Mario Milosevic

Most towns have people who live on the edge. They are poor, or have peculiar (to other people) ideas about how the world works, or are hermits, or don’t like most people, or, well, who knows. They’re just seen as different. For this week’s story I wanted to write about one such person. He thinks of himself as helping his town and his tribe, and so he does, even if it is in a way that most everyone else doesn’t understand.

As usual, I started the story when I woke up Sunday morning, which was about 8. I wrote it in three or four sessions with short breaks between and finished it about 2. Did some cleaning up and had Kim read it, then published it to the ebook sites. It came to about 5100 words. Enjoy!

This one grew out of an image I found on Dreamstime. The picture of the puppet’s eye caught my attention and I sat down about noon today and started typing. I let whatever was in my brain come out on the page. I finished the story about 3. It came to about 3400 words. Later in the evening I published it here. This is a strange piece, just the way I like them.

This week’s story began with an article by Andrew Marantz in the current Harper’s which details the imminent demise of Tuvalu, an ultra low-altitude island nation in the Pacific that is slowly being drowned by rising sea levels. I read this article with great interest. I found all the details of how an island disappears to be fascinating. The saga gave me the idea for my story about a king whose nation is slipping into the sea. I wanted the story to straddle the real world and the allegorical realm. To that end, I gave the king a “palace” in the form of a double-wide trailer. I also treated the king with great respect as a character, but made it clear that his realm is a distinctly modest dominion.

Anyway, I don’t want to give away too much of the story. I started writing it at 7:30 on Sunday morning, and finished it about 10:30. Three total hours writing, about 3400 words long. I took another hour and a half to edit it and to make a cover and format it for publication and upload it to the ebook sites. Kim read it and said it was a very Mario story. Another half hour to put it up on my own website and to write this post. Total time from start to finish: about 5 hours.

The good folks at Green Snake Publishing just released my novel The Coma Monologues. I’m very fond of this book. In it, a man, Gary Hawken, gets smacked by a truck and falls into a coma. His doctor says he has little chance of recovery, but his wife, Melody, does not accept the doctor’s opinion. She decides she will bring her husband back by telling him stories. Specifically, she gets people from his life to come to his bedside and talk to him in a series of monologues. His high school chum comes and talks to him. As does a former teacher and camp counsellor. The hospital janitor puts in his two bits. Isaac Asimov also talks to him (even though he is dead). A centaur comes and delivers a monologue. Scheherazade, perhaps the most famous storyteller of all, talks to him. Also his house. And God. And Mother Nature. They’re all there to try to bring him back to the living. It was great fun as a writer to try all the different voices and as I was reading it over while getting ready to publish it, I felt like it would be a fun book to read. So here’s hoping I’m right.

Here’s an excerpt from the book, the beginning of the Scheherazade monologue:

scheherazade

I am told that my fame has outlived me. How can this be? You are not of my time and country. This place is foreign to me. What are these bare white walls and these contrivances surrounding you? I see boxes, shiny. And lights. The sighing of machinery, if machinery it is. Or is it magic in those boxes? Are there genii living in them?

I may not even be real. Am I the manifestation of some wizard’s imagination? Calling me up for his amusement? Indeed, are you such a one? Are you more cunning than you appear, inert and dumb on the bed before me. My king was such a man. So filled up with hate and revenge in his heart that he could not be moved. Not for many months, though I told him tales.

And why does my history still live on in this age? I come from a time and place when killing a woman, merely for being a woman, was not a crime. Indeed, it was common practice for a king who tired of his wife to dispatch her to the empty realm and no consequences befall him for such an action. Not just kings. Men of lower class, even the lowliest of the low, could indulge such murderous impulses with impunity.

But history changes things, does it not? My tale, one of desperation, one in which I concocted tales as a way to outwit a wicked king, has become a charming legend, when in truth, as I lived it, it was a terrifying and soul-slaying time.

You know that the king forced himself upon me? Your legends of me do not make that clear. He made three sons by me in this way. Finally, after I had exhausted my tales, after I had birthed for him three children, then and only then, did he consent to let me live.

Let me live.

In all my stories that I told to him, none was so fantastic, so incredible as my own tale, the tale of how I became a queen.

Your versions of my legend make it clear that I volunteered to be his consort. Oh, how the blind eye of history mocks my life. Why would I volunteer to put myself into such jeopardy? I did no such thing. I was snatched up from the streets by the king like a common dog and made to appear before him for his night of debauchery. Can you conceive of any sane person, any sane woman, putting herself into such a situation? If you can, you have a more expansive, a more profound imagination than I ever employed in my survival.

No, it was only my quick-witted thinking, on the spot, that allowed me to propose to the king that I might tell a story before my death.

You know the rest, of course. I stopped my story before the end, feigning weariness. I told him I could not go on. The king granted me a day’s reprieve that I might finish the story the next night. Such a kind-hearted soul, no? Bah! He wanted to hear his stupid story, one I made up about a king and a genie and, oh for goodness sake, who knows? It was a ridiculous tale, born of desperation. My professed weariness did not prevent him from raping me that night. Nor the subsequent nights. But that bit of my tale is missing from your legends, is it not? Too awful, I suppose. The reality of what happened to me might spoil the charm of my tales, is that it?

On the next night I finished the first story and immediately launched into a second. I stopped before the end and the king indulged his desires upon my body again. And so our life together proceeded in this way, night after torturous night. I desperately wracked my brain for a new story every night. Sometimes I remembered old tales my mother had told me. Sometimes I made up new stories from my own imagination. Other times I told about my family. My kind sister, my timid brother. Everything I ever knew, all the people I had ever met, they all went into the ragbag jumble of my storytelling. It kept me alive, yes, but what a life. I thought of death. Longed for it. But life has different plans for us sometimes. Life can be stronger than our own impulse for a preferred existence.

The title of this one came first. I thought it up as I was falling asleep Saturday night. I liked the sound of it and how it evoked an image of caustic dreams. Got up Sunday morning and just plunged into the story. I thought of time travel and a 12 year old girl and her relationship with her mother and deceased father somehow gurgled up from my sub conscious brain. I wrote steadily for four hours and finished the story about 11 in the morning. Broke for lunch and to do the dishes. Found a good picture on Dreamstime of the earth rusting away and put the cover together. I spell-checked the thing, read it over twice, gave it to Kim for her fixes and posted it in the afternoon. Total time, including writing, doing the cover, and publishing it to the ebook sites: about 6 hours. It came to a little over 5,000 words.

Got up about 7 and spent the morning with Kim before she went to Portland for a workshop for the day. After she left I muddled around with some ideas, but nothing much was coming to me. I had no inspiration for a story at all. Nada. Zippo. I remember this from my poetry writing days. Some days it seems that there’s nothing with which to make a poem or a story. I suppose I could have just let the writing go for today, but I didn’t want to do that. I was committed to this challenge, so I was going to find a way. I browsed through Dreamstime.com looking for an illustration that might jump start me. Found one that struck my fancy, a profile of a person fading off into oblivion. Hmmm. Something there. Made me think of loss and illusion. Good themes for a story, right? Right. Then I looked through some story fragments I had lying around on my hard drive. Found a pretty good 500-word beginning about a tattoo artist in Portland. I read it over a couple of times, just to get the feel of the character and his milieu, and I was off. Spent the next three hours writing the story. Took a break every hour to walk around, drink some water, and get ready for the next hour. Finished the story about 1 p.m. Went outside for a walk and came back and read the story over, gave it a title, and printed it out for Kim to read. When she got home I finished making dinner and she read the story and gave her opinion. I fixed the booboos she found and published it. About 3600 words total, 3100 of them new today. Total time, including looking for inspiration, writing the story, proofing the story, formatting and publishing the story: about 6 hours. A good day.

This is a catch-up post on my challenge to myself. A few weeks ago I decided I would write and publish a short story a week for a year. I began on 9 October 2011 with the 3700 word short story “Killing Time.” I wrote and published it the same day. I make no claims as to its quality, either good or bad. The e-book revolution allows writers to put out their work quickly and easily for the whole world to discover but I’m not venturing an opinion as to whether or not that’s a good idea for literature, reading, society, or life in general. Time will tell; history will judge. I will say that it is a great feeling to have the freedom that indie publishing gives an author. I can publish what I want, at the length I want, with the covers and blurbs I want, and at the pace I want. So far I’m not seeing a down side.

My second story in the challenge was “They Taste Like Chicken” (4300 words). I wrote that one on 16 October. Total elapsed time between starting the story and getting it published  on the ebook sites was a little over 6 hours. I felt like I hit my stride with this one. The concept, story, cover, and title just all slotted together very nicely and I was pleased with the result.

The third story in the challenge I wrote today, 23 October. “The Night Alex Almost Flew Over Old Lady Grayson’s Place” ended up being 4400 words long. I started it at 7:15, when I got up. I worked on it for a bit, then went downstairs and washed some sushi rice for the night’s dinner. I set the rice to drain and went back upstairs and wrote for another hour or so. I went back downstairs and put the rice on to soak. Back to my upstairs office and more writing. Kim made us both some breakfast. I took a break and we ate together and talked for a bit. Then I returned upstairs and finished the story some time before noon. I spell checked it and did a quick read through to see if it made sense. It seemed to, so I left it and Kim and I went out to the woods for a hike. We were gone about two and half to three hours. When we got back I printed out the story and Kim read it while I made us a quick lunch of soup and sandwiches and also put the rice on to cook and did the dishes. After lunch I went over the story and made the corrections that Kim suggested. Then I put the cover together and published the story to all the ebook sites. Total time working on the story and getting it published: About 7 hours. Not bad. A day’s work. After I published, I made the sushi and we ate it while flipping between the fourth game of the World Series and the Sixty Minutes piece on Steve Jobs. Maybe more information than you wanted to know about one day in the life of an indie writer, but there it is. The creative life interweaving with the everyday life. Or maybe making the everyday life a creative life. Either way, it felt like a really good day.

I’m making each challenge story free on this site until I write the next story.

I think I’ve mentioned on this blog before that often the best way to learn to do something is to do it, even before you know how. That’s the way I learned to write poetry. I wrote a poem a day for three years. Practice practice practice. Or, as I’ve heard others put it: chop wood, carry water. So. In the spirit of daily practice, I’ve undertaken a new project: I’m going to write and publish a short story a week for a full year. First one is up now. Click on the “Free” tab at the top to read “Killing Time.”

The Red Market looks at the global market in human tissue. Carney uncovers a class system in which the products of poor human bodies migrate to the bodies of rich humans. From a section of the book in which he details the practice of hiring people to do clinical trials of drugs:

As with kidneys, eggs, and every other red market, the flesh of trial subjects can only move upward through the social hierarchy…. The poor and destitute bear the risk of testing drugs, but only the affluent receive their potential benefits.

This book was a real eye opener for me. Carney writes about a village in India in which almost all the women have sold their kidneys just to survive. He tells of the common practice of kidnapping young children to sell them to orphanages where affluent adoptee parents are duped into thinking the child they are about to adopt actually is an orphan. He explains how a temple takes in donated hair from pilgrims then sells the hair on the open market, a nearly billion dollar a year market. And he explains how grave robbers in India bleach bones to be sold to medical schools in England, the United States, and other countries. And that’s just for starters. There are chapters on professional lab rats, egg harvesters, and bone merchants. The red market is extensive and all-encompassing. Almost every country in the world is knee deep in it, as provider, recipient, or both.

I had no idea of the extent of this market. It is a global enterprise in which kidneys, bones, skin, blood, and anything else that can be sourced from a human body attracts a clandestine underground in which the recipients are generally ignorant of the source of the tissue they use. Medical schools, hospitals, doctors, and patients almost universally close their eyes and cover their ears when it comes to knowing exactly where the body parts they use comes from.

The Red Market is a thorough and sometimes harrowing work of reportage. I was transfixed and fascinated. Very highly recommended.

Ekaterina Sedia is a terrific writer and an accomplished editor and anthologist. She’s just published her anthology Bewere the Night: Tales of Shapeshifters and Werecreatures, which is brimming with marvelous stories about werewolves and suchlike creatures. It even includes one of mine: “An Unnatural History of Scarecrows.” You think scarecrows aren’t scary? You think scarecrows can’t shapeshift? So did I, until I started looking into the matter while researching my story. Be afraid.