Stange horizons has a great list of standard / tired plot points and devices. It's an interesting read, as it contains a description for just about every story you have ever read, and why the plot devices it employed is old and tired.
This list makes what I see as a meta-point about writing, which is plot doesn't make or break a story. I'm sure a great writer could grab anything off this list and produce great fiction with it, even while using the most tired devices. Execution is how great books are written, written honesty and without authorial sentiment. All books worth reading have a thesis, the author is trying to say something specific. How true the author is to this thesis, honesty being key, determines whether a book is just a nice story or if it has greater worth. This greater worth emerges when the brain of the reader connects with that of the author, and for a short period of time share in an experience that could not arise under different circumstances.
All of the above is rather high minded, and assumes that stories accomplish more than just entertaining the masses. Basically it asserts the assumption that stories have the potential to be art, but that most stories are not. Many people would find these assertions ridiculous or pretentious, to the former: eat me, and to the later, you are right.
Not Eschaton
Friday, June 13, 2014
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Dana begins...
“Hey, can you mop the floor out
front?” Everett asked.
Dana looked up
from her phone, “Sure.” She was leaning
against a sink behind the counter of a sandwich shop. The shop interior is yellow with brown tile
flooring; counters and benches and walls all yellow, loudly urging the patrons
to please buy your sandwich and leave, please.
Laid out before her was a veritable cornucopia of vegetables, meats and
cheeses, all of constituents of the modern American sandwich. She put her phone in her rear right pocket
and pushed herself off the yellow Formica counter. Dana’s father owns this sandwich shop. She walked around the counter and to the
closet that housed the mop. She filled
the mop bucket with warm water and added 1 cap full of bleach and some
detergent.
Mopping
she didn’t mind too much, she could just enjoy her own thoughts for five or so
minutes. It was a solitary job that
didn’t require customer interaction, customer interaction being the only thing
she really disliked about her job, especially pretentious type. No cheese
please (because it wasn’t real cheese,)
no lettuce (it’s not romaine or some other real
type), and please, Dijon mustard, not the yellow (which made Dana wonder if
yellow mustard was somehow fake.) One
such woman was in the store, a woman hated by Dana. She had this way of asking for Dijon mustard,
it wasn’t so much an ask as it was an aristocratic decree, because Ms Dijon,
which is what Dana had taken to calling her, also had an English accent. In Dana’s mind this was the trifecta, 1. Old,
2. English, 3. Dijon.
Head
down, switching between tile and grout, she mopped her way down the customer
side of the counter, stopping at the drink fountain to clean the soda splotches
on the floor. She turned toward the lobby
tables and worked her way around Ms Dijon, who had seated herself near the
front door. She grit her teeth when she
saw Miss Dijon bite into her sandwich, obviously enjoying herself. In addition to being Dana’s daytime nemesis,
Ms Dijon was also what her father termed a “loyal customer”, and Dana knew
enough of her father to know that fucking up was generally ok, so long as it
didn’t mess up her father’s things, and Ms Dijon was definitely one of her father’s
things. As such, she left Ms Dijon
alone. “Fucking pretentious hag,” was
all she could muster as she mopped passed, low enough for only Dana to hear.
About
half way down the row of tables, as she was pushing her mop under a table she
noticed something square and black on the seat, a wallet. Dana quickly looked around to see if Everett
was in view but he was still in the back.
Ms Dijon’s back was also to her.
She quickly pocketed the wallet and began mopping again, only slightly
faster now, cleaning the tile but skipping the grout.
Once the bucket
was dumped and rinsed, Dana hid herself in the unisex bathroom. She pulled the bi-fold wallet from her pocket
and turned it over in her hands. Inside
she found an ID with the face of a man (not unattractive,) an assortment of
credit cards and $400 cash. She
absentmindedly place the wallet, minus the four hundred dollar bills, on the
sink and then stood before the toilet staring at the four bills. This much free currency had never before
fallen into her hands. Her excitement
was palpable, her hands tightly held the bills as she considered the coming
weekend. Drugs, there would be drugs,
and some other things, details to be worked out later.
Suddenly
there was a loud knock on the door. Dana
yelled slightly at the surprise intrusion. As she bolted up right, her arms flailed
a bit which caused her to lose grip on two of the four bills she was examining. There was another loud knock, but she did not
hear this one. The world had gone into
slow-motion, her eyes locked onto the bills floating, mid-air. She shot her hands out, frantically in the
direction of the bills, snatching one with her left hand while simultaneous
causing the other one to jet off in an unpredictable direction. She tried for this last one with her right
hand and missed, and then just watched as the bill arced right into the toilet
bowl.
She
stood before the bowl, head down, fists in balls watching the bill float
serenely on the water. “Shit shit shit
shit shit!” she chanted under her breath, each “shit” taking on greater
intensity.
She
looked left and right for something to fish the bills out with, deciding the
paper towel roll looked the most promising.
She gave a fonzerelian blow to the paper towel dispenser, and it popped
open to display a mostly filled roll.
She quickly freed it, and then just stood there a second, unsure of how
to use her new tool. Dana ripped off a
few sheets. Gently she dipped these
sheets into the water, fishing like, hoping the bills would adhere to the now
wet towel. All this method succeeded in
doing was to push the bills further under the surface of the toilet water. “Fuck…”
It then occurred
to her that using the spool at the center of the roll would allow her to just
scoop the bill right out, and so she began to unroll it. About a quarter of the way through the roll,
with a growing pile of brown paper at her feet, she thought twice and began to
re-roll the paper towels, though she was no more successful at rolling it back
up. The edges of the paper cylinder
becoming ever more raged the more she rolled.
The center was nice and tight, but the rerolled areas were anything
but. She attempted to jam the mass back
into the dispenser, barely able to get it back into place.
Over her shoulder,
she looked at the toilet bowl.
“Fuck it”, she
said. She grabbed the roll from the dispenser
and then quickly unrolled the entire thing onto the floor. She took the center spool and fished the bill
out of the toilet, placing it into the sink. She grabbed the hand soap from the counter and
squirt three pumps worth of soap onto the bill.
With her hands she worked the bills under the water until she was
satisfied. She then crouched down before
the pile of paper towels, and sort-of smashed the two bills into the pile of useless
brown paper with her hand, moving the bills around until they seemed reasonably
dry. She folded the four bills in two
and placed them in her wallet. She placed
the stolen wallet in her purse.
Dana crouched
before the pile of paper, considering her choices. She considered flushing it, thought of
placing just the end of the long tail into the toilet and flushing it and then
watching the long trail of paper slowly get consumed by the hungry toilet. Although the idea was very tempting to her,
she realized that this came with its own host of potential problems and decided
against it. Instead she decided on a
simple solution, reaching both arms around the brown pile and lifting it. She negotiated herself plus package through
the bathroom door and into the back room.
Everett looked up when she walked in, “What the…?” He stood.
“Some asshole
fucked up the bathroom, paper towels and shit everywhere. Don’t worry though, I got it all cleaned up.”
“Oh, thanks…” he
said sitting back down, somewhat confused at her sudden proactivity. ”Hey, did you see a wallet in the bathroom,
or out front maybe?”
Dana
froze for a second. She had become so
preoccupied with the paper towel mess that the inevitability of the wallet
owner’s return had slipped her mind.
“Some guy lost his
wallet. He’s goin’ through the trash out
front looking for it.”
“No,”
she said flatly. “Maybe the guy who
fucked up the bathroom took it,” she
offered, smiling. She walked to the
front of the store and saw a man, elbow deep in the trash can.
He
was attractive with black hair, tall and thin.
She called to him, “Hey, you need some help there?” and then she gave
him a bit of a smile. He stood up and
looked at her, absently wiping his hands on the front of his jeans. She could tell that for a second she had him,
the way his eyes didn’t waver from hers.
At that moment she considered using the wallet as her in, maybe she’d
lead him back to the bathroom and then magically produce it, maybe get his
number.
The man then
remembered what he was doing and said “Excuse me, but have you seen a…”
The store doorbell
rang and they both looked over to watch a woman enter. She was about Dana’s height, but blonde and
quite a bit prettier than Dana. Dana
glanced back at the man and noticed his countenance had changed. The glimmer of interest was now one of
apprehension.
The
woman moved quickly to the man and took the trash can from him and then looked
inside. “Nothing?” she knowingly asked. The man shook his head and she turned and
walked up to the counter. The woman put
on a faux smile, and then with a certain saccharine voice said: “My husband
seems to have lost his wallet. Has
anyone turned one in?”
Dana
regarded them both, her ‘in’ with the guy had obviously flown out the front
door and Dana was suddenly becoming irritated with this woman. Dana started cleaning the sandwich board,
picking up pieces of wilted olives and green pepper and throwing them back into
their containers. After shooting the
last piece of olive from a couple of feet away, she replied without looking up,
“Sorry, I haven’t seen one. Have you
checked the bathroom?”
“Yes,
I was just in there.” the woman replied.
“The woman at the front of the store” she gestures, “says she saw it on
one of the benches, but now it isn’t there.”
Dana
froze. The possibility that Ms Dijon had
seen the wallet, and then just left it on the bench had not occurred to
her. She thought quickly, had anyone
else come into the store? She didn’t
even know when the wallet had originally been left. She figured at least one other person must
have come and gone between the time of the wallet drop and the time of her
finding it. Had someone? She tried to remember the last time she had
heard the doorbell. Someone must have
come at this time of day, she thought. But
wouldn’t that person have seen the wallet?
God damn Ms Dijon.
And
at that, Dana looked up at the woman and said “I’m sorry, I’ve been mostly
cleaning in the back. I mopped, but I
didn’t see it then. Sorry.” And to her apology she added a sympathetic
face.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Good news for those us fucked up enough to already be taking Celexa...
Celexa can help stave off Alzheimer's! That's right folks, not only is my own brain out to kill me, it is bent on doing it to a lucid me.
And we will never be alone again...
I'm not sure why, but this song is so addicting. It reminds me, somewhat of Eye in the Sky by The Alan Parsons Project. They diverge rather drastically from each other as each song progresses, but there is something about the easy beat progression that is almost relaxing, in a somewhat ethereal manner. Anyway, here is Eye in the Sky if you are interested:
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