Preview of "Nock" by Scott McGlasson

Zombies and Archers and Zombies—OH MY!

The feral locked eyes with Stace Tomlinson and moved toward her across the forest clearing. Dark clouds threatened rain again, gray above leeching the autumn colors from the forest all around her. The thing’s ruined clothing and filthy pallor blended in perfectly, making her shot difficult. Watching its decrepit state and slow pace, Stace guessed that it had been around for a long time, maybe even going all the way back to just After. It was a big buck. Probably a well-muscled man once, by the looks of it. Stace and her father had tracked it up the hill after spotting its prints in the sodden earth of a deer trail. It was late afternoon and they had been heading back to town, but the patrol had been uneventful and the tracks fresh and easy to see.

“Remember,” her father whispered from just behind, “the arrow flies when you’re surprised. Deep breath now. . .”

Stace inhaled, filling her lungs with chill October air. Her left arm locked straight, holding an ashwood recurve bow, and her right held the fifty pound pull to her cheek as she focused on her target. The damned thing wasn’t making it easy.

Oblivious to everything but living prey, the feral advanced on stiffened legs. It moved like an animated length of chain. Each foot fall caused the body to follow in a stilted wave, the upper torso undulated back and forth and the head, the last link, tilted from shoulder to shoulder. The decay on this one was bad. At thirty paces, Stace could see bones pushing through the remains of its gray skin. Where not covered by tattered clothing, the feral’s hide hung off its frame, puddling around joints and jowls, swaying like wheat fronds as it staggered toward her. What hair it had left dangled in knotted tangles down to its exposed collarbone.

“Hold the string with your back and shoulder, not your arm,” Rob Tomlinson said. “Now . . . breathe out.”

She exhaled through pursed lips and slowly let her fingers relax, trying not to anticipate the moment when her muscles were no longer tense enough to hold the bowstring taut. The feral’s milky eyes stayed on her, its mouth twisted into a snarl. Stace used that as her focus, drawing a line up from the jaw to a spot just above the nose where the bone would be thinnest. She caught the rhythm of the thing’s swaying back and forth, as her father had taught her, allowing the bow to become an extension of her self, and the world shrank down to that one spot on the feral’s horrible face. She released the bowstring to thwack on the plastic guard protecting her left wrist. The bodkin-tipped arrow blurred through the space the feral’s head had just tilted past.

Teeth opening and closing, it snarled at her, a rasp that sounded like dry twigs being dropped down a pipe as it continued toward them through the knee-high grass and brambles.

Her father huffed at the miss.

“Again,” he said.

Stace held two more arrows in her right hand. With a quick, circular snap of the wrist, she swung a second shaft up, nocking it with index and middle finger while holding the third arrow ready with ring and pinky. She pulled the bowstring to her cheek, grunting with the effort, and sighted on a spot just above the feral’s forehead and released.

Thwack

Much closer this time — she actually saw the thing’s dirty hair flutter as the arrow passed by — but a miss anyway. Failure.

Stace frowned and lowered her bow, grinding her teeth and trembling with all the lambent fury her sixteen-year-old body could muster. A single thought, a mantra, vibrated through her.

I don’t wanna be a farmer.

Ranger field trials were coming up the following week. To fail during Selection was to condemn her to a life of crops and crafts instead of running through the forests outside the security wall. Running was freedom. Running was as far from working the fields as one could get.

Not taking her eyes off the approaching feral, Stace heard the soft noises of her father nocking an arrow in his own massive bow. She realized he was preparing to drop the creature himself. Frustration flashed through her and tears began to build up at the corners of her eyes.

I do NOT wanna be a farmer.

BUY NOCK TODAY!

The author, Scott McGlasson consults his human helper.

About the Author

Scott McGlasson is the author of NOCK – the winning entry in the Infected Books Year of the Zombie Pitch and Page competition.

A former member of the US Air Force, he spent nearly a decade as a rock radio personality before getting a “real” job in logistics. He spends what little free time he has herding cats managing the Space Opera and Space Opera: Writers groups on Facebook. Flash fiction contests for SO:W have been judged by such sci-fi luminaries as Neal Asher, David Farland, and Peter F Hamilton.

Scott currently lives in St Louis, Missouri USA with his wife, Monica, daughters Evelyn and Emily, and son, Trip.

Quick Notes on Middle Ages Social Mobility

She's just a simple, innocent, peasant girl!

Caveat: There are lots of great articles and in depth analysis available on this topic.  These are just some quick notes to get you started if this is a theme of your writing.

While it may seem that social mobility in the Middle Ages was largely stagnant—with peasants being tied to the land and the noble class off-limits—this is largely misunderstood. Throughout all periods of the Middle Ages (Early, High and Late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance) status was more mobile than most people think. You might not become king through inheritance, but you could move up or down through the ranks. It could take a few generations, but rising and falling happened all the time.

Marriages of nobility were often for position and/or gain, regardless of gender and sometimes with little consideration to class.  If a merchant was rich enough, influential enough, or both, a noble family, down on their luck, might well salivate at the chance of marrying into all that power and wealth.  The reverse is also true, as a merchant class family might want to gain additional influence (and thus wealth) by achieving membership into the peerage, which offered certain additional advantages that couldn’t simply be bought.

Downton Abbey (although set in the early 20^th century) offers a wonderful thumbnail sketch in just the first episode and throughout the series where the overarching focus is on saving the dying institution of the great estates.  Initially, the problem was solved (before the show starts) when Lord Grantham specifically went to the United states to marry a rich American Cora, who had no title or nobility whatsoever.  Her money was then tied, inextricably, to the Downton Abbey estate, with no hope of untying it when the initial heir died on the Titanic.  The reverse was also true. The family was hopeful that the new heir would want to marry Lady Mary, and thus secure their joint futures.

He's just a simple, innocent, peasant boy!

Some social structures were far more rigid depending on the time and place. In Japan during the Sengoku Jidai, peasant to great lord was possible (though never easy).  However, Hideyoshi's Social Status Control Edict or the Separation Edict enacted in the late 16th century IIRC changed all that, and made social mobility much more difficult. Peasants could no longer go to war, which pretty much tied them to the labor class permanently, and samurai were not allowed to farm or become merchants.  This became even more structured during the Edo period in the early 17th century. There were still ways around this (like being adopted by a samurai family), but social mobility became much harder.

By contrast, during roughly the same period, Italian city-states were incredibly mobile social structures.  Of course, it depends on how rich or influential (or both) the individual in question is, which could make for a powerful alliance (of give access to ready cash loans) depending. Most importantly, when writing about any of these time periods and your pairing of a peasant and a noble, you want to keep your social, political and technological standards as period-correct as possible. 

The Magnificent Seven - Review/Comparison

You magnificent bastards!

Instead of offering a regular review, which are widely available, this will be more of a review/comparison between this new film and the “original” The Magnificent Seven.

Growing up, I watched a lot of Westerns.  A lot of Westerns.  My dad loved them, and we watched them together.  It was a weekend staple.  I also watched a lot of musicals.  My mother loved them, and if you wanted to get some of her movie/song lyrics, you needed to be well versed (as it were).  I’ve even watched non-Western musicals—like Paint YourWagon—because they starred actors who were quintessential frontier types.  You simply haven’t lived until you’ve heard Clint Eastwood singing despondently while walking among the trees, or Lee Marvin doing a muddy dance rendition of “Hand Me Down That Can O’ Beans”. 

If I recall correctly, neither man touches a gun the entire movie, and the only violence is some standard, friendly, neighborhood bar brawls.

You're as magnificent as ever!

So it’s hardly surprising that this past Saturday I ended up in a theater this weekend with my father to witness the remake of The Magnificent Seven.  I’m fairly certain I’ve seen most of the iterations of this movie starting with the original template, The Seven Samurai and then through the entire catalog of Magnificent title (Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven, and The Magnificent Seven Ride) Battle Beyond the Stars right through the anime Samurai Seven including the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “The Magnificent Ferengi” and Black Adder’s “The Black Seal”.

Antoine Fuqua pays some layered and obvious homage to the original throughout this new telling of a rag-tag group of borderline criminals/heroes.  The plot skews very little from the original source material Akira Kurosawa 60+ years ago.  There’s a bad man Peter Sarsgaard’s Bartholomew Bogue, harassing a small town of mostly defenseless but decent folk.  He’s a dirty, rotten, low-down, no-good, yellow-bellied sap-sucker who will stop at nothing to get what he wants, even if that means killing men, women and I assume cute puppies and kittens.  To stop him, it will take hard, dangerous, men with some true grit (see what I did there?).

Enter Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), who is introduced in one of the most cliché Western-genre ways possible—stopping just outside the bat-wing doors of a saloon, his shadow hidden from the patrons while they all look in rapt attention before he pushes inside to confront the bartender.  Damn, that’s cool!  Fuqua made of point of that in the film, “I kept reminding myself of when I was a 12‑year‑old boy, when I was a kid watching it with my grandmother, what was the feeling I had? How much fun was it? How cool were they?”  Chisolm isn’t a real person—he’s an archetype, an angel of vengeance and justice in an unjust world.  Like Yul Brenner’s Chris Adams, he’s a champion of the cause because it’s the right thing to do (sorta).  For example: Chisolm wears his gun on his right hip with the butt forward and pulls a “cavalry draw”—with his right hand initially reversed.  I assume, like The Princess Bride’s Inigo Mantoya, he does this on purposes because to draw any other way would leave him unsatisfied and the fights would be over too soon.

"Why not just cross-draw, Denzel?"
"Reasons.  Bad-ass reasons."

But don’t look for this kind of draw to start becoming a staple of Westerns.  It’s overly clumsy and dangerous.  It can be practiced to perfection so that it’s “as fast” as other kinds of draws, but it still points the barrel of the gun (the end where the bullets come out) into the body of the shooter while his finger is trying to find the trigger—not a combination most safety instructors would advise.

Yep, Chisolm is that good/dangerous.

And he’s only the beginning.  Chisolm, spurred for “some reason” to draw out Bart Bogue,

Takes seven of you, huh?

begins to search out similarly competent gunslingers.  Chris Pratt’s Joshua Faraday takes on the role originally personified by Steve McQueen as Vin Tanner.  A jokester, prankster who is as quick with a witty retort as he is his own guns.  If you look closely, you’ll see that at one point Faraday uses a “mare’s leg” a shortened rifle made famous by McQueen on the television series Wanted: Dead or Alive and again by Zoe Washburn on Firefly.  Ethan Hawke’s Goodnight Robicheaux is a Doc Holliday type based in part on Robert Vaughn’s Lee, a poster-child for post-Civil War PTSD.  With him comes Byung-hun Lee as Billy Rocks in James Coburn’s role, who can use a knife (or series of knives) as well as anyone with a gun.

The remaining three characters are somewhat wholly new, or looser conglomerates of the original movie.  Vincent D'Onofrio as Jack Horne is something of a cross between Charles Bronson’s stoic, yet warm-hearted Bernardo O'Reilly and big man Brad Dexter’s Harry Luck.  Horst Buchholz as Chico, the hot-blooded villager who wants to become a gunslinger is only sorta found in Martin Sensmeier’s wonderful Comanche warrior, Red Harvest (we could have used a lot more of him and that's not just because I love archers!).  Finally, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s Vasquez doesn’t really have much of a parallel, although he might be a mirror of Chris Pratt, and the two have a couple of clever exchanges before the shooting starts.

Fun fact: Red Harvest is the name of the Hammett story
which Akira Kurosawa used as the basis for Yojimbo.

And that’s really the heart of this movie.  Rather than the slower-paced 1960 film, which took a little more time to develop all the characters, including a number of the townspeople, this updated version is a quick build to the blow-em-up and shoot-em-out that dominates the second half of the film.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  The trailers don’t hide what this story is about, and it delivers all that is promised and then some.  Bad Black Bart Bogue enlists an army of 200 gunmen (read as cannon fodder) for our heroes to mow down, rarely missing a shot or running out of ammunition until dramatic tension has to be built while James Horner’s riff on the classic Elmer Bernstein score soars and falls with our “heroes” efforts.

Make no mistake, this is an updated classic Western that does right by its history and its is modern audience.  I don’t know that the film needs to be seen on the big screen, but wow does it look pretty.  Certainly worth the price of admission of you have any love for Westerns, or any of the actors that showed up to pull leather.

Last Night This Morning

The Great Communicator 5000!

After sleeping with someone in the bed for literally years and years, I don’t sleep well alone.  But I especially don’t sleep well when:

• My 4-year-old is up at 11 PM for his nightly scream
• One of my homestay students is up at 1:47 AM with the front door open and tons of lights on for “reasons”
• My 9-year-old is up at 5:30 AM asking me to sign his homework

So yeah, I’m a bit cranky.  Do you want to ask me that again?

You'll Never Believe What Shocking Thing Trump Said!

Get me some of those facts!

If you were confused by last night’s presidential debate, it’s probably because you didn’t know there are two Donald Trumps.

This isn’t really new as far as politics go.  The Right and the Left have always had to appeal to their base voters during the primaries to beat out the other candidates—leaning heavier progressive or conservative in order to do so.  Once the nomination is clinched, the question is only how well they can pivot back toward the middle and secure enough swing votes needed to win.

The trick here is keeping your distance but not looking like you’re keeping your distance.  You have to campaign casual.

But there’s nothing casual about Trump, which is why he’s effectively split in two, contradicting himself, and saying he didn’t say things when anyone paying even remote attention knows he did say those things.  You can call up Sean Hannity and ask him.

For everyone else, I suggest you employ the following memes.  When Trump says something you agree with:

When Trump says something you don’t agree with:

Following that all should be well.  He is, after all, the best.

M&Ms, Skittles and Poison

Exactly where are you "importing" these M&Ms?

There has been a lot of reverse analysis on these Skittles/M&Ms analogies, and generally I enjoy them.  Overall, I think they miss several points.  The first, of course, is a hasty generalization fallacy.  These memes are citing 1% or 10% or sometimes even 20% as “poisoned” for which, of course, there is no substance of support.  It’s also reflective a general xenophobia that has pervaded thinking for some time, but which has very little basis in reality.  Further, if we’re to believe these memes, then the incidence of “poison” would be immediately obvious from the start, and practically pervasive given that we’re now five years into the Syrian conflict.

But the real response here is we’re not talking about poison pills, we’re talking about 13.5 million human beings.

Fathers, mothers, children and innocents who have fled the violence of their country and are in need of assistance.  They didn’t want to leave.  Most of them would never have left in the first place.  Would youwant to leave your home?  They had no other choice because their government is more interested in maintaining power throughcampaigns of indiscriminate violence than it is in taking care of its people.  More than that, though, any nation that believes itself to uphold moral integrity and human rights, any nation that claims to be Christian and based on Christ-like ideals, any nation that wants to be "great again" should be willing to do everything in its power to prove to the world that we act in the same way as we chant our beliefs from political stages and preach from our pulpits.

Or, to put it more simply, we have nothing to fear from Skittles, M&Ms or stupid analogies but fear itself.  That’s exactly what these memes are designed to generate.

Wasatch Springs Plunge

Yes, of the whole state of Utah!

Years ago, my father was in interior demolition and construction.  I don’t remember a lot of construction, but as a young child, I do remember the demolition—especially since I got to “help” on some of the sites.  This was probably meant to keep me busy, and focus some of my extra energy, but I always found it really interesting.  My parents probably remember me complaining about it, but they’re wrong.

Like the time I removed the molding from shelves at the back of a shoe store.  For whatever reason, there was a treasure-trove of pens and pencils hidden behind that molding, and I was allowed to keep whatever I found!  Later, fairies came and took the pens and pencils back to their evil lairs, but that’s just the nature of fairies.  There’s no accounting for them.

One particular site that my father worked on which I remember reasonably well was the Children’s Museum of Utah.  The site for this was an old hot springs spa in North Salt Lake called the Wasatch Springs Plunge.  I recently discovered that the Children’s Museum (at least this one) moved to the Gateway center in downtown Salt Lake City in 2006.  But from 1983 to 2003, the museum was housed at the old Wasatch Springs. 

This is especially memorable to me for two reasons.  First, I had just read about the Giant’s Causeway in some book with illustrations of the hexagonal basalt columns created by volcanic heat.  Second, I stood at the bottom of one of the old pools which had small hexagonal tiles.  I equated the two and thought that the hot springs had, somehow, been shaped in the same way as the Giant’s Causeway.  The regular, uniform shape didn’t throw me for a moment.  Many of the tiles had been popped, and I was allowed to collect them.

I’m sure my parents thought I was nuts, but I kept them like some kind of found treasure for many years.  I don’t know exactly what happened to them, but I have my guess that those fairies that infested our house probably took them away.

Either way, I came across an article today on the Wasatch Springs Plunge, which provided a thumbnail sketch of the building and site history.  It was a nice trip.