Bad Boys, Bad Girls, and why we love them so...

When I heard this month's topic, I must admit I got just a little frustrated. I'm not a Bad Boy. Worse, I've had to help friends recover from the fallout of a relationship with a Bad Boy who they just couldn't resist.

I asked the Ur-Goth why they had such an appeal, but she couldn't tell me. She's not really into them, either in reality or in fiction. Thing is, we both acknowledge that they do seem to have a huge appeal. So in the interests of trying to talk about them, I thought about the equivalent, Bad Girls. I certainly relate to the attraction there. The zest for life, the lack of attention to societal pressure, and the wanton disregard for anything resembling rules.

Of course, what with me totally getting distracted from the topic, that didn't really pan out either, so I started looking at 'Bad Boys', trying to see what they have in common. Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds, Angel, Spike yeah, I'm a Sci-Fi fan, as you can see. Thing is, even with that short list, one stands out. Three of them are really good guys with a tough outer shell, and maybe some dark impulses...


...And then there's Spike. Unrepentant vampire and thug. You get too close to him, and he'll eat you up, and not in any kind of good way. But even before he turned over a new leaf and became a 'good guy', he had legions of romantically inclined fans. It took me a while to figure out what he's got in common with the other two, the core of the appeal of Bad Boys (and Bad Girls, for that matter).

Bad Boys do what they want.

Bad Boys don't do anything they don't want to do.

If a Bad Boy shows interest in you, it's real.

Once I realized that, I realized I'd been writing a Bad Boy for a while now. Steve, the firefighter-turned-superhero in my serial Blue Bloods, is a guy who does the right thing for all the wrong reasons. His reprobate behavior is forever getting under the skin of his teammates, Drew and Angela. Every time they're about to kick him out the door, he takes a hit for them. Not because he felt obligated, or because he thought it was the right thing to do.

Because it seemed like fun at the time.

And he wanted to.

Ages, and what (if anything they mean)... cancelled due to inclement weather!

So it seems every time I've got something planned, something topical comes up and interferes. Graduation, the first day of school, holidays, life just doesn't stop! But today I've carved out some time to talk about something I deal with a lot; what age means and what it doesn't mea...


...what's that? Huge snowstorm headed for the Northeast? Again!?


So, okay, another topical post. This time, on something that affects me in a fairly serious way, even if most of us remember them fondly: Snow Days!


As a kid, I'd watch the snow come down, hoping it would start to pile up. I remember looking out and seeing piles of snow in my back yard, but never hearing my school number called. I recall days I couldn't see a single flake on the ground, but we stayed home. It made no sense to me then. Now, of course, I know why we get off school and why we don't, both the practical safety reasons and the stupid political ones.


The practical reason, of course, is the safety of the students. Since most schools in the Northeast are built to ignore a little snow, the problem isn't the safety of the children in the school, it's getting them to and fro. There can be piles of snow everywhere, but if the roads are clear, school's open. Alternately, if the roads are icy, even if there isn't any snow, the kids are staying home that day.


Pretty simple, but you do need to take into account getting the kids home, too. If the snow is scheduled for ten in the morning, you're better off not bringing the kids in. Sending them home before the midway point of the day (usually noon or one), the day doesn't count anyhow.


Now, if those practical concerns were the only things going, you could check the weather report and know if you're going to have school the next day. Unfortunately the folks making the call worry that the weather man is wrong. If he is, they'll get angry calls from parents. Some of those guys are elected, so they hold off until other districts make the call, at which point they can hide in the herd. The safety of the kids gets kinda lost in the shuffle. Yeah, that kinda annoys me.


Anywho, I still remember those snow days as a kid. Kinda funny, but they're fundamentally the same for me today; I wake up late and wander to my computer. Todays is an Alienware MX-11, instead of my old Vic-20, but I still fire up some games and kill time until my brain thaws out enough to function. After that, I get some food and, if the snow isn't actively falling from the sky, bundle myself up to go play in the snow. Then I'd go by myself and hope to find some friends, now I follow my sons out and make sure they play in the field across the street rather than in the street itself.


Finally, when they're worn out and cold, I bring them in and feed them hot chocolate. After that we sit around covered in blankets and watch some TV; Doctor Who and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic FTW! Eventually they start to nod, and I take them up to bed, and then my wife and I repeat the same thing, only with Elementary and Almost Human.


So... what do you guys do when weather interrupts your otherwise well planned (really, I swear!) life?

Halloween Memories from Our Authors

Veronica sez: We thought it would be fun to share a few of our own favorite Halloween memories with you today. This little ghost guy is a favorite pin of mine, that my Dad gave me when I was a kid - have a safe and sane (but spooky!) holiday!!!

Robert C. Roman:

Mine is a mix of funny and little-kid-sweet-romantic. 

Three Halloweens ago, my wife stayed home to give out candy, and I took our little boys (aged 2 and 5, respectively) trick-or-treating for the first time in our new neighborhood. Our older boy, Lucien, had been trick or treating once before, but this was the younger, Viktor's, first time ever.

 Our neighborhood is four cul-de-sacs and two half-block dead end streets all connected by a single lane, and we're nearly at one end of all of it. We started through our cul-de-sac, picking up a few pieces of candy every few houses, as most of them were dark. After one lap of the cul-de-sac, the boys were a little dispirited by all the closed houses, and we were considering going back in, but after waving to Mommy, the little ones decided to press on.

 Ah, such a fateful decision. Halfway to the next cul-de-sac, we ran into a strange procession. Every child in the neighborhood, from my older son's bus stop partners to the few trick-or-treating teenagers, being led along the street by a tiny moppet no bigger than my two year old. She took one look at the boys, grabbed Lucien by the hand, and said 'C'mon! We're gonna get free candy!'
 And so my son met his first girlfriend, Carter, the tiny force of nature. She towed him around the neighborhood not once, but twice, and thereafter to innumerable play-dates and parties for the next two-and-a-half years, including one spur-of-the-moment Halloween party (she grabbed kids and pulled them inside when they trick-or-treated her house).

Diane Burton:

I was a young single and went to a girlfriend’s house to watch movies on Halloween. She wanted to watch a movie that I think was called “The Hand” about a dismembered hand that crawled around and killed people. In one scene, it crept up the back of the driver’s seat and strangled the driver.  It was in black and white, which made it that much more creepy, made in the 1930s I think. Anyway, after the movie was over I had to drive home. I just knew that hand would creep up the back of the seat and strangle me.  Fastest I ever drove home.

Heather Long:

When my daughter was 4 years old, we took her to Disney World. She dressed up like Belle and we went to the Mickey's Very Scary Halloween Party. All of the characters at the park bowed to the 'princess' and she trick or treated at the different attractions, we also got to watch the Boo To You Halloween Parade which is opened by a headless horseman racing up the street--and my daughter declared after it raced past--that poor horse, he needs a better rider. That man couldn't keep his head.

It's as hysterical to me today as it was then.

Jessica Subject:

My Halloween memory is...

We used to live on a street perpendicular to Elm St. And one Halloween, one of the residents had decked his house out, and he dressed up like Freddy Krueger. I didn't get scared, but a lot of the parents did when he jumped out at them. It was more funny than anything.

Maureen Bonatch:

One of my favorite memories was when I was pretty young and my older sister, Kathy, took me through a 'haunted house'.  I'm sure it was probably pretty lame as haunted houses go, since it was done by the church bazaar, but not when you're about seven.   A group of us were walking through it and we were at the end of the line, I turned around and Frankenstein was right behind us, arms outstretched, moaning and coming right for us! I became slightly hysterical, as seven year olds can, and Frankenstein ended up having to 'ditch the scary monster act' and kneel down to console me, lol.  

(P.S.  my parents home, where I grew up was and still is Elm Street..after I reluctantly watched the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie I slept with the lamp on for a week...  umm..I was probably about twenty years old, lol)

Mimi Sebastian:

Here's my memory from childhood. I was at my uncle's house in New York and like many of the brownstone type houses, all the backs faced an alley. My cousins and I used to play on the alley street with the neighbor kids, but one night around Halloween, all the adults had gone back inside the house and I stayed outside alone, leaning against the fence, glancing down the street. It was particularly dark. Suddenly, I saw a light appear in the middle of the street about ten yards away from me, almost like a flashlight or lantern, approaching slowly, but I didn't see anyone holding the light. I was somewhat frozen to the spot until I heard laughter coming from the same direction as the light. That pretty much unstuck my feet and I raced back into the house. I don't know what the heck it was, if it just a neighbor taking a stroll, but in my child's mind, it's provided a scary memory to this day!

Stephanie Beck:

My favorite costume is a tiny cow sleeper that all my kids wore when they were babies on their first Halloweens. I've never been big on the holiday, but who doesn't like candy and tiny adorable cows?

Virginia Nelson:

Back when I was a young teen, I got with a bunch of other kids who wanted to set up a haunted farm house (mostly  boys who wanted to scare their girlfriends), so we went out to the old deserted place, decorated it then several of us took our positions in the house... I was lying on the bed with a phony knife in my chest, fake blood all over the room... everyone set the stage and the kids coming out to the house got the scare of a life time...

Afterwards, we all left, went out for something to eat then returned to the old deserted farm house to clean up. The joke was on us because this time the girls who we had scared came back, cleaned up our mess and rearranged everything including the killing scenes. Scared the dickens out of this 13 year old and others when we walked in and saw three people lying on the floor in a pile of fresh blood and a hobo looking guy standing over them.

That was the last time I set up a haunted house for anyone...

Web Serial Review - Worm by Wildbow

As I may have mentioned, I write a pair of web serials, Blue Bloods and Blank. I've actually become fairly fond of the format. It means if I like a series, instead of waiting a year for a sequel I get more every week, sometimes more than once a week.

With that in mind, I've been reading a few of them. The best of the lot I've found so far is a superhero story called Worm, by Wildbow. As a quick aside, that link goes to the first chapter, not to the current one. Serious spoilers if you go to the main site, because the main site is also the current chapter, and the series is almost completed.

In the case of a normal book, that might mean there are, perhaps, fifty to one hundred fifty thousand bits of wordy goodness to read. For Worm, however, it means a lot more than that. Wildbow has been writing two chapters a week since the middle of 2011. He breaks it up into major storylines, each with a name (like 'Gestation', 'Parasite' and 'Monarch') and a number. The current storyline, which is purported to be the last, is arc number 29, "Venom". Overall each one is the length of a medium length novel.

But enough about format. If Worm were a traditional format print novel or an ebook, I'd be just as addicted to it, I'd just have to wait longer for installments. You want to know about the story!

Worm centers on Taylor Hebert, a high school girl with a secret: she has the ability to control any arthropod within a several block radius. In a world where super heroes and heroines have been around since the mid seventies, this gives her two options. She can use her powers for personal gain becoming a super villain, or she can use them to protect others and become a hero. She wants to be a heroine, but not too many people can see the heroism in calling swarms of creepy crawlies to stop bad guys, mostly because they're all shrieking and going squick.

The thing I love most about Worm is the characterization. Taylor is the target of an organized bullying campaign, and Wildbow nails it on every count. The methods of the bullies, the reactions of various bystanders, and the abortive attempts of the school administration to deal with it are all so startlingly true to life I'd almost guess Wildbow has studied his Olveus.

It's not just Taylor who gets that level of detail, though. Every character on the page is fleshed out and unique, whether it's Lung's warlord mentality, Imp's reaction to being a neglected child, Legend's constant struggle to balance work and family, or Rachel's fumbling attempts to deal with a world which mystified her before she got powers. What's even more impressive is that Wildbow even manages to put solid characterization into super-powered serial killers and a sentient AI.

Despite being a story about superheroes, Worm has less action than you might think. That said, when Wildbow does an super-action scene, he does it right. When the supers start swinging, buildings shake and shatter, Skitter's swarms fill the sky, and Grue's darkness blankets the land.

Did I mention Wildbow has some fantastic geek-culture references worked in, like the cape who can create and manipulate darkness who calls himself 'Grue'? It's the icing on the fantastic layer cake of characterization, subtle world building and action that is Worm.

Anyone who likes superheroes, action, or tales with some grit in them should give Worm a read. It's definitely worth the time. Do note that Worm is a bit on the dark side, and isn't recommended for children or folks who want to avoid possible Triggers. As Wildbow puts it, 'it's easier to list the triggers Worm doesn't have than the ones it does'.

Give it a try, let me know what you think in the comments, and I'll see you next month!

EDIT - As noted in the review, the actual title of the web series is 'Worm'. bit of a faux pas to name the character rather than the book in the title, I know. Sorry about that!

Please allow me to introduce myself...

...I'm a man of wealth and taste.

Okay, not really, but it has come to my attention that I've blogged here three times and, as of yet, still haven't really introduced myself. I've talked about the Steam Punk World's Fair, I've talked about graduation day and the class of 2012, and I've talked about the vagaries of sudden illness and family crises, but I haven't said 'Hey there, I'm Robert! How goes it?'

So.

Hey there. I'm Robert C Roman. As you might guess from me showing up as a guest at the Steam Punk World's Fair, I write Steam Punk. Specifically, I write a Diesel Punk series called Iron Angel. I'm also the author of the Artifice series, which wavers like a drunken sailor between Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy, although lately it seems to be stumbling more toward the latter than the former. I also write Science Fiction, both Space Opera (Blank) and Superheroes (Blue Bloods). Both of those will be showing up in September on Juke Pop Serials.

My post in June kinda let the cat out of the bag about me being a teacher. Specifically, I teach Biological Sciences at WWHS down in lovely Camden, NJ. I used to do tech support, I used to do project management, I used to do a lot of things that made more money, but I could never explain my job with three simple words like "I'm a teacher."

I'm married to the Ur-Goth, a woman who grew up idolizing Emma Peel, Catwoman and Morticia Addams. We've been together eighteen years this September, and I'm still as enthralled with her today as I was the first time I saw her in the icy rain on the tarmac of the Philadelphia International Airport. We've got two little boys who keep us busy.

So that's me. What I write, what I do, who I am. Good to meet you!

It's That Time Again!

Hallo Again! It's the 21st of the month, so that means Robert's back in the house. For those of you who missed last month, I wrote about the Steam Punk World's Fair, since I'd just come back from that event. Well, it turns out this month I've just finished an event on the 20th as well. An event from an entirely different aspect of my life. Yes, my secret identity is revealed! I teach life sciences at Woodrow Wilson High School, and today was graduation day!

This was the first time I've gone to graduation. I teach all four grades at the school so I've had students graduate before, but it's usually been one or two, and most of them in the past have chosen not to walk for one reason or another. This class, on the other hand...

This goes out to the young woman who hadn't been coming to class, and hiding in the back when she did. One day she was struggling with her notebook, writing with her off hand. It turned out she'd hit a wall because she didn't want to get suspended, and someone made her so mad she had to hit something. Her hand was bloody and crooked. I sent her to the nurse, and when she returned the next day, hand in a cast, I moved her next to a student who was there every day, took good notes, but was having occasional problems 'getting it'. He took her notes, she explained the knotty bits to him.

This goes out to the young woman who said, "I can't do this! I'm not learning anything!" When I asked her "What's Deoxyribonucleic Acid?" Her immediate response? "Oh, that's DNA, genetic material, how you get stuff from your parents."

This goes out to the young man who didn't pass his HSPAs (state graduation tests) on the first try, or the second, or the third. He's old enough he could have signed himself out, but he refused to quit. He. Kept. Coming. Back. Every Day. Hammering away at it until he passed it.

This goes out to the young lady too shy to talk in public, even when talking would pay her college bills and not talking nearly got her suspended. What she can't say in words, she says in images to make angels weep. It also goes out to the young man who makes her smile... and stand up straight and tall and even talk in public now and then.

This goes out to the young man who, when I lost the flash drive with all my grades on, brought me a perfectly functional one he'd found lying on the street. It wasn't mine, and I told him that, but he gave it to me anyway, because I needed one to keep my grades on.

This goes out to the young woman who still hates me for pushing her. She said she was going to quit school and have kids. She managed to keep up with some of my best, most hardworking students, and did it all in a language she wasn't proficient in.

This goes out to the young man who kept his campaign for office clean, even when some students vandalized his posters with slurs about his sexual orientation. It does get better.

This goes out to the young man who came to me, confused at receiving an 'F' for the first marking period. I told him he'd missed too many days to pass for the year, but I would let him make them up during his lunch. I saw him every lunch from then until the end of the year. I still remember what he said to me in May. "You're like a nightmare. You never go away, you're always here!"

To the young lady who can't stop laughing. Ever. No matter how much she ought to.

To the young man who didn't have enough English to write the answers to the questions, but by god he could draw them.

To the young man who made sure my students had pizza at the end of the year.

To the young lady who took a year off to have her daughter... but came back and finished.

Speaking of coming back, remember the young woman with the hand and the young man with the notes? They went missing on the last day of school 2010, and when I hunted them down they were in one of the labs with a small group of students, watching YouTube videos. When I asked them why they weren't watching the movie I was showing, she looked at me, looked at her friends, and said "Mr. Roman, you're looking at the best seven students of the class of 2012."

All seven graduated today. Four top 20 students, two class officers, and one entrepreneur. Good work, guys. Damn good work.

I'm proud of you. All of you.

This goes out to the Woodrow Wilson High School graduating class of 2012.

BENEDICTION

Be Strong,
Be Swift,
Be Smart,
Live Long,
Love Well,
Fear Nothing.

 ***

A quick note - I know last month I named names and posted pictures, but those were pictures of adults doing what adults do at a public convention. While a fair number of the graduates are no longer minors, and the fact that they're now graduates mean I can give them a lift to job and college interviews, (laws and policies are funny things) between the minors in the crowd and the fact that it was a students, staff, and family only event, I hope you're all okay with the lack of names and pictures this month.

Robert C Roman is an author of Steam Punk, Paranormal Romance, and Urban Fantasy, as well as other things which shall remain secret until revealed. In his copious free time (not) he can be found noodling about on Facebook, Twitter, or at his website.

A Ghost Story by Robert C. Roman

Hallo all!  Robert C Roman here to entertain you for an hour or so.  It's Halloween, and that means it's time for all manner of scary things to come crawling out of the corners. 

Today I'm going to treat you to an old favorite; a ghost story!  Everyone I know has one hiding in a closet somewhere.  They may believe it, they may think it's a hoax, or they may have a completely rational explanation for it, no matter how scary.  For some it's personal, for some it's one they heard from someone else, and for some, me included, it's something that happened to someone in the family.

I remember it pretty clearly.  It was a summer morning; school was out for the year.  I was ten years old.   My little sister came toddling down to breakfast; she was two and a half years old; just big enough to be walking and talking on her own.  While I tried to scam more Count Chocula, she got Mom to pour her some Kix and crawled into her chair.  Before she started eating, she announced to one and all that there had been a man in her room the night before talking to her.

Let me tell you, you've never seen panic until you've heard a toddler announce that there was a home invasion the night before, and everyone else slept through it.  Mom got Dad, Dad scoured the house and checked all the locks for evidence that something had been tampered with.  Eventually little sis described the intruder.  He was tall (taller than Dad, at least), had curly hair, and was really 'square'.  Now, neither my sister nor I are old enough for 'square' to be slang for us, and she was a little young for slang in any case.  When pressed for more details, she also said he was 'glowy'.

Now, at some point I got the bright idea to show her pictures and see if any of them looked like the 'glowy' man.  I tugged out the picture album…

Okay, for those of you too young to remember, pictures used to be stored in special books; kind of like scrapbooking, only with more organization and less scalloping along the edges.

…so I tugged out the picture album and started pointing to people.  I was careful not to name any names and to make sure there was always a 'lineup', because I was a huge fan of Quincy, and that's how they did it on Quincy.  Was the man a boy or a girl (a boy).  Was the man old or young (several pictures put the age range at late middle age; fifty-ish).  Was the man tall or short; shots of folks beside Dad clocked the guy in at solidly over six feet; maybe six four.  Finally, when we hit the picture of one of my Uncles Sister says 'oh!  Like him, only not him.  The man was squarer.'

Now, that Uncle takes after his dad in a lot of ways, but there were no pictures of Grandpa when he was in his fifties in the album.  In his forties, yeah, but not in his fifties, and he hadn't aged well.  He looked quite a lot different.  The pictures of him when he was younger than fifty were, well, 'not square enough', according to my sister.

Young sleuth that I was, I remembered an old photo that used to hang on the wall in my dad's office.  It hadn't been up for at least four or five years, because the picture frame wouldn't stay put.  Instead, it lived on a shelf about a foot from the ceiling, lying face down to keep dust off the photo.  I only knew it was there because I might have been instrumental in making the picture frame non viable a number of years before that…

I admit nothing!  You can't prove anything!

…at any rate, it took a footstool set on a folding chair for ten year old me to clamber up to the seven foot shelf and pull down the picture.  Upon retrieving it, I showed it to my sister, who looked once at the picture, brightened up and said 'That's him!  He was a nice man.'  Except for one fact, that statement would have made the morning far calmer.  I mean, little girl dreaming about Grandpa coming to visit in the middle of the night is no big, right?

Y'see, my sister had never seen that picture before.  Nor had she ever met my grandfather.  He died when I was two.  Five years before my sister was born.

SO!

What's your ghost story?  Tell me in the comments!  One lucky commenter will not only win a copy of my newest eBook, 'What Not to Fear', but I'll also send them a little basket of Halloween goodness!