Very late in Larry Brooks' "Story Engineering", he reveals that he is a former minor league pitcher, which makes the copious amount of sports analogies make some sense. What it doesn't do is make them any easier to slog through.
The idea behind "Story Engineering" - that there are Six "Core Competencies" that any writer must master in order to write publishable stories - is vastly interesting, pretty important, and isn't really taught in creative writing classes. I want to get that out of the way first - I like this book, for the most part, but I am going to be critical of it, because it wasn't as good as it should have been.
The presentation is muddle and obscured by constant harping on how important these principles are, and how lost you will be if you try to change them. He drives these points home with his beloved analogies and metaphors, comparing writing to everything from golf to surgery to sex. Yup, he gave new meaning to "narrative thrust".
His biggest crime seems to be one of padding. There's a Preface, that gives a vague overview of the subject of the book. Then, there's Chapter 1, which does pretty much the same thing. Chapter 2 re-hashes the exact same information, but in a slightly different way. It's not until Chapter 3 that he finally names any of the Competencies. For a book that implores writers to hook readers early in their story, this is a pretty poor example.
Which actually leads me to his second biggest crime: missed opportunity. One of the Competencies is "Story Structure". He lays out the idea that there are Story Milestones that happen at roughly the same point in every successful story (more on both the terms "roughly" and "successful" later). The First Plot Point divides the first two parts of your story (analogous to the first and second acts of a screenplay), and happens at roughly the 25% mark of your story. The Second Plot Point divides the third and fourth parts (analogous to the second and third acts of a screenplay), and occurs right around the 75% mark. In what I'm sure was a complete and utter coincidence, the chapter focusing on the Second Plot Point starts 75% of the way through "Story Engineering" (yay Kindle!). This made me think, "why not lay out the entire book to line up with your Competencies"?
Ok, that's not exactly feasible, since the book is not just about the structure of stories, but also Character, Theme, Concept, Scene Execution, and Writing Voice (the other 5 Core Competencies). That said, why not make this book as tight as the method you're promoting? Why ramble about concepts when you tell us to avoid doing the exact same thing? Why bring up a topic, tell us you're going to explain it, then change course and talk about something else for pages before actually explaining the concept? Why the constant sales pitch to convince us to use the techniques we're trying to learn about (presumably so that we can use them)?
The answer is his third biggest crime: he can't get out of his own way. He loves his Six Core Competencies. He loves his own writing style. He detests "organic" writing (writing with no planning/outlining, just letting the story go where it goes). It is the constant reminders of all of this that get irritating after a while, because on many of his points, I already agree. I get his point about "organic" writing - if you have no plan, the first draft tends to be a rambling mess that goes nowhere. Then, you edit it down into a more coherent story. If you write a full-length novel, this can be incredibly tedious, not to mention time-consuming. Instead, if you plan ahead and know your story milestones, you can bang out a draft that is far closer to being done than if you just wing it.
This makes sense to me. I'm sure other writers won't agree - many believe that outlining robs a story of its spontaneity. My response would be that after the first draft, how spontaneous is the story? If you can write a first draft that is perfect, then yeah, totally spontaneous. After that point? You have the story on paper, and are just tweaking/rewriting it. Not much spontaneity left at that point, so why not plan it out a bit beforehand? You don't have to go crazy like Brooks and lay out every single scene in your novel. You can just sketch out the four parts, and the associated Milestones, then you are free to ad lib as much as you want.
It's like jazz - there are base melodies/progressions/phrases, but as long as you stay within those, you're free to improvise. (Ok, that's my one analogy for this review.)
Brooks does introduce a great tool that can be used by any writer - the beat sheet. Basically, it's a stripped-down outline. I could see "organic" writers using it, as it is essentially a bare-bones first draft. Brooks sort of makes this observation; he discusses the ability to make changes to the beat sheet as far easier than a 400-page manuscript, comparing them to the maneuverability of a speed boat and a cargo freighter, respectively.
Of course, by this point in the book (the last few chapters), his offer of an olive branch to the "organic" writers feels meager and back-handed, especially given the fact that he's still telling them that their approach is stupid and useless. Why not mention that your Six Core Competencies are best utilized when the writer is a planner, but they can help "organic" writers be more efficient and successful? Then, leave out all the cheap shots at "organic" writers, all of the commentary on how you won't get published if you don't follow these principles, and then wrap up with "If you write 'organically', here's how you can apply these principles, but maintain your writing styles."
Instead, it's, "Fine, you still want to write organically? It won't work, but *sigh* try this." Very condescending. Not to mention the fact that some of this comes in Chapter 49 of 50, and still assumes that the reader is clinging to "organic" writing. How did no editor call this guy up and say, "Um, if they're still reading by your second-to-last chapter, they're probably on board. You can probably drop the adversarial stuff now"?
On top of all this is his idea of "successful". He seems to vacillate on what that means. Is it commercial success, or just critical success? He brings up Dan Browns fun but hollow The Da Vinci Code as a shining success story, so you're left feeling it's about commercial success. Then, he admits that while The Da Vinci Code was incredibly lucrative, that doesn't mean the writing was particularly good. Then he goes back to saying that he's not analyzing the quality of the writing, just the structure, and adherence to the Six Core Competencies, but it did sell a lot! Later, he rips into "literature", claiming its champions (snooty folks at places like Oxford...pah!) allow long stretches of character development that doesn't advance the plot, and this is boring, and Moby Dick sucked, and...wait... He's ripping on "literature", both classic and well-respected modern works. All of which got published, and a lot of press. Throughout the book, he's railed on about how failure to adhere to these principles will GUARANTEE rejection. So, how did this "literature" get published?
He is definitely a genre fiction author, and I sense a fierce desire to protect his own. That's fine, and I agree that considering "genre fiction" as a lesser form of literature is a little ridiculous, but it's ok to acknowledge that there are different benchmarks for success. If your goal is to teach us how to write books like Dan Brown or James Patterson, that's fine, but be up front about it, don't patter on about writing, then rip on half the literary world 80% of the way through your book.
And then there's the rules that aren't rules. There are so many contradictions in his statements that he could quite legitimately call this The Bible of Writing. The First Plot point should be right at the 25% mark of your story...unless it's a little earlier or a little later. That's up to you. But in successful writing it is ALWAYS at the 25% mark, except in this example, where it isn't.
He lays out rules, claims they are the only way to do things, then backs off and claims they're just guidelines. Then he gets worried that he's getting too soft and says that they must be followed.
At any rate, his fourth and final (to me) biggest crime is just the grammatical/factual errors. Using plurals when he should be using the singular - "Competencies" in almost all of the Part Titles; "criteria" instead of "criterion", which is a biggie to me, since he's supposed to be convincing us he knows what he's talking about - is the clearest example. He misrepresents the words of Elmore Leonard, too, which makes you wonder about other things he said.
All in all, I think the book is valuable. The concepts in it, when boiled down and distilled, are important, and I think they will help make me a better writer. The rest of the book...actually may help make me a better writer, too, if only to know what to avoid doing. I would recommend it to anyone who is just starting out in writing, or is struggling with it.
2014-06-18
"Empty Moon" (First Draft) Part 3 of 3
<< Part 1 | < Part 2
I awoke the next evening to the red glow of the setting sun through the horizontal blinds; I had slept through the entire day. Brandy was already awake. The rain had stopped sometime while we slept. Through the door of the bathroom I heard the water pouring down, cascading off her body to the floor of the small shower. I lay there in the fading light listening to the sounds of approaching evening outside, people heading home, rustling bags from wherever they had been shopping, cars idling at red lights, waiting in traffic. A horn blared, a high-pitched staccato note, and an engine revved, pulling a car through the intersection and away from my window.
As the streetlights came on one by one, a cool wind blew, rustling out the last few remaining droplets of rain that had collected on the leaves of the tree outside my window. From the bathroom a loud, flat sound signaled to me that Brandy had dropped the soap. I checked the time, and realized that she had been in the shower for at least twenty minutes now. I got up, pulled a pair of shorts on and crept over to the bathroom door, listening carefully to the sounds from inside. Nothing but the steady pour of the shower. I knocked on the door.
“Brandy?” I said. “Are you in there?” Nothing but the water.
I opened the door slowly. A burst of steam evacuated over my head. I stepped into the humid bathroom. The orange and blue curtain was drawn. As I stepped towards it a small sound, a small moan, like the sad, dying gasp of a trumpet, reached my ears.
“Brandy?” I said again. “What’s wrong?” Again, no answer, just another soft moan and a gasp.
I walked up to the shower and pulled the curtain aside. Brandy was standing there facing me, her dark red hair, almost black from wetness, hung in slow waves down her back. The water poured down her face, down her trembling, naked body into the drain. Her hands covered most of her face; her eyes were red and irritated.
I reached into the shower and turned the water off. Brandy didn’t move, just stood there, shaking and crying. I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her. I led her out to my bed and sat holding her quivering body. She stopped crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her. She sniffled and turned her head to look me in the eyes. She blinked slowly and sniffled again.
“I have to go,” she said.
“To work?” I said.
“No, I have to leave.”
“Why?”
“Just before my father died, he bought me a bike. The thing lasted for years. I rode it until I was too big for it. And then I took it with me wherever we moved. But the traveling was too much for it. It started to fall apart. I eventually had to throw…it…away.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But what does that have to do with us?”
“Because,” she paused to sniffle. “I can’t stand this.” She pulled herself into my shoulder. I held her, rubbed her back. “I was standing in the shower and just thinking to myself about all of the stuff that I’ve lost – toys and books and people and…things. It all disappears, no matter how hard I try to hold on, everything breaks, everything dies.”
“That’s what happens,” I said.
“I can’t take it.”
“You kind of have to. It’s not very fair, but you have to.”
She pushed away from me, tearing herself from my grip. “I can’t watch you die, I’m not going to.” The sun had set; my apartment had faded into darkness. “I’m not going to,” she said again.
She stood up, dried herself off, and got dressed in the dark. I sat silent on the unmade bed, listening to her move around the room, finding her clothes. She put on her pants, her bra, her shows. She grabbed her jacket and bag and headed for the door. I cut her off.
“I’m not going to let you leave,” I said. I grabbed her arms. I felt like I was in a Film Noire detective story.
She shrugged out of my grip. “Dammit, I’m going to leave whether your let me or not.”
“Please,” I said, “Just talk to me about this.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t explain it any better than I already have.”
I stepped towards her. “What if I promised not to die before you?”
She leaned forward and kissed me gently on the lips. “Goodbye,” she said into my ear. She slid around me, opened the door slowly and walked out into the hall. I spun around and caught the door before it closed.
“Brandy,” I said. She stopped but didn’t turn. “No good story should end with one of the main characters just leaving, especially a love interest,” I said, quoting my college fiction professor. “You can’t just go,” I said softer.
She turned her head to look at me. Her reddish curls bounced with the motion. “So maybe your life isn’t a good story,” she said, and walked out of the building.
I slammed the door and began looking for my clothes. I found a shirt, but I couldn’t find my shoes. I turned on my desk lamp, filling the room with warm yellow light. Brandy’s wet towel was on the floor where she had dropped it as she got dressed, my shoes concealed beneath it. I put them on and ran out into the street.
I caught a glimpse of her under a streetlight, about a block east. I wanted to call to her, to make her turn around, but there were people in the street, so I began to walk. In my haste to catch her, I had only thrown on a t-shirt. The people I walked past were clad in heavy coats, their hands either tucked deeply into their pockets or in gloves. From the looks I received, I assumed it was cold, but I didn’t feel it.
Brandy walked the four blocks out of downtown without looking around, her head down, eyes focused on the ground. When she would pass under a streetlight, I would catch a flash of her red hair. She walked straight down Main Street to a small cemetery. From her bag she produced a flashlight and clicked it on, sending a column of light into the night sky. She redirected it into the graveyard.
I followed the bouncing beam of light, dancing through the uneven rows of headstones. The sliver of the waning crescent moon that hung low in the sky was of little help. I found a path, but kept losing it. My thin shoes were soaked. Eventually the beam stopped, focused on one headstone. I made my way over to it. Creeping up behind Brandy, I read the carving on the gravestone. Singer, d. 1848.
“This is my father’s grave,” Brandy said, from near the origin of the light.
“It can’t be,” I said. “This guy died over 150 years ago.”
“Perception versus misconception,” she said in a solemn voice. “Do you know why we didn’t put the year he was born? Because the engraver wouldn’t put 1037-1848 as a life span.”
“You’re telling me your father was over 800 years old?”
“Time isn’t constant. It moves slower for some people than others. Father was just over 81 when he died. My mother only lived to 72.”
About 720 years, I thought as I stared at the gravestone, wondering if she was insane. She had told me some weird things before, and they had seemed believable. I found myself unwillingly believing her again.
“So how old are you?” I said.
“I’m 26,” she said. “I was born in 1740.”
“So you’re really 260 years old.”
“In your definition of years, yes.”
“This just doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “What happened?”
She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Are you a vampire or something?”
She turned to face me. “I already told you. I don’t know why. It just is. There’s no explaining it. One year to me is like ten to you. That’s all I know. I’ve lived through revolutions and war after war after war.”
“And the whole time we’ve been seeing each other…”
“Has been about a day and a half to me,” she said.
“You’re insane,” I said. “You’re just gone, out there.” I turned to leave. I kicked a headstone and fell to the wet grass. Brandy helped me up, the flashlight’s beam playing over her father’s tombstone. As she let go of my arm, a drop of water splashed on my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She turned the light on me, reached out and grabbed my hand. Kissing my fingers softly, she clicked the light off and placed it in my hand. In the sudden darkness I was blind.
“Keep it. I know my way through here by heart. Goodbye.” I heard her turn to leave.
“I love you,” I said. She stopped.
“No you don’t,” she said. “You think I’m insane. You…” she broke off. “I never should have told you. Maybe…maybe time moves faster for you, and you really do love me. But I can’t take that chance. I don’t want you to love me.”
“Because you don’t want to love me,” I said.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t finish my thoughts.”
We stood facing each other, seeing more as our eyes adjusted to the near pitch-black night. The only sounds were the wind through a grove of trees in the distance, and the occasional car.
“Where are you going?” I said finally.
“Barcelona? I dunno. Away.”
And with that she turned away from me and faded off into the night.
I stood there as the silver sliver of moon rose into the night sky. I looked out toward the street. No sign of her. My eyes slowly adjusted more to the light. She was gone. I looked around, but she was nowhere to be seen among the low grey markers.
Tonight I wait for her. Even though I know she won’t be coming back, I sit up here on this dark roof, my back pressing against this cold brick retaining wall, watching the stars meander through their dark path. That bright one there is the North Star. The far edge of the cup of The Big Dipper points to it. Those three in a row to the east are Orion’s Belt. I never could make out the rest of Orion, that great mythical hunter, especially when the sky is full of other stars.
The light from those stars is millions of years old. It left the surface of those stars long before even small mammals roamed the earth. Some of those stars have already died, but we won’t know for thousands of years. It’s the illusion of time.
The moon is gone; it has finished its cycle and is beginning a new one simultaneously. It’s time to start over.
___
(Read more about this short story here.)
I awoke the next evening to the red glow of the setting sun through the horizontal blinds; I had slept through the entire day. Brandy was already awake. The rain had stopped sometime while we slept. Through the door of the bathroom I heard the water pouring down, cascading off her body to the floor of the small shower. I lay there in the fading light listening to the sounds of approaching evening outside, people heading home, rustling bags from wherever they had been shopping, cars idling at red lights, waiting in traffic. A horn blared, a high-pitched staccato note, and an engine revved, pulling a car through the intersection and away from my window.
As the streetlights came on one by one, a cool wind blew, rustling out the last few remaining droplets of rain that had collected on the leaves of the tree outside my window. From the bathroom a loud, flat sound signaled to me that Brandy had dropped the soap. I checked the time, and realized that she had been in the shower for at least twenty minutes now. I got up, pulled a pair of shorts on and crept over to the bathroom door, listening carefully to the sounds from inside. Nothing but the steady pour of the shower. I knocked on the door.
“Brandy?” I said. “Are you in there?” Nothing but the water.
I opened the door slowly. A burst of steam evacuated over my head. I stepped into the humid bathroom. The orange and blue curtain was drawn. As I stepped towards it a small sound, a small moan, like the sad, dying gasp of a trumpet, reached my ears.
“Brandy?” I said again. “What’s wrong?” Again, no answer, just another soft moan and a gasp.
I walked up to the shower and pulled the curtain aside. Brandy was standing there facing me, her dark red hair, almost black from wetness, hung in slow waves down her back. The water poured down her face, down her trembling, naked body into the drain. Her hands covered most of her face; her eyes were red and irritated.
I reached into the shower and turned the water off. Brandy didn’t move, just stood there, shaking and crying. I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her. I led her out to my bed and sat holding her quivering body. She stopped crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her. She sniffled and turned her head to look me in the eyes. She blinked slowly and sniffled again.
“I have to go,” she said.
“To work?” I said.
“No, I have to leave.”
“Why?”
“Just before my father died, he bought me a bike. The thing lasted for years. I rode it until I was too big for it. And then I took it with me wherever we moved. But the traveling was too much for it. It started to fall apart. I eventually had to throw…it…away.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But what does that have to do with us?”
“Because,” she paused to sniffle. “I can’t stand this.” She pulled herself into my shoulder. I held her, rubbed her back. “I was standing in the shower and just thinking to myself about all of the stuff that I’ve lost – toys and books and people and…things. It all disappears, no matter how hard I try to hold on, everything breaks, everything dies.”
“That’s what happens,” I said.
“I can’t take it.”
“You kind of have to. It’s not very fair, but you have to.”
She pushed away from me, tearing herself from my grip. “I can’t watch you die, I’m not going to.” The sun had set; my apartment had faded into darkness. “I’m not going to,” she said again.
She stood up, dried herself off, and got dressed in the dark. I sat silent on the unmade bed, listening to her move around the room, finding her clothes. She put on her pants, her bra, her shows. She grabbed her jacket and bag and headed for the door. I cut her off.
“I’m not going to let you leave,” I said. I grabbed her arms. I felt like I was in a Film Noire detective story.
She shrugged out of my grip. “Dammit, I’m going to leave whether your let me or not.”
“Please,” I said, “Just talk to me about this.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t explain it any better than I already have.”
I stepped towards her. “What if I promised not to die before you?”
She leaned forward and kissed me gently on the lips. “Goodbye,” she said into my ear. She slid around me, opened the door slowly and walked out into the hall. I spun around and caught the door before it closed.
“Brandy,” I said. She stopped but didn’t turn. “No good story should end with one of the main characters just leaving, especially a love interest,” I said, quoting my college fiction professor. “You can’t just go,” I said softer.
She turned her head to look at me. Her reddish curls bounced with the motion. “So maybe your life isn’t a good story,” she said, and walked out of the building.
I slammed the door and began looking for my clothes. I found a shirt, but I couldn’t find my shoes. I turned on my desk lamp, filling the room with warm yellow light. Brandy’s wet towel was on the floor where she had dropped it as she got dressed, my shoes concealed beneath it. I put them on and ran out into the street.
I caught a glimpse of her under a streetlight, about a block east. I wanted to call to her, to make her turn around, but there were people in the street, so I began to walk. In my haste to catch her, I had only thrown on a t-shirt. The people I walked past were clad in heavy coats, their hands either tucked deeply into their pockets or in gloves. From the looks I received, I assumed it was cold, but I didn’t feel it.
Brandy walked the four blocks out of downtown without looking around, her head down, eyes focused on the ground. When she would pass under a streetlight, I would catch a flash of her red hair. She walked straight down Main Street to a small cemetery. From her bag she produced a flashlight and clicked it on, sending a column of light into the night sky. She redirected it into the graveyard.
I followed the bouncing beam of light, dancing through the uneven rows of headstones. The sliver of the waning crescent moon that hung low in the sky was of little help. I found a path, but kept losing it. My thin shoes were soaked. Eventually the beam stopped, focused on one headstone. I made my way over to it. Creeping up behind Brandy, I read the carving on the gravestone. Singer, d. 1848.
“This is my father’s grave,” Brandy said, from near the origin of the light.
“It can’t be,” I said. “This guy died over 150 years ago.”
“Perception versus misconception,” she said in a solemn voice. “Do you know why we didn’t put the year he was born? Because the engraver wouldn’t put 1037-1848 as a life span.”
“You’re telling me your father was over 800 years old?”
“Time isn’t constant. It moves slower for some people than others. Father was just over 81 when he died. My mother only lived to 72.”
About 720 years, I thought as I stared at the gravestone, wondering if she was insane. She had told me some weird things before, and they had seemed believable. I found myself unwillingly believing her again.
“So how old are you?” I said.
“I’m 26,” she said. “I was born in 1740.”
“So you’re really 260 years old.”
“In your definition of years, yes.”
“This just doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “What happened?”
She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Are you a vampire or something?”
She turned to face me. “I already told you. I don’t know why. It just is. There’s no explaining it. One year to me is like ten to you. That’s all I know. I’ve lived through revolutions and war after war after war.”
“And the whole time we’ve been seeing each other…”
“Has been about a day and a half to me,” she said.
“You’re insane,” I said. “You’re just gone, out there.” I turned to leave. I kicked a headstone and fell to the wet grass. Brandy helped me up, the flashlight’s beam playing over her father’s tombstone. As she let go of my arm, a drop of water splashed on my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She turned the light on me, reached out and grabbed my hand. Kissing my fingers softly, she clicked the light off and placed it in my hand. In the sudden darkness I was blind.
“Keep it. I know my way through here by heart. Goodbye.” I heard her turn to leave.
“I love you,” I said. She stopped.
“No you don’t,” she said. “You think I’m insane. You…” she broke off. “I never should have told you. Maybe…maybe time moves faster for you, and you really do love me. But I can’t take that chance. I don’t want you to love me.”
“Because you don’t want to love me,” I said.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t finish my thoughts.”
We stood facing each other, seeing more as our eyes adjusted to the near pitch-black night. The only sounds were the wind through a grove of trees in the distance, and the occasional car.
“Where are you going?” I said finally.
“Barcelona? I dunno. Away.”
And with that she turned away from me and faded off into the night.
I stood there as the silver sliver of moon rose into the night sky. I looked out toward the street. No sign of her. My eyes slowly adjusted more to the light. She was gone. I looked around, but she was nowhere to be seen among the low grey markers.
* * *
Tonight I wait for her. Even though I know she won’t be coming back, I sit up here on this dark roof, my back pressing against this cold brick retaining wall, watching the stars meander through their dark path. That bright one there is the North Star. The far edge of the cup of The Big Dipper points to it. Those three in a row to the east are Orion’s Belt. I never could make out the rest of Orion, that great mythical hunter, especially when the sky is full of other stars.
The light from those stars is millions of years old. It left the surface of those stars long before even small mammals roamed the earth. Some of those stars have already died, but we won’t know for thousands of years. It’s the illusion of time.
The moon is gone; it has finished its cycle and is beginning a new one simultaneously. It’s time to start over.
___
(Read more about this short story here.)
2014-06-17
"Empty Moon" (First Draft) Part 2 of 3
< Part 1 | Part 3 >
We stood on the roof of my building looking out at the city. We didn’t talk much. The moon shone down on us, just over half full, amidst the constellations and man-made satellites.
“She’s waning,” I said to Brandy. “Finishing the third quarter of her life.”
“How do you know so much about the moon?” she said, looking out over the city.
“Astronomy. Easy science credit in college.”
Brandy leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I turned to look in her eyes. Her black eyebrows arched upwards, the outer corners of her eyes curved downwards. It was the look she gave me when she wanted something. Her breath was coming out in short bursts of steam.
I leaned forward to place my lips on hers. She thrust her head upwards, forcing our lips to make contact. She wore no lipstick. My tongue danced across her lips, tasting the soft flesh. She opened her mouth, flicked her tongue against mine. Our tongues mingled, feeling the heat of our mouths. Her tongue pulled back as her lips closed. I pulled back and looked into her eyes. Red circles spread across her cheeks. I pulled her chin to me and kissed her again. My hand slid down the front of her long-sleeved shirt. I grabbed a breast, soft and plush, yet firm. She gasped as my thumb slid across the front of her breast, grazing her small, hard nipple.
I could feel the blood rushing past my eardrums. My face grew warm and felt out of place in the cold night air. Her hands rubbed my shoulder blades, pulled me closer to her. I shifted my feet and put my other hand on her back. We stopped kissing occasionally to take breaths of our own air. We continued to kiss, to put our lips together, to probe each other with our tongues as the moon trolled across the night sky.
Eventually, my hands changed position, one moving under her shirt, the other sliding down her back. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I felt her hand – right or left, I couldn’t tell in the moment – slide off my back and down to the front of my pants. I pulled my head back and looked at her. She was smiling broadly, her lids drooping, brown irises staring into mine. Her hands rubbed against my pants. I grabbed her arms and led her inside to my apartment.
Five days later, we went for a walk in the park in the late afternoon. The sky was grey, darkening by a shade every hour. The streetlights came on early, as the sun found itself unable to push through the cloud cover. The rain began to fall slowly as we made our way down the sidewalk back to my apartment. We walked faster as the rain dampened our hair, then began to run as the droplets got bigger and fell faster. We burst into the lobby of my building soaking wet and out of breath. I shook my hair as we walked down the hall to my apartment, a two-room, one-bathroom living space in the back of the building. It was the smallest unit in the building. It was cramped, but there were trees outside my bedroom window. We walked in; she toweled her hair lightly, then laid down on the green blanket covering the green sheets of my bed. I put a Miles Davis CD on and lay down next to her.
I looked into her bone-china face, my hand in her hair, playing with her curls. They were still wet, but slowly drying on my pillow. She looked into my eyes as her hands played across the front of my shirt. The mournful sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet hung in the air over us. It was the sound of someone who’s seen a life I had only glimpsed. It was the sound of someone who knows things I have only thought about. I don’t cry when I think about my father, but that trumpet alone could break me down. Brandy closed her eyes.
I leaned forward. Our lips met, tongues sliding over each other. I pulled her closer to me, held her tighter. I pressed my lips tighter to hers as Miles’s trumpet rose to the climax of the song. I shut my eyes as he pushed all of that pain through the brass of his horn. As the instrument faded I opened my eyes and pulled my mouth away from Brandy’s. Her eyes were brown slits, her mouth a red curve. She kissed me softly on the lips, then rested her head on my chest.
We lay silent, letting song after song wash over us, humming along with the parts we knew. My nose rested in her perfect, clean hair. Her hair was always clean. Even when I spent all night with her, that hair would smell like she had just gotten out of the shower.
The sound of rain coming in through my open window increased. The soft staccato splashes of the droplets gave a nice counterpoint to the fluidity of the jazz. And at the same time it is a soothing, almost melancholy addition to the music. Mother Nature improvising with the Miles Davis Quintet. I let out a deep breath.
“Did you ever notice,” Brandy said, “That people who are about to die always seem to find God?”
I tried to look down into her face to find out if she was serious, but all I saw was the top of her head. In my silence, she continued.
“I mean, even the atheist will say, ‘Please God, no’ if you put a knife to his throat.” She turned slightly in my arms to look straight up. Her eyes were serious, as though she was concentrating on one of the various little peaks of the landscape of my ceiling. Her nose twitched slightly. “Even some people who are followers of some religion that doesn’t believe in God will beg to a Judeo-Christian God for their salvation.”
“That’s from a movie, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s true.”
“Well, ‘God’ has become another exclamation, like ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’.”
“I think it goes deeper than that. I think that in the moment of death, people see the truth. I think Christianity might be the one true religion.”
“Oh, dear God, I hope not,” I said. We laughed. Miles continued to cry through his trumpet, the rain continued to fall outside.
“What do you do?” I asked her.
“What, for a living?” she said, sliding back to shine her green concrete eyes into mine. I nodded. “I’m a phlebotomist.”
“Really,” I said.
“I suck people’s blood, and then run all kinds of tests on it. You’ve probably met lots of us in your time, you just never knew it.”
“So basically you suck for a living.” She nodded. “Are you good at it?” I said.
“Well, I haven’t received any complaints yet.”
The trumpet trilled, the saxophone rose up, the drumbeat increased. Miles sounded angry, like he was lashing out at all of the misfortunes in his life. Or maybe at himself, as most of his troubles were self-imposed. He was addicted to drugs. That was his fault. He lost favor with the critics when he tried to write music that would be commercially successful rather than personally fulfilling. And he lost fans when he took five years off because he needed rest from too much performing and too many drugs. Those all resulted from choices he made. Of course, he made all of those choices about fifteen years after he wrote and recorded the album we were listening to that night.
I looked at Brandy and wondered at the choices I had made in my life. Some were fairly intelligent, and some were fairly dumb. I was still alive, and for the first time I was happy, so I guessed I had made some good choices. I kissed Brandy on the lips. She had been a good choice. The saxophone died down, laying down a rhythm for the sad trumpet blowing two sad notes over and over.
The next song started with a quiet, tinkling piano intro. We got under the sheets and shut the light off. The trumpet and alto sax picked up the piano intro, altered it, transformed it, and brought it back to the original.
To be concluded...
(Read more about this short story here.)
We stood on the roof of my building looking out at the city. We didn’t talk much. The moon shone down on us, just over half full, amidst the constellations and man-made satellites.
“She’s waning,” I said to Brandy. “Finishing the third quarter of her life.”
“How do you know so much about the moon?” she said, looking out over the city.
“Astronomy. Easy science credit in college.”
Brandy leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I turned to look in her eyes. Her black eyebrows arched upwards, the outer corners of her eyes curved downwards. It was the look she gave me when she wanted something. Her breath was coming out in short bursts of steam.
I leaned forward to place my lips on hers. She thrust her head upwards, forcing our lips to make contact. She wore no lipstick. My tongue danced across her lips, tasting the soft flesh. She opened her mouth, flicked her tongue against mine. Our tongues mingled, feeling the heat of our mouths. Her tongue pulled back as her lips closed. I pulled back and looked into her eyes. Red circles spread across her cheeks. I pulled her chin to me and kissed her again. My hand slid down the front of her long-sleeved shirt. I grabbed a breast, soft and plush, yet firm. She gasped as my thumb slid across the front of her breast, grazing her small, hard nipple.
I could feel the blood rushing past my eardrums. My face grew warm and felt out of place in the cold night air. Her hands rubbed my shoulder blades, pulled me closer to her. I shifted my feet and put my other hand on her back. We stopped kissing occasionally to take breaths of our own air. We continued to kiss, to put our lips together, to probe each other with our tongues as the moon trolled across the night sky.
Eventually, my hands changed position, one moving under her shirt, the other sliding down her back. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I felt her hand – right or left, I couldn’t tell in the moment – slide off my back and down to the front of my pants. I pulled my head back and looked at her. She was smiling broadly, her lids drooping, brown irises staring into mine. Her hands rubbed against my pants. I grabbed her arms and led her inside to my apartment.
* * *
Five days later, we went for a walk in the park in the late afternoon. The sky was grey, darkening by a shade every hour. The streetlights came on early, as the sun found itself unable to push through the cloud cover. The rain began to fall slowly as we made our way down the sidewalk back to my apartment. We walked faster as the rain dampened our hair, then began to run as the droplets got bigger and fell faster. We burst into the lobby of my building soaking wet and out of breath. I shook my hair as we walked down the hall to my apartment, a two-room, one-bathroom living space in the back of the building. It was the smallest unit in the building. It was cramped, but there were trees outside my bedroom window. We walked in; she toweled her hair lightly, then laid down on the green blanket covering the green sheets of my bed. I put a Miles Davis CD on and lay down next to her.
I looked into her bone-china face, my hand in her hair, playing with her curls. They were still wet, but slowly drying on my pillow. She looked into my eyes as her hands played across the front of my shirt. The mournful sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet hung in the air over us. It was the sound of someone who’s seen a life I had only glimpsed. It was the sound of someone who knows things I have only thought about. I don’t cry when I think about my father, but that trumpet alone could break me down. Brandy closed her eyes.
I leaned forward. Our lips met, tongues sliding over each other. I pulled her closer to me, held her tighter. I pressed my lips tighter to hers as Miles’s trumpet rose to the climax of the song. I shut my eyes as he pushed all of that pain through the brass of his horn. As the instrument faded I opened my eyes and pulled my mouth away from Brandy’s. Her eyes were brown slits, her mouth a red curve. She kissed me softly on the lips, then rested her head on my chest.
We lay silent, letting song after song wash over us, humming along with the parts we knew. My nose rested in her perfect, clean hair. Her hair was always clean. Even when I spent all night with her, that hair would smell like she had just gotten out of the shower.
The sound of rain coming in through my open window increased. The soft staccato splashes of the droplets gave a nice counterpoint to the fluidity of the jazz. And at the same time it is a soothing, almost melancholy addition to the music. Mother Nature improvising with the Miles Davis Quintet. I let out a deep breath.
“Did you ever notice,” Brandy said, “That people who are about to die always seem to find God?”
I tried to look down into her face to find out if she was serious, but all I saw was the top of her head. In my silence, she continued.
“I mean, even the atheist will say, ‘Please God, no’ if you put a knife to his throat.” She turned slightly in my arms to look straight up. Her eyes were serious, as though she was concentrating on one of the various little peaks of the landscape of my ceiling. Her nose twitched slightly. “Even some people who are followers of some religion that doesn’t believe in God will beg to a Judeo-Christian God for their salvation.”
“That’s from a movie, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s true.”
“Well, ‘God’ has become another exclamation, like ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’.”
“I think it goes deeper than that. I think that in the moment of death, people see the truth. I think Christianity might be the one true religion.”
“Oh, dear God, I hope not,” I said. We laughed. Miles continued to cry through his trumpet, the rain continued to fall outside.
“What do you do?” I asked her.
“What, for a living?” she said, sliding back to shine her green concrete eyes into mine. I nodded. “I’m a phlebotomist.”
“Really,” I said.
“I suck people’s blood, and then run all kinds of tests on it. You’ve probably met lots of us in your time, you just never knew it.”
“So basically you suck for a living.” She nodded. “Are you good at it?” I said.
“Well, I haven’t received any complaints yet.”
The trumpet trilled, the saxophone rose up, the drumbeat increased. Miles sounded angry, like he was lashing out at all of the misfortunes in his life. Or maybe at himself, as most of his troubles were self-imposed. He was addicted to drugs. That was his fault. He lost favor with the critics when he tried to write music that would be commercially successful rather than personally fulfilling. And he lost fans when he took five years off because he needed rest from too much performing and too many drugs. Those all resulted from choices he made. Of course, he made all of those choices about fifteen years after he wrote and recorded the album we were listening to that night.
I looked at Brandy and wondered at the choices I had made in my life. Some were fairly intelligent, and some were fairly dumb. I was still alive, and for the first time I was happy, so I guessed I had made some good choices. I kissed Brandy on the lips. She had been a good choice. The saxophone died down, laying down a rhythm for the sad trumpet blowing two sad notes over and over.
The next song started with a quiet, tinkling piano intro. We got under the sheets and shut the light off. The trumpet and alto sax picked up the piano intro, altered it, transformed it, and brought it back to the original.
To be concluded...
(Read more about this short story here.)
2014-06-16
"Empty Moon" (First Draft) Part 1 of 3
The roof is dark tonight. The light over the door is broken, and the light from the street below climbs the walls, but seems to fall away before cresting the wide slab of granite that tops the waist-high wall around the edge of the building. I stare at the stars scattered across the sky. In the absence of the moon, there are so many of them it is hard to tell them apart. They are like grains of sand. If I close my eyes, the sound of a car in the street below sounds almost like a wave. The moon is new tonight.
The way the sky was the night I met Brandy, full moon shining amidst the clouds, making them look darker and more sinister, I thought Halloween was already here. It was the perfect sky for a night of evil. That’s what I thought the night I met her. That’s what I thought as I stood on the roof of my four-story apartment building, watching the people scurry along the sidewalk, bundled tight against the cold night air, rushing home to their space heaters or electric blankets, or whatever they used to shut out the cold world.
I leaned on the granite ledge that surrounded the roof of the building and looked down on those people. My limp hair hung straight, framing my face. I felt like a gargoyle, watching over the building, protecting it from demons and other dangers of the Middle Ages. Except that I really didn’t care what happened to the building or its inhabitants.
From behind me I heard the crash of several of the small stones that lined the roof. A footstep. I kept my attention on the thin but steady flow of people in front of my building. A footstep. This one was closer to me. A footstep. They are picking up speed. A footstep, another. I turned to see a young woman standing there in the moonlight, hands in the pockets of a long, black overcoat, reddish-black hair dropping down to her shoulders in thick, elongated springs. Her face was dark, shadowed by her hair. I couldn’t see her eyes, just her red lips. She was nearly as tall as I was. She stood there looking at me look at her, a half-smile gracing her lips.
“Do you come up here a lot?” she said.
For some reason, I thought about James Dean meeting Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, how calmly Dean handled everything. I nodded. She walked up to the granite edge and looked out at the surrounding city, then down at the people.
“Interesting,” she said. She flashed me a smile, her brown eyes glittering.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like it up here.”
She looked up at the bright, full moon, the clouds scudding in front of it, then back at me. “My name’s Brandy,” she said. “Brandy Singer. Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”
My mother never told me never to talk to strangers. She also told me not to major in English. I didn’t listen to her then, so why would I listen to her now? We went to a small, nearly empty diner a couple of blocks from my apartment. Neon lined the wall near the ceiling, bathing everything in a surreal green. The waitress forced a smile as she poured our coffee. I dumped a load of sugar into the black, steaming liquid and took a sip, all the while looking at the tall beauty sitting across from me, wondering what she could possibly want from me. I remembered hearing about women in New Orleans who would seduce men, drug them, and steal their kidneys. Or was it their liver? Either way, there was something about Brandy that didn’t seem dangerous. She took a sip of coffee.
“Good coffee here,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you know that George Washington was one of the first people to drink coffee in the US?” Somewhere in the back of the diner a glass broke with a muffled curse.
“No, I didn’t know that. I always assumed he drank tea.”
“He did before the Boston Tea Party, then they started boycotting it.” She took another sip of the coffee. “He needed something to drink, and since the coffee wasn’t taxed, he tried it. It’s been an American tradition ever since.”
“Strange that he needed something to drink,” I said.
“Well, we all have something. Some people drink coffee, some people down flagon after flagon of wine. Some people sit in front of the TV all day long.”
“Flagon?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Flagon. It’s an archaic word, but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at me over her mug, steam rising around her eyes. “So,” she said. “What’s yours?”
I laughed and looked out the window at a car passing slowly through the narrow alley. Such a scenic place for a window. I turned back to Brandy. Her eyes hadn’t left, the mug hadn’t moved. I took a breath.
“Jazz,” I said. “I love jazz.” I proceeded to describe my collection of music. “How about you?” I said.
She looked at me for a few seconds. “I love people. I love to watch their patterns, what they do and why.”
“An anthropologist,” I said. She smiled.
“What do you do for a living that affords you so much time to stand on the roof of an apartment building and so much jazz?” she said as she put down her cup.
“I write for a local paper,” I said.
“Ah, a reporter out scouring the crime scenes for details?”
I put down my cup. “No,” I said. “Food critic. I’m supposed to go to restaurants and survey the food.”
“Supposed to?” She took a sip of coffee.
“Yeah, I write reviews of places that have closed recently, usually because of some disaster, a fire or something.”
The waitress came back to ask if we wanted anything else. We told her that we just wanted coffee. She breathed a sigh of relief. I watched her walk away and wondered just how long it would be until she snapped.
“Did you write that review of The Black Beauty?”
“The jazz club that burned down? Yeah, I wrote that. It ran right under the article of the place burning down.”
“Sounded like a fun place.”
I stirred my coffee. “That’s what I’d heard.”
Brandy looked up at a picture depicting an old man feeding breadcrumbs to some ducks at the edge of a pond. “So you’ve never actually written a review?”
I took a gulp of coffee, now thick from the amount of sugar I had poured into it and shook my head. “I don’t really need to. My father died when I was in college and left me all of his money – a tidy sum, good investments – so I could live off that if I ever get fired, but my pieces are more filler than anything else.”
“What if you run out of places that have closed recently?”
“It has happened. I just make them up. I see it as making good use of my English degree.”
She took a couple of sips of coffee and stared at me. “Did you make up The Sunny Day Eatery? I can’t remember ever reading that it closed,” she said.
“Yeah, that place never existed,” I said.
“Damn, the chicken piccata sounded incredible.”
“Well,” I said, “That’s actually my own recipe. Some night you could come over and try it.”
Her face lightened, her red lips stretching across her face. There was something very child-like in the expression. It was the look of a child who gets the exact gift, the perfect surprise.
“Nothing is ever as it seems, huh? I’d love to.”
To be continued...
(Read more about this short story here.)
The way the sky was the night I met Brandy, full moon shining amidst the clouds, making them look darker and more sinister, I thought Halloween was already here. It was the perfect sky for a night of evil. That’s what I thought the night I met her. That’s what I thought as I stood on the roof of my four-story apartment building, watching the people scurry along the sidewalk, bundled tight against the cold night air, rushing home to their space heaters or electric blankets, or whatever they used to shut out the cold world.
I leaned on the granite ledge that surrounded the roof of the building and looked down on those people. My limp hair hung straight, framing my face. I felt like a gargoyle, watching over the building, protecting it from demons and other dangers of the Middle Ages. Except that I really didn’t care what happened to the building or its inhabitants.
From behind me I heard the crash of several of the small stones that lined the roof. A footstep. I kept my attention on the thin but steady flow of people in front of my building. A footstep. This one was closer to me. A footstep. They are picking up speed. A footstep, another. I turned to see a young woman standing there in the moonlight, hands in the pockets of a long, black overcoat, reddish-black hair dropping down to her shoulders in thick, elongated springs. Her face was dark, shadowed by her hair. I couldn’t see her eyes, just her red lips. She was nearly as tall as I was. She stood there looking at me look at her, a half-smile gracing her lips.
“Do you come up here a lot?” she said.
For some reason, I thought about James Dean meeting Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, how calmly Dean handled everything. I nodded. She walked up to the granite edge and looked out at the surrounding city, then down at the people.
“Interesting,” she said. She flashed me a smile, her brown eyes glittering.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like it up here.”
She looked up at the bright, full moon, the clouds scudding in front of it, then back at me. “My name’s Brandy,” she said. “Brandy Singer. Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”
My mother never told me never to talk to strangers. She also told me not to major in English. I didn’t listen to her then, so why would I listen to her now? We went to a small, nearly empty diner a couple of blocks from my apartment. Neon lined the wall near the ceiling, bathing everything in a surreal green. The waitress forced a smile as she poured our coffee. I dumped a load of sugar into the black, steaming liquid and took a sip, all the while looking at the tall beauty sitting across from me, wondering what she could possibly want from me. I remembered hearing about women in New Orleans who would seduce men, drug them, and steal their kidneys. Or was it their liver? Either way, there was something about Brandy that didn’t seem dangerous. She took a sip of coffee.
“Good coffee here,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you know that George Washington was one of the first people to drink coffee in the US?” Somewhere in the back of the diner a glass broke with a muffled curse.
“No, I didn’t know that. I always assumed he drank tea.”
“He did before the Boston Tea Party, then they started boycotting it.” She took another sip of the coffee. “He needed something to drink, and since the coffee wasn’t taxed, he tried it. It’s been an American tradition ever since.”
“Strange that he needed something to drink,” I said.
“Well, we all have something. Some people drink coffee, some people down flagon after flagon of wine. Some people sit in front of the TV all day long.”
“Flagon?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Flagon. It’s an archaic word, but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at me over her mug, steam rising around her eyes. “So,” she said. “What’s yours?”
I laughed and looked out the window at a car passing slowly through the narrow alley. Such a scenic place for a window. I turned back to Brandy. Her eyes hadn’t left, the mug hadn’t moved. I took a breath.
“Jazz,” I said. “I love jazz.” I proceeded to describe my collection of music. “How about you?” I said.
She looked at me for a few seconds. “I love people. I love to watch their patterns, what they do and why.”
“An anthropologist,” I said. She smiled.
“What do you do for a living that affords you so much time to stand on the roof of an apartment building and so much jazz?” she said as she put down her cup.
“I write for a local paper,” I said.
“Ah, a reporter out scouring the crime scenes for details?”
I put down my cup. “No,” I said. “Food critic. I’m supposed to go to restaurants and survey the food.”
“Supposed to?” She took a sip of coffee.
“Yeah, I write reviews of places that have closed recently, usually because of some disaster, a fire or something.”
The waitress came back to ask if we wanted anything else. We told her that we just wanted coffee. She breathed a sigh of relief. I watched her walk away and wondered just how long it would be until she snapped.
“Did you write that review of The Black Beauty?”
“The jazz club that burned down? Yeah, I wrote that. It ran right under the article of the place burning down.”
“Sounded like a fun place.”
I stirred my coffee. “That’s what I’d heard.”
Brandy looked up at a picture depicting an old man feeding breadcrumbs to some ducks at the edge of a pond. “So you’ve never actually written a review?”
I took a gulp of coffee, now thick from the amount of sugar I had poured into it and shook my head. “I don’t really need to. My father died when I was in college and left me all of his money – a tidy sum, good investments – so I could live off that if I ever get fired, but my pieces are more filler than anything else.”
“What if you run out of places that have closed recently?”
“It has happened. I just make them up. I see it as making good use of my English degree.”
She took a couple of sips of coffee and stared at me. “Did you make up The Sunny Day Eatery? I can’t remember ever reading that it closed,” she said.
“Yeah, that place never existed,” I said.
“Damn, the chicken piccata sounded incredible.”
“Well,” I said, “That’s actually my own recipe. Some night you could come over and try it.”
Her face lightened, her red lips stretching across her face. There was something very child-like in the expression. It was the look of a child who gets the exact gift, the perfect surprise.
“Nothing is ever as it seems, huh? I’d love to.”
To be continued...
(Read more about this short story here.)
I was writing crappy vampire love stories before crappy vampire love stories were cool!
Way back in the murky mists of the year 2000 I wrote a story called "Empty Moon" for a fiction writing class at UNH. I believe it was one of the first fiction classes I'd ever taken, and I remember feeling like the one big, fat flounder in the middle of a bowl of cherries. In short: horribly out of place. I was in a class bring taught by a professional writer (Professor Charlotte Bacon had published a novel and a book of short stories by that point), surrounded by writers, at least some of whom were sure to be future professional writers, and all of whom were sure to be more suited to a fiction writing class than me.
As it turns out, my fish out of water feeling was short-lived, and soon I was a big, fat flounder swimming in the ocean amongst the other fishes. I had taken prose writing, and essay writing, and had submitted some very well-written papers for other classes. The big difference here was that I got to make things up. I may not have been as well-read as my classmates. I may not have had the same background as my classmates (having spent the first couple years of my college career pursuing an engineering degree). What I discovered, though, was that I could write as well as any of them.
Fiction writing at UNH was taught from the "literary" perspective, meaning character-driven, non-genre fiction. We weren't to write science fiction. We weren't to write mysteries. We weren't to write horror stories featuring vampires. When I'm feeling even marginally confident of something, telling me I can't do something just makes me want to do it more. I was feeling somewhat confident about writing, so I felt confident I could write a genre story as a character-driven piece of "literary" fiction.
Which brings us to "Empty Moon". I decided that if I treated the vampire as just another character, I could write a story about two people meeting, falling in love, and then discovering the secret one of them was hiding. The word "vampire" never even needed to appear in the story (though it does once). I thought it could work, and I was determined not to listen to advice from my professor that it was better to write the stories as two humans, and plunged on ahead. Believe it or not, at one time, I was kind of cocky.
The other reason I chose to write about a vampire was that the first image that popped into my head, that sparked the story to life, was that of a person crying over a broken vase, and the idea that everything breaks eventually. No matter how careful we are with things, no matter how much we protect them, something will happen. The vase shatters. The car breaks down. The loved one dies. Who better to put voice to that idea than someone who has lived a long long time, and seen a lot of loss. An immortal. A vampire! Who can walk around in the daytime. Yeah, I beat Stephanie Meyer to that bit of...stupidity.
The actual execution of this story was a bit clunky. I resist the urge to cringe upon re-reading (and retyping, since I can't find a digital copy of it), because I know it was one of my early stories, and is a raw first draft. There are words and phrases that I can see immediately should have been axed, and I'm already reconstructing the entire story in my head. The reveal is...well, the reveal kind of craps on my whole initial concept. A family of (not quite) vampires?
What is interesting is that I revised this for my final portfolio for that class. I have the revised story, in which I removed the vampiric element, and changed the story a bit to make it more realistic, and, in my extremely humble opinion, ruined it. Maybe I'll rework that into something completely different.
So, while I don't think "Empty Moon" is anything great, I certainly think it's better than what it turned into. As such, I have decided that revising and rewriting "Empty Moon" will be my next project. I will post the results of said project here. First, though, I will post the original, raw, unedited first draft of "Empty Moon" in 3 parts.
Please feel free to comment on any or all of the parts.
As it turns out, my fish out of water feeling was short-lived, and soon I was a big, fat flounder swimming in the ocean amongst the other fishes. I had taken prose writing, and essay writing, and had submitted some very well-written papers for other classes. The big difference here was that I got to make things up. I may not have been as well-read as my classmates. I may not have had the same background as my classmates (having spent the first couple years of my college career pursuing an engineering degree). What I discovered, though, was that I could write as well as any of them.
Fiction writing at UNH was taught from the "literary" perspective, meaning character-driven, non-genre fiction. We weren't to write science fiction. We weren't to write mysteries. We weren't to write horror stories featuring vampires. When I'm feeling even marginally confident of something, telling me I can't do something just makes me want to do it more. I was feeling somewhat confident about writing, so I felt confident I could write a genre story as a character-driven piece of "literary" fiction.
Which brings us to "Empty Moon". I decided that if I treated the vampire as just another character, I could write a story about two people meeting, falling in love, and then discovering the secret one of them was hiding. The word "vampire" never even needed to appear in the story (though it does once). I thought it could work, and I was determined not to listen to advice from my professor that it was better to write the stories as two humans, and plunged on ahead. Believe it or not, at one time, I was kind of cocky.
The other reason I chose to write about a vampire was that the first image that popped into my head, that sparked the story to life, was that of a person crying over a broken vase, and the idea that everything breaks eventually. No matter how careful we are with things, no matter how much we protect them, something will happen. The vase shatters. The car breaks down. The loved one dies. Who better to put voice to that idea than someone who has lived a long long time, and seen a lot of loss. An immortal. A vampire! Who can walk around in the daytime. Yeah, I beat Stephanie Meyer to that bit of...stupidity.
The actual execution of this story was a bit clunky. I resist the urge to cringe upon re-reading (and retyping, since I can't find a digital copy of it), because I know it was one of my early stories, and is a raw first draft. There are words and phrases that I can see immediately should have been axed, and I'm already reconstructing the entire story in my head. The reveal is...well, the reveal kind of craps on my whole initial concept. A family of (not quite) vampires?
What is interesting is that I revised this for my final portfolio for that class. I have the revised story, in which I removed the vampiric element, and changed the story a bit to make it more realistic, and, in my extremely humble opinion, ruined it. Maybe I'll rework that into something completely different.
So, while I don't think "Empty Moon" is anything great, I certainly think it's better than what it turned into. As such, I have decided that revising and rewriting "Empty Moon" will be my next project. I will post the results of said project here. First, though, I will post the original, raw, unedited first draft of "Empty Moon" in 3 parts.
Please feel free to comment on any or all of the parts.
2014-05-27
The Story Behind "Folded"
So, I feel weird about doing this, but I've revised Folded, and replaced the post with the updated copy. The changes this time are minor, though overall, they're pretty big.
Some people reading this blog have probably read "Folded" before, as I showed it off to family and friends, and posted an earlier draft of it online (more on that later). Either way, here's a quick* history of the story, in case you don't know it:
I was in my fifth year at UNH, finishing up my degrees, taking a fiction writing class. Our first short story was due at the beginning of September. I actually didn't procrastinate. I had an idea of what I wanted to write, and I knew that once I started, it would flow out. So, two days before it was due (I know, that doesn't sound like much, but for me, it's a lot) on the morning of September 11th, I sat down to write. I will always remember that date, as it was 2001. Not long after I started working, my best friend sent me an instant message, I turned the TV on, and didn't get any more work done for the rest of the day.
In our class later that day, Professor Denman acknowledged the gravity of the day and extended the due date until the beginning of October. She could have just pushed it back a week, but I think she understood - perhaps instinctively - that the next couple of weeks would be tumultuous. Looking back, I do wonder if she thought some of us might like to write about it, as a way of dealing with such an unimaginable event. I don't think anyone did. I think we all wrote about something as far away from it as possible. Writing can be a great tool for coping, but sometimes, when the wounds are too fresh, it is also a great tool for escaping.
I put the paper off, again, picking up where I'd left off, and finishing it the night before it was due. I handed it in, and it was read by the rest of the workshop a few weeks later, to mostly positive commentary. Some people were put off by the 2nd-person narrator, and most wanted more details of the relationship. Looking at my notes from that class, there seemed to be a definite split by gender on the line "She always wanted something more from you." The guys liked it (one noted: "That's the way I usually feel in relationships."), while the women were confused or put off, mostly, I think because there was not enough detail about the relationship.
Looking back at the original draft of the story, it didn't change much on first revision. One major change was the removal of a large chunk near the beginning that was basically me ruminating on my time working at McDonald's. I like some of the details I used, but for a short story, it was just too off-topic. All of the dialog from that scene was cut, as I decided to keep actual dialog as part of the narrative until the very end. I tweaked just about everything on that first revision, then again in a second revision that would be submitted as part of my final portfolio.
At the very end of the semester, I picked up my portfolio from outside the professor's office. In her comments on the story, she commended me for my revisions, and suggested I submit it to Aegis, UNH's literary journal. So I did, and then I forgot about it. I'd submitted to Aegis a couple of years before, and received the submission back in my mail box with a short rejection letter. More of a notice, really. I never saw "Folded" in my mailbox, but I didn't think that was odd. A couple of months into the Spring semester, a classmate asked if I'd seen the latest issue. I hadn't, so she fetched me a copy. There, in the back, was "Folded, by Matt Pedone". I'd been published! In a campus literary journal. I was still excited. They only published two short stories a year, so it was a little victory to be chosen.
Since then, I've gone back to the story a couple of times, touching up language here and there. recording it as the vocals to a bunch of techno songs I wrote in GarageBand. Lately, as I've tried to get back to writing, I decided to do another major overhaul, analyzing every line of every paragraph, tightening up what I could, expanding where needed. What I think works best about the original is the compactness of the writing, the flow. It's not long, sweeping descriptions, pages of narration of a single event. Scenes are laid out in a couple of sentences.
For example, I wanted to show the apartment better, but I couldn't just have him walk around looking at stuff. I couldn't really even have him lounging around different parts of the apartment, as that would break up the flow too much. I think my edits maintain that flow, while giving a better picture of the story. Hopefully my edits worked. I wanted to punch up the opening a little, a couple of paragraphs that I don't think I'd touched since 2011. I wanted to make the castle towards the end a little more real. Again, I hope I've done that, and not just ruined one of my better stories. Time will tell, I suppose.
To read an earlier version of this Folded, click here.
*Believe it or not, this was quick for me. I'll try** to be better in the future.
**But, I probably won't be.
Some people reading this blog have probably read "Folded" before, as I showed it off to family and friends, and posted an earlier draft of it online (more on that later). Either way, here's a quick* history of the story, in case you don't know it:
I was in my fifth year at UNH, finishing up my degrees, taking a fiction writing class. Our first short story was due at the beginning of September. I actually didn't procrastinate. I had an idea of what I wanted to write, and I knew that once I started, it would flow out. So, two days before it was due (I know, that doesn't sound like much, but for me, it's a lot) on the morning of September 11th, I sat down to write. I will always remember that date, as it was 2001. Not long after I started working, my best friend sent me an instant message, I turned the TV on, and didn't get any more work done for the rest of the day.
In our class later that day, Professor Denman acknowledged the gravity of the day and extended the due date until the beginning of October. She could have just pushed it back a week, but I think she understood - perhaps instinctively - that the next couple of weeks would be tumultuous. Looking back, I do wonder if she thought some of us might like to write about it, as a way of dealing with such an unimaginable event. I don't think anyone did. I think we all wrote about something as far away from it as possible. Writing can be a great tool for coping, but sometimes, when the wounds are too fresh, it is also a great tool for escaping.
I put the paper off, again, picking up where I'd left off, and finishing it the night before it was due. I handed it in, and it was read by the rest of the workshop a few weeks later, to mostly positive commentary. Some people were put off by the 2nd-person narrator, and most wanted more details of the relationship. Looking at my notes from that class, there seemed to be a definite split by gender on the line "She always wanted something more from you." The guys liked it (one noted: "That's the way I usually feel in relationships."), while the women were confused or put off, mostly, I think because there was not enough detail about the relationship.
Looking back at the original draft of the story, it didn't change much on first revision. One major change was the removal of a large chunk near the beginning that was basically me ruminating on my time working at McDonald's. I like some of the details I used, but for a short story, it was just too off-topic. All of the dialog from that scene was cut, as I decided to keep actual dialog as part of the narrative until the very end. I tweaked just about everything on that first revision, then again in a second revision that would be submitted as part of my final portfolio.
At the very end of the semester, I picked up my portfolio from outside the professor's office. In her comments on the story, she commended me for my revisions, and suggested I submit it to Aegis, UNH's literary journal. So I did, and then I forgot about it. I'd submitted to Aegis a couple of years before, and received the submission back in my mail box with a short rejection letter. More of a notice, really. I never saw "Folded" in my mailbox, but I didn't think that was odd. A couple of months into the Spring semester, a classmate asked if I'd seen the latest issue. I hadn't, so she fetched me a copy. There, in the back, was "Folded, by Matt Pedone". I'd been published! In a campus literary journal. I was still excited. They only published two short stories a year, so it was a little victory to be chosen.
Since then, I've gone back to the story a couple of times, touching up language here and there. recording it as the vocals to a bunch of techno songs I wrote in GarageBand. Lately, as I've tried to get back to writing, I decided to do another major overhaul, analyzing every line of every paragraph, tightening up what I could, expanding where needed. What I think works best about the original is the compactness of the writing, the flow. It's not long, sweeping descriptions, pages of narration of a single event. Scenes are laid out in a couple of sentences.
For example, I wanted to show the apartment better, but I couldn't just have him walk around looking at stuff. I couldn't really even have him lounging around different parts of the apartment, as that would break up the flow too much. I think my edits maintain that flow, while giving a better picture of the story. Hopefully my edits worked. I wanted to punch up the opening a little, a couple of paragraphs that I don't think I'd touched since 2011. I wanted to make the castle towards the end a little more real. Again, I hope I've done that, and not just ruined one of my better stories. Time will tell, I suppose.
To read an earlier version of this Folded, click here.
*Believe it or not, this was quick for me. I'll try** to be better in the future.
**But, I probably won't be.
Good Reading, Slow Reading
Looking over my profile at goodreads.com, I realized that most of what I've been reading lately has been non-fiction. From books on the history of time and science to a sci-fi star's foray into the internet world, what I've been reading has been interesting, but a little too real for someone trying to develop a writing habit. There's nothing wrong with reading something informative, if out of your realm of studies. I'm not an astrophysicist, and I don't plan on studying cosmology, but Hawking's book was fascinating. I am a fan of science (and, I would argue, a scientist by profession), so Otto's "Fool me Twice" was a little more in my wheelhouse, though not necessarily anything I needed to read other than academic interest. The issue I have is that I read too slowly.
Sure, I read George Takei's "Oh Myyy!" and "Lions and Tigers and Bears" in the span of three days, but they were short, and not terribly deep. Fun, and occasionally touching, ruminations on social media, but not a magnum opus on the state of society in the internet age. "Fool Me Twice", on the other hand took me about 3 months to read cover to cover. It was thirty-six pages longer than Takei's two books combined, but much of the end matter was made up of footnotes and references. I'd say the two books were about the same length.
"Fool Me Twice", however, goes well in-depth into the history of science and how it relates to the US. I would argue the first quarter of the book is devoted to the history of science and of the US. It starts with current trouble the author has had in trying to make scientific issues talking points during election campaigns, then goes back over 500 years to talk about the origins of modern science and democracy, as the two are linked (simplified version: as science gained popularity, people realized that anyone could attain the knowledge to make decisions about their world, meaning they had power, not the king, whose sole claim to power was divine right). He fawns over Jefferson a bit (professionally, not personally), then launches into a history of science in the United States, from its gloried status through World War II and the start of the Cold War/Space Race, to its decline as the Cold War dragged on and nuclear panic spread, to the attacks of the 70's and 80's after various debacles and disasters. Honestly, the book kind of drags on. Much like this paragraph. The book is interesting (hopefully this paragraph was, too).
Shawn Lawrence Otto would probably be a little miffed that one of the tidbits that sticks in my head from his weighty tome is this: if it weren't for the Cold War, we might not have the Interstate Highway System. Not sure if that means there wouldn't be the vast network of interstate highways, or just that each state would have been allowed to mandate their own speed limits much earlier. The world may never know. Or care.
The point of all of this is that I wish I read faster. I've been trying to alternate between non-fiction and fiction, as well as between kindle and hard-copy. I have a shelf full of "to read" books, and a handful of titles on my kindle (as well as about 40 books on an Amazon wishlist), and the hardest thing is waiting to finish one book before starting the next. According to goodreads.com, I am currently reading 5 books right now, which is kind of true. On the kindle, I am reading The Twisted Thread by Charlotte Bacon, mostly because I took a few classes with her at UNH, and hadn't kept up with her writing career. Simultaneously, I'm trying to read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, because we were flying to Washington DC, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to use the kindle (turns out, I could have). I'm also reading three non-fiction books, one of which is a cookbook, the other two being textbooks. All three of those have been put on indefinite hold.
Once again, I run into my slow reading problem. It took me two (relatively short, I will admit) plane flights, as well as some extra down time to get through the first 50 pages of "Love in the Time of Cholera". Yes, it is deep writing, packed with detail and meaning, but it was not a slogging read full of ponderous prose (cf. "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson). Even Bacon's "The Twisted Thread", which features a little less depth than Márquez's masterpiece has taken me weeks to get to 34% (blessing and curse of the kindle - you can easily know how far you've gotten, and how much you have left).
This relates to my writing, and to this blog in the sense that I feel like I just don't have enough time in the day. I should. I get home between 5:00 and 6:00 on a normal work day. If Sarah is at work, I have the evening to myself. I usually have to cook dinner, but that only takes an hour. I should be eating by 7:30 at the latest, and done by 8:00, leaving me a good two hours to read and to write. The problem is, when I get home from work, I want to decompress. I don't want to do much of anything. I want to plop down on the couch, turn on the TV, and turn off my brain for a bit. By the time I haul my ass off the couch to make dinner, I'm done doing real work for the evening.
This is a major problem, and one I have to correct if I want to be a writer. I am not taking this seriously enough. I have to find my drive. I have to push myself to go into the office and sit down and write. Sit down and read. No TV until I've done this for 90 minutes. No making dinner until I've done this for 90 minutes. An hour and a half of reading and writing. Hopefully, I can make this work, and hopefully my drive will take over. Maybe I don't make dinner every night. Frankly, I don't think that's the worst thing in the world (I could stand to lose a few...well, actually well more than a few pounds).
90 minutes. I can do this. I will read. I will write.
Sure, I read George Takei's "Oh Myyy!" and "Lions and Tigers and Bears" in the span of three days, but they were short, and not terribly deep. Fun, and occasionally touching, ruminations on social media, but not a magnum opus on the state of society in the internet age. "Fool Me Twice", on the other hand took me about 3 months to read cover to cover. It was thirty-six pages longer than Takei's two books combined, but much of the end matter was made up of footnotes and references. I'd say the two books were about the same length.
"Fool Me Twice", however, goes well in-depth into the history of science and how it relates to the US. I would argue the first quarter of the book is devoted to the history of science and of the US. It starts with current trouble the author has had in trying to make scientific issues talking points during election campaigns, then goes back over 500 years to talk about the origins of modern science and democracy, as the two are linked (simplified version: as science gained popularity, people realized that anyone could attain the knowledge to make decisions about their world, meaning they had power, not the king, whose sole claim to power was divine right). He fawns over Jefferson a bit (professionally, not personally), then launches into a history of science in the United States, from its gloried status through World War II and the start of the Cold War/Space Race, to its decline as the Cold War dragged on and nuclear panic spread, to the attacks of the 70's and 80's after various debacles and disasters. Honestly, the book kind of drags on. Much like this paragraph. The book is interesting (hopefully this paragraph was, too).
Shawn Lawrence Otto would probably be a little miffed that one of the tidbits that sticks in my head from his weighty tome is this: if it weren't for the Cold War, we might not have the Interstate Highway System. Not sure if that means there wouldn't be the vast network of interstate highways, or just that each state would have been allowed to mandate their own speed limits much earlier. The world may never know. Or care.
The point of all of this is that I wish I read faster. I've been trying to alternate between non-fiction and fiction, as well as between kindle and hard-copy. I have a shelf full of "to read" books, and a handful of titles on my kindle (as well as about 40 books on an Amazon wishlist), and the hardest thing is waiting to finish one book before starting the next. According to goodreads.com, I am currently reading 5 books right now, which is kind of true. On the kindle, I am reading The Twisted Thread by Charlotte Bacon, mostly because I took a few classes with her at UNH, and hadn't kept up with her writing career. Simultaneously, I'm trying to read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, because we were flying to Washington DC, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to use the kindle (turns out, I could have). I'm also reading three non-fiction books, one of which is a cookbook, the other two being textbooks. All three of those have been put on indefinite hold.
Once again, I run into my slow reading problem. It took me two (relatively short, I will admit) plane flights, as well as some extra down time to get through the first 50 pages of "Love in the Time of Cholera". Yes, it is deep writing, packed with detail and meaning, but it was not a slogging read full of ponderous prose (cf. "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson). Even Bacon's "The Twisted Thread", which features a little less depth than Márquez's masterpiece has taken me weeks to get to 34% (blessing and curse of the kindle - you can easily know how far you've gotten, and how much you have left).
This relates to my writing, and to this blog in the sense that I feel like I just don't have enough time in the day. I should. I get home between 5:00 and 6:00 on a normal work day. If Sarah is at work, I have the evening to myself. I usually have to cook dinner, but that only takes an hour. I should be eating by 7:30 at the latest, and done by 8:00, leaving me a good two hours to read and to write. The problem is, when I get home from work, I want to decompress. I don't want to do much of anything. I want to plop down on the couch, turn on the TV, and turn off my brain for a bit. By the time I haul my ass off the couch to make dinner, I'm done doing real work for the evening.
This is a major problem, and one I have to correct if I want to be a writer. I am not taking this seriously enough. I have to find my drive. I have to push myself to go into the office and sit down and write. Sit down and read. No TV until I've done this for 90 minutes. No making dinner until I've done this for 90 minutes. An hour and a half of reading and writing. Hopefully, I can make this work, and hopefully my drive will take over. Maybe I don't make dinner every night. Frankly, I don't think that's the worst thing in the world (I could stand to lose a few...well, actually well more than a few pounds).
90 minutes. I can do this. I will read. I will write.
2014-03-10
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