Electric Dragon Cafe

Results of the Last (sorta) Contest

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:26:00 +0000

Many moons ago I commanded you to write me a story. Here was the prompt:

A young girl commits an act so horrible that she is locked away in a mental institution. As the extended family gathers to comfort the girl's parents, it occurs to an uncle that the situation is suspiciously similar to an event involving his two brothers thirty years before. His youngest brother died as a result, and his other brother, the girl's father, was the only witness. Did the girl's mental instability come from her father, did this instability cause him to kill the youngest brother, and what might happen if a concerned uncle brings the subject up after the rest of the family has gone to bed?

You might also consider the wider implications of the genetic madness. Does the patriarch of the family also hide a dark side? What about the uncle, does darkness lurk in his soul, waiting for the right moment to take control, or has it done so in the past only to be buried in the deepest reaches of his subconscious memory by his better nature? Think about it, play with it, and see what you come up with.

With one exception, your answer was a resounding "No!" Now I give you the the fruit of that one exceptional person's labor.

Mutiny

Wendy Berndt
Anne was laying on the psychiatrist’s couch, looking out the window. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail that she was chewing. She was wearing a pair of ragged old jeans with a black t-shirt that had a skull and cross bones on it.

Hearing the door unlock, she turned her head and saw a new doctor enter the room. She had been through two yesterday and she didn’t have high hopes for number three.

As the new doctor sat in the chair, he pulled the glasses from the top of his head so he could read her file. After a few moments, he looked over the top of his glasses at the girl on the couch. “You started a mutiny at the homecoming assembly?” Dr. Jon Benson asked and looked down at his notes again. He rubbed his forehead and looked back to the girl on the couch. Shaking his head, he repeated “A mutiny?”

Anne, who was really getting tired of this question, replied tersely, “Yep.” followed by a deep sigh.

“How did you do that?” Dr. Benson asked as he put down the file to give his full attention to Anne.

Sighing again, Anne replied as if repeating a lesson she had memorized, “I jumped out of the bleachers, took the microphone from the gym teacher, cried ‘Down with Homecoming’ and half of the senior class followed. Then we tied up the principal and teachers.” Anne said all this with little enthusiasm.

“Um, yes” Dr. Benson cleared his throat. “About tying up the teachers, they weren’t the only ones you tied up, were they?” Anne was looking out the window, trying to ignore the Dr. “Anne?” the he repeated.

“Nooooo.” Anne prevaricated, looking down at her hands. Dr. Benson just kept looking at her. “We also tied up the cheerleaders.” Anne said. She grinned and looked up at Dr. Benson. “That was the fun part!” she gushed quite excited now.

Dr. Benson looked at her over his steepled hands. “Can you tell me why that was, Anne?” he asked.

“Cheerleaders are annoying, and I don’t like them,” she said, scrunching her face up. “I don’t like assemblies either. I really don’t like assemblies.” She repeated.

Dr Benson, looking very confused, asked, “If you don’t like assemblies, why did you go to this one?”

A laugh escaped from Anne. “Dr. Benson you are too funny!” Anne exclaimed. “Like I had a choice!” She laughed again. Looking at the Dr, she tried to explain, “I have to go to school, right?” Anne asked. When Dr. Benson didn’t answer, she repeated the question, “Right?”

“Yes Anne, you do have to go to school.” Dr. Benson answered shortly.

“Well,” Anne explained, “I skipped the assembly last year and I was given in-school suspension as punishment. The suspension was a big old waste of time.” Anne said rolling her eyes and shaking her head. “Anyway, I decided this year I would try to have fun at the assembly.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It seemed a simple enough plan at the time, but I sure didn’t see this coming. I was figuring on suspension again.” Almost under her breath she added, “How do you commit someone like this, honestly?”

“Well,” Dr. Benson agreed, “The best laid plans of mice and men I guess…” He flipped to the last page of her file, “Since we were unable to get in touch with your father, we got a hold of your grandfather.” Dr. Benson said looking up to see her reaction.

A big smile lit up her face. “Really, granddad” she said looking at the doctor. “He’ll get a laugh out of this one!!” she crowed. Laughing to herself, she rolled over on the couch and looked out the window.

Dr. Benson got up and locked the door behind him as he left the room. He stopped at Dr. Reed’s office and knocked on the door.

“Come in” Dr. Reed called from behind his desk, turning in his chair to face the door as Dr. Benson walked into his office. “Jon” he greeted, “please have a seat!” Jon sat down.

Looking uneasily over at Robert, Jon blurted out, “Is Anne really your niece?”

Sighing, Robert looked over at Jon. Finally he answered, “Yes.” Taking off his glasses, Robert pinched the bridge of his nose. “Anne is my brother’s daughter.” Shaking his head he added, “She definitely takes after my dad’s side of the family.” Not knowing what to say, Jon just looked at Robert.

Robert smiled at Jon. “Don’t get me wrong, Dad and Eddie are smart. They are just a bit, odd.” Wanting to explain the situation better, Robert got up and walked around his desk to sit on the edge nearest Jon. “It’s like this,” Robert tried. “Dad has always been interested in pirates. When he was a little boy, his parents took him to see an exhibit on Blackbeard, you know, Edward Teach. Dad has been obsessed with pirates ever since then. He went to medical college and graduated with a degree in DNA studies. Dad believes that, no matter what any of the circumstances are at your birth; the decade, your race, your gender; when you are born, your genes dictate who or what you will become.”

“Specifically, Dad thought, and still thinks, Blackbeard would have been a rebel in any society, not just the early eighteenth century. To prove his theory, dad needed a child with Edward’s DNA. Unfortunately for dad, cloning is illegal, so he had to create a fetus in the lab. It couldn’t be an exact match, so he modified some of the DNA to match Edward’s. He used a surrogate to give birth and then raised Edward as his own son. A few years later, he met and married my mom and I was born. As we grew up we both knew what Dad was trying to do. When we got older, we both decided to study science. I went for psychiatry but Ed is truly his father’s son and followed in Dad’s footsteps. Ed’s daughter, Anne, was modified in the lab just like Ed was, but other than being female, she has the exact DNA of Edward Teach.” Robert finished up.

Looking around, Jon said with a half smile “Okay, you got me! Where is the hidden camera?” After a few minutes, Jon smile started to slip. “Is this for real?” he asked, still waiting for the film crew to jump out from behind a door. “Robert? Are you serious?” Jon asked, not quite able to believe what he had just heard.

Robert nodded his head. “Yes. If you get right down to it Eddie and Anne are science experiments. Ed is just as fascinated as Dad with the DNA studies and was able to expand on what dad started. Anne is my dad’s granddaughter, but she is also a close copy of one of the most notorious pirates in history. Dad and Ed will be pleased that she started a “mutiny” at school. She doesn’t know she has been genetically modified and therefore doesn’t know her real family history.

“Wow” was all Jon had to say. As he was opening his mouth to ask another question, the door was opened and Dr. Charles Reed entered.

“Robbie!” Charles cried out, “Come give your dad a hug!” He engulfed Robert in a bear hug. “Was I right? Is she evil? She gets it from her father!” he exclaimed, smiling. “I guess you could say she gets it from her grandfather too, but we’ll give Ed the credit for this one.” He winked over at Jon like a proud new papa and let Robert go. “Are you going to introduce us?” he asked looking over at Dr. Benson.

Rob came over and said, “Jon, this is my dad, also a Dr. Reed. Dad, this is Dr. Jon Benson, he just came from talking to Anne.” Jon said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you sir. You have a smart son here.” Charles shook Jon’s hand not really listing to him.

Looking from one to the other Charles asked, “So, how is Anne holding up? Where have you got her?” He waited for his answer.

Jon cleared his throat, “Well Dr. Reed, we have her down the hall, locked in a room for observation.”

Robert added, “The boarding school called the police when they couldn’t reach Ed, and they decided to bring her here. She has put quite a number of students in danger with her stunt and the authorities have had her committed until she can be evaluated to determine if she is a hazard to herself or others.”

Charles looked at his son in a kind of shocked awe.

Say it ain't so analytics!

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 03:23:00 +0000

Sadly, Google has failed me. For the past six or eight months I have been checking my Google Analytics account every week. Every week I've been saddened to see that I received 0-2 page views. For the better part of a year I have taken this to mean that my cherished readers had abandoned me. I believed this so thoroughly that I recently posted a message declaring those folks fickle friends.

As it turns out, even though I raised the quavering needle on the Loyal-Reader-Neglect-O-Meter from Shameful to Abominable, my circumstance has never been so dire as I was led to believe. I have been visited not by the paltry six or seven family members Google Analytics claimed, but by more than a hundred this month. Eighty-two in the last seven days as a matter of fact.

Huzzah for loyalty.

Boo-Hiss to my Analytics account.

How did I figure it out you ask. Mrs. Gordon is an interweb genius. That's how.

So, I'm sorry to all of my unreasonably loyal devotees. May you all receive Mad Props, or whatever it is the kids are handing out these days. I'll try to make this shadow of my former site more worthy of your attention.

Sincerely,

Gordon

Little Jackie Paper Loved that Rascal Puff Too...

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:43:00 +0000

One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more,

And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

Greetings fiction fans. I've been gone for a good long while so I could take care of some personal issues, but I'm back for a limited time to give you an update. Sadly, since circumstance forced me to cut out prizes, interest in the Electric Dragon Cafe has dropped to almost nothing. Within ninety days, thousands of monthly visitors became hundreds. Hundreds became about six, and most of those six were my family. I thought I could hold the writing community's interest without the promise of a $25 gift card, but apparently not.

In the eight months that I ignored this site to clean literal, metaphorical, and metaphysical house, only four people wrote in. Two had fiction to post, one had a request for information, and one wished me well (And many thanks to S. E. Gordon (no relation) for his kind words. Older readers who see this should go to www.segordon.com as soon as you finish. Definitely not for younger readers, but Mr. Gordon is working hard and he deserves some support).

While my cold reptilian heart was briefly warmed by their responses, these few are not enough to warrant so much time and effort as a real, regular web presence requires. I know I have never been the most attentive site manager, but it was still a lot of work for a busy guy, and always enough for the thousands of people who visited the Electric Dragon Cafe. Now, without prizes, interest has waned, and like my noble cousin Puff my scales fall like rain.

If you find you miss me, my humble advice, or the stories you used to read here, then check back from time to time. Write in. I'll keep the site here (it costs me nothing now) and I think I'll put the writing advice back. I love helping young writers. I will answer the questions you send from time to time, and I may one day have time and attention enough to spare that I can make it something special again. For now, I have promised my few stalwart contributors that I would post their submissions. Assuming I get permission to post them, these will probably be last outside fiction submissions that you'll ever see here, and I will always treasure them.

I hereby formally apologize for all the broken promises and unfulfilled dreams, and give a hearty thanks to everyone who has read or submitted over the last few years. Good luck to you all. Keep writing.

Sincerely,

Gordon the Friendly Dragon

Is it a contest? Is it writing advice? Or is it something altogether new?

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:05:00 +0000

Since we have neither gotten the old content up, nor posted a new contest, I have decided to deliver both in bite sized pieces until we get the ball rolling again. My last bit of advice revolved around idea generation in fiction writing. The gist of the article was that in order for a writer to generate ideas, the writer must train the mind to think in ways that are friendly to fiction. Yesterday I took part in one of the many odd things I do for fun that often spawns story ideas as a byproduct.

I was thinking of buying "www.(my real last name).com" for another website I have wanted to build off and on for the last few years. Just to see what would happen I typed the url into my address bar and met a family of strangers with my last name, and a little girl with the very same name and age as my daughter. I promptly e-mailed a link to a picture of the girl to my older brother with the subject heading "My daughter has an arch nemesis," thinking of the baby with one eyebrow on The Simpsons. As usual with this sort of message, it prompted a conversation that lasted for the better part of a day. Below is each message with the author's name and subject heading.

From: Gordon
Subject: My daughter has an arch nemesis.

Here I placed a link to a picture of a girl the same age as my daughter, but blond, and not as adorable.

From: Gordon's Older Brother
Subject: Your daughter's evil twin.

No, it is your daughter's evil twin from an alternate universe.

From: Gordon
Subject: Re: Your daughter's evil twin.

That can not be. The other girl didn't have a goatee.
(For those of you who are not sci-fi fans, the goatee is a Star Trek reference, not random nonsense)

From: Gordon's Older Brother
Subject: Re: Your daughter's evil twin.

True, but how could a girl grow a goatee. It is the blond hair that gave her away.

From: Gordon
Subject: Re: Your daughter's evil twin.

Wouldn't that make my dark haired daughter the evil one?

From: Gordon's Older Brother
Subject: Evil baby from an alternate universe.

Wow, you got me on that one. You're the father of an evil baby from an alternate universe! She must have been switched at birth, and is actually an evil baby genius. Have you checked for any secret doors that lead to her laboratory?

From: Gordon
Subject: Re: Evil baby from an alternate universe.

No, brother, you got me. No alternate universe. No door. No lab. Not a genius, and not switched at birth. Just evil, and she got it from her father. You should not have been so persistent...

I'll see you when the lights go out.

My brother has not responded to this last message. It might be that he tired of the conversation, or it might be that he is holed up in his panic room. In either case we can use this real life occurrence to generate a nugget of story. If you take the flow of our e-mail conversation, particularly the line, "Just evil, and she got it from her father," and roll it around in your brain for a bit you might come up with an idea like this:

A young girl commits an act so horrible that she is locked away in a mental institution. As the extended family gathers to comfort the girl's parents, it occurs to an uncle that the situation is suspiciously similar to an event involving his two brothers thirty years before. His youngest brother died as a result, and his other brother, the girl's father, was the only witness. Did the girl's mental instability come from her father, did this instability cause him to kill the youngest brother, and what might happen if a concerned uncle brings the subject up after the rest of the family has gone to bed?

I freely admit that this is not the best story ever conceived, but it is at least as good as the premise for a number of Dean Koontz books I have read, and it could easily be incorporated into a larger story as a complication or subplot. This idea (and a host of others) occurred to me because I've been making my brain think this way for fifteen years or so. It's reflex now, and it's a whole bunch of fun.

You might also consider the wider implications of the genetic madness. Does the patriarch of the family also hide a dark side? What about the uncle, does darkness lurk in his soul, waiting for the right moment to take control, or has it done so in the past only to be buried in the deepest reaches of his subconscious memory by his better nature? Think about it, play with it, and see what you come up with.

Because I have deprived you of a contest for the last few months, I give this story nugget to you. Take it, write about the confrontation, and submit your story as a comment on this post. For that matter, feel free to write any story that occurs to you after reading the e-mail conversation between me and my brother, then follow the guidelines below, and I'll pick a few of my favorites to post on this site. Since I'm still blissfully unemployed I'll have to send the lucky winners a writing journal instead of the big bucks my contributors are used to. Good luck all, I hope to hear from you soon.

Guidelines:

-As usual, excessive sex and vulgarity will disqualify your entry. "Excessive" can be defined as anything not crucial to the progression of the story.

-Try to keep this one short. 1500 word limit.

-Leave contact information in your comment. Nobody but me will see it, and nothing will be viewed by the public until I have reviewed and edited it.

-Deadline: Keep them coming until I say otherwise, but I'll wait a month before I post anything.

Simple, Seductive, and Wrong ...and Seductive

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 01:12:00 +0000

I miss my old site, but I decided to try posting something to this new "BLOG" thingy because Mrs. Gordon told me it would be easier than messing with all that HTML code stuff, so as an experiment I thought I might take a moment to discuss the meaning of blog. I am familiar with the word, but to me it has always been a sound I made involuntarily when I had the flu. I'm told that it means "web log," and that appeals to me because I have always wanted to record a log like Kirk (Captains Blog, Stardate 63496.2. Why does putting the word "star" in front of an existing word make it futuristic and spacey? And why, since I'm being candid, didn't anyone put pockets on my uniform? Velcro is not the same thing).

Sadly, I know it is not a log like Kirk's because I saw a news program when I was in the doctor's office for my centenial checkup. I know that a blog is a simple way for folks to express their opinions on the interweb, and a way for bad journalists to waste airtime. So, I say that the meaning of "blog" is "another way for people with opinions to share them as quickly as possible."

The long and short of the situation is that I do not want this site to be that. The old content will be back up as soon as we have time to transfer it, and I'll do my best not to waste valuable bandwidth transmitting meaningless nonsense from one computer to another simply because it takes little effort to do so. My posts may not be as regular as some, but they will be relevant to those who wish to read, write, learn about, and discus fiction. Still, when it is this easy to post I can see how folks are tempted to display every thought that passes between their ears. .

In a totally unrelated story, I gave my dog a bath today and he said the cutest thing...

FUNemployment and Prizes

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:35:00 +0000

Howdy folks, Gordon here. As much as I hate to say it, with fate having hamstrung my income, Mrs. Gordon and I can no longer afford to keep the Electric Dragon Cafe in it's former, somewhat more glorious, state.

Our budget has been cut from mere slimness to emaciation, so rather than scrap the whole thing, we have been forced to give up our more expensive site in favor of this very, very cheap blog template. We are also discussing the fate of the contest. It only costs us about two hundred dollars a year, but even that is more than we can handle in our current, lamentable, and hopefully temporary financial situation. We want to keep it going, but it will certainly take a different form. For now, we have food on the table and all our bills are paid, but something has to give and this is it (also eating out, ordering pizza, cable, movies, books, ice cream, and, rather oddly if you ask me, cool mint mouth wash. We've switched to this purple eucalyptus stuff). Mrs. Gordon and I will do our best to make this sad little blog special for now, but rest easy knowing that I made sure that everything the Electric Dragon Cafe was has been safely filed away, and I suspect we will eventually be able to resurrect it.

Thanks for reading,

Gordon