Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
Happy New Year, One and All, from the cast and crew of the Literary Lab!
Michelle Davidson Argyle
Domey Malasarn
Scott Bailey
Friday, December 31, 2010
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Pinpoint Your Goals!
The new year is fast approaching, and with it many of us make resolutions. As writers, the new year shouldn't be our only time to make resolutions pertaining to our craft, but I thought it would be fun to talk a little bit about what you might want to accomplish or improve in 2011.
Sometimes I think we go about things the wrong way, though. So a bit of advice. If one of your goals is to get an agent, you might want to rethink your focus.
Sometimes I think goals skirt around the issue, and that's the reason they are never completed. For example, many people say they want to lose X amount of pounds within the year, when it would probably be wiser to look at it from a different angle and make the goal to exercise at least once a day, or maybe cut out half the meat in your diet, or eat more vegetables and drink more water. Because, after all, the idea of losing weight is to be healthier, right? Feel healthier. Look healthier.
After all, the idea of getting an agent is to publish a book, right? There is a lot that surrounds publishing a book, and a lot of different ways to go about it. Make sure you're attacking the right goals.
One of my writing-related resolutions for 2011 is to deepen my prose. I'm really interested in creating more beneath the surface than I have in the past. I want every sentence to charge the story forward, but also contain layers beneath it that move at different speeds. This goal comes from my desire to write more literary work, even if it doesn't appeal to a wide audience. I have some short stories in mind, one more novella to write, and possibly another novel to revise. I have a lot on my plate, but the goal I will focus on is my prose. I think it will help move all my goals forward in the end.
What is one of your resolutions? Don't be afraid to say get an agent, haha. I only made that point above to illustrate how we can look at things differently and pinpoint the goals we're sure we want.
Sometimes I think we go about things the wrong way, though. So a bit of advice. If one of your goals is to get an agent, you might want to rethink your focus.
(1) Why do you want an agent? Are you really ready for that step, or do you want an agent because that's what everyone else wants?
(2) Have you tried to get an agent in the past? If so, were there a lot of rejections? Only a few? Some specific feedback? Maybe your goal should be more specific, like master the art of your first chapter, write a better query letter, write a better book, query at least one agent a month, learn the rules and how to better break them, etc.
Sometimes I think goals skirt around the issue, and that's the reason they are never completed. For example, many people say they want to lose X amount of pounds within the year, when it would probably be wiser to look at it from a different angle and make the goal to exercise at least once a day, or maybe cut out half the meat in your diet, or eat more vegetables and drink more water. Because, after all, the idea of losing weight is to be healthier, right? Feel healthier. Look healthier.
After all, the idea of getting an agent is to publish a book, right? There is a lot that surrounds publishing a book, and a lot of different ways to go about it. Make sure you're attacking the right goals.
One of my writing-related resolutions for 2011 is to deepen my prose. I'm really interested in creating more beneath the surface than I have in the past. I want every sentence to charge the story forward, but also contain layers beneath it that move at different speeds. This goal comes from my desire to write more literary work, even if it doesn't appeal to a wide audience. I have some short stories in mind, one more novella to write, and possibly another novel to revise. I have a lot on my plate, but the goal I will focus on is my prose. I think it will help move all my goals forward in the end.
What is one of your resolutions? Don't be afraid to say get an agent, haha. I only made that point above to illustrate how we can look at things differently and pinpoint the goals we're sure we want.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Do your characters sound different?
I'm keeping this short since I'm throwing it out to you rather than talking about it myself. Are you able to create characters that sound different when they speak? This is something I don't think about very much as I write, and I'm wondering if anyone has any tips.
I'm curious to know:
1. what techniques you use to make your characters sound different and
2. if you, as a reader, are bothered when characters DON'T sound different.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Best Books As Gifts
I apologize to anyone who doesn't participate in the frenzy of gift-giving on or around the twenty-fifth day of December every year. I don't mean to marginalize you or ignore you, but today I'm going to post about giving and receiving books for Christmas.
Because giving and receiving books as gifts at any time of the year is fabulous, and I exhort all of you to do it as much as possible! And also because I'm still in that happy post-holiday glow and I don't want to write a post about technique or craft or any of that serious stuff! So let's just cut the crap and get to it:
What's the coolest book you gave/got for Christmas this year?
I'll start: Mighty Reader wanted Salman Rushdie's new novel Luka and the Fire of Life and so I bought it for her. I wanted the Everyman's Library edition of Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable trilogy, so she bought it for me. Yay, modernism! She also got me a cool non-fiction book about eels because, you know, eels.
Your turn!
Because giving and receiving books as gifts at any time of the year is fabulous, and I exhort all of you to do it as much as possible! And also because I'm still in that happy post-holiday glow and I don't want to write a post about technique or craft or any of that serious stuff! So let's just cut the crap and get to it:
What's the coolest book you gave/got for Christmas this year?
I'll start: Mighty Reader wanted Salman Rushdie's new novel Luka and the Fire of Life and so I bought it for her. I wanted the Everyman's Library edition of Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable trilogy, so she bought it for me. Yay, modernism! She also got me a cool non-fiction book about eels because, you know, eels.
Your turn!
Monday, December 27, 2010
Does your story have a hypothesis?
First off, if you missed Scott's last post, please check it out because it's a great one!
"There's a difference between controls done to genuinely test your hypothesis and those done when you just want to show that your hypothesis is true."
For me, each story I write has some sort of "hypothesis" or at least a question that is unanswered when I start the story. My hypothesis for my novel Rooster, for example, was that the world could sympathize with a man who was seemingly unlikable. My hypothesis for Bread was that a man could reach such a low that self-sacrifice was the best solution for him.
I start out with a hypothesis, and the job I assign to myself is to test whether or not that hypothesis is true. To do that, I expand on my story, I let it progress in directions that feel natural or "real" to me.
I try not to force it.
But, sometimes, when I do force it--when I suddenly throw in a bad twist in the story or when I make my characters do things that are inconsistent with their personality--that's the point when I stop genuinely testing my hypothesis and start trying to show that my hypothesis is true. I see this sort of thing in a lot of mediocre books and movies, when there is some point in the story where I feel like the creator is suddenly just trying to get to the finish line. I sometimes use the word sincerity to describe this sort of thing. When a story is forced, it doesn't feel sincere to me. The writing suddenly become a manipulative device to try and show a hypothesis. I don't know if other writers feel this way, but it captures my thought process as I'm working through a story.
As I write these days, the biggest challenge I face is to keep from forcing my story, especially when I get near the end. I'd say I haven't succeeded in doing this yet. I need to keep genuinely testing my hypothesis instead of trying to show that my hypothesis is true.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Some Books That Changed Things, 2010
First, this is not really a Friday Filler post, but then again, it's All About Me so maybe it is. Except it's not:
Happy Holidays to any of you who celebrate any holidays that might be happening right now! Was that non-specific yet heartfelt enough? Because really, it's been a hard year for a lot of folks and what I wish most for everyone's 2011 is peace and joy but, mostly, peace because it's so hard to come by. Peace on Earth, everyone.
But back to me: I was thinking about which of the books I read this year that have influenced the way I write. Not necessarily books that were my favorites, but books that have changed my relationship to my own fiction. There were not many of them, but there were a couple:
Women In Love, by D.H. Lawrence. A classic, depending on who you ask. This book is a bit clunky in the prose but Lawrence had a way of directing your attention to the uncomfortable but real emotions of his characters, of showing how people do the most unpredictable things in order to achieve happiness, even resorting to a kind of savagery, and how some people might get it right while most people get it wrong. There's a matter-of-factness in Lawrence's approach to character that I definitely see working its way into my own fiction.
Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges wrote no novels, concentrating his efforts on short stories and essays. The stories are amazing and groundbreaking; Borges had an eclectic education and his influences include everything from Shakespeare to Poe to folktales to Cervantes to Einsteinian physics. The thing that I am getting from Borges is that you can push ideas really far and be vague about where you end up but that vagueness is good and valuable and mystery is an excellent addition to life, and therefore to story. Weird, that is, is good.
How Fiction Works, by James Wood. A non-fiction book about fiction. I read a lot of books about literary history and literary theory and narrative theory and all of that, but this book is not that sort of academic writing. This is a sort of old-fashioned primer on the art of fiction, focused on what makes the good books so good. Wood might try too hard to reduce things down to the ubiquity of "free indirect style" narration, but his delight in character and the poetry of language is infectious, and his arguments in favor of the artistic elements of writing make me want to try harder. There were no specific lessons for me in this book, but it certainly got me more excited about being a writer and that's nothing to sneeze at, kids.
The point of all of this is not to get you to read the books. The thing is, really, that what Davin, Michelle and I are doing here at the Literary Lab is less about lessons on writing (though we're all quite capable of beazling and prolixing for thousands of words about the bits and bobs of our craft) than it is about getting you excited to be fictionauts and showing you that the three of us try really hard to constantly improve our artsy craft and crafty art, and we hope that we have--in our own small way--inspired you to try harder, too.
Beggars that we are, we are even poor in thanks but I must thank you on behalf of Domey and Michelle for coming to our little corner of the interweb and having these chats with us. Because one thing we forget to say often enough is that you folks, with your willingness to engage us in this ongoing dialogue, inspire us to work hard and think deeply and aspire to brilliance. Because this matters, really it does. It matters to you, it matters to us and my hope is that by reinforcing each other's will to brilliance we can all raise our game, as the kids say, to the next level. And that would be really cool. Peace on Earth. Bigger and better. All of that. Thanks.
Happy Holidays to any of you who celebrate any holidays that might be happening right now! Was that non-specific yet heartfelt enough? Because really, it's been a hard year for a lot of folks and what I wish most for everyone's 2011 is peace and joy but, mostly, peace because it's so hard to come by. Peace on Earth, everyone.
But back to me: I was thinking about which of the books I read this year that have influenced the way I write. Not necessarily books that were my favorites, but books that have changed my relationship to my own fiction. There were not many of them, but there were a couple:
Women In Love, by D.H. Lawrence. A classic, depending on who you ask. This book is a bit clunky in the prose but Lawrence had a way of directing your attention to the uncomfortable but real emotions of his characters, of showing how people do the most unpredictable things in order to achieve happiness, even resorting to a kind of savagery, and how some people might get it right while most people get it wrong. There's a matter-of-factness in Lawrence's approach to character that I definitely see working its way into my own fiction.
Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges wrote no novels, concentrating his efforts on short stories and essays. The stories are amazing and groundbreaking; Borges had an eclectic education and his influences include everything from Shakespeare to Poe to folktales to Cervantes to Einsteinian physics. The thing that I am getting from Borges is that you can push ideas really far and be vague about where you end up but that vagueness is good and valuable and mystery is an excellent addition to life, and therefore to story. Weird, that is, is good.
How Fiction Works, by James Wood. A non-fiction book about fiction. I read a lot of books about literary history and literary theory and narrative theory and all of that, but this book is not that sort of academic writing. This is a sort of old-fashioned primer on the art of fiction, focused on what makes the good books so good. Wood might try too hard to reduce things down to the ubiquity of "free indirect style" narration, but his delight in character and the poetry of language is infectious, and his arguments in favor of the artistic elements of writing make me want to try harder. There were no specific lessons for me in this book, but it certainly got me more excited about being a writer and that's nothing to sneeze at, kids.
The point of all of this is not to get you to read the books. The thing is, really, that what Davin, Michelle and I are doing here at the Literary Lab is less about lessons on writing (though we're all quite capable of beazling and prolixing for thousands of words about the bits and bobs of our craft) than it is about getting you excited to be fictionauts and showing you that the three of us try really hard to constantly improve our artsy craft and crafty art, and we hope that we have--in our own small way--inspired you to try harder, too.
Beggars that we are, we are even poor in thanks but I must thank you on behalf of Domey and Michelle for coming to our little corner of the interweb and having these chats with us. Because one thing we forget to say often enough is that you folks, with your willingness to engage us in this ongoing dialogue, inspire us to work hard and think deeply and aspire to brilliance. Because this matters, really it does. It matters to you, it matters to us and my hope is that by reinforcing each other's will to brilliance we can all raise our game, as the kids say, to the next level. And that would be really cool. Peace on Earth. Bigger and better. All of that. Thanks.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Opposites Attract: Horror and Christmas
One of the best lessons I've learned about writing is to put two unlikely things together. For my novella CINDERS I turned a normally innocent and happy Cinderella into an unhappy, ungrateful woman. For my novel MONARCH I mixed together guns and butterflies. In my novel THE BREAKAWAY my main protagonist is kidnapped, but for her it ends up being something she wants.
Not only do I do this with the main idea of a story, but I also carry it down to different levels in the story, sometimes even down to the sentence level. Conflicting emotions in characters creates delicious tension. Two ideas which seem opposite at first, but are slowly revealed to have ties, creates enormous surprises.
Christmas is no different. Think of A Christmas Carol, one of the most spooky, but also most popular Christmas stories ever told. Something about the combination works. In that same vein, Loren Eaton is holding his annual Advent Ghosts Shared Storytelling Event. Loren hosts the I Saw Lightning Fall blog. He says:
Every year, this blog hosts a round of Advent-themed storytelling, a time for us to gather around the dying fire and share tales as the cold wind moans outside. These aren't long stories, just 100 words each, and it's open to anyone and everyone who'd like participate. Why not read some of last year's selections?
Smashing horror with Christmas is a spooky, spectacularly fun event! You should join in. It's only 100 words. All stories will be posted tomorrow and linked from Loren's blog. Have fun!
And while we're at it, I'd like to know what opposites you smash together in your stories! Do share.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Random Wednesday Thoughts
I had SO MUCH fun with the giveaway yesterday! I loved the funny comments sprinkled throughout the questions and the various guessers of answers! Woohoo! Thanks to everyone who stopped by.
This will be my last chance to post before Christmas, so for those of you who celebrate it, Merry Christmas!
I'll be working through the holidays, but I still enjoy this time of year. I like the lights, and I really like the fact that there's no more traffic on my commute, nor is there a problem parking! Yay!
Luckily, though, I will have more down time than usual in the evenings, and I'll be working on my new novel, whose working title is--sadly--Cyberlama. An equally bad alternative is Let Me Go, Dalai Lama. Yeah, did I mention it took me about five years to come up with the title Rooster for my last novel? I'm excited about this story, though. I feel like I've finally latched onto something after working through about a dozen other story ideas.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
The Literary Lab Trivia Giveaway!
Welcome to the Literary Lab Trivia Giveaway.
Throughout the day (from roughly 9 am to 5 pm PST), we'll be randomly posting trivia questions about literature or our blog in the comments section of this post.
Along with each question will be a prize.
Be the first person to answer correctly, and you'll win the prize!
Easy, huh?
If you're ready, go to the comments section and check it out.
*Note: You won't be getting the prizes until after Christmas, most likely. Sorry! Oh, and there's no limit to how many prizes you can win!
Monday, December 20, 2010
Your characters offstage
Do you keep track of what your characters do offstage?
In many of my stories, I follow multiple people, through multiple times. I love epics, and I've always dreamed of successfully writing one. But, one of the biggest challenges to writing an epic isn't only keeping track of my characters when I'm writing about them. I also have to keep track of my characters when I'm not writing about them.
Has Veronica been away for six months while I'm writing about Markus and Sissy? Well, what has Veronica been doing?
I'm sometimes successful at keeping track of the offstage characters, but then there's the added challenge of figuring out how that time offstage has affected them emotionally. If Veronica was fuming mad at Markus before leaving for a year-long sabbatical in Zurich, is she still fuming mad when she returns? Or, has the time away made her forget her anger, or at least push it down into the pit of her belly so that she can seek her revenge more systematically?
For me, the best epic writers (ahem, Tolstoy) are able to account for offstage characters and their continued emotional journeys, even though we as readers don't experience it directly. This skill not only makes the characters seem more believable, but it also helps to make the world of your fiction more believable.
Oddly enough, the time when your character isn't on the stage is also an opportunity to develop them.
I'm currently dealing with a similar situation in my current book. I'm trying to portray seven characters that are much wiser than I am, and to do that, I'm making claims that their wisdom has shown through during times that I don't actually write about. I support this by having other characters chime in about their wisdom, a technique that helps to support many character details.
We may jump through time to keep from having to include unimportant details that happen between important scenes, but that doesn't mean we can't make those spaces work for us.
Do you have an example of great things your characters did offstage? What do you do to keep track of it all?
Friday, December 17, 2010
Friday Filler! With Short Stories.
Last Friday I told you that Domey, Michelle and I were going to have a short story contest between the three of us. Well, we did! And there are stories to prove it. But first, some details missing from last Friday's post.
The rules of the contest were that Domey, Michelle and I would all use the same "image" as a prompt. The "image" was supplied by Mighty Reader, who also suggested the contest in the first place. Mighty Reader also supplied a second image for the exclusive use of Michelle.
The "image" all three of us used is "A performer named Jake Jacket, sitting alone in a hotel room." That's it. The second image for Michelle was "a little black cat." Not much to go on, you might say, and you'd be right.
So these "Jake Jacket" stories have Domey starting with Jake in the hotel room, me ending with Jake in the hotel room, and Michelle starting or ending with Jake in the hotel room as is her wont.
None of us began writing until Tuesday. That was unplanned and possibly just slackerly of us. But we're busy people, people, so back off. I finished mine on Tuesday night and did a wee bit of editing on Thursday. Michelle finished hers on Thursday. I am amazed Domey wrote his at all, so much did he complain of the trouble he was having making enough of a psychic connection with this Jake Jacket fellow to write about him.
So that was the contest. There is no voting on the stories, because we love and respect each other too much to compete like that. Anyway, here are the stories.
~Scott
*this post intro was written by Scott, but posted up by Michelle because she had issues getting Davin's story in this morning, so yeah, sorry Scott.*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"Signs" by Michelle Davidson Argyle
**This story has been removed for publication**
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"Gift of the Magi" by Scott G.F. Bailey
Jake Jacket stood in the open doorway of a blimp that bobbed in the air fifteen hundred and eight feet above a football stadium. Jake wore a tight blue, red and white jumpsuit, a crash helmet covered in silver glitter and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Strapped to Jake’s back was an Aebersold KX-95 jetpack. The jetpack weighed nearly sixty pounds and despite the padded straps, Jake’s shoulders and spine already ached and he’d only been wearing the damned thing for five and a half minutes.
Leaning backwards a few degrees to shift the weight of the jetpack and to move out of the cold wind at the blimp’s door, Jake shouted into his cell phone. The noise of the wind and the roar of the crowd of seventy-thousand football fans below him drowned out almost everything else.
“What if it doesn’t work?” he called into the phone. From three hundred and seventy-nine miles away, in a comfortable leather chair in a comfortable walnut-paneled office, Jake’s producer answered.
“Why shouldn’t it work? It’s a freaking high-tech jetpack. It’s the same jetpack you’ve been riding all year. Safe as bathwater.”
“Safe as milk,” Jake corrected him.
“What?”
“Safe as milk!”
“Exactly. Nothing to worry about.”
The Aebersold KX-95 jetpack had not been designed to act as a parachute or to save a man falling from the sky. Jake had no idea if he’d slow down at all when the jets ignited or if he’d only plummet to his death on the 50-yard line. Not that he cared a great deal either way, but like anyone else Jake avoided pain when he could.
“No one’s ever tried this before,” Jake yelled into the phone. There was a pause before his producer answered.
“That’s the whole point: it’s never been done. We talked about this last week, remember? This is a new act for you, for the viewers. This will exceed everyone’s expectations.”
“I’m terrified,” Jake yelled. “I may throw up. How would the viewers like it if I came flying out of this blimp in a cloud of my own vomit? Would that exceed their expectations?”
“You don’t have to be like that, Jake. You’re a professional. Look, you’ve got less than a minute. I’m going to hang up now. Have a good flight.”
“What?”
“A good flight.”
“What?”
From behind him, someone pulled the cell phone from Jake’s hand. Some other unseen hand patted him on top of his helmet. Jake nodded. Time. He coughed and tasted bourbon. Did everyone on the blimp know he was well on his way to being drunk? Did the crew have a betting pool on how many bones he’d break in the fall, or if he’d even survive? Who gives a crap. Jake stepped into the air.
The crowd cheered, a wave of ugly noise rolling up and beyond Jake’s falling body. Jake heard nothing. The white hiss of air screaming past his head masked everything else. He was falling, yawing alarmingly and face up, off-balance, following the weight of the jetpack down, down, down toward the earth. So fast. So fast. His right bootlace had come untied. I can’t die like that, Jake thought, and pulled the triggers on the jetpack’s hand controls. He felt the two jets vibrating behind his back and he pitched forward but still the Astroturf rushed up at him. A marching band marked time in the end zone, the bells of the sousaphones all turning right-to-left-to-right like synchronized oscillating fans and Jake thought, well this is it.
The lines of exhaust from the twin jets found the ground and Jake slowed, amazingly, gently, safely just in time. He landed on his feet in the middle of the field and cut the power to the jetpack.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the PA system thundered. “The amazing Jake Jacket!”
The crowd erupted into a wild roar of approval mixed with disappointment. Jake threw his hands in the air, as he’d done after hundreds of other jetpack rides all over the nation, at county fairs and baseball games and corporate team-building events. He smiled; he was contractually obligated to. Then he was surrounded by cameras and security men and large-breasted cheerleaders in tight uniforms and Jake thought another drink was in order. Nobody told him that the jet’s superhot thrust had melted large swaths of Astroturf, delaying the start of the game’s second half while the field was repaired. The ratings were so good that nobody really minded.
Jake was bundled off the field and he found his way to his crew. He took off his gear and changed into an old brown suit before slipping out of the stadium and up the street to a dark bar. He stayed in the bar all afternoon, past the end of the game and watched the regular daytime drunks filter out to be replaced by the regular nighttime drunks.
A kid, some longhair in his twenties, appeared to Jake’s left. The kid looked vaguely familiar, having one of those pretty, perfectly symmetrical celebrity faces with a perfect shadowing of stubble. Leather coat, black shirt and jeans. Musician, Jake thought.
“Hey,” the kid said.
“Hey.”
“Hey, you’re Jake Jacket.”
“So I am. Keep it to yourself, will you?”
The kid looked around the bar as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune to have stumbled into the right dive bar out of all the dives in the city.
“I won’t tell anyone,” the kid said. “I saw you on TV today. That was amazing.”
Jake couldn’t believe how skinny the kid was. Why were all these rock stars so thin? Drugs, probably, or boutique European liposuction. Jesus Christ. The kid had his hand out.
“I’m Tom. Tom Clean.”
“The Tom Clean?”
“Yeah, that’ s me.” The kid looked around again, pretending embarrassment but hoping someone had overheard and recognized his name. Tom Clean hid his disappointment.
Jake took Tom’s hand, shook it once theatrically and let go.
“I wanted to be a rock star,” Jake said. “I guess everyone does.”
“I guess. Are you a player? Music?”
Tom Clean was drinking cheap domestic beer from a longneck bottle.
“I have no talent, I guess.”
Jake was drinking bourbon on the rocks with a water back.
“At least you’ve got the jetpack.”
“At least I’ve got the jetpack. At least I’m not waiting tables or working on a factory line, right? At least I make enough money to drink myself to sleep.”
“Hey, Jake, don’t be like that. It’s early. You want to shoot some pool?”
“I want to shoot myself.”
Down the bar, nine stools beyond Tom Clean, a pretty woman in a green dress with a deeply plunging neckline was ordering a Cosmopolitan. Jake adjusted his tie and sat straighter for a moment. As he watched the woman he slowly fell forward into his habitual slump and then looked away from her, at the melting ice in his glass. Jake was willing to risk his life riding a jetpack, but that was as far as it went. A woman was out of the question. Death before dishonor.
“Hey, Jake. C’mon,” the kid said. “You’re Jake Jacket, the Jetpack Man. You’re totally cool.”
“Totally. Cool.”
“Hey, I wish I had a jetpack.”
“You could buy one, you know.”
“My accountants won’t let me. I tried once, last year. I called the Aebersold company. You fly a KX-95, don’t you? Beautiful machine, man. It’s totally cutting edge. Same gyroscopes that the military uses in their land-to-air missiles. I put them in touch with my accountants, and that was the end of that.”
“Your accountants said no?”
“Fascists.”
“They control your money?”
“Conditions of my parole. I was in rehab all spring, you know.”
“I was drunk all spring.”
“Really? Cool.”
“Hey, Tom Clean.” Jake registered dimly that he was getting pretty hammered. He always called people by their whole names when he had crossed from the pleasant phase of a drunk into that mysterious dark kingdom beyond.
“Hey, Tom Clean. Do you want to buy my jetpack?”
“Yours? For real?”
“Yeah. I’m retiring, Tom Clean. Today was the big finale. There’s nobody on Earth who’s done my act, and I say I should go out while I’m on top.”
“Totally cool.”
“What do you think, Tom-tom Clean?”
“Wow. But I can’t get my hands on more than a couple of hundred a week.”
“Terms of your parole.”
“Yeah. Fascists.”
Jake looked past the kid. The woman in the green dress had picked up a friend, a guy in a blue suit with a shiny tie and a bull market haircut. Good for her, I guess. Good for him.
“Hey, Jake. I’ll trade you for it.”
“What?” Jake had already begun to forget his offer to the kid.
“I’ll trade you for the jetpack. How much is it worth, do you think?”
Jake pushed the hair back from his forehead and took a sip of water.
“Ten thousand?”
“Wow, Jake, that’s too cheap.”
“I didn’t pay retail, Tom Clean. I can let it go cheap. But what do you have that’s worth ten thousand? A car?”
Tom Clean laughed.
“All my cars are worth a lot more than ten-freaking-grand, Jake. But back at the hotel, I have a 1970 Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix owned for nineteen weeks. Swear to God. He rehearsed with it for the Isle of Wight gig.”
Jake had no idea what most of that meant.
“So it’s worth ten?”
“At least. But I didn’t pay retail for it, either. See, we both sacrifice and get what we want.”
“Gift of the Magi.”
“What’s that?”
“I accept your offer, Tom Clean. Let’s go to your hotel.”
The kid had a town car for the night, and the air from the open windows cleared Jake’s head a little as they were driven across the city. First they went downtown to the Hilton and picked up the guitar, which was in an aluminum and Kevlar flight case. They drove back uptown to the hotel where Jake and his crew were staying and the driver backed the town car up to the equipment trailer in the parking lot. The kid stayed in the car, doing a line of coke while Jake unlocked the trailer and helped the driver shift the jetpack into the town car’s trunk.
“You really retiring?” the driver asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“My kids love you, man.”
“Sorry.”
"It’s okay. I guess every athlete has a shorter career than the fans like.”
Jake smiled. He and the driver shook hands. Tom Clean threw his arms around Jake before handing over the guitar and riding away into the humid, pressing dark. Jake stood in the parking lot, looking at the headlights streaming by on the freeway above the hotel. It was a really shitty little hotel, and at last Jake went inside.
He sat on the edge of the bed with all the lights off. His drapes were open and the reflections of innumerable taillights spattered across the windows like rain. The guitar case lay on the floor at Jake’s feet, unopened. Jake had no idea how to play guitar, but for a while he’d be in possession of one that Jimi Hendrix once played. Maybe. Who could say? The kid was pretty fucked up and perhaps not too bright.
In the morning the crew would find the jetpack missing and they’d immediately suspect Jake. His producers had paid good money for that machine and they’d want it back. The kid would want his guitar back, too. None of this was real.
Jake leaned over and opened the case. The guitar looked like nothing special and it was chipped and scratched and had cigarette burns on the headstock. It was heavier and somehow clumsier to hold than Jake had imagined, and it smelled of stale cigarettes and pot. Jake didn’t try to play it. He sat, awkwardly holding the guitar on his lap, watching the traffic thin out and the sky darken as dawn slowly approached.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"The Speed of Jake" by Domey Malasarn
Jake Jacket rises from his king sized bed in a Doubletree Hotel, somewhere. His feet are already touching the floor when he wakes. His boots are already on. There’s a basket of pears wrapped in cellophane on the bureau with a card looped through a twist of baby blue ribbon:
The telephone rings and Jake answers it.
“That you, David?”
“Rise and shine, Jake! You’re in Palm Springs, California. It’s eleven o’clock on July third. I ordered room service. The whole damn place didn’t have any bear claws, but I told them ‘Jake Jacket doesn’t perform without his bear claw,’ and they wrangled one up for you. How you feeling, Jake? Hung over?”
“Yeah. I told you I didn’t want a bachelor party.”
“It wasn’t a party. It was a get together.”
“With strippers.”
“Strippers you didn’t even touch.”
“I’m not gonna let my Vondette down. Not when I’m this close.”
“You’re a good kid, Jake. D’you sleep?”
“Think so, but the bed’s already made.”
“The bed’s always made, Jake. You never get under the covers anymore.”
“I never did, did I? I never had time.”
“And you never will, Jake. But it’s all part of the show. We like it that you don’t sleep under the covers. The world likes it that you don’t sleep under the covers. Young boys in Utashinai, Japan try to emulate you by not sleeping under the covers—There’s room service coming; I can see them in front of your door. You got ten minutes to eat. Bye.”
A knock. A seven-foot-tall teenager with a big Adam’s apple walks in. He wears a vest that’s red in front and black in the back like a movie theater usher. “David sent over breakfast for you, Mr. Jacket. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“No need to call me sir.”
“Sorry, sir. I’m just a fan, that’s all.”
“David said you wrangled up a bear claw for me.”
“I went down a few blocks to a bakery I know. Shirley’s. They had one…They had more than one if you want more, but I only got the one. David said you only wanted one. If you want more, I can go get another one for you.”
“I only want one. I only have time to eat one.”
“Yes, sir. Here you are, sir.”
“You want me to autograph anything for you?”
“Would you? We’re not allowed to ask. I don’t—” He digs his long fingers into his tiny front pockets, inhaling so that he can reach all the way down to the bottom. “—I can’t believe I don’t have anything for you…for you to sign.”
“Here. Take mine.” Jake fishes out an empty matchbook from his own leather pants. The book is from San Diego. There are no matches inside, only the fuzzed row of cardboard stubs. He scrawls his name on the back.
“Thank you very much, sir. This is the best tip I ever got.”
“You coming to the show tonight?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be down in the front with my mother. We’ve been saving all year.”
“Neither of you have any heart problems, I hope.”
“How problems, sir? No. Well, Ma, she’s a bit down because her last boyfriend just left her. But, no, no heart problems that I can think of.”
“That was a joke, kid. I just meant ‘cause the show can get pretty exciting. Bigger and better. That’s always our motto, and we’ve been doing this twenty-some years, so we’re pretty big and we’re pretty better.”
“Bigger and better, that’s right, sir. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was a joke. It’s just that Ma’s been kinda down.”
“Hm. Aren’t we all? What’s your name?”
“Arthur Fitzmaurice, sir.”
“Well, Arthur, I’ll look out for you tonight. Now go on and let me eat my breakfast.”
“Yes, thank you. Sir, very much. I mean…”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll see you at the show. What’s your mom’s name?”
“Mary.”
“Well, maybe I’ll say hello to Arthur and Mary while I’m up on stage.”
“Really, sir? We’d love it, Mr. Jacket. Ma’d go crazy.”
“Well, that’s what I’m here for.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“Do I need to sign the bill?”
“No, sir. My manager is taking care of the bill. No need to, sir.”
“All right then, I’ll see you tonight, Arthur.” He shoots the boy with his finger gun.
***
Jake Jacket calls his Aunt Rosemary from the hotel phone. He has to call twice, and when she answers she says she was out in the yard checking on her garden. They talk briefly. They talk about tomatoes and the cracked rib Jake got two nights ago in the Sphere of Death act.
“You tape yourself up good, Jakey. You’re always rushing around. You’ll go on and make it worse.”
“I like to move fast, Aunt Rosemary. Keeps me from thinking too much.”
“I always say, you—”
“Got famous too soon. I know Aunt Rosemary.”
“You did good in school. You coulda been an nephrologist like your daddy, or maybe a coroner like your uncle.”
“I know it, Aunt Rosemary.”
“Now you just risk your life every night like a man on a mission. You’re thirty-three, but you’ve lived like you’re sixty.”
“Times flies, Aunt Rosemary. I love you.”
She sighs. “And I you, Jakey.”
“Aunt Rosemary?”
“Yes, dear.”
“I’m asking Vondette tonight, Aunt Rosemary.”
There’s silence on the phone for a minute. Then the woman’s voice comes back cracked with emotion. “You make me proud, Jacob. I know I was worried that you two haven’t known each other that long. But, it’s nice to see you settle down.”
“Who’s settling, Aunt Rosemary? Vondette will just have to keep up!”
***
By three in the afternoon Jake Jacket is backstage pacing in the wilted center tent of the Palm Springs County fair. He’s sweating in his white leather jacket. He sighs with relief when David shows up with his hands behind his back.
“I’m an idiot,” Jake says.
“It was right where you thought it was.” David produces the small black box, opening it in front of Jake to reveal the diamond ring inside. “Is it the way you remember it?”
“I’m so nervous I think I’m going to vomit in my helmet tonight,” Jake says. He tucks the box into a pouch on his belt.
“I think I saw her come in already. She’s got on a pretty pink dress and pink lipstick with a pink bow in her hair. You can’t miss her. She’s the prettiest thing here. And she’s wearing the sweetest smelling perfume. Like tulips.”
“You could tell what her perfume smelled like?”
David laughs. “That part may’ve been in my head,” he says.
“So, do you think she’ll say yes?”
“Of course she’ll say yes, Jake-boy! Yes, she’ll say yes. You’re Jake Jacket! Bigger and better!”
“Bigger and better, yeah, yeah,” Jake says. “Do you think she’s expecting it?”
“I think she’s been expecting it since before you thought to do it. She can start touring with us. Maybe raise a little Jake Jacket Junior. We’ll have the kid in a jetpack before he’s two.”
“My Aunt Rosemary won’t like that.”
“Course not. Nobody will like it, Jake. But you can’t keep it from happening if someone has it in them to be a daredevil. Just like you can’t keep it from happening if someone has it in them to be a regular devil.”
“Like you, David.”
“You need someone to look after you, and there ain’t no one more invested than a greedy, money-grubbing bastard like me, Jake.”
“Sometimes I don’t know about you, David.”
“Sometimes I don’t know myself, let me assure you.”
***
The crowd streams in just before the show. Jake thinks to peek around the curtain to see Vondette, but he decides to wait until he’s on stage to keep it spontaneous. He likes the idea of the spotlight panning through the crowd, finally fixing on his beautiful pink lady, shiny as a new apple.
“He said he’d say our name, Ma.” It’s Arthur Fitzmaurice on the other side of the curtain. In the rush, Jake had forgotten about him until now. From the volume of the boy’s voice he must have gotten a seat right up front like he said. The tired voice of a woman Jake takes to be his mother Mary answers.
“Just don’t get your hopes up, Arthur. These entertainers are busy people. He’s probably forgot all about you by now. I bet he meets hundreds of people a day and makes that very same promise to all of them. If he followed through it’d be like reading the Palm Springs county yellow pages.”
Somewhere else a balloon pops and some people in the crowd gasp. Jake fastens his helmet and heads toward his motorcycle. He feels the need to get some reassurance from David again, but there isn’t any time. The lights go down. He sees the spotlight lingering at his entrance and he revs the engine. A second later, he’s with his people, their expectant faces watching and waiting. He hits the ramp and soars over the eight-barrel run. He loops around and takes another ramp and ten barrels. He pauses just long enough to see Arthur Fitzmaurice clapping his hands, his too-large Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.
Jake rides on stage as the clowns roll in the Sphere of Death. The crowd quiets. Jake’s partner Lyle waits inside, looping around on his own motorcycle, finally making one complete vertical revolution while Jake unclasps his cape. A moment later, there’s a drum roll and the clowns open a latch on the Sphere. He revs his engine and enters. The pace is slow at the start. Both motorists circle each other. As they increase their speed, their revolutions get wider until both are driving horizontally.
Jake eases into a steady pace and takes the opportunity to look out at the crowd through the gaps in the Sphere. At first it is a blur of faces and balloons, circles of color. Then, he starts to pick out individual people, Arthur and his mother Mary, a baby with a bonnet. He spots a flash of pink that he assumes is Vondette and a shock of anxiousness courses through him. He and Lyle have gotten faster now, and finally Jake angles and starts his vertical ascent so that both riders criss-cross at the top and bottom of the sphere.
“Today’s the big day, huh?” Lyle calls out to him.
“Got the ring in my pocket,” Jake shouts.
They keep up their pattern until the crowd is roaring, and finally Lyle, and then Jake slow down until they are able to stop and exit the sphere.
An announcer’s voice comes on the loudspeaker. It’s supposed to be David, but Jake detects a Southern twang that David doesn’t have. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is only the beginning! With Jake Jacket, you can always expect the act to get bigger and better!”
The spotlight fixes on Jake, so bright he can no longer see out into the crowd. A harness lowers in front of him and he steps forward into it while the clowns strap him in.
The announcer: “For the next act, Jake Jacket will show that man can fly!”
Jake is lifted off the ground and races two hundred feet into the air. The light is slow to keep up with him, and for a brief second, he sees the crowd below: Arthur, Mary, Vondette, and beside Vondette, David whispering in her ear. The man kisses Vondette on the cheek before slipping back into the crowd. There is a second when Jake can get angry. Instead the harness propels him through the air so that he swings out over the crowd, soaring above them. He makes two laps under the big top before the harness unlatches to the shock of the crowd and Jake is sailing over them toward a trapeze hidden in shadow. He catches it to the relief of the crowd but they are awed again when he swings back and lets go into nothing. The lights shut off. The crowd is silent. A moment later, Jake stands center stage with his cape back on. The crowd roars and Jake takes a bow.
“Thank you, everybody! It’s an honor to be here in Palm Springs. We hope to put on a tremendous show for you tonight!”
The crowd applauds.
“First, though, I’d like to say hello to my good friends, Arthur and Mary Fitzmaurice. Arthur was kind enough to wrastle a bear for me this morning.” He directs the spotlight over to the front row where both people are blushing and jumping up and down. “And, now,” Jake says, “I’d like to make a very special announcement about a woman I love.” He reaches into the pouch in his belt. He unfastens it and removes the tiny black box while the spotlight pans around the crowd and finally stops on Vondette, pink and shiny. “My Aunt Rosemary is the woman I love most in the world,” Jake says. “She’s raised me ever since I was six, ever since my ma and pa died in a train wreck on a rainy winter’s day in Buffalo, New York.” Vondette had been beaming, but something in her face starts to unravel. “I brought with me today a diamond ring that I paid a lot of money for. And, I was hoping to make my Aunt Rosemary proud by offering it to someone that I might share the rest of my life with.” He can feel the pressure building up in his throat. He swallows once, careful not to make his nerves audible on the microphone. “I think I’m gonna make my Aunt truly proud, when I give this ring to Mary Fitzmaurice, a woman who’s been a good mother to Arthur, and who should be proud for having done such a good job of raising him.”
The crowd is quiet. The spotlight lingers on Vondette for a moment longer and then slowly creeps back over to Arthur and Mary.
“A ring?” Mary’s voice is timid as she looks over at her son.
“A ring for you, Mary. From Jake Jacket, because you and Arthur have been such dedicated fans.” Jake lowers himself on one knee so that he can hand the box over to the woman. The band starts and the crowd claps, and Jake continues with the show.
He doesn’t remember much about his performance that night. The crowd responds when he expects them too, all except for Vondette, who disappeared before Jake even got to his Ring of Fire act. For the finale, he leads the crowd outside and directs them to form a horseshoe around him, leaving a clearing for him to make his departure. The clowns appear and help him strap on his jetpack, and he secures his goggles on and prepares for flight. He’s counting down, when young Arthur Fitzmaurice appears in the crowd. He’s so tall he stands out, even though he’s in the back.
“Mr. Jacket!”
Jake turns around, nervous that the finish is going to fizzle. “What is it, son?”
“What you did just now, for my Ma. That’s the best thing any man’s ever done for her.”
“But we can’t take it from you, Mr. Jacket,” Mary says, also stepping forward out of the crowd. Jake can tell that she’s been crying because there are trails of dark mascara streaming down both of her cheeks. She hands the ring over to him. Jake takes it, not really knowing what to do.
“Fly away now,” Arthur whispers. “We’re good, Mr. Jacket. Fly away.”
Jake looks out at the confused faces around him. The clowns begin their countdown again, and the jetpack starts to hiss. He braces himself and soars into the darkness. The lights from the fair diminish and are replaced by the steady position of the stars in the sky. Jake takes out the ring and holds it up. It sparkles like the stars as he hovers over the earth. It is a slow rotation, the earth below him, so slow it gives Jake some time to think.
The rules of the contest were that Domey, Michelle and I would all use the same "image" as a prompt. The "image" was supplied by Mighty Reader, who also suggested the contest in the first place. Mighty Reader also supplied a second image for the exclusive use of Michelle.
The "image" all three of us used is "A performer named Jake Jacket, sitting alone in a hotel room." That's it. The second image for Michelle was "a little black cat." Not much to go on, you might say, and you'd be right.
So these "Jake Jacket" stories have Domey starting with Jake in the hotel room, me ending with Jake in the hotel room, and Michelle starting or ending with Jake in the hotel room as is her wont.
None of us began writing until Tuesday. That was unplanned and possibly just slackerly of us. But we're busy people, people, so back off. I finished mine on Tuesday night and did a wee bit of editing on Thursday. Michelle finished hers on Thursday. I am amazed Domey wrote his at all, so much did he complain of the trouble he was having making enough of a psychic connection with this Jake Jacket fellow to write about him.
So that was the contest. There is no voting on the stories, because we love and respect each other too much to compete like that. Anyway, here are the stories.
~Scott
*this post intro was written by Scott, but posted up by Michelle because she had issues getting Davin's story in this morning, so yeah, sorry Scott.*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"Signs" by Michelle Davidson Argyle
**This story has been removed for publication**
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"Gift of the Magi" by Scott G.F. Bailey
Jake Jacket stood in the open doorway of a blimp that bobbed in the air fifteen hundred and eight feet above a football stadium. Jake wore a tight blue, red and white jumpsuit, a crash helmet covered in silver glitter and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Strapped to Jake’s back was an Aebersold KX-95 jetpack. The jetpack weighed nearly sixty pounds and despite the padded straps, Jake’s shoulders and spine already ached and he’d only been wearing the damned thing for five and a half minutes.
Leaning backwards a few degrees to shift the weight of the jetpack and to move out of the cold wind at the blimp’s door, Jake shouted into his cell phone. The noise of the wind and the roar of the crowd of seventy-thousand football fans below him drowned out almost everything else.
“What if it doesn’t work?” he called into the phone. From three hundred and seventy-nine miles away, in a comfortable leather chair in a comfortable walnut-paneled office, Jake’s producer answered.
“Why shouldn’t it work? It’s a freaking high-tech jetpack. It’s the same jetpack you’ve been riding all year. Safe as bathwater.”
“Safe as milk,” Jake corrected him.
“What?”
“Safe as milk!”
“Exactly. Nothing to worry about.”
The Aebersold KX-95 jetpack had not been designed to act as a parachute or to save a man falling from the sky. Jake had no idea if he’d slow down at all when the jets ignited or if he’d only plummet to his death on the 50-yard line. Not that he cared a great deal either way, but like anyone else Jake avoided pain when he could.
“No one’s ever tried this before,” Jake yelled into the phone. There was a pause before his producer answered.
“That’s the whole point: it’s never been done. We talked about this last week, remember? This is a new act for you, for the viewers. This will exceed everyone’s expectations.”
“I’m terrified,” Jake yelled. “I may throw up. How would the viewers like it if I came flying out of this blimp in a cloud of my own vomit? Would that exceed their expectations?”
“You don’t have to be like that, Jake. You’re a professional. Look, you’ve got less than a minute. I’m going to hang up now. Have a good flight.”
“What?”
“A good flight.”
“What?”
From behind him, someone pulled the cell phone from Jake’s hand. Some other unseen hand patted him on top of his helmet. Jake nodded. Time. He coughed and tasted bourbon. Did everyone on the blimp know he was well on his way to being drunk? Did the crew have a betting pool on how many bones he’d break in the fall, or if he’d even survive? Who gives a crap. Jake stepped into the air.
The crowd cheered, a wave of ugly noise rolling up and beyond Jake’s falling body. Jake heard nothing. The white hiss of air screaming past his head masked everything else. He was falling, yawing alarmingly and face up, off-balance, following the weight of the jetpack down, down, down toward the earth. So fast. So fast. His right bootlace had come untied. I can’t die like that, Jake thought, and pulled the triggers on the jetpack’s hand controls. He felt the two jets vibrating behind his back and he pitched forward but still the Astroturf rushed up at him. A marching band marked time in the end zone, the bells of the sousaphones all turning right-to-left-to-right like synchronized oscillating fans and Jake thought, well this is it.
The lines of exhaust from the twin jets found the ground and Jake slowed, amazingly, gently, safely just in time. He landed on his feet in the middle of the field and cut the power to the jetpack.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the PA system thundered. “The amazing Jake Jacket!”
The crowd erupted into a wild roar of approval mixed with disappointment. Jake threw his hands in the air, as he’d done after hundreds of other jetpack rides all over the nation, at county fairs and baseball games and corporate team-building events. He smiled; he was contractually obligated to. Then he was surrounded by cameras and security men and large-breasted cheerleaders in tight uniforms and Jake thought another drink was in order. Nobody told him that the jet’s superhot thrust had melted large swaths of Astroturf, delaying the start of the game’s second half while the field was repaired. The ratings were so good that nobody really minded.
Jake was bundled off the field and he found his way to his crew. He took off his gear and changed into an old brown suit before slipping out of the stadium and up the street to a dark bar. He stayed in the bar all afternoon, past the end of the game and watched the regular daytime drunks filter out to be replaced by the regular nighttime drunks.
A kid, some longhair in his twenties, appeared to Jake’s left. The kid looked vaguely familiar, having one of those pretty, perfectly symmetrical celebrity faces with a perfect shadowing of stubble. Leather coat, black shirt and jeans. Musician, Jake thought.
“Hey,” the kid said.
“Hey.”
“Hey, you’re Jake Jacket.”
“So I am. Keep it to yourself, will you?”
The kid looked around the bar as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune to have stumbled into the right dive bar out of all the dives in the city.
“I won’t tell anyone,” the kid said. “I saw you on TV today. That was amazing.”
Jake couldn’t believe how skinny the kid was. Why were all these rock stars so thin? Drugs, probably, or boutique European liposuction. Jesus Christ. The kid had his hand out.
“I’m Tom. Tom Clean.”
“The Tom Clean?”
“Yeah, that’ s me.” The kid looked around again, pretending embarrassment but hoping someone had overheard and recognized his name. Tom Clean hid his disappointment.
Jake took Tom’s hand, shook it once theatrically and let go.
“I wanted to be a rock star,” Jake said. “I guess everyone does.”
“I guess. Are you a player? Music?”
Tom Clean was drinking cheap domestic beer from a longneck bottle.
“I have no talent, I guess.”
Jake was drinking bourbon on the rocks with a water back.
“At least you’ve got the jetpack.”
“At least I’ve got the jetpack. At least I’m not waiting tables or working on a factory line, right? At least I make enough money to drink myself to sleep.”
“Hey, Jake, don’t be like that. It’s early. You want to shoot some pool?”
“I want to shoot myself.”
Down the bar, nine stools beyond Tom Clean, a pretty woman in a green dress with a deeply plunging neckline was ordering a Cosmopolitan. Jake adjusted his tie and sat straighter for a moment. As he watched the woman he slowly fell forward into his habitual slump and then looked away from her, at the melting ice in his glass. Jake was willing to risk his life riding a jetpack, but that was as far as it went. A woman was out of the question. Death before dishonor.
“Hey, Jake. C’mon,” the kid said. “You’re Jake Jacket, the Jetpack Man. You’re totally cool.”
“Totally. Cool.”
“Hey, I wish I had a jetpack.”
“You could buy one, you know.”
“My accountants won’t let me. I tried once, last year. I called the Aebersold company. You fly a KX-95, don’t you? Beautiful machine, man. It’s totally cutting edge. Same gyroscopes that the military uses in their land-to-air missiles. I put them in touch with my accountants, and that was the end of that.”
“Your accountants said no?”
“Fascists.”
“They control your money?”
“Conditions of my parole. I was in rehab all spring, you know.”
“I was drunk all spring.”
“Really? Cool.”
“Hey, Tom Clean.” Jake registered dimly that he was getting pretty hammered. He always called people by their whole names when he had crossed from the pleasant phase of a drunk into that mysterious dark kingdom beyond.
“Hey, Tom Clean. Do you want to buy my jetpack?”
“Yours? For real?”
“Yeah. I’m retiring, Tom Clean. Today was the big finale. There’s nobody on Earth who’s done my act, and I say I should go out while I’m on top.”
“Totally cool.”
“What do you think, Tom-tom Clean?”
“Wow. But I can’t get my hands on more than a couple of hundred a week.”
“Terms of your parole.”
“Yeah. Fascists.”
Jake looked past the kid. The woman in the green dress had picked up a friend, a guy in a blue suit with a shiny tie and a bull market haircut. Good for her, I guess. Good for him.
“Hey, Jake. I’ll trade you for it.”
“What?” Jake had already begun to forget his offer to the kid.
“I’ll trade you for the jetpack. How much is it worth, do you think?”
Jake pushed the hair back from his forehead and took a sip of water.
“Ten thousand?”
“Wow, Jake, that’s too cheap.”
“I didn’t pay retail, Tom Clean. I can let it go cheap. But what do you have that’s worth ten thousand? A car?”
Tom Clean laughed.
“All my cars are worth a lot more than ten-freaking-grand, Jake. But back at the hotel, I have a 1970 Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix owned for nineteen weeks. Swear to God. He rehearsed with it for the Isle of Wight gig.”
Jake had no idea what most of that meant.
“So it’s worth ten?”
“At least. But I didn’t pay retail for it, either. See, we both sacrifice and get what we want.”
“Gift of the Magi.”
“What’s that?”
“I accept your offer, Tom Clean. Let’s go to your hotel.”
The kid had a town car for the night, and the air from the open windows cleared Jake’s head a little as they were driven across the city. First they went downtown to the Hilton and picked up the guitar, which was in an aluminum and Kevlar flight case. They drove back uptown to the hotel where Jake and his crew were staying and the driver backed the town car up to the equipment trailer in the parking lot. The kid stayed in the car, doing a line of coke while Jake unlocked the trailer and helped the driver shift the jetpack into the town car’s trunk.
“You really retiring?” the driver asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“My kids love you, man.”
“Sorry.”
"It’s okay. I guess every athlete has a shorter career than the fans like.”
Jake smiled. He and the driver shook hands. Tom Clean threw his arms around Jake before handing over the guitar and riding away into the humid, pressing dark. Jake stood in the parking lot, looking at the headlights streaming by on the freeway above the hotel. It was a really shitty little hotel, and at last Jake went inside.
He sat on the edge of the bed with all the lights off. His drapes were open and the reflections of innumerable taillights spattered across the windows like rain. The guitar case lay on the floor at Jake’s feet, unopened. Jake had no idea how to play guitar, but for a while he’d be in possession of one that Jimi Hendrix once played. Maybe. Who could say? The kid was pretty fucked up and perhaps not too bright.
In the morning the crew would find the jetpack missing and they’d immediately suspect Jake. His producers had paid good money for that machine and they’d want it back. The kid would want his guitar back, too. None of this was real.
Jake leaned over and opened the case. The guitar looked like nothing special and it was chipped and scratched and had cigarette burns on the headstock. It was heavier and somehow clumsier to hold than Jake had imagined, and it smelled of stale cigarettes and pot. Jake didn’t try to play it. He sat, awkwardly holding the guitar on his lap, watching the traffic thin out and the sky darken as dawn slowly approached.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"The Speed of Jake" by Domey Malasarn
Jake Jacket rises from his king sized bed in a Doubletree Hotel, somewhere. His feet are already touching the floor when he wakes. His boots are already on. There’s a basket of pears wrapped in cellophane on the bureau with a card looped through a twist of baby blue ribbon:
See you tonight. Bigger and Better.
Love,
Vondette.
The telephone rings and Jake answers it.
“That you, David?”
“Rise and shine, Jake! You’re in Palm Springs, California. It’s eleven o’clock on July third. I ordered room service. The whole damn place didn’t have any bear claws, but I told them ‘Jake Jacket doesn’t perform without his bear claw,’ and they wrangled one up for you. How you feeling, Jake? Hung over?”
“Yeah. I told you I didn’t want a bachelor party.”
“It wasn’t a party. It was a get together.”
“With strippers.”
“Strippers you didn’t even touch.”
“I’m not gonna let my Vondette down. Not when I’m this close.”
“You’re a good kid, Jake. D’you sleep?”
“Think so, but the bed’s already made.”
“The bed’s always made, Jake. You never get under the covers anymore.”
“I never did, did I? I never had time.”
“And you never will, Jake. But it’s all part of the show. We like it that you don’t sleep under the covers. The world likes it that you don’t sleep under the covers. Young boys in Utashinai, Japan try to emulate you by not sleeping under the covers—There’s room service coming; I can see them in front of your door. You got ten minutes to eat. Bye.”
A knock. A seven-foot-tall teenager with a big Adam’s apple walks in. He wears a vest that’s red in front and black in the back like a movie theater usher. “David sent over breakfast for you, Mr. Jacket. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“No need to call me sir.”
“Sorry, sir. I’m just a fan, that’s all.”
“David said you wrangled up a bear claw for me.”
“I went down a few blocks to a bakery I know. Shirley’s. They had one…They had more than one if you want more, but I only got the one. David said you only wanted one. If you want more, I can go get another one for you.”
“I only want one. I only have time to eat one.”
“Yes, sir. Here you are, sir.”
“You want me to autograph anything for you?”
“Would you? We’re not allowed to ask. I don’t—” He digs his long fingers into his tiny front pockets, inhaling so that he can reach all the way down to the bottom. “—I can’t believe I don’t have anything for you…for you to sign.”
“Here. Take mine.” Jake fishes out an empty matchbook from his own leather pants. The book is from San Diego. There are no matches inside, only the fuzzed row of cardboard stubs. He scrawls his name on the back.
“Thank you very much, sir. This is the best tip I ever got.”
“You coming to the show tonight?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be down in the front with my mother. We’ve been saving all year.”
“Neither of you have any heart problems, I hope.”
“How problems, sir? No. Well, Ma, she’s a bit down because her last boyfriend just left her. But, no, no heart problems that I can think of.”
“That was a joke, kid. I just meant ‘cause the show can get pretty exciting. Bigger and better. That’s always our motto, and we’ve been doing this twenty-some years, so we’re pretty big and we’re pretty better.”
“Bigger and better, that’s right, sir. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was a joke. It’s just that Ma’s been kinda down.”
“Hm. Aren’t we all? What’s your name?”
“Arthur Fitzmaurice, sir.”
“Well, Arthur, I’ll look out for you tonight. Now go on and let me eat my breakfast.”
“Yes, thank you. Sir, very much. I mean…”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll see you at the show. What’s your mom’s name?”
“Mary.”
“Well, maybe I’ll say hello to Arthur and Mary while I’m up on stage.”
“Really, sir? We’d love it, Mr. Jacket. Ma’d go crazy.”
“Well, that’s what I’m here for.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“Do I need to sign the bill?”
“No, sir. My manager is taking care of the bill. No need to, sir.”
“All right then, I’ll see you tonight, Arthur.” He shoots the boy with his finger gun.
***
Jake Jacket calls his Aunt Rosemary from the hotel phone. He has to call twice, and when she answers she says she was out in the yard checking on her garden. They talk briefly. They talk about tomatoes and the cracked rib Jake got two nights ago in the Sphere of Death act.
“You tape yourself up good, Jakey. You’re always rushing around. You’ll go on and make it worse.”
“I like to move fast, Aunt Rosemary. Keeps me from thinking too much.”
“I always say, you—”
“Got famous too soon. I know Aunt Rosemary.”
“You did good in school. You coulda been an nephrologist like your daddy, or maybe a coroner like your uncle.”
“I know it, Aunt Rosemary.”
“Now you just risk your life every night like a man on a mission. You’re thirty-three, but you’ve lived like you’re sixty.”
“Times flies, Aunt Rosemary. I love you.”
She sighs. “And I you, Jakey.”
“Aunt Rosemary?”
“Yes, dear.”
“I’m asking Vondette tonight, Aunt Rosemary.”
There’s silence on the phone for a minute. Then the woman’s voice comes back cracked with emotion. “You make me proud, Jacob. I know I was worried that you two haven’t known each other that long. But, it’s nice to see you settle down.”
“Who’s settling, Aunt Rosemary? Vondette will just have to keep up!”
***
By three in the afternoon Jake Jacket is backstage pacing in the wilted center tent of the Palm Springs County fair. He’s sweating in his white leather jacket. He sighs with relief when David shows up with his hands behind his back.
“I’m an idiot,” Jake says.
“It was right where you thought it was.” David produces the small black box, opening it in front of Jake to reveal the diamond ring inside. “Is it the way you remember it?”
“I’m so nervous I think I’m going to vomit in my helmet tonight,” Jake says. He tucks the box into a pouch on his belt.
“I think I saw her come in already. She’s got on a pretty pink dress and pink lipstick with a pink bow in her hair. You can’t miss her. She’s the prettiest thing here. And she’s wearing the sweetest smelling perfume. Like tulips.”
“You could tell what her perfume smelled like?”
David laughs. “That part may’ve been in my head,” he says.
“So, do you think she’ll say yes?”
“Of course she’ll say yes, Jake-boy! Yes, she’ll say yes. You’re Jake Jacket! Bigger and better!”
“Bigger and better, yeah, yeah,” Jake says. “Do you think she’s expecting it?”
“I think she’s been expecting it since before you thought to do it. She can start touring with us. Maybe raise a little Jake Jacket Junior. We’ll have the kid in a jetpack before he’s two.”
“My Aunt Rosemary won’t like that.”
“Course not. Nobody will like it, Jake. But you can’t keep it from happening if someone has it in them to be a daredevil. Just like you can’t keep it from happening if someone has it in them to be a regular devil.”
“Like you, David.”
“You need someone to look after you, and there ain’t no one more invested than a greedy, money-grubbing bastard like me, Jake.”
“Sometimes I don’t know about you, David.”
“Sometimes I don’t know myself, let me assure you.”
***
The crowd streams in just before the show. Jake thinks to peek around the curtain to see Vondette, but he decides to wait until he’s on stage to keep it spontaneous. He likes the idea of the spotlight panning through the crowd, finally fixing on his beautiful pink lady, shiny as a new apple.
“He said he’d say our name, Ma.” It’s Arthur Fitzmaurice on the other side of the curtain. In the rush, Jake had forgotten about him until now. From the volume of the boy’s voice he must have gotten a seat right up front like he said. The tired voice of a woman Jake takes to be his mother Mary answers.
“Just don’t get your hopes up, Arthur. These entertainers are busy people. He’s probably forgot all about you by now. I bet he meets hundreds of people a day and makes that very same promise to all of them. If he followed through it’d be like reading the Palm Springs county yellow pages.”
Somewhere else a balloon pops and some people in the crowd gasp. Jake fastens his helmet and heads toward his motorcycle. He feels the need to get some reassurance from David again, but there isn’t any time. The lights go down. He sees the spotlight lingering at his entrance and he revs the engine. A second later, he’s with his people, their expectant faces watching and waiting. He hits the ramp and soars over the eight-barrel run. He loops around and takes another ramp and ten barrels. He pauses just long enough to see Arthur Fitzmaurice clapping his hands, his too-large Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.
Jake rides on stage as the clowns roll in the Sphere of Death. The crowd quiets. Jake’s partner Lyle waits inside, looping around on his own motorcycle, finally making one complete vertical revolution while Jake unclasps his cape. A moment later, there’s a drum roll and the clowns open a latch on the Sphere. He revs his engine and enters. The pace is slow at the start. Both motorists circle each other. As they increase their speed, their revolutions get wider until both are driving horizontally.
Jake eases into a steady pace and takes the opportunity to look out at the crowd through the gaps in the Sphere. At first it is a blur of faces and balloons, circles of color. Then, he starts to pick out individual people, Arthur and his mother Mary, a baby with a bonnet. He spots a flash of pink that he assumes is Vondette and a shock of anxiousness courses through him. He and Lyle have gotten faster now, and finally Jake angles and starts his vertical ascent so that both riders criss-cross at the top and bottom of the sphere.
“Today’s the big day, huh?” Lyle calls out to him.
“Got the ring in my pocket,” Jake shouts.
They keep up their pattern until the crowd is roaring, and finally Lyle, and then Jake slow down until they are able to stop and exit the sphere.
An announcer’s voice comes on the loudspeaker. It’s supposed to be David, but Jake detects a Southern twang that David doesn’t have. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is only the beginning! With Jake Jacket, you can always expect the act to get bigger and better!”
The spotlight fixes on Jake, so bright he can no longer see out into the crowd. A harness lowers in front of him and he steps forward into it while the clowns strap him in.
The announcer: “For the next act, Jake Jacket will show that man can fly!”
Jake is lifted off the ground and races two hundred feet into the air. The light is slow to keep up with him, and for a brief second, he sees the crowd below: Arthur, Mary, Vondette, and beside Vondette, David whispering in her ear. The man kisses Vondette on the cheek before slipping back into the crowd. There is a second when Jake can get angry. Instead the harness propels him through the air so that he swings out over the crowd, soaring above them. He makes two laps under the big top before the harness unlatches to the shock of the crowd and Jake is sailing over them toward a trapeze hidden in shadow. He catches it to the relief of the crowd but they are awed again when he swings back and lets go into nothing. The lights shut off. The crowd is silent. A moment later, Jake stands center stage with his cape back on. The crowd roars and Jake takes a bow.
“Thank you, everybody! It’s an honor to be here in Palm Springs. We hope to put on a tremendous show for you tonight!”
The crowd applauds.
“First, though, I’d like to say hello to my good friends, Arthur and Mary Fitzmaurice. Arthur was kind enough to wrastle a bear for me this morning.” He directs the spotlight over to the front row where both people are blushing and jumping up and down. “And, now,” Jake says, “I’d like to make a very special announcement about a woman I love.” He reaches into the pouch in his belt. He unfastens it and removes the tiny black box while the spotlight pans around the crowd and finally stops on Vondette, pink and shiny. “My Aunt Rosemary is the woman I love most in the world,” Jake says. “She’s raised me ever since I was six, ever since my ma and pa died in a train wreck on a rainy winter’s day in Buffalo, New York.” Vondette had been beaming, but something in her face starts to unravel. “I brought with me today a diamond ring that I paid a lot of money for. And, I was hoping to make my Aunt Rosemary proud by offering it to someone that I might share the rest of my life with.” He can feel the pressure building up in his throat. He swallows once, careful not to make his nerves audible on the microphone. “I think I’m gonna make my Aunt truly proud, when I give this ring to Mary Fitzmaurice, a woman who’s been a good mother to Arthur, and who should be proud for having done such a good job of raising him.”
The crowd is quiet. The spotlight lingers on Vondette for a moment longer and then slowly creeps back over to Arthur and Mary.
“A ring?” Mary’s voice is timid as she looks over at her son.
“A ring for you, Mary. From Jake Jacket, because you and Arthur have been such dedicated fans.” Jake lowers himself on one knee so that he can hand the box over to the woman. The band starts and the crowd claps, and Jake continues with the show.
He doesn’t remember much about his performance that night. The crowd responds when he expects them too, all except for Vondette, who disappeared before Jake even got to his Ring of Fire act. For the finale, he leads the crowd outside and directs them to form a horseshoe around him, leaving a clearing for him to make his departure. The clowns appear and help him strap on his jetpack, and he secures his goggles on and prepares for flight. He’s counting down, when young Arthur Fitzmaurice appears in the crowd. He’s so tall he stands out, even though he’s in the back.
“Mr. Jacket!”
Jake turns around, nervous that the finish is going to fizzle. “What is it, son?”
“What you did just now, for my Ma. That’s the best thing any man’s ever done for her.”
“But we can’t take it from you, Mr. Jacket,” Mary says, also stepping forward out of the crowd. Jake can tell that she’s been crying because there are trails of dark mascara streaming down both of her cheeks. She hands the ring over to him. Jake takes it, not really knowing what to do.
“Fly away now,” Arthur whispers. “We’re good, Mr. Jacket. Fly away.”
Jake looks out at the confused faces around him. The clowns begin their countdown again, and the jetpack starts to hiss. He braces himself and soars into the darkness. The lights from the fair diminish and are replaced by the steady position of the stars in the sky. Jake takes out the ring and holds it up. It sparkles like the stars as he hovers over the earth. It is a slow rotation, the earth below him, so slow it gives Jake some time to think.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Is Your Work Supremely Boring?
Last week I posted the question if your first chapter can be too exciting. Today I'd like to ask if your work is supremely boring. My greatest fear is that my stories are soooooboooooorrrrring. I go through this on every draft because after awhile they are so familiar to me I can't imagine anyone else would find them exciting. This is why I have what I call Alpha Readers - more like Cheerleaders. They are made of awesome. They deserve a special place in heaven.
A long time ago I would have said that if a writer got to the point where their work was boring to them, they were in big trouble. I don't believe that now. Some writers spend years on a project. It can get so familiar that working on it can be boring and, well, a lot of work. However, these writers who become bored with their work still love their work, and they are still driven by artistic achievement. That's not boring.
I think that's the word to remember: familiar.
Anytime something becomes familiar, it runs the risk of becoming boring. If this happens to you and your book, keep going. Most writers I know who have this problem start working on another project. I suppose that's one way around the problem, but it can create other, bigger, problems. As I said above, a good way around all this is to get some good Alpha Readers (readers who read as you write, chapter by chapter or section by section). Cheerleaders are important, at least for me. I can't write in a vacuum. Talk about becoming too familiar with my surroundings...
My answers aren't the answers for everyone. How do you deal with getting bored with your work?
_____________________________
On another note, we received all but one entry for our Notes from Underground anthology! For the next month we'll be formatting this huge project and getting it ready for sale. We'll unveil the cover as soon as we can. Special thanks to Tara Maya for her artistic talents!
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Deadlines and Other Dates
First off, today's the big due date for our Notes From Underground anthology stories. For any of the selected writers who still haven't turned in your story, you have until midnight PST to get them in to us...and we hope you do! (Or else, Nevets.)
Second off, don't forget that on December 21, we're doing our trivia/giveaway day. All day long, we'll be posting up trivia questions and giving prizes to whoever answers correctly first. I've been spending the last few days collecting some fun and silly prizes, so I hope you'll check in throughout the day!
Third off, check out Michelle's blog now. She's announcing something exciting! Okay, this isn't a deadline or an other sort of date, but check it out anyway.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Transitions and Foreshadowing
Sometimes when I am first writing a scene, especially one that's got a lot of dialogue, I jump from one conversational thread to another with no warning. That is, the characters are all talking about dogs, for example, when one of them will change the subject, suddenly asking about paramecia. This can jar the reader, which is usually a bad thing.
I know that some writers want to write a scene where one character surprises another, and that's fine. "Hey, what the--?" the surprised character says. But you don't want to surprise your reader the same way. You don't want them to question the internal reality of the story. If character X is concealing something, and character Y is going to spring the news that she suspects this, your reader should be aware of this in advance. You need to prepare the change in the dialogue. The reader should be able to see it coming. Not necessarily the answer to the question, but the question itself.
Most of the jarring transitions in dialogue or other scene elements are not attempts to spring a surprise; it's just clumsiness on the part of the writer. For example, one of the passages in a MS of mine read like this:
[Prince Hamlet has given Horatio an astrolabe found in an abandoned observatory]
The astrolabe was heavy. I had never touched it before but I had seen it every day that I served as Tycho’s assistant, over the desk where I performed my slow calculations after a night spent observing the heavens.
"Thank you, my lord. I will treasure this."
"You should sell it," he said. "There are men who would pay handsomely for such trinkets."
"How long have you been hiding here?"
"I do not hide, Horatio..."
The transition from talk of the astrolabe to Horatio's question ("How long have you been hiding?") was too abrupt, and not prepared for the reader. So I added a transitional statement to bridge the ideas:
The astrolabe was heavy. I had never touched it before but I had seen it every day that I served as Tycho’s assistant, over the desk where I performed my slow calculations after a night spent observing the heavens.
"Thank you, my lord. I will treasure this."
"You should sell it," he said. "There are men who would pay handsomely for such trinkets."
"I shall keep it, for it has been hiding here awaiting my return," I said. "And how long, my lord, have you been hiding here?"
"I do not hide, Horatio..."
This transitional passage works by taking an element from the current conversation (the astrolabe) and an element from what's to come (hiding) and combining them into a single idea (the astrolabe was hiding). This makes it appear as if Horatio's question ("How long have you been hiding?") flows naturally out of the conversation and smooths over the transition between subject matter.
Which is essentially my entire technique for transitions, whether I'm working on a short dialogue or a large-scale plot device. If you are going to introduce something new into the story, you should prepare the reader for it. We call this "foreshadowing," which is a term I really like. The "shadow" of what's to come falls on the narrative before we see the thing itself.
Anyway, suppose you are writing a book and you want to introduce vampires (really, Scott? Vampires?) into the story. What are the elements of vampirism that you'll be using? Maybe blood, sharp teeth, cemeteries, etc. So I'd have some of those elements in the narrative well before the actual vampires show up. Yes, maybe you think it's way more cooler to have the vampires explode onto the scene as a Big Damn Surprise, but you need to drop subtle clues for your reader ahead of time. It will make the vampires seem natural and inevitable. (Also I add this general comment: Don't confuse surprising your characters with surprising your readers. It is not the same thing.)
So the basic model for any sort of transition becomes this:
Past story elements --> transition <-- Future story elements
You just drag elements from where you are and from where you want to go together into a single scene. The cool thing about this is that you can pretty much use whatever elements you want. The less obvious the elements the better, and it still works most of the time.
I know that some writers want to write a scene where one character surprises another, and that's fine. "Hey, what the--?" the surprised character says. But you don't want to surprise your reader the same way. You don't want them to question the internal reality of the story. If character X is concealing something, and character Y is going to spring the news that she suspects this, your reader should be aware of this in advance. You need to prepare the change in the dialogue. The reader should be able to see it coming. Not necessarily the answer to the question, but the question itself.
Most of the jarring transitions in dialogue or other scene elements are not attempts to spring a surprise; it's just clumsiness on the part of the writer. For example, one of the passages in a MS of mine read like this:
[Prince Hamlet has given Horatio an astrolabe found in an abandoned observatory]
The astrolabe was heavy. I had never touched it before but I had seen it every day that I served as Tycho’s assistant, over the desk where I performed my slow calculations after a night spent observing the heavens.
"Thank you, my lord. I will treasure this."
"You should sell it," he said. "There are men who would pay handsomely for such trinkets."
"How long have you been hiding here?"
"I do not hide, Horatio..."
The transition from talk of the astrolabe to Horatio's question ("How long have you been hiding?") was too abrupt, and not prepared for the reader. So I added a transitional statement to bridge the ideas:
The astrolabe was heavy. I had never touched it before but I had seen it every day that I served as Tycho’s assistant, over the desk where I performed my slow calculations after a night spent observing the heavens.
"Thank you, my lord. I will treasure this."
"You should sell it," he said. "There are men who would pay handsomely for such trinkets."
"I shall keep it, for it has been hiding here awaiting my return," I said. "And how long, my lord, have you been hiding here?"
"I do not hide, Horatio..."
This transitional passage works by taking an element from the current conversation (the astrolabe) and an element from what's to come (hiding) and combining them into a single idea (the astrolabe was hiding). This makes it appear as if Horatio's question ("How long have you been hiding?") flows naturally out of the conversation and smooths over the transition between subject matter.
Which is essentially my entire technique for transitions, whether I'm working on a short dialogue or a large-scale plot device. If you are going to introduce something new into the story, you should prepare the reader for it. We call this "foreshadowing," which is a term I really like. The "shadow" of what's to come falls on the narrative before we see the thing itself.
Anyway, suppose you are writing a book and you want to introduce vampires (really, Scott? Vampires?) into the story. What are the elements of vampirism that you'll be using? Maybe blood, sharp teeth, cemeteries, etc. So I'd have some of those elements in the narrative well before the actual vampires show up. Yes, maybe you think it's way more cooler to have the vampires explode onto the scene as a Big Damn Surprise, but you need to drop subtle clues for your reader ahead of time. It will make the vampires seem natural and inevitable. (Also I add this general comment: Don't confuse surprising your characters with surprising your readers. It is not the same thing.)
So the basic model for any sort of transition becomes this:
Past story elements --> transition <-- Future story elements
You just drag elements from where you are and from where you want to go together into a single scene. The cool thing about this is that you can pretty much use whatever elements you want. The less obvious the elements the better, and it still works most of the time.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Transforming History: Tomorrow We Dance by Tara Maya
Happy Monday, everyone!
I wanted to talk about the novelette, Tomorrow We Dance by Tara Maya. (Tara didn't ask me to mention this as part of any favor. I volunteered to do this because I think it's a fantastic read, and I hope you'll give it a chance.)
Tomorrow We Dance tells the story of a young boy who becomes a follower of the Bone Whistler, a man who claims he can bring back the dead. The boy is willing to risk everything for this dream, and it's possible that he could lose it all.
That alone is a compelling and exciting story, but Tara Maya doesn't stop there. Tomorrow We Dance also revitalizes literary history. Reading this work reminded me of the strange addiction people have to the classic fairy tales and how they work. This contemporary story makes you see the classics in a different light and somehow manages to unify this long lineage of storytelling while also transforming it into something new. You'll feel yourself propelled forward and backward at the same time.
Tomorrow We Dance is available as a stand alone novelette or as part of a larger anthology called Conmergence. I sincerely think this is a great story that will appeal to the majority of people who visit TLL. So, check it out!
Friday, December 10, 2010
Friday Filler! With A Contest!
The contest, alas, is not for you, but for us! Read on. But first, this:
Yes, that's Rudolph, standing in my front yard. I Hope Santa doesn't try to repress him again this year, just because his nose glows. Anyway, 'tis Friday and I have some announcements:
Notes From Underground: If you are one of our handsome/lovely contributors, don't forget to send us your submissions by next Wednesday, December 15th! It would be a shame if your stuff didn't get into the anthology. Just saying, in a passive-aggressive threatening manner.
Trivia Contest & Giveaway! The first annual really cool Literary Lab Trivia Contest With Prizes (we'll find a shorter, punchier name soon, I promise) is coming to town! Stop by every hour on Tuesday, December 21st for questions and prizes! I don't know what the questions will be, nor do I know what the prizes will be, but we'll sort that out by the 21st and it will all be amazing.
The Great Mighty Reader Challenge: This is the contest of which I spoke! Domey Malasarn, Michelle Davidson Argyle and I have accepted a challenge from Mighty Reader to each write a story based on an idea/image she has supplied. This came about during Davin's recent visit to the very nice home I share with Mighty Reader. Davin and I were discussing how different our basic methods of creating a story are: he has an initial idea for the beginning and writes away from it while I have an initial idea for an ending and write towards it. Mighty Reader suggested that we each take the same idea and Davin would use it as a starting point and I would use it as an ending point. So we're going to do that. Michelle is going to use the prompt as either a start or end, as she likes. We each have One Week (next week, as it happens) to write our brilliant stories. We'll post them, or links to them maybe, here next Friday. Stay tuned. It will be awfully fun.
Also! It's Friday, and none too soon! This week has made me very tired. Tomorrow we go forth and ritually slaughter an innocent tree, which we'll drag home and cover with lights and tinsel and stuff. There will also be a hot lunch and hopefully cocoa.
Yes, that's Rudolph, standing in my front yard. I Hope Santa doesn't try to repress him again this year, just because his nose glows. Anyway, 'tis Friday and I have some announcements:
Notes From Underground: If you are one of our handsome/lovely contributors, don't forget to send us your submissions by next Wednesday, December 15th! It would be a shame if your stuff didn't get into the anthology. Just saying, in a passive-aggressive threatening manner.
Trivia Contest & Giveaway! The first annual really cool Literary Lab Trivia Contest With Prizes (we'll find a shorter, punchier name soon, I promise) is coming to town! Stop by every hour on Tuesday, December 21st for questions and prizes! I don't know what the questions will be, nor do I know what the prizes will be, but we'll sort that out by the 21st and it will all be amazing.
The Great Mighty Reader Challenge: This is the contest of which I spoke! Domey Malasarn, Michelle Davidson Argyle and I have accepted a challenge from Mighty Reader to each write a story based on an idea/image she has supplied. This came about during Davin's recent visit to the very nice home I share with Mighty Reader. Davin and I were discussing how different our basic methods of creating a story are: he has an initial idea for the beginning and writes away from it while I have an initial idea for an ending and write towards it. Mighty Reader suggested that we each take the same idea and Davin would use it as a starting point and I would use it as an ending point. So we're going to do that. Michelle is going to use the prompt as either a start or end, as she likes. We each have One Week (next week, as it happens) to write our brilliant stories. We'll post them, or links to them maybe, here next Friday. Stay tuned. It will be awfully fun.
Also! It's Friday, and none too soon! This week has made me very tired. Tomorrow we go forth and ritually slaughter an innocent tree, which we'll drag home and cover with lights and tinsel and stuff. There will also be a hot lunch and hopefully cocoa.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Can a First Chapter Be Too Exciting?
Chapter 1
example
Bill stepped away from the bomb and brushed off his hands. It would explode in a matter of minutes, but first he had to take care of Iggy walking around the corner. He was a bulky man with muscles like sacks of oranges stuffed under his skin. Bill took him on, chuckling the entire time. One, two, three blows. Iggy grunted.
"We'll both die in that bomb you set up!"
Bill grinned. "You will - I'll walk away laughing."
Iggy shoved an elbow against Bill's nose. A sickening crack. Warm blood gushed over his lips. Iggy would pay for that. With his adrenaline rising, Bill's moves came faster, more instinctual, until Iggy fell to the ground unconscious. Perfect.
Bill walked away. Beneath him the ground shook as the bomb exploded, hot and loud, a thunderous applause.
______________________
Chapter 2
example
Bill watched his wife from across the table. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life, but that didn't mean he should say anything. She hated it when he said crap like that. He tapped the divorce papers on the table. His coffee steamed in a china cup decorated with purple pansies. Funny. Ellie's mother owned this cafe. She also painted the china. Funny.
"Are you certain this is the right thing to do?" Bill asked, still tapping the papers.
"Of course," Ellie growled, and picked up her cream cheese pastry. It remained a mystery how she ate so terribly yet remained so thin. Bill guessed it was her night patrol that shed the calories. Vegas had too many criminals to make her job boring and anything like a desk job. He, on the other hand, glanced down at his beer-belly gut and silently cursed his corner office with a view. Cushy chair.
"You know I still love you. I'm going to buy your breakfast and keep sending you checks for the kids."
"Of course you will." Ellie took a huge bite of the pastry, somehow managing to keep crumbs off her perfectly red lips. She chewed and swallowed and kept her eyes on Bill. It was in these moments he thought of a tiger sizing up its prey.
______________________
One of our readers, Justus, asked the question "Can a First Chapter be Too Exciting?" a few weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it for quite awhile. My novel Monarch begins with a fight between a spy and two FBI agents. There are guns and blood and excitement. It then moves to Chapter 2 where nothing more exciting happens than an inn-keeper serving her guests coffee and worrying about the rainstorm. She runs into the spy at the end, but that's at the end.
Obviously I don't think a first chapter can be too exciting, but I do think a first chapter runs the risk of leading your reader in the wrong direction. I run this risk in Monarch except for the fact that I introduce the inn-keeper briefly in the first chapter (who she is). Because I do this, the second chapter carries a question over for the reader: How are the spy and the inn-keeper going to meet again and what will happen?
It had better be something exciting!
A Promise
From my experience a first chapter should carry a promise, whether it's filled with physical tension, emotional tension, or some other clever kind of tension. That tension - whatever you set up - must carry over into the rest of the story. It might not be in Chapter 2 or 3 or 4, but those chapters had better start building back up to that tension you set up.
If your promise doesn't carry through at a reasonable pace, I'm going to think you threw in all that excitement in Chapter 1 only to hook me as a reader, and that's going to irritate me to no end. I'm going to greatly dislike you as an author because you tricked me. Readers don't like to be tricked. They like to be surprised, but not tricked. There's a difference.
The Base Ingredients
The main thing to remember is to keep your first chapter from sticking out like a sore thumb. It should fit into the rest of your story. I like to think of a first chapter like the base ingredients for a story. Everything starts there, and everything will branch out from there - or at least it should. By the time the reader gets to the end of the book that first chapter should shine! The reader should see things in that first chapter they didn't see before. The last chapter of the book will have ties back to the first. It all comes full circle.
So you tell me: How do the two chapter examples above work for you? Would you keep reading the story? Do they feel completely separate or connected? Is the first chapter too exciting?
example
Bill stepped away from the bomb and brushed off his hands. It would explode in a matter of minutes, but first he had to take care of Iggy walking around the corner. He was a bulky man with muscles like sacks of oranges stuffed under his skin. Bill took him on, chuckling the entire time. One, two, three blows. Iggy grunted.
"We'll both die in that bomb you set up!"
Bill grinned. "You will - I'll walk away laughing."
Iggy shoved an elbow against Bill's nose. A sickening crack. Warm blood gushed over his lips. Iggy would pay for that. With his adrenaline rising, Bill's moves came faster, more instinctual, until Iggy fell to the ground unconscious. Perfect.
Bill walked away. Beneath him the ground shook as the bomb exploded, hot and loud, a thunderous applause.
______________________
Chapter 2
example
Bill watched his wife from across the table. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life, but that didn't mean he should say anything. She hated it when he said crap like that. He tapped the divorce papers on the table. His coffee steamed in a china cup decorated with purple pansies. Funny. Ellie's mother owned this cafe. She also painted the china. Funny.
"Are you certain this is the right thing to do?" Bill asked, still tapping the papers.
"Of course," Ellie growled, and picked up her cream cheese pastry. It remained a mystery how she ate so terribly yet remained so thin. Bill guessed it was her night patrol that shed the calories. Vegas had too many criminals to make her job boring and anything like a desk job. He, on the other hand, glanced down at his beer-belly gut and silently cursed his corner office with a view. Cushy chair.
"You know I still love you. I'm going to buy your breakfast and keep sending you checks for the kids."
"Of course you will." Ellie took a huge bite of the pastry, somehow managing to keep crumbs off her perfectly red lips. She chewed and swallowed and kept her eyes on Bill. It was in these moments he thought of a tiger sizing up its prey.
______________________
One of our readers, Justus, asked the question "Can a First Chapter be Too Exciting?" a few weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it for quite awhile. My novel Monarch begins with a fight between a spy and two FBI agents. There are guns and blood and excitement. It then moves to Chapter 2 where nothing more exciting happens than an inn-keeper serving her guests coffee and worrying about the rainstorm. She runs into the spy at the end, but that's at the end.
Obviously I don't think a first chapter can be too exciting, but I do think a first chapter runs the risk of leading your reader in the wrong direction. I run this risk in Monarch except for the fact that I introduce the inn-keeper briefly in the first chapter (who she is). Because I do this, the second chapter carries a question over for the reader: How are the spy and the inn-keeper going to meet again and what will happen?
It had better be something exciting!
A Promise
From my experience a first chapter should carry a promise, whether it's filled with physical tension, emotional tension, or some other clever kind of tension. That tension - whatever you set up - must carry over into the rest of the story. It might not be in Chapter 2 or 3 or 4, but those chapters had better start building back up to that tension you set up.
If your promise doesn't carry through at a reasonable pace, I'm going to think you threw in all that excitement in Chapter 1 only to hook me as a reader, and that's going to irritate me to no end. I'm going to greatly dislike you as an author because you tricked me. Readers don't like to be tricked. They like to be surprised, but not tricked. There's a difference.
The Base Ingredients
The main thing to remember is to keep your first chapter from sticking out like a sore thumb. It should fit into the rest of your story. I like to think of a first chapter like the base ingredients for a story. Everything starts there, and everything will branch out from there - or at least it should. By the time the reader gets to the end of the book that first chapter should shine! The reader should see things in that first chapter they didn't see before. The last chapter of the book will have ties back to the first. It all comes full circle.
So you tell me: How do the two chapter examples above work for you? Would you keep reading the story? Do they feel completely separate or connected? Is the first chapter too exciting?
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Charlie's One-Sentence Story UNcontest
I know it was a joke yesterday when Charlie suggested we have a one-sentence story contest. But, the more I thought about it, the more I figured it could be fun.
So, here's the deal. I'm challenging everyone to write a sentence in the comments section that feels as complete as a story. This is not a contest, but what I'd love to see is a sentence that really captures where you are in your writing right now, in terms of voice, genre, tone, subject matter, etc. Make this YOUR sentence, something that could be identified as yours in a lineup. You're not trying to beat anyone else, but rather you're displaying your "orange" amid all the other "apples," if that makes sense. We have a lot of new followers lately, and I'd love to see what y'all write.
I'll rotate some of the sentences to the front side of this post throughout the day as (and if) they come in.
And, I'll be posting mine...as soon as I think of it.
Later...
Here's one from Jabez:
Six strong men circled the last tree to guard it, but one by one they fell to the axes of the gathering mob and finally so did the tree, and it was cut and split and the pieces piled high to make a pyre for my little girl, who’d wanted nothing but to live, and when the embers died and the ashes scattered I looked out at the blasted land and cried for the world I destroyed for her sake.
and Imelda:
As she sat there in her office chair the morning sun glowed as social media her led from website to website, her mind and thoughts traveled miles before she realized the sun was gone and now the moon was jeering her loss of a day.
and Justus:
Even the 'Crimson Mountain', looming above all his fellow dragons, stood anxiously in the shadow of Theikuv; only the sky dared look down upon the mountain, and for that indignity it had received a vicious thrust from a jagged peak.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
In Praise of Ambiguity
One of the things I have come to believe is that stories which can't easily be summed up, whose themes are complicated or ambiguous, whose characters are neither good nor bad nor indifferent, are the stories that stay with us the longest and have the most power with readers. Stories that reduce life to simple, easily-digested and easily-described forces tend to be forgettable and aren't the stories that readers come back to or put into the hands of other readers. But stories that mirror the real complexity of the world sometimes take on lives of their own and work their way into the fabric of our culture. Myths do this, and if you look at myths you will see that they are generally messy and morally indeterminate. The plays (especially the tragedies) of Shakespeare do this, with their unexplained bursts of violence and their protagonists who are both hero and devil.
Where, you might ask, is all of this coming from? Well, I am writing a synopsis of my novel Cocke & Bull. I've never had the scintillating pleasure of crafting a synopsis before, but I figured it couldn't be that hard. After all, I know the story pretty well and I have my outline so how difficult can it be to flesh out my notes into a one-page narrative of the narrative?
It turned out to be harder than it looked, because while the story is fairly straightforward and the character arcs are easy enough to describe, the meaning of the dramatic action is ambiguous. Why do my characters do the things they do? Well, it's complicated. How do my characters feel about each other and themselves? Well, it's not really clear and it depends, you know, it really depends. The more I narrow the focus of the discussion about the story, the less powerful the story seems.
You know how, when you're in grammar school English classes (and sometimes when you're in university-level English courses), the teacher tries to get you to come up with a one-sentence statement of a story's themes? I don't care what your one sentence is; any decent story is going to be poorly-described by it. With a good teacher, those "theme sentences" might lead to a smart discussion of the story, but the discussion of stories shouldn't lead to those reductionist one-sentence statements. Because a good story is rich and has multiple layers that cannot easily be described. A good writer examines her topics from many angles and shows those angles to the reader but never sums up or chooses which angle is best, especially which ethical or moral angle. A good writer sympathizes with his characters but doesn't shy away from showing when those characters do unsympathetic things.
A good story is not simple.
When I revise, there is a temptation to cut out anything that adds ambiguity to the story. There is a temptation to eliminate multiple meanings, to narrow, to remove vagueness, to cast everything as either/or and to make the actions, characters and themes easy to grasp. This is a temptation that I must resist, because if I give in to that temptation, the story will be emptied out, and much smaller than life. I don't mind writing a story that can't really be figured out once and for all. The truth, at least as I see it, is that life is difficult and messy and not readily summed up. I want my fiction to be the same way.
Which means that my synopsis will of necessity be a sort of one-dimensional discussion of my novel, but that's okay as long as I don't start thinking that the book should be as easy to grasp as the synopsis.
Where, you might ask, is all of this coming from? Well, I am writing a synopsis of my novel Cocke & Bull. I've never had the scintillating pleasure of crafting a synopsis before, but I figured it couldn't be that hard. After all, I know the story pretty well and I have my outline so how difficult can it be to flesh out my notes into a one-page narrative of the narrative?
It turned out to be harder than it looked, because while the story is fairly straightforward and the character arcs are easy enough to describe, the meaning of the dramatic action is ambiguous. Why do my characters do the things they do? Well, it's complicated. How do my characters feel about each other and themselves? Well, it's not really clear and it depends, you know, it really depends. The more I narrow the focus of the discussion about the story, the less powerful the story seems.
You know how, when you're in grammar school English classes (and sometimes when you're in university-level English courses), the teacher tries to get you to come up with a one-sentence statement of a story's themes? I don't care what your one sentence is; any decent story is going to be poorly-described by it. With a good teacher, those "theme sentences" might lead to a smart discussion of the story, but the discussion of stories shouldn't lead to those reductionist one-sentence statements. Because a good story is rich and has multiple layers that cannot easily be described. A good writer examines her topics from many angles and shows those angles to the reader but never sums up or chooses which angle is best, especially which ethical or moral angle. A good writer sympathizes with his characters but doesn't shy away from showing when those characters do unsympathetic things.
A good story is not simple.
When I revise, there is a temptation to cut out anything that adds ambiguity to the story. There is a temptation to eliminate multiple meanings, to narrow, to remove vagueness, to cast everything as either/or and to make the actions, characters and themes easy to grasp. This is a temptation that I must resist, because if I give in to that temptation, the story will be emptied out, and much smaller than life. I don't mind writing a story that can't really be figured out once and for all. The truth, at least as I see it, is that life is difficult and messy and not readily summed up. I want my fiction to be the same way.
Which means that my synopsis will of necessity be a sort of one-dimensional discussion of my novel, but that's okay as long as I don't start thinking that the book should be as easy to grasp as the synopsis.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Story is a matter of organization
A couple of days ago, I was responsible for teaching a lesson on "Genomic Approaches to Multifactorial Disease" to a class of college juniors. It was a topic that I knew very little about, considering my thesis was about arsenic contamination in Bangladesh.
As the cherry on top, none of my co-workers in lab really knew much about "Genomic Approaches to Multifactorial Disease" either--and they all happened to be very busy last week, so they probably couldn't have helped me even if they did--so I ended up giving a practice lesson to my friend T, who is a fellow writer, not a scientist.
So, there T and I are, practicing in my office, and I'm throwing out scientific terms and diagrams and methods of statistical analysis, when he raises his hand and says, "I think you should show and not tell."
It took me a second to understand where he was going with this, but then I figured it out.
See, I had been giving a general outline of genomic approaches to multifactorial diseases to him without getting to an actual example, like the study of high blood pressure, and he said that, for him, the example would make everything clearer.
The whole experience reminded me that almost every message we communicate to someone else can be organized in the form of a story...and techniques that we use to tell an exciting story can also be applied to any messages to make them more exciting.
When the time came for me to give my actual lesson, I organized each part of my lecture to come out like a story, setting up a question in the beginning, going through the thought process of how to solve that question, and then building to the climax where the question was answered. It made for an engaging discussion, and I had multiple students come up to me after the lecture to say how interesting my talk was.
This has all reminded me that the skills we learn as story tellers can be applied to so many things outside of our fiction writing. I think I seem to be a more interesting person in general because I've learned to share details about my life more in a story form. It's a matter of organization, setting things up so that there's a beginning, middle, and end. It's a nice tool to carry in our back pocket for anytime we need it.
And! It's December 6, just a few days before all of our Notes From Underground stories are due! I'm excited to see what we end up with. Already, we've gotten some great stories, and I can't wait to get them published and available for readers!
Friday, December 3, 2010
Friday Filler! Mule Rides!
So anyway, it's been a long week and I, for one, am glad it's about over. I live in Seattle and winter is the rainy season, which means perpetual overcast when you can see the sky, which for me is rare because it's dark when I wake up and dark again when I leave the office, so I tend to think of winter in Seattle as the Land Of Perpetual Night. But! This winter (or very late fall, yes, to be more precise) brings some sunshiny moments to Mr. Bailey's life! If you look here, you'll see that I have a sunshiny new agent! And after working on my novel Killing Hamlet for several years, it looks pretty certain that it will finally be going out on submission to publishers in early January. Which is teh roxor, and don't let anyone tell you differently.
There aren't enough exclamation points to emphasize how cool it's been working with Weronika, but I must warn you: there has been a flurry of activity and I'm feeling a bit out of breath. Author photo? Author bio? A synopsis of the next novel (Cocke &; Bull) just on the off chance that an editor wants to offer us a 2-book deal? A fresh new pitch for Killing Hamlet because my original query letter writ two years ago no longer fits the book as it stands today? Yes, I say yes, and likely more to come. So busy busy busy and I haven't even begun my Christmas shopping yet. Anyway, this is all just my subtle way of saying that things are cool in my life.
Other cool things that don't have anything to do with me:
Tonight in downtown Seattle, the 24th Annual Great Figgy Pudding Street Corner Caroling Competition, which closes some major streets and fills block after block with singing folks. It's way cool, and Mighty Reader and I have made this one of our traditions.
Tomorrow in my neighborhood, it's the annual tree lighting, which is a cool community event with prizes, music and snacks. Sunday there will be mule rides. Mule rides! We also have a fabulous outdoor farmer's market on Sundays, so the pleasure is doubled, at least. Mule rides!
Seattle can't be the only cool city on Earth, so what's going on in your fair town this weekend?
There aren't enough exclamation points to emphasize how cool it's been working with Weronika, but I must warn you: there has been a flurry of activity and I'm feeling a bit out of breath. Author photo? Author bio? A synopsis of the next novel (Cocke &; Bull) just on the off chance that an editor wants to offer us a 2-book deal? A fresh new pitch for Killing Hamlet because my original query letter writ two years ago no longer fits the book as it stands today? Yes, I say yes, and likely more to come. So busy busy busy and I haven't even begun my Christmas shopping yet. Anyway, this is all just my subtle way of saying that things are cool in my life.
Other cool things that don't have anything to do with me:
Tonight in downtown Seattle, the 24th Annual Great Figgy Pudding Street Corner Caroling Competition, which closes some major streets and fills block after block with singing folks. It's way cool, and Mighty Reader and I have made this one of our traditions.
Tomorrow in my neighborhood, it's the annual tree lighting, which is a cool community event with prizes, music and snacks. Sunday there will be mule rides. Mule rides! We also have a fabulous outdoor farmer's market on Sundays, so the pleasure is doubled, at least. Mule rides!
Seattle can't be the only cool city on Earth, so what's going on in your fair town this weekend?
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Are Reviews an Issue?
Yeah, so I have no brain because today is Thursday. I honestly thought it was Wednesday until my husband came home for lunch and informed of reality. So I really don't have a post to put up today, but I would like to direct you to my post on Rhemalda Publishing where I DID remember to post! Please go stop by and comment!
I feel so dumb.
Are Reviews Only for Readers?
I feel so dumb.
Are Reviews Only for Readers?
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Stick with your ideas?
Sorry, everyone...I completely forgot that I was supposed to do a post today. The truth is, I've been swamped all week with work. But, I wish everyone happy writing!
I've been working on a new story, and I hope it engages me enough so that I can see it through. I've been trying my best to keep it under wraps, though I've spilled the beans to a couple of you. It involves the Dalai Lama! He gets hooked up to a machine and becomes semi-robotic! That's all I'll say and nothing more.
Michelle brought up the other day that she was surprised by how often I start ideas and don't finish them. The reason I do that is because each new story is an experiment for me. I don't know if it will go anywhere, and most of them don't, even though the beginning might be interesting. I tend to start multiple things and then stick with the one that compels me the most.
Does anyone else work the same way or do you find one good idea and stick with it?
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