Samhain Publishing

It should come as no surprise I decided to watch AMC’s latest foray into westerns, Hell on Wheels, the minute I saw Anson Mount smoldering his way across the trailer. Oh, my preciouses! The long! The lean! The shoulders and the steely-eyed glare! His ex-Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon is such a fine piece of man flesh, even the beard and a permanent layer of grunge can’t detract from his lickaliciousness.

Likewise, since I’m a writer, it should come as no surprise that I immediately followed my first viewing of the show with an orgy of research into the series, its setting (the laying of the First Transcontinental Railroad), the critical reaction… And that’s where I stopped, because the first review I read turned out to be an extended rant on how the show wasn’t true to the period, because it insisted on shoe-horning modern attitudes and issues into the history of the period (italics mine).

Hell-o! That’s what historical fiction does. No historical fiction (or nonfiction, for that matter) depicts a period or its issues accurately in context for the same reason you never step in the same stream twice. Not only has the United States changed since the mid-nineteenth century, we’ve changed. You couldn’t create a leading man—or leading lady—true to 1865’s ideals without producing 2012’s idea of a monster.

Regardless of whether he fought for the North or South in the Civil War, the ideal nineteenth century American male would be a white supremacist. He would be narrow-minded with respect to religion, whatever his religion happened to be. He’d consider women creatures of inferior intellect and “moral fiber” who needed to be “protected” and segregated for their own good, like children and other feeble-minded souls: African-Americans, Native Americans, Latin Americans, Asians, Africans, the Irish, the Itallians… His sense of entitlement would make the top management of Lehman Brothers seem morbidly self-abnegating by comparison. And the less said about his dietary expectations and personal hygiene, the better.

The ideal woman of the time would not only share his attitude, she’d conspire with her beloved to enforce the oppression of her peers. If those less perfect vessels complained, they’d be dismissed as bitter shrews with a persecution complex. Chances are the description would be accurate, too. Sustained repression, the total absence of rights and an inability to rectify the situation will do that to a girl.

But that’s okay. The creators of Hell on Wheels and Samhain’s many fine historical novelists don’t have to create nineteenth century beau ideals. They’re not writing for 1865. They’re writing for now. So they create characters who don’t fit in their time, like a failed southern tobacco planter who married an abolitionist (Bohannon); a half-black, half-white former slave; an aristocratic Englishwoman in search of an identity outside of the expectations of her class; a prostitute tattooed (mutilated in the view of the time) by the Native American war band that abducted her as a child; and an entrepreneur determined to grind into dust all those who despised him for being born poor and Irish-American (see the nineteenth century opinion of Irishmen above).

The characters’ inability to blend in forces them to become agents of change—bridges between their time in history and ours. They allow us to congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come and to view their challenges as a measure of how far we need to go.

This doesn’t give creators of historical fictions—literary or video—a pass on getting the details right. Heaven help the producer whose audio effects person uses a diesel whistle for a steam train, for example. About three million locomotive enthusiasts and (in the case of my husband) their immediate relations will flood their offices with irate letters, emails and phone calls. Period details aside, the success of any historical fiction depends on its ability to speak to the people of 2012 and those who come after. And the way you speak to us is to address our meaningful issues and conflicts, whether it’s government malfeasance, corporate greed, class conflict, race relations, gender politics or notions of romance.

This use of the myths, legends and histories of the American West isn’t anything new. The First Transcontinental Railroad has long been viewed as means to examine our national goals. Among the movies and TV shows which use it for this purpose are John Ford’s silent film The Iron Horse, Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific and multiple episodes of the TV show Maverick. There’s also Jules Verne’s ironic take on the whole business in Around the World in Eighty Days. Even better to my mind, however, is Hell on Wheels’ most illustrious predecessor: Mel Brooks’s 1974 classic, Blazing Saddles.

You don’t see the resemblance? There’s corporate greed and governmental incompetence, a serious examination of the many forms of bigotry, gender politics, professional ladies with accents, a smart-mouthed African-American with an agenda, and a bad-assed gunman with a tragic past. Of course, that makes railroad entrepreneur Thomas Durant (played by Colm Meany) 2012’s Hedy—I mean Hedley Lamarr, and turns Gene Wilder’s Waco Kid (sporting his darling Donald Trump comb-over) into my boy Bohannan…

What? Yes, I can see how you’ll never be able to view the series in the same light ever again. No, of course, I won’t stand in your way if you need to bleach your brain now.

You’re welcome.

Jean Marie Ward
JeanMarieWard.com

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The photograph shows the train known as the Jupiter on its way to the Golden Spike Ceremony commemorating the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. It may be hard to see at this size, but Native Americans watch the train from the top of the hill.

With apologies to the Immortal Jane (There can be only one!), there are two writing truths universally acknowledged:

- That a writer must pin Butt In Chair to accomplish anything worthwhile, and

- Whilst pinning BIC, the writer must write what he or she knows.

Which essentially means if you write fantasy, or if you presume to write science fiction without an advanced degree in some arcane super science, you are (in words that would have the Immortal Jane grabbing for her sal volatile) royally screwed.

That’s what my only professional writing teacher thought, anyway. She refused to consider any genre literature unless its practitioners followed Rule Number Two to a PhD. The woman put me off writing for years. I’ve since decided it was a Cunning Plan to thin the ranks of her writing competition, but I’m a lot older and more evil than I was at twenty. I worked for years in government public relations, and while I wouldn’t exactly call what I did lying for a living, it did give me a profound appreciation for the fact that fiction is all made up.

But I still want it to read real. So I do a lot of research and fret way too much about whether I understand the social dynamics of a time and place. What did they use to heat the Emperor’s rooms in the Forbidden Palace, for example? What would it be like to colonize Mars? What do ghosts really think about the people who live and work in their former homes?  I’m still trying to find details on the Ming Dynasty version of a space heater, but I got the other two nailed, in the weirdest possible way.

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Do you ever think about what happens to your books after you’re gone? I mean long gone, as in two-hundred-years-after-your-grandkids gone? Recently, I had a chance to find out. As a volunteer guide at the Carlyle House in Alexandria, Virginia, I was invited to tour the workshop of Thomas Albro, the restorer working on John Carlyle’s family bible.

Carlyle was a wealthy 18th century merchant and patriot, friend of George Washington and the builder of a Georgian Palladian style manor home boasting the only front lawn in historic Old Town Alexandria. Seriously—city trustees passed a law requiring all houses in town to front the street as soon as the Carlyle House was finished.

Like many of his contemporaries, Carlyle used blank pages in his family bible, a massive sixteen-by-ten inch tome published in London in 1759, to record the births and deaths of his two wives and nine of his eleven children. In the two hundred sixty years since, the book was rode hard and (all too literally) put away wet. The bible had it easier following the conversion of the house to a living museum in 1976. It rested in a specially constructed display case, its pages carefully turned by cotton-gloved curators on a schedule designed with preservation in mind. Despite the staff’s best efforts, however, by 2010 the pages had browned to the point where it was hard to read the text, much less the family notes scattered throughout. The binding—the bible’s second—was crumbling, to say nothing of the debris trapped between the pages.

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You think it’s hard explaining to Aunt Ermintrude why you read romance? Try telling anybody who isn’t a fan that you write fantasy. Regardless of gender or pay grade, their eyes immediately narrow to slits. “You don’t really believe that stuff?”

Do you?

The unspoken follow-up hangs in the air in all its italicized, accusative glory. You’d almost think they were frightened of something.

I usually answer with a smile and a little shrug. You see, I do.

Not all of it. I’ll pass on vampires, werewolves and the sexy shifters of urban fantasy. While I’ve known my share of bloodsuckers and leeches, I’ve never known anyone to sprout fangs without the help of good prosthetics. None of the wolves of my acquaintance grow extra hair on the night of the full moon, and forget the notion of a sexy dragon. I’ve been on the receiving end of dragon’s breath. It involved a near fatal dose of habanero peppers, quickly followed by other, less pleasant…outcomes.

But the rest of “that stuff”? Let me put it this way, I possess a rather limited imagination. If you read something truly weird in my fiction, chances are it happened to me.

Like the ghost cat that shares the house with my husband Greg, our corporeal cat and me. My Halloween freebie for the Samhellion recounts some of Ghost Kitty’s adventures, but I saved the creepiest one for you.

It happened several months after Our Most Benevolent Feline Overlord joined the family. His Benevolence likes to sleep in a bed warmed to the body heat of his human slaves and soon trained us to leave the bedroom door so he could move freely in the wee hours. I’d grown accustomed to the thump of a twelve-pound tom cat landing on the corner of the bed and stalking across the comforter, so I didn’t think anything of it one particular night when I felt the thump and the poke poke poke poke of little cat feet negotiating the covers. Then I looked up and noticed His Benevolence sitting on the threshold of the room and nothing sharing the bed with me. Nothing…unless you count the very visible, cat foot-sized depressions in the comforter.

I gulped. It’s one thing to know your house is haunted by a spectral cat. But. On. The. Bed. While you’re in it?!

Disgusted at his human’s cowardice, His Benevolence flicked his tail against the floor. He leapt onto the bed and padded to his customary spot at my side. GK squished a little round by my feet, and there the three of us stayed until Greg joined us shortly before dawn. He tried to tell me I was dreaming, but I insisted he turn on the light. A cat-sized depression remained in the comforter by my feet, though the sense of a weighted body had dissipated.

The experience wasn’t a night terror. I was awake and mobile the whole time. In fact, I deliberately petted His Benevolence to prove I could. Plus, neither His Benevolence nor I could’ve smushed that particular spot in the covers without disarranging the rest of the bed. There was no chill, either. The temperature in the room never dropped, and once I got over my freak, there was no sense of menace. It was just…

Weird.

My work-in-progress, tentatively titled Highway from Hell, features two other real weird personal experiences. Since they deal with the undead and shouldn’t-be-moving, they fit right in with a 21st century retelling of the myth of Eurydice trailing her rock star husband Orpheus out of hell.

If there is one constant in fantasy, horror and science fiction, it’s this: the only surefire method of killing a monster is to chop of its head. It works on anything with a body—vampire, werewolf, zombie, dragon, Cthulhu, Martian… Sometimes you have to find the right head to chop, or cut off several at once, but the principle remains. It even works with the Immortals of Highlander, and that franchise has more lives than Dracula and my ghost cat combined. Cut of its head and it’s dead, dead, dead.

Except when it’s not.

While strolling in my local park a couple years ago, I noticed what appeared to be a red-headed pigeon waddling purposefully down the path. The red that caught my eye wasn’t the wash-out, rusty red splotches you usually see on a piebald pigeon, but a real, honest-to-goodness scarlet. Blood red, if you will. Oooh, the shiny. Employing my best Elmer Fudd stealth technique, I sidled up for a closer look. I needn’t have bothered with the wery wery qwiet. The rich ruby color that caught my attention wasn’t a red-feathered head, it was the meat end of a severed neck. Kinda gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “bird brain”.

Dead bird walking isn’t as singular as you’d think. A rooster known as Mike the Headless Chicken survived eighteen months after losing his head. And he wasn’t the only one, though he was probably the only chicken to find himself more popular than a sitting president, which is a whole other level of weird in itself.

Then there’s the stuff that defies description or explanation, which appears to have no precedent in history or folklore and is, pardon my blanks, scary as —it.

My late writing partner Teri Smith was the Queen of Weird. If there was a ghost anywhere within five miles of her, it wouldn’t, ahem, rest until it came up to her and shook her hand all the way to the bones.

Like the time we were driving home from some late night sessions at Romance Writers of America’s 2000 convention at the Marriott in downtown Washington, DC. I’m what polite people refer to as “directionally challenged”, so it should come as no surprise that I managed to use a half tank of gas finding my way from Adams Morgan to I-95 South. In the process, I drove past nearly every haunted building in downtown DC.

Teri stopped being polite after the second face appeared at the window of a closed historical landmark. By the time Dolley Madison waved from the second story of the Cutts-Madison House, she was shielding her eyes and singing “La La La La” at the top of her not inconsiderable lungs. For months afterwards, she wouldn’t let me anywhere near a steering wheel unless she had personally verified the route on Mapquest, Yahoo and Google Maps, and researched the passage to ensure an accidental wrong turn wouldn’t land us in the middle of a Civil War battlefield or a spectral reenactment of the Lincoln assassination, complete with tri-state manhunt and John Wilkes Booth’s death scene.

I thought it was great. Having Teri triple-map all our destinations cut our travel time by half, and we usually managed to drive by a Starbucks along the way. Venti ice tea for the win! But good as the strategy was, it couldn’t cover every eventuality.

A few months later, a friend came to town to bury her aunt’s ashes in the family plot. After the Saturday afternoon ceremony, the friend and her family, Teri and I retired to Embassy Suites in Alexandria, Virginia, to honor the departed with reminisces and healing laughter. Again, Teri and I left late, well after midnight. But as with RWA, we expected a late drive and hadn’t drunk anything except water, tea or soft drinks since dinner.

The garage underneath the Embassy Suites wanted to be a labyrinth when it grew up, but it was well lit and Teri found the car pretty quickly. (Have I mentioned I’m directionally challenged? Rinse. Repeat. I have, word of honor, gotten lost in an elevator.) I even took the precaution of asking the night clerk at the front desk which exits we could use—in Teri’s hearing—so that we stood a decent chance of making it out of the underground before we had to be at work Monday morning.

Everything was proceeding according to plan, except for this weird echo we heard as we snaked through the levels to the nearest exit. It sounded like someone banging a hammer against a piece of sheet metal. But who’d be doing that after 1 a.m.?

It wasn’t somebody. It was something.

The sign over the exit we planned to use—a huge metal panel, four feet high and as wide as a traffic lane, suspended from chains as thick as my wrist—was jumping like a Jack Russell terrier after a treat. It wasn’t swaying back and forth or from side to side. It was shaking and shimmying, its left and right sides jerking upward in random patterns that set the chains clanging and the metal howling.

My first thought was earthquake. Earthquakes aren’t common in northern Virginia, but they do happen. But the building wasn’t shaking, only the sign. Meanwhile, Teri was wheezing a high, thin sound and trying to climb into the backseat without taking her eyes off the sign.

No way we were driving under that thing, even if it meant backing all the way through the labyrinth to the other end of the building. Fortunately, we weren’t far from the hotel’s lower lobby. I barely tapped the brakes before Teri was out of the car and pounding up the stairs to the hotel doors. She beat me inside by yards, and Teri was a large woman. She couldn’t move fast. But that night, she damn near flew.

While Teri gasped for breath beside me, I explained the situation to the night clerk. My description was a marvel of rationality. I elaborated on the dangers of metal fatigue, random air currents and potential structural instability. I invoked the insurance rates on my antiquated Chevy Cavalier. Not once did the faintest hint of anything paranormal or supernatural pass my lips. I didn’t spend all those years in government public relations for nothing.

Maybe she was just tired, but the night clerk looked bored. “The ___ Street exit, huh?”

I nodded. Teri nodded, too. She still couldn’t talk.

“Okay.” She pulled a paper ticket from a drawer. “This’ll get you out the monthly exit.”

I stared. The woman accepted my story so calmly and gave in so quickly, without once suggesting we pay extra. Had she heard it all before? How often did this happen? Teri, however, was completely focused on escape. Not trusting me to quit while we were ahead, she snatched the ticket out of the night clerk’s hand and dragged me back to the car.

By the next day, her curiosity exceeded mine. We spent the next two weeks scraping the Internet for any hint of the peculiar at the Embassy Suites. We never found anything, which means nothing in Alexandria. Founded in 1749, the only city in the United States to surrender twice to the British in the same day, the largest slave market north of New Orleans, the longest continuously occupied southern city in the Civil War—who knows what might’ve happened there, or when?

Maybe that’s why people are so unnerved by the idea of someone believing “that stuff”. City streets, suburban tract homes, parking lots—the most ordinary places in our lives are one small fright away from the uncanny. No matter where you live, you’re not alone. As mystery writer Ellen Byerrum’s husband says, “There’s something in the woods.” It’s big and it bites.

And after thousands of years of civilization, we still don’t know what it is.

Jean Marie Ward

Since I’m enjoying myself at Balticon (with Gail Z. Martin! Gail Carriger!! and Tanya Huff!!!), it seemed only fair that my Samhain blog readers should, too. With that in mind, I offer the following short short story in the hopes it will prompt a smile and maybe a devilish grin or two.

About the Flies

The flies massed in battalions inside the window screens. That would never work in today’s real estate market. Catherine searched her uncle’s house for the cause and found Beelzebub in the basement freezer.

His presence explained a lot about her uncle’s death—not to mention the flies.

“Release me,” he buzzed, “and the handsomest man alive is yours.”

“Too late,” she laughed. “Been there, done that, couldn’t divorce him fast enough.”

“Release me,” he droned, “and you’ll know wealth beyond a banker’s dream.”

“In exchange for my soul?”

“It’s the usual deal.”

“Uh uh. I saw what was left of my uncle.”

He considered her a moment.

“Release me,” he purred, “and I’ll take revenge on your former employer.”

That was tempting, especially for a woman of a certain age and a certain weight with no prospects. A particularly large fly zipped past her ear. Catherine shook her head.

She found a book on exorcisms in her uncle’s library. Mr. B was soon gone. Thanks to some self-sealing plastic bags and a bit of honey, his flies were, too—removed to her ex-boss’s mansion by the sea, where they flourished. After she settled her uncle’s affairs, so did Catherine. No flies on her.

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©2010, Jean Marie Ward

Now that that is out of the way, welcome to 2010!

Writers on this blog and elsewhere have shared some profound thoughts on the “Naughties” over the past week. Much as I like the name, I’m way too shallow for deep thoughts on any subject.

Besides, I’m not too sure how I feel about the last ten years. I love history and repeat it often, but the Zero-Decade is too close for me to have any perspective. I tend to focus on the present and near future, which I can worry about much more effectively.

The next ten years give me a lot of material to work with. Of course, there’s global warming and a screwed up health care package and war and terrorism, a growing energy crisis, Mayan Calendar madness and the evergreen Nostradamus predictions of doom. That’s just the global stuff. Three different friends plan weddings this year, one of them barely eighteen. That’s always good for a panic—have you seen the latest divorce statistics? And divorce is the least of it. Sadly, although we made great strides in the last century, violence against women is not a thing of the past, and the younger the couple, the greater the risks.

Which brings me to what really scares me about December 2012—hello, that’s the last month this century can call itself a kid. After that it’s a teenager. No more cute mini-person with curls and clear skin repeating (and sometimes mangling) the opinions of its elders in a darling lisp. No, we’re talking snarky. We’re talking snarly. We’re talking acne, hormones and delusions of immortality. We’re talking mayhem and rebellion…

Did I mention hormones?

Consider what this century has to work with: robot dogs, combat drones with artificial intelligence, satellites that can ping anybody and anything on the planet (the Brits even call theirs “Skynet”; are they mad?), a growing interface between electronics and life-forms—i.e., us. Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law is becoming reality: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

We could wind up living Terminator. We could become the Borg.

We could get Amber.

I remember what I was like as a teenager. Everything was bigger than life—the highs, the lows, the utter mortification, the determination to show them. All of them, even when the identity of them changed from minute to minute.

I wanted magic. I wanted magic to change myself and the world. I wanted to be an actor and a rock star and Lois Lane. I wanted to write the Great American Novel, script the movie and film it. I would’ve wanted to act all the roles myself, except I wanted to cast a lot of hot guys—which was, in fact, the only reason I wanted to go through the trouble of writing the novel in the first place. After all, writing is work. If I was going to work, there damn well better be hot guys involved.

The thing is, I thought I could do it. Fifteen years old, with a total lack of acting and musical talent, halfway through high school, with no equipment or instruction or experience in any of the fields needed to pull it off, I knew I could do it. Anything was possible. I was the Little Train That Could. Besides I was very good at bossing people around.

If I’d known about CGI… (Insert shivers here.)

And now I can have CGI… (Insert more shivers, of a distinctly different kind.)

I haven’t given up on magic or the The Great American Novel With Lots of Hot Guys, and I’m still bossing people around. I suppose these are all signs of a deeply flawed character. But prefer to think it shows some goals are achievable if you keep trying. After all, I did write for newspapers and ultimately published both government journals and my own magazine. (I married a super guy, too, but that’s another blog.) Okay, I didn’t grow up to sing or act or direct, but lots of people do. They become basketball stars and rocket scientists, too. And I guarantee the event or compulsion driving them to the top founds its fuel in the fury, the desperate need to prove something and, yes, the hormones that make the teens so scary.

Adolescence is a terribly productive time—emphasis on both the “terrible” and “productive” part of that sentence. It’s frightening from inside and without. Facing the teen years of the new century of a new millennium, all I can think of is the famous misquotation from All About Eve: fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

But the destination—the results of adolescence’s mad stew of hope, determination, fervid enthusiasm and creativity unconstrained by the possibility of failure—will be something to see.

Happy new decade!

Jean Marie Ward

“You’re gonna need Sherpas,” Greg taunted.

The spouse person always says that when I’m compiling my lists of what to pack for a trip. I wanted to flip him off, but this time he was… um, right. When he caught me I was tallying the costumes I need for this year’s DragonCon.

There’s the Pirate Ball, but everything about that costume packs flat. Except the boots, which can’t use for the Steampunk Ball, but I might be able to match up with the costume for the DragonCon attempt on the world’s largest “Thriller” dance. Then there’s the growing contingent of waitresses from Merlotte’s, the bar in Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels and HBO’s True Blood series, assembling for the parade. Alas, my days of playing not so sweet juveniles like vampire Jessica are long past. Still, I’d make a killer Arlene. Maybe I could re-use the top for one of my panels.

But what am I going to do about the high tea?

Oh for the days of capacious trunks and well-sprung coaches. Of footmen to carry your luggage to your room and maids to tend to your every need. Of dancing all night and sleeping ‘til the afternoon…

And if you don’t count the panels, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing at DragonCon. I stared at my list, while my mind cycled through the amusements contained in every Regency novel I ever read. “Well, day-um,” I said, “I’m summering at a Regency house party.”

Greg stared at me.

“No. Really. I’ve got seventeen reasons to prove it…”

(The Reasons)

1. You have to leave the City to get there. Forget the fact the party’s in Atlanta, one of the largest cities in the US. Atlanta doesn’t want anything to do with us. They roll up the streets and hide their children—not to mention the cheap eats—in the vicinity of four con hotels rather than let them associate with the mad, bad guests of Castle DragonCon.

2. The major exception to this general ostracism is the local pub, Max Lager’s, which like most such establishments in the early 1800s, brews its own ales and beers.

3. When you’re not at the pub, chances are you’re gaming all night with cards, dice and automata—er, computers. What—you thought mechanical gaming was something new? It was the very latest thing…_in the 18th century_.

4. The maid wakes you up. You certainly won’t be capable of getting up on your own after all the drinking and gaming you’ve been doing the night before. If you ask nicely, someone might even bring you hot chocolate too.

5. It’s all about the vampires, monsters and ghosts—just ask Lord Byron and the Shelleys. And the DragonCon stories about them make it into books too. Witness With Nine You Get Vanyr (and at least one other lovely volume of my personal acquaintance, but I won’t name it here, because it was issued by another publisher).

6. There’s nothing the staff hasn’t seen before. Just ask them.

7. Your daily activities will entail at least three changes of costume. Sometimes more.

8. All the itinerent peddlers for hundreds of miles around will gather in the manor park, otherwise known as the Dealers Room and Exhibition Halls, to sell you all the things you can’t get from the worthy merchants who are all hiding for the duration.

9. You will be expected to demonstrate some accomplishment—literature, art, music, beating the automata. The only difference is these days the gentlemen are painting watercolors as well the ladies. After all, everybody wants to be in comics or manga.

10. You can get up close and personal with royalty: Lois McMasters Bujold, Terry Gilliam, the aforementioned Charlaine Harris, Mr. Spock—er, Leonard Nimoy… Who needs Prinny?

11. Much of the day is spent on the hunt. Foxes remain the preferred prey, though most DragonCon attendees are interested in the two-legged variety—always assuming the really cute person ahead of you in line isn’t a Kitsune (a magical shape-changing fox). After all, it’s DragonCon; anything’s possible.

12. There may be duels. With swords. At the very least there will be demonstrations of swordplay and pugilistic prowess. Well, there’ll wrestling…

13. There are balls and dances with live music every night—and every one of them qualifies as a crush.

14. The Hellfire Club is alive and well and partying in the catacombs—er, basement meeting rooms, after midnight.

15. The climax of the weekend is the Masquerade.

16. When it’s over you’re sore, you’re exhausted, you’re not sure you can face the ride home—or how you’ll explain the things you purchased from the peddlers once you get there.

17. And you’re counting the days until you return.

Hope one of these days to see you there!

Jean Marie Ward

Cartoon heroes might seem, um, two-dimensional, but that’s only until you really get to know them. Anime and manga boast some of the most intriguing heroes around. No single medium has a monopoly on good characterization—or sexy guys. These are just a few of my favorites.

Alucard (Hellsing)
Yes, the name is Dracula spelled backwards—no spoilers there. But this isn’t your grand-anything’s Drac. Alucard takes the stuff Bram Stoker was afraid to talk about and takes it beyond the limit. In theory, Alucard is bound to the Hellsing organization’s leader, Integra Wingate Hellsing, but it’s more of a courtesy—from a being who doesn’t believe in the concept. Alucard can summon every drop of blood he ever spilled and shape it to his will. To call him a demon is inadequate, and nobody but nobody rocks a red trench coat the way he does. Plus, he’s got a really great gun.

Colonel Roy Mustang (Full Metal Alchemist)
Roy owns the biggest little black book in the nation, he looks great in a uniform, promotes women officers, and he’s the hottest fire wizard around. (No kidding. They call him the Flame Alchemist.) What more could a girl ask?

Alex Rowe (Last Exile)
Alex is the classic wounded hero, scarred by the loss of his fiancé and dear friends, he survives to become the scourge of those who caused their deaths. His passion, concealed between an exterior colder and harder than the black skin of the airship known as the “Kill ‘em All Silvana”, is destined to remake a world. But not without a terrible sacrifice. Still, you’ve got to hand it to a guy who, impaled on a tree of roses, still manages to off the villain with his bare hands.

Sesshomaru and Miroku (Inuyasha)
This is a two-fer, but in a sense, you can’t have one without the other. They are such diametric opposites. (Yes, I am a little schizophrenic when it comes to what I find attractive in a guy. What was your first clue?)
Tall, elegant, aristocratic and ruthless, Sesshomaru is the full-blooded demon son of the great Dog Demon Fang. Sesshomaru has nothing but contempt for anything human. Then “Fluffy” (as fans call him) gets adopted by a little girl named Rin. He tries everything he can think of to persuade her to leave him alone, but the next thing you know he’s saving her life, dressing her in pretty clothes and letting her boss around his demon attendants. (To be fair, even at eight, she’s brighter than his valet.) She intends to marry him when she grows up. Sesshomaru may have poison claws, a sword made of demon bones and the ability to transform into a humongous demon dog, but my money’s on Rin.
Miroku, on the other hand, is as human as human gets. He’s a scalliwag, a scapegrace and a terrible flirt. He’s also the brains of the party (always a plus in my books). A peripatetic young monk apparently unacquainted with any notions of chastity or head shaving, he wants to kill the series villain in order to lift his family’s curse—a void or “wind tunnel” in his right hand, which is great for Hoovering up bad guys but which will one day swallow him whole. Since he doesn’t expect to live to see twenty-five, he’s very eager to leave a little piece of himself behind and asks every pretty woman he meets if she’ll have his children. Naturally, the only one he really wants is the sweet and serious demon hunter he never asks. After all, they have no future, and he’s everything she hates in a man. You’ve seen that story before too.

Spike Spiegel (Cowboy Bebop)
The twenty-six episode anime series Cowboy Bebop is as cool as science fiction gets. The “cowboys” are a ragtag group of interplanetary bounty hunters—a former cop, a naughty card sharp, a 13-year-old hacker genius, a “data dog” and Spike—aboard the good ship Bebop. Their adventures, comic and tragic, play out to a soundtrack by Yoko Kano which distills everything you ever loved about mid-20th century rock and jazz. Then there’s Spike, the coolest smart-mouthed slacker romantic who ever lived. He can make a purple suit seem like a totally rational fashion choice. He’ll convince you a pink spaceship is as macho as it gets. Spike is so damn icy cool, Keanu Reeves—Neo himself—wishes he was him. And he doesn’t stand a chance. Nobody does.
Characterization doesn’t get much better than that. The anime was so perfectly realized, the prospect of turning it into another medium promises only disappointment.

Squirrels and me. Me and squirrels. I won’t claim to be squirrelly, but when I told friends my next Samhain blog fell on National Squirrel Appreciation Day (yes, there really is one, and today’s the date—check out the link), nobody was terribly surprised.

After all, our neighborhood squirrels are the fattest in three states. They’ve also acquired a certain reputation among the local raptor community. I think it was the Cooper’s Hawk they punched out.

Well, it was bird-brained of the hawk to try to wrap its talons around something which outweighed it by around (a very round) pound. It might’ve worked for Henry Hawk in Looney Tunes, but remember the smartest thing in Looney Tunes is a talking rabbit.

The Cooper’s Hawk failed attempt did serve one very useful purpose, however. There’s no longer any doubt about who sits at the top of the neighborhood food chain. Local hawks still gather on the fence from time to time to reminisce about how big they were back in the day, but that’s as far as it goes. After a minute or two, they shake their heads sorrowfully, maybe kill a pigeon or two, and leave.

Plus, I like squirrels. I think they have a lot to recommend them. In fact—unlike the hawk who was too stupid to know when it was licked until it was down on the ground and squawking like a chicken—I think squirrels make sterling models for romance heroes.

Hear me out. I’ve got thirteen points to make. So it’s not quite Thursday. It’s close enough for squirrel work, anyway.

Thirteen reasons why squirrels are good models for romance heroes:

They’re smart. No matter what the advertising says, they’ve never yet made a bird feeder that a determined squirrel couldn’t crack. And face it, there isn’t anything sexier than smart.

They don’t take themselves too seriously. They see nothing wrong with entertaining you for hours. And they work for peanuts.

They understand the value of teamwork. If one squirrel isn’t up to the task of hacking into a given birdfeeder, he’ll find a buddy to help.

They’re thrifty, always putting aside nuts for a rainy day. Or any other time they need a snack.

They believe in sharing. They stow their nuts where anyone can find them. Dig one up and it’s yours. Buried treasure for all—without all the fuss and bother of sand traps or undead pirates.

They’re conservationists. They were planting trees before most of knew how to pronounce “green”. Maybe it wasn’t what they had in mind for those acorns or nuts, but you’ve got to admire the results.

Their teeth never stop growing. This is a big plus for the vampire fans.

They understand the importance of a good wardrobe. That’s why they come with so many designer options: black, white, gray, red, even stripes!

They’re omnivores. Translation: You can feed them anything, and you’ll never hear them complain, “That’s not the way Mom made it.”

They come in diurnal and nocturnal flavors, which means there’s a perfect squirrel match for both the morning people and the night owls among us. And the night squirrels know how to fly. (Remember what I said about the teeth? Rinse. Repeat.)

Even the non-flying varieties are able to leap eight feet. A couple years ago, one particularly plucky gray squirrel was filmed leaping over fifteen feet to escape a burning building. It landed unharmed. What action hero wouldn’t find it useful to leap eight to fifteen times his height in a single bound?

They’ve got financial muscle too. According to Wikipedia, they’ve taken out the NASDAQ stock market twice. (Hmmm, maybe we’re looking at the current economic crisis all wrong.)

And the number one reason why squirrels make great models for romance heroes: It’s all about the nuts, babe. All about the nuts.

We knew we were doomed the minute we met.

“Not with a ten foot pole!” I announced mentally, though I’m still not sure who or what was supposed to be listening.

Greg heard the word. “Doom, doom, doom,” played over and over in his head. He fought it by trying to find something—anything—about me he could reasonably object to.

I didn’t have to try quite so hard. He’d just recovered from some nasty bug and was about fifteen pounds below skinny. If all the jabbing bones and straggly goatee weren’t enough to put me off, there were the hard brown eyes peering at me like Dr. Frankenstein at the purple ray. No problem keeping my self-appointed distance.

We managed to delude ourselves like this for two months, despite the fact we couldn’t stop snarking, sniping and talking to each other. We couldn‘t help ourselves. We’d read most of the same books, seen many of the same movies and related to them in ways that left our friends scratching their heads.

We didn’t think Halloween would be any different. I dressed as Shakespeare’s Viola playing Cesario, knowing I looked gorgeous in black velvet. I wasn’t dressing for Greg, you understand. Not at all. I had even worn the costume for a date with someone else the night before.

Greg knew which party I was likely to attend, and he planned to take his time getting there. He didn’t intend to snub me, but he did intend to angle for different fish—someone less likely to catch him in the same net.

Instead he strode through the door of the townhouse, through the living room and half the dining room to plant himself in front of the chair where I sat, pointedly chatting with someone else. His cape flared behind him as he walked—a real floor-length opera cape properly lined in white satin. (Not red. Red is for wannabes.) His white tie and tails looked like it was tailored to his lean, broad-shouldered form. The goatee was gone, revealing a long, bony face full of interesting planes and angles.

Then I noticed something odd about his hairline. He had a widow’s peak. That wasn’t right. Greg didn’t have a widows peak. But Dracula did.

“I shaved it,” he admitted, carefully enunciating the “s“ around his fangs.. “Well, I shaved in half. That way I can change the part and it’s gone.”

That’s when I knew I was doomed too. He was sardonic, fiercely intelligent, sexy and…

A total goof.

It was the goofiness that did me in. Only a goof would shave in half a widow’s peak. That’s what made him happily-ever-after material. Looks change and fade. Intelligence can cut. Wit can burn. But goofiness is forever.

Greg and I have been together ever since. Ironically, given the way we got together, when I started writing fantasy I avoided writing about vampires. I read about them. I’ve seen all the movies, but I never wrote about them. There were so many good vampire stories on the market, and I didn’t feel I had anything to add to the conversation.

That changed a couple of months ago. Right now I’m working on not one, but two, very different vampire stories. One’s your standard much older, much more glamorous, heartbreakingly beautiful vamp with a secret sorrow. Yada Yada. It’s not that the story is the same-old. I don’t do “same old”. I write too slow to trap myself into writing anyone else’s kind of story. But the vampire fits the classic mold much more closely than most of my heroes. In a sense that’s part of his charm. He’s my doorway to the great vampire fairy tale of paranormal romance.

But his isn’t the story that rides me like some demon jockey. No, that’s reserved for the second story, the one where the vampire hero is only two or three years older than the very human, college freshman heroine who discovers him when he awakens, bewildered and hungry, after death has turned him. He is a goof. A very sexy goof, a very brilliant goof, but still a goof. The kind of guy you wind up taking home to your parents, because really, what else can you do?

And for the duration of the first draft, when the words are something only I will see, his name is Greg.

*

And before I turn this Halloween blog to another of my talented Samhain colleagues, I want to wish Samhain Publishing and all the readers and writers in its growing community a very happy anniversary. Here’s to you with cheers and a ton of cyber-confetti!