The Works and Worlds of J Dark
What I learned about being a writer is that
a) it’s hard work,
b) there are long days of struggle with few sentences, and occasional bursts of inspiration that can cover pages,
c) the stories are what drive the writer, the desire to see for themselves, what happens next, and finally
d) there is nothing like seeing the end of the story so another can begin.
Writing is what I like doing, and what I want to do. But I do notice that when I read, words are not as hard to come by. By reading, I set my mind into looking at, and for, words to use in the story I am writing. The words still struggle, but I’ve more focus for the writing, and this also benefits in that there are more synonyms that come to mind for a word, and that makes reading more interesting.
Mom dressed all the time in old clothes and dark colors. When we went out to the store, it was usually in the very early morning. Mom always told me that it was best, because there weren’t many people around and it made shopping easier. Looking back, I think it was because at those hours, hardly anyone she had met at her ‘job’ would be around. She table-danced, or stripped, whichever describes it best for you. Mom hated it, and came home crying a lot. That would make Dad unhappy and those were when the biggest fights happened. About her job. About the money she brought home because dad couldn’t work. About him not working. They always fought. They didn’t pay much attention to me then. I learned to hide in my room when their voices started to get an edge. It meant that things were going to get broken, and a lot of slapping and throwing. It was better in my bedroom.
As I look at the memory of it, that room was my refuge. The one place I had some little privacy of my own. It wasn’t sacrosanct. Both mom and dad would come in to wake me up, or yell at some accident, or even hide from one another, either in play, or, you know. The not-fun-not-play stuff like fighting or yelling or crying. Dad did it a little more than mom. He’d charge in and slam the door, then lean against it. Mom would pound a few times, then go quiet. Dad watched me as he leaned on the door. He’d hold his first finger to his lips and go ‘shhhh’.
Do you know how you’re going to say goodbye to someone? Is it going to be a loving embrace and a soft caress of their cheek before they go to the great beyond? Or, is it going to be heated words and a pistol stuck in their belly as they try to argue, or to plead with you, not to pull the trigger? Or is it simply a call in the night? A quick stop at the mortuary to look at a lump of flesh bloated with formaldehyde, because that’s the law? Or, will you, like me, wonder what happened when they just disappear? Here one day, and gone the next, and no clue where.
I remember, or think I do, the last time I saw Mom and Dad. They’d dropped me off at Uncle Soap’s apartment after packing the beat-up gold Ford Taurus for a camping trip. They often went camping alone at least twice a month, down in the Big Bend National Park. I remember him having on his red and black shirt he’d pulled the sleeves off. Mom always told him that was her favorite shirt of his. She’d wear it around the house sometimes to tease Dad. Not that they were all sweetness and love. More than once I heard them screaming back and forth about all sorts of things. Always it was mostly about drugs.
I didn’t understand then, but I think I do now. They argued the most just before they went camping, and were best together after they got back. As a child, I saw the change, and knew it had something to do with them going camping, but it really didn’t matter. Mom and Dad were happy. They paid attention to me, and bought me things like a new set of shoes, or a cool shirt. It’s funny that I remember the clothes but not their faces. I remember Dad always being skinny, and he had fuzz on his face. I don’t remember if it was a beard or mustache, both, or if he just didn’t shave every day. Mom was like Dad, skinny.
When they didn’t go camping, Dad stayed home nights with me while Mom went to work. She’d always dress up in baggy pants and a shirt, and carry lots of bright, flashy clothes that fit in a little carry bag to work. Dad would stay awake with me until I got tired, then I’d get tucked into bed on the couch at the far end of the trailer. I’d fall asleep listening to Dad watch television. Every so often, before I passed out, I’d watch him give himself a shot of ‘medicine’ in between his toes. I know he was shooting up now, but then I knew he was always more happy afterwards, so it seemed a good thing to me. I knew something was off, most four-year-olds can sense things. We’re not yet aware enough of how to lie to ourselves and avoid uncomfortable truths. Denial and delusion aren’t something that’s learned right away.
Hiya, as you can tell it’s eight days into the New Year and this is the first post. it’s been a little slow, and for that I apologize. To get to the situation, Book Three, (current working title “Beguiling Words”) is stubbornly refusing to finish. It may require a rewrite of the last portion again to find that elusive path to the end.
Frustrations aside, things feel like when a person is moving from conscious thought to a more instinctive reply. There’s a point in practice, where, at the start you have a steep learning curve, and then a plateau, where movements you have to think about to perform, struggle to become a learned response one doesn’t have to think about. This is where I’m feeling my writing at the moment. It’s like I can see more of my weaknesses, and I can get around them by thinking about each word and situation, but there’s the struggle to push on and let the words flow, which then loses some of the descriptive emotional color, or vibrancy of the background.
The job now is to let the lessons I’m seeing in writing sink in and become part of the learned response so I can add more to the story while the instinctual flow can add more color, description, and emotional impact without the conscious part interrupting the creative flow.
Stumbling over a generator cable, he caught his balance, then was in the clear once again, until a few docks later when the process repeated. Four minutes and a good deal of dodging later, Charlie came to the north end of the dockyard. This was where the burglaries had happened. Skid slowed to a stop. The docks here were thinner than the south end, and older. The wooden planking was grey from weathering. The planks had cement poured next to them, building the dock area outwards to hold the larger loading equipment. The warehouses abutted the edge of the docks. Their wood and red brick walls and single story construction seemed to Skid like huge turtles that came ashore and died in place.
The break-in happened on the dock side of the northernmost building. The yellow police tape on the front door and huge loading dock next to it was a big clue. Charlie took a long look at the building as the sun baked the asphalt and concrete. And the air carried the smell of salt water and decaying fish to his nostrils. He looked towards the docks, which was no help. The last two piers had no ships, and no workers around to talk to. He turned to look back south. The nearest potential witness was about a hundred yards away, and there were a couple hundred servicing a pair of freighters. He could see the cranes on the pier moving large pallets of crates. The grey, blue, and yellow forklifts picked up smaller pallets off the large pallet, and like ants in a line, rolled back towards the warehouses to drop off their cargo.
He turned back towards the south. The sunlight glinting off the forklifts scuttling back and forth was mesmerizing. He blinked, then sighed, “What do I do now?”
Night settled down over the dockyard. While the sounds of traffic had slowly dissipated, the cacophony of the cranes and workers was still at full roar, and carried faintly to Skid, who had moved to the end of the old, weather-worn pier to watch for thieves coming back to break into the warehouse. They gotta return to the scene of the crime. This place is too easy not to pick over. Skid crossed his fingers, hoping he was right. All those comics and mysteries he loved so much said that bad guys always came back for more. I just have to wait, and I’ll catch them red-handed. He settled in for a night of watching, only to find out the rule every other cop has been on a stakeout figured out. The crooks will never appear when you’re awake or ready, if they show at all. This was Skid’s new experience. He kept himself awake by running down to the first active dock, then back again to the end of the old pier, with the predictable results of letting people know he was around.
It was eleven thirty at night when a heavyset figure drove up in a dark car. The vehivles lights were out as it purred to a stop next to the warehouse. This has got to be it! Skid thought excitedly. It was just like the comics. The crooks came back for more! He didn’t wait, but dashed up to the car, shouting “Freeze! You’re under arrest!” The car’s floodlight mounted on the right side of the car came on immediately and spun to illuminate him.
Skid blinked in the light as a voice said, “Jesus Christ! What the hell are you doing, kid! Trying ta give me a heart attack?!” The voice was familiar somehow. He decided to ignore it and confront them like the hero he was supposed to be. He ran quickly to the driver-side door, and gave it a hard yank. The interior light came on to illuminate the gate guard, sitting in the driver seat. Her face was pale in the glare of the harsh mercury lighting from the parking lot lamps. Skid felt his cheeks flush in embarrassment.
“>Uh, sorry. I didn’t think…I just didn’t think.” The stammered apology seemed to calm the guard, who managed a thin smile. She shifted in her seat. The door clicked as she pulled the inner lever and opened it, shifting her heavyset bulk out the door and into the muggy night air.
“I understand. It’s no big deal. I scared myself on my first evening doing guard work.” She paused a moment, then took a breath as she seemed to gather her thoughts. “It was six years ago I got hired. I’d just gotten out of college with a degree in Biology, only to find no one wanted a biologist without a masters, or a doctorate. I jumped on the job. The lead out here gave me the route to drive, what to check, and where to stamp the clock to prove I covered my route.”
Her eyes lit up with the remembered first night. “One thing that they forgot to tell me was that pier eight was a twenty-four hour pickup for priority loads. I drove past the gate, and found it open. At night, all the gates are supposed to be locked. This one was wide open and a pickup was sitting just inside. People were scurrying around flashing lights at the crates, then loading them onto the pickup. There were seven of them and just me with a mag lite and walkie talkie.”
“I called it in quietly, and you know what my lead said?” She chuckled. “He said ‘go check it out, rookie. Oh, and don’t get shot’, which didn’t help my paranoia at all. I walked in and announced myself, at which point there were a couple of screams. The guys dropped the small crate they were moving and seven flashlight swiveled onto me. ‘Jesus ma’am! What the hell are you giving us a heart attack for!? We called it in and I’ve got the papers for the pick up right here.”
I could hear frigging laughing coming over the walkie. I’d been so tense I’d held the transmit button on. My lead had set me up.” She chuckled again, then turned what was supposed to be a stern face at Skid, but her smile ruined the whole stern thing. He found himself grinning at the story. “So, did you get him back?”, he asked her. The guard, whose name was ‘Menendez’ according to her name badge just above her left chest pocket, smiled, and shook her head. “No, it doesn’t work that way. Though, I do seem to remember someone replace his sugar packets with salt once.” Skid chuckled, then looked around the parking lot again. “Is this you trying to tell me that I’m wasting my time?”
He turned off Belcher, then slowed and turned on Collier. The street ran north and fronted the warehouses that stored good from the ships being serviced at the docks. The pace on the docks and warehouses was frantic. It looked to Charlie like an ant nest that had been kicked open. Cranes were moving cargo off the freighters in large pallets. Another freighter was sliding containers down a ramp to waiting eighteen wheel tractor-trailer flatbeds. The line of trucks stretched over a quarter mile by his estimate.
He looked back forward just in time to avoid drifting into the curb at forty miles and hour. He over-corrected and moved into the oncoming lane. He grunted as he planted his foot and shifted back into the proper lane. I gotta pay more attention. I can handle a wipeout, but not an oncoming car. Where is the turnoff to the dockyard? Charlie’s thought was answered a moment later as the road ended at a ‘T’ intersection. He slowed then slewed right, skidding on the loose gravel, then straightened out, slowing to avoid a tumble, and approached the gate. The gate was a railroad crossing re-purposed to be a traffic control. It was currently down as the gate guard was checking the papers on a white and blue UPS truck.
The outbound lane had a tractor trailer slowly moving forward to leave the docks. At his speed he’d bee there before the truck could clear the gate, and with four others behind it, there was no way to use the oncoming lane to bypass the guard. ‘Skid’ slowed as he approached the gate, raising his hand to his pullover mask to make certain it was still in place. The heavyset gate guard stopped talking as the bright red and blue stocky superhero trotted up to the gate.
“Whatta ya want, uh, kid? I’m kinda busy here”, the guard said with a surprisingly soft voice. ‘Skid’ took a moment to realize that the guard was a woman. He could feel himself blush as he tried to sound authoritative.
“Sorry, ma’am. I’d heard that some stuff was stolen last night. I came by to look the, uh, scene over and see if there is something that, umm, would help find the crooks.” He tried to puff his chest out, and got the mental image of a cartoon mouse trying to look tough while facing a cat. The man the guard was talking to had also turned to look over at ‘Skid’, then turned back the guard with a small chuckle, making Charlie blush even redder.
“I suppose I could let you look around. Heck, seeing you prowling might make them guys with sticky fingers decide not to try anything if a costume’s poking around.” She pressed a button, raising the gate, then waved her clipboard at ‘Skid’. “G’wan through. Place that got hit’s on the north side up there.” ‘Skid’ nodded, then trotted around the van, accelerating back to a somewhat leisurely thirty miles and hour. He slowed again as he dodged a swarm of fork lifts moving pallets of crates and boxes to the white concrete warehouse to his left. The traffic was incessant, with two men shouting orders to the stream of men, and equipment coming from a docked freighter. The noise was near deafening as ‘Skid’ dodged swiftly, and awkwardly between the moving vehicles and people.
There is a quote from Calvin Coolidge above my computer:
‘Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved, and always will solve the problems of the human race.’
This is also the case in writing, with a caveat. Writing requires personal determination and persistence to finish a story once begun, because there always will be rough spots in developing the story, dissatisfaction of the editor with the presentation, and numerous edits to fix errors in spelling, language, and word usage. The problem with ‘Press On’ is that there are times where starting over on the idea of a story works better than attempting yet another re-write. There’s no way to figure out where the line is, except your own opinion. You have to honestly look at your work and decide where the line is between re-editing, and starting over. Only you can make that final decision, as you’re the one with the vision and the story.
Prologues are often used to create a scene ahead of the main story, or to impart information that the author sees as relevant to the story. I’ve not used prologues in any stories so far, but that just means I haven’t set up a story that needed one. I personally like prologues. The information gets me ready for the story and gives me an insight I didn’t have prior to reading. Here’s an example of a Prologue. It is from the upcoming novel, “No Fury”, by R. Goodrum and L. Thorndyke.
The Solar Road of Spinset is a marvel of engineering unparalleled in history. This artificial structure links the polar regions of all three worlds (Lambent, Recondite, and Shadow) to an artificial structure which is always one standard hour away from each planet. This transportation system stretches and shrinks as the planets move. The central hub is always precisely in the center of the position of the worlds. Objects which are outside the road have no effect upon the road.
Meteoroids, asteroids, and comets have all made their way through the path of the road without affect. Even slow moving artificial objects pass through. Nothing outside the road has any ability to change what happens inside the road. This is even true of the sun. At times, the hub or spokes of the Solar Road pass through the sun: nothing happens to what is inside or outside the spokes and hub.
The three worlds travel about the sun at different intervals. Lambent is the innermost of the three having 304 cycles of light and dark, day, with a leap day every tenth orbit about the sun, year. Recondite has a longer orbit: 459 days with a leap day every 6 years. Shadow has the longest year at 560 days with two leap days every five years. The Solar Tribunal has established the tribunal year as 453 days with two leap days every ninth year. Even though each planet rotates at a different rate, the Tribunal has established a 20 hour local day for each world. Each hour is further divided into 100 minutes which are divided into 100 seconds.
Travel to or from the central hub takes one hour regardless of the planet from which one starts or ends their trip. Hence “uninterrupted travel between two planets is always exactly two hours. Most citizens who travel between planets choose to use Tribunal Standard Time rather than local time for their timepieces.
The central hub, also known as Triune, was designed to house and support one million individuals. The birth and death rates of Triune are rather low: births are in the range of 10,000 per year while deaths are below 5,000. This has resulted in a mandate that all persons born in Triune most choose a planet on which to reside after the age of 18. This is a permanent commitment. Thereafter, these individuals are allowed to return to Triune only one week per decade unless they can obtain permanent Triune citizenship.
Permanent citizenship is so valued that powerful people from the three planets vie for it. They are willing to become janitors, wait staff, garbage collectors, street sweepers, etc., for the right of permanent Triune citizenship. The bodies of every individual who has every spent at least one year in Triune has regenerated to the point of modest age: seeming to be between 30 and 40 tribunal years of age. There is no sickness or illness, disease or deformity among any individual who has lived in Triune for at least a year. Individuals who have had artificial body parts implanted much undergo surgery within nine month of arrival to have them removed lest the regeneration process force them out violently.
The Tribunal Ancients, also known as the Triumvirate, are the system authority. They are housed at the hub of the Solar Road. These leaders are chosen from the populace of each planet. Their appointment is permanent. The Ancients do not age even though they were once mortal like the rest of their kind. Now, immortal, they can only die through accident, murder or suicide. There has never been an ‘official’ suicide among the Ancients. Accidents which can kill an Ancient are very rare. In the history of Spinset, only two Ancients have died of accidental causes. Murder, on the other hand, has been far more common. Typically, one Ancient is assassinated each century.
On the occasion that a vacancy occurs, any individual may present themselves to one of the temporarily erected testing facilities which are under the direction of the lower officers of the Tribunal. The testing may result in one of three conditions being set: reject, tentative acceptance, or immediate acceptance. Immediate acceptance has only occurred once in history when it was granted to the ten year old, Jason Ardan Milson. Naturally, most individuals who present themselves, over 99.99999%, are rejected by the testing system. The remainder receive tentative acceptance. With time, those who were tentatively accepted are either rejected because a more acceptable candidate was identified or acknowledged as the best candidate. The longest time to confirm a replacement has been one hundred eighty days.
The transit time between worlds is linked to the number of living Ancients. As stated earlier, with all three of the Ancients imbued with the power of their office, the transit time is one hour to the hub and another hour to the destination. At times when one of the posts was vacant, the travel time grew about a minute per day during the vacancy. The longest vacancy resulted in four hours transit time between planets.
-from the Codex Trimvir – Passage 7836.
As you see, this spells out the location, some details of its unusual setting, and some background on what the story may focus on. It primes you for the story, which is the purpose of a prologue.
Charlie 'Skid' Moore ran leisurely in traffic, easily keeping up with the forty mile an hour pace. His bright uniform of red shirt and blue pants stood out in the crush of lunchtime vehicles. He'd originally gone for a dark grey and black, thinking it looked cooler, but after four very near misses, he'd opted for a brighter, more visible color combination, which created a wholly different set of problems. People, especially those in the news business, and fanatics on both sides of the 'superhero' argument were prone to following him around. It made it hard to enjoy just being himself for the sake of it. Now however, the congested traffic made it easy to avoid the Newsies and just enjoy running. Skid accelerated to sixty miles an hour, weaving quickly between cars. Drivers leaned on their horns, with some swerving to avoid the speedster in traffic. Skid grimaced at the screeching tires and prayed that he just hadn't started a chain reaction wreck, but beyond agitated honking, there was no metallic crunching. Thankful, and just a bit tense, Skid took the down ramp and dashed east towards the dockyards. I'll start patrolling there. The scanner last night said there were a few robberies. Some missing crates and busted loading doors. I can check that. He angled off on to Belcher street, then sped up. His field of vision narrowed. His eyes started to have trouble registering things closest to him. The 'tunnel effect' continued to narrow as he accelerated. God if I could only see stuff around me. That was what had gotten the papers to nickname him 'Skid'. Early on in his career, he'd tried to use his full speed to catch a van escaping from a convenience store robbery. He was on the van so fast that he barely had time to register the impending collision and darted out of the way. He tripped on steps to a brownstone, then stumbled along the sidewalk, still at high speed. He'd managed to dodge a couple out for an afternoon stroll, then angled back into the street and stopped running. The skid marks of his melting sneakers as he tried to stop like a comic book hero were over sixty yards long. The van got away by turning on a side street while Charlie had been frantically avoiding collisions. He learned his lesson after that, staying under sixty miles an hour in moving traffic. He'd accelerate, when he had room, but in a city like Boston, room to run flat out was near impossible to find. Considering he'd never figured out his top speed, he wasn't certain he knew of anyplace he'd be safe testing it.