Gavin spends his morning reading the email of his ex-girlfriend, Stella. He has a restraining order, so he can’t approach her. The email has to do. Until it stops. Until Stella disappears from the world. Gavin thinks he knows what happened to her, but how can he help her? He’s not a hero—or is he?

“E-Male” by Edgar-nominee Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available for $1.99 on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores.

 E-Male

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Every morning, Gavin got up, fixed himself a mocha grande with sprinkles, and padded barefoot to his computer.  He kept the computer in the second bedroom of his rent-controlled apartment.  The bedroom was the size of a closet, but he didn’t need much. Besides, the apartment itself was big, considering most places in Manhattan were the size of a shoebox, and he paid one quarter what the square footage was worth.  He’d been here since he was a student, only then he’d had to share with three other people.

Now he had the place to himself—him and the cat—and he preferred it that way.  He had his routines and his rituals, and he valued all of them.  They got him to work by noon, and that was saying something for a man who had been self-employed most of his adult life.

He would set the mocha on the second shelf of the desk and log on, careful to check his firewalls and his virus protection first.  Then he’d download his e-mail, with its insistent spam (BIG BREASTS—THIRTY DAYS!) and even more insistent business matters (Need the drawings for the Peterson account Friday.  Have any prelims yet? Don’t want to be surprised).  Sometimes, he’d find a letter from his sister, filled with news about his niece (first grade and liking it), his nephew (coasting through the second grade) and her husband, who had the uncommon good sense to stay home to raise the baby.

Gavin would answer what he could, delete what he couldn’t, and then he’d go to his morning treat:  Stella’s e-mail.

Stella, his almost-wife.

Stella, his now-ex-girlfriend.

Stella, who hated him almost as much as he hated her.

***

Stella’s e-mail was rich in metaphor, lacking in love.  But Stella had never been rich in love.  Stella preferred lust.  Good, old-fashioned, I-want-you-baby-in-the-worst-way lust.

Not hers, naturally

His.

And he rarely got a chance to use that lust—in a constructive manner at any rate.  Or, at least, that was what Stella had told the judge when she got the restraining order.

Gavin seems to think he owns me, she had said. He watches me all the time.  I’m afraid of him, Judge.

Gavin clenched a fist and then made himself relax it slowly.  She was such an actress.  Such a bad actress.  But the judge had fallen for it.

Men always fell for her, always lusted after her.

Even that judge.

When Gavin looked at Stella’s e-mail, his memories of that lust would come back.  Stella had a wide variety of correspondents, most of them male, and most of them elderly pretending to be younger.

The slang always gave them away.  They wrote, “Hey baby,” or “You look like one cool chick.”  They wrote in full sentences with capital letters and real punctuation, instead of e-mail shorthand.  It seemed strange to see someone type out “in my humble opinion,” instead of using imho.

Gavin wondered if Stella was bright enough to catch these subtle clues, or if she thought all these men writing to her were young and handsome and interesting.   Unlike him, as she had told him often enough.

“Yeah? So what am I?” he had asked, later realizing such a question had been the beginning of the end.

She had actually thought about the answer.  Then thought about it some more, and then revisited it, like a hole in her tooth, something she couldn’t ignore.

First she’d said, “You’re okay in bed.”

Then she’d revised it.  “You’re an artist.”

Finally she ended with, “And you’ve got money.”

The okay in bed had bothered him.  He was fucking great in bed.  Every woman except Stella had told him that.  He saw to them first, and then he took care of himself.  What more could a woman want?  But Stella hadn’t been that enthusiastic about sex in the first place.

She loved teasing.  She loved being the object of lust.  But she hated the fluids, the time, the sheer physicality of sex.

He’d thought about e-mailing that to her admirers.  Sure, her picture on her website was hot.  He’d taken it after a moment of passion, and yeah—artist that he was—the stuff he’d photoshopped out was barely noticeable.  You thought you saw a nipple, an attractive nipple, unless you looked closely.  Then you’d realize you saw the suggestion of a nipple, not a real nipple at all.

The real nipple was disappointing.  Large and bulbous and clearly a tool for child-feeding, not for male entertainment. It made her entire breast look like the end of a baby’s bottle instead of something a man wanted to wrap his hand around.

Whenever he took naked pictures of her—and he took a lot more than she realized—he always had to deal with the nipple problem.  He’d become an expert at the nipple problem by the time he designed her website.  She hadn’t even noticed how he’d tucked in her waist to make it look just a bit smaller, or brought the color from the blanket over her hips to hide what little hair she had just so they wouldn’t get in trouble from her webhosting service (which actually defined pornographic pictures as ones that showed everything, as opposed to artistic photos which did not).

Of course, all these idiots who e-mailed her read her blog and thought they knew her.  Her blog was ninety-percent fantasy and ten percent reality, and that ten percent only showed up when she was pissed off.

Any guy who was paying attention would know she was a real piece of work, a woman with a lot of issues and even more hang-ups, and one beaut of a temper.

But guys didn’t think of that when a woman described how she liked to spend her evenings alone, just her, Mr. Buzzer, and a package of microwave popcorn.  All the guys figured they could make her give up the buzzer.

He was here to tell them that they were wrong.

***

That’s what he initially thought he’d do, e-mail every Joe Asshole who e-mailed her, warning him away in creative and untraceable e-mails.  Instead, Gavin got caught up reading her made-up blog, comparing it to the e-mails she sent and received, and wondering if she really felt better about her life now that he wasn’t in it.

To his friends, he said he didn’t miss her.  His work certainly didn’t suffer.  He had his commissions, mostly for ad agencies and websites and magazines, and he had two gallery shows this year in Boston, which was the next best thing to New York.

Anyway he wasn’t really without her.  He had her cat—well, the cat she’d abandoned to him, even though she still used said cat’s name as her password—and sometimes, in the middle of the night, he could pretend that little ball of warmth against the middle of his back was Stella.

He had her words, too, and not the ones she’d sent him in anger the day she left (he kept those e-mails as well, downloaded and backed up, just in case).  He had her sent mail, which he read religiously, and her unsent mail—her drafts folder—which he only opened on Sunday.

He loved unsent.  Drafts were written in anger, and Stella excelled at anger.  Once he’d found a letter that verged on pornographic, and he wondered if she’d meant it for him until he’d found the name “Tom” halfway down the page.  In no way, could Gavin be made into Tom, not even when you squinted and blurred the letters together.

There were five Toms in her e-mail list, but none of them had that particular e-mail address, an address she had never sent anything to before or since.  Gavin could’ve traced it, he supposed, but he saw no need since she’d never sent the letter.

She might’ve fantasized about this Tom, but she never consummated the fantasy, and that was enough for Gavin.

***

Lately, though, her e-mail had become a little staid.  Almost boring.  At first, he attributed it to the fact they’d been broken up for more than a year.  She’d never been much of a rocket scientist.  She hadn’t even graduated from college, preferring to pad her resume so that the four years she spent at an elite school looked like a complete education.

Over the past two weeks, she stopped corresponding with most of her men.  Her letters took on a terse note, as if she was too busy to be bothered to write anything.

Then he realized that she hadn’t used the e-mail account for nearly three days.  No sent mail, no unsent drafts.  She hadn’t even responded to the real letters — the ones from family members whom he’d met once and hated — and that was unusual.  In the past, she would let the men hang for days, letting them think maybe they’d screwed up by sending such a needy letter to a woman they’d never met, but she never, ever (not even when he’d begged) ignored her family.

That was the first sign that something was wrong.  The second was subtler.  A man whose handle was jondoe61 had disappeared from her regular e-mail.  Gavin had to dig deep into her files to realize that Stella had actively blocked jondoe.

It had to take something incredible to make Stella block anyone.  She didn’t even block spammers most of the time.  She had blocked Gavin, of course, but that had been on the advice of her attorney.

And Gavin had known how to get around it.

Blocking jondoe61 got Gavin’s curiosity up.  What had it taken for Stella to decide this guy had to stay away from her, even if it was only in e-mail?

First Gavin checked the junk file, but the web mail provider that Stella used actually had an efficient junk filter.  The junk went into the junk folder, then got permanently deleted after seven days.

Stella had blocked jondoe61 nearly sixteen days before.  So Gavin couldn’t find what had provoked her, and he certainly couldn’t remember.  All of her mail from men he didn’t know seemed vaguely pornographic to him.  He blamed her for this — no one should be that explicit in her blogs without expecting some kind of nasty e-mail in return.

But Stella had never had an off-switch.  She didn’t seem to realize that things she said, and, by extension, things she wrote had repercussions.   She coveted the lust, although she did want it couched in romantic terms (“you’re so beautiful” instead of “I want to fuck your lovely ass”).

If men were savvy, they understood that she didn’t want honesty.  She wanted poetry.  But she also seemed to understand that you had to read a lot of raunchy e-mail to get to the pretty ones.

And she never blamed herself for the content.  If men wrote her nasty letters, it was because men wrote nasty letters, not because she talked about sex toys and orgasms in her nightly on-line ramblings.

Gavin sighed, sipped his now cold mocha grande, and realized he’d wasted half a morning on Stella’s e-mail.  She hadn’t logged on, either — which would have chased him out of there in a heartbeat — and he’d lost track of the time.

If he wasn’t careful, he would lose the entire day.  He couldn’t afford that.

Well, he could, but it wouldn’t be a good precedent to set for himself.  A man who was self-employed had to have an asshole for a boss or he’d get nothing done.

At least, that was what Gavin told the cat.  The cat, who had been licking her back leg when he spoke, showed her disagreement by sticking out her pink tongue and keeping her leg raised in a sort of feline-finger gesture.

However, cats knew nothing about employment, the little freeloaders, so he decided to ignore her and get to work.

He had a commission to finish.

***

He actually forgot about Stella until the next morning.  He made his mocha grande with extra sprinkles, padded barefoot to the computer, and logged on, thinking about his half-finished painting instead of the mystery of jondoe61.  Only by habit did Gavin go to Stella’s e-mail — and discovered that she hadn’t written a thing all week.

He scanned through her sent mail, wondering if she was on to him.  Maybe she had realized he’d been reading everything, and as a result, she hadn’t saved copies of the sent mail.  But he diddled with the e-mail himself, sending mail to one of the spammers as a test, and the mail he sent in Stella’s name and with her account showed up in the sent mail just like it was supposed to.

He deleted the test e-mail and remembered jondoe61.

Stella kept her answered mail.  She was too lazy to delete a letter after she had responded.  Gavin scrolled down through nearly 1000 messages, searching for jondoe61.  When Gavin finally found an e-mail from jondoe61, he clicked on it then reset the e-mail program’s perimeters so that all of jondoe’s letters grouped together.

After reading six of them, he pushed aside the mocha grande, wondering if he could ever drink one again.  He knew that both breakfast and lunch would be out of the question.

Gavin wouldn’t have blocked jondoe61.  Gavin would have reported him to the e-mail provider and maybe the to police.

This man was sick, his letters so twisted and perverted that Gavin doubted he’d ever get the images out of his head.  jondoe61 described what he wanted to do to women and when Stella answered him—

“Babe, what were you thinking?” Gavin whispered, knowing she hadn’t been thinking at all, just answering her mail like she always did—

jondoe61 told her that he hadn’t just contemplated these things, he had actually done them, and he could prove it to her.  One little meeting, and she’d never think about Mr. Buzzer again.

Gavin’s nauseous stomach clenched. Only great self-control and an unwillingness to believe that Stella was dumb enough to meet this creep kept him at the computer.

She had blocked the guy, Gavin reminded himself.  She hadn’t met with him.  She’d blocked him.

And that, in Stella’s mind, was worse that going to the police.  Denying the man the comfort of her presence was the severest punishment she could conceive of.  Gavin knew that too.  He also knew the lengths she would take to punish a man, a man who only wanted a little time with her.

Really, was a little time too much to ask?

His fists were clenched again.  He had to work at opening them.  He took three deep breaths like that court-appointed counselor ordered him to do, and then he made himself concentrate.

He checked the junk file.  Five letters from jondoe61 mixed with the Viagra offers and the Nigerian scam artists.  Five letters, all of which grew progressively angrier as Stella refused to respond.

Five letters sent on the same day.

The day Stella had last accessed her e-mail.

Monday.

This was Thursday.

Thursday morning.

Gavin made himself breathe three times again. She had probably just changed her e-mail address.  He would have to do a search and find the new one.

But changing her e-mail address wasn’t like Stella.  She hadn’t changed her real address in more than a decade.  She had kept the same telephone number her whole adult life, and asked for a variation of it when she had gotten her cell phone.

When Gavin’s lawyer had told her moving with no forwarding would solve all of her problems, Stella had looked at him as if he had just suggested she jump in front of a moving bus.

Gavin sprang out of his chair, startling the cat. She looked up at him with green expressionless eyes.  He told himself that he spent way too much time alone, that isolated people made shit up.

But he couldn’t shut off his brain.

So he picked up the phone, and dialed Stella’s work number from memory.  The receptionist who answered was someone new who didn’t recognize his name and therefore was willing to tell him that Stella hadn’t shown up all week.

“She called in sick on Tuesday,” the receptionist said.  “Frankly, I’ve never heard her sound so bad.”

He didn’t like that.  He also didn’t like the fact that the answering machine picked up on her landline and her cell’s voicemail was clogged.  He went back to the computer and looked at the stupid letters from her annoying family.

They were wondering why she hadn’t answered her phone either and how come she’d missed some baby shower and why the heck she suddenly got so rude.

He went back to the sent mail, and when it told him nothing, he broke into her work account. That took some doing.  Even though the company kept its e-mail on its corporate website, the web mail portion wasn’t as sophisticated as the main web providers.  He had to keep his fingers crossed, hoping some anti-spyware software wouldn’t find him, and then he had to use the password cracking program that he’d downloaded months ago to access the entire system.

Once he was in, getting to Stella’s e-mail wasn’t hard.  And dumb bitch that she was, she used the cat’s name as her password at work as well.  When he found her, he’d tell her to be more original.

Then he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to talk to her, and thought maybe he’d send her an anonymous e-mail just to piss her off.

When he found her.

Which he hadn’t, so far.

***

What he had found was a letter to everyone in her personal address book telling them that she had a major project at work and asking them to refrain from contacting her until she contacted them.  She misspelled refrain, and that wasn’t like her.  She always spell checked, saying that a correctly done e-mail was like dressing properly for a party.

Gavin’s hands were shaking as he examined the other major e-mail she’d sent late Monday.

Hideous flu.  Doc says it’s extremely contagious.  Should be back on my feet in a week or so.  Staying off e-mail till the dizziness goes away.  Sorry—

 She hadn’t even signed it, and that was the tip-off.  Stella  had an automatic sig line in her work e-mail that gave her mailing address, her e-mail address, her cell, business phone, and fax number, as well as announcing to each and every person she had contact with that she had been promoted to Executive Office Assistant, which sounded like a glorified secretary to him, but she was pretty damn proud of it.

He scanned through the rest of the mails.

Nothing sent or received that had the slightest bit of interest.  Nothing about her illness except a few queries from higher-ups trying to find out when she planned to return.

No answer to those either.

Gavin didn’t like this.  At all.

And there was nothing he could do.  He couldn’t go to her apartment because of the restraining order — the damn neighbor called the cops when he was on the stoop the last time — and he couldn’t call her family because they’d just hang up on him.

He couldn’t go to the cops because they’d want to know why he was spying on her.  They’d pick him up for violating the restraining order.

Damn Stella.  If she hadn’t been trying to punish him so hard, he could help her now.  She had shut down all his options.

He had no way to prove that she was missing.

Except his gut.

And the ugly tone of the letters from jondoe61.

***

That was what Gavin kept going back to.  jondoe61.  The stuff he’d said in his e-mails was beyond disgusting.  No one should imagine those things, let alone inflict those images on naïve and somewhat innocent women like Stella.  Hell, she couldn’t take Gavin’s anger or his explanations that yelling and throwing were reasonable responses to adverse stimuli.

He’d “scared” her, poor baby, and she’d fled.

No wonder she’d blocked jondoe61.  The asshole had raised the stakes considerably, and he hadn’t even met Stella.

Or had he?

Gavin went back to jondoe’s original e-mails.  They sounded a bit too familiar, like things a man might say to a woman he met, not one whose blog he read every night.

Not that Gavin knew the difference between an in-person stalker and an on-line one.  Not really.  He wasn’t even sure if on-line stalking was illegal.

Except for him, of course, and only when it concerned Stella.  He was barred from contacting her, and in that court order someone had the brains to add “through all forms of communication in existence or to be developed in the future.”  Meaning, his stupid overpriced lawyer said, no e-mail and no chat rooms and no texting.

Gavin was just guessing about jondoe61.  But his guesses were based on his knowledge of Stella, and the things she’d tolerate.

She would never tolerate jondoe61.

Since Gavin couldn’t check up on her — at least not any farther without breaking a court order — he decided to check on jondoe61.

It took Gavin three hours and two newly downloaded hacker programs to get to the site without paying for it — which should have been a tip-off to him, but wasn’t, dammit, not until he was in — and what he saw made him glad he hadn’t eaten all day.

The man’s website was a study in perversion.  Women in states of bondage, women glassy-eyed and black and blue, women looking sad and resigned…and dead, if you came right down to it.  Gavin didn’t think anyone could pose that kind of dead, the pasty skinned empty-eyed version of dead that never showed up on television crime dramas.

He studied the photographs, not because he was perverse (he most decidedly wasn’t) but to see if they were photoshopped.  He had a good eye for photo doctoring — he’d done enough of it himself — so he knew he would be able to spot when someone else did it, and he didn’t see any of it here.

What he did find, almost accidentally, was that a lot of the photos were of the same group of women. If you clicked in the center of one of the early photos, the link led you to other photos of her.

They had a sequence: scared woman, bound woman, terrified woman, glassy-eyed woman, and empty-eyed woman.

He found dozens of these sequences, all of them posed — if that was the right word — in the same place, all of them with different women, all of them clearly taken over a period of time. How long, he couldn’t tell.  When, he couldn’t tell either.

But it was definitely a period of time because the woman’s hair went from pretty and clean to tangled to tangled and greasy.  Her face went from well-scrubbed to scratched to sallow.  Her eyes went from emotional to vacant.

Gavin looked away.

He wanted to take a shower.  He wanted to toss his computer out the window.

Hell, he wanted to burn it — and the inside of his mind.

Instead, he sat back down and found the part of the website that he knew had to be there. The special members-only part, the section for members who paid extra.

Two more hacker software downloads and one frozen screen later, he found it.  It was labeled In Progress.

And damned if it didn’t have a photo of Stella inside.

***

Gavin had dialed 9 and 1 before he set the phone down.  How stupid was he?  He had a restraining order, for crissakes.  Cops always suspected guys with restraining orders of illegal activity.

Hell, he’d called Stella to explain that the night he got the order, and then found himself hauled to jail the next day for a violation.  His lawyer had played for the judge’s sympathy—and since Stella wasn’t there, had gotten it with a simple (and true) argument: Gavin’s never been subject to such treatment before.  He has no idea what the order means.  Besides, he hasn’t threatened Stella McAllister in any way.  He has never physically harmed her.  She’s just trying to make his life miserable.  And, Judge, it looks like she’s succeeding.

Gavin had gotten off with a night in jail and a warning that next time, he’d get a lot more time and a hefty fine.

He couldn’t afford either.

Then there were the other matters that the police would frown on:  He had just downloaded four different hacker programs and illegally penetrated a for-profit website; he had downloaded what looked like snuff photographs, the worst kind of porn, and to top it off, what set him on this journey was his own illegal hacking of his ex-girlfriend’s e-mail.

He had broken he didn’t know how many laws, and he didn’t have any reason to except simple curiosity. That he’d stumbled on something bad was purely accidental, and proving that it had been accidental stumbling might be dicey at best.

But Jesus, he couldn’t let anything happen to Stella.  He didn’t love her, not any more, but she was an okay person.  He didn’t wish anything bad on her.

He had to tell someone.

He just wasn’t sure how.

***

He made himself think it through.  The key, for him, was to save her without getting caught.  That meant that someone else had to do all the heavy lifting.  He could hire a private detective, but how the hell would he know the guy was competent or would protect him from the cops or would even do anything besides collect money and sit on his ass?

He didn’t.  So that was out.  Just like calling the cops directly.  Or calling her stupid family.

Except…

One of the benefits of living in New York was that everything was close.  The spy store always creeped him out when he went in it, but he went in it all the same.  They sold devices that altered a person’s voice over the phone.  He could make himself sound like a five-year-old if he wanted to.

Instead, he chose to sound like an older woman.  He bought the stupid device, then read the dumb manual, then stopped at one of the few remaining pay phones on the island.

He made sure he was wearing a pair of gloves (thank God it was cold enough that this didn’t look unusual) and before he went anywhere near the phone, he tugged a ballcap low over his face, making sure he didn’t look at any buildings or traffic lights or banks, so no automatic cameras could get a clear shot of his face.

Then he plugged in some newly acquired quarters (which he had touched only with his gloves) and dialed her mother’s number from memory.

(It scared him that he had that number memorized too.  How pussy-whipped had he been in this relationship?  Jeez, maybe he’d been the one lucky to escape with his dignity intact.)

When her mother answered, he said in his old lady voice, “Stella hasn’t been to work in nearly a week.  She’s not home sick like they think. She’s disappeared.”

Then he hung up.  He used the same phone, and the same voice, to leave a similar message on her boss’s voicemail.

But he didn’t call 911.  Instead, he called the regular police line and asked if they had an e-mail address, something they used for disturbing photographs.

“What do you mean, ma’am?” the person answering the phone asked.

“I’ve seen a naughty website,” he said,  “and I do believe there are children on it.”

“Can you give me the URL?” the person asked.

“The what?” he asked, just for verisimilitude.

“The web address?”

“Oh, no.  It’s on my son’s computer.  When I’m babysitting my niece the next time, I’ll just e-mail you.”

“Ma’am, who is your son?”

“Who do I send it to?” he asked as if he hadn’t heard the previous question.

“We have a computer crimes division, but, ma’am, it might be easier if we just visited your son and—”

Gavin hung up.  Quietly, quickly.  He stuck the device in his coat pocket and, keeping his head down, walked to the nearest deli, ordered a hamburger to eat in, and a cake to go.

Then he went into his favorite bookstore, and chatted up the pretty clerk like he usually did in the afternoon.  She was petite and red-headed, nothing like Stella.  He initially thought that was the attraction, but then he realized that the clerk incited the same kind of lust that Stella had, a long time ago.

Only with this woman, he never let on.  He’d learned that lesson.  Better to fantasize.

So he visited her as a treat for doing a good deed, bought the latest New Yorker, and went home, his heart pounding.  He felt like he had done something wrong.

But he always felt like that after he talked to the pretty clerk.  He blamed Stella for that too.  She had made him ashamed of his own lust.

She had also made him worry that other women wouldn’t be interested in it, when they had been in the past.  In the past, redheads had found him as attractive as he had found them.  They’d enjoyed each moment with him, whether it was in the darkness of their own bedroom or a quickie in an alley after they’d gotten off work.

He’d tried to go slower with Stella and look where that had gotten him.  Making anonymous phone calls and being afraid to ask the pretty clerk for a cup of coffee.

If he hadn’t been so upset, he might have gone to his bedroom and worked off some of the tension.  But he didn’t have time.  He had to finish what he’d started.

He had to execute the next part of his plan from his home computer and he prayed his skills were up to it.  If not, the cops would come after him anyway.

He needed to send the URL for the jondoe61 website to the police computer crime unit.

He’d thought and thought about that all the way home, and finally he decided to have Stella do it.

He sent an e-mail from her personal account, back dated the damn thing to the day she disappeared, and added this cryptic note:  If anything happens to me, check out the man who runs this website.  He’s been threatening me.

As a last minute thing, he decided to attach all of jondoe61’s letters.  Then he sent the mail to the police, ccing her mother and her employer.

When he finished, he paced for another hour, knowing he wasn’t done, but he wasn’t sure what was left.

Finally he realized what was making him so damn nervous.

He had to trust someone else. He had to hope he’d done enough to save her before the scratched-face stage.  Or the glassy-eye stage.  Or, God forbid, the empty-eye stage.

He had to trust.

And he’d never done that before.

***

He couldn’t sleep.  He couldn’t eat.   He couldn’t check on anything.  He couldn’t even break into Stella’s e-mail any more, not without raising suspicions.

And those images from jondoe61’s site kept haunting him.  Gavin wanted them to go away.

He wished he could scrub out his mind.

Then he realized he had to scrub his computer.  Deleting stuff wasn’t enough.  Putting things in the trash didn’t clean it off the hard drive, and doing a disk clean-up didn’t do it either.

He had to make the information impossible to access. He had to make it go away.

Finally he settled for moving his important files to another hard drive.  Then he switched drives.  Once the new drive (which was really an old drive he hadn’t gotten rid of yet) was up and running, he took the drive with all the incriminating material, and set all of his kitchen magnets on top of it.  Then he poured coffee into it while it was plugged in. The resulting electrical surge popped two breakers in his apartment’s circuit box, but fortunately didn’t cut the power anywhere else in the building.

In his closet, he set the stained and ruined hard drive, which no longer powered up (and God, he hoped the information on it was long gone).

Then he prepared for the worst.

***

The worst happened two days later when the police finally visited him.  Two rather bored looking detectives, neither of which resembled the handsome and ambitious detectives on television, came inside and asked him when he last saw Stella.

Gavin could honestly say that he hadn’t been near her since the restraining order, and why, he wanted to know, were they looking into this?

Because she was missing, one of them said as if he didn’t care.

Gavin wanted to tell him to care.  Gavin wanted to say that Stella had probably progressed from scared woman to terrified woman.  But he didn’t say anything.  He answered the questions, let some of his peevishness show because peevish was how he’d feel if Stella had gone on an extended vacation without telling anyone.

The detectives made some cursory notes, told him everything was routine, reminded him to stay away from her, and left.

And he didn’t hear anything for another two days.

***

In the end, he heard only because he’d been living with New York 1 as if it were the last television station in town.  NY1 broke every damn story in the city, and they would love a kidnapping if they knew about it.

The story came across at 9:21 p.m. as breaking news.  The police had found an executive secretary, held captive for days in a website designer’s warehouse.  The designer had found her through her blog, traced her address through her webserver, and stalked her.  He kidnapped her, sent dismissive e-mail to her friends and family, forced her to call her employer, and set about turning her into one of the horrible before-and-after montages he created for his site.

The story had to sound bizarre to the layperson — what website designer would need a warehouse? — but it soon became clear that this guy and his little circle of friends photographed their grisly pastimes, used their captives until the captives lost their usefulness, and then murdered them.

The cops even found a nearby dumping ground.

Stella was alive, but she’d never be the same.  Gavin could tell that from the few glimpses of her he got on NY1 and in the papers.  The Daily News had a tearful shot covering its front page.

Stella never used to cry like that.

He nearly sent condolences, but he couldn’t.  He had to stay uninvolved.  A mystery tip had led the police to the designer, a tip, they thought, from a subscriber who had finally gotten fed up with the website.  The paying customers were all being investigated.

Gavin hoped to hell that the cops weren’t as good at digging through computer records as he was.  He hoped that they wouldn’t notice the site had been hacked about the time of Stella’s disappearance.  He hoped that he had wiped all traces of his own e-mail address from the website itself.

But he wasn’t sure he had.

He and the cat lived in fear for weeks, fear that turned into a nagging worry for a few months, and then into relief after a year.

A year.  And he got no thanks because he couldn’t take credit.

He couldn’t even check Stella’s e-mail any more without fear of being caught.

His mornings were ruined.  He needed a new routine.

***

He finally found one when he realized the pretty bookstore clerk used her own name as part of her e-mail address on a web-based mail server.  Her password was, of all things, “password,”  and her e-mail wasn’t as interesting as Stella’s, probably because he had no real vested interest in the clerk, but it gave him something to do while he sipped his mocha grande.

And he could think about her, both at home in his private lustful moments and when he visited every afternoon, careful only to say hello. Because if he said more, she’d know he knew too much about her.

Not that he thought he knew too much.  He wanted to know a lot more.  Where did she live? What did her bedroom look like?  Did she close her eyes when she kissed a man or did she like to watch him?

He liked it when they watched.

But he couldn’t tell her that.  He couldn’t tell her anything.  He didn’t want her to stop him.

For, in addition to performing a private service for his own momentary entertainment, he was also performing a public service.  He was guarding her against creeps and stalkers and people who wanted to hurt her.

Because they were out there.  They were all over the place.

And he was a silent superhero, keeping a vigilant eye on her life.

Just in case she needed him.

Like Stella had.

“E-Male” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was first published in Two of the Deadliest, edited by Elizabeth George, Harper, 2009.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Just a few years ago, traditional publishers had a monopoly. They controlled the distribution of books. This meant that the publishers dictated terms to booksellers and they dictated terms to writers. What resulted was what happens whenever anyone controls a marketplace: lots of nasty business practices, lots of unfairness, and lots of take-it-or-leave-it ultimatums.

Those of us who got our start in traditional publishing turned ourselves into strange pretzels as we tried to survive the craziness. We put up with behavior that we wouldn’t tolerate in our personal lives, closed our eyes to the damage that we couldn’t stop, and did our very best in a bad situation.

Traditional publishers never got in trouble for their monopoly because they studiously avoided working in tandem—Random House did not collude with Bertelsmann to control pricing, for example. But they did—often—play follow the leader. If one publisher came up with a good way to make extra money, then the other publishers quickly followed suit.

You’re seeing the same behavior from the airline industry right now. The various major airlines control the not-so-friendly skies. When one adds a baggage fee, or a leg-room fee, or a fee to use the damn bathroom, another one does a variation on the same thing, until the only way that a passenger can protest this kind of behavior is either get their Congress critter as riled up as they are or refuse to fly altogether.

But eventually, we all need to get somewhere thousands of miles away very quickly, and unfortunately, that means that we have to interact with the airlines—against our will and to the detriment of our pocketbooks.

Just a few years ago, the only way to get a book was to interact with the traditional publishing industry in one way or another, either through a bookstore or the library. Even those folks who frequented used bookstores still had a finger in the publishing industry, because the book had to be published first before it ended up as an already-read pee-stained copy on some dusty shelf.

This meant that a writer who wanted an audience larger than their friends and family had to work with the publishing industry. And if the writer’s project didn’t have Success written all over it in big silver letters (meaning it wasn’t Harry Potter meets Edward Cullen in a battle to the un-death, with hobbits and one pretty girl looking on), then that writer got paid a pittance for joining the club. And the writer was grateful for that pittance because She Was Published.

Just a few years ago, publishers had given up on building careers, deciding instead to launch newcomers all the time in hopes that they would become the latest Stephenie Meyer or Suzanne Collins. So the idea of building a career one midlist novel at a time had faded, and a lot of writers—who had been at this for decades—made noises about retiring or moved to comics/gaming/screenwriting or became teachers, truck drivers, or bitter drunks sitting in the corner of every writers conference within driving distance.

At the same time, publishers had given up on independent bookstores, making them pay full wholesale price for a book while giving a chain like Borders a deep discount for that same book. Which meant that the chain bookstore could sell that book at half-price or lower, while the independent, which probably paid half of the cover price, couldn’t discount at all.

Publishers didn’t care as long as they made their four-to-six percent profit every year. And because no one protested their business practices, there was a lot of skimming, and forgotten royalties, and unreported foreign sales. Who was going to fight the big bad publisher, anyway? A writer? Give me a break. The agents? Most agents soon figured out that they made more money if they went to bed with the publishers instead of the writers.

(I blame Hollywood contaminating the agent pool by teaching them the old joke: He was so dumb that he slept with the writer.)

Expect an agent to defend a writer’s work, actually negotiate a contract, make a decision that favored the writer? Only if that writer was (and is) the agent’s cash cow. The midlist writers got screwed from every direction—agent, publisher, it didn’t matter.  All the while the agent and the publisher kept telling the writer, “That’s the way it is, sweetie. Take this deal. It’s the best we can get in these tough economic times.”

And you know what? Given the realities of publishing just a few years ago, it might have been the best they could get.  Editors fought for their writers…until it became clear that an editor could lose her job over fighting too hard. Agents fought for their writers…until it became clear that the agent wouldn’t sell to that publishing company any more if she fought too hard.

Writers shrugged and gave in. Or worse, writers had no clue what they were signing or what they were doing, and believed the agent/editor/publisher when they said, “Sweetie, you’re not worth any more than this.”

It was—and still is— the rare writer who stood up for herself.

I’ve been trying to get writers to stand up for themselves for years now on this blog. I just published a group of blog posts as a short book for writers called Surviving The Transition: How Writers Can Thrive In the New World of Publishing, and the point of that book isn’t to convince you all to go indie and publish everything yourself.

I’m a realist. I know that most writers will never go indie, even if it is in the writer’s best interest. Writers rarely make the hard choices for their best interest. Writers—established or not—are desperate to be published, and will probably sell their grandmother (for one-one-thousandth her worth) just to get their novel published by a regional press.

So why am I pissing in the wind? Because I know that a lot of you are listening. You say so, and then you prove it by negotiating deals that surprise me, standing up for yourself in new and creative ways, and then reporting back.

Instead of giving up on the writers who decided to stick with traditional publishing for everything like some of the gurus of indie-publishing have (going so far as to call these writers “stupid,” when they are not), I would rather figure out ways to make publishing—traditional or not—better for all of us.

Because if I had my druthers, I would indie publish and traditionally publish. I don’t like having all of my eggs in one basket, even if I own the basket myself.

So, selfishly, it’s better for me if a bunch of us shove traditional publishers kicking and screaming into this new world along with us.

None of us writers will ever agree on the best contract terms. What’s good for me won’t be good for you. You have different circumstances.  I may not need a hefty advance. You might. I might think that a royalty rate on e-books that’s too low is a deal-breaker. You might not. And so on.

But we can—and should—agree on one thing:

We should be willing to walk away when a traditional publisher offers us terms we don’t like.

Why is that important? Because traditional publishers have to realize that they are no longer the only game in town. Those old take-it-or-leave-it attitudes no longer apply. Their monopoly has vanished, and we as writers need to reinforce that with each and every contract negotiation.

And—by the way—don’t expect your agent to have the same attitude. The agent model thrives in the old world of publishing with the monopoly, and struggles in this new world of publishing. It’s only a handful of good and ethical agents who even acknowledge that the writer can sometimes be better off without a traditional publisher, without trying to rope that writer into some company affiliated with the agency itself.

So as I say almost weekly in this blog, the writer has to educate herself on copyright and on contracts and on business. Every month, I tell you guys to buy the Copyright Handbook from Nolo Press, and every month most of you ignore me. But you need it now more than ever. And you need a good intellectual properties attorney to handle your contract negotiations with you, with your oversight.

The other area we as writers should completely agree on is this:

We should never ever ever ever sign a blanket non-compete clause.

As traditional publishers slowly realize that they no longer have a monopoly, they’re acting worse toward writers instead of better. They’re trying to scare writers or worse, force them into behaving a certain way.

Remember that I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV. You should always keep that little thought in mind when I discuss contracts or legal terms. Mostly I talk about them from my own extremely opinionated point of view.

And in that point of view, I believe that one of the most insidious things a traditional publisher has in the contracts these days is something called a non-compete clause.

The clause often goes like this:

“The Author agrees that during the terms of this Agreement he will not, without written permission of the Publisher, publish or authorize to be published any work that might compete with the Work.”

(The capitalized Work refers to the book that is the subject of the contract.)

Sometimes the clause continues with this:

“The Author also agrees not to publish any other work without written permission of the Publisher for two years after the publication of the Work.”

The net effect is to prevent the writer from writing anything else without the publisher’s permission. Since the first part of the clause goes for the term of the Agreement, and the term of the Agreement is often dictated by sales, then that means that for a writer whose book (under this Agreement) becomes a bestseller, this writer will always have to ask his publisher’s permission to write anything else—including blog posts.

Even the more limited “also agrees” clause for two years or six months or whatever “after the publication of the Work” is terrible. Because that still puts a writer’s entire career at the mercy of his publisher. It took three years from purchase to publication of my first novel. If you add the two years of the clause on top of that, I wouldn’t have been able to publish anything without my publisher’s permission for five years.

Those five years established me as one of science fiction’s premier short story writers. I won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in those years, based not on the novel (which hadn’t come out yet) but on my short science fiction. I also sold nonfiction, mystery fiction, and horror fiction, none of which I could have published if I had signed that clause. I would not have been able to make a living as a writer.

Writers who now indie-publish their backlist or their other work that the traditional publishers have turned down cannot do so under that clause.

These clauses are horrible and insidious and, some believe, unenforceable. (The Passive Guy, who also works as a lawyer, has expressed that opinion in his excellent (and much more detailed) analysis of a non-compete clause.) The reasoning goes that such a clause is actually a restraint of trade. You can’t interfere with someone’s right to earn a living.

The problem with an unenforceable clause is this—if you sign a contract with that clause in it, thinking it unenforceable, and your publisher decides to enforce it, then you’ll end up in court arguing your case. Even if you have a good case—a winnable case—you’ll still lose years of your life and maybe tens of thousands of dollars defending yourself.

Do you want to do that? I certainly don’t.

The best way to avoid such a mess is to refuse to sign such a clause in the first place.

Walk away from that contract. Walk.

Carrie Vaughn did just that a few years ago. Think about this: at the time she walked from her publisher, she had become a New York Times bestselling author—you know, she had joined the ranks of the writers who supposedly have clout in this business. But her traditional publisher refused to budge, expecting her to cave.

She did not. She got another traditional book deal and did not have to sign a non-compete clause to do so.

Her experience came just as the indie book publishing revolution started. Who knows what choice she might have made today.  What’s fascinating to me was that her traditional publisher was unusual in those days for asking for such a clause.

It’s standard now. Traditional publishers have gotten draconian rather than easing off. They’re trying a lot harder.

And watch for this. The traditional publisher might be willing to remove the offending non-compete clause, because the same thing might be covered elsewhere in the contract. The other places the non-compete shows up are the option clause:

“The Author agrees to let the Publisher see the Author’s next Work. The Author warrants that no other Publisher may see the next Work until and unless this Publisher has refused the Work. Even then, the Author agrees to give the Publisher the right to match any offer from a competing publisher….”

I’m doing that one from memory, because I haven’t signed crap like that ever and I haven’t seen it in a contract of mine for years, although I see it all the time in other writers’ contracts.

Notice there’s no timeline here. The publisher can sit on the “next Work” for a decade if he wants to, and the writer can’t do anything else with the property. Also, the phrase “next work” can apply to non-fiction, coffee-table books, sports books, or science fiction. It’s not specific. So if you sell your publisher an urban fantasy, he might demand to see the cookbook you’ve just finished—and he might prevent you from ever publishing it.

Think that won’t happen? This one has existed since the dawn of publishing contracts and it stalls writers’ careers all the time. You need to chop your option clause down to something completely specific—“Author agrees to let the Publisher consider the Author’s next novel in the urban fantasy series about sexy trolls written under the name [whatever you sold the book under]. Publisher has 30 days from the turn-in of the Work to make an offer on the next Work.”

Note that this clause isn’t dependent on publication, which can be dicey and might never happen. And even if the publisher dilly-dallies, it doesn’t hold up a writer’s career. She can pull the next book after the publisher has had thirty days to consider it.

Plus, the option only applies to the next book in the urban fantasy series about sexy trolls that she wrote under one name. If she decides to write a second urban fantasy series about sexy trolls under a different name, the option doesn’t apply. Nor does it apply to her mystery about deadly trolls, her coffee-table book depicting trolls that live among us, or her nonfiction sports book about metaphorical trolls who manage basketball teams.

Finally, the other place the non-compete nonsense is showing up is, believe it or not, in the warranty section. The warranty section of a contract used to be boilerplate—the author warrants that she didn’t copy the novel verbatim from some famous writer, etc.  Now traditional publishers use the warranty clause to hide all kinds of stuff that they don’t want the writer (or the writer’s representative) to notice.

One of those things is the non-compete. It shows up in the warranty section like this:

“The Author Warrants that she will not publish another work without Publisher’s express permission.”

And that’s it. It does the same duty as the non-compete clause, but it’s usually buried in more obscure language between clauses about publishing delays due to Acts of God, and the author certifying that she has the legal right to sign this particular contract.

So even if you cut one part of the contract, it might not matter. You have to cut all references to the non-compete wherever it appears.

I’m getting reports from several writers, not just the Carrie Vaughn piece, that many traditional publishers refuse to cut the non-compete clause. If you like your publisher and don’t want to walk, you can often defang the clause, like I showed with the option clause above.

You could add language like “For six months [or one year or two years] from the publication of the Work, the Author agrees that he will not publish or authorize to be published any similar work under the same name which would injure the sale of the Work.”

Note that there’s no publisher’s permission involved. And the publisher would have to show damage, that the sales were injured. A time-limit also helps.

Also realize that any promises your editor (or agent) makes to you in e-mail doesn’t count. Whatever changes you make have to be in the contract. Promises made in e-mail don’t count if they’re not in the contract itself. I’ve had a lot of contracts with easy-going editor/publishers who got fired or moved up the corporate ladder and got replaced by the demon spawn from hell.

Now I approach all of my contracts, even if they’re negotiated with really nice reasonable people, as if that person will get fired and replaced by said demon spawn from hell. Because I’ve experienced this ride before and it ain’t no fun.

Why am I harping on the non-compete clause at the expense of the royalty clauses or the advances or any other egregious thing that might be in a publishing contract?

Because the non-compete clause is the way that traditional publishers are using to hang onto their monopoly. So they can’t control the entire industry any more? No big deal. They can control their writers.

You think the publishers won’t enforce these clauses? They will, if push comes to shove. And it just might, particularly if you’re successful.

So put this one in your goodie bag. Do not sign a blanket non-compete clause. Ever.

And those of you who are indie published, you might think you’re out of this fight, but you’re not. If you sign with Kindle Select, you’re agreeing to a non-compete clause. If you make a movie deal and you don’t read the contract, you will probably sign a non-compete clause.

Think it doesn’t happen? It happens all the time. The Puzo estate is dealing with just such a thing right now, with book sequels to The Godfather, and this baby’s in litigation.

Don’t let anyone tell you what to write. Ever. Ever.

If you keep that as your philosophy, you will avoid the worst of the non-compete clauses. The net result will be that you will retain complete control over your writing and your career. You won’t sacrifice it because someone tells you it’s the only way to get published or the only way they’ll do business with you.

If it’s the only way they’ll do business with you, why would you want to do business with them?

Walk away.

You’ll be doing us all a favor.

I blog every week on the publishing industry, taking time away from what I consider to be my actual work—writing fiction. I lose about 3,000 words of fiction every week to do this, which means that I lose revenue. In order to continue doing the non-fiction blog, I do need to earn money from it. Which means from you, the readers, because I’m going direct to you with the information, no middleman.

Last week, I left off this little coda, and sure enough, donations dropped off, like they do every time I fail to mention the donate button below. So in addition to sending me your comments and your e-mails, please consider leaving a tip on the way out.

Thanks.

Click Here to Go To PayPal.

“The Business Rusch: “Competition” copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Oh, I just love the puns I can make with the name of this magazine. Lightspeed is wonderful, in case you haven’t been reading it. And my story, “Craters,” is available on the site for free this week. If you want to read the entire Issue (which I would suggest), you can order it on the site itself. Or you can simply read the story for free by clicking this link. Enjoy!

“Red Letter Day” by Hugo-award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available for $1.99 on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores.

The free story will only be available for one week.  If you missed this one, click on the links above.  There’s another free story lurking somewhere around this site. Track it down, read, and enjoy.

Last year, I wrote a series of posts on how writers of all stripes can survive the transition from the old world of publishing to the new world of publishing. I’ve updated the posts and compiled them into an e-book called Surviving The Transition: How Writers Can Thrive In The New World Of Publishing. This book is for established writers, new writers, writers who want to stay in traditional publishing, and writers who never want to join traditional publishing.

Here’s the cover blurb:

Most writers run their careers the same way they did in the 1990s. But publishing has changed so much since then that any writer who works on the old model will no longer make a living. 

In this short book, international bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch shows you how to think about the new world of publishing, who to trust, and who not to trust. 

She also gives you a blueprint for survival—what to learn, what to ignore, and how to find help. If you are a successful professional writer—or hope to become one—then this book is for you. 

You can order the book in all e-bookstores, including Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords. If you want to read the older versions for free, click on this link and start with “Writing Like It’s 1999.”