Opening of a novel; any feedback welcome

[Cioran]

This is the opening of a novel, the whole work currently at about 50,000 words. Any feedback is welcome. Thanks. :)


The Eternity Invasion

These fragments of a memoir, pages browned and curled around the edges, were found in the sea of debris.

<Fragment One>

I am Jules Pick. These pages are intended as a metaphorical message in a bottle, to be hurled into the ocean of fire that is now roaring at our feet, the Second Holocaust. Whether they shall survive this latter-day inferno and someday be read, or whether there shall even be eyes to read them, is something I cannot know and does not concern me.

I vividly recall the Three Days in November. Anyone who was alive then, and not too young to form lasting memories, certainly recalls exactly where he was and what he was doing when he heard the news.

The news actually came in three separate earth-shattering bursts, two of them literally of gunfire: on Friday, Sunday and Tuesday, the canonical Three Days.

I was 14 years old.

I was the shy, pampered and sickly only child of Abraham and Sarah Pick. We lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in a spacious and comfortable flat in the venerable Imperial Apartments, built in 1892. The regal Renaissance/Baroque revival landmark, with its lovely terra-cotta columns and arches, presided imposingly yet gracefully and benignly over the tree-lined intersection of Bedford Avenue and Pacific Street. When I grew up in the fifties times were indeed pacific, if not idyllic. But trouble was already brewing even if we did not know it, a little cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand.

My father, Abraham, was a doctor and a self-trained classical violinist. My mother was a translator. My father did not speak of the past. He spoke little at all, and when he did his words and passions were articulated in the language of music, principally Violin Concerto in D major by Beethoven or Violin Concerto in D minor by Sibelius. Most nights those limpid strains rose from our flat while he practiced, the bow gliding over the strings as his elbow sawed back and forth, the eyes of his owl-like face closed in ecstasy behind the round glasses with the thick lenses that he, like me, wore. As he played his lips trembled with euphoria and sweat dotted his bald pate, the overhead light blazing off of it and bathing him in a radiant glow like a spotlight from Heaven.

Jarringly, this same man who played so beautifully and spoke so sparingly was verbose and caustic when it came to the subject of the blacks (Negroes in those days) who were then moving into Crown Heights in ever greater numbers. “Shoeshine boys,” he called them. “Urban gorillas. Descendants of Ham. People from another planet.” I did not know until many years later that my Father had escaped Hitler’s gas chambers and ovens. Of this trauma both he and my mother were dogmatically silent. Learning of my father’s past, I was never able to fathom the tetrahedron of his soul: how it was possible for three of his faces, that of Jewish intellectual, Holocaust survivor and vulgar racist, to meet at common vertices.

I was never able to reconcile these (and other) contradictions that he presented. For instance, we were Jewish but not Jewish. Like many Jews my father was an atheist, not believing in a literal God. But in addition, unlike most other Jews in that place and time, our lives were neither defined nor circumscribed by the Synagogue, the Sabbath, the Torah, the rabbis. My father disdained the usufructs and rituals of overt religiosity, and he spoke as disparagingly of God as he did of Negroes. He was particularly disdainful of various notions of an afterlife or immortality, and the prospect of eternity, when raised, proved to be one of the few topics that could loosen his typically reticent tongue. “If you could live forever, you’d have no reason to live,” he would insist. “Death and birth are boundaries and, just as the frame of a beautiful work of art orients the painting and gives it meaning, so too does birth and death orient our lives and give them meaning.” Moreover, he believed that even if God existed, He could not be counted on to provide eternal life to us mere mortals, pointing out: "Did not the Lord, in Genesis, bar the way to the Tree of Life by surrounding it with cherubim and flaming swords?"

While dispensing with the trappings of overt Judaism, my father (and my mother, too) showed no particular inclination to assimilation. When I grew up in the fifties I quickly became acutely aware of the difference between my family and other families, and between myself and other boys who routinely beat me up, causing me to retreat ever more deeply into the “silence, cunning, exile” of Joyce, whom I had already read while my peers read comic books. My father showed quiet contempt for the outside world, in particular for popular culture, and the one inviolate demand he made of me was to “study, study, study,” a mantra he liked to repeat while looming over me as I sat with my nose buried in my schoolbooks, my pop-bottle-bottom glasses, exactly like his, sliding down my nose while I cogitated, which required that I push them back up my nose from time to time. My father wanted me to study, not to become an intellectual like he was or even a doctor, but for practical reasons: that I might earn a lot of money and also “fit in,” as he put it, which struck me as curious, given that he himself disdained assimilation. In the Sputnik era he foresaw me doing something in the way of mathematics or engineering, perhaps signing on to the then-nascent NASA and its dreams of “throwing our cap over the wall of space,” as President Kennedy so memorably put it on the day before he was shot. In truth my heart lay with the arts, a fact that I could never bring myself to tell my father. Why would he, who played the violin so beautifully, not understand my aspirations to mold form out of chaos, meaning out of absurdity? Yet somehow I intuited that he would not understand, and so I never raised with him the subject of what I really wanted to do with my life.

My bookworm nature and genetic shyness, coupled with my slight physique, set me off from the All-American students at the public schools I attended, and gave me my first inkling, at an early age, of existential alienation and angst. Freud and neuroses were names in the news of that era, and I acquired my own neuroticism early and with great sincerity.

Like my father, my mother was cold and unapproachable. She earned money translating texts obscure or religious from European languages into English for publication by small university presses, the intended audience the intelligentsia. From one of these texts I learned about the Jewish legend of the golem, a myth that for some reason has haunted me my whole life. I learned that the word “golem” appears only once in the Bible, rendered in the Hebrew as גלמי, and meaning "my unshaped form.” However, in the Mishah, the first major redaction of the Oral Torah, it means an uncultivated person: "Seven characteristics are in an uncultivated person, and seven in a learned one." In addition, “golem” is often used to denote a lunk or a hunk of a person who is enlisted to serve its makers or overseers under controlled conditions, but to whom the golem is otherwise hostile. More captivatingly, in the legend of the Golem of Chelm, for example, the forehead of the golem is inscribed with Hebrew words to keep it active, presumably for eternity. One such word is emet (אמת), which in the Hebrew language means “truth.” The golem may be deactivated by removing the aleph (א) in emet, thus changing the inscription from “truth” to “death” (met מת, "dead"). For reasons that would not become clear to me until later, and which remain somewhat obscure to me even now, the golem legends exercised a powerful hold on me. I imagined that these tales from Jewish folklore encoded a secret message that was intended specifically for me, an idea that powerfully appealed to my youthful vanity, which heretofore had been so stifled by my alienation from my peers and parents: to think that the Torah, written so long ago, contained a secret message for my eyes only! But I was never able to decode the message, until recently.

On the first of the canonical Three Days in November, the Friday of that trio of even-numbered days separated by gaps of odd-numbered days during which the population let sink in what had happened, I was at home alone in our flat in the Imperial Apartments, having talked my way out of attending school by feigning sickness, a stratagem I employed with increasing frequency to avoid a place that I hated. My father was at his medical practice, where he enjoyed humorlessly browbeating his hapless and sheepish patients for their poor eating habits, lack of exercise and addiction to cigarettes. My multilingual mother was meeting with a private client, a wealthy businessman from Tokyo, in connection with a translation that the client had commissioned: the Torah in Japanese. I was alone. Guiltily, I was trying to persuade myself that I really was sick: I lay sprawled on the couch with wet wash clothes draped over my forehead to suppress my imagined fever (or was it my feverish imagination?). I was watching TV, an activity that induced more guilt, because my father regarded television watching as the province of the indolent and illiterate, and only grudgingly put up with presence of the Idiot Box, as he called it, in his book-lined abode, suggesting that while he felt he needed to make some accommodations with the modern world and its contrivances, he believed at the same time that he could treat those contrivances like the proverbial crazy aunt in the attic. It goes without saying that the TV needed to be extinguished during his evening violin practice.

I was watching a TV situation comedy called (oh, irony) “Father Knows Best,” on ABC, when the first bulletin hit. A couple of days later, the second day of the Sacred Three, I was reflecting on what had happened, and seeing vividly in my mind’s eye, with its growing Third Eye of the imagination, how events must have transpired there in Dallas: the midnight-blue limousine turning the corner and then rolling serenely down Elm Street toward the triple underpass, framed by leafy boughs between which the predator’s telescopic lens with its crosshairs prowled, fixing the prey. The brightly colored flags, including the yellow-fringed Stars and Stripes, aflutter on the moving death car. Jackie’s pastel-pink outfit and matching pink pillbox hat. The grass, acid green in the swollen Big D sun, the temperature unseasonably in the 70s. Jack’s chestnut-red hair, that immaculate coif. The russet façade of the Book Depository Building. Color. So much color. I don’t know why color played so large a role in my re-imagining of the events of that day, but it did. Maybe I know why now.

The crack of gunshots, the small of gunpowder, the scarlet gout pumping out of the side of the president’s head, his white brains smearing the midnight-blue of the trunk. The following Sunday, Day Two of the Big Three, my parents were in silent mourning and although my father struggled to bridle his emotions his face was perpetually ashen and he did not play the violin. Nor did he talk. Here is what it felt like for me, and probably for him: America, for all its problems, was safe, sound and secure, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that had led from the recent charnel houses of Europe. Now the world had been turned upside down by some gunshot blasts. Either there was a purpose to the assassination, suggesting a hidden conspiracy, or else a dashing young charismatic leader had been felled for no purpose at all, suggesting an unsettling element of randomness to reality. Either prospect was deeply disturbing, especially so, no doubt, to a survivor of Hitler’s death camps, as my father was even though I did not know this fact about him at the time.

Then on Day Two another blast out of the blue, and the accused assassin was himself assassinated. It seemed as if the whole world were spinning out of control, a rapidly whizzing top now gyrating chaotically across the surface of an underlying nothingness making up the myth of our lives.

Day Three was the following Tuesday. It was, so many surmised, the Sign that tied together and, properly understood, explicated the recent cataclysm that had shaken all our lives.

For on that day, for the first time, They were spotted.

Although some would write off my experience as an extravagant species of pariedolia – the tendency to see that which is not really there, like the Virgin Mary in the knothole of a tree – I have no doubt of what I saw, in the first photograph reproduced on the front page of The New York Times, under marching battalions of all-upper-case lettering as large or larger than the letters used to announce JFK’s assassination a few days earlier. I saw it on the scarred and pitted surface of that immense planet, if that is what it was, a planet larger than a hundred of our suns and clearly visible through a telescope, even though it was calculated to be some twenty-five light years distant. It was traveling at a mind-boggling rate of speed, half the speed of light, the astronomers said, and it was headed directly for us. Assuming it maintained its speed and trajectory, it would arrive in our solar system fifty years hence, in the year 2013, when I would be at roughly retirement age in my own life, a life that had not yet unfolded and held I knew not what.

What did I see on that planet? The word emet (אמת), TRUTH. A few days later I saw a new photograph, and the letter aleph (א) had been removed from the inscription. It now read met. מת

Which means DEAD.

<End Fragment one>

[hillwalker]

I really like this. It starts off like Don DeLillo and I'm hoping it's not going to finish more like Dan Brown.

Ok - it's a little over-written in places - two or three adjectives where one would suffice - but you write fluidly and concisely.

I can't say I found the references to Judaism doctrine particularly interesting or the exact meaning of the word 'golem' but I guess that both form an integral part of the back story.

There are several original expressions that work really well:

the tetrahedron of his soul in particular

And the promise of an intelligently written sci-fi novel would keep me reading.

H

PS - I also managed to spot one typo :

The crack of gunshots, the small of gunpowder... - smell?

[My2cents]

I agree with hillwalker that this is a very good opening. I worry though if you can make the premise stick and make the rest of the novel as absorbing as the opening.

I say that because the strength of the opening isn't the premise (the end of the world) but how you introduce a very detailed and compelling portrait of the narrator/protagonist and his family. If you can manage to continuously incorporate the everyday qualities of the narrator and the family while at the same time moving your plot to its apocalyptic end, it would be a compulsive read through and through.

But to get back to the opening....It's the best opening of any aspiring novelist's novel that I've read.

[AuntShecky]

The idea of writing fiction against the background of world events is a fruitful one, as proven by Dickens (The Tale of Two Cities) as well as contemporary novelists such as Milan Kundera and --as a previous commentator mentioned --Don DeLillo. That you've chosen to employ such a theme is admirable and ambitious.

Upon reading your first chapter, I have a couple of differing reactions. At first I was confused about the time frame. Since the narrator states that he grew up in the Fifties, and that the earth-shattering event had occurred when he was 14, I was scratching my head. To my knowledge the world is pretty much still intact (though I just peeked out the window to make sure.) So how could the End have come circa 1963 or so? For a minute there I thought you were presenting a kind of alternative universe kinda thingie, like Game of Thrones or that erstwhile hit TV series, Lost.

Reading further, however, I saw that the "Three Days" referred to the historical events in Dallas, and that particular tragedy was a mere precursor to our apparent doom, which I learned later in the piece, happened (or was to have happened) in 2013, right smack in the middle of the Baby Boomer-narrator's retirement years. You really fooled me! One thing a fiction writer should do is to defy expectations, so by that criterion, this was quite clever.

On the other hand, I find that as far as your writing style and presentation go, you haven't (as yet) broken away from the pack of run-of-the-mill SF writers. By that I mean, the somewhat-stilted language common to much science fiction shows an overzealous attempt to be taken seriously. Ironically enough, this is especially evident when the topic is the most serious theme you can get--our demise as a species! Some science fiction writers guard against succumbing this self-conscious, over-the-top tendency --which very easily can become "campy"-- by immunizing their work with a healthy humorous perspective. (Harlan Ellison is one of these writers who comes to mind.) EDIT: 6:08pm EDT --How could I have forgotten the great Kurt Vonnegut? Likewise Douglas Adams! They're even funnier than Harlan, but all three writers (et al.) manage to maintain smart perspectives.

As an analogy, one of the former film critics from The New Yorker--can't remember if it was Judith Crist or Pauline Kael-- once wrote of the dialogue in a stultifyingly solemn Biblical epic that "The characters don't make statements. They make pronouncements." This is also true of much science fiction. Concerning your prose, I'm suggesting that you lighten it up slightly.

Framing the story within a written account -- such as the narrator's manuscript--frequently appears in science fiction epics; it's a valid motif, but in my opinion, it's overused, especially in End-of-the-World novels, recently in The Book of Eli.

I did notice that your descriptions -- such as the portrait of the narrator's father-- are quite vivid; however, a science fiction story captures more interest when it's propelled by action rather than narration. I'm saying again what I've already said a thousand times on the LitNet: "Show, Don't Tell." Additionally, don't put the background in the foreground. Open with a scene designed to grab the reader's interest; you could always fill in the historical and quasi-historical info later in small doses throughout the piece. Beginning "in medias res" is always a good bet. If it was good enough for Homer --the Homer, not Simpson-- it's good enough for you.

Finally one of my pet peeves is the term "apocalyptic" (the term used by one of the earlier commentators. The contemporary connotation of the word almost always refers to the end of the world, but all "apocalypse" means is "revelation." It doesn't necessary mean Final Doom. (Some theological scholars believe that despite John's horrifying visions, the final book of the
New Testament attributed to him was less about the End of the world as the end of Roman dominance, specifically that of the Emperor Nero.)

The fact that we've been "treated" to a rash of so-called apocalyptical novels and movies lately can of course be a symptom of the zeitgeist swirling around the prophecies about December 2012. Ah, gloom and doom and global destruction-- "That's entertainment!" Paranoia, what fun! But if you plug the topic into the Google machine, you'll find that the Mayans' descendants are laughing at us for taking this so seriously.

Another typo: "wash clothes" (wash cloths) and a couple of questionable word choices. "Usufructs" , albeit a $50 word usually means enjoyable things,is not immediately associated with the trappings of religious practice. Also "gout"-- an ailment affecting the
lower extremities, esp. the toes-- very seldom is the word used for a bodily substance.



That's my initial reaction to your ambitious project, which I'll make a note to read as you add subsequent sections. One final note: I see that you are a new LitNetter. If I may be so bold to suggest that along with posting your own material, you will also read and comment upon the works of others. (I'm not a Moderator-- just a fellow member!)

Good luck, and I hope you enjoy your experiences on this remarkable website.

Tourist to cab driver: How do I get to Columbia University?
Cab Driver: Study! Study! Study!

[Cioran]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I will read and comment on the work of others as time permits; at the moment I've very little of it, but will make an effort to do so.

The narratator in Chapter One seems a bit stilted and given to portentous and somewhat stilted pronouncements because, well, he is a bit stilted and given to portentous pronouncements; however, the novel is not going to be all first-person narration by him, just snatches of it. Also, as will emerge, his character has many different facets.

I'll reply to AuntShecky's nice crits in a little more detail later. I appreciate them. There is plenty of humor ahead. :cool:

I'll also post Chapter 2. The work has many voices and veers from first to third person and back again, and jumps around in time and space, as will be clear from the second chapter.

Thanks again.

[Cioran]

Enclosed is chapter two. Many thanks in advance for any response


New York City, July 1976

She made her way unsteadily down the narrow stairs of the fleabag hotel where she lived.

She carried under one arm a large, flat package wrapped in brown paper that was awkwardly held together by twine and duct tape. With her free hand she clutched a shopping bag for Dumpster diving.

When she reached the landing -- the scarred, pitted and unclean marble floor with its pattern of inlaid black diamonds on a background that once was white but was now beige -- she paused to take a breath. The diamonds on the floor made her think of the diamonds that she once owned. Diamonds are not forever.

She clopped across the floor on her battered shoes, which were also held together by twine and duct tape, and fortified with a cushion of newspapers between her bare feet and the shoe soles. She went out the door, the threadbare hems of her wool overcoat swirling above her swollen ankles, which were raddled with open sores.

Hot as a blowtorch. The comically big sunglasses that she wore, shaped like eagle wings and studded with fake diamonds on the rims, cut somewhat the glare of the sun off the pavement. Although she was already sweating, she did not remove or even unbutton her overcoat, nor did she doff the wide-brimmed slouch hat that she wore which, together with her flamboyant sunglasses, gave her the air of someone decked out in a disguise for trick-or-treating on Skid Row.

She shambled east on 42nd Street past the New York Times Building, with its electric clock jutting from the side of it reporting the time as one-thirty. There was not a cloud in the sky, but the smog of the city gave the blue above a pale, sickly, washed-out cast, like faded denim. She had to thread her way past some hookers clopping about in their platform heels, their miniskirts so short that that their lower buttocks showed. A couple of them swung their purses around and they strutted and preened in front of the office building of the world's greatest newspaper. She wondered what had happened to the city, to America, to the world. Things had not been like this back in her day. She had lived in New York City in the fifties when it was respectable.

Things were going to hell everywhere.

She made her way across Times Square like someone putting her soul at hazard, toting her package, she thought weirdly, like Jesus his cross. Traffic thick, unrelenting. Coagulated, the veins of the city at the Crossroads of the World, the heart of it, stopped up. Horns blatted, and drivers poked their heads out of their car windows and cursed lustily in their New Yawk accents. Wilted collars, undone ties and red, sweat-dotted faces. A mad onrush of pedestrians. The three-card monte players were plying their con game on the doe-eyed European tourists under the smoking Camel billboard: "I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel," the slogan read, and out of the O-shaped mouth of the aviator depicted on the sign, giant smoke rings issued with monotonous regularity.

East of Broadway, on 40th Street, she paused over a news rack. BAKED APPLE, the New York Post headline screamed. The temperature today was forecast to top 100, and it felt like it. Her eyes, hidden behind the outré sunglasses, drifted with curiosity to a strip at the top of the front page, yellow letters on a back background: JULES PICK AT GARDEN TONIGHT. In smaller type: See Pages 4-5.

Already tired, she entered the Greek diner near Mad Ave, where the the Mad Men in their boxy, modernist glass and steel office towers continued to churn out campaigns to sell cars, soap, TVs, TV dinners, overseas vacations, any kind of escape to distract the mind from madness. The word ESCAPE was part of the mantra of the age, ESCAPE, ESCAPE, ESCAPE, as if there were anywhere to escape to. One cannot escape a death sentence, she thought, save by commutation. Did the world hope for the governor to place a call at midnight? Or for God to do so?

She sat down at the counter but the waitress, a portly woman with a wilted rose pinned to her blouse, turned down a radio, looked at her sadly and shook her head. Near her was the owner/chef, with his raven-back hair, his aquiline nose, his onyx eyes and his hairy, beefy forearms folded across his white smock. MOTHER was tattooed on one of those forearms, the word wreathed in roses. When she persisted in moving her eyes in mute inquiry from her to him and back again behind the shields of her shades she heard the owner say, "I'm sorry, we can't serve you no more." So she pushed herself up off the stool while the waitress turned the radio back up. Elton John.

Goodbye Norma Jean
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled

She paused at the door to hike up the large, flat package in its sad brown paper wrapping and its tatterdemalion twine, its duct tape already peeling and curling around the edges, perhaps wilting from the heat. And her shopping bag. Mustn't forget that. The stuff people threw out, the waste! It was a scandal.

She paused at the door and looked back mutely and imploringly at the waitress and owner/chef, but they could not see the pain in her eyes behind the darks of her shades, and their expressions remained adamant: Permanent banishment was her fate. As she pushed out the door, the Bernie Taupin lyrics pursued her into the street like a familiar scent:

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

Before arriving at the pawn shop, she paused, stunned, to find that in a hole-in-the-wall storefront, yet another euphemistically named "Rest Stop" had opened. HEAVEN PEACE, it was banally called. MEET MAKER. Inept English translation of adjoining neon Korean iconography. But in smaller scrawl on the hand-lettered sign, all euphemistic pretensions had been dropped: "Uthnasia," the sign said, misspelling "euthanasia." "Quick painless," and then the quoted price. Cheap. "We Use Gas."

The pawn shop had the proverbial triad of balls hanging above the door. When she opened the door, a bell rang. Sloe-eyed Sam was ensconced behind the counter as always, like a troll under a bridge, and she moved toward him at a dreamily slow pace, clutching her package in both arms, bearing her Cross. She was flanked by musical instruments, costume jewelry, bric-a-brac and general junk, the material superfluity of lives gone bad. A ceiling fan turned slowly, stirring up the stagnant air. Even the walls were sweating today, moisture leaking through cracks in the plaster.

"Miss Baker," Sloe-eyed Sam nodded, inclining his head toward her like a man at prayer. He discretely fished a handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt, patted his forehead and upper lip, and then returned it to its place. Miss Baker. She signed all her slips, her receipts, "Baker," and so he called her Miss Baker but she called him Sam.

"What's today, Miss Baker?" Sam said gallantly, always addressing her respectfully and with the honorific. "More memorabilia?"

She set down her shopping bag, and tore the brown wrapping paper off of her package.

Without uttering a word she held up the large black-and-white photo, blown up to absurd proportions and pretentiously framed in gilt. She imagined that the image spoke for herself.

Sam whistled. "More memorabilia. How come youse…"

"Take it. Take it off my hands. Please."

"How much you want for it, Miss Baker?"

She named the price. Sam looked crestfallen.

"Now you know I can't give you that much money for that photo, for any photo, Ms. Baker," he said gently.

"That's the point," she replied. "It's not just any photo." She pointed at the signature scrawled across the lower right corner. "That's his signature. In his own hand. This is authentic. Potentially worth a fortune."

He regarded her dubiously. After a pause he said: "If that's the case, if that is his authentic signature, why don't you sell it at auction? Then you stand to make a fortune, not me." He was about to add, "and you look like you could use it," but he bit his tongue so hard that he tasted blood.

Before she could reply he said: "That's the case for all this memorabilia you bring in here, Miss Baker. Why don't you sell it instead of hocking it? Marilyn Monroe memorabilia is hot, never hotter. Yet you bring this stuff in here and you know I can only give you a fraction of what some of this stuff is worth."

"We've been over it before," she said with a sigh, nervously adjusting her outsized sunglasses and then tugging uncertainly at a strand of blonde hair threaded with gray. "Someday, I hope to buy it all back."

"Redeem the ticket."

"Yes."

Sam shook his head.

"But you never have bought back any of this stuff. And I've ended up selling most of it. Some I still keep from you, way past the redeem date."

"A lady can always dream, can't she?"

Sam said nothing. His gaze had drifted back down to the oversized photo that she kept holding out toward him.

"The signature is authentic," she pressed.

"Is it?" Sam asked, shaking his head. "And how, Miss Baker, if I might ask, would you have gotten ahold of a signed photo by President Kennedy, showing him and his brother Bobby with Marilyn Monroe at JFK's birthday party in 1962?"

"At Madison Square Garden," she reminded him. "Local angle."

"How could you possibly have acquired such a thing?"

"Don't ask, Sam. Just … "

"I can't verify the authenticity of that signature, Miss Baker. And even if I could, I couldn't afford what you're asking for it."

She set down the photo.

"Do you know that I just turned fifty years old, Sam?"

He saw her full lips, without lipstick, set off by deep lines that ran down from the wings of her nose to the corners of her mouth. He saw the gray-threaded strands of uncombed blonde hair straggling outward from under the hat like a heap of hay. A beauty, Sam thought sadly. Once, this woman was a beauty. A babe, even. Once.

"June 1. On this earth half a century."

"Happy birthday, Miss Baker."

"Thanks. But I've lost my good looks. Good looks are all I ever had."

"They say, Miss Baker, that women are their sexiest when they're in their fifties."

"Do they say that, Sam?"

"Now you take my wife … please." Drawing no reaction from her, he harrumphed and said, "Little joke there, Miss Baker. Rodney Dangerfield. My wife is in her fifties and never hotter. Serious."

But her attention was drifting. She was pulling the torn brown paper over the photo again, repairing the wrappings as best she could: retying the twine, tamping down the curled duct tape.

She shuffled off toward the door and reaching it, she looked back at him and said, "This is the last of it. I've got nothing more to hock."

He named a price.

"Not enough. Not nearly."

He inclined his head toward her.

She grasped the doorknob, paused, and then looked back at him again: "You have any kids, Sam?"

"Two. Sally and Sam Jr."

"How old?"

"Twenties."

"They'll be in their late fifties in 2013. When They get here. Likely still alive, though you and I will have passed from the scene. Thank God."

Sam looked down at the counter top. He could find nothing to say.

"Goodbye, Sam," she said, and opened the door. The bell above rang, and she stepped out into the blazing sunlight, the shields of her shades taming but not defeating it. The pavement was so hot, she thought, that you could probably fry an egg on it. She could feel the heat radiating up through her shoe soles, even with the protection of the newspapers stuffed inside.

She passed by the new, neighboring euthanasia outlet, briefly studied the sign, contemplated the door set back in shadow with the big WELCOME sign on it, and passed regretfully on. Not yet.

A shabby beggar, sitting cross-legged on a street corner with a hand-scrawled sign pleading for assistance, his knees sticking out of the holes in his jeans, had lighted some candles: incense. Her eyes fixed on one of the tiny flames gliding upward from the wick. Then an unexpected brisk, refreshing breeze sprang up to disperse the stagnant, blanket-thick humidity, and the candle light wavered and wimpled and then winked out. Clouds scudded, and darkness moved over the land.

The rain set in.

[Calidore]

The narratator in Chapter One seems a bit stilted and given to portentous and somewhat stilted pronouncements because, well, he is a bit stilted and given to portentous pronouncements; however, the novel is not going to be all first-person narration by him, just snatches of it. Also, as will emerge, his character has many different facets.

[snip]

I'll also post Chapter 2. The work has many voices and veers from first to third person and back again, and jumps around in time and space, as will be clear from the second chapter.


Nothing wrong with this, as long as you do it well enough to keep the reader along for the ride rather than constantly throwing him off the rails.

However, I'd suggest bumping at least that narrator back a bit. You want the opening to bring readers into the story; if they have to slog through "stilted, portentous" narration before caring what's going on (and without yet any reason to think the entire story won't be told that way), you're going to lose people.

[Cioran]

Nothing wrong with this, as long as you do it well enough to keep the reader along for the ride rather than constantly throwing him off the rails.

However, I'd suggest bumping at least that narrator back a bit. You want the opening to bring readers into the story; if they have to slog through "stilted, portentous" narration before caring what's going on (and without yet any reason to think the entire story won't be told that way), you're going to lose people.

I will try bumping it back a bit, but I don't think the narration is either stilted or portentous; rather I think the narrator is. The narration reflects his character, or at least one aspect of his character, but I don't think anything about the narration per se is off-putting, at least not imo. But I'll give it an edit and dial back a little and see what happens; 90 percent of writing is editing anyway, which is what makes writing so hard.

[hillwalker]

This is brilliant. I'll buy the book on the strength of what you have shown us so far - forget about it being 'stilted' or 'portentous' - this is a novel not a short story. Stick to your guns!! Most readers will make the commitment to read on given the quality of writing and the intriguing plot...

There are a couple of stylistic issues.

Many of your sentences/paragraphs begin with 'She did whatever she did'. You need to consider varying the way you express yourself
- and some of your sentences ramble on when some judicious splitting would make them easier to digest:

Although she was already sweating, she did not remove or even unbutton her overcoat, nor did she doff the wide-brimmed slouch hat that she wore which, together with her flamboyant sunglasses, gave her the air of someone decked out in a disguise for trick-or-treating on Skid Row.

By the end of this one I'd forgotten about where she was or what else she was supposed to be doing.

Also some of your observational asides (such as 'Diamonds are not for ever' or 'Things were going to hell everywhere.') don't work that well. You're revealing yourself (the author) when you're meant to remain invisible behind the scenes.

And you're pushing 'Miss Baker' too much in the dialogue. People don't constantly refer to the person they are addressing by name.

One other point you might need to consider if/when you seek a publisher. Quoting most pop songs costs an arm and a leg in copyright payments. Even Elton John doesn't come cheap.

Other than that it's a great ride so far. Just be aware also that if you do intend getting this published it may work against you to have had it exposed on the web to all and sundry...

H

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I'm not sure I've ever seen hill praise prose so judiciously. You should feel honored, Cioran.

[Cioran]

Other than that it's a great ride so far.


Thank you. :) You ain't seen nothin' yet. :yikes:

Thanks, hillwalker and others, for your kind comments and excellent feedback. The novel currently is at just over 54,000 words, and I expect it will exceed 100,000 words.

My idea was to post for feedback the first five chapters, which are only a small part of the whole. Is there a problem with that, given hillwalker's comments about exposing the work to "all and sundry"? It is my impression that all work posted on the web is copyrighted. But if there is a problem with posting original creative work, maybe this forum should be accessible to members only, and not searchable by Google etc. You could put this particular forum behind a firewall that is accessible only to registered users.

Anyway, more later.


I'm not sure I've ever seen hill praise prose so judiciously. You should feel honored, Cioran.

I do. :)

[hillwalker]

Some publishers are not too keen on work that has already been published elsewhere - whether it be a chapter in a magazine or electronically. But others are happy enough as long as the entire novel isn't already out there on the web for all to download for free.

As far as copyright is concerned, it will always remain your intellectual property but once it's on here there's nothing to stop anyone copying and pasting it into other web sites. Having said that, prose and stories are less prone to hijacking than poetry.

I learnt my lesson when I found about 20 of my LitNet poems on a variety of sites appearing to be run from China. I couldn't decide whether I should be angry or pleased that they considered my efforts worth pirating.

H

[Cioran]

Some publishers are not too keen on work that has already been published elsewhere - whether it be a chapter in a magazine or electronically. But others are happy enough as long as the entire novel isn't already out there on the web for all to download for free.

As far as copyright is concerned, it will always remain your intellectual property but once it's on here there's nothing to stop anyone copying and pasting it into other web sites. Having said that, prose and stories are less prone to hijacking than poetry.

I learnt my lesson when I found about 20 of my LitNet poems on a variety of sites appearing to be run from China. I couldn't decide whether I should be angry or pleased that they considered my efforts worth pirating.

H

I'm certainly aware of the copy/paste problem. My thought was, though, that if one is posting just a few chapters of a much longer work, I can't see much risk. No one can do anything with fragments of a novel even if copied, and I doubt any publisher would worry too much about a fraction of a long work posted.

However, if this IS a problem, I guess I'd have to ask what is this forum for? I have to presume that people posting here are aiming for eventual publication; but if there is too much hazard in posting, the forum's purpose seems undermined.

As I think I mentioned earlier, you might considering making this forum usable and viewable only by members; i.e. non-public. I spend most of my online time at The Galiliean Library, (http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php) where I post as davidm, and if you go there you will notice that there is a "Write" forum that is closed to the public. It's a fairly active forum, too.

I'd like to post a few more excerpts here specifically to get feedback from writers, but will await further feedback on whether this is a good idea. Perhaps a moderator could advise? (don't know if Hillwalker is one such or not.)

[hillwalker]

Perhaps a moderator could advise? (don't know if Hillwalker is one such or not.)

:smilielol5: No he's not.

I think you're ok to post a few chapters as you say - besides, you'll as likely as not be editing them before submission to a publisher.

It's poems that are most at risk.

h

[Cioran]

Ok, here is Chapter 3, and then I guess I'll stop here, though I will continue to post chapters and revisions at the aforementioned Galilean Library, behind the firewall. Again, any feedback is appreciated; I'm already rewriting Chapter One to take into account constructive criticism. Thanks again. ... Oh, well, in preview mode, I just noticed that bad words get censored. :hand: Sorry about that!


Area 51, August 1999

"Dreamland."

"Excuse me?"

"They call this place Dreamland, too, don't they? Among other names."

"Sure, it's got lot of names. I call it Hell."

The barkeep, who appeared to be about 20 years old and was stuck here in Hell, ran a damp cloth over the bar counter. She looked a little alien herself: Red hennaed hair tied back in a bun, green eyes, a metal stud imbedded in one of the wings of her nose. She wore a tight, clinging white T shirt that showed off her jugs to good effect: Those big boobs bobbled, braless, as she exerted herself cleaning the counter. GOT MILK was written provocatively across the front of the shirt. She had a spider-web tattoo radiating outward from an elbow, and her lips were painted black. Tight black jeans showed off her ample *** and seductive legs, which tapered down into leather boots. A little chunky but she'll do, the man who had asked her about Dreamland thought. I'll make her dreams come true.

The man clutched the neck of a bottle of Bud in one hand. In the other, he lifted a cigarette to his mouth, took a deep drag on it and then blew a jet of smoke up into the murky rafters. The air conditioner, apparently in disrepair, gamely hummed and loudly rattled but did not quite beat the heat. The Nevada sun glared in the windows, making a sharp contrast with the darkness of the bar, which was called the Little Ale Inn.

It was empty except for the customer and the bartender. Alkaline flats outside, white desert stretching out to the blue mountains. This town -- if town it could even be called -- drowsed in the late-summer heat, its residents mostly trailer-park trash. Dead. The real action would begin when the sun went down and the Doomers crawled of their tents, scanning the sky for flying saucers with their binoculars and their big-eyed zombie stares.

The man who sat on a vinyl-clad stool at the chipped and pitted bar looked down at the surface of it. He looked through mirrored sunglasses that hid his eyes, but reflected the eyes and face, twice, of anyone who looked at him. The bar counter was chipped, pitted, dirty, disgusting. Whatever varnish had once coated it had long since eroded away, and into that rutted oak surface people had carved, with knives or other sharp objects, their names, obscene puns, caricatures of erect penises, vulgar Vs for vaginas, and mysterious glyphs like the private alphabets of the irretrievably insane. It resembled the meteor-scarred surface of some outlier planet, and now and then its inhabitants, cockroaches, scrambled madly across it. Some of carvings were intended to represent aliens: the usual banal oval faces with pointed chins, slanted bug eyes, antenna. Little Green Men, LGMs. Which representations only showed the poverty of the human imagination, he thought. If only people knew. Jesus Christ.

With the toe of his boot, he nudged the double-locked briefcase that he had rested on the floor against the bar stool.

He took another drag on his cigarette, blew off a stream of smoke, and then lifted the Bud to his lips. He set the bottle down on the counter and looked meditatively at the wall behind the bar. Above the bottles on display and the containers of ice below them were numerous signs and bumper stickers, pasted or tacked helter-skelter to the wall: One showed a black-and-white caricature of Bill and Hillary Clinton, next to blocky type that read: DUAL AIRBAGS. Another: "What's yellow, henpecked and lays chicks? CLINTON." Another: "Vote Democrat. It's Easier Than Thinking." Another: "You can have my gun -- BULLETS FIRST!"

The man looked around. In another part of the bar, LGM memorabilia were for sale. An alien teddy bear, green and fuzzy and again with the big slanted eyes, oval head and antenna, amused him. He expressed his amusement by barely moving the corners of his lips upward, causing a few crinkles to radiate outward from those corners. Whether his eyes hosted amusement or not was impossible to determine, for they dwelt on the other side of mirrors. If one looked at those mirrors one would see only one's self. Twice.

The man was dressed in a sand-colored corduroy sport coat and a blinding white shirt, open at the collar, no tie. His skin, especially around the neck, was leathery and lobster-red. He wore skin-tight blue jeans and leather cowboy boots. His hair was close cropped, and like his coat it was the color of sand. He was clean-shaven, with a nose like an Indian arrowhead. Probably his eyes were Paul-Newman blue, if only anyone could find those eyes behind the mirrors that concealed them. He was as lank as a teen-ager, but probably in his late fifties. Looked good. At least he thought so. So, from time to time, did the ladies.

Some silence prevailed. The man ground out his cigarette in a large glass ashtray with notches cut in the corners. He drummed his fingers. He noticed a bottle label emblazoned with a horse's head. Knight to f3, he thought. Game of the Century. He patted the miniature board in the inside pocket of his jacket. The little pieces within jiggled.

The girl behind the bar was now cleaning some beer mugs with her wet rag. She glanced at her only customer speculatively. He lifted another cigarette from a battered pack, an unfiltered Pal Mal, put it to his lips, theatrically struck a match off the wood of the bar top and when the flame flared he touched it to the tip of the cigarette, keeping his hand cupped around it, and then waved out the match and blew more smoke into the gloom. He said tonelessly, "What's your name?"

The girl did a double-take. Was he talking to her? Must be. No one else was around.

"Latisha," she said, sounding none too happy about it. She sighed, and elbowed sweat from her forehead. "Wish the damned A.C. worked right," she muttered. She banged down the glass she had been cleaning and snatched up another, applying the rag to its interior with brisk circular motions betraying frustration and even despair. Impatience, anyway. The man with the sandy hair was watching her carefully out of the corners of his mirrored shades. He was evaluating her as if she were a chess position. He thought: Time for a fianchetto. That'll catch her off guard. "What are you doing here, Latisha? If this is your idea of hell?"

"Money for college. Summer job. Tips. Tourist trap."

"Make good money?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"The good money is the night shift, when all the nuts arrive to keep their vigil."

"Why aren't you on the night shift, Latisha?"

She banged down the second glass, looked at him truculently, considered for a moment her response, and then blurted out: "Because I won't **** the owner."

"If you ****ed the owner, he'd give you the night shift and the big bucks? That it?"

"That's it."

"Why don't you **** him, then?"

"Because he's a filthy pig."

The man drank in silence. Latisha resumed puttering behind the bar. The hum and rattle of the air condition was the only sound. Some flies swooped around in lazy predatory circles. Two of them lighted on the bar counter and began ****ing. The man smiled thinly at this.

"Don't you want to know my name?" he asked the girl.

"No."

"It's --" the man almost uttered the words Dream Maker, but checked himself and said, "Howard," a name that just kind of clunked there in the gloomy bar like an anticlimax. Latisha grunted in bored, rote acknowledgement.

"What are you doing here, Latisha?"

"You already asked me that. I told you."

"No, I mean, what are you doing anywhere? What are you doing?" Gambit. Would she accept or decline?

"That's your business?"

"How old are you, Latisha?"

"More of your business again."

"I'd guess twenty."

"Twenty-five. Thanks, I think."

"Twenty-five. When the bastards arrive to kill almost everyone and enslave the rest you'll be thirty-nine. You've got fourteen years to live and here you are in this **** hole earning money for college, for whatever it is you want to be that will mean nothing in a just a few short years. Young chick like you under a death sentence. How's that feel, Latisha?"

"Shut up!" she roared at him, and raised a glass to hurl at him. She trembled all over for a moment, her boobs jiggling seductively under the tight white T-shirt, and then instead of throwing it at him she smashed it to the floor and broke down in tears.

"I'm sorry."

She did not reply. She found a broom and a dust pan and began sweeping up the mess. Her could hear her sniffling. He covertly smiled. She was in check. Only, she didn't know it.

"I only said it because I'm frustrated, too, Latisha. Frustrated, anxious, and angry for young people who --"

"Have no future."

"Exactly."

"Thanks for the reminder."

"I said I was sorry."

She swept up in silence, crouching on the other side of the counter. When she got up again she looked at him.

"You want another beer?"

He studied his watch.

"Just one more. One for the road."

She brought the beer and set it before him.

He lighted another smoke.

"You got an extra you can spare?"

He gave her a smoke, struck a match and offered her a light .

She took a drag, and coughed. She squeezed her eyes shut and waved the smoke away. Coughed again.

"It's like it's your first smoke," observed the man, who had called himself Howard.

"It is my first smoke." She inhaled again, grimaced, held the smoke in her lungs for a few moments and then explosively released a jet of it up toward the ceiling. Her eyes were teary and she looked dazed.

The sandy-haired man smiled his thin smile, which slightly dimpled the corners of his lips. "It's not pot. You're not supposed to hold it in."

"Just trying to get used to it."

"Pretty weird to take up smoking at age twenty-five, Latisha."

"I'm hoping for cancer. Slow-motion suicide. Isn't that what they call smoking?"

The man silently studied her.

"What'd you say your name was again?" the girl asked. She had grabbed a bottle of Bud, and snapped off the cap with a bottle opener. Took a swig.

"Howard."

"Well, Howard, enough about me. What about you? What are you doing way out in the middle of nowhere, the Nevada desert?"

"Passing through."

"Business?"

"Yes. I'm a traveling salesman."

"What do you sell?"

"Dreams."

She looked at him quizzically. Anxiety briefly furrowed her features, as if she had just made some unpleasant and perhaps frightening mental association.

"All salesmen sell dreams, Latisha. No matter what they actually sell, dreams are what we're really selling."

"Where you headed, Howard?"

"San Francisco."

Her eyes widened. "For real?" She sounded like a kid on Christmas morning.

"Yes. For real."

"I've always wanted to go to San Francisco."

"Never been?"

"Never."

"Where do you attend college, Latisha?"

"Michigan State. East Lansing. Cow college."

"And you're from? I mean, originally."

"Akron, Ohio."

He drank his beer, and set it down. Stabbed out the cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray. Looked at her through his mirrored shades.

"Want a lift, Latisha?" Rook to King 8, check. Again.

Latisha saw her face double-reflected in the mirrors of the man's shades. She saw her herself running a hand through her hennaed hair, that maroon-tinted mop, and she saw her eyes get big again. Her face paled.

"A lift … to where?"

"To San Francisco."

She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

"That's your dream, right? To head West. The place where America runs out. Land of second chances, or of last chances. And I'm a dream--" he nearly said maker, but caught himself. "Seller. A dream seller. Only this dream's free, Latisha. On me. Cheers." He lifted his bottle, inviting her to clink it with hers. After a pause, she did.

But then she tensed up, and drew back a step. She could not see his eyes, behind the mirrors, boldly ogling her tits jiggling under the tight T-shirt. She set her beer down on the counter.

"I don't even know you," she said dully. Instinctive suspicion in her eyes, which narrowed, and in her pinched voice.

He moved in his knight to secure his position. She was now in zugzwang: no good move. He imagined that he could have played this game blindfolded. That's how good he was.

"Sure you do, Latisha," he said brightly. "I'm Howard the traveling salesman and you're Latisha the discontented college student, stuck here in hell by your own admission to earn some extra money. Summer job, only the owner won't give you the night shift because you won't **** him. That's what you said. What else is there to know? We're practically an old married couple, now."

She was awkwardly holding her first cigarette between her index finger and thumb, in what was called the Russian style. She gingerly stabbed it out in an ashtray and said the magic word: "Money."

He reached into the lower left pocket of his tan corduroy sport coat and flashed a wad of bills, at which she goggled. Then he stuffed the money back down into his pocket. He said: "Better live a little. While there's still time."

Checkmate.

Half an hour later they were on the road. They had taken a detour to her place, a cubicle that she rented at the rear of a trailer. She threw her clothes into a duffel bag and scooped up her cat, an ugly troll-like creature with an actual beard, frazzled gray whiskers flaring outward and downward from the mouth. The cat eyed Howard suspiciously, never taking its eyes off of him until Latisha had stuffed it into the duffel bag along with her meager wardrobe and some tins of cat food. Howard frowned. He considered the gleaming, cut-diamond shapes of the cat's alien eyes, and wondered if it had the power to see through his mirrored shades to his own eyes. The thought made him uneasy. He did not like the cat.

"What's its name?" he asked conversationally.

"It's a him, not an it," Latisha replied, and Howard took note of the irritation in her voice. "His name is Fyodor."

"Fodor's? You named a cat after a travel guide?"

"Fee-yo-dor," she enunciated carefully. He had hoped for a giggle, but got more irritation. "After the writer. Dostoevsky. First because he has Dostoevsky's beard, and second because I'm studying Russian lit in college."

On the road she sat beside him in the front seat, duffel bag in her lap, the cat mewling from within. He had an old midnight-blue Chevy, with fins and lots of chrome. It was a relic of the fifties, and it surprised her. She remarked offhandedly that it didn't seem to be the sort of thing that a traveling salesman would drive. He said he collected old cars.

"Jesus," she griped, discovering that the car did not have power windows. She rolled down the side window.

"No air conditioning," she said, marveling at the ancient dashboard. "How do you --"

"Complain, complain," he said. "The air conditioner in the bar wasn't working so well, I noticed."

They drove in silence for a time, the car pointed at the white alkali wastes off which the early afternoon sun glared blindingly. The distant mountains were lavender. The Sierra Nevadas.

They drove by the vast tent city on the barbed-wire perimeter fence of Area 51, surrounded by the huge KEEP OUT signs. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY.

"They sleep during the day," Latisha said with a bored yawn, nodding at the tents. "And come out at night."

"To watch the sky."

"Right."

"But the aliens aren't due to arrive for more than a decade."

"These people are convinced that they're already here, and that some of them are on the base." She nodded at the sprawl of the military complex that expanded distantly into the harsh scrublands and the glimmering curtains of heat.

"How many Doomers here?"

"Thousands. They're like pilgrims at Mecca or something. Waiting for something to fall from the sky. The resolution, the explanation, the end. The End of the World."

"They won't have to wait all that long."

"Thirteen years, that's still a long time to me."

"Time passes much faster when you're an old geezer like me."

"How old are you, Howard?"

"Fifty-seven."

"You look younger. You're a pretty good-looking guy, for --"

"For an old mother****er? Was that what you were going to say?"

They both laughed. It felt good.

The laughter died and they drove in silence.

"Why don't you take off those mirrored shades, and let me see your eyes, Howard?" Latisha asked. He noticed the flirtatiousness in her voice. "I bet you got nice eyes. Why hide 'em? I imagine they're blue, like Paul Newman's. You even look a little like Paul Newman."

Howard adjusted his glasses and said, "I've got weak eyes, Latisha, very sensitive. To the sun. I have to keep 'em on to fight down the glare out there. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to drive."

They drove in silence a while longer, heading west on a two-lane blacktop road bisected by white divider lines. The only sound was the hum of the wheels on the road and the occasional mewling of the feline Fyodor Dostoevsky from within the duffel bag. The bag moved in Latisha's lap as the creature within it squirmed vitally, suggesting dissatisfaction. Howard was sure now that he did not like the cat.

"Can I have another smoke?" Latisha asked.

He handed her a cigarette, and a matchbook to light it. She lighted it, coughed a little less vigorously this time, blinked her eyes, and then stretched her arm out the open widow with the cigarette between her fingers, the smoke trailing behind as the car cruised down the road at about fifty miles per hour.

They passed trailer parks.

"These people," Latisha said with a shudder. "Their necks are so ****ing red you'd burn your fingers to touch 'em."

"I saw the bumper-sticker collection in the bar. I guess Bill and Hillary are none too popular down here."

"They think," Latisha said, wonderment in her voice, "That when the aliens get here, they're going to fight them. With their precious guns. Defend their homes and women. And win. I mean, they really think that way. They also think the whole thing is a government conspiracy, a big lie. That there are no aliens, but that the aliens are made up to force One World Government. Black helicopters, and all that. A big hoax."

"No aliens," Howard said. "Some of them are Jules Pick followers?"

"A few, not many. Pick's arguments go over their heads. The World Soul and all that ****. The psychic wound in the sky. They regard Pick as intellectual and a fag. Which he is. Both. It's comical how he tries to hide that he's queer. Everyone already knows it. And that marriage of his! To her!"

"And Star Wars? The Reagan/Gorbachev thing, the alliance?"

"Lotta Star Wars fans. They're gaga for Reagan."

Howard nodded.

"And they think that even if the aliens are real, and even if guns won't defeat them, and even if Star Wars don't defeat them, then, if worst comes to worst, at the last minute Jesus will descend from the sky and save them, save the whole world. That's their mentality."

"There's a word or something for that. Saving at the last minute."

"Deus ex machina," the girl supplied knowingly, a tint of pride in her voice. "Not for nothing I study lit."

"You're very smart, Latisha."

"Thanks, Howard."

"Psychology," Howard said. "Defense mechanism. Gives them hope, confidence. The noble lie. Evolutionary psychology. We evolved to tell ourselves noble lies to in order to get through the day. Get through the night. In this case, get through the decades."

"You're smart, too, Howard."

"Thanks, Latisha."

After a pause she said, "What you said earlier, kind of scared me."

"What was that?"

About selling dreams. Dream seller."

"Why?"

"It reminded me of Dream Maker."

She was watching the road through the windshield, and even if she had been looking at him, she probably would not have noticed the imperceptible tightening of his fingers around the steering wheel, or the way that his knuckles whitened as he squeezed it.

"They say …"

"Stuff and nonsense, Latisha. Old wive's tales. All kinds of crazy stories are abroad nowadays. Sign of the times. The Zeitgeist."

"…that sometimes he hitchhikes in the desert, just like this desert, late at night. Like a ghost on the shoulder of the road, thumb thrust out. Hides his eyes behind a wide-brimmed that he keeps slouched over them. Wears a trench coat or something."

"Why hide his eyes?"

"You know. You've heard the stories. His eyes are red. All red. They glow like embers. Like twin setting suns in the sockets of his eyes. They are the eyes of someone not of this world."

"Pure bull****, Latisha. Something out of a bad horror flick."

"If you pick up the Dream Maker, they say that he makes your dreams come true."

"What dreams?"

"Whatever you want. Just name it."

"Like a genie or something."

"Right. Only you get one wish, not three. He makes that wish come true. That dream."

"And then?"

"Then he kills you."

There was a pause. Then Howard said: "That's if you pick him up, according to the stories. But what happens if he picks you up instead?"

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing. Forget it."

They drove in silence.

[hillwalker]

I'm still enjoying this. You've managed to develop a voice that's worth listening to. We trust you to come up with an interesting plot and the occasional surprise without really breaking sweat.

As far as the writing is concerned you might consider replacing 'The man' at the start of the second long paragraph with 'He' since you've already introduced him at the end of the preceding paragraph...

and there was some repetition regarding his shades' ability to reflect two images of the person looking at him.

Other than that, there's nothing else to find fault with other than a few grammatical glitches:

Old wive's tales. should be 'Old wives' tales' - wives is the plural of wife as no doubt you know.

If you use a colon you don't need to capitalise the first word of what follows - it's not like a full stop:

She looked a little alien herself: Red hennaed hair tied back in a bun, green eyes, a metal stud imbedded in one of the wings of her nose. She wore a tight, clinging white T shirt that showed off her jugs to good effect: Those big boobs bobbled, braless, as she exerted herself cleaning the counter.

and when a sentence of dialogue is broken by a speech tag again you don't need to capitalise the first word within the second set of quotation marks:

"They think," Latisha said, wonderment in her voice, "That when the aliens get here, they're going to fight them...

I also spotted a few typos:

The real action would begin when the sun went down and the Doomers crawled of their tents, scanning the sky for flying saucers with their binoculars and their big-eyed zombie stares.

and

We evolved to tell ourselves noble lies to in order to get through the day. Get through the night. In this case, get through the decades."

Nothing you're not going to spot on a re-edit.
But it's an intriguing piece. My only concern would be trying to pitch a 100,000 word novel if it's your first. 60-80,000 is a huge risk for a newbie let alone an epic of such proportions.

Good luck with whatever becomes of it.

H

[Cioran]

Thanks for the response, Hillwalker. The grammar/colon and other glitches I know and will fix on editing. It's hard to catch everything even when you sweep through it three or four times. The stuff about the repetition on the shades I already realized. Nice catch; you a careful reader.

This is not my first novel. It's my fourth, with a fifth and a sixth on the way concurrently with this one. The sixth is the text for a graphic novel by a talented artist friend of mine. None of the novels have been published yet. I hope to change that.

I have had nine short stories published, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, for what that is worth.

I am also here, honestly, because I am hoping there are people in the agent/publishing business that might be around. I hope to make a connection if possible. I've got the goods. I just need the agent.

I'll post a couple of more chapters. Thank you again. :)

Hm, I have created a sig, but it does not show. Let me post this and see if it does.

ETA: Now it shows, but only in this most recent post, and not in the previous posts. That seems odd. Oh well, no problem, just curious.

Well, after reading up on the subject a bit, I discovered that what I'm doing here is the proverbial really bad idea. So I won't do it anymore.

It would have been nice if a moderator had offered some guidance on this, but I guess there are no moderators. I do appreciate the feedback, especially from Hillwalker, but I am rather amazed at how little feedback in general there is in this forum. What's the point of a creative writing forum, if it lacks a lively exchange of manuscripts and feedback?

However, given that it's a wretched idea to post work intended for publication online, I'll cease immediately. Writing is loneliness. That is for sure.

[hillwalker]

However, given that it's a wretched idea to post work intended for publication online, I'll cease immediately. Writing is loneliness. That is for sure.

It doesn't have to be. If you can find a local writers' group you'll get a better chance to workshop your piece with a real live audience... and if they take writing seriously they won't sugar-coat their feedback.

As for the lack of meaningful feedback on here - particularly on the Short Story forums - you're spot on.

Good luck and send me a PM when (not if) it's published.

H

[Scheherazade]

It would have been nice if a moderator had offered some guidance on this, but I guess there are no moderators.Hi, Cioran.

Could you please PM me with the issues you need guidance on?

Welcome to the Forum :)

[Cioran]

Hi, Cioran.

Could you please PM me with the issues you need guidance on?

Welcome to the Forum :)

Thanks. :)

Actually I probably don't need guidance. I just need to stop posting stuff that I intend to try to sell. After doing some research, I gather that most publishers will not even consider work posted on the Internet, even if it's not the whole work. I suppose what I was wondering is how moderators here deal with this issue. Do you recommend, for example, that people post only texts that they have no intention of trying to sell?

[hillwalker]

I can't see how moderators can take an individual interest in everything posted on here and somehow protect everyone's intellectual property. It's up to each individual to decide whether they intend seeking publication sometime in the future before pressing the button.

I think you're right when you say most on here are either trying out a work in progress that will be significantly revamped before being offered for submission, or they're just posting stuff for distribution that they have no intention of ever selling.

Personally I only stick stuff on here that I'm happy to be shared for free. I'm on my third YA novel (one about to be published next summer - another still in search of an agent) and not a single word has ever been posted on here or anywhere else for that matter.

I hope you're able to resolve the issue regarding your own work because it's got potential.

You might be wise to press the Edit button and delete everything you have posted on here (replace it with ***deleted***) while you have the opportunity to cover your tracks. This facility is removed after a certain period of time.

The chances then are that no one will ever know it was once on-line.

Good luck.
H

[Cioran]

You might be wise to press the Edit button and delete everything you have posted on here (replace it with ***deleted***) while you have the opportunity to cover your tracks. This facility is removed after a certain period of time.

The chances then are that no one will ever know it was once on-line.

Good luck.
H


Well, thank, hillwalker, though in my research I discovered (from a forum devoted explicitly to creative writing) that closed forums, for members only, and deleting stuff is useless too. Stuff you delete has already been archived.

I don't think it's really a problem. This is only a tiny fragment of a long work. I guess what's really disappointing is that it means forums like this are useless for people like me, because there really can't be online writers' groups in which writers trade and critique professional-level texts for critique. So what happens is the only things that get posted aren't intended for publication or are just beginner's stuff.

Ah well. I had hoped to find a place here to engage with others seriously, but it seems one really can't do that because posting serious work is considered publishing it, and most publishers won't publish what they regard as reprints. It's totally stupid, of course, What publishers ought to be doing is encouraging talented writers to post their stuff on the internet, so that they, the publishers, can find promising new authors.

The world sucks. :nopity:

[Cioran]

If any should be interested, the novel today passed the 70,000-word mark. :hurray: I started it exactly 63 days ago, so I am proceeding at a brisk clip.

I can't post any more excerpts, for reasons already discussed, but if anyone here is an agent or publisher or connected with agents or publishers, please drop me a PM. You won't regret it. I've got the goods. In addition to this novel in progress, I've three others already completed, and will be writing another next month for November's novel-in-a-month contest.

I also work as an editor at a major newspaper, so I know words. Words Am Us. :ihih:

Thank you in advance. :)

[Jack of Hearts]

Good luck, it seems like you can pull it off.

As a rather bizarre coincidence, this reader was just today reading Wittgenstein's lecture on ethics at the website in your signature--The Galilean Library. If that is your website, then thanks for putting that lecture up. Take that, Principia Ethica!






J

[Cioran]

Good luck, it seems like you can pull it off.

As a rather bizarre coincidence, this reader was just today reading Wittgenstein's lecture on ethics at the website in your signature--The Galilean Library. If that is your website, then thanks for putting that lecture up. Take that, Principia Ethica!






J

Yes, TGL is, and others are welcome to join. We have a great chat room and a wonderful writing/art subforum, behind a firewall so work is protected. I am currently working with an artist there on the text of his graphic novel.