I’ve always wanted my own character. John D. MacDonald has Travis McGee and Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes. You know what I mean. They create a character that is rich and compelling, interesting to both the writer and the reader. Their personality and status quo allows for a rich variety of storytelling opportunities and like an old friend, grow old with them through time.
As much as I adore writing in other universes, and helped create one or two to share with others, I always thought I should have one or two characters to call my own. In the back of my mind, I guess I’ve been sending out a signal and have been patiently waiting to see who will walk out of the dim recesses of my mind.
At first, I thought it might be the young apprentice wizard I introduced in “Solo”, a short story that appeared Mob Magic a decade-plus back. And while I want to return to him, he hasn’t been insistently bothering me.
Instead, it appears that Gabriella Trotter, my protagonist in ReDeus has decided to inhabit my mind. When Aaron Rosenberg, Paul Kupperberg, and I began developing this shared universe, we each wanted our own character to roam with. Paul’s Junker George is out to slay the “false” gods and is hopping the globe to do so and Aaron’s cop Tom Duran seems content to operate in New York City, the one free zone on Earth.
But Gabbi is on the road. When the gods demanded worship, she knew them to be real but had trouble accepting them as true gods worthy of worship. Instead, she ignored them as best she could, covering the celebrity beat for the Seattle Times-Intelligencer, and hanging out with her girlfriends. Then, all of a sudden, everywhere she turned one god or another has been interfering with her, toying with her almost.
It was all designed to get her out of Seattle and on the road. Gabbi, who isn’t sure what to believe in, is on her personal vision quest and allows me to explore little corners of America we might not otherwise visit ion our anthologies and forthcoming novels. I like that she’s not perfect and is struggling to find a place for her in a vastly different world. Together, she and I are looking forward to seeing what’s next. On the other hand, unlike me, Gabbi’s always got one eye on the rearview mirror, uncertain when Coyote will turn up next.
Where did she come from? As Mike wrote earlier this week, Inspiration shows up unbidden and never on command. She arrived almost intact and the name quickly followed. When Carmen Carnero, now a rising comic book artist but a few years just at the beginning of her own career path, drew this first image of her, I thought she pretty much nailed her.
Gabbi’s first road trip ran here recently and soon there should be another installment from America’s highways.
The stars were twinkling in the barren night sky as Gabriella Trotter leisurely drove down Route 90. Her eastward route took her farther and farther away from Seattle. It had been a hasty decision and one she didn’t allow herself to contemplate. Instead, she listened to pop anthems from her youth on the satellite radio, finishing the now-cold and greasy fries that remained in the white paper Sonic bag. Thankfully, the local deities allowed burgers, although the mandate was that they were now all-buffalo—more authentic, it had been declared.
She had lost her job at the newspaper thanks to the gods’ intervention, and she was more than a little tired of being Kunulla’s plaything. Gabbi had no idea what the god wanted with her but he somehow found her lack of faith in any deity appealing or challenging or something. He’d already exposed the unseemly side of the celebrities she’d covered, altering her coverage from fawning to jaundiced. While it might have made her a sharper writer, it had also seemed to piss someone off and now here she was, without income.
Pamela had asked about her prospects and Gabbi had told her there was money in the bank, so when she’d paused for a takeout dinner she’d checked her balance. Her rainy day fund was eighty-five percent funded, so she could live off those resources for a few months before really needing to worry, but she’d also assured her fellow Musketeers she could freelance, and that grew more and more appealing as Seattle receded behind her.
It was late and she would need to stop somewhere for the evening before continuing her sojourn. Summit was up ahead, according to the road signs, so she hoped they had a cheap motel. Already she was mentally preparing a To Do list for the next morning which included notifying her parents and sibling of this decision—then, when the shock wore off, asking them (although it might involve begging) to pack up her belongings. When they were done, she would terminate her lease and cancel all the utilities. Or maybe she’d sublet it, let Rebecca use it for clandestine affairs. Plenty to think about.
She let herself yawn long and loud since there was no one to be bothered. It also reminded her she needed to end her first leg of the journey to nowhere soon.
But all thoughts of comfy beds and free shampoo were erased when she saw the blond man waving his arms frantically along the side of the road. His car was off to the side, its emergency flashers racing up and down one side of the vehicle. As tempted as she was to keep going, there was literally no one else on this desolate stretch of highway and she couldn’t live with herself if she abandoned someone who was truly in need. Maybe he just wanted gas money or a tow truck.
She slowed down without jamming on her brakes and then glided directly behind his distinctly older and darker car. He was maybe thirty, thin, and nervous looking as his arms continued to flap despite her coming to a stop.
“You’re not a doctor, are you?” he asked in a high voice.
“Sorry,” she said from her lowered window, “a writer. What’s wrong?”
“My wife…the baby is coming…like NOW!”
Oh shit. Now she couldn’t leave him alone to his misery. There was not only a woman involved but a new life.
“Where’s the nearest hospital?” she asked, unbuckling her belt and getting out.
“Summit, but we don’t have time,” he said, sounding on the verge of panic.
Gabbi strode past him and decided to look for herself. Sure enough, in the passenger bucket seat was a sweaty female form with a very distinctive bulge between breasts and knees. She was gritting her teeth and clearly enduring a contraction. Gabbi knew as much as the next person about the process but had never trained in emergency births on the side of highways and wasn’t sure what she could do.
“How far apart are the contractions?” Gabbi asked as she entered the car, noting the back seat was filled with luggage, a huge bag of disposable diapers, and assorted detritus.
“Three, four minutes apart,” the woman gasped. “It’s coming.”
“I’ve heard. I’m Gabbi.”
“Estella.”
“How can I help? Do you need a ride to the hospital?”
“Yes, but the baby will be here first.”
Crap. “What’s wrong with your car?”
“The battery shorted out,” she said. “Willie can’t get it jumpstarted with the emergency kit.”
“Are you sure we don’t have time to move you to my car? I can be a very fast driver,” Gabbi assured her.
“I was already in labor before we left home, but waited too long and the baby’s really impatient to get out here,” Estella said. Gabbi could see the other woman was younger and prettier, with long brown hair that was currently stringy from sweat but would look terrific when dry and brushed. She was momentarily jealous, then refocused.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said with a smile.
Estella returned it and nodded. “Me either.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Yes. Whatever the gods decree.”
Okay, she was a believer and these days the gods wanted to return some mystery to the world so more and more pantheons had ordered that midwives and doctors keep the gender a secret.
Estella wailed as a fresh contraction arrived and her left hand reached out and found Gabbi’s, squeezing it and causing her to yelp from the surprising strength behind it. She glanced to her left and saw Willie pacing back and forth.
As the contraction passed, Gabbi estimated barely two minutes had elapsed since she arrived. That meant things were speeding up. There was little doubt that she was about to help deliver a baby into this world.
“What’s with Willie? Why isn’t he here holding your hand?”
Estella shook her head. “He’s a wonderful man, and will make a terrific husband, but he panics easily and can’t stay focused.”
Just great. Gabbi shot her a look, asking permission to begin touching Estella in uncomfortably intimate ways. The woman looked exhausted already and the hard part hadn’t arrived yet but she nodded. With some hesitancy, Gabbi reached out and placed a flat palm atop the swollen belly. There was definitely something moving in there but beyond that she had no idea what she was doing. Thankfully, Estella was in a skirt so there were no pants to fuss with. But it did mean looking at lady parts to see if the baby was crowning yet.
“Go ahead,” Estella said, and then gritted her teeth as a fresh wave of pain washed over her.
Regretting taking I-90, Gabbi reached under the skirt and worked to slide off the panties off the writhing figure. Sure enough, there was something moist and messy-looking peeking out from between her legs. This baby was on its way out and Gabbi needed to act.
“Willie!” she shouted above Estella’s own wail of pain. Within seconds, the distraught husband was at the door. “No one’s coming; it’s just us, so I need your help.”
He stared at her, wide-eyed. She decided it was time to finally sound like her mother, firm and commanding. “Get me blankets. Or something to wrap the baby in.”
That he understood and opened the rear door and began rummaging. Estella once more reached out to grasp her hand.
“Is there something with a blade in your emergency kit?”
“Yeah,” he finally replied.
“Good. We’ll need that to cut the cord. It’s going to be messy; I don’t suppose you have towels around here?”
“No.”
“Then you better plan on hosing this out and detailing it before she gets home from the hospital,” Gabbi said, receiving the offered baby blankets. There were three, each a different pastel shade, and all about to be baptized in blood.
“The cliché says I should be sending you to boil water, but I don’t think that will work,” Gabbi said to Willie, who remained in the backseat, peering over to watch his wife give birth.
“Where were you that this happened?”
“Estella’s not due for two weeks, we thought we could have a final day trip to Seattle, you know, together.”
“Sounds nice,” she said, positioning one of the blankets under the other woman’s butt, keeping one over her shoulder for the baby itself.
“We visited the Temple of the Colville and Estella was bled by their resident shaman.” Willie said.
Inwardly, Gabbi grimaced at the mention of Indian deities. She was trying to get away from them, Kunula in particular. “Do you worship the Colville gods?”
He let out a sigh at the same time Estella wailed. Gabbi saw she was now obeying her body’s own instructions and was actively pushing the baby out.
“Okay, Estella, it’s time, I guess,” Gabbi said in her most reassuring voice. She winced at what the other woman was enduring, uncertain if she’d ever want to subject herself to this. It was some vague notion in the back of her mind, never consistent with wanting her own child or not.
“No,” Willie said, and at first Gabbi thought he was rejecting what was before his terrified eyes, but the voice sounded different.
“No?”
“I’m Scandinavian and Estella is such a mutt she has no real pantheon,” he said by way of explanation. Then, in a guilty voice, he added, “We were going to go to Europe after the baby was born.”
“Better start planning that itinerary because here it comes,” Gabbi said. The head had now come completely into view so she placed her hands underneath, cupping them as if she could catch it. The head was a gooey mess of white, red, and dark stuff and Gabbi wished she had paid better attention in health class.
There came shoulders, then arms, and as Estella’s grunts and groans were traded in for shrieks and screams the baby inexorably left the birth canal, entering a new, colder world. Gabbi kept her blanket-covered hands in position as the small human form emerged. The tiny mouth opened and she somehow heard that first breath of air.
A tiny piercing cry cut through Estella’s own war chant and suddenly silenced her. The baby was now completely out and Gabbi wrapped it as gently as she could in the blanket, patting and rubbing to get the icky placenta material off the newly pink skin. When she thought she had done the best she could, she noted the umbilical cord stretched back into the womb.
“Willie,” she commanded. “Get yourself over her with that blade—come cut your daughter’s cord.”
“A girl,” Estella said between gasps.
“A girl,” Gabbi confirmed with a broad smile.
Willie came out with a utility knife, which she hoped was clean enough, and she cocked her head toward it.
“Where should I cut it?” he asked.
“Unless there’s a dotted line somewhere, just guess,” she said.
He reached out with a shaky hand as the baby continued to cry in Gabbi’s trembling hands, and sliced through the cord, added fresh ick to the mess in the car. With the baby now free, Gabbi used the last clean blanket to swaddle the squirming, crying form. Once done, she handed the baby to the girl’s mother.
Estella held the baby, gazing in exhausted wonderment. Then, after several moments, she used her free hand to begin unbuttoning her blouse so she could nurse her daughter for the first time. While a wonderful moment, it was now one Gabbi could easily pass on witnessing. It was actually time for the family to bond so she eased herself from the car.
“Go to them, Willie. I’ll call 911 for help,” she said in a soft voice.
He took a step toward the dimly lit interior, then stopped and turned toward her. “I suck at this sort of stuff,” he said. “I lost it when she needed me. I felt like such a jerk for not being able to fix the battery and having no other car out here. We had just been to the temple so I prayed to the Colville, prayed for help, and then you showed up.”
That made Gabbi feel uncomfortable. ”I was already on the road when all this started, it’s not like I got a summons.”
“Maybe not, but I prayed and you arrived. Thank you.”
She nodded in tired bewilderment.
“You have to have faith in people,” he said and finally went to join his wife and child.
Gabbi called and made the report, assuring the concerned operator on the other end of the call that mother and child seemed fine for now. Her chore done and exceedingly tired, she took one last look at the new family and smile wearily. She got behind the wheel, now desiring a hot shower before a comfortable bed, and thought about Willie’s last words.
Kunula had challenged her lack of belief, which had resulted in her rejecting him and his fellow gods. She’d hit the road and suddenly came across this. Turning over the engine, Gabbi thought she’d start small then. She’d believe in the decency of her fellow man and see what happened next.
Confession time: I’m still scared that they’re coming for me.
By “they,” I mean aliens…the kind who creep into your bedroom at night and whisk you away to their ship for tests or just outright torture. The thought of it terrifies me: that I might be lying there, helpless yet conscious, as they take me away.
I’ll bet it scares you, too. Because it’s something that might just happen to any of us on any given night. If eyewitness reports are to be believed, it happens all the time.
Not to mention, we’ve seen it happen again and again on TV and in the movies. The alien abduction scene has been recreated so many times, it’s become ingrained in our collective consciousness. When it’s done right, there’s nothing scarier.
For me, the best and scariest version was in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Just thinking about the scene in which the aliens keep trying to get into the locked farmhouse so they can snatch the little boy inside sends shivers up my spine. No, really.
Long before that, there was the story of Barney and Betty Hill, who claimed to have been abducted while driving in rural New Hampshire in 1961. This story also made a huge impression on me. Decades later, in fact, when I was driving in rural New Hampshire myself one night, I thought I was doomed to repeat their experience. Rolling around a bend in the road, I saw the edge of an illuminated disk hanging above the darkened forest. White-knuckling the wheel, paralyzed with fear, I let the car drift the rest of the way around the bend…
…At which point, I saw that the edge of the disk was actually the upper edge of a hot air balloon sporting a Burger King ad. Out in the middle of nowhere, I kid you not.
So much for my big Close Encounter. But finding out that my flying saucer was just a big advertising balloon didn’t take away the fear. It’s still with me to this day…lucky for you.
Because my fear of abduction inspired “Chariots of the Godless,” my story for ReDeus: Native Lands. While brainstorming ideas for a story for Native Lands, I thought about things that are part of the quintessential American cultural landscape. Alien abduction quickly came to mind. The fascination with extraterrestrial encounters, from the Roswell incident to the Allagash Waterway abductions, is deeply ingrained in the fabric of our national imagination.
Would alien abductions still happen in post-Return America, in a country ruled by omni-powerful gods and roamed by mystically-attuned divine entities? Better yet, could the gods and divine entities themselves ever be the victims of abductions?
I loved the idea right off the bat. The thought of one of these godly powerhouses spirited away by alien beings, subjected to the same kind of terrified helplessness and violation as human abductees, seemed like new ground to cover. It felt fresh, like something I hadn’t seen before.
“Chariots of the Godless” took off from there. Along the way, it became an action-oriented tale, a race against time as the aliens carry off captive gods for mysterious, perhaps sinister, purposes. It also became an unlikely love story, as a relationship grows between human abduction expert Dr. Nessus and the justice goddess Mayet. Nessus and Mayet could not be more alien to each other, both in temperament and in terms of the worlds they come from…but they move past their fears and find strength in the very differences that fuel their alienation.
Maybe this will be our truest salvation when the aliens come to call: recognizing that our fears of abduction relate most directly to our fear of the unexpected, of the stranger who sneaks into our lives uninvited and changes us in some deep way. For the truth is, our fear is often misplaced; strange changes are not always bad and can lead us down unexplored roads we might never have dared travel if left to our own devices.
Though I, for one, will continue to watch for glowing disks hovering over the treeline when I drive through the woods at night. And if I glimpse strange lights outside my bedroom windows, I will hold my breath and pull the covers up just a little bit higher.
ReDeus: Native Lands is now available in digital and print formats.
So you’ve heard of three-part deities, right? The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the Christian tradition, the Triple Goddess Hecate in Greek Myth and the Wiccan traditions? Well, Crazy 8 has a triple deity of its own, personified by Bob, Paul and Aaron. This trinity edits ReDeus, reads our stories, and transmits to us via the divine email words of wisdom. You’re never sure which of the three is speaking, but the results are always awe-inspiring, enlightening, and delightfully snarky.
It was in one of these divine communiqués that a couple of throwaway lines in my story “Axel’s Flight” were transformed, as Io was transformed into the sacred cow, into a story of their own. Clever deities, these, even if you don’t know which is which. Ovid couldn’t have described a more wondrous metamorphosis.
The passage thus selected was:
“The gods had curtailed a good deal of Hollywood’s output over the last decade, offended by the CGI special effects which made their miraculous powers seem commonplace. Only swift action by a consortium of gods of arts from various pantheons had prevented the outright destruction of the likes of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and such films were rarely seen now by mere mortals.”
Not sure what about it grabbed the three-headed spirit of editorship. Perhaps, like Ganymede, it had really interesting thighs. Whatever it was, one, two or all of the heads said unto me: “Oh, and this would make a great story for Native Lands!”
When the god(s) speak, you don’t ignore them. Especially when they’re offering you money, a shot at a Hugo Award, and the privilege of sitting next to them on the autograph lines at several cons. Well… they’re offering one of those three.
And so I developed “Chinigchinix Nixes Pix,” a tale of a young(ish) screenwriter who’s working on a Summer blockbuster about the Angel of Death. If the title baffles you, it’s because it’s written in slanguage, otherwise known as Variety-speak–something akin to mystic runes. Our narrator, we’ll call him N, takes a meeting one day and discovers that Chinigchinix, or Quaoar as he’s more commonly called, the patron divinity of the Tongva people who once inhabited the hills of LA, has taken over the American film industry. He’s shelved all projects that don’t have the potential to glorify the gods (yes, even the romantic comedy based on Windows for Dummies that was to star Brad Pitt.) But he likes our hero’s story, Call Me Sam. He likes it so much, in fact, that he’s going to help with the re-write. That means he needs to spend a lot of time with our beleaguered protagonist, and that means they’re moving in together.
Hilarity ensues.
I set out to write a short, punchy tale about censorship, writing by committee, and the clash of cultures between humans and gods. It was to be a brief adventure in the style of Douglas Adams. As each volume of the Hitchhiker trilogy (all five of them) was short, so my little visit to La La Land would be a quick in-and-out, don’t-worry-if-it-offends-you-because-it’s-going-away-soon, not-long-on-the-plot jaunt. Did I mention it was short? I kept it under 10,000 words. If you know me, you know that’s not easy for me to do.
And yea, verily, the god(s) said, “It sucks. Make it longer.”
Gods. What can you do, right?
So I added fifty percent more words. (I discovered a box of them in the pantry, behind the Quaker Oats. They were past their expiration date, but I figured “What the hell? Who’ll know?” I poured them in, stirred, and now “Chinigchinix” is a lot longer. If the language is a little moldy and archaic in spots, that’s why.)
When it was done, I asked the Trinity how I was to deliver it unto them. They told me to put it on the altar in the back yard and burn it. (You have an altar in your back yard too, right? They told me it wasn’t just me.) So I threw the pages on the grill–er, the stone stained with the blood of countless sacrifices to Bob, Aaron and Paul–and touched the sacred Bic unto them. The wind did carry the smoke and ashes unto the heavens, where dwell the Three, and Chinigchinix is nixing pix in Native Lands, volume three of ReDeus.
Right guys?
I said am I right? You got the sacred ashes, right?
Bob? Aaron? Paul?
ReDeus: Native Lands, truly containing this story, is now available in print and digital formats.
I certainly mean the state, which I regard as my own native land despite that my birth and first five years of life took place in upstate New York. I also mean the band, a favorite of mine for nearly 40 years whose music accompanied the majority of my writing process on this story. And I also mean the residents, from the native tribes to the homesteaders, who struggled against nature and, yes, each other in their quests to live off of the land and make a home on the prairie with only their determination and faith and work ethic to fuel them.
Mix those inspirations liberally with the weirdness drifting through my own mind, and that is the formula for my contribution to Native Lands, “The Initially Unsettling But Ultimately Triumphant Return of Afterbirth Boy.”
Spoiler alert: Don’t read the story title until after you have read the story.
When I received the very gracious invitation to propose a story for the Native Lands anthology, I immediately knew that I wanted to write a tale that felt like home. Growing up in a town of 6,000 in central Kansas and then spending 15 additional years in a similarly sized Kansas town while reporting for a twice-weekly newspaper, I many times had the sense that the problems of big-city America did not apply to our lives here. As I read Divine Tales, I was struck with a similar impression. Sure, the Gods would work wonders or horrors in the lives of people on the coasts. But how would things shake out around here? What challenges might a small town face in light of these arrivals? Who would step up for the little guys?
Turns out, at least in my mind, it was a little guy. I imagined Mitchell Finehorse as a kid not necessarily like me but certainly like someone I would have hung out with in my high-school days. As for his chosen company in the story, well, those guys came by way of Pawnee legend. Specifically, I was inspired by a tale known in some accounts as “Good Boy and Long Tooth Boy” and in others as “Handsome Boy and Afterbirth Boy.”
Well, I know a winning title when I see one.
I had a great time writing what I intended as a fun romp of a story, and my sincere hope is that you will enjoy your visit to my native land.
ReDeus: Native Lands will be available in print and digital editions starting this Friday.
I keep being reminded of the wisdom of Blackadder the Third: “Sir Thomas More, for instance – burned alive for refusing to recant his Catholicism – must have been kicking himself, as the flames licked higher, that it never occurred to him to say, ‘I recant my Catholicism.’”
When the gods returned – to the world of ReDeus – they summoned millions of people, descendants of those who had once worshipped them, back to their ancestral lands. “Those who don’t make it out in time are given a choice,” according to the writers’ guidelines. They can swear fealty to the gods of whichever country they are stranded in “or be treated as prisoners of war”. That paragraph became the starting point for my story in Native Lands. I wanted to see inside a POW camp.
I wanted to look at some of the inmates of that camp, and ask the question: What is keeping them – each one of them – from bowing down to the Native American gods? In some cases, the answer is obvious; in others, less so. Why would a modern-day Italian-American, for example, care about the Greco-Roman gods of his forefathers? Why would pledging allegiance to them be any different, any more appealing to him, than pledging it to their American rivals? Or vice versa?
On the other side of that coin is the question, what do the gods want from us? Do they judge us by our actions or by what lies deeper in our hearts? We might buckle under and do as they tell us, out of fear or respect for their power – but what if that isn’t enough for them? What if they need more?
My story is called “Enemy of the State”. It concerns one particular prisoner of the gods and a parole hearing that goes very badly for him. His crime was a minor one – in his eyes – but the gods will never let him go. So, he joins a group of fellow inmates in a desperate escape attempt. Of course, a prison built and run by the gods is going to have more than your standard security measures in place… How far will a man with no particular commitment to any belief system go when his freedom is at stake? And what will be the likely consequences to a man who challenges the gods and loses?
I didn’t know much about Native American mythology before I wrote this story. By chance, though, I read an old Ghost Rider comic, in which Johnny Blaze is set upon by Thunderbirds: creatures that create storm clouds with the beating of their wings and shoot lightning from their eyes. That inspired me to find out more about them, and soon enough they were circling in the sky above my POW camp. Otherwise, everything I needed to know about prison life came from watching many hundreds of hours of Prisoner: Cell Block H. I just knew that would pay off some day!
ReDeus: Native Lands will be available in print and digital editions next week.
I’ve always wanted my own character. John D. MacDonald has Travis McGee and Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes. You know what I mean. They create a character that is rich and compelling, interesting to both the writer and the reader. Their personality and status quo allows for a rich variety of storytelling opportunities and like an old friend, grow old with them through time.
