are bought at a small price.

Your characters must desire. They must want something and be willing, like Hamlet, to even “couple hell,” to get what they want. No one is attracted by insipid desire. Make your characters want something. Make it real desire. That is how the pot gets boiling.

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