There are certain events I daydream about attending. One of these is CrimeCon, a fairly new annual convention of true crime enthusiasts who gather to enthuse about their favorite cases, crime shows, and podcasters.

I listen to several true crime podcasts. And I kept hearing the hosts of Generation Why, Crime in Sports/Small Town Murder, Crime Writers On, and Truth & Justice advertising CrimeCon and talking about how they’d be there. Seriously, literally every single podcast I listen to was going to make an appearance.

I started to think maybe I should make an appearance, too. It might be fun. Plus, when you listen to the same people every week, sometimes twice a week, for years, you start to think you kind of know them. I eagerly await the next installment of Generation Why’s Justin and Aaron, knowing my Monday morning commute will be all the brighter for it. I bicker with Rebecca Lavoie and Kevin Flynn when I don’t agree with their Crime Writers On opinions. (They may not know it, but I still do it.) These were my people, and they would all be gathered together in Nashville in May for one special weekend.

I mentioned it to Jason. He was not at all opposed to my going, but didn’t entertain the thought of coming with me for one moment. He doesn’t give one hoot about true crime. “Why don’t you price it out?” he suggested. “For one,” he added. (He really has no interest in dead people.)

So I did. And thus the first hurdle.

A flight was about $500 round trip. Then the hotel would be $225 a night. And to actually attend the convention? Three hundred dollars.

Here is where I would like to remind you, gentle reader, that I’m cheap. There was no way I would shell out that kind of money for a death convention, no matter how appealing it sounded.

Adding to that was the list of special guests. See, there’s a bit of infighting going on in the true crime podcast world. At last year’s CrimeCon, Payne Lindsey (Up & Vanished) ruffled quite a few feathers by giving a presentation on why he was doing true crime podcasting right . . . implying that every other podcaster was doing it wrong. The word “amateurs” may have been used. In addition to this, Truth & Justice’s host, Bob Ruff, declared last year—rather recklessly—who he thought was guilty of killing Hae Min Lee (and for you Serial fans, he doesn’t believe it was Adnan Syed). The Crime in Sports hosts recently called him out on this behavior, and I love the Crime in Sports guys. Plus, Bob did some sloppy editing last week that kind of made Damien Echols (West Memphis Three) sound like a lying jerkbag, which, believe what you will about Damien, wasn’t fair to him. So I was already ticked off at Bob.

Thus, the second hurdle: Both Payne Lindsey and Bob Ruff were being touted on CrimeCon’s website as special guests. Plus a third guy who I don’t listen to anymore because he’s arrogant and condescending to one of his cohosts. No special guest honors for Justin and Aaron, or the Crime Writers On gang, or my boys James and Jimmy at Crime in Sports . . . people I actually liked.

You know what? I really didn’t want to go after all.

So to my friends out there who are passionate about the genre, I hope you have a wonderful time. I’ll miss seeing some of my favorite pod personalities, but the minuses really outweigh the plusses for me this year.

And I’m sure I’ll hear all about what happened there on the podcasts.

I'm a fiction writer. So this week, here's a short story!

The Nature of Temptation by Stacey Longo

Her eyes follow his steps as he passes her desk on his way to the staff lounge. The words of Thomas Harris—spoken so chillingly by Sir Anthony Hopkins over twenty-five years ago—ring in her ears: we covet what we see every day.
 
And oh, how she covets.
 
She watches his retreating form: the sinew of his shoulders flexing as he strides confidently to his destination. The curl of his brown locks poking out from under his cap. The way his faded jeans cup his butt.
 
I want. She feels foolish. The saliva is working in her cheeks like a teenager at the high school prom. But she can’t help herself. I want.
 
She’s worked at the library for thirteen years now, calling wayward bibliophiles who’ve kept their books out too long, filing returns in their proper place, never once straying from the Dewey Decimal System. At night, she retreats to her apartment, binge-watching Dexter or Breaking Bad, her iguana, Mr. Greenjeans, in her lap. After dealing with books all day, the last thing she wants to do at night is crack open the pages. She’d once thought her job—hell, life itself—had quelled all the embers of passion thrumming inside her. The library has killed her desire to read. She’d thought that was the only craving she’d had left, now reduced to chilled, blackened coals. But then he came into her life—as casually as a leaf fluttering from tree to earth, sashaying in the breeze as it skims down to settle on the ground.
 
We covet what we see every day.
 
It doesn’t help that he works right across the street. After months of his daily visits to her stacks, she finally got up the nerve to stop into the Crusty Cruller last week before clocking in. She’d gazed at the frosted, sprinkled wares through the glass, her senses overwhelmed by the pinks and purples, the yeasty smell of freshly kneaded dough, the noise.
 
Oh, the noise. Chatter and laughter and a little girl wailing because her big brother had gotten the last chocolate bomb—a dark cakey doughnut with thick chocolate glaze, topped with fudge chunks—and the music, piped in overhead, the Beatles telling her most hidden of thoughts, over and over: she loves you, John Lennon insisted, spilling her secret.
 
She’d fled before ordering so much as a coffee. It’s clear if she’s to go through with this, it must be on her turf.
 
She’s managed to resist for—hell, a decade, if she’s truly being honest in her counting. Is that really the last time she allowed herself a bit of decadence? Where had the time gone? Her sassiness? Her ability to grab onto the best things about life, things that would no doubt kill her in the long run, but were oh, so sweet in the moment?
 
She was looking at fifty, now—and not from that far a distance. Time was running out. Life had turned bleak and mundane. She missed the pinks and purples. They’d shocked her only because they’d been absent from her life so very long.
 
But today. Today is the day. She’s ready for a change. To indulge her wanton and wild side. She’s tired of being proper—a rule follower who never steps out of line, who apologizes if a colorful word accidentally slips past her lips, who scowls when giggles break out in the YA section.
 
A librarian.
 
His gait takes him past the circulation desk in a flash, so quick she almost misses him. Oh, no you don’t. Not today. Today it’s my turn. The wheels of her chair get caught on the foot of the desk as she pushes away, standing. She bangs her stomach against the rim of the desk, lets out a soft oof!, and hurries to follow.
 
She catches up right as he’s placing his wares on the table in the staff room. A dozen doughnuts, apparently still warm, from the way the heat radiates onto the cold tabletop and is nipped away. His eyebrow kinks up as she faces him. Her cheeks fill with heat, and she bites back the instinct to flee. She glances down at what he’s brought: four powdered jellies, three crullers, two pink sprinkled, two purple. One chocolate bomb. She inhales sharply, letting the sugary scent set her synapses to firing. I want.
 
“I want.” She speaks it out loud, and the words are a release, giving her the last boost of confidence she needs to go through with it.
 
“Yes?” The softness, eagerness in his brown eyes propels her onward.
 
“I want that chocolate bomb.”
There. She’s said it. Type two diabetes and celiac disease be damned: she’s denied herself long enough. We covet what we see every day.
 
He makes a big show of pulling a napkin from his breast pocket, snapping it in the air like the unfolding of a bedsheet, and scoops up her doughnut, presenting it as a prize.
 
She takes it, biting in without so much as a thank you, closing her eyes to let the fudge and frosting and cake-like morsels run rampant across her tongue. She’ll pay later, of course: she’ll need a shot of insulin and will no doubt be running to the bathroom all afternoon with stabbing abdominal cramps. But for now, oh, for now . . . she’s tasting a little bit of heaven, right here on earth. She offers the doughnut guy a black-crumbed, toothy smile.
 
“I’ll bring two tomorrow.” He taps the brim of his cap, winks, and leaves.
Isn’t he a doll, she thinks. Too bad he’s half my age. She licks the sugary glaze off her fingers, sighs, and takes another bite.
____
This story first appeared on https://thestoryside.com. If you haven't visited The Storyside lately, stop on by! We have lots of good stuff on there.

I have no blog today.

What I do have, however, is a writing/editing partner who not only listens to me whine when I have no blog, but often dons a cape to save the day when I need him. Within a few hours he'd whipped up the piece below, just for your reading pleasure. Without further ado, I give you Rob Smales.

I had an odd experience recently.

Being a writer of dark fiction, I’ve done at least cursory research into a whole host of things some folks might find odd. Methods of speeding up decomposition. How much chocolate, by weight, it would take to actually kill a dog in one sitting (it’s a lot—you might be surprised). How Satan might go about winning a national election. I’ve even checked out weird stuff like sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is one of those natural things we all do that only seems weird or scary when we notice it, either from it working too well or not well enough. Now, this is only in layman’s terms, but what I’m referring to as sleep paralysis is that disconnect that happens between your brain and body when you sleep. Your body doesn’t know what’s going on while you dream, so if it starts getting signals—like if you dream you’re competing in a marathon, so you’re constantly thinking run, run, run—it’ll try to obey them. Without that disconnect, the dream mentioned above would have the sleeper waking up twenty-six miles from home, exhausted, footsore, and embarrassed. Especially considering their yellow ducky pajamas.

Not that I have yellow ducky pajamas.

Anyway, when the brain manages to throw a tin can on a string across the divide and get some soft, maybe garbled messages through to the body, like a pair of giggling kids shouting Can you hear me now? across their first clubhouse, you wind up with sleepwalking; weird, but it happens often enough that we sometimes laugh about it—it, and those pajamas.

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about today. I’m here to talk about the other end of the spectrum, when our brains have had their little turkey timers pop, or they’ve run out of things to dream about, or you just really have to pee, and your mind has decided it’s time for you to wake up and get about your business . . . but your body hasn’t gotten the memo.

Stupid, stupid body.

So your brain wakes up, and you come back from climbing Mount Everest, or reliving your first date (and it’s going much better this time around), or telling your boss what you really think of them, or whatever happy dreamcation you’ve just been on. You’re lying in your bed, and fully aware of it, and you try to open your eyes and rise and shine—or at least rise and pee, I wasn’t kidding about that—but that’s as far as you get. You try to open your eyes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way, you’re in that bed and that’s where you stay, because you can’t move. Someone forgot to open the connecting door, or your body’s phone is on silent—again—and try as you might, you just can’t tell it what to do like you used to.

Sounds creepy, right?

And it gets worse if you were having a bad dream. Have you ever dreamed about having an argument with someone, then been mad at them for the rest of the day? You know, intellectually, that they actually had nothing to do with that argument, that it was all in your head, but you just can’t help giving them the squinty eye the next time you see them? That’s simply emotion you can’t get rid of, based on an imaginary experience. Now, picture you’re falling off Everest, or that first date turns out to be with your real first date’s father, or your boss is telling you what he thinks of you, and you try to wake up from that panicked state (especially that father thing, Jesus) and find yourself completely paralyzed.

I’m pretty sure I’d no longer have to pee.

I’d done some reading on the phenomenon, and I’d come to the same conclusion you’ve probably come to by now: waking in this state would range from disconcerting to terrifying, but it sure ain’t gonna be happy.
And then, a few weeks ago, it happened to me.

I woke in my bed. Sort of. I mean, I couldn’t open my eyes, but I’d fallen asleep lying half on my side with my right arm pinned beneath me, reading from my Chromebook on the bed beside me, and damned if I wasn’t fully aware it had grown pretty uncomfortable. My elbow was digging into my side, and I think that right arm had gone numb. I tried to open my eyes again. No dice. I tried to roll onto my back. Might as well have been trying to lift a Buick . . . no, that’s not quite right. That sounds like I was straining to move, fighting some kind of restraint, but I wasn’t. The strain was all mental; try as I might, I couldn’t get my muscles to try with me.

Well, I thought, this is interesting.

I knew what was going on, you see, and I actually did find it more fascinating than frightening—and then I felt a presence, close and looming over me, practically breathing in my face. This should have been frightening—in fact, it almost was—but I’d read about this too: the sensation during paralysis that you’re not alone in the room. It’s a little more of you carrying dream sensations into the real world, like the fear from a nightmare or the anger from an argument; right before I woke, I must have been dreaming I was talking to someone who loomed over me. But I’d woken calm. Who would loom over me, yet make me calm?

My son, for those of you who don’t know, is fifteen years old and already two inches taller than me, and he loves to loom over me.

That’s one mystery solved. Now I just have to figure a way out of this weirdness.

I gave up on trying to open my eyes; they both seemed heavy as a couple of skyscrapers, and besides, all they’d do is close again, leaving me right where I started. I decided to focus on my left arm.

My right arm was pinned beneath me, but my left lay atop me, running along my side. If I could just get those arm muscles to heave once, to give a really good jerk, I’d at least roll myself forward with the motion and let some blood back into that pinned arm—if I was really lucky, maybe I’d even punch myself in the face! That’d break the paralysis for sure. I ignored the phantom looming boy and focused all my will on that arm, straining with every synapse at my disposal. I mentally yanked at that arm for, oh, ten seconds. Or maybe ten minutes. Possibly ten hours—things were really subjective right about then. It was like thinking my way through a lake of warm peanut butter (the smooth kind, of course) just to try to make contact with a limb that’s been attached to me for more than forty-eight years, but I yanked with everything I had.

The arm became unbalanced and slipped forward and off my side, planting the back of my left wrist in the mattress and locking my elbow straight. Actually, a little more than straight. Over-straight to the point of pain.
I’d managed to make myself even more uncomfortable. Terrific.

I lay there pondering this predicament—when suddenly I was standing in another room. Well, not suddenly; it was more that, as sometimes happens in dreams (and I realized pretty quickly I’d fallen asleep again), I’d always been in that room. Well, I thought, at least I’m not pinning my own arm any--

A looming shape passed the doorway, and I saw it was my son walking by.

Was this where I’d been talking to him before I woke up? I went to the doorway and found myself in a kitchen, one I’d never seen before, but that was still perfectly familiar. Hey, this was a dream, right? Things don’t have to make sense. I saw my son walk through another door, and seconds later heard the water turn on in a shower.

Hey, I thought. Dream or not, this is just too good to pass up!

I got to the bathroom door and saw a big, old, clawfoot tub with the shower curtain drawn around it, the water on. Steam billowed over the curtain, carrying with it the sounds of washing, and my boy quietly singing to himself.

Isn’t he cute, I thought—right before I hollered “Boo!” at the top of my lungs.

With a scream, water, suds, and a bottle of conditioner came flying over the curtain—and I laughed myself awake in my room. My left arm hurt and the right one was numb, but I could move again, and I rolled back off the bed and onto my feet. I marveled at the strange experience I’d just had as I tried to shake some feeling back into my right arm as I shuffled toward the bedroom door.

I’d been wrong. I still really had to pee.
_______
You can find Rob's books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in select retail stores. He's not only a fabulously talented writer, but as I mentioned, the best writing and editing partner ever. Thanks for saving the day yet again, Rob.