Some time ago we began a story called 'Deer in the Roomlights', where some boys (from Secret Sidewalk) plan to spy on a house that has a giant stuffed moose inside it. They were heading over to that house at the end of chapter one, and that's as far as the story ever got. It just didn't have enough going for it. They were going to spy on it from another - deserted - house across the street, and maybe one other boy was going to sneak into it and get in some trouble, but no, that other boy turned into Wyatt Lorenzo, who got a book of his own instead, called Renegade Robot.
We have some new ideas, though, beginning with Johnny's ideas about lights that go on and off by themselves when people leave and enter a room - there are no switches. it's some kind of magic. Also there are picture frames which cause whichever picture goes into it to come alive. Some other notions came up of skeleton lights that talk and laugh, and a temporarily vanishing ocean (when you see it at 11:20 in the morning, you can't see it again until 11:20 at night)(this as opposed to the cliche of 'midnight').
We followed this to the idea that the ghost house and the moose house are somehow connected in a mysterious way. They are opposites, identical in appearance but completely opposite in action. When a light goes on in one, the same light goes off in the other. When a window opens, its opposite closes, and so on. The kids discover this, and fool around, enjoying the side effects, until ... suddenly there is someone in the other house, and they open their front door, and the kids' door is closed. And locked. And they are trapped. Meanwhile, their opposites emerge from the other house and come out into the world, their world, in their place. These doppelgangers go into their lives and there is nothing the kids can do about it.
Until, the opposites are drawn back to their own house just as the kids were drawn to the ghost house in the first place, and when they enter it and close the door, the original kids are unlocked and can come back out into the world and into their own lives, only to encounter whatever it was their opposites had done in their places ....
Note that the door of the ghost house must have been left open at the beginning, leading the kids to go into it in the first place ...
Another one of Johnny's brilliant ideas is that instead of some neat ending, the kids and their opposites are merely drawn back in and out over and over again, and the story could simply end with 'et cetera et cetera'! Wouldn't that piss off a lot of readers, who love their tidy little endings so?
Now, it's Johnny's assignment to write his version of this and other stories in class this year. I can't wait to read them!!
Pigeon Weather Productions: Fiction Even Stranger Than Truth
Monday, August 30, 2010
re ducks
re-read a bit of my Time Zone just now. someone at barnes and noble commented it was 'probably the worst book' he had ever read, but i was sucked in, once again. i still think it has something to it
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seriously
i read an interview with a couple of women writers who complained that their books, bestselling 'chick lit' novels, weren't getting reviewed by the new york times, weren't being taken seriously as literature. sexism was the claim, and probably true enough, but to me the real problem is that ANY author of ANY fiction IS being taken seriously. it's just stories. relax!
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Saturday, August 28, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
driving force
an article today suggests that finding a new niche is a more powerful evolutionary force than interspecies competition. perhaps it's basic instinct, creatures migrate not out of necessity, such as scarcity, but out of a fundamental drive. we are born explorers, seekers ... as are all living things
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Saturday, August 21, 2010
Billy Budd
from the great movie of the great book, this central line delivered by the Captain: Billy, you in your goodness are as inhuman as Mr Claggert was in his evil
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blurb
it's the end of the world as we know it when the Renegade Robot causes the Frantic News Network and a powerful Christian sex cult to collide in a fiery orgasmic freak out
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Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Crusade IV
Lord help us! No, I take that back. Please, Lord, don't! The last thing we need is for America to declare Holy War against the billions of Muslims in the world - and yet, modern Republicans will do whatever they think will get them a 'win'. After all, they invaded Iraq merely in order to assure re-election in 2004 (otherwise known as the Rove Strategy). As Reagan would say, 'there they go again'. This time it's stoking up mass hysteria about a 'mosque' in New York City. If we all used the word 'church' instead of 'mosque', would they go so crazy over this? Probably. These are unprincipled people, who continually prey on the ignorance and fear they can so easily provoke. Wherever it suits them, they will stir up hatred against Muslims, Mexicans, Blacks, Chinese, Italians, Irish, it really doesn't matter. This is the history of America and any cursory glance through its pages will show you the same things happening over and over and over again. It just happens to be Republicans this time, but it was Democrats when it came to lynchings - we're all implicated as Americans. It ain't just Nazis who do this sort of thing.
Those who would attack the very freedom of religion this nation was ostensibly founded upon include many who claim to defend it.
Those who would attack the very freedom of religion this nation was ostensibly founded upon include many who claim to defend it.
Monday, August 16, 2010
intellectual workers
An article on teleread.com about publishers and price-fixing of ebooks recently provoked many comments; mostly from 'writers' who missed the point entirely. The article itself was fairly silly - it proposes that the antitrust issue is irrelevant, partly because there is no monopoly (which is debatable, certainly) and in part because government regulation is b-a-d (a typical conservative approach, which conveniently ignores all the b-a-d stuff that happens when there is no regulation, e.g. global financial collapses and disastrous oil spills, to name a couple of recent examples). The issue is purely one of economics and public policy - are monopolistic practices acceptable or should government intervene?
This has nothing at all to do with writers, writing, literature or authorship. Books, including ebooks, are products, the authors of which are analogous to assembly line workers in any industry. They contribute their piece and are paid according to what they can manage to get from the corporations they work for. Intellectual laborers historically suffer from their vanity and self-importance. They even attack each other for grammatical errors and typos in comments, rendering themselves even more irrelevant in this debate. I won't even get into the fields of literature in which these laborers toil. This is also not relevant, even if it is amusing.
This has nothing at all to do with writers, writing, literature or authorship. Books, including ebooks, are products, the authors of which are analogous to assembly line workers in any industry. They contribute their piece and are paid according to what they can manage to get from the corporations they work for. Intellectual laborers historically suffer from their vanity and self-importance. They even attack each other for grammatical errors and typos in comments, rendering themselves even more irrelevant in this debate. I won't even get into the fields of literature in which these laborers toil. This is also not relevant, even if it is amusing.
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Saturday, August 14, 2010
Our Mutual Friend
Once again amazed by Dickens, how he does it, a vast array of characters, all complex, all real, all unique, with their own 'tricks and manners', their own motivations, woven together in a web of tremendous and exciting complexity ...
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Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Secret Sidewalk on getfreeebooks.com
Saturday, August 07, 2010
Downloads by Week
by the numbers, for anyone who is curious, Zombie Nights went to #1 at around 32,000 on smashwords. 'Snapdragon' is currently #14 at around 10,000. Death Ray is #26 at around 6000, to give you an idea of how those things go. Zombie is now around 39,000 on smashwords and 5,000 on feedbooks. So, without Zombie, the totals are around 32,000 on smashwords and 26,000 on feedbooks for the other 24 titles combined. feedbooks downloads seem to be growing faster, especially overseas (as android phones spread, I suspect). Right now, approx 55% of my feedbooks downloads are in the US, another 15% are in the UK, and the other 30% are elsewhere around the world (Europe, Asia, Australia).
Of course, all of these are free ebooks. Amazon won't let me give stuff away so I've had to charge 0.99 dollars (0.75 pounds in Amazon UK) and the comparisons are amazing. I've sold approximately 20 ebooks through Amazon. Yep, 20. Compared to more than 100,000 free downloads. It's quite a difference!
if i was doing it for money, i'd write porn - um, i mean "erotica". that seems to be where the real money is in ebooks. no one can tell what you're reading on an ereader!
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Worminator
I wrote this five part story for my son while he's away at overnight camp this week. he'll get one part each day. the story is based on the ten plot points he gave me before he left.
------------------
On a cool grey summer morning, a black stretch limousine (matchbox serial number WRMN8R) pulled into the last runt-only reserved space in the coffee shop parking lot. Slithering from its trunk came a slimy brown wriggling robot monster neurasthenialogist, its one hundred and four lethally poisonous legs tapping their way across the pavement, freezing for a moment as the ferocious beast chained in the adjacent K9 StayAway vehicle unleashed a horrific yowling, then proceeding with calm fury as it realized the nasty creature could not reach him. Wormy, as his enemies called him (he had no friends), was on a mission, perhaps the most important in his entire oozacious career.
Suddenly a blast of hot air threatened to dispatch him airborne, but his tenacious tentacles kept him pegged to the sidewalk as humongous leaves hurled about him. A leaf blower man was rearranging the fallen tree appendages in some sort of unfathomable ritual which mystified the sinister mind of the wriggling robot. Surely the brown decaying vegetable matter was of no major concern. Why, then, all this noise and bother? But that was cogitational matter for another day. His ultimate target, the coffee shop, reared its bitter smell before him. Here lay a mystery worth investigating down to its final dregs. Wormy had sworn to defeat his arch-enemy many times before, but never had he been this close. Somewhere inside that coffee shop was the source of Super Sam's tremendous five hour power. All he had to do was find it, stop it, and put his enemy to sleep, forever.
------------------------
Creeping, crawling, slinking and sliding, Wormy inched his way closer and closer to the coffee shop, passing a travel agency on the right, a hat store on the left, vaguely wondering how such places could remain in business in times like these, then the deserted former furniture store on the left again, and the bank promising to be with you when adapting is the new model. Finally, he reached his destination. All he had left to get past was the simpering, yipping miniature white poodle which was straining now to reach him and bite his legs off. Not a problem. Wormy veered into a narrow crack between the tiles and slipped by the canine nearly invisibly.
"Dogs", Wormy thought. "Hate 'em."
Reaching the glass side wall, Wormy reached up with his very front feelers and attached himself to the pane. He pulled himself up and then along the perimeter, maintaining a low profile until he found a perfect perch; comfortable, yet with excellent interior visibility. His informant had communicated that the secret lay beneath one of the tables near the starboard entrance. That might have been helpful if Wormy had known which entrance was starboard, but he never could figure those things out. He now observed that the place had two entrances, and that every table was near to one or both of them. He sighed. At least he knew that the secret was 'beneath' a table, but now that he looked more closely, he could not see anything beneath a table except the floor.
"I should have known", he told himself. "Never trust a moth", for it was indeed Goober the Moth who had told him of the secret, and now that Wormy had time to think, he realized that Goober had never yet, in his experience at least, been right about anything at all.
-----------------------
As Wormy waited and watched, he saw nothing but sporadic crowds of people spring up, first waiting in one line, then waiting in another, entering empty-handed and leaving with hot white paper cups in their hands. Somewhere in between those events, plastic or paper was exchanged.
"It must be a sort of ritual", Wormy told himself. "One of those odd human things. They are always giving each other one thing and then turning around and taking another, a perpetual transfer of items. Maybe it's their language", he reasoned, "the way that we worms feel the earth and all of its vibrations to know the state of the world, and the way those filthy canines sniff and lick every bit of discarded detritus, so these human creatures understand each other only by presenting and receiving objects to and from each other".
He felt another gust of heat and was nearly blown off his transparent perch, knocked silly by another dead and dried out leaf. The worm turned, and just in time to make an important, even crucial discovery. The leaf blower man had turned his hot air tube directly at the entrance to the hat shop and in that moment, the shop itself seemed to waver and flicker in the air for a moment, and then it vanished completely. Wormy could not believe his eyes, and rubbed them with several forelegs. Instead of the hat shop, there was a booth of sorts, like the kiosk where they sell tickets at the boardwalk, and inside the window of that booth was a raging, bright red vortex of lava, smoke and steam.
Then it was gone, and the hat shop reappeared in all its glorious unlikelihood. There again was the poster of the girl with the foot-long eye lashes, and the other poster of a girl with snakes for hair. Piles of leather caps and straw boaters emerged on the shelves within.
"The portal!", Wormy exclaimed. "So Goober was right about something after all! That phony hat shop is the gateway to the Infernal-Reckoning-whatsit-type-place. Amazing! But how?", he wondered, "how to get it to open?"
The leafblower man had redirected his bursts of pointless mess-rearranging currents towards the bank, and Wormy could not think of any way he could force the creature to repeat his earlier effort.
"There must be another way", Wormy thought. "And I must find it, quick"
----------------------
Wormy watched the hat store for some time, but nothing else occurred. No one ever went in. No one ever came out. Why would they? Who the heck needs a hat store? You can get a hat almost anywhere. After awhile he returned his attention to the coffee shop, especially the tables and their underneaths. He inched himself a bit lower to get a better angle, but all he saw was thoroughly disgusting; some roundish globs of gray goo were attached to the bottoms of every table. He wondered how the people could calmly eat their fancy pastries on the other sides of those thin slices of wood, and yet they sat there, greedily gobbling down those butter and flour mixtures with chocolate. Here was an old woman stuffing her face with doughnut. There was a young boy mashing a muffin into his mouth. Now a young executive chugged some icy beverage. Over there a well-dressed woman was sipping something hot. Wormy felt like he was losing his marbles.
"I've been on a lot of dangerous missions before", he reminded himself, "but nothing as boring and nauseating as this".
Only the thought of Super Sam kept him from abandoning his post.
"That big lug", he thought. "Who does he think he is and where does he get those powers? To be able to lift small children with his little finger, helpless, innocent children who do not wanted to be lifted at all? To be able to wander around initiating conversations with just anyone? It isn't natural. And, worst of all, that friendliness! Oh the horror. Oh the humanity. Oh the humidity. Hmmm. It IS getting rather hot and sticky out here!"
Fortunately, Wormy was a trained professional neurasthenialogist, so all of his whining and complaining could not keep him from functioning normally, and so kept his eyes on the ball, on the underneaths of tables that is, and even though he watched, and even though he saw, he could scarcely believe the revelation that revealed itself so readily. It was the woman with the hot beverage! Casually, she reached beneath the table, tapped one of the pieces of hardened bubblegum three times, and a drawer slid out, like a keyboard beneath a computer. She typed several spots on its surface and the drawer drew back into the table as if it had never been there. Behind him, the hat store vanished once again and he saw the lady stroll calmly into the portal and then she was gone. Wormy hurried after her as fast as he could go, but he was a small mechanical centipede after all, not built for speed, and by the time he arrived the millinery had re-established itself as the erstwhile occupant of that space.
"Drat!", exclaimed the exasperated insect, but after his motor had cooled a bit he reflected on his good fortune, realizing that now he finally knew the secret, and was close to his goal of the ultimate domination of his most treacherous enemy, that big old nice guy, Super Sam.
-----------------------
There were only two obstacles in his way. One, how to lure Super Sam to this particular suburban strip mall, and two, once he was lured to the mall, how to point him in the direction of the so-called hat store. Well, maybe three obstacles, Wormy realized, because once he had Sam here in the mall, and there at the hat store, there was the other matter of what to do then. The hat store might be a gateway to the Infernal Reckoning-whatsit-type-place, but what did that even mean? Would Sam be consumed entirely by lava and flames, or would he merely experience some temporary discomfort from the heat? Once he was pushed inside, could he easily get back out again? These were some of the unknowns facing the worminator as he contemplated his next move.
Getting Super Sam to the site was going to be difficult enough by itself. Sam lived twenty miles away and never, as far as Wormy knew, even traveled over the hill in this direction.
"I will have to make up some kind of a story", Wormy decided, "and send him a note. No, I will send him a series of notes, a note every day, and each note will lead the story further and further until Sam simply can't help himself, and will find himself magically drawn to this very spot. After that", Wormy schemed, "it will be a simple matter of using that nasty white dog to bark him over in this direction, then that lanky kid's skateboard will come in handy. Super Sam will trip on the skateboard and roll in the direction of the hat store. That is when I will make my move!"
Wormy got busy and started to write. He was lucky enough to have been created with the gift of gab, and in no time at all he had scribbled down a complicated and thoroughly beguiling story which he sent, in installments, far over the hill and deep into the woods where Super Sam lived in his trailer with his truck and his tools. The story was intriguing, about a secret magical spot of great power, in which a treasure was hidden, a treasure that could only be recovered by someone big enough, strong enough, and nice enough to ask for it politely.
"I can do this!", Sam declared, and as the last note contained quite detailed directions ("proceed eight hundred feet and make a u-turn"), he hopped into his truck and drove over the hill, straight to the strip mall in question. There, Wormy awaited him from beneath the very table with the hidden drawer. As soon as he saw Sam pull up he tapped on the gum and the drawer slid open. Wormy scampered to the upside and tapped away on the spots in the same sequence he had witnessed the mysterious lady doing.
Yes! It worked! The hat store vanished right on queue! His scheme was going well. The stupid white dog started yapping its head off and Sam veered over to its left to avoid it and there he stumbled onto the skateboard which took off with Sam's ankle attached and dragged him straight towards the portal. Wormy rushed out to the sidewalk as fast as his hundred little legs could carry him - too slow once again to get there in time. He saw Super Sam disappear into the gateway, but before he could get there himself, the darn hat store came back just as Wormy had reached the last tile.
All he could do now was wait. If Super Sam never came out, then victory would be his. On the other hand ... but no, he didn't want to go there.
"Think positive", Wormy reminded himself. "Think triumph. Think joy. Think ultimate domination".
He thought all of those things while he waited, and waited and waited out there on the sidewalk. No one came out of the hat store. No one went in. Why would they? He was becoming more and more confident with every passing moment, but then, what's that? Could it be? Is that Super Sam coming out of the store, and with a new black cowboy hat on his head? Oh no, it was, and he was heading right towards Wormy, his big boots stomping down on the pavement like heavy steel plates, coming right at him ... Left ... Right ... Left ...
Squeak!!!
Squash!!
Splat!
And then that was that.
------------------
On a cool grey summer morning, a black stretch limousine (matchbox serial number WRMN8R) pulled into the last runt-only reserved space in the coffee shop parking lot. Slithering from its trunk came a slimy brown wriggling robot monster neurasthenialogist, its one hundred and four lethally poisonous legs tapping their way across the pavement, freezing for a moment as the ferocious beast chained in the adjacent K9 StayAway vehicle unleashed a horrific yowling, then proceeding with calm fury as it realized the nasty creature could not reach him. Wormy, as his enemies called him (he had no friends), was on a mission, perhaps the most important in his entire oozacious career.
Suddenly a blast of hot air threatened to dispatch him airborne, but his tenacious tentacles kept him pegged to the sidewalk as humongous leaves hurled about him. A leaf blower man was rearranging the fallen tree appendages in some sort of unfathomable ritual which mystified the sinister mind of the wriggling robot. Surely the brown decaying vegetable matter was of no major concern. Why, then, all this noise and bother? But that was cogitational matter for another day. His ultimate target, the coffee shop, reared its bitter smell before him. Here lay a mystery worth investigating down to its final dregs. Wormy had sworn to defeat his arch-enemy many times before, but never had he been this close. Somewhere inside that coffee shop was the source of Super Sam's tremendous five hour power. All he had to do was find it, stop it, and put his enemy to sleep, forever.
------------------------
Creeping, crawling, slinking and sliding, Wormy inched his way closer and closer to the coffee shop, passing a travel agency on the right, a hat store on the left, vaguely wondering how such places could remain in business in times like these, then the deserted former furniture store on the left again, and the bank promising to be with you when adapting is the new model. Finally, he reached his destination. All he had left to get past was the simpering, yipping miniature white poodle which was straining now to reach him and bite his legs off. Not a problem. Wormy veered into a narrow crack between the tiles and slipped by the canine nearly invisibly.
"Dogs", Wormy thought. "Hate 'em."
Reaching the glass side wall, Wormy reached up with his very front feelers and attached himself to the pane. He pulled himself up and then along the perimeter, maintaining a low profile until he found a perfect perch; comfortable, yet with excellent interior visibility. His informant had communicated that the secret lay beneath one of the tables near the starboard entrance. That might have been helpful if Wormy had known which entrance was starboard, but he never could figure those things out. He now observed that the place had two entrances, and that every table was near to one or both of them. He sighed. At least he knew that the secret was 'beneath' a table, but now that he looked more closely, he could not see anything beneath a table except the floor.
"I should have known", he told himself. "Never trust a moth", for it was indeed Goober the Moth who had told him of the secret, and now that Wormy had time to think, he realized that Goober had never yet, in his experience at least, been right about anything at all.
-----------------------
As Wormy waited and watched, he saw nothing but sporadic crowds of people spring up, first waiting in one line, then waiting in another, entering empty-handed and leaving with hot white paper cups in their hands. Somewhere in between those events, plastic or paper was exchanged.
"It must be a sort of ritual", Wormy told himself. "One of those odd human things. They are always giving each other one thing and then turning around and taking another, a perpetual transfer of items. Maybe it's their language", he reasoned, "the way that we worms feel the earth and all of its vibrations to know the state of the world, and the way those filthy canines sniff and lick every bit of discarded detritus, so these human creatures understand each other only by presenting and receiving objects to and from each other".
He felt another gust of heat and was nearly blown off his transparent perch, knocked silly by another dead and dried out leaf. The worm turned, and just in time to make an important, even crucial discovery. The leaf blower man had turned his hot air tube directly at the entrance to the hat shop and in that moment, the shop itself seemed to waver and flicker in the air for a moment, and then it vanished completely. Wormy could not believe his eyes, and rubbed them with several forelegs. Instead of the hat shop, there was a booth of sorts, like the kiosk where they sell tickets at the boardwalk, and inside the window of that booth was a raging, bright red vortex of lava, smoke and steam.
Then it was gone, and the hat shop reappeared in all its glorious unlikelihood. There again was the poster of the girl with the foot-long eye lashes, and the other poster of a girl with snakes for hair. Piles of leather caps and straw boaters emerged on the shelves within.
"The portal!", Wormy exclaimed. "So Goober was right about something after all! That phony hat shop is the gateway to the Infernal-Reckoning-whatsit-type-place. Amazing! But how?", he wondered, "how to get it to open?"
The leafblower man had redirected his bursts of pointless mess-rearranging currents towards the bank, and Wormy could not think of any way he could force the creature to repeat his earlier effort.
"There must be another way", Wormy thought. "And I must find it, quick"
----------------------
Wormy watched the hat store for some time, but nothing else occurred. No one ever went in. No one ever came out. Why would they? Who the heck needs a hat store? You can get a hat almost anywhere. After awhile he returned his attention to the coffee shop, especially the tables and their underneaths. He inched himself a bit lower to get a better angle, but all he saw was thoroughly disgusting; some roundish globs of gray goo were attached to the bottoms of every table. He wondered how the people could calmly eat their fancy pastries on the other sides of those thin slices of wood, and yet they sat there, greedily gobbling down those butter and flour mixtures with chocolate. Here was an old woman stuffing her face with doughnut. There was a young boy mashing a muffin into his mouth. Now a young executive chugged some icy beverage. Over there a well-dressed woman was sipping something hot. Wormy felt like he was losing his marbles.
"I've been on a lot of dangerous missions before", he reminded himself, "but nothing as boring and nauseating as this".
Only the thought of Super Sam kept him from abandoning his post.
"That big lug", he thought. "Who does he think he is and where does he get those powers? To be able to lift small children with his little finger, helpless, innocent children who do not wanted to be lifted at all? To be able to wander around initiating conversations with just anyone? It isn't natural. And, worst of all, that friendliness! Oh the horror. Oh the humanity. Oh the humidity. Hmmm. It IS getting rather hot and sticky out here!"
Fortunately, Wormy was a trained professional neurasthenialogist, so all of his whining and complaining could not keep him from functioning normally, and so kept his eyes on the ball, on the underneaths of tables that is, and even though he watched, and even though he saw, he could scarcely believe the revelation that revealed itself so readily. It was the woman with the hot beverage! Casually, she reached beneath the table, tapped one of the pieces of hardened bubblegum three times, and a drawer slid out, like a keyboard beneath a computer. She typed several spots on its surface and the drawer drew back into the table as if it had never been there. Behind him, the hat store vanished once again and he saw the lady stroll calmly into the portal and then she was gone. Wormy hurried after her as fast as he could go, but he was a small mechanical centipede after all, not built for speed, and by the time he arrived the millinery had re-established itself as the erstwhile occupant of that space.
"Drat!", exclaimed the exasperated insect, but after his motor had cooled a bit he reflected on his good fortune, realizing that now he finally knew the secret, and was close to his goal of the ultimate domination of his most treacherous enemy, that big old nice guy, Super Sam.
-----------------------
There were only two obstacles in his way. One, how to lure Super Sam to this particular suburban strip mall, and two, once he was lured to the mall, how to point him in the direction of the so-called hat store. Well, maybe three obstacles, Wormy realized, because once he had Sam here in the mall, and there at the hat store, there was the other matter of what to do then. The hat store might be a gateway to the Infernal Reckoning-whatsit-type-place, but what did that even mean? Would Sam be consumed entirely by lava and flames, or would he merely experience some temporary discomfort from the heat? Once he was pushed inside, could he easily get back out again? These were some of the unknowns facing the worminator as he contemplated his next move.
Getting Super Sam to the site was going to be difficult enough by itself. Sam lived twenty miles away and never, as far as Wormy knew, even traveled over the hill in this direction.
"I will have to make up some kind of a story", Wormy decided, "and send him a note. No, I will send him a series of notes, a note every day, and each note will lead the story further and further until Sam simply can't help himself, and will find himself magically drawn to this very spot. After that", Wormy schemed, "it will be a simple matter of using that nasty white dog to bark him over in this direction, then that lanky kid's skateboard will come in handy. Super Sam will trip on the skateboard and roll in the direction of the hat store. That is when I will make my move!"
Wormy got busy and started to write. He was lucky enough to have been created with the gift of gab, and in no time at all he had scribbled down a complicated and thoroughly beguiling story which he sent, in installments, far over the hill and deep into the woods where Super Sam lived in his trailer with his truck and his tools. The story was intriguing, about a secret magical spot of great power, in which a treasure was hidden, a treasure that could only be recovered by someone big enough, strong enough, and nice enough to ask for it politely.
"I can do this!", Sam declared, and as the last note contained quite detailed directions ("proceed eight hundred feet and make a u-turn"), he hopped into his truck and drove over the hill, straight to the strip mall in question. There, Wormy awaited him from beneath the very table with the hidden drawer. As soon as he saw Sam pull up he tapped on the gum and the drawer slid open. Wormy scampered to the upside and tapped away on the spots in the same sequence he had witnessed the mysterious lady doing.
Yes! It worked! The hat store vanished right on queue! His scheme was going well. The stupid white dog started yapping its head off and Sam veered over to its left to avoid it and there he stumbled onto the skateboard which took off with Sam's ankle attached and dragged him straight towards the portal. Wormy rushed out to the sidewalk as fast as his hundred little legs could carry him - too slow once again to get there in time. He saw Super Sam disappear into the gateway, but before he could get there himself, the darn hat store came back just as Wormy had reached the last tile.
All he could do now was wait. If Super Sam never came out, then victory would be his. On the other hand ... but no, he didn't want to go there.
"Think positive", Wormy reminded himself. "Think triumph. Think joy. Think ultimate domination".
He thought all of those things while he waited, and waited and waited out there on the sidewalk. No one came out of the hat store. No one went in. Why would they? He was becoming more and more confident with every passing moment, but then, what's that? Could it be? Is that Super Sam coming out of the store, and with a new black cowboy hat on his head? Oh no, it was, and he was heading right towards Wormy, his big boots stomping down on the pavement like heavy steel plates, coming right at him ... Left ... Right ... Left ...
Squeak!!!
Squash!!
Splat!
And then that was that.
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