Author: John Siebelink

“After the Stop”—A Short Story

Here’s a little crime fiction piece I wrote last week. This is the first short story I have ever posted on CrapPile, but in honor of over 1000 followers in rapid time here is a reward for visiting me and showing me some love!

PS–Forgive me if its a little rough. Unlike blogging, fiction writing is something I had taken an even longer break from before starting back up…

“SHIT!”

LeMarr pulled over as the red and blue lights lit up his rear-view mirror and hit the emergency lights. His license and insurance card he kept paper clipped to the registration in the cupholder for this very situation. As he reached for the bundle he felt the Beretta tucked in his belt. This he threw hastily into an old fast food bag in the passenger side floor board, grabbing an old fry to munch on when. He attempted to process the cold, greasy potato as patrolman got to his door.

“I’m Officer Bates with the San Rapids Police Department. The reason I’m stopping you tonight is because you were driving without your headlights on. I also noticed that your right brake light is out, were you aware of that?”

“I didn’t, no. This is my first time working this week.” His flashlight explored the inside of the car before coming to the information in LeMarr’s hand. “That your license and everything?” The driver nodded and offered them slowly. Bates took them and shined his light over them briefly before turning away.

“Hang tight for a bit, alright?” His light clicked off and he disappeared back into his squad car. LeMarr’s heart started beating fast as he stared down at the Buger Shop bag. Part of him felt that the flashlight had rested on it longer than anything else when the cop was scoping out the car. Did he suspect that there was more than a week’s worth of trash at the bottom of it? Not only was the gun in there, which he had no permit to carry—let alone conceal—but also the Amp his brother Tre had stashed there that morning when his probation officer showed up for a visit. He had completely forgotten it was there until that moment, when it was too late.

Thoughts raced through his mind. He was positive there were no outstanding warrants on him. The DUI charge, which should have been the only item on record for him, had just been dropped. The Marine Corps Reserves has kept him clean for over two years and was the only reason the cop had not sensed any drugs as he was leaning at the window. If he had been stopped before his enlistment years ago, they would already be halfway to the San Rapids County Jail.

He could not believe he had been so stupid. The school where he was the night janitor at was two blocks away in full view, and still he managed to get himself pulled over. In all his years of driving he had never had a brake light go out on him; he did not even know that that was possible. The most pressing matter, though, was the bag on the floor. There was enough drugs inside to put him away for a good chunk of his life, and that was not even counting the concealed weapon. After years of struggling and hanging with the wrong crowds it felt like he was finally getting his life on track. There was the strong possibility life as he knew it was about to be over for good. It scared him.

LeMarr’s eyes turned back to the mirror. The officer was still in his car, doing Lord knows what with his information. He looked around. The streets were empty. The cars were parked on the edge of a forested area and as far as he could tell from a quick scanning there were no security cameras of any kind around. He turned his neck and peered down into the dark at the Burger Shop bag. Every instinct in his body was telling him to grab the gun and down the officer when he came back with his license and registration cards. His hand slowly started going for the bag. It would be easy, knowing who he knew, he thought to himself. The gun could easily be disposed of. The car was an old junker. It could be scrap at the scrapyard in no time, and for doing him the favor of holding his stash he was sure Tre could hook him up with a ride. Then he could go on with his life without thinking another thought of “Officer Bates of the San Rapids Police Department.”

Suddenly, he heard the police car’s door open behind him and his hands immediately went straight the wheel. Reaching for the gun now would be suicide, and even if the officer’s hands were full there was no way he could pull out the gun and bring it up for a shot before the officer was able to draw his. He was screwed.

Bates stepped over to the driver’s window with his flashlight by his ear and handed LeMarr back his information.

“The next time you see police lights on behind you, pull over immediately. I know you might not have seen us right away, but you ran the red light back at that intersection before you stopped. That puts us in a bad spot.” He turned and quickly flashed the light towards the trunk. “I already told you about the brake light. I recommend getting that fixed ASAP so you don’t get pulled over again. Let me see you turn your headlights on.” LeMarr obliged. “Make sure you never drive without those on. That could end up really bad for you or for someone else. At this point I’m just going to let you off with a warning, but remember what I told you.”

“I will, Officer.”

“On your way to work?”

“Yes sir. Work is right there, actually.” LeMarr pointed at the high school. Bates nodded.

“Well, hopefully you aren’t late for work. Have a good night.” Bates clicked off his flashlight and after he did so, LeMarr heard a second click. Turning towards the passenger side he caught the face of a second officer. He leaned back and took a deep breath.

A partner.

It made perfect sense to him now. Patrolling a secluded area late at night by one’s self was not something the city would take a chance with. Of course there had been a partner. He looked back at the bag. A tear rolled down his cheek. He had been too busy worrying about the consequences of his name being run through the system that he had almost brought his own room upon him. Taking on one man was a long shot, but there was no way he could have gotten out of a scratch with two SRPD officers. He had been lucky. Lucky or smart, an LeMarr could not decide which one had saved his life right then and there.

He sat back with the emergency lights flashing for a while as the patrol car disappeared into the night, then rolled down the window and tossed the Burger Shop bag into a ravine as he drove to work.

The Benefits of Dictation

…now I have something new to experiment with!

Story Empire

Hello Story Empire readers! I’d like to fly – at least when it comes to writing – rather than plodding along. There’s one tool I now use to do just that: Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Good thing you don’t have to train this dragon to dictate well.

When it comes to writing a book, there is a faster way without a huge expense which also feels like flying. In my last post, I described how I was working to clear my own logjam with available time and one of those changes was to spend a little money to address my constricted writing time. I purchased Dragon Naturally Speaking and set out to dictate so I could produce more words per hour than typing. To dictate well, it requires training Dragon – which sounds like the title of a couple of movies.

Training a Dragon is simple, especially when compared to the movie…

View original post 1,627 more words

A Week of Novel Writing

For the first time in my life I can honestly say that I have been working on a novel–the same novel–for seven days straight. Averaging around 500 words a day, my book is currently a rough 3500 if my math is correct. It’s actually a little bit higher but not by much.

I feel like I’m making good progress for being the world’s greatest quitter and procrastinator. I have wanted to write a novel my entire life and somehow I decided to wait until I was 28 to get my head out of my ass and start making it happen. My best friend Sara always tells me to stop looking at the past and just focus on the present, so instead of being ashamed of not having finished any of my previous novel-writing escapades I will just be happy as a clam that “When the Captain’s Away…” is coming along.

I honestly don’t think I would have been able to get back into fiction writing if not for this blog. The amount of love and support from fellow bloggers and those who have found my articles on Twitter and Facebook, not to mention my daily posts holding myself accountable, has really kept me focused and on track. There was one day I only made it a fifth of the way into my daily word count, but I caught right back up the next day and have been cranking it out ever since. I know that 500 words is child’s play compared to a lot of successful writers–the other John S. has said that he averages 2k a day, and Isaac Asimov averaged a whopping 4000 a day and usual MORE. But right now I’m easing my way back into it. I know I could write 1000 words easy, I’ve done it many times before, but I also have jobs, sleep, a girlfriend, and Pokémon go play. Eventually I will get there.

Heck, a writing professor I had a couple years ago told me that he didn’t think it was possible to write 4000 words a day. I am eager to one day write at an Asimovian rate, but for now I’m happy where I’m at.

Now, back to writing.

Nine Years of Facebook

My dad texted me in early 2009 while I was at MOS school at Camp Johnson in North Carolina, encouraging me to get on something called Facebook because it was geared more towards adults and more mature than MySpace (and because my grandma had gotten a Facebook and wanted me to connect with all of them). So this year is my nine-year anniversary of creating my Facebook.

The actual anniversary has already passed, I can’t remember the exact date, but in about seven or eight months it will be a decade on Zuckerburg’s masterwork. Some days I don’t even want to make it that long…

When I first got on and a high school friend IM’d me for the first time, I was in love. I had never had anything with an instant messenger before and thought it was pretty cool. Facebook didn’t have a soundtrack in the background as MySpace had, but it did have an IM. It was way better than having to send emails and wait for replies.

Fast forward to 2018 and the only reasons I still have it is because of my blog and because there are a few people that I can only communicate with via social media. And the pictures. I like the pictures. And the constant updates from people, that’s awesome. The video sharing and the memes…ok! So there are many reasons for a person to love Facebook. I’m guilty of it all.

But I hate how evil it’s made people and how it’s nearly destroyed certain freedoms. One can’t express an opinion online anymore without someone hating you for it. Threatening you, labeling you a fascist or a Nazi because you voted for one party or candidate over the other. Or for not voting at all. And even some of the most mature among us are guilty of it. I’ve found myself getting boiling red mad and engaging in passionate, vengeful rants that in the real world outside of the internet I never would have done. It’s embarrassing but it’s happened. And those of us with intelligence that can separate lies from facts see deceit and propaganda being spread like wildfire and people believing it! FB has become such a vital part of our lives, those of us who have it, that it makes the perfect advertising space for people who want to direct the sheep to their side of the pasture. The war between the left and the right is already waging, patiently on alert for the chance to leap from the screens into the real world.

I’d love so much to get rid of it and never pay it a single kind again. I’ve tried it before, but keep coming back. There’s just too much good, if it can be called that, mixed in with all the wickedness. And the good in this case outweighs the bad. It’s a nightmare but it’s part of life.

A Couple of Science Fiction Prompts For You All

Isaac Asimov used to say that the best science fiction, if done correctly, illuminated the human condition. Just as scientists keep an eye on the latest developments and ponder what new discoveries lie ahead in future research, lately I have been looking at the world we live in today with all its various problems and thinking about what it fill be like for future society. It has given me a few ideas for some discussions, and since they involve the future and current changes and progress (or lack of) in today’s social climate they can accurately be called science fiction, as they deal with change.

I offer them here freely while acknowledging that

a) they might have been done by others already. With the vast amounts of stories and novels already written, not to mention those already being written, it’s impossible to get to them all, and

b) I have no current intention of using them myself. My own writing interests in the SF field primarily lie in military science fiction and space opera. If someone else uses any of them before I write my own story, I can refer them to this blog entry to show that I came up with the idea (at least on paper) first. Even then, I think these are so broad that many writers could make use of them even in passing without having to accuse one another of plagiarism.

All that being said, and thank you for putting up with my rambling once more, here is what came to me while I was out walking the chihuahua:

1) I envisioned a time not too long from now where broken homes not only begin to number those of the happily married, but that it has become such a socially-acceptable predicament that people by and large will brush aside families with both parents as old-fashioned with maybe even a little contempt in their opinions. I foresee classrooms filled with kids who live with only one parent who pick on and look down on kids who have both a mom and a dad living in the same house (or two moms and two dads, whatever might be their individual situation). Also, there are already numerous stories of petty women who have kids solely to receive child support checks. For many single moms and dads with children, the monthly check from the other parent is another small source of revenue for them that they couldn’t get if they were married to the spouse. Same thing with alimony. I don’t wish to presume that pettiness and sheer greed will infect a majority of future parents and couples, but it’s something that I can see increasing all the same, if only by a little bit.

Indeed, this broken homes prediction leads to my second point:

2) Marriage will become archaic. The original primarily sole purpose of marriage was the creation of children. It had very strong religious regulations attached to it, which is why divorce was for so long a shameful predicament to find oneself in and was illegal except for extreme circumstances in many places up until very recently. Now that people are quickly turning away from religion, either abandoning it all together or at least are not adhering strictly to principals as years past I see more and more people choosing not to get married. After all, it’s an expensive process. You have to apply for and pay for a marriage license, you more often or not have to pay either the court or a minister to marry you. The social expectations for weddings and honeymoons make both extraordinary joy expensive for most people, I see our increasingly-lazy population eventually not choosing to go through the hassle and expense. It is not illegal to have sex and have children before marriage, and if you live together long enough it becomes a common-law marriage anyways. Why would someone who prefers to blow money on lavish things at the expense of more important things choose to get a marriage license and tie the knot?

3) I mentioned in the previous idea that it is currently perfectly legal to have children. More and more kids under age 16 are getting pregnant and having babies, a further sign of the diminishment of moral values (in many cases) than previous generations. I’ve gotten a sour feeling lately that certain very liberal areas such as California are trying very hard to make the government more powerful in the reading and education of children than the parents are. It would not surprise me one bit if someday they try introducing legislation requiring potential parents to acquire licenses in order to have children. It is an extremely long shot, in my opinion, but at the same time it very well could be a reality. Take the process of adopting a child from an adoption agency, for example. It’s not a license, per se, but the caseworkers conduct extensive interviews, background checks, home visits, house inspections, and supervised visits before a decision is made whether or not to allow an individual or couple to adopt. And it is an EXTREMELY expensive process. The cost exponentially increases when attempting to adopt a child from overseas. Conceiving your own child, on the other hand, is not nearly as bureaucratic and expensive (or so I, one without children, have been told) as adoption and without any big legal mess. If fascist politicians get wind on the opportunity for increased revenue from birthing licenses and the possibility of population control (may future generations condemn me if any dictator gets this idea from me) then I see such laws going into effect. Then the children will essentially be the offspring of the state, not the parents who made them.

As with all problems, recognizing that this shit can happen and taking steps to prevent them is always possible. Unfortunately unless God himself makes an entrance as He did you in the Old Testament and shakes today’s people to their bones and makes them fear the fires of Hell, most people will I think be perfectly content with letting the world around them fall apart until one day they look back in regret that things have become the way that they are and start looking for people to blame. Little will they realize that they have only themselves to point the finger at. I really hope that none of these items come to pass, and that this is simply a Dark Age for humanity that we will eventually overcome. Part of me is confident that future historians will be in a position to look back at us ancient Americans and ancient Earthlings and scoff at us for our negligence barbarous ways.but part of me is also half-confident that there will be no future historians to look back at us.

I wonder which is the best case scenario?

Six Days of Novel Writing

Today I very easily cranked out another 550 words of the book. In total, I think I have a little over 3000 words done.

I’m doing most of the writing on my phone, and I find that I’m actually writing faster and a bit easier than using my computer. I wish I had learned of the Google Docs app years ago. I always confined myself to writing at my desk, so whenever I was busy with work and had no time to get on the computer, no writing got done. Same with blogging and the WordPress app.

I can’t believe tomorrow will be one whole week since I started writing the thing. It’s been way too long since I’ve spent a week writing any kind of fiction, and over five years since I was so dedicated to writing a novel.

Progress.

The Other John S.

In 2011, I began to be interested heavily in writing science fiction and began doing research, discovering many of the legendary masters along the way as well as the existence of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America). It’s president at the time was an author I’d never heard of before, and one that you’ve seen me write a lot about on here–John Scalzi (the other John S.).

His brief biography of the SFWA website mentioned his long-running blog, “Whatever”, and after a few days of reading through that site and getting to know him and his work better I decided to take the plunge and become a blogger myself. As I’ve written many times, the first and many of my successive efforts were short-lived, but it gave me the foundation for what eventually became CrapPile. He was the first blogger I ever read, let alone became a regular subscriber to, so much of my blogging style and subject matter (I.E. whatever) I got from him.

Despite the similarities in style and humor and the I don’t give a damn what you think attitude we both apply to our blogs, I am far from a Scalzi copycat. In fact, we couldn’t be more opposite, not counting being white heterosexual males with dark hair and glasses who blog and write science fiction. He is very much a liberal whereas I am more of a conservative-leaning moderate. He is very strict when it comes to communications and commenting, whereas I don’t care what you do so long as it’s legal and non-threatening. I have always had a problem with myself esteem so I’m always humble; Scalzi is a bit egotistical. He’s also one of the most intelligent writers I have ever read, putting his philosophy major to very good use. I, on the other hand, do not have the experience for too in-depth intellectual conversations (though that is slowly changing thanks to my Ray Bradbury-inspired reading program). And of course, he is a Hugo Award-winning novelist, essayist, short story-writer, musician, blogger, game writer, and many other professional things that a young nerd like myself have always dreamed of being. And he’s married with a daughter, my two biggest dreams currently unfilled.

In the writing world, he has written too many things to count: The Old Man’s War series that served as my first fictional Scalzi experience, Redshirts (that I have autographed by the man himself), a remake of H. Bean Piper’s Little Fuzzy, several blog entry collections (one of which he also signed for me), and many, many more.

His story is the classic dirt poor to bestselling author story. He knew what his dream was, he worked for it, and now is one of science fiction’s leading talents. Several times he has answered emails from me giving me valuable (yet insanely brief) advice on various topics. He was directly the inspiration for a blog post I wrote for Amazing Stories on what an aspiring writer should be reading.

Only 49 as of this writing, barring tragedy he still has many fine years of writing ahead of him for the world to enjoy. It is my prediction that should he live long enough and catastrophe doesn’t bring civilization to its miserable knees and it still exists, that someday he will be awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from SFWA. He pretty much is one already.

John, may your mallet or loving correction never become too heavy to bring down on those who deserve a thorough whack.