DETECTIVE CHARLEY MANNING COMES ALIVE

Yesterday at Torque, drinking skinny hazelnut latte, I was anticipating next issue of Vancouver Vector, thinking 'bout what happens next in my campaign to get someone other than myself to publish one of my already completed novels.

Day before that sent query letters to agents for Angie's Choice. Plan two queries to publishers. Other than that, what next?

My wife again put her two cents in, praising The Man In The Mirror—my first novel—as interesting and suspenseful, and her being a mystery reader, I'm tending to heed her words. However, getting that novel into file form's daunting. Typewritten ms is yellowed and ink has seeped into the paper, blurring the letters. Optical character recognition (OCR) software doesn't work. I've tried my own OCR and had Office Max try theirs. Checked into a typing service. Nine-hundred bucks to type the ms into editable files. I hear "edible" when my interior monologue says "editable". Does that mean I think that if I put that much money into editable files we won't be able to afford edible goods? 

I tell you...the new novel, the Detective Charley Manning tale, is rolling along quite nicely and, methinks, it's stolen my heart away. I was going to reveal the current opening paragraphs, but I'm suddenly experiencing proprietary twinges toward the ideas that drive the book. I smell publishing success in ways I've never in my long and harried writing life experienced it.

ANGIE'S CHOICE COMPLETED. ARKANSAS CHARLEY BEGINS???

Angie's Choice final rewrite done. Oh happy day! Gonna have my ever-reading wife peruse Chapter One to approve my additions to the dinner conversation. If I can catch her lively interest I know I'm good to go. Next decision? Got three novels to rewrite, specifically, Delinquent Lives, perhaps the more serious novel, or the one about the failed author turned porno writer who discovers that his fantasies direct his choices of women in real life, or I could continue the new novel I began yesterday which really excites me. Humn? Follow the excitement or do the serious novel? The new novel begins as per below:

Oh happy day!

"Arkansas Charley dragged smoke from a Pall Mall deeply into his lungs and peered down at the telltale wisp of smoke that leaked between the second and third buttons of his wrinkled Paisley shirt. Shaking his head morosely, he plucked two wrinkled tidbits of flesh from his left wrist where the metal watch band had gouged under the skin. Carefully, he balanced the tiny fragments of himself on the shaky tip of his middle finger and held them to the sunlight that streamed remorselessly through McDonald’s front window. To someone watching, Charley appeared to be giving a finger to the sun.

"The fleshy remains of himself on his finger tip were another sign of the inevitable decline all flesh was heir to. Down into the bone of himself, Charley knew and accepted that in a decade or so, give or take a couple of years, he would be nothing but a hank of hair and a piece of bone. Like all of animalkind, except for those beasts slaughtered young and rendered up for the tables of the globe, he would grow steadily worse until his decaying body could no longer support the thoughts and feelings, the actions that all humans called life. For now, he sighed to himself, he would have to give up wearing watches."

POST PARTUM HURRAH...almost

I do affirm and attest that yesterday, at or around the time of 14:30 Pacific Time (daylight savings) said author, George T. Thomas, heretofore known as The Silent Boomer, in a Starbucks beside Mill Plain Blvd. in the City of Vancouver in the State of Washington did complete, wrap up and, for all intents and purposes, put the quietus to a final rewrite of his novel, Angie's Choice, when said author completed work on said book's final chapter, Chapter Twenty-Two. Said author also reported extreme relief and attacks of "what do I do now?" Further, said author reported he is "put out" that due to certain past incidences of EEM (i.e. extreme exuberation malfunction) he may no longer pop a champagne cork and celebrate as he once did in the distant days of his inglorious past.

It should be noted that said author also reports a contradiction, in that said novel, though finished, is not finished? Said author said he may invent an entirely new discussion in Chapter One of Angie's Choice in which the two couples talk about "Boomer stuff" rather than have a conversation about old time radio advertizing jingles as is now the case in said novel, he said. The said author further stipulates he believes the reader must be drawn closer to his four characters (Angie and Curtis Davis and Larry and Marcia Chadwick) as they sit chatting around a table cloth covered table at a restaurant dinner, so that said reader will be drawn to follow said couples deeper into the novel and care more about the horrific things that happen to said couples when they become the said hostages of said two paramilitary killers are even more affecting, he said. The author further said, with a shrug of his shoulders and a sad look on his features that he's having fourth thoughts about the book's title and the said use of the word "said", he said in my article about his said project.

report submitted by Sad Sadie Said, Turkish folk singer

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE SUCCUMBS TO A SILENT'S SKILLS

After five grueling hours today the penultimate chapter of Angie's Choice succumbed to a rewrite.

"Bent at the waist, her hands pressed against the deeply creviced, sticky bark of a Ponderosa, Angie looked down at her feet and gasped for air. Her legs wobbled unsteadily beneath her. For the moment, she could think of nothing but the painful sensation of her laboring lungs and the burning rip of air dragged into her windpipe. After a time, as her breathing came easier, she heard both her captors also gasping for breath. She knew she could run no farther. 

"She'd lost a shoe miles back and reached down to feel the bottom of her bare foot, but its skin was so numb she couldn't tell what the damage was. Jake had been shoving and dragging Angie along for hours through the darkness, both stumbling over rocky ground and carpets of pine needles, scrambling up hills and sliding down steeper slopes. Twice, they splashed ankle-deep through cold, rushing streams. Occasionally, from the vantage of higher elevations, they caught the gleam of flashlights flickering between trees. A helicopter had thumped its way overhead a couple of times, but it’s searchlight couldn’t penetrate the thick forest canopy shielding their movements. Lately they’d heard hounds baying in the distance. Once or twice, a human voice shouted loudly enough to be heard."

Writing at my age is filled with difficulties. For the scene I worked on today with three characters on the run in a forest, I had to keep going back to remember who was sitting down or leaning against a tree or on his or her feet. Those are continuity details important to the veracity of a scene. An old writer, in a hurry as I was this morning, can make distracting errors if his inner eye forgets those details. A man is on his feet who just a moment before was lying on his back. "When did he get to his feet," the reader will ask, and who can blame her?

IT'S A GOOD NEWS MONDAY!

Torque Coffee, tea on a mon(sun)day, bay door thrown up to let Kerouac sunbeams fly and flies in. Framed in bay door of never-ending same dimension—a Hilton's tan plainness on a square of canvass, hint of blue sky and white clouds thin as harem pantaloons in the left corner of a Rene Magritte kind-of painting. Happiness of vision!

YESTERDAY, rewriting at Black Rock Coffee, I was tired in the afternoon (aged man two o'clock nap). Nothing came of the pitiful attempt except drowsiness and drooping spirit...but...

LAST EVE, AN EMAIL: 
George:
Can we use the article you sent recently on 50plusnorthwest.com?  We will include a link to your website.
Greg Johnson
50plusnorthwest

Of course you can, I chirped. Of course, gladly, happily, publish my pathetic, funny essay.... Of course, also, no money. What's new in the current writers' domains? For the barest of moments, I think of Vonnegut. In 1950s, two short stories earned him 1,500 dollars, enough to keep his family afloat for six months. A writer dare not hang at the end of that clothesline. He'll fade in sunlight. Anyhow, damn it, I'm appreciative, and Editor Greg Johnson's acceptance keeps me hyped to my goal, my item on a bucket list—to wit—to get someone other than myself to publish one of my four novels before I die.   

AND TODAY...Happy day, my Chapter Twenty rewrite of Angie's Choice flew by, done before noon. Two chapters remain (and that touch-up in Chapter One to make it more appealing), then I won't look at it again. I'll send it around and around, ceaselessly, until it begs to be let die...or I die...whichever comes next.

SILENT BOOMER AS BAIT FOR ZOMBIE ATTACKS

the open bay (trap) door

I sit in the spacious concrete cavern of Torque Coffee in downtown Vancouver, Washington (not B.C., Canada). We await the next  attack of the undead. The bay door is thrown open to a sunny day, inviting wandering zombies to enter. I sit in plain sight of the bay door as bait. It's an ambush. Across the street, the shell of the local Hilton stands empty, all its personnel zombieized by earlier forays. Bellhops in their bellhop caps make comical zombies, if you can imagine. Remember that bellhop who used to call for "Phillip Morris"? Imagine him as a zombie.

Before I slipped from my home office this morning, I put one last spit and polish to yesterday's rewrite of Chapter Nineteen of Angie's Choice. I planned to begin rewrite of Chapter Twenty at Torque, but (stupid me) I forgot to download that ms with its alterations onto my thumb drive. I can't get more work done today. Oh, I suppose I could work on Chapter Twenty here and save the ms under a different file name, then interweave the two versions by cutting and pasting to the latest ms that sits on the desktop of my desktop computer at home. Trouble is I'd risk erasing valuable changes I made this morning. 

This old Silent Boomer is not immune from making mistakes while transferring data from thumb drive to computers, ms to ms, and vice versa. It's too risky for a hard of hearing old man with poop-stained underwear (an easy target even for stumbling zombies with poop-stained underwear themselves) to accomplish without an occasional error or four. So I'll wait. I've made sufficient progress the past two weeks. Time to relax and enjoy a zombie attack or two.

SILENT BOOMER FINDS HIMSELF WITH CRACKED POTS

Laura Dufala ceramic

Rewrite of Sophie's Choice went so well this morning that I drove to McMennamen's in Troutdale, Oregon to take in the "Cracked Pots Art Show". The day was humid and hot for Oregon. Signage at show offered statistics about America's trash production from which the recyclers work. 

Beautiful crafts. I bought earrings for Mertie and an inexpensive piece of ceramic wall art by Laura Dufala of Gresham, Oregon. A couple of young women offered skirts made of men's ties. Thought of Mertie, but they required hand washing. Domesticated me, asked. The work that most intrigued me was Kelly Phipps Metalworks. Click the link and take a look. She's damn good, but the best pieces were out of our price range.

A mere two pages left in Chapter Nineteen. Rewrite lifted my spirits. I caught an inconsistency in the original ms that was a chapter apart. Some days my attention to detail is better than others. The violent ending has begun from which Angie Davis will emerge a transformed woman. 

McMennamen hotel from pitch and putt golf course

Strangely (atheist that I am), I heard myself think "coming in on a wing and a prayer" as I contemplated the final landing of Angie's Choice. How many remember that old WWII song?