Was it Just a Story?

      A friend of mine said something beautiful recently: “I thought for years that I was a novelist, but then years went by and I still hadn’t written one and I wondered whether this thing about me being a fiction writer was just a story I’d made up about myself.”

Eating Cake with a Future Supermodel

      Last Summer I made friends with a lovely young girl--Riss!--who was just beginning to carve out the beginnings of a modeling career for herself. I found myself at her send-off party just before a national pageant. Go Riss.
      The room was packed with former schoolteachers, fellow models, friends, and family. Mostly family. Riss modeled some dresses for us from a corner of the conference room that had been decked out with red carpet and a camera tripod. I learned what a $10,000 dress looks like. It was interesting to experience that while wearing a button-down shirt from the thrift store. Being untucked, it covered the bit of rope I'd used to improvise a belt. Back then I looked more or less like an unmade bed everywhere I went.
      I hovered around the edges of the whole gathering, taking notes, talking to strangers. The idea was to write a memory piece for the family to keep. The party marked an important moment for Riss. She had one foot in rural Maine, the other in L.A. or N.Y.C. or wherever opportune winds might blow her. At her incredibly young age, Riss was tackling an intensely judgmental and selective career, where the barrier to entry is high.
      Suddenly the photographer shouted "Get your picture taken on the red carpet!" and Riss stood waiting with her cocktail dress, measured pose, the incredibly consistent smile. I laughed with a few of the men in her extended family and her mother and scratched notes about the line that formed next to the photographer's tripod: little girls and boys, an uncle, a pair I assume were Riss's grandparents. The line formed loosely, then gradually dissolved as the gang shuffled forward to meet the lens and the flash. Hard-working Mainers, all. I felt right at home.
      Until an arm slipped between my elbow and body, seized me by the wrist, and started dragging me forward through the crowd. It was Diane, a dress shop owner from the town I lived in at the time. Her shop neighbored the cafe that I managed. Diane's a wonderful woman.
      But at that moment she was my jailor, dragging me toward the blood-red carpet with startling strength. Already in motion toward the expensive cameras and dresses, with no hope of escaping, I had to scan my surroundings on the fly for a spot of open table surface to drop my notebook.
      "Oh my God," said Katie, then Miss Maine, as she saw me coming. I'd served her coffee before. I think I fell while I served her. Buster Keaton-style.
      "Remember me?" I asked.
      She laughed. "Yes."
      And then I was pushed out onto the carpet between Riss and Katie. Diane stepped over to the other side of Rissa and there we stood, smiling in a row. Am I the only one without a sash? Where's mine?
      "Hi!" Riss said.
      "Hi," I said. I wanted to ask whether her cheekbones hurt from smiling for the past full hour, but I didn't have time.
      "Look this way!" Cried the photographer. I shut my mouth and awkwardly obeyed his three or four commands like a dog that hasn't quite learned the difference between "sit" and "roll over" yet. I am not a natural.
      Flash.
      "Take one of Norissa and Nick together!" said Diane. She and Katie abandoned us on the carpet. Uh-oh. Six dozen family members staring and sizing up the scruffy longhair standing next to their Riss. No, no, that's fine. Really. Just shoot me.
And so the photographer, Akers, did. "Don't puff out!" he said from behind the tripod. Now when I look at the photo I see what he meant. I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but I was pushing my chest out so I look like one of those lizards that inflates to make itself look scary when it's threatened.
      Flash.
      "Don't move yet!"
      Diane steps toward us again, puts one hand on Norissa's leg and one hand on mine, and presses our sides together. Laughter in the room. Oh come on!
      Shoot me again, sir, please. The first wasn't quite fatal.
      Flash.
      Riss's mom--Cynthia--from the back of the room: "Now tilt your heads toward each other juuuuust a little." The room roars.
Riss's hands go up and she laces her smile with a mock-angry scowl. "All right!" she says, thrusting her palms out. Akers, mother, and Diane relent, and we slink away.
It's time to cut the cake, which has a black shoe made of spun sugar on top. "I might have seconds," jokes Riss's dad while waiting for his first piece. The family is clearly celebrating. The clock spins.
      Then, finally, a chain reaction of goodbyes. The room thins, then empties. About ten of us remain. We pull a few tables together and sit. The pageant looms. It feels like we're eating cake on the edge of the world. I wonder how Norissa's feeling, and look around. I turn just in time to catch a purple streak as Riss tackles her sister with a crazy hug that threatens to take them both down. Her hairpiece goes awry.
      "I love you!" She yells into her sister’s shoulder.
      "It's neat that you're here," Cynthia says as we sit. "You know, because sometimes people meet by chance in life and wonder what it would have been like to know one another. And here you both are."
      I don't remember how I responded. Norissa was seventeen then. I was twenty-five. I still don't understand what made Cynthia and Diane want to marry us, or what Norissa made of all that silliness.
      But I'm grateful that I was invited. The cake was great, the family welcoming. What a blast.
      Now that I think about it, that same bit of rope that held my pants up at a party for future supermodels now holds my beaten-up copper guitar together. But that's a story for another day.

The Urge to Flee

      The urge to give up is strong when I first plant my palms on the floor. As I start pushing, though, I gain momentum. The middle, in a way, the plateau--that's the easiest part. I find a rhythm and for maybe sixty seconds, the movement is easy.
     Then my arms and chest start to tear. I want to run from it; instead, I push harder. I push through the pain one, three, five, seven more times, then--splat--my arms give out and I'm left gasping like a carp, facedown in the imprints my hands made in the carpet, red-faced and growling and happy.
      Comfort isn't happiness. I know that much.
      Working muscles builds strength, but only if you push until your body begs and, finally, bails out. And each time you ride it out just a little longer than you expected to.
      I meet resistance too when I discover problems in my guitar playing. I hear a fast melodic passage like birdsong in my head, but one of my fingers--usually the pinky--mumbles and slurs and some of the sounds never hit air. The songbird’s voice cracks. And there's always a half-conscious, millisecond-long battle in which I decide whether to try it again or play something safer, something easier, something I can already play perfectly.
      But of course, you'll never grow by playing that same old music day after day.        It’s hard work to keep pushing, to keep reaching. But as you climb into bed after nightfall, satisfaction always wells up to fill that space you carved out for it during the day.

A Most Unusual Bookmark

Over at my songwriting blog, the spam comments are relentless and usually dull. They exist mostly just to nickel-and-dime my life away.

But this one took my eye. I nearly choked on my tea, in fact:

The first verse is forever tainted, sir.

Confound it all.

Swallowed Whole by Books Without Pages

Come with me. We're going back to the days before Facebook, before Myspace, even before the Internet. Back, back, back to the days when computing involved a keyboard and a terminal. No mouse... just a black screen with green text.

........In this seemingly lower-tech time, there existed "Text adventures." Upon booting one from an enormous floppy disk, you'd see a short paragraph or two of descriptive text. Something like:


You find yourself in a field of knee-high grass, hearing birdcalls and buzzing insects. The sun falls hot on your shoulders and forearms, bearing down from directly overhead. In the shade of a tree to the west stands a slumped old shed, gone dark with years of weathering. One of its doors stands halfway open. To the south, the field slopes downward to the treeline, where the forest begins.

........And then the game was afoot. You'd simply type what you wanted to do, and a text parser within the game would process that and give you more information. Let's say you typed:

>GO WEST

........This would prompt the game to print a new paragraph describing what happens next:




You stand in front of the weathered old shed. A rusted padlock sits broken on the stone step. The shed's door hangs half-open; it's all dark inside.


>EXAMINE PADLOCK


The metal is crumbling. It's old, but still... this padlock didn't break itself.


>TAKE PADLOCK


You pocket the rusty padlock.


........I love the writing style of these games: at its best, terse and vividly sensual. And knowing that you can explore and examine anything that's described definitely changes the reading experience to something even more lifelike.
........In a text adventure you might also talk to fictional characters; you might take, carry, and use tools and objects; you might solve puzzles and mysteries; in some stories, you might even die if you made poor choices.
........When I think of these games now, I go a little soft inside. There was such pleasure in being able to carve my own path through a story. Such pleasure.
........Thankfully, text adventures are alive and well today. To learn more about playing modern and historic interactive fiction, or to learn about what it takes to write your own, visit brasslantern.org.

Head Space for Writing.

The beautifully simple text editor pictured here: Darkroom. Totally stripped-down, with no buttons visible, no distractions at all in full-screen mode.

I cleared my desktop, then tweaked Darkroom's transparency. Here's what I got (click the photos to enlarge).

Not a bad way to write.