dangereux expérience

As she has before, my favorite Littlebird got me thinking. I've been waiting to find or make time in a large chunk to start writing. As everybody who has done this know, one should not wait for time or find time, one must make time. I had been successful with this before. I could make chunks of time available to write. Life has changed.

Now, there is time out there, but there aren't large chunks of it. Most of these blog posts, the ones written during the week, are often composed or thought out during work time. There are one and three minute gaps in work that I could use to scrape out fragments of thoughts, or read blogs while a plate prints out, a file downloads, or an application loads. Time that most of my coworkers would use to chat or joke, I would use elsewhere. Lately there has been more time at work, moments when work just peters out. That's time that is actually harder to use, as I spend more brain power trying to make or find work.

So there are moments, there is time, just not in a chunk. Instead of focusing on catching up on blogs, I'm going to see if I can use it to write fiction. I've already used it to scribble out messages from the Muse. But that doesn't happen every day.

So, today was an experiment. An experiment that yielded 600 words. Not much. As someone who can write a thousand word email without thinking about it, it's not much. But it is mostly coherent and linear (except near the end when there were more notes and "gee I want to write about this" kinds of things.

So here's some of that. First, some background. The character of Barry Mygnot is not a new thought. He was there for a bit, and it was about a month ago I realized, he's how Steve finds the girl (Rachel, still not good with that name). Also, Barry is a now a mortician (although he wasn't always) and works at a funeral home that bears his name (well, his grandfather's name who started the business). This is from Act 1, Second Chapter (even if it may not be Chapter 2 at the end). Ugly Draft Zero text follows.

"Steve had gone to high school with Barry, who was a few years ahead of him in class, and light years ahead of him with the girls. Having access to a large car with both a bench seat in front and lots of lying down room in back was an irresistible turn-on for some of the local girls.

"After high school Barry got the hell out of town, wrestled an associates degree in accounting to the ground, and went into collections for a bank in Cleveland. Forever trying to reach escape velocity from Cedarbank, he quickly found his calling was in finding people and money and moved ever farther away to work as a private investigator in Minneapolis.

"It was only the boat anchor of his father's death that brought Barry back into the gravity well of small town Ohio. And once he was back, he found he couldn't escape again. So he set up shop in his namesake's business, put on a black suit and set a polite smile on his face to answer for the umpteenth time that, no, that wasn't his name on the business, and Mygnot and Sons had been caring for the dearly dead, "planting them," Barry would say in an unguarded three-beer moment, for nearly a century.

"Barry was in back, his black suit coat (he bought them by the gross), sparkling white shit and narrow black tie were draped over a bush, handy incase drive through business may come in. He was repairing some of the wooden clapboard that had rotted through. Under his t-shirt and suspenders he had his cell phone (dead batteries, Steve tried to call) clipped to his pants, his constant worry-doll companion. Never knew when business might pick up, and the dead were always impatient to be dealt with.

"While his retail business was mostly paid through insurance, there were those who never had enough, or any at all. Some of those would try to run out. Then there would be slow payments from the business-to-business aspects. (cash/casket and carry business joke?) He collection days helped the family business collect from the dead beats."