Today’s Teaser Tuesday comes from the short story, “A Short Walk Home.” I don’t know why I even reacted; it was just a rustle, probably an opossum or raccoon. But I became newly aware I was beside a corn field, not soybeans, and I couldn’t see a thing in… Teaser Tuesday: A Short Walk Home
This is the story of how I submitted a substandard short story to an editor this week and am sorta proud of it.
It’s been a turbulent week, and it’s only Wednesday. You may know that my day job is animal (and human) behavior, and I have two dogs who are both family members and sort of business partners. Last week, I got a call that my sleek, shiny, very active Laev had tested positive for lymphoma. Monday afternoon, we met with the oncologist, confirmed Stage 4 (of 5), and had her first chemo treatment. On Tuesday morning, my other dog Shakespeare was diagnosed not with an infected tooth as expected, but with very fast-moving bone cancer, and he was given as little as 3 weeks to live.
I hopped over to check something on an Amazon listing, and I found this:I Feel Rather Flattered.
We’ll be presenting tonight on Japanese Folklore & Mythology (and talking about Kitsune-Tsuki) at InConJunction in Indianapolis. And I’ve added a new video clip, my favorite scene from Ran, to the panel. /rubs palms together gleefully/ Say hello!
I talk a lot about Japanese folklore here on the blog, for obvious reasons, but I haven’t talked much about ninja. And ninja have certainly entered national pop culture and folklore, so they’re as valid a topic as any other.
Plus, I got to have dinner with some lately. I don’t mean I dined with students of Bujinkan Taijutsu or other martial arts heirs of ninjutsu skill, I mean the dressed-in-black, popping-out-of-ceilings legend of thousands of movies and cartoons and books. Those ninja.
I Dine with Ninja
The problem with writing is that it’s wholly subjective. Qualitative. No hard data.
Where we can do quantitative analysis, we can make reasonable judgments even when our emotions aren’t in alignment. “I felt great about this today, but we actually had only a 70% success rate.” Or, “Oh, man, today has been a total downer and I hated this session, but we nailed it with a 90% success ratio.”
That’s very nice for behavior analysis and free throws. Not so useful with writing.
So today’s post is about a field trip to family history.
We hopped in my new car and headed up to Logansport, IN. There’s a Catholic church there, now called All Saints since it blended with two other local churches, but it used to be known as St. Joseph’s. It was built in the 1880s, and my great-great-grandfather and his sons handmade each of the 650,000 bricks to construct it.
Generations, Brick by Brick
There are two reactions I get from pretty nearly all my beta readers and critique partners, regardless of the story:
“I don’t know exactly what your characters look like; don’t you ever describe them?”
and,
“Holy smokes, your action scenes are really detailed.”
These may be phrased in various ways, but the general gist is almost always there. And it’s a problem for me.
I’m very visual. Except when I’m not.
Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon and realized it tied directly to Asian folklore and therefore I could totally justify a blog post.
Cushing had a long and varied career, playing everyone from Sherlock Holmes to the Sheriff of Nottingham, but even those who aren’t film buffs will remember him as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (as pictured here), one of the few who could successfully tell Darth Vader when to step off.
But Cushing had a particular niche in horror films, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today — specifically, his role as Van Helsing in a kung fu zombie vampire movie.
You read that right.
Peter Cushing and Asian Folklore
Today’s #TeaserTuesday comes from “Torrent,” a science fiction short story.
Merced… Mercen… What had been the word Captain Trafalgar used?
Do you mean to search for Mercedarians?
She answered in the affirmative.
Teaser Tuesday — Torrent
