Two short stories forthcoming:
“Night of the Fish People” will appear in Under the Stairs anthology
and
“The Astrozen Composer” will appear in appear in First Contact Imminent anthology.
I read this YA book to preview it for my high school students. This was a good read–I would definitely recommend to students. Constable’s descriptions are not so heavy as to weigh down the story, but they are enough to allow readers to paint their own pictures. Even though the chapters are long (in terms of number of pages), they fly by. The style/reading level is not overly challenging so as to discourage an adolescent reader; neither is it too simply to bore an advanced reader.
I enjoyed the premise: Calwyn is clinging to the old world of magic–a series of chantments that can control various aspects of nature and people. Most citizens of her world are distrustful of those who can sing these spells, even though the singers are simply misunderstood. Interwoven through this fantastical story were snippets of wisdom that can be applied to our own “non-magical” lives–observations on the nature of life and death, ambition and acceptance. These musings can serve as philosophical diving boards for more advanced readers to delve deeper into the text, drawing parallels between Calwyn’s world and their own. In short, the novel follows the typical archetypal journey with enough twists so that it doesn’t disappoint.
Specifics for students/young readers: The protagonist is female, which might be a turn-off to some of my male students, but the story contains enough action that male adolescent readers might be able to forget about the fact that the story is told through a female’s eyes. The third person point of view, I believe, will help make Calwyn’s story more palatable to male readers. Even when the action stops, there is enough interaction between characters to keep things interesting. For example, there is some subtle “love tension” between protagonist Calwyn and her male companion, Darrow, as well as some aggression between and among characters. Those interested will pick up on the subtleties of the characters’ relationships. Those uninterested can easily ignore them, following the action of the plot.
Specifics for adult readers: This book is meant for young adults. As such, the reading level will not be a challenge for adults, but the book will be a quick read. As an adult reading this book, I craved more layers of development, but the world Constable created was an interesting concept to consider. I did enjoy the more philosophical musings (that appeared more towards the end of the novel), as I could easily draw connections to our modern world in terms of power, balance, and the place of an individual within society.
Specifics for writers: From a writer’s point of view, I enjoyed picking apart how Constable was able to tell a complicated story in a concise way. She added just the right level of details to interest her target age group without burdening them with excess description or information. She really trusted her readers to fill in the gaps with their imaginations.
Overall, I would recommend this book. There are two more in the series, which I intend to read.
I like to write horror, so I can appreciate that some scary noises are fun. Creaky hinges or crisp October evenings. An echo of footsteps during a game of hide-and-seek. Whispers in the darkness around a campfire. The creaking of an airplane cabin is not one of those “fun” scary noises. But such was the atmosphere of my flight to Phoenix on June 25. The flight started out well enough. For once, I hadn’t allowed myself to get nervous ahead of time. But I did have enough foresight to bring my little notebook, into which I ended up pouring my anxieties during the flight. And here, deciphered from the bumpy blue scribbles in that notebook, is my experience on that flight:
Just after the drink service, we hit turbulence. Drinks are spilled. Kids are crying. Not only did the seatbelt light go on, but the flight attendants have been asked to sit down as well. I knew it was bad when, as a passenger tried to hand the flight attendant an empty drink container, she said, “It’ll have to wait—it’s not safe right now.” The only turbulence I’ve encountered this bad was flying home one night on the tail end of a storm.
* * *
After two hours of on-and-off turbulence, during which time I tried to stay asleep, the flight attendants are still seated. They’ve started gossiping in the back—I’m seated in the last row—and most of the passengers have acclimated to the bumpy ride. They say the human body has a mechanism allowing it to ignore repetitive or long-term environmental disruptions like buzzing or birds chirping or jarring, jolting turbulence and the creaking cabin noise resulting from it.
Not this human body.
I press my face to the window watching plots of farms in greens and browns spread beneath my like a quilt. I’m wishing I were there, in the heartland of America, perhaps, safely on the ground. I’d take anything—a pile of manure, a pig farm—whatever it took to get me safely off that plane. My husband asks if I really need the window open so wide. He, like the other passengers, is trying to sleep. The light is disruptive. I break my trance and look around: the kid next to him is sleeping, as are the people in the next two rows.
I shut the window.
My husband nods his head in sleep. The flight attendants giggle in the back at a juicy piece of gossip I cannot quite hear. The plane jolts us from side to side. No one reacts. I am in my own private nightmare. A combination of all my fears. Claustrophobia. Acrophobia. Fear of being powerless to help my immediate safety. I pull up the window, hoping for a clue to our location. I have a napkin with the airline’s various cities mapped on it, and I’ve eyeballed the trajectory, divided the flight time, and estimated where we should be by now. I peek out the sliver of light hoping for a glimpse of the Missouri River.
But there’s nothing but clouds. A mass of white. Another jolt.
A kid that looks like Ralphie from A Christmas Story ignores the seatbelt sign and scurries to the bathroom. I remember an anecdote: just before the flight, this kid and his brother were arguing about whether a McDonald’s wrapper counted as recyclable paper. They tossed it in the recycling bin anyway. My mind dashes to Lost and all the ways passengers caught random glimpses of each other’s personalities before getting only too familiar after the plane crash on the island.
The plane crash.
My mind jolts back to my Hellish reality as I wonder if turbulence can be so bad as to tear apart a plane bit by bit. I wonder what the point of seat belts is on a plane. Really. I always see pilots rolling extensive luggage behind them as they board the plane. I wonder if one of those parcels is a parachute. Is there a secret code pilots have—maybe the flight attendants are involved as well—in which they decide that the plane is done for? They announce the code over the loudspeaker, and it’s probably something innocuous so as not to frighten the passengers, something like “I heard Phoenix is hot this time of year.” And at this point, the flight attendants smile that plastered smile at the passengers and saunter to the back of the plane. And on the count of three, the doors are thrown open and the pilot jumps out followed by his harem of flight attendants, all equipped with parachutes that open to display the airplane’s logo to the suckers left above.
I wonder this as the plane jolts again. I wonder whether the pilot might provide an update on the status of the turbulence. I’m wondering why he doesn’t. And then I think to myself: why would he? If we were past the turbulence, he’d tell us so (or at least turn off the Fasten Seat Belt light). But if things were bad—scary bad—of course he’d keep quiet. Maybe he’s on the phone with his wife, telling her goodbye just in case. Or maybe he has to focus so hard on navigating through the turbulence that he can’t spare a moment to talk to the passengers.
My mind wanders one final time to an anecdote from my dad. He was on a flight, and after a bout of turbulence, the man next to him ordered a double shot.
“First time?” my dad asked. “You get used to the turbulence. It can’t really bring down a plane.”
“No,” the man said. “I’m a pilot. And if you knew what almost just happened to our plane, you’d be drinking too.” The man didn’t say anything more, and of course he could have been making it up, but it makes me wonder what pilots know/encounter/avoid that we the passengers will just never know.
* * *
POST SCRIPT
After finishing the entry above, I forced myself back into “sleep mode,” the same mode I force myself into when watching a really bad movie or TV show. Kind of like “safe mode” on a PC when starting up after a particularly bad crash. Minimal awareness. At the hotel, I researched the purpose of seat belts on planes. It turns out that in 2010, an airplane hit such bad turbulence that passengers who weren’t buckled in were injured by being thrown against the wall and ceilings of the cabin when the plane lost altitude. Lost altitude! It’s a good thing I hadn’t researched that before hand.
We encountered little “Ralphie” again on the flight home: he was sitting behind us this time. He was sitting next to a stranger who insisted in engaging the boy in conversation over the entire course of the four-and-some-change-hour flight. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that the boy had no sense of volume control or appropriateness, and I could hear every scrap of his shrill conversation. But at least there wasn’t as much turbulence. Besides, it could have been worse: if the plane had crashed on some mysterious tropical island, little Ralphie could have been my next door neighbor for years to come!
My horror short story, “An Essay for Ms. Krimson,” has been accepted for the Hellology anthology (table of contents). This story was inspired by the creepy closet in my classroom. 🙂
I just learned that my story, “A Lasting Impression” (working title) has been accepted for the September/October 2011 issue of New Moon Girls magazine. After taking a creative writing class as a way of kicking my writing motivation into gear, I made my first sale to this magazine back in 2008. It’s a magazine targeted to pre-teen girls, and I submitted here to sharpen my middle-grade writing skills.
Not having “branded” myself yet in any one genre or market, I also write horror for adults. Browing amazon.com for a link to one of the anthologies that published my work, I found a review that mentioned me by name. While having my name mentioned in a review is not an earth-shattering thing, it’s certainly exciting! Reviewer M. Souza writes, ” I found a handful of new authors [in Fearology] I’m going to be keeping my eyes on, and I’m going to highlight a handful of my favorites: Val Muller’s “Horrible Harry” – The story of a woman alone carrying the fear of a boogeyman who killed her father….” (amazon.com review).
There were two weeks of school left, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had things planned almost perfectly so that my students would be healthily occupied with end-of-year projects and presentations up until the last day of school.
Things were going well, that is, until I opened my big mouth:
Being an English teacher, I thought I was being clever by using such figurative imagery. But I had inadvertently issued a challenge to Fate.
Despite my happiness, I had slept horribly for nearly two weeks. In light of everything going well, my subconsciousness seemed to be preparing for something. Maybe puckish fate had been sprinkling my dreams with tiny nightmares.
As an English teacher, I thought I was smart enough to know that things like foreshadowing happen in books and movies, but they don’t happen in real life. Turns out I was wrong.
We were sitting on the couch watching TV, when Eric erupted in an expletive.
He had spilled his water. A big, tall, icy glass of it. It was a rare occasion, and I watched as he sopped it up with towels.
I only remembered the incident because it was repeated that night. At nearly midnight, I awoke from a sound sleep by yet another expletive. This time, Eric had spilled his water on the bedroom carpet. Behind the night table. And the dresser.
In the four years we’ve been living in the house, Eric has not once spilled water.
I woke up grumpy and helped him clean it up.
I slept terribly, plagued by dreams I could not remember.
The following night, I awoke at midnight realizing that I had left my phone—my alarm clock—in the car. I checked for it in the garage. This detail is important only in that when I went to look for it, there was in fact NOT a gushing mess of water issuing forth from the hose faucet.
When I awoke the next morning at 5:30, the toilet flushed but wouldn’t refill. I spent the next fifteen minutes trying to figure it out.
My heart pounded. The adrenaline coursed through my veins. Eric had no water pressure. I had no water pressure. This was more than just coincidence. I felt it in my gut. Something was terribly wrong. I rushed down the stairs as theories about a water company conspiracy flooded my brain. Maybe the apocalypse had come while we slept. Or the ocean had evaporated. My brain cooled as everything on the second floor seemed fine.
But then…
Russsh.
Russsh.
The rush of water. Like a flowing stream.
“Are you running water up there?” I asked.
“No,” came a sleepy reply.
But I heard a gushing nonetheless. I ran down to the basement to check the bathroom. And what I found down there set me on full alert mode. It is a trait I inherited from my mother through which I can wake from a dead sleep and spring into action in a matter of nanoseconds. It’s a talent reserved for the most dire situations, catalyzed only by such things as medical emergencies, screaming family members, or puddles of water in the squishy basement carpet…
Not fully awake, Eric trudged down the stairs, my hysteria not registering yet.
Running into the garage, I discovered Niagara Falls had relocated to my hose faucet. The world moved in slow motion. The fountain wet everything in its path. The insulation. The utility carpet. The pegboard. It had pooled in buckets and in the crevaces of tools.
Swimming through the tool room, I climbed on a crate, my pajamas already soaked, and reached the shut-off valve.
I allowed myself to breathe again. There was nothing but the beating of my heart and the…. dripping of…
WATER!
I sloshed down the stairs to the basement. I checked out the storage area under the stairs. A layer of water was creeping its way up the cardboard boxes, oxidizing the metal armor of a Halloween costume, saturating the drywall.
I checked the clock. I had only 90 minutes before I had to leave for school. My “perfectly-planned” lessons now demanded that I be at school to grade students’ oral presentations. Not that they would have minded if there had been a sub….
My husband called his boss, who chuckled at his reason for personal leave. “It’s not icy out, so I assume the water is–kinetic?” he asked faceteously.
At least SOMEONE got a chuckle out of it.
I spent the next 90 minutes frantically removing saturated cardboard from under the stairs and running the carpet cleaner’s vacuum function, grateful that the thing had finally paid for itself. When I finally arrived at school, my hair still dripping wet from the fastest shower on record, I hurried to make arrangements for substitutes after the student presentations.
As I drove home, I hoped maybe the whole thing had been a dream. A very bad dream.
But it wasn’t.
At home, my husband, who had been running the carpet cleaner when I left, was on the couch, forlorn. He was eating McDonalds. All those cardboard storage boxes were still there under the stairs, soaking up the water.
But at least it had finally stopped dripping.
“I thought you were going to keep cleaning down there,” I said.
“Vacuumed for hours…” he mumbled. “Called some places…” He stared blindly at the McDonald’s bag. “They forgot my double cheeseburger. But I got you two of the little ones.” He looked back down at his fries as if they, too, were in conspiracy against him, as the rest of the day seemed to have been.
“Have one of mine,” I said, tossing him a burger. I ate mine without tasting it and hurried back down the stairs. The dogs (did I mention we have dogs?) were so confused. Eric was home. I was home. Water was everywhere.
Leia, the adventurous one, bounded down the stairs with delight. The carpet squished under her, and she wagged her stub of a tail.
Yoda, who is afraid of everything, ran back upstairs.
Meanwhile, Eric’s phone rang. A moment later, he informed me that someone was coming to help dry the carpets. He would be here in a matter of minutes. “And, um,” he added, “we’re supposed to clear out the room.”
“What?”
“And the storage under the stairs.”
I sprung to action, grabbing things left and right. But Eric just stood there looking like he forgot how to breathe.
I should stop here to clarify:
The basement is Eric’s “man cave.” I’m legally not allowed to clean it. Not even to vacuum. Eric, a notorious newspaper hoarder, has a stack of newspapers that doubles as an extra end table, a stack of video games, and various containers of snack foods to satisfy whatever video-game-induced craving might hit. It was all too much for him, and he kind of wavered in place a little bit as if he might move to do something, but then he’d stay put, surveying the room like a general surveying the remains of his men on a battlefield. He was lucky, however. The water seemed to spare the most important elements of his man-cave.
Here’s a map:
I was so thrilled that the largest stack of newspapers was spared…
I don’t really remember how it is we managed to clear all the elements of the man-cave into the living room upstairs, or the garage, or the patio. But we did. Armfuls of DVDs, vintage video game systems, even a full-body replica of Roman armor found its way safely out of the water.
Now, we have a series of industrial-strength fans and a robotic-looking dehumidifier. We were told that everything will be fine in three days. The carpet has been loosened from the walls, and it undulates with the power of the fans. Leia takes delight in the rippling carpet, prancing around and rolling like it’s her own private ocean.
Yoda, on the other hand….
And me? With the living room full of plastic storage containers and my husband now “homeless” and monopolizing the “non-video-game TV,” I have confined myself to the kitchen with my laptop. And created this. I hope you enjoyed : )
