There’s two sides to every story, and while it might seem a little odd to come down on the side of the corporate suit in a tale about community activism, it’s just as important to meet people where they are. Time and experience have shown the flaws in Duman’s protest technique.
The version of this story that I included in “Six-Pack” had a much flakier Duman and a much more harassed Esterbrook. Had I written this 2014 story either ten years earlier or ten years later, Esterbrook and Duman would have skipped off into the forest arm-in-arm, either through a vindication of youthful perceived moral superiority or a middle-aged daydream desire to flee the grind.
I think I wrote “Wet” in 2014, when the idea of being able to escape the pressures of American life by turning into a fish and swimming away would have had a certain appeal. I was wondering whether this story had some Jonathan Livingston Seagull influence when I re-read it. It’s specifically set in Scarborough Marsh, a tidal saltwater wildlife preserve in Maine.
There’s no paywall on “This Thing that I’ve Become,” a Kilimanjaro Rising story written around 1993 or 1994. I don’t know whether its guilt-ridden protagonist chose to become a werewolf or whether it was something that just happened, but dealing with the reality of it has complicated his life, and now he’s on the run. This would have been a very different story if I’d written it thirty years later, but I like its isolated intimacy.
Two Patreon stories again this week, and one of them has no paywall.
I first wrote “Citywolf” in 1993. The Citywolf is probably my most unreliable narrator and is certainly my most delusional, convincing himself that a simple trip to the library to drop off some books is an adventure only he can see through a wasteland only he can accept. However, a lot happens on this simple trip to the library – more than might happen if he was truly delusional…
I wrote “In the Soup” a couple of months ago. I started thinking about the old and frankly racist trope of the two explorers sitting in the cookpot surrounded by cannibals waiting for dinner, a trope made famous in Warner Bros. cartoons, New Yorker pages, and Mad Magazine articles. My brain started begging for a subversion. The result was this story of two human explorers, one experienced and one naive, finding themselves in a similar position, with one explorer completely misinterpreting the situation.
I spent a lot of the summer of 1992 in the woods out back; sometime in August I wrote this story about nature as escape. The story went through extensive rewrites to be Patreon-ready; the original was full of speculative monologues and inside baseball, and I felt it would be poorly understood. It was one of the easiest rewrites I’ve ever done.
The title comes from Toto’s “Africa,” one of my favorite songs. My favorite interpretation of the song is that it’s about yearning for a place you’ve never been. The deuteragonist of this story is someone who can’t understand why he’s obsessing over a co-worker; the antagonist is someone who’s pretty much given up.
I wrote a number of stories with the same theme throughout the 1990s and gathered them under the group title “Kilimanjaro Rising.” I’ve been leafing through some of them. Maybe I can show them off soon.
I have a few stories about people who desperately want to be werewolves, but are unwilling to put in the legwork. For these wannabes, there are always unscrupulous shamans willing to take shortcuts for a quick buck, but a werewolf needs guidance before and after transformation to deal with the sensory inrush and explosion of hormones and new strength and speed. For the first several weeks, a new werewolf is susceptible to mood swings capable of doing a lot of damage, both to himself and to others.
Clive used to specialize in edge cases. Now he enjoys a peaceful retirement in the Louisiana bayou. But every once in a while a moron shows up at the door.
This story is a companion piece to “Roadhouse Boys,” a novel about a werewolf’s journey from neophyte to mentor. It hasn’t been published yet, but the overall theme is: These boys play rough.
One of the few novels I actually managed to get traditionally published was a science fiction comedy called “Found: One Apocalypse.” (Sounds like an anime title. Never really grew on me.) The story is about a war hero with PTSD who fled the accolades and became a junk dealer, who finds a derelict spaceship lumbered with experimental weaponry and decides to keep it. Iorgi Murrett kept himself sane by focusing on his work. In this story, we see that that focus is cultural.
I wrote several stories about Iorgi Murrett and gathered them in an anthology called “Repairing Armageddon.” (A much better title.) In this one, a young Iorgi Murrett, recently returned from the war, decides to go on a fishing trip on his home planet, Isbjornheim, in the Borean Empire. But Boreans never do anything small.
Two more stories this week, both from 2014. In “Hot Dog,” werewolves move to Central Park; in “Fair,” they’re running a dunk tank at a county carnival. In both stories, they pass themselves off as benign innocents, the better to get closer to humans and learn more about them.
With “Werewolves on a Waterslide,” that’s three stories now about werewolves making themselves “safe” to get closer to humans, but in these two stories, they’re doing it to fulfill an agenda. A common theme in my werewolf stories is that the monsters mean no harm to humans, but it’s getting hard to hide. Sooner or later, they have to interact, and the monsters would rather that interaction be peaceful.
“Hot Dog,” “The Long Black Ride, “and “To Market” all appeared in the anthology “Six-Pack.“
This week’s a double-header because they’re kind of short. Also, one of them is free-to-read.
“Werewolves on a Waterslide” is the newest story in the pile, written just this last week. The title crossed my mind and wouldn’t go away, but I ended up debating with myself for a while about posting it, since I wasn’t sure that now was the best time for a story about compliance in a repressive environment.
I had a long talk with myself about the sort of bargains we strike to survive in society, about what freedoms we’re willing to sell, hoping that selling them will grant us privileges. An indolent society of peaceful forest denizens isn’t going to have to compromise with humans very much. I decided to go ahead with the story when I realized that compliance can be its own form of dissent if the privilege earned grants access to the tools to change or overturn the system.
Or maybe a bunch of werewolves just wanted to play on the waterslides.
The other story this week is “Trash Men,” the only story I ever wrote about the pandemic, during the pandemic. It’s set in the same universe as the “Akela” novels, where people are haunted by the specter of some great, unnamed cataclysm about to befall the world. A form of bird flu with a 23% fatality rate has put the world on lockdown, but Ambimorphs have relative immunity. Two Raccoon-Men (Procyons) have taken jobs as sanitation workers in a very quiet Manhattan, and grow closer together as the rest of the world falls apart.
I’ve been asking myself: Am I really putting my best on Patreon every week? I mean, I should be, right? Every story ready to post should be the absolute shiniest, most polished, most magnificent narrative I’ve ever concocted, capable of making the angels weep and the deserts bloom, a tour-de-force of heart-wrenching drama.
Which is kind of silly, because if I were to do that, you’d be reading my stories in perpetual descending order of quality, from the treasure to the trash. Give it a few years and you’d be saying, “Man, this guy used to make the deserts bloom and the angels weep; what happened?”
I can promise you that every week contains my favorite story of that week. Select a story that’s the right length and spend a little time with it getting it ready for the spotlight, and I always find the parts that make it shine. Posting it is like being a proud papa sending a fledgling off to Kindergarten. This week’s favorite is “The Long Black Ride,” and I can promise you, hand to heart, that it is ready.
I have a soft spot for stories that can be engaging without having overweening life-or-death stakes. A famous writer once gave me hell at an event for awkwardly asking if every story had to start with a bang, but as I get older, my stories are more and more about lazy, indolent werewolves hanging out in the woods trying to avoid excitement.
Werewolves show up a lot in my fiction, and you’ll see plenty of them if you stick around. But I have no patience for the horror movie cliche of the mindless slasher, so my werewolf stories are mostly about the gentle friction between affable monsters and suspicious humans. In “To Market,” a hungry werewolf pack sends one of its own to steal food from a new rural supermarket.
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