Raise the Gipper! Chapter 14: The small cramped dark inside, is up

Raise the Gipper! Temporary freedom!: Chapter 14: The small cramped dark inside:

This one features some quite literal eating of the rich, a Santorum family quarrel, Santorums on the run in disguise, and the first on-screen appearance of Sarah Palin; the least you can do is read it, my brain hurt for days after trying to write like she talks.

This evening, the convention programming—which everyone kept pointing out had three times the audience of Obama’s record-breaking 2008 acceptance speech—was one long vamp until Reagan could make another appearance. The ice arena had been covered with carpet but the deck above it had been removed, so that the space was close to freezing, but the bright lights were on, and clouds formed and billowed in the upper reaches of the Forum. Everywhere, there were little mini-demonstrations, cheering fests, and general noisemaking by people who wanted to be on camera for the people back home.

Every few minutes the newscasters would remind anyone who might have been in a coma for the last couple of days that the newly risen Ronald Reagan would be arriving just after sunset, and that the hunt for the Santorums was still on.

But most of the time was taken up with the Draft Palin movement. Handmade PALIN-VP signs had appeared everywhere a few hours ago, and not long after there had been printed ones.

Crowds wandered through the aisles, obsessively singing:

Ron Reagan’s body lay a-mouldering in the grave,
And Mitt was lame, and Paul was nuts, and Newt would not behave,
But there were weapons to spend money on and forests left to pave,
So his corpse came shambling back!
All he needs is Sarah Palin,
All he needs is Sarah Palin,
All he needs is Sarah Palin,
Since his corpse came shambling back! 

MTV had latched onto a Palin-themed beach party. It featured American flag bikinis and Palin wigs and glasses on busty women, grinding on buff men in Reagan masks. The History Channel was promoting a documentary with the teaser, “Did Hitler Plan to Conquer Alaska with Zombie Stormtroopers?” Fox News reported epidemics of fainting and the vapors. MS-NBC covered a Westboro Baptist Church demonstration with signs that read GOD HATES ZOMBIES TOO.

Raise the Gipper! Chapter 13: Conspiracies against the laity, is up. Three entangled little love stories

Raise the Gipper! Temporary freedom!: Chapter 13: Conspiracies against the laity:  

Joe and Aura are having a very satisfactory lunch date, demonstrating a message for all young men: always take her someplace where the waiter is on your side.

Reagan can't get Nancy on the phone:

The tears of a zombie,

When he can't get his Mommy.

And things are very difficult in the Santorum household because, well, there's this medical discovery ... the denial phasebegins the chapter:

The doctor had huge white teeth, which he was using to smile like an exceptionally stupid skull, an impression reinforced by his shiny shaved head. “Well,” he said, “It’s no bad news at all. Right there in the blood test and the vitals, Mrs. Santorum. You and the Senator—and of course, we all hope and pray, the Vice President, soon—are about to be parents again. I’m sure you’ve been through all the drill before. I’ll want to get an ultrasound, but you can stop worrying—”

“You’re saying the blood work came up positive for pregnancy?” Santorum asked.

Something in his tone must have shaken the doctor out of his too-cool-to-treat-celebs-differently-from-anyone-else heartiness. “Is something wrong?”

“You might say that,” Santorum said. “Yes, you just might say that. That blood sample was from me.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah.” Santorum rolled up his sleeve. “Better get someone in here to take another one, and this time, don’t get it mixed up with someone else’s. For your information, if this one comes up pregnant, or if it says I have Dutch elm disease, that won’t be right either.”

“Right away, yeah,” the doctor said, and hurried out without meeting Santorum’s eyes.

“It’s all Obamacare,” Santorum muttered. “If he hadn’t totally socialized medicine in this country, doctors like this guy wouldn’t be able to get a veterinarian license.”

Raise the Gipper! Chapter 11: A rosary of pain, is up. And I'm pleasantly surprised by it

Raise the Gipper! Temporary freedom!: Chapter 11: A rosary of pain

Everything is so accelerated with this book; wrote it in two months flat for a situation that will only last a few months (in fact it changed some as I worked, and I've noticed a few inconsistencies due to that).  And because in a sort of weird way I kind of direct, design, and act my books (scenes in my novels I approach like a theatre guy, it's just how I do it) I have the same tendency that keeps actors, designers, and directors sane: I forget as soon as I'm done.  (A successful actor who remembered all his lines from all his plays, movies, and TV shows would be a very strange sort; actor memory for scripts is like a sort of longer term version of  "waitress memory" for orders).  So I had pretty much forgotten Chapter 11, and was delighted to find out that the Sabatini quote, which is from the most over the top scenery-chewing Evil Pirate in a pirate novel EVER, was at the front of what's actually a pretty lively chapter; sparks fly between Joe the Tea Partier and Aura the Occupier, Josh explains several things about the nature of the Divine that make sense to me anyway, there's quite a bit of really weird violence, and a nice out and out zombie versus evil bat-like space alien brawl.  AND the moral question about whether it would be okay to torture an evil space bat if you were already a damned soul anyway, in order to save all life on Earth, is explored in a way that I think many writers have overlooked, possibly because most of the ones who write about the fate of life on Earth don't write about zombies and evil space bats.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I was very pleased to find out how much fun it was turning out to be, especially since I could barely remember writing it (but I did, in one ferocious rush on March 24, according to my work diary.) 

Raise the Gipper! : Chapter 10: Bound to non-play, is up and available

Raise the Gipper! Temporary freedom!: Chapter 10: Bound to non-play

Not much to say here except there's a certain amount of goofy violence and the only scene set in the White House.  May add more details later, must run.

Raise the Gipper!: Chapter 9: A suit without faith, is up and lurching.

Raise the Gipper! Temporary freedom!: Chapter 9: A suit without faith

The most fun about writing this chapter was getting to write in the voice of Fox News.  My brain started to hurt a little toward the end and my hair became kind of stiff, and I had the oddest desire to wear high heeled pumps and glare into the camera as if I could hear people muttering 'bullshit!' at me, but it was fun nonetheless.  

The chapter opens with the Fox news broadcast, and then moves into terrifying Santorum, refrigerating Reagan, humiliating Mitt, and getting Joe and Aura closer together, so there's something in there for sadists, morticians, anybody who was ever bullied, and those of you who just like a nice love story about two nice people.   Sadisticpreviously bullied morticians with a sentimental side should especially appreciate it.

An excerpt from the Faux News coverage:

“Well, Jeremy, of course on line polls are not at all scientific, in fact they’re pretty much completely bogus and in this case it’s one that was made up on the spot by a high school student, but we all know that misleading non-information is always better than dead air, so here goes. The earliest survey taken since the rather startling resurrection of the former president is looking awfully good for the challenger and awfully not good for President Obama.” The young blonde woman’s head was bobbing vigorously but her chin-length hair never moved. “Preliminary results of a completely unscientific Facebook pool conducted by Britney Fern of Passaic Southwest High School appear to allegedly show that sixty-four percent of the members of the junior and senior classes think zombies are much cooler than black guys, and that includes an amazing twenty percent of the black guys in the poll, although Britney does note that the other four African-Americans she polled all say that Alfonce Wiley is kind of dumb and might not have understood the question. Now over to Mike Rotchitchiss at the Supreme Court, where, since it’s a Sunday and court will not be in session for several more weeks, he’s going to stand in front of a locked building and speculate.”

A brief squee about something cool

Allen Kaster's brave little operation at Infinivox has continued to produce some of the best audiobooks ever, despite this being kind of a rough time for audio, and I've been delighted in the past with how they've handled my work, but Adam Epstein's reading of my story "Martian Heart" (originally in Life on Mars) is just plain brilliant.  It's a very oral story, meant to be a voice speaking more than words on a page, and Epstein got that voice, leaving me so pleased my eyes are a little damp.  Yes. Just right.  Bravo.

Raise the Gipper! Chapter 8: A tea-party of ghosts, is up

Raise the Gipper!  Chapter 8: A tea-party of ghosts:

This is an unusual chapter of Raise the Gipper! in several ways.  For one thing, it's the only one that has generated any negative fan mail; a couple people thought it was some form of just too mean, although the person who used that phrase also added but not inaccurate.

I found that George Orwell quote irresistible for reasons that ought to be apparent.

Also, it's one of just a couple of chapters in this book with no scene breaks; funny generally means short, which generally means starting a scene as late as possible, so the scenes throughout are very short and cut to the chase very quickly, and the average scene is probably only about 1500 words.

So this is one of the few "long shots" (movie sense, i.e. the camera is continuous, without cuts to other cameras and angles) in the  book.  Nevertheless I took the long shot, because, frankly, it's the chapter where I get to beat up Newt Gingrich, and who wouldn't want to spend some extra time on that?  The Newtie Toot Toot might be the best comic foil since Dick Smothers and possibly since Oliver Hardy, but I'd rather watch him work with Moe Howard, actually.

Or maybe I just like the idea of a long shot.

And for those of you who are kind of thinking of this book as a civic duty, because you like my writing, or you like zombies, and you don't like Mitt, or Republicans, or you want to support politically progressive satire (oh, god, please, not that), this chapter is probably the single best chapter for pretending you read the book; you'll be able to say "I hope this isn't a spoiler but I loved the part where ...."

Of course a zombie novel kind of intrinsically has spoilers, now doesn't it?

If nothing else, read till the end to find the place where Callista Gingrich reveals which part of Newt is an exceptionally teeny little target.

(Big hint .... from another literary classic by another chronicler of the fantastic ...

But I think that the most likely reason of all  ....)