BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Okay… For this one we need a little “reminder background.”

First, most – if not all – of you know what kind of books I write. If you don’t, well, then what the hell is wrong with you? I have a family to feed. Go out, buy my books, then come back and read this. I’ll wait for you…

{Insert Jeopardy Theme Here}

There… Much better. So, as you can see, in order to write dark novels about dark things – in particular serial killers and predators – one must do an enormous amount of research into same. Eventually it starts to get to you and makes you a little paranoid. This is exactly why I walk my kid to and from school. By the time I was in the second grade, I was walking myself to and from school, but that was a different time, and it wasn’t as scary – or, at the very least we didn’t know that it was scary. At any rate, the O-spring is way beyond first grade, but I still walk with her. That way, if a predator shows up, I can just kill the bastard and be done with it. ‘Nuff said.

Second – O-spring has a friend living nearby whose parents pretty much feel the same way, but don’t work from home like moi, so they don’t have the flexibility in their schedules to do same. No problem. O-spring, O-spring Friend, and I walk together. Problem solved.

Third – As I’ve noted before, O-spring is freakin’ brilliant. She’s in the Gifted program, qualifies for C4K classes and all sorts of stuff. And, on top of being brilliant she is “gifted”… What that means is that all that brainpower comes with a quirky personality, hyper-excitability, and things like that. Not ADHD, mind you. It’s just a whole different set of personality traits. Because of that, she can be a bit dramatic. Okay… A LOT dramatic. Most of the time. So, when she approaches something in a calm fashion, sans drama, it tends to take you aback…

Where is all this going? Well, I’ll tell you…

We were walking to school, and as per the age bracket, “Dad” being along is just cramping their style, so they tend to ignore the 800 pound, Bermuda shorts, ripped tee shirt, black socks with sandals, worlds greatest dad hat wearing parental unit trundling along behind them. While there is a certain sadness for me in that, I get it. It’s a phase that should end sometime around when she hits 30. All good. Hopefully I’ll still be around. However, by the same token it gives me an opportunity to observe them like a cultural anthropologist or something. They prattle on about the things that are important to their tween brains, and some of the conversations can be a bit off-the-wall.

This past Monday, for instance…

As we came within a block of the school, the overpowering scent of tater tots filled the air. Obviously, “hash brown nuggets” were on the menu for the kids who buy breakfast at school. At first, the O-spring was thinking she smelled waffles. Of course, that’s possible. I’m sure her nose is better tuned than my half-century old olfactory sense. Be that as it may, it’s where things went that took me buy surprise.

O-spring friend, we’ll call her Mary for anonymity’s sake, launched into a sudden rant. It wasn’t terribly heated, but it was definitely lively. The subject? Waffles. It seems that whenever they have “Breakfast for Lunch” at the school, the cafeteria refuses to provide them with plastic knives to cut up their waffles. Per Mary, they cite safety concerns… Howwwwwevvvveeeerrrrrr (trying to write tween here… forgive me) they have no problem at all providing them with a plastic knife whenever they have, oh… say something on the order of turkey and gravy. So, why not with waffles too?

O-spring responded to this with, “I just tear them into strips and dip them into the syrup.”

Mary went on undaunted, “But do they think we are going to do? They say we might break the knives and hurt ourselves. But we can have them with the turkey.”

“I just dip the waffles,” O-spring said again.

“And we can break anything that’s plastic. It could happen with anything, so why just the plastic knives?” Mary’s rant was still gaining steam.

As much as this diametrically opposed behavior surprised me, it was only the cake – I mean, after all, I could see the ramping up out of O-spring, but Mary is usually the calm one. The icing was about to be applied.

Mary started to launch into another litany of observations about plasticware and ridiculous school bureaucracy when my daughter stepped even further out of character. Gently placing her hand on her friend’s shoulder, in a soothing voice she said, “Calm down, Mary. You’re scaring the squirrels.”

I’m pretty sure I ruptured my spleen trying to contain the guffaw that wanted to exit my gut. After all, I didn’t want to be accused of frightening the rabbits. Apparently the wildlife was already tortured enough…

More to come…

Murv

Something people like to ask me is whether or not I have ever killed someone off  in a story. Well, since I write suspense thrillers about serial killers one would think that I could just look at them and say, “Duh.”

Well, sometimes I do, actually.

Then they go on to explain that what they really mean is, “Have you ever put a real person into a story and killed them off in the story because you were mad at them or something?”

Then I look at them and say, “What? Are you some kind of sicko or something?”

After I spend a few minutes watching them get all flustered I let them off the hook and give them a real answer.

That being, “Yes. Of course.”

I have made real live annoyances in my life into characters, then had them meet an ugly demise. This is something that every fiction author on the planet who writes a murder mystery, suspense thriller, or the like has done at one time or another. If such an author tells you otherwise, s/he is lying. Guaranteed. They can tell you I am full of it if they want, but they are still lying. I take a dump every morning.

Hell, just look at the facts – they even have coffee cups and t-shirts that say, “Be careful or I’ll kill you in my next book.”

Those didn’t happen by themselves, let me tell you.

So, yes, over the years I – like most all of my word slinging colleagues (some of them write non-fic) – have named fictional victims in my novels after old girlfriends… I have named them after the idiot behind the counter at the local shop ‘n stop… I have named them after someone who did me wrong… And then I have offed them in some horribly gruesome and terribly painful fashion – all on the pages of a novel.

It’s one of those cathartic writing exercises. It makes you feel good and just a little evil at the same time.

However, one particular “story killin'” stands out in my mind above all others. It actually didn’t happen in a novel. It was in a short vignette I wrote while in High School. You see, I was in a film study class – mostly because it was an English Credit, and I had already taken all of the truly academic English/Lit courses. This is not to say it wasn’t a good class, because it was. I actually learned quite a bit and enjoyed it immensely. But I digress…

During that semester there was this girl seated in the desk next to mine. We’ll call her Janice, mostly because that was her name. Now, Janice wasn’t a horrible person by any stretch. At least, not that I am (or was) aware. She was, however, insanely annoying. You see, she had no desire whatsoever to think for herself, so even in a class so subjective as Film Study, she wanted everyone else to provide her with the answers. Since I was sitting a mere three feet to her left, and was “gettin’ good grades” as Timbuk 3 would say, she figured I was a good candidate for providing them.

In keeping with the song reference theme, she had another issue – Just like Joe Walsh has crooned, “she just would not shut up…”

Yeah, Janice was a talker, and that just made her even more annoying.

So moving right along… One day Janice happened to notice that I didn’t just write for the school newspaper. This happened because I dropped some papers and she got to them before me. My guess is she was probably looking to see if there were answers she could steal. What the papers were, however, were some of my short stories.  For whatever reason, this intrigued her, and she embarked upon a mission to talk me into writing a story that featured, who else, her.

She kept on me, and on me, and on me for more than a week. Every time I saw her in a class. Now, it bears mentioning here that Janice and I weren’t exactly friends, nor were we dating or anything like that. She was just one of those bizarre folk who would glom onto someone and drive them crazy just because… well… she could.

Anyway, after finally becoming fed up with the harassment, I gave in. That evening, I went home and rolled a sheet of paper into my trusty Smith-Corona manual typewriter (yes, I’m old) and proceeded to tap out a 2 or 3 page vignette featuring none other than Janice herself. It was a sci-fi sort of setting, with her being a high level operative of some government organization who had been captured by very bad people – but in a stroke of blonde genius (yes, Janice was blonde and a poster child for the negative stereotype) she had managed to subdue her immediate captors and was making her escape from the maximum security facility where she was being held for interrogation. (wow… that was a long sentence)…

Anyhow, as I am sure you have guessed, she didn’t make it. It was a sad and horrible death. Not overly gruesome. Just the right amount of gore, mixed with pain, and a healthy dose of “holy shit, I should have turned left instead of right.”

The next day, in Film Study class, as we were taking our seats and she was bugging me, I handed over the pages. Ten minutes later, as we were all sitting quietly, working on our assignments, she blurted out while waving the papers wildly, “WHAT? YOU KILLED ME?!”

Now, there is something else I should mention here – Our teacher, whose desk was nearby, had been hearing Janice annoy me about this story for the entire week prior. In fact, the teacher had even told her to lay off on several occasions, not that it really did any good, obviously.

So, as Janice belted out her umbrage over my having dared to do her in on the page, drawing quiet attention from every corner of the room, the teacher looked up from her desk and without missing a beat said, “Can you blame him? You’ve been annoying the poor guy all semester.”

Hmm… I think maybe I should name a victim Janice in a future novel. After all, that’s one of the great things about being a fiction author – you can always dig  up your enemies and kill ’em again…

More to come…

Murv