So there it goes, September. Already out of reach, almost irretrievably lost among the past months of time gone by.
It will never be September, 2006 again. Memory will distort it to unrecognizable displays. I’ll sit solemnly in death watch, for it will not last the night.
Just threw a short story, Gazpacho, up at the Crapometer because there’s a point, just as with middle age, where the vision is not clear close up. The timing was right: they were looking for submissions, and frankly, I was looking for help.
I’ve hesitated before to go through some critique groups as often the majority are geared towards fantasy or crime or romance novels, but sometimes you get a member of the crew who is more comfortable with reading a diversity of style and genre. And I’m in a hurry here, wanting to get some of these stories out while the interest still lingers within me. I’ll likely just set for a while after that.
Got some good information back, and am learning where the story is successful and where it falters. And, its not always in what the commenter means to say, but what he doesn’t realize he’s said that tells me much.
For some time now the road had been deserted, white and scorching yet, though the sun was already reddening the western sky. He walked along slowly in the dust, stopping from time to time and bobbling on one foot like some squat ungainly bird while he examined the wad of tape coming through his shoesole. He turned again. Far down the blazing strip of concrete a small shapeless mass had emerged and was struggling toward him. It loomed steadily, weaving and grotesque like something seen through bad glass, gained briefly the form and solidity of pickup truck, whipped past and receded into the same liquid shape by which it came. (p. 1)
Ah, my man, McCarthy. Once again I fall totally into his story. McCarthy has a knack of drawing the setting, then coloring it in just enough to let you look into a three-dimensional world.
Our minds are directed to the road, then the sky, then back down to the the infinitesimal dust of the road, as if to say, this may be small compared to the universe of the sky and beyond, but this, this is where it’s all going to happen.
Love it.
Ah, leave it to Hitch to fulfill the gothic needs by including one of the stories of M.R. James, The Ash Tree.
Witches, curses, horrible deaths over the generations, bedrooms haunted by an old ash tree that nearly touches a family home.
This is the kind of story on which I was raised.
Rejection on a job received in the mail today–finally. Shouldn’t have gotten myself hepped up about it, and I’m glad I started deflating early on. So much for positive thinking.
In truth, the past seven years or so have been a dedicated effort to change direction. Went to school, have been writing like constantly, learning new things in computer software and technology, but as the years pass, it’s time to face the facts.
So grandma’s gonna take up her knitting needles after all.
This is one of the more interesting digital videos I’ve seen–fascinating because of the work involved.
Thanks to Dennis Jerz for the link.
I’ve been getting more and more points towards You-Tube, and while I think there’s a lot to learn there for me–as well as enjoy–I’m afraid that if I make it a regular stop I’ll just never get any other work done.
Need a Cormac fix. But since I’ve so many books in the pile, I’m pulling one out of there (have a total of five left in there!): The Orchard Keeper.
Am still enjoying Stories for Late at Night, and will post on any wowsers that come up, but Halliday’s Pieces of Silver was the high point of the anthology so far–it was a story that, like Tillie Olsen’s I Stand Here Ironing, will be with me forever.
Red maple leaves on the black asphalt of the driveway like bright drops of blood.
Summer, wounded, dying.
Oh my, what a fool I am. The story I was so taken with, Pieces of Silver, in the Stories for Late at Night anthology I’m reading is one by Brett Halliday–who I now find out after Googling the name is quite well established in the mystery genre, including the Mike Shayne series.
The story was so much more than mere mystery to me, however. It held a depth that would have well placed it in the literary short story category.
UPDATE: I loved this story so much that I’ve just search the web for it online. Alas, no such luck. I’ve also talked myself out of typing it up for you–that’s how much I loved it.
But even while it may not make sense to you, I must give you this, the closing:
He was a fool, you say, to throw money at the feet of Lolita hile she danced the fluencita for her lover?
But yes, senor, that indeed would have been a foolish thing for the gringo to do.
You have misunderstood me, senor. It was not the gringo Thurston who threw the money at Lolita’s feet. Dias, no!
He was not that foolish. Indeed, he had already turned his back to leave when it happened.
But it was very unwise of him to pay Senor Simpson ith American silver dollars.(p. 153)
Okay, so I’m navigating my way through a wonderful piece by Steve Ersinghaus called Stoning Field, and I get lost in the loop, traversing a Mobius Strip it would seem. But all the while, the reader is learning navigation (unless like me, you were shorted on patience in birth and your monthly supply has been used and you know the author well enough to cry for help). Going through it again, I recall the placement of buttons and what they are coded to do. When a button is not where you’d expect it to be, you wave the ol’ cursor around in despair, and voila!
Immediately following, I played a few quick games of Solitaire, as I often do to keep my hands busy while my mind is pondering something a bit more weighty. Something strikes me, gels into this: whoever the gods be that create hypertext, games, etc., must know something about their prospective audience. What attracts them? What leads them onward? What is their tolerance level of frustration? This last is likely one of the most important.
In navigating Solitaire, I have established a pattern: move from the right columns first, avoid tagging on until necessary, i.e., a king comes up, move a card down from the deck first if it’s going onto the finished pile, etc. But there’s something else I notice: there’s a stupidity handicap built it. I’ve always suspected this, but I believe it now to be true. If you play the game dumb–missing the obvious plays, after a game or two the setup is geared so you can’t possibly lose unless you continue on a downward spiral in alertness and gameplay.
So, who and on what do the creators base their patterns to avoid losing their players?
This may not be a part of the nationwide campaign slogans, but Connecticutitians will understand and appreciate this…
My husband walks into the living room where I am computing and watching TV, and says: "Well, Gibb, I love you," and adds, "I’m Jim Gibb and I approve this message."
The gringo Thurston? Si, senor. I remember him well. I was one of those who went with him on his trip into the hill country exploring for oil. (p. 141)
So starts out Pieces of Silver, a short story by Brett Halliday, and this opening line explains better than I much of the story right there. Thurston is missing, and the narrator is telling the reader what happened to him. The difference in cultures, an American in Mexico, is a large part of the plot, and the first person narrator is able to tell us that Thurston was a disagreeable man whose scorn for the natives is palpable. We find that on his trip, he eyed a man’s young daughter, Lolita, and the man, Simpson, is himself an American who has married a local Indian and raised a family there.
Hitting upon both family and cultural traditions, Halliday presents us with a plot buildup where we begin to expect trouble from the very beginning–knowing, of course, that it will result in Thurston’s disappearance which we’re told from the very first sentence. And the writing is intimate and inviting, as the father, Simpson, fearing for his daughter’s purity threatened by the lustful Thurston, sends for her betrothed to seal their intentions in a celebration:
Faster and more fast was the beat of the music,and Lolita circled faster and yet faster, stamping her right foot sharply, her eyes hold those of her lover, a strange quiver in every muscle of her young body that was bent backward like a drawn bow. (p. 151)
The conflict and arc build to climax:
But it ended suddenly. Over the heads of the watchers, half a dozen American dollars clattered at Lolita’s feet.
The music stopped. Lolita looked down at the coins with round eyes, a flush of shame on her cheeks. Ruoey Urregan whirled about, his face black with anger. (p. 152)
Urregan, her betrothed, and the others want to kill the American, Thurston, for this insult, but they leave, and the following morning Thurston and his crew head out for the hills. He is lured by the Indians on promises of locations of oil, and is never heard from again. But the twist (and spoiler): It was not Thurston, but Lolita’s own father who threw the coins, knowing that Thurston would be blamed and murdered.
Great little story with all the elements of intrigue and social conscience and drama.
Winding down from a nice long bout of inspiration. Unable, however, to polish up and finish.
I used to like this part–still do, but not when I seem to just be spinning my wheels. Why is it so hard to see the problems in your own work, and then to fix them? May be time to go back to basics on a serious level. Dug out my notes on a Contemporary Fiction course and will go through them all tonight. The story is just stuck and closed to me; I need to look at it with a new eye and give it one more try before it’s left behind me with all the others.
Why am I always the last to know?
My friend, Nancy, happened to mention it today and what struck me as odd is that Willie has gotten away with it as much as he has. Being openly honest and traveling for months, any pull-over of his bus has just gotta produce something, no? But then again, the law would need just cause to stop and search, so it’s up to the mechanical guys to make sure the bus is always in tip-top condition with no tail lights out, etc.
Anyhow, he seemed to get through it all easy enough.
Have been hearing reviews of the newest Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and I’m sorely tempted to order it even though I have No Country and the Border Trilogy on the hearth (and maybe a couple more).
Though my writing enthusiasm is rapidly fading from sheer frustration, I’m still wound up on reading but there’s just so damn much to read and such diversity of fare. I still need to get into those philosophy and historical classics, and I need to also plow back into the interactive fiction (once I get out of the padded room with no door in Book and Volume) as well as the four or five video stories such as Still Life and Silent Hill and Watchmaker. And, of course, the learning of software that I just don’t have the mind for right now.
But McCarthy beckons, sending the Judge dancing around in my brain once more to tempt me back into the depths.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology