Training Day

Without tradition, our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof!

Yes, yes, I must share one of my traditions. I finished my second (relative to recent writing endeavors) short story last week. Last Wednesday, to be precise. On an airplane, which is sort of unusual because nearly the entirety of the story was written on a train. Which was appropriate because the majority of the story takes place on a train.

This one is not as good as the previous. Maybe good isn't the appropriate word, but rather finished. While "What Lies Within" is mostly complete, with a few small rewrites, this new one (which is as of yet officially untitled, but uses the moniker "I was on a train the first time I saw her...") has at least one major rewrite ahead of it. At least three major changes have already been identified.

I'm okay with that, of course. I wanted to get the whole thing down before worrying about fine-tuning.

But, because it is what I do, here is an excerpt from my Train story...

"Like art, I suppose, these still life portraits in motion. Some are whimsical, serious, beautiful, absurd.

Let me paint the picture for you. The train is not colorful, but it is bright. Soft yellows, greens nearly like grey, and subdued blues speckled with the green-grey so as to mute it even further. The florescent lights are dull but many, and the shadows are few and hidden beneath the seats. The tint of the windows keeps the shine of the sun out, though the light still makes its way inside. The men wear darker, earthier, colors, the blues of their jeans and the blacks or browns or tans of their jackets. The colors in their hair do not stand out. The colors the women wear are more varied, accented. The darks are deeper, the lights are brighter, and the subdued tones matched in ensemble. The colors of their hair do not match the extreme differences between the whites, greys, and darks of the men, but they are more nuanced. They have depth, and texture, highlights. Among them, she is standing, feet set apart wide, holding on to the rail with one hand. In her other hand is her phone, its white headphones trailing their way up past her scrubs to her ears. You cannot see her eyes; it looks as though they are closed, but she is simply looking down, distracted from the world by her phone.

There is nothing special about her. She is spectacular.

I look for her often in this gallery."

 Before you all jump to conclusions, this is NOT based on a true story, and she is NOT based on a specific person!

Anyways, I have the Tierra Bella Century bike ride in Morgan Hill this weekend, so expect tradition #2 to make an appearance Sunday or so. Maybe I'll do that one in iambic pentameter. And by "maybe," what I really mean to say is "I will most definitely not write that post in iambic pentameter unless someone volunteers to pay a large sum of money for me to do so."

What Lies Within

I don't blog all that much, but there are a few traditions I should uphold when I do.

For those of you know are in the know, which may be very few, I am a writer. No, really, I'm a writer. Not a guy with talent who talks about it, but someone who is actually writing. A bit back, I was encouraged by a close friend to get off my ass and see where the writing thing takes me. maybe you would call it my new way of looking for a new job. and since my current job allots me nearly two hours of commute time as it is...

Well, I've been spending those two hours reading books, which I still hold to be a valuable use of that time. But at the urging of my friend, I went out and bought a tiny laptop (or notebook or netbook or whatever the term is these days) for the sole purpose of writing on the train during my commute.

So, here it is, six and a half thousand words later, the first fruits of my labor, a short story titled What Lies Within. I will be returning to my novel shortly, but I want to ramp myself up and get some practice in and some momentum from finishing some shorter works before I dive into the longer material (so probably one more short story after this).

I'm not actually going to put the story up on this blog, at least at this time, because posting it here can qualify as publishing it. For one, i've only finished the first draft. It will require some fine tuning and editing. For two, if I do decide to try to sell it, many markets won't accept material that's been previously published.

But I'm not going to leave you hanging. Here is the beginning. If you are interested in reading the full text, let me know, comment below or something. I'd love  for people to read it, at least after I tune it up a little bit, I just don't want to publish it here yet.

Without further adieu...

It was dark in my office before she turned the light switch; the only glow was from my fag, the burning ember at the tip of my cigarette, but it only extended a little ways before being swallowed up by the darkness. Sure, some leaked in through the windows, past the shades, extensions from street lamps and neon lights and the occasional high beams from cars reaching all the way up to my second floor suite, but they were just afterthoughts, framing the dim shadows at the edge of the room.

She was something else, though, like some sort of fire crafted into flesh, red and orange and white. I could see her shadow and silhouette when she opened the door from the bulbs in the other room, and the details filled in when the lights came on. I didn't know which one I liked better, but I liked them both.

“Your robot said you were still here, when I talked to him. I didn't expect you would still be, by now.”

“I make it a habit of waiting in the dark with a bottle for a pretty girl to walk through the door. First time it's actually happened.”

“I need your help, of course. I need to find someone; you're the only one looking who's actually person. They're all a robot, or a computer, or a plug, looking up credit card statements on their google. They don't actually find people, just footprints. I need to find someone, my moneyman. He's disappeared.”

 I have just discovered as I looked to see if there was a picture worthy of including in this post that my title, "What Lies Within," is also part of a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is not where my title came from; it actually came from lyrics to a song by the Silversun Pickups, which played a strong part in the inspiration for the story.

Though the Emerson quote is somewhat appropriate, I'll leave you with The Pit...

The Jack Reacher Quandry

A year and a half ago, I went to the movies one evening and watched Jack Reacher, an action movie staring Tom Cruise. I don't know why I went to watch it, I'm generally not a big Tom Cruise fan, but I guess I had heard enough good things about the movie that I was willing to gamble twelve bucks on it.

I liked the movie. A lot more than I expected; I mean, it wasn't an instant classic or anything. You have to have certain expectations when viewing an action movie, and this one exceeded those expectations.

So I went home, and when I see a movie I like, I do a little research on it. Discovered that it was based on a novel byLee Childs called "One Shot," which was one of many in a series about title character Jack Reacher. Also turns out that the series is successful, and generally well-regarded.

The next time I was at Half Price Bookstore, I picked up the first novel in the series, "Killing Floor." And then I read it.

It was a very cliched action/adventure mystery (maybe I like crime novel better than mystery) that read exactly like a Hollywood action movie. The stoic, tough loner hero who is good at everything, smart, sarcastic, persuasive, always beats up the bad guys, and his plans always work (and if they don't, he's always lucky enough to get away with it). We're talking a real Mike Hammer here. The girls are always pretty and smart and capable (except when they need rescuing) and sleep with the hero. The villains were well-connected and arrogant and tough and sadistic. You've seen the movie a dozen times, and it had a different name and star in each one.

The funny thing was, I loved the book. The writing was crisp, the action well-told, and with just enough depth to keep it out of the kiddie pool.

So I picked up another one of the series (there's like fifteen total), "The Persuader," and tried it out. Same hero, same character archetypes, new situation, equally unrealistic. And I loved it, too. And "Bad Luck and Trouble," and finally "One Shot" (I waited to read "One Shot" because it was made into the movie so I already knew-ish the story). Loved them (side note, having read the novel, I was very impressed with the movie adaptation. They kept the main story with all the important parts, faithfully translated all of the characters [even when they combined a couple of them together], and only made changes to suite the new medium).

I don't understand it, because these are the type of books I should have enjoyed maybe one read and then quickly forgotten. I've read Mikey Spillane, Clive Cussler (unfortunately), I've read Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels, and they had their moments (good and bad). I've read a dozen Tom Clancey novels, and liked them well enough when I was a teenager (and have no interest in revisiting them as an adult with discerning taste).

Jack Reacher, in all of his absurd cliches, trumps all of them. Four out of four is a pretty good track record, randomly chosen through the series. I don't expect any of the rest of them to get better, but I'd imagine they don't get much worse, either. But I'll probably read them, at some point.

You don't have to think too hard when you read them, and it's a good refreshing read after something dense.

Jack Reacher, I am sold. Sign me up.

In other, related, news, this has been a good couple of months for me, literature-wise. It's been a stretch of good reading, including several phenomenal novels by authors I'd never read before, visiting a classic I'm surprised I never read in school, a wonderful new non-fiction by one of my top-two non-fiction authors, and the above-stated Jack Reacher novel.

I discovered Haruki Murakami, a spectacular import from Japan. His "Windup Bird Chronicle" was spectacular, unlike anything I'd ever read before. I also went through "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," which wasn't as good but was still quality. Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto" was breath-taking. It seemed so light, like it was floating on air. Despite the completely mundane (and by that, I mean not supernatural) story, it had an ethereal quality that I can't quite explain. It breathed. Not many books can do that. "The Lord of the Flies" is iconic, and there is a reason for that. "Cooked" by Michael Pollan is good stuff; I like every word that man said, because it's exactly what I wanted to hear.

Now I'm going to go re-watch that Jack Reacher movie, and then maybe an episode of "Eureka," the greatest tv show ever.