Reay Jespersen

With a child’s life in the balance, a parent will do exceptional things. Ilsa was slipping further away with each passing moment and needed the apothecary medicine strapped under my cloak. My only option was to cut through the Dark Forest. Tales of the region said that most avoided the Forest at all costs, and that those who didn’t were never heard from again. But the Black Path would cut my travel time by half at least.
With no choice to make, I went in.

Spidery trees clawed the sky from the fog-laiden ground, and all was deathly quiet. I pushed myself hard for long stretches at a time, stopping only when absolutely necessary. I was perhaps half way through to the far side when a beautiful woman in tattered clothing approached me, stepping – almost forming – out of the dim fog. She seemed familiar, possessing some aspects of my late wife, yet at the same time strange.
She cupped her hands, imploring. “Good sir, may I please have some food?”
But what little food I had brought from the distant village was lost as I fell into a stream I was crossing much earlier. I had nothing for myself, let alone to offer to others. I told her I could not help her.
With that, her demeanor changed drastically: her beautiful face became twisted and hateful, once-beautiful eyes suddenly blazing with anger. She closed her fist, opened it again, and blew a fine powder at my face. My eyes stung and my breathing was reduced to choking gasps.
Everything went black.

I awoke as if immediately to find myself bare and leather-strapped to a wooden table. Candles, books, glass jars of oddities, and small, rusty farm tools were everywhere in the room, whose smell turned my stomach.
“You don’t like your new home?” An old woman’s voice croaked at my expression. I turned to see a mockery of the woman I had seen on the path, now decades older; bent and twisted. She wasn’t looking at me, but was instead focused on her work as she pushed a ladle around a cauldron hung over her large fireplace.
“Where am I? Who are you?”
“You should never have entered my domain,” she said, sparing me only a brief glance.
Tales of the Dark Hag flitted through my mind. No longer myth. No longer stories for children to scare each other with. Alive and before me and holding me prisoner.
Then, remembering what the tales said she did with her prisoners.
“Free me, fiend, or you’ll pay dearly when I’ll escape,” I informed her.
“Escape?” She asked. “And how, pray, will you do that?” She glancing at my legs before turning back to her cauldron. I looked down the length of my body to see my legs had been cut off above the knee, now ending in stumps with bloodied poultices wrapped against them.
Yet rather than of myself, I thought of Ilsa. Without her medicine, she would now certainly die… utterly alone. Tears welled up, and though I don’t recall doing so, I must have uttered her name.
“Oh, not to worry,” the old crone said. “She’s doing very well. Aren’t you, dear?”
All in a moment, cold, rasped metal encircled my small finger just before pressure was put upon it, and with a crisp snap, a blinding pain shot through me. Vision swimming as unconsciousness vied to take over, I looked down to see Ilsa wrapping a poultice to the wound she had inflicted, where my finger had been. The blood flow stemmed immediately.
I wanted to say her name, call out to my only child. But in my shock, I could do nothing but watch. She took my finger to the old woman. “Yes, Mother,” she responded. The Hag dropped my finger into her brew, stirring it in as Ilsa watched.
First heart, then body, and now mind broken, I finally let unconsciousness take me… hoping to never wake again.

She sat in the empty subway car, chastising herself for riding it so late at night. No one should, in this city going to Hell in a hand basket, but particularly at her age? What had she been thinking?
Still, the ladies of her Bridge Club had insisted there was no other way than to hold the games at Meredith’s house this week – their usual community centre meeting spot closed for renovations as it was – so Edna had little choice but to travel across the city to attend.
Oh, she could have taken a taxi, of course, but at the prices they charged? She could get a month’s worth of food for her tabby, Mr. Pickles, for what a taxi would cost to drive her a half hour away.
No matter, she thought, looking at her reflection in the window beside her and adjusting her flowered hat. She was here now. No use crying over spilled milk. Or at least, Mr. Pickles certainly wouldn’t be upset if such a thing were to happen.
The subway pulled into the next station, which Edna was quietly relieved to find seemingly empty. Only one more station to go. But as the subway eased to a stop, her smiling, shrunken apple face dropped when she saw a group of young men gathered a short ways down on the platform, talking and laughing about something. Hoodlums, the lot of them, with their long or bed-tossed hair and unshaven faces, dressed in their undershirts and worn dungarees. Two of the five wore baseball caps, one normally but the other, particularly brazen one wearing his cap backwards. Backwards! It was like the lot of them were raised in a barn. And, as was just her luck, the whole braying pack of them herded onto the far end of her subway car. Pursing her lips, Edna shifted uncomfortably.
The doors closed and the subway lurched forward, pulling out of the station, and still the hooligans kept up their shenanigans. As the subway plunged into the tunnel, one of the group facing Edna gestured to her with his head. The others became quiet, all turning to look at her. They looked at each other again. The one turned directly away from her said something, and the others nodded and laughed darkly; a sound without humour. Edna had a bad feeling about this.
Her suspicion was confirmed when the same one spun on his heel and started making his way toward her. The rest of his filthy pack followed him, those not busily making themselves look nonchalant instead sporting insipid grins on their faces.
Edna distracted herself, looking around at anything except them, until they stopped a few paces from her and stood there. Head turned to the side, Edna finally peered at them, darting her eyes to them and away again. She sighed deeply and finally looked them straight on.
“What?” She snapped.
“Your purse,” the lead hood smiled.
“What about it?” Edna asked, unfamiliar with mugging protocol.
He looked at his companions, some chuckling at his bemused expression. He turned back to Edna, serious. “What about it is I want it.”
“Well, you can’t have it,” she said.
His face betrayed a moment of surprise before it was replaced by anger and he started a slow, purposeful strut toward her. “I don’t think you get it,” he said, now almost on top of her.
“No, deary,” Edna said, her most innocent grandmother face on. “You don’t get it.” She snapped to her feet, throwing an empty hand toward him, and he became a two-dimensional form of pure light before disappearing.
His dumbfounded friends stood wide-eyed and slack-jawed where they stood. “So,” Edna said to them, cocking her head slightly and smiling. After a single, pounding heartbeat, they broke and ran back down the length of the subway, clambering over each other to get away. She tut-tutted them. So predictable.
She threw another open palm at one, and he shrank into nothingness, even as she gestured to the next and he was sucked into a door-shaped portal that opened and closed in the blink of an eye. She pulled up her sagging knee-high stockings and set out with purpose after the remaining two.
A gesture of her hand, and the second last of them disappeared into a miniature, all-consuming tornado which began at his feet and swept up his body and over his head.
The remaining hoodlum slammed into the door between subway cars, frantically pulling at the handle, which found itself suddenly locked. He turned around to find some other way out and stopped in his tracks when he saw Edna standing an arm’s reach away. Hyperventilating, he backed against the door, looking around for some salvation; a desperate, caged animal.
His breathing became more shallow as she approached, this smiling old lady no taller than his chest.
“Wh-… what are you?” He strained.
“Irked,” she said with a quick nod. She levelled a finger at him. “And…” she touched his stomach, with a high-pitched, “Boop!” He turned into confetti and made a small pop as he weakly blew apart and drifted to the subway floor.
Edna brushed bits of confetti off herself as the subway pulled into her station. The doors opened. She adjusted her flowered hat and stepped out onto the platform, turning toward the escalator. Toward the bus, and Mr. Pickles, and home.
Hell in a hand basket, she thought to herself. The city was getting so bad a demi-god couldn’t even feel safe on the subway any more.

“You finished your homework?”
“Yes, sir.”
Wilfred glanced at Agatha, who nodded her confirmation. She touched her napkin to the side of her mouth. “He finished it after dishes and before listening to the radio last night.”
Taking a sip of coffee, Wilfred looked with a slight smile at his son, who sat in his pajamas and scooped the last bit of oatmeal into his mouth. “Well, perhaps the son I had last year, who was so willing to let his work and grades slide, is starting to become a young man I can finally be proud of.”
“I want to do well,” Edwin said earnestly as he concentrated on scraping the bowl clean. He looked up. “To make you proud of me, yes, but also because we were told that only the students with the highest grades will be chosen for the clubs.”
“And those who show particular enthusiasm and ability will no doubt be selected as the leaders,” Wilfred confirmed. The boy’s eyes lit up with aspiration.
The family returned to its breakfast routine. The clinking of cutlery on plates was all that broke the silence for long moments.
“Have you heard any more about the transfer?” Agatha asked.
Wilfred shook his head as he took the last bite of egg and toast. “Nothing yet,” he finally said. “It would probably still be out east, if anywhere.”
“I hope so,” Agatha said. “That’s where the Beckers moved, you remember?”
“I remember.”
“It would be wonderful to see them again. Mindy and I could restart our Bridge club. Maybe with new members from the neighbourhood. I’m sure there must be Bridge players out that way.”
Wilfred nodded automatically. “I’m sure of it.”
She took a small bite of her eggs, pensive. “So they said by the end of the week?”
Wilfred sighed, sagging slightly in his pajamas, tired of days of the discussion. “Yes. They said they would know for sure whether or not I’m getting transferred by the thirteenth, the end of this week, and would let me know either way by shift’s end Friday.”
He remembered something and checked his watch. “Blast, I’m late.” He stood up and hurried to his room.
“Late? For what?” Agatha asked. She got up and followed him, nervous. Edwin leaned slightly in his chair to be able to look down the hallway of their small house and see his mother standing at the doorway to his parents’ bedroom.
“The meeting,” Wilfred said from within. “I told you about it last week, remember? The managers wanted to meet with lead supervisors to go over the lagging turnaround time we’ve been having the last few months. Our numbers are way down, and they’re none too happy about it.”
Edwin slid from his chair and made his way down the hall.
“But the meeting is now? This morning? So it won’t keep you tonight?” Agatha asked.
“Yes,” Wilfred said, forcing patience. “That’s why I’m late now.”
“Well alright,” she said, still anxious. “But call me if you’re going to be late for dinner.”
He sighed. “Of course.”
She smiled and smoothed the front of her dress, turning and walking back up the hallway, stroking Edwin’s crew cut hair as she passed by him. He got to the door of the bedroom and looked in, having always enjoyed watching his father get ready for work.
Already in his pants and starched shirt, Wilfred threw his jacket onto his arms and leaned down to pull his boots on, polished to a shine visible even in the early morning light.
Looking at himself in the full-length mirror, he stood up straight and did up the buttons down the front of his jacket before he saw the reflection of the boy in the doorway. Wilfred smiled and turned to him, flawlessly official, even the leather of his snapped holster buffed to perfection.
Knowing what his father was expecting, Edwin stood at emphasized attention and clicked his slippered heels together, saluting his right hand at arm’s length upward in front of him.
Wilfred’s expression became serious and he clicked his boot heels together and saluted back the same way, holding the pose for a moment before smiling and breaking form. “Go on and get changed and get your books, or you’ll be late, too,” he said with a gesture of his head. “And keep up the good work at school.”
A wide smile on his face, Edwin nodded once and ran into his room to gather his books, wanting to do well. Wanting, as every boy does, to make his father proud.

Cassandra sat at the end of the sofa closest to the window in the dark living room. The curtains were parted, and she looked up to the cloudless, starry night sky, a small smile on her face.
Her young son peered out from behind his bedroom door, looking at her for a long time. She’d been doing this a few times a week for the last month. Exactly a month, he slowly realized.
He finally pushed the door open and stepped into the short hallway. If she heard the light slap of his small bare feet on the parquet floor of the apartment, she didn’t show it. He stood half-hidden at the wide doorway to the living room, watching her.
“Mama?” He finally asked.
She turned to look at him, slight surprise crossing her face.
“Jason, honey… what are you doin out of bed?”
He looked down for a moment, bending one foot around the other, toes splaying on the floor, and gave a shrug. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Mmm,” she said mildly, turning back to the stars. “Me neither.”
He watched her for short time again.
“Whacha doin’?” He finally asked.
She turned back to him.
“Just… thinking.”
“About Jerome?”
She gave a sad smile. “About a lot of things,” she nodded slightly. “But yeah… mostly about Jerome.” The tears in her eyes were staved off by her warm smile.
“C’mere, baby,” she said, opening her arms to him. He went to her quickly, enveloped in her powerful but loving weight.
She eased up on her hug and turned to him.
“You wanna look at the stars with me?” She asked. Pressed against her, he smiled and nodded.
She shifted up the couch slightly, patting the place she’d just occupied. He hopped up and rolled onto his back, her thigh a makeshift cushion for him. They gazed skyward in silence for several long minutes before she began to hum quietly, a warm, heartfelt but sorrowful tune that Jason could recall since before any other memories. It was a song passed down from her mother, Cassandra had told him. And her mother before her.
He knew the words to better than anything else he could think of, going over them in his head even before she sang them, whispering but with heart and power to her voice.

Mama done tol me,
Said Baby, doan you cry,
We’ll leave here together,
To be home by an by.
She wipe my tears an hol me,
I never be alone.
We’ll leave here together,
And baby, we’ll be home.

There was silence for long moments, save for Cassandra’s relaxed breathing. It caught for a beat when, under the trees out in the courtyard, she spotted some dark figures moving. More hints of shadowed shapes than anything else.
Pushers. Gang members. Maybe even the ones who killed her son. Not that it mattered any more. Around here – the worst area of the city, and infamous country-wide, but all she could afford on her meager salary – no one would talk about the bad things that happened. A dozen people could witness a young man get killed one evening, caught in a crossfire between a rival pushers, and no one would say a thing. The police, when they were around, would only say they hadn’t found anyone yet. Not even any suspects. And a month after she held her boy’s head in her lap, crying out for someone to help her and finally, finally hearing the sirens in the distance as Jerome’s life bled out of him, the people responsible walked around freely.
A tear ran down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly, and stroked Jason’s head. He hadn’t picked up on her sudden discomfort, still looking at the stars.
“You always did love them,” she said, making herself look to the positive that was still in her life. Jason nodded. Before he started school, when he had a father, he went camping once with his daycare. Way out of the city to where there were only trees and rocks, and hardly any roads, just a few dirt ones. And he could see more stars than he ever thought possible. He’d never forgotten the awe he felt.
He was a bit disappointed when he looked at the stars back home, in the city, because you couldn’t see nearly as many. But he’d always loved them.
“Can I visit them one day? When I grow up?” He asked.
She smiled and looked down at him; his life ahead of him, eyes and heart wide open to whatever the future held.
“Honey, you can do anything you set your mind to.”
He breathed a few times.
“Will I ever forget him?”
Cassandra held her breath to hold back from crying openly, the question cutting her to the quick with its innocence and earnestness.
“No, baby,” she said, stroking his head and looking down at him, her tears coming freely now, running down her broad cheeks and soaking into her thin summer nightgown. “Not if you don’t want to.”
And he knew what she said was true. That as far as he may go some day – even to the stars – as far away from his mother’s hugs, and from the place where his big brother had taught him things and meant so much to him, he would always and forever be loved.

She wipe my tears an hol me,
I never be alone.
We’ll leave here together,
And baby, we’ll be home.

A philosophy isn’t an easy thing to change. We grow up being taught certain things (intentional or otherwise), believing certain things, and have opinions formed by interactions with the people in the world around us and our experiences - things that are right and wrong, things that should or shouldn’t be, and why.

It has long been my philosophy that while I’m a creative idea man - I have notebooks full of them, for everything from stories and characters to settings and isolated independent scenes, inspired at times by anything and everything I experience and hear - the fact that I see precious few of those ideas through to completion, always writing something only to be distracted, crow-like, by the sparkle of a new idea, means that I should protect what relatively little I do finish.

Protect it from what? In short, theft. Which sounds exceptionally egotistic put so bluntly, but truly isn’t so. My concern has never been that of course people will steal my material because it’s clearly so damn good, but rather that I’ve been writing stories of various kinds literally since I could put two sentences together, and so with a lifetime of writing to my credit and with a passion to make even a modest living writing my own material, that it would kill me if someone somewhere took any of my material and presented it as their own and had success with it when I hadn’t.

Then several years ago I came across the website of a friend of a friend (whose name I unfortunately no longer recall, with some embarrassment), who regularly posted new short story material on her site. It blew me away, in part that someone could crank out fresh material that quickly, but more because she was just laying it out there for anyone and everyone to see and for anyone and everyone to take. I contacted her in that regard: here’s my baggage, and aren’t you similarly concerned about people taking your ideas and using it for themselves? Her response was that she has more than enough ideas to go around, and that what she posted was the tip of the iceberg of her completed material arsenal. Intriguing!

Years later, part of my wanting a website of my own was to accomplish the same feat: to not only write stuff, but post it. This was around the same time I started pitching some of the feature-length scripts I’d been working on, so it was part and parcel with not just finishing material, but trying to start getting some attention for it and for myself. And you can’t do that by sitting on a (slowly growing) pile of finished material and not telling anyone who had the ability to do something with it; to make something of it and, over time and with some luck, of you.

That first point of the website failed when I found myself still unable (ok, unwilling) to post my material online. Same old reason. Despite the big steps toward going public with my stuff, I couldn’t quite step over the threshold and actually do it.

A few years later, cutting now to a scant month or two ago, I read an interesting, brief article which cited someone - I believe Cory Doctorow - who stated that writers shouldn’t fear pirates of their work, but should instead fear anonymity. An interesting outlook which truly struck a chord with me.

Then this last week, I followed a link from Bubble Cow on Twitter which hit even closer to home. Seth Godin’s point in his excellent article on how to protect your ideas in a digital age is to not protect them at all, but in fact get them out there as much as possible. You aren’t going to be successful keeping ideas all to yourself, but may find success in making a name for yourself as someone with a lot of ideas.

In that light, and inspired in part by Twitter followee Alan Baxter constantly posting and hyping new material, and by new followee Simon Later’s infectious love of writing and posting about it, my philosophy is at least in the process of changing, with a huge part of that being my taking that step over that threshold I spoke of.

My next post will be the first time I’ve let the public see a story I’ve entered in contests but have shown to precious few; my first #flashfriday entry; the first time I’ve posted something I was hoping to save for future print publication. And hopefully, far from my last.

So the winners for the first mifiction contest were announced today, and I was none of’em. Basically, they’re taking the classic Choose Your Own Adventure-style approach to stories and formatting them for use on mobile devices. Great idea, to be sure, and one that I think will do well. However, it would seem that my concept - having the reader be a superhero and take on various criminals en route to discovering what a supercriminal mastermind is up to at the climax - either wasn’t done well enough, or wasn’t their cup of tea (no UK pun intended). What makes it a little more disappointing is that I had thought that if it were a success, my story could very easily be spun off into other stories featuring the same character. Much like a comic series.

Having said all that, I’d already known for the last week or so that even if I were rejected, I’d plow through and finish the story, at least for myself. It’s not only proving an interesting challenge to offer the reader multiple choices for certain actions while trying to keep the main thrust of the story moving forward - a unique challenge to this kind of format - but at over twenty packed pages, it’s also easily the longest (prose) story I’ve written since high scool. Anyone who knows me knows that while I’m constantly struck, and smitten by, new ideas for stories, characters, and settings, following through with them to completion happens all too rarely - typically due to getting hit with other ideas which then lure me away from work on earlier ideas. So having pushed myself to get this far in the hopes of publishing through mifiction, I’m eager to finish the story, if only for myself. I at least want to finish the first draft, as I’m not sure how much polish I want to bother putting on it when it’s not going anywhere at the moment, and the often-advised putting it in the proverbial drawer and forgetting about it will let my fresh eyes in months or years to come take a more clear-headed approach to editing and re-writing, should I wish to fix it up in the future.

This also raises an item of note I’ve been considering the last couple of weeks:
It shall be my New Year’s Resolution to submit stories and/or screenplays to no fewer than twenty-five contests or publishers in 2010. A scant number for writers who’ve been pushing themselves on submissions as hard as I should’ve been for a long time, but a wholly achievable number for someone who’s done precious little submitting in the past. An average of two submissions per month (plus one for good measure) should by rights be something I could do in my sleep. And if I happen to blow that target out of the water early on in the year, then so much the better.

In light of that, if you’re a writer and submit your stuff to contests or publishers who are looking for short story/flash fiction or feature-length/short screenplay material, please mention them in the comments section or contact me directly with your (much appreciated) insight.

Thanks very much!

I’ve officially signed up for Movember, a prostate cancer awareness/cure fund for which men grow moustaches through the month of November. Please help me raise cash for prostate cancer awareness and cures! http://ca.movember.com/mospace/41973

In light of my recent shift of approach to writing, Jackie suggested - and not for the first time - that along with writing at other times, I deidcate one night a week to it. Wednesday was the day she recommended, typically being a rather uneventful night and being the last day of the week when I have a pretty good idea of when I’ll be getting home from work.

Sadly, this was an unusually busy night, so while I left work on time, after making one stop for food shopping and another for seeing a friend we’d been meaning to see for some time, we only got home at 7:30. Tack on dinner prep, eating, and catching a few scant extra minutes of the second period of the Leaf game - interesting team they’ve cobbled together… be watching to see how they do this year - and I was only sitting down to start writing at 8:30. Hardly the “night of writing” it was supposed to be.

Still, by 10:00, I’d done a notch over 1900 words on a kids’ story which I think has a solid idea behind it but whose execution isn’t really doing much for me. I’ll keep pushing on it and try to finish it regardless of how brutal a first draft it may end up being, however, because if I keep trying to get a new start to it I’m happier with, I may never make any real progress in it. I’ve realized recently, apparently a quality Jackie had long-since identified, that I don’t like lack of progress in my work (and the more I think about it, in other aspects of my life, as well). Hence, I figure my re-hashing the opening to this story, potentially again and again, will only get me more frustrated/less interested in it than forging ahead and finishing it would, even if it results in a far from perfect first draft. Rough aspects can always be worked out in re-writes, after all.

For now, off to sleep in pursuit of another aspiration of mine: getting a decent amount of sleep during the week. So crazy an option to my often being tired and looking like hell that it just might work!

Talk soon.

So I dropped the ball a week ago.

In failing my first attempt at 100 words a day for 100 days, I got back on the saddle and did it right the second time. Not only that, blew past the original 100 days and kept going. And I recently amped that up to 200 words a day. Not a lot, perhaps, for someone aspiring to be a writer, but far more than I’ve (perhaps ever) consistently written in the past.

Then last week some time I woke up in the morning and realized that I hadn’t done my words the day before. We’d had friends over the previous night, and my watch alarm had gone off at the set time - a last-ditch reminder I used to get my words done if I hadn’t done so previously each day - but I didn’t do them. Time was, particularly amid the 100 words a day for 100 day challenge, I would’ve been mortified. But I was strangely alright with it.

In part I think it’s because I realized that while I want to make a living from writing, every writer has his own approach to getting that writing done. And while I’d stuck firmly to the 100 words a day for 100 days challenge (v2.0) and beyond, while the challenge was clearly designed to get a person into the habit of writing every day, that never really took for me. It was always something I went out of my way to do (first thing in the (early) morning, over lunch, etc.), or was reminded to do (typically via watch alarm and sometimes via Jackie).

And it was shortly after that, in an I Should Be Writing interview podcast, that I heard China Mieville say that he doesn’t really have any particular approach to writing. He doesn’t do it every day, nor at the same time, nor in the same place, nor anywhere near a consistent volume of words.

The point is, every writer approaches writing differently. Doing the daily thing was never really my bag, and at times felt like I was just writing to fulfill the agreement with myself, not writing becuase I had anything I was particularly passionate about writing. And there’s a strong argument to be made for stopping (or changing tactics) when something you love doing starts feeling like an obligation.

Hence, as I lay there awake on the morning of realization that I hadn’t written for the first time in what I figure is in the range of a year and four months (give or take), I was actually ok with it. Time to revisit the drawing board and see what else I can try in order to keep the writing both flowing and interesting to me. Any and all suggestions on that score are, as always, welcomed.

Talk soon.