I am wearing out the keyboard on my laptop. And not from blogging, obviously. Wonder if you can fix that with duct tape?
While a lot of the world is off at RT, I am here with werewolves and werepanthers, brainstorming stuff for the next book. And hoping the keyboard holds. What’s everybody else up to?
Book Club Discussion, Satisfaction Guaranteed. Join the Cherry Forums book club discussion beginning April 15 to talk about Satisfaction Guaranteed, available now from St. Martin’s, and ask the author questions! Discussion is open for a week, and I’ll drop in to respond until it closes.
I have squat for the blog; all my brain cells are going into the Very Due Book and Very Due Proposal. So, from the dark corners of my hard drive, here’s a short story. I may have written this after sitting in one too many meetings.
Conspiracy by Charlene Teglia, copyright 2008 all rights reserved
Laura Allison Miller Parker received the divine revelation that changed her life Monday morning shortly after 10 a.m.
Before that, she herself would have testified that no malevolent cosmic forces or guided intelligence of ill will caused the series of incidents that made her life a gray and dingy sordid misery of existence instead of the bright and hopeful future she’d always envisioned. She took life’s little love taps in stride. She weathered each personal storm with the protective umbrella of her confident belief that it couldn’t possibly last.
But somehow, last it did.
The revelation came shortly after the delivery of a bouquet of flowers and a card congratulating her for the splendid achievement of surviving on Planet Earth for thirty consecutive years.
This delivery might not have triggered the revelation. In retrospect, the card and flowers with their unwelcome reminder of youth and beauty slipping away, life passing by without the landmark accomplishments she expected after the triumphs of her academic career, only represented the final, unbearable donkey’s straw.
The straw that did the real damage came just before the unwelcome observation of her natal day. It came in the form of a pink slip, delivered in tandem with the check for her weekly wages, an amount so absurdly low it could only be regarded as an obscenity, an insult to her credentials and intelligence, and nothing but a temporary setback.
However, at 9:49 a.m. it occurred to Laura that this represented more than a temporary setback.
At 9:59, the florist delivered the final straw.
And at 10:01, Laura had a vision.
The universe opened up and spoke to her, and this is what it said: “Laura, this is your life. This is all there is. This is all there ever will be. And at the end, there is simply nothing but oblivion in the void. Every grand design, every shining ambition, every secret dream you ever held was a cruel lie fostered by a cruel world. Your every hope was a false hope. Your every ideal, an idol with feet of clay. Your every hero, a celluloid ghost on the projection screen of dead dreams.”
Not in so many words, of course, but the general sense of it came ringingly clear.
The vision departed, but Laura was changed. Now she knew. Now she understood. All the goals she imagined reaching, all the lofty heights she’d planned to scale after Climbing The Ladder and Paying Her Dues, all her future successes, these things would never be hers. They were a bitter lie.
In reality, the ladder of success only had another rung, then another, then another, and all the corporate climbers weren’t the best and the brightest racing to the top, but rats in a cosmic maze running down blind alleys.
In reality, dues were debts with compounded interest that only multiplied so that they could never be paid in full.
Obeying the collective wisdom of advisors and planners, she had plotted out a career path and set off on it, skipping along as lightly as Dorothy following the Yellow Brick Road, only to find that it led to a dead end.
At first, shock numbed her. Then came betrayal. And blinding rage. The best years of her life, the fiercest outpouring of her passion and her vision, all gone, wasted, spent on a lie. A lie the entire fabric of society concocted and colluded in, a lie of cooperation, a conspiracy of lies to deny the fabric of the real universe and weave over it with the stuff of rosy dreams.
And now she knew the only truth she’d ever been told lay in a children’s story about the emperor’s clothes.
Her illusions stripped away, she saw reality laid bare. And like any sane person, the knowledge caused her mind to snap.
Her coworkers might have noticed that she seemed distracted, but in actuality she gave very little outward sign of the metamorphosis she had undergone. Laura remained at her desk. She stamped, signed and sent forms and papers as if they mattered, as if they held meaning, although of course she now knew that they didn’t. She attended a department meeting at 11:00, on time even though that didn’t matter at all, either. She felt a vague responsibility to keep up the pretense for all the others who were still deceived by, and participating in, the great lie.
And then, at 11:25, she stood up to give her presentation. She had spent weeks doing careful research and more weeks analyzing the results. She had stayed late, charting the data. She had invested weekends in devising a plan of action based on the results. All that time she had, of course, operated under the false belief that this was important, that the numbers represented something tangible.
Now she knew better, and so she scrapped the work of months without a second thought and gave an extemporaneous speech instead.
Like the most cheerful of lunatics, Laura enjoyed it. She threw out non sequiturs, knowing full well that none of the other corporate climbers would dare admit that they didn’t understand nor even suspect that the words were gibberish, meaningless phrases pulled at random, glib and sly and brilliant in their madness.
They wouldn’t suspect because they remained bound by the illusion that meetings had importance, that important things were done at them by important people who then filed important reports and sent out important notices.
Now that Laura knew otherwise, she gave an ode to nonentity, an esoteric expression of existentialism, with obscure random quotations, statistics and bar graphs that gave new meaning to imaginary numbers.
Her former fellows, those who still clung to illusion and their rungs of the ladder, sat in stunned silence for fully three minutes after her outrageous proposal.
At 11:55 a.m., her proposal was enthusiastically endorsed and seconded and the meeting concluded.
Laura accepted this triumph calmly, knowing the inevitable outcome had no more real meaning than the scintillating burst of rhetoric that prompted the decision. Regardless of action, the hostile forces of the universe would ponderously see to it that the cosmos’ ill will be done.
At 2:20 p.m., she began to contemplate solipsism.
Consequently she failed to exhibit any kind of excitement at 3:47, when her pink slip was rescinded, her employment reinstated, and a bonus awarded.
If it was real at all, Laura decided, it only provided further proof of the madness and malevolence of the universe.
I’ll mention these again when the time comes, but here are two upcoming online April events:
Book Club Discussion, Satisfaction Guaranteed. Join the Cherry Forums book club discussion beginning April 15 to talk about Satisfaction Guaranteed, available now from St. Martin’s, and ask the author questions!
Meet the author, Samhain Cafe, Friday April 25th, 9-10 a.m. EST. Join me for chat, excerpts, and a chance to win a download of one of my Samhain titles. You will need to be a member of the Samhain Cafe Yahoo group to post and be eligible to win.
Aside from that, I’ll be doing a lot of writing in April to make up for March, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t planning to go to RT this year. 🙄
Via Rob Breszny:
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Normally you’re inclined to massage problems
until they relax, not bash problems until they break. Your preference is to
paint fuzzy, impressionistic pictures rather than creating crisp snapshots.
Nevertheless, the astrological omens indicate that in the next two weeks,
you should take an approach recommended by Winston Churchill: “If you
have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a
pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it
a third time — a tremendous whack.”
Yeah, maybe I’m trying to be too subtle. Time to take a pile driver to the werewolves…
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