Some songs just call out for comparison to crime fiction. This is one of them.
I can see the hero in most good crime stories thinking the lyrics to this song ->
Is it getting heavy? And then realize It's getting heavy Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be
The key to many of the crime stories that I like is to take a normal person and put him or her in a situation that he/she can't handle -- but has to. That spot where you're more than you can be. Despair. Fear. Anger. Hope. All that emotion stuff.
Sometimes that's having the crap beat out of you. Sometimes it's puzzle-solving. Whatever.
People are in danger. They're not getting a superman. They're getting an ordinary person, a person who has to do ordinary things.
And I think that's one of the reasons I like crime fiction. We ask so much of a person who usually isn't capable of it. At least, the "hero" doesn't start out that way.
He can't stop bullets. She can't outrun a train or leap buildings. Our heroes break.
Tell everybody Waiting for Superman That they should try to Hold on the best they can He hasn't dropped them, forgot them or anything It's just too heavy for Superman to lift
Yeah, our heroes break. Then they get back up. Because that's what heroes do.
Continuing to race my blog buddy Dave White (phew, that was a bunch of links) I finally got Alex Jackson out of the strip club. Then he goes back. I think I've lost control of the character. At least in the debut, LOST AND FOUND, I was able to rough him up when he did that to me. Now he just wants to have some drinks and chase a killer. I'm guessing he's about to run into some trouble. Until then, though, here he is going back to the club >>
She was good looking for a moment, until you got up close. Then she was all teeth and eyeballs, like a forensics reconstruction scene when they don’t have all the skin plumped out right.
In poor light, if you didn’t look at her face too long, you could fall in love with her. Her career counselor must be proud of himself for getting it so right. She wasn’t set to strip until the next night, but she was there hanging around Hardwick’s in case someone couldn’t make it. She was helping Jay behind the bar when I got there.
When I got her on the phone after I left the comic shop, Mallory had told me to look for Cali’s feathers, which turned out to be less interesting than I’d imagined. She had some blurry green and yellow peacock-ish feathers carved into her shoulders. I didn’t know at the time about any of her other defacements. I was in a hurry.
After I paid the cover charge, I stepped over to the side of the bar where she was serving longnecks to rednecks.
“Why do they call it a cover charge?” I asked. Def Leppard was playing “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” Over my shoulder, an otherwise attractive girl was pouring syrup on her breasts and sliding around the stage. I felt bad for whoever was onstage next. I looked around the crowd a little. For a second, I felt bad for everybody.
I leaned in closer to Cali. “Cover charge. Shouldn’t it be an un-cover charge?”
“Why’s that?”
“Strip club,” I said. “Because people take off their clothes?”
“Oh,” she said. “A joke. You the new comedian? You’re worse than Floyd.”
The music around me stopped. A couple of people still sober enough to clap were making noises behind me. Big Jay the bartender was calling Cali down to the other end of the bar.
“You want something to drink, funnyman?”
“Jack. In a glass. No ice. No umbrella.”
She pulled some Old Crow from under the shelf, spilled it into a tumbler, and handed it to me. She was well on her way to being my least favorite stripper.
As a graduate student in Kansas, I took a class called “Research Methods,” a semester’s work largely outdated when “Google” became a verb.
Back in the dark ages, we would stumble among hefty hardbacks from the Modern Language Association of America, indexing the publication information of scholarly articles. You’d find out the where and when of the article you thought you needed. Then you’d search the library for a while until you were convinced that they didn’t carry that article. Then you went to the research desk and the nice person there helped you fill out a slip of paper requesting the article.
Then they would attach that slip of paper to carrier prairie dogs (CPDs) that would travel across the Midwest attempting to locate a library with the article. If you were fortunate, within a month or so you would receive a letter in the mail saying that a copy of the article had been located and would be mailed to your university within 10 business days. Then your library would mail you a letter informing you that the article had arrived and that you had 24 hours to pick it up or it would be destroyed to make room for large hardbacks indexing article information.
Is my world not falling down I'm in pieces on the ground
-- Neil Young, " Flying on the Ground"
One of the things they don't tell you is that your book is no good until it's done. Until then, the novel is just pieces on the ground.
Elvis Costello said something like this: You have your whole life to write your first album and two years to write your second.
Same sort of thing with novels. When you finish that first novel, you maybe pass it around, clean it up, rework it. Then out to agents. Work with an agent on the book. Then out to publishers. Then working with editors. Then readings and selling and marketing.
Until your first book is done, no one "in the industry" gives two poops about you. You get that first one out there, then the questions start coming.
Get a girlfriend and it's all "when you getting married?" Get married and it's all "when you having kids?" Have kids and it's all "when you having another kid?" And so on.
So you got that book? Great. When's the next one?
Well, I'm working on it.
Love to see it when it's done.
So you're back where you were working on the first book. No one gives two poops until it's done. OK, that's not exactly true. The team will help push you in directions. You probably have more people interested in how it's going. And if I needed to send a couple of chapters off -- even in the middle of the action -- I could and I know I'd get excellent feedback. But basically, like the first book, what matters is the book when it's done.
So that's why writing short stories is so different.
Alex Jackson is my novel character. He swims in the ocean. He floats out with the big waves, gets chased by the sea monsters. I have to go get him. Sometimes he gets lost and needs help.
Oscar Martello just jumps into rivers, creeks, and ponds. He's in an out quickly, cannonballing from rockwalls into dammed up pools, diving from bridges, kayaking down rapids. He's in and out quickly. Sometimes he hits his head. Sometimes he gets through without much trouble. He's my short story guy. And he gets seen by more people.
Alex is so far out to sea right now, even I lose him. Oscar just jumps in and out of the creek, then moves on to the next swimming hole.
More people have been hanging out with Oscar, swimming around with him, tubing down the rapids.
Writing stories can give quicker rewards -- sending stories out, passing them to folks who are amazing readers, editors. And people like reading short stories. You can hang out with someone for a little while without too much commitment. If you don't like them, you just hop out of the creek and head home. That's much different than swimming out to sea with someone, finding out they're a bore, then having to swim back to shore.
Short stories are nice, contained excursions. You can be done writing in a day or two, maybe a week. Novel writing is the long haul, the working by yourself until you're done. The not being able to talk about things for fear of spoilers.
And when you're done with that next novel, then you can share it. Then you can talk about it. Then you can answer the question, "So what's the next one about?"
As an undergraduate, I created an independent study to read Somerset Maugham. CAKES AND ALE. OF HUMAN BONDAGE. RAZOR'S EDGE. MOON AND SIXPENCE. All fantastic, especially his "John Ashenden" creation.
I still consider myself a Maugham fan. Not, of course, like Neil Jenman. The real estate guy and author has a monstrous Maugham collection, which you'll see in the video.
And, of course, folks love Maugham's "understanding" of the human psyche. With lines like this one, who wouldn't ->
"It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me." -- Maugham
Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 10:31AM 
