All-Patron Reward: My Favorite Scenes 1

I'll continue my Gaming-influenced posts later, but I can't find the box with key notes for some of that, so instead I'll do this little series until I do.

I often say that I don't write for a particular audience. That doesn't mean that I don't very much appreciate having an actual audience, but rather that I'm writing stuff that *I* would want to read, but no one else will write. And it's equally true that both as reader and writer, I see that all books have their best and worst points. 

As such, even in  my own books there are particular scenes that I really, really like more than any other parts of the book. I thought that it might be interesting to highlight those scenes for my readers, and I'll do it in order of publication!

Digital Knight/Paradigms Lost

Here I cheat a little bit, since Paradigms Lost was a substantial rewrite, but I don't want to do two sections on what are just two versions of one book. 

I have a great fondness for this book; it was my first published novel (well, actually a fixup of three stories strung together, later five stories with interspersed elements) and was the first glimpse into my main writing universe. But Digital Knight itself was clearly rougher work than my later books, and while there was some smoothing done in making the reissue work, a lot of it couldn't be fixed without a complete rewrite, which I didn't want to do. 

Still, there are a few parts of it that I think work really well, and I think my top favorite scene in the book remains the one that happens when Jason has been taken hostage by drug kingpin Carmichael to force Verne Domingo to give Carmichael his (implied to be supernatural) contacts for acquiring... valuable materials.  As they wait for Verne's "answer" to Carmichael's demands, night falls and a storm begins....

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The intercom buzzed. "Mr. Carmichael, Jimmy and Double-T don't answer."

His relaxed demeanor vanished. "What? Which post were they on?"

"Number one—the private road entrance."

"The line down?"

"No sir, it's ringing, they just aren't answering."

He glared at me, then flicked his gaze to the window, as did I. So we were both watching when it happened.

The huge gates were barely visible, distorted shapes through the wind-lashed storm; but even with that, there was no way to miss it when the twin iron barriers suddenly blew inward, torn from their hinges by some immense force.

"What the hell—" Carmichael stared.

Slowly, emerging from the howling maelstrom, a single human figure became visible. Dressed in black, some kind of cloak or cape streaming from its shoulders, it walked forward through the storm, seeming almost untouched by the tempest. I felt a chill of awe start down my spine, gooseflesh sprang out across my arms.

Battling their way through the gale, six men half-ran, half-staggered up to defensive positions. Stroboscopic flashes of light, accompanied by faint rattling noises, showed they were trying to cut the intruder down with a hail of bullets. Even in that storm, there was no way that six men with fully automatic weaponry could possibly miss their target, especially when it continued walking towards them, unhurried, no attempts to dodge or shield itself, just a measured pace towards the mansion's front doors.

The figure twitched as gunfire hit, slowed its pace for a moment, was staggered backwards as all six concentrated their fire, a hail of bullets that could have stopped a bull elephant in its tracks. But the figure didn't go down. I heard an incredulous curse from Carmichael.

The figure raised one arm, and the three men on that side were suddenly slapped aside, sent spinning through the air as though hit by a runaway train. The other arm lifted, the other three men flew away like rag dolls. The intruder came forward, into the light at the stairway that led up to the front door, and now there was no mistaking it.

Verne Domingo had come calling.

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I love this scene partly for the fact that it really is the first time we see the potential scale of power in the universe. The vampire Elias Klein had been fast and hard to kill and super-strong, but he wasn't a force of nature.

But here, Verne summons up a major-scale storm, controls it to take down gateways, and walks through a hail of automatic gunfire that should have shredded him, without even really mussing his suit. 

The second of my favorite scenes in this novel is in the section titled "Mirror Image", when the honeymooning couple is walking along and notice something odd...

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The yard was very dark; no lights were on in the house to which it was attached, the fence was high, and my eyes were still accustomed to the streetlights. But I could make out something on the ground, about thirty or forty feet away… and it seemed to me that across the yard there was a movement, another gate opening, and someone going through. There was nothing I could put my finger on… but something about that distant, moving figure sent a sudden shiver down my spine. "Hello?" I said tentatively.

There was no answer, though I heard a faint clack noise of the other gate shutting in the distance. "Sorry to intrude, but I heard something… ?"

Still no answer, but no sudden attacks from darkness either. I took a deep breath and stepped inside, walking slowly towards the object lying on the ground in front of me. Even before I reached it I had a very nasty feeling I knew what it was. I pulled out my keyring and turned on the mini-flashlight, pointing it downward.

Lying on the ground before me was a dead man.

"Oh, for crissakes," I heard myself say. "I'm on vacation,dammit!"

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Poor Jason; even if he's trying to live a normal life, the dangerous and bizarre will find him.

Diamonds Are Forever

Following Digital Knight, I wanted to publish more of my own work, but that wasn't to happen until Grand Central Arena quite some years later. Instead, Eric Flint suggested a little collaboration and pitched the idea that eventually became Diamonds Are Forever, a story to complete the Mountain Magic anthology he'd been working on. Diamonds is technically a novel, but an extremely short one, coming in at about 43,000 words. 

Going back over it, I still find it quite enjoyable, though I would back off on the (at the time quite deliberate for various reasons) Yiddish that Jodi uses liberally throughout the story. But my favorite scene remains unchanged; it's the scene that both Eric and I loved because I had deliberately written it to appeal to Jim Baen's known preference for having attractive women on the cover of his books. I'd already encountered that; the original cover of Digital Knight is the way it is because Jim had asked the artist if he could put a blonde on the cover.

So we decided to give Jim exactly  what he wanted... and then he went and did a pulp Boris Karloff lookalike cover. You can't win. 

But I still love this scene, where I have -- for absolutely justified in-story reasons -- the heroine strip almost naked before facing down a hideous monster.

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She took a deep breath and hummed to herself for a few moments, running scales up and down, loosening her throat and lungs so they could deliver when needed. As she did so, she started stripping off all the extraneous metal. Her backpack hit the floor as she started a run of do re mi and her shirt and pants (with metal rivets) joined it a few moments later as she ran back down the scale, followed by the wetsuit.

Being human—okay, male human—I could at least appreciate the view, which was magnificent even if stopping just short of being indecent. Jodi’s sports bra and panties had no metal in them, so she left them on. Still, there was a definite exotic charm in the setting, especially with the waiting monster in the background. Any fantasy illustrator in the world would have been in seventh heaven.

Jodi stood still for a moment, muscles just a bit too tense, then took a deep breath and started walking forward.

As before, once she got within seventy feet, the creature raised its head and started humming. But this time Jodi wasn't wearing anything metal to be affected. She kept moving forward slowly, forty feet, thirty, twenty-five, twenty...

At twenty feet, the Magon hissed and moved slightly. Jodi stopped and opened her mouth. A pure note issued forth, one matching the eerie hum precisely in pitch. The hum instantly sounded louder than ever, and Jodi’s voice responded, increasing volume steadily.

The Magon must have encountered caverns in which it had heard feedback. The hum started to fade for a moment as it stopped generation. But nothing had ever tried this trick on it before; as Jodi made a step forward, its instincts forced it to begin the defensive signal generation again.

Jodi’s face was as set as a marble statue, giving out an unending, unwavering tone that I knew could not be sustained much longer, a crescendo of echoing sound that was answered in the swiftly-building hum that she was trying to drive out of control. The Magon moved, jerkily, trying to shake its head and drive away an indescribable sensation, starting a lunge forward but drawing back as the movement increased the resonance. Even from this distance I saw Jodi’s face changing color slightly, reddening from the effort of wringing the last dregs of air from her lungs to maintain the feedback cycle. She was running out of air, it wasn’t going to work—

And then the sound of her own pure voice echoed out from behind me, doubled and redoubled, as the Nowëthada, having caught on to her plan, all joined together to imitate the same precise sound. Though they were much farther away, there were twelve of them, and they were putting all the strength into it they could; with their ability to imitate other sounds perfectly, they did exactly what was needed. They maintained the resonance as the Magon gave a frustrated whine and finally moved, in fits and starts, towards Jodi.

But by maintaining the resonance, the Nomes had given Jodi a breather. She backed up two steps, her lungs refilled, and this time her voice seemed to split the room with a single note of high-pitched thunder. The resonant hum from the Magonrose with her volume, becoming louder, the creature scrabbling now to reach its own forehead with claws just a bit too short—and the crystal antenna exploded with enough force to send shards flying thirty feet.

The Magon gave a shriek that pierced my ears like an icepick and lunged at Jodi; no longer under control, just berserk and out to kill the one that hurt it. Jodi ran.

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That covers my first two books; the next installment will take on the next two!