“Your world is very interesting to us. It’s like a roller-coaster. Besides you people treat us well.”
“But you’re living in a dump.”
“It’s just a game for me. You’ve heard of other people from my world that live among you. For example the cast of
“Is there anyway I can go to your world?”
“Of course Bill, we discover people all the time. Take the rope and off so that I can get out of this chair.”
“Oh right. Sorry.”
Brittany stood up and rubbed her wrists. Then she stretched her knees and arced her legs.
“What you have to do Bill is drink all of that Pepsi while I dance.”
As soon as she started dancing she looked better. Her thick dreds become long flowing hair. Her dirty kin became clean. The pus vanished from her navel ring. By the time Bill was on his third Pepsi he could hear the music. His house seemed larger. His furniture became bigger, newer, more conformable, more fashionable. The air smelled better. He drank and drank and drank; although it became harder with each can. There were other people dancing with Brittany now. The roof of his house vanished and above was the bluest sky he had ever seen, with more perfect white sun above. The birds sang in time with swelling music. Flowers began to grow out of his floor. He drank and drank and drank. It really hurt. The President was walking up and beside him the Pope was roller-skating. People of all colors were dancing together. Good looking people. People better looking than anybody he had ever seen. He drank and drank. Soon the case would be finished. Boy did it hurt. He really needed to go to the bathroom. He hoped they had bathrooms in the Real World. There was a talking lizard. There was the talking dog. It was all too wonderful. He could see the Pillsbury Doughboy in the distance dancing, dancing, dancing. One more can. He popped the top. He took a slug.
Bill’s gut exploded. He had a moment to look down at the ragged hole that blood and Pepsi were gushing out of. Then he died and slowly began to fade from the Real World.
Brittany and her friends were laughing, but with his last breath he thought that he could detect some compassion in her voice. Maybe not enough to buy him a used copy of
OUR NOVEL
Upon my recent diagnosis with Carson’s Syndrome, I realized that it was time to talk about the creation of
I am Moses Gubb, and I on from my success with
First let me tell you a little about myself. Not that I was born and so forth, you probably have a good idea about that, no I want to explain the late twentieth century to you. Everyone wanted to be a writer, because a good deal of effort in the craft seemed to have been removed. My mother had told me with horror that in her first job she had a manual typewriter. It was one of those tales of “how bad it was” that ranked up there with the idea of a TV without remote control. There were all kinds of software in those days that helped you write. They formatted the text, they prompted you with both words and plot, and they even encouraged you if you stopped writing due to some from of block. I remember when the first time my computer got the (as it was then called) World Wide Web. It was as much of a breakthrough then as doing away with keyboards had been a few years before.
My job1 or as we said then, my job, was a manager of a video store in Austin, Texas. It was the “cool” video store next to New Atlantis, which was a used bookstore, and a bar called the Decline of West. It didn’t pay for shit, but it did bring in a steady group of artistic people. Austin was sort of a writers’ colony in those days. You couldn’t spit without hitting a published author. I know because I spit a lot, mainly just at the people walking by into Violet Crown Videos. My girlfriend worked for me and made even less. We considered ourselves to be as cool as our videos. But we had one tragic secret. Unlike our clientele, we hadn’t achieved in any art form. Now we were smart enough to see writers don’t have any money, or they wouldn’t have grumbled so at the dollar a day late fee on their DVD’s (I’m guessing that the readership of
How tough could writing be? After all, New Atlantis was filled with it, clearly most of it turned out by people less smart than us, if not in fact less talented. I asked Mary Denning, a founder of the Contrarians, a school of Austin writers, what her secret was. “Persistence.” She said. I figured I could try that awhile, at least until it got boring. Picking what to write was the next hurdle. I asked all the writers that came in, what sold, and they all said mysteries. So I got some mystery writing software, and I took off. My first novel was entitled
Meantime Belinda was trying a more social approach she had joined a group of people that wanted to write mysteries called People Who Want to Write Mysteries (PWWtWM) or as they affectionately called it, “Pootem,” The group brought famous people in the field of mystery writing to Austin—agents and publishers and such—which would surely snap up some of the locally produced delicacies. So we both attended and shelled out money for workshops. We watched other people being published left and right. In fact at out first workshop the woman who had set to the left of me and the man who had sat to the right of me, both sold a mystery novel in a month.
Was there some cosmic conspiracy against us?
I wrote many short stories in those days,” The Dairy Queen Murders,” “The Jell-O Slayer,” “The Pork and Bean Menace.” But none of them sold. One was even returned to me with a thin pencil scrawl “It’s the food guy again.” I would show them. I tired writing about drinks.
About this time Horace Greenslau came on the scene. Horace appeared in the form of unsolicited e-mail (or as we called in those halcyon days “Spam.”) Horace presented him self to the brethren and cistern of Pootem as a wily old publisher with many tricks up his ink stained sleeves. He pointed out two facts. Fact number one: the second sale is easier to make than the first, so if you want to be a published author, the best thing you can be is already published. Fact number two: you don’t have to pay dead guys anything but respect. His emails to Pootem just talked about these ideas, he said he just kept thinking about them.
So one day I sent a note to this list saying why not put them together? You could put a book that was half stuff by dead guys that you didn’t have to pay any money to, and half by living guys that were first time writers.
What a great idea! Wrote Greenslau.
It became his project at once. He had spots for eleven writers, to mixed with eleven classics of detection. It