Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer, page 3

Worst Murder Mystery Ever

I have begun - sort of and for the fourth or fifth time - writing my NaNoWriMo book for the year.

NaNoWriMo is NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. You can sign up online to take part. It greatly helped give me structure (of time, not plotting) to get a book finished. The goal is to write a 50-thousand word book in 30 days. I did it, thanks to NaNoWriMo.

That book was tentatively titled HANGING. My editor, Vally Sharpe, suggested a change using the W. H. Auden quotation that opens the story and the book wound up as EVIL IS ALWAYS HUMAN.

This current work-in-progress is going under the name WORST MURDER MYSTERY EVER or WMME for short.

I am calling it the "worst" murder mystery ever because I plan to lay out whodunit at the very beginning. Yeah, the book starts by telling who killed whom.

When I planned to try to do this (I'm still not sure I can do it; I'm trying), I knew that most mysteries follow a typical pattern. I didn't want to follow that pattern. As I did a little research of real mysteries, I discovered that quite a few real-life mysteries are far more than just "whodunits."

The big questions, imho, are WHY? and WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ONES LEFT BEHIND?

I started writing the story from the beginning of the investigation, at the moment when investigators arrive on the scene. I came up with a pretty good (imho) plot twist or two for that scene.

Then I realized I didn't really have a good whodunit because I had not written the actual murder scene. So. I put it aside and thought about it.

I also did some research, reading a novel from 1955 called VANISHING LADIES (I think) by Ed McBain. That book was supposed to be a police procedural, but it's really more of a noir-ish tale of prostitutes and bad cops.

Now I am writing again. This time I've started drafting the murder as well as doing back stories on my two protagonists. I'm hoping it works out.

The Places Dreams Take Me

“Sickness will surely take the mind where minds don’t usually go.” – a line from the rock-opera Tommy by the Who.

I was in high school when that movie premiered and I had to see it because Elton John was the Pinball Wizard. When I did see it, I was impressed with the whole thing.

The girl who was ever-so-briefly my girlfriend at the time got the Tommy album by the Who afterwards because she was a lot cooler than I was. (Actually another boy had bought her the album, but he was a lot cooler than I was, too.)

Anyhow, this is not about Tommy. It’s about sickness.

I think sometimes that dreams are mental illness: that we have brief little takes on what it’s like to live in the illogical world of the mentally ill. Some of those little takes yield ideas that challenge us to consider alternatives to the “logical world.”

For me, those little takes include some pretty bizarre trips into places where there is knee-deep snow and no visible streets and houses occupied by ghosts. There are places where the zombie apocalypse is strictly for entertainment purposes and yields the opportunity for target practice without the fear of horrid death.

There are places where my dead father is still alive, his death a misunderstanding and his advice and help and support still right there where I need it.

Last night’s little stroll into insanity included a chicken egg that had something alive in it, something black and feathered and hideous and that I didn’t want to see so I washed the rotting shell until it gradually disintegrated in my hand and the thing I didn’t want to see got caught in the sinktrap where it squirmed just enough that I would know it was not dead.

Yeah, I like my dreams, even the ones that totally creep me out. I know that they are just little excursions into insanity, little trips into a world that I can’t get to any other way.

Going at It: How Sex Screws Writers

In my book Evil is Always Human, I used the euphemism "going at it" for sex. It sounded reasonable for a rural Georgia kid in 1912 to say and it kept me from having to give many details.

In the sequel, my narrator is an adult and I need to reference his sex life because it will matter to the plot. I am a bit hesitant to do this because I don't want to eff up the effing.

In attempting to describe an encounter with a prostituter, my narrator says this:

I ain’t going to try to tell you what she looked like. Ruth Ann weren’t what folks nowadays call pretty. She was a whore and she looked like a whore. It was a made up kind of pretty that fell off when she stood up and she had a belly and wrinkles and a scar here and there. It was what women really look like when they whore.

I like that because it seems honest, bordering on harsh, which is how I see my narrator. For what it's worth, he and the prostitute get along well and I am considering their having a relationship beyond the transaction.

I hope I can handle writing about actual sex delicately without getting offensive. After all, I want my mother to be able to read this.

I have thought back to how other writers have done sex scenes and I think most glide above the situation rather than even skimming the surface. This is probably for the best because erotic plot strands can overwhelm a story, I'm afraid.

I think of three authors' approaches to sex. First, Richard Braughtigan in The Hawkline Monster has a pretty wild sex scene between a cowboy and a young girl pretty early on. It throws a curveball to the reader, but in a way that Braughtigan makes work by having other curveballs later.

Next are two novels by Cormac McCarthey. Child of God is about a necrophiliac. Outer Dark is about incest. Neither is erotic though the deviant sex is important to both.

Finally, Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov does a fantastic job of centering on sex without ever having sex. As I recall, the unmentioned act of sex between the older man and the young girl is not described at all. In fact, the narrator all but chastizes the reader for expecting it.

My goal is to make my story as true to life as possible. I am still not sure how I will handle it in the final draft.

Just for your amusement, though, here's another passage from the draft:

I walked down the little hall and seen that the one on the left was open so I went in. There was a little kerosene lamp setting on the dresser and it give off pretty good light since there was a mirror behind it. That was the first time I ever seen Ruth Ann. She was laying there on the bed with that sheet pulled up.
“What’s your name?”
“Waymon,” I told her.
“Well, Waymon, my name is Ruth Ann. You take your drawers off and get in this bed.”
I done like she told me and we went at it. It didn’t take long and I got up and started putting my drawers back on. “You like being a whore?”
She didn’t say nothing back right off. I turned back around and seen she was taking a squat over the slop jar and washing herself off good.
I pulled my overalls up and fastened them and set down to pull on my boots.
“I reckon I do,” she said after she was back in the bed with the cover pulled up.
“Do what?”
“Like being a whore.”
“Why is that?”
“Good money.”
I hadn’t thought about that, but I reckon it was if you had fellows like Cap bringing in their work crews every Saturday night. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Uh-huh,” I told her. “You ain’t seen fifteen in fifteen.”
I thought she would get mad at that, but she didn’t. She laughed. “I tell you what,” she said, “I’ll tell you you the best I ever had and you tell me I look fifteen.”
That made me grin. “How old you reckon you’d look if I was the second best you ever had?”
“Twenty.”
We both laughed then and somebody beat on the door. It was Toothy. “You all right, Ruth Ann?”
“Yeah, Buck,” she hollered back to him. “This fellow just told me a joke.”
I didn’t say nothing. I looked back at her. She was still grinning.
She said, “Most fellows don’t tell me a joke, they show me one.”


Keep your fingers crossed that I can finish this sequel.

Aging Gratefully

Here I go again, bitching about getting older when the truth is that there are a lot of dead people who never got the chance to be in their mid-50s.

So. I won't bitch this time. I'll just make a few observations.

One is that time does indeed seem to move faster as you get older. When you are ten, a year is 10 percent of your life. That's a lot of life between Christmases. When you're fifty, a year is only 2 percent of your life. It moves a lot faster.

On my way to work this morning, I heard a song that I hadn't thought about in a while: "Love Spreads" by Stone Roses. I got to work and looked it up and found that it was a hit in 1994.

You know, 1994. AKA: Yesterday.

Actually, 1994 was 18 years ago.

If "Love Spreads" were a person, it would be eligible to vote this year. (That's provided, of course, that it could gather the paperwork now necessary to prove its identity.)

I called my daughter while the song was playing because its feminist slant makes me think of her. I didn't get her, of course, because she's busy. I did, however, leave her a message. I also let the refrain of the song play on her voicemail.

Twice today I found myself reflecting on the body-as-shell-for-the-spirit concept. I always counter-balance that sort of positive thinking with Freud's quotation "Physiognomy is destiny." Sure, it's just a shell. But it's my shell.

Work exhausts me. Part of that is because I try to stay busy all the time so that the hours will pass quicker. The other part is that I'm too old to have such a physical job. (And I have a really crappy shell.)

There was a funny cartoon a few years ago of two prisoners chained to a dungeon wall, with one saying to the other, "At least the weekends don't fly by here."

So. That's all I've got for now. A few less-than-morose thoughts on aging.

Post-Apocalyptic America

I love the whole post-apocalypse scenario. It's a chance to have epic stories in worlds with fewer people and, thus, fewer complications.

For example, one of my side projects is called Worst Murder Mystery Ever. I set it in 1968 because I needed it to be a simpler time. Still, because legal matters are involved, I am running into complications that limit the plot.

Even 1968 has too many people and too many complications.

My novel Evil Is Always Human was set in 1912 and has pretty limited involvement with legal matters. Well. Other than the murders of a few people and the prosecution of the innocent. Still. I could have injustice in 1912 without worrying that it would be illogical. It was 1912, after all.

So.

The idea of a novel set in a post-Apocalyptic America is appealing for that same reason. I think Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of the best of the genre. It is a simple tale surrounded by horror, rooted in reality and yet unbound by our world.

So, yeah, I'm thinking about that.

Although I had several chapters of a zombie apocalypse novel going, I think there are too many zombie books out there right now. Showing the world after a different disaster would probably be better. The unfortunate truth is that there are a lot of ways things could get worse and relatively few ways things could get better.

I would also like to consider the medium itself as an opportunity to create. Rather than simply telling the tale in third person -- or even in first person -- I think it might be interesting to combine some different narrators as well as some different ways of introducing information. It could be fun.

With November rapidly approaching, I am thinking that I want to do another book, but do one totally different from the last one. We'll see. We'll see.

What Comes Next?

What is next?
This thought came to mind this morning as I was having an out-of-body experience at work. I have that sometimes: I’m thinking about something to the point that I suddenly realize I’ve been automatically doing my job without actually thinking about doing my job.
I try not to do this when I drive.
The thinking this morning that led to leaving the present was this: What is left? What do I have to look forward to between now and my death?
I don’t have anything on my schedule.
I’ve done anything that I have a reasonable shot at doing. From here on, it’s gravy.
You would think there would be a way to donate my remaining years to someone with a lot of stuff left to accomplish, some fellow who is dying and doesn’t want to because he never saw Paris Hilton.
I know, I know. I’m talking a brave game, but when the Grim Reaper comes, I’ll be scared shitless of death just like everybody else. I know that. I’m not suggesting I want to die.
I’m just suggesting that there ought to be something important for me to do, even if I don’t know what it is.
And I wonder if everyone has similar thoughts, wondering if there might something super-important hovering out there, waiting for us to find it and do it.
And we aren’t even smart enough to look for it.

My Left Foot - And Pop's

I was born with flat feet. And I think I had a club foot, too, but I am not sure. When I was a kid, my parents would take me to Scottish Rite Children's Hospital in Atlanta for treatments.

The treatments included putting my legs in casts over and over. I don't know that it did any good, but I think it made my legs shorter than they would have been, if only be a few inches.

I'm five foot-two. A few inches would have been a good thing.

Anyhow. The treatments ended when I started school. Then when I was 13 or so, they operated on one of my feet. The next year, they operated on the other. The surgery didn't do much good, either.

For years I blamed myself, thinking that I had done something wrong when I was in recovery from the surgery, but over the years I have come to realize that is probably not the case.

My left foot has gotten worse and worse, though neither foot is too good. Last year I got shoe inserts that help with pain but don't do anything to fix the problem.

So.

This morning, I was looking at my feet, thinking how gnarly that left one is.

And I was reminded of Pop.

Poppa Whitlock, my father's father, walked with a cane when my mother first met him. I remember his left leg being twisted pretty badly, the heel turned almost parallel with his right foot.

I remember that he would take his shoes and socks off and prop his foot on the cane when he sat. Looking at my foot now, I see Pop even though he's been dead nearly forty years after he died.

Pop's impediment made him who he was. Mine makes me who I am. No, not entirely, of course. We're more than the sum of our flaws.

But our flaws are probably more memorable than our commonality.

Cars - Evil Evil Cars

I am currently fiddling around with the sequel to EVIL IS ALWAYS HUMAN. It will begin (current plan! subject to change!) around the year 1925.

The nature of the story doesn't require a lot of research. It is fiction, after all, and the characters involved don't get involved in any historic events.

Still, I have to weave in some historical fact: automobiles, roadways, available consumer goods, etc. I want to be accurate, in general at least.

One facet of this story has my main character working as an automobile mechanic. I am considering having him travel at one point.

I think the best part of my story is the interaction between characters. I don't want to get bogged down, therefore, with details that are not really important to the core of the story.

I was pleased yesterday to have a fellow who had just read my book tell me how accurate he thought the car descriptions were. This fellow owns a Model T; that's what had prompted our discussion.

He thought that my characters had believable reactions to the sound of cars. (The first novel is set in 1912 to 1925.)

Then he told me his family Model T story. His grandfather had owned many cars, but there were no Model Ts. Why not? he had asked his father.

It turned out that grandfather's brother had driven another family member's new Model T. The brother had driven said car into a barn and was killed immediately.

A dislike of the Model T was the outcome.

That story prompted a discussion of the danger of American cars in the old days.

All that has me thinking more about the role that cars will play in the story.

We'll see.

Old TV: New Movie

Basically, movies have been around 100 years. Television has been around 60 years. This makes me wonder where they came up with ideas for movies for the first 40 years.

I'm kidding, of course, but.

Hollywood recently made one of my childhood favorites, "Dark Shadows," into a movie. The original was a gothic horror soap opera, done on a 1960s TV series budget. The movie version went for campy.

No, I haven't seen it yet, but I will. When it's on NetFlix. I'm too cheap to gamble on a full-priced movie these days.

It's a little disappointing that they didn't make it a big budget horror flick, but I can appreciate that it's easier to go for campy than to scare people these days.

This same camp-over-serious movie take was done with "Dragnet" a few years back. It was awful.

As long as your movie version is going to suck anyhow, why not really go for it?

So. Here are some TV shows that should be made into blockbusters:

ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, THE MOVIE - Sure, Andy Griffith is about 90 years old, but he could play the grandfather of Opie's son, Andy 3, who is the new sheriff of Mayberry. Of course, these days, the town is called Methberry, and - well - they aren't worried about Otis and the source of his moonshine anymore.

GREEN ACRES, THE MOVIE - Unfortunately, this one has Adam Sandler in the Oliver role. Nothing else matters because it will suck.

FLYING NUN, THE MOVIE - Sr. Betrielle will be able to fly, but not because of twisted physics. Clearly, she has supernatural powers. Whether these powers come from God or Satan is the question.

Surely my ideas are no worse than the ones Hollywood is coming up with. And. I know some of mine would suck.

Where did you get that idea?

Here's the deal: I have some really odd dreams. Not every night, but fairly often. And some of those dreams are weird enough that they make me think.

Or.

They make me laugh.

Last night, I dreamed that this fellow had a robot woman to - Uh.

Well. She was there to provide him with pleasure. I will (thankfully, perhaps) leave it at that. Almost.

She was a sex robot. There. I will leave it at that.

I don't honestly remember what she looked like. Anyhow. The guy was a jerk and I took the sex robot away from him.

What did I do with the sex robot? I gave it to seven dwarves.

I know, that sounds silly.

If it makes it any less silly, they weren't dwarves exactly. They were more like gnomes. Specifically, those lawn gnomes you see in yards.

There weren't seven of them. I only saw four or five. So.

I guess the title of the dream would be "Sex Robot and the Four or Five Gnomes."

I woke up from this ridiculous dream feeling amused. Sometimes I think my brain takes these bizarre strolls just for that purpose.