Archive for July, 2008
Friday, July 25th, 2008
"Not an early start today but it doesn’t matter at all because the unity feeling is back. That is the fine thing. That makes it easy and fun to work."
John Steinbeck, ‘Working Days,’ Entry #14, June 14, 1938
Well, not necessarily easy to work, but certainly fun again.
Chapter six is done and chapter seven is begun and after lots of preliminary stuff, the book is off and running. Or, if not running, limping along like a Special Olympics athlete with a knee brace and crutches.
Chapter six was the novel’s engine, that souped up HEMI that gives us the forward motion. In this case, it was a murder and seeing that dead body will now lead us the machinery of an investigation and a carnival of suspects. (hehehehe, right now, there are – literally – 300+ suspects)
But then, as so often happens and which I love so much, the ecstasy of discovery also came along with chapter six. I had forced Jace into a situation where she was getting pummeled verbally and emotionally by one of her own detectives (because of things that happened in the the first book) and as she stood up for herself, as she decided this was the moment when she’d taken enough bullshit, I discovered just how badly things had gone for her during the eight weeks between the end of the first book and the beginning of the second.
I love those discoveries. This one was small in actuality but huge emotionally. Just a bit of paper, really, that I realized was defining Jace for this entire book. The outcome of the definition was there already, but I hadn’t understood exactly where it had come from.
I know, it sounds smooshy and ostentatious and overly-writerly, but that’s pretty much how it is. And let me tell you, those kinds of discoveries, where the writer’s subconscious is allowed to stretch out and get some good steam up, do not happen with outlines.
As a writer, I never had much use for outlines and plans and all the rest. Christie Golden, a fantasy writer friend of mine, and I once had a conversation about outlines. She writes Big Fat Fantasy with thousands of characters and all kinds of spells and brews and potions and all the things that readers of BFF love and demand. To keep it all straight, she works from outlines.
But her outlines run 100 pages.
To me, just write the damned thing. If the outline is that long, that involved, it’s really nothing more than a short version of the book. Outlines worked for her and she didn’t really give a shit that I thought them a waste of time.
Well, I still don’t use full book outlines but I do find myself outlining chapters. I have a few paragraphs, a few sentences. Just enough to get in the important points that I have to get in. Anything extra I discover I consider the literary equivalent of found money. I see it, get excited and gleeful, and move on.
So while I don’t yet have a complete picture of what is what in this book, I do now have strands and threads slipping out and away from me like all the roads out of Rome. But it is in that very mess and entanglement that I find my control over the book building. It is in the chaos building on the page that I find some of the unity about which Steinbeck wrote.
I really do think this is going to be fun now. Not that the set up hasn’t been fun, but hell, now we’ve got blood and vendettas.
I don’t care who you are, blood and vendettas ain’t nothing but fun.
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Friday, July 25th, 2008
"Last night the itching, burning jitters and no sleep until 3:00 a.m. Hope my nerves aren’t weak because they have a long haul ahead."
John Steinbeck, ‘Working Days,’ Entry #17, June 17, 1938, Friday
Well, my nerves aren’t shot at all, but are frazzled a bit. Got some news last week that there might – MIGHT – be an offer looming in the next week or so. Yeah, thanks Agent Bob, for letting me know that ’cause I haven’t slept at all since getting the email. Damn him with his faint note of hope and possibility coupled with a giant "HAFTA WAIT AND SEE."
Aaaauuuuuuggggghhhhh.
So I’m not sleeping and instead spend my time juggling all my little cockroach plans and schemes into some semblence of order just in case there is an offer. I’ll do this and do that and go here and go there and blah blah blah. None of it means anything until there is – or isn’t – an offer.
But it’s fun to think about.
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Saturday, July 19th, 2008
(with background music by the Louvin Brothers…appropriately enough because today’s is about tractors)
The First Time
She said the tractor was driving along the road. Not just anyroad, but a road nearly 30 miles from the Sheriff’s Office. She said the driver was weaving all over the road. She said he might be drunk. Thinking this might be a DUI with a fun little twist, but less than an hour from going off-duty, I jumped in the prowler and headed out.
Thirty miles.
I didn’t drive crazy. It wasn’t an accident. There were no shots fired or knives plunged into someone’s chest. Just a crazy farmer’s kid, driving drunk on Keystone Light or Boone’s Farm wine and taking Daddy’s tractor for a spin. But then our lady called back and said it was no longer on the road. Now the tractor was in a ditch. It was at a strange angle. It was running. The driver was no where to be seen. Maybe he was caught under the mowing deck.
Now I ran quick. Lights. Sirens in the intersections. Heart rate up a bit. Skin a bit sweaty. Got there as quickly as I could, thinking about first aid and compressions and rescue breaths and all that other first responder stuff.
Now…understand that I don’t know anything about tractors, or even farms. I grew up in the city. Milk and meat and corn all come from Safeway or Albertson’s, not Joe’s lower 40. But even with my limited farming experience, I can see the obvious.
The tractor was in the ditch. It was at an odd angle. It was running. But there was no mower deck and there were no left-over pieces of a farmer’s son.
And it sure as hell hadn’t been driving down the road. It had been there for a few hours at least, using the power drive on the back to run a pump that was pumping out flooded land.
Oh, yes, I had some choice words for our intrepid caller. See, frequently we have people sex up their calls to get us moving more quickly. Either she did that or she was a complete idiot with zero common sense.
Either way, I checked the area twice for dead or drunk people, found none, and went home.
The Second Time
Not my shift, but the same song, new verse.
The Third Time
Ditto.
The Fourth Time…Sixth Time
The Tenth Time…Twentieth Time…Four Hundred and Eighty Seventh Time
Ditto ditto ditto.
The Last Time
This time the call came through 911. It was sexed up again. Crashed and probably dead, with body parts probably everywhere and maybe drugs and probably even weapons of mass destruction!
My shift, but not my call.
Knowing what was what, because we’d done this 9,528 times, the responding deputy finished up something else first. The dispatcher, a part timer, got a little nervous and asked a couple times if he was going.
"Thirty miles to a call we’ve been on a hundred times?"
"But this is a different location."
True, but all the calls had been within a couple miles of each other.
After the deputy left, the dispatcher looked at me and said, "Well, if he is caught in the mower deck, we won’t need an ambulance by the time he gets there."
"We’ll need the coroner," I said.
"Hell, no, we’ll need a squeegy."
Hmmmm…that was much funnier in person than it is on the cyber page. Ah, well.
And just so you know, the guy wasn’t dead. In fact, there wasn’t even a guy. There was just a tractor…and a pump.
And an annoyed deputy.
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Saturday, July 19th, 2008
"[My ancestor was a slave trader, but] I don’t have to be a slave trader."
Overheard at the bookstore…not said to me personally, but I was there so that’s close enough.
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Monday, July 7th, 2008
"I am very happy in this work, I do know that. It satisfies me so far. But I wish I could have the music. I really need the music. Have to make the sound of the tractors and the dust of the tractors. I’ll have to have music before that…."
John Steinbeck, "Working Days," Entry #7, June 6, 1938
Coltrane. Baker. Davis. Horn and Horne. McDuff. That’s the music of this novel. Not quite all jazz all the time, but close.
Except, while Steinbeck wrote literally about music (actually, he writes about not being able to hear his music over the washing machine, which is as pedestrian as it gets), he is also talking metaphorically about music.
In other words, does the work – the words on the page – sing?
I’ve begun chapter five and the lady ain’t singing yet. She’s warming up, maybe, but not quite yet stepped up to the mike and belted out whatever tune is in her head. That is because, as much as I preach get in and get going immediately if not sooner, I’m trying to slow down in this series. Much of what I’ve done so far has been warm up. There is a touch of back story, a bit of set up to minor incidents, and two or three bits of major set up.
Yet now, as of 11:30 last night, we have a body.
At least, the rough draft of body. Right now, it’s in the hallway, a shank sticking outta its chest.
So we’re not really singing yet…just sort of moaning. Hopefully, it will eventually sing. Hopefully, the language on the page will match the language in my head and it will all match the music of the death. We have to hear the shrieking alarm beyond me simply saying, "That alarm was noisy, dude." We have to hear the last few moments of life beyond me simply saying, "Then the dude was dead…oh, wow, man." And we have to hear, in the music of the language o the page, the slow spill of blood.
That’s the music Steinbeck was really talking about. It’s much harder to hear and – hopefully – nearly impossible to compose to the standards of the composer.
Up next? The machinery of investigation. Oh, by the way, we are starting with more than 300 suspects.
Hehehehehe…this is where it gets fun.
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Friday, July 4th, 2008
It was a heavy day in the city. The sun blasted through the dirty glass and touched everyone in the store with the fire of a kid holding a magnifying glass over a hapless ant.
Okay, it’s not like a big city, it’s Princeton. And it wasn’t all that hot, really, and I have no idea if the people at the pharmacy felt hapless or not. Hell, I wasn’t even there. But I heard this actually happened.
There’s a lady at this pharmacy and she finds a note on the floor. As curious as anyone, and probably – like anyone – hoping the slip of paper was actually a winning lottery ticket someone had accidently dropped, this lady snaps it up and reads it.
“Murder In The White House,” it says.
You know this little old lady, gray hair and special shoes, is thinking What the fuck?
“Murder On Capital Hill,” it says.
Holy shit, our geriatric detective thinks. Murder is afoot, murder most foul and it is up to me, Thou Whost Would Buy Metamucil and bunyon pads, to stop it!
“Murder In The Supreme Court,” the note reads.
Surrepticiously, our heroine takes the note to the owner of the pharmacy. Quietly, so that the plotters and evil-doers who’ve conveniently dropped the note can’t hear, she gives it to the head drug dispenser and asks that she pass it up the line.
“Up the line?”
“We must get this to the police. Perhaps it can be dusted for prints. Mine, obviously, will have to be taken as an exclusionary set. Also, the ink can be analyzed for what kind of pen wrote this note. We can then trace that back to the manufacturer, the wholesaler, and the retail outlet. Perhaps they have credit card records of this sale. The paper, too, can be traced, though it is more difficult. We shall have to alert the FBI and Homeland Security.”
“But – ” The pharmacist points at the note.
“Murder at the FBI,” it says.
“Egads, who is left to save us?”
“Uh…the Princeton Police Department?” the pharmacist asks.
“Brilliant. Call them.”
And then our note-finder leaves. Hey, she’d done her bit, she doens’t have to stay for all of it.
But something about the note feels wrong, like an odd note played in the midst of a contemporary music experiment…I know, it’d be hard to find a wrong note in those kinds of aural train wrecks, but you get what I’m saying.
So our druggist calls Officer Peoria (I don’t want to embarrass him, if you can dig it), and gives him the note. It feels strange to him, too. So Officer Peoria takes the suspect note (as opposed to the suspect’s note) to our local bookseller and says, “Does this note, encrypted though it appears to be, mean anything to you?”
Our bookseller looks long and hard, racks her formidible brain, and says – sagely – “Yes.”
“What?”
“Well, I believe it to be less a threat of political assassination than a listing of books by one Margaret Truman.”
“Who?”
“Mary Margaret Truman. Once upon a time, she was a singer. Then a writer. Also the daughter of President Harry S. Truman.”
Officer Peoria frowns. “Truman was, I believe, a Democrat.”
“Yes.”
“So the daughter of a Democrat, probably also a Democrat, is plotting a massive political killing spree against the machinery of these United States? Currently run by Republicans?”
“Well, probably not…as she’s been dead since January 29 of this year.”
“Died this year, huh?”
“So did Arthur C. Clarke.”
“Well, there you go.”
“Exactly.”
“So I can throw this note away?”
Our bookseller nods and offers up a trash can. “I think so.”
The End
- editorial fair play: what I’ve written is EXACTLY – almost – how it happened. I’ll leave it to you to sort truth from truthiness.
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