There are Villains, and then there are...

by Jude Mason

As others have hinted at, when I first began writing, I had no idea villains were such an important aspect of story telling. I figured writing romance and erotica, all I really had to do well was write about sex!

Okay, so after my first book was published, I realized I needed to do some work on my bad guys. It wasn't easy and I still suck at those really cool ones you don't realize are bad until the end of the story. Mine are all so obvious it's painful. But, maybe that's all right too. You get your cliche' bad dude and it's easy for the reader to hate him. Here's a little snippet from Livin' on a Prayer, one of the Slippery When Wet series':

"Mr. Santino?" Logan reached across the man's desk to shake hands with one of the fattest men he'd ever met. He'd called and Santino had told him to come right over. Apparently, Shane had told the man about him and the job was still open.

"And you're Logan White; Reverend Grayson spoke highly of you."

"Call me Logan, please. I really need the job; I hope Reverend Grayson explained I need to start as soon as possible."

"Sit down," he said and lowered his bulk into the office chair. The office itself was small, a filing cabinet and the desk with the two chairs was about all there was room for. Santino filled his side of the room, and more. Balding and in his late forties, at least, he had a dour look that made Logan slightly uncomfortable for some reason. "Yes, Shane told me you were new in town and money was tight. He also told me you're fresh out of COR."

Logan's stomach lurched, but he sat down opposite the big man. Here it comes—the excuses and reasons why he couldn't hire an ex-con. Logan readied himself for the disappointment.

"Yes, I've been out for about two weeks, maybe a little longer now."

"Any trouble inside?"

An unusual question, he thought, but replied, "No, nothing. I did my time and got out."

"And you want to start right away?" Santino shuffled through a folder, sorting out a set of papers.

"Yeah, the money I had is about gone. I either find work soon or I'll be out on the streets." The confession came hard.

"Can you have these papers filled out by tomorrow morning? You can start then."

"Really?" Logan asked, shocked, glad, confused, but most of all just happy to have a chance. "I mean, yes, I'll have the paperwork back to you first thing and what time would you like me here?"

Santino laughed, a loud belly laugh that rocked his chair, threatening to break it. "Well, we don't do a breakfast so get here at no earlier than ten. Chef can show you were you'll be stationed and where things go.

"One thing, you mind your own business and whatever goes on at Zarah's stays in Zarah's. Got it?" There was a threatening tone to that last remark and Logan wondered what the deal was, but agreed. He really had no choice.

You get right from this little bit of description and dialogue that Mr. Santino isn't a nice man. If I'd made him blond, blue eyed and smiling, he'd have been a better villain, in some ways, but that's my shortcoming.

I'm also very, very fond of strong women who take care of villains. Roses was one, but let's take a look at something from Cat's Claw instead. The villains in this book were a family of hillbilly poachers, the Baxter's, who are so damn obvious it was impossible to make them anything but.

Ahead, the window slammed shut. Both of them ducked a little lower into the weeds. Looking toward the house, she saw the front door swing open and a tall, slightly over-weight man strode onto the veranda. He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and at first, Morgan didn't think he was the one—too ordinary looking. Dark-haired and bearded, he looked a little like a bear. But when he reached behind himself back into the house and brought out a rifle, she knew he wasn't just somebody living in Tommy's house, it was him.

A gentle push against her haunch reminded her of how dangerous their position was. Less than twenty-five meters from the house, if they made the wrong move, this man, Tommy, might very well see them.

She watched Joshua ease through the long grass and weeds, moving in a winding path toward the house. She followed his lead, but not his path, and zigzagged forward, always keeping the man in her sight. A thistle caught at her hide, something dug between the pads on her left paw and she bit back a yowl of pain. The journey took too much time. She was afraid the man would go back inside before they got close enough to charge.

Joshua bolted. He'd managed to get a little closer then she had, and took the opportunity to rush the man first. She was right behind him, her cougar scream making the hair on her own neck stand up.

"Christ!" the man screamed. He had just enough time to raise the rifle to his shoulder. But before he could aim, or pull the trigger, Joshua was on him. The man hit the floor with a loud thump, but somehow managed to keep his hold on the gun.

Cat claws ripped through cloth and soft human skin. Cat teeth sank into tasty human flesh. Ear splitting screams tore at them. As Joshua raised his head to scream his triumph, she joined him. Straddling the man's flailing arm, she took hold of the gun with her teeth and flung it off the porch.

"No! Get away!" His pleas came fast, furious, and made little sense to either of them in their rage. "Help! Help me!" The call echoed through the night, unheard and unheeded.

There's no mystery, no waiting until the last few paragraphs to drag out Mr. Ugly, as soon as you see this man, you know he's bad news. Perhaps it's just one more style of writing. Perhaps I still have a lot to learn when it comes to plotting (this I have no doubt). Perhaps I just need to stick to my ubur sexy guys with kink and leave the mystery writing with those sneaky villains to others.

Here's a question for you readers. Do you like to know who your villains are before the end of the story? Do you like to have time to hate him, wish the hero would figure it out? Or do you like that shock when he's revealed, mere paragraphs from the end? I'd love to know.

Villains vs. Bad Guys

By Jenna Byrnes

I don't think of myself as writing villains. Villains are someone like Darth Vader from Star Wars (although he became a little less villainous when Hayden Christensen played him in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith). I also consider Ursula from The Little Mermaid a first-rate villain.


And Cruella DeVille from 101 Dalmatians is about as villainous as they get.



I write contemporary erotic romance and romantic suspense, so while there's the occasional bad guy, I never really considered them villains (I've used that word more times in this post than I probably ever have in my life.)

I love writing romantic suspense because it combines the two things I most like to read, romance and mystery. It takes some plotting, but when I can pull it off, it's a great feeling. It's exciting to keep the reader guessing who the bad guy actually is. In most good fiction, TV or movies, part of the fun is trying to figure out "who done it" before the end. The trick in writing this is to introduce a variety of possible characters along the way, dropping hints as you go. When it's over, the reader/viewer wants to be able to look back and say, "Oh, yeah. I get it. That makes sense." There should be a feeling of satisfaction that the loose ends have been tied up properly.

Some of the legal-type thrillers get so caught up in details that when you sit down to pick up where you left off, you actually have to try and remember what's going on and who the main characters are. I know someone who writes in the front of books to keep track of the cast. That's way more work than I want. If I'm reading and it's not work-related then it's for relaxation, and I want to be entertained, not put through the wringer.

But even in those books, I don't consider the bad guys villains. I guess I reserve that term for the really epic baddies.

Curses -- Foiled Again!

By Lisabet Sarai



In the good old days, when I first began writing erotica, I didn't worry about villains. None of my first three novels has a truly evil antagonist. Raw Silk does include Edward Harrison, Kate's sleazy boss who steals her brilliant innovation and tries to sell it, but he's a minor character whose crimes serve mainly as an excuse to push the relationship between Kate and Gregory into a new phase. In any case, he gets his come-uppance in a torrid femdom scene that raises the heat level of the novel significantly.

The primary conflicts propelling Raw Silk and Incognito arise from the heroines' confusion about their sexual needs rather than through external events. Ruby's Rules is driven by the competition between the hero and the heroine, but although each stoops to some unethical tactics, neither one is in any sense evil. A villain was not required.

I didn't start needing villains until I wrote Exposure. This novel is an erotic noir thriller that begins with a double murder. In Exposure, as dictated by the genre, nearly every character is a potential villain. The biggest bad guy is a crafty politico with no scruples and an anger management problem. However, since his identity as the primary evil-doer is not revealed until late in the book, I didn't need to explore his character too deeply.

My first serious encounter with the villain conundrum occurred in writing my recently published paranormal erotic romance, Serpent's Kiss. This book is loosely based on Mayan mythology and features an apocalyptic struggle between twin gods reincarnated in modern times. The latest cycle has reached its end. Jorge Pélikal and Teodoro Remorros are ancient enemies, fighting to determine whether the earth and mankind will be completely destroyed as the cycle reaches its conclusion, or whether some aspects of civilization will be spared.

When I had finished the first draft, I asked Garce to critique the book. He was, as always, both tactful and helpful, but his comments about Remorros made me realize that how amateurish my attempt at an arch-villain really was.

Garce wrote:

“In some ways the relationship between Remorros and Jorge is more intriguing than the one between Jorge and Elena. This is the great Brahma and Shiva theme, or creating the world and destroying it. From a human view the creator is good and the destroyer is evil. But nature doesn’t see things this way. Destruction is the engine of evolution, causing some forms to pass away and better adapted forms to replace them. ... This raises interesting questions in your treatment of poor Remorros.

Remorros, as presented, is something of a mustache twirler. His function is tie the hapless girl to the railroad tracks (or bed posts) and get lost while she frees herself or Dudley Do Right frees her. This is unworthy of the premise attached to Remorros who has an essential function in things. He is the asteroid that frees the world of the dinosaurs and opens the way for Homo Sapiens who pray to the Gods he creates.”

I cringed. He was right on the money. Remorros was ultimate evil, with no rationale for his cruelty and no redeeming features. He inspired no sympathy, and hence, very little interest. He was a cardboard cut-out. Garce went on to educate me on the key to memorable villains:

“A good villain has a moral nature, he has a moral argument. If he ties the girl to the railroad tracks, he has reasons that seem good to him for doing so. Darth Vader didn’t start out as Darth Vader. He tells Luke the Emperor will bring order to the Universe. Shakespeare’s great villains were all moral beings. Macbeth is a good man who descends into evil in the progress of the story. Goneril and Regan torment their father Lear out of a twisted sense of public duty. Iago baits a trap for Othello because he hates the black moor; because he has been passed up for promotion and suspects Othello has been fucking his wife and partly because he really doesn’t like black folks. But he has reasons, he’s the most thoroughly evil of Shakespeare’s villains but we love him because he is so clever and he has his reasons”

I went back to work and tried to broaden and deepen Remorros' character. In the final version of the book, he is a lover of chaos. He truly believes that the universe needs to end. He tries to convince Elena (the heroine) that her lover Jorge is naïvely attempting to hold back the inevitable, that the world is dark and deserves to be destroyed. He has some success because Elena's history had given her an understanding of cruelty. She is no stranger to darkness.

Remorros still doesn't begin to fulfill the vision that Garce laid out for him. Hopefully, though,his added complexity makes him a bit more believable.

Now I am facing the mustache-twirling problem once again. I'm working on a M/M paranormal erotic romance called Necessary Madness. Kyle suffers from violent bouts of precognition that foretell terrible disasters. Rob is the cop who falls for Kyle despite the young man's disruptive psychic powers. I have both these characters well in hand. I know who they are, their history, how they will react in various situations and why they are attracted to each other. The villain, on the other hand, was until recently a huge mental blank.

I knew that he was a sort of black sorcerer who stole psychic powers through horrific rituals. That was necessary in order to fulfill the requirements of the plot. But who was he? Why did he want to do this? At first I thought that he was an older man, distinguished and wealthy, a prominent philanthropist with a dark secret life. If he already possessed money, respect and material power, though, why was he driven to acquire paranormal powers as well?

I raised the topic with Garce. Here's part of what he said:

“You need that back story answer for Anthony. Did he start out evil? Or did he become evil? Remember also, he does not see himself as evil. Never. He thinks he's right. Right about what?

So the question becomes - what are his values? Not sure? Go at this from another angle - the hero or the heroine - what are HIS/HER values? The villian will often have the same values as the hero but centered on himself. Or his values (think Darth Vader/ Luke Skywalker) will be the reverse image of the hero's.

The Joker is a mirror of Batman, which they both acknowledge... They share the same demons but handle them differently. Does Anthony share some personal demons in common with your hero? Think about your hero. There should be a connection between their values. What are your hero's values?”

Reading this triggered a classic “aha” experience for me. All at once I knew that the villain must be young, not much older than Kyle, and charismatic in a similar way. He is handsome and brilliant, the sort of person who makes your heart beat faster just being around him. Like Kyle, he was born into a family with paranormal abilities, but somehow the only power he inherited is the ability to sense the psychic abilities of others. Despite his personal gifts, he feels cheated and inadequate.

Kyle's prescient visions are a curse. They isolate him from humanity. He trusts no one (until he meets Rob, of course!) and contemplates suicide. Meanwhile, Anthony would kill to acquire Kyle's ability to see the future.

I'm not sure successful this take will be. I've only written one short scene involving Stefan (as he now calls himself). However, I feel far more confident that I can bring him to life. I have hopes that he will be a more complex and involving character than poor Remorros.

I don't know if villains will always be tough for me. I do marvel at the fact that ten years after publishing my first novel, I still have so much to learn. And I'm enormously grateful to have colleagues who share their insights, knowledge and opinions to help guide me along my upward path as an author.

Player Piano

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The Knitty Gritty On Talent

I got royally screwed last Christmas. My girlfriends and I all agreed we would not, under any circumstances, give each other gifts for the holidays. And I believed these bitches too, so guess who ended up looking like a total dumb-ass when we all got together for a Christmas party and folks started handing out presents?

Yep, that's right. Me. The gal who came empty handed.

Not that I wouldn't have looked like a fool anyway. If there's one thing I suck at, it's picking out presents for people. I never have any idea what to get. My husband only gets what's on his Amazon wish list, and he's happy with that, in light of other gifts I've tried to bestow upon him. As for everyone else I know? Ugh. Aside from the one year I gave all my friends a copy of an anthology I was in, I've never known what to give. It's partly because I wait too long to shop, and partly because I suck at bargain hunting. I could buy nice gifts all right... if I had unlimited time to buy and an unlimited budget to pay for it all. Which I don't.

My mother, however, doesn't have this problem. She is a very crafty person, meaning she can knit, crochet, and sew just about anything and get it done quickly. She's a genius with a needle, be it a sewing needle, a knitting needle, or a crochet needle. And because she's always working on something, she never lacks for a gift, whether it be for a bridal shower, a baby shower, a birthday, or Christmas.

So it never fails to amaze me when I hear my mother talk about how she has absolutely no talent.

"You're kidding, right?" I always say when she complains about how bad she is at quilting. "Do you not remember the baby quilt you made for Princess?"

"Oh, I know, but I had so much help," she says. "The lady at the quilt shop told me how to do the blocking, and you picked out the fabric. Good thing too, because I'm just terrible at picking out colors."

"It was a baby blanket! And we didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl! Pink and blue, Mom! How hard was that?"

"No, no. You picked out lovely fabric. All I did was sew it together, and I really didn't do that good a job at it."

Oh vey! "Well what about all the dolls and the toys you used to crochet when I was a kid?" I remind her. "I still have those toys, and the kids love playing with them!"

"Are you joking?" Mom exclaims. "Throw those things out, Helen! They were some of the worst things I ever made!"

"No I'm not throwing them out! You're crazy! I love my old toys, and you did a great job on them!"

"No I didn't. There's mistakes all through 'em."

"Well I can't find any mistakes in them."

"Trust me, they're there."

Jeeze Louise! "All right, what about the Scandinavian sweater you made for me? Nobody I know has a sweater that nice! Everybody just raves over the polar bears you knitted into that baby!"

"Helen, I had to take a class to make that thing! I couldn't do that again if I tried. If it hadn't been for the teacher, I would have thrown the whole thing in the trash. I'm telling you, I have no talent!"

Ay caramba! "What about the girls' dress-up costumes? Princess wore her dresses all through Disney World. We had tourists from Japan asking if they could take her picture! She was so popular, I thought the park was going to hire her at one point!"

"I take no credit for how those dresses turned out. Your aunt helped me with those. She told me what fabric to get, and then she told me how to do the appliques..."

Is this woman for real? I can't believe that with all the projects my mother's done, she doesn't think she has any talent! Seriously, look at what she's made over the years!

Princess' christening gown...

Pixie's christening gown...

The colonial dress I wore in elementary school for historical dancing...

And let us not forget the beloved moo-cow potholder which has given my children endless hours of entertainment!

I don't know what to think. I can't understand why anyone who could do this kind of work, who could knit and crochet and sew for hours and produce such wonderful things, would ever say they have no talent. My mom constantly tells me I have talent.

"You write," she tells me. "You draw, you paint, you cartoon. You make these odd little movies. People pay you for your work."

"They'd pay you to, if you had an Etsy shop or you hit the craft fairs!"

"Oh, I can't do that stuff. I have no head for running a business..."

Ay yi yi! It's enough to drive a person mad. I grew up listening to Mom's non-stop inner critic. After so many years of hearing her complain that everything she did was complete crap, I promised myself that I would never say such a thing about my work. I knew I had talent, and I wouldn't let my own inner critic tell me I was lousy at anything! If I didn't know how to do something, I learned. I took classes, pestered my friends, trolled the library for how-to books. If I made mistakes, I fixed them with as little fuss as possible. Yeah, there were a few projects I had to throw out. We all have those days where something goes completely wrong and there is no salvaging it. But that never stopped me from starting over again. And it never led me to say there was something I couldn't do. The result was that after several years of practice in my fields of choice, I excelled at a lot of different things.

But there were some things I never tried my hand at. A few weeks back, I was talking to a friend of mine about a comment one of Princess' teachers made to me. Princess can be a bit flighty in the classroom, and sometimes doesn't pay attention to what she should be doing. Words like "ADHD" and "medical evaluation" were bandied about, to my dismay.

"She's just a dreamy little kid!" I told my friend. "She can focus. She just needs to remember to focus."

"Have you tried teaching Princess to knit?" my friend suggested. "I was the same way when I was a kid, so the nuns at my school taught me to knit and that helped a lot."

"Uh, I don't knit..."

And that's the sad truth. The things my mother is most gifted at are the things I never learned to do. Yeah, I learned to sew, but I had to teach myself because my mom swore she couldn't make the outlandish sci-fi costumes I wanted to wear to conventions so badly. I taught myself to do a lot of things, too - drawing, cartooning, digital art, writing. It wasn't long before I was in territory completely foreign to my mother, and every time I showed her a completed project, she'd shake her head and say, "I could never do that. I have no talent..."

"You don't knit?" my friend said. "Well, I can teach Princess the basics, but you should try learning too. It's something you could do together, and when Princess gets stuck, you can help her out."

The maelstrom of self-doubt that hit me when she said that was as overwhelming as it was unexpected. Me? Learn to knit? Yeah, I can build a website, write a story, and draw cartoons on the fly, but I'd been doing those things for years! Now suddenly here was a craft that I had never picked up. If my mother, who's a knitting goddess, thought she had no talent at it, how the hell was I going to learn?

And then I remembered my promise to myself. And I called an expert for some advice.

"Hey Mom, I've got a friend who offered to teach Princess to knit."

"Oh, that's wonderful!" my mom said. "You should learn too. You're so talented, you'd be good at it."

"Yeah, but it's not something I've ever tried..."

"Helen, it's easy! You just need to learn the basic stitch. I know where I can get a children's knitting kit. I'll order it and send it to Princess. Take a look at it. You should be able to get supplies for yourself at the craft store."

A week later, the knitting kit showed up. Princess jumped up and down, clapping her hands as I opened the box. There was one set of needles, two skeins of yarn (pink and pale green), a yarn needle, and a how-to book. I flipped through the book. The projects looked simple enough. I can do this, I thought, squashing my inner critic. This won't be hard at all.

We hit the craft store the next day and I picked up a set of needles and a skein of yarn for myself. Princess and I spent the entire evening sitting on the couch, winding our yarn into balls. The next day, we picked up our needles and tried to knit.

It was not as easy as I had hoped. My stitches were either too tight or too loose. I dropped some entirely. Pretty soon I felt like I'd gone cross-eyed from counting stitches and repeating, "Up, around, down, and off." After the first few rows, I was ready to quit. But there was this little person sitting next to me, dressed in pink from head to toe, struggling with the same task. Princess looked so adorable with her face scrunched up, tongue sticking out of one corner of her mouth. She held up her first stitches to me and asked, "How does this look?"

"That's very good, sweetheart. You've very talented at this."

"How's your knitting going, Mom?"

I held up my work. Even though I felt like I was struggling, I had the advantage here. Princess is six. I'm forty. With age comes a certain amount of hand-eye coordination.

"I'm doing okay, I guess."

"Wow! Mom, that looks awesome!"

"You think? I've dropped a couple of stitches, and this part is too tight... I'm not sure I'm going to be any good at this..."

"Mooooooooom!"

I wonder if the look that crossed my daughter's face at that moment resembled the look that crossed mine whenever my mother complained about her work.

"I may not be good at it," I told Princess. "I like it, though. I like sitting here with you, learning how to do this. Want to do some more?"

"Yeah!"

At our weekly play date, I caught up with one of my good friends, a woman who had screwed me over on the whole "no gifts" thing last Christmas by giving me a lovely tote bag she'd sewn herself. While the kids played on the swings, I pulled out my needles and started knitting.

"Hey, what's that?" my friend asked.

"Princess and I are learning to knit. This is supposed to be a pot holder. It's a little uneven."

"Huh. I do a lot of needle crafts, but not that one. Still, it looks pretty good to me. And it'll be useful too. Personally, I never have enough potholders."

"Really?" I asked, thinking hard about the previous Christmas. I began knitting in earnest.

This year, when Christmas comes around, I will not be empty handed. Princess and I have already decided. We will be giving everybody we know a potholder. Including my mom. I know she'll be proud.

Potholders, work in progress by Helen and Princess Madden

An OK-Guy

by Ashley Lister

You have to promise to keep this a secret. It’s just between you and me. Don’t tell anyone else and don’t share the link to this page. Do I have your word that you won’t tell anyone about this? Good. Here it comes: when I’m not writing, I have a heroic secret identity. I am the superhero known as OK-Guy!

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve read the newspaper reports of my heroic exploits and you’re wondering: How can Ashley Lister be OK-Guy? OK-Guy can leap tall buildings in a single bound. OK-Guy can move faster than a speeding bullet and stop speeding locomotives with his broad and manly chest. Surely Ashley Lister isn’t capable of doing those things.

Well, the truth is, I haven’t always been OK-Guy.

I don’t doubt you’ve heard how Spiderman was bitten by a radioactive spider which led to him becoming Spiderman. Well, in a similar incident, I was bitten by something radioactive which imbued me with super powers. However, I didn’t fancy doing heroic deeds under the name of ‘Crabman’ or ‘Pubic-Louse-Man.’ So I opted to go with the name OK-Guy, which seemed fairly innocuous but also aspirational too. Those people who point at Clark Kent’s alter ego can say, “Superman is a super man.” They can also point at me and say, “That OK-Guy is an OK guy.” Isn’t it clever how I picked this name to work on so many levels?

I should point out at this stage, because of my origins, I do have an arch nemesis: the evil Quellada Man. Quellada Man is armed with a specific medical lotion and an extremely fine-toothed comb – the combined effects of which could weaken me to a state of intense vulnerability. However, I’m not here to write about the evil Quellada Man. I’m telling you about my secret identity and not his.

It’s a bit of a tricky life being both OK-Guy and Ashley Lister. It means I have two social circles: the world of writers and reader and the world of superheroes and supervillains. Obviously I don’t want people from these two social circles mixing because it would almost certainly lead to some embarrassment and there’s a risk that a supervillain could try to compromise my integrity by threatening my reader. (I know I’ve written ‘reader’ in the singular here but I’m not 100% convinced that I have more than one person reading my work so I’m choosing to err on the side of caution). Consequently, to ensure the safety of my reader, I try to keep my OK-Guy identity a closely guarded secret, which is why you can’t tell anyone about this blog.

I enjoy many aspects of being OK-Guy. It’s always fun to be a hero who fights crime and stops bank robbers in the midst of a major heist. Sometimes I will keep some of the money that gets dropped in the battle between me and the gangs of master criminals. But I only ever keep enough to cover expenses such as my bus fare to the robbery or any lunch costs that are incurred whilst I’m waiting for crime to happen. Sometimes I’ll take an appropriate amount that could be considered ‘reward money.’ This is NOT the same as stealing.

I have some immense super powers. I’m stronger than the mere mortal of my alter ego that is Ashley Lister. Ashley Lister is in physically poor condition because of spending so many hours sat in front of a PC and simply writing or reading. I, as OK-Guy, am able to run at twice the speed of smell. (This is a particular measurement of speed that is only ever used in reference to superheroes who have been born through the bite of a radioactive pubic louse).

I can leap tall buildings in a single bound. However, I usually prefer to take the elevator. Leaping is a little on the flashy side. And it sets off my vertigo.

I have the ability to fly and have done this on several occasions. Most times I’ll go economy class, although, after Quedalla Man’s last unsuccessful heist (valiantly thwarted by me) I picked up enough ‘reward money’ to afford a first class flight.

Not that it’s all first class travel and ‘reward money’ being a superhero. There are some weeks when I miss just being plain old Ashley Lister. The pressure of being an icon and legend can be a trifle overwhelming. However, this week is not one of those weeks.

If I had simply been plain old Ashley Lister when this week’s topic came up – what talents do I have besides writing? – I would have had nothing to write about. Ashley Lister writes fiction and non-fiction. Ashley Lister reads books and then writes about them in book reviews. Ashley Lister reads poetry, and then writes and performs poetry to audiences who are usually politely puzzled by his performances. In short, Ashley Lister does nothing other than write, write again, and then sit down to write some more.

But now, dear reader, you know the truth. Beneath the mild-mannered exterior of the incessant writer that is Ashley Lister, there beats the heart of an OK-Guy.

Memories of Her Long Lower Loops

by C. Sanchez-Garcia

My first job was as a bus boy. That was at a Shoney's Big Boy in College Park in Atlanta. I stopped by there last year, and now its a Simone's Steak and Seafood. I was about 17 years old at the time, and just out of high school. My mom had moved my brother and myself there, partly to get far away from Dad, but I think really because it was in her nature. She simply didn't know how to stay put.

Shoney's was the beginning of my journey into adulthood. The waitresses liked me, partly because I didn't steal their tips, and they took me in. I was a shy kid but I had a gimmick. I could analyse handwriting. I was good. It was my window into the world of other people. Studying handwriting was my first experience with studying sycretistically and asynchronously. I studied several books at once. I also studied different parts of the books in coordination with each other, not always just front to back. One day I would be studying middle zones, three books at once. The next day upper and lower loops, three books at once. This has an interesting effect of blending disparate ideas together into a natural and intuitive hash. When I looked at a handwriting I was experiencing it in an intuitive way, and though living inside the person's skin, the way a musician would read a sheet of music. Picking up a customer's receipt, or a person's scribbled notes I could hold my thoughts quiet and let some other part of my mind feel and speak the meaning of the person's personality. I could break down the process into cause and effect if I had to, but what I was seeing was more like an image of the person's interior world. A thin middle zone, and exaggerated high zone - an idealistic romantic person. If also leaning far forward, an emotional person, passionate in love, but flighty. Something like that.

One day a waitress named Vicky saw me looking at her handwriting on a napkin in a vacant way, and asked what I was doing. I told her I was getting to know her from her handwriting. People aren't creeped out by this, they love it. She asked what kind of sample I needed. I told her the best thing was a sheet of unlined paper, written top to bottom. The words didn't matter as long as it was the natural way she wrote. After the lunch rush, she came into the break room with her paper and I went to work on it. She was deeply moved by what I told her and told the other waitresses. Soon I was flooded with samples of their writing, and then their husbands and boyfriends. I never charged anything, because by then we were like family.

A new waitress showed up around the middle of summer. She was a little chunky, with large intense eyes. She had a silly, moronic giggle you could hear across the room and a way of being in a dozen places at once. Her name was DeEtta. I exchanged a few words with her, not much. I quickly wrote her off as a fool. She had a little girl named Cathy about seven or eight years old, who came in after school, took a back booth and did her homework on the table, waiting for her mom to get off. She was a quiet, intense kid who seemed close to her mother, but never a father in sight.

Somehow I didn't see how she would ever fit in. She was just weird. Vicky told her about my handwriting hobby. "Can you do mine?" asked DeEtta, and waved a napkin at me with that toothy smile. I really didn't want to. I knew there was nothing interesting about her. I didn't want to tell her anything bad, but at the same time I didn't want to snub her. She was tenacious, and finally I said yes, but I needed a proper sample and explained to her how to do it. She came back with it the next morning and I stuffed it into my apron pocket and kept putting her off. I told her I'd look at it after lunch.

That was an especially rough day. I got into a huge argument in the dining room in front of the customers with the assistant dining room manager, a guy from Egypt named Salim. I was fired. My first job, and I'd gotten fired for arguing with management. Vicky told me to stay right where I was, just get coffee and wait in the back. The lunch rush had begun. The waitresses went on strike.

Would people do that for me now? I don't know, it was a different time in 1972. I was a different person too. The customers came, the waitresses elbowed the dirty dishes to the wall and took their orders. They refused to clean the tables. When the main dining room manager came in he saw the piles and yelled for me. I came out and he hollered "Garcia what the hell is this?" The waitresses, including DeEtta who suddenly looked very fierce, gathered around him. Angry waitresses are like wolverines. They berated Salim and complained about how he'd fired me. The manger stomped into the backroom. "Garcia - get in there and clean those tables. Nobody's fired unless I say so." I had my job back. After the lunch rush had cleared out I went to the break room and thanked everybody who came by for standing up for me. I had my coffee and took out DeEtta's paper, trying to think of kind things I could make up to say. It turned out I didn't have to.

I had never seen a handwriting like this. It throbbed with power. Everything was written with a pressure on the pen that pressed letters through the paper like braille. It was the hand of a brilliant mind, an intense and passionate soul. I would have never have imagined it could have come from the woman with the dumb grin, but her name was on it. A middle zone which showed critical thought, soaring imagination in the high zone. Full swelling erotic lower loops, a woman a man dreams of having in his bed. The words, the few I could even read, turned out to be a brief, slightly rambling discourse on Albert Camus.

DeEtta came in and threw down her apron on a chair. She sat down across from me with her Shoney's Big Boy coffee and folded her hands. "How are we?"

"Thanks for sticking up for me out there."

"Workers have to stand up for their rights or they'll run right over you. There should be a union."

"Right. Listen. I need to tell you something," I said. "This is embarrassing for me."

"Something wrong?"

"You know, I had this idea about you. I don't know. Like maybe you weren't too bright or something."

Her eyes twinkled. "Okay. So?"

"Actually, you're really smart."

I had hoped she'd laugh. Instead she looked serious. "So now you think I'm smart? Should I be flattered?"

"No, I think you're like - really smart. I had you all wrong. At first I thought maybe you were like sort of a goofball or something. I'm sorry I guess is what I mean. I've never seen anything like this in my life." I waved the sheet of paper. She gave me an appraising look as if deciding whether or not I was worth rescuing. She took the paper from my hand and glanced at the little notes I'd scribbled on it.

"People sometimes think that about me until they know me. So you can really do it. That's nice." She folded the paper and put it away. "You going to be a bus boy all your life?"

"I don't know what I'm going to do. How'd a smart girl like you end up here?"

"You think the other women aren't smart?"

"I - "

"You should use this talent to change the way you look at people. Don't you think so?" That was a phrase I would hear a lot from her, that Socratic challenge - Don't you think so? "Well, I'm about thirty and I just got divorced from Cathy's father. I don't know what I'm doing here, but I probably won't stay."

"This thing you wrote. Who's Cam -us?"

"Ka - MOO. Have you ever read Camus?"

I told her I'd never heard of Camus, who was he? Existentialism? No, hadn't heard of that either. Did I read? What did I read? Ray Bradbury? She used to read him, but she'd outgrown him. Had I read any of the classics? Did I read poetry? Shakespeare? Not even in school? Mark Twain for god's sakes?

She invited me to walk home with her and Cathy. We went up a long flight of wooden stairs into a rented second floor walk up that looked at first as if someone had broken into it and trashed the place. Clothes were tossed around, including a very impressive bra . A small TV, some toys. And books. Books everywhere. There was a box of encyclopedias it turned out she had carried with her hitch hiking from Arkansas. There were books in Italian. She loved Italy, had spent the last few years living there. When no college would admit her she had jumped the iron fence of a prestigious school run by nuns and demanded admittance and they had accepted her on the face of her determination to learn. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, King Duncan says "There is no art to read the character in the face." How true in her case. But I didn't know anything about Shakespeare. Not yet. DeEtta would fix that. While Cathy played with their cat "Poo" (short for "poop"), DeEtta sat me down on her bed. She reached under and hauled out a box of old paperbacks and gave me two of them. "You're bound to like one of these." One was "The Stranger" by Camus, her favorite book at that time. The other was "The Last Temptation of Christ" by Nikos Kazantzakis. "Try Camus first. If you don't catch on to him, try Kazantzakis."

I never did get Camus. The Kazantzakis book set me on fire. Even today, it is still the only book that has the power to make me weep.

For two years, we were inseparable companions. Although I felt a secret passion for this exciting, earthy woman, she kept everything very chaste, a scholarly elder sister and her obtuse but bright younger brother. In those two years she became the great teacher of my life. She was working on a novel, which she showed pages of to me from time to time. I was the only one she trusted with it. It was hard to write, she said, she hadn't found her voice. In time she would.

One day we were walking the railroad tracks, discussing the songs of Woody Guthrie which she had turned me onto, and the subject of poetry came up.

"Which poets have you read?" she said.

"I don't read any."

"Oh, hell."

"I don't get poetry, I tried in high school, but nothing sticks."

"That's because you need to read good poets."

"I tried a few. I just can't get into it."

We went to her apartment and she made me jasmine tea and sat me back down on her bed, which in its way had become our classroom. From a stack on the window sill, she pulled out a paperback of Dylan Thomas. "This is how you learn to read poetry. Listen. You and the poet have to meet on the same level. You can't do that in the beginning, because you don't have the experience. Find a poem in here that catches your eye and memorize it. You don't have to understand it, just remember the words. That's all. It has to be a poem you like. Someday you'll be doing something or going through something and the words will come back to you and then you'll get at the what the poet has experienced. It's telepathy, it's the only telepathy there is." I took her book home that night and memorized most of "Fern Hill".

We took meditation classes together. We visited a psychic together who said that she had been my mother in a past life. She schooled me in different writers in those celibate evenings laying on her bed together, hips and elbows touching, Cathy next to us, talking and debating the great questions of life. Meanwhile the world was moving on around us. Karma was calling. We were on our way somewhere else. My Dad offered to help me get into college if I came back to Minnesota. DeEtta told me this would be a good idea and she was going to Seattle to start over again. There was nothing for either of us in College Park, which is neither a college or a park. She had a sister and a brother in Seattle. So ist das Leben, as Nixie says. So it goes.

She went to Seattle. I went to Minneapolis. We wrote letters every week, sharing the news of our lives, and our rambling ideas. I lived for her letters. I sent her stuff I was writing. I wrote down my dreams for her. She met a guy. I met a religious sect and moved in. DeEtta didn't like the theology which was too fundamentalist. The sect didn't want me corresponding to strange women who didn't want to join up. They were my life now. The old world had to be cut off. DeEtta wrote furious letters, objecting to my leaving her out of my life. But what could she do? God was calling me away from the world, or so I thought. She called me Icarus, flying too close to the sun. My wings were doomed to melt. Twenty years later they did and I fell a long ways down.

A few years ago, though a lifetime later, I was loafing on the Internet, looking through books on Amazon. I wondered if she had ever written her novel and I did an author search on "DeEtta", since I couldn't be sure of her last name. There aren't many women in this world named DeEtta, which helps when you're doing a name search. Only one name came up. This author DeEtta had lived an adventurous life, she had lived in Italy and written screen plays. She had a new book "The Force of A Feather" detailing her search for the life history of a freed slave named Biddy Mason. (Which turned out to be an excellent book on the subject of slavery.) A search through the libraries of San Antonio where I was living turned up a copy at a library near me. This would be a hard back book, which would mean there would be an author's photo. I drove there after work and found it on the shelf. Even after a gap of thirty years, she didn't look that different than the way I remembered her. It was my old friend.

I bought a copy and sent it to her through the publisher, with a long adoring letter detailing how she had changed my life, and turned it around more than she could know. After a long time Igot my book back with an autograph. A terse post card, polite, coolly friendly, but without invitation. She wished me well.

The world had moved on. Timing is everything, and time had separated us beyond healing.

The young single mother with the demeanor of a bimbo and the penmanship of a steel trap mind. The earnest young man, looking for a great purpose to devote himself to. But she had left her thumbprint on my brain forever. There is not a book I ever open without remembering her with longing. She had opened doors to me and given me the gift of a life of the mind.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would

take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

from "Fern Hill" Dylan Thomas

See - I get that now.

Thanks DeEtta.

C. Sanchez-Garcia