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Halloween Horror Excerpt: Mania of the Black Cat

October 28, 2015 By scottbowen

By pure luck, I am still alive. Why this beast didn’t kill me when it had me, I don’t know.

Last night I went outside for a short walk down the driveway. It was full dark, well into the night, but I wanted a bit of air before bed. Judith was reading, and said she would wait for me. I took the big flashlight and went down the gravel lane, along the tall hemlocks. The night smelled of pinesap and wet stone.

Just enough ambient light showed the contour of the driveway, and I walked along with the flashlight off. I hadn’t gone far when I heard an odd sound, a kind of throaty sigh. It set me on edge. I waited and listened, and after hearing nothing else I turned and walked toward the house. Then I heard a sound behind me, to my right, and I shined the flashlight there. A great black streak flew across the driveway, just outside the beam of light, and some kind of creature shrieked at me as if with hatred.

 

Front paw print of a cougar. An adult paw prin...

Front paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I scampered sideways as I tried to get the flashlight on the animal. I didn’t want to run and trigger an attack response, but I gained momentum with every step. Scampering for the door, I heard the big cat running, and I looked back.

Its dark mouth opened as it came for me, its long canines bright. I held up my arm to block the animal, and it sank its teeth into my forearm as it collided with me and knocked me onto the porch. Its claws dug into my shoulders and it held me down on the boards, shaking its head, almost breaking my arm. I flailed and screamed, and kicked with my feet. I smashed it in the head with the flashlight, and then put the bright beam right into its eye.

The cat let go of me and flew away with a scream. It moved more like a huge flying snake than any cat.

I lay in shock for several minutes, flailing feebly with my legs and arms, unable to stop my fight reaction. My chamois shirt was stained with blood. The moaning sound I made was pathetic, babyish.

When Judith finally turned on the light and opened the door, and saw me bloody and squirming on the porch floor, she shrieked and ran back into the house.

I got to my feet and staggered down to her bedroom. I heard her in there, making a terrible, pained sound. I told her I was all right, and that she shouldn’t worry. She made no reply.

 

# # #

[In honor of Halloween, Scott Bowen Creative will be running excerpts from the recently completed collection, Horror 12: Stories of Terror & Possession. A previously published story appears here, at HorrorZine.com.]

Filed Under: SB Blog Tagged With: Cat People, Cat Woman, Halloween, horror fiction, panther

A subject-line solution

September 14, 2015 By scottbowen

In recent times, I’ve been editing/rewriting a lot of business e-mails, and writing a lot of original subject lines that seek to do one thing: get the click to open the message.

I also receive a lot of promotional and commercial e-mails, and I don’t see a lot of subject lines that make me want to reach out and make billions more electrons flow.

A still from a recent example of light writing...

A still from a recent example of light writing with a human subject in frame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Face it: we’re all jaded about e-mail subject lines. So every week I wonder, What the hell can I write?

I’ve concluded that if you want people to click the e-mail, you at least have to make them feel like they’re not doing this alone. You have to make them feel that they’ll have an instant guide who will navigate the pending experience with them.

For good or ill, I’ve settled on a temporary solution: I start the subject line with “Let’s.”

It suggests freedom of choice, but with some focus. It also implies some support: the people approaching the customer are interested in helping him or her find what he or she wants, while the recipient can assert every individual taste.

Then the rest of the subject line is on-topic (product, service, whatever): “Let’s turn heads” (fashion). “Let’s climb the mountain” (outdoors equipment). “Let’s do a burn-out” (automotive after-market).

This isn’t a perfect solution, but it has some positives: 1. The word count stays low for mobile-device screens. 2. It’s inviting, and slightly inspiring. 3. It’s on-topic, but leaves a little bit unexplained, and the curious reader/customer is a good one.

Let’s try it.

# # #

Filed Under: SB Blog Tagged With: Advertising mail, B2B, B2C, business writing, Computer-mediated communication, e-mail, e-mailing, mobile device, on-line shopping, shopping, social media, subject lines, touch-screens

Cutting the clutter of your clichés

September 11, 2015 By scottbowen

Imagine if everyone decided to pick one cliché a week and do his or her utmost to banish it from personal usage.

Some of us will have much more work to do than others. We won’t eliminate all clichés, and other, not-yet-known clichés will take the ranks of the departed.* But, like donating a t-shirt emblazoned with some catchphrase or symbol you don’t truly believe, every time you banish a cliché, you purge unnecessary crap from your own life.

This effort needs no title or slogan—it’s just a regular personal practice, intellectual good hygiene.

To start, I’ll pick the one cliché I currently despise the most: “No worries.”

"No worries" text, on the cover of a...

“No worries” text, on the cover of a spare tire on the back of an automobile in Australia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

A single Australian is the source of this expression as used in American speech: the fictional Crocodile Dundee, played by actor Paul Hogan.

Before 1986, nobody in America said, “No worries.” We said, “That’s o.k.,” “No problem,” or “Sure thing” when we should have said, “You’re welcome.”

Then came the first eponymous Crocodile Dundee movie, and everybody soon had a case of the no-worries.

“No worries” gave us another way to avoid the decency and simplicity of “You’re welcome,” while at the same time allowing us to impart an even greater breeziness.

In America in late 2015, if you’ve paid off the mortgage and have, say, $5M in the bank, and your family members are all healthy, you probably have no major worries. The rest of us have some worries, large or small.

“No worries” on its face is a lie, and, frankly, sounds stupid.

I might have spoken this cliché maybe a dozen times in my life, but I’m guilty of using it in e-mails. No more.

No worries.

 

*That’s the other half of the fight: resisting the new cliché. There was a time when expressions such as “Take it to the next level,” “Do more with less,” and “Move the needle” didn’t exist.

 

# # #

 

 

Filed Under: SB Blog Tagged With: American English, B2B, B2C, cliches, clutter, Crocodile Dundee, English language, marketing, No worries

Editing Animal Grammar: Only If They Ask

April 1, 2015 By scottbowen

Meerkat at Antwerp Zoo.

Meerkat at Antwerp Zoo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A gorilla communicating with humans via modified American Sign Language. Dogs and pigs scoring higher than third-graders on intelligence tests. Humpback whales singing to Queen songs played from British submarines.

All of this is well established. We know animals have their own form of intelligence that can challenge and match the human mind.

The next real step involves humans and animals using digital technology to communicate original thoughts in real time.

And that begs a serious editorial question: Will we – should we – correct poor animal grammar?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: SB Blog Tagged With: American Sign Language, Chicago Manual, content strategist, Corgi, editing, editor, gibbon, hyena, Koko, meerkat, MLA, Orangutan, Queen, sperm whale, Zurich

Ode to the IBM Selectric II

March 13, 2015 By scottbowen

English: IBM Selectric II typewriter (dual Lat...

English: IBM Selectric II typewriter (dual Latin/Hebrew typeball and keyboard) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I was a kid, I’d visit my grandmother at her office job. On the typing stand connected to her steel desk sat a grayish-green IBM Selectric II typewriter. I had never seen anything like it, and typing on it, even when I couldn’t yet type correctly, was great fun.

The Selectric wasn’t just a typewriter. It was a machine. It should have come with tank treads and a turret. Even the name was cool, something almost sci-fi.

The on/off button was on the right side of the keyboard, and as soon as you clicked it on, two things happened: The “element”—the spinning ball that nailed the letters to the paper—came alive with a twitch and a chirp, and the machine began to hum. As the metal parts grew warm, a light scent of lubricating oil arose from the opening in the cowl.

Typing on the Selectric was very easy and smooth compared to manual typewriters. If you were a fast typist, you could go like mad on a Selectric, until it sounded like a little machine gun. I don’t know if IBM trademarked that sound, but it could have, because nothing else sounded like the Selectric element, especially when it was tapping out three or four letters second.

Imagine an entire room emitting that racket. That was my typing class in high school: twenty-four sophomores hammering away. There were plenty of computers in other classrooms, but in Mrs. Casterlin’s typing class, the Selectric II ruled.

My mother, who worked as a legal secretary, insisted that I learn how to “touch type”: fingers on home row, eyes on the material you’re typing up and not looking at your hands, the keyboard, or the paper pressed against the platen.

At first, I hated it, because I simply wasn’t good at it. But by the middle of the marking period, something began to flow, eyes to brain to fingertips, and somehow I started typing. I eventually reached a speed of 92 words a minute. Like riding a bicycle, you never unlearn—you can always type once you know how. The immediate benefit was being able to type papers in high school and college, typing up my journalism assignments quickly. To this day, I type fast without looking.

The Selectric used what are called “whiffletree” linkages that performed a digital-to-analogue conversion: The linkages converted the pressing of a key to the analogue movement of the element. This is the reason why late-generation versions of the Selectric could be connected to a computer and used as a printer. The Selectric, thus, was a beautifully transitional device, a machine of oiled metal parts, designed using computerized technology, functioning with a digital-analogue system, and capable of being an out-put device for an actual computer.

Another detail about the Selectric that I never forgot was the “feel” of the keyboard. When the typewriter was off, the keys felt weirdly dead, like little stones. Turned on, the keys each had a lively tension—they pressed back against the fingertip. In my lifetime I have watched the keyboard transform, from those attached to the magnificent typewriters I poked at as a kid to the ultra-sensitive (way too sensitive) screen pads I can’t type on worth a damn. Supposedly, from the reports I read and hear, most people don’t know how to touch type and rather deploy some sort of self-customized pecking method developed for their iPhone or iPad.

I’m glad I’m just old enough to have experienced learning and then knowing the physicality of typing on the Selectric, and other typewriters, not on a computer or digital device. When you learn to do something so elemental to your profession, and to every job you’ve ever had, you don’t forget the experience of learning or forget the machine with which you learned, especially such a good one. Such a real one.

###

Filed Under: SB Blog Tagged With: analogue, Computer keyboard, digital, IBM, IBM Selectric typewriter, iPad, iPhone, linkages, Touch typing, Typewriter

The James Dickey-Zardoz Connection

February 2, 2015 By scottbowen

Today is the poet James Dickey’s birthday. He would have been 92. He was born in Atlanta, and died on January 19, 1997.

Rediscovering and reinterpreting Dickey’s poetry is a process that will last decades, because he did such amazing and original things with form and voice in his poems. His body of work defies categorization.

More has been said in popular culture, however, about Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) and, even more so, about the film version of the same name (1972). However, before anybody would read the poet’s first novel (he wrote two more), he or she should read at least one collection of poetry–Drowning with Others or Buckdancer’s Choice: Poems, perhaps.

But in thinking lately about the creative process, both personal and commercial, and in thinking about Dickey on his birthday, I must, in his honor, spell out the James Dickey-Zardoz connection. Yes, it is real, and not far-fetched at all, even though Deliverance and Zardoz differ grandly.

If you have never seen the 1974 film Zardoz, and you have the slightest interest in sci-fi, you must watch it. It is brilliant, much more than just salacious and violent fantasy, as early reviewers thought, and truly greater than a cult film, as it is often classified. To watch it is, in part, to see everything that convinced Ian Fleming that Sean Connery could, indeed, play James Bond after the author initially dismissed the Scottish actor. Connery, however, took the Zardoz lead-role of Zed as part of his effort to escape the effect his Bond years had on his career.*

The James Dickey-Zardoz connection goes like this:

Dickey started writing Deliverance in 1962, and Hougton Mifflin published the novel in 1970. It quickly became a literary bestseller, and is now listed in the Modern Library’s top 100 novels of the twentieth century. Dickey wrote the screenplay for Warner Brothers studios, and British director John Boorman took charge in 1971. The film version of Deliverance was such a success–it garnered three Academy Award nominations–that, as described in a Roger Ebert review, Boorman had the commercial latitude to make whatever film he wanted next. When a cherished plan to make a version of The Lord of the Rings didn’t come together, Boorman made Zardoz, the film premiering on February 7, 1974. It was not a film version of a novel. Boorman wrote the story from scratch.**

That is a complex process, one that hinges on much chance, massive amounts of hard work and talent, and a lot of film studio money. But it happened. If there’s no novel Deliverance, does Boorman not make Zardoz? We have no way of knowing. The path from Dickey’s typewriter to an avante-garde sci-fi film, however, is traceable and explicable.

Maybe this is just a footnote in American literary and cinematic history, but I think it’s a very interesting one–how one highly original work begets another highly original work, and how one success begets another. Zardoz, however, enjoyed nothing like the critical reception of the cinematic Deliverance. Even after it gained rightful praise in the decades after its release, fans still misinterpret Zardoz.

Boorman and Dickey had a difficult professional relationship. Dickey had wanted Sam Peckinpah to direct. Boorman had mixed feelings about signing on to the project. As quoted in the Dickey biography, The World as a Lie, Boorman said, “Sometimes [Dickey] was jealous and hated me for, as he imagined, stealing his story from him. Then, another day, he’d congratulate me on one of my ideas and regret it hadn’t occurred to him when writing the book!” (p. 480). Boorman eventually asked Dickey to leave the set of Deliverance, although Dickey later returned to do his scenes as Sheriff Bullard.

Indeed, the creative process is complicated, even downright wrenching at times. Will the thing get made? Will it be a success? Will it destroy the creator? Will anyone care?

If you’re convinced, you take the risk. Dickey and Boorman did.

# # #

*In an interesting twist, Boorman initially hoped to cast Burt Reynolds in the role of Zed, after Reynolds had played Lewis Medlock in Deliverance. But Reynolds was ill and could not take on the role (a stroke of luck, frankly). Boorman’s letters to Richard Harris about playing Zed went unanswered (another stroke of luck). Connery took the part for a payment on par with what he got for Dr. No, twelve years earlier.

**The novelization of the screenplay, by Boorman and co-writer Bill Stair, came out in April 1974, and is a favorite of the contemporary novelist Gary Shteyngart.

Filed Under: SB Blog Tagged With: creative process, Deliverance, James Dickey, John Boorman, science fiction, screenplay, Sean Connery, Zardoz

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