Rest In Peace Alondra

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 was one of the worst days of my life. The night before, my niece Ali and her boyfriend Zack had gone on a date to Reno, NV (they lived in Fernley, NV, just outside of Reno).  They had come home around 10:30pm.  At some point between then and Midnight, they both passed away due to carbon monoxide poisoning.  My sister found them around midnight.  My older nephew informed my father and me around 2am on Wednesday.

There was shock.  There still is.  For most of the week I thought about all the things she'll never get to do or try to be.  Simple things like never going to Senior Prom.  Never getting to drive on her own.  Never getting to go to college. Never getting married. Having her own kids. And on and on.

Ali was a sweet, gentle girl who nonetheless had a core of strength inside her. Tell her she couldn't do something and she'd show you she could.

She was always smiling and loved to laugh and sing.  She loved her friends and had many.  Always outgoing, she made friends easily. And she wanted her family to share her friends, too.

I'll miss you Ali. You were the kindest, sweetest niece an uncle could ever want.

Why Han Shot First

A few of my posts have been started by something I read on Twitter.  This is one of those posts.

Earlier today somebody on Twitter posted the idea that it didn't matter that Han Solo shot first or last in whichever version of A New Hope you've seen. (I'm old enough that I saw the original in 1977 in a theater and Han shot first.)

However, from a character standpoint it does actually matter.  Han Solo is not a hero.  He's barely an anti-hero. He is a mercenary who works for the highest bidder.  The entire negotiation scene between him and Ben Kenobi in the Mos Eisley Cantina makes this clear. He's only interested in taking Luke, Ben and the droids as passengers if the price is right.  After that he's all smiles.

Almost immediately Han is accosted by Greedo, one of Jabba The Hutt's tough guys.  The scene that follows shows Han feeling out Greedo.  Maybe he can be schmoozed or bribed.  When it becomes apparent that Greedo is out to gun Han down, he takes matters in to his own hands and shoots first.  It isn't a heroic act and it fits Han's personality at this point.

Everything that Han says and does in the movie is pragmatic and self-serving almost until the end when he shows up and distracts Darth Vader, allowing Luke to make the shot that destroys the Death Star.  And even then that act only happens because Chewbacca coerces Han. (This is made clear in the semi-canon Star Wars radio play.)

The point of all this is that Han Solo is not a nice guy at the beginning of the story.  He isn't particularly nice at the end, either, but he's pragmatic.  Shooting first is pragmatism.  Waiting to be shot at is heroic.  And Han at that moment is not heroic.  That scene weakens the arc Han goes through in Star Wars.

I didn't have a lot of problems with the changes George Lucas made to the Original Trilogy.  Some of them were silly (parts of the Mos Eisley sequence in particular) but some of them actually helped the movie without getting in the way of the plot (the way Cloud City was opened up and made to feel larger).  However, having Han shoot first immediately felt wrong.  I understand the logic but I knew when I first saw it that it was the wrong change to make.

I stand by that.

Dragon Zombies

Sometimes you get ideas because of something someone says.  Or something you say.  Or something you hear.  This is from the middle case.  Chatting with the #WritersRoad group on Twitter Monday led to the idea of zombies riding dragons.  Zombies. Riding dragons.  So here's that idea in the... flesh.

Dragon Zombies

They rode.

Dark skies masked their movement, giving them the appearance of shadows flashing across the clouds.  Their destination still several miles away, the riders called to each other in whooping shouts, their voices cracking and booming like thunder.

She stood on the wall as she had every three nights for the last two years.  The others saw her as young and still green.  There had been a few skirmishes she'd been involved in, but nothing that could be considered her blooding.  She shivered as the wind came up, hugging herself and stamping her feet to try and keep warm.  Her leathers would defend her but they did little to warm her.

She looked in to the cloudy dark sky, looking for something she wasn't sure what it was.  A feeling of dread made her shiver again, fear creeping up her spine.  Then she heard them.  The steady whumph whumph whumph of giant wings beating the air.

"Miri!" she called down to her comrade on the ground.  "Dragons!"

Miri stared in to the dark, searching for the sign she was sure Keredith had heard.  Whumph!  Whumph! Whumph!  The beating of the air grew louder and closer.

"Aye," Miri breathed.  "Dragons."  She ran the several yards to the signal bell faster than she'd run any distance in her life.  She reached up and yanked on the thick rough rope, ringing the bell for all she was worth.  "Dragons!" she called.

"Dragons!"

They rode.

Torches lit the village below.  Torches lit the way to the treasure they sought.  Riches for the beasts and flesh for the riders.  Confident in their ability to lay waste to the village before any true resistance could be raised, the riders coaxed their mounts into a slow, leisurely circling dive toward the ground.  The slaughter would be fantastic.

The militia roused quickly.  They'd trained for this.  They'd drilled and practiced and sweat and bleed for this.  Now they waited.  Waited for the moment.  The moment when the dragons would be upon them and they would fight with all their will and strength.

Miri surveyed the lines of archers, the first defense against the winged beasts and their decrepit riders.  She hoped they would be able to thin the flyer's ranks some before the fighting began in earnest.  The rest of the fighters, young and old alike, waited behind those lines, huddled behind walls and makeshift bunkers.  Swords, spears and pikes gleamed in the firelight, grim faces already streamed with sweat.  The waiting was excruciating.

"Here they come!" yelled the archer's commander.  "Ready!  Take aim!  Fire!"

A volley of fifty arrows flew from the bows, the archers ducking down to let the second line rise up, aim and loose their shafts at the oncoming dragons.  Miri watched as the arrows flew home, most of them glancing off the beasts armored hides.  She heard some cries of pain, though.  Some of the archers had aimed not for the beasts but for the riders.  It would do little good, Miri knew.  The riders didn't fall to a few arrows.  It would take fire and salt and what few acids they could muster to truly kill the riders.

The archers were able to loose two more volleys each before the dragons were on them.

"Attack!" her commander called out, his voice cracking with strain.

The flesh fought back because that was what the living did.  They fought because life was in them.  They fought because the unliving frightened them.  So be it.  They were food.  Let them be food.

The riders dismounted quickly, their blackened weapons slicing at the living with wild abandon.  They had little worry of being killed by the flesh.  The flesh would all die eventually.  And then the feasting would begin.

Swing, duck, slash, punch, kick, swing again.  Three of the living went down in a matter of seconds.  More fell like wheat before a scythe.  Blows fell on the bodies of the unliving to little effect.  Some of the living had lit their weapons aflame.  It mattered little.  The unliving feared fire, but not enough to stop their progress.  The flesh would die.

The creatures kept coming.  The dragons were trying to set the people and the buildings alight.  It was simply luck on the part of the people that stone didn't readily burn.  Thatch could be and would be replaced.  The rest would stand.  Blackened, perhaps, but it would stand.

Keredith swung her blade in quick, sharp arcs across the front of her body, trying to keep the three abominations from flanking her.  Sweat clouded her vision but she didn't need to see very well to know where the enemy were.  Their moans and growls were enough to let her know they were seconds from breaking through her defense.

There was a thump and a whoosh as someone threw lighted oil at her assailants.  Their growls turned to screams as they ignited and burned.  Keredith saw her opening and dodged around the creatures and ran to find some oil of her own.

The flesh was fighting back.  The flesh was winning.  The flesh had learned to keep its fear in check.  This was unexpected.  The unliving thrived on the fear.  The fear drove the living to panic and the panic sweetened the meal.  Something had happened.  Something had gone horribly wrong.

All around the smell of burning rotting flesh rose in to the air.  The dragons had retreated.  They could easily flame the living but they knew their masters preferred the meat unchared.  The smell was wrong.  The fight was wrong.  The flesh was wrong.  It had gone wrong.

Still, the unliving fought.  What could they do.  The living were their cattle.  The living had to die to feed them.  That was how it had alway been and would always be.

Miri slashed at her attacker with a lit blade, severing the creature's hand at the wrist.  It dropped the dirk it had been threatening her with and screamed.  The pain caused it to run at her and she drove the point of her short blade in to its belly, slicing upward as they closed the distance between them.  The creature flopped to the ground, howling.  Miri stepped on half of its chest and hacked at its neck with her blade.  It took several seconds, but Miri was able to behead the thing and move on.

And move on she did.  By now the remaining fighters had opted for some form of fire.  Mostly oiled blades lit in flame, but also a few torches and many thrown flasks of flaming oil and pitch.  Miri had chosen the flaming blade.  It allowed her to remain quick while hurting her opponents with every strike almost no matter where she hit.

The creatures were thinning.  There were still too many of them to think the fight was over, but it was slowing.  Miri had more time to breathe between each engagement.  She saw Keredith fighting her own battle a few yards away and then saw another creature closing on the girl, trying to flank her.  Miri moved, her already tired legs burning with the effort.  She crossed the distance quickly and came up behind the second creature.  Rather than try to turn it, Miri simply pulled her flaming blade across its throat from behind.  The sword bit deep and cut through three-quarters of the creature's neck before it had  a moment to react.  It didn't even have time to scream.  One final pull of the blade and Miri jumped back as its head flopped to the ground.  She then slashed at Keredith's other enemy, attempting to take its legs from beneath it.  She knew this would be an effective ploy on a living creature but didn't stop to think how one of the unliving would fare.

As it turned out, not well at all.  The creature still tried to crawl at Keredith, but she had the upper hand now, her blade falling quickly and repeatedly on the creature's skull, smashing it to bits, brains flying everywhere.

A cry went up in to the night.  The unliving were done here.  They had to retreat.  The dragons moved to the perimeter of the village, gouts of flame penning the flesh in.  Flaming arrows flew.  Most of these were ineffective, though a few found their targets in escaping unliving.  The screams of the beasts and their masters filled the night as they rose in to the air, flying away from the rout as quickly as their wings would carry them.  The flesh had won this night.  There would be others.  And the flesh would lose.  In the end the flesh always lost.

Baaad Little Kitties

     Yesterday @NikiBrandyberry on Twitter posted something about having to read about three little kittens to children.  The exchange that followed spawned the following little story.

      It was just getting dark as we made our way down the hole that led outside.  Mom would have preferred we stay in tonight, but she knew the score.  There was hunting to do and we were the ones to do it.

BAAAD LITTLE KITTIES

     Mom had told us early on about the expectations we would have to live up to.  We'd come from a long line of hunters, some famous and some unknown to all but a very few.  We, Mom had told us back then, were three who would make a difference in the world, even as young as we were, kittens maybe five or six months old.  We didn't know and neither did Mom.  We weren't full grown yet because we weren't as big as she was.

     We popped up from under the house in to the failing light of the day.  We'd all taken longer than usual naps today since we knew we'd be up most of the night.  Mom stood watch over us while we slept.  If any of the humans came around she'd distract them by rubbing against their legs and mewling.  The things she did for us.

      We stopped once we'd come up from under the house and sniffed the air.  The town was filled with scents.  Some familiar (the boy across the street, his dog, the old jalopy that raced up and down the street on weekends) and others were new.  It was these new ones, or ones them that grabbed our attention.  We headed off across the yard and climbed up the fence.  Then we made our way to the front of the house and the town beyond.

     "Smell that?" Boots asked, her whiskers twitching excitedly.

     "Yeah!" and excited Patches said, eyes bright.  "Let's get 'em, Bear!"

     Rats.

     Not just rats, though.  Those were easy, unless they got to you with numbers.  These were zombie rats.  Dead, desiccated, rotting rats.  The only good thing about them was the literal lack of brains.

     I'm Bear.  (I hate that name.)  Where Patches is a calico and Boots has the white paw markings on her otherwise gray coat, I'm a sort of nondescript off-white color.  I'm not that big, but my fur is long and fluffy and reminded somebody of a bear.  So, it stuck.  I want to puke every time I hear it.  Not the time for lamenting, I remind myself.

     We prowl along the street in the direction of the scent, whiskers flicking, tails tall and straight, following the rats.  We had time.  They weren't too fast.  We were quicker.

     Patches ran ahead of Boots and me, excited for the hunt and the kill.  He really should stick with us, but he could handle himself.  Patches had been in more than a few scraps he knew what the stakes were.  Us or them.

     He waited at the entrance to the alley the scent had led us to, looking back, teeth bared.  We caught up a few moments later and the three of us looked around the corner as one.

     It was rats.  Half a dozen of them.  They'd cornered a human girl.  It was hard to guess her age, but she was young, probably shouldn't have been out at night without her parents.  The rats her close to her, starting to climb up her shoes.  She smelled of fear and sweat.  The rats smelled worse.  We quickly looked at each other, nodding.  In a flash we were in action.

     I moved in on two of the zombie rats.  Did I mention they didn't have much of a brain left?  It didn't register with these rats that we weren't also rats come to joining the party.  SLASH!  SLASH!  My claws ripped through the first one cutting it in to bloody pieces.  Two more slashes and the zombie was dispatched.  I had a few seconds so I glanced at my siblings.  Patches had already shredded one of the rats in to tiny bloody pieces and was stalking the other one.  Boots was likewise finishing off the first of her rats and eyeing the second one hungrily.

     Assured that my brother and sister had things in paw, I launched myself at my other rat.  This one had a bit more brains than usual, and wasn't going to go down easy.  He dodged my first two attacks, so I decided on another tactic, leaping in to the air and landing on his back, slashing with my front claws and then raking him with my rear claws as I lept off the rat, spinning in midair to land just in front of my adversary.  He launched himself at me but was too sluggish.  I dodged to my left and then launched myself in to the air again, coming down on the rat's back and wrapping my front paws around his neck  and flipping on to my back to rake him with my rear claws again.  One, two, three rakes and the rat let out a pained squeal with each, the last one dying away quickly.  I raked him twice more to be sure he was dead then I rolled over, dropped him to the ground and took a look at the other two.

     Patches has his second rat in his mouth and was worrying it vigorously.  I could hear bones and tendons snapping as he went.  A second later he let the rat go and it flew across the alley, dead.

     Boots liked to torment her prey and this rat was no exception.  She was batting it between her front paws, teeth bared as the dazed creature squeaked with each hit.  Tired of this game, she took the rat in her mouth and bit down hard, snapping its neck.  As Patches had done, Boots flung the rat across the alley.

     As one we turned to the young girl who had been the rat's victim.  Her fear was still apparent, but amazement had joined it, the emotions warring across her face.  We strode up to her and began to rub against her legs.  Humans liked that.

     "Good kitties", she said, reaching down to pet us.  Her fear was nearly gone.  She glanced at her watch and gasped.  "I gotta get home."  She ran out of the alley and down the street.  We followed her, keeping our distance.  Once she reached her door and was greeted by her distraught parents, we settled in to cleaning ourselves, getting the stench of zombie from our fur and bits of flesh from our claws.

     Then we set out on our way.  The night was young and there was still good hunting to be had.

What Makes The Anti-Hero Tick?

@Lexcade on Twitter was wondering about the line between villain and anti-hero.  Where it was and how it was defined.  So, with my vast experience as a reader (yeah, right) I thought I'd take a shot at it.

A villain is someone who is doing whatever he is doing for personal gain no matter the cost to anyone around him.  A villain can be a bank robber or a megalomaniac bent on ruling the world. The defining point is that the character doesn't care about anyone beside himself and his goals. He'll torture, maim and kill anyone who gets in his way as he reaches for his goal.  He may or may not be sane but he is always focused on his goal.

Examples are the various Bond villains (especially the ones from the Sean Connery era), The Batman villain Joker, Superman villain Lex Luthor and Harry Potter bad guy Voldemort.  They're all focused on their goals and they're all willing to kill to get what they want.

A hero is a selfless individual who looks out for the safety and well-being of others.  He'll put his own life on the line to save a total stranger, not because he stands to gain from it, but because it's the right thing to do. The hero attempts at every turn to do no harm to bystanders and to limit damage to personal property.  He is a "boy scout" to varying degrees.

Examples of the true hero include just about every superhero from the 1940s on (there are some exceptions and we'll get to those), Joe Friday in Dragnet and just about any character played by John Wayne (again, there are exceptions).

So there's the range from bad guy to good guy.  In between we have the anti-heroes.  Their reasons for doing what he does, for saving damsels (or dudes) in distress vary greatly.  They are almost always characters who go against the grain, who have their own methods for getting things done and who tend to not stand for bureaucratic b.s.  They are often loners, usually because they feel the world doesn't understand them and that it's better to be alone than with people that they feel uncomfortable around.

Anti-heroes, unlike the villains, usually has a code to live by.  Most often this code involves what they won't do to get the job done. For example Batman has a hard and fast code against killing no matter who the person might be. Wolverine of the X-Men has a general code against harming children, going as far as telling the young Katie Power (of the Power Pack) to keep her eyes closed so she won't see him effectively disembowel the villain trying to hurt them both.

Examples of the anti-hero include Batman and Wolverine as mentioned above, Marvel Comics' Punisher, certain incarnations of James Bond, the Sylvester Stallone character John Rambo, John McClain from the Die Hard movies, and pretty much every other action hero who doesn't fit in to the true hero camp.

So, where's the line?  Essentially this: an anti-hero is a hero but without the need to uphold the law or be beholden to anyone.  The anti-hero gets the job done. It may require a high body count, it may require a great deal of visceral violence and it will probably require a few well-placed quips, but the job will get done.  An anti-hero is not a villain because, unlike the villain, the anti-hero cares if someone innocent gets hurt in the crossfire.  The anti-hero can seem to be a villain (the Punisher started out as a Spider-Man villain) but never crosses the line into being purely evil.

Sean Connery's James Bond may throw an electric heater in to a bathtub full of water, killing the henchman through electrocution, but he won't put a bystander danger of his own accord and will, in fact, go out of his way to avoid hurting people who aren't involved in his fight.

John McClain may kill hundreds of the villain's henchmen, but he won't fire in to a crowd because he might injure or kill a civilian.

Anti-heroes will work outside of the establishment if the establishment gets in their way but they'll always come back to the fold in the end because the establishment represents what's right even if it is a pain in the ass.

Boiling it down to its core the thing that sets an anti-hero apart from a villain is the anti-hero's desire to do the right thing. Save the hostages, capture the bad guy, uncover the corruption, whatever it is. The anti-hero is heroic without having to be the boy scout.

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?  I started this blog as a way to post flash fiction. That lasted for two posts. The question I have rolling around in my brain is what to do with it now? Does it become a personal blog? A blog about writing? Maybe a bit of all that?

Here's the thing: all of the blogs/journals I've had on the Internet have been places to vent frustration about the world around me. This is true of my personal offline journals as well. The time when I feel the urge to write things down is when the world has gotten me down. As much as I've tried to write about the good things that have gone on (and there have been a few of those over the years) but it doesn't last. I suppose I'm too happy at the time and writing about it doesn't occur to me.

But I'm going to try. I'm going to try to make a point of writing the good things and the bad things that happen.

Life


Dad spent Christmas in the hospital with pneumonia and a blood clot in his lungs. (Pneumonia in one and the clot in the other.) Got the pneumonia cleared up but had to wait over a week for the anticoagulant to build up enough so they could send him home.  (Quick background:  Dad had a tumor in his lung two years ago, went through radiation and chemotherapy and that tumor is gone, then they found another one at the beginning of last year and a procedure called Gamma Knife Radiation (essentially a extremely focused beam to cut out the tumor). That tumor is also now gone, or at least very hard to find when they do the PET scans they've been doing.

Work is work. I work at Target primarily as the Key Team Member for Signing. I prepare the silly little signs for every weeks Sunday Circular. If I'm lucky I work on the salesfloor one or two days a week. Some weeks I actually get enough hours that I can almost pay my bills. As New Year starts I may or may not have to go back on partial Unemployment to make ends meet. We'll see.

Writing


I put the current Work In Progress on the back burner during the holidays. Mostly because the holidays in retail are Hell x 100.  I intend to get back to it fairly soon. Probably in the next week or so. I'm at a good stopping point, though, so getting back in won't be a problem. I'm hoping to have the first draft done by maybe March or April depending on how much time I have. Then revision time begins. If I'm lucky I'll get the whole thing done and done by June or July.

Other Stuff


Behind the scenes I'm also a gamer. Right now I'm playing Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG. It's an impressive game, fully voice-acted with lots and lots of story stuff. There's still a lot of the "Kill x of y" quests, but they come as bonus missions along with the main quest.  Bioware, it seems, realized that the player is going to kill those guys anyway so there didn't need to be a large number of that type of quest.

I've also started playing the new Elder Scrolls game Skyrim. Like the other games in the series it's a open world game where you can go just about anywhere and do anything you want.  I've only played about two hours of it, but I'll get back in to it at some point.

I also play quite a few games on my iPod Touch and right now I'm addicted to the new Bejeweled and it's Diamond Mine mode.  A different challenge and it's actually a lot of fun.

I don't read much anymore.  I do listen to quite a few audiobooks, though.  It's a different way of consuming both ficiton and non-fiction and it allows me to do other things while I'm listening.  I may sometimes have to listen to a book more than once to get everything out of it, but I do that with movies and music, too.  At the moment I'm listening to Star Wars books based on the Old Republic game.  They're fun and have some interesting ideas in them.  The reader has a bad habit of mispronouncing words to an annoying degree (this, to me, is a problem that can be solved by a good director) but the overall stories are fun and not too heavy.

So, that's that. I'll try to post updates at least once a week. No promises. Have a good week!

BDCWB Flash Fiction Challenge #2 Entry

Childhood Lost

The storm clouds made her nervous.

They had gathered in the early morning before sunrise and had slowly moved across the fields and threatened rain.

She had been playing in the fields as she did most days. School had been out for almost a month and she'd been allowed to do as she pleased unless her mother or father needed her. She tended to stay within earshot of the house. Close enough that her parents could find her but far enough that the sprites wouldn't be afraid.

The sprites were the reason she liked the fields. They had a home in an elderly oak tree that sat in the field. Her father had talked about cutting it down several times over the last few years, but he had never done more than talk. The sprites knew her and would come out of the tree's branches like so many fireflies, drifting on the breeze.

They weren't much for playing, actually, but they liked to talk and they liked to hear about the world beyond the fields. She told them about school and Mrs. Stephenson, her teacher, and about Sparky her dog. Sparky had even come to the tree with her once but all he'd done was bark and that frightened the sprites. She told them her hopes and dreams. How she wanted to get married some day and be a famous musician or maybe a movie star.

The sprites listened to all of her stories, often making comments and suggestions or joking about how they thought a person looked or talked. They hadn't been too far off with Old Man Thompson.

Sometimes they brought her presents. Flowers or small stones. She took them graciously and kept them in a small wooden box in her room, hidden under her bed.

'Let the storm come' she thought as she walked toward the oak tree after lunch (peanut butter and jelly and Fritos). Ominous as the clouds looked she was close enough to the house that she'd only get a little wet and her friends would keep her company until then. The summer was long and the day seemed endless.

Thunder cracked in the distance as she approached the tree.

A lone firefly sprite floated down from the tree.

"Go away," it said.

"But…" was all she managed before the thunder cracked directly overhead.

"Go away," the sprite repeated.

"Why?" she asked.

"This storm is unnatural. It will destroy you if you stay here. And you must survive."

She was used to the cryptic way the sprites talked, but something in the sound of its voice made her believe this sprite.

"Okay," she said, her voice almost a whisper.

She walked back to the house with her head hung low. She reached the screen porch at the back of the house, climbed the stairs and turned to look out over the fields and the oak tree beyond. Lightning arced across the sky, splitting the tree in two.

She cried for days afterward.