Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 3: Aries' Cage (1999)

Alas, poor Aries! I knew him ... Horatio? (holds bird skull in hand and weeps)

What can I say? I was in a dark place in the late 1990s, and "Aries' Cage" marked my third tragic short story in a row. I had inner demons to expunge, and I was on a roll!

I don't recall offhand whether I wrote "Aries' Cage" in '98 or '99, but I want to say it was April of '99. I could be wrong about that. The original draft is in a box somewhere at the moment, and I'm not feeling the need to dig for it. Fortunately, whichever year I actually penned this one, I definitely remember where I was emotionally when I wrote it and what was going on in my life to inspire the tale.

I mentioned in "Part 1" that I had gone through a bitter break-up at the end of 1996. Granted, time had passed before I got to poor, little Aries, but I was still deeply affected by that relationship. I think I always will be. With time and distance, that's not a bad thing. It was a learning experience for me, and I'm grateful for it and for all of the illuminating pain it brought me.

This particular relationship lasted four years, and I allowed myself, slowly but surely, to be isolated by it. I'll be honest; I don't like to talk about it. Actually, I hate talking about it, but, as I said, it was a valuable life lesson for me, and I would be remiss not to share it.

The first thing to know about codependent relationships is that they're sneaky. Before I got involved with this guy, I was quite the social butterfly. I had so many close friends that I could never have picked one out as my one "best" friend. I was involved in the world around me. I volunteered. I was on committees. I had friends to spare, though I wouldn't  have dared. Or, so I thought.

When he came into my life, we bonded so powerfully, so quickly, that I didn't see the relationship for what it was until it was far too late to stop it. We spent every waking moment together for four years. And whenever we weren't together, we were talking on the phone to each other. The festering problem was that he didn't like any of the other people in my life. Truth to tell, I think he always thought he could do much better than to spend his time with me, but it took him four years to act on that thought. So, being as deeply connected to this person as I was, I didn't notice the growing number of invitations I was turning down, or the plans I was breaking, because he didn't want to go. I didn't notice that I was slowly putting myself into a cage and giving him the key.

He was a misanthrope. He had no other people in his life, aside from his parents and his dogs. We were social opposites, but we had so much else in common that it was insane. I could go on a tangent here, about all of the great things in the relationship, but those things have nothing to do with the story I'm reminiscing about. Still, to be fair, there were a lot of things that genuinely brought me joy in that relationship. It was only in the end that the toxicity reached lethal levels.

I wont say too much else about it; not only because I hate talking about it, but because this relationship is not what triggered the writing of "Aries' Cage." It was added fuel, for sure, but it was not the flashpoint.

Suffice it to say, his disdain for my other friends and my family began to weigh on me a lot. I was still too naive and codependent to break it off. When someone sneakily pulls you into a codependent relationship, cutting you off from everyone else, the cage that traps you there for years is the fact that you've already lost everyone else. He became my entire world. So, when he broke it off, I was devastated.

Side note: Several months later, my dog, Barney, who'd been my brother since I was nine, passed away. As I think back on that time, I'm beginning to see what put me in the mindset of writing nothing but tragedies.

I was fortunately able to pick myself up and rebuild my life, better than it had been before. I regained old friends and discovered new ones.

I mentioned before the girl who fell in love with me, turning on me when I came out of the closet. The next part of that story is that we reconciled and became very close friends after I got out of that bad relationship. We became best friends. I even introduced her to another friend of mine, and they started dating, which eventually brings us to the true flashpoint for my sad little bird story.

I watched these two friends of mine form an intense bond in no time at all. It raised a lot of red flags for me. I saw too much of the man who'd broken me in her and too much of me in her boyfriend. Neither one of them had ever been in a real romantic relationship before. They were young and inexperienced. Before either one of them knew what was happening, they'd become nearly as codependent with each other as I had been in the relationship I'd just gotten free of. It was one-sided. It was her way or the highway. And he went right along with it, losing friends just as I had. He didn't lose all of them, but he did cut off anyone she had a problem with. She started making all of the decisions, and he was too frightened of losing her to argue. It was hard to watch.

It was witnessing this other relationship that pushed the story of "Aries' Cage" onto the page. It was so obviously about them in my mind, that I was afraid to ever let them read it. But, art is expression, and it may as well not have been expressed if no one reads it. So, I let them. They had no clue. It was both funny to me and horrifying.

Their relationship lasted longer than mine had, before they met their own bitter breakup, years later. To me the lesson of both my experience and theirs was to run screaming from any close relationship with clingy, needy, insecure people. These things can never end well.

So it was, with Aries, though I wrote the story long before my friends' relationship crashed and burned. I wrote it to process what I was seeing happen to two people whom I dearly loved. I was powerless to stop it, so writing about it in code was my only solace. All the better that it helped me to define what I myself had so recently been through.

I don't really have much else to say about "Aries' Cage." It was short, to the point, and depressing as Hell. I dare say it's the saddest thing I've ever written. I almost never revisit this story. It's painful for me. It brings up the memories that I'm sharing with you now. I suppose if this blog entry is a downer, it's apropos.

I posted "Aries' Cage" on my website in September of 1999. I think it was up there for months. I don't recall if I took it down when Cry, Wolf was published in December, or if it was when I posted "Night Light" the following February. That information is floating around the archives somewhere. As with the previous two short stories, "Aries' Cage" returned to the website the following year as a downloadable Word file. Over the years, it's been re-issued numerous times, most definitively as an e-book on Amazon.com.

As I look back on it now, I find that the greatest gift this story holds for me is the ability to measure just how much I've grown over the past two decades; both as a writer and as a human being. I'm proud to be someone who has grown impervious to such cages. I'm happy and singing and free!

Thank you, Aries. You were there when I needed you.

Rest in peace. 

Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 2: The Ghost in the Olive Grove (1999)

As I continue this journey through time that is a look back at the first twenty years of my writing career, I want to allow myself to be as transported as I can. I want to put myself back in the past, in order to recall everything that was going on around me as I wrote, every influence, every part of the story behind the story. Sometimes, there is an epic tale behind the tale; as with the last entry. Sometimes the work is fueled by my personal struggles, my personal pain.

"The Ghost in the Olive Grove," which turns twenty next month, is not one of those stories.

It was actually 1998 when I wrote it. To put it in context, as mentioned in "Part 1," I had written mostly bizarre short fiction since my teens. I had never fancied myself a serious writer, but I had so many stories within me. I wrote all the time, and it was a task. I seldom even used dialogue in these silly tales of mine. But writing was an urge I could not defy. When a story came into my mind, it always did so with an urgency, demanding to be brought forth into the realm in which I (mostly) lived.

My first attempt at "serious" fiction had been the novel Cry, Wolf, which I had finished a rough draft of the previous year. I had also written the short story "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," which I had been utterly surprised by. As "The Ghost in the Olive Grove" came to me, I still had not quite gotten used to the idea that I might be a devoted writer of "serious fiction" someday. My novel was collecting dust. "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" was safely tucked away in a folder. I thought these were things I might pull out from time to time and marvel that I had written them. I thought, at best, I would share them with friends, though I was dabbling with the idea of submitting Cry, Wolf. Still, I thought them to be more or less peculiar impulses that I had gotten out of my system. I was a cartoonist, really. My ambition was to go to film school; to make the cartoons in my head a reality. I had no interest in being a prose writer; especially in the horror genre.

As I said, "The Ghost in the Olive Grove" did not come from a place of pain or personal demons. In fact, as with my cartoons, it came from a fairly silly place. This was in the days of forwarded e-mails; surveys that existed for the sole purpose of amusing our friends and/or testing our knowledge of them. I received one such e-mail from my friend Amy Dolton. I no longer recall the specifics of the questionnaire that I was to fill out about her, but I do recall that one of my answers led to this story.

The question was about where I saw her in the future. My imagination had its way with the answer. I told her that I saw her surrounded by children and desperate for love, only able to find solace in her torrid affair with a ghost in the olive grove. We had a laugh over it, but the instant I had typed in the phrase, "ghost in the olive grove," the seed of a short story began to take root and grow in my imagination. What if some sad young woman actually were to seek love in the arms of a ghost?

Not long after, I was compelled, as is always the case, to sit down and write what I was thinking. I based the protagonist on my friend Amy, because it amused me to do so. But I knew the dark turn this story was to take even before I typed the first word of it. I usually see the ending of a story or a novel, or even a series, before I ever sit down to write. It's the ending that generally compels me to finally write the beginning; so, it was the plot twist at the end that  finally pushed my hands to the keyboard and forced me to bring this one into the world.

Even knowing the tale would be dark, and having already written an entire novel, with which I was fairly satisfied, I was still surprised how well this story, about a ghost attempting to seduce a recent divorcee, flowed. I think I wrote it in a single day, and I showed it to my friends soon after. I showed it in particular to Amy. Amy got a good laugh out of the plot twist at the end, referring to herself thereafter as the "ghost luster."

Other friends, who missed the inside joke, still gave me positive feedback; aside from my mother, who never liked a tragic ending.

My accidental writing career began in this way though. I was writing tragedies. "Depressing fiction," as one of my more toxic co-workers later called it. I wasn't doing it deliberately. I wasn't consciously aware of the theme at all in my work. I was just writing the stories that came to me as they came to me. Perhaps I was dealing with wrangling a number of inner demons at the time, but I never identified any of them as being of particular influence on "The Ghost in the Olive Grove." It was just a fun story.

I put it in the folder with "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" and moved on with my life.

The following year, things had changed. I had continued to write "serious fiction" and found myself flooded with ideas. This was to be my life, and I had accepted it. My first novel was about to be published, and I had started a website to try to build a readership before it hit. I had intended to put up a new short story every month that could be read on the site for free, but it had been two months since "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" had been posted. I don't recall precisely, but I think the primary reason for the delay was the lack of a graphic to accompany the story.

I finally posted "The Ghost in the Olive Grove" in August of 1999, without a graphic. I got plenty of feedback from readers. It sounds odd to say it, but I was mostly surprised by how much the story terrified people. I know it was technically a horror story, since it involved a ghost, but I had never personally found it frightening. In my mind, I wasn't writing "horror," I was writing a story that had interested me. I wasn't trying to scare people. I specifically recall laughing with one of my friends who went on and on about how he was so scared by the story that he couldn't even finish reading it. He couldn't sleep after what little he had read of it. It made no sense to me, but he was far from alone. Twenty years later, I still see it as an interesting story; not frightening in the least. But what does author intention really have to do with reader perception? We all experience the same stories differently, and I value that.

Back in '99, my website wasn't as expansive as it is today. I didn't keep an archive of works on display. "The Ghost in the Olive Grove" replaced "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" and was, in turn, replaced by "Aries' Cage" the following month.

Two years later, I had a much better website for showcasing my work. I wanted to re-post all of the old fiction I had taken down, so that new readers could have a better sampling of my work to help them decide whether or not to buy my novel.

I asked my friend and co-worker, Molly Brimer, to create a graphic to go along with the story this time. I actually handed her a picture of my friend Amy to use as a reference, since the character was an homage to her. This marked the beginning of a wonderful professional collaboration that has spanned nearly twenty years itself. The graphic Molly painted for the story remains its cover art to this day.

I re-posted "The Ghost in the Olive Grove," with Molly's new art at the top of page 1, as a free Microsoft Word file on my site on August 3, 2001. It has since been re-issued a number of times; most recently as a Kindle e-book on Amazon.com, and it remains one of my most widely-read works.

Aside from unexpectedly launching my horror-writing career, it was also, technically, the first publication in an ever-expanding universe of horror fiction. But I'll come back to that. I've still got twenty years to cover in this new blog series!

Next up: "Aries' Cage."