I’m not going to say much about this story. I’m pretty certain there won’t be a recap. I’d like to leave this gruelling piece of work behind me, thank you. Really the only thing I want to say is to the readers who only have Liquid Calling as a sample of what I write. I tend to bounce around from genre to genre, you”ll figure that out over the course of the year, but considering my first (and for some only) story was what it was I feel obligated to tell you that there is no huge twist or strange deaths coming in this story. I really only mention it because I know that sometimes you can get your wheels spinning thinking you’re seeing clues that aren’t there and then you get to the end and you’ve missed the whole story because you’re waiting for the twist. I’m not saying I play this one entirely straight, far be it from me to ever do that, but there’s no giant plot twist. It just is what it is. Sort of.
On a technical note, I’ve implemented a “See More” break a few paragraphs into the story. This is to avoid having a giant six thousand word post in the middle of my blog. Hopefully I did this right and it doesn’t mess anything up.
Also I’ve added a separate “Stories” category. Now you can either go to one particular story and see all the blogging that leads up to it as well as any follow up, or you can go to the “Stories” category and just see all the stories lined up. Hopefully that will make this a little easier, but I’m pretty sure this is bound to get messy by the time I’ve got twenty-six stories floating around on here.
Oh, and this one really came down to the wire so I’m pretty sure there are some typos in there. If you see one please let me know, you can just post it in a comment. I can delete them once I’ve corrected the typos so there won’t be a bunch of outdated comments.
Anyway, happy reading.
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New York City Marathon
By
Joseph Devon
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Byron sat on his barstool, a pen in one hand. His white button down shirt was rolled up at the sleeves so that his bare arm rested on the wooden molding along the edge of the bar. His other arm was bent at the elbow, the hand attached pressed against his forehead, his fingers buried in his black curly hair. The fingers holding the pen were holding it loosely while his thumb flicked the end making the point bounce and tap on the bar. “They come,” he said, “every year to run. They come to show what they are made of. They run to…” his voice stumbled to a halt. “Jesus,” he said, the slightest hint of Irish brogue in his voice almost twisting the word into “Jaysus.” Byron looked down at the notebook in front of him for a couple of seconds, then he let his elbow slide out until his forehead bonked down on the edge of the bar. It sounded loud enough and solid enough so that there might have been some actual pain involved. He curled his arms around his head almost like he was going asleep. Then his muffled voice shouted up from somewhere under the bar. “Why the fuck do they run?”
Will, standing next to him, trying to get the bartender’s attention, glanced over at Byron. Will momentarily gave up trying to order another round. “You know there’s an actual marathon not ten feet,” Will pointed, “out that door. In fact once you’re at the door there’s nothing but sidewalk and a bit of a crowd and then, right there in the street, there’s a real marathon. I’m thinking maybe you should go take a look at it. Might help you write about it.” Continue reading ‘Short Story: New York City Marathon’
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This story has whooped up on me in so many different ways I’ve completely lost objectivity. I have no idea if this turned out well or not. Not to mention the fact that this is going to require an ungodly amount of rewriting because it was basically two different stories butting heads with each other for a good long while. I don’t know. It’s one-thirty now and I’ve got the day off tomorrow. Hopefully some sleep and the light of morning will help me make some sense of this. I’m heading to bed.
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I think I mentioned on here how great a feeling it is to finally finish a story. I can now mention from experience how far in the opposite direction the feeling is that comes after you finish a story and then Word closes and you lose your entire night’s work. I feel like I just got turned inside out. I have no idea what to do right now. I tried swearing really really loudly but that didn’t do much. Then I tried going through the various file recovery things that Word offers but that didn’t work either, so I wound up swearing some more. It’s gone. Everything I wrote tonight.
Writing this actually helped calm me down a bit but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to work through it all again which means I’ll be rushing and frustrated and sloppy and skip over some things but that I’ll have more editing time, or if I should let it rest tonight and rewrite it tomorrow night which means damned little rewrite time.
This has been a rather trying story. It’s fitting in a lot of ways.
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The ending for this story clicked in the subway tonight. I was about two stops from home and suddenly there it was. The ending and the last few steps leading up to it. It’s a nice feeling when that finally happens and you can stop blundering around in the dark and start working towards something. Naturally I only have three days to get it there but I guess you can’t have everything. At least I can stop wavering back and forth and picking away at the various characters and just try to walk them home…assuming I can come up with those intermediary steps. They can be rough sometimes. I’ve just got a little sliver of daylight now but at least I stand a chance of making it if I run. Here goes.
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I’m nowhere with this story. The choice I was talking about yesterday still exists…do I abandon my original idea and run with something that’s more me right now or do I stretch myself, most likely, too thin and try to dredge up the original concept. This is why it’s good to write something rather quickly or forget about it entirely. You see, because this story has been sitting in my head for a good three years now I started to fall in love with the way I saw it shaping up. I thought I had a good match between my setting and story and characters. Only, now, sitting here, I keep trying to pin down the original concept and it keeps slipping away.
Basically the story (as all stories) is a couple of characters hashing out their problems. And I’ve forgotten my in to those problems.
Now see if you can follow this. To write sad you need to be sad. Not through the entire story, but you need somewhere to hang your hat. You need a seed. You need a good base. Truthfully it’s a lot like my understanding of how method actors work. When you need sad you dig up sad and you, very very carefully, begin to hang ornamentation on it, dressing it up for your character, and if you do it gently enough you can take the original lump of sad and massage into a living breathing person. And I had the perfect lumps of sad for these various characters, a different little mental paper cut for all of them, but I’ve lost it. Sort of. The thing is, as I mentioned, I fell in love with this damned story in my head over the course of the past few years, so over the past two days I keep going around and around the same loop. Either I decide to forget the old concept, which I love, because I can’t find the sad. Only this has yet to fail to make me a little sad. So then I start to think, hey, I’ve got a decent lump of sad now, maybe I can work with this, at which point I mentally switch over to maybe trying the old concept, which cheers me up immediately. I can’t think of a more perfect impossible situation.
Granted I could just turf this to the side and write some garbage, but I’m not real keen on that idea.
Whatever, I’m going to try listening to Coldplay.
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I’m completely blocked up. This story could go two ways and I can’t figure out which way to take it and it’s driving me a little insane. I had an idea of what I wanted to do with this story and especially this setting, but considering what’s come out of me already taking the story to that idea would mean a lot of patchwork and it feels like I’d end up slapping something onto the story that isn’t really there. On the other hand, I could follow where the story is leading, but I’m worried that this isn’t the right choice, only the easy choice. I don’t know if the story is going in this new direction because of the format of this project or because I no longer have that first idea in me or because I see an easy path. Also, I’m not sure the new idea fits in with the setting as well as my old idea. And I’m completely blocked up about this.
Two night ago I was tossing in bed and I had it, I had it perfectly, I remember thinking that I should get up and write “it” down but I didn’t…I rarely, if ever, do that. My thinking is always that if I can’t recreate whatever thought I had through the actual process of writing, then that thought didn’t belong in the story to begin with. I definitely feel like I lose out on some well worded phrases with this philosophy, but I usually am okay with that because the stories tend to run smoother. What’s happened here, though, is that what “it” is has been redefined between the night I couldn’t sleep and right now. Basically I’m no longer sure what “it” is. I’ve completely lost my way. I don’t even think there’s a right choice to be found here. It’s a little scary.
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I’m pretty sure the Discovery Channel and the History Channelare just making up occupations now so they can have subjects for new shows. They take a couple of crazy bastards, put them into some sort of transportation device, get Mike Roweto narrate and call it a day. Next they’ll have guys driving trains into live volcanoes to harvest, I dunno, lava bugs or something. You wait. It’s coming.
Anyway. I’ve mentioned this before but writing on Monday is a pretty awful experience. There’s (I’m listening to a song about corduroy pants right now….very odd) very little pop in the air on Monday nights. It’s just so boring. Maybe this will get easier when football starts again.
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The title is set for this one. This was a pretty obvious choice, I don’t think any other options even appeared in my head. I mentioned I had a setting I wanted to use for awhile, and this is it. Simple enough. Although nothing with me ever seems to have only one meaning and…well…you’ll see.
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I have, basically, nothing. I’ve got a setting I’ve always wanted to write about, and I’ve (finally) got a couple of names. And that’s it. That’s what I started with a few hours ago or whatever it was. Nothing. But you start writing and your characters start doing things. It’s very slow going, extremely slow going. When you have a plot to walk through your characters automatically have to do things and the way they decide to do things starts to define them, but I don’t have much of a plot here. This is going to be a thinky-talky type story. So I’ve got two characters, and it takes hours to work through a few paragraphs, but what I’m doing, besides focusing on the language just to have something to focus on, is making choices. They just start coming. You make one and then you make two and then you’ve got a bit of a grip on one of your guys, because you’re not going to make him a refrigerator salesman or whatever without starting to think about whether he’s good at being a refrigerator salesman, and if he’s good then you’ve culled out a little about him, there’s a few things that go into a salesman’s personality, you don’t need to stress them crazy hard, but they’re there. And if he’s good at his job then you wonder if he’s happy doing it, or if he’s so good that he’s a little high-and-mighty about it and then you’ve made another choice and you write some more dialogue and this starts to come out and before you know it you have, not just two names, but some personality to go with them. Not that I have refrigerator salesmen in this story, but that’s how it goes, and the only way I can think of describing how it happens is that I just relax, stop trying to create and focus on the typing and I just let it happen. I know I’m going to go back and rewrite so I can relax and let myself make these choices and know that I can always cut a paragraph or two where all I do is work through something similar to the salesman thought process above and leave only the real stuff. And I let myself misstep. Those are also important. I let myself finish sentences that don’t seem right at all because when something clunks horribly then you’ve got a clue as to what’s not working and you can figure out what might work in it’s place.
And then you come onto your blog and you babble all sorts of things because you don’t have a story and you want to procrastinate.
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