According to the third-century Roman senator Dio Cassius, when Emperor Hadrian attempted to give Appolodorus (the architect who designed the Markets of Trajan) some advice, Appolodorus said, “Go away and draw your pumpkins.” Hadrian did, but later, he sent Appolodorus some of his own designs and asked what Appolodorus thought of them. Appolodorus, poor man, told him. And Hadrian had him executed.

It was nothing like that. For one, nobody there had the power to have anyone else executed. Not legally, anyway. For another, the farthest thing from my mind when my work was criticized was having the critter killed. Not only did I like everyone who critiqued my work, I agreed with almost everything I heard. For the past week, though, I’ve been thinking about how to apply the specific criticisms of my submission story to my writing in general. The most common criticism I heard was, “This needs to be longer.” Or, as John Scalzi put it, “This isn’t a story. It’s a scene.” And that, right there, has been an issue in my writing all along. I write scenes. And I often fail to connect them to anything else. In other words – I don’t finish things.

That’s going to end. It’s part of the Viable Paradise Oath. “I will write,” it begins. And then it goes on. “I will finish what I write.”

There’s more, but those are the first two steps. And that’s where I’ll begin. I will write. And I will finish what I write. And I will rely on my classmates, my husband and my friends to hold me to it.

You’re all listening, right?

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Busy.

Very, very busy.

OMG, busy.

Busy. Send help.

Still busy.

At SF Fringe.

Busy.

Please, make it stop.

At SF Fringe. Theatre good. Sean Craven and Chris Cornell cool. 21 Club oddly clean.

Still busy. Make it stop.

And so on.

You didn’t want to read that any more than I wanted to write it. Except maybe the bits about the Fringe.

Tomorrow morning, though, I’m headed for Viable Paradise (hours earlier than I anticipated).

I’m packed. I think I’m ready. Okay, I’m not ready, but I am packed.

And that’s gotta be worth something.

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If they came from the coasts, I wondered, why didn’t they feed in the Central Valley? And then I thought I’d better answer that question.

Nobody knows what brought the first wave – the flesh-eaters – but everybody had a theory. Government experiments was a good one. Some of the older people thought it was radiation, maybe. Whole websites went up to talk about rays from outer space. A lot of people, though, thought it was something in the food. They talked about pesticides and hormones and a whole lotta other Michael Pollan/gen mod/Monsanto bullshit. I never bought it, but my girls sure did. The older one went all “slow food” on me – wouldn’t eat anything she hadn’t grown herself, or that she hadn’t seen produced. The other one went full vegan. So far as I could tell, she wouldn’t eat anything at all. Didn’t matter, though. The second wave got them both.

There are people who say we should just leave them alone. “Let them live,” they say. “They’re not hurting anyone.” I say it’s not living, what they’re doing – stinking of death, their lips and ears dropping off with decay. And as for “not doing any harm,” they’re doing plenty. They feed like locusts, except locusts get full. And locusts don’t have thumbs. These people’ll understand the damage being done when their pantries are empty, and their grocery stores, too. My girls would have understood it, if it hadn’t taken them, too. They grew up in this orchard, and they raised animals for food. My girls knew their dinners didn’t come shrink-wrapped on styrofoam plates.

The younger one, the vegan, left the the orchard for art school in San Francisco. She fetched up with the band of critters that ravaged Gilroy. They broke into the processing plants, tipped over full truckloads of bulbs. All that garlic must’ve done them some good, because they found their way back to I-80 and made it over Donner Pass. I can’t imagine what’ll happen to them when they reach the Salt Flats, but that’s not my problem. She’s not my problem. Not anymore.

My neighbors can’t understand me when I talk like this. “She’s your daughter!” they say. But she isn’t. My daughter died in The City. Whatever’s dragging her body around is nothing to do with me.

Her sister lasted a little longer. This thing moves like a wave, in from both coasts. She was in the viticulture program up at UC Davis. I’d told her she could have some acreage here when she finished. There are some good wineries starting in the Central Valley. I suppose it’s only natural that she went west when it took her, toward Napa. A boar hunter from Michigan took her down with a 12 gauge. He sent me her driver’s license, and an apology.

So that’s my girls, and truth be told, I’m glad they’re gone. Never mind what I said back there – I don’t know if I could have brought myself to kill my own kids, even if they are dead already.

But they’re only two. There are thousands more. Hundreds of thousands. The cities are almost empty now, and those bands of critters are roaming the countryside, looking for food. Whatever sense they have left draws them to farms, vineyards, orchards and sometimes, processing plants like that one in Gilroy. They’re not flesh-eaters, like the first wave. Not unless you make them mad.

Last week, one of my rice-farming neighbors took out a few hundred with his combine, before the survivors climbed up in the cab and ate his brain. I knew one of those critters, when he was at school with my girls. Nice kid. Had a 4-H pig in the 7th grade and never ate meat again – not until Davis ran over his friends. I’ve got something a little… bigger in mind. It’s the irrigation that makes our crops grow, and without the dams, the irrigation doesn’t happen. There’s a lot of water bottled up behind those dams, and there are a lot of abandoned construction sites since the first wave took so many of the road workers. That means a lot of equipment, and a lot of dynamite, that isn’t guarded. The dams aren’t guarded anymore, either. I know these critters can’t be drowned, but I’ve seen cows left in water too long. The skin and muscle all washes away from the bone, and I can’t see how even a dead thing can move after that’s happened. Tonight, I’m going out to shake fruit from the trees. Tomorrow, when they come, I’ll be ready. Pray for me. I think I’m going to need it.

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“Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine,
an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine
does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that’s all. Now, why
don’t you take a long, close look at this sign.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t go in the water with an open wound?” I asked. “Especially if I’m wearing my seal costume?”

“Egg-zackly!” he said.

It didn’t strike me as odd at the time that was quoting Jaws. I’d been doing a bit of research on Wood’s Hole, where I’ll be catching the ferry to the Vineyard, and I knew that it was home to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the director of the Institute had reviewed Peter Benchley’s Shark Trouble as “intended more as an argument against the hype than more fuel for it. The author’s introduction,” she wrote, “emphasizes how much has been learned since he wrote Jaws in 1974 and that sharks, including the most fearsome ones, are in much more danger from humans than humans from sharks.”

It wasn’t until I told the story to NovySan and he asked, “What does Jaws have to do with Martha’s Vineyard?” that I realized…

“I don’t know. It was set in New Jersey, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?” his daughter asked. “I thought it was in Jamaica or something.”

“No, it was New Jersey,” I said. I was positive. But not so positive I didn’t look it up the next day. And as far as I can tell… Amity Island could be almost anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard, but might very well be off the coast of Massachusetts – you know, like Martha’s Vineyard. The first few pages of the book, which I skimmed through on Amazon, told me nothing except that Amity was a place that New Yorkers came for the summer. The Wikipedia entries for Martha’s Vineyard and Jaws told me the movie was filmed on the Vineyard. I was terribly confused. But then I found the link to New Jersey I was looking for – the one that explained why, all these years, I’ve thought that fictional white shark had terrorized the Jersey Shore.

In the Google Books preview of Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State, I discovered that a series of shark attacks on the Jersey Shore in 1916 was one of Benchley’s inspirations for Jaws. The information was familiar enough that I know I’d read it before – probably around the same time I first read Jaws, which must have been in high school. (It’s on a dusty bookshelf in my mind, right next to The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby – and wouldn’t that be an awful mashup? Or brilliant, maybe.)

And so, once again, the Internet informs me that something I’ve known for years isn’t something I knew at all. At least I didn’t invent a disease this time.

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And I found it.

It’s called Viable Paradise.

It runs for a week, in early October. The timing is perfect. It’s on Martha’s Vineyard, and I’ve never been to the East Coast. So that’s perfect, too. And it’s focused not only on the craft of writing, but also on “the art of writing fiction people want to read.” And that’s just awesome.

Of course, being me, I intended to write something new for my application, and being me, I didn’t. I also intended to submit it several months ago – VP does say that applying early really does improve your chances of being accepted. But again, being me, I didn’t do that, either. No, I sent my manuscript off on the very last day, and you know what? I got in anyway.

Of course, you did know that – you read the title of the post, didn’t you? But still – I got in. Holy shit and ohmygod, I got in.

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