Lazlo Zalezac: Blog

Fighting for Family is a story that has provoked very strong reactions in readers. This story was completed before I ever posted a single chapter. I made no changes to it as a result of reader comments.

Some readers couldn't get through the first few chapters; feeling that it was overly violent in an emotional sense. Every character, with the exception of Claire, was blamed for the problems within the family. Much to my surprise, this included the boss and his wife. John was a lazy ass who failed to step up to his obligations as a husband and a man. Vicki was a bitch who ditched her family. The kids were spoiled rotten brats. The reverend was a sadistic bastard who got his jollies off while watching David rant at his mother. The boss pulled her away from the family without regard to the effect of all that travel. The boss's wife stole the lifeline from Victoria by supplanting her, thereby leaving Vicki with no choice except to face her family.

Other readers wrote that they couldn't read the story without reliving their childhood. Emotional scabs that they had thought long healed had been ripped off without warning. Their notes were filled with so much raw emotion that it hurt to read them. I read them anyway.

Many readers wrote that they or their spouses couldn't remember their wedding vows. There is a whole genre of stories about spouses who are not faithful. Few stories are about cases where the other vows are forgotten. Why is that? Is it because we feel that loving, honoring, cherishing, and obeying are not as important as fidelity? Or is it because infidelity is easily proved while failing to uphold the others is not? I fear that there are many who can not remember their wedding vows. I think if we look around us, we can see the consequences of that in the form of broken marriages and dysfunctional families.

Many readers told me that all John had to do was show Vicki a bank statement (he had, but she had ignored it) and things would never have developed to the point that existed at the beginning of the story. Never underestimate the ability of an obsessed person to ignore all evidence that contradicts the subject of his or her obsession. Just look at an underweight girl who believes she is fat despite the fact that she looks like an Auschwitz survivor.

Let me tell a true story about a couple I knew in which the wife obsessed over her coffee pot and whether it was plugged in whenever she left the house. This was back in the good old days of electric percolators. She would not leave the house without checking the coffee pot at least a dozen times. Her husband would start to drive off and she'd jump out of the car (even while it was moving) to check the pot one last time. He'd get to the end of the street and she'd try to get out of the car again. Once she was away from the house, she would call a neighbor to check it. That stupid coffee pot was an obsession.

She and her husband argued about it, often in public. On a couple of occasions the husband even carried the coffee pot out to the car, but that didn't stop her from returning to the house just to check that it was the real coffee pot he had brought with him. No one could convince her that the coffee pot wasn't plugged in.

One day the husband lost it and grabbed the handle of the coffee pot beat the hell out it on the counter until the handle broke off. Then he drove over it with the car just to make sure that it would never work again. Nearly every neighbor, myself included, watched him flatten it with the car. A lot of us were laughing about it because we thought it was funny. Everyone knew about her obsession and his anger over it. For the couple, though, it was not funny. There were tears and hurt feelings. They got over it in time. However, he never allowed another coffee pot in the house.

We aren't talking rational behavior. Now, I'll admit that I had this woman in mind when I was writing this story. I've seen things that were nearly that extreme with people and their jobs. I've watched men and women park their family on a back lot in pursuit of their careers.

A relative of mine would leave a party to make a three hour business call. He would drive off while talking on his cell phone leaving his family behind without a ride. He literally would forget them when there was an opportunity to make some money. It should be noted that he's been divorced and is working on his second marriage. He still puts money ahead of family although he has tempered his behavior a bit.

A co-worker visited my house one weekend. He called his office voice mail three times an hour. Nearly every discussion was interrupted when he would stop to check his e-mail on his cell phone. I worked with him and I knew that there wasn't a real reason for him to be doing that. His wife got so angry that she grabbed his cell phone and threw it in the street. The cell phone survived with just a cracked face. Their marriage may not.

I'm not saying that the story presented here is a good way of going about fixing a problem in which one partner is obsessed (to the point of a major psychosis). In this story, one woman has effectively trampled on the feelings of four people for a long time. How does one go about fixing it? In most real life cases, she'd have been kicked to the curb. That doesn't solve the problem - only the symptoms.

I consider Vicki to be a heroic figure. Her family is dumping on her. She is getting hurt -- horribly hurt. It even gets worse in later chapters. However, she keeps getting up and trying to get past their anger. She is a fighter.

If we were to change the story to where it was five outsiders trying to destroy her marriage, then the pain and suffering that she experienced in trying to save her family would be essential to a heroic story. We would be rooting for her to win. We'd be hoping the bad guys lose.

In a way, there are strangers in this story -- the angry people created by the past. There are Rose and Rosie, David and Davey, the John who hates Victoria and the John who loves Vicki, and then Lisa who hates her mother and the insecure Lisa who wishes she had a loving mother. You might say that her mission is to figuratively slay the John who hates Victoria, the Rose whose thorns are poisonous, the David who is about to turn into an angry young man, and the Lisa who hates her mother.

Then there is Vicki and her alter-ego, Victoria. Here's an interesting thing, Vicki overcomes Victoria with the simple act of disposing of her cell phone and leaving that life behind. She goes on to confront her other enemies. She weakens them by withstanding their assaults without defending herself. She offers love and understanding instead of violence. What a powerful weapon that is.

Finally, there is Reverend Billings, whose qualifications to be a man of the cloth are questioned by everyone. He's an odd sort of reverend who doesn't preach the normal sermon. He even appears to be more interested in a lingerie catalog than the fact that a young girl has beaten her mother.

No, he's a different sort of man who believes that you can't ask for forgiveness until you understand what you are asking the other person to forgive. The road to salvation is a rocky one and not without pain. He doesn't quite think things are as easy as asking for forgiveness and all will be forgiven. Forgiveness easily bought is worth little. The value of something is the price a person is willing to pay for it.

He believes the path to hell is tempting because it promises that all problems will be solved without pain. It is seductive because the true cost is hidden until it is too late. We all march through life with one foot on the path to hell. It doesn't matter if it is lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, or pride that tempts us. We are tempted just as each member of the family was tempted. Vicki was led astray by pride and greed, John by sloth, David by wrath and sloth, Rose by wrath, and Lisa by envy.

It was not an accident that the family was canning apples at the beginning of this story. Apples are the fruit from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is a lot of discovery about the nature of good and evil taking place in this story. Each character is forced to examine the demon that lives inside him or her.

The move from a suburban house to the country was also not an accident. A home in the suburbs gives rise to images of houses, white picket fences, barbecues in the backyard, and a happy family living inside - a little mini Garden of Eden. That image should give us pause. Perhaps the Garden of Eden wasn't all that perfect, but Adam and Eve were protected from discovering that until they lost their innocence. Maybe, just maybe, leaving the garden wasn't a trip from a paradise however artificial, but was a trip to a natural world in which the best that resides within us can be demonstrated by overcoming adversity - a world in which heroism is possible.

Yes, I do believe that Vicki is a heroic figure.

Country Boys is a story about cultural clashes inside the USA. When I started posting it, a lot of readers immediately wrote that they thought a country boys whoops ass tale was a lame story concept and a few asserted that it was beneath me. Well, it wasn't a country boys whoop ass story.

There are a number of cultures represented in this story - the country culture, the urban culture, the inner-city culture, the law enforcement culture, the gang culture, and the suburban culture.

Bit players in the story provide little glimpses of different perspectives about the action within the story. An unnamed young woman has sex in a van with anyone in the gang because she sees that as optimizing the quality of life available to her. She isn't a unique person in real life -- there are lots of young women just like her.

There are people who love the country-side either in permanent immersion or as occasional visitors. There are others who think nature makes a nice picture on a postcard, but 'ugh' there are insects out there. There are subcultures who think crime just is and that it can't be eliminated while there are others who think that fighting crime is the responsibility of every citizen. There are even some who view crime as the only way to survive in what they perceive to be a hostile society.

I know people like Pepper. People who have lived their lives without ever taking something apart to see how it worked. Young men who don't know how to change a tire. People who look at you incredulously and ask, "How is it possible that you've never had a Chai Latte?" Yes, there are people who believe that knowing the current trend is a sign of intelligence and sophistication.

I also know people like Dan, Joe, Sonny, and Donny. Proud men who are equally willing to stand alone for what they deem is right and to stand in unity with their neighbors in times of trouble. Men and women who work with their hands and minds with a touch of commonsense added. People who believe in God, self reliance, hard work, patriotism, and charity. They also have the bizarre idea that doing a excellent job at work should be rewarded with raises and promotions while performing poorly should lead to a loss of job.

I also have known people who believe that might makes right. There are those who believe that if you can't stop them from taking what they want then they have a right to it. The elements of the story about gangs posting on their website that they were chasing the police was taken directly from a newspaper.

There are also members of law enforcement who are trying their best to ride herd over the chaos created by pseudo-legal wrongs, individuals with callous disrespect for law, and zealous watch groups who demand humans to perform perfectly or else. The bit about the huge number of law enforcement people (1200) who went out to arrest 52 gang members was straight out the newspaper. There was also the case where neighbors protested the police closing down a crack house in their neighborhood. I didn't include cops getting killed while drinking coffee in a donut store. There is the side of the story that isn't often told -- the side that wonders about the hopeless of effectively protecting the public.

It has come to my attention that a lot of people are disappointed by what appears to be an abrupt ending. Good. I didn't want to leave a sense of closure for the characters in the story.

When cultures collide, the individuals involved are uprooted. Long held beliefs are questioned, leaving most people without satisfactory answers. Heroes come home from war and in the dark of night question the righteousness of their actions. Wounded heroes lie in bed wondering if their sacrifice was worthwhile. It is natural after things are over to wonder 'what if I had...'.

After cultures collide we are left with a sense of unease - the feeling that things aren't right and will never be right again. The world has changed on us and what we once accepted without thought is suddenly brought into question.

There are no purely 'good guys' or purely 'bad guys'. There are imperfect people doing the best they can with what they believe to be right. Too often we feel cheated when all is said and done. Why? We believe that everything should be peaceful when reasonable people interact.

Do we live happily ever after? Only in fairy tales.

I occasionally get e-mails complaining about many elements of my stories. I would like to take a moment to address two of those complaints.

One complaint is that some of the stories that I post do not have a sufficient quantity of sex in them. At the risk of offending some readers, I have to say phooey on that. While I suppose that there are some people who feel that Tabasco sauce goes well on everything, my experience has been it doesn't go that well with ice cream or apple pie. Likewise, not every story demands explicit sexual descriptions every ten paragraphs in order to be a good tale.

An important point should be made concerning sex in stories on SOL. There are a lot of excellent stories on SOL that do not have any sex in them at all. There are even more great stories that have oblique references to sex without blow by blow accounts of inserting tab A into slot B (or should I say slut B?). There are an overwhelming number of postings that have lots of sex and no stories; many of those postings are just horribly written pieces of garbage.

I hope that I'm not talking out turn, but as far as I know Lazeez does not claim Storiesonline to be an erotic literature website. He does claim it to be the website of the World Literature Company. The world of literature does not mandate that every story have sexual content. One of the reasons that I post here is that I like the fact that SOL allows postings of all degrees of sexual content from none at all to nothing except sex.

Another complaint is that some of my stories aren't realistic. The interesting thing about fiction is that it doesn't have to be true to life. Some stories require a greater suspension of belief than others, but that is allowed. Faster than light travel - no problem. Child geniuses who earn millions and have harems before reaching puberty - no problem. The genre of fiction admits a lot of leeway between the story world and reality. Is there room for a fictional story in which telling a woman that you would like to use her thighs for earmuffs doesn't result in violence? I guess not -- that is too extreme.

Now, I've even been told by some readers that having a character in a story tell a woman the first time he has met her that she is incredibly sexy is a mortal sin. Even worse is actually having the character say exactly what he would like to do with her. Apparently in their world of storytelling, the incredibly handsome man wiggles an eyebrow and the woman falls down with legs spread wide. If the man is a nerd, the woman takes pity on him and jumps his bones at the first opportunity; she discovers in the process of bone jumping that she can't resist the sexual prowess of the nerd.

Now I've gotten a number of e-mails claiming that the Donaldsons are a bunch of assholes. They might be, but in my opinion they are lovable fictional assholes. Would I want to live next door to one in real life? No. However, I might write a story about living next to one.

I've had readers tell me that they would kill a man if he was to ever treat their wife, sister, daughter, mother, female friend, or dog as Donaldsons are portrayed in those stories. The suggestion is that it isn't funny to write about characters like that. The Donaldsons are nothing compared to characters appearing in prime-time television sit-coms.

I realize that there are some who lack an appreciation of tongue-in-cheek satire and humor. I hope that they never read Johnathon Swift's 'A Modest Proposal.' I can imagine the e-mails that little piece of satire would generate.

The fact of the matter is that I think political correctness has gone way too far in our modern world. I believe that there are occasions when it a good thing for an author to trample over all that the PC correctness crowd holds holy. One PC holy truth that, in my humble opinion, deserves trampling is that it is wrong to tell a woman she looks attractive. Until the last 30 years, it hasn't been wrong for 25,000 years.

I'm not advocating that we return to the days of clubbing a woman on her head and dragging her off to the cave. However, not being able to tell a woman that she looks nice because she changed her hairstyle is wrong. Interestingly enough, criticism is less often judged offensive than compliments.You can say that someone is obese but you can't say that someone is sexy. There is something wrong in a world in which a verbal harassment isn't a matter of actually saying something offensive, but is defined in terms of the willingness of a person to claim offense (often with financial gain).

I have just finished posting Samuel. It is one of the darkest stories that I've written. Some would say that it is a dramatic departure from Quatyl, Magic, and the Donaldsons. I would have to agree with that.

I just finished reading the collected works of another author here on SOL. He has over four hundred stories, but they are just the same three stories written with different names. The structure of all of his stories is identical. Each as the same beginning and he has one of three endings that are used over and over.

I do not want to be that kind of author. I want each story of mine to reach for something different. Whether the subject matter is spiritual, emotional, adventure, personal growth, humor, or just plain coping with life, each story should be unique.

The rate at which I've been posting has diminished significantly over the past year. My life has been busier than ever and only now is the dust beginning to settle. I will be posting more stories and completing the stories begun here, but my posts will continue to be sporadic for the time being. Please be patient.

I posted the end of Commune today (actually it is now yesterday). I enjoyed working on it, but understand how others might not enjoy it. I realize that the topic is a bit depressing, particularly for individuals who might be going through circumstances similar to those described within the story.

I suppose that I ought to let it be known that 2/3 of the story had been written in November as part of my attempt to do a NaNoWriMo novel. I completed the required number of words by the end of November, but I didn't get to the end of the story. I held off publishing it, but life has gotten very busy and I had to ease off on writing. Rather than disappear for six months, I chose to start putting the novel on SOL. I raced to finish it before running out of chapters to upload. I just barely made it. Real life has been kicking the daylights out of my muse of late.

Some have wondered why I haven't been posting Magic. Well, Magic has taken a minor backseat to Commune because I didn't really want three unfinished novels hanging around while I was busy working. I'll be working a bit more on Magic now that Commune is done. I can't promise much, but I might be able to get out one chapter a week.

I sometimes think that a few fans believe that I'm a retired old guy who writes to occupy a bit of my time. I wish. The fact is that I work a full-time job that occasionally turns into more than a full-time job. When you get impatient for a new chapter, just remember that I'm doing this stuff for free and as a hobby. Have patience. I still have plenty of story ideas.