. Spinning .

Jack leaves for work at seven a.m. He gets coffee at the diner on 6th and East Elm.  He takes it black with two sugars. It keeps him warm and awake. He cannot afford the prices at the trendy coffee shops and only once did he let someone buy him a latte. He didn’t think it tasted four dollars’ worth.

In front of the diner he sets up his pot and rings his bell and all day watches people rush by him, a Salvation Army Santa. He is a fifty-one year-old former aeronautical engineer but he hasn’t worked as that for almost three years. He had a job at Home Warehouse for nine months until they closed several stores. A few months later they had to give up the house.

A woman drops two quarters into the pot. Ho-ho-ho, Merry Christmas! he says. She smiles as if she had written a check for five hundred dollars. Smug. Her coat is fine camel hair wool and she wears a bright holly green cashmere scarf with matching gloves and hat. He suspects that she’ll be buying a laptop computer for her children for Christmas. She’ll get diamond earrings from her husband, or maybe a large sapphire ring. Claire, he remembered, preferred the pale blue of tanzanite.

He stamps his feet, he is cold, but the cold doesn’t cut into him quite as much anymore. Officer, he calls out, can you watch this for me for a minute? The policeman walks over but he won’t take the bell. Jack puts that on the ground just under the pot.  He hurries into the diner, heads for the men’s room and relieves himself. He washes his hands and buys a coffee and buttered hard roll on his way out. Thank you, Officer, he says, and picks up the bell.

Every day three bankers walk by just after noon. They converse as they walk at a brisk pace, weaving around people who aren’t walking as quickly, or who stop to dig into a pocket for change. Each of the bankers looks Jack in the eye, still talking to each other, not missing a step nor a word. None of them ever throws a coin into the pot. Jack holds their stare with his own. You’re all assholes, it says but they don’t seem to care.

Merry Christmas to you too, Santa! says an unbelievably tiny old woman. She bites off a mitten and digs around in her purse to come up with three dollar bills that she drops into the pot. Cold today, she says, pulling the mitten back on over fingers blue not from cold but poor circulation, Jack thinks. He smiles at her, a smile a bit warped with shame.

As the afternoon loses its sunshine and the dusk sneaks in with its cold, Jack starts to pack up his gear. It has been a good day. He’s been given two coffees, a hot chocolate, a cup of soup and a rough mental count of about seventy-three dollars in the pot. He sighs and climbs the three flights up to his room at the Y, glad that he can at least now pay the rent.

Honestly, my best stories come from a single opening line and today’s just flowed neatly from this:

When I was ten, my father handed me a shoebox and told me that in it was a piece of the sky.

Just wish I had more time to keep at the editing; I’m still in the afterglow phase of completing the narrative and believing it’s really all finished, knowing that if I’m going to submit anything this season I need to do it like in the next two days.

“Maude Nichols found her husband’s gun, loaded it and shot it directly into her left ear because she couldn’t find the remote for the TV. “

While I’m settling into the Wordpress format and repairing whatever mistakes I’ve made along the way, I’ve also made up a new home page for the Mac, one I’d set up a long time ago but never got into.

Netvibes was a good choice for a home page since it allows many widgets and plugins and stuff to fill the page easily with what I’m mainly interested in seeing first thing on the screen. One gets used to a certain arrangement of things–guess that’s why they call it “home.” But my Excite page that I’ve always used for years had stopped making the investment portfolio available and once upon a time that was vital info to me. I’ve since found a few different plugins that serve the purpose, but really, I don’t even want to watch my future crumble in today’s scenario. The only other thing I really liked at Excite was a local tv listings grid and while I can’t find something like that, I’ve been able to delete most of the other data off the site and just link to Excite for that purpose. A bit more trouble, but I’m adapting.

What I don’t have completely set up yet and have been working on is a Public Netvibes page–though even in its undeveloped form it’s had two requests for befriending; one of which was a request to help the user learn English whereby he’d teach me Turkish in return.

Which brings me to some of the other social networking systems I’ve joined, such as twitter and Facebook. I like twitter; it allows me to voice those little random thoughts or doings that run through the day. Since I’ve been asked not to twitter so often, I’ve learned to curb my urges to tweet on impulse, though I suppose any who don’t like what I do or say have full freedom to stop following me. I don’t follow a lot of those who follow me; maybe I’m just antisocial, but it doesn’t seem necessary to me to have hundreds of so-named ‘friends’ when I don’t have anything in common with them except for the service itself. Same with Facebook; I know lots of people on Facebook but I’ve only invited one person to follow me, though I’ve responded to all who have asked me the same.

What’s odd about Facebook, to me, is that in searching around, there are so many people I know but they are all from different parts and times of my life. It just would seem odd to merge family, co-workers, friends, etc. all together on one plane in time. This is something I need to investigate further.

The weblog is what I’m most comfortable with working in. Perhaps it’s just my stubborn streak in learning the new, or making changes, or adding to what is already a heavy writing schedule and scattered arena of the internet. This too is something I need to delve into further; to find a place or two that brings everything together in their own separate modules.

Just a brief bit:

Sometimes your past lies just ahead of you. Because you weren't around, or didn't like it, or maybe you were zonked on drugs or maybe just too busy being someone who you weren't.

Bradley Verasovich was one of those kids you just knew would turn out bad. No, he didn't bury kittens in sand up to their head or pull wings off flies; as a matter of fact, there was a short span of a couple months one summer where he caught flies, those large horse flies, and kept them in jars as pets. He'd painted little windows and a red door on the jar and fed them peas.

Out of war come stories, those of horror, those of courage, those of love. My grandmother, as did many grandmothers and grandfathers, repeated them often enough to ensure that their survival served a purpose. They needed to show the evil side of human nature as a warning, but also to reveal the good so that it did not get burdened by the one to overwhelm the other to the point where hope was lost. My grandmother told the story of how kindness had saved her from the gas chamber. It was only as an adult that I discovered that it was all a lie.

This opening that comes to me in the dark hours of a predawn cup of coffee comes with a plot that leads it to a dramatic arc–unusual for me since I very rarely see the story laid out until I’ve started writing it. But even at this stage, only minutes old, I see the telling of it, the twist. And there’s something else that becomes clear; it could well prove best told in the form of hypertext.

It seems that the theme of perception guides my use of hypertext as a medium; when I find two strong characters it seems that there will automatically be two points of view that intertwine and parallel themselves to possibly different ends. This was the secondary basis of my first story written in hypertext–the main being the choices made that bring about different conclusions. Still, I’m not proficient enough with the hypertext medium–even with the marvel of Storyspace that makes organization of story lines so much easier–to make full use of the form.

With the above beginning, the natural inclination is to return to the past via the grandmother’s story and to show as well the reality of an opposing point of view, a version that includes the events that grandma didn’t witness that would change her small segment of experience of WW II considerably from one of kindness to one of biased hatred. That would be, of course, the story of the German officer who she considers her savior, but who in fact selects her in particular, as a Polish friend to Jews, for death. What saves her is not him, but a more intricate series of events played out in careful time.

My task now is to either let the story play itself out in traditional text form, or to toss this opening paragraph into Storyspace and see if I can learn the patterns that would tell it perhaps in more depth.

A hawk, colored pink by a rising sun, circles a still-grumpy sky that reluctantly gives up its clouds to southern winds.

…I’ve been led into the lives of an old man and for two days he’s bothered me with a need to tell me things:

But as her face came to his mind he shuddered, frowned, and gathered his saliva in a hot angry ball of phlegm when something made him swallow it instead.  His rage disarmed by thought instead of action made him realize it was because she’d left him, sickened, died and passed into another world where he was not allowed to go, and that it was between them, the very first time one had gone somewhere distant without the other. Without the opportunity, without permission and agreement, for if she’d asked, he knew now he would gladly go.

I’ve no idea where this is coming from, but Poe has left me and somehow a Chekov wannabe had moved into his room:

As he traveled he realized that birdsong followed, had been following him for a while.  He stopped and looked up at the trees, the branches reaching to each other across windows of bluest sky.  Each time the bird would call, his head would jerk in that direction and he’d spin around in place, his eyes watching for what his ears would tell him.  He did this many times and faster each until he felt himself get dizzy and the branches reaching down instead of holding hands above him.

This is a continuation of this strange short story I started yesterday right here at Spinning though I’ll likely remove that post shortly since I see this going somewhere I like–I think.

But where from comes the voices?  (Did I just write "where from comes?")

The farther that he fell from God the greater grew the need to tell a world he knew that didn’t know that he’d once woven wreaths from grapevine, pressed the fruit into a wine.  No one cared, he knew, of a little blue horse crocheted by loving hands to sleep beside him in the cradle. It would likely end as dust beside the broken wheels of bicycles and houses torn apart by another man’s machinery and ground beneath the teeth of giants eating earth.

A friend commented on a post at Spinning about aging in that the prose should be turned into a poem.  I agree that I can take this off-the-cuff post further, but I think what I’d like to do with it is expand it into short story. There’s a seed of darkness in there that needs to be exposed and as I believe that story seeks its form, I think this needs to be a linear narrative (it deals with time) and need not be of any particularly long length–perhaps even a flash fiction piece to bring out that dark side with the most impact.

I’m thinking of a woman who believes something wrong is happening to her body as she notes the changes of natural aging.  Everyone pooh-poohs her anxious complaints and yet, we find that something strange indeed is going on.  I like that.

Draft #5 means only that there were enough changes made to Draft #4 (and on backward) to warrant a completely new draft number.  But this is it.  I must move on. 

Only A Phone Call Away 5.pdf

Interesting too that in Lonnie’s post today entitled Letting Go she speaks of the difficulty in letting go of characters.  But she refers to different portions of the process.  In one, she mentions letting the characters do their own thing, go their own way regardless of what she would like to have happen.  This is an essential part of writing because otherwise, we limit them to our own experience and expectations.  She also covers the decision to go ahead and let something bad happen to a favorite character.  This is tough too; not knowing for sure if they will recover.  They will be changed–but for the good or bad?

But there’s a third step to be taken here as well: that when the story’s done, it leaves your head.  Yolanda’s gone, and now too, this mid-life crisised wife and mother is on her way out the door.