A Few Copies of Clockmaker handdelivered

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, April 8) I began hand-delivering some copies of The Clockmaker's Son around town. The first copy was delivered into my wonderful daughter's hands as always. Then two copies were delivered to my sister's house- one for her and her husband, the other for my brother and his wife.

Today some copies accompanied me to work. My office manager, my best friend, a close friend, and the receptionist I usually work with all got their copies this morning. I have two more copies for coworkers- one of whom is currently in sunny FL. She'll be back later this week and I'll give her the copy reserved for her.

The remaining copies are going to Articulture2018 with me. These are all the rest of the copies I have on hand. I most likely will not be ordering more. I suppose you can call it a very limited edition.

If you want a copy, show up early on Saturday the 21st at the Church of Atonement on the corner of Court and Pleasant Streets for this year's Articulture2018 event celebrating the arts in their myriad forms in Westfield, Massachusetts! The event opens to the public at 10Am and closes at 7PM. The authors will be upstairs in the church's Guild Room to the left in the reception all through the French doors.

Yea, It's NOT Pneumonia!

I felt lousy all weekend with shortness of breath and a tight sensation in my chest, and a wet, cough- so I went to work this morning, booked an appointment and was seen...the good news is I don't have pneumonia, which is something I'm always afraid of with my compromised immune system and all my allergies and asthma issues. The bad news is that this nasty super virus can hang around for 3-4 WEEKS before the body kicks the squatter germs out once and for all. (Here I heave a huge sigh.)

As I posted on facebook the other night- I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.

This virus literally knocks the legs right out from under you. Although I haven't felt horribly sick, the constant having to blow my nose and cough up junk has me worn out...so worn out that my legs have actually felt fatigued. Sheesh! Despite the RA and chronic tendinitis in my right foot I spend most of my work day running around the office delivery paperwork to folders, faxing paperwork back, running to refer to charts at the opposite end of the building, chasing down providers for signatures, jumping up and going to talk to people who appear at the window despite their knowing there isn't a receptionist on the side of the office where I work. I can't ignore them and their questions. I run all day long...and then stagger up the deck stairs when I get home on wobbly legs. "Out! Out, damn virus!" I cry.

I am nearly finished writing the so-not-like-me nearly novel-length story that this virus is forcing out of me. Don't know if it'll ever get published or not. It's outside of my comfort zone by several thousand miles.

All I can say is- I'm doing the happy dance that this is NOT pneumonia, just a crappy butt-kicking virus.

6 Days Sick & 30,747 Words Written

   I came down with an upper respiratory virus last Saturday evening. On Sunday night, I began writing something, previously described in the last blog post. I've been testing my limits by not taking any sick time, by going to work every day this week, not letting this virus kick my butt. Work has been busier than ever and extremely stressful all week, but I stuck with it every day and dragged myself home exhausted every afternoon. However, I've been motivated to write this story that wants to be told. Every night I've eaten dinner, played with the cats for a few minutes and then written from 6:30PM to 11:30PM. This morning I reached 30,747 words, 13 chapters written and some of the most gruesome, graphic stuff I have ever put into print. It is one young woman's headlong, dangerous journey through a world perilously controlled by treacherous men who assign little value to females other than recreational use for purposes of pleasure.
   I still don't know where this is going, but it's leading me to places I never expected to find myself.
   Maybe it's the virus talking? We'll just have to see where this all goes.
   The name of the now novella sized story is The Worth of A Woman.
 

I Don't Know What I'm Writing, But

    I don't know what it is that I'm currently writing but it's moving along quickly with 9 chapters written since this weekend and most of it already edited. It's a story about a country that has fractures, with misogyny ruling. Girls are raised into their mid-teens by breeding communities and then auctioned to the highest bidder. They're raised and trained to be entirely submissive to males. The government is haphazardly run and disorganized. It seeks faction leaders to perform pay for hire executions and to get rid of undesirable troublemakers in general. These factions are basically left alone and are self-sustaining. The streets are a dangerous place. Even if you are aligned with a faction and have their protection it doesn't necessarily mean that you're safe. There are outsiders living in the woods practicing forgotten arts, like homeopathic and holistic medicine.
    Enter 15-year old Jade, a tempestuous redhead whose father is more than happy that she's finally reached the age where he can send her to auction and make her some other man's problem. The savage and cruel businessman, Mann, bids high on her, but a twenty-something gun-for-hire faction leader with an order of execution shows up and begins bidding against the evil brute. As the price rises for Jade, the drugged and seemingly docile redhead on the auction block, Archer executes the order, killing Mann in front of all the men gathered to bid on the girls. He reverts to being high bidder with Mann dead and wins her. But, before can even get her home, she catches him off guard, grabs his sawed off shotgun, and threatens to kill him. In the struggle that ensues, they both sustain damage. Archer realizes that what he bought for a steep price is not what he expected to take home.
     Jade is her own person- fighting the protocol of her training and trying to find her own place in a society that treats females little better than they treat their dogs. She refuses to submit to her master and though he's furious about that and constantly urged by the men in his compound to just put her down and take the loss, he's not quite ready to go that far. Her resistance to what she is expected to be unexpectedly draws him to her, even while she is repelling him continually and making him even angrier.
     Then, trying to pull herself together to return to the compound after being brutal raped in an alley a few days earlier, Jade overhears two men plotting against Archer. She finds herself angry about who the paid assassin is.
     Both Archer and Jade experience a gradual turning away from the way the world is at the present time toward the way they want to world to be- but whether or not they'll survive the often vicious battles that break out, the treachery of people they thought were friends, and attacks of a personal nature meant to drive a wedge between them once and for all, is unknown because the ground they call home is a constantly shifting landscape more difficult for two young people to navigate than anything either one of them could ever have imagined.
     I don't normally write this sort of harsh realism, so where this is coming from- I have no clue. After finishing The Clockmaker's Son, a cross genre horror/romance novel, this story idea rose like a phoenix from the ashes in my brain and has taken flight with no planning whatsoever. Where it's soaring to- I really have no idea at present. Whether it will ever be a novel is uncertain because it's harsh, brutal, realistic, crude, vulgar, voyeuristic, disturbing, raw...sort of like reality TV in the future when society more or less has reverted to the dark ages.
     We'll see what happens.
.

The Sinister Staircase

A Sinister Staircase by Susan Buffum

It appeared in the center of a traffic island where Main Street branched at a ninety degree angle onto Elm Street, at a gentle curve to the left around the town green, or continued straight onto the narrower School Street. The island was triangular with multiple traffic signals like tall, yellow pines with bristling light cones—red, yellow, and green—controlling motor vehicle flow. Brick pathways trisected the island, converging at a central junction, each traffic light situated on its own raised dais enclosed by granite curbstones.

It wasn’t there one afternoon. But, it was there the following morning. It created traffic snarls as drivers slowed to a snail’s pace as they craned their necks, tilted their heads back trying to look upward. Several rear end collisions occurred during the morning commute when drivers abruptly stopped to gawk. A number of verbal altercations took place, but they were brief due to the fact that those involved were more curious about the staircase that rose from the center of the traffic island in a lazy, looping coil.

So high it rose that it appeared to vanish into the low lying, steely-gray clouds hovering just a story or two above the tallest building, which happened to be the three-story corner building that now housed a trendy coffee shop on its lower level. There were people sitting at the counter on stools facing out toward the green, eyes raised to the gray clouds, hands wrapped around ignored wide-mouthed cups of coffee in which sweet, creamy hearts surrounded by delicate curlicues floated atop their contents.

A half dozen brave souls had made it up to the second floor and out onto the small balcony where there were several tiny, round, wrought iron café tables with spider-legged matching chairs. There was an occasional stiff breeze gusting down the street in unpredictable bursts. The air smelled heavy with impending rain and slightly poisonous with exhaust fumes trapped beneath the clouds..

“That wasn’t there yesterday, was it?” wondered a woman with long, unruly strawberry-blonde hair who wore a leather jacket and jeans to a woman of indeterminate age who was sitting alone at the next table, her cellphone held like a prayer book in both her slender, pale hands, her face cast in a slightly bluish light.

“Nope,” came a masculine reply. “City must have slapped it up after five o’clock last night. Another damn waste of taxpayer money, if you ask me,” he muttered. He was dressed in work coveralls, was leaning against the brick wall near the doorway leading back inside the building from the balcony. “I’ve got to get to work so my taxes can pay for more crap like this,” he grumbled as he disappeared back inside. The thudding of his steel-toed boots as he descended the wooden staircase to the first floor felt like the reverberations of thunder beneath the feet of the people on the balcony.

“Is it some sort of art installation?” asked a college-aged girl with bright turquoise hair who stood up from her seat to walk to the short wrought iron railing on the parapet that prevented people from jumping and deterred others from climbing over onto the ledge and falling to the brick sidewalk below. “I bet it’s some artist’s doing, but what’s the point of placing it in this town? No one here appreciates art.”

Her companion, a tall, lanky young man with a fall of brown hair obscuring the right side of his lean, chiseled face shrugged as he furiously texted on his cellphone. “There’s nothing holding it up, you know,” he pointed out. “No supports. Another strong gust coming down Elm Street and that thing will topple over. Mark my words. Someone’s going to get killed.”

“You’re such a fatalist,” the girl muttered, grabbing her backpack from the tiled floor, slinging it over her right shoulder before grabbing her coffee that was in a takeout cup. “C’mon, we’re going to be late for class.” The lanky boy rose, stuffing his phone into his sweatshirt pocket before grabbing his own backpack and cup of coffee. He followed the girl with the turquoise hair to the door, ducking as he passed through.

This left the woman with the blue glow illuminating her face, the woman in the leather jacket, and a middle-aged man with a doughy face, receding brown hair, and black-framed glasses that magnified his watery blue eyes on the balcony. “Is that a kid on the staircase?” he asked, reaching up to adjust his glasses. He squinted through the smudgy lenses at the staircase diagonally across from the balcony. “I think there’s a kid on the staircase,” he said.

The woman with the phone glanced up, her gaze falling on the staircase. A slight frown creased her brow and she gave an elegant one-shoulder shrug before returning her gaze to the screen of her phone. “More a young woman, I’d say, not a young girl.”

“No, it’s a child,” he disagreed. “All gangly legs and bare feet on a day like this. Where’s her mother, I want to know,” he replied.

“She’s probably downstairs having coffee. You know how kids are. Easily bored and restless. They like to play,” the strawberry-blonde woman said.

He hauled himself up off the tiny, spindly-legged chair to go to the railing recently abandoned by the girl with the turquoise hair. He caught a faint hint of her cinnamon scent hanging on the heavy air. It made his stomach growl. His thoughts veered to the huge cinnamon roll he had seen in the pastry case behind the counter downstairs. He’d eaten breakfast before leaving home. However, he thought he might have to buy that obscenely enormous pastry and take it to work with him this morning. It was too much temptation to ignore with that scent teasing his olfactory sense. “I think she’s carrying a basket.”

 The women didn’t answer him. One was too absorbed in what she was reading on the small screen of her phone. The other was watching a crow that had landed with a flutter of dark wings on top of a nearby streetlight.

“She doesn’t even have a jacket on, or a sweater. She should at least have a sweater, or a sweatshirt. And some sort of shoes on her feet. She must be cold.” He thought he should go down there and offer her his jacket, but people were such alarmists these days. His kind gesture might be misconstrued as an attempt to molest the girl if he fumbled while trying to button it around her, if he accidentally touched her. One couldn’t even be a good Samaritan in this day and age without someone taking offense or misconstruing good intentions.

Down on the street, the girl hesitated, stopping on the bottom step of the staircase. Across from the island, on the corner, was a hair salon with sparkling golden letters painted on the Main Street side windows. Beside that business was a small bookstore. The proprietor of that shop stood outside the door on the granite stoop smoking a cigarette, one hand thrust into the front pocket of his jeans as he surveyed the morning traffic. The sleeves of his hoodie sweatshirt were pushed up to his elbows revealing lean arms with sinewy muscle snaking around the bones beneath his skin. He wore high-top canvas sneakers as bright a shade of red as arterial blood.  Next to the bookstore was a café, the heads of its patrons in the booths against the front window were bowed over their breakfasts, already having dismissed the mysterious staircase as some sort of advertising ploy, or ridiculous addition to the recently renovated downtown.

The girl seemed to take in everything with one sweep of her calm, dark eyes. She shifted the basket, and then leaned down, setting it on the brick pathway. It rested against the bottom step of the staircase.

“Gathering eggs, little lady?” asked an elderly man who walked crooked over so that he appeared to be the living personification of the cane he gripped in his left hand. The girl gave him a frank and curious look. He nodded toward the basket at her feet. “In your basket, you got eggs?”

“No, sir,” she replied softly. “It’s empty at the moment.”

He dipped his right hand into his deep trouser pocket then dropped a shiny quarter into the bottom of the basket. “Now it’s no longer empty,” he said, nodding his head with satisfaction as the white silhouette of a striding man lit up indicating he could cross the street safely.

A woman holding the hand of a toddler dug her free hand into her jacket pocket, plucking out a dollar bill that she dropped into the basket as they passed by, following the elderly man across Elm Street to the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop. The girl’s head turned as she followed their progress along the sidewalk toward the library on the corner.

Then she frowned down at the money in the bottom of the basket, squatted down and plucked it out, tossing it onto the bricks and then standing up with a defiant scowl on her face, as if daring anyone else to defile her basket by dropping money into it. She folded her thin arms as two men crossed Elm Street to the island. One walked past her to press the button to make the light change so they could cross. The other stopped, looked down at the girl who tilted her head back to look up at him, her face still set in that jaw thrust forward expression. Their eyes locked and held as he crouched down, picking up the dollar bill and the quarter. He rose to his full height again, stuffing the money into his windbreaker pocket, his expression daring her to remark upon his taking it. “You got something you want to say to me, little girl?” he asked, a hint of mockery in his tone, a subtle dare shadowing his words.

“There’s lots more of that, you know,” she replied.

“Lots more of what?”

“Money,” she said, her thumb popping up and flicking in a backwards motion over her shoulder to indicate the staircase.

“What do you mean? There ain’t nothin’ up there,” he retorted.

“Yes, there is. There’s lots and lots of money up there.” He started to scoff at her, but her face was suddenly cherubic, full of that innocence young children radiate. She cocked her head slightly toward her left shoulder, then bent and grasped the handle of the basket. “You’ll need this to carry it back down in.” She held the basket out to him.

He looked skeptical, but reached out and took the handle in his hand. “Chuck, c’mon, man,” said his friend from near the light signal pole. “She’s pullin’ you leg. There ain’t nothin’ up there but sky.”

“Doesn’t hurt nothin’ to run up and take a quick look. Kids don’t lie, right? She’s too young to know how to lie. It’ll just take a coupla seconds. Up and back. Hang tight.” He gave the child a little push to one side and quickly began climbing up the staircase.

“What’s really up there?” asked the other man who pushed his long, dirty, blonde hair back from his face with one hand. He didn’t know why Chuck thought the girl was a kid. She was older than his teenaged daughter. There were the curves of an adolescent girl beneath her simple white shift. They were rather intriguing curves with their promise of filling out to become womanly curves in a few years’ times. “You can tell me.”

“Everything you could ever dream of,” she replied.

“You don’t say.” She nodded, giving him a surprisingly coy look for such a sweet looking young lady.

“She wasn’t yankin’ my chain, Jimmy! Money! There’s piles and piles of it up here!” came Chuck’s distant, excited, and incredulous voice from high above their heads.

“See?” she said.

Jimmy put his foot up on the bottom step and grabbed the railing.

“I wouldn’t go up there, if I was you,” said a voice to his right.

He turned his head and saw it was the bookstore proprietor who had come across the street and was now standing on the island on the brick path. “What business is it of yours, weirdo? Go on back to your shop and stick your big nose into a book, and slam it shut!”

The bookstore proprietor smiled affably and shrugged. “I read a lot. Maybe you should take it up, reading. It never bodes well to climb a staircase you don’t know what’s at the top of.”

“Money! I’m rich!” came Chuck’s gleeful voice, followed by a metallic clatter.

Jimmy, the bookstore proprietor, and the girl all watched as several coins rolled down the staircase. They landed at Jimmy’s feet. He grinned smugly at the man from the bookstore, before shoving him aside and dashing up the staircase. “I’m comin’, Chuck! I want some of that cash!”

The bookstore proprietor sighed, turning his eyes toward the girl. She was a small child with short blonde hair, brown eyes, and lips that curved into a sly smile as he just gazed at her. He nodded, and as he did she seemed to waver in his vision like a mirage, or an image reflected in a funhouse mirror. She appeared to grow from child to adolescent, to young woman, to matron, to crone before becoming a child again. As he studied her, took the measure of her, the basket came rolling slowly down the staircase. “What do you collect in your basket?” he asked her as she bent to pick it up as it came to rest against her bare ankle and foot.

She looked down into the basket then reached inside. Half her arm seemed to disappear into the depths of the basket, although to his eyes it looked rather shallow. “Hands,” she said as she lifted a man’s clenched hand from the basket by the ragged, gory stump of its wrist. The book proprietor stepped back one big step as the girl smiled up at him. As she smiled, the hand she held unclenched and a shower of coins fell onto the bricks at their feet with a discordant metallic clatter. She laughed, her laughter as sweet as honey, but there was something tainted lurking within it.

The bookstore proprietor nodded as he kicked a nickel with the toe of his red sneaker. “That certainly is a sinister staircase,” he remarked. The child tossed the disembodied hand into the air. It vanished. Clutching the handle of the basket, she turned and began to climb the stairs without replying. His eyes followed her until she vanished into the gray clouds that still hung low over the intersection.

As he began to look away his eyes fell on the woman standing on the second floor balcony of the coffee shop on the corner. Her face was still illuminated by the screen of the cellphone she held like an open book in her hands. Her eyes rose from the screen to meet his from across the street for a long moment. Slowly, her eyes lowered and her left hand moved as she tapped on her screen.

In his pocket, the bookstore proprietor’s cellphone rang like an old bicycle bell to indicate that he had a text message. Her eyes rose from her phone’s screen as he pulled his phone from his sweatshirt pocket. He tore his gaze away from hers as he tapped the screen and opened the text message. I’ve got your number, he read.

“I bet you have,” he murmured as he swiped the screen and it went dark.

He glanced again toward the balcony, but the woman was gone. The staircase, however, was still in front of him. The coins still littered the brick path at the foot of the stairs. Cars flowed past as he walked to the yellow street signal post and pressed the button, then waited for the ghostly striding figure to light up in the small rectangular signpost across the street in front of the hair salon. There were people on that sidewalk waiting to cross to this island. “Let them come across,” he thought as the figure lit up and he stepped out between the parallel lines of the sidewalk, striding quickly back across the street and over to the granite stoop of his shop. As he opened the door and stepped inside, he flipped the book-shaped sign that hung on the inside of the door so that it read OPEN.

Walking through the store, he noticed a book that had fallen from the shelf. He went to pick it up, to place it back on top of the bookcase in the empty spot that marked the space it had recently occupied. Turning it over in his hands, he saw that it was a copy of Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White.

He laughed.

(NOTE: The novel Some Must Watch published in Great Britain in 1933 was adapted to the screen by screenwriter Mel Dinelli and became the basis for the film The Spiral Staircase in 1946 , starring Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, and Ethel Barrymore.)

Last Night

   So, last night I'm writing the seventh version of a story that's been kicking around in my head when Kelly sits down across from me and says, "I have a great idea for a little ghost story for the next Ghost Stories LIVE! which is coming up in April. She says it involves a magician. I say, "Well you'd better write down a few notes so you don't forget." "Notes?" she scoffs. "I'll just write the story."
    I blink and she's done (well, a few blinks, but it seemed like only one blink before she was holding up a page filled with her tiny crabby printing. I said I'd read it and she laughed, reminding me that I can't see her writing never mind read it. She said, "I'll read it to you." She proceeded to read the story.
   Wham! One strike of the hammer and she nailed it! I sat there in awe of her...much like she has sat in awe of me in the past. 374 words...to my way of writing, that's just barely a beginning paragraph!! Kelly Buffum- you are incredible!
   Today we're laughing about the size of the table of contents when she finally puts her book of flash, micro, and very short fiction ghost stories together in one volume...the table of contents will be longer than the pages full of stories!!
   Gotta love her! She is a maestro of mini fiction.

The Clockmaker's Son Release Date postponed

I thought I would be releasing my NaNo novel from 2017 this spring, but there might be a small delay...there's something in the works that I can't talk abut right now.

I did complete my final revisions and corrections. Kelly's taking her whack at finding all my comma issues and anything else she can catch that I've missed during multiple read throughs. You really do need fresh eyes, critical eyes and not just your own tired, jaded, forgiving eyes when getting a book ready to be published.

Off in pursuit of stretching cats!