by Corrine Kenner | Feb 20, 2016 | Uncategorized
Star closed the door and locked it. The cab was waiting to take her to the airport.
She didn’t know if she would ever return. In a way, she hoped this would be the last time she’d ever have to look at the trim, white-painted bungalow that had been her home for so long.
She had grown up there, moving from pigtails to a Mohawk to a full-fledged Afro in the process.
She had watched her parents grow old and die there.
And now that her sister was gone, too – three funerals, all in less than three years – she was ready to move on to a new place, with fewer painful memories.
She slid into the back seat of the taxi.
“United,” she told the driver, checking to make sure that her boarding pass and I.D. were still in her purse.
Traffic was light, but then again, it was 11 o’clock at night. Normal people were at home, getting ready for bed, following their routine, getting ready for another day.
Star only knew that she would wake up in Los Angeles, in a Hyatt hotel, far from the sadness and fear that had plagued her for as long as she had lived in that little white house.
The cab driver pulled up outside the United terminal and slowed to a stop.
It was only then that she looked at him for the first time.
From the back, he looked oddly familiar – even in shadow.
That sinewy neck. Those pointed ears. Sloping shoulders … and then he twitched.
She knew that twitch.
As he turned, she recognized his menacing grin. She had seen it, every night since she was three, whenever she dared to peek under her bed.
“Don’t run off too fast,” he leered. “I’m going with you.”
by Corrine Kenner | Feb 13, 2016 | Flash Fiction, The Wanderers
Heevin squeezed himself into his man suit.
Every morning he had to go through the same rigorous process of dressing for work. He folded in his 8-foot tentacles, forced the air out of his thoracic bladder, and sliced off his carbon monoxide stress antenna. That part hurt a little, like breaking a nail, but it always grew back during the night.
Once he had adjusted his skin, he looked passably human. A little ungainly, but what data analyst didn’t come off as clumsy and socially inept? His discomfort was a feature, not a bug.
He slithered out to his Prius – no, wait, he forced himself to walk, in case any neighbors were looking – and made his way down to Facebook’s data center.
Mark Zuckerberg, one of Heevin’s childhood friends from Planet Zuck, had arranged for him to move to Earth for the express purpose of finding love.
No, Heevin wasn’t looking for love in the traditional sense. Instead, it was his mission to find and quantify the data set that would enable Facebook engineers to implement Phase Six of their Cosmic Domination Tour.
Frankly, it was lonely work. Only a few Zuckerines actually worked on earth; most telecommuted from home. The few female data scientists who worked in Heevin’s office were equally cold and remote, even though they were human. And while they paid lip service to love, they all spoke bitterly of men – especially on Valentine’s Day, when only the secretary got flowers.
Ugh. Valentine’s Day. A tribute to a tortured, slaughtered saint. This was passion? This was romance? Try as he might, Heevin couldn’t wrap his oversized head around the concept.
Heevin sat down at his desk and compiled the Facebook data that had come in overnight.
Six billion likes.
Three million pokes.
And seventy-eight thousand shares of an ecard that read, “Roses are red, violets are blue. I want to puke when I think of you.”
“Puke?” Heevin googled the term.
So now love was conflated with projectile vomiting.
Humans might be complex biological entities, but they certainly didn’t have the dignity and grace Spork gave one-celled organisms.
Behind him, a woman cleared her throat, shaking loose some mucous before she took a few quick puffs from her inhaler.
“Quite the Valentine, isn’t it? Six guys from high school sent it to me this morning.”
He turned to see Stephanie, a pleasingly plump middle-aged analyst from the Department of Dinner Plate Photos.
She was wearing a new Grumpy Cat sweatshirt; perhaps she was angling for a transfer to the Division of Cute Cat Videos.
Something about the cat’s scowling face, superimposed over her 44-Ds, piqued Heevin’s interest. He noticed that she smelled a little ripe, like a grocery-store peach that would go bad in one more day.
Heevin’s scientific mind began to compile a devious plan.
“Stephanie,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “Do you have any plans for lunch?”
They found a table for two in a quiet corner of Facebook’s company cafeteria, a revolving restaurant at the top of Zuckerberg Towers. A tuxedo-clad waiter unfolded their napkins with a flourish, the wine steward brought them each a glass of Pinot Noir, and the chef’s personal assistant chef stopped by to tell them about the day’s special: fair-trade broiled pheasant, topped with a dollop of fresh-caught Alaskan salmon mousse, garnished with Himalayan greens, and drizzled with cold-pressed pomegranate oil.
They both agreed to sample the dish. When the chef went back to the kitchen, Stephanie sighed.
“I miss the days when Nigella cooked for us,” she said. “I feel like Rocco just phones it in.”
Heevin swallowed wrong, which started him coughing. Drinking water through his mouth always took special concentration, but Stephanie’s criticism of the Zuckerberg chef had caught him off guard. Heevin knew for a fact that Rocco personally flew to Planet Zuck every week to get live Wagyu Garlic for his Pasta alla Bolognese.
He reached for his water, but he forgot he wasn’t wearing his tentacles. Instead of finding the glass and picking it up with a slow, graceful shimmy, his thick human paws knocked it off the table.
His coughing intensified. Stephanie handed him her glass – and in the process, her fingers brushed his.
Suddenly, his coughing stopped. He had reached his objective — and the amuse bouche, a delicate ginger-sprinkled hamachi, hadn’t even been served yet!
They enjoyed their lunch immensely. The Zuckerines knew how to cook, and humans knew how to eat. You didn’t need a degree from M.I.T. to see that.
The pinot noir was a perfect complement to the paté-stuffed truffles that started every meal in the Facebook café. A bolder, richer-bodied merlot brought out the dusky undertones of the pheasant.
Despite her earlier misgivings, Stephanie agreed that Rocco had outdone himself that day.
For his part, Heevin thought Stephanie grew more beautiful with every bite. She cooed and purred all through lunch, and she giggled like a schoolgirl when Heevin made a joke about savoring the breast meat.
By the time the dessert cart arrived, Heevin and Stephanie were playing footsie under the table. She hadn’t shaved her legs in years, and the downy hair above her ankles drove him crazy with desire.
For the first time in his 18 months on Earth, Heevin knew that love wasn’t just a theory. It was a fact.
During his drive home that night, the onboard air analyzer in his Prius confirmed what Heevin already suspected: skin-to-skin contact with an ovulating human female had infected him with an invasive, parasitic virus.
A purple light flashed on his dashboard, bells began to chime, and a well-modulated robot voice advised him that his health and safety would soon be assured.
“Decontamination protocol initiating in 10 seconds.”
Heevin pressed the pause button.
Yes, he could rid himself of the virus. No Zuckerine had ever willingly submitted to an ongoing infection, so no one knew what the long-term ramifications would be. What if it led to illness or incapacitation? What if it led to marriage?
With a click, Heevin could sterilize his bloodstream and start fresh. He could wash that woman right out of his Keratin, and no one would ever be the wiser.
But he didn’t want to.
She had already invited him to her condo, for an evening of Dungeons and Dragons Super Boggle Strip Scrabble. The game was her own invention, but it sounded intriguing.
If he liked playing with her, she had suggested, they could move from the gameroom to the bedroom.
Heevin already knew he would win, whether or not he lost his shirt.
He was a scientist, after all.
He smiled, knowing that Mark Zuckerberg would soon get the data he’d been waiting for.
And Stephanie?
Heevin laughed out loud. Later that night, when he stepped out of his skin, she would get a little something, too.
by Corrine Kenner | Feb 4, 2016 | NaNoWriMo, Tarot for Writers
This is where my book began
I have a soft spot in my heart for NaNoWriMo, because it prompted me to write the Tarot for Writersguidebook. In fact, the whole project started with this simple Q&A feature for the NaNoWriMo website in 2006.
Q: Corrine, as a mystic, you are writing your novel using only tarot cards to guide you. Could you tell us more about the psychic method for novel writing?
A: Most people think of tarot cards as a fortune-telling device, but they’re also an excellent tool for writing and creative thinking.
There are 78 cards in a tarot deck, and each one is packed with images and symbols. The names alone will trigger your imagination: the first three cards, for example, are the Fool, the Magician, and the High Priestess.
In theory, every card in the tarot deck represents a separate stage in the journey of life. In fact, tarot readers often refer to the “Fool’s Journey” in the cards—which is a lot like the Hero’s Journey that writers use to frame their stories.
At its most basic, however, the tarot is simply a practical way to build a novel from the ground up.
If you need a setting for your story, pull a card: most tarot decks include images of deserts, gardens, mountains, cities, farms, and village squares.
If you need a hero or a heroine, you can take your pick of protagonists, antagonists, and a full cast of supporting characters.
If you need help describing your characters, you’ll have no trouble visualizing them once they’re laid out on the table in front of you. You’ll find men, women, and children — old and young, rich and poor, from every walk of life—and it’s easy to invent dialogue when you imagine all of those figures talking to each other.
If you’d like a simple way to develop a storyline, throw a few cards to represent the past, present, and future, or the beginning, middle, and end of your tale. If you need a plot twist, just shuffle, and you’ll find conflict and surprises in every turn of the cards.
It’s also fun to “read” the cards for your characters. You can lay out a simple spread to determine what happened to a character in the past—or to decipher what’s going on in their fictional subconscious minds.
And if you want to kill off any of your characters, you can always deal them the Death card.
