Murderati

ME RABBIT, YOU COUGAR

Please welcome back our dear friend Simon Wood!

This year’s Left Coast Crime convention, held in mile high Denver, allowed me to bring out my inner twelve year old boy.  It was the chance to take part in a surveillance and counter-surveillance exercise.  This was one of the extra-curricular activities held during the convention that I jumped on the second I saw it on offer.  Short story writer and ex-DEA agent, R.T. Lawton, put the exercise together.  A surveillance team would have to track a bad guy on the streets of Denver.  The object was for the bad guy to lose the team and for the team not to be spotted and not to lose their bad guy.  How super cool is that?  This was my chance to join the ranks of James Bond and Harry Palmer as the latest spy about town.

I signed up to be one of the hunted.  I put that down to my narcissistic side where I want to be followed by strangers all the time.  As the hunted, I was a ‘Rabbit’ and I was going to be hunted by a team of cougars.  I got quite excited as I’d heard that cougars were predatory older women.  Nice.  Sadly, cougars was just the term for the surveillance team that would be tailing me.  So I shelved the idea of being chased by women all over town for another day.

I wasn’t alone in my rabbit status.  Fellow bunny girls and guys were Marcus Sakey, Reed Farrell Coleman, Margaret Coel, Jason Starr, Donna Andrews, Michelle Gagnon and Twist Phelan.  The identities of the cougars were kept from us to keep things interesting.  For extra flavor, rabbits and cougars were briefed separately.  Us rabbits were taught some techniques for exposing cougars, such as doubling back, entering buildings and watching for who stops, etc.  And the cougars were taught their little tricks for avoiding detection.  I was given a map of downtown and a list of places and times to meet one or more of my fellow rabbits to make “exchanges.”  I was given my start place with a time to be there and told just to do my thing and avoid my cougars.

The game was set.

Hmm, little problem there.  I know the streets of Denver like the back of someone else’s hand.  Also, I get lost in unfamiliar places.  So to avoid wandering the streets hours after the game was over, stopping strangers and asking, “I’m a rabbit and I’m lost, how do I find my hotel?” I did a little homework.  I walked the route ahead of time.  I timed myself and looked for alleys and neat places to hide.  I should add that I was supposed to change into a disguise part way through the exercise and I needed a phone booth or somewhere to do that.  I also didn’t want to walk around with a map in my hand looking like a tourist dufus.  My dry run was a good move on my part as I noticed there were a lot of police and private security on the streets of Denver.  I drew more than a couple of glances from some rent-a-cops during my test.  The last thing I needed to do was get picked up and packed off to jail.  It gave me time to come up with a little plan.

The game kicked off in the late afternoon.  I walked the first leg of my route slowly, looking over my shoulder.  It was surprising to note how paranoid I became after the first thirty seconds.  I’m going from place to place on my route and all I can think about is that I’m being followed by people I don’t know.  They could be anyone.  I must treat everyone with suspicion because everyone is out to get me.  Will I ever be safe?  So I treated everyone I saw as a potential cougar.  It didn’t take long to spot cougars milling around Denver’s streets.  They were so focused on their rabbit and I was so focused on looking out for people following me, it became easy to spot them.   That was the shortcoming of playing a game with so many players in such a small geographical area, but I rolled with the punches.  I was here to play.

When I reached the stage of the game where I could break out my disguise, I wasn’t sure if I’d lost my cougars.  So many were milling about that I just had to hope my daring costume change would do the trick.  I was quite wily, in a way, with my disguise.  I have a padded denim jacket where the lining unzips and is a different jacket.  I also have a pair of glasses that makes me look like Tim Maleeny and a trusty baseball cap.  Because of the law enforcement presence I didn’t like the idea of ducking into a building to change, but I found a very conveniently located building to use as a shield.  I walked up to it on the wrong side of the street.  I waited for traffic to head towards me and I bolted across the road.  If anyone was following, they’d be taking a chance crossing the road after me.  The second I went behind the building, I peeled off my outer coat, pulled on my hat and glasses and emerged the other side of the building a new person.  I took a couple of odd streets to check for cougars and I seemed cougar free.

I went to my last meeting spot pretty sure I was in good shape.  I did check though.  I stopped in front of a shop window and pretended to looking at their wares while I was looking for cougars.  Sadly, I hadn’t looked at which store I stopped in front of and I was checking out the latest offerings from Bare Essentials.  It took me a moment to realize my error which was backed up by three cosmetologists eyeballing me and thinking, he’s not a winter complexion.  I decided that telling them I was trying to avoid cougars wouldn’t have helped.  As I walked back to the convention hotel pretty sure I’d evaded my cougars, I thought about the little things that continued to give me away.  I was wearing a wedding ring and earrings.  I should have removed those when I changed.  Although I had changed, I couldn’t change my shoes.  I’d realized this when I was packing, so I packed some very ordinary sneakers.  Anything unusual would have stood out.

Sadly, I didn’t get to use my big weapon.  With all the security hanging around, I decided to use that disadvantage as an advantage.  If I hadn’t been able to give my cougars the slip I was going to go up to a rent-a-cop and use my accent.  I was going to say, “Hello, I’m a tourist in this fair nation and I hear stories about violence and muggers.  I’ve seen Law & Order, don’t you know, and some people are following me.  Those people over there to be exact.  Now it could be nothing or it could be something, but do you minding talking to them while I find my hotel.”  With this accent and innocent face, it would have worked like a dream.

Anyhoo, the teams returned to the hotel and we all swapped stories.  Everyone enjoyed playing spy for an hour.  The kid in all of us is hard to shift and when you’re as short as I am, it’s nearly impossible.  Personally, I had a hoot taking part.  I may have taken it a little too seriously, but it will work its way into my books and stories.  Check the bookshelves if you don’t believe me.

Yours in disguise,
Simon Wood

http://www.simonwood.net

And a Nation Weeps…

And by nation, I mean the Murderati nation as this is my final post on Murderati.  I will pause as you dash out for some Kleenex. 

Yes, it’s time for me to move on.  2007 has been an incredible year with book releases, book contracts and awards and 2008 promises even more.  2008 will see the release of three books.  I hope to secure as many new contracts and write as many new books too. 

But for all the success of 2007, there’s been a price and that’s been time.  I haven’t had any time for my family and friends, let alone for myself.  I’m a reliable person by trade, but not of late.  Everyone has gone on the backburner while I worked.  So the year hasn’t been all gravy.  There have been a few lumps that never got strained out.

I checked back on my resolutions I made at the beginning of the year.  I only achieved one and that was to cement a place in New York publishing (which God willing, I’ve done for the moment).  The others, not to work so hard, hang out with Julie, learn a new skill, I failed at miserably, not even coming close.  I need to do much better in ’08.

To succeed in ’08, I have to drop a few commitments to free up some time.  The two important ones are Sisters in Crime and Murderati.  I served as the NorCal chapter president of Sisters in Crime.  Sisters took up a lot more time than I expected.  The chapter faced a number of issues that no one expected and ate into my time.  I will remain a member of SinC, but I will be resigning from the board.  I’m also dropping Murderati.  It is only a weekly commitment, but it does eat into my time.  There are a bunch of essays I write that never make to the blog (and with good reason).

So what am I going to do with my additional time?  I do want to achieve my failed resolutions of stopping to enjoy the moment, hang with Julie and learn a new skill (I really want to learn how to fence and speak Spanish—I call it my Zorro phase).  In addition, I want to get back to my short story writing.  I wrote only two shorts this year.  I usually knock out twenty to thirty.  I want to experiment converting one of my short stories into a stage play.  There are a couple of novels that I call hobbies that I want to finish before they become quests.  I need to focus on promoting my books.  I just didn’t do either book justice this year as I ran from one commitment to another.  Again, I don’t know if I’ll achieve all this, but I want to give myself the freedom to do it.

If you’d still like to hear from me, my monthly e-newsletter goes into its 6th year and you’re welcome to join.  It consists of observational essays that poke fun at the world and me.  Just click the link to sign up.

I know I’m leaving a big hole and it’s going to moderately tough act to follow for whoever replaces me, but I'm sure whoever it is, they'll do a bang up job.

So cheerio and good luck.

Yours at an end of an era,
Simon Wood

Something I Don't Want For Christmas

Christmas is just around the corner and it’s a time for giving, but there are some things I don’t want—bad reviews to be exact.  I was thinking about reviews the other day.  Well, not exactly thinking, more like obsessing.  Despite my rough, gritty exterior that you’ve come to know and mildly like, I’m quite squidgy inside, so the idea of getting a bad review is likely to make me cry or hide under the duvet until someone compliments me.  So I started to think about what would be a nightmare review.  Here’s what I hope never to see written about my books this Christmas or at any time:

“A great bathroom read—very absorbent.”

“It’s one hell of doorstop.”

“Out of all the books I’ve read this year, this was one.”

“Once read, never remembered.”

“This book made me switch on the TV.”

“It was grate!”

“This book is very put-downable—a policy that should be applied to the author.”

“An author to track down—and do bad things to.”

“It made me hate my ability to read.”

“This was a real page burner.”

So those are some of my nightmare reviews.  What are yours or what ones do you wish you could have written for other people’s books?  (No names or titles, please).

Yours hoping for everything I deserve this Christmas,
Simon Wood

Lying to be honest

I’m a pretty good liar, especially on the spot.  Someone can toss out a subject and I can pretty much tell them some convincing facts about history, science or the arts—none of it true.  Hmm, I wonder if I’m related to Dan Brown to me. 

This is, of course, great when it comes to telling stories.  I’m not lying.  I’m just flexing my fiction muscles. 

Where things go a little awry is when it comes to telling the truth.  Lies need polish and racing stripes.  The truth doesn’t.  It’s naturally shiny.  But I struggle when faced with telling the truth.  It looks so vulnerable and naked when I tell it and in most cases no one believes me when I do tell the truth.  The other week someone told me they didn’t believe my pieces about having to crash land a plane and falling off a mountain were true.  They bloody were and I have evidence to back it up.

A few months ago I had a run in with Julie over my truthfulness.  I’ve pulled the wool over Julie’s eyes so many times that she doesn’t have a fear of blindfolds.  She’s used to my fibbery.  This time, I ran into a little problem. 

Now that I work from home, I’m a little house husband and I do the laundry and things.  Laundry is a task I don’t mind.  I find it quite therapeutic when I’m working a story idea out in my head.  So, on this particular day, Julie came home to nice, neat piles o’ laundry.  Please place Simon in the good books section of Julie’s world.  I was typing away and Julie came in.  I expected to get my good boy pat on the head.  Instead, a pair of scarlet ladies underwear hit me in the back of the head.

“Whose are they?” she demanded.

I peeled the knicker cap off my head, examined them and said, “Yours?”

“No, they’re not mine.”

Well, they weren’t mine.  They were these tiny little Victoria’s Secret things.  Not my style for sure.  To settle things down, I said the one thing I thought would calm her.  “I don’t know whose they are, but you have them.  Finders keepers and all that.”

“I don’t want somebody else’s underwear.”

I went to say they were clean, but didn’t think this would resolve the issue.  So I shrugged.

“I want to know whose these belong to,” she demanded.

This is where I panicked.  The truth was, I didn’t know who the knickers belonged to and me proclaiming my innocence didn’t seem to be working.  I should have lied at this point and told her I was holding them for a friend or something, but I scrabbled for an explanation and came up with, “Maybe they’re your mum’s.  She house-sat for us the other week.”

“My mom doesn’t wear these.  Have you had someone here?”

“No,” I said, but it sounded so weak.

“Tell me the truth.”

“I am.”

“Then how did these things get in our laundry?”

“I don’t know.  It could be a trick.  Maybe someone pulled a prank on me.”  I said this as if it was likely that one of my chums would get back at me by dropping the naughty undies in my gym bag.  I tend pull pranks on others.  Payback is a female dog.

“Then I suggest you find out.  That’s your task.  Find out who owns these things.”

“I’ll get on it straight away, my petal,” I said, but Julie had left the room.

I’d told her the unadulterated truth (ew, bad choice of word there) and it didn’t sound very convincing.  I didn’t know how to be more convincing.  If I had been lying, I would have done a great job of having a story lined up with backup lies on hand.  I’m a totally interactive liar.  So very now.  But my truthiness (thanks, Stephen Colbert) sounded so lame it needed shooting.

Like a half-lit firecracker, I gave Julie time to cool off.  I snuggled up to her on the sofa and asked, “You do believe me, don’t you?”  She told me that she did but in one of those clipped tones that said otherwise.  I gave her another ten minutes and asked her again and got the same tight answer.  For the next hour, I repeated my question every ten minutes or so.

“If you keep asking, I’m going to start doubting you.”

I stayed quiet after that.

I asked my lady chums if they’d played a cruel joke on me and all replied that they hadn’t.  This news didn’t please Julie.  She was leaving on a business trip that weekend and she left me with instructions to get to the bottom this issue.  My Sherlockian skills narrowed it down to Julie’s mom.  Julie didn’t want to ask her mom for obvious reasons.  If they weren’t her mom’s, then her mom would think of me as a cheater.  A thorny issue.  Anyway, Julie left for trip. 

About an hour later, I received a call from Julie.  “I talked to my mom.  They’re hers.”

Not one to gloat, I told Julie she could apologize any time she felt like it.  Oddly, she hung up on me.

When she returned from her trip, I chatted to her about our knicker mystery.  I reminded her that I’d been right from the beginning.  I said I was little worried that she thought I might be a cheater. 

Julie said, “I had total faith in you and I only threw the underwear at you for a joke, but when I asked for an answer, you looked completely guilty.  You were telling me you didn’t do it, but all I saw was guilt.”

And there lies the problem.  My honest face is real shaky.  I know why.  I didn’t have a good story to back up the truth.  My “Dunno” defense felt as weak as it sounded, but the issue at hand wasn’t something I wanted to lie about.  In retrospect, I should have embellished in some way.  I would have come over more convincing. 

I wish I could say my truthfulness hasn’t gotten me into trouble.  Oddly, my lying never has.  I’m not sure what that says about me, but I’m guessing it’s not good. 

You believe me, right?

Yours truly,
Simon Wood
PS: CrimeSpree Magazine interviewed me in their latest issue and you can read it here.

Out Of The Blue

I was reading back over some old posts and I came across a remark made by Murderati’s own Alex S.  She asked me why I felt it necessary to put my characters through hell.  I put it down to my talent for disaster.  I am usually the catalyst for some small calamity to come my way.  Sometimes, it’s my own damn fault, but sometimes, I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time.  This trait reminded me of something that happened a fair few years ago.  A small incident led to something that had the potential for something much larger.

I used to race cars in England in the early 90’s.  I ran a pretty shoestring outfit and was forever wheeling and dealing to stay to stay in business.  Not all my sponsors paid me.  Some provided valuable resources I couldn’t afford.  One such resource was a truck to transport my car.  A company provided me with free use of a shiny new Ford Transit van.  Someone else lent me a trailer.  I used to drive to Staines to pick up the trailer in the Transit before each race.  Truck and trailer made me a pretty sizable obstacle and naturally people would be eager to get around me.  One lady pushed her luck a little hard at a roundabout.  She tried to sneak across me as I attempted to get off the roundabout.  We ground to a halt on the roundabout just shy of hitting each other.  The problem was we’d blocked all traffic on the roundabout.  The lady and I traded insults as it took us several minutes of maneuvering to get off the roundabout.  I went on my merry way.  The lady didn’t.  She drove up on my tail flashing her lights and honking her horn.  I was pissed off too, but I had the race on my mind and I like to be a little Zen in the run up to the race, so I ignored her.  The lady buzzing around my bumper lost interest and went on her not so merry way.

I thought that was that until after the race a couple of days later when my sponsor told them the police had contacted them about a road accident.  Being my supportive sponsor, they immediately handed over my details to the police. 

The police officer assigned the case came for me a few times, but I was always away at a track when he called.  This wouldn’t have looked so bad if the officer made an appointment but he chose to arrive unannounced.  Eventually he caught up with me as I was unloading my racecar into my storage unit.  He asked for a word.  The word I gave him was yes.

He was a nice guy and I liked him.  He seemed to be a down to earth guy and very un-cop like with his attitudes.  He helped me lock up and we chatted about racing on the way back to my house.  In the living room, he asked if I knew about an incident.  I said I did and told him what happened.  He told me a different account.  I’d hit the woman on the roundabout, totaling her car and driving off.

“I beg your pardon,” I said and went to object, but he cut me off.  He cautioned me and read through a little of charges that included but weren’t limited to fleeing the scene of an accident, reckless driving, and reckless endangerment.  I was looking at a driving ban at the minimum.  This was a major problem.  A ban on the streets is a ban on the track.

I tried to protest.  If I’d hit the car, there’d be damage on the Transit and the trailer.  There wasn’t any.  If I had any doubts to the damages to the woman’s car, I caught sight of a Polaroid pinned to his file.  The car was caved in on one side.  The cop cut my protests short.  He needed my statement and I gave one.  It was obvious what was going on here.  This chick crashed her car on the way home, looked to someone to blame and chose me.

I talked and the policemen wrote.  He handed me the statement to sign.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t looking at a statement, but a confession.  Where I said I hadn’t done something, he wrote that I knowingly did, not just once, but all the way through the account.  I said we had a problem and policeman smiled and said, “Do we?”

“Yes, this says I did it.”

“Must have been a slip of the pen,” he said.

Somewhere in the region of 25 slips in fact.

I don’t know if he knew I have difficulty reading or not.   He had met my mum a couple of times when he came looking for me and she might have said something about it.  If not, I’m not sure how he thought he was going to sail this one by me.  My mum was present and I had her read the statement aloud.  I had to cross out and initial “errors” throughout the document.  The policeman made no apology and left.

I didn’t agitate the situation by reporting the cop.  It was pretty obvious what he’d tried to do.  But I saw no point in raising the ire of a police department.  I already had this woman in the other car trying to screw me over.  I was pissed off, but I let it go.  If they got even trickier, I’d speak up.

Luckily, they didn’t.  The charges were dropped two months later.  It was hard not to.  For all the collateral damage done to the woman’s car, there wasn’t a scratch on the van and trailer.

Nevertheless, the situation bugged me.  It could have all ended differently—and badly for me.  I think I was most pissed off by the cop.  I’d totally misread him.  The upshot is that it’s a nice demonstration of why I put my characters through hell.  It might be fiction, but it has its origins planted in reality.

Safely yours,
Simon Wood

Not Sweating the Big Stuff

There’s a lot of gloom and doom floating around these days when it comes to the future of the printed word.  People are reading less and less.  Publishers are consolidating both in numbers and in authors.  Technology is changing the way books are made and the way they are read.  Everything is going digital.  The internet has created a mentality of it has to be free or I’m not paying for it.  The rise of YouTube means the world is preoccupied with people’s homemade entertainment.  The book is a dinosaur.  The future is a meteorite that will make the novelist extinct.

While all this has more than a little merit for it to be worrying, I don’t really care.  Now, I’m not being obtuse and breaking out the fiddle while the flames are licking around Rome.  No, I don’t really care, because I can’t do a damn thing about it.  These things are beyond my control.  I can’t halt the march of technology, despite what my pen pal Teddy Kaczynski says.  I can dictate how publishers choose to run their businesses as much as I can control the tides—did that once, got my feet wet.   I can’t dictate what the public does with its disposable income (but they will when I’ve perfected my mind control antenna, then we’ll see who’s the king of all media).  I can kvetch all I want, but it’s not going to change anything, so what’s the point of worrying?  All I can do is hope things don’t change so significantly that I find myself marginalized, then abandoned. 

If the book (in all its connotations) is to change, then I will change with it.  The book is a medium.  It’s packaging.  Storytelling is what counts.  Storytelling can’t change.  It’s a constant—like dishonest politicians.  It’s always been there and it’s always going to be there.  So what if all books go to audio?  Who cares if in a hundred years the book is a pill you swallow and as it dissolves into the bloodstream, the story is carried to the brain where it is experienced as a memory?  At the end of the day, a storyteller is needed—and that’s where I come in.

And that’s where I take hope.  Stories need storytellers.  The way stories are told may change but not the need for a story to be told.  Movies and television are stories projected on a screen and told with images.  Plays are stories acted out by people.  These formats arose through technology.  The book itself is an advancement of oral traditions.  Despite these formats and advances, the story still remains.

It doesn’t matter what happens in the future, but every movie, TV show, video game, magazine, podcast, audio book and cigarette packet warning requires a writer—and that’s where I come in. 

Those who need me know where to find me…

Yours for now and forever more,
Simon Wood

A Year to be Thankful

If you’re reading this, why aren’t you eating?  It is Thanksgiving after all.  Oh, you have one of those families.  I see.  Well, you’re welcome to hang out here.

As I said in last year’s message, it’s apt that they have an English guy doing the Thanksgiving message as Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday that I grew up with, and therefore don’t have any great connection to.  I feel like a guy at a bra wearer’s appreciation society dinner.  I know what a bra is and I’m happy to celebrate them, but the benefits of wearing one don’t do a whole lot for me.

That said, I have a lot to be thankful for this year.  2007 has been an incredible year.  I saw the publication of two novels.  I wrote three books and signed four book contracts.  This enabled me to go full time as a writer, allowing me to live the dream.  I launched my horror pen name with the sale of The Scrubs.  I received another honorable mention in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, my third in four years.  And the year was topped when I won my first major award by winning the Anthony for best short story.  I’m used to being the bridesmaid when it comes to winning things, so winning the Anthony will remain one of the best, embarrassing and humbling moments of my life.  All in all, it’s been a year of ricochets as one good event has spurred another.  2008 promises to be an even better year.  I’m not sure I deserve it, but I’ll take it.

On the home front, Julie and I celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary.  It seems like we’ve been together much longer—and I don’t mean that in a bad way.  Life’s been a rollercoaster.  A lot has happened over the years.  Even when we’re standing still, we seem to be moving.  I’m glad to have Julie around.  This year has been a tough one which has kept me confined to a room for most of the year, so I’m thankful she stuck around. 

So that’s about it for this Thanksgiving.  I hope you’re spending the day with people you want to be with.  If not, check the bathroom, they might have a window to escape through.

I’m off to a friend’s now.  They’d better have pie.

Yours ever thankful,
Simon Wood
PS: Just because it’s Thanksgiving, it doesn’t mean I’m not working.  I’ll be signing at Pleasant Hill B&N on Saturday and San Francisco Mystery Bookstore on Sunday.  If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll drop by.
PPS: A reader pointed me in the direction of a nice review Paying the Piper picked up, so I thought I'd share.

Here Come The Judge…

I get to smack my gavel again soon as I become a judge for short stories for a well known magazine.  This is my third year as judge.  I’ve received notification that the first batch of manuscripts are on their way.  The thought of it fills me with excitement and trepidation.  Excitement at reading some really great stories and trepidation at reading some not so great stories.

The joy has been that I’ve been lucky to have encountered someone’s work with real promise and it was great to reward that person for it.  The pain comes from deciding who wins and who doesn’t.  I can’t believe the crush of responsibility pressing down on me when I’m short listing the pieces.  Who am I to say what is good and what isn’t?  The question keeps revolving around inside my head.  At the end of the day, I take pride in what I do and I don’t want people thinking I’m a crappy judge, so I take the decision very seriously.

I look for style, structure, prose, originality and a certain indefinable quality that makes me curse and say, “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that.”  It’s at this point that I pray that this represents the best of their work because I don’t need the competition out there.

I have to admit I have a selfish reason for being a judge. 

Who said money?  Fess up.  Who said that?  Don’t make me come back there.

Yes, the money is much appreciated, but that’s not the selfish reason.  Being the judge makes me a better writer.  I get to review work that isn’t my own.  This is very liberating.  I get quite protective of my own work, whereas I can be very callous of others.  It’s easy for me to say this one doesn’t cut the mustard and move on.  It’s said with a frog in my throat when I recognize something lacking in someone else’s rejected manuscript similar to my own work.  I think every writer should take a stint as an editor for this reason.  This little wakeup call helps me to be very critical of my work.  I use the stories I’ve rejected as a check sheet to use against my own pieces.  I must admit I turn a little green when I find screw-ups in my own work.  Professional writer, my arse.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Bad stories are just as instructive as the best ones.  You can learn just as much from those that grate as from those that are great.

However, I’m not opposed to a fabulous story.  I look at stories with a mechanical eye.  I break them down into their component parts so I can understand how they tick and hopefully I can use that knowledge to build a better story.

Yours presiding over all,
Simon Wood
PS: One of my own favorite short stories, Acceptable Losses, received an honorable mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
PPS: I’m moderating a panel at Clayton Books on Saturday at 2pm.  If you’re anywhere close, please drop by.
PPPS: Thanks to Fran and everyone at Seattle Mystery Bookstore for treating me like a king last Saturday.  If you’re resident of the Emerald City, please support them.

I See The Future And It’s Quite Blurry

Bugger!  I failed my eye-test.  I can’t believe it.  I studied so hard.  I knew all the parts of the eye and I still failed.  The eye-guy says that my close-up vision is still good, but, I can’t see distances for toffee.  I told him he was dead wrong and he said, “Over here, Mr. Wood.  That’s the coat rack.”

Okay, maybe he’s got a point.

I know why I flunked my eye-test.  I get so nervous about it, because I don’t know if I’m answering correctly.  The guy wheels up the giant Elton John glasses circa 1976 and squashes them into my face and asks me which blurry image do I like the best.  Eventually, I can’t tell the difference between the blurry images and I can’t make up my mind which is best. The eye guy loses his temper and I feel like I’m Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, but Lawrence Olivier isn’t asking, “Is it safe?”  The words that strike fear into me are, “Number one or number two?  I just need to know a number, Simon.  One or two?  One or two?  I can’t let you leave until you tell me.  One or two?”

So I need glasses.  It’s not a problem.  I can deal.  I am a little worried that my writer buddies are going to pick on me now that I have glasses.  I can see some of the hardboiled guys yelling out, “Four eyes,” then stealing my glasses and beating me up.  They’re hardboiled for a reason, y’know.  The cozy people, being more subtle, will just write something mean on my back.  They’re sneakier.

But to my advantage, I can do the dramatic glasses removal during book negotiations.  I look disappointedly at the advance offered and slowly pull my glasses off and rub my eyes and sigh and say, “This is one time I wish I was seeing double (the dollar figure).”  So glasses have their ups and downs.

But I’m going with glasses.  No contacts for me.  I can’t stand anything in my eyes.  The eye-guy had a hard enough time getting the drops in my eyes.  He had to hold me down and pull my lids back to get the stuff in.  Oddly, I kept my mouth clamped shut.  I don’t know why.  I’m definitely not going with the eye surgery.  I’d go on a bad laser day and get zapped, but my mother-in-law dissuaded me.  She just had the surgery and said, “I saw my cornea peel off,” like it was a good thing.  I don’t need to hear that, especially when I’m eating.

So I’ve been wearing glasses for about a week.  It’s okay.  I can see better.  Things used to have that soft focus thing going on, like on Star Trek whenever James T Kirk set eyes on his woman of the week.  Julie says I look very distinguished, but then she laughs and runs away.  I’ve stopped complaining that we need a high definition TV because the picture is for crap.  I did see an intruder in the house, but it was a false alarm.  It was just Julie.  I didn’t see that coming.  Maybe I should have gotten glasses sooner. 

Yours in sharp focus,
Simon Wood
PS: I'm to San Francisco to do a lunchtime signing at Stacey's with Tim Maleeny and Mark Coggins.  Then tomorrow, I'm off to Seattle to do signings up there.  Check my website for when and where.

My Other Sister

I know I've missed Halloween but I thought I would share this true life story from my youth.  It's one of those events that helped shaped me.  So sit back and enjoy...

I was seven when I met my other sister. 

As a child, it wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up during the night craving something to drink. I usually slept with a glass of water or juice on the nightstand next to my bed. On this particular night, I’d drained my glass and found I still hadn’t quenched my thirst. I hopped out of bed and, glass in hand, left the bedroom I shared with my sister, three years my younger. I switched on the landing light so I wouldn’t disturb anyone and trotted downstairs to the kitchen. I made myself a drink and took it back up the stairs.

As I reached the top of the stairs and turned to face my bedroom, a full-length mirror next to my sister’s bed reflected my image. I wasn’t alone in my reflection and I froze. Behind me was my sister wearing her black polka dotted nightdress. She was lying on the top stair, her face stricken in pain, reaching out to grab my bare ankle. She fixed me with her totally black eyes. There were no whites in her eyes at all, just solid black. Her mouth opened and closed as if trying to say something, but no words made it out.

My mind whirled. How had my sister followed me down the stairs and sneaked behind me without me noticing? What had caused her eyes to turn black? My mind snagged on the falseness in the reflected image, preventing me from answering the questions. For to the left of the mirror, my sister slept soundly in her bed, her face turned away from me. The fact she was wearing a flowered nightdress and not the polka dotted one only confirmed the impossibility of the distressed girl in the reflection being my sister.

My other sister’s hand continued to reach out for me and was within inches of grasping me. I couldn’t tell if she existed only in the reflection or whether she was right behind me. I didn’t dare turn my head to find out. In the reflection, my view of her was at least twenty feet away, but if I turned to face her, then those black eyes would be right on top of me.

Whether my other sister really meant me harm or just needed my help, I didn’t have the courage to find out. I bolted for my room, throwing my drink into the air and screaming all the way.  This meant running directly at the mirror and if my other sister existed there, then I was running straight towards the creature and not away from it. In the mirror’s reflection, my other sister made a desperate lunge, missed me and collapsed on the landing, but she lacked the strength to give chase. I hurled myself on the bed and buried my face in the pillow and bedclothes.

My screams woke my sister and my parents. My mother had to pry me from the mattress that I clung to in the fear that it wasn’t my mother who had me, but a false mother like the false sister I’d seen in the mirror. Even when she managed to unpeel my fingers from the mattress, I refused to open my eyes in fear that I was in the arms of a phantom. But when my mother shushed me and rocked me, I knew no false mother would treat me with such tenderness and I opened my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” my mother asked. “Why all the screaming?”

Through my sobs, I choked out the event I’d witnessed. My mother showed me that my sister, although crying herself from being rudely awakened, was okay, and more importantly, that her eyes were okay.

"You were dreaming,” my mother insisted.

How could it be a dream? I’d made myself a drink. I told my mother this.

“Well, whatever you saw, it isn’t there now,” she said. 

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“Because we would have seen it when we came into the room. Come on, come look.”

My mother tried to show me, but I clung to my bed. She wrenched me free and I went with her, even though I dug my toes into the carpet. She showed me that nothing lurked on the landing, other than my father cleaning up my spilled drink.

At some point when I’d calmed down, my parents put me to bed, but I failed to fall asleep straight away, fearing my other sister would return to get me. Finally, exhaustion claimed me and I slept through until morning.

After that night, I developed a fear of mirrors after dark. Once the sun had set, I averted my gaze or closed my eyes when passing a mirror. I wanted to hang something over the mirrors, but I didn’t want to expose my fear. If I woke during the night needing a drink, I let my thirst go unquenched. Nothing would get me out of bed after dark. I never wanted to meet my other sister again. I feared my escape might not be guaranteed.

Two weeks after the incident my sister was struck down by a nasty bout of flu, which kept her, confined to her bed for several days. The nightdress she wore when the flu hit was her black polka dotted one.

I don’t know if the phantom sister I saw was a premonition of some kind, but I never saw my sister in that stricken pose on the stairs during her influenza bout or at any other time and she never possessed those black eyes. I wonder if the phantom was some form of guardian spirit trying to warn my family of a threat to my sister’s welfare? Regardless, I didn’t look into a mirror at night for another seven years fearing a repeat encounter with my other sister or some other phantom that lurked in mirrors. 

Eventually, when I summoned up the courage in my teens to stare into a mirror at night, I saw nothing, although I broke out in gooseflesh fearing that I would. Now, I’m in my thirties, and if I’m honest, I still fear what I’ll see in a mirror. If I have to get up at night, I don’t turn on the lights and I keep my eyes averted. My other sister has never shown herself again, but I can never be sure it will stay that way.

Yours reflected,
Simon Wood
PS: I'm off to LA for a signing at the Mystery Bookstore with Tim Maleeny and Mark Coggins, then we're off to Men of Mystery.
PPS: Artist, Deena Warner commissioned a story to go with her 2007 Halloween Card and I came up with something called, Thursday.