Slowing it down....

Only wrote 1406 words yesterday, the lowest single day total so far. Had to let go of the need to constantly match 2000 and know that the only thing that matters is that I get to 50,000 by the end of the month. There's not much to be gained by finishing next Tuesday (as my pace says I will) and a lot to be gained by dropping back down to a more reasonable pace. Just spat out 300 words about the relatively inconsequential searching of a garage, but still decent prose.

Reading The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Have I mentioned that yet? The book is just incredible. Chandler's prose style is absolutely amazing. I know what I'm going to be reading for the next several months....

Photoshopping

Modeling the new wind jacket that Mom and Frank bought me.

Word count: 38066
This chunk (for reference's sake): 397
Percent of current: 1.04
Percent of target: .794

---

It draws me back in. I zoom in on the picture, on the spot where, in my copy of the photo, I am lying, posing while unconscious. I look for any signs of alterations trying to see if I had been stripped out of the picture by some highly-trained digital photography expert. I find nothing. There’s nothing that looks like it’s been brushed or blurred; no obvious repeating patterns that would indicate a copy and paste; not a single pixel out of place.
I go back to the bathroom and fish my wallet out of my pants. I retrieve the photo with me in it and take it back to the study. I flip on the scanner and digitize the image, hoping to take a look at it as well, trying to see if I’d been stripped into this one. Again, I come up with nothing.
I’m no Photoshop expert, but I’ve done my share of forging images. It’s not what you think: I never doctored something to close a case; never falsified evidence. But sometimes clients want what they want and when money was tight, I was willing to give it to them. The point is that I’ve seen falsified pictures before and even those that are very good at doing it will leave some trace that the picture isn’t 100% legitimate.
Maybe the people who did this are better than very good. They certainly haven’t pulled any punches or spared any expense when it has come to any other aspect of this drama. I sit back in my chair, looking at the pictures side by side and wonder what they could possibly mean. The woman in the photos is in the exact same pose in both pictures. The floors appear the same, though the lighting isn’t good enough, even when I fiddle with the levels, to compare the grain of the wood.
I think about the cigarettes in the drawer, lean forward to grab them and that’s when I see a shadow across the woman’s face that doesn’t continue onto the floor. I look closer and sure enough, there is just the faintest trace of a second light source being obscured by another presence in the room. In the photo that I’m in, the shadow continues uninterrupted. I wonder how much they paid whoever did the doctoring. Whatever it was, it was probably too much.

75%

Just hit 37,500 which puts me squarely at 75% done with this thing. Groovy!

Slagging Normal

Word count: 36707
Words to go: 13293
Percent complete: 73%

Charlie had a revelation while taking a bath, so I figured I'd take one too. Turned out to be a decent idea. Was able to work out a timeline of events of the story. Should probably write it down somewhere......Okay, that's better.

---

The Bloomington-Normal Area Convention & Visitors Bureau will tell you that the Bloomington-Normal area has endless amounts of attractions including historical and artistic sites, sporting and cultural events and boundless opportunities for small and large business alike. This is bullshit and should not be believed. Bloomington-Normal is a shithole and like all metropolitan shitholes, it is attempting to pull the wool over your eyes with pretty talk of being the fastest growing area in Illinois and a wonderful place to live. They all say the same things – pick Parumph, Nevada; Aberdeen, Maryland; or Derby, Kansas. It doesn’t matter much which one you choose, they’ll all tell you that they’re a wonderful place to be, a fast growing community, a safe haven away from the hustle and bustle of the big, mean cities. It’s all crap. It’s all marketing and deception. Don’t believe their hype.

Crisis of Confidence

It's amazing, writing this thing, how scared I am of moving forward past the point the story is at currently. I'm spending a lot of time going back to earlier scenes and filling them in rather than pushing the story forward.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I rely a lot on my characters to dictate how things are going to go and I let them drive the story. Often, I'm surprised at things they do. Writing a mystery is tough -- you need to have some idea of what the final outcome is, and I do, but the problem is that I've set Charlie Bonnet up to be this waffling, somewhat weak fraud of a detective and right now he's having a huge "should I keep going or should I give up" crisis.... Not that I personally am -- at 35,000 words, there's no way I can stop now -- but what if he decides to give up? Story's over. And he never finds out all the secrets.....

I've been putting off the standard-issue road trip/change of scenery that I used in 2003, but it's about to happen.

Also: started reading The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler last night. Talk about a brilliant book. Just the very beginning is a great hook, an amazing character set up, brilliant description, great dialogue.... Damn.

Word 35,000

"into"


That is all.

Business Speak

Word count: 34488

---

I press the button for the elevator and wait for its arrival with a couple businessmen in suits. We exchange polite nods and they continue a conversation that matches the vague and complicated language from Lobranches’ website. They speak of cross-valued silo platform pollenation or some such thing. Business speak has always eluded me. It might as well be an unbreakable cipher. I like playing along, though, so I nod like I know what they’re talking about, as if contemplating my own issues with cross-ventilated value-added self-leveraged synergistic nodes. God bless these people for being on the frontlines, down in the trenches, getting the work of America done.

This just in...

...I am, as we speak, making my main character take a hot bath.


Come on -- he's had a really rough couple of days.

More with the World's Worst Rock Band

Word count: 32216
Percent complete: 64.43
Estimated completion date: Nov 22

---

Exiting through the kitchen again, I am stunned by the wall of sound that hits me. The rain has died down to the point that outside travel is no longer life threatening. I walk down the back stairs leaning now not against the wind but against the noise. It has a physical presence out here. I picture it as a monster with a diabolically evil face. It rears up and takes a swipe at me, forcing me to cower back in fear. I gather my wits and will and cross the yard to the garage. Struggling against the cacophony, I open the door and face my nemeses.
The band is in the middle of a cover of a Portishead song that until I hear them murder it, I am quite fond of. They look up at my entrance but do not bother to stop or even to acknowledge my presence.
I try yelling for them to stop a couple times but it is no use. The music is even louder within the confines of the garage. The band members are all wearing earplugs – an idea I have contemplated of late. I wait for them to finish and then I speak again.
“Hey! Guys!” I yell, the ringing in my ears causing me to speak louder than usual.
“What?” yells the bassist.
“Can you take the earplugs out?”
“What?” he repeats.
I mime the act of removing earplugs. I never thought I’d have to do this. “Take. The. Earplugs. Out!”
They comply. “What do you want, dude?” asks the singer.
“Guys. It’s two in the morning. I’ve had a long day. I just want to go to bed. I’m sure the entire neighborhood just wants to go to bed. Do you think you could call it a night?”
“But we just got started,” complains the guitarist, a sallow-faced kid of about 20.
“We don’t have to listen to this guy,” says the singer.
“Actually, yes you do,” I say. “You are breaking so many noise ordinances right now I can’t even begin to name them. And you’re being incredibly bad neighbors.”
“You think we give a shit?”
“I’m starting to think that you don’t.”
“Exactly. Now get the fuck out of here.”
I really wish I still had that gun. I don’t want to shoot the kid, but I would love to scare him a little.
Actually, I’d love to shoot him. I’ve never shot anyone before but this one seems like a prime candidate to start on.
“I don’t think so.”
“Fine then, we’ll just keep on practicing.” He turns to address his band mates. They replace their earplugs. “Alright, let’s do ‘Two Carts Full of Crap.’ Ready? 1…2…3…4….”

The most boring milestone word ever

Word 30,000: "a"



Sorry.

Blame it on the Rain

Word count: 29,473
Minutes to 30,000: I'm guessing about 25.

This excerpt contains a little tribute to The Thin Man -- I actually wrote the "put two and two together" bit before I read the passage in Dashiel Hammet's book, but I just now added the bit about "twenty-two." (Just so you know how the genesis came about.)

---

It starts raining on me as I walk home. It is another one of those sudden storms that descend upon this city without warning and often without remorse. Wind whips through the trees, blowing stray newspapers around and kicking up dust until the rain soaks down the ground and it turns to mud. Huge drops of rain batter me as I struggle to make any progress down the street. It's the kind of rain you're scared to get caught out in. At any minute, you might get washed away.
Lightning arcs across the sky, each time lighting up the night briefly but intensely. The white flashes are a cruel reminder of each blow to head I’ve taken lately. Thunder cracks after each flare, closer and closer. Car alarms, almost inaudible above the noise of the storm, go off in response to the rumbling aftershocks.
I never know whether to run or to just keep on walking. If you run, you just run into raindrops you wouldn’t have hit, but if you walk, you stay wetter longer. I figure I’m already as soaked as I can possible get and my main goal now is to get inside as soon as possible. Gripping Kimp’s jacket tightly in one hand and using the other to secure the gun in my pocket, I start jogging towards home. It feels good to be running to something. In the back of my head, there is a feeling that it’s the first time I haven’t been running away from something.
The good feeling doesn’t last long, however. It is replaced by the feeling of cold, wet, hard concrete rushing up to meet the back of my head at a pace roughly equal to that of the speed of gravity. I must have hit a slick patch of sidewalk and my feet went out from under me, sending me to the ground. My head’s taken so many blows over the last twenty-four hours, I’m surprised I can still put two and two together.
“It’s four,” I say to the sky, just to prove that I’m still able. I’m reasonably sure that’s the correct answer. It’s either four or twenty-two. I’ll check on a calculator as soon as I can.

Just some stuff....

word count: 28629

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At Steve's suggestion, I registered Illinoir.com today. Neat. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, if anything, but now I have it. Wahoo.

Did a google search on Illinoir and it seems like all the hits are PDFs containing OCR errors on "Illinois." How come nobody else has used this? Is it possible that I had an original idea at one point?

Deadly.

All smiles

Had a really great day today. Worked at Morseland and that went well even though I was bartender/manager which I've never done before. Had good after-work-drink-a-beer company. Bears won. Then I came home and wrote and had neat experiences.

One in a while, something will happen where I'll say "Oh man, maybe so-and-so did such-and-such." My novel is surprising me in ways that a story I was writing never has before. Not sure if it's because I'm writing a mystery and I'm figuring it out as I go along or what. But I'm having these neat "a-ha" moments that feel just like the moment when you figure out something clever in a movie.... Except I'm making it up as I go along.

It's kinda neat.

I think I know what "Illinoir" means.

And you people -- you just have these bits and pieces of a bigger picture. Wild. Wild stuff.

Random excerpt

Word count: 27131 (with words written at work still to be counted)

---

“Thank you, Mr. Bonnet,” she said. So she was in the right place after all.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name,” I said, sitting down as well.
“Oh. I’m Olivia Tweed,” she said, extending her hand across my desk. I took it lightly in mine but found that she has a powerful grip. We shook hands and honestly, I didn’t want to let go, but I did before it got awkward. She asked, “Didn’t Mr. Barnum tell you I was coming?”
Of course Mr. Barnum didn’t tell me you were coming, I thought to myself. Mr. Barnum is a fat, lazy slob who wouldn’t know how to relay a message if Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell and Steve Case were all giving him pointers. But of course, I said none of this. I simply tell her that unfortunately, I had no idea she would be visiting me that day.
“Well, that’s too bad. I’d hoped you’d be able to prepare for me,” she said.
I took a surreptitious glance at her left hand. There was no ring. “Don’t worry, Miss Tweed, I’m always prepared for everything.”
She smiled. “That’s nice to hear.”