Sunday, March 30, 2008

• And Once Again...

  Currently Reading Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 4 By Jack Kirby see related

  ...there was something I was going to blog about, but no idea what it was. I vaguely recall thinking of it during Torchwood, but now I can't recall.
  
  In other news...uhm....there isn't much. :) Got a bit of work done around the house, managing to move a lot of books from the back room to the office, so that pretty much all my D20-ish stuff is now here for ready grabbing. And, of course, The Novel (TM). Running into the problem of having characters doin things for reasons beyond 'the plot says so'. Part of it is that most of the plot this far has been reactive, but it's the point where the protagonists need to earn that title and start acting first. (This is a pretty common dramatic structure -- the hero(es) get the crap kicked out of them for X pages, then finally start kicking back.) Problem is, as a lazy, selfish, cowardly, bastard, it's hard for me to get into the head of someone whose response to trouble isn't "I'll stay here while someone else gets killed". (And since my characters don't know they're PCs and don't have their character sheets in front of them, they can't just say 'We have enough hit points to handle it'.) I don't view it as an insoluble problem; a good thing about writing, as opposed to, say, DMing, is that you can always go back and retcon things, adding in emotions, motivations, and so on, establishing stuff in Chapter I so that it makes sense to march into Certain Doom in Chapter V.
  
  Speaking of Chapter V, it has, I think, the best action scene I've ever written. Like most writers, I normally hate every word I write as soon as it's down on paper, but this one I still like, a chapter or two later. So I have 3 or 4 paragraphs I'm really proud of, out of, uhm, 106 pages so far. That's well above average for me.
  
  Oh, now I remember! I was going to post my latest bit of flash fiction. This is a lot less gory than the buzzard one. :) It's something I've had dancing in my mind since the late 1990s, but this is the first version of it to make it on paper beyond the first few paragraphs. It's a very truncated, compressed, version of the concept, which I always envisioned as a shortish story (about 10K words) or a half hour TV dramatic presentation. It's the bare bones of the concept, stripped to the beginning and the climax, without much middle, but I might flesh out the skeleton later.
  

  ---

  The Uncreated
  
  "Happy" Harry Hannigan was sitting in his office, minding his own business, when the statuesque redhead came in and started shooting at him. This was not, in and of itself, especially unusual. A significant percentage of Harry's infrequent pay went to patching up bullet holes in his office. What he did find unusual, as he leapt behind the increasingly bullet ridden solid oak desk and fumbled for his own pistol, was that he had no idea who the woman was.

  "Hey!" he shouted, looking for a quick exit that didn't take him past the still firing woman, "Why don't you put that thing back in your pocket, like the nun said to the priest, and we can chat about this?" Her only answer was to stop firing, solely because she had run out of bullets, and flip the barrel open to begin loading more.

  Harry saw an opportunity. He scrambled out from behind his desk and leapt for her, trying to wrestle her to the ground (a prospect not without its incidental rewards) and disarm her. He did knock the pistol from her, and it went flying out into the hall, where it skidded along the cracked marble floor beyond the dingy office. His grapple was less successful. She caught him in the midsection with her knee, and he fell back, grunting. "Look," he began. "We don't got to do it like this. Hey, I know a funny story you might like. Seems this sailor goes into a bar, right, and he's got a moose with him. So the bartender says..."

  She kicked at him again, then ran for the gun. Harry had found his holster, slung carelessly over a chair, and grabbed at it, to find the gun was bereft of bullets. He heard the click of tasteful high heels on dingy marble, and made a quick tactical decision, bolting for the window. He started forcing it open, feeling chips of grey paint fall on his face, when she entered. He dashed out of, hearing two more bullets whiz past him. The fire escape would take him down to the trash filled alley below, then he could run, get his bearings, and try to solve this. Of course, his curiosity wasn't going to let him do anything that simple -- it never did.

  He quickly peeked through the window.

  "If you don't mind my asking, who are you? I like to know who's shooting at me. Makes everything much more friendly and personable."

  The woman smiled a tiny, thin, bitter, sad, smile. (It was, Harry reflected, amazing how many emotions could be contained in one facial expression.)

  "I'm your dead wife, Harry." Then she fired again, and Harry dodged backwards, tumbled over the railing, grabbed it, felt it crumble and give, and plunged 20 feet into a pile of discarded rags from the tailor shop on the ground floor. He quickly gave thanks to Mr. Sheinerman, whose castoffs had saved his life a good dozen times now, and rolled to his feet. He then headed to the bar, as he always did when things got like this, which was, on average, once a month or so.

  One thing nagged at him, though, as he bolted along familiar 7th Avenue -- he never had a wife, dead or otherwise.

  Toolihan's Bar And Grill (But Mostly Bar) was dimly lit, and it was all for the best; a good look at the place would turn the stomach of the most desperate wino. Harry lumbered up to the bar and took his favorite seat. Carl Toolihan poured him his usual, without asking. He saw Harry drink it down, and then, he looked puzzled.

  "No jokes, Happy?"

  "Hm?"

  "Every day, for too many years, you come in here, you sit down, you tell me some really crappy old joke, then you drink. Today, no joke. What's up with that?"

  "Someone's been shooting at me."

  "So? Someone shoots at you all the time. Hey -- you don't pay your tab, I'm gonna start. But someone's shooting at you, that means you got a case, right? So you're gonna get some money and then we'll be square, leastwise for now."

  "No case, Carl. That's what's bugging me. She's shooting at me for nothing. She said..."

  "What? You got her daughter in a family way? Her in a family way?"

  "No...she said she was my dead wife."

  Carl took this in. "You never told me you were married."

  "I'm not! I wasn't! Never even been engaged."

  "So she got you confused with someone else."

  "Called me Harry."

  He looked around the bar, in the dim shadows. The usual crowd was there. They were always there, the assorted barflies, no matter what time of day or day of the year, the same people, like the bar was a painting he walked in front of. It was a funny thought, and not the kind that made people laugh.

  Something caught his eye.

  "Hey, Carl. What's behind that door?"

  "Stockroom."

  "I ain't never been in it."

  Carl shrugged. "Why should you have been? It's just, y'know, a stockroom. It's got...stock."

  Harry got up and walked to the door. He opened it.

  Behind it was nothing.

  Not an empty room. Not an open space. Just...nothing. Non-creation.

  He shut the door and staggered back.

  Karl waved to him. "So, what'd you see?"

  "Nothing."

  "Told ya. Have another beer." He turned to take a brown bottle from the shelf behind him, then the bottle turned crimson as two bullets tore through his chest. The woman stood in the doorway.

  Harry stared. That never happened. A dozen, a hundred thugs and toughs and wiseguys had come into Toolihan's, threatened him, beat him, even shot at him, but they never went near Carl. It just didn't happen.

  "Why? Why? You're crazy, you know that? I never had a wife, never mind a dead one! I'd remember that!" He inched towards a beer bottle. Grab it, break it, have some kind of weapon...

  It exploded as a bullet passed through it. "That's right. You never had a wife, so she was never murdered by mobsters, so you never reminisced about her, never dreamed of her, never made her live over and over in your memories." She smiled. "And I wanted to live. I wanted to, so badly. But for me to live, you have to die. Your jokey bumbling and constant flirting don't work right with the torment of a murdered love." Her smile broadened into a manic grin. "Hey, Harry...did you hear the one about the dead detective?"

  She fired. He felt the bullet cut into his heart. Then he felt nothing.

  Somewhere else...

  "You're two weeks late, Mort. Detective Tales Monthly is about ready to go to press. Where's my story?"

  "I'm sorry, Frank. Really. I've been staring at the damn Underwood 'till my eyes bleed, and nothing is happening. It's like...Harry's gone. He used to always be in my head, and now, well, he isn't. I can't find him. I type a couple of sentences and they're dead on the page."

  "Great. Just friggin' great. We got a lead story to fill, and you're my top draw. You want me to give that Gibson hack the cover slot?"

  "No...no, wait, I can do something. Remember my other idea? The first one I pitched?"

  "No, I don't...wait. Yeah, I do. That whole dark, cynical thing...what was it? The Grim Vigilante or something?"

  "Yeah. Tortured soul, battling against the underworld ever since they killed his wife in a gangland crossfire...really meaty stuff. I wanted to do it, but you said people wanted more fun characters."

  "Right. I still don't like it, but...we need words on paper. Get me the first installment by next week, and we can pad the rest out with something from the slush pile."

  "You got it."

  "Wait, though. I still don't like the dead wife angle. People like it when there's sexy dames in the story, and it won't be right if he's always mooning over his ex. Make it his Ma and Pa instead. Just as tragic, right?"

  "I...I guess so. It still doesn't feel right...but, yeah, I can make it work. Sure."

  Somewhere else, in the place where the ghosts of ideas wait, the woman sighed and checked her pistol.

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