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By Tgreen, February 25, 2019 9:54 am

Big old wall of words coming at you to talk about writing, and planning, and doing both poorly, and also an update on the sad but inevitable fate of Happy Friday. Take a look, if you dare…

Arizona

Longtime readers — and you know who they are because they’re the ones who run in the other direction at the first sign of the phrase “longtime readers”; I mean, Carolyn’s read so many of these things I think she gets on a plane to another country any time I start a paragraph with the letter L just to be safe — may recall back in 2015 when I tracked my daily writing with a countdown from January 1 to December 31. When that ended, I still tried to keep up the daily schedule but missed a day sometime in January, then missed another day, and eventually lapsed back into my usual writing schedule of doing something when I felt like it or when I had a deadline.

Which is why when 2017 rolled around, I did the same thing. I wrote every day and did a little social media countdown to keep myself honest. And again, on December 31 I stopped, figuring I’d made my point. And maybe I did, because this time I didn’t stop the daily writing. Sure, some days it was revising old stuff instead of all new writing. And some days it was a few sentences or paragraphs. But other days it was a couple thousand words. The point is, I didn’t stop when the countdown stopped. I still haven’t stopped. I’ve done something writing-related every day since January 1, 2017. This had been good and bad.

It’s been good because, hey, it’s always good to get the words down on paper, or on the screen. But it’s been bad because it’s hard to stay focused every day. It’s hard to stay goal-oriented when some days you’re just too tired to put the words in any kind of order. It’s too easy to focus on whatever you’re working on at that moment without seeing how, or even if, it fits into some bigger plan. It gets easy to abandon any sense of a bigger plan because you can always say you’re working every day and therefore of course you’re being productive.

But over the last 2+ years, I realized that the daily work is worth a lot more if it’s directed at a specific goal. It doesn’t mean I’m any better at doing it that way, but at least I know when I’m doing something constructive and when I might just be spinning my wheels, and that’s a start.

My pattern for the last couple of years has been pretty consistent. I shoot for a story for The First Line every quarter, depending on what line they’re offering, though usually I take a shot no matter what the line is. Sometimes I just don’t end up with a complete story, and whatever I wrote sits unfinished in the archives unless and until I find some way to repurpose it. I also try to shoot for The Last Line and Tales from whatever industry they’re highlighting that year. This keeps me working on at least 6 short stories a year, and I usually find another couple of places to submit to, which helps to give me things to focus on.

I also do NaNoWriMo every year, which forces me to bang out 50K words in a month. I’ve written several awful books this way, and I’ve also written a couple of books that might be worth something if I put in the work. And that’s been the dilemma I’ve faced the last few years. Do I bail on the short stories and put in the time on one of these novels, or do I stick to the somewhat instant gratification of the short stories and hope that somehow I’ll squeeze in time for one of the novels someday? The last few years I’ve mostly been doing that second one, and it hasn’t really worked.

So when it came time to figure out the plan for 2019, I thought I’d put the short stories aside for a bit and focus on a novel. Last year I’d picked this space opera thing that was mostly a love letter to the Star Wars and Star Trek of my youth and that wasn’t completely awful. To fix it I’d need to do a lot of world building and to be honest I got lazy about it. Instead I moved to another book that was kind of a suburban noir. It also needed work, like it needed at least one new character added in there so that the ending made more sense, but that level of work seemed a little easier. So I picked that as my 2019 work.

Punch it, Chewy!

Then, while flying the red eye from Arizona in early January, I had an idea for a project. Four parts, spread out over the year. Four stories. All stand-alone and all taking place in Arizona. I sketched out a few ideas and went to work, because the first story had a February 1 deadline. I started a story, ran out of steam, started a second story, ran out of steam, figured out how the first story was supposed to go and went back to that, all while trying to live a life and do my day job.

It didn’t work. I was still standing up and punching as late as 11PM on January 31, but I just couldn’t make the deadline. So now I have to decide if I walk away and go back to my original plans for 2019, or if I take a crack at the next story anyway and see if I can make it work with a decent amount of time to dedicate to it. The cool thing about the idea, for me, was that the stories would be stand-alone, but when they were all finished, I’d add some common thread to the ones that didn’t sell and maybe try to self-publish a little novella. And that’s the thing that keeps me considering this idea at all after last month’s failure.

I’ve still given up on any other short story work for the year unless some amazing idea comes to me, because it’s past time to get serious with editing and revising one of these novels to try and sell. I’ve done some work on that suburban noir already, and that space opera thing never completely leaves my brain, so I’m gonna devote some time to that one as well. The goal is to have at least one of them more closely resembling an actual book by the end of 2019. There’s still a ton more that would have to be done after that, but it’s a huge first step I’ve never quite achieved before. Now I get to see if I can do it.

Of course, if the opportunity to write a reboot of happens to come up, all these plans get thrown out the window, so if you’ve got any casting ideas for 2019’s Sheriff Lobo, feel free to send them my way.

Hey there, where you goin’…

The problem, though, is my brain is like a magnet for questionable story ideas, and just last week something I wrote to someone in an email got me thinking, and now I have several pages of notes I’m writing to try and convince myself to write the damn thing, or to not write the damn thing. It’s kind of hard to tell sometimes. All of which is kind of a long way to say that planning is hard and almost never works. There’s a little free hard-earned wisdom from your Uncle T.

And since people have asked, I suppose I should give an update about the only writing of mine some of you folks care about. Happy Friday. People want to know if Happy Friday is ever coming back. And the answer is that I used to think it was, but since it’s been dead and gone since Trump’s 100th day, it seems obvious that Happy Friday is official done for. It had a good run but everything has to end sometime, and that last Top 100 List was as good a way as any to wrap things up. So yeah, Happy Friday is finished. More than wenty years, on and off, is nothing to sneeze at, but that’s enough. If I was ever gonna write a funny joke, I’m sure it would’ve happened already. So Rest In Peace, Happy Friday.

Which, of course, means it’ll be back at some point to cover the 2020 election season. I’m feeling pretty confident this election is the one that’s gonna finally break this country, and I would hate to miss out on that. So I just have to get some momentum on the fiction writing and then we’ll all get to see if I’ve got anything left in the tank to document the absolute fucking circus I expect 2020 to be.

2020 is coming…

T “this was way too many words to have to read on a Monday morning so I don’t blame all of you for never making it all the way down to here” green

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By Tgreen, April 27, 2016 11:11 pm

There came a day when a small web-based company of no particular note in a small city of no particular interest found itself on the brink of losing two of its biggest clients. The spark was gone, the work was bland, and the clients were cheap. It was a dangerous combination and the small company could not afford to lose both clients. It couldn’t afford to owe either one, really, but there was a secret contingency plan to lay off half the company and do some anonymous side work for one of the more reputable porn sites until better clients could be landed. The three execs who knew of this plan didn’t ever want to have to implement it, but each one of them had large mortgages and unhappy marriages to support and they were willing to sacrifice whatever was necessary in order to keep that money coming in.
One of the middle managers at the company, a harried man of 40 named Gil, took it upon himself to get an outside perspective. Since he didn’t know about the secret contingency plan he didn’t know that he was one of the lucky ones who would not be laid off. He also didn’t know that this would prove to be a mixed blessing because he was actually a paying customer of the reputable porn site in question and it would have taken no more than three days for this information to work its way through the now much smaller company. But without knowing any of this, he came to the office one day with a plan to fix things and a new consultant to potentially fix more problems in the future.
It soon became obvious that while his coworkers were happy to have the idea that solved the immediate client problem, none of them appreciated that Gil was now bringing in an outsider on a regular basis. Some of them didn’t want the competition and some of them were afraid the consultant would be able to take one look at them and see just his little they did anymore. And others just didn’t want to be bothered learning another name and sharing the office snacks and having another person whose weekend they now had to ask about. And so the first meeting with Lou the consultant went poorly. No ideas were shared and no weekends were laughed about and no plans were made to put together a Happy Hour to welcome the new guy.
Gil felt responsible for this problem, because he was, and so he set out to fix it. Since he’s fixed the original client problem, he thought maybe he was on a roll and it was probably best if he struck now while he was on a hot streak. He set out to gather his brain trust around him to come up with a plan on how to deal with Lou, realized he didn’t have a brain trust, and so he forced the people who reported to him to gather in a room late one afternoon to discuss the situation. Within minutes he learned that while the group had several different reasons for not liking Lou, the one thing they all agreed on was that Lou knew nothing about their business, and possibly knew nothing about any kind of business. Kevin, who’d taken on the role of ringleader at this meeting, kept calling him an idiot savant without the savant, and it only went downhill from there.
“Where did you even find this guy?” Kevin asked.
“I met him at a party,” Gil said. “We got to talking about work and I mentioned some of the problems we were having and he had some good ideas. So good that I asked if he’d be interested in a consulting gig. And he was.”
“You seriously offered him a job after meeting him at a party?” Kevin said.
“Yes.”
“That was a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
“No good has ever come from anyone you meet at a party.”
“I don’t agree,” Gil said.
“I met my wife at a party,” Martin said from his seat at the end of the table.
“There, see?” Gil said with an air of triumph.
“See what? He’s agreeing with me,” Kevin said.
They all looked down the table at Martin. “Who were you agreeing with?” Gil asked. “Me or him?”
“Him.”
“There, see?” Kevin said. “It’s unanimous. Get rid of him.”
“The two of you agreeing doesn’t count as unanimous,” Gil said.
“Then let’s take a vote.”
“No vote.”
“Oppressor.”
“I’m not oppressing anything. It doesn’t matter who wants to get rid of him. The contract is ironclad. If we fire him we still have to pay him everything.”
This was true. What Lou lacked in business acumen he made up for with his uncanny ability to negotiate a good contract. Besides guaranteeing his fee, plus a fat early termination penalty, his contract stipulated he was only required to come to the office once a week, he didn’t have to answer every email he received, and while he was expected to offer advice and solutions, he didn’t have to offer good advice or solutions, or say anything that was remotely helpful. It could be argued that by signing this contract the company was proving it deserved every hit it had taken recently, but Gil refused to consider that possibility.
“All I want you to do is talk to the guy when he’s here,” Gil said. “He offered me good advice at the party, so he’s not a moron. Maybe he’s just unmotivated. Maybe he just needs to loosen up and feel more comfortable with us.”
“Yes,” said Phil from his seat at the other end of the table.”
“See, Phil knows.”
“No, it’s not that;” Phil said as he held his phone up for all to see. “I knew that advice he gave you sounded familiar.”
“Let me guess, he got it off of one of those motivational poster sites,” Kevin said.
“No, not even close,” Phil said.
“See, give me some credit here,” Gil said.
“He got it off an episode of The Office,” Phil said. “I’ve got it queued up right here if you want to watch it.”
“We’re taking our business advice from episodes of The Office now?” Kevin said. “Is that ironic or pathetic or some new level of bad we’ve never seen before?”
“Was it at least a good episode?” Carol asked. She rarely spoke up at these meetings because she had a hard time masking her contempt for Gil’s management style. In truth, she was usually so quiet Gil would forget she was even present, and today he spun his head around in surprise at the sound of her voice.
“Trick question,” Phil said. “There are no good episodes of The Office.”
“That’s not true,” Carol said. “It was really good for a couple of years.”
“British version was way better,” Kevin said.
The debate continued for the better part of an hour, and only ended when Kevin noticed that it was time to go home. They were unable to agree on the quality of The Office or which version was better. They also realized that the debate about The Office had distracted them completely from the matter at hand, and left them with no strategy on how to handle Lou’s upcoming visit.
“How can I even talk to the guy now that I know his advice came from a TV show?” Gil asked. “You guys are gonna have to talk to him.”
“How can you not talk to him?” Kevin asked. “Will you just hide all day?”
“Maybe I should call out sick.
“If you call out sick I’m calling out sick too,” Phil said.
“How can you do that? You won’t even know if I did it until you come in to the office yourself,” Gil said. “You can’t call out sick once you’re already here.”
“I’ll just say I’ve got whatever you have.”
“Like an epidemic,” Kevin said.
“Don’t say epidemic,” Gil said. “Not after last time.
The last time the office thought there was an epidemic came the day after Karen from Accounting threw a Game of Thrones season finale party that ended in one case of alcohol poisoning, a half dozen sick calls, and a rumored pregnancy scare. Pictures from the first half of the party were featured on the company’s social media page. Pictures from the second half were almost universally deleted upon viewing. Since no one was willing to admit how far things had gotten out of hand, though, everyone claimed to have a virus and the HR department came within an hour of implementing the company’s pandemic plan. This plan involved a contact with a company in Mumbai that promised to seamlessly continue the company’s work with an expansive group of outsourced employees. Ironically, it was later acknowledged that had the pandemic plan actually been implemented, the company would have turned the largest quarterly profit in history. Thus there as an unspoken rule that no more than three employees could call out sick at the same time.
“I’m reserving the right to call out tomorrow,” Gil said. “So you bastards better show up. You too, Carol.”
“You can’t include her in the blanket bastard statement?” Kevin asked.
“I’m just playing it safe. I’m not sure where HR came down on that one,” Gil said. “I failed their last two quizzes so I feel like I’m on very thin ice with them. Best to behave myself.”
“But calling out sick to avoid your contractor is fine?”
“It’s a strategy.” Gil gathered his tablet and his notepad and stood. “I trust you guys to talk to Lou and get something out of him. Then, when I’ve recovered from my 24-hour flu, we can discuss it at length and figure out our next step.” Before anyone could say anything else, he hurried from the room. People could say what they wanted to about Gil, but he could leave a room faster than anyone else in the company when he was motivated.
The rest of them looked at each other, wondering who was going to call out sick tomorrow and help start the next epidemic scare.
“You think this guy watches The Walking Dead too?” Carol asked.
“Why?” Kevin asked.
“Maybe he could offer some advice from that show.”
“Okay, now we’ve got a plan,” Kevin said. “Good meeting, everybody.”

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By Tgreen, November 27, 2012 12:42 am

If you understand nothing else, understand how much I hate to quit. How much I hate to quit just about anything, really (though I’ll admit to enjoying it when I’ve quit a couple of jobs during my career, including probably one more than most of you realize…). It’s just not in my nature to quit easily, and I’ve fought some damn stupid fights for some really lost causes in my day. I don’t even regret most of them, because fighting’s better than quitting.
That said, there are some realities that even I won’t fight, and so it’s time to face the fact that this year, NaNoWriMo kicked my ass. Kicked it worse than the Patriots handing a beatdown to the Jets.
For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is simple — write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November, win nothing but the feeling of accomplishment at actually writing a book in 30 days. I’ve tried it several times and I’ve won more often than not. But not this year, no sir. This year I suffered a good old-fashioned ass whupping.
I knew it was coming too. Could see it real clear real early, but I had to try anyway. The storm threw me off pace at the start. Not because my house was damaged or anything — I was real lucky there — but because I took in some displaced house guests and, most importantly, I was stuck working from home for that first week. So much of my NaNoWriMo writing gets done during my daily commute and I didn’t have one of those for nearly a week. And when I finally did, those buses were too crowded to get much done.
I think by the end of Day 1, I was about 1,000 words off pace. Turns out that was the closest to being on schedule I was ever gonna get this month. I was still making a decent effort, though, until my trip to Disney. That’s what blew the whole plan out of the water, and if I had any sense in my head I would’ve figured it out by my second day in Florida. I didn’t figure it out, and instead still was making an effort when I got back. Even after barely writing 1,000 words that whole week, somehow I thought I could still pull this off.
So today, I quit. No NaNoWriMo book for me this year. The idea I was working on was halfway decent. It had some potential. I could’ve done something with it under better circumstances. Don’t believe me? Here’s the first paragraph that I came up with late on November 1:

I spoke to the doctor after the storm and he gave me the worst news I could’ve imagined. He told me I was fine. Perfectly healthy for a man of my age and station. Which meant I was gonna have to find another way out. You see, I couldn’t just leave. Couldn’t just quit. If I wanted out there was only one way to do it — feet first in a box. And the doctor’s report wasn’t cooperating.

This narrator was caught up in a bad real estate deal. Oddly enough, a couple of days in I decided it was the same real estate deal that was a major plot point of another NaNoWriMo book I wrote several years ago. That year I hit the word count but never got to the ending. Maybe this real estate plot point is cursed and I should stop trying to use it. Maybe some day I’ll crack the code and end up with two semi-connected novels to sell. You just can never tell, which is why I do any of this to begin with. And since after a few pages I dragged in a character from last year’s winning NaNoWroMo novel, I could end up with 3 books. Or not.
As lousy as it feels to quit, it’s a little easier this time because I’ve already got a December deadline for something I think I can sell, and selling’s better than fighting’s better than quitting. Plus, I’ve got 2 other plans in the pipeline that might get me 2 more sales in the first half of 2013. I wouldn’t say no to either one.
I’m not used to quitting, so I’m not quite sure how to end this. Maybe with the last couple of paragraphs before I pulled the plug. In the end I kind of want to know what happens to my main character, so maybe I won’t leave him here. I hope not, anyway. I hate walking away from something like this, a mere 12,752 words into a 50,000 word story:

Jim crossed the room with careful steps. His head swiveled as he tried to see everything at once as he approached the stairway. He peered up into the blackness and frowned. Then he rapped the flashlight against the wooden bannister. The hollow metal-on-wood sound rang out.
“Anybody here?” he called. “Anybody need help?” He banged the flashlight twice more. “Anybody here who doesn’t belong?”
“You think that will work?”
“Might trick one of the dumber ones,” Jim said with a shrug. “Wait here. I’ll check upstairs.”
“No, this is my thing. I’ll go with you.”
“Suit yourself.”
Jim aimed the flashlight beam up the stairs. We could see nothing but dirty carpet and a blank wall at the top. I remembered a large framed painting up there, but it was gone now. Jim started up with slow, careful steps and I followed. The steps were slippery so I grabbed the bannister for support.

And that’s all there is. There ain’t no more. To be honest, I’ve got no idea who’s up those stairs. I’d like to find out, but that’s not gonna happen this month. November kicked my ass. Let’s see if I’ve got a comeback in me for December. Like the song says…

There ain’t no shame
In just giving up and walking away
Walking away
In just giving up
In just giving up
And walking away

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By Tgreen, November 1, 2012 7:53 pm

Day 1 of November’s 50,000 words in 30 days writing challenge and here’s the update:

I’ve got nothing.

The day isn’t over yet, but right now that’s my update. With the following addendum. I took a little time today to finish off a story to submit to The First Line, something I’ve been unable to accomplish for more than a year. I’m not sure the story’s any good — I’m suspicious of anything I write that doesn’t have any dialogue even though I like to try a story like that every now and then — but it’s good to get back in the game. I’m hoping that accomplishment gives me some momentum for this month. I’m gonna need all the help I can get because if you haven’t heard, right now I’ve got nothing.

And to prove my point, here’s a quick excerpt from Secret Identity, the story I submitted today:

Yes, the movie. Plenty of words have been written about the Multyman movie, a few by people who actually knew what they were writing about. All I’ll say about it is yes, it was a bomb, the biggest bomb of the half century according to the people who track such things. It was done on the cheap and yet everyone involved still lost money. It ruined a half dozen careers, including my father’s, and it still tops almost every list of bad movies no matter what the list’s conceit happens to be. It’s never been released on home video and probably never will be. I have access to a copy but have never watched it all the way through. And honestly, if even half the people who claim to have seen it in all its glorious awfulness during its brief run had actually plunked down cash for a ticket, that movie would’ve been a modest hit and maybe some careers could’ve been saved.

The movie fiasco was all my father’s doing, too. He made a bad deal and let the pack of amateurs at the studio step all over him. He didn’t see it that way, though. He went to his early grave claiming they’d done a fine job and if anything, their biggest mistake was being ahead of their time. If that movie has a time, we’re nowhere near approaching it yet.

And now, on to NaNoWriMo!

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By Tgreen, October 19, 2012 8:55 am

Writing experiment time! No, I haven’t hired a pack of monkeys to read my writing, mostly because I’ve seen every Planet of the Apes movie and so the last thing I’d ever want to do is piss off a pack of monkeys. No, this experiment is in response to that storyish excerpt I posted earlier this week. On that one I got busted by coworkers both current and former for writing something that sure as hell seemed like it was, at the very least, strongly influenced by a certain employer of ours.

For now if I decide to write any more office-based stuff, I’ll do it the way I always have — I’ll run it through a filter of nearly a quarter century of office life. That way if you see something familiar, you can think you know what it’s based on or you can wonder if that same insanely stupid shit you lived through really also happened somewhere else. Trust me, most times it’s that second one. So if all this rambling hasn’t scared you off, I’ll have my assistant dim the lights and we’ll see just how much of a Frankenstein’s monster we’re dealing with here…

Ben scrolled through the endless list of emails in his inbox, wondering if he was ever going to figure out how to prioritize this stuff. Most of it was too new to him, so it all looked the same. Every one of these emails could’ve been equally worthless or equally important and so far he had no way of knowing the difference. The only thing Yank had told him about it was to ignore any email marked Urgent.
“Everyone uses that in every email, so the word has no meaning anymore,” Yank had said. “Ignore it enough times and maybe people will learn their lesson.”
Yank had a long list of lessons be wanted people to learn, and Ben was so far unable to figure out that list either.
Ben turned away from his emails to give his eyes a break and he noticed Yank walking toward his desk at a fast pace while looking over at the far end of the office where the conference rooms were located. He didn’t actually look in Ben’s direction until he dropped into the nearest empty chair.
“Hey, Ohio, you know all that good advice I’ve been giving you?” he asked.
“No,” Ben said.
“Well, I’m about to give you some of the most important advice I could ever pass along.”
“And what’s that?”
“Run like hell right now,” Yank said. “Run and don’t look back. See you tomorrow.”
“What? Why?”
“There’s no time. Just get the hell out of here before it’s too late.” Yank jumped from the chair, turned his head to survey the whole office, and then started backing away. He got about three steps when the familiar voice of their tech manager called out from behind them.
“Yank, got a second?”
Yank stopped backing away and said something Ben couldn’t hear that was probably profanity of some sort.
“I’ve got about one second, Kevin. What’s up?”
Kevin nodded at Ben and slouched against a nearby pillar. “You work on that theme park job?”
“Nope.”
“You didn’t ask me which theme park job.”
“Because I haven’t worked on any theme park jobs, so by definition I haven’t worked on whatever job you’re talking about.”
“This was one of Eric’s projects,” Kevin said.
“Eric who quit Eric?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can’t help you, Kevin. He didn’t let me work on his stuff.”
“You refused every request to help him out.”
“What can I say, we had a perfect working relationship,” Yank said. “I miss that guy already. You shouldn’t have let him go.”
“You were at a meeting for this one,” Kevin said. “I know you were.”
Yank cocked his head and appeared to be staring past Kevin as he considered this. Then he frowned.
“Oh, that meeting. I was only at that meeting because there were free sandwiches. I didn’t actually pay attention to anything.”
“Still puts you ahead of anyone else left here tonight,” Kevin said.
“Once again my love of a good sandwich comes back and screws me. Ohio, write that down.”
“Just duck your head in the conference room. See if you can help,” Kevin said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Site’s broken.”
“Which page?”
“All of them.”
“Of course all of them. Why do I even ask? What about Ohio here?”
“What about him? Ben, did you work on this site?”
“He spearheaded it,” Yank said before Ben could say anything.
“We started this site six months before we hired him,” Kevin said. “But an extra set of eyes couldn’t hurt. Ben, do you mind sticking around?”
“No problem.” Ben left his chair and followed Yank across the office
“You just totally sold me out,” he said.
“Maybe that’ll teach you a lesson,” Yank said. “Run when I say run. At least you got asked.”
“Yeah, but it felt like one of those requests you can only say yes to.”
“Look at that, Ohio, you’re learning a new lesson every day.”
There were only two men seated in the conference room. Nate, their lead programmer, and Barney, the guy who owned the place. Ben barely knew either of them, but Barney scared the hell out of him. Not because he was some kind of imposing presence — Ben towered at least half a foot taller than him — but because Ben was not capable of relaxing around anyone who could, in theory, fire him on a whim. He appeared to be a perfectly pleasant man, but Ben steered clear just the same.
Yank pushed the glass doors open and looked at the website displayed on the big screen on the wall.
“All I wanna know is, who broke it?” he asked as he took a seat at the end of the table. Ben circled around and sat to his right.
Yank squinted up at the screen. “This thing looks fine. What’s the problem?”
“You know the name of the park, right?” Nate asked.
“Yep.”
“What’s the website say?”
After a moment’s pause, Yank’s eyes snapped open. “Well now, isn’t that interesting?”
“So interesting I’m screaming right now,” Barney said. “You can’t hear because I’m screaming in my head, but trust me. Screaming at the top of imaginary lungs.”
“Have we ever put up a website with the wrong company name on it, or is this virgin territory for us?” Yank asked.
“I think this is new,” Nate said.
“Then this is a proud moment,” Yank said. “Ohio, when you consider all of the many ways this company has fucked up over the years, I hope you can appreciate what an honor it is to be here when we’ve discovered a brand new way to fuck up. Anyone wanna pose for a picture to capture the moment?”
“Yank, that’s enough,” Barney said. “There’s problems on every page. Wrong artwork, updates that are missing. Who knows what else. We need to go through the whole thing and fix it all.”
“What about Eric’s replacement?” Yank asked. “She seemed like a nice woman. Just the kind of person you’d expect to jump at the chance to help out even if it wasn’t, oh, I don’t know, her fucking job. Where the hell is she right now?”
Nate averted his eyes and Barney shook his head. “She actually quit this morning,” he said.
“How did that happen?”
“She said she couldn’t deal with the late hours, so she walked.”
“Jesus,” Yank said. “She wasn’t here two weeks and she quit? We really need to do something about people like that. If they’re smart enough to quit after two weeks, we should immediately promote them to management, because they’re obviously smarter than the rest of us and probably know things.”
Ben didn’t like the way the vein on Barney’s left temple was pulsing. He wondered if Yank’s strategy was to get the boss to stroke out right here at the table. Then he remembered that Yank and strategy were two words not very well acquainted.
“Yank, seriously, shut up,” Barney said. “I want the next words out of your mouth to be something productive. If they’re not, you can go home and you can stay there until I tell you to come back in. Clear?”
Yank stared at Barney for a long moment, and Ben felt his stomach roll over. He didn’t want Yank to say anything because he was sure these next words would blow everything up. Then Yank turned to look up at the big screen, and he took this in for an uncomfortable minute. He looked back at Barney with a frown.
“I don’t know a goddamn thing about how this site is supposed to look,” he said. “I’m not learning in the next five minutes either. So what we’ll need is printouts of what we’ve got and printouts of everything we were told to do. I’ll compare ’em and I’ll tell Nate here what he has to fix. He’ll make the fixes and in the morning you’ll have something to test.”
“I can get you those screen shots,” Barney said as he rose from his chair. “You need anything else?”
“Ohio here is gonna need a snack in a little while,” Yank said. “He’s gonna be up past his bedtime and he gets cranky if he hasn’t had something to eat.”
Barney shook his head as he left the room.
“He’s not gonna be here the whole night, is he?” Yank asked.
Nate shrugged. “He told me he’d do whatever we need him to do.”
“We fucking need him to go home is what we need him to do. Does he honestly think he’s the lynchpin in this plan?”
“I told him we can handle this,” Nate said. “I don’t know if he’ll listen.”
“You told him too early,” Yank said. “There wasn’t a plan yet.”
“Now that the plan came from you, you think he’s just going to walk out of here?”
“You can’t tell him you can handle something before you can tell him how you’re gonna do it,” Yank said. “You know he gets paranoid. You’ve gotta back your bullshit up or you never get rid of him. Rookie mistake, Nate.”
Nate shrugged.
“Speaking of which, any idea how this got so fucked up?”
“Nope. Usual reasons, probably. It’s like nobody was in charge of the site since Eric left,” Nate said. “This is what happens when nobody’s in charge.”
“Dirty little secret of this place, Ohio, is this is also what happens when somebody’s in charge. Don’t be the somebody that fucks up this bad.”
Ben reached across the table to snag one of the sets of stapled printouts. It was a list of the errors on the site. It was nearly ten pages long. Yank didn’t look at one but he gestured toward the pile.
“I’ve said it before, this is what happens when we hire people who can’t write and people who can’t read and let them work together,” he said. “No one wants to hear that.”
“Charlie was the programmer on this,” Nate said.
“I don’t care. Didn’t Charlie spell his name wrong in his email signature and not notice for three weeks? He’s your example?”
“I’m not arguing with you,” Nate said. “I just wanna fix this and maybe get home while it’s still today.”
“That’s another problem,” Yank said. “No one ever wants to argue about this. Ohio, one of these days we’ll learn our lesson here. Maybe one of us will even be around to see it.”

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By Tgreen, October 15, 2012 7:04 pm

NaNoWriMo’s coming up in a couple of weeks. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing a novel in a month, besides the fact that it’s a terrible idea to write a novel in a month, it’s that to survive National Novel Writing Month, you need to be a little bit crazy. But just a little bit. Start November too sane and you quit in four days. Start it too crazy and by December 1 you’re proudly mailing your 50,000-word manifesto to the authorities and before you know it you’re on the no-fly list. And so once mid-October rolls around I start getting my mind ready to be just a little bit crazy.

So here’s a little bit of nothing that I’m hoping is helping to fine-tune some crazy into my brain. Again, it was written on the bus and in a meeting, so have mercy. Maybe you’ll like it, and maybe you won’t…

“Okay, Ohio, it might be time for Plan B,” Yank said. He paged through the short stack of papers on the table and then dropped them with a dull thump in front of him. “Yeah, definitely Plan B.”
“What’s Plan B?” Ben asked.
“The thing you do when Plan A doesn’t work out, obviously,” Yank said.
“I don’t think I have one,” Ben said.
“How can you not have a Plan B?”
“I didn’t think it would be necessary.”
“Plan B is always necessary,” Yank said. “Nothing stays good forever. In fact, the average shelf life of something good is about six days. Six days, Ohio. How can you walk through life without a Plan B when at any given moment you’re less than a week away from everything going to hell?”
“If that’s the case, then I’m even more screwed than I thought,” Ben said.
“How do you figure?”
“I don’t think I have a Plan A either.”
“Funny thing about life, Ohio. If you don’t choose a Plan A, one will be chosen for you,” Yank said. “Plan A never lasts, anyway. Plan B is what gets you where you’re going.”
“So you actually have a Plan B?”
“Of course I do.”
“Even though I haven’t seen any evidence that you’re capable of making any other kind of plan, you have a Plan B?”
“Exactly. Why waste my time on any other kind of plan when Plan B is the only one that counts?”
“Then what is it?” Ben asked.
“I can’t tell you,” Yank said. “But rest assured it involves at least one border crossing, a bag of unmarked bills, a case of good tequila and a tight red dress.”
“You’re not wearing the red dress in this plan, right?”
“God, I hope not,” Yank said.
Another small group walked past the conference room, deep in an animated discussion. Ben didn’t recognize any of them, and he was pretty sure Yank didn’t either. When Yank recognized someone he usually shared a nasty comment, so his silence spoke volumes. Ben looked down to the other end of the table where Scott sat engrossed in his smartphone. Ben had no idea if he’d even noticed how long they’d been left waiting.
“Does it always work like this?” Ben asked. “Do you always have to sit around just waiting for him to show up?”
“Not all the time, but mostly,” Yank said. “Sometimes he’s got better stuff to do in the afternoon so he makes sure he’s on time for us so he can get us out of the way.”
“Kind of insulting, isn’t it?”
“What’ve you heard about this guy, Ohio?”
“That he’s an idiot,” Ben said.
“Hurtful.”
“You’re the one who told me he’s an idiot.”
“Still hurtful,” Yank said. “But it’s true, this client is an idiot. I’m sure he means well, but he can’t help it, he’s an idiot. Drove everyone who ever had to work with him crazy. I’m like the fourth or fifth person in charge of this job. He ran all the others off.”
“They have problems with this guy and they put you in charge of him?” Ben asked.
“Hard to believe, huh? But that’s what they did. I think they did it because they wanted me to blow up the relationship so he’d drop us. They got sick of him but they can’t drop him, so they put me here to force the issue.”
“There’s no way that happened,” Scott said without looking up from his phone.
“You can’t prove I’m wrong,” Yank said.
“You can’t prove you’re right. Your theory would require everyone we work for to have no business sense whatsoever.”
“I thought you said I can’t prove I’m right,” Yank said. “You just did it for me.”
“I’ll admit, I can’t think of a single reason why they’d put you in front of a client,” Scott said. “But there’s no way they did it so you could drive him off.”
“Yeah, that makes no sense,” Ben said. He probably wouldn’t have said anything if it were just him and Yank here, but Scott’s presence and comment gave Ben some cover.
“Oh, please, it’s passive/aggressive leadership at its best, which is something we specialize in,” Yank said. “If I piss off the client, he drops us and we’ve broken free of a delusional gasbag without getting our hands dirty. We love not getting our hands dirty. And as a bonus, since it’s now officially my fault we lost this guy, I’ve got a huge target on my back if someone decides they need to cut some salary from somewhere.
“But for some reason me and this idiot get along, so not only do I not kill the relationship, I get him to throw three more projects our way. Which means I’ve now done the exact opposite of what my bosses wanted me to do, but they can’t touch me because of all the money I brought in.”
“Wow, I knew you lived in a fantasy world, Yank, but I never realized just how far from reality it is,” Scott said, his thumbs now typing something on his phone. “You could practically ride a unicorn to work at this rate.”
“At least look in my direction if you’re gonna insult me like that,” Yank said. “What’s so damn interesting on that phone?”
“Just Facebook.”
“Come on, I know for a fact you don’t have enough friends to spend that much time on Facebook.”
“You’d be surprised,” Scott said.
“I’d be surprised if this idiot showed before noon.”
“If he’s this much of an idiot, why didn’t you just kill the relationship?” Ben asked.
“Ohio, this guy is an idiot, but he’s an idiot with money, which makes him the best kind of idiot you can find,” Yank said. “I want to keep him around in case one of my plans ever makes it to the financing phase.”
“What plans?” Ben asked.
“Much as I love working for the mouth-breathers we work for, I’m not staying here forever. I’m always on the lookout for something better. So when I’m ready to spin off my own company or franchise or religion, I might need to grab for a piece of this idiot’s checkbook.”
“Religion? You can’t start your own religion,” Scott said.
“Sure you can. You need the right business plan and infrastructure and enough backers with deep pockets, but it can be done.”
“And maybe some theology for your members to believe in,” Scott said.
“Sure, I guess. After the money, of course.”
“Of course.”
“This isn’t your Plan B, is it?” Ben asked.
“Of course not,” Yank replied. “It’s way down there on the list. Like Plan N or O or one of those other letters you run together when you say the alphabet fast. I’ve got lots of details to figure out before I can seriously consider it.”
“At least you’re putting the right amount of thought into it,” Scott said. “I hope work isn’t getting in the way.”
“I will say, however, that Plan B and my religion may end up having tequila in common,” Yank said, ignoring Scott.
“Now you’re talking,” Scott said, ignoring the fact that he was being ignored.
Ben looked past Yank and saw that the hallway was empty. Almost creepy empty, like the kind of empty that exists right before the zombies show up. He realized it was time to start shuffling his calendar around. They weren’t leaving this room any time soon.
“I’ll tell you, the biggest problem I have with the whole religion plan is that I don’t actually believe in religion. Any religion,” Yank said. “So I’m thinking that the instant I start this religion, I’ll stop believing it.”
“Tell you what, Yank, I’m way out ahead of you on that,” Scott said.
“Heretic.” Yank turned to face Ben. “I’ll be in the market for a few good disciples, Ohio. Keep that in mind.”
“Do disciples get health benefits?”
“Do not encourage him, Ben,” Scott said. “He’ll never stop if you do.”
“Ye of little faith,” Yank said. “If you stopped to consider the sheer amount of money out there waiting to be dumped into a new religion, you wouldn’t be talking like this. You’d be begging to get in on the ground floor.”
“The Book of Yank, chapter 3, verse 14,” Scott said.
“I’ll clean it up for the bible,” Yank said. “Ohio, write that down. And maybe start transcribing my other bits of wisdom. You never know how much stuff you’ll need to fill the holy books.”
“As soon as I hear some wisdom, I promise I’ll write it down,” Ben said.
“Et tu, Ohio? Keep it up and I’ll make you run this meeting.”
“That’s cruel and unusual punishment,” Scott said. “Maybe you are ready to start a religion.”
“I learned from nuns,” Yank said. “I know how to go hard core.”

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By Tgreen, March 12, 2011 2:13 am

Yes, I know I should’ve posted this 2 weeks ago, but I was busy. So busy that I couldn’t take 5 minutes to slap together a blog post? Perhaps. So let’s not waste another moment. Here’s the deal. I’ve got a story, Cog in the Spring 2011 issue of The First Line. Until March 13, you can get a free PDF download of the issue. So click here and look for the Free Issue link. You’ll get a free PDF that has my story and several other fine pieces of fiction. And if you get there after March 13, you can buy the PDF, or a hard copy of the issue, and not only will you be entertained, but you’ll be giving some nice folks a couple of bucks. You can’t lose.

And to give you an idea of what you’re getting into, here are the first 2 paragraphs of my story:

Sam was a loyal employee. This wasn’t saying too much in an age when a loyal employee was mostly one who didn’t steal office supplies or badmouth the company on Twitter every other day. Still, such employees were getting harder to find in an age when a loyal employer was one who didn’t lay off half the staff every other month. Sam realized that for many it was all a game now, with some of his coworkers trying to screw the company before the company screwed them, but Sam didn’t play that game.

For one thing, he didn’t have time. His role as lowly cog in the great Transglobal Endeavours machine kept him busy for nearly 50 hours a week. He constantly referred to himself as a lowly cog, but in truth he’d worked at Transglobal Endeavours just shy of 5 years now and had officially figured out a long time ago that his entire division, and possibly the entire company, was made up of nothing but lowly cogs. He often wondered if it was appropriate to refer to anyone as lowly if everyone was lowly. He didn’t know what he was, really, and so he said cog because it was somehow comforting.

Wanna see the rest? Head on over to The First Line and get yourself some short stories. Thanks for stopping by.

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By Tgreen, February 13, 2011 12:39 am

Earlier this week I got this scene stuck in my head. I don’t know where it came from or why it hung around so long, but it kept playing over and over in my head until it became way more distracting than it’s worth. That happens every now that then. Lots of times a scene will show up from out of nowhere, with no warning, and after a little while if I ignore it, it goes away. But then there are the rare cases when the scene won’t go away no matter how hard I ignore it. Those scenes dig in and force me to pay attention to them. The only thing to do when that happens is to type the scene out and move on.

This particular scene really has nothing to do with anything I’m trying to work on now. Doesn’t really have anything to do with anything I was thinking of working on in the future. It just showed up and didn’t want to leave. So I typed it up. And since Molly asked so nicely, I’m gonna post it here. Maybe it’ll make some sense to somebody. It’s first draft writing, banged out in one late night and one evening. Not the kind of thing I’d normally share with the world. But I don’t know that I’ll ever use it for anything, so I might as well share…

George climbed the stairs on the side of the building and found the room in the back, overlooking the parking lot. The door was open. He couldn’t see anything inside from out here on the narrow concrete walkway, but he could hear Glen Campbell wailing about the pitfalls of being a Rhinestone Cowboy from a tinny radio speaker somewhere inside. He looked this way and that, peeked down at the parking lot one last time to make sure he was alone, and entered the dark room.

There were two beds. The one closer to the door was still made and the top blanket looked relatively clean and pressed for a motel of this caliber. The farther bed was a tangle of sheets and blankets, with an open suitcase balanced at the foot and a lanky man in boxers and a t-shirt sprawled across the rest of it. His name was Kyle and he looked up at George and lifted a hand in a lazy greeting. His other hand clutched a can of beer that was a close relative to the short lineup of empties on the dresser.

“Aloha,” he said before taking a drink.

“Why’s the door open?”

“Air’s busted. Gets too hot with the door closed.”

“Why don’t you call downstairs to get it fixed?”

“Why don’t you stop assuming I didn’t think of that already? They’re sending someone up.”

George shrugged off the backpack he’d been wearing and dropped it in the center of the made bed. “There any more of those?” he asked, gesturing toward the beer can in hand.

“In the bag,” came the reply, along with a nod at the small round table pressed hard up to the dresser. It held a paper bag with the top folded over, plus a Styrofoam container, a pile of napkins, and a couple of squat cardboard cups with lids on them.

“There’s ribs in that box,” Kyle said. “You can have ‘em if you want. They’re too spicy for me.”

“Where they from?”

“That place down the road. The one that’s open all night?”

George flipped open the top of the Styrofoam container and snatched up a rib, thick and meaty and glistening with a thick red sauce. He took a bite and the heat of a thousand peppers seared his tongue and nearly tore his head off his body. The heat flared, then subsided into a low, nagging pain. Whoever had created this sauce was a genius.

“Good stuff,” George said as he used his free hand to pull a beer from the paper bag.

“I like food that’s a little spicy,” Kyle said. “But usually I order something hot and you can barely taste anything. So I ordered the super hot or whatever the hell they call it. And I think that shit melted my fillings.”

“Look at you, outthought by a pit boss in some two-bit fast food joint.” George gnawed the rest of the meat from the bone and then deposited the bone in the small trashcan by the door. He snagged another rib before he took a seat on the edge of the empty bed.

“Where’s the rest of them?” he asked.

“Room on the other side of the place,” Kyle said. “They’re too loud.”

George nodded as he popped the top of his beer can. He gulped the contents of the can. It was still cold, but well on its way to lukewarm. George wouldn’t be able to drink another if he waited too much longer. He finished his first beer and second rib in a few moments, then mashed paper napkins between his sodden fingers to clean them. Once all remnants of the barbecue sauce were gone, he grabbed a second can and returned to his perch on the bed.

“You bring it?” he asked.

In response, Kyle sat up, reached into his open suitcase, and retrieved a small packet wrapped in a dirty towel. He tossed it across the gap between the two beds. It landed beside George with a thud. George drained half of his second can before he hefted the packet, testing its weight. It was heavy and solid, and the towel it was wrapped in smelled of old dust and mildew. He unfolded it, flipped it over and unfolded it again to reveal a dark hunk of metal. A revolver, .38 by the looks of it. The metal was dull and lifeless. George slipped a hand underneath it and lifted it from its nest in the towel.

“What the hell is this?”

“My uncle’s service revolver,” Kyle said, his tone somewhat defensive. “He was a cop once.”

“Once in the 1800s?”

“You asked for a gun. That’s the only one I could find.”

George turned his hand to view the weapon from every angle. It looked exactly like something that had been cared for once, long ago, then forgotten and neglected for more years than anyone cared to remember. It would have to do.

He flipped it to the side and snapped it open. The cylinder popped out and he eyed it to confirm his first impression that there were no bullets.

“You bring any ammo?”

“Couldn’t find any,” Kyle said. “We’re gonna have to buy some.”

“Gonna have to buy a kit to clean this fucking thing too,” George said. “Where’d you find it?”

“In the attic, in some old boxes. I didn’t even know it was there. Good thing I found it now, before my kid went poking around up in there.”

“You have a kid? Since when?”

“Since always. He just turned five last month.”

“Shit, I don’t think I knew that,” George said. He turned the gun around and looked up the barrel. “No worries about your kid hurting himself with this thing. Even if he could find a bullet for it, it’s so damn dirty it’s not gonna shoot anything. He’d be in more danger if he dropped it on his foot.”

He thought he saw something clogging the barrel, so he held the gun over the towel, pointed it downward, and tapped against the side. After three taps, some dark flakes fell out, along with the tiny, dried and shriveled body of a brown spider. George barked a laugh.

“Was your uncle Barney Fife or something? Did he ever use this thing?”

“My uncle’s dead twenty years,” Kyle said. “Gun’s probably been in that box at least twenty-five.”

“After I clean it we’re gonna have to shoot it. You know anyplace we can do that?”

“I thought we were bringing the gun for show,” Kyle said. “You never said we were gonna use it.”

“Probably we won’t. But if you’re bringing a gun, you’ve gotta be ready to use it.”

“And you’re ready to use it?”

“Right now I think I’m more ready than the gun is.”

“You ever shoot a gun before?” Kyle asked.

“Plenty of times. More rifles than handguns, to be honest. But I’ve shot guns like this before, over the years.”

“Ever shoot one at somebody?”

George leveled him a look that said there would be no forthcoming answer to that question.

“You know a place we can shoot this thing?” he asked again.

“Down by the river, probably,” Kyle said. “Go down there right after sundown and it’s not real crowded. Quiet too, but not so quiet a couple of shots would send anyone running.”

“Sounds good enough.” George rewrapped the gun, along with the spider’s corpse, and slipped the packet into the drawer of the nightstand between the beds. “I wanna meet the others. Introduce me.”

“They’re in room 211, around the front of the building,” Kyle said. “Introduce yourself. Don’t be shy.”

George was going to argue, but he was already tired of Kyle’s voice. He drained the second beer and added the empty can to the collection. Without another word he walked out of the room.

There were seven doors along this side of the building, then four more after George turned right, and then after three more doors following another right, he found the door to room 211. It was closed, like every other door except for Kyle’s. He could hear the TV from inside. He knocked.

A short, dark man with longish hair and a full beard cracked the door and peered out at George. He said nothing, and based on the small slice of his face visible through the space between door and frame, it looked unlikely that he was interested in speaking.

“¿Hablas Inglés?” George said.

A small shake of the head. “¿Habla usted español?”

George did, a little, but for now was going to play dumb. “No,” he said, with an emphatic headshake. A standoff, he thought. Mexican. How appropriate. He smiled.

The door was pulled open from inside and another man was revealed behind the first one. He was older, the hair at his temples white, his skin dark and wrinkled from years of exposure to the elements. His dark eyes narrowed and he looked George up and down.

“You’re el Blanco?” he said.

“I guess so,” George said. “Kyle’s friend.”

The man waved him into the room and shut the door behind him. The room looked much like the one he’d left Kyle in, but there were four other men lounging on the beds or on the floor or basically anywhere a body could sit. Any space not filled by a body was covered in grocery bags, some stuffed with groceries and some already doing duty as garbage bags. The room smelled of sweat and beer and junk food. And George thought he smelled the faint aroma of marijuana too. This was how he imagined a dorm room might smell.

The man who answered the door pushed his way back to a spot in the edge of the bed and joined his compatriots in watching the TV. Wresting was on, from Mexico, and the picture was so fuzzy and static-filled that George couldn’t imagine how they could follow the action. That was their problem. They were content to ignore him for now and he was content to be ignored. George turned his attention back to the older man, obviously the boss of this crew.

“You have guns?” George asked.

The old man shook his head. “Kyle said no guns.”

George nodded. At least they could follow orders. Or lie to him convincingly. For now he’d assume that first one.

The man fished around in a paper sack on the dresser and produced a can, which he held out to George.

“¿Cerveza?”

George took the can, which felt colder than what Kyle had been drinking, and thanked him. He looked at the can and all the words on it were Spanish. While George could understand it a bit if he listened, and could mangle it a bit if he spoke it, he couldn’t read a word of the language. He drank anyway, and it wasn’t the worst beer he ever had.

“You been to the place yet?” he asked.

The old man nodded. “Yesterday. It’s like Kyle said. Should be easy.”

“It’ll be the first easy thing, then,” George said. “But here’s hoping.”

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By Tgreen, December 6, 2010 1:25 am

If I held my breath in the morning
would I wake up for a lifetime
Lose my job in this depression
well I don’t care ’cause I got your love

I squeaked in just under the wire this year, I’m not ashamed to admit. This year’s NaNoWriMo was a tough one. As I previously mentioned, I started the month more burned out than I realized, with barely the energy to come up with an idea in the first place. Then I fell behind after the first couple of days, and spent the rest of the month struggling to keep from falling even farther back. The job tossed me a couple of curveballs too (though not as bad as the ones they’d already tossed me in September and October), and I’ll admit I considered quitting a couple of times. Not too seriously, because nothing happened that really justified quitting, but it was an option I considered.

When you’re racing to finish a novel in a month, you will grasp at the thinnest of straws more than once. For me, the first set of straws was all about the plot. I didn’t have one, but I had some ideas. I started with a guy who gets fired from his job while the job keeps a dead guy on the books. I thought the dead guy might end up being more important to the story than he ended up being. He gets mentioned a lot, but, not surprisingly I guess, he doesn’t do much to advance the story.

For a little while I thought maybe the story would be about the fired guy and a friend of his giving up on the whole work thing and starting their own religion. That possibility gets mentioned several times, but becomes more something they plan to do after they finish doing whatever the hell the book is supposed to be about than something the book could actually be about. So that was no help. To get the whole religion thing started, I needed a character to suggest it, and for that I thought it would be easier to drag in a character I’ve used in a couple of other stories, since he’s been published before and has proven to be the type of character who would naturally be planning a religion as his next career move.

Since this character, Yank, besides being used in a couple of stories, is also one of the main characters of my previous(?) comic strip Greetings from Shokanaw, I thought he’d be a good source of comic relief. And maybe he was at first, but eventually he started turning from comic relief to the damn conscience of the story. I was too tired to stop him. As I followed the characters deeper into their plan to fight back against the inconveniences of unemployment, Yank became less punchline machine and more man with a point to make. I knew for sure I’d lost all control over him when this happened:

“You say you’re concerned about the people who work for you, but the first lie every employer tells himself is how much he cares about his employees,” Yank said. “It’s a lie they have to tell, and that they have to believe. They couldn’t get any real work done otherwise. Tell the lie, then believe the lie, and then you can go about your business. It’s how the world works. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

It was an important point to make in the story, and by that point Yank was the only one who could’ve made it, but comic relief? Hardly.

When this is over, over and through
And all them changes have come and passed
I want to meet you in the big sky country
Just want to prove mama, love can last

This book only got written because I got my upgraded copy of QuickOffice for the iPhone. No doubt my fellow commuters thought I was texting away like a 16-year-old girl every morning and every night. That actually would make more sense than what I was really doing. Who in their right mind writes a book on a cell phone during a crowded commute? Nobody in their right mind, I’ll tell you that. The bulk of the rest of it was written using Pages on the iPad. A small amount was written in Word on my MacBook, but rarely was I in the mood to sit in my office and type. Last year that’s where almost all the work got done. This year I’m so out of the habit of working in my home office, it was the last place I wanted to be after a long day at work.

And those long days at work, they were long. There probably weren’t as many of them as there were last year, but when they happened, they were like a punch in the face. There’s a reason for that, and I’m not going to explain it here today, but eventually I will. But basically, any time I got stuck with a long work day, besides having to do the work, I had to deal with the fact that it shouldn’t have been me stuck working late. That shouldn’t be my responsibility anymore. But it was, and it kept me from home a lot, so those long commutes became the place to write.

I think I would recommend the commute-writing for anyone who just wants to get into the rhythm of writing without having to think about it too much. Because if you try to think about it too much, I doubt you can get much done on a bus or a subway. When you’re sitting at home, at your desk, computer at the ready, you can afford to sit back and contemplate that next perfect word you’re about to release unto the world. When you’re jammed into a seat on the bus, half the time you’re typing to spite the situation you find yourself in. You’ll be damned if you’re gonna let your stupid commute to your stupid job keep you from getting something done. You’re a writer so goddammit, you’re gonna write. That’s how I did it. I’d sit down in the bus and within a minute I’d be banging out the next scene. Was it great stuff? No. But when you’re racing to 50K, nothing you write is great. The bus stuff was as good as the couch stuff. For what that’s worth.

And I’m not strong
And you’re not rich
And we’re not lost
Where we don’t live

For awhile I thought my main character was going to cheat on his girlfriend. Possibly with one of his coworkers. Maybe even with one of his girlfriend’s friends who was hanging around the story looking for trouble. No cheating ever happened. Stupid character had more integrity than I wanted him to. That happens sometimes. Possibly because the original plan for the book had him getting very little support from his girlfriend over his sudden unemployment, and ultimately that’s not how that part of the story worked out either. What’s the point in even trying to plan these things, even if the planning only happens a day or two before the writing, if nothing ever goes according to plan? WIsh I could answer that one for you.

So in the end I’m left with 51-or-so thousand words, and a story that turned out almost nothing like I planned. Par for the course, probably, if you’ve ever heard me discuss any of the other NoNoWriMo books I’ve written. As usual, I had some periods where I didn’t know what day it was, didn’t know when I was getting any sleep, didn’t know why the hell it was 2AM and I was still writing, didn’t know why I was bothering, and didn’t know if I was ever going to finish. Was it worth it? Not sure. But a couple of things happened at the end of the month to make me think maybe it was.

First off, the last couple of days of writing went better than they should have after the month leading up to them. It’s like some raw, creative part of the brain finally shoved everything else aside and took over. Every scene that needed to be written to get to the end jumped out at exactly the right moment. It’s as if I finally found the proper amount of exhaustion, frustration and anger to fuel the last 10,000 words. And then there was the other creative project I had going on in November, though “going on” is way too charitable a way to refer to it.

We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds
And we can’t build our dreams
On suspicious minds

You see, there was a December 1 deadline for a short story collection that I wanted to be in. The short stories had to be about people who worked in the courts, I had a big story about the courts, and figured all I had to do was edit out a piece of that story. I even knew what I wanted to use, and several months ago had pulled out 3 scenes that I thought I could edit together to submit. Then somehow I managed to blow several months’ worth of lead time and, if this submission was going to happen, would have to do this editing, and any rewriting, while working on the NaNoWriMo story. Somehow it took until well into November before I realized this was a bad idea. Then I read the submission guidelines again and convinced myself that the stuff I’d planned to use wouldn’t fit anyway, and gave up that idea.

Cut to November 29, when I remembered another part of the same story that might work. I ignored this revelation, because I was busy finishing the NaNoWriMo book. But the idea wouldn’t leave, and when I finished writing on the 30th, I was in such a creative frenzy I decided I’d see how much work it would take to Frankenstein something together out of this new idea. So I went back to this old courtroom story (coincidentally, my 2005 NaNoWriMo book), hacked out 3 pieces, put them together with just a little bit of new writing, and mailed that sucker out. This whole process took maybe an hour.

Do I think this story will get bought? Probably not. But I needed to feel like I was in the game somewhere, and this was my best chance. It was odd taking 5-year-old writing and stitching it together with new writing, because I think I’ve learned a couple of things in the last 5 years. I hope I have, anyway. But the insane creative part of my brain wanted to keep working, so I let it, and assuming the story gets rejected, I’ll post it to the Treetop Lounge eventually.

This last-minute frenzy taught me something, though. It taught me that if I take the time to work on something, crazy things happen that I wasn’t expecting. It also taught me that the stunts, like writing 50K words in a month, are fun but not enough. I need more. I need to be working on stuff that might lead somewhere. That might turn into something important. I know I can’t abandon the stunts completely, because that’s not in my nature, but I have to put in more time when there’s no stunt going on, because if I put in the time, I’ll get something good.

Previously, I’ve done this November mad rush and then sat back for weeks to rest from the abuse my brain took during the stunt. This time I’m trying something different. There’s a writing project with a February 1 deadline that I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Have tried, in fact, and failed. It’s time to take another crack at it, so this week my brain is gonna have to start being creative again because there’s another story that needs writing, and time is short. Unlike this blog post. Is it possible to write 50K words about a 50K-word story? If so, I may have just done it tonight. Damn.

T “if I’d stuck to Twitter this post wouldn’t have gotten so long” green

And I know that it’s been hard
And it’s been a long time coming
Don’t give up on me
I’m about to come alive

Comments (0)

By Tgreen, November 22, 2010 2:10 am

A few big events happened with this alleged novel this week. First, on the 15th we reached the halfway point of this contest. Second, on the 17th I actually reached the halfway point to 50K words. This officially put me 2 days off pace, but since I usually aim to write as many as 60K words, I was about 4 or 5 days behind. Still, given the odd directions this month has been taking, I’d take 2 days off the official pace.

The two other big events were probably the biggest ones since I first sat down at the keyboard on November 1. I started writing on my iPhone during my commute, which saved me from slipping even further behind. And somewhere around Day 19, I finally figured out what this book is supposed to be about. You might think that 19 days of writing is a lot to do before figuring out what the hell it is you’re writing, but I might say in response that this time around, 19 days was a goddamn bargain.

You see, last year my NaNoWriMo novel was almost entirely plot-driven. I knew that early on and wrote accordingly. I didn’t know exactly where I was going or exactly how I was going to get there, but I had a plot and any time I had my doubts, I had that plot to cling to. This year, I had some situations and some characters, but no driving force behind them. Not that I knew of, anyway. My characters liked to talk, though. They talked and talked and I let them do it in hopes that they’d get somewhere. And on Day 19 they did. On Day 19, one character looked back at all that had come before and proposed a plan. And another character went along with that plan. And before I knew it, I had a plot.

Best of all, it wasn’t like I’d stumbled on something that would require massive changes to the previous 18 days’ worth of work. Nope, this plot grew more or less organically from what had come before. I’m still not sure how that happened.

There’s one last event from last week that counts toward the full NaNoWriMo experience. I spent a couple of minutes at the bus stop Thursday morning trying to figure out exactly what day it was. Last year that happened several times. This year so far, only once. Still plenty of time for a repeat, though.

With just 9 days to go to the end of the month, my current word count is just 1 day off the pace to 50K. I’d like to think I can make it, what with the days off for Thanksgiving coming up. And now that I know what the book’s about, the writing itself should come easier. There’s just one problem, one flaw in the plan. When I figured out where the book needed to go, I worked it over and over and came up with a roadmap to the end that I was happy with. This lasted half a day before I realized that if everything happened the way I thought it should happen, the climactic action would take place without my point of view character present. He actually couldn’t be present, and if he couldn’t be there, I had no way of letting the readers know what the hell was going on.

And so I find myself with 9 days to go, maybe 18,000 words to write, and a plot that, if the reader is going to be there to see it, now requires my main character to go against everything the plot’s supposed to be about. There are worse ways to stack the deck against yourself, but maybe someday I’ll figure out the easy way to do things. And now, a bad excerpt from approximately the point where the plot reveals itself:

“Okay, we need to set some ground rules,” Walt said.

“Seriously? What do you think you have here?”

“Ground rules. What we discuss today doesn’t leave this table unless we mutually agree otherwise,” Walt said.

“Come on, is this really necessary?”

Walt just stared across the table at him, saying nothing. Kyle believed he’d sit like that all day if that’s what it took to get an answer.

“Okay fine. I accept the ground rules,” Kyle said.

“I’ll warn you, this might piss you off,” Walt said. “The first part, I mean. Don’t let it. Keep your head clear and hear me out. This is not a day for rash decisions.”

Kyle nodded his understanding.

“The company, it appears, is throwing in the white towel,” Walt said. “After years of mismanagement and braindead errors, the management team is giving up.”

“You guys are folding?”

“In good time, I’m sure. But first, they’re hiring a consultant to tell them every stupid mistake they’ve made. Every error and miscue, laid out for all to see. You wonder why they’d do this when they have an office full of people who’d do the same thing for free, but there you have it. Management is basically admitting they don’t know how to manage.”

“I wonder if this is why they want my severance check back so badly,” Kyle said.

“Probably, but not for the reason you might think. I’m sure they can afford to pay for this whether they have your money or not. But if the check is still out there, it’s just one more black eye that they don’t need their new consultants to see. One more question they have to answer. One more buck someone has to pass. But get the check back and, at least in their minds, it’s one problem moved to the solved column. Or more likely, one problem that never happened at all.”

“And just when I thought there couldn’t be any more reasons for me to hold onto that money,” Kyle said.

“Attaboy. But if you want to screw them, would you be interested in maybe a more proactive way to do it?”

“Like what?”

“The way I see it is, if they can afford to blow money on this, they could afford to not fire people like you. Their priorities are screwed. But if they want to blow their money on this, I was thinking maybe we could find a way to get that money for ourselves.”

“Meaning what?”

“Well, Kyle, have you ever had a burning desire to be silent partner in a consulting firm?”

Oh yeah, first draft writing fresh from the morning express bus. How can you not love it?

Be back soon. Gotta write.