Stella Haunts Me!
I’m lying in bed next to my wife when Stella McMasters lifts the covers and slips in beside me. She taps my chin.
“When are you going to do it?” she asks.
I glance over to see if Stella has awakened Jane. My wife usually takes a dim view of me sleeping with two women at the same time. Fortunately, she’s snoring.
I turn back. “Going to do what?” I ask.
She snuggles closer. “Tell the rest of my story.”
I sigh, for she’s asked this before. Stella’s the cyborg heroine I created in Beyond Those Distant Stars, a SF action romance published by Mundania Press (http://tinyurl.com/74a6zqp). Twice I’ve tried to write a sequel, Star Warrior, but I’ve been stymied each time.
I try to brazen it out. “Listen, honey, you’re my creation, and it’s up to me to continue your story or not.”
This doesn’t fly. Stella’s face hardens, and she raises a fist. Two-thirds of her body is synthetic, and she could crush me with a single blow. “I rule an empire of a thousand worlds,” she says, “and I’ve got enemies who want to destroy me. Hell, there’s enough for a whole boatload of books. I can be an even bigger hero than Miles.”
That’s Miles Vorkosigan, the creation of the multiple prize-winning SF author Lois McMaster Bujold, whose name inspired Stella McMasters’ name. “Look,” I say, “I tried twice to continue your saga, but my writers’ group found too many implausibilities.”
Stella gives me a chaste kiss, which is unlike the passionate ones she gave her unfaithful lover in Beyond Those Distant Stars. “Screw the implausibilities. Just write it. ” She smiles. “I feel great adventures ahead of me. New challenges, new men, new triumphs and revelations. Sweetie, my saga is just getting started.”
My name isn’t Sweetie, but I don’t tell her that. “I can’t do it,” I say. “I tried twice—”
Her hand squeezes me below the covers, but not as a lover. I moan in pain.
“Do it,” she orders. Seeing Jane roll over beside me, she taps my chin again and disappears.
Jane sighs. “Stella again?” she asks.
Great. My wife heard. “Yes.”
She moves closer. “It was worse this time, wasn’t it?”
I don’t need to answer. Jane kisses me gently.
“Honey,” she says, “why don’t you do what she says. Only in the sequel . . .”
“Yes?”
She giggles. “In it, you kill the bitch off.”
* * *
Being haunted by your own character is no fun. If Stella wants sequels, why doesn’t she take charge and sweep me along plot-wise like other authors’ characters do? Doesn’t she recognize writer’s block when she sees it?
Two days later, I enter the shower to find Stella waiting there for me.
“Look,” I say, “we have to stop meeting like this.”
Nude, she taps my chin. “Then you know what to do.”
* * *
After I dry off, I sit down and start Star Warrior again.
About John Rosenman
John recently retired as an English professor at Norfolk State University where he designed and taught a course in how to write Science fiction and Fantasy. He is a former Chairman of the Board of the Horror Writers Association and has published approximately 350 stories in places such as Weird Tales, Whitley Strieber’s Aliens, Fangoria, Galaxy, The Age of Wonders, and the Hot Blood anthology series. John has published twenty books, including SF action/romantic adventure novels such as Beyond Those Distant Stars and Speaker of the Shakk (Mundania Press), A Senseless Act of Beauty (Crossroad Press), and Alien Dreams (Drollerie Press and Crossroad Press). Shorter books include A Mingling of Souls and Music Man (XoXo Publishing), Here Be Dragons(Eternal Press), The Voice of Many Waters (Blue Leaf Publications), Green in Our Souls(Damnation Books), and Bagonoun’s Wonderful Songbird and Childhood’s Day (Gypsy Shadow Publishing). Recent developments: MuseItUp Publishing published two novels, Dark Wizard andDax Rigby, War Correspondent. Another SF novel, Inspector of the Cross, will appear in February. MuseItUp Publishing also published More Stately Mansions and The Blue of Her Hair, the Gold of Her Eyes, and it will release Steam Heat, a tale of erotic horror in December.
Readers can visit John at his website, www.johnrosenman.com, and other sites:
http://www.myspace.com/291520102\
https://twitter.com/#!/Writerman1,
https://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1164323809 and . . .
http://s631.photobucket.com/albums/uu31/jrosenman/.
About Dax Rigby, War Correspondent
As WWIII rages on Earth, War Correspondent Dax Rigby travels to the savage planet Arcadia to investigate and report on the Western Alliance’s mission there. Soon, he fights not only to save two intelligent alien species from extinction, but also to rescue a dying human outpost threatened by a mysterious disease.
Facing assassination attempts, seduction from a passionate pilot, and his own mysterious powers of resurrection, Dax struggles to maintain his loyalties and complete his mission. The fate of two worlds hangs in the balance. Will he find a way to redefine both his identity and his destiny in time?
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