Metamorphosis by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

From the Catacombs
     
    [by Tim Powers]
    T HESE THREE STORIES are collaborations between James Blaylock and three students at the Orange County High School of the Arts, known as OCHSA. He and I both teach there.
    Blaylock is the head of the Creative Writing department—my boss—and our attitudes toward fiction writing are pretty similar: take your story seriously, make it intriguing and accessible and entertaining to readers, and work at getting it published. The ceiling of the basement room I generally teach in is papered with rejection slips the students have received, and they’re always adding more—and many of them have already made professional sales, too.
    There aren’t actually any chairs or desks in that basement room, just pillows and beanbags and an extensive library that stretches away into other subterranean chambers. The Creative Writing department is in a converted 19th-century church, complete with choir lofts, and tall stained-glass windows, and this catacomb basement which Blaylock took over.
    I’ve taught fiction writing at a lot of places—at various colleges, and the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University, and the Writers of the Future Workshop in half a dozen cities—but I’ve got to say I’ve seen the brightest and most promising writers at OCHSA.
    Even as I write that, it seems peculiar—
high school
students?
    Well, I guess these aren’t typical high school students. We get to choose from among a lot of applicants, based on samples of their writing, and they come from all over the southern California area, sometimes with long commuting—and they’re powerfully motivated. By the time we first meet them they’re generally already impressively well-read and writing their heads off.
    I like to think that Blaylock and I, and the other creative writing instructors, all of whom have professional credits, are leading these students away from—well, from majoring in creative writing in college, among other things. I hope they’ll major in anything else—literature, history, anthropology, engineering!—and write fiction on the side, learning the writing craft from their widespread reading and their experiences. Lester del Rey once said that “to know everything about writing, and nothing else, is to know nothing about writing.”
    I have high hopes for these students. They write stories because they love stories, and they bring to their developing craft an enthusiasm that excludes self-conscious conformity to whatever literary postures happen to be in style. And here’s the work of three of them! Enjoy it, and remember their names.

Stone Eggs
     
    [with Adriana Campoy]
    H IS U NCLE J ONATHAN had been gone only a couple of days when Max tried on a pair of the old man’s trousers. The strange idea came into his mind when he was petting the cat, and he didn’t question it. The trousers fit him well, as did the khaki work shirt and suspenders that had been hanging in the closet next to them. They were old fashioned, but they suited the house, in which everything hearkened back to a lost age. A
suitable suit
, Max thought, smiling at his own joke and feeling somehow more at home now, like a hermit crab in a new shell. Elmer, his uncle’s ancient, tailless cat, regarded him from the doorway with an air of approval, as if borrowing the clothing had been the cat’s idea all along.
    The invitation to housesit had come in the form of a letter, posted, apparently, when the old man was already leaving, because Max had found the house empty, with a note on the kitchen counter that read, “Make yourself at home.” The invitation had been as vague about the date of his uncle’s return as it had been about his destination. That also suited Max well enough, since his lease had run out on the flat he had been renting above Watson’s Drug Store in the Plaza, and he was temporarily homeless. Most of his own stuff was in a closet-sized storage unit that cost him forty dollars a month, a sad