Lumpy

By Douglas | Published: March 8, 2010

Day 463

Maybe someday I’ll feel more shame that I never write on weekends anymore. I’m certain were I to go back and check I’d find that those days’ contributions to 1000 Days to be below the average quality I maintain here. I cling to the absurd notion that Saturday and Sunday mornings allow for sleeping in. They don’t.

Place absurd clinging here.

As for the current weather, I’m not buying it. Gray, raining, and warm? I don’t think so. This ain’t Seattle.

I’d like to thank Kathryn Bigelow for fucking it up for all of my daughters. Yet another woman based hurdle they won’t break. Cheers Kat! What was up with Sandra Bullock? She appeared embarrassed to win—genuinely upset. I thought it was nice Jeff Bridges calmed his nerves with some pharmaceutical or another. Jim undoubtly curled up in his $100 bill quilt crying himself to sleep.

This was not my plan.

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This Won’t End Well

By Douglas | Published: March 5, 2010

Day 462

http://gorillaartfare.com/2010/02/dont-finkfeeeel/

She was naked. And halfway in and halfway out of a marble wall.

I was a dog, another species unable to appreciate her beauty. Except I wasn’t. I was as human as she appeared to be.

Of the three of us, her, me, and the marble wall, only the wall responded to her prescense. It swirled and splashed with pastel illustrations of feathers, fronds, and joyous bongols. These happy illustrations radiated from the rose-like flower blooming between her pale breasts. I wasn’t sure if she caused this or if the wall volunteered. Many of the sinuous petals looked to have smiling faces.

Except for her hands, which she tucked modestly between her legs, a crisp angle defined the intersection of her body and the plane of the wall. Her hands though, more her fingers…fingertips really, extended vaguely into a shadow beyond the surface of the wall’s reality. In that deeper world she might have perched on the cusp of a tall tower like a gargoyle or sat on the prow of a fantastic sailing ship. She wore short brown hair.

The body and face of a maiden with the eyes of a matron.

“I am asking you a question,” the maiden said.

She asked me a question? Or will ask? “Huh?”

“I will be asking you a question. You may choose to answer yes or no,” the matron clarified.

“But in the end I’ll be doing whatever you wish of me?”

“Of course,” answered the heart of a crone.

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Breaking a Rule Badly

By Douglas | Published: March 4, 2010

Day 461

I read all of Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing yesterday. I’d not read them all together until now, but seen a couple here and there. I don’t recall nine but one of the ten stuck with me overnight: don’t begin with weather. I can’t recall if I’ve ever opened with weather here on 1000 Days. Sure I’ve opened with environmental conditions: raining, wet, snow, cold, dark, misty. I don’t think those have ever been elevated to actors within the landscape. I’m going to give it a shot this morning.

I expected to call up a thunderstorm, but seem that forest fires dominate my thoughts. Today that’s weather. Hopefully I can pull this off without using the words licking or raging or roaring.

Flames licked the base of a pine tree while the frontline raged on the other slope; the main fire had roared through here earlier in the morning. Just kidding.

Downwind, the smoke taints the light pale orange. Sarah hooks a grocery bag of photos over a pointy lump of something and latches the backglass of her Toyota 4Runner. The cave-like atmosphere is both novel and frightening. When she pauses for moments like this she wonders if somehow she won’t make it to safety by the span of time she’s wasting right now. She envisions her escape barred by a toppling flaming Ponderosa and her 4Runner skidding to a sideways halt in the dirt road. Surely she could throw it into 4-wheel drive and skirt the main trunk.

She realizes she’s gasping from loading the truck and from breathing the smoke. She goes inside one more one-last-time to seek cleaner air and mementos. She finds neither.

Back outside she grabs the extra propane tank and vents it open. Twenty bucks is worth not coming home to a perfectly sound house with a scortched hole near the grill. Should she lock the doors?

“Fuck it.” She leaves the doors unlocked.

And there I didn’t really write about weather or fire. By the second line I had a character. Hmmm.

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Dripping Red Strands

By Douglas | Published: March 3, 2010

Day 460

I have this title that came to me from somewhere some time ago. I associate it with a scene from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator movie in which the gladiators walk through dripping red strands of cloth. The scene is handled ambiguously enough that I’ve never been sure if I should recognize this event as some traditional blessing of the gladiators or just a bit of scenery dipicting life in Rome not having anything to do with the arena—just a shortcut passageway to the fight. Maybe I should know. I don’t though. I’ve not bothered to research it as I’d rather not know.

Why this scene and this title are linked in my thoughts escapes me. The one overt linkage between the two is the most tenuous. That connection is the spark but not the flame. Ambiguity fires my title.

My title is not ambiguous. My title is susinct and specific. My title is the kind which immediately tells you all about the story. Except it hasn’t told me all about the story. The story is the part I can’t figure out.

In an expansive 100-character high fantasy trilogy this story would be the subplot not incorporated. It’s the novella or short story collected posthumously in a poorly sold compendium—if it were written at all. Lately I’m wanting to write the commoner’s story: not the princess, not the foundling, not the dragon killer. I want to know how the nobody baker, the unattractive barmaid, or the sallow footman contribute to the dismisal of the ultimate evil. And not in the heroic caught up in the whirlwind of important people way, but in the quiet unspoken almost uninteresting way.

This Dyemaker’s Conjecture.

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Don’t Read This: At The End You’ll Realize That’s Not Reverse Psychology

By Douglas | Published: March 2, 2010

Day 459

Today I am writing to fill this space. Today I am writing because I have to write. I have to write daily and I have to write in the morning because I utterly fail at writing in the evenings. Even the evenings when I have the time and have promised myself I would write as a stopgap for not having wrtten that morning.

I’d rather be doing other stuff. I’d rather be working and getting ahead of the day so I can end it sooner and write in the afternoon as I sometimes promise myself I will. I’d rather be reading funny things on the Internet. Interesting things. Writing things. Distracting things. I’d rather be watching that last Equalizer DVD so that I can return it to Netflix and get some real movies back in the mix. I’d rather be watching those movies that I don’t yet have.

My fingers are cold. My stomach is swirly and feels like one big snow globe that’s been shook up—”Hey that’s not snow!”—instead of a long organized tube of guts. My head’s cold because my hair is cut needlessly short and I’ve got a fucking cat twining my legs like she unaware of how easily I could crush her, snap her in half, or snap her in half by crushing her.

Fleh.

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A Return to the Drenfennelen River

By Douglas | Published: March 1, 2010

Day 458

Kraite and Duoroo. And the Drenfennelen River.

I have not written of these two in over a year. Before that last entry another year. But I like these two. I should do them a little more justice than I have.

Kraite, as I recall, is some furry bounty hunter on a mission to do something to capture or kill or generally waylay Duoroo. He is thoughtful but no intellectual. His vocation implies he’s more of a rogue than his personality.

Duoroo is a blind monk with aikido-like skills. Her mind free of knowing what anything looks like she’s developed an encyclopedic memory and a great sense politics though she does not dabble in the latter.

I need a few things: a reason for Kraite to be there, a reason for him to change his mind, a way for Duoroo to accomplish that change, a situation for them to pair up against, some twist that involves Mallen, a little conflict between the two unlikley partners, and a world to put this all in. Reading back it appears that some government in “Theeble” had been paying the monks for healing water that did not heal.

Let’s put Duoroo out of place. She’s a cast-off daughter of an off world dynasty recently swept by tragedy. She is now the sole heir or something like that. Her identity is an open secret among the older monks but not one they ever expected to become a problem. Kraite’s been hired to extract her from the monastery with as little harm or notice as possible.

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