Issue 38 November 2016 Flash Fiction Online November 2016

I checked the astronomical calendar. Several, in fact. I even checked the astrological calendar and a handful of websites listing popular or amazing events in November. Pretty quiet. I have to say, it is fairly packed with great holidays, but isn’t any month anymore?

(I remember reading the book Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman in which the main character keeps a journal, recounting a particular Saint’s holiday every single day of the year. I remember thinking how odd that was, to be expected to celebrate day in and day out. But, honestly, we have National Toilet Day on November 19th. It seems like celebrating The Feast of Saint Bibiana–December 2nd, just in case you feel the need to torture a Christian in her honor–would be a tiny bit more respectable than throwing glitter into the porcelain throne.)

But I digress. This month some string of planets in some other arm of the galaxy has apparently aligned in just such as way as to cause something of a publishing anomaly, at least at Flash Fiction Online. This month we’re running stories from three of our FFO alumni. THREE of them!

That doesn’t often happen around here. In fact, I don’t remember it ever happening. But it has. This issue is as rare as a blue moon.

To make things even more fun, we’re including a link to each author’s previously published story. Be sure to click through to those.

And our three returning authors are:
Samantha Murray, with “Boxes and Lockets and Clocks.”
(Previous story: “Portrait of My Wife as a Boat,” July 2015)
Alexis A. Hunter, with “Perfectly Not Normal.”
(Previous story: “Gold Dress, No Eyes,” February 2015)
Matt Dovey, with “Quartet of the Far Blown Winds.”
(Previous story: “This Is the Sound of the End of the World,” March 2016)

Also, this month, our reprint selection, “Project Earth is Leaving Beta,” by J.W. Alden. This story originally appeared in the May 2016 issue of Nature.

Enjoy!

Tia’s mother’s truth is kept in a wooden box on the mantel above the fireplace.

It’s a plain box, not ornate at all. Sometimes they are carved and intricate, like the delicate jewelry box Tia has seen next to her aunt’s bed. A few people wear theirs around their necks, a wooden locket nestling at the base of their throat. Always wood – rosewood, mahogany, black cherry. A truth would not stay in steel or gold.

Her mother’s box is a simple pale creamy beech. Tia cannot remember it not being there. She never used to notice it–just another familiar part of the house she was growing up in. These days, though, at nearly-thirteen, Tia finds her eyes drawn to it whenever she is in the room. When her mother isn’t nearby, Tia often goes and runs her fingers over the cool smoothness of the lid. She puts her ear up to it and imagines she can hear a faint swish-swooshing sound, although she can’t, not really.

“It’s no business of yours,” her mother replied curtly when Tia asked her, many months ago, what was inside. “Don’t touch it.”

“They don’t know what’s inside,” her friend Casey tells her, with the gentle superiority that comes from being born nine months earlier than Tia, and having older sisters. “They can guess, but they don’t know.” She tells Tia how her eldest sister’s truth was making bumpy nodules on her chest for two days before it seeped out of her like a coiled mist and her sister caught it and put it in her bedroom drawer while she went to buy a locket for it. Her sister is pretty young to have her truth already, Casey says. Tia doesn’t always know whether to believe Casey, although it is hard not to–she is always so certain and convincing, and her eyes are very direct.

Tia suspects that inside her mother’s box is the truth that she is adopted. She looks nothing like her mother, her eyes and hair are brown while her mother is very fair. Perhaps the truth is that her father was the one who had wanted her, and her mother never did. It would explain why she was so very strict with Tia, why she yelled, why nothing Tia ever did was good enough and should be better than that.

When her mother screeches at her for staying out too late with Casey, and for not being disciplined enough, not being motivated enough, Tia wonders, not for the first time, what would happen if she opened the lid and let her mother’s truth out. Casey says that if you let a truth out then it is not true anymore, but Tia doesn’t think this can be right. She doesn’t open her mother’s box though, just in case. I want to be adopted, she thinks. I don’t want to be related to you.

* * *

She sees them sometimes, at the shops or on the street; the grown-ups who drift around with something unsure, searching and desperate about their eyes. Like they’ve lost something. They never have lockets and Tia doesn’t think that they have a truth at home safe in a wooden box either. They scare her a little, and she shies away from them.

* * *

It is not till she is thirty years old that some small hard lumps form in Tia’s neck near her lymph nodes. They get more swollen and painful as the day progresses and move around if she presses on them. Eventually, that evening when she pushes down hard to try and relieve the ache, something gives with a wheeze and loosens. It pours out of her like smoke, but heavier, denser, more undulating, and Tia sees that finally, she has a truth of her own. She cups it between her two hands, then puts it in the little drawer at the base of her wooden clock. She has a box upstairs, purchased many years ago, with a little rose inlay, but she decides to leave it in the clock.

She feels strangely peaceful. She doesn’t know exactly what the truth is – although she suspects it may have something to do with the hard things she is learning about her own nature by being in a long-term relationship–but she is content enough not knowing what her life will be about just yet. It is enough to know that her life will have been about something. She doesn’t tell her mother that she has a truth at last. Her mother does not approve of her lifestyle choices. Tia can feel the judgment in the narrowing of her mother’s gaze, the tightening of the lips, every word not said.

* * *

When Tia’s mother dies, Tia has not seen her for nearly eight months. She walks through the old house–feeling like everything is coated with a fine dust of memory, of history. She is arrested by the sight of her mother’s box on the mantel–exactly where it has always been, not budged an inch.

She puts her hand on the lid and pauses. It doesn’t matter now, she thinks. It doesn’t matter anymore.

The lid has a weight to it that Tia isn’t expecting. It opens slowly, and her mother’s truth comes out, like a little puff of air from bellows, like an exhaled breath, like a sigh.

A truth her mother was gripped and terrified by. Love. Her mother loves her. Loved her. Always did. Always, always did.

Perhaps her mother never even knew how much.

Tia feels a lump in her throat and presses there with her fingers, but it is not her truth, going forth unfurling, it can’t be. It is something she can’t keep in a box, something softer and quieter, like regret, like sorrow.

And Tia stands there, till twilight falls outside the window, making it hard to see the edges of things, in her mother’s house, an empty box full of nothing on the mantel.

Dear Backers,

The beta test of Project Earth is finally over. We can’t thank you enough for your patience and generosity during our crowdfunding period. But before we roll out Earth 1.0, there’re a few things you should know.

First the bad news: this update comes with a server wipe. We know you’ve poured time and effort into your “lives” on Earth, and it’s disappointing to lose your progress. Unfortunately, this can’t be helped. We experimented with methods of porting existing avatars into the new version, but it brings a host of compatibility issues with our new character creation system (more on that later). As a consolation, we’re planning another exciting in-game “End of the World” event, so you can go out with a bang.

Here are some big changes to expect in the new update:

• New: Abuser Report System

Every multiplayer experience comes with griefers and trolls. Unfortunately, the nature of Earth’s gameplay makes it difficult to tell when someone is being an asshole on purpose, but we’ve implemented a system that lets you flag an avatar for review. This notifies our mod team, who will examine the player’s behavior for signs of intentional griefing. Please don’t abuse this feature! Only report an avatar if it exhibits unreasonable hostility that could not possibly be the result of normal “human” development.

• New: Advanced Career Paths

A limited number of political and business leadership careers will open to the general player base. Previous builds allowed only members with mod privilege to take on certain leadership positions in-game, which allowed us to shape the progress of “civilization” as we saw fit. We’ve listened to your feedback on this policy, and we’re thrilled to open this aspect of the game to all players. We’re also hoping this will address the “conspiracy theory” phenomenon that became prevalent in previous builds.

• New: Space Exploration

Many of you were quite vocal when we curtailed the space race during our “Cold War” in-game event. At the time, we worried about the player base advancing past the capabilities of our current build, so we steered focus back toward Earth itself. Since then, we’ve been working hard on a new procedural engine for the cosmos, and now we’re ready to roll it out. We hope this will revitalize many career questlines, including the astronaut path. Oh, and don’t think we haven’t heard your complaints about the lightspeed barrier. These things take time.

• Fixed: Character Homogeny Issues

We turned a blind eye to this for a while, because we knew a fix would cause waves, no matter how we approached it. But after long deliberation, we’ve given the character creation suite an overhaul. A proprietary algorithm now determines your character’s congenital traits, including things like gender, race, and sexual orientation. Any trait your avatar is “born” with will be free of manipulation from players or mods. We know this might upset those of you who feel these traits are a matter of player choice, but we believe this is the more realistic approach. An increase in diversity will only enhance our experience on Earth. Plus, the “straight white male” template keeps crashing from overuse.

• Fixed: Dreams

We’ve finally isolated the cause of the “dream” phenomenon, in which an avatar retains glimpses of the player’s real world memories upon waking from logout status. Some team members argued we should make this bug a supported feature, due to the impact of dreams on art and culture in Earth 0.91. In the end, we’re not comfortable with the risk involved. Though it hasn’t happened yet, this dream glitch could lead to avatars realizing their “lives” are a game. We’re not entirely sure what would happen if this occurred, but we’re looking to avoid the sudden emergence of a secret resistance group working toward exposing the simulation, so we decided to remove them.

• Fixed: History Leak

There’s been discussion on the forums about a so-called “history leak” phenomenon, in which various myths, legends, and religious tales seem to reflect previous builds of Earth. For instance, the Greek pantheon resembles the superuser avatars the development team used in our alpha test. Many flood myths bear a strong resemblance to the “End of the World” event from our first playable build. While working on the dream bug, we discovered a crucial link between these two phenomena, which helped us iron this one out. Sorry, but your old avatar won’t be worshiped as a messiah in Earth 1.0.

Since this marks our official release, we anticipate a large influx of new players. We’ve set up a special section of the forums for first-timers. Please consider paying it a visit and offering some advice to the noobs. Remember how disorienting your first trip to Earth was (especially if you installed the “childhood” DLC expansion).

The new “End of the World” event is scheduled for December 21st. We expect a doomsday cult or two to arise before then since some of you will unwittingly communicate this date to your avatars in dreams. For this reason, we’re keeping the nature of the apocalypse a secret until the end is upon you. Rest assured we’ve come up with something exciting and different this time around. No floods, plagues, or supervolcanoes. We’ll give you one hint: watch the sky.

On behalf of everyone here at Blue Marble, we’d like to thank our backers and beta testers. Our little world couldn’t have made it this far without you, and we hope you’re all permanent residents. Earth 1.0 is only the beginning!

E. D. Amun

Development Lead, Project Earth

Blue Marble Games, Subsidiary of Ogdoad Entertainment

Previously published in Nature, 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Silence is the great divider. Perhaps that is why Melinda wields it so effectively against me.

In the silence of space, solar winds flash green, pink and yellow across the gas giant before me, the aurorae twisting like sea worms. Folded nebulae of colour and gravity stretch across the darkness behind it, unimaginable arms of light like grasping gods. Dust twinkles all around me as it vaporises in the antimatter field of our ships.

My own daughter. Alien to me now.

Thirty light minutes behind me is Eritty, 34th and newest colony of humanity amongst the lonely stars, a small pearl of water and warmth lost in the glare of the system’s blue giant. Melinda is down there, though she may as well be light years distant.

I do not know her anymore. Her children do not know their grandmother. And I don’t know how to bridge the gap between us.

Approaching arranged in a quadrant, and visible only by the absence of stars: the Quartet of the Far Blown Winds. Spread like sails and pushed by distant starlight and supernovae, the four objects drift into the system. They are huge beyond understanding, incomprehensible in their composition. All our probes and all our science leave us no wiser. We do not know what they are comprised of: any signal is absorbed perfectly by the blackness of the side that faces us, or reflected by the liquid silver of the far side. They travel from above the galactic plane, and we do not know where they come from, only that they must have been coming for such a long time.

And now they will cross Eritty’s path and collide with this rare gem of habitability; doing so, they will destroy our tenuous hold out here, the existence we cling to amongst cold stars and scathing winds. If we cannot stop them–if I cannot stop them–Eritty will be gone, and I will drift in my ship, unmoored and alone. I will never meet my granddaughters. I will never find the way to apologise to Melinda.

I run my fingertips across the smooth carbon glass of my cockpit, and elegant vertices bloom in their wake, detailing the practised plan of interception. Command sent, my squadron of Interposers splits into a formation, the eight of us forming a square framed against one part of that oncoming quadrant. Three other squadrons form up relative to us in the same formation, creating a square of squares.

My ship is lost against the immensity of the objects, and all the universe turns dark as they block the light of the galaxy before me. Eritty and its star are behind me, and the other ships of my squadron are so far away–so infinitesimal against the scale of creation, impossible to make out by eye–that for a moment an idea overwhelms me: that I am alone in a void; unique, singular, self-contained; a universe in and of myself.

But a flash of blue from my proximity trigger tells me I am not, and I send the signal to activate the interjacent broadspectrum diffusers. My ship connects to the Interposer diametrically opposite in our square, and a beam of broad radiation ignites between us, spanning the electromagnetic spectrum and manifesting in the visible portion as a fizzing, coruscating blue. The other six ships ignite their diffusers, crossing the square with three further beams, a + overlaying an X. The other three squadrons will be lit in the same pattern; together we are a new geometric constellation, standing guard against destruction.

When the Quartet crosses the path of our diffusers, it will be disrupted and scattered, and threaten us no more, no matter what it is made of. We have never operated on so large a scale–most asteroids require only two Interposers, carefully positioned–but the diffusers disrupt the fundamental nuclear forces. It is a physical impossibility for anything to withstand them. They will save Eritty.

And now the Quartet is upon us: silent in the vacuum of space; inexorably borne on solar winds and simple physics, an elegant evocation of Newtonian mechanics; dark and unknown and threatening, the perfect manifestation of the galaxy’s cold cruelties and all its unconscious vehemence against life. The size of it smothers and oppresses me, and I feel suddenly insignificant, and fear that I cannot stop it: that my failure against such sublimity is inevitable and irrevocable and all my futures are used up. I will end here, alone; will Melinda mourn me?

And then the Quartet breaks and splits, not on touching the diffusers but ­before touching them. The sails dissolve into tiny fluttering sheets of black and silver, an indefinite number of birds flocking and shifting and flowing around the beams, moving with sentience and purpose.

Behind us, they reform into the quartet of sails, but angled anew: intelligently, away from the solar plane and avoiding all the planetary orbits, using the furious light of the blue giant to speed themselves towards the galactic core and away from us forever.

Though my squadron is connected by no more than standard voice comms, I know the realisation strikes us all at the same time: other has passed us by, a lifeform unknown, the only other life we have ever encountered amongst all the stars and dust clouds. Against the vast epochs of the Universe, the unthinkable canvas of the galaxy, our paths crossed, for one time, perhaps the only time, then parted; and we will be alone again; less alone for knowing they are there, but more alone with the knowledge of loss. True isolation requires comprehension of one’s loneliness.

We are two miracles of stardust, and we will remain ever distant. But Eritty is safe, and on it are more miracles, my miracles, my daughter and her daughters.

And the distance between us doesn’t seem so insurmountable now.

In the womb, you already know she is different. You feel her first kicks earlier than should be possible. Later, when your belly is stretched taut, you can see and feel the edges of appendages that should not be.

You can’t muster the courage to ask the doctor–but your ultrasounds last longer than most as you study and study the gray-black image twisting on screen: two arms, two legs, head.

Normal, the technician says, but you know better.

* * *

Her father didn’t stay; he left as soon as he saw the second line on the stick. You’d thought better of him. The disappointment is almost worse than his absence–it colors all your memories of him, robs them of their sweetness.

You hope you won’t see much of him in her.

Already, you know she’s all you and more than you and your only fear is that she’ll grow past you, beyond you one day.

* * *

Before the baby is born, your best friend Mari moves in, fills many of the father’s absences. She holds back your hair when you vomit; she holds you when you weep with fear about the coming changes.

You’re dependent on her. Emotionally, financially, physically. You try not to hate her for that, but sometimes you do.
And she holds you even then.

One night, she tentatively slides her hand over your rounded belly. Her fingers are cool, smooth. You don’t push her away.

Your baby kicks with what feels like six or seven feet. Mari’s eyes widen, face slightly pale, but she doesn’t question, and she doesn’t run away–and you love her for that.

* * *

Ani is difficult to hold. She squirms and writhes. She feels heavy and sharp-edged, though to your eyes she looks exactly like what they called her–normal.

Not normal, you whisper hoarsely, hardly able to utter such blasphemy. You begin to sob, thinking of all the ways in which your lives will be more difficult, thinking of all the things–the sleepovers and soccer games–she will likely be excluded from.

Perfect, Mari says, embracing you both. She’s perfectly not normal.

You can’t cradle Ani to your chest without her stabbing you with numerous invisible spikes, or lashing you with what feels like a heavy, corded tail. Still, you let her hurt you as she shifts her edges, both of you helpless to the uncontrollable muscle spasms of infancy.

* * *

You and Mari stretch your lives to fit around Ani.

You stretch your strength and your patience and your hearts.

Both of you take turns: feeding her, working outside the house, big spoon/little spoon, falling apart, being strong.

It’s hard but, looking into Ani’s face, it’s worth it. You touch the tiny curve of her ears, the little button nose, those lips so perfectly formed. Mari, passed out beside you, doesn’t see the sleeping smiles, doesn’t feel the tightening grip of what seem to be tentacles wrapping around your wrist, possessively.

It’s hard, but you hope Ani holds onto you this way forever.

* * *

Ani’s appendages grow bigger with her. No one else can see them, not even Mari, but sometimes you catch a glimpse of them, waving around the child’s head or bobbing near her feet, more and more as she gets older–ghosting images with slowly darkening lines.

At six months old, Ani doesn’t fit in the car-seat.

At three years old, she doesn’t fit in the car–you accidentally slammed one of her unseen arms in the door, and she screamed.

Such cries, they ripped you apart. Not another car ride after that.

It’s cheaper to walk anyway, Mari said, mustering a smile.

You think in a few more years she won’t fit in the house. What then?

* * *

You are afraid. You’ve always been afraid.

Ani is more than you, more than Mari–do you dare to whisper, more than human?

She’s six years old now, and she watches the stars often, captivated. It’s the only time her appendages are still, her lines constant. She tilts her little head to the side as if listening.

You take her hand in yours, sitting beside her on the apartment steps. Her fingers are chill and unresponsive; you squeeze, and a slight, distracted smile flits on her lips.

You are not afraid of her being Other or being More.

You’re afraid of her leaving to search for others who are also More.

But how can you stop her? How can you make a permanent home for someone whose edges and shapes are constantly changing?

You can’t, Mari whispers.

She pulls you into her arms, giving Ani space and time to be alone. You fight Mari’s grasp, but she presses your head to her chest. You can’t, she says again.

I’m not ready, you cry into her shirt.

You will be, Mari says. We both will. We still have time.

You look to Ani, so small and casting such large, strange-shaped shadows, silhouetted by the moon. She is perfectly not normal, and she will break you, shatter you, before it’s all over, but you can’t find it in you to be angry.

Only, somehow, grateful.

LAST column, I told the tale of why you should always get paid and why a lot of micro-presses are horrible. The “sale” of my second story was a pyrrhic victory, and not really a sale, so there I was with two pathetic credits on my cover letters. How long would it be until I sold another story?

Let’s pick up where I left off, in the Gutters of 2002:

• In 2001 I graduated with an MA in War Studies and began contract work at the Royal Military College in Course Development. Which is a fancy way of saying I made photocopies of academic articles for ten-pound reading guides and basically did the crap jobs my boss wouldn’t touch. Worse, she spoke to me like I was a six-year-old kid on Romper Room (and yes, that’s DoBee . . . the Bee).
• By demonstrating to everyone else that I knew a lot about, you know, history, I was lifted from gopher to research assistant. I worked for two great historians creating distance-learning courses for the Canadian Forces. It was awesome! I wrote lectures and essays! I got paid! I put my MA where my mouth was! But I was smacked by a cold fact: I would always be fighting for scraps of work unless I had a doctorate (OH THE IRONY!)
• Winter, I was dispatched to Fleet School, Quebec, to teach the Canadian Navy about the history of technology. The class revolted on the second day due to overwork from their program (the story is detailed in my short essay for the James Jones Literary Society Journal). Worse, despite agreeing with their arguments, I had to find a way to make the class work. My secret? Lead by example. I got them resources, worked harder than they did, slept less than they did, ate with them every day and doubled my office hours, and more. I pulled them out of their funk to a solid grade point average before they vanished with gratitude. One thanked me later when they started doctoral work. When I showed up in Halifax the next year to do the same thing, another former student saw me at a Tim Horton’s. “Oh god no,” he said, loud as a Klaxon, “Ridler’s back!”
• I also started a column at the oldest continues newspaper in Canada. “Ridler’s Morning Rictus” was where I, “Kingston’s most eligible bachelor,” discussed wrestling, punk rock, and horror novels and more . . . until every staff writer complained that I was plucking from their field (sports, entertainment, etc.). After a single, glorious column, RMR was canceled. I, however, remained the city’s most eligible bachelor for years.

And I was writing. During my break from grad school (2001-2003), I wrote a novel called Trinity of Mirrors . . . a name that served no other purpose other than sounding cool (kinda like how you think naming your band Fart Wagon is awesome . . . until you sober up). ToM was so awful that, somewhere around the 150 page mark, our hero, a kid named Digger, is running through a cemetery. Digger turns around, looks at me, Jay Ridler, the writer, and remarks, “why the fuck am I running around a cemetery? There’s no one chasing me! None of this shit makes sense!”

The novel collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity (a grand tradition among writers). With a notebook in hand, I sat at The Copper Penny restaurant, ate spiced fries and began again. I learned to outline, create detailed histories and character sketches. And I started to write the whole fucker again from the top. As 2002 crashed into 2003, I’d re-drafted my novel Chains of Bone (much better title, still an awful book). It was basically an angry letter to Guy Gavriel Kay for what I saw as a pathetic ending for my favorite character in his novel Tigana. And it was also about Latvian werewolves, or “men with wolf eyes”, who are kind of boring except for the fact that once they give their word, they never break it. I found out about them after reading eccentric clergy man and folklore junkie Montague Summers book Werewolves. Which, as we all know, is “all documented, all true.”

For shits and giggles, I also wrote short stories, about one-per-month.

All were rejected. The novel. The stories. Even a stray poem. Nothing came close. I was still writing garbage after two-plus years. And yet I kept trying to get better, but I had no idea if it was happening.

2003 was a year of plus ça change. I’d decided to go back to grad school . While doing the PhD, I’d focus on writing short stories after cranking out another novel and a half (I’m anything if not reckless and speedy).  So as that year unfolded, the gutters ate up my year:

• I selected Dr. Omond Solandt as the subject of my doctoral thesis, and began course work in my fields of War and Technology, Cold War History (International Dimensions), and War and Literature. I had initially taken Canadian Defence Policy and worked with future Chief of the Army Major-General Andrew Leslie along with an assembly of nutty and talented grad students and old soldiers, but switched to War and Literature when my instructor, John Marteinson (he of the iron handshake) was diagnosed with terminal cancer and unavailable. John was one of few people in academia who championed my pursuit of a writing career alongside history. I believe his comment was “anyone who tells you to abandon literature is already defeated. They have nothing to tell you that matters.”
• Was shot to Halifax to teach the Navy again (see above), and lived for two months in the Cambridge Suites Hotel like a king, doing karate in the weight room, goofing off at the Ale House, and learned how to play blue grass finger-picking from a talented Celtic guitarist and singer from Cape Breton.
• Learned that the urban legend about “Friday Night Singles” in Halifax (where wives of sailors take off their wedding ring and pretend to be single while their hubby is on ship) . . . had some truth in it!
• I spent oodles of time and money at Strange Adventures Comic Book Shop, befriending the staff (who did competitive Alan Moore impressions!), and thinking deep on how to write comic books from some killer interview books.
• Continued my streak of eating Life Cereal for breakfast, unabated, since I was fifteen.

And I wrote a lot of short stories.

They all got rejected. All three novels, too. Two years, and no new sales, let alone one that paid. 

I did receive one nice note from the late George Scithers at Weird Tales about my short story “Blood and Sawdust”,  a story that would eventually be sold and become the novel of the same name . . . but not that year! That year B&S was still riding the rails, looking for work, and getting a fistful of nothing as it traveled from slushpile to slushpile like the Littlest Hobo . . .   

2004 rolled around and that shitty “sale” from two years ago was starting to gnaw at me like a starved chipmunk that prefers the taste of flesh to nuts (rim shot!). So I kept writing while the gutters filled yet again with crazy crap:

• I read most of Hemingway’s war literature for my comprehensive exams, as well as the killer five-volume bio written by Michael Reynolds. Taught me a lot about dialog, action, theme, omission, and compression.
• I was surviving off my online classes when, that Fall, someone overspent my department’s budget by an order of magnitude. The Ombudsmun laid the smack down on all online classes until the mess was fixed. ALL THE WORK I HAD PLANNED FOR THE YEAR WAS CANCELLED. $15K vanished before my eyes. In shock, and desperate for cash, I did something I swore I’d never do . . .
• . . . I returned to retail after five years free of saying “would you like a bag with that?” I am forever in debt to Oscar Malan at Novel Idea bookstore for hiring me when he didn’t need an extra hand. I worked the Saturday morning and Monday night shifts everyone hated, paid bills while I read a lot of books at the desk and got a killer discount for all my grad school books. Plus, the staff was a ragtag bunch of misfits, anarchists, slackers, retirees, high school students, and me! Any job that let me play Tom Waits while I read James Jones  was a precious job indeed.
• My academic supervisors, hearing of my plight, threw research work at me. I still remember the head of the program saying “Your College may have failed you, but your program won’t.” I’m indebted to Brian McKercher, David Last, Sean Maloney and Mike Hennessy for finding enough scraps of work to allow me to continue my studies.

Still terrified about cash, I also harassed those that still liked me at the Kingston Whig Standard to let me write a five-day serialized Halloween story (so no one would think I was dipping into their non-fic fields). . . and they agreed!

Better? They paid me $500.00 for a 3500 story, or, better than pro rates in fiction magazines).

I broke my two-year publication drought and made BANK . . . all without submitting to a magazine.

And why?

BECAUSE OF ALL THE SHIT IN MY LIFE THAT WAS NOT WRITING!

Sure, I was also writing. That’s a given. That’s the LEAST I could have called upon. But that alone didn’t produce that story. Experience, connections, circumstance, creating opportunities outside the norm, and rising to the occasion when it mattered all added to the mix. These factors, braced by my drive to improve, created an idea that became a reality. And, I might add, in the nick of time!

What happened next was natural: a soap opera actress from The Young and the Restless liked one of my stories . . . and what happened next change my life forever!

HAHAHAHA! Well, one part of the above is true. Which one? Find out, next month, as I continue to drag you through The Gutters!

Until then, go buy Jay’s latest novel with a brand new cover, A TRIUMPH FOR SAKURA, which award-winning writer and editor Nancy Kilpatrick called “Hunger Games, Fight Club and True Blood rolled into one bloody good novel.” BUY IT NOW, BE HAPPY FOREVER!