The Woeful Web

"What a woeful web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."

My mother used to tell me that. Usually after I'd spun yet another outrageous story as a child, either to explain some equally outrageous behavior, or when I'd just spin a tale for fun.

It's a bit of a mis-quote. The actual line is "Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." From Sir Walter Scott's poem Marmion. It's often mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare.

I like my mother's version better. Woeful just has a bit more panache than tangled.

My mother's point was that deception, or lying, if you prefer, may begin with one little lie, but then requires more lies to support it. Eventually, the lies become so big, the tales so tall, that you can never keep them all straight. Never remember which one you told to whom. Or when, or where. The lies then begin to twist and turn on themselves, just like that tangled web, until the entire carefully crafted structure comes crashing down on the liar, revealing the fraud and ultimately resulting in woe for the liar.

My mother despised liars. But loved to read. So what of authors?

Once when I was very small, seven or eight years old as I recall (a very long time ago at any rate) but already, at my mother's constant encouragement, voraciously consuming every book, children's or otherwise, I could lay hands on, I asked the question:

"But aren't books all lies?"

"Not all of them," she answered after a moments pause to consider the question. "Some books are all truth, at least as the author saw it. Some books are based on the truth, which means the writer may have embellished them a bit to add to the story." Another pause here as she explained the word embellish to me. "And yes, some books are all lies. But we call that fiction. And so long as everyone understands that the story is all made up, just to entertain others, it's not considered a lie, but a story."

It wasn't long after this that I began putting pencil to paper (remember that ugly green extra-wide rule they used to hand out in elementary school in the '70's? That's the stuff I began with) and started spinning webs of not woe, but wonder.

Not that anything I wrote back then was so wonderful. Could I find any of those sloppy, early attempts at writing, I would no doubt laugh myself silly. Or have a stroke knowing I was responsible for all that bad grammar.

But my mother read all of it. Smiled lovingly at my juvenile attempts to create plot, characterization, and some semblance of structure. As bad as I know those stories must have been, she encouraged me to keep at it. To continue. To read more, so that I could understand the craft more, so that I could become a better storyteller.

Sadly, adolescence fell upon me like a hard rain from a stormy sky and instead of taking to the path my mother had encouraged me to follow, I set upon a course of self-destruction, A true and total woeful web that I did not break free from until I was well into my thirties.

But one day, for no particular reason at all, I felt the urge to write again. I began with short stories. Just some little ideas that had been roaming around in my head, taking up space that had long gone unused, tickling the underside of my subconscious and demanding to be set to paper. Toby was the first. Just a sweet, semi-autobiographical story of a boy and his dog. Once I'd polished it up a bit and decided it was worthy of, at least, my mother's eyes, I sent it off to her. The next time we spoke she told me she loved it. That it had made her cry.

Normally, making your mother cry is a bad thing that rates right up there with being a habitual liar, but in this case her tears were an emotional response to words I had put on a page. They added fuel to a fire that had been banked, but still smoldered somewhere deep within my soul.

Still, a boys mother will always see good in him. God knows mine saw good in me, even after I'd proven time and again that my own personal wellspring of good had dried up when I about eleven years old. So I was hesitant to believe that I could churn out a story that anyone besides her would read. "Try a writing course," she suggested in a letter. "See if a professional can convince you of what I already know."

And so I did. And, lo and behold, a bona fide professional author and editor saw something in my work. She worked with me for a year or so, not pulling any punches, and the end result was my first published work Dark Matters: A small collection of short stories, headlined by Toby, that has yet to draw any negative reviews.

To my sadness, my mother did not live to see that collection published. She had read every story in it (and a few that didn't make the cut, like my horrible attempt at a romance story that ended with a man being dragged under a bed by a decades old collection of dust-kitties and devoured alive-I just don't seem to have the romance bent in my repertoire, as my mother and editor both readily informed me) but never got to see it in print. That collection is dedicated to her.

Having accomplished that, I moved on to my first novel, Infernal, and Oh! The tangled (but not at all woeful) web was woven. That web was not to be contained in one novel. It's simply too big. And as I spun the tale of a man/not man discovering his place in the multi-verse, I inadvertently created a multi-verse in my own mind, the likes of which I had never imagined. The stories there, in what my wife named the Elsewhere, are endless, alive, and perpetuate more stories, back stories, stories far in the future, deep in the past, and everywhere in between.

I'm currently working on six of them. And while I've been asked, repeatedly, when I will publish the next, I honestly cannot say. They are each progressing at their own pace; some just begun, other's nearing completion. Each and everyone of them somehow connected; individual strands that make up a tangled web that seems to grow larger with each passing day.

I'm just the conduit.

And if none of them are ever published? I'm okay with that. Because this web, originally created by me at my mother's urging, this Elsewhere my mind takes me to, is where I can be safe. Free. Anything I want to be.

My mother is there, too. Unseen, but a presence nonetheless. Encouraging me to keep at it. To keep telling the story and spinning the web. To become the consummate liar.

The woeful web? In this case, I think not. Mine is a web of wonders. And I want to share it with the world.

Thank you, Mom.

I love you.