What Girls Are Made Of

Watch me cutting every string 
One by one 
See me cut out all the rot 
Bit by bit 
Watch me as I push you back 
Inch by inch 
I push you back boy 
Inch by inch 

~ Garbage, “What Girls Are Made Of.”

There are many battles being fought in popular culture at the moment. Battles against homophobia, racism, bigotry, sexism, and misogyny. There have been popular uprisings against the male-centric and medieval attitudes of comic writers, SFF legends and fan conventions are producing harassment policies for their attendees.

The controversially titled article in the New Statesman, by Sophia McDougall, “I hate Strong Female Characters” generates the usual polarised comments that are best avoided, typical of an article discussing gender imbalances.

McDougall’s main point is that male characters can have a full range of human attributes, female characters get to be ‘Strong.’ They still don’t get dialogue, a starring role, a front and centre position in the trailers, the posters and the media they are part of.

They act in stereotypical ways, kicking ass and kissing some random guy. Taking control, like strong women.

As a male writer, I mostly agree with McDougall’s arguments. I recognise that men are the primary demographic of comics, women who enjoy the stories and art of this medium are stepping into a world where attitudes haven’t changed much in 100 years.

Me, I’m not a comic book fan. I like a good graphic novel, but serial comics are something I grew out of when I left high-school. 2000AD was always a big influence from my childhood and on my writing. 2000AD was also quite unique in my reading experience, with really well written stories like The Ballad of Halo Jones, a female soldier in a dystopian future (written by the legendary Alan Moore). There was Judge Anderson the Psi division colleague of Judge Dredd. Even male dominated series’ like Rogue Trooper had female GI’s.

Halo Jones wasn’t “strong” she was just a woman trying to get through life the best way she could.

I like to write female characters. Three of my novels feature women as the lead protagonists and antagonists.

Else, from Tankbread, is a complex person. She starts out as a fully grown, but completely new person. A woman with the mind of a newborn. As a clone, grown for consumption by the world’s zombie overlords, she has a life’s worth of development and experience to go through in a short space of time. Tankbread is as much a story of her self-discovery as it is the story of saving the world, even after it has ended. Else develops as a character, through set-backs, discovery, exploration and ultimately tragedy.

Her experience is important because she goes through the stages of life from infant to adult in a month. She is vulnerable, violent, intelligent, curious, creative, selfish. She learns all the things that make us human, joy, sadness, humiliation, wonder, hate, love and grief.

In the following two books, Tankbread: Immortal and Tankbread: Deadlands complex female characters take the lead roles again. Perhaps more importantly, complex women have supporting roles too. Some assist and others oppose. But all are detailed and human and certainly much more than “Strong.”

Engines of Empathy (currently under contract for publication) also has a female lead. Charlotte Pudding is a self-described single, professional woman. She is intelligent, recently orphaned and employed using her college degree in computer psychology to help customers better interact with their empathic appliances.

When she finds herself drawn into a quest to save the world she deals with a range of situations and antagonists. Some are male, some are female. All are weird and fill Empathy Universe with a thought provoking and often humorous story.

In the sequel, Pisces of Fate, Charlotte’s brother, Ascott, is the main character in the story. He is supported by Shoal, a girl that he feels very strongly about, but her personality is entirely her own. She saves him (more than once) and like all good characters, she has a depth to her that includes good and bad. She has her own ambitions, motivations, beliefs and values.

I write characters like this because I love a good story. I like characters that struggle and suffer and succeed and find love, are struck by tragedy and get angry at the injustices of the world they inhabit.

For me, “strong” women aren’t enough. They need to be as complex and detailed and flawed and interesting as the male characters.

Hook, Line and Stinker

The three best ways to open a story:
1) Dialogue 
2) Scene setting
3) Characterization

And do it quickly: Not too much description on the first page. Just enough. Place the hook, then get out for a bit, and come back.

The internet is littered with advice like this. This particular version came from a Facebook post by Jason V Brock (that's a link to his Wikipedia page).

Personally I think it's like all advice (on writing and everything else). Listen to all of it, take it seriously and then do what works for you.

With that in mind, here's the opening sentences to some recently completed stories:

They say the man from Suffolk seemed in fine fettle they day he died. ~ A Clowder of Cats

Dougal Brown ate dirt. ~ Digger

The Coachman’s Arms brought comfort and a wide range of beers and wines to its patrons.
 ~  The Codger

“I figure I have an hour, maybe less, and so for those of you who come in to find out what the hell happened. Excuse the chains, but this is it. An eyewitness report. ~ The Resolute Report

I have 123 photographs of my back. ~ The Tao Of The Tattoo

Richie returned to consciousness in a room that smelt like the high school locker room after a championship game. ~ Rite Of Passage 

The Sharps rifle is the finest weapon ever invented by man, the .50 calibre shot can be fired by a competent marksman at a rate of up to ten rounds per minute with deadly accuracy. ~ Walking The Line 

And for a bonus, the opening line of the yet to be finished Pisces of Fate, the sequel to Engines of Empathy

In the warm tropical waters of the Aardvark Archipelago swims a fish that no one likes. 

The Cloth Faced Doll

My nephew, Ian, sent me an email - telling me about a dream he had of children singing "Ring-a-ring-a-rosy" and then falling down dead. In the dream he was also pursued by a cloth faced doll - that he could only see out of the corner of his eye. He asked me to write a horror story based on his idea. 

Here's the first, unedited draft.

 

The Cloth Faced Doll

By Paul Mannering and Ian Wills.

Some dares are stronger than magic spells. Stronger than a pinky-promise. Stronger than swearing on your grandmother’s grave, even though she is still alive, plays tennis twice a week and gives you money on your birthday. Some dares are invoked with the words passed down through the playground generations, from the older kids to the younger ones. Some dares you have to accept, or be forever known as the kid that chickened out on a dare.  Which is why Toby Shannon crawled through the wire fence around the old Saint Yvonne School after dark, after bedtime and after being dared to go into the abandoned building. 

He had to come back with something to prove his bravery. Then he would be in the gang. Part of the group that sat together at recess and lunch. Part of the group of friends that no one messed with. He would be in and then the bullying would stop.

The Saint Yvonne School was one of the oldest buildings in the area. It had been closed for a hundred years and had been haunted for even longer. Hayden, who told Toby what he needed to do for his initiation dare, said that a kid sneaked in to the school one summer and they never found him until a week later. When they found the kid, his hair had turned white and he couldn’t speak. Now they kept him in a padded room up at the Bellview hospital, even his parents didn’t visit him.

Toby sometimes thought that a padded room at Bellview would be a nice change from going to school every day. Being pushed, and teased and laughed at, having his schoolbag thrown in the toilet, and his lunch thrown into the bushes. Compared to that, sneaking into a creepy old building would be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

The fence was rusted mesh, diamonds of wire with a trim of wind-blown litter and dead weeds. In places the fence had rusted away and you could squeeze through the gaps.  The grass inside the fence seemed dead too. Like nothing could grow in the shadow of the old school. Toby had asked his dad about the school. He’d told him to look it up on the internet. The websites said that the school had been turned into a hospital, during a Cholera epidemic a hundred years ago. Children who got sick were put there, beds lined up in the classrooms and hallways like a hospital ward. A lot of the sick kids died. Toby looked at old black and white photos, some of them showed stern faced nurses and doctors in white coats and stiff uniforms. Others were photos of sick children, lying in beds, their listless eyes sunk deep into their pale faces.

Under his feet the brown grass crunched with a sound like stepping on spilled cereal. Toby didn’t run, he walked, through the dead weeds and all the way up to the wide stone steps at the front of the building. The school stood three stories high, all the windows were boarded up, even the ones with bars over them in the round towers at the top corners.

At the top of the five wide stone steps Toby crouched down and listened hard. He could hear the wind blowing through the dead trees, making them creak and moan. He could hear the shrill scream of the wind racing through cracks and gaps in the walls. Screaming like the ghosts of children with dark eyes sunk deep in their skulls. Toby pulled a board, it was loose, just like Hayden said it would be. The door behind it had a hole big enough for Toby to slip through. He was small for his age, which is why the bullies picked on him.  Inside he stood up, the Super Dude Sam torch he carried clicked on and the narrow beam of yellow light made the shadows rear and stampede along the walls. Beyond the light, the darkness seemed darker. Toby waved the torch around, like a light-saber. “Voom-voom,” he whispered, the sound vanishing into the open space of the large hallway he stood in.

The floor was covered in dirt and trash, the tiles were arranged in a diamond pattern of brown and grey. Directly ahead and a bit to the right a set of old wooden stairs led up to the second floor. Toby looked around, the old wooden walls, the peeling paint and wallpaper, the empty cans of spray paint and cigarette butts. It seemed weird that no one had painted the walls though. There were no tagged messages on the dirty walls. Just discarded cans and signs of teenagers being here. Maybe the ghosts got them? The thought rose unbidden and unwanted in Toby’s mind. He swallowed hard and thought about how the bullying would stop if he just did this one thing.

Walking forward he passed the stairs, heading towards the back of the building. According to the floor plans he had seen online, one of the children’s wards was back there. A door of dark wood blocked his way, the oval handle of black metal set high on its face. Toby reached up and turned the handle, the door opened when he pushed. A slow agonised scream of stiff hinges echoed off the walls and nearly stopped his heart.  Toby froze; all he could hear now was the thudding of his heart and the thin rasp of his breathing. Holding the torch in one hand, he dug his asthma inhaler out of his pocket and took a deep sucking gasp. Holding his breath until he saw stars he exhaled slowly, the tight feeling in his chest easing and the taste of medicine in the back of his throat felt comforting.

The space beyond the door had been filled with junk. Old bed frames, with coiled springs and wooden frames were stacked haphazardly around the room. Toby took a careful step forward, the light flashing and catching the mouldering piles of discarded mattresses, like giant rotting cheeses, pierced with holes where rats and birds had made their nests. Toby stared as one mattress quivered and a rat squirmed out of it, Toby swallowed hard, remembering a story, an old story  found in a box of old books, a story about an evil Chinese sorcerer who would put a live rat on people’s bellies with a pot over it. Then he put a dish of hot coals on top of the pot and added more coals until the rat got so hot it would chew its way out the only way it could to save itself from burning. Another shot from his inhaler helped Toby keep breathing.

He walked into the room, stepping around the old beds and away from the mattresses that with the lumps that bulged and slithered where the rats moved. At first he thought it was the wind, a soft sighing whisper, and a cold draft brushed over his neck. Toby turned around, rubbing the back of his neck checking for spiders. The door stayed open, and he could see all the way out to the gap in the front door. A straight line that he could run- no not run. If you run, they will get you. You need to be brave and walk. One steady step at a time, always expecting that cold dead hand to fall on your shoulder and drag you down to where the dead children waited in the dark.

Toby reached the end of the room, there were a few rat-chewed magazines with weathered pages stuck to the floor. Those were no good. He needed some trophy that couldn’t have been found somewhere else. Maybe a piece of the mattress covering? The image of tearing off a strip and a whole swarm of rats tumbling out of the hole made Toby shiver. No, best to leave the mattresses well alone.

The sighing whisper came again, Toby thought he could catch the almost words of a song, a nursery rhyme. It sounded familiar. Turning his back on the room Toby walked carefully to the door and heard the whispers again. Atishoo…Atishoo…we all fall down… Children’s voices, singing, somewhere very far away and very faint.  Every hair on the back of his neck now stood up. Every nerve tingled. He would not run. If he ran they would grab him. A hundred pale ghostly hands would drag him down and he would be trapped forever, singing a song older than the children, older than the building, older than anything except death.

Breathing slowly Toby reached the front door and then looked around again. The sounds of children came clearly in the still air; the faint whispers, girl’s voices, boy’s voices, all whispering and giggling. Toby’s fists clenched. The plastic body of the Super Dude Sam torch creaked. “Stop laughing…” he said quietly.  The sound continued, he heard the bustle of nurse’s skirts, the creak of wooden floorboards, the coughs and moans of the sick and dying.  Over it all he could hear the children, the whispering, laughing children. Laughing and whispering like the bullies at school. The ones like Hayden, and Jessica and Grant and Sarah. The ones he hated so much he would rather go into a haunted house at night than have to face their torture for one more day.

“Leave me alone!” Toby’s anger burst out of him in a shout. He wheezed for air and fumbled for his inhaler but it slipped through his sweat-slicked palm and bounced across the floor. The torch light found it, lying in the dust and dirt at the bottom of the stairs. His breath whistling through the tight band closing around his throat Toby stumbled forward and on his knees he snatched up the inhaler. Pressing it, he couldn’t get enough air in for the vapour to work. A panicked feeling of suffocation gripped him and he pressed the trigger again, finally his airway opened and he took a third dose, inhaling deep breathes and waiting for the panicked shaking to stop. 

A girl in an old fashioned dress stood on the stairs in front of him, like someone from an old black and white movie. Except she was made of grey mist and he could see the stairs behind her. Her hair was braided into two long whips that hung down her back. Her eyes were shadows, circles of darker black in the shadows of her face. Cradled in the crook of one arm she carried an old fashioned doll, its body was carved from wood, the head made stitched from a scrap of cloth and padded, only one button eye remained and the dress she wore had a faded pattern of checks.  Just like the girl, all colour had bled from it. Like the girl, the doll was now a grey shadow thing.

Around him the unseen children sang, Ring-a-ring-a-rosy…   Toby would have screamed, but the air just whistled out of his throat. He whimpered and lifted the torch, hoping that the light would banish this thing born of the horrifying shadows. When the beam touched her, the girl melted away, like steam vanishing from a bath. The doll dropped to the wooden steps, landing with a solid thunk. Toby snatched it up and backed away. He didn’t care about proving anything to anyone anymore. The need to get away from this place blanked every other thought.

Once the board was back in place Toby walked quickly, still afraid to run, all the way to the mesh fence. Once he had crossed the street, then he ran. He ran until he wheezed and shook. Climbing back in his bedroom window he stuffed the doll in his school backpack and took regular puffs on his inhaler until he fell asleep.

Hayden and his gang left Toby alone the next morning before school. They waited until the morning break to gather around him, penning him in, giving him nowhere to run to.

“Bet you didn’t go. Bet you were chicken!” Hayden said and the others laughed. Jeering and making chicken clucking noises.

Toby unzipped his Super Dude Sam backpack and pulled out the doll. The head of it was padded with something soft. Woollen hair and rough stitching marked the face and eyes. Circles of red had been painted on the cloth cheeks, now the faded colour gave the doll a strange, feverish appearance.

“I went there. I saw a ghost and she gave me this.”

Hayden blinked and stared. The filthy doll stared back with her single button eye and her cotton stitched mouth seemed to smile.

“HA-HAA! Toby plays with dolls!” Hayden yelled and pushed Toby hard. He fell down, the doll yanked from his grip and raised triumphant as evidence of Hayden’s chanting. “Toby plays with do-olls! Toby plays with do-olls!”  The others took up the chant, and Toby felt tears stinging his eyes. They weren’t going to make him part of their gang. They never expected him to do what they dared. Being brave hadn’t changed anything.

Hayden and the others danced in a circle around him, chanting, and laughing. Other children came to see who was lying on the ground. They eagerly took up the chant too, Toby plays with do-olls! Toby plays with dolls! It echoed and swirled around him. A dark tornado of noise that swept the last hope of his hope away. Toby curled up in a ball and cried, the voices of the children blurring until he heard them merge with a whisper that grew in strength until it was all he could hear…

Toby plays with do-olls!

Ring-a-ring-a-rosie

A pocket full of posie

Atishoo! Atishoo!

We all fall down!

Then silence. Toby opened his eyes and sniffled, wiping the snot and tears away from his face with a sleeve he sat up.  Hayden and the others were lying on the ground, the doll sat in the centre of the circle, near Toby’s feet. The children did not move. Arms and legs splayed in all directions, they lay like puppets with their strings cut. All so still and quiet, and Toby knew, with a sudden and terrible certainty, dead. All of them had fallen down and they would never get up again.

He picked up the cloth faced doll, and just for a moment, he thought he could hear the sound of children laughing and singing a very old song…

 

Engines of Empathy - Prologue

Here is the full text of the initial draft of the prologue of Engines of Empathy

PROLOGUE

     As always, leaving things to the last possible minute was proving to be a bad idea. In this case, a particularly bad idea as the last possible minute included the sum total of the time remaining in his life. He always expected he would die in his bed, or someone else’s bed many years hence. Warm, comfortable and surrounded by impatient descendants with something cryptic to say as his last words. He’d given his penultimate utterance a lot of thought, “My only regret is that you never met your birth parents,” had been his personal favourite. He imagined saying it to his grown up children and watching their faces as he drifted off.

     Of course his darling wife would be deceased by then, out-living that most perfect of women would be the honourable thing to do. Fate appeared to have a different opinion as she was away visiting her parents until the baby arrived. In his opinion the installation of children was a fine thing, but taking delivery of the finished product nine months later? That he felt was better left in the hands of experienced women.

     The rain and crashing thunder outside made it difficult to hear the whine and click of his approaching assassin. The only lighting available in the large mansion was the flickering glow of candles, and there were precious few of those.

     “What-ho Mr Wibbly?” he called into the darkness. Somewhere out there a door handle rattled, and then exploded out of the frame in response. The prototype possessed remarkable strength, but very poor fine-motor skills. Dashing on stockinged feet he made for the library. Closing the door he went to the fine writing desk that took pride of place in the room. He had bought it at an auction, recognising it as living oak, the rare wood that had been a key to the discovery of the age. The discovery that was now going to get him killed.

     The letter was complete, but there would be no time to post it now. He paused, listening between the rumbles of the storm outside for approaching death. There it was. The whirr and click of clockwork gears; the slow, deliberate sound of approaching betrayal. The letter folded up into a narrow strip, with shaking hands he prised open the hidden slat in the roll-top desk’s cover. Pressing the letter inside, he winced as the office door shuddered under repeated blows.

“I’ll be right there!” he called. Sliding the slat back into place, he patted the desk fondly one more time and whispered, “That should cause someone no end of trouble.” He smiled and went to meet his death.

Who's driving this thing?!

I love that moment when you are on the edge of your seat, totally engrossed in an action packed story. You have no idea what is going to happen next.How is the hero going to get out of this impossible situation?

... And the only thing you can do is keep typing to find out.

Editors As A Species

  Yes, editors are human. We have families, day jobs, hobbies, and our own writing, editing, submitting and re-writing to get on with.

We did however take on the job of reviewing submissions for (in my case) anthologies and production scripts. So we don't complain. We do however read some of the most god-awful literature ever excreted from the backsides of some barely literate apes.

We don't get paid for this. In fact the last anthology I edited I personally put up the US$350 to pay our writers $25 for each successful submission. The publisher wasn't able to pay anything but I wanted quality stories, and I got them.

We don't get paid. We instead get to pore over the full range of experience and ability in the written word. We get stories that are so disparate from the guidelines we wonder if the submitter made a mistake and sent us the wrong file. We get stories in foreign languages, in unopenable file formats, in stupid fonts, in weird colours. We get stories that are incomprehensible, lacking in any form of grammar, spell or punctuation checking. We get piles and piles of complete turkey-droppings. And then...

...We find something that takes our breath away. A story we simply have to have. The story you read and it sticks with you. The story you wish you had written. The story that makes you wonder, what the hell am I doing? If there are writers out there who are this good, I may as well just pack up my pencil and go fishing instead.

Those are the ones that make it a joy to write an acceptance letter. Those are the ones that make all the soul-destroying, "please don't take it personally, but your story isn't what we are looking for", sanitised responses, when all you really want to do is email them saying, "Are you kidding me? Please never submit anything to anyone ever again, in case by some bizarre accident it accidentally gets published and the collective IQ of the world drops sharply as a result."

So like every other writer, editors go through the pangs of rejection and the joys of acceptance. There is nothing like putting together a publication of stories that are your favourites. Giving money to people for writing is the greatest feeling in the world. Their gratitude is genuine and the lessons we can provide to those who aren't there yet are sincere.

Spare a thought for the editors. That we respond at all is indication enough that not only are we human, we still have some faith in literate humanity left.

cheers
Paul

PS: I write reports for the government all day. At night I write and edit short stories, novels, audio-plays, screen-plays and the occassional offensive limerick.

Old Stories: The Tower

I've been trawling through some old files and finding old stories. This one is from 2009 or earlier. Never published of course.

The Tower by Paul Mannering

The architect and reason for the tower were lost to the sea in aeons past.  Only the stones remained. Each block of black basalt curved slightly, just enough to cling to its brethren and encompass the tiniest angle of curvature in the round edifice.  The tower stood tall and phallic on the barren black cliffs above a storm grey sea and waited.

 Tomlay and Adelsa left the tower in dull morning light cast by the ancient red sun. The tide had receded uncovering the rich mudflats and the shellfish that they harvested.  Today they called each other Tomlay and Adelsa, yesterday each had created different names for the other.  One was male and the other female, and after smashing the hard calcite husks of their meal, they slurped and gnashed their teeth against the pale slime flesh nestled within.

The emptiness of their bellies satiated, Tomlay grunted at Adelsa and pushed up against her buttocks, his genitals swelling.  Adelsa, today bearing the complimentary female parts refused him and Tomlay pushed harder, grunting with increased ferocity.  The female scampered away and climbed the sea-worn stones of the cliff, pausing, crouched on a narrow ledge to throw small stones at the furious male below.

With a dismissive gesture, Tomlay turned away from her and loped off down the beach.  Hunched over, his flat pale hands slapped the hard-packed wet sand every few strides and he collected and discarded anything that caught his eye without pausing in his rush.

Adelsa’s hoots faded into the hiss and moan of the surf.  Tomlay scampered over the horizon, if Adelsa would refuse him today, then he would seek solace elsewhere.

The sun was midway between the grey sea and the highest point of the sky when Tomlay reached the next bay.  The tide was returning, sweeping back in a long pulsing flood to cover the mud and sand, refreshing the shellfish beds and maintaining the smooth palate of the long beach. Tomlay splashed through the edge of the surf until the salt stung his eyes and his translucent eyelids flexed shut and turned his view into a muted sepia shade.

Turning away from the water, he scuttled on long boned legs, up and over the dunes as barren as the tower cliffs, to the border of the marshlands beyond.  The marsh did not interest Tomlay or Adelsa, they had never found reason to penetrate its humid, rustling depths.  Passing along the soft-earthed strip of land between sand and bog Tomlay felt his lust swell anew.

At the further end of the second bay, a peninsula rose.  Twin to the rock under the tower, this outcrop made a pedestal for a statue, vast and unknowable, the smooth stone rose to a dizzying height in the air and bore a pleasing feminine shape like that which Adelsa wore today and Tomlay might wear tomorrow if Adelsa tired of it.

His hairless body glowing with exertion Tomlay bounded up the rocks, leaping and grunting he sprang and clung until he reached the top.  Here he rested, idly stroking himself as he crouched and breathed the salty air. Squinting up at the statue Tomlay considered every curve and niche.  Not wanting to waste his climax, he released his grip upon himself and hooting in delight scuttled forward to leap upon the naked toe of the figure. From there he scampered up the smooth incline of the massive carved foot and laid his hands on the cool stone of the giant ankle.

Adelsa grew bored with crouching on her ledge.  She knew where Tomlay was going, having been there herself many times. Straightening, she finished climbing to the top of the cliff and with her back to the tower; she flexed and twisted her body, catching the warmth of the morning sun on the waxen flesh of her breasts and thighs.

Tomlay became one with the embodiment of female essence.  He entered her; this vast repository for all that was female, merging his own flesh with that of the dark stone.  In the warmth of her womb, he was zygote.  Fertilized egg dividing and conscious of all existence, the seething turmoil of a billion-billion generations of DNA twisted around him.  Filtered light glowed sanguine and comforting; he remembered conception and birth throughout time.  This was the culmination of life, only the genetic memory remained. Tomlay ejaculated and cried out, his emissions floating in the warm space that both surrounded and engulfed him.

Returning to the tower Adelsa felt the shuddering connection that Tomlay made with the female, encased in the up-thrust structure. With a moaning cry to the burning sun her own form broke down and joined with his in the union of genetic replication. Together they disseminated in to the component units of genes and the chemical codex of life. 

Through out the day and the night they would gestate. In the following dawn two new forms would emerge, craft names for themselves and bask under the pale light of the red sun and experience the success of life.