BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

There are certain things, that when said aloud, will bring most any conversation to a screeching halt. You know the things I mean. Stuff such as, “Whoops, my hair is on fire…” or “Whoa! Is that Dana Delany over there?”

Personally, I have an intense fondness for the Dana Delany comment, but then we already knew that, right? Well, if you didn’t, you do now… Oops… Guess that was sorta awkward, eh?

The thing is, there are several such phrases that can bring a conversation to a sudden halt. Case in point…

I was prattling on endlessly with my PA the other day. As it happens, the o-spring is out of school for the summer, so she was sitting there fiddling about with her Nook or some such since it is loaded up with a ton of summer reading for her. Since she’s all kinds of brilliant and has a high school level command of the English language, I often forget that she’s still just a tween, so my filters aren’t always in place. In this instance, they weren’t, and I was talking to my PA about Merrie Axemas, and In The Bleak Midwinter, giving him a synopsis of the stories, how they related, differed, and other such nonsense.

Well… Anyone who has read Merrie Axemas knows that there is a dismemberment involved. Merrie. Axe. Mas… You get the idea. So moving right along, as we are talking the o-spring pipes up and says:

“Did you know that when your head is chopped off you still live for eleven more seconds?”

This really shouldn’t – and didn’t – surprise me. After all, she’s my kid… But that’s not the thing that stopped the conversation. I mean, think about it. I research all manner of nastiness for my thriller novels… After all, I write about serial and/or spree killers for the most part. That’s why I’m a member of the HWA, and not the “Grandma’s Cozy Knitting Happily Ever After Ending Whodunit Club”…

But on with the story… you see, since both my PA and I know my kid, we just continued the convo, involving her at this point. Mainly discussing the fact that 11 seconds might be a bit of a stretch, but that there was some evidence to indicate that the brain continued to function very briefly following decapitation.

This then turned to different ways of dying, and before I knew it my PA and my daughter were into a discussion of which way to go would be the least traumatic. They got onto beheading, suffocation, drowning, etc, and I added my two cents, that being the fact that I was under the impression that suffocation wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to go, no matter HOW the suffocation happened. That’s when my PA regaled us with a tale of how he had almost drowned – or come somewhat close – when he was a child, and how it had gone from a fearful struggle to a simple calm… Well, obviously he didn’t drown, or he wouldn’t have been there having weird death conversations with my tween daughter.

But this was when the conversation stopper came.

Darling daughter pipes up, “Yeah, I almost drowned a few years ago.”

You could hear a pin drop. I stared at her. She stared at me. My PA stared at her. She stared at him. We all stared at each other.

Finally I broke down and said, “When was this?”

“A few years ago at blankity-blank pool,” she replied.

“How?”

She shrugged. “It was before I knew how to swim and my friend took me to the deep end and left me there because she didn’t know that I couldn’t swim.”

I stared some more. “Why am I just now hearing about this?”

“I dunno.”

“So, did the lifeguard jump in and save you or something? I mean, it seems to me they would have told us about it when we picked you up from summer day camp.”

“No,” she said. “My friend just took me back to the shallow end.”

“Well, did you start sinking or what? How did you almost drown?”

She thought about it a second and then said, “Well… I might’ve kinda exaggerated…”

Guess I can’t complain. She’s my kid. She got it honest…

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