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jpskewedthroneToday, we have a little guest blog post from one of the anchor authors of the ALIEN ARTIFACTS/WERE- anthology Kickstarter (check it out now). She's talking about her story for the WERE- anthology, which features were-creatures OTHER than werewolves. So welcome Jean Marie Ward!
My Kind of Crazy Town
By
Jean Marie Ward
“I need to steal something.”
My husband didn’t look up from his computer. “What kind of thing?”
“It’s not so much a what as a where. I’m working on a story for Joshua Palmatier’s Zombies Need Brains, a kind of continuation of my story in The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity. Well, it features two of the characters and . . .”
Greg gave me the spousal stink eye and quoted The Thin Man. “Has it got anything to do with the gun?”
Which is his code for: I don’t need to hear what you did when you were a little child. Cut to the chase.
“I need something worth stealing at Catholic University or the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. For the plot.”
He thought about it all of a second. “Would a papal tiara work?”
A papal tiara, for those of you who didn’t suffer through Catholic school, is Roman Catholicism’s version of the triple crown. Literally. It started life as three gold crowns stacked on a sterling silver base, and is why all those Renaissance paintings of popes look like they’re wearing giant sparkly bullets on their heads. In theory, they’re used at papal coronations, but since they’re every bit as heavy as you’d expect, and modern popes don’t flagellate themselves any more than they have to, they’re mostly display pieces.
“There’s one in the Shrine,” he continued “and the security is”--he waggled his hand to indicate that on a Washington, DC, scale of ten, the precautions in question probably qualified as a minus-three.
“Perfect!”
Doubly perfect since the Shrine’s papal tiara, while plainer than most thanks to its mid-20th century modern design, weighs a full ten pounds. Ten pounds of silver, gold, dozens of diamonds and precious gems. Oh, the stumbling and bumbling and chaos I can wreak with a ten-pound silver football in the middle of one of the biggest churches in the world, across floors and down stairs polished to a silky mirror gleam!
I love This Town (yes, Joshua, it needs to capitalized. That’s what we call it: This Town), my birthplace, my heart’s home. Washington, DC, boasts a street plan that could serve as a demon-summoning circle--and that’s only the stuff on the surface. The city sits atop an underground network of forgotten streams, buried streetcar tracks and disused tunnels that make its above-ground map look positively benign.
Washington also hosts embassies from nearly every country on the planet, plus a glorious melting pot of communities, cultures, cuisines, legends, demons and gods. The world’s single greatest producer of greenhouse gasses (aka the U.S. Congress) sits across the street from one of the world’s greatest repositories of arcane tomes, scripts and texts (the Library of Congress). They both share a hill with a court called Supreme and a train station called Union.
We have more named ghosts than anyplace except London--not to worry, we’re catching up--and we think the perfect location for a possessed statue is in the inner courtyard of the Federal Courts’ Court of Appeals Building. (Word! She’s called Black Aggie, and you can read all about her here. She’s one of the sights I routinely show my victims--I mean, friends visiting the city.) Considering the lawyers in This Town, it’s probably appropriate--especially since she was modeled on a statue by Augustus Saint Gaudens popularly called Grief. But I’ll digress more about that later.
Better yet, DC is a criminally under-used location for urban fantasy, which is why I set most of my contemporary fantasy here. Most of my fiction, period. In addition to all things spy, it’s a primo location for anything noir, as those of you who snagged the Alien Artifacts/Were--? Incentive booklet Dangerous Dames will immediately discover. What happens in our bars . . .
(Since I’m a nice person--when I’m not leading innocent civilians into the presence of demon-possessed statues, that is--you can find out exactly what happens in my kind of DC bar by following this link to "District Coincidental". It’s only one very short story, and Patricia Bray can only kill me once, right? Right?)
The main problem I face writing fiction about DC is it’s really, really hard to top the stuff that passes for normal around here. The cash drop site I describe in “District Coincidental” was famously used by spies and would-be influence peddlers in the days before the CIA moved out to the George Bush Center for Intelligence in northern Virginia.
(Yes, I know the name is a contradiction in terms. All us locals know. We didn’t name it; blame that on your elected officials. At least the in-house spy museum is good, much better than the four-room Spy Museum on Seventh Street you pay $20 to visit.)
The cash drop is still at the bar, unchanged from the 1940s. What you want to bet it’s still being used? (The other truth about This Town is politicians never learn from the past; they always repeat it.)
Even the city’s early history is outlandish. If unlike your elected representatives, you paid attention in history class, you may have learned that the British burned the White House, the partially constructed Capitol and several other government buildings to blackened shells on August 24, 1814. What you probably did not realize was they were not chased away by the Mid-Atlantic states’ pitiful excuse for an army. Andrew Jackson had nothing to do with it, either. He was off fighting the redcoats in the west, and didn’t send those Brits running back home to Mother England until the Battle of New Orleans--a full month after the war officially ended in January 2015.
No, what sent the British fleeing our Capital City in white-knuckled terror was the two--count ‘em, two!--hurricanes This Town rained down on them within a single twelve-hour period. Talk about hot air--and Congress wasn’t even in session. They’d fled the town days before with the President, the army, and anybody else with delusions of grandeur.
(I wrote about that, too. The novella, “Cooking up a Storm”, appears in Tales from the Vatican Vaults, an anthology published in the United Kingdom on the 201st anniversary of the invasion. I’d shoo you off to your local retailer to buy it, but currently Tales from the Vatican Vaults is only available from British merchants like Wordery.com. How’s that for fine Washington irony?)
Then there are Washington lawyers. Over the years I’ve met many, some of whom I’m delighted to call my friends. But they are definitely a breed apart. We haven’t seen their like since Rome ruled the world, and unlike conquering Roman generals, they aren’t plagued pesky, skull-toting slaves direly intoning: “Remember man, thou art but mortal.”
I’m pretty sure Washington lawyers are mortal, but I’m not entirely convinced they’re human. What they are is another matter. They’re too articulate for Cthulhu’s progeny, and despite what you may have heard, they are not hell spawn. The Devil has long since given up trying to control them. Every time he goes head to head with one, he loses. From what I’ve seen, Stephen Vincent Benet based “The Devil and Daniel Webster” on an actual case. After all, despite his Yankee roots, Daniel Webster spent most of his adult life arguing laws in Washington.
I don’t think our lawyers are space aliens, either. The breed has occupied the District for a long time without using the rest of us as a food source. The rumors they are vampires are just that. The real bloodsuckers in This Town are the lobbyists. Unlike lawyers, they never have to show up for daytime court dates.
But whatever they are, the ones actually practicing within the city limits have a really hard time behaving like people.
You’ve heard that line from William Congreve, “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.” Well, let me tell you, not around here. In evidence I present this article from The Washington Post, the newspaper that once upon a time gave you Watergate.
The short form is DC is a great town for street musicians. Spread Love, a New Orleans-style outdoor band, routinely plays for tips next to the Farragut North Metro station, on a corner overlooked by the Treasury Department and a major Washington law firm, to the delight of locals and tourists alike. The lawyers in both buildings, however, greeted their joyful noise the same enthusiasm as Linda Blair greeted her parish priest in The Exorcist, culminating in an attempt to sic the Secret Service on them--apparently forgetting under duress that the Secret Service no longer answers to the Treasury Department. (They’ve belonged to Homeland Security since 2001.)
When coercion by proxy didn’t work (because the agents were too busy taking selfies and grooving to the music), the lawyers tried bribery. They offered the band $200 a week to move. The band laughed. But the band can make up to $200 an hour on that corner--a sum that puts their earnings almost on par with a junior assistant Washington lawyer.
Obviously, to the lawyers overheated legal brains, this means war. They are buying equipment to measure the band’s sound levels in the hope they exceed legal limits. (Hard to do that in the heart of DC’s business district, just sayin’.) They have vowed to take their complaints to the mayor and the DC Council. And if that fails, they’re already putting the money aside to hire a string quartet to steal Spread Love’s space on the corner.
I can’t top that. I just can’t.
Well, maybe with a were-opossum . . .
Jean Marie Ward
JeanMarieWard.com
My Kind of Crazy Town
By
Jean Marie Ward
“I need to steal something.”
My husband didn’t look up from his computer. “What kind of thing?”
“It’s not so much a what as a where. I’m working on a story for Joshua Palmatier’s Zombies Need Brains, a kind of continuation of my story in The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity. Well, it features two of the characters and . . .”
Greg gave me the spousal stink eye and quoted The Thin Man. “Has it got anything to do with the gun?”
Which is his code for: I don’t need to hear what you did when you were a little child. Cut to the chase.
“I need something worth stealing at Catholic University or the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. For the plot.”
He thought about it all of a second. “Would a papal tiara work?”
A papal tiara, for those of you who didn’t suffer through Catholic school, is Roman Catholicism’s version of the triple crown. Literally. It started life as three gold crowns stacked on a sterling silver base, and is why all those Renaissance paintings of popes look like they’re wearing giant sparkly bullets on their heads. In theory, they’re used at papal coronations, but since they’re every bit as heavy as you’d expect, and modern popes don’t flagellate themselves any more than they have to, they’re mostly display pieces.
“There’s one in the Shrine,” he continued “and the security is”--he waggled his hand to indicate that on a Washington, DC, scale of ten, the precautions in question probably qualified as a minus-three.
“Perfect!”
Doubly perfect since the Shrine’s papal tiara, while plainer than most thanks to its mid-20th century modern design, weighs a full ten pounds. Ten pounds of silver, gold, dozens of diamonds and precious gems. Oh, the stumbling and bumbling and chaos I can wreak with a ten-pound silver football in the middle of one of the biggest churches in the world, across floors and down stairs polished to a silky mirror gleam!
I love This Town (yes, Joshua, it needs to capitalized. That’s what we call it: This Town), my birthplace, my heart’s home. Washington, DC, boasts a street plan that could serve as a demon-summoning circle--and that’s only the stuff on the surface. The city sits atop an underground network of forgotten streams, buried streetcar tracks and disused tunnels that make its above-ground map look positively benign.
Washington also hosts embassies from nearly every country on the planet, plus a glorious melting pot of communities, cultures, cuisines, legends, demons and gods. The world’s single greatest producer of greenhouse gasses (aka the U.S. Congress) sits across the street from one of the world’s greatest repositories of arcane tomes, scripts and texts (the Library of Congress). They both share a hill with a court called Supreme and a train station called Union.
We have more named ghosts than anyplace except London--not to worry, we’re catching up--and we think the perfect location for a possessed statue is in the inner courtyard of the Federal Courts’ Court of Appeals Building. (Word! She’s called Black Aggie, and you can read all about her here. She’s one of the sights I routinely show my victims--I mean, friends visiting the city.) Considering the lawyers in This Town, it’s probably appropriate--especially since she was modeled on a statue by Augustus Saint Gaudens popularly called Grief. But I’ll digress more about that later.
Better yet, DC is a criminally under-used location for urban fantasy, which is why I set most of my contemporary fantasy here. Most of my fiction, period. In addition to all things spy, it’s a primo location for anything noir, as those of you who snagged the Alien Artifacts/Were--? Incentive booklet Dangerous Dames will immediately discover. What happens in our bars . . .
(Since I’m a nice person--when I’m not leading innocent civilians into the presence of demon-possessed statues, that is--you can find out exactly what happens in my kind of DC bar by following this link to "District Coincidental". It’s only one very short story, and Patricia Bray can only kill me once, right? Right?)
The main problem I face writing fiction about DC is it’s really, really hard to top the stuff that passes for normal around here. The cash drop site I describe in “District Coincidental” was famously used by spies and would-be influence peddlers in the days before the CIA moved out to the George Bush Center for Intelligence in northern Virginia.
(Yes, I know the name is a contradiction in terms. All us locals know. We didn’t name it; blame that on your elected officials. At least the in-house spy museum is good, much better than the four-room Spy Museum on Seventh Street you pay $20 to visit.)
The cash drop is still at the bar, unchanged from the 1940s. What you want to bet it’s still being used? (The other truth about This Town is politicians never learn from the past; they always repeat it.)
Even the city’s early history is outlandish. If unlike your elected representatives, you paid attention in history class, you may have learned that the British burned the White House, the partially constructed Capitol and several other government buildings to blackened shells on August 24, 1814. What you probably did not realize was they were not chased away by the Mid-Atlantic states’ pitiful excuse for an army. Andrew Jackson had nothing to do with it, either. He was off fighting the redcoats in the west, and didn’t send those Brits running back home to Mother England until the Battle of New Orleans--a full month after the war officially ended in January 2015.
No, what sent the British fleeing our Capital City in white-knuckled terror was the two--count ‘em, two!--hurricanes This Town rained down on them within a single twelve-hour period. Talk about hot air--and Congress wasn’t even in session. They’d fled the town days before with the President, the army, and anybody else with delusions of grandeur.
(I wrote about that, too. The novella, “Cooking up a Storm”, appears in Tales from the Vatican Vaults, an anthology published in the United Kingdom on the 201st anniversary of the invasion. I’d shoo you off to your local retailer to buy it, but currently Tales from the Vatican Vaults is only available from British merchants like Wordery.com. How’s that for fine Washington irony?)
Then there are Washington lawyers. Over the years I’ve met many, some of whom I’m delighted to call my friends. But they are definitely a breed apart. We haven’t seen their like since Rome ruled the world, and unlike conquering Roman generals, they aren’t plagued pesky, skull-toting slaves direly intoning: “Remember man, thou art but mortal.”
I’m pretty sure Washington lawyers are mortal, but I’m not entirely convinced they’re human. What they are is another matter. They’re too articulate for Cthulhu’s progeny, and despite what you may have heard, they are not hell spawn. The Devil has long since given up trying to control them. Every time he goes head to head with one, he loses. From what I’ve seen, Stephen Vincent Benet based “The Devil and Daniel Webster” on an actual case. After all, despite his Yankee roots, Daniel Webster spent most of his adult life arguing laws in Washington.
I don’t think our lawyers are space aliens, either. The breed has occupied the District for a long time without using the rest of us as a food source. The rumors they are vampires are just that. The real bloodsuckers in This Town are the lobbyists. Unlike lawyers, they never have to show up for daytime court dates.
But whatever they are, the ones actually practicing within the city limits have a really hard time behaving like people.
You’ve heard that line from William Congreve, “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.” Well, let me tell you, not around here. In evidence I present this article from The Washington Post, the newspaper that once upon a time gave you Watergate.
The short form is DC is a great town for street musicians. Spread Love, a New Orleans-style outdoor band, routinely plays for tips next to the Farragut North Metro station, on a corner overlooked by the Treasury Department and a major Washington law firm, to the delight of locals and tourists alike. The lawyers in both buildings, however, greeted their joyful noise the same enthusiasm as Linda Blair greeted her parish priest in The Exorcist, culminating in an attempt to sic the Secret Service on them--apparently forgetting under duress that the Secret Service no longer answers to the Treasury Department. (They’ve belonged to Homeland Security since 2001.)
When coercion by proxy didn’t work (because the agents were too busy taking selfies and grooving to the music), the lawyers tried bribery. They offered the band $200 a week to move. The band laughed. But the band can make up to $200 an hour on that corner--a sum that puts their earnings almost on par with a junior assistant Washington lawyer.
Obviously, to the lawyers overheated legal brains, this means war. They are buying equipment to measure the band’s sound levels in the hope they exceed legal limits. (Hard to do that in the heart of DC’s business district, just sayin’.) They have vowed to take their complaints to the mayor and the DC Council. And if that fails, they’re already putting the money aside to hire a string quartet to steal Spread Love’s space on the corner.
I can’t top that. I just can’t.
Well, maybe with a were-opossum . . .
Jean Marie Ward
JeanMarieWard.com
