"A Dream to Fill the Earth"

Note: The following piece was written as part of the flash fiction challenge "Wake Up, Writing Monster" hosted by B. Nagel. Audio of the story was recorded as part of Peter Dudley's concomitant "Voice Thing" challenge. To listen to the recording, click the widget at the end of the story or visit ISLF's Soundcloud.com page.

John's nightly janitorial route always took him last to the corner office of Randall Templeton III on the twenty-four floor of the Beverly Heights City Center. As he dumped Farnsworth Templeton LLP's final full trash can into his fifty-gallon Rubbermaid, an opalescent globe little bigger than a quail's egg tumbled out.

"Huh," he said into the 4 a.m. silence.

The globe glowed softly in the fluorescents' ambient light. He plucked it up, brushed it clean. Then as he wheeled the collected refuse to the service elevator, he slipped it into his pocket without even thinking.

As it did most every day, the downtown bus line carried John nearly to the doorstep of his tiny duplex unit. His wife, Anne, clad in khakis and a Continental Café polo, opened the door before he knocked, proffering a cup of joe. Ignoring the corn flakes before her, Helene kicked Goodwill-sneaker-clad feet while proclaiming how the entire first-grade class would be going to the zoo in a few weeks, and would daddy chaperone, please, please, pleeeeeeeze?

John said he would. He praised the integrity of Anne's brew. He told them he loved them, but be needed to sleep before his eyes turned into raisins. Anne shooed him toward the bedroom, where he emptied the contents of his pockets onto the dresser. Sliding under the covers, he heard their laughter fade into the bustle of the waking day.

Then he heard something crack.

He sat up.

"Hello," a voice said.

A small, furry head poked from gleaming shards on the dresser.

"What are you?" John asked.

Ink-drop eyes blinked. "Why, I'm your Dream."

John blinked back. He'd never planned for ammonia and mops to become the tools of his trade. Once Selectric typewriters and Parisian cafes had filled his thoughts of the future. But when Anne became pregnant on their honeymoon, literary ambition surrendered to paying the power bill.

"Really?" John asked.

The Dream smiled a broad smile filled with tiny teeth. "Why not put it to a test?"

So John found himself at the kitchen table with pad and pen, the Dream on his shoulder, cleaning its claws. It was a small thing, no bigger than John's thumb.

John shook his head, his mind a perfect blank. "Yeah, I've got nothing. I really should sleep."

"Try for my sake."

So John tried, and soon enough he lost himself in scratching out and stringing together sentences, ignoring the increasing complaints from his aching eyes and straining bladder. Before he knew it he had a rough chapter about an expartriate novelist named Charleston struggling to compose in a Marseilles garret.

"Ugh," he exclaimed when he finally looked up, "it's one. Work starts in five hours.' He glanced at the Dream. "Hey. You look bigger."

The Dream smacked its lips. "I love a little time."

The next week passed in an increasingly muzzy disorientation. John fell into a rhythm of stumbling home at dawn, scribbling down scenes until he couldn't stay upright, snatching some sleep and dragging back to work. The entire time the Dream rode his shoulder, whispering literary admonitions, which John would jot down on a pad. Though it was now about the size of a parrot, no one seemed to notice it.

But he soon learned someone had noticed the change in his habits.

The trill of the phone jerked John from a dream about Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd. begging to represent him.

"Hello?" John said.

"Johnny," said Marcus Miliband, manager of Glow Shine LLC franchise no. 59. "I've had complaints."

He unspooled the list with vigor. The lobby level bathroom stank like spoiled eggs. The break room microwave was developing a baked-on strata of exploded lunches. And no one could find a single packet of Glow ‘n' Go brand coffee anywhere in the building.

"Who'd even drink it?" John asked.

"Don't like that your job involves coffee service? Tough. Do it or find another -- capisce?"

The Dream stretched on the carpet, long as a golden retriever. "I adore inattention to detail."

There are only so many ways to slice a schedule. After the call, John sectioned his compositional time into smaller periods, taking advantage of ten-minute breaks and bus rides. But something had to give. He didn't think Anne and Helene noticed his mental absences during mealtimes and weekends. He wasn't writing that much.

"Daddy." A small hand tugged on his shirtsleeve. "Miss Johnson needs you to sign this."

John squinted at the indemnification form his daughter had slid in front of him. "Right. The zoo. Well, I'll look at it and --"

"But it's today."

John sighed and set down his pen. Today? How had he lost track so easily? "Sweetie, I'm sorry, but daddy's worn out."

Anne stopped spreading peanut butter on Roman Meal and fixed her husband with a steely glare. "John. You promised."

"I know, but work's killing me --"

"And you're wrapped up in your hobby."

"Hey, I deserve a little time to myself."

"You take more than a little."

"Please," Helene begged, "please stop fighting.

"We're just having a discussion," Anne said, taking the girl's hand. "We'll discuss this later," she added, shooting a loaded look at John. "Someone has to ensure our daughter makes it to school."

The front door clicked shut.

The early morning sunlight streaming through the windows disappeared as if obliterated by eclipse.

"Ah, alienation," the Dream rumbled.

"I can't do this," John said. "I'm exhausted."

The Dream shrugged massive shoulders. "That's what nicotine and caffeine are for."

"It could cost me my job."

The Dream flexed its talons. "Succeed and you won't need one."

"And my family."

The Dream smiled, a broad smile filled with finger-long teeth. "Child may fail thee, spouse assail thee, still remain within my fold. What else can you do? No matter the balance in his bank account, Templeton didn't enrich his life by forcing me to sleep."

John's hands began to tremble.

The Dream seemed to swell in size. "Fear is the sweetest thing."

John stared at the black-eyed creature, the thing that would fill his hours and days, his home and earth itself if it could until nothing else remained.

The pen clattered onto the tabletop.

"You don't want to do that," the Dream warned.

"No," John said, "you don't want me to."

He snatched up the permission slip and ran for the bus stop.

Today, John still empties Randall Templeton III's trash. His wife still buses tables. His daughter still wears secondhand shoes. Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd. still hasn't called. Something about six-inches tall still rides around on his shoulder, fed on thirty minutes a day and unnoticed by everyone else. Sometimes John still listens to it while he cleans. Sometimes he doesn't.

This disappoints the Dream. It wants so much more. Yet it knows John lacks only a chapter or two in a certain manuscript. Agents might follow and, perhaps, a signed contract.

And that, well, that comforts it.

A Dream to Fill the Earth by I Saw Lightning Fall

Britt Offers Two Takes on SF Violence

Ryan Britt engages in the old debate-team tradition of arguing both sides of an issue over at Tor.com. Initially, he states that science fiction movies need to purge themselves of narrative violence. Excerpts:

When I talk to people about my interest in science fiction I run into trouble when we start talking about movies. Do I like Star Wars? Sure, but outside any sort of argument of whether it is or is not actual science fiction, the thing about Star Wars that bugs me is the same thing that has been bothering a lot of SF fans for several decades now. Though entertaining, Star Wars created a slew of monsters: science fiction movies that are mostly shoot-em-up blockbusters full of mindless action violence. Why is the genre of unlimited imagination often so predictable at the cinema? ...

[T]he incredibly popular Matrix trilogy has at its core a very inventive concept concerning a real world versus a digital one. Which one is more preferable? Do we really have free will? But these cool ideas ultimately take the form of ridiculously trite speeches exposed by characters whose only real personality traits are their ability to shoot/chop at people. The problem of the action/violence in the Matrix movies is compounded by the fact that the stakes of said violence are dubious. When characters are granted physical powers previously reserved for video game characters, not only does the action/violence cease to be interesting, it betrays what its real purpose is: violence for violence's sake. Is this brand of violence any different than the goal of pornography? Should you stand for it in your science fiction?

Then Britt takes an opposing view, arguing that the genre needs violence for verisimilitude's sake. Excerpts:

Violence does indeed have a place in science fiction; so much so, that I would argue that much of science fiction actually needs violence. And the reason is that in order to be effective fiction, science fiction has to comment on the real world. ...

In a recent interview on The New Yorker's blog, author Mary Gaitskill commented on the way violence is incorporated into our lives and the creative process saying; "… most people sublimate the violence, are even able to use it in a creative way. There's an interesting and very terrible line between that sublimation and more overt expression, a line that gets dramatically crossed in wartime situations …" The act of sublimation seems to be the key here. If science fiction, or any fiction, tackles violence it would seem the route would need would to be an acknowledgement without a celebration.

For my part, I think Britt hits the proverbial ball out of the park on at least one point, namely that if violence exists in a story it needs to not titillate. For all the usual talk of artistic freedom, I think most storytellers realize theirs is a profoundly moral undertaking, one that shapes peoples' minds at a bedrock level. If violence steps onstage during storytelling, it ought to do so in a way that doesn't encourage base instincts.

(Picture: CC 2009 by erin m)

Blood Is a Bit Mixed

In the late nineties, I spent close to a month in three countries near Africa's tip, and my memories of each nation couldn't be more different. In Swaziland, I recall sipping sweet tea and eating oranges in a dirt courtyard behind a Reformed church. The scents of boiled sadza and stewing meat fill my thoughts of Zimbabwe. But when it comes to South Africa, I mostly remember the bars on the windows in Johannesburg and how every car seemed outfitted with a complicated key system to discourage vehicular theft. It's a rough city, and I only learned how close I came to disaster one night when recounting to an Afrikaner how a group of us got lost on the highway. He explained that a close friend of his had done the same and ended up dragged from his car, doused in gasoline and set ablaze. That sense of ever-present peril thoroughly informs Cape Town-based author Roger Smith's debut novel, Mixed Blood.

John Hill isn't John Hill's real name. Back in America, people once called him John Burn, and then he'd owned a successful business, the honor due a wartime veteran and a picture-perfect family. But as Hill, he's lost everything except his wife and child, and he's barely holding on to them. He thought immigrating to South Africa would keep a stateside criminal secret hidden, and at first it did -- until the two men turned up. A pair of drug-addled Cape Town gangsters broke into his new home, a random transgression, a thrill crime with no plan or purpose. Their mistake. Quick work with a carving knife removed the thugs from the equation, but now the calculus of John's expat life has gotten exponentially more complicated. Unable to go to the police because of his past, he tries to hide the bodies, which soon attracts the attention of a very corrupt cop and a fearsome killer who is himself quick with a blade.

Mixed Blood succeeds most in its portrayal of a stratified city whose social classes differentiate themselves not only by race and wealth, but also by how easily they can avoid violence. That doesn't prove particularly easy for even the most advantaged. In Smith's Cape Town, safety depends less on law than luck. It's an incendiary place where the violence can erupt from as small a matter as taking a wrong turn and where none of its inhabitants have clean hands. Indeed, a back-cover blurb perfectly sums up the novel's nuanced presentation of human depravity: "The bad guy is really bad -- but so are the good guys." Unfortunately, the book doesn't handle religious belief with the same light touch. In fact, Mixed Blood seems to propose an inverse relationship between virtue and piety, with the most believing characters descending to the blackest depths while skeptics avoid the worst degradations. A disappointment, as are a few lurches in the plot. Still, Smith satisfies with a noirish ending and an abrupt denouncement that hits like an enraged heavyweight. Blood may be a bit mixed, but it's a solid hardboiled thriller all the same.

(Picture: 2010 by cliff1066™)

Sans Support?

When Jeff VanderMeer told how he wrote a novel in a mere eight weeks, he explained that family support proved vital. "I can't tell you how easy Ann made this experience, since I rarely left the house and she did a lot of things I usually do for the household," he said on his blog. "I can't thank her enough for that, and I owe her big-time." Indeed, most professional authors name the backing of friends and loved ones as the bulwark that bolstered their success.

So what happens when an author doesn't have it?

Those close to me are, God bless them, awesome folks, kind and loving and gracious to a fault. Yet they rarely get my interest in genre fiction. In fact, it positively perplexes them. Futuristic speculation, fantastic dreaming, grim grotesquery -- at best they tolerate such things, at worst openly wonder why anyone would waste his time with them.

I don't think I'm alone in facing such skepticism. Fantasy, SF and horror hardly receive high praise from the culture at large. Even literary fiction seems to have slipped in perceived influence, moving from being the firer of men's hearts to residing in an academic backwater. Could it be that Plato was wrong, that we really don't need to exile the poets from the perfect republic because no one notices them much anyway?

Surely not. Narrative remains a powerful shaper of the mind, even if no one recognizes it as such. In his "Defence of Poetry," Shelley famously argued that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Perhaps we simply need to convince others of the truth of it.

(Picture: CC 2005 by Clearly Ambiguous)

Anders on Kids and Dark Classics

Charlie Jane Anders, editor of io9, considers when it's appropriate to allow children to watch classic dark movies. Excerpt:

How do you tell if your kid is ready for the hand-chopping Empire Strikes Back?

Not to mention a bunch of other genre classics that are for almost all ages, like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Or some recent superhero films. There are a bunch of movies, TV shows and graphic novels that are maybe just a little too scary, violent or sexy for little kids. And there's no exact rule of thumb for how old a kid needs to be before they're ready to watch some dark, scary material.

So we asked some experts, and here's what they told us.

Read the whole thing. The experts' advice falls all over the proverbial map, from being practical ("When in doubt, it's better to wait" and "watch it with your kid") to suspect ("One general rule: eight is the turning point") to entirely unhelpful ("Tons of shows and movies aimed at kids are dark and violent anyway"). It surprises me, though, that none of the experts advocated sitting children down for some careful analysis of what they've watched. During my college days, one English professor loved to fling around Wordsworth's flammable phrase "we murder to dissect" as a rebuke to those more given to explicating literature than experiencing it. And perhaps analysis sometimes does destroy the pathos of a work. But it can also provide both understanding and emotional insulation for sensitive little minds.

(Picture: CC 2008 by sean dreilinger)

Heller on How To Guard Against Online Distractions

Joseph Finder, author of Buried Secrets, talks about tools he uses to stay productive in an age of endless diversion. No bonus points for guessing that more than one is analog:



(Hat Tip: Brandywine Books)

Blount on How To Be a Matador With Words

In the May 14, 2011, edition of The Wall Street Journal, Roy Blount Jr., (Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text) talks about -- and exhibits! -- the delight one can find in playing with words

When we write, we work with what? Words.

Wow -- nine straight words beginning with W. "Just virtuosity," as the card shark played by Charles Coburn says in "The Lady Eve" after showing off an especially nifty false shuffle. "You don't really need it."

What I was doing was playing around. Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words. Letters, even: W, for example, though L and K are catchier. L leads you in and K connects. Why do you think young people say "like" so much?

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ. Sculpture, I told this person (although sculpture is something I know nothing about), is for people who like playing around with granite or automobile bumpers or quantities of chewed gum or whatever. Gardening is for people who like playing around with bulbs and dirt. Writing is for people who like playing around with words -- like "bulbs" and, let's say, "loam."

Read the whole thing. Right now I'm in the midst of multiple first drafts, facing two stories still in the wow-I've-seen-more-organization-in-a-post-party-frathouse state while knowing I have a third I really need to start if I want to make a particular deadline. To put it mildly, I dislike first drafts. Manuscripts that have rounded the fifth or sixth revision? Now those are a lot easier to get excited about, when stories feel more finished than not and crippling self-doubt doesn't threaten with every other sentence. But perhaps Blount offers an alternative to the grin-and-bear-it approach to early drafts -- play. Even bad writing isn't a chore when we're having fun (although Blount wisely urges us not to get to infatuated with our own diction: "I like a writer who gets off on words, but not one who gets off on getting off on words. That writer is out to impress more than to express").

(Picture: CC 2008 by purolipan)