Biff Mitchell's Blog: Writing Hurts Like Hell, page 21

Finishing

There is nothing more orgasmic than writing a beautiful sentence...even if you're the only one in the world who can appreciate its beauty. But then...then...there's compiling all those beautiful sentences into a complete whole. In my case...like...Biff Does Vegas. But my kids might be reading this blog, so we'll leave it at that.

OK...I like the trip there. I always have. I wrote something on my LinkedIn to the effect that sitting at the top of the mountain with a beautiful view is cool but, hell, the adventure's over. So I'm not a big fan of finishing. I'm into the trip.

But then, things finish. If they don't, the journey's going nowhere. Such is the hell we have to live with in this universe that never seems to make sense.

Let me tell you a story.

"Please do," said the fox.

Guess what, fox? It's screw off Thursday. So...please do.

I've written novels that took me up to three years to write. Hey, I work and do lots of other shit. My last novel, Reality Wars, took exactly three years.

But then, I've written short stories that took me longer. One of them, The Nickel, took ten years. And it's like...twenty or thirty pages.

I was traveling out to Vancouver with a friend who's car broke down on the busiest street in Winnipeg during rush hour traffic. The engine fell out. We sold what was left of the car to Trapper John's Used Cars, Best Deal In Town, or something like that. Got $99.

Took a bus the rest of the way. Glad that happened though, because it inspired the best story I've ever written or ever will write. It was in Saskatchewan that the bus passed an intersection in the middle of nowhere. I mean, there was nothing but flatness for a thousand thousand miles in every direction. But there was this intersection where two roads crossed paths.

And there was a sign. It read: D NAT ONS. I mean, wtf, in the middle of nowhere? Donations for what? And there was a donation box below the sign. Did I mention wtf? That image suck to the inside of my mind like the worst booger from somebody else on the elevator that ever was that sticky.

I carried it out to Vancouver where things got so hot I had to leave and come back to New Brunswick where the woman I loved still lived. I carried it through about another day or two before I was hit by 50,000 volts of inspiration and started writing about it.

I wrote furiously...like...I burned the letters off my typewriter (remember those? those things that didn't allow you to cut and paste, and if you burned the manuscript for a novel...without a carbon copy...well...goodbye novel). But I stopped just short of finishing. It was like the journey with no end in sight. No reason to continue. There was no ending. So, I put it away for a while. About three years. And brought it out again...and got another few pages. But no ending.

It wasn't until several years later that I took my type-written manuscript to work with me that the juices started flowing again. And, boy, did they flow. I was a bartender in a the games room of a night club. (NOTE: want to learn about people...spend a few years working as a bartender. END OF NOTE.) It was quiet that night. Well, it was still early and the only customers I had at the bar were three members of the Princess Pats regiment. There was a military base close by.

I started to work...with pen...on the next page of the story. And the next page. I'd already passed the work up till then to the three guys at the bar and then passed each page to them as I finished it. I got three or four pages done that night...before things started to get busy and I had no time to write. Boy, were they pissed that they didn't get to read the end of the story.

But I knew I was close to the end, close to finishing. I put the pages away and got people drunk for the rest of the night. Those pages stayed as they were for another few years, teetering on the edge of finishing. Until one day or night...I honestly don't remember...I finished it. It was just one more page.

One more page. I waited years for that one more page. Waited that long to finish it. The story won an award in an Australian literary magazine site and was later re-published in the Projected Letters Literary Magazine (now defunct until the publishers get off their academic asses and do something useful). But the journey was over. I knew the ending. It was a beautiful view.

And this is why I drive everything I've written out of my mind and focus just on what I'm writing now.

The adventure.

Story Research and the Not So Smooth Drive

I was sitting in a coffee shop one night working furiously on a short story for one of the Twisted Tails anthologies (The editor, J, had mentioned that, if I didn’t have the story to him pronto, bad things would start happening to me.) when I felt someone nudge my shoulder. I quickly grabbed my Saint Christopher’s cross to ward off evil editors before turning to see who it was. It wasn’t J.

It was a pimply faced middle aged wide eyed short paunchy balding man wearing the ugliest sweater I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil your appetite by describing the sweater. He asked if I were Biff Mitchell. I said no, but he just ignored me and waved two crumpled sheets of paper in my face.

“I need you to tell me what’s wrong with this.” He sounded pissed off and disappointed at the same time. I thought for a moment on whether or not I should take the paper out of his hand and shove it up his nose, but I don’t do things like that anymore, so I took the sheets and looked at them.

“There’s something wrong, but I don’t know what it is.” His eyes looked like they were almost ready to burst into tears. “Ashley, my sister, read it and laughed.” I think he called her a bitch, but I’m not going to use that kind of language here. I told him to calm down and I started reading. He moved to the empty chair on the other side of the table as though he was going to sit, but I told not to sit down, that it would ruin my focus. I read the first page.

Surprisingly, the writing wasn’t bad. In fact, it was good enough that I continued reading into the second page. And that’s when I almost started to laugh.

He described the cockpit of a Formula 1 racing car going full out as smooth as a bar of soap sliding across ice. Now, I’m not going to get into a critique of the imagery, but I will take issue with the description itself. I’ve never driven a Formula 1 racer myself, but I once saw a video clip of the inside of one going full out…and it was anything but smooth. In fact, it was bumpy as hell and it seemed to me to be a miracle that any car could hold together under that kind of stress.

His sister obviously saw the same video clip. In his case, a simple search through YouTube might have given him a little more insight, but, obviously, he just used his imagination and figured that a car built for those speeds would probably drive smoothly at those speeds. His research obviously sucked.

Good research is a key ingredient in a well-written novel. Lack of it shows, not just in terms of inaccuracies, but in terms of convincing descriptions of settings, procedures, operations, cultures and everyday rituals…just to name a few aspects of fictional world-building.

I mentioned this to the man in the ugly sweater and he grabbed the pages away from me, stared at me with wide swollen eyes, stood up, broke into tears and ran out of the coffee shop. He could have avoided that whole scene with just a little bit of reality.

Free Story - The Nickel

(Originally published in Projected Letters Literary Journal, 2004)

Shards of sunlight flickered off the car's bumper as it disappeared over a rise in the road. Josh stared at the bright bursts of light and breathed deeply, winded from his run through the woods behind the shack where he lived. As though it had been hiding until the car left, the silence crept back from the woods, oozed from the wild grass and shrubbery pushing through cracks in the pavement where the two highways intersected.

Josh wondered who would be driving out this far from town so early in the morning. With the exception of a few hunters in the fall, burly old Ned Wilkins, the grocer from town, was the only person who ever drove out to the mill road when he dropped by twice a month. Gruff-spoken as he was, he was company--something Josh had little of since his father's death--and Ned always brought a box of supplies: things like soap, cornmeal, salt, and Josh's favorite, comic books. Josh could not read, but he enjoyed looking at the pictures of brightly costumed heroes and villains. The villains, he knew, were the ones who were zapped in the end because good always won out over evil. On Ned's visits, Josh and Ned played checkers. Sometimes Ned let him win. But Ned had not dropped by in three weeks and Josh was running low on matches.

He walked across the weed-patched pavement of the station drive-in and stopped at the concrete stand where the gas pumps used to be. He glanced at the box and looked down the road. The dust had settled now, but a faint odor of exhaust fumes still lingered in the air. It was a rare smell these days, far from the days when Josh was young, when the mill was open and the mill workers streamed through the junction, stopping for gas from his father 's pumps. They were happy days, when his father, a big man with a round, red face, brought his sleepy-eyed customers in with a big smile and a good word and sent them off with a full tank and a friendly glow. Josh cleaned window shields while his father pumped gas. And no one ever made fun of Josh for not being too bright, mostly because everyone loved his father, Calvin Wright. They loved the boom of his laugh and the smile that never left his lips.

Then the mill closed. The woods had been stripped by budworms and fire. The stream of cars and trucks dwindled to a tickle and stopped altogether. But Calvin never lost his smile, even when he had to close down the pumps and travel to town for construction work or whatever else he could find. "Things will get better," he used to say. "Things can only get better."

One day, about two years after the mill closed, Josh's father coughed up some blood. A month later, he was dead.

Ned had driven Josh to see his father in the hospital in town a few days before he died. Josh was scared at the sight of his father, withered and stark like a dead tree in a big hospital bed that had seemed as though it would swallow him up. Ned and Calvin exchanged a few words, almost whispering, and then Calvin asked if he could speak to Josh alone. His voice cracked, his breath coming in gasps. "You'll be looking after yourself from now on, son, but Ned's agreed to drop in from time to time. I wished it was different. You're young yet, but strong."

"You're gonna be alright, Dad," Josh said, but he knew from the hazy film over his father's eyes that the life before him was nearly spent and ready to sink forever into the big hospital bed.

"Yes, I'll be alright now, Josh, but I won't be around to take care of you. I figure you can take care of yourself. You're not smart the same way others are, but your heart is good. An' what they got in schooling, you got in living your days in the woods, learning about living." He broke into a violent fit of coughing and Josh's blood froze. It didn't seem that his father's shriveled body could withstand the rack of the cough. Panicking, Josh cried: "I'll get the doctor, Dad."

"No, stay here. It's gone now." He wheezed a few times, his face gaunt but determined. Grabbing Josh's arm with fleshless fingers, he said: "You might think my life is finished, but nothing's ever finished, Josh, nothing."

Even though his father's hand was shrunken, Josh felt it tightening powerfully on his arm. "You got to start things with a mind to do 'em, but you can never finish. Like keeping with the box. It goes on. You try to finish up, but you never will. Never."

Something deep and incomprehensible thrashed about in his father's eyes. "Never." The word was barely audible, the last thing Josh had heard his father say as he drifted into a deep sleep, his lips curling into a soft smile as though he had known something all along and found out he was right.

Fifteen years had passed since then and Josh had grown into a bulking and contented thirty-three-year-old man. Ned had offered to take him in and let him work in the store, but Josh had refused to leave the junction. The small shack, the woods and the quiet were his home. Fishing the streams, snaring rabbits and watching the clouds were his life.

And the box. The box tied it all together.

Gray and weather-beaten, the box perched on a post by the road. A tattered cardboard sign hung from the front like a piece of shredded skin with a few faded gray letters: D NAT ONS. It had been there since Josh could remember. He was never sure what it was for exactly, but he was vaguely aware that it had something to do with helping people, and that gave it an air of respectability in Josh's eyes. He used to watch his father snap open the huge padlock with a skeleton key and remove coins and paper money, which he kept in a cotton bag under his bed. Once a week, a long black car pulled up at the station with silent, unsmiling men who took the money from the bag and drove away.

After the pumps closed, Josh's father stopped going to the box each evening because there was never anything in it, and the black car had long since stopped coming. One day Calvin saw Josh eyeing the key on its hook by the door.

"Got eyes for that skel'ton key, Josh?" the trace of a smile lined his lips. Josh became flustered. He didn't know what to say. It wasn't the key that was important or all that interesting; it was the box. The key was part of the mysterious act of opening the box and helping others.

"Take the key, Josh, it's yours." Josh stared at his father. "And the box, too. They're both yours."

Ever since then, Josh had worn the key around his neck, tied to a ratty old shoelace. Each evening, like his father had done, he marched dutifully to the box, opened it ceremoniously, looked in and, finding nothing, locked the emptiness back inside.

Now, something moved inside Josh like the smell of gasoline fumes reaching deep into his memory. His hand moved to the key around his neck. His breathing slowed. He walked toward the box and began to hum. It was a low hum, a sound that rose, trailed off and rose again, and the pattern of the hum was the pattern of his life, and he seemed to flow more than walk to the box. Standing before it, he removed the key from his neck and placed it into the padlock, turning it slowly until the lock snapped open with a clunk. He removed the lock, lifted the lid and looked inside. Lying solemnly on the bottom was a shiny new nickel.

He stopped humming.

His first inclination was to drop the lid and leave the coin lying there like a riddle with no answer. He was not used to anything new touching his life. But the coin was there, real and demanding to be acknowledged. He picked it up gingerly and rolled it between his thumb and fingers, studying the relief picture of a beaver hunched on a log on one side and a picture of an expressionless woman on the other. He ignored the letters and numbers. The coin had a nice heft at the end of his fingertips. There was something enjoyable in the weight that seemed so big for an object so small. He was fascinated by the precise edges of the coin, the circularity that came back on itself so smoothly. The roundness pleased him. He closed the lid and locked the box.

Later, sitting on his stool by the wood stove, still gazing raptly at the nickel turning on his fingertips, Josh wondered what to do with it. The men in the black car had not been out to the junction in years, but Josh's father had never kept any of the money in the box. Josh remembered a time when money was short and he suggested they use money from the box.

"Stealing's not right," Calvin said, his eyes icy. "'Specially from folks that are needier than ourselves."

"But it's s'posed to help folks an' we need help, Dad." The reasoning seemed apparent to him.

"Then we'll get our help elsewhere, son." The ice in his eyes softened. "The money from the box belongs to others."

Josh knew what he had to do. If the coin was not his to keep, and the box was his responsibility, then he must take the coin to the right people. But he had no idea who they were or where to find them.

An idea crossed his mind. Ned would know how to find them. All Josh had to do was go to town and find Ned. He hadn't been to Ned’s store since his father's funeral, but it hadn't seemed like a long drive in Ned's truck, and there were lots of streams and trees along the way. And maybe he could get some matches. And some comics.

It was still morning and he reasoned that if he started right away, he would be in town before dark. Humming again, he draped his jacket over one shoulder, left the shack unlocked, and started down the road toward town with big, purposeful steps.

***

The noon sun spilled invisible fire onto the weather-beaten pavement. Josh had been on the road for hours and his stride was beginning to totter. Walking to town no longer seemed like a good idea, especially without a jar of water. The streams and brooks he had seen as a child had dried up, leaving sun-scorched beds of rock and pebbles. He feet were sore and his head ached from the heat. Horseflies, attracted by the pungent odor of sweat, buzzed around him, zipping in to land stubbornly on his neck, his face and his clothing. He brushed them away, arms flopping back to his sides. And they came again. He no longer hummed, his throat too dry to sustain a note. Hot sweat drenched his clothing and stung his eyes, seeping acridly between his lips and into his mouth. He fantasized plunging into the wavering mirage on the road ahead until the mirage dissolved. Then he fantasized on the next one, and plodded on. The sky was cloudless; the air, windless. Nothing moved but the flies and Josh. He dared not look at the woods lining the road fifty feet from each shoulder. Though sparse and tinder-dry, they might tempt him with shelter from the sun and he would sink into a bed of crinkly leaves and stay there forever, shrouded in budworm webbing.

Josh's thoughts traveled back to his childhood, back to a blustery winter night when the wind had pounded against the walls of the shack, making it tremble and creak. Inside, it was warm with heat from the wood stove reaching into every corner of the room, and Josh was comfortable and sleepy in his bed as he listened to his father and Ned talking quietly and playing checkers. He stared through the slots of the grill at the flames, and the smell of burning wood was sweetened as it mingled with the smoke from his father's pipe.

Ned talked around his chewing tobacco: "Nope, Cal, I surely did not want to go over there and shoot up the Kaiser's army. T'tell ya the truth, I was scared so that I pissed my pants the first time I heard shells boomin' miles away, an' we was headin' for all that noise."

"No shame in that, Ned," his father said as he jumped two of Ned's pieces and removed them from the board. "Fear's a natural feeling. Keeps a man alive."

"Right you are, Cal. But that's not what bothered me so much at the time as wonderin' what the hell I was doin' headin' for all that noise an' not wantin' any part of it. But we was all tired, worn down from a long march with full kit, an' I kept walkin' towards that boomin', liftin' one foot in front of th' other an' wonderin' why."

A gust of wind battered the far wall and the entire shack groaned.

"There was wounded men bein' brung back all shot t' hell," he said with a distant look. "An' I wondered if they had any idea why they was wounded, why they'd gone into that boomin' to get themselves all shot up. An' I thought about patr'ism an' protectin' folks back home, an' lots of things, an ' before I knew it, we was smack in the middle of the boomin', lookin' over the tops of trenches at land that looked like it'd bin ripped an' torn by some giant plow gone haywire." Rolling the tobacco wad to the other side of his mouth, he added with finality. "Still don't know what the hell I was doin' there."

Josh was beginning to wonder the same thing.

Now, he took the coin from his pants pocket and studied it closely. Turning it slowly between his thumb and two fingers, fascinated by the clean edges and the pleasurable heft. He flipped it a few inches into the air and caught it. He flipped it again, this time a few inches higher. Before long, he was flipping it several feet into the air and the heat and the flies were forgotten. He was humming again, his eyes transfixed by the flipping coin. He watched it tumbling through the air, throwing off sparkles of sunlight as it came spinning down into his palm. Soon, it was as though his mind were spinning with the coin, his being merged with the being of the coin, shooting up and tumbling down. Everything but the coin washed out of his vision, and then the coin disappeared in a flash of brilliant white. Nausea churned tightly in his stomach as he felt his body dropping, his mind still spinning and his ears filled with humming.

He was uncertain how long he'd been unconscious but, judging from the position of the sun, it was not long. He felt rubbery as he raised himself to his feet. He shook the dizziness from his head and stooped to pick up his jacket. As he did so, he saw the coin on the pavement a few feet away. Surprised and elated at the same time, he snatched it up, inspected it closely, apologetically, and put it back in his pocket.

Every exposed part of his body was bright red. He was getting hot and cold flashes, and his body tingled with the imminent danger of not finding water soon. He could not understand how he could have misjudged the distance to town by so much. Nothing was as he remembered it.

He draped his jacket over his head and continued walking.

***

The sun moved slowly across the sky and Josh was no longer walking a straight line. Several times his wobbly legs carried him onto the shoulder of the road and twice he had tripped and fallen down only to struggle back to his feet and continue walking. The road seemed endless; the town, unreachable. All that was real was the heat, his thirst and the steady shuffle of his boots across the burning pavement. Horseflies bit into unresponsive flesh. The temptation to drift in the scorched woods gnawed at his will, tied itself to his legs.

Then, on the road ahead, he saw the faint outline of a bridge. He quickened his pace and soon the faded green girders were distinct and promising against the blue sky.

He mustered his energy into a slow easy run and, even before he reached the bridge, he could smell the water, hear it crinkling through the woods. He arrived at the bridge breathless and stood by the steel railing, gazing jubilantly at the lively stream, silvery under the early evening sun. A path led from the edge of the railing down through bushes to the stream. He picked his way carefully down the steepest part of the path and then ran with a joyful bellow and belly-flopped fully dressed into the water. He splashed about wildly until his energy left him and then he just sank, neck deep, and savored the cool, life-restoring massage of water.

Half an hour later, propped on an elbow on a patch of grass, Josh finished his sixth raw frog leg. He licked his lips contentedly as a fly darted by collecting air. It was a pleasant spot with healthy trees and alder bushes. Uneven grass, dotted by large rocks left by years of spring high water, sloped gently down to a narrow, pebbly shoreline, and the air was sweet with the smell of water and plants. A crow cawed from the distance upstream. Josh cawed back to it.

A few beer cans littered the area, but these were heartening to Josh, a sign that he was close to town. That would come tomorrow though. Tonight, he would rest by the stream and tomorrow he would finish the trip into town to see Ned about the coin. Remembering the coin, he reached his hand into his pocket and clenched it around nothing.

Something thick and ugly curled inside his stomach.

His hands snapped to his other pockets, rummaging and throwing their small contents onto the ground. No coin. He scanned the ground around him. Nothing. The small shore area grew expansive with merciless glints and glitters from rocks and broken glass. The water sparkled mockingly under the lowering sun.

It would soon be dark.

The last time he could remember having the coin was on the road by the railing when he brushed his hand on his pocket and felt it there before he descended the path to the stream. He retraced his steps to the road and from the road back to the stream. Nothing.

He glanced at the sun. About twenty minutes of useful light. He put his boots back on and waded into the stream. Water ran swiftly around his pant legs, and Josh began to fear that the fast flow would wash the coin down to where the stream deepened. He crouched down close to the water, his gaze trying to penetrate glistening wavelets as his hands slid nimbly over rocks and pebbles. Long shadows of trees crept over the water towards him. Mosquitoes attacked him hungrily. He moved faster, lost his footing on a slippery rock and toppled into the water with a shallow splash. Cold shudders racked his body, but he ignored them as he propped himself onto his knees and stared at the endless flow of water rushing into the imperfect distance.

It was dark when he fumbled, cold and drenched, back to the shoreline. Water squished in his boots, weighing down his steps. He slumped on a patch of grass and tugged his boots off, poured the water from them, and thumped them on the grass a few times. His frustration mounted and he pounded his boots onto the ground, and pounded them again.

"Darn!" he cried.

And then he saw it, outlined faintly by the dim glow of moon and starlight. The coin. Rolling out of his right boot.

He dropped both boots and reached forward slowly, cautiously. His right hand closed around it. Blood throbbed in his forehead as he raised his hand, opened it, and saw the coin lying in his palm, the small heft so familiar. He closed his fist around it and felt a cool spread of elation throughout his body.

After a few minutes, he checked his pocket again. There was a small hole near the bottom where the coin had fallen through, and then had fallen down his leg and into his boot.

"I'll sew you when I get back home," he said. He walked wearily back to the tree where his coat was hanging, draped the coat around his neck and, after making sure the coin was still tucked safely in his left pocket, he sat with his back to the tree and fell into exhausted sleep.

***

The morning sun was still laced with night chill when Josh, muscles and joints aching, lumbered back to the road. His face was red and grizzled and his damp clothes sent chills through his body as he moved. But Josh was humming. The nickel was secure in his pocket and he was twirling the key on its shoelace in slow circles. The movement pleased him, the roundness of it. From the bridge, he looked down at the stream, sparkling in the morning sunlight. It occurred to him that he should retrieve a few empty beer cans and fill them with water for the remainder of the trip. But looking down the road, he could make out the scattered buildings of town about two miles away. He bellowed happily, almost dancing on the pavement and, twirling the key, he was soon passing the first small bungalows, their graveled driveways spilling onto the road where metal mailboxes leaned at odd angles.

The road turned just ahead of him, and Ned's store, with its two big windows and white, balustrade porch, sat on the outside of the turn. Josh ran awkwardly to the gravel parking lot that fronted the big white building. He bounded up the three sagging steps and opened the screen door.

Behind a long, wooden counter laden with jars and display cases, he saw a weasel-faced man with a balding head stocking wall shelves with tin cans. The man turned his head inquiringly towards Josh as he approached the counter. Josh asked for Ned.

"What d'you want with Ned?" the man asked, looking up at Josh suspiciously.

"I--uh--" Josh had no idea how to explain. The box, the coin, the stream, the road all crowded his mind at once. He thrust out his fist. The weasel-faced man jerked back. Josh opened his sun-reddened hand slowly and the nickel gleamed coolly on his palm. "From the box--" he said with a deep, dull voice. "--the men from the charity."

The man behind the counter relaxed slightly, but still looked uneasy. Leaning forward to look at the coin, he asked: "Charity? What chari--" He leaned farther, looking at Josh thoughtfully. "Aren't you Calvin Wright's boy? The one livin' by himself out to the old junction?"

Josh nodded, feeling easier at the mention of his father's name.

"Well, I'll be," said the man, pulling at his chin with a thumb and forefinger. "You look like hell. You all right?"

Josh nodded again and said that he was thirsty. The weasel-faced man smiled and took a bottle of orange pop from the cooler at the end of the counter. With a single movement, he opened it and handed it to Josh. "On the house," he said, and watched silently as Josh downed the pop with a long, noisy guzzle. Josh handed the empty bottle back, burped, and thanked him.

"I guess you were thirsty," said the man, staring at the bottle. "Now, what 's this 'bout a charity?"

"The box to the junction. I brung a donation. Is Ned here?"

The man puckered his lips and parted them with a muted pop. "No. I'm afraid not. Ned passed away last week. Heart attack, while he was unpackin ' a box of pickles, an' was dead the next day. I'm his nephew, Ernie."

Josh's mouth opened slowly as he realized why Ned had not been out to see him.

"An' if you mean the old donation box to the junction," Ernie went on, "well, that charity ain't around no more, not since the mill closed down. Hell, that money was for laid-up workers from the mill. Ain't no laid-up mill workers without no mill. Why don't you just pocket that nickel."

Josh looked dumbly at the coin, now a strange enigmatic thing without purpose, lying in his hand.

"Say, now, just hold on a second," said Ernie, pulling hard at his chin. "Seems to me there was somethin' here for you. Out back. A box. Just a second now." He rushed off to a door at the end of the counter and reappeared a few seconds later carrying a large cardboard box, which he placed on the counter in front of Josh. He tore off a strip of paper that was taped to the top and read it: "Josh Wright. I believe this is for you."

It was the same size as the boxes that Ned had brought on his visits. Josh lifted one of the flaps and saw the glossy cover of a comic book. Inside, there were four more comics, a box of book matches, a bag of flour, cornmeal--all the things that Ned used to bring for him--placed tightly, carefully, in the box.

"I was gonna drive this out to you this week," said Ernie. "Had no chance so far, with just takin' over the store, gettin' settled into things. Hope you didn't need any of that stuff too urgent." He thought a moment, and added: "Ned an' your daddy were pretty close friends."

"They was," said Josh, shifting his eyes down the counter. "What's that?" he asked, pointing at a clear plastic container with coins and a few bills in it. A small, black and white picture attached to the top showed two children who looked as though they were in pain.

"Oh, that's a donation box for muscular dystrophy victims."

"Donation?"

"Sure, like the one out to the junction, sort of."

Josh looked at the coin still tucked in his left hand. He picked it up with his right hand and dropped it into the slot of the plastic box. The nickel landed with a clink and settled in its place among the other coins.

"Say, Josh," said Ernie, "things are usually pretty slow 'round here this time of day, an' I wouldn't mind a break from the store. How 'bout if I drive you home. It's a long walk to the junction an' it looks to be another scorcher today."

Josh accepted the offer, and Ernie, untying his smock, said: "Fine. Let's head out there right now." He hung the smock on a nail and took two bottles of orange pop from the cooler. "These'll take some of the bite out of the heat on our way there. You want to grab onto your box of goodies?"

***

As they pulled away from the store in Ernie's green van, Josh fingered the key that hung from his neck. He was grateful for the ride home as he listened to Ernie talking about the store. He wondered if Ernie played checkers. But most of all, he was glad that he would be home soon to open the weathered old box by the road and gaze into its splendid emptiness.

The Six Characteristics of a Laundromance

A friend recently signed out a copy of my first novel, Heavy Load (a laundromance), from the library and asked me if "laundromance" is just a catchy word I introduced to sell lots more copies of the book.

I assured him that nothing in Creation would help me to sell lots more copies of the book, and that the book has six characteristics that make it a laundromance, these being:

• A laundromance depicts everyday, common life. The stains on your laundry are out in the open in the laundromat. And, let's face it...doing your laundry is one of life's mundane rituals that can't be escaped unless you can afford to have your laundry done by someone else, or you're 35 and still living at home.

• It must be narrated by the laundromat. Yep, the laundromat is sentient and can go into the minds and bodies of its customers where it visits their pasts through a liver or dimple, or goes into their brains to see what's happening in the present. Got this idea from a book called Focusing by Eugene T. Gendlin.

• There must be a least one laundry tip. I visited the Tide site repeatedly while I was researching for the book. I also found tips on dozens of other sites, and I asked for tips from the folks running the Paragon Laundromat in Fredericton for tips. They had a lot of tips. For instance, you never throw your clothing and soap and bleach in right off. Especially the bleach. Let the machine fill up with some water, then add soap and bleach and let it mix before putting the clothes in.

• There must be an element of real or potential romance. I mean...it's a laundromance.

• None of the romantically involved characters are allowed to speak to each other. In Heavy Load, none of the three main characters involved in a three-way relationship on a Saturday morning speak to each other at any point in the story. But in the end, love blooms. Or...potentially blooms.

• Always, the main theme is: Things get dirty, things get clean. After all, a laundromat is a place of regeneration. After a visit there, you suddenly have a whole new wardrobe, a regenerated wardrobe.

My friend nodded knowingly and walked away without comment, obviously impressed with my deep-seated understanding of humanity and its relation to dirty clothes.

A Rose by Any Other Name…Might Not Sell

I used to write commercials for a radio station; you know…those thirty second blasts of sound that keep you awake in rush hour traffic. The key element in a radio commercial is the first line.

If it fails, everything fails. Think about it, the listener is driving through rush hour traffic (that’s the most expensive air time for a radio station), possibly texting a friend, yelling at the kids for throwing pop tarts out the window, giving the guy in the left lane the finger for whatever reason (plenty of those in Freddie Beach with its internationally acclaimed record for having the worst drivers in the world) and looking for the next off ramp. The trick is to cut through this moving circus and get the driver to listen to the radio, and the only way to do this is to start the commercial with something personally meaningful to the driver.

Let’s say the driver has been thinking about buying a new car and the ad for a car dealership starts with, “Get your ass into AJ Auto for the best deals and service in town!” I’m not sure if this is going to compete well against a pop tart flying out the window. Change that to, “Looking for a new car?” and you’re a lot more likely to get the driver’s attention, right off the bat, so that they hear the entire commercial, including the name and location of the dealer.

This is the way the title of a book works…if you’re really interested in selling the book. There has to be a personal connection between the title and the reader. “Murder! Murder! Murder!” would probably attract someone looking for a murder mystery with a lot of murder in it. “Baseball Was My Waterloo” might attract a sports fan. “Strange Love in Hong Kong” might attract a romance fan with a thirst for weirdness. In fact, just about any title you can think of will attract some specific audience. Go ahead, think of a title for a story and ask yourself who might be attracted to it. There will always be someone.

So your title is important, almost as important as the cover art. (I dare you to challenge me on this one. I’ve walked down supermarket aisles, past stacks of books and it’s always the cover art that screams out the loudest.) The only exception I can think of is when the title is part of the art. Or there’s no art…just a white page with the title. Or the author is so beloved that the very presence of his or her name within thirty feet draws the attention of ardent fans. OK…so there could probably be a thousand or more exceptions…but I’m telling you right now…your title is important.

Case in point: beautiful cover art that draws a crowd from to the airport’s bookstore shelves…a hundred copies of the book casting a spell-binding aura over the crowd. When they get up close and just beginning to reach for a copy, they read, “Why I Like Cats.”

Big waste of cover art.

Better idea to get the reader to open the book, “Why I Don’t Kill Cats.”

“So what does this have to do with roses?” said the fox.

“That was just the title,” replied Biff. “Something to get your attention. And it worked. You’ve read this far.”

So just how do you come up with a title, provided you haven’t already? If you don’t have one, then anything will do to begin with. This is called a working title. I can be anything you want it to be because it’s not going to be the final title. Here’s how it works.

The Working Title

The working title is what you call your novel while you’re writing it, just so that you have a name for it. This may (and likely will) change by the time you’re completed the novel, and this can be for any number of reasons. You might decide that you don’t really like it; you might decide that it’s not catchy enough; you might decide that you like something else better; you might decide that it doesn’t fit the evolving mood and tone of the novel; your publisher might change it.

Worse…the novel might change to the degree that the title no longer makes any sense. This happened to me with my fifth novel. It was to be the sequel to a previous book, so I was pretty damn sure how it was going to go even before I began story boarding. It was going to be 2000 years in the future. (kept) I was going to use several of the characters from the first novel. (kept) I was going to have an online triathlon. (kept, with modifications) I was going to bring Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, back from cryostasis into a world where he would be the last programmer in the universe. My working title was The Last Programmer. As the story board progressed (almost from the beginning), this idea dropped away and Torvalds was left in cryostasis. (Sorry, 'bout that Tor.) The novel’s final title was The Reality Wars. I put the focus on the cyber triathlon.

But it’s still good to have a working title. It can give you a point of focus as you write. It gives you a better reference point than just “My Book” or “That Thing I’m Working On.”

The Final Title

This may end up being your working title, unchanged, un-dropped and still relevant. It can happen. However, if you haven’t already changed the title while still in the planning, first draft or re-writing stages and you still aren’t happy with it as the title that will appear on the published cover then you have some serious work to do.

Start by asking yourself, “What is this book about?” The title should reflect something about the book: the theme(s), the mood, the context (historical, international), the genre, or the basic storyline.

Write down everything that comes into your mind. You might even want to use some of this to do some clustering exercises. Carry this around with you. Look at it from time to time. Keep adding to it. Sleep on it. Talk about it. Think about it. Sooner or later, it’ll come to you.

When it does, ask yourself:

• Does it appeal to the target audience?
• Does it address the content?
• Is it understandable (not too long or convoluted)?
• Has it already been used? (Google the title.)
• How will it fit into a series? (if you plan a sequel or two)
• Is it sellable?
• Is the title descriptive?
• Does it conjure an image?
• Does it fire up the reader’s imagination?
• How will it fit with cover art?
• Does it need cover art to pull it off?
• How do YOU really feel about it?

Ask your friends and family what they think. Do some brainstorming with them. You’ll come up with something.

Free Story: Ladies of the Fountain

The Three Rules for Wishing on a Fountain (if you really think your wish will come true):

1. Make your wish.
2. Throw your coin.
3. Run like hell.

He threw three coins, but the damn fool didn’t run.

***

Staring into the white sculptured eyes of the first lady of the fountain, he said: “I want you to be alive and be my woman.” He threw the first coin and it landed in the top bowl. To the next lady he said: “I want you to be alive and be my woman.” He threw the second coin. It landed in the middle bowl. To the last lady, he said: “I want you to be alive and be my woman.” He dropped the third coin right into the bottom bowl. As it dropped through the air, he was happy and thought about how cool it would be if all three of the statues in the fountain came to life and were all madly in love with him and wanted nothing more than to accompany him everywhere and fuck his brains out every day.

Cool, he thought.

“Thunk,” said the last coin as it sliced into the water.

***

He didn’t run. He stayed and stared at the fountain: a big circular bowl made of white marble. A short podium with three rams’ heads jutted out the center, and three ancient Greek-looking women, arms crossing their chests, stood back-to-back in a circle on top of the podium.

“Run, you idiot,” said thunk. But he stayed and he stared at the fountain.

Balanced like half the scales of an unfathomable justice on top of the three ladies’ heads was a second bowl though smaller than the one on the ground. A pillar sprung out the center of this bowl as though it were a single purpose of thought spurting from the minds of the three ladies, and there was a third bowl, smaller than the second bowl, on top of the pillar. The whole thing formed a V pointing skyward with water from a metal tube bubbling into the top bowl, trickling down into the middle bowl and then into the bottom bowl.

***

For makeup the ladies wore spider webs and dark streaks blown across their faces by the wind and the rain. He used to clear away the webs with this hand until one day a large brown spider with long legs poked its obscene body out from under a stone white lock of hair just inches from his hand. After that, he thought the webs actually lent the ladies a touch of naturalness so he left the webs alone.

The fountain appeared ancient, ancient and Greek, like the kind of thing to inspire myth and mayhem, which was exactly what it would do.

***

He stared into the ladies’ white stone eyes as he walked around the fountain, loving them and wanting them. Stone sculptures in a fountain. Beautiful and timeless. But stone. White stone.

He really didn’t have much of a life.

He looked away from the fountain, into the long narrow distance of The Green, a strip of grass, trees, walking paths and benches by the river, and of course, a white stone fountain with three sculpted women of indeterminate ancient origin.

He strolled to the edge of The Green where it banked on the river, stood by a massive weeping willow and stared across the river, so wide at this point that tourists mistook it for a lake. A light wind whipped across the gray water and brushed gently through the droopy leaves of the willow. Alder bushes, reeds, ferns and saplings crowded the bank down to the water’s edge where muddy flotsam dried in the sun. Further down The Green, Dutch Elms towered into the sky, their tops spreading out like giant umbrellas in the heat-dazed air.

His head bustled with images of beautiful women whose loose robes flapped in lusty zephyrs revealing perfectly sculpted legs and cleavage plunging into depths that would drive him mad.

Warm gusts of wind rippled the deep grass of the Green like footprints of an invisible presence.

Run.

***

It was an abrupt change in the splish and drip of water in the fountain, a change in delicately balanced rhythms. The breeze evaporated into stillness. A million blades of grass stood erect. Every leaf on every tree hushed and hung. Time blinked for an instant and something sneaked past time’s inexhaustible logic and dipped its magical toes into the water of the fountain.

Splish.

Too late to run.

***

The ladies stepped out of the bowl wiping spider webs and whiteness from their faces. Deep blue flashed into their as eyes they looked around curiously, taking in the grass, the sky and the trees. They looked each other up and down with growing recognition and smiled.

“At last,” said Tia. “Time to party.”

“You might want to cover up a bit, dear,” said Alaia, pointing to a comely example of ancient breast slipping into full view at the top of Tia’s robe. “We don’t want our cleavage plunging into depths that will drive the mortals mad.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Tia as she nudged her robe barely enough to cover the pale pink of an eternally erect nipple.

“Oh, you guys,” said Epsy. “Always on at each other.”

The other two looked at her, thinking simultaneously All this time to contemplate, and still a ditz.

“Where is he?” said Tia.

Alaia pointed at a man standing by the riverbank. He wasn’t a memorable person: balding up front, long ponytail dangling from the back, generic face.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Tia.

“Think about it, dear. What kind of man is going to throw three coins into a fountain, make the same wish three times and really expect to get his brains fucked out?”

Tia looked at him again, shrugged her shoulders and pouted. “You’re right. If we just didn’t need the losers.”

Alaia nodded. “Better make this good.”

***

His name was Rollo. Rollo. His jaw hung dangerously close to falling off his face as Tia walked toward him, her robe slipping ever so slightly to reveal the tip of a nipple winking from depths that threatened to drive him mad. She moved across the grass like butter mixing with warm honey and put her arms around his neck. He felt her breath on his face―a warm Mediterranean scent heavy with lust and music―and all his strength flowed out of his body and into her lips as they pressed on his mouth. He flowed into her, eyes wide and body sapped of the will to even tremble. Her kiss drained his soul and left his body a single vibration of desire. He felt her thigh pressed up hard against the hardest erection of his entire life.

Alaia and Epsy looked at each other, winked and smiled.

Tia’s lips seemed to float away from Rollo’s mouth and she giggled and every giggle blew hot pleasure into his face. “I’m Tia,” she said. “And you’re…?”

Her voice sent a wave of pure lusty energy caroming off every cell in his body and landed full on his erection. “Huh!” he said.

“Huh,” repeated Tia. “Strange name. Is there a story behind it?”

Her voice rolled through his body like a hot snowball gaining strength and momentum and splashing into his penis with a force that nearly emptied his brain into a black hole of pleasure.

“Look, Huh, I know you can talk,” said Tia. “You made the wishes. Three times. Once for each of us…and here we are. Say something.”

“R…” said Rollo.

“And…” encouraged Tia.

He felt himself falling into her eyes and somewhere in the space that he fell through, the word “Rollo” slipped into the paralyzed wind.

“Rollo,” said Tia, nodding. “Reminds me of someone I used to know a long time ago.” She took his hand and led him to where Alaia and Epsy stood, smiling. “I want you to meet my…let’s say…sisters. This is Alaia.”

Alaia curtseyed and said, “Pleased to meet you Rollo.”

Rollo opened his mouth slightly and nodded.

“And this is Epsy,” said Tia.

Epsy futtered her lashes and winked at him. “I don’t care what the others think,” she said. “I think you’re cute.”

Alaia and Tia looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Rollo stared into Epsy’s eyes and felt himself evaporating into her direction. He smiled. His mind was beginning to clear enough that he could think at least one clear thought. His wish. In his wish, they were supposed to fuck his brains out.

“That’s right, Rollo,” said Tia.

His eyes widened. Did I say that out loud?

“It’s Ok,” said Epsy, giggling. “This way we know how to please you.”

Suddenly, everything seemed to make sense to Rollo. His wish had come true. They would be with him. The three women looked at each other and grinned. “For a slow start, this one caught on quick,” said Alaia.

“Time to explore!” said Tia. She pointed toward the end of The Green where buildings peeked out from behind the maples and elms. “Is that a city?”

“You might call it that,” said Rollo. “More like a glorified town, if you ask me. It’s…”

“Are there places to eat and drink?” asked Tia.

“And shopping?” said Epsy. “Are there places to shop?” “How is the food in your glorified town?” asked Alaia.

“Is the wine heady?” asked Tia.

“Actually,” said Rollo, “this city is known mostly for its relaxing atmosphere and absence of choice.”

The ladies looked at each other, puzzled. Then they giggled and grabbed Rollo’s arms and dragged him toward the buildings. “We need to party,” said Tia. “And you…you need a life.” She winked at the other two.

As they passed by a statue of Robert Burns, the Scotch sage seemed almost to look on in approval through pigeon-shitted eyes.

***

On the opposite side of the street, sprawling Victorian style houses put on Victorian airs in the morning haze, their wood rot painted over, dusty curtains sagging heavily behind fading windows.

“What a shame to build with wood,” said Epsy, “when stone is so much more permanent.” Tia craned her neck around Rollo and joined Alaia in glaring at her.

They passed a marble and brick building fronted by sculptures of animals and abstract shapes clawing at the air.

“Is there food and wine in this building?” asked Epsy.

“That’s just an art gallery,” said Rollo. “Mostly paintings and… “At least it’s made of stone…for permanence.” Tia and Alaia glared again.

They came to a building that filled the sky, stone and glass towering above them. Epsy regarded the building approvingly. She was about to comment on its stoneness when another thought crossed her mind, something deep and infinitely meaningful for someone cast in stone since God knows when. “I have to pee.” All three ladies stopped, almost tugging Rollo off his feet. “And that’s not all I have to do,” said Epsy, slapping her robed rump. The three giggled and Tia pointed at the building. “Are there facilities in there?”

“It’s a hotel,” he said. “But they’ll have public washrooms on the main floor.

“We have to pee in public?” said Epsy. “I don’t think I want to do that. At least not yet.”

“I mean, they’re…”

“He means open to the public, Eps,” said Tia. “Nobody’s going to watch you tinkle.”

They went through a pair of massive brass doors and into a high-ceilinged hall, ornate with leather, red felt and muffled air. Daryl Shaw, a reservations clerk who dreamed of someday owning his own bed and breakfast, suddenly put together all the parts of his life into something that finally made sense. He saw into the deepest meaning of things and realized that he really didn’t want a bed and breakfast because he didn’t really like people and didn’t want to spend his life serving and reserving them. He grabbed onto a bundle of initial plausibilities, walked off the job, and set out to make his life itself a work of art.

Rollo led the ladies into a hallway and pointed at an overhead light announcing RESTROOMS. “The door under the light,” he said. Giggling and pinching each other, the ladies disappeared into the washroom. Rollo waited for what seemed like hours. He thought that no human being could pee for so long. He was about to knock on the door when it burst open and the ladies barged out in a storm of laughter. Tia hooked her arm under Rollo’s. “You don’t notice it so much when you’re stone and have a couple hundred pounds of fountain on your head.”

Rollo nodded. “I suppose so.”

As they passed an open door with an unmade bed, Tia looked in and said, “A bed!” Without another word, she pulled Rollo into the room and threw him onto the bed. His clothes peeled off as he flew through the air and he landed naked. Tia was also naked. Behind her, Alaia and Epsy were naked. Staring at Tia’s marble-like breasts, Rollo said: “I think I’m going to loose my mind.”

Mounting him, Tia said, “You most certainly are.”

She pounded onto him for what seemed like hours. He was a wave rushing over an infinite ocean as she surfed his penis into a crazy horizon. He felt his pleasure soar into the universe and crash into the end of time and then soar again over and over and then it was Alaia riding him and then Epsy and then Tia again and all the fixed perspectives of his life seemed to flow out of his brain and evaporate from the churning surface of a pool of pure pleasure. It might have lasted hours, it might have lasted years.

As they left the hotel, Rollo had difficulty getting his head around the fact that it was still mid-morning. So he stopped thinking about it.

***

On the sidewalk, Epsy belched hard enough to knock three pigeons senseless. Passerby Richard Conway saw this, walked into the street and fell into an open sewer. As he plunged to certain death, he wrote an entire rock opera about a down-and-out truck driver in his head. It ended with a plop.

Tia yelled, “Gypsies!”

Everyone followed her eyes to the park across the street, filled with open-walled tents and tables. “That’s an arts and crafts fair,” said Rollo. “They have it every…”

“Oh, look at the beautiful scarves,” said Epsy.

“You said the shopping wasn’t good,” said Alaia, one eye cocked scornfully.

“But it’s only…”

“It’s wonderful!” yelled Tia. “Let’s shop!”

They pulled Rollo across the street and past ticket attendant June MacLean who picked up her iPhone and began writing that novel she’d always dreamed of, now that everything was suddenly so crystal clear.

“Oh look at the scarves!” barked Epsy. They rushed to a green-topped tent with hundreds of tie-dyed scarves flapping from wooden hangers and the ladies disappeared into rows of swaying color.

All around them, artisans, artists, crafts persons, patrons, customers, critics, apprentices, sculptors, weavers, etchers, potters, jewelers, glass blowers, and stone masons perked up from artistic detachment, and a new generation of craft emerged from their collective consciousness. Never-before dreamed of motifs that mocked all pre-conceived notions of design sprouted willy-nilly from minds suddenly bursting with fiery notions.

By the time the ladies exited the tent―scarves blowing from their necks, arms and ankles―the laid-back mid-morning arts and crafts show was bustling with excitement. They passed a tent with racks displaying thousands of porcelain pins, broaches, ear rings, and belly button rings all decorated with colorful bugs. Rollo noticed Epsy’s attention pausing a moment on a bright black and white ladybug pin. He bought it for her. She smiled and giggled and pinned it to her robe right over her left thigh. Then she kissed him on the cheek.

***

A folding sign advertising a special on Irish stew caused them to detour into Molly’s Coffee House. Molly’s turned out to be a licensed coffee house. The ladies drank every drop of wine, beer, and spirits from the bar and then from the store room. A group of Bohemian tourists passed a note book around their table and wrote the world’s first collective unconscious novel to win the Nobel Prize for literature. It was about coffee and beer.

***

Back on the sidewalk it was mid-morning. Rollo and the ladies were festive and drunk as they passed a man in a three-piece suit who gawked at Tia in a manner that displeased her. She smiled at him and ran her finger down the inside neck of her robe just enough to reveal the exact amount of cleavage to make him tear off his clothing and devote the remainder of his life to naked barding.

They passed a tall red brick building with a sign announcing Sports Hall of Fame. Alaia pointed at a large patch of thick grass shaded by a towering Dutch Elm. “Let’s rest awhile,” she said. Nobody argued.

Laying in the grass Rollo listened to the three ladies talk of many things, like how Tia drove Nero fiddling mad with her cleavage and Alaia teased Da Vinci by changing the slant of her mouth every time he was just about to get it right. Epsy giggled as she told how she inspired Catullus’ bed sheet tent.

“Which brings to mind…” said Tia.

And the three ladies converged on Rollo in the deep green grass under the tall Dutch Elm on a hazy summer mid-morning.

***

They came to a fountain similar to the one on The Green, except it had just one figure and it was on top of the fountain.

“Pan!” screamed Tia, pointing wildly at the golden figure, naked and mischievous-looking with his baby face and old eyes. “What are you doing here!”

Rollo half expected the statuette to answer but it remained frozen in stone and gold paint, unspeaking, water pouring from its midsection. A tiny breath of sadness seemed to surround the ladies as they nodded to each other. Alaia said, “Another time.”

“You knew him?” asked Rollo.

“Partied with him many times,” said Alaia.

“Sometimes he had sex with the wrong people,” said Tia.

“And the wrong beings,” added Epsy.

Alaia shrugged and smiled at the statuette. “See you later,” she said. “Party animal.” She pointed to a sign over an alley between two red brick buildings. “What’s that?” she asked.

Rollo read the sign. Piper’s Lane. “It’s named after the statue I guess. It leads to an outdoor party area with tables and decks and umbrellas.”

“Party area?” said Tia.

“Yes, but …”

“What are we waiting for!” said Epsy.

“But, it’s …”

“Time to party!” said Tia.

“But it’s closed!” yelled Rollo.

“What do you mean closed,” asked Alaia. “It’s late.”

Rollo looked around at the mid-morning cityscape and shrugged. “It doesn’t open until noon. In fact, most of the bars…”

“Let’s go,” said Tia.

As the ladies pulled Rollo away from the fountain, he could almost have sworn that the Pan’s mouth curved into a brutal smile. Seconds later, they were in shade between the two old buildings in an alley that smelled of urine and wood rot. The stone walkway was cracked and potholed. Epsy made no comments on the permanence of stone.

The alley opened into a sunlit square with brightly furnished decks, cobblestone walkways, specialty shops, pubs―most of them closed―and a large roofless dance area with an empty stage. There were about twenty people scattered through the decks and tables, drinking coffee, reading newspapers or talking quietly.

Epsy and Alaia pulled Rollo into the center of the courtyard where they sat under a wide blue and white striped umbrella while Tia grabbed onto a bartender, ignored his pleas that they were closed, and told him to bring food and drink, lots of food and drink. “More food and drink than you dare dream of,” she commanded. The bartender would eventually write a film script about two beer bubbles that fall in love and soar to the top of the glass where they evaporate together and reach an infinite oneness in the surrounding air. It would be lauded as one of the most remarkable films of all time but, with a running time of twenty-four hours, it would never actually be produced.

By the time Tia got to their table, other people were starting to arrive. Bar owners messing with computerized accounting programs closed their laptops after deciding that today would be a good day to open early. People working in surrounding buildings decided it was time for a break, time for a frosty cold beer and some salad. A group of drunken rednecks who had slept under their table the previous night so as not to lose it the following day decided to start the world’s first intellectual country band. They called it the “Existential Cowboys Who Are In Touch With Their Feminine Selves.” During their first live performance―in a country bar―the audience would pummel them to death with beer mugs and pitchers.

Within minutes Piper’s Lane was hustling with the sound of laughter and clinking glasses. Everywhere, the conversation was animated and passionate with talk of spatial relationships and the delicate balance between reality and illusion. People theorized and postulated new meanings into their ordinary lives, rising as they did into new realms of awareness.

A group of musicians lugged instruments onto the stage, plugged in and started playing. The music was indefinable, like something not heard on earth since gods slept in the clouds and woke up in ditches. The music flowed like hot tomato sauce over the tables and umbrellas and into the streets and over the buildings and over the naked bodies of hundreds of vibrant humans gathered in Piper’s Lane talking of form and content and the countless ways of arranging them into new meanings.

Rollo glanced around at naked men and women standing with drinks in hand, sitting with palms cupped over bare knees, absently scratching public hair while making a point about the ontological proof for the non-existence of reason. It didn’t surprise Rollo that he was also naked. In fact, it seemed more than natural, almost expected. And he wasn’t surprised when the three ladies pounced on him as one. Everyone was suddenly inside everyone else. They coupled on tabletops, on bench tops, on chairs, on the ground and standing up. An elderly man who’d just been told by his doctor an hour earlier that he would never get it up again felt his penis whip up like a telephone pole. People performed wild acts on the naked musicians as they played without dropping a note. Their music spiraled inexorably from mild to frenzied, and electrified the air, propelling the gathering into further sexual acts, into new ways of inserting body parts into body parts and positions that broke all rational laws of gravity and flexibility.

As they fucked, they talked. They talked about literature and art and ideas. They spoke in poetic tongues. They plotted plays and devised dialog. They inspired each other and consumed each other.

Whatever Rollo was feeling was far beyond sex with the three ladies who pummeled his penis and licked his body and kissed him all over as though they were one thing covering every square inch of his body simultaneously. He felt alternately on fire and frozen in space and time. His mind emptied into a beautiful ocean of calm and Tia, Alaia and Epsy were waves breaking over his being while he sank happily into a void where everything was waiting to become.

His loins began to build to something wonderful and great and the thought crossed his mind that in all the sex he’d had so far, he hadn’t come once.

Now, he felt the impending explosion. His awareness flew out the top of his head and soared into the air. He gazed right through the blue and white umbrella at himself covered with three beautiful women of indeterminate ancient origin mauling every cell of his body with their lust as all around them hundreds of people talked and found new ways to penetrate each other.

His brain exploded as his loins exploded.

And he emptied.

***

Rollo shook his head. It was dark. He was standing by the bank of the river under the massive weeping willow. The air was still. The grass was motionless. Every leaf on every tree slept, dreaming of the warm sun and winds that would come the next day. He looked across the river, so wide it appeared more as lake than river, and he wondered where the day had gone. He turned and looked longingly at the three ladies in the fountain. He reached into his pockets for coins but his pockets were empty. He remembered wishing earlier. How long had it been? How long had he been standing by the river?

He was hungry. He walked toward the fountain looking at the one he thought of for some reason as a bit of a ditz and feeling strangely as though he could almost imagine her thighs wrapped around his waist. He walked past the fountain thinking about the relationship between Incan architecture and the work of Andy Warhol. These thoughts would eventually lead to a unified theory of the arts that would make Rollo the greatest art theorist of all time, even though he would never be able to actually sit down and discuss a single one of his arguments without losing interest and turning his attention to something else like perhaps a mote of dust riding the tide of an exhaled breath.

He passed by the fountain without noticing the faded stone outline of an insect much like a ladybug pinned on the robe over the left thigh of one of the ladies.

***

He lived for another forty years. He never married. He never had sex. He worked day and night on his unified theory of the arts and he sculpted in stone. He was never lonely, feeling in some reach of his being that he’d reached some inestimable height from which he was slowly falling back to an world that he would probably never reach. For the most part, he was content.

He died in a car accident. The doctor who performed the autopsy was surprised to find no brain in his skull.

(This story first appeared in Twisted Tails VII: Irreverence, edited by J. Richard Jacobs and published by Double Dragon Publishing.)

Free Story: Ross Howard - Psychic

Ross Howard was a psychic. A real-life, bonafide, honest-to-goodness psychic. And he’d been a psychic for, oh, let’s see now...six hours. Ever since he’d been banged on the head by a hammer that morning on his way to work. He wasn’t sure how that had happened; probably just a random head banging but, when it was over, Ross was a psychic.

He could read minds. Predict the future. Lift heavy objects through the power of thought. He hadn’t tried the last one yet, but he could predict the future and he’d predicted that he would soon be lifting heavy objects just by thinking it.

In the meantime, he was having one hell of a time reading peoples’ minds, delving into their most inner secrets, peeking into the stuff of their lives, prying away the illusory boards shuttering the windows into their pasts.

Only problem was...people kept lying to him. In their thoughts. And he had ample proof of this. For instance, he read the thoughts of a woman in the coffee shop line-up just a few hours ago. She was thinking about buying a regular coffee with lite cream but, when she opened her mouth to order, she said, “I’ll have a double caramel latte.”

Liar.

And he could have sworn he’d seen the hint of a malicious smile as she placed her order.

An hour before that, a man driving an SUV in front of Ross was thinking about turning right but almost as soon as Ross read the man’s thoughts he suddenly turned left without any warning and cut across traffic at a busy intersection, almost crashing into a Ford pickup, a convertible Punch Buggy and a woman on a mountain bike.

Crazy liar.

And had Ross seen the man laughing into his rear view mirror?

So he figured he’d try a little reverse psychology. A woman sitting at a restaurant counter bounced her choice between the lemon meringue and apple pie before deciding on the lemon meringue. But Ross knew she was lying and knew that she would pick the apple. When the waitress came over to her, she said, “Could I have a slice of that lemon meringue pie, please.”

These people couldn’t even tell the truth when they were lying. And again, he could have sworn he’d seen a nasty grin on the woman’s face as she ordered her lemon meringue pie.

It was mid-afternoon in suburbia and the sun was shining, not a cloud in the sky, but there was just the slightest of breezes to keep everything warm but comfortable. It was a beautiful day to be a psychic...if he could just figure a way to get people to think the truth. The woman at the restaurant kept with her decision to the lemon meringue pie, but she’d led him to believe that she would get the apple pie by deciding not to get the apple pie.

Had she done that deliberately, just to mess with his head? Or...were mysterious forces at work? With the gift of his new powers, maybe he’d opened some sort of portal into states of being beyond the ordinary. Had he disturbed things that were better left alone? He thought about this for a few minutes and decided it was time to lift heavy objects with his mind.

He focused on a garbage truck parked by the side of the road about thirty feet away. He thought deeply. Very deeply. He visualized the truck lifting gently upwards from the pavement. He closed his eyes and imagined all weight and substance drifting out of the truck so that it would rise, rise, rise from the pavement. He opened his eyes and the truck was still grounded. So he commanded out loud that the truck rise. He lifted his hands, palms upwards, as though he were lifting the truck with his arms, and said, “I command you to rise! I command you to rise!” The truck stubbornly stayed where it was.

Ross decided that he’d probably seen a little further into the future than he’d guessed when he predicted he could lift heavy objects with his mind.

Back to mind reading.

He saw the mini mall a few blocks ahead with the bright blue sign announcing his favorite cyberbar, The Lively Laptop Cyberbar and Grill. Beer and a laptop. That’s what he needed. He passed a yard surrounded by a metal fence and looked into the future, predicting that a dog would bark at him. As the walked by the fence, sure enough, a vicious Dachshund barked indolently at him as it lay on its side in the cool grass. His ability to look into the future was starting to develop.

He walked through the tinted glass doors of The Lively Laptop Cyberbar and Grill into a large LED lighted room with a bar running the length of one wall, booths attached to the other wall, and coffee tables surrounded by easy chairs filling the floors. The glow of monitor screens lit the faces of about a dozen people hunched fervently over laptops. No one was talking. He’d never paid much attention to the other customers in the past, but today he would be paying much attention.

Time to read some minds and find out who was downloading porno. He bought a Corona from a young woman wearing thick glasses who dragged herself reluctantly from her laptop behind the bar. He read her mind. She was irritated with him. She frowned when she passed the beer over the counter to him. Ah, he thought, someone’s finally thinking the truth. He paid for his beer and walked slowly, so as not to attract attention, to one of the tables against the wall. He opened a dated laptop sitting in the center of the table and pressed the ON button. While the laptop booted up, he looked around the room. Who’s mind would he read?

His eyes settled on a middle aged man in a two piece suit with his tie and shirt collar loosened around his neck. He focused on the man’s head, looking deep into his brain, opening his own mind to whatever thoughts would flow from the man’s cranium. Almost immediately, he knew the man’s name—Bob. Bob something. He knew the man was writing an email to a business associate. He knew that man was writing, “I’m sure Hanson will go along with the plan, but we’ll have to watch Mercer carefully.”

Good.

That was a successful mind read. He thought about approaching the man and asking his name and what he was doing, but the thought crossed his mind that the man might suspect that his mind had just been read. That was something he’d have to think about. Secrecy. If other people found out about his powers he could find himself in a bit of a pickle. How would they react to his ability to peer into their deepest secrets? Would there be those who would want to hire him for his psychic talents? Would there be those who would fear his talents and want him dead? Would they see him as a precursor to a new race of superior human beings and fear for the extinction of the human race as it is? Would he be seen as a threat to national security? Would they send teams of men in black suits and black SUVs in the wee hours of the night to wisk him off to some secret laboratory where he would spend the rest of his life under observation, poked with cold steel instruments, interrogated endlessly, hooked to wires and electrodes, subjected to psychological testing at all hours of the day and night?

No...he would have keep his new powers secret. At least, for the time being. In the meantime, he would work on them, develop them, get a grip on his full potential. And right now, he would read someone else’s mind. Let’s see. The woman in the corner with the glasses that seemed to cover most of her oval face. Her eyes were the size of silver dollars as they stared into the laptop monitor, her face illuminated eerily, like a phantom object shining out of the darkness of the corner. He stared intently at her high forehead, stared into her forehead where the gray matter was, where her thoughts were. Her name was Sara. She was thinking, “...mmm, ffttt. Mmmm...rrrrgggg; mmm...fftt...”

No way could that be a lie. So her name had to be Sara. His powers were in top form. He was reading minds like a pro. He was on the cusp of great things. No one could stop him now. If they came for him in the wee hours of the night, he would know. He would know before they knew. He would lift them into the skies with his ability to lift heavy objects just by thinking about it and let them hover over their fate until they screamed for their mommies.

He took a long celebratory drink of beer, then watched as his laptop screen finally displayed Firefox. He cursored to the Google search box and entered: mind reading for beginners. 556,000,000 results. He decided to do some research later. In the meantime, he would just learn by doing. He turned the laptop off and chugged the rest of his beer.

Outside, the sky was beginning to cloud over. Ross predicted rain.

He spotted a small plane in the sky and decided to try his hand at long distance mind reading. He projected his thought reading power into the sky and centered on the plane, penetrating the fuselage, directly into the mind of the pilot, whose name was Bob. Bob was thinking about his approach to the airport, which seemed strange. Ross thought that the airport was in the opposite direction. But he wasn’t sure. So he wouldn’t accuse Bob of lying. As he thought this, he noticed that the plane dipped its wing. Wasn’t that how pilots saluted and acknowledged someone on the ground? Well, he wished Bob a happy landing.

Yes, his powers were getting stronger by the moment. He was reading people’s minds like reading comic books. He was the master of transparency. He started thinking about how best to use his powers and the answer came into his mind immediately: time to get rich.

He headed straight for the Tenth Street Casino. It was time for some poker, and it didn’t matter how straight faced the other players were. But he would let them win some small amounts, at first. Let them get over confident, ready for some big bets. He would know exactly when to lose and win. He would play them from within their own minds.

An hour later, he walked out of the Tenth Street Casino broke, his wallet cleaned out, his savings cleaned out, his wrist minus a watch.

Liars !

He couldn’t believe it. It was as though they all knew that their minds were being read and deliberately did the opposite of what they were thinking. Even when they were about to do the opposite of what they were thinking, they suddenly did the opposite of that.

Cheating liars!

He was stunned. Heading towards him down the sidewalk was a woman pushing a stroller with something bundled up so tightly it was impossible to tell if it was a baby or a dog. He read the woman’s mind as she was about to pass him. It was a baby boy. His name was Bob. Finally, another successful mind reading.

The woman stopped and looked at him quizzically. Uh-oh. Was his secret out? Did she, through some form of mother’s intuition, sense that he’d been reading her mind? Would they be coming for him in the wee hours of the night?

“Traci,” said the woman.

Ross stared at her. What the hell was she talking about?

“My baby is a girl. Her name is Traci, not Bob. And that’s a nasty bump you have on your head.”

(Note: This is one of the many fine stories in the Twisted Tails VIII anthology from Double Dragon Publishing.)

Humor 101

We all have a sense of humor. Well, maybe not you-know-who. But the rest of us do, and it’s really unfortunate that most of us keep our humor to ourselves. We do this for a variety of reasons, the main one being that we’ll say something we’re damn sure is funny but, just as we’re about to say it…we freeze at the prospect that everyone will look at us as though we’re weird and no one will laugh. No one will get it. People will shun us. Maybe they’ll be offended. Friends will deny us. Family will label us as “that one.”

I get this a lot.

On the other hand, I really don’t give a shit if people laugh or not. If they laugh…cool. If they don’t…I just label them a bunch of humorless bastards on the fast track to eternal misery. And somehow, that makes me feel better. I’m not going to recommend this approach to everyone, just those who, like me, didn’t survive the 60s.

In my workshop, Writing Hurts Like Hell, I have my students do two exercises that are sure-fire methods to gear up their humor writing skills. They don’t take a lot of effort and they should be fun.

But, before I get into them, I want you to keep in mind that your first attempts at these exercises might not work so well. You might end up writing something that’s totally devoid of humor, something that will either put the reader to sleep or make them look at you with that “bastard on the way to perpetual misery” look. But that’s OK. Keep your early efforts to yourself. If you know that nobody else is going to see them, you’ll have a much easier time relaxing into them. I guess the biggest flag that you’re ready to share with others will be that moment when you smile or laugh to yourself. (Now, you still might be the only person on the planet who will smile or laugh at it, but…hey…you made one person smile. And that’s a good start.)

Another thing to keep in mind: you don’t have to make people laugh. That’s comedy. Comedians have to make people laugh or somebody behind the curtains uses a pole with a noose at the end to catch the comedian and pull them off the stage, if they haven’t already been stoned to death by the audience. You’re not under that kind of pressure. If you can just lift the reader’s spirits for a moment, then you’ve done your job. My personal definition of humor:

Humor is anything that lifts the spirit in such a way as to say, “Yeah, it’s all so very serious…but not right now.”

Give your reader that moment of release from the gravity of the world.

So…first tip: exaggerate.

This is one of the best ways to hone your humor. Think of something mundane and write it down. Think about it a moment and then write something a little less mundane about it. You don’t have to stick to the facts, or even anything logical. In fact, forget about logic. Go nuts. Write something absurd and without any rational explanation, something totally out there. Here’s an example…

You see a sign on the road with a picture of a deer. The deer almost looks like it’s dancing. Up the road, you see an actual deer―and it’s dancing. Not only that, it’s wearing a ballet dress and tights. Further up the road, you see several deer dancing. Some are doing ballet, some are doing the tango. Still further along, you see dozens of deer dancing, then hundreds―ballet, rumba, flamenco, tango, twist, 2-stop. They’re in the woods, on the roadside and on the road. You have to stop your car and watch while they dance. After a while, they dance away into the woods and everything is quiet. As you start to drive forward, you see a sign that shows a moose. It looks like the moose has a grenade launcher.

Like I said, go nuts. Let your imagination go wild. You don’t need a scientific explanation for anything you write…and don’t let your internal critic say, “Oh, come on…that can’t happen.” Yes it can. In the world of humor, in the world where you’re suspending the rules of normality, anything can happen. So, let it.

At first, you’ll probably suck big time at this and write reams of boring drivel but after a while you’ll get the hang of it. You’ll write something that’ll make you smile either as you write it or when you read it later…or both. Show that one to a friend.

The next exercise is even more fun, but can be a little more difficult: writing captions. Yep, write captions for photographs. For instance, you see a photograph of three muscle builders posing on a stage, smiling adorable muscle builder smiles, emanating manly confidence, competing against each other but still displaying muscle builder bonding. Put a dialog cloud over one of them to show his thoughts as he’s smiling and posing. His thought? “Which one of these morons farted?”

And that’s the key. Ask yourself, “What’s the exact opposite of what’s happening in this picture? That’s where the humor’s going to be…in what’s not happening on the surface, but what’s going on inside the minds of the people in the picture.

You’ll probably suck at this one as well in your initial attempts, but stick with it. Your humor is back there hiding behind your frontal lobe. Keep doing captions…one or two a day…and it’ll come out.

Look for images in magazines, newspapers, brochures…everything visual that comes your way. And for some real chucks…go to the family albums. These are people you know. Ask, “What is the exact opposite Grampa Wiggins is thinking with Grandma Wiggins sitting on his lap?” I’ll bet you can think of a few things right now without even seeing the photograph.

Do these two exercises each day (or maybe a couple of days each week) and you’ll start to make yourself smile. And then you can start making other people smile.

After the First Draft

So you’ve finished the first draft for your novel. You’ve worked evening after evening (assuming, like most writers, you have a day job as opposed to being a poverty-ridden Bohemian living on friends’ couches and writing on soiled paper with a stubby pencil) for a year, or two years, or more. Your friends have stopped inviting you to parties because they know you’re going to say something absurd like, “Sorry, gotta write.” Your significant other has long been someone else’s other and you can’t even remember their name. At work, people talk about television shows that you’ve never heard of, excluding you from the circle of those in the know. You’ve become a coffee-addicted outsider.

But that’s alright; you have the first draft for a novel and now you can have a life again. For a while.

What you have now is several hundred pages of really bad writing. That is, if you’ve been doing the right thing…writing as quickly as possible (saving revisions and rewriting till the first draft is finished) so that you don’t lose the story and your enthusiasm for it. Now it’s time to let go for a few months. Just put the manuscript aside and forget about it. This is going to be difficult. I mean, the sooner you send it off to a publisher, the sooner you’ll see it on the best-seller lists, sell the movie rights and move into that 50 bedroom mansion in Tuscany you’ve always wanted, right?

Right. So, you don’t have to read the posting any further. Just call someone at Random House and tell them you’ve finished your novel and you’re ready to talk advances,

On the other hand, you might want to improve your chances of an agent talking to someone at Random House (they don’t talk to writers, just agents). Before you send off that novel (to an agent if you’re aiming for the Big Six publishers, or an editor if you’re scaling down to indie publishers), you need to look at it objectively. You need to rise above the mire of details and “known truths” in which you’ve been immersed for so long that you’re the last person on earth who can really judge the quality of what you’ve written.

In short, your first draft is something you shouldn’t even let your friends (if you still have any) see. You’re going to have spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, incoherent descriptions, inconsistent information, poorly constructed sentences, indecipherable paragraphs, boringly long dialog that goes nowhere, adverbs and adjectives that are the exact opposite of what they supposedly describe. What you have is what you’re supposed to have…dough, ready for the oven. But you need to get away from it for a while before you’re ready to see it for what it is: just…dough.

Besides, you need a break from the writing regimen, some time to read a book or two, call the former significant other and wish him or her all the best in their new relationship, or just say, “I wrote a novel. What’ve you done lately?” You need time to drink beer, catch up on television, spend some time in the shower, do that laundry you’ve been putting off since last Spring.

I generally take three to six months. I try not to think about the manuscript calling out from my computer and Google Mail (Yep, Google Mail. Each night, after I’ve finished writing, I mail the manuscript to myself. This gives me a daily update stored outside my computer…a handy thing for someone whose computers crash as often as mine do…and also gives you proof of copyright, dated on a daily basis by a third party.) If I come up with ideas that I’d like to incorporate, or suddenly realize that I wrote something the wrong way, or re-consider the role of a character, I make notes in a document called “Revisions,” but I don’t touch the manuscript. Instead, I drink beer (or wine), play some pool http://www.doolys.ca/, go canoeing with Nanook of the Nashwaak, relax. Sometimes, just to keep the flow of words in my life going, I work on a short story or two, but not intensively…more like some gentle stretching or a leisurely run.

It seems strange at first…suddenly having time to do things, fun things, things without schedule. But I get used to it. And then, of course, by the time I get used to it, it’s time to dig back in and start the real work of writing: re-writing.

I tell my students in my Writing Hurts Like Hell workshop that no novel is ever written; novels are re-written. And then re-written again. And again. Until they’re finished. This process could take a few weeks. It could take a few months. It could take a year or more. I know writers who came close to having nervous breakdowns during the re-writing process (and a couple who nearly lost it after their books were accepted for publication and they had to do yet another re-write under the yoke of merciless editors). No book is finished until it’s on a bookstore shelf or posted on Amazon or another online bookseller.

For the most part, writing the first draft isn’t all that stressful. In fact, it should be relaxing. Your mind should be open to new directions, tapped into the subconscious and excited about the work. Getting to your place of writing (coffee shops for me) should be something to which you look forward, eager to push the story just a little further towards the end, eager to see how that argument between Tina and Turner is going to transpire before Tina stabs Turner, eager to find out exactly how Ray gets out of the burning factory (where you left him tied up in chains in the basement yesterday). Each time you sit down to write, you have a rough idea where you’re going next, but it’s when you do the actual writing that you find out how to get there. It should be relaxing, exploratory, fun.

Not so with re-writing. The fun part is over. The work part begins: thinking with your left brain, making hard decisions, deciding what stays and what goes, what makes sense and what doesn’t. It’s like going to classes and taking notes…and then writing the exam. This is where everything you do counts because it’s time to commit. You can change your mind off the cuff while you’re writing because you’re still in the process of creation, of filling the unknown void with the suddenly known. But in re-writing, you have to take the already known and make it convincing, accurate, readable, satisfying and publishable.

Yes, publishable. When you’re writing the first draft, you’re writing for yourself. It’s your story and you’re telling it. In the re-writing, you’re writing for an editor who’s going to look at it through the eyes of people who are going to buy (or not buy) your story. Loose, open-ended writing has no place in re-writing. Everything now comes under scrutiny, judgement, evaluation, second thoughts, the guillotine of the Delete button.

It’s a big, long process and it can be done the right way or the wrong way. The worst way is to just start at page one and make micro changes to spelling and sentence structure and all the other little revisions to make the writing perfect page after page.

Here’s my process:

Step 1 (Relax): Drink beer and party my ass off for three to six months.

Step 2 (Refresher): Read through the whole manuscript, but don’t make any changes, just make notes in the margins (if you’re reading a printed copy) or notes in the text, highlighted in yellow (if you’re using a computer) or use Word’s track changes feature. This isn’t the time to get caught up in details. You’re looking at the big picture. How does the story flow? Does it slow down where it should speed up or vise versa? Are all the characters really essential? Is this scene essential to the story, or does it just confuse things or draw the story out in a boring manner? Big things.

You’re going to notice things like spelling errors, clumsy sentences, paragraphs that should be cut in half or reversed, repetition, inaccuracies…and on into the wee hours of the night. But you have to resist making changes. The idea is to read at close to the same pace as you would a published novel. You’ve been away from it for several months and now it’s time to get back into it with fresh eyes and a bit more objectivity. Maybe that paragraph about the cat in the graveyard isn’t quite as mesmerizing as you thought it was while you were writing it. Cooling your creative heels for a while takes some of the fog off your eyes.

Step 3 (Second Draft): So…ready to make changes to spelling and grammar? Good. But not yet. This is where you make the big changes. Remember in Step 2 where we mentioned non-essential scenes? This is where you look at the note for Scene 3, Chapter 4 that says: Is this really necessary? Consider dropping this. Can you imagine how heart-wrenching this would be if you’d spent, say, an entire evening or two re-writing this scene to make it perfect and then realize that it just slows the story down and doesn’t do anything to advance the plot? Now’s the time to drop it, before you’ve wasted any more energy and time on it.

In my last novel, The Reality Wars, Notice how I put in a plug for my book? We’ll get into this when I do a posting sometime in the future about how to market your book after you find a publisher.) I had over 180,000 words in the first draft. In the second draft, I cut over 35,000, mostly because I dropped two characters who didn’t do anything to advance the plot and may even have caused some reader confusion. This meant tracking down every passage where they were mentioned and any passages that may have been affected by them, and deleting or re-writing those passages so that the characters were gone, but everything still made sense.

In this draft, you’ll also be looking for things like scene juxtaposition. You may have a scene in which Jake is wondering why his father killed himself, but it comes before the scene in which his father actually commits suicide, and the reader’s wondering what the hell’s going on. It’s not hard to make mistakes like this in the first draft because you’re focussing so much on the just getting the story out of your head.

You might find inconsistencies, like Cassie wearing a blue coat while she’s talking to her mother, but you come back to this scene later and she’s suddenly wearing a red coat. Or Dave might have blue eyes in Chapter 1, but have green eyes in Chapter 3. These things happen. There may be inconsistencies in timelines.

I posted a novella at the Zoetrope Writer’s Community several years ago. (It was a community of fiction writers who read and critiqued each other’s work. I think it’s defunct now, and replaced by the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, devoted to filmmakers.) The story took place over a period of several thousand years. One of the community members sent me a two page list of timelines that were skewed, inaccurate and otherwise just plain wrong. I spent a week implementing his changes. But this is the kind of thing that happens in the first draft.

Another thing to look for is modulation…the rhythm of your story. This is something you might have in mind when you’re writing your first draft. You might have short scenes for fast action and long scenes for slow action, but you’re unlikely to have a sense of how those really work until you’ve finished your novel. When you read over the first draft, you might find that you have one slow scene in a section of the story that just doesn’t’ fit; it slows things down where the action should be continuous. This is the time to decide whether the scene gets dropped or relocated.

Mood and atmosphere can be so easily buggered up in the first draft. For instance, you have a section in an old house where people are disappearing and the remaining people who were stupid enough to go into the house with the curse on it in the first place are seriously creeped out. But you get into the thoughts of one of the characters as she thinks about the pool party she attended few days earlier and this scene goes on for a page or two…and totally breaks the mood of fear and eeriness you’ve been building for the last fifty pages. If you’ve been away from the manuscript for a few months, this disruption of mood with blare out. Now’s the time to delete or relocate.

Look for things like conversations that drag on and on and on…and go nowhere. I’ve noticed this in a lot of novice writers. They get some pretty cool dialog going and the accents are perfect, the tones are right on, the language flows beautifully and the diction fits the character to a tee. But the conversation goes on for three pages and does nothing to advance the plot or reveal parts of the characters that haven’t already been revealed. This is what I call elevator talk, and it should be enthusiastically slashed and burned. Ask yourself: Would the whole meaning and usefulness of this conversation be improved if it were just a page or less? Put all your conversations under the microscope.

Related to superfluous dialog is superfluous description. A writer friend of mine, Beth Powning, spent years and much traveling researching her novel, The Sea Captain’s Wife. Her descriptions of clothing in the 19th Century were accurate and absorbing. However, she had to cut over a hundred pages of description from the first draft. This especially happens when you’ve done a lot research and you want to use as much of it as possible. You might over-describe a house, someone’s facial features, a setting, a legal procedure or a character’s feelings about someone they love or hate. Modern audiences seem to respond to writing that goes light on description and lets the reader fill in most of the details. Ask yourself, “Does this two page description of the meadow behind the house really need the part about the robin feeding worms to her young in the nest clinging to the large branch with veins like those of a champion weight lifter after a three hour workout in a hot gym with…?”

Probably not. Minimalist is the way to go, unless details in the description advance the plot or will be needed as clues to solve a crime if you’re writing a mystery.

Step 4 (Third Draft): OK…you’ve re-structured, ruthlessly deleted superfluous material, relocated scenes, corrected inconsistencies and done some re-writing. Now you have things pretty much the way they’re going to stay for the duration. You have a stable script and unless you get a mind-altering brainstorm that causes your head to melt, what you have is ready for the small stuff, the micro editing.

This is the fine tuning part, where you correct spelling and grammar. (Although you might have already corrected the spelling in the previous draft since it’s not really that big a deal when you have things like spell check.)

This is where you look at each sentence, paragraph and page and make some really serious decisions. That sentence you thought was so beautifully worded in the first draft and maybe even through the following drafts is suddenly under a microscope with a scalpel attached to the lens. Here’s an example:

Ted thought that he was the only one in the group of young men, who were all members of the same soccer team, who had any really realistic ideas about where their little enterprise was going and what they should be doing, as a team, to make some lasting changes at the outset of their venture, rather than wait until their mistakes were so entrenched as to be impossible, or unnecessarily difficult, to change way down the road.

According to the MS word count, that’s 78 words. That’s a lot of words for one sentence, especially when this is part of a scene that’s packed with fast action and intense thrills (You did get that, didn’t you?). But, when I wrote this, I was almost in tears at the majesty of the diction, the depth of thought, the magical flow of images spilling across the screen, and I’m sure that you share these feelings. But…maybe we can improve on this perfection. How about this?

Ted felt alienated from the others by his insistence on proceeding cautiously with their venture so that mistakes made now wouldn’t be compounded in the future.

Twenty-six words. And it says pretty much the same thing, except it gives a more precise insight into how Ted feels: alienated. And this sentence could have been re-written thousands of ways…all of them better.

Most of your re-writing won’t be this drastic though. Mostly it’ll be dropping a word or two. For instance, the “pretty much” in the last paragraph could be dropped and have no effect on the meaning of the sentence. I`m leaving it in because it`s the way I talk. Editors, though, want `tight` writing. They want the writing pared down to the essentials. Anything that doesn`t reveal character, advance the plot or compel the reader to keep reading gets tossed.

Before you begin this step, may I suggest that you read The Elements of Style from cover to cover. You only have to do this for your first novel. After that, use the online version for specific edits and things you might have forgotten.

Step 5 (More Relaxation): After that last draft, you can relax for a few weeks. But that’s all. Any more than three weeks and you will disintegrate. You need this time to get away from the details. I mean, you did some pretty close editing. So now…drink some more beer. Call friends who may have forgotten your name. Call the ex. Tell her or him that you’re OK with their choices, like, if you’d rather have hamburger than steak…I’m OK with that. This is the time to have some fun.

But just for a few weeks.

Step 6 (Fifth Draft): This one’s not so bad. You just read through the entire manuscript and make notes where you might have missed something. When you’ve finished reading, make the changes in the notes. By this time, it shouldn’t be a lot. If it is, you might want to considerea career in busking. The good thing now is that you’re ready to share your manuscript.

Stop 7 (Feedback): If you have any friends left (or relations who still speak to you), give them a copy of the manuscript and ask them what they think about it. You’ll likely get just two or three who’ll give you feedback, but that’s OK. They’re the ones you want the feedback from. Their feedback will likely lead to a few more changes.

Sometimes, getting feedback on just a few things is helpful across the whole book. When I was doing the editorial changes for my third novel, The War Bug, the editor told me to delete every instance of “And then.”. It wasn’t until then that I realized how much I used it and how distracting and unnecessary it was

Step 8 (One Last Read Through): By now, probably the last thing you want to do is read this manuscript that’s sucked the life out of you for so long, but you should., because now you’re going to send your manuscript (well, the first thirty or so pages) to a publisher or agent, or maybe you’re going to self-publish.

I always do one last read-through…just for peace of mind. And generally, I’ll find some stupid little error here, another there, spelling mistakes, places where I’ve accidentally deleted half a sentence. It happens.

After that last read, you’re ready for the riches, adulation, fame and glory that I know you’re going to receive because, after all this, you deserve it. And please don’t forget us little people.