A Death at The Hangman's Noose?

You probably have never heard of the Anti-Anonymous writer’s conference, and that is a dirty rotten shame, especially if you have ever had any desire to write. The price was right too, the worst piece of writing you've ever done.

"You know Rick that just might work." Michael grinned, his teeth glowing in the dimly lit bar.

"Might? There's no doubt about it," Rick said, his green eyes glowing with that cat-like stare of his. "Even old Cal over there lit up when I explained it," he said rising to his full seven-foot height.

"My only concern is the competition," Michael said, his white eyes scanning the room. "Some of those guys could put us out of business."

"You worry too much," Rick said. "And what are they going to say? We're trying to publish stuff they wouldn't even look at. Besides, if we don't get some fresh blood in the writing pool, we're all going to lose our markets."

"And I suppose you'd call it ghost writers anonymous." I said as I nodded to the bar tender for another drink.

Rick and Michael looked at each other and shrugged.

After a few more minutes we finally settled on the Anti-Anonymous Writers conference. "And I assume you have some ideas on advertising." I said as we moved to the next step in the process of planning this thing.

"We'll just build it, and they will come," Michael said. 

"Even the solids?" I asked.

"Cal,” Michael put a semi-solid hand on my shoulder. “That's why we have you here."

"So I'm supposed to take care of all of the advertising for this thing."

"In your terms it's called word of mouth," Michael said.

I thought for several minutes. It wasn't nearly as effective as the other ideas I had, but it was the cheapest, and for what we wanted to do, a small group would work as well as a large.

"Then I guess the next step is to set a date."

"How about tomorrow," Rick said.

"How about next month," I said sternly. "Ghost folk may have instantaneous word of mouth, but we solids don't."

"One month from today it is then." Michael said. “I'll reserve a conference room upstairs."

At the time I didn't even realize that there were conference rooms in the Hangman's Noose, but my dealings with the owner had been brief and I had much younger then.

One month later we held a very successful the conference. There were two dozen participants, and the professional writers we invited claimed to have had a good time. We published those revised worst works at quite a profit, and the clamor to sign up for the next year was tremendous. Within a week after planning the next conference we tripled the number of sessions we wanted to do, and we were considering a larger location. Of course Rick and Michael vetoed that idea, since the Hangman's Noose was the only place they could stay for more than a few hours at a time, something about ghost folk and real space. Unfortunately more people meant more rooms and refreshments. Suddenly our profit was gone, and we were going to need help with funding.

"I guess we could charge a fee," I said.

"That would defeat the purpose," Michael said.

"Writers on our side are not rich," Rick said.

"It's not much better over here," I said.

We thought the dilemma was solved when Earl J. Worlington III decided that he wanted a piece of the action. If we'd known half the illegal enterprises he was involved in, or how far in debt he would put us when he offered to help, we would have sent him packing. While it would have meant keeping our second conference a bit smaller, we'd still be a legitimate operation and could have attracted some legitimate donors later on, but hindsight is 20/20.

Since the Hangman’s Noose is accessible from at least a dozen worlds (and my physicist friend tells me it is a legitimate phenomenon) and since the entrances are generally in the roughest part of town, the bar was a law unto itself. The owner, a force to be reckoned with on her own, had a crew of bouncers that were virtually invisible until something went wrong, and those bouncers would appear, and had contacts with bounty hunters on many of the outlying areas so that those who raised a ruckus would simply disappear. Unfortunately there was one of those bounty hunters out there just waiting for Earl to make a move.

We were in the process of figuring out the profits for that year's conference, when the little hooded bounty hunter raised a fuss with one of the barhops, and then claimed that Earl was a part of it. The bouncers appeared, followed by the owner of the Hangman's Noose.

The authorities on several worlds had pooled their resources and offered a sizable reward for his capture and the little bounty hunter had conned one of the bouncers to help him. When the dust had settled it was revealed that Earl was using ill gotten funds to cover our expenses, and when the bounty hunter tracked him to our conference, the authorities in addition to taking Earl away, took all of the funding, and a good share of our profits. The owner of the 'Noose was magnanimous enough to count her cut of the bouncers reward as payment for the conference. Unfortunately the other writers were not as understanding, and it was all the rest of us could do to come up with the promised fees to pay them for their time.

Once we sorted everything out, we were allowed to continue holding the conference, but not at the Hangman's Noose, at least not officially.

"I can't have law-keepers trying to bust in here every time you make a bad choice about who to take funding from," she said.

If you still want to attend the conference, you'll have to find out where we're hiding it. It's still being held unofficially every year, and we usually have a great turnout, (most of the well known authors aren't afraid to show up) but it's all under cover and the cost is still your worst piece of work.

qed.