Remember the Phantom Naked Guy!

This post is SFW, I swear.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on agent queries for The Resurrectionist’s Song. I have no news on that front, obviously, but a random conversation about something completely unrelated reminded me of a lesson I’d learned long ago, and that I’d probably do well to remember more regularly as I wade through agent listings and try not to be intimidated by inanimate web pages.

Why am I intimidated by inanimate web pages? Because they’re owned by people who might reject me. Who probably will reject me, in fact, according to the law of averages. And rejection is scary. But here’s why I’m doing it anyway.

I give you now the tale, and the lesson, of the Phantom Naked Guy.

During my misspent youth, I misspent a single semester at an extremely conservative Catholic college that happened to be located near a national forest. By “extremely conservative”, I mean that the Mass was still in Latin and somebody suggested that I be burned at the stake for not being Catholic. That traditional outlook had major effects on the female population there; most of the girls in the dorm where I lived seemed to be planning to marry a nice Catholic boy and settle down in the middle of nowhere to home-school their twelve kids. A significant number of them had a never before attended classes with people who weren’t related to them (apparently there are a few Catholic communes out there that funnel their girls directly into this college). They had had next to no contact with men or boys who weren’t their fathers, brothers, cousins, and so on.

And then the Phantom Naked Guy burst onto the scene like a nudist in a nunnery.

I never saw him personally, but I talked to a few people who did, and a typical encounter would go like this: two or more girls would be hiking one of the forest trails near the campus, either for exercise (the school had no gym, and most athletic activities were men-only) or for pleasure. Suddenly, around a bend in the trail would come a man about 30 or 40 years old, about five foot ten and Caucasian, wearing absolutely nothing. Not a stitch. Not even shoes. He wouldn’t scream or jump out at anybody, mind you. The most offensive thing I ever heard of him doing, aside from being naked in a national forest, was wave cheerily to the girls. While naked, of course. Search parties never found him after these encounters, earning him the nickname of Phantom Naked Guy.

Naturally, the entire female population of the school collectively lost their minds.

Casual hikes ended. Now expeditions into the forest had to be planned like the Normandy invasion. Young women, terrified that the Phantom Naked Guy would leap out of the bushes and assault them, went into the woods in large groups, or (more often) not at all. Male escorts were suddenly in high demand, which perked up a lot of lovelorn Catholic boys considerably, but since many of the male students were planning to become priests, the girls didn’t get as many takers as they would have liked. The college staunchly refused to lend out either of the campus’s two sheepdogs (long story) as protection. And so, as a last resort, a nervous coed stopped me on my way into the dorm one night and asked me if I’d be willing to go along as a bodyguard. With my knife, of course.

The short explanation for my knife is this: when I showed up on campus in August, I had brought with me a small folding hunting knife with a 3.5-inch blade, covered in black enamel. My dormmates discovered this fact when they sneaked into my dorm room in September (they were throwing glitter around because it was my birthday) and discovered the knife lying on my pillow. (I had been opening a birthday package, then realized I was late for class, so I dropped knife, package, and contents on the bed and ran for it.) Even though I only used the knife for opening stubborn envelopes and cutting up fruit, I soon had a reputation as the campus blade fiend. And so it came to pass that when girl gangs, obliging college boys, and sheepdogs had all failed, my knife and I were called to action. And I had an interesting insight.

The conversation went like this.

Girl: “Hey, would you like to go on a hike this weekend with me and [name redacted]?”
Me: “Uh … why?” (We weren’t friends. I’m not sure we even spoke outside of class.)
Girl: “Because you have a knife.”
Me: “What?”
Girl: “We’re scared of the Phantom Naked Guy.”
Me: “And you want me to … stab him?”
Girl: “If necessary.”
Me: “To protect you.”
Girl: “Yes.”
Me: [Pause for thought] “Why are you worried about a naked guy?”
Girl: “Well, he’s naked. There’s got to be a reason for that.”
Me: “Right. So why don’t you just throw a rock?”
Girl: “Huh?”
Me: “He’s naked. He’s all target area. Throw rocks and pinecones if you want him to go away.”
Girl: “That’s gross.”
Me: “Grosser than stabbing him?”

Needless to say, I did not get that bodyguard job.

But I learned a valuable lesson from the Phantom Naked Guy. Until that moment, I hadn’t really thought about what I’d do if I met him and needed to get him to leave. (As an old theatre geek, I was more comfortable with nudity than the average Catholic schoolgirl.) But to most girls who had heard of him, he was a figure of terror. The Phantom Naked Guy, rapist extraordinaire (at least in potentia.) Except only an idiot would go hiking in that forest alone—there were mountain lions out there—so he was always outnumbered. And the guy was stark naked. Not actually that threatening, or even odd, once you got past the fact that typical hikers weren’t naked. And as I pointed out, he was pretty vulnerable to rocks and pinecones. It was a coniferous forest in earthquake country. It was practically made of rocks and pinecones. The proper solution was probably to just wave back, but if you were really that scared of the Phantom Naked Guy and/or he was really that threatening, you could theoretically drive him off with a handful of gravel.

Now, I know that indecent exposure can sometimes be tied up with a number of other, more problematic behaviors. I’m not saying the Phantom Naked Guy, who apparently enjoyed walking naked past Catholic schoolgirls, wasn’t going to be real trouble someday. But he might have been just a lone nudist; California has a few of those. And at least at the time, the problem wasn’t sexual assault, or any attempts thereat. The problem was a naked guy in the pine woods freaking people out. And pinecones are naked-guy Kryptonite.

So where’s the lesson in all this?

Sometimes your problem is a naked guy in the pine woods. Sometimes the thing you think is absolutely terrifying is actually quite vulnerable to pinecones. As I’m typing up query letters, trying to find the perfect combination of words that will persuade some agent to rescue Teh Novel from the slush pile, I need to remember the Phantom Naked Guy. This task looks scary. I don’t like being rejected any more than anyone else does. But I’ve been on the other side of this equation, too, and I know that the fear of missing out on a great piece of writing is sometimes almost as great as the fear of rejection. I am venturing out into the woods, expecting to do battle with Bigfoot … and I need to remember that sometimes it’s just the Phantom Naked Guy.

So as you go about your business this week, take a good, hard look at the things that scare you. There are scary things out there, true. Those woods had far more mountain lions than nudists. But sometimes your problem isn’t much of a problem at all. Not if you’re willing to wave back.

Or, at worst, chuck a pinecone.

Hooky day

Enforced idleness is hard on a writer. One of my favorite authors, Sol Stein, was fond of saying, “A writer is someone who cannot not write.” That’s me all over. My fingers get itchy if I’ve gone more than a day or so without jotting something down, or plotting a scene to a song on the radio, or having a conversation with an imaginary person.

But having sent Teh Novel out to the beta readers, I pretty much had to sit down and rest for a while. For one thing, I wanted to do my own light polish while I let a group of readers do the heavy lifting of figuring out whether the story really works as well as I think it does. (It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have that particular stress-boulder sitting on your back.) So I couldn’t run off and work on another project. But I was also physically exhausted. I’d had to stay up until 3 in the morning (my most productive writing time usually ends around midnight, or 2 a.m. at the latest, which tells you more than you need to know about my circadian rhythm) just to make the final changes and get the manuscript ready to print on Tuesday, October 15. I’d spent that whole Tuesday sleepwalking through my commitments, chugging cinnamon black tea and Coke Zero as I emailed PDFs and dropped off 300-page printouts in floppy binders. So Wednesday I was pretty much a lump—moving slowly, feeling sore, still not all the way recovered. Yeah, go ahead and laugh. I’m old.

And Thursday was my day off work. So naturally I set off a bug bomb.

I knew I needed to hit my mental reset switch in order to make those polishes before the beta period was up, and I’ve been having trouble with moths lately, so I set off a noxious lavender-scented moth bomb in my closet and ran off to play hooky. My sensitive nose ensured that I wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon.

So what do writers do when they play hooky? Well, my first stop was the nearest kayak-rental place. And unlike my last kayak adventure, this time I had my camera along. So here’s what the world looks like from just above the waterline of a banged-up yellow kayak:

 

I only crashed the boat once. Progress!
 
My next stop was a local independent bookstore, where I wanted to pick up a copy of Shadow of the Alchemist, the new Crispin Guest noir by Jeri Westerson. I was hoping to hit one of her signings over the coming weekend, but I wanted to start reading early. Hooray for the inimitable Book Carnival! (They have more signed copies if you want to buy them—hint, hint.)

  

And Book Carnival is a couple of doors down from Altair-4, a store that specializes in science fiction and military books. I ignored the tanks-and-guns side of things, but I did manage to find a Shadow pulp novel I hadn’t read yet and a collection of sword-and-planet stories that I’ve been looking for since 2005 or so. The store owner thought the really important part was the Frank Frazetta cover. Having skimmed over the stories, I’m pretty sure he’s wrong. 

 I then finished up the day with the most important part of writer-hooky …

vacuuming!

 Yes, I went home, tossed the moth bomb outside to finish airing, and vacuumed pretty much the whole apartment. I am a bit of a compulsive vacuumer—I run the vac when I’m stuck on a story, or stressed out, or any of a hundred different varieties of distressed—but cleaning tends to fall off my to-do list when I’m in the final stretch of a book project. By the time a manuscript goes out, I’m lucky if I can find my floor. And at that point the general state of mess begins to stress me out, which makes it that much harder to do anything else … you get the idea.

But I also put new strings on my guitar over the weekend, so I wasn’t totally responsible. 

Okay, here are more kayaking photos. You can drool over them while I go work on that last round of polishing … the manuscript goes to somebody who wants it around November 1, and then it’s back to Masks… 

Paddleboarder with dog. Yes, dog is in midshake.

Pretty.

I swear I didn't run into all these landscapes I'm pointed at.

I imagine rogue paddleboarders graffiti-ing the retaining walls
of these obscenely expensive bayside homes. Atlas!

Why yes, that IS a freeway bridge off the port bow (between the palm trees).

Deep in the weeds

What Chapter 28 of 38 looks like.

Last night, I finished rewriting Chapter 28.

There are 38 chapters in Teh Novel.

I have been averaging two chapters per day, most days.

ONWARD!!!!!

A song for bones

It’s funny, what scares you sometimes.

When I started working on the poems required for The Resurrectionist’s Song, I was absolutely terrified. I knew I wasn’t a very good poet—I once served on the editorial board of a literary journal and discovered that I couldn’t even understand most of the poetry submitted for publication, let alone tell good from bad. If I couldn’t even figure out the rules of the genre, how was I supposed to write anything in it above the level of “There once was a girl from Nantucket”?

But the book demanded poems, and I try to give stories what they need, so I scribbled the best I could do and cautiously emailed them off to a friend from graduate school, a real live poet who has probably never used the word “Nantucket” with a straight face. Then I ducked and covered and waited for the explosion.

Shockingly, he tells me my poems do not suck. So here’s one for you on this sunny Monday morning, the first poem I wrote for The Resurrectionist’s Song. It’s repeated a couple of times in the story, most notably chanted over a set of old bones and over the body of a character at the point of death.

There is no mention of Nantucket.

LAMENT

Bone to ash and soul to sky,

One to scatter, one to fly;

Tooth for tooth and eye for eye,

Marching, marching home to die

Hands we held and mouths we fed,

Shadow cast on marriage-bed,

Some who followed, some who led,

Now the army of the dead.

Skeletons at victory-feast,

Voices stilled and laughter ceased;

There, from mightiest to least,

Watching, patient as some beast.

Ancient grudge and honeyed lie,

Warring-song and battle-cry,

Bone to ash and soul to sky,

Marching, marching, you and I.