Some of my ‘auditions’ are not full stories or even full scenes, but tableaux, flashes of action, bits of dialogue. Sometimes they run together until they actually make up a scene. This bit, if it fits after editing, is for the ‘Orchard’, otherwise known as Where Angels Die.
A case of vengeance
25 December 2014 by 13 Comments
A silly squib. The idea has been kicking round in my head for years, and this seems as good a time as any to flush it out.
‘—Not exactly a ghost story,’ said the Middle Management Devil, between slurps at his tea. ‘They are not, aha, ghosts when we have them Down Below.’
(Never let anyone tell you that devils are witty or urbane. Only their P. R. department believes this, and a P. R. devil will believe anything. Devils are uniformly hideous, ill-mannered, awkward, and smelly. Imagine the worst science fiction convention you have ever heard of, and then imagine that the common interest binding the people there is not rocket ships or rayguns, but terrorism and torture. The very most polished devil is not quite as urbane as a farting contest at a NASCAR rally.)
‘Go on,’ I said, not because I meant it, but because there was no point in saying anything else. The stranger had slouched into my booth at Denny’s uninvited, taken a seat (now covered in slime), and struck up a tedious conversation, all without a word or glance of permission from me; and he had shoved a grimy business card at me—
B. FLYSPECK FLIVVERPUFF, M. M. D.
—explaining, as if it were something that tickled him all over with pride, that the initials stood for that title which I gave in the first sentence above. He was clearly one of these mad monologuists that you see at diners after the bars have closed, and there was nothing for it but to hold fast and let him talk himself out.
‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘the passion of vengeance is, aha, very good for business, you understand, but we know better than to indulge in it ourselves. The essential work of Middle Management would go completely to pieces. It’s enough to do to tyrannize one’s subordinates and backstab one’s superiors, when one does it in a purely professional and disinterested way. If one did it because of a petty personal grudge – now, I ask you: is there anyone in Hell that you would not hold a grudge against? Nothing would ever get done; nothing at all. The damned would pile up like cordwood, humiliated perhaps, but not actually tormented. Lower Authority would never stand for it.
‘Now this one fellow we had, oh, some centuries back, was absolutely eaten up with that very passion. Revenge, revenge, revenge. [Read more…]
—will now be a brief intermission—
25 December 2014 by Leave a Comment
Rather, there just has been. Cut for medical TMI: [Read more…]
Droll’s audition
25 December 2014 by 3 Comments
From time to time, characters from my stories turn up unbidden in my mind, and perform scenes for me that they think I may wish to include in my books; or new characters turn up for the first time, and show me what they can do, and ask me to find them a place. The character you are about to meet is one of the first kind. I have known him for many years; he comes in at the middle of The Grey Death, the long-delayed second book of The Eye of the Maker.
He is a little fellow, not much over four foot high, with a marvellously shabby and scruffy beard, a mass of tufts pointing in all directions; he insists that he is a Dwarf, of the ancient and legendary mountain people, though of course all right-thinking folk know there are no such things as Dwarfs, and he is merely a midget with delusions of ancestry. His name is Droll Yocrin. The first name is tolerably obvious, and seems to suit him somehow; the second name is thoroughly obscure. There is a folk-etymology to the effect that ‘Yocrin’ is derived from ‘yoke-ring’ (for the O is long), but what on earth a yoke-ring may be, not even the folk-etymologists can tell me. Droll himself insists that it is a Dwarfish name out of the ancient mountain-language, but that his father did not teach him enough of that tongue to interpret it properly.
I hope you like him. He invited me just lately to visit him in his workshop – for he is a jeweller by trade – and see how he passes his Yule holiday. Yule in Pyrandain is more like the Scottish Hogmanay than anybody’s Christmas; it is the eve of the New Year, and an occasion for various festivities to break up the long cold darkness of deep winter. But there are glimpses here and there of something more—
[Read more…]
Christmas letter
25 December 2014 by 9 Comments
Dear Theophilus,
It is long since I have written to you, for which I beg your forgiveness, and much has happened. I was furnished by the astounding generosity of my 3.6 Loyal Readers, plus benefactors I had not known of, with the funds to get a proper set of book covers done for the Orchard; only I have no book to wrap them round, for I have been ill and stymied. Ill, not only with my usual maladies, but with a recurrent flu, which may be the same germ that turned into pneumonia when my father got it, and carried him off. (You will know, of course, through the usual channels, that he has died.) I shall speak a little of my other troubles; then, what matters more, of my efforts – and what has stymied them. [Read more…]
An experiment in widgets
15 December 2014 by 12 Comments
I have just installed the Buy This Book plugin for WordPress, by Claire Ryan. I became aware of Ms. Ryan’s work when she followed me on tsū. (She has another plugin for newsletters, which I may try next if this one works well.)
You will notice, therefore, a new bit in the sidebar: ‘Books by Tom Simon.’ Click on a book cover, and you should get icons with links to Amazon and/or Smashwords, depending on where the title in question is offered. Click on the icon, and it should take you straight to the product page at the retailer. I would be much obliged if any of my 3.6 Loyal Readers would try this for themselves and make sure that it works. (You don’t have to buy the books, especially if you already own copies. I know that part works.)
In other news, tsū informs me that I have now earned, as my share of their advertising revenue, the glorious sum of (drumroll, please) ONE CENT!
At this rate, I shall earn $100 and be eligible to receive a cheque from them in just about 100 years. Of course, it is highly probable that my rate of earnings will alter somewhat in the meantime.
Literary hospitality
15 December 2014 by 1 Comment
All I know was that the Canadian literary society rushed out, as it were, full of hospitality, wanting to welcome anybody from England – any stray traveller. In the confusion of the moment I was mistaken for a literary man and dragged in to partake of that glorious camaraderie. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of trying to explain that I was a lecturer. But that wouldn’t do because some of them had been to my lecture.
—G. K. Chesterton
When all else fails, shout?
11 December 2014 by 2 Comments
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock; to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
–Flannery O’Connor
Thomas Clark Shearer, 1927-2014
10 December 2014 by 11 Comments
My father died of pneumonia about 2:20 this afternoon, Mountain Standard Time. He was 87, and as I have mentioned previously, in an advanced state of dementia; he had been virtually speechless for over a year.
I hope I may have more to say later, but I do not think I shall be fit to write anything for the next few days.
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