NVDT #62 – To Speak, or Not to Speak

PART OF OPEN LINK BLOG HOP

The Prompt – Do you embrace dialog or narrate your way around it? Why?

Dialogue. Every time. I write dialog first and fill in around it, because it’s better from the characters than us. You can do so much with a little dialog. Dialog is our tone palette. Major, minor, happy, sad. Where rhythm and word choice from characters exposes them in ways narration never could.* Where they are allowed to breathe without tags and adverbs. I would open a forum for nothing but the discussion of dialogue if I could get participation. I dropped my example because of AW’s post, wherein I disagree that narration can fill in where dialog can’t. Even for time collapse, backstory, forward motion. Which was the example. I’d rather read 1,200 words of mostly dialog than “and then he did this, and she did that” and particularly any “thought this or that.” The only place dialog can’t supplant narration is the solo man/animal/creature against whatever, the endless postcard set design, and there are places in First Person where you have to weave in head time or the work would all be “And then I…” And for some people I know like Anonymole who openly admits he doesn’t like people, much less a buncha chicks sittin’ around shootin’ the shit. But for most other people? Dialog wins.

*Caveat – Good dialogue, not that crap where everyone speaks the same stilted cardboard supported by adverb tags or directorial action tags. He said, being a dialogue asshole. By ‘that crap’ I can go all the way to billion sellers the likes of Baldacci, James and the spy agency alphabet soup people. Come on, that adverb tag junk is Nancy Drew business. Authors as disparate as Elmore Leonard and Maya Angelou agree that the dialog should tell us how a character feels and if we as authors feel the need to tag it, we should rewrite it.

Dialogue is music. It has rhythm, dynamics, grace notes… I have often wished that writing had the same notation as music. Fermatas, crescendo, decrescendo, piano, forte, triple forte. All running over or under the dialogue like a sheet music melody line. Oh well. As students of dialogue we need to figure that out.

My characters run the gamut from gangsters to a Valley Girl Prima Ballerina, musicians, jocks, hookers, a French lawyer, motel clerks, construction workers, kids… Here’s some examples you are free to read or ignore.

Two Stevie Winners – La Soirée Dansante, plus a solid mix of narration and dialogue, built after the dialog, Gator Bait

My favorite Valley Girl – Octopus, The Recruiter, You Kiss Like You Dance

Short and Random – Redneck Hemingway, Nice to Meet You, Oh, What the Hell, Toothbrush, Dusk in Douala

 Several of those will give you character insight, tell a story in a story, open up backstory or kill time with a lot more finesse than telling you “She’s a Valley Girl Ballerina” or “Him and CL been friends since they was twelve”  carrying on like they’re all fifth-grade school teachers with adverb tags. You can learn all you need to know about who a character is by listening to them tell you who they are. And that’s pretty much my site. Oh hell, here’s a quickie for you if you don’t read Redneck Hemingway. You know who they are, something’s up and I never say a word.

Thursday, noonish, May 14th, 1981, Los Angeles International Airport

“That’s it?” Trace darted the Volvo wagon between a limo and a cab, slid up to the curb at LAX. “Gone ‘till Tuesday? No Coach Cowboy ‘You have a better chance of hitting it with your eyes open’ wisdom for them? Dude… It’s not gonna fly. I’m tellin’ you–”

“Don’t you start that Coach Cowboy shit. And they’ll get over it, trust me.”

“Yeah right… They’re gonna ask me, man, get all up in my ass. What’s my chop for that?”

“What I just said. Gone ‘till Tuesday.”

“You don’t know those women like I do. They’ll–”

“I know more than enough. They all have trust issues. All of them. Men talkin’ shit, men full of shit, patronizing flower-buying smoke blowers… Even if I laid out my plan, which I can’t because I don’t have one, they’d still call bullshit because they want something they can hold in their hands, not more talk. So leave it. Next Hollywood burger run is on me ‘cause I’m not gonna hear all the crap they come up with about me this weekend, you are.”  Jackson popped his door open. “If I’m lucky, I’ll never hear it.”

“If you say so. But I don’t like it, bro. Not even… Hey… What about your fuckin’ dog, man? That’s too much dog to just –”

“Taisia’s got Ella. Eeze skates, Ella runs. They’ll wear each other out.”

“Goddam, man… How tall is she?”

“The Russian or the Wolfhound?” Jackson climbed out, tossed his garment bag over his shoulder, looked back in at his driver, winked. “Six-two. Take your pick.”

“Dickhead. Two Amazons, one on skates. My sons need to see that.”

“Sure ‘they’ do. Take an oxygen tank or an am cap.”

“They’re teenagers.”

“You aren’t.”

“Fuck. You. So…Tuesday. Are you sure that’s all you have to say?”

“Don’t try to sell it, man. Let it ride. Gone. Till. Tuesday. Second verse, same as the first.” He patted the Volvo’s front fender, walked away.

Trace lit a roach from the ashtray, the limo behind him honked, Airport Security appeared by his door.

“Sir, this is pick up only, not drop off. You —”

“It’s raining upstairs.”

“That’s what everybody says. You still need to move your vee… Whoa! Aren’t you the dude from Cleave —”

“Yes.” Trace handed the roach to the security guard. “How’d you like to be me for a weekend?”

“Whoa, dude!” The guard hit the roach, handed it back. “I would, you know, but like that’s impossible. I mean, I can’t play guitar.”

“How are you with angry women and softball?”

What’re others saying about dialog? Check it out.

PART OF OPEN LINK BLOG HOP

NVDT Random – Oh, What the Hell

Once upon a time, someone suggested that I couldn’t write the gross stuff. So I reworked a ‘Jackson recruiting for the softball team’ bit into Russian Interference and forgot about it. Fast forward. This morning I had a post in the can about why bother writing fiction, but in that post, I read something that triggered something else, and what follows just fell out. Another thousand words to a vehicle on blocks in the weeds. Exercise is exercise, right?

***

Burke nodded at the two uniforms tying off yellow tape, pulled on his gloves. At the front door of the overgrown, desperately-in-need-of-paint 1920s Pasadena craft house a short, squat crime scene suit handed Burke a suit of his own, turned him around, and sent him back down the front steps with “Don’t care who you are, put this on.” He stepped off the cracked walk into dead grass and weeds to avoid the plastic evidence storage bucket brigade and shook out the disposable Tyvek suit with built-in booties. He wrote BURKE – MCD on the front and back of it with a Sharpie, struggled into and zipped it, hit the sidewalk in step with the in-bound parade. Inside, the first person he encountered was his FBI Task Force partner, her arms folded.

“About time, Burke.”

“Miss much, Lachelle?”

“Words will just get in the way.”

“Gloria Estefan. Nineteen-Eighty…?”

“Six. I was thinking Leon Russell.”

“What the hell do you know about Leon Russell?”

“As children, my sisters and I sang oldies for our supper. Everybody knows about the Wrecking Crew. White people, backing black girl groups? All the rage in El Lay back in the day.”

“Is that an issue now?”

“Could be the reason I can’t find a young brother anywhere can keep time without a damn drum machine.”

“So it was all a conspiracy to neuter black people’s natural rhythm?”

“Could be.”

“That’s why you went to college, joined the FBI? To sort that shit out? You do, they’ll put your face on a collectible stamp. Right in there with Thurgood Marshall, Lena Horne, Louis Armstong –”

“That’s enough.”

“If they do, picture me in a tile-lined, state-run eldercare, toothless, in diapers, licking the back of your head to stick your face on my Publisher’s Clearing House entry form.”

“You’re more disgusting than the crime scene, you know that?”

Burke wasn’t sure if it was his pee yellow Major Crimes Division suit or Laschelle’s emblazoned with FBI that parted the crowd of forensics bumping shoulders in the narrow halls while she led him through the restored once upon some time just after World War II house to the kitchen. The door of the fridge stood propped open with a found-on-site broom handle wedged between the door and the frame. Blood dripped from the bottom of the refrigerator into forensic collection Tupperware.

“Fuck. Me.” Burke turned from the gray-haired head thawing in the freezer compartment. Another, younger head with red not-found-in-nature hair sat on a Thanksgiving-themed serving platter over the vegetable bins. An almost full jug of Florida’s Natural Lemonade and a half-eaten Subway sandwich perched on the top shelf. “Can’t we make lemonade in California?”

“We used to be in the orange business.”

“I feel a ‘Disney is the evil empire’ sermon coming.”

“Not from me. I like my mice in underpants. And my orange juice from Florida.”

Burke glanced at the expensive coffee/grinder/espresso machine. “I don’t suppose there’s coffee…”

“There’s a Starbuck’s jug on the doughnut table. Out there,” she thumbed toward the back door. “On the driveway.”

“Espresso would be nice.”

“If you’re telling me you’d put anything made in this house into your mouth …”

“Couple of heads and a leftover meatball sandwich in the fridge, dirty coffee cups in the sink… Tells me it didn’t seem to bother whoever lives here.”

“Sick fuck.” She grabbed his arm, pulled him down a short hall into a taped off but unoccupied by forensics bedroom furnished in a stainless-steel table slightly larger than a twin bed with a commercial-grade meat grinder bolted to one end. Under the grinder, half a dozen empty five-gallon ice cream buckets hosted flies. By the hundreds.

“Now we know why no early morning Pasadena dogwalkers have called in any headless corpses for us. Was that anyone we should know in the freezer?”

“The freezer is her mother. The –”

“‘Her’?”

“The day-to-day things found here say female.”

“I should go take a –”

“Bagged, tagged, gone. You don’t need to be prowling around in feminine hygiene products and thirty tubes of lipstick when there’s real crime scene material here requires your particular brand of investigative ju-ju. Besides, we’ll for damn sure get more CSPs of minutiae out of here than we can look at in a fucking year. And before you get all pissy, I made them hold up on moving the hard stuff until you’d seen it, gotten your ‘vibe’.”

“How thoughtful. The mother. She had on lipstick. Makeup.”

“I think we’ll learn she was dead, probably from natural causes, before being decapitated and frozen for posterity.”

“ID on the other one?”

“This was in the fridge by her head.” Lachelle pulled a small forensic ziplock from the pocket of her hazmat, held it up. The bag contained a lapel pin. Suthapali Grenada, MD. Oncology.

“Rage. This is rage, Shell. It’s been about rage all along. Fuck. How’d we miss it?”

“Overtrained to ignore the obvious, maybe? Her mother tapped out, the girl lost it. After that, anybody having too good a time? AMF.”

“And you already know who ‘the girl’ is?”

“Waitin’ on you to catch up. It’s the Venice ice cream lady.”

“Fuck. Me.”

“You said that already. You can keep at it, but you’re not my type.”

“I don’t know if that was sexist, racist, or age-ist.”

“Get over yourself. Care to know what she did with the bodies?”

“Hamburger patties. Maybe breakfast sausages.”

“Damn. You’re good for an old white man.”

“There you go again. There was a six-pack patty press and a half-empty Costco size Cajun Spice jar on the kitchen counter.”

“I knew that. Making sure your eyes were on this early of a Sunday.”

“Goddammit…” He toed one of the ice cream buckets. “You know this has to be the biggest DNA cluster fuck ever. How many heads now, total? Thirteen, plus the two in there. Fifteen?”

“Sixteen.”

“You’re still wanting the freeway ramp cactus head in this. I say no.”

“I say you want a different obsessed, fucked up whackadoodle for that one, for job security. Sorry, they found cactus head’s charm bracelet in the garage.”

“Shit. Now there’s trophies?”

“My Ontie used to say if you’re going to lose it, be textbook about it.”

“I need coffee.”

“I’ll say you do. Wait till you see the garage.”

NVDT Random – Succinct

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.”

–Michelangelo

This quote came to me via David Limrite’s weekly ‘Go get ’em, tiger’ email for graphic artists. I found it not only timely but very applicable. The post is here if you need some encouragement to shoot high and suck and not feel bad but learn from it. Been there so many times I became my own cheerleading section.

What I really want to know is how did Mike even see that stuff, much less nail it? And Beethoven. Get out. These people should be illegal.

---

NVDT #61 – Make Sense, Goddammit

 I was going to put this off, but it’s time for another discussion of mechanics. If only for me.

I complain a lot about scene-setting. And paragraph construction. What I’d like to do is what we did back in freaking high school. Dissect a passage of literature to discover its mechanics. Most people I engage with these days have no idea what I’m talking about. “Show Don’t Tell” with stilted, unimaginative call and response dialog is the main topic of discussion. Or compositional cut-and-paste sectionality. That’s a made-up word, sectionality. I figure it’s okay because the other day I watched a video where a hotshot DJ demoed a piece of software. He used a made-up word for a feature that’s been around longer than he’s been alive. If someone more literate, or even one working off phonics, went looking for that feature? They would never find it. Never mind. I have a post coming on that.

Scene setting.

The ever-popular postcard intro. A chunk that is descriptive of place and time, the author telling us where we are, the climate, how it smells, the flora and fauna, blah, blah, blah.

So? Hemingway did it in “Hills Like White Elephants”. It starts out like all postcards. Here’s some terrain for you. But – There’s an artistry in that opening. Like a master cinematographer’s focus puller, the scene starts out wide, pulls down the mountainside to the tracks, the station, the wall, the beads in the door, to the people. Bam. No clumsiness, no lack of transition or obvious transition. No “Here’s your scene. Got it?” No, higgledy-piggledy flitting around, no lack of logic.

Nope. We are funneled right down the mountainside and into the scene.

There are several ways to work the mechanics. Find the landing zone, the thesis of your scene/paragraph, which is often the first line of the following paragraph after the postcard and that is a classic example of sectioning (later). Park that thesis at the end of the postcard, not the beginning. Otherwise it renders the postcard a useless paste-on unless we can be put in it via all that illogic.

With a tarp held over my head, I made my way to the Mushroom Man. Noon and the sun would cook my skin without it. (Without what? A trip to to the mushroom man?) The city’s ruins, baked white, provided pockets of shade. I scrambled from shadow to shadow. (To what end? Oh, that stuff back there a few lines?)

What’s the point of all that? Making the way to the Mushroom Man. However, the pivotal action was made into a secondary clause semi-related to an article of clothing. I wish I was on my Surface and could use the red pen. So, we pull M Man and make everything else support that action, staying with the first person opening idea.

I snapped the reflective tarp over my head to keep me from cooking in the noon sun. The baked, white ruins of the city offered rare pockets of shade and I scrambled from shadow to shadow as I made my way to the Mushroom Man. (making my way, if you must, for you -ing people)

Start someplace. End someplace. Don’t go a couple places out of order in the middle. Lit logic, like math, requires an equation to get to the point. Before you drop a paragraph or scene and leave it, find the point of it. Once there, The Hemingway funnel (the focus pull) is the easiest way to get a fluid result.

While we’re here, let’s try to avoid ( as appears later)

the smell of loam filled my senses. 

Smell is one sense, and makes no sense filling the others without further description. How about giving the smell a modifier instead? Or filled my parched nostrils. Or, The air, thick with loam, assaulted my senses. Or a variation thereof with some sticky words like ‘was’ and ‘it’. Also, ‘filled’ is a big word that means filled. In the case of senses filled it would render one incapable of further action. No more sight, sound, smell… Protagonist overcome, story over. Think about what you’re saying and don’t count on your readers to read through it. Make sense, goddammit

The bumpy road – We all know this one. A great opportunity to set the landscape, the upkeep of the road, the car, the driver, the supplies, until we pull around the last tree/bend in the road and the castle/house/plantation/town pops into view. Videographers work this to death. Remember to log how they do it next time the inspector’s car pulls up in front of the manor house or the taxi makes its way across the rain-slicked bridge into ghetto funk or the dusty wild horse ride up to the ranch house. Those were the demos. If your road is long and winding, fix it.

Sectionality – Chunk A. Chunk B. No elbow grease on the seams.

Clods of frozen earth littered Vasily’s fields, he expected the weather would break them apart by spring. All the sugar beets had been yanked from the ground and piled into two grey-wood sheds. The Ural winds would continue to dry them, concentrating the sugars.

“Zima won’t marry you without land.” Vasily stood above the mouth of the grinder, 

What the hell? What is the point of the three disparate parts of this opening? What sort of sheds? Lean-to? Open-air? That’s the only way the Big Wind is going to dry them. We are given no reason to care about the fields or even the beets except for their sugar being concentrated. To what end? Here’s your frozen field where beets used to be. ZONK. Oh look, someone’s talking.

The Ural winds whipped (howled, etc) over Vasily’s fields. Fields now a barren landscape of frozen clods, and they’d stay that way until spring. The beets that had been yanked from those fields now piled into grey-wood sheds to dry, concentrating their sugars. Vasily pulled his gaze away from the window, returned to the tasks at hand.

“Zima won’t marry you without land.” Vasily stood above the grinder…

There comes a time where all our Google or National Geographic-isms need to sit down unless we want to get more descriptive about what type of shed will allow for Ural winds to dry beets. Otherwise, it’s a geography lesson, so set the winds free from any specific task.

Again, start somewhere, wide if you want, and flow into the people. Yes, the window was a cliché funnel and there’s plenty of passive voice. Check out the best sellers below, or Hemingway, and get over it. At least it wasn’t ‘how the hell are these things related?’ bullet points, a line break and dialog.

Aside from “Hills Like White Elephants”, which is widely available, the below examples are both quite good and worth a study if only for their mechanics.

Helen Simonson in Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand works several mechanical devices to drop readers into a scene. You can read the first page as a look-inside on Amazon. Here’s her trick. She always involves people, usually with an interruption. In other parts of the book the characters find the need to reflect for a page and a half on England’s bucolic Green and Pleasant. But otherwise we get bits and pieces of where, how, time, furniture, personality… Without overkill. We get the set decorations as the characters become involved with them. Not, “Here’s the old settee covered in X etc…” We get the settee as experienced by a character sitting in it as part of the action/interaction. She even weaves backstory (with a cliché mechanism, but it’s thankfully brief) into the scene. The scene works though. Well, the dead wife picture is hokey, but it’s so well-greased I let it slide. And it doesn’t eat up a page and a half.

Jennifer Eagan’s The Keep works along the same lines but with a touch of the bumpy road. We are told of an ancient castle and in the very next line we begin to experience the terrain, the weather, everything through the character. She uses some great word choices along the way. For immediate backstory, we get comparison and contrast between the weather here and back there and a few airport incidents that border on author digs, but throughout the entire book she breaks the 4^th wall like a good post-modernist, so she’s entitled. This is also available as a look-inside on Amazon.

The one thing I got from the useless Stanford class were these two books from the reading list. I dove right in, even if no one else wanted to discuss mechanics. I also heard words like “hate” used to describe works of fiction. You didn’t like it. Okay. Maybe it really sucked. Okay. But you can’t really “hate” it. It’s not like a book murdered your grandmother or anything. You didn’t like it or thought it sucked, next. Hating is  waste of energy.

Thesis (funneled way down here) – Find the point of the scene/paragraph. Make it one good sentence and then dress it for your party. But make sure you know WTF you’re trying to say, and say it with a modicum of precision before you give it a pass and move on.

The examples used above were from Anonymole’s September scene writing challenge. This wasn’t a cheap shot, he knew it was coming.

 

NVDT #60 – Fruits, Pumpkins, and Story Food

PART OF OPEN LINK BLOG HOP

Prompt – What is your favorite fruit dish? Can you share a recipe for it? Do you include food in your stories? While we’re talking about food, pumpkin, yea or nay?

My favorite fruit dish is pictured above. Not just apples, but lots of different fruits. In that format. You see fruits and I are at an impasse. I don’t like to peel and slice and do all that. Like I lived in Hawaii one summer and man, I loved the fruit bowls. That someone else prepped. And the easy ones, like strawberries, I enjoyed those as a kid, but now they gross me out. Same with all the little blue ones. Used to pick those with my grandmother and turn my face purple. No more. Thesis – My idea of good fruit is the juicy, chunky stuff that someone else has to prep.

Pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice cake, whipped cream, and buttercream icing? Hell yeah.

Do I use food in my stories? Yes. Sorta. Only as scene vehicles to get dialog driving. No recipes or shopping trips with the recipe list. Hey, wouldn’t be me without a coupla half chapters!

Two examples –

Bobby B II

The two-story overhead door to the backlot at Monterrey Mick’s Mad Mods was open most of the way. Warm, haze filtered Mid-Afternoon Saturday in L.A. sunshine flooded the area on both sides of the French drain that ran the width of the door. Bobby faced the sun on one side of the drain, Bernie on the other, each perched on one of the red and white Coleman coolers the jumbo shrimp had shipped in. They had a lazy rhythm working as they pulled shrimp out of a pile of ice on an aluminum cart for a slice and devein before they rinsed them under a propped-up garden hose and tossed them into a big pot of ice water. The sixteen-gallon shrimp-boil pot Bobby had rented, full of Bernie’s Trinity and spice, pearl onions, and baby Yukon Gold potatoes simmered on a propane burner in the corner like a giant diffuser full of an aroma called “home.”

“This shrimp’s not too nasty for the Gulf, Boudreaux.” Bernie squinted, held one up and tossed it into the bucket of ice water, reached for another.

“Farm-raised tigers. They shoulda been deveined before they left.”

“Farm-raised explains the short on nasty. Deveined would drive the price way up. Think about paying you and me right now in Hollywood dollars for all the Sunday afternoons we did this for free when we were coming up.” She held up a hand sealed in a stainless-steel mesh glove. “You order the gloves with the shrimp?”

“Asked Senior to pick these up when he bought the knives.” He held up his own gloved hand, wiggled his fingers. “I knew he’d send the sharpest ones he could find. Told him I’d like to keep my thumb.”

She shook her hair out of her face, not looking at him in the midst of a shrimp toss. Whatever was gnawing at her, the smell of home, the Trinity she put together from memory in her sink, the easy talk, the familiarity of place, the laughter over roach coach breakfasts on the set with this kid… She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it forced out “Mick’s looking for a way into your money, Boudreaux.”

“So are you. You workin’ with him, or free lancin’?”

She kept up her end of the one for me, one for you deveining, let three cycles go by. “I’m waiting to see where the eye tracks. How’d you know?”

“I didn’t come out here to learn about cars, I came to learn about people. I figured the place that would take me didn’t see me at all, they saw easy money.” He tossed a shrimp, looked over at her. “I asked a man who does background checks for a boat company I started to run everybody connected to this place. ‘Cause I wanted to see whatever the game was. He said if I saw it once when I could see it coming, I’d understand the scam mechanics and get past feeling like a dumb redneck kid all the time.”

She waited for two more shrimp cycles, built up a little steam. “This man of yours decided, out of all the dime bags of fuck-everybody-and-everything money-grubbing narcissistic Hollywood assholes in this place that I was the one?”

“No.” He wasn’t sure he could tell her yet that she was the only star in the sky at Mick’s Mad Mods. Or that he knew she’d spent every dime she made as a suntan oil and bikini model on UCLA and a diction coach to get her voice out of the bayou. “He said you had a degree in entertainment marketing, had told these people you were ready to rob a liquor store to get some investment money together for anything to get you out of TNA work, and they pulled you in.”

 ***

The Great Kerrigan Bank Robbery

“I don’t like helicopters.”

She hooked my arm with hers. Hooked. A perfect word.

“Why?” She would always look better in one of my shirts, crazy morning hair, inquisitive eyes and all than I ever would.

“I was flying before I could drive. I’m probably alive today because of my deep and abiding distrust of helicopters. Besides, in the Cub,” I flipped a custom three pepper omelet the size of the twelve-inch skillet, “with good weather I can be airborne in 75 feet, maybe less, so…”

“Who needs one, right?” She furrowed her eyebrows. “You do know the only reason it flipped with such ease is the pound of butter.”

“It’s a skill.”

“Don’t kid yourself. It’s the butter.” She released my arm, ran a pizza wheel through the omelet, held back half while I tilted the pan, let half slide off onto her plate. I moved the skillet and let the other half drop the same way on mine.

“Butter is something I learned from my mother. I hear olive oil is healthier, but I save that for vegetables.”

“Tu Madre, eh? Did she die of a coronary?”

“Not yet.”

“Decent genes and you know about vegetables.” She dropped a sausage link on her plate, licked her fingertips. “And you can almost cook.” The cocked eyebrows and smile were for effect before she stepped outside in the morning shade of hundred-year-old cottonwoods and pecan trees that surrounded my patch of planet Earth. “How can it be that a morning so perfectamente maravillosa prefaces the heat of hell?”

Like most people who comment on predictable weather, Cav didn’t expect an answer. She stood barefoot on the pea gravel, her left hip kicked out slightly to the side, forked a small mouthful of omelet and surveyed my landscaping.

“This,” she rubbed her foot on the smooth pea gravel, delivered “It is native to the area?” with a straight face.

“I liberated it from an unsupervised highway department materials yard.”

“The work was difficult?”

“No ill effects.”

“Espléndida.” She pointed her fork at the water. “Your lake is lovely.”

“It’s not much, but it’s mine.” I say mine. It wasn’t very big, but stock ponds are lakes in parts of Texas. And I was the only full-time squatter on this one. My nearest neighbor was an ancient black man who grumbled but never spoke, lived off-site and drove up with his dog in about fifteen minutes when someone called from the phone hanging off the back of the gas pump at the marina. Which had happened three times in seven months. I think having a marina or an improved boat ramp makes it officially a lake, even though the marina was a pier, a shack, and a gas pump, and the back-your-boat-in ramp was a pair of muddy ruts next to the ‘marina.’ I stepped out of the ancient Airstream to join her.

“That’s the one?” She nodded at the Cub Craft sitting half-in and half-out of the water, tied off to an old parking lot concrete bar. “She flies in 75 feet?”

“Good weather, medium load, and the floats off.”

“I want to see.”

“Now?”

“Pendejo. I’m eating. Hey. You didn’t tell me you had Tabasco.” She tapped my nose with her fork, waited for me to return with the familiar red bottle. “Do you know of Kerrigan, Paro? It’s a town the size of a fly-speck in this Texas of yours.”

PART OF OPEN LINK BLOG HOP

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NVDT Random – Seriously?

No shit, really. It’s already a fact that Event Brite handles the free “tickets” to Mass. In order to maintain social distancing requirements, only a certain number are allotted.

Well, found out this week that reserved seating (tickets) to Christmas Eve services are available, social distancing math and everything. The catch is, since everybody wants to make a good show of holiness to the relatives, that reserved seating will set you back $500.

So I figured I’d go ask an authority, and who better than Robert Plant, the man who wrote the last word on the subject. I got his answer.

If you hear a rustle in the hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now, It’s just the clinking of the dolly’s wheels…

Huh, wait…

Nothing hidden or deep, meaning-wise. Simply the clinking of the dolly required to haul the cash box back to the rectory. Which is far less obscure than the sprinkling of the May queen. I mean seriously. Why’s she ‘sprinkling’ in the hedgerow?

NVDT #59 – Who Dat Say Who Dat?

PART OF OPEN LINK BLOG HOP

Prompt – When writing a sequel or series with the same characters, do you ever have to refer back to your first book because you forgot what you wrote about a certain character?

Are you kidding? Forget serials, (of which I have one in the dumpster and one that could become a series), I have trouble keeping track of who’s who in a single book. Which is why I use Scrivener. There’s a great search function and this ­­–

A handy folder in the binder labeled ‘Characters’.

I know people who have dropped library headshots, lengthy bios, materials owned (houses, cars, ranchettes, airplanes, designer clothes and accessories…). I don’t go to extremes. But having a given location where I can hit up the cast when I can’t remember someone and don’t want to drop a placeholder till I can find them is a real benefit. I’m sure many of you have a Word folder or part of a notebook for that but for me? Having them right inside where I’m working is perfect.

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NVDT Random – Advice From Captain Obvious

Having trouble selling your book, using every tag known to man to drive traffic your way and still not succeeding? Using all those tags to find something that’s not Witches Warlocks and secret portals fan fic to read and coming up empty? Here’s your sign. You must be using the –

I know I have been!

NVDT Random – SepScene Wrimo Last One – Redneck Hemingway

Wind’s Come Up Some

“Harper.” Dupree jumped down from the mud-caked high-rise pickup. “Figured I’d find you somewhere up in here.”

“Dupe. Pull up some bumper.”

“Truck’s awful clean.” Dupree put his palm on the hood. “Ain’t been here long, either.”

“Nope.”

“Square?” Dupree offered a crushed pack of Winstons.

“Gave ‘em up. Lent an all.”

“Lent’s some done, idn’t it?”

“Seems like.”

“Gettin’ a run up on the next one?”

“Never hurts to have a little banked. Just in case. Y’all didn’t go on an get bait, didja?”

“Got a feelin’. Stopped just shy a goin’ in.”

“Good. Hate it if you’d hadda dump a bucket a shiners on my account.”

“Wouldna been nothin’. Where was it you were at, again?

“Hadn’t said.”

“Then you’d best.”

“Microtel.”

“Damn, Harp. One by Love’s an the Mac-Donald’s? Out there on the by-pass?”

“Yep.”

“Straight?”

“Man… Damn. I tell ya what.”

“I heard that.” Dupree held out his Winston, let the breeze ash it. “Wind’s come up some.”

“Some. Could use us a little rain.”

“Not in this ‘un.”

“Prob’ly right.”

“You were sayin?”

“Said ‘I tell ya what’.”

“I hearrrrd that. Ol’ ‘What’ got a name?”

“Sure she has.”

“Secret a some kind?”

“Didn’t say I knew it.”

“Sheee-it, son. Your momma know how you come up?”

“Not less you done told her.”

“Not me. Somebody oughta.” Dupree stretched himself off the bumper. “Fine afternoon for it. Microtel an all. Some kinda ‘what’, huh?”

“Damn… I tell ya what…”

“I heard ya.” Dupree flicked the Winston butt at the lake, opened his pickup door. “We fishin’ t’morrow?”

“Reckon so.”

“Didn’t get ol’ ‘Damn… Tell ya what’s’ name or number, didja?”

“Nope.”

“Liar.”

Harper shook his head. “Man… Damn.”

“I heard that.” Dupree’s truck belched black diesel. He leaned out the window, smacked the door. “Harper. Nextime we’re not fishin’ an you’re holed up there down to the Microtel with a fresh shave, a clean truck an a girl ain’t got a name busy makin’ you stupid, call somebody?”

“Yep.” Harper unwound from his bumper, took a long look at the lake while Dupree spun his tires reversing up the gravelly shoal. “I tell ya what…”

 

Sketch from Harper, Jackie and the Microtel

NVDT Random – Mo Mo Mo SepSceneWrimo

Jackson had sweated his way through his dollar-fifty black and gray thrift shop bowling shirt, thought he might be living out his last day. He swore if he got home in one piece he would never be so stupid again.

He’d walked out of his apartment three days ago to see a couple of white guys, some cholos, a skinny black guy, and a girl who looked too young, all jacking parts off his primer gray ’64 Impala. They were loading his battery, trunk mounted spare tire cover, big Holley carburetor, and the two wheels facing the street into a shit brown Dodge van. And laughing. He’d yelled “Hey! What the fuck?” and started towards them. One of the white guys pulled a knife that looked like a machete.

Once they’d gone, like a real pussy, he’d whined to his neighbors in the funky little house next door who’d come out to watch. He could hear everybody from the pajama tux summer. Don’t be a whiner. Don’t be that guy.

Well, he’d been that guy and now he was sitting in a Karpet King van in the parking lot of a new condo complex almost on the ocean in Carlsbad, San Diego County. Everything was new. The monstrous nickel-plated forty-four magnum resting on the window sill of the van fit right in with all the fresh paint, shiny doorknobs and mail drops. Jackson mentally added never tell a neighbor you don’t know very well you need to make some quick cash to his list of rules to live by.

The sharp-dressed man with the gun had folded the van’s mirrors in, told Jackson to turn the rearview mirror to the dash, keep his hands on the wheel and look straight ahead. And don’t be stupid.

“Like bein’ here in the first place?”

“Comedian, yeah? I like it.” Magnum man, casual. Like everyone made small talk with a forty-four magnum in their hand. “You owe the dudes give you this van money or something?”

“No, man,” Jackson said from the back of his throat. “I’m getting paid.”

“Good for you. Clean is the only way, man. You kinda look like a dude could be from Karpet King, you know? So you get stopped, you’re not high, you been layin’ carpet all day, don’t know who put that shit in your truck.” He glanced at the rear of the van for a split second. “Me, I don’t mess with coke no more, ‘cept as business. The only time I ever wanted some was right after I did some, you know? So if I don’t do it, I don’t want it.”

“I knew a girl once who said that about sex. I tried to study on it a couple of times. Didn’t help much. Couldn’t pay attention.”

“Sex or blow?” They both laughed a small, tight, quiet laugh. Magnum man shot the shit with him about how girls shouldn’t put so much stiff crap in their hair like they did, and how short bangs were shit on kids and grown women should forget it. How Art Monk was the only keeper in the first round of the draft. How the nine-and-seven Rams even made it to the Super Bowl just to get their asses kicked was all politics. They both heard the back doors of the van close. The big gun came off the sill of the van, back but still straight on him. Magnum man reached in his sport coat pocket, handed Jackson a postcard from a Santa Barbara motel and a Mapsco page.

“Drive back to El Lay, smart and easy, like the working man you are. Drop the van at the address in the ‘to’ box. The map’s marked up for you, same as how you got here. Park the van, forget where you left it, take a walk. Like a mile or so. Call a friend or a cab.”

Jackson followed the directions to the letter. He didn’t have cab money but his neighbor Star had a POS Pinto that ran okay since he’d worked on it for her, and a soft spot for him since he’d been keeping an eye on her daughter after school and helping her with homework. He called Star, waited for her in an industrial cleaning company parking lot just off the Gardena Freeway in Rancho Dominguez. A perfect place to disappear. Every set of headlights that went by he wondered if that hadn’t been the plan all along.

***

When he climbed out of Star’s Pinto at their apartment building a young kid in a beanie appeared, handed him an envelope, disappeared back into the night. Inside the envelope was the rubber-banded six hundred dollars in twenties he’d been promised. He’d heard it was worth more, but he hadn’t crossed a border. And he was alive. He peeled three twenties off the top and handed them to Star.

“Enough? More?”

“If you have a couple of pizzas in that envelope that can be here before Sky’s bedtime we’re three times better than good for a short run up Long Beach Boulevard.” Star rarely smiled, but she one arm hugged him before going around to her door. “I have a couple of cold beers. Medium pepperoni with extra cheese for Sky and she’ll really think you’re a god. Get you and me something with more than one vegetable, along with this?” She held up the sixty bucks. “I might agree with her.”

***

The third time the neighbors informed him that he was driving again they told him, as usual, “Tomorrow at seven. Pick up the van out front, deliver the postcard”.

The next morning there was no sign of his neighbors. No cars, no lights, the house quiet. He kept his fingers crossed all day, but at six-fifty-five a white Chevy van from Valorian Commercial Janitorial Services rolled up. A female, her face obscured with a scarf and hooded sweatshirt left the keys and postcard in the seat, walked away.

The address was an apartment complex in Yukaipa, San Bernardino County. A long drive. When he arrived the gun was back.

“This time you’re the dude drops those stinky blue biscuits in the pissers? Fuckin’ truck stinks, my man.”

Jackson stared at some early Halloween decorations children had taped to an apartment window. “It does. And this was a drive.”

“Not much different than the last two, this is just more out of the way. Ex-urban, they call it. Like Uptown. You know, where the fuck is Uptown? Between the ‘burbs and Downtown? And like which way? North? Is south of the 10 Under town? What’s way the fuck past East town?”

“Arizona?”

“That’s why I’ll miss you, compadre. This is your last run.” He could feel Jackson tighten up from outside the van. “No, dude, you won’t be dead unless you get lost. There’s a toker’s party pack under the passenger the seat for you, no blow because it’s bad for you. Going away present. That girl in your wallet, she special?”

“Used to be. How do you —”

“Been all through your shit. You ever do this again, nothing in your wallet but your license and some cash. Girl that pretty, somebody might get ideas. You’re a good guy, Jackson. You follow directions and don’t talk.” He lit a black and gold cigarette with his non-gun hand. “I gotta let the LB cool for a time. Those badasses hassled my guys livin’ in that house next door to you? They weren’t beginners. Didn’t steal nothing, just scared my guys into shitting themselves, put their minds in diapers. So bad I have to get a new crew.” He popped a couple of smoke rings, studied his smoke.

“Didn’t see those dudes coming, Jackson. I pay, you know, so I see the locals, the government. This was some private fuckin’ army out of nowhere fucked up my crew. Bad motherfuckers, not head cases. Professional, quiet. Kind of guys make shit vanish. Like dictators or coke dealers or anybody pisses them off. So badass they scared me and all I saw was what they left behind. I thought you might be connected, so I went deeper on you. I know, you haven’t ripped me off, lightened your load or made any contact. But maybe you have some friends. Had to check. Business is business.”

“I don’t know —”

“That’s why you get a going-away present. If you did know we’d have to stop being friends. Then you’d be dead. And even if you don’t know nothing about some crew of invisible badasses I’m thinking, you know, maybe I’d be dead right behind you. Two good looking dudes like us? That would break a lot of hearts.” Magnum man held the gun down at his side, patted the door of the van. “Here’s your postcard.” He waved his hand casually as he stepped back. “Whose idea was the piss biscuit truck?”

“I thought you picked them. Like these guys owed you money, you borrowed the trucks.”

“Too much work, too many people. My man Lonnie usually steals them but he took up with a stripper, her boyfriend didn’t think much of him. So I used that red-headed guy this time. He must not like you.”

“Yesterday, when they told me to make this run? He said I looked like a guy who drove a Chevelle SS and stole his girlfriend.”

“He thinks everybody looks like that guy. Wasn’t you, was it?”

“No. Know how he feels. Mine got stolen by an old college in England.”

“You gotta feel better about that, though, than if it had been some skinny dude from Modesto with a SS and perfect hair. That shit could really turn you. Especially the hair. Hard to argue with the SS, but a bitch could let you know you need to up your style before she walks, you know?”