M. Darusha Wehm

Science fiction and mainstream books by award-winning author M. Darusha Wehm

aliens

Lucidity

last night I had
the most wonderful dream

Carly moaned softly in her sleep, and rolled over. She dreamed and dreamed, and when she woke, she found that she still had the lingering shadow of a smile on her lips. Her body was loose with the remnants of her orgasm. She stretched, and smiled fully as her eyes slowly opened. She loved Mondays.

there was a man
so beautiful
he took the breath from my body
we were drawn to each other
as if we had magnets
in our souls

Carly walked into the dream research lab a few minutes early, but Dave was already there. His back was turned to her, but she knew his body by heart. Dave Windeman, M.D., PhD. had been Dr. Carly Andrews’ partner in research for nearly four years, but not, alas, in life. From the first day they worked together it was clear that they were the perfect pair in the lab, complementing each others’ weaknesses, feeding their strengths. They were so obviously well-suited to each other, their grad students never understood why they weren’t a couple off campus.

It was not a question they had never secretly asked themselves.

As she watched Dave lean against his desk and read a report, Carly felt an involuntary flush come to her face as she vividly remembered her dream from the previous night.

our mouths touched
and sparks flew from our parted lips

Carly sighed softly, and walked toward her partner. Dave stood, sensing her behind him and turned. He smiled, and Carly saw the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Morning, Doctor,” he said. “You slept well, I trust.” He raised one eyebrow, and Carly felt herself blushing again.

“Very nicely, thank you,” she said, forcing her voice to remain even. “And you look particularly well rested yourself, Doctor,” she answered.

“Indeed,” Dave said. “It was another impressive showing from our friends last night.” He leaned back against the lab bench, and took a sip from his coffee cup. “It was the Swedish women’s soccer team for me,” he grinned with false machismo. “Anyone interesting for you?”

into his ear
I whispered
your name

Read on a single page

Image: Ktr101

I’m an Alien

[This was originally published as a guest post on John Mierau’s blog]

Alien 2

(photo by rarebeasts)

As I write this, I have been an alien for over three years. I’m a Canadian, but I’ve been in Canada for fewer than two of the past 36 months. I live on a sailboat and since 2008 I’ve been traveling the world about as fast as a dog can run. Sometimes it seems hard to believe.

But all authors spend much of their lives as foreigners. In our stories we, like our readers, are visitors to the fictional lands we’ve created. But unlike our readers, we authors are the tour guides and as such we have to pay attention to the little things that the locals take for granted.

We need to spend some time in our stories, finding the best grocery stores, figuring out the local transit system and poking our noses into that hole in the wall eatery in the sketchy part of town. Each story is an opportunity for cultural exchange between the world we live in and the world of our characters.

Editor extraordinaire Ben Bova wrote, in the must-read The Craft Of Writing Science Fiction That Sells:

Your job as a writer is to make the reader live in your story. You must make the reader forget that he is sitting in a rather uncomfortable chair, squinting at the page in poor light, while all sorts of distractions poke at him. You want your reader to believe that he is actually in the world of your imagination, the world you have created, climbing up that mountain you’ve written about, struggling against the cold and ice to find the treasure that you planted up at the peak.

Writers all know that the key to writing success is best distilled as “butt in chair.” But there’s more to writing great stories than just pounding away at the keyboard. If you want to create a world in your story that is more real to the reader than her own comfy reading chair, you need to get away from the keyboard every once in a while and interact with the real world, especially the parts of the world that are strange. At least, strange to you.

Whether you write mainstream young adult fiction, warm-hearted Christian romance or hard SF space opera, you can get ideas for settings, plots and characters from engaging with people and places that are unfamiliar to you. Visiting a foreign country (or even a foreign part of your own town) can open your eyes to new ways of living, to new styles of dress or culture and to new people.

My attraction to travel is, perhaps oddly for a writer, based more on seeing new places than meeting new people. The humbling solitude of sailing the wide open sea of the Pacific, craning my neck to follow a tropic bird soaring past the peaks of Polynesia, listening to the endless animal song in the jungles of Central America – these are the rewards I seek from a life on the move. But, even so, I know that those places that were the most wonderful of all I’ve visited were made that way as much by the people I met there as by the grandeur of the landscape.

Fiction writing is all about character. Settings, especially in science fiction and fantasy, are incredibly important, but without the characters we love to live through, all that worldbuilding is meaningless. If we want to write compelling stories, we need compelling characters in compelling situations. And travel, at its best and its worst, puts us in a position of meeting all kinds of characters.

Many of the people I’ve met along the way have found their ways into my stories – a turn of phrase here, a hair-raising anecdote there. I’ve learned that the more people I meet, from as diverse backgrounds as possible, the better and more real my characters have become. Plus, people tell wonderful stories about their lives and their homes. Just as a writer must be a reader, a storyteller must be a storylistener as well.

The places I’ve visited and the people I’ve met there don’t show up unadulterated in my stories. I don’t have a story about spending 30 hours on a dilapidated bus in South America and I don’t have a novel set in the ancient Mayan capital of Tikal. But those adventures have given me ideas which do appear in my stories, disguised by the veil of fiction but made more real because of my experience.

This is what fiction writers ultimately do – distill the kernels of their own experiences into stories that, even though they never factually occurred, expose a core human truth.

I have the great fortune of having spent over three years as a full-time traveler, but you don’t need to sail a boat half way around the world to see new places and meet new people. Go for lunch with a co-worker you hardly know. Take a bus to the nearest city or small town. Visit a different church or take in a public lecture at the local college. Expose yourself to something different; don’t be afraid to be the stranger in the room.

Travel doesn’t have to mean expensive vacations. Travel means encountering that which is different with an open mind and a true willingness to learn about something new. And after all, isn’t exposing us to different lives and different worlds what great stories do?

The Foreigner

I slip into the fake-leather seat, and look at my watch. I have about an hour before the shareholders’ meeting, but I have to stop by the day care first, so I want to make this snappy. I’ve found that the little impatient look usually stops these people from making small talk and gets them down to business. Not this guy, though. From the moment I sit down, he starts with the chit chat. I sigh softly to myself, not wanting to be rude, and look up at the mirror that lets me see a little of his face. That’s when I notice that he’s not from here. I can hear it in the accent, and when I look closely I can see that his eyes reflected in the mirror look a little… off. Great. Just what I need. Another bloody foreigner.

Still, I’m not prejudiced, so I give the man my particulars and he gets going. I know it’s probably going to take at least twenty minutes, so I lean back, close my eyes and hope I can maybe just sleep through it.

No such luck. He’s chattering away at me, about the weather and some boring local political thing, when he looks up at the mirror at the same time I glance up and our eyes meet. “You might not realize this,” he says to me, “but I’m an immigrant.”

“You don’t say,” I answer, bored and rolling my eyes, though he can’t see me anymore, his focus back on his job where it belongs.

“It’s true,” he says, not noticing my sarcasm. “I have a home here now, but I came through the portal about a year and a half ago. You ever been through?” he asked, his eyes darting up to the mirror and catching my gaze.

I fake a smile and shake my head. “No,” I say.

He laughs mirthlessly. “Well, you probably would not want to. Oh, my plane is a beautiful place. We have these amazing snow-capped mountains there that you just don’t have here, and the architecture cannot be believed.” He pauses a moment, and I worry that I’m going to get the tourism board lecture. Instead, he mercifully goes back to his story. “I’m sure the other planes are lovely, too. But the trip – Gott in Himmel – it’s a bear. I truly thought I was going to die. It was like my flesh was being ripped off my bones. Yeugh.” He shivers at the memory.

Of course, I’ve heard all about the terrible pain of the interdimensional transporters. They say that the scientists who accidentally created the first rift between one instance of the universe and the others only realized they had done anything remarkable at all when they heard the agonized shrieking of the poor bastard who fell in the hole. Not something that sounds much like a holiday to me. I always said I’d wait until they figured out some painless way to travel between the planes, thank you very much. Besides, I never really understood what was so great about being surrounded by a bunch of foreign freaks in the first place. It’s not like you even have to travel for that.

Read on a single page

Image: Daniel Clayton Greer

Career Opportunities

Jo-Lynn had always laughed at Charlotte, her stupid sister-in-law, who believed the crap in those so-called newspapers she bought at the supermarket every week. It was no wonder that her no-good brother married Charlotte; he’d always liked them dumb and easy.

Once Charlotte moved in to the small house Jo-Lynn had been sharing with her brother Carl since their parents died, Jo-Lynn had decided it was time to move. She just didn’t have an excuse to go to the city, and she wasn’t about to move away then have to come crawling back when she ran out of money. She needed a plan.

She’d been out on the back porch having a cigarette when she saw the light in the sky, squinting as the saucer landed. She was plenty surprised when the aliens grabbed her and she found out that Charlotte’s trashy papers weren’t entirely full of garbage.

Carl hated that Jo-Lynn finished high school with honours, hated her even more for wanting to go to the city and attend the community college. “What do you want to be groping rich old ladies for?” he asked, sneering, between sips of Pabst Blue Ribbon, when Jo-Lynn told him she was moving to the city to become a massage therapist. “As if some fancy college makes you better than me,” he slurred, as Jo-Lynn left the room to pack.

She figured the aliens were trying to probe her that night on the table on their ship, but being one-celled organisms, they didn’t know how to do it. They just poked and prodded with their pseudopodia, all night long. But by the time they finally dumped her back in the yard, Jo-Lynn had come up with a plan. Those aliens gave a damn good massage.

© M. Darusha Wehm

Image: “Emu Beer Can” by Michael Theis