Through a Smokey Haze – Part One
Today I lay on the couch, typing the newest installment of my next short story. I do so because I quite literally can no longer sit at my desk computer. The chair for it is nothing more than a metal folding chair with a few throw pillows on it. When I stood up today, my bad hip refused to work appropriately for a good ten minutes. I was wobbling rather dangerously, and my hip felt oddly detached from the rest of my body. We are so tight on money right now that I can’t afford to replace the chair. My wife’s situation is no different, as her chair is so broken that the bottom has busted out. Sitting on it for an extended period of time ruins back muscles like no other. After one two hour stretch, my neck hurt for days afterwards. As I lay here on the couch, my back aching from too much time on the chair, I have had to tell my toddler “No” at least thirty times, firmly remove his hand from the laptop cord twice, and have had to keep him from removing my earphones no less than six times. My wife, hard at work on Thanksgiving, had to come over and corral him into the kitchen to allow me a chance to write today. He refused to nap earlier, and the opportunity for such an activity has now closed, as we are serving Thanksgiving dinner.
As I lay here, aching, frustrated, worn out, and with the Temple edit looming over me like the Sword of Damocles, I cannot help but feel like a fraud. You know those hilariously obvious not-quite copyright infringement Chinese movies? Where everything is basically the same, but enough has been altered to allow for international copyright law to be satisfied? That’s what I feel like. I feel like all that I’m doing with my time at the keys is creating cheap, slightly offensive knockoffs of actual good things. I feel that the true act of being an author, editing, is something that is and will always be beyond my capabilities. I find every excuse under the sun not to do it. Clean my house? Check. Take care of things that have lingered for months, if not years, rather than sit down and take care of what I am literally hoping will launch my entire career?? Yep. I do that thing. Or I play video games, or I watch movies / anime, or I spend time with my family. Or I blame it on being tired, or I blame it on being late at night, etc, etc. The list of things I have come up with to put off editing is prodigious, to say the least. The first draft of anything is unfit for human consumption. None of the blogs, authors, editors, or publicists that I have talked to as I’ve started my career have affirmed that a first draft is acceptable for anything. One author indicated that she tried to slip a first draft into her editors hands, and she flat out refused to do anything with it until it had been shaped into a proper draft.
Writing itself has become easy. Look at this post! I’m already over five hundred words and I haven’t even gotten to the meat of the post! It’s something that I have done with such frequent repetition that it has become rather simplistic. This post, so far, has taken me ten minutes of write time. The story itself? That’ll be another 10 – 15, and will be over a thousand words on top of what I’ve done already. I’m writing 1300+ words a day, which is a phenomenal achievement for a man who had never so much as put pen to paper prior on anything that wasn’t a college paper prior to July of 2016. I’m not saying that it hasn’t been productive, or that I haven’t shown tremendous and consistent progress. But I’ve had Temple completed since… September? Early October? It’s still not edited. I’ve done maybe… six hundred words? It took forever too, almost two hours of reading, rewriting, rewriting the rewriting, then rewriting it all again before it became something I felt good about attaching my name to. Plus, I am married to an English teacher. The thought of reading the draft out loud where she could hear fills me with dread. I’m not really comfortable with her reviewing my work, even though she’s a natural ally. There’s just too much marriage involved for me to ever detach myself from her opinion on my writing. If she were someone I knew only as a friend? Oh goodness, I would be all over her expertise like I hit the Chinese buffet: Fast and with gusto. But I’m very much a man of malnourished social graces and lack any claim to highly nuanced emotions. She knows this about me, and I know that it’s caused her no small amount of grief. But most of my childhood was spent with me in a reflexive defense posture growing up, due to weight and general nerdosity. It’s hard to change those ingrained habits at this late date. I’m trying, but it has been and always will be a tough row to hoe.
As for the new story, Through a Smokey Haze, this is one of those things that waltzes into the mind in the quiet moments between laying down to sleep and achieving such. In those times, emptying my mind of all the commotion which lays claim to it during the day, my new protagonist slouched in. World weary, hard-bitten, wise with his actions and thoughts, but lacking any true sense of control of the things going on around him. He’s a detective for hire, a pr, vate contractor farmed out to work cases the regular fuzz can’t or won’t touch. In a throwback to his profession, he wears the classic trench-coat, hands in his pockets, rain falling on his fedora as he lights a cigarette. Yeah, that’s where I’m going with this one. What makes my story unique is not the tone, nor the anti-hero who lives in the world I’m building. No, this one will be all about the setting. Along the same lines of The Pill and the Patsy, this is a character story. Sure, there will be some action, but first and foremost it’s about getting to know and love the man in the trench-coat. That’s what all the best ones have always been about.
With further genre troupes,
Through a Smokey Haze – Part One
The rain battered his fedora as he craned his neck to light his third cigarette in as many minutes. A flash of light, a half-glimpsed impression of blocky features, and only the cherry shone out of the high collars of the trench-coat. He returned the light to his upper inside pocket, at the same time removing the fork from his lower inside pocket, and giving it the customary flick to activate the holographic display. Pulling his hat further onto his head, and his trench-coat firm once more against the chilly Septober evening, he held the display in his lower right hand, and with his neck craned to block out the weather he read the script that flashed past at top speed. He flicked the fork through pager after page of paperwork, marveling at what he read as he flicked through the dossier of the victim whose death had Horizon PD frothing at the mouth. It’s not often they call me in for a murder. The thought flashed past as he kept reading. An outside observer would think that he was just giving the file a cursory glance, not really taking any of the information in as he zoomed through it. That would be a horrible mistake, because only fools underestimated Sam Coli’q’uea.
A man holding a briefcase over his head returned to Sam’s side with a steaming cup of a dark amber liquid. “Sorry it took me so long Click, that Cafe is packed. Everyone has turned out for the show.” With the last words, he dismissively nodded at the flashing lights and buzz of conversation which made up the press conference hastily thrown together by the Horizon PD to deal with the flock of reporters which had shown up like a pack of ravening h’hrarl to a slain veelborer. Pests, Sam thought with indifferent dismissal as he turned his head back from his brief acknowledgement of Richard’s statement to the task at hand. The alley was brightly lit, as all such alleyways were. Supposedly it was to ward off the kind of crime that happened tonight, but even here in the heart of Horizon Station, you couldn’t escape the violence of the Chimera. Not even if you’re the most dangerous and influential of the lot, apparently. This morbid thought struck Sam as he swapped the fork to his upper right hand to slip the lower pair into his trench-coat pockets. The pages of this case file were endless, hundreds and hundreds of documents detailing generation upon generation of the crimes she had committed. Known crime associates, known business dealings, suspected business dealings, known bases of operation, suspected bases of operation… While he assimilated the information he would need to even have a prayer of solving this case, he couldn’t help but stare at the mess in front of him. Blood, fresh and bright orange, coated the walls to shoulder height. The body was flayed of chitin until it was an unrecognizable collection of ruptured muscle pods and sinew that should have been stronger than any ship metals. The sinew was slashed to ribbons, cut through in solid, straight lines as though they had posed no barrier at all. Sam had already flicked through several holo-snaps which showed in great detail how easily she had shrugged off anti-carrier laser cannons, several kinetic missiles, and even once took a tac-nuke strike and shrugged it off. Thousands of years, that’s how long she had been alive. The foremost of her race, the paragon to which both of the other heads of the Chimera aspired to emulate, K’th’rek V’lithlian lay broken in a pile of her own viscera, with her blood painting the alley. The most powerful person in the whole of the Spiral Arm was dead in a back alley, and it was up to Sam Coli’q’uea to figure out why.
Rainfully,
Justin
