Is it sci-fi or horror? by J.C. Kavanagh

 

The Twisted Climb
Book 1 of the award-winning series

I'm well into the manuscript for Book 3 of my Twisted Climb series, but every now and then I take a break from writing a young adult book and switch to.... sci-fi horror. Yeah, I have a fascination for science fiction thanks to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. And I have a lurid fascination for horror, thanks to Stephen King's Carrie, The Shining, and The Stand. Many of the adventures in The Twisted Climb's dream world have paranormal and horrific features - features that I love to wrap my twisted mind around. Mmmm, delicious.

Lead characters in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek 
William Shatner as Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Spock 

The 1978 original cover of Stephen King's The Stand

So when I have an opportunity to write something other than YA (young adult), I wholeheartedly accept. I belong to a writers' group called 'The Wordsmiths,' a very talented group of local authors and poets. To stir the creative pot, our group leader frequently provides story prompts. Last week's storyline choices were:

1. Your character, by chance or habit, peers through a telescope. They see something unusual - what is it?

2. Your character has just checked her lottery ticket numbers and finds that she has all the numbers and is a big winner. What goes through her mind the first hour and what does she decide to do.

Sooo... my twisted mind went to work and came up with this...  

Just one look
by J.C. Kavanagh

 “I know it’s there!”

“It’s not there – I’ve inspected the entire quadrant.”

Ellie drummed her fingertips against the cold, metal desktop. “Well, I saw it yesterday and the day before, so, it’s got to be there. Dying stars don’t disappear in a day.”

Her new colleague, Freizen, shook his head. “I know that – you forget my specialty is in galactic death.”

Ellie deliberately turned her head to one side and rolled her eyes, preventing Friezen from witnessing her sarcastic response. Galactic death is his specialty – ahaha! She held back a laugh, turning it into a quick cough.

Friezen leaned toward her, his one eye seeming to grow larger with each passing second as the single pupil replicated over and over until it appeared as multi-faceted as the arachnid species found on earth. Only this wasn’t earth. This was a galaxy far away where humans were called ‘alien.’ On this planet, there were only spider-like beings – creatures with a single eye and eight hairy limbs. Ellie waved a hand in front of her face. “You don’t scare me with your alien eyeball,” she said softly. “We came in peace, remember?”

Friezen shifted his body back, allowing his single eye to roam over her human body. Slowly, the pupils merged to one and Ellie knew he had overcome his fight-and-kill mentality. It was always this way with him. Actually, it was this way with his entire species.

Ellie tapped a set of coordinates on the wall-sized computer screen, enhancing the quadrant ten-fold. “This is where you’re pointing the telescope, right?” An image of the starry sector appeared on the wall before them. Bracing hands on hips, she said, “I want to look for myself.”

In response, Friezen waved four of his limbs at the eyepiece of the enormous telescope. “You can take a look – but you only get one look.”

Ellie stepped toward the eyepiece, sidling past Friezen. She was confused at his comment. If that was a dying star I saw and if that really was part of the Milky Way galaxy, then I might have witnessed my own planet self-destructing. But why would Friezen hide that from me?

“Just one look?” she asked. He nodded and pointed once more toward the telescope.

Ellie leaned into the eyepiece, focusing on the spiral-shaped sector. There! It’s there! The dying star was glowing brightly in its final death dance. She turned toward Friezen just as he spewed a massive gob of gossamer web on her face.

“Humans are so stupid,” he said. “But their brains are quite tasty.”

* * * 

I'm not sure which genre reflects this short story, sci-fi or horror. What do you think?

If you're looking for great books to read during the March break - check out my award-winning Twisted Climb series. Action, adventure, suspense, drama and paranormal activities abound!

Stay safe everyone!

J.C. Kavanagh, 

Voted Favourite Local Author, South Simcoe, 

author of The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends (Book 2) voted BEST Young Adult Book 2018, Critters Readers Poll and Best YA Book FINALIST at The Word Guild, Canada 

AND 

The Twisted Climb, 

voted BEST Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers Poll

Novels for teens, young adults and adults young at heart 

Email: author.j.c.kavanagh@gmail.com 

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Einstein’s Brain by Mohan Ashtakala

 

Dr. Thomas Harvey with Einstein's Brain

Albert Einstein was born on April 14, 1879, Ulm, Germany, one-hundred-and-forty-three years ago. Since the time he gained fame for his works, his genius aroused much curiosity. Some of his peculiar thought processes became well known. He found difficulty speaking as a child, concerning his parents to such an extent that they consulted a speech doctor. Later, Einstein revealed that he thought in pictures, not in language. He famously imagined riding a beam of light; the experience perhaps foreshadowing his theories on the behavior of light.

He suffered from dyslexia, and found himself unable to socialize with schoolmates. He preferred playing by himself, working on puzzles and building complex structures with blocks. In later years, music had a way of unlocking secrets. When confronted with a difficult physics problem Einstein would pick up his violin, and then suddenly stop and shout, “I’ve got it,” as the answer entered his mind.

The combination of his eccentric childhood and his later notoriety gave birth to much interest and speculation with respect to his brain. Was Einstein’s brain different from those of normal men? Did it explain his genius?

The opportunity to study this came in April 18, 1955, when Einstein passed away. He wanted to be cremated and his ashes spread over the sea, as he did not want his presumptive grave to become idolized. However, during the autopsy, Dr. Thomas Harvey, of Princeton, removed the brain and preserved it. It does not seem that this was done with permission, despite the fact that Hans Albert, Einstein’s elder son, endorsed the move only after the event occurred.

Harvey took the brain to the University of Pennsylvania, and dissected it into several pieces, some of which was supplied to leading scientists. The rest, he kept to himself, hoping to find support for research, but for many years, no such opportunity arose, and it travelled with him to the many places he subsequently lived. In 1978, journalist Steven Levy found the brain, preserved in alcohol, in two mason jars in a cider box. They had been sitting there for over twenty years.

Finally, in the 1980’s, research on portions of the brain were conducted by Berkeley professor Marian Diamond. Sadly, or fortunately, as the case may be, Einstein’s brain proved not to be anything special. The only peculiarity was a small increase in “glial” cells in the left interior cortex, but not so significant as to explain the man’s genius.

Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanauthor.com) is the author of The Yoga Zapper, a fantasy, and Karma Nation, a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

The End of the Story...by Sheila Claydon

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Writing a book is a mix of things: a hard slog, moments of elation, moments of recognition even, and of course a lot of staring at a blank screen. A writer's mood can swing from depression to excitement from one sentence to the next. And then, when the last i is dotted and the last t is crossed, there is the editing. The acknowledgement that the section in chapter ten that seemed just right, no longer works. Nor does the timeline in chapter twelve. What has been missed out? What has been forgotten?

Once all that has been rectified to the writer's satisfaction, and all names and dates checked and double checked (yes, I did accidentally change the name of the heroine for a couple of chapters in one book, which would not have been a good look if the mistake had gone to print!) then it is the turn of the publishing editor, who will inevitably find a whole lot of other things that need attention.

While all that is going on there are a couple of other things that is very important indeed. The title. The cover image and the blurb (the short description that will hopefully persuade a browsing reader to buy the book).

This can be both the best and worst of times. The blurb cannot be too long but nor must it leave out the kernel of the story. The cover image must fit with the most up-to-date publishing style while at the same time show what the story is about, and finally the title. This can be the most tricky thing of all. Does the writer use the name of one of the characters, as I did in the first two books of the Mapleby Memories series, or is it better to find another link within the story.

It took me quite a while to find a title for my latest book (due out in April) and in the end it wasn't really me who found it, but my teenage granddaughter! She was staying with me for a few days and we were discussing her English homework and, because she naturally has a very quirky way of looking at things, she was explaining to me how once, when she was given a topic to write about, with a title, she was almost at the end before she realised she hadn't tied it to the title at all. What did she do? She wrote a final paragraph cramming everything in and, believe it or not, got good marks!

I didn't do that of course but it really made me think. Was there something that had featured throughout the book that could be used in the title? I re-read the whole thing and realised that there was. The moon!  Because the story stretches across the centuries the events that took place were observed by many a moon. I had the title. Many a Moon not only trips off the tongue, it is quite a memorable phrase and, when I re-read the story I realised I had indeed used a moonlit image quite frequently. Admittedly I did copy my granddaughter a tiny bit by inserting a couple of extra moons, but only two, and then the book was complete.

In April readers will be able to discover what the moon saw. Until then I have one final edit and then Many a Moon: Mapleby Memories Book 3, the final book of the trilogy will be published, with a cover, a blurb and a title I really like. I hope readers do too. 

The Irish Are Everywhere

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Happy St. Patrick's Day, readers!

My heroine Ursula of Mercies of the Fallen and Ursula's Inheritance found her Irish born champion in Rowan Buckley, an Irish transplant to Canada during An Gorta Mor, (The Great Hunger 1845-1850.)

Rowan was a member of an Irish diaspora (Diaspóra na nGael), which describes people like me, and I suspect many of you-- ethnic Irish descendants who live outside the island of the saints and sinners. There are over 100 million of us...more than fifteen times the population of Ireland itself!

Did you know:

* It has been suggested that St. Brendan visited Bermuda on one of his legendary voyages. The beautiful Bermudiana is a flower that grows only there...and around Lough Erne and Lough Melvin in County Fermanagh, and is known as Feilistrín gorm, or Blue-eyed grass.

*  On the Bridge of Tears (Droichead na nDeor) in West Donegal, Ireland, family and friends of emigrants would accompany them as far as the bridge before saying goodbye, while the emigrants would continue on...

* Many of the Wild Geese (expatriate Irish soldiers of the 16th, 17th and 18th century) who had gone to Spain and their descendants continued on to its colonies in South America. Many rose to positions in the Spanish governments there. In the 1820s, some helped liberate the continent. Bernardo O'Higgins was the first Supreme director of Chile. When Chilean troops occupied Lima during the War of the Pacific in 1881, they put in charge Patricio Lynch, whose grandfather came from Ireland to Argentina and then moved to Chile. Other Latin American countries that have Irish settlement include Puerto Rico and Colombia.

My Short Stab at Historical Fiction by Susan Calder

 

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One thing I like about writing short stories is the chance to explore genres and characters different from those of my novels. Last fall I completed my first work of historical fiction, a 4,500-word story set during the 1918 influenza pandemic. A Deadly Flu is also my first short whodunit and my first police procedural. I've featured detectives in secondary roles before, but not as story protagonists. 

My idea for A Deadly Flu took root almost two years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic revived my interest in that earlier virus, which was inaccurately called the Spanish flu. I first heard about the 1918 pandemic on an episode of the 1970s television show, Upstairs Downstairs, when the young wife of the wealthy Bellamy family's son developed a fever and died the same day. 

 During the summer of 2020, I read books and articles about the 1918 pandemic and was struck by its relevance a hundred years later. The prime advice in both pandemics was the same: wash your hands, social distance and avoid crowds. The 1918 Pandemic's second and mostly deadly wave struck my home city of Calgary from October to December 1918. Business, churches and bars closed. People wore masks and lived in fear. 

 Around this time, I was mulling ideas for my fourth mystery novel, to be set during our current pandemic, and wondered if the 1918 flu might provide a parallel backstory. I got the idea of a pharmacist who murders her lover by pouring a medicine that mimicked the 1918 flu's symptoms into his whisky. When he died, the medical profession’s tunnel vision assumed this was another influenza death.

I began writing the backstory as a suspense from the killer’s viewpoint and enjoyed researching Calgary neighbourhoods of the time, along with its streetcar system, fashion, and particulars of the city-wide lockdown. But by the end of the draft, I realized my long ago story wouldn't add enough interest to the contemporary mystery I had in mind. I set the backstory aside and plunged into the current novel. 

                                               Nov 11, 1918 - Calgary WWI Victory parade 

Then the Crime Writers of Canada put out a call for submissions for its 40^th anniversary anthology. Stories had to be set in Canada, feature 'cold' in some way, and be under 5,000 words. I hauled out the backstory and set it during a Calgary cold wave in December 1918, with a detective, rather than a villain, protagonist. A benefit of writing a detective from the early twentieth century is that I didn't have to know about DNA, data bases, and other modern police gadgetry. Since I only had a short space to establish reader connection with my protagonist, I gave him a wound--his wife had died a year earlier in childbirth--and developed a romantic subplot.   

I wrote the story, sent it off, and was thrilled last month to learn A Deadly Flu will be included in the Cold Canadian Crime Anthology, to be released this May. Meanwhile I've been working on my novel-in-progress. Inspired by my historical detective, for the first time in a novel I’m including the viewpoints of two detectives in addition to my insurance adjuster sleuth. I foresee much research into modern police work. One day soon, I’d like to write a historical novel and, perhaps, develop A Deadly Flu into a novella, a genre I haven't tried. That’s another thing I like about writing short stories—they can be stepping stones to future books.