Evil Gusts

Very weird thing happened to me yesterday. I was tired and trying to get Demon Baby to take a rest, which is really one of the most futile ventures--I need a NASA team of rocket scientists to figure out how to do that one. But I was lying there, still, on the futon, trying to get HIM to be still, and suddenly there popped into my head a name I hadn't thought of in 25 years. With that name came a slew of others--editors I worked with when I first got out of college.

After the pseudo-rest-time was over, I went to my computer. A click or two of Google later, I discovered one of those editors is in federal prison.

Now, to be sure, I thought this guy was "going places"--I just didn't expect it to be prison. But I did remember a few things about him. He was very good-looking, he had absolutely not one ounce of sincerity or "real" personality to him, he liked to banter, he was smart, he dressed well, and he was trouble when he was drinking. More on this later.

Editor #2, whom I can't name here, was a sexual harasser of the first order long before you could approach human resources with a complaint. He was utterly and completely creepy. He was nicknamed The Slug by the women editors I knew. He was also very smart. And he is now so HUGE in publishing, my mouth dropped open. HUGE!!!!! However, I would be willing to bet that once a sexual harassing creep . . . well, you know where that's going.

Editor #3 was the nice guy. He smoked pot (I know because I went to a Tom Petty concert with him), and he was just a great person--quiet, not the lugubrious creep of #2, or the showboat of #1. He ALSO is successful, but in a quieter sphere of publishing. I am really happy for him. In his picture, he's lost some hair but still looks like a nice man.

Back to Editor #1, since it's a matter of public record, here's what he did (NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH!!!). Now . . . I sat there yesterday, stunned. I was shocked. Believe me, I was shocked. BUT, on the other hand, I'd seen him drunk. Now, here's the other thing . . . if you hunt for other articles, you will find that he was taking all kind of anti-anxiety meds and was an alcoholic from "job stress," donated tons of money to CHILDREN'S charities . . . and had descended into some personal hell--so the judge went "easy" on him (he could have drawn a longer-than-72-month sentence). So part of me was shocked . . . and part of me thought . . . he was never "real"--his whole personality was a falsehood. Always. He could "smile for the cameras" so to speak. But like so many glad-handing salesmen types, it was all fake.

And PART of me was shocked for the very reason that we never expect to KNOW someone who does something like that. It's like a little gust of evil passed through my life 25 years ago. Of course . . . is my mind ticking with book ideas? Hell, yeah.

So here's the thing. I have said before my FAVORITE "serial killer" book was JUST KILLING TIME (I no longer read them because they scare me too much--but years ago, this was the best one). Look at the reviews! I cannot believe that he never wrote another book. Unless it was a pen name and he really has as someone else. But the thing I remember most from the book was a stat--that 1 in 10 of us has MET a serial killer. That's how MANY there are operating, but the feds keep people in the dark for as long as possible, not releasing to the public just how many cases seem to link until they are concentrated by time and area so much that local press figures it out. We've met them. One in ten. Doesn't mean you are lined up to be a victim. Means maybe they packed your groceries. Maybe they live next door. Maybe you've even worked next to them in a publishing house. Don't get me wrong, the editor I used to know didn't murder. But he might as well have. Because that crime steals souls.

It's weird knowing you've met evil. Like a gust. Passing through.

Thoughts?

Love Canal

I was once at a kids' basketball game, and a mother sat in a lawn chair near me on the sidelines. My kids are not particularly into sports, except for one who adores softball, and so the basketball game was more for the sake of exercise. Afterall, my child at the time was all of 5. He couldn't dribble. He couldn't do a lay-up. He could maybe get the ball from point A to point B without dropping it and it rolling away. And that was great. Except this mother . . . she screamed at her son the whole time. "You loser." "You better get that ball, you lazy bum." SCREAMING at the top of her lungs. I sat there and wondered if I could call the police for emotional abuse, but I was already working in the foster care system and knew, frankly, the police had more to worry about than a toxic mom. They wouldn't DO anything. And it was my little angel, my darling girl, who was four, who came up to me and said, "How can that mother expect her son to have any self-esteem if she screams at him like that?" Before anyone wonders about the truth of this story, my kids have really high vocabularies, so yes, she was that young, and yes, she had that line of thinking. And the mother heard. And it shut her up. But I knew it wasn't over for poor little Bradley on the baseketball court. He had to go home with the mother equivalent of Love Canal.

You see, there is overt evil in life. There are people who ooze evil. There are gang members wearing their colors, murderers carrying weapons, people you might cross to the other side of the street when you see them. Our prisons are full and overcrowded. You don't have to look far to find darkness.

But there's another kind of darkness--and it's what I am striving for in my work in progress. It's Love Canal. It seeps out underground, over time. No one can see it, smell it, or taste it in the water, but it's there like a cancer. In alcoholic homes, for instance, often the family pulls together in an effort to make it appear, from the outside, that they are "perfect" when in fact every night after work, Dad drinks himself into oblivion and then gets nasty. There are millions of girls and boys across the globe being sexually abused, but putting up the front that they are okay, even as the damage is hurting their soul day by awful day. There are whole churches that have hid sexual scandals, schools that somehow have let predators into the classroom. That's the evil I am exploring right now. In my book, it's the mother who has torn apart her daughter every day until the poor girl can't believe she's worth anything. But the mother is on magazine covers. She's respected in her field.

Love Canal . . . .

Thoughts?

A Line in the Sand

I am working on a kids' fantasy book that I have been toying with for a while. My kids read it--and love it--and I get to have an awful lot of fun as a writer. And in a key scene, because the clan in the book has their lineage through Russian history, the hero of the book shows my heroine, a 12-year-old girl, where the family tree broke off--and Rasputin is part of it. At some point, that part of the clan went to the shadows and became a different sort of clan entirely. There's a visual--a burnt-out tree. It's very obvious where the people who went to the shadowlands departed the good part of the family. The burnt landscape SHOWS you as reader. But in adult books, the line of demarcation is more slippery.

I wonder then, about the nature of evil. If you could trace it in a character, like unraveling a loose thread in a sweater, could you find THE defining moment. At what point does someone make not a leap of faith but a leap of another kind.

We all have defining moments in our lives. If we're lucky, those moments make us stronger and move us more toward good. I know I had a defining moment on New Year's Eve, 1994. I was in a hospital bed, really, really sick and in terrible pain. The person I had once been was slipping away day by day--and a person in my life did a cowardly thing. At that moment--and it was indeed a single MOMENT--my world changed. There was me before that moment and me after. Shortly after this event, though still very sick, I picked up stakes and moved hundreds of miles away and made a new life somewhere else with my child. I was a lot stronger for it. I learned something about the nature of people. And I learned what I was made of.

Villains must have those moments, too. But in a different way. At what point do people stop being human to them and start being target practice? At what point is rape OK to them? You can ask the questions and never get the answers, but I think as writers it serves us well to figure out that point in our characters.

Thoughts?