Plot Point

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.

How can I not post this?

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.

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: