“Scott’s Exit” • by Bruce Bethke

 

What a change two months can make. The last time I saw Scott, he’d had a bad relapse and was a mess. Tonight…

I dunno. I think I liked the mess better.

“Hi kids,” he said, as cool, cocky, and obnoxious as on the day I first met him.

“That’s not the way you start,” Tom reminded him. “The traditional way is by saying, ‘Hi, my name is Scott, and I’m—’ ”

“Bugger tradition,” Scott said. “And maybe my name isn’t Scott. And maybe I’m not even a were-anything.”

Tom sighed heavily and started rubbing his forehead, as if he was suddenly developing a migraine. “Don’t start this crap again, Scott.”

“I told you, I’m not Scott. I’m Secret Agent Delta Tango Mango Foxtrot Alpha.”

Hank boggled. “What? Did I miss something here?”

Tom sighed again. “Scott is convinced we’re all under surveillance. That we’ve got an informant in the group.”

I laughed. “An informant? In a 12-step meeting? That is just nuts.”

“Strictly speaking,” Scott said, “it’s paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of persecution.” He shrugged. “And sometimes it’s the only rational response to a situation.”

Hank shook his head. “Now I know I missed something. Geez, you go out of town for one weekend—”

“I don’t know how you missed it,” Scott said. “It was all over the frickin’ news. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating possible links between ALPS and domestic terrorism. They think WCA meetings are being used as fronts for recruiting dangerous radicals.”

“Ah,” Tom said. “You get this stuff off the Internet, don’t you? No, the DHS is looking for right-wing domestic terrorists.”

Scott smiled, in that smug way I’ve come to hate. “You forget, kids. I’ve got friends inside DHS. That ‘right-wing’ memo everyone was buzzing about two weeks ago was just the cover story. The real deal is us. And when the head of DHS dropped that Freudian slip last week about screening people in airports for medical problems and then sending them on to their destructions, that was about us.”

Hank shook his head. “No, you’re confused, Scott. That was about Swine Flu.”

“You can believe that if it makes you feel better, Hank, but there never was any Swine Flu. It was all just a dry run, to see how fast they could scare people into changing their lives just because of a virus. You wait until the stories about the ALPS Pandemic start breaking next week.”

Tim nodded. “Yeah! I knew it! That’s why they’re buying up silver!”

Tom sighed one more time, and then sat up straighter in his chair. “Okay Scott, I think we’ve heard enough. If you’re not here tonight to be serious—”

Scott flashed on angry, for just a moment. “Oh, but I am serious. I am so frickin’ serious you’ve never seen serious like this before.” He turned to the rest of the group. “And strange as it seems, I’ve come to like some of you people in the course of the past year. A few of you I even consider friends. That’s why I’m here tonight.

“Hank? You and your Michelle, you be careful. She’s got Stoker’s Disease. That’s what my friends say the people inside the CDC are calling it now, and they’re also working up a little thing called Project Molokai. Look it up. Some of what you’ll find on it is true.

“The rest of you? They’re coming for us, kids. And I for one don’t intend to make it any easier for them to find me. Which is why tonight is my last night here. And if you’re smart, it’ll be your last night, too.”

And with that he turned and walked out, his thousand-dollar hand-made English shoes ticking across the floor like a time-bomb.

“Well,” Tom said, at last. “That was... interesting. Okay, who’s next?”

_________________________

 

BRUCE BETHKE is best known for either his genre-naming 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his Philip K. Dick Award-winning 1995 novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few readers have known about him until recently is that he actually started out in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed MIDI and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but finished his career in the supercomputer industry, doing stuff that is absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-versed in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

In his copious spare time he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the fun of it.

ABOUT THIS STORY: “Scott’s Exit” was originally written for Curse of the Were-Weasel, on online multi-author multi-character multi-threaded role-playing narrative that was more conceptual art than coherent fiction. That it appears here today is because it came up in the context of a discussion with Pete Wood regarding the future development of Tales from The Brahma and The Odin Chronicles,  and Pete dared Bruce to put it online to see how people reacted to it.

Frankly, the thought that he wrote this little bit of gonzo paranoia 14 years ago scares the bejeebers out of Bruce. Funny, isn’t it, how something can go from being crazy, ridiculous, and utterly preposterous to being, “Oh yes, that’s probably exactly how they did it.”

Read More

“Relapse” • by Bruce Bethke

He was looking bad, rough. You can tell when someone’s had a relapse, and it doesn’t take ALPS-heightened senses, either. They say recovering alcoholics can smell it when someone in their group has gone off the wagon.

Scott didn’t smell funny, but clearly, he’d lost it. Normally the guy was overdressed to a fault and cheerful like a daytime game-show host. Then he went missing back in mid-January, and now here he was in group again, looking like something the cat had dragged in.

“Hi,” he said. He looked up, started to make eye-contact, then went back to looking at his shoes. I saw they were scuffed and salt-stained; another bad sign. Crockett & Jones, Leeds, U.K., a thousand bucks a pair—we knew because he’d told us, repeatedly, and now here he was looking like he’d been playing street hockey in them.

“Hi,” he tried again. “My name is Scott, and I’m a were-weasel.”

“Hi, Scott.”

He managed to look up and hold the eye-contact for a few seconds this time, and almost managed a smile. Progress.

He went back to looking at his shoes. “First off, I’d like to thank my sponsor, Tom, for getting me back into group.”

Okay, no wonder he looked like something the cat had dragged in. He’d been dragged in by the cat.

“I—” he paused, gulped, swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. Yes, I’ve—” He looked up, around the circle, and nodded. “Yes, I’ve had a setback. I screwed up. I—” Another heavy sigh.

“I started doing politics again.”

What could we do? Nod sympathetically. Encourage him to keep talking.

“I thought I could handle it. I thought, just a little taste. Just once, for old times’ sake. I thought—” He shook his hands in the air, as if wrapping them around some invisible something right in front of his face, and then dropped them into his lap, and sighed.

“I couldn’t handle it.” He went back to looking at his shoes.

When it seemed like that was all he had to say, Tom cleared his throat. “Go on, Scott. Tell us the rest.”

Scott locked eyes with Tom, took some kind of strength from it, and nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. They need to know.” He took another deep breath, sat up a little straighter in his chair, and then a bit of the Old Scott came back into his voice.

“As you’ve probably guessed,” he said, “I’ve been down in D.C. for the last six weeks, angling for a job in the new administration, or at least a lobbying gig. I mean, were-weasel, politics: a natural fit, don’t you think?” Everyone around the circle nodded sympathetically.

“Well let me tell you, friends, I didn’t have a clue. You don’t have a clue. There are things crawling through the halls of Congress now that... that...

“Look. This administration is like an enormous frickin’ magnet for Dark Life.”

Joe the Lion blinked. “Dark Life?”

“Y’know, dark matter? Dark energy?” Scott thumped himself on the chest. “Dark Life. Us. Cryptids. Beasties. Things that go bump in the night. Creatures that don’t officially exist—or at least we didn’t, until the ALPS activists started coming out of the closet and getting into people’s faces.

“I tell you, there are things going on that none of us have a clue about. There are things walking the streets of D.C. now that haven’t seen the light of day since the Carter administration. You can’t even get an interview for a contract job on K Street unless you’re at least a sasquatch. I ran into a frickin’ wendigo in the Dirksen Building!”

Joe the Lion blinked again. “Wendigo?”

“It’s Algonquin. Look it up later. While you’re at it, look up cryptozoology, too.

“Look, people,” he said to the rest of us, “there is—”

He paused, and pointed across the circle. “Hank, I’ve been following your blog. Don’t worry about that Reverend Riley. Internment is the least of our worries. People, there is a frickin’ war building up out there.”

Joe the Lion nodded. “I knew it. Vampires versus were-beasts.”

Scott scowled. “Oh, don’t give me that comic-book crap. We’re talking about war between the New Breeds—us—and the Old Line dark life; the ones who liked being in the shadows, because it gave them more power.”

I finally had to interrupt. “War? Really, Scott, don’t you think that’s being just a little dramatic?”

Scott turned and looked at me, and gave me the full-bore heavy sigh and rolling eyes treatment. “No, I don’t think that’s ‘a little dramatic.’ Right now there are clashes going on out west between the were-cougars and the were-jaguars, who are trying to push north and muscle in on cougar territory. So far they’ve managed to cover it up and blame all the murders on the drug cartels, but it’s only a matter of time...”

He broke off, and sighed again. “Look. All I can say is, there is stuff going out there that scares the willies out of me. We are only scratching the surface; ALPS is only the tip of the iceberg. We think we understand this disease. We’re only buying into the cover story. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I for one am scared beyond my capacity for rational comprehension.”

He sighed one more time, then shrugged, sat back, and tried to smile.

“But hey, what do I know? I’m just a weasel.”

 

_________________________

 

BRUCE BETHKE is best known for either his genre-naming 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his Philip K. Dick Award-winning 1995 novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few readers have known about him until recently is that he actually started out in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed MIDI and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but finished his career in the supercomputer industry, doing stuff that is absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-versed in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

In his copious spare time he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the fun of it.

ABOUT THIS STORY: “Relapse” was originally written for Curse of the Were-Weasel, on online multi-author multi-character multi-threaded role-playing narrative that was more conceptual art than coherent fiction. That it appears here today is because it came up in the context of a discussion with Pete Wood regarding the future development of Tales from The Brahma and The Odin Chronicles,  and Pete dared Bruce to put it online to see how people reacted to it.

Tomorrow Scott makes his final appearance, in “Exit.” 

Read More

“The Were-Weasel’s Tale” • by Bruce Bethke

“Sorry I’m late. There was some nasty weather in Chicago today and I was stuck in O’Hare for a few—okay, I know, I’m making excuses. Let me start over.

“Uh, hi. I’m Scott, and I’m a were-weasel.”

[Group: “Hi, Scott.”]

“I hope you’ll excuse me if I seem a little nervous. I’ve never actually—I mean, I’ve been coming to Were-Creatures Anonymous for about a month now, but to work up the nerve to stand up and talk—well, it’s taken me some time to come to grips with it, and accept what I am. I mean, I’ve been aware of my wereness for a long time, but I’ve been pretty deeply in denial. I thought I could handle it myself. I was like, support groups are for total losers, you know?

“Sorry. I didn’t mean you were losers. Not all of you. Not total losers, anyway.

“Uh, it’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve really come to realize that my—well, that my problem is out of control. It’s ruining my life. I mean, people who used to be my friends hate me now, and the people who claim they’re my new friends are like, just, damn. Who’d want them as friends?

“I suppose—well, maybe it was different for you, but I really can’t remember when I became a were-weasel. I mean, I really can’t for the life of me remember ever being bitten by any kind of weasel, much less a were one. But I know that the first time it became a problem for me was when I was in Junior High. It was in eighth grade, Mrs. Kazmarek’s American History class. We’d had a big assignment I didn’t feel like doing, to write an essay on Lincoln, and just my luck, the Kaz singles me out and tells me to come up in front of the class and read my essay. Well, this piece of paper I’m holding is blank, of course, and I’m just standing there at the front of the room, in front of everybody, all embarrassed and humiliated and everything, with my face turning bright red and the puberty hormones surging and all that, and the Kaz gives me that over-the-glasses look and says, “Well?” And then Sue Miller, in the front row—she was this pretty little blond I had the crush to end all crushes on—well Sue started giggling, and you could hear the whole class drawing their breaths, and in about a half-second they were going to totally explode in laughter—

“And just like that, it happened. I transformed, right there, in front of the whole damn class. And right off the top of my head, running on ninety-nine percent pure bullshit, I rattled off the most amazing essay you ever heard about Lincoln, with not one single word of truth in it, beyond the fact that some guy named Abraham Lincoln was once the President of the United States.

“Well, the Kaz was stunned, of course. She gave me an ‘A’ on the spot. Never even asked to see that blank sheet of paper I was holding.

“I can see some of you; you’re giving me that look. That was a problem?

“Yeah, that was a problem, but I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. And I’ll get back to it.

“But right now, I have a question: is that what it was like for you, the first time? Because to be honest, I really haven’t spent a lot of time around other were-creatures, and I honestly don’t know. I’ve been in denial, remember?

“I only know that I really got off on the raw power, and the way the Transformation, when it happened, was like—like—well, it was even better than sex with Sue Miller, a fact I later confirmed through extensive and repeated experimentation.

“But at the time, I was confused. I’d heard the stories; I knew the legends. Full moon, right? Not for me. I was really—ah, irregular. It was more related to hormones and stress than anything having to do with the Moon. When my life was going well and everything was on an even keel, it was really nice and predictable, every 28 days, like clockwork. But when I was stressed out, I could transform two or even three times in a month—or sometimes not at all. One time I went three months without transforming, and it scared the hell out of me. I thought—well, I didn’t have a clue what to think. That was right after the first time Sue and I went all the way on the couch in her parent’s basement, and I thought she’d, like, done something terrible to my body. I was scared out of my ever-lovin’ mind—until the next month, when the Transformation happened right on schedule, and I could go back to breathing again.

“While I’m asking questions: I don’t know about you, but for me, well, some months it’s really heavy, and I become like this giant rabid stoat that walks on its hind legs like a man, and other months it’s so light all I have to do is remember to shave twice daily and keep my mouth closed so the Normals don’t see my fangs.

“But as far as being a curse goes, well, it was really more of an inconvenience than a curse. And to tell the truth there were times it was damned useful. I never would have made it through law school or launched my political career if I couldn’t get in touch with my Inner Weasel on a regular basis.

“That’s when things started to fall apart. As I worked my way up the political ladder, I became totally dependent on my Weasel Sense. In time—well, eventually I wound up being the Press Secretary to somebody really important, if you can believe that to look at me now, but along the way I got so totally addicted to using my Weasel Powers that finally I just couldn’t turn them off any more. At the end, even I couldn’t tell when I was spewing bullshit. It got easier to try to figure out when I might be telling the truth, because it happened less often.

“I’m sure you’ve heard stories like mine before. In the end, I pushed it too far. I lost control. I actually transformed in the middle of a press conference, in front of the entire White House Press Corps, and not one of them noticed. I mean, maybe Maureen Dowd did; she later wrote a column in which she called me a “beady-eyed little ferret,” but at six-foot-two and two-hundred-and-ten pounds I’m by no stretch of the imagination “little,” so maybe she was just communing with her own Inner B— er, something, that day.

“But while the press didn’t notice, the people I worked for sure did, and that’s when they decided I’d become a liability. I got fired; replaced. But I still had my Were-Weasel Powers, right? So that’s when I decided I would really stick it to former employers, and show them the full fury of an enraged were-weasel! I would write a book.

“You can guess what happened after that, can’t you? Now all my former friends hate me, and all the people who claim they’re my new friends are total dirtbags who claim to love me but secretly—not that secretly, actually—despise me.

“And that’s my story. My name is Scott, and I’m a were-weasel. But with your help, my friends, I believe I can change.

“Hey! Why are you all looking at me like that?”

 

_________________________

 

BRUCE BETHKE is best known for either his genre-naming 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his Philip K. Dick Award-winning 1995 novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few readers have known about him until recently is that he actually started out in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed MIDI and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but finished his career in the supercomputer industry, doing stuff that is absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-versed in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

In his copious spare time he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the fun of it.

ABOUT THIS STORY: “The Were-Weasel’s Tale” was originally written for Curse of the Were-Weasel, on online multi-author multi-character multi-threaded role-playing narrative that was more conceptual art than coherent fiction. That it appears here today is because it came up in the context of a discussion with Pete Wood regarding the future development of Tales from The Brahma and The Odin Chronicles,  and Pete dared Bruce to put it online to see how people reacted to it.

Tomorrow, Scott returns, in “Relapse.” 

 

Read More

Curse of the Were-Weasel: Lessons Learned • by Bruce Bethke

Fifteen years later, the problems with Curse of the Were-Weasel seem obvious. Not to hog all the glory, but the biggest single problem with Curse was me, and my insistence of trying to do this thing entirely with writers.

Huh? What? Who else would I have used?

Understand, this was one of the times when my background in music and theater really let me down. I didn’t understand it then: for something like this to work fiction writers need firm guidance and assertive direction. They need hard guidelines. They need a series bible.

I’d worked from rigid series bibles before and didn’t much like them. In fact, I’d written series bibles for other publishers and other projects and didn’t like them much, either. But for a project like this, they are a necessary evil. The “herding cats” metaphor is overused but in this case entirely apt. Writers—print fiction writers especially—don’t know how to improvise. They tend to be introverts. They don’t know how to work together as a part of a group, playing off each other, supporting each other, and riffing off each other’s contributions. 

Fiction writers don’t know how to jam.

As a musician or someone doing improv theater, this is something you just sort of instinctively know and don’t give too much thought. You just know, when you ask a half-dozen musicians with whom you’re familiar to get together, what sort of instruments and skill levels they're likely to bring to the jam session and in which direction things are likely to go.

Ask six fiction writers to get together and "bring something to play," and they’ll show up with an electric guitar, a flugelhorn, a kalimba, a fish guiro, a set of bagpipes, and a basketball. Not even John Cage in his prime could have gotten something coherent out of that. 

Maybe Peter Schickele could.

___________

So Curse of the Were-Weasel was launched in June of 2008, and as soon as the gate was opened, the cats all scattered and did their own things. It was confused, chaotic, inconsistent, and totally phase one of lumpy gravy. The lack of an overarching plot was crippling. The reader participation idea never worked at all. The concept of having weekly meetings in real time was the worst thing about it. Anyone who’s ever had to organize a Zoom or Skype meeting can imagine what that was like, especially given that Zoom and Skype hadn’t been invented yet.

In the end Henry Vogel and David Goodman staged a coup and tried to seize control of the thing, to impose some sense of direction, but it was probably too late. Vampires were introduced, in a controlled fashion and subject to restrictions similar to those that applied to our ALPS victims; they were now properly termed victim’s of “Stoker’s Disease” and Henry began to develop a nice romantic subplot involving a sexy female vampire named Michelle. Someday I’ll have to ask him why he keeps writing romantic heroines named “Michelle” into his stories, given that that isn’t his wife’s name. That’s probably a topic better saved for a private conversation.

An anti-ALPS element was introduced, in the form of one Reverend Riley and his fundamentalist followers. I wasn’t entirely happy with that as such characters tend to devolve into Cartoon Christians and become really ugly caricatures, so I tried to introduce a political angle, with the idea of “Dark Life” and a developing power struggle between the new breed of out-in-the-public-eye ALPS victims and the old-school cryptids who preferred to remain in the shadows. I figured the “Dark Life” characters would relish the power they accrued by staying hidden and therefore gravitate to Washington D.C. I had some interesting ideas for developing that.

But then the El Paso County coroner’s office called, to tell me my daughter’s body had been found, and I lost interest in pretty much everything for a long time after that.

___________

 

Fifteen years later, why is Curse of the Were-Weasel back on my mind? Because behind the scenes, Pete Wood and I have been having a long-running conversation on the future of both Tales from The Brahma and The Odin Chronicles. I think there are important lessons to be learned here from the failure of Curse of the Were-Weasel that can be applied moving forward. Dawn of Time worked because fiction writers understand the round-robin approach to group writing. “I’m going to write a chapter and end it with a cliff-hanger, and then it’s over to you to figure out how to get Dawn out of the mess I wrote her into!” 

Fiction writers know that game. Most like to play it. And the writers working on Dawn of Time also benefited from knowing where the story ended. Dawn was always going to end up back where she began. Contradictory as it seems, on a project like this, writers benefit a lot from knowing which possible plot paths are already closed off and therefore not worth pursuing.

Those I think are the lessons to be learned from the failure of Curse of the Were-Weasel. If you’re going to try to create a multi-author multi-character multi-threaded tale—or for that matter, just to co-author a story with a good friend—remember entropy. Organization rarely develops spontaneously. The forces that produce chaos and nonsense are always much stronger. Put in the work ahead of time to map out an overarching plot structure. Define the outer limits of the world and the story and make sure your authors understand and agree to abide by them. (Nota bene to Pete Wood: Go back and re-read your own interview with David Gerrold, especially the parts about how hard it was to get Harlan Ellison to abide by the limits of the Star Trek world.) Plan an ending. Even if your story never gets to it, it really helps your writers to know the direction in which your story is trying to go.

Write the damned series bible. 

In yesterday’s post I used the word “aleatoric,” which sent some people running to their dictionaries. The important thing to remember about using aleatory is that it’s not completely random. It’s introducing random elements and performer-decided real-time choices into a predefined structure, and if anything it requires putting in even more work up front to define that structure, so that the end result isn’t just incoherent noise.     

Here endeth the lesson. Learn from my mistakes.

—Bruce Bethke

P.S. On a purely personal note: the lesson I learned from Curse of the Were-Weasel was that the titular were-weasel, Scott the Douchebag, was nowhere near as interesting to readers as I found him fun and interesting to write. The characters the readers liked and wanted to see more of were my throwaway romantic couple, Harald and Tina, who were only meant to appear in one story. 

I’ll have to give some serious thought to what else they can do. I mean, besides have sex.

Read More

Curse of the Were-Weasel: A Retrospective • by Bruce Bethke

In the first decade of the 21st Century—an unimaginably long time ago, it now seems—long before there ever was a Stupefying Stories, there was a sort of an online writing workshop called The Friday Challenge. The Friday Challenge pulled together a talented but eccentric group of promising young writers, and produced a number of equally promising but eccentric literary projects, one of which became Stupefying Stories, but the strangest of which had to be Curse of the Were-Weasel.

Curse of the Were-Weasel was, in technical terms, an attempt to explore the question of whether a blog engine could be used to construct a multi-author, multi-character, multi-threaded serial fictional narrative, and along the way to develop over time a correspondingly complex and collaboratively designed fictional universe in which there was lots of room for different writers to play without treading on each other’s toes.

In a sense, at the time, things like this were already being done. There were plenty of other blogs out there that contained nothing but the purest fiction, although most purported to be the non-fictional chronicles of the blogger’s sex life and/or political activities—or all too often, both. We already knew that a first-person blog describing, say, the wild and uninhibited sexual adventures of a beautiful young bisexual female advertising copywriter turned pole-dancer and political campaign web 2.0 consultant would draw a large and loyal, if perhaps demented, readership. Probably even land us a movie deal.

But we were not interested in trying to pass off fevered prurient fantasies as reality. And we certainly didn’t want to produce porn. 

Hence, Curse of the Were-Weasel: an intentional attempt to develop, over a planned course of two years, a shared universe populated by a large cast of fascinating characters, and to use this universe to present stories in weekly, serialized, interactively developed, and not necessarily linear installments. 

But why this story? We considered a number of other potential story lines, but this one seemed to provide the greatest openness for aleatoric development and require the least hands-on guidance. The market category of “paranormal romance” was just beginning to become unbelievably hot at the time, as evidenced by the collected works of Laurell Hamilton, Yasmine Galenorn, Kim Harrison, and my own personal favorite, Ronda Thompson—

Ah. The giants.

—and it showed no signs of dying off any time soon. It’s tempting to blame Joss Whedon and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) for this state of affairs, but I’d put the point of inception at least five years earlier, with Ron Koslow’s 1987 TV series, Beauty and the Beast.

But how could we be different? Vampires have been horribly and heavily overused in gothic serial romances ever since the dawn of the genre (Dark Shadows, anyone?), but while the conventions of the werewolf trope were equally widely known, they were not, at least at that time, so heavily overused. Besides, there are a lot of variations on the were-creature trope from cultures all over the world, and the genre is not without its opportunities for humor.

So were-critters it would be. 

Then the question became, how do you free the werewolf trope from its more inconvenient limitations? (Only in full moonlight, deathly allergic to silver, tendency to black-out and experience periods of bestial homicidal insanity followed by amnesia, etc., etc.) How do you turn were-creatures into intelligent, articulate, and sympathetic first-person narrative voices? In short, how do you bring them out into the light of day? 

The answer came to us in a flash. This is the 21st Century. What if were-creaturism was now known to be a disease, a terrible, communicable, debilitating disease with potentially deadly outcomes, true, but nonetheless, only a metaphorical curse? Why, that would make the people who contracted this disease victims, deserving not fear and scorn but sympathy and understanding—and all the manifold services of the entire Victim Support Industry! Why, we realized, if such a thing as were-wolfism were real, werewolves would be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and not only could you not fire a werewolf who went feral in the office, you’d be required by Federal law to accommodate their disability! 

And thus was born ALPS: Acquired Lycanthropic Polymorphism Syndrome. A retroviral disease passed on by exchange of bodily fluids (usually, but not always, via the blood/saliva interface involved in “biting” behavior), ALPS by some as-yet-not-fully understood mechanism activates dormant sequences in the victim’s DNA, resulting in a so-called “transformation” into a temporarily altered physiognomy and accompanying reversion to primitive, predatory, carnivorous behaviors. Given that this transformation usually involved changes to the mandible structure and hair-growth patterns, the conventional (if distasteful) expression would be to say that the victims “turned into wolves…”

But why stop there? World folklore abounds with tales of were-bears, were-cougars, were-jaguars, were-tigers, were-badgers, and many, many more—including, yes, were-seals. So on further reflection we decided our ALPS victims should be capable of changing into a very wide variety of forms, according to the nature of their character, and all of which resembled large, carnivorous mammals. (We decided to make a sticking point of the large, carnivorous mammal requirement, so no were-tunas or were-banana slugs or anything really silly like that.) Further, we decided it would make them more interesting if their transformations were not slaved strictly to the lunar cycle, but rather were erratic, hormonal, and in some cases, possibly even voluntary, thus making it more akin to getting really in touch with their inner animal avatar, rather than just reverting to mere mindless beasts.

With those basic rules in place, all that was left was to come up with some excuse for our ALPS victims to get together on a weekly basis, in order to interact and tell their stories. Once we couched it in those terms, the answer was obvious: Were-Creatures Anonymous. Because here in Therapy Nation, what else would werewolves do but form a 12-step group to help them deal with their issues, their feelings of alienation, and that ever-present urge to solve their interpersonal problems by ripping some jerk’s throat out, tearing open his rib cage, and feasting on his still-beating heart?  

Curse of the Were-Weasel launched on Sunday, June 8, 2008, with “The Were-Weasel’s Tale.” Almost immediately, it went careening wildly off the rails. What went wrong? 

What didn’t?

 

[To be continued…]

 

  

Read More

“First Date” • by Bruce Bethke

I have it bad for la chica bonita. Go figure. I live in Minnesota. I’m as Nordic as Nordic gets. I come from that ancient genetic factory somewhere north of Oslo that makes ‘em tall, broad, and strawberry-blonde, with a beard you could hide a battle-axe in. In school they called me ‘Harald the Red.’

Yeah, that’s right, with two a’s and no o. My dad is a history buff. He shook the name out of our family tree somewhere. It last belonged to my great, great, great— somebody.

So why is it that Nordic blond women do nothing for me? You could pull me through all of time and space and set me up on a hot date with Elke Sommer or Ursula Andress at her absolute peak…

And somewhere, something ancient deep inside my brain would say, “Eh. I knew your mother. I knew your grandmother. I knew all your foremothers back to the dawn of our race, and frankly, they were all a bunch of depressed neurotics.”

But introduce me to some dulce little chica—let her bat those big brown eyes at me, or wiggle her cute little butt in my general direction. Show me two minutes of Salma Hayek doing her snake-dance thing in From Dusk ‘Til Dawn…

Woof.

Anyway, that’s my theory. My Norsemen ancestors didn’t go viking for the plunder. They went viking to get away from Norse women. So when my favorite coffee shop hired a new waitress, and she turned out to be 5-foot-1 of dark-haired, dark-eyed, brown-skinned chicana beauty, I was instantly, hopelessly, smitten.

Yeah, Harald the Red, the mighty Viking. It took me three weeks to work up the nerve to ask her out. Another three weeks to get her to say ‘yes.’

And that’s when she popped her little surprise. “Harald,” she said, “you’re a sweet guy. But there’s something you really need to know about me, first.”

I shrugged. “You’re, uh, undocumented?”

“No, not that. I mean, yes, I am, but—well, if you really are serious about going out on a date with me, there’s somewhere else you need to go with me, first.”

And that’s how we wound up driving through Lowertown, just after dark on a Saturday evening. I thought it was some kind of joke or test, at first. The junkies, the winos; the gang tags spray-painted everywhere. “That’s where we’re going,” she said, pointing.

“You’re kidding,” I said. I craned my neck to look at the name carved in the marble over the entryway. “The Rampant Loon Media Building? What on earth possessed them to locate their business here?”

“They got a great tax break from the city.”

So I found a place to park the pickup truck, and we got out and took the sidewalk to the main entrance, stepping over the sleeping bums and the puddles of I don’t want to know what and walking past a dark alley entrance that brought all my willies and cold shivers out to dance in a conga line on the back of my neck. But we made it into the lobby okay, got waved past by the security guard, and took the elevator to the 13th floor.

Where we walked into a meeting. Huh. This was something I’d never heard of before: Were-Creatures Anonymous. It was some kind of demented variation on a twelve-step program for people who thought they were—

Well, as my adorable little chica put it, “Hi. My name is Tina, and I’m a were-jaguar.”

Actually, for a bunch of people who were clinically nuts, they weren’t half-bad. They were for the most part calm, sober, and pleasant—except for this Scott guy, who reminded me of a used-car salesman and left me with a deep desire to wash my hand after he shook it. Everyone there accepted that I wasn’t one of them but was only there to support Tina, and they congratulated me on my open-mindedness and all that; it was pretty embarrassing, actually. But we got through the coffee hour okay, and sweet little Tina really seemed to be warming up to me. She kissed me in the elevator, and held my hand and cuddled up to my side as we left the building and walked back to where I’d parked my truck. As we passed that dark alley entrance that had given me the willies so badly on our way in, three young thugs stepped out of the shadows. I saw the flash of a knife blade.

And then my world turned red.

¤

The next thing I knew, I was waking up naked in a strange bed and my left arm was numb. I turned my head, saw that the naked woman laying on my left arm was Tina, and from that made the leap to guessing that this was her apartment. I sure hoped the bedroom was always this much of a mess.

I must have made some sound or somehow disturbed her. She slowly opened those beautiful big brown eyes, and then just as slowly eased into the most amazingly satiated smile and snuggled in closer.

“Darling,” she whispered, “why didn’t you tell me? Madre di Dios, you were magnificent! So strong! So fierce! So…insatiable!” She bit my earlobe, gently, kissed her way down my neck, and then worked her way back up to my ear again. “Why didn’t you trust me? Why didn’t you tell the group that you’re—you’re—” She tched. “Were-bear seems such an inadequate name.”

“Because it is, and I’m not,” I said. “The correct term is bearserkr.”

“Whatever.” She kissed my neck again, harder and more insistent this time. “Whatever it is, you were unforgettable last night!”

That’s when I finally reached across with my other arm, and pulled her on top of me, and kissed her on the forehead and held her tight.

And stared at the ceiling, and let my anger soar up to the sky. Yeah. Unforgettable.

Damn you, Odin, and damn your thousand-year curse! They all say that! But just once, would it be too much to let me remember?

_________________________

 

BRUCE BETHKE is best known for either his genre-naming 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his Philip K. Dick Award-winning 1995 novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few readers have known about him until recently is that he actually started out in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed MIDI and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but finished his career in the supercomputer industry, doing stuff that is absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-versed in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

In his copious spare time he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the fun of it.

ABOUT THIS STORY: “First Date” was originally written for Curse of the Were-Weasel, on online multi-author multi-character multi-threaded role-playing narrative that was more conceptual art than coherent fiction. That it appears here today is because it was on the old SHOWCASE site, and it came up in the context of the conversation that began when Bruce said “No more multipart stories” in yesterday’s post and Pete Wood panicked because both Tales from The Brahma (season 2) and The Odin Chronicles (season 2) are currently in development. Bruce will have lots more to say about Curse of the Were-Weasel—but not today. 

Read More