Samhain

As it's Samhain, or Halloween, here's a wee story for the season...

Samhain

 

The light is fading. Burnt orange, matching the leaves, the sun sinks closer to the horizon. I almost believe it will hiss as it kisses the water of the loch; my lips curl upward as this fails to happen.

There is a vague shape in the sky, sort of an anti-shadow, as the moon begins to assert its dominance. A shape wheels across the sky, flitting through the light.

The air has a greasy feel to it. The static charge is high, causing the hair on my arms to rise as though in response to an ancient calling. I feel the pull inside me, hooking into every fibre of my being.

The sun passes its limit, disappearing below the waves. For a few moments, stray ripples of light remain to colour the water; then it is gone, leaving only blackness behind.

Darkness falls, an absence of light punctured by pinpricks of starlight. The temperature falls, cold drawing in close. I can feel it, the closing in of…something.

It is Samhain, you see, the night of the year when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest. I can feel it, bulging in places and stretched almost to breaking point. It reminds me of a plastic bag that is overfilled, the material stretched taut and almost transparent, ready to tear.

Like now.

A soft splash murmurs across the water, some unseen fish breaking the surface. Ripples spread outwards, mirroring the ripples I feel in the surface of reality.

I stand there, allowing the night to wrap me in a velvet embrace. I can feel…things…moving just outside my perception. Hunting, searching, looking for a way to bridge the divide.

I shiver. The moon is full now, casting silver light across the waters.  I feel a tear begin in the veil and close my eyes. A presence leaks through, liquid and alien. It settles on me and soaks into my being, imposing its will on mine.

Calmness suffuses me. I am expecting evil, inhumanity, something; not this.

My innermost desires and thoughts are laid bare. Stripped of all obfuscation and examined, I almost cannot feel the pressures that are applied.

It is over almost before I know it has started. The presence is gone, leaving behind nothing but a hollowness inside.

I feel my smile grow without it touching my eyes. I know how to fill that emptiness the presence has left behind. I feel a purpose suffuse me.

I start to walk. Away from the loch, back towards the town. My smile grows as my steps quicken. The hollow feeling is soon to be banished, at least for a while.

As I walk, the knife drops from my sleeve and into my hand.

Clean Reader - Legal or Ethical?

I've been hearing and reading a lot recently about an app called Clean Reader that has been developed to, according to its developers, 'remove unnecessary profanity and blasphemy from a book.'
I have to say that this idea fills me with dread. If it's legal (and I have my doubts) then this is the thin end of the wedge for overly aggressive censorship.
The idea that someone can take a piece of work I've written and randomly change words makes a mockery of the creative process. Like all authors, I weigh my word choices carefully in order to evoke a specific feeling or setting. Change one word and the whole sentence/paragraph loses its impact and clarity.
I very rarely use profanity in my daily life, I've never felt a need for it. (Plus, as a father to two small children, I have to be careful what I say, but that's a whole other story...)
My books, however, do contain profanity. They also contain sex and violence and blasphemy. I write horror stories, for Christ's sake (oops, wonder if clean reader works on blogs?) and, to write a believable character, they need to behave in a way that is consistent with real life. So, for example, if someone is in severe pain, I believe they would resort to good old Anglo-Saxon (i.e. swearing) rather than saying something along the lines of, 'Oh dang, my leg's hanging off, that stings a bit.'
My current WIP deals with the relationship between a group of four students on a hiking holiday. There is a typical student drinking session involved, and yes, the language does get rather choice. Ever been on a student drinking binge? Enough said.
I also want to touch on the legality of this app. The makers say they have taken legal advice and that, because it performs the word substitution on the fly, without changing the original downloaded text, it is legal. I disagree. My considered opinion (and I do have a legal qualification) is that what the app does is just as much an infringement on the intellectual property as changing the source file. It's the same as going to an art gallery and placing masking tape over the naughty bits on a painting. The original is still there, you just can't see it. And I wonder how well you'd fare in court if you tried this and claimed that you weren't altering the originals, just providing a different version that didn't offend your religious and cultural sensitivities. Not very well, I suspect.
Another thought that occurs to me is this: what is the position re reviews? I mean, having seen some of the app's attempts at cleaning up the original text (a quick search of the internet provides several examples), it's clearly not very good. But if a reader tries a book and writes a scathing review based on the clean reader version, how valid is this? I mean, they haven't read the original book, so how can they review it? It's like watching Under The Dome on TV and then trying to write a review of the book. (And again, a quick search should unearth that particular shit storm. (Oops, dang it all to heck, another target for clean reader!))
I've no idea (yet) if it's possible to find out if a book has been modified by clean reader, although I'm looking into it and following the debate with great interest. If it is possible, then I shall be keeping an eye on it and requesting any of my books be excluded from it. If you don't want the language, don't buy the books. I don't believe this app is legal or ethical - how much uproar would there be if I produced an app that modified parts of the Bible? Or any other religious text, for that matter? We only have to look at the recent Charlie Hebdo attack  to see where this kind of tinkering can lead us., So, through gritted teeth: Leave. The. Books. Alone.