Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #101: Beer and Time Travel: "Remembrance of the Future"

Just a few of the many Michigan craft beer brands

I saw a submissions call for stories about beer. I am a beer drinker, and the city I live in, Grand Rapids, Michigan, once tied with Charlotte, North Carolina, for the award of Best Beer City in the United States. Our town is filled with breweries, and the local brews are marvelously good. So when I saw the call for papers on beer, I wanted to contribute to the anthology. How could I come up with a unique story on the drink that is so much a part of American culture?  The answer came from Mexico.

Pulque

I had seen references to a type of Mexican beer called pulque, made of the fermented sap of the maguey plant (better known to English-speakers as agave). I had read about it, wanted to try it, but could not find it. Some research revealed that it was popular in Mexico, where one could find pulque bars, but the drink was difficult to find outside that nation because transporting or canning it purportedly ruined the flavor. Most pulque bars were local, so the industry had not gone international. I asked my daughter, who had lived and taught four years in Mexico, about the drink:  "Pulque is nasty," she told me. I guess it's an acquired taste.

But the Mexican connection gave me an idea for a story.

A local epicure and chef named Phil Ochs (he is distantly related to the late folk singer by the same name) writes and gives seminars on cooking with beer. His title is The Beervangelist. He is locally famous and makes a living by writing a column on cooking with beer, appearing on TV, and giving seminars where he teaches recipes using various brews. He has dreams of making it big and landing a TV show—becoming "a beer-cooking Rachel Ray or Emeril Lagasse." When he hears that a pulque bar, La Casa Pulque, with the curious subtitle Recuerdos del Futuro (Remembrance of the Future), has opened up, he contacts the owner, Maya Perez , who invites to organize a cooking seminar there and to come and meet her and taste pulque. He visits on a snowy night.

Aztec pyramid in Choulula, Mexico

Maya shows him around and gives him glasses of pulque to taste. After the tour, and when he has drunk several glasses, a man shows up and threatens her. He steps forward in her defense and, when he is gone, asks her who he is and if he is a gang leader. He is, she says, and tells him to be careful, he might pull of knife the next time. Phil tells her he grew up in a rough neighborhood and knows how to fight with a knife. When the bar closes, she invites him to her place. Her place is a portal that transports them back in time.  Maya tells him they are in the ancient city of Choulula, Mexico, and identifies herself: “I am Mayahuel. I am a goddess—the goddess of rising, swelling, fermentation and of pulque.”

Depiction of Mayahuel

She authenticates her goddess-hood and also convinces him, by making love to him Aztec-style, that he is not mad. She explains that she has gotten on the wrong side of Mixtotl, the man who threatened her, who is in fact a god, because she has refused to participate in the festival dedicated to him, in which a man and a woman are sacrificed. The man, the woman, and the priest who performs the sacrifice must be drunk on pulque (a historical fact I discovered doing research). Not an Aztec but a Mayan goddess, the ritual sickens her. She has escaped to the future to avoid her part in it (and by doing so to bring it to an end). Mixtotl has come for her and insisted she return to ancient times and play her part in the sacrifice. She has chosen Phil as her champion. He must defeat Mixtotl to free Maya and to end the ceremony.

Mayahuel, contemporary depiction

Supernatural stories always contain a charmed object. Maya gives Phil a knife given to her by Raugutiene, the Baltic goddess of beer and fermentation (Maya knows all the gods and goddesses of brewing), with whom she took refuge when she first escaped Mexico. It not only cuts; every cut creates a certain amount of drunkenness in one's opponent. Phil is encouraged but also knows that ancient gods were skillful warriors with supernatural powers. It would not be an easy fight.

He has discovered, in fighting with gang members in his old neighborhood, that they often went through a set of ritual moves before fighting. He won knife several fights by attacking them when they were going through their preliminary "dance." Sure enough, Mixtotl, begins a dance to begin the fight. While he is doing it, Phil gets a good cut on him. Using the skills learned on mean streets, he is able to disable Mixtotl—though the spell of the knife helps greatly. With victory, he wins freedom for Maya. The human sacrifices will end. Mixtotl will not be worshiped. And she can return to the future to run her bar—and to explore a relationship with her new-found mortal lover.

The story appeared in an anthology, Six-Pack of Stories. It is available in print. Get a copy here.

 For more good reads, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Soon, a sequel to my vampire novel, Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute, will be released. It is titled Sinfonia:  A Painted House. Stay tuned.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy #100: Revenge and the Pleasure Principle: "The Priestess and the Sorcerer"

“The Priestess and the Sorcerer” appeared in Erotique, one of those amphibious stories part sword and sorcery and part erotica. As is usual with an erotic story, it starts out with a steamy sex scene. A man and a woman are getting it on. The descriptions are explicit. The man is said to be a Norman—one of the French who invaded England in 1066 and took control of the nation. The woman, named Hegla—a non-French and more Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon name—is servicing him. After he finished, though, the second part of the hybrid story kicks in. The Norman suddenly begins to weaken. In panic, he feels the life ebb out of him, feels his frame convulse and cave in. In a moment, he is dead, his body a shrunken, shriveled leftover of what it was before—all due to his intercourse with the woman he thought to be a prostitute.

But Helga is just standing in for a genuine working girl, a friend from childhood, named Kirsi. When she sees what has happened to Helga’s customers, she is terrified and kneels down, muttering the name of the holy goddess. Helga replies, It is her work you see, and she will bless you as greatly as she has cursed this man because you helped me as you did. We begin to understand that this is a planned-out hit—vengeance—and that it involves magic. Helga leaves for the next phase of her plan. Kirsi gives her a yellow scarf and tells her to stand by a stone on the road if she wants to snag her next customer.

As Helga goes to the rendezvous place, the reader is given backstory. Helga was a priestess of the Goddess Freya, a temple maiden who had begun training and age six and was under a twenty-year vow of virginity and service. One morning, three men ride in, pull a sack over her head, sexually assault her, and abduct the acolyte she is training to be a future priestess.

She returns to her family to recover. No longer qualified to be a priestess, she slowly heals from the trauma of her experience. She learns that the men deliberately assaulted her to show the weakness of her religion. They hope to spread Christianity, the faith of the new wife of the King has taken. The King himself has not embraced the new religion. The Queen's minions seem to think that brutality is a good way to coerce people into converting.

Helga eventually finds healing with her family. She ventures out and connects with old friends. She even takes lovers, wanting to normalize her experience of sex. After a year, she goes away to meet with a sorcerer. She is willing to give anything to him, including her soul, to enact vengeance.

The Sorcerer, named Scealu, helps her, and does indeed want her soul. She willingly gives it. He has her cut herself just belong her collar bone and smear the blood from the cut on the stone inscribed with runes. The stone absorbs the blood. The wound on upper body is gone, leaving a white scar.

Helga returns. She has already killed a second man in her disguise as a whore. The third man, who is with him, sees what has happened to his comrade, and flees. Helga’s father and brother catch him and tie him to a bed. Helga stimulates him, climbs on top of him, and pleasures him. The last of the trio of her assailants is dead. But she is not finished. The men had taken her acolyte, Gwendolyn, and left her a group of nuns who had established a convent by the sea. The Normans apparently warned them. They have abandoned Gwendolyn and are in a boat; the helmsman is threading their way through a place of treacherous currents amid small, rocky islets.

Helga, who learned to hunt as a girl, takes up her old bow, lets fly an arrow, and kills the helmsman. The boat careens out of control, smashes against the rocks, and the nuns fall in the water and drown. She has exacted her revenge. She delivers Gwendolyn to the new priestess of Freya, says good-bye to her family, and returns to Scealu, who owns her soul.

Once there, he asks if she has anything to give in exchange for her soul. She is offended by the idea of offering her body to him (she did so in exchange for the magic that enabled her to kill the three Normans). She also grows angry at the thought of exchanging her dress and standing naked for him. The text continues:

Then she noticed the leather covering designed to protect the soft flesh of her wrist from the recoil of the bowstring when she let an arrow fly. She had forgotten to take it off. She untied the thong, frowned angrily, and threw it at him. He caught it and smiled.

“You are a spirited woman,” he said. “This is a very well-made arm guard. I return your soul to you in exchange for it.”

Her courage and desire for justice has impressed him. The white scar vanishes. Helga relaxes. Scealu tells her she is free of the spell and can go; the men who embrace her from now on will not be affected as the Normans were. He also tells the new religion will replace the old. This will be so in her lifetime, he says, so she will need to act wisely. He invites her to spend the night with him, and she agrees. She will make a new life back home. Whatever changes come, she will weather them with courage.

The story appeared in the journal Erotique Volume 3.  Get a copy here. If you like erotica and sword and sorcery fantasy, you get the best of both worlds in this story.

For additional titles see my
Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your
comments. This is my 100th
blog, so you will be commenting
on a historical artifact!

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My Second Novella: Strange Brew

Strange Brew was the second novella I published. It took its title from an old song by the British rock group Cream:

  She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue.

  In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you.

 With you!  What are you gonna do?

 Strange brew, kills what’s inside of you.

I always interpreted the song to be about a relationship where the woman is just trouble for the guy. I thought of her as being as bad as a witch. But then one day the idea struck me:  What if a real, true-to-life witch with considerable magical powers fell in love with you? The line, “With you! What are you gonna do?” had creative resonance and I began working on the story.

The witch is English, she is named Lybecca, and she is the most powerful witch in England. She has lived for almost two millennia. And, she has recently followed the trend of many in the late 1960s and early 1970s and begun using drugs, which has deranged her mind a little bit. She meets Andrew Cabot, an American blues/rock singer who has recently hit it big and is establishing his career after two chart-topping singles. They meet, drop LSD, and spend the night together. Andrew plans to go his way, thinking Lybecca one more groupie girl. She tells him she is in love with him. He says they hardly know each other and they agree to go their separate ways. She tells him she is a witch, but he attributes her statement to being her being burnt out on hallucinogenic drugs. She agrees and goes off.

The next day at practice, Andrew feels ill. He has an attack of severe intestinal pain and his band members take him to the emergency room. The doctors tell him he has advanced gastro-intestinal cancer, chide him for not seeking treatment, and tell him there is nothing they can do to help him. The cancer is too advanced; he should have sought medical help when he first sensed something was wrong, which would have had to have been six months ago. They give him painkillers and send him home.

While he is waiting for his ride back to the flat he has rented, Lybecca appears:

She wore a minidress with wide horizontal stripes. She crossed her arms.

"Convinced?" she asked.

I could not answer for the pain. I nodded.

She got up, walked over, and touched my head.  The pain vainished

I knew she had healed me.

"I'll be at the Bronze Bell at 4:00.  See you there."

Then she was gone.

Thus their relationship begins. Andrew finds out, though talking to friends of hers who are witches, that she is mildly deranged but is too powerful for anyone to confront. Those who have crossed her up have suffered unpleasant fates. He is trapped. Yet as he gets to know her, travels time with her, and meets her daughter (whom he finds out he fathered when he and Lybecca made love on a trip to the past and his child is in fact older than he), he begins to see Lybecca someone who is hurting, vulnerable, and unhappy. He begins to feel something for her—not exactly love, but empathy.

Later, she tells him why she began to use drugs. Her other child was killed. She also tells him how she became a powerful witch by studying with a Hoodoo practitioner in the American South in the 1930s. They had a child together. The child had come to see her and had died in an accident. Only the Hoodoo man can cure her of her affliction. And his cure may not work. It may destroy her.

They go back in time to the 1930s. As Lybecca undergoes the cure, Andrew meets blues singer Robert Johnson and other bluesmen he has listened to and imitated. He also gets in a wrangle with local men over his willingness to associate with African-Americans (this is the time of segregation). After he beats one of them up, he is cornered by a group who mean to do him despite. It is at this point that Lybecca returns, cured by the magical spell, restored to her sanity. And even more in love with Andrew. Now he loves her as well. They return to the present to begin their relationship under more favorable conditions.

The novella is available, here is a link to it: Strange Brew.

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

I would love to hear your comments. Happy reading.

Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer #99: Horror, “The Gremlin.”

I don’t write a lot of horror—some, but not much, since I prefer paranormal and fantasy writing with a little literary fiction mixed in. But I do indulge occasionally. I have written several stories for The Horror Zine, one of the best e-zines of that genre on the web. One of them was “The Gremlin.”

Most people know that Gremlins are creatures who tear up airplanes. RAF pilots in World War II reported seeing them—probably a result of fatigue and stress from flying too many missions. They began to appear in novels and stories and became famous with the publication of a book by Roald Dahl, better known for later stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and Giant Peach. They took their place in mythology, a specialized sort of elf or imp. But they weren’t always cute little creatures. Many people remember the episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” from The Twilight Zone where William Shatner sees a Gremlin on the wing of passenger plane. Everyone remembers the scene where he pulls the curtain back and the Gremlin is staring at him, its face pressed against the window.

I had been trying to write a story in response to a call for submissions of Indiana stories. After repeated attempts to write a tale about my hometown of Kokomo, Indiana (yes, there is such a place; no, it is not the place the Beach Boys mention in their song), I gave up on my original story and decided to switch it to a horror tale. For some reason, I chose a Gremlin.

Elwood Haynes and early automobile

One of Kokomo’s claims to fame is that one of the first automobiles was invented there. It was built and driven in 1906 by a man named Elwood Haynes (who also invented the process for making stainless steel). I had originally meant to write a story of his first drive down a road called Punkinvine Pike, but the story just would not set up. So I switched it to a story about a young man and young woman driving down the pike who are attached by a Gremlin.

Why would a Gremlin attack them? I’m not sure. But those creatures seem to have an aversion to mechanical things. I got the idea that Haynes’ development of automobiles ruined their peaceful environment and they still harbor a lot of chagrin toward mechanical things. They hit the gremlin, call the police, but the creature manages to get away before they police arrive. They ask Alex (the main character, Alex Haynes, is related to Elwood) what happened. He tells them they hit something, some kind of animal that looked like an orangutan but had green fur. The police ask if he has been drinking. His girlfriend’s parents take her home. Alex then is taken to the police station. He asks why. They only say they want to question him further out of “concern for public safety”—the creature he has described, they say, might be dangerous, might have escaped from a zoo.

Gremlin from Twilight Zone

At the police station he is questioned by federal agents. They tell him the blood and fur samples on his car are not related to any species except some they found on British aircraft during World War II. Then they ask him if he knows anything about Gremlins. Alex answers:  “Gremlins? Well, it was a car produced by American Motors in the 1960s. Or a monster—one of them scared the hell out of William Shatner on an old Twilight Zone episode. Other than that, I’m not real up on them.”

They reply that they are concerned because Gremlins really do seem to exist, evidence of them has been found in the Middle East, and they are concerned this may be a threat to national security. “So he might be working for Al Qaeda?” Alex asks. After more questioning, they let him go. He returns home. The Gremlin comes after him.

It breaks into his house. He has a .22 hunting rifle—not a lot of velocity—but puts enough bullets in it that the creature flees. When he jumps out the window he broke in through there is the sound of machine gun and heavy weapons fire. The local SWAT team and the federal agents are there. He knows a SWAT team member from school. She tells them they have to take him in:  standard policy for anyone they find with a weapon, and he still had the .22. There, the Federal Agents tell him they thought the creature might come back and so they and the local police staked the place out. “If this was a gremlin, we need to study it. Unleashing such creatures on our military installations, especially in the Middle East, is something we must be concerned about—at least about the possibility. We want learn as much about the creature as we can. And we don’t want the existence of the creature to leak out so that we have an uncontrollable media event on our hands. We’ll have to ask you to keep quiet about this—in fact, we’ll have to insist on it.”

Alex understands. The Federal Agents say they will pay him “compensation” for all that has happened. If the government can’t throw you in jail, he muses, they can always pay you off. He feels some sympathy for the Gremlin, who takes on the stock role of the pitiable monster—like Frankenstein or the American Werewolf in London. He wonders if Elwood Haynes perhaps first woke the creature when he drove his early automobile; if the creature perhaps hibernated but was awakened by the scent of a relative’s blood. He wonders where it all will end. He also wonders how many more gremlins will begin to awaken now.

The story appeared in Shadow Masters, a publication put out by the very fine publication, The Horror Zine. It is available through Amazon. 

For more good horror, get a copy of my vampire saga, Sinfonia.

For additional titles check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy horror readings. Be afraid; be very afraid.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #98: Writing About Vampires: "Jancinda"

Bella Lagassi as Dracula

I started writing vampire stories about the time the Twilight series was winding down. I did not follow the series. I read one of the book and, for all the criticism of the writing I did not think it was all that bad for a Young Adult novel; I saw the last film and, once more, didn’t think it was stupid or kitschy. In fact, I thought that the twist at the end (that the battle between the two armies of vampires did not really happen but was only virtual reality) was clever. The main thing about Twilight, though, was that it gave vampires a bad name. I saw submission guidelines that said “No Vampire Stories”; some would allow the genre but said “no sparkly vampires.” I had some ideas so came up with my breed of vampire tales. The first one I wrote and published was called “Jancinda,” the name of the female protagonist in the tale. She would become an on-going character.

Vampire literature has changed and developed since it began in early 1800s. The vampires of the earliest stories, The Vampyre by John William Polidori (1819) and Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) were quite different from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Later on, Anne Rice’s novels, such as Interview With a Vampire, changed the vampire “world.” Other writers, like Stephenie Meyer with Twilight, continued to develop and alter the nature of vampire literature. I added my contribution, small though it may be, with the series of stories about the vampire Jancinda Lamott.

Carmilla and Laura

Vampires started out as creatures of complete evil. Dracula was bad and nothing else; no redeeming qualities in him. Carmilla, the lesbian vampire in that novel that bears her name, only wants to satisfy her thirst for blood and her passion for a young human girl, Laura. But by the time of Anne Rice, 1976 and onward, vampires become more complex, conflicted, and multilayered. By the time of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and The Vampire Diaries they are complex characters.

Jancinda Lamott

My character Jancinda crosses over to the world of vampirism one winter night when she is bitten by one of the undead named Julian. Of those bitten, all but one in three thousand die. Some, though, become vampires through this contact, and Jancinda is one of the few that does. When a vampire bites a person who will transform, he or she has the duty to care for them and introduce them to the world of the undying. Julian, however, has no such scruples and leaves Jancinda lying in the snow to die when the sun comes up. A woman named Bonita Perez senses her and takes her into her apartment. The vampire Bonita begins to teach Jancinda how to live the new life she has entered.

Jancinda is able to adapt but struggles with what has happened to her. She has to kill (my vampires only need blood once a month). She sometimes anguishes over the ethics of this. Once she asks a friend, “How can God let something like this happen to us and then hold us responsible for it?” She sets up an online business that does resumes, grant writing, and editing, and does quite well. And she maintains a relationship with a human boyfriend named Wesley.

Bonita

The story “Jancinda” is about this. Wesley is suddenly dumped by Jancinda, wonders why, and persistently asks her why. She will not return his calls. She will not answer his letters. One night, drunk, he goes to her apartment and pounds on the door, demanding entry. To his surprise she lets him in. After some obfuscation, she tells him the truth:  that she has become a vampire.  He is afraid, thinking she is deluded and might kill him in her delusion that she is one of the undead. She proves it to him by showing how she has no reflection. Then he is afraid she will kill him because she is not deluded and wants to get his blood.

Jancinda promises Wesley she will not harm him. He sympathizes. He knows vampires drink blood, but he does not know that being a vampire enhances and sharpens your sexual desire. Jancinda’s vampire nature takes over, and they fall into their old lovemaking routine. He describes Jancinda as passion seizes her:  As I ran my hands over her breasts and stomach and down past the waistband of her shorts, I became aware of changes. Her skin pulsated with bursts of heat—so much heat I thought it might burn my fingers. Her skin paled. Her eyes filled with a fiery, hungry look. I felt her hands run over my back. Her nails had changed to sharp talons. Kissing her and putting my tongue in her mouth, I felt the smooth, sharp spears of fangs.

But their lovemaking does not change things a lot. Wesley sees her from time to time, though she still will not date him. When he runs into her and she is with her vampire friends, it makes him uneasy. They eye him like he’s a very attractive piece of meat they would love to wrap up, carry home, and dine upon.

Later, though, he gets a desperate phone call from Jancinda. She has been in an automobile accident that jammed the doors of her car shut. The police and a crowd of people are there, so can’t use her vampire super-strength to break the doors or transform to a bat and fly away. She asks him to come. He arrives just before dawn. The police say she can go. Hardly able to breathe because the sunrise is upon them, she wraps up in a sun-proof blanket, Wesley secures her in the trunk of his car and delivers her to a “safe house” where she will be shielded from light.

His act of valor makes Jancinda see why she loved him when she was mortal. They begin their relationship once more. Jancinda says she will accommodate him and tell the other vampires to leave him alone. Neither of them know where the relationship will go, but they intend to maintain it. More stories about the vampire Jancinda Lamott would follow.

“Jancinda" appeared in the anthology Bite from the Heart, available on Amazon. Get a copy here. 

If vampire stories are your thing, check out my novella, Sinfonia:  The First Notes on the Lute, A Vampire Chronicle, Part I, available here.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy reading.

Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #96. Writing from Long-Held Questions: “The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel.”

I had always been intrigued by the quotation Edgar Alan Poe uses as an epigraph for his poem, “Israfel.”  It is this:  And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. —KORAN.” I got a copy of Poe’s works for Christmas when I was age thirteen, but I didn’t examine the quotation until many years later. I looked for it in the Qur’an, but could not find it. I did some searches and couldn’t find it on any of the popular search engines. I did, however, run across someone who had a much better knowledge of the Qur’an (I knew this because he used technical terms I did not know). It seems that Poe either just made the quotation up or got it from a source that misquoted it. I liked the poem, the opening stanza of which reads

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell 

   “Whose heart-strings are a lute”;   

None sing so wildly well 

As the angel Israfel, 

And the giddy stars (so legends tell),   

Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell   

   Of his voice, all mute. 

Even misquotes, however, can begin the imagination working and I came up with an erotic story, “The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel.”

Hala

It centers on a young woman named Hala. She is sold as a slave to pay a debt and lives in a coastal city. She is a Christian, her owners are benevolent, though when she comes of age, her duties include servicing their son, a thing Hala comes to accept and eventually enjoy. She wonders if he will marry her but her world is jarred when he gets in trouble with the authorities. To pay his fine, or to perhaps pay a bribe, the family sells her. She ends up in the slave market in Baghdad. She is sold to an older man and takes up his place in his home.

As his mistress, she has privileged status in the house. Very quickly, however, she encounters a woman named Fatima, who bullies her. After her first experience in bed with her master, she is lying down, contemplating, when Fatima bustles into the room:

“Get up, you lazy whore,” she said.

Hala glared at her.

“Up, unbeliever—and don’t look at me like that or I’ll make you pay for your insolence.”

Hala got up. The woman led her to a bath chamber. Again, she pushed her along, cursing her all the way. Hala’s anger flared. She turned and again glared at the woman. She swung her hand to slap Hala, who seized her fingers and sunk her teeth in them.

She bit down as hard as she could. The woman began to scream.

“Murder!” she cried at the top of her voice. “Murder! This kaffir is trying to kill me!” She bellowed and roared as Hala clamped her teeth with all the force she could call up.

She heard scrambling and clattering. The young man she had admired earlier in the day came bursting into the room, scimitar drawn.

The young man who comes to the scene, named Suleiman, creates order. After he leaves, taking Fatima, Hala realizes she has been standing there, naked as the day she was born, all the time he was in the room. She thinks him extremely attractive.

Fatima is disciplined and reduced in rank as a servant for her behavior. Hala is assigned a servant girl who tells her Suleiman is their master Daroysh’s bodyguard. Like them, he is a Christian but is not permitted to serve in the army or the police because of his religion. Hala begins to dream of him and the two of them get to know each other. Suleiman is attracted to Hala, but does not think they should risk being found out and so will not become her lover.

Time passes. One night she dreams of the Angel Israfel, whose heartstrings are a lute. She awakes from the dream to find Suleiman in her room. He has not been able to resist the love he feel for her and she joyfully yields to his embrace. They become lovers.

During her time in the seaside town where she lived her many years, Hala had learned to play the lute from the daughter of English merchants residing there. She has asked Daroysh to purchase one for her and he does. She tells Suleiman she will be playing at a dinner tonight for Daroysh’s friend Kharki, who is highly critical of him for hiring unbelievers, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians.  Kharki will not sit with unbelievers, so Suleiman says he will listen from within the next room.

That night, Kharki makes an attempt on Daroysh’s life, hoping to take his position working for the government. Aided by Fatima, he announces he will kill Hala first. Just then Suleiman and some guards come into the banquet hall, kill Kharki, and capture his henchmen. He later tells Daroysh that he knew to come to his aid when he heard discordances from Hala’s lute. She never played discordant music. Daroysh is grateful, gives Hala her freedom and permission to marry Suleiman. They live long and happy years together. She never forgets her dream of the Angel Israfel.

The story appeared in an erotica journal called Oysters and Chocolate, which is no longer published. You can read it, however, in a special issue of Erotique that consists entirely of my erotica—“The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel,” and a number of other stories about relations and the joy of love. Take a look at their website here.

For additional titles see my Writer's Page.

If vampire stories are your thing, a unique and unusual tale is Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute: A Vampire Chronicle, Part I.

For another multicultural story, I recommend The Sorceress of Time.

Happy reading.

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.