Tag: motivation

Further Future Mes are Fargoed

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It’s happened.  I knew it was only a matter of time — and if I’m honest with myself, it was never that much time to begin with — before I blew a tire.

No, I know, just this weekend I posted about how swimmingly the edit is going, how happy and fun everything is, how much it surprises me that things aren’t as bad as I thought.  But they are.  Things are undoubtedly as bad as I thought and even worse than I feared.

It’s like this time about a year ago.  I was driving with my wife to pick up my dad and my brother at the airport.  We took our Camry, which is a tank of an old car, but its tires were nearing the end.  They were so near the end, in fact, that the car would wobble when it got up above 45 miles per hour.  I knew a blowout was likely if not imminent, but I wanted to pretend that things were fine and that the tires were good for a little bit longer.  But sure enough, as we’re tooling down I-75, there’s an unmistakable BOOM flapflapflapflapflap and the car is pulling hard to the right like a hamstrung horse.

This — editing this novel — is a little different, in that I can’t really get proactive and go put new tires on the thing before I set out for the airport.  The edit itself is about fixing the tires, and replacing the motors in the power windows, and that burned out blinker, and the sandpaper windshield wipers, and that crack in the rearview, and getting that shudder in the transmission checked on.  In short, the whole damn car needs work if I hope to sell it, and make no mistake, the ultimate goal is to sell it (the novel, not the car).

Still, I knew the blowout was coming, and today I hit the first.  Probably the first of many.

There’s this moment in the first act.  It’s awfully hokey.  Like, for all intents and purposes, my protagonist and his sidekick basically accept as a given the weird sharknado that’s going down, break out the fringed vests and start singing Bob Dylan like everything’s gonna be cool.  And, to be fair, it helped Past Me to get past that troublesome moment and move on with more conflicts and more plot development.  And the stuff that comes after is good.  Problem is, when Present Me (then Future Me) goes to fix the Koombaya moment by removing the hokeyness from it, the entirety of the pages immediately following begin leaning like a house of cards built on sand in a windstorm.  AND I KNEW IT WAS COMING.  This is the part of the draft where Past Me started leaving a whole lot of messages to Future Me (now Present Me) which are sometimes as helpful as “go back and write a little bit of exposition for this particular thing” but more often as useless as “THIS SUCKS, HAVE FUN FIXING IT LOSER”.  I’d be laughing if that weren’t an actual note I actually came across in my parsing today.

It’s pretty clear that Past Me was just having his jollies on the promise of Future Me coming round to clean up the sticky bits on the carpet, and again, I knew at the time that I was doing just that.  In fact, I remember pretty clearly while I was drafting having a good laugh at what a jerk I was acting like toward this hypothetical Future Me that was going to have to deal with the angry neighbors and the ruined wallpaper.  It makes me want to hit that guy.  Because now I’m looking at a draft — about 20,000 words into it — and it’s as holey as a hand grenade of Antioch.  As porous as the freaking Falcons’ defense.  As flimsy as the Braves’ chances of making the postseason.  (GOD, it was an awful weekend for sports in Atlanta.)

Don’t get me wrong.  I know that the hardest part — the writing, the creating, the sheer calling from nothingness into being of this thing — is behind me.  But the task ahead ain’t all sunshine and lemondrops.  I can’t even say it’s peanut butter sandwiches and leftover pizza.  It’s looking more like a torrential downpour of excrement and a slog through alligator-infested swamps.  And my tires have blown out, so I have to go the whole thing on foot.  Not that my Camry was going to make much progress in a damn swamp… okay, too many mixed metaphors.  The point is, the proverbial sharknado is hitting the proverbial fan and the work is about to get real.

But tomorrow is another day, and it all gets simplified down to manageable bites on my to-do list for another Further Future Me.  Man, I feel sorry for that guy.

Things Writers Need — Sanctuary

Pavowski3 Comments

This week, in “Things Writers Need,” perhaps the last of the BIG ideas: a sanctuary.  If the series is to continue, it’ll have to start diving into the nitty-gritty, the finer, more specific things.  Lots to ponder.  But at any rate, the Sanctuary.

Let’s get one thing clear: writing is hard.  To be specific: coming up with ideas is hard, writing the ideas down in a coherent and meaningful way is hard, making the time to write is hard, not getting distracted from writing is hard.

On a good day, writing is like chasing butterflies with a net that instead of a net uses bubbles.  Just when you think you’ve snagged one of the buggers, the net bursts and you have to dunk your wand in the solution again.  (That’s not nearly as sexual as it sounded coming out.)  On a bad day, you have no net and must entice the buggers to land in your mouth using only the hypnotic ululations of your tongue.  (Also not directly intended to be sexual.)

On a good day, you’re tracking the movement of radioactive particles through the vacuum of space, standing in your backyard with a whacked-together dish of ceramic and tinfoil hoping to snare quarks from the ether.  On a bad day, meteorites are smashing your house to bits and your dish is on fire, and also the quarks are superheated and are burning your satellite dish to a cinder.  Burning it for a second time.

On a good day, you’re on the Atlanta perimeter trying to catch somebody using a turn signal.  On a bad day, the interstate has snowed under and everybody’s walking home.  Except you’re still in Atlanta and the walk home takes a day and a half.

That is to say that if you’re going to write properly, you need supreme focus, free from as many distractions as possible.  You need a sanctuary.  A safe haven from the world.  A bunker to protect you from the bombs, big and small, that blow up every day in your world.  A soundproof chamber to block out the low drone of life.  A treehouse you can climb into to escape the leaping jackals.  A little bubble of air at the bottom of the ocean.

Ideally, this would be a room of your own.  A room free of needless ornament and away from regular foot traffic, or maybe full of little bric-a-brac (is bric-a-brac plural?) that inspire you or fill your head with strange and wonderful ideas, and just off the hallway so that you can hear the soothing sound of footsteps as your significant other or your kids or your cats or your hamsters or the neighborhood dog approaches.  A room that has no television, or maybe one that has a television receiving no signal so that it only plays soft soothing static, or perhaps one hooked up to a DVD playing old episodes of Leave it to Beaver on repeat because that’s what stimulates your brain.  A room with no windows, or maybe a window overlooking the dense cruel cityscape below, or a window overlooking your children’s playground, or the soft contours of a white-sand beach, or the sweeping majesty of the Appalachians, or a painted backdrop of unicorns leaping over rainbows and farting out quarks for you to catch in your satellite dish.

Look, the makeup of the room is not a standardized thing; it should have the things that benefit the writer’s process in it, and it should forcefully reject anything that obstructs that process.  Writers need a space that keeps their heads level.  A space that can shut out the demons and distractions and the e-mails and the worries and the crises and the bills and…

Okay, I’m actually stressing myself out a little bit thinking about all the things that get in the way when I’m trying to write.  The simple fact is that there is no end to the stream of things that will try to stop a writer from writing on any given day.  If the writer is not equipped to fend those things off, they will sweep him under like so many tons of thrashing white water and deposit his soggy corpse with the rest of the broken dreams at the shattered delta of Unfinished Projects.  A simple place to write is one of the best defenses for keeping those things at bay.  It doesn’t have to be lush and finely furnished.  It doesn’t have to be lined with polished mahogany or stocked with leather-bound books or busts of famous dead people.  It doesn’t have to overlook a sunlit veranda or a tranquil garden.  It doesn’t even have to smell like scotch and candlewax.  It just has to be a place that makes a writer feel comfortable and safe and relaxed and creative.  It helps if it has a door.  But you know what?  It doesn’t even have to be a room.  It just needs to be a space where you do your writing.  Thoughts are semi-tangible things, I think.  Bits of them bleed out and seep into the walls, the floorboards.  They mingle with the air, and discolor the carpet over time.  You need that space to soak up the essence of your thoughts so that on the days when the ideas don’t want to flow, you can stew in those ambient thoughts to release some of the locked-in juices.

I’m lucky in that, at work, I can sneak a half hour at lunchtime, close my door and be alone with my thoughts in total silence if I like.  I’m not so lucky in that my house (which my wife and I once thought so huge and cavernous) affords me no such luxury.  Between two babies’ bedrooms, our bedroom, and a guest room (which has also sort of become a makeshift library and cat bedroom), there is no sanctuary to be found.  The best I have is the use of the desk adjacent to the kitchen, which butts up against the stairs which are essentially the heart of the house.  There’s no door, even, to shut the world out.  Also, of course, when I’m at home, I’m Dad, which means I am always on call.  So I have to make the most of my time at work and enjoy what little sanctuary can be had while I’m there.

That’s not to say that I can’t write at home.  I can, and often do.  But it only works because I’ve talked to my wife and she respects my time and space while I’m writing, provided I don’t ask for too much of it.  It works because I take that time when the kids are asleep and don’t need my attention.  It works, in short, because it has to work and because I make it work.

That said, when we ever get around to buying a new house, it’s gonna have to have at least a walk-in closet or something I can turn into a study.  You know, in addition to the basement we need, and the bathrooms with reasonable fixtures, and the less ridiculous plumbing situation, and a lot fewer trees in the backyard, and a porch that isn’t falling apart, and…

Sorry, I got distracted.

What’s the most important thing inside (or outside) your writing sanctuary?

Things Writers Need — TIME

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School is back in session, and as you might have noticed if you’re a regular here at Pavorisms, it’s taking a toll.  My writing has suffered a vicious setback at the hands of being back to work and will likely continue to be set back until I get a handle on a new routine for the year.  That said, today’s topic for “Things Writers Need” is particularly salient.

 
Today’s thing is time, bloody precious uninterrupted sacred time.  Time to make deadlines, time to think up story ideas, time to actually write the blighted thing.  Specifically, I want to talk about the actual time you need when actually actively writing.
 
Let’s get this straight.  Writing is HARD.  Even when you’re writing about something you love, it’s knuckle-whitening, teeth-grinding, marathon-running HARD.  The best writing is a greased pig with a hot poker applied to its nether bits; it darts this way and that, wails like crazy and will kick mud in your face the moment you think you have a handle on it.  Even if you do manage to lay hands on the thing, without the utmost focus it will twist right out of your arms, leaving you sprawled in the mud and wondering whether the sweet savory taste of bacon is worth all the trouble.  (It is.)  You can’t corner it.  You can’t strategize it.  You just have to chase after it and hope to get lucky enough to scoop it up every now and then before it leaves you in the dirt.  Every once in a while the magic just happens.  But it can’t happen if you don’t have time to chase the pig around the yard.
 
Time
There’s a quote I loved from the much-adored John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, “What a slut time is.  She screws everybody.” Doesn’t even buy you diner first.
 
The fact that I am realizing lately more than ever before in my life is that time is a fixed, non-renewable and ultimately precious resource.  Life is filled up with so very many things we must do that it can feel like a mug’s game trying to decide what to do with the time you have left over.  Writing, sad to say, takes up a lot of time.  Even on a good day, I can get maybe 1000 words an hour.  Measure that against the novel I just drafted at 89000 words and that’s ninety hours at a minimum, but let’s be more pragmatic and assume it was closer to a hundred and fifty.  Where does a guy with a full-time job and two full-time kids get that kind of time?
 
You get it at the expense of other things.  You have to cannibalize the things you hold most dear and use the sweet sweet time you harvest from their still-breathing husks to do the thing that matters.  My thing is video games and TV.  I’ve been a video game junkie since I was five years old and played my first round of “Skier”, in which you steered a pixelated blob down a white expanse dotted with pixelated tree-like green things and pixelated brown lumps and pixelated H-shaped things which somebody assured me you were supposed to navigate between but I was too busy crashing my pixelated blob guy into trees and cackling like a Bond villain to care.  (Seriously, ask my dad about my experiences with “Skier” and he will laugh until he’s blue in the face.)
 
And TV, holy god!  I used to think that TV was a drain on my life before we got Netflix.  Now it’s a ravenous all-consuming black hole.  On one side you’ve got brilliant network shows one-upping each other with crime dramas and sitcoms, on another side you have cable shows pumping out blistering tour-de-forces in character study and horrible dark drama, on another side you have premium channels hawking epic escapist fantasy and historical fiction, and then there are the on-demand streamers giving you a smorgasbord of bizarre and compelling no-holds-barred excursions in the secret lives of everyday people.  I really think one could watch eight to ten hours of television a DAY and still miss out on some of the incredible programming that’s coming out of TV in the last ten years or so.  I say that not as a rant against television but more as a statement of awe.  There’s SO MUCH GOOD STUFF out there.  As a writer, watching a good show is research, right?  RIGHT??
 
Point is, it has to go.  Or at least, most of it has to go, because, see, if you want to create, you need large, unbroken swathes of time to let your mind stretch out in.  You need to be able to stew in your thoughts, to fart around with your characters and work on the Gordian knot of tangled plotlines and entrapments that your stories turn into.  I’m not even talking about the actual act of writing, I’m talking about just thinking about writing.  You have to carve out these huge chunks of time in which to operate.  Writing isn’t a microwave dinner, it’s a slow cooker.  You can’t catch ten minutes here, twenty minutes there and expect to turn out Hamlet.  (I understand that some writers work that way, and bully for them.  Honestly.  But how much better could they be if they didn’t have to write that way?)
 
I read a fantastic article a few months back on NerdFitness.com (yeah, ‘net browsing is another thing that could do with some cannibalizing) called “Why ‘I don’t have time’ is a Big, Fat Lie”.  Steve Kamb has it right here.  It’s true.  So true, it hurts.  In short, the article encourages you to change the way you think about time.  We all have the same amount of time in our day, no matter how much we might wish it otherwise, and some of us are doing amazing things with that time and others are withering on the vine.  Instead of saying, then, that “I don’t have time” to write that novel or run those three miles before work or cook that nice dinner, Steve encourages you to say instead “it’s not a priority.”  Because we make time for the things we prioritize, even if the decision to do so is not a conscious one.  Sitting on your donk and watching TV or playing a video game gobbles up your precious time, so while you’re doing that, you’ve made it a priority.  This is not to say, of course, that TV or video games should be eschewed entirely.  Far from it.  (TV is research, right??)  But we (and by “we” I mean “I,” and by “I” I mean “writers,” and by “writers” I mean “everybody”, really) have to make time for the things we want to do even when the making of time is difficult.  And I really shouldn’t say “make time”, because the time is just there.  You just have to steal it away from the other unimportant sharknado in your life that wants to steal it first.
 
So you have to fight for your time.  In full battle-armor and with broadsword polished and flailing and a tiny little holdout dagger in your belt ready when the fighting gets really gnarly, if necessary.  You have to carve that time out of your schedule anywhere there is meat left on the bone, and when there is no meat left, you might just have to cut the bone, too.  I operated on six hours of sleep most nights this summer because I’d stay up late writing after sprout #2 went to bed late and then wake up early when sprout #1 popped out of bed like a happy tornado at six AM.  (Of course, my wife operated in staccato bursts of two hours of sleep at a time, so I bow to her masterful experience there!)  It sucked, but I got it done.  I’m trying to find the groove now for being back at work with two kids at home leaving footprints in the jello, and it’s difficult, but I’ll find that groove somewhere.
 
However you find it, you have to make writing the priority, and that means you have to make the time to do it.  That’s the bottom line.  Writers need time to do what they do if they want to do it well.  If you’re a writer, you have to claim that time however you can.  If you’re dating or married to a writer, well… maybe cut him (or her!) a break once in a while.  Give him (or her!) an hour’s break from the kids — take ’em to the park or something — or take a girls’ or guys’ night, or I dunno, build him (or her!) a temporal displacement chamber in the basement so that he (or she!) can by god create more time and get some damn writing done, paradoxes like meeting your future self or becoming your own grandfather be damned.
 
No, seriously, if anybody has any leads on that temporal displacement thingy, let me know.
 

There Are Good Runs, and Then There Are Exceptional Runs

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This summer has been a bit of a running renaissance for me.

I got my latest start in running a little over two years ago, flew a bit too close to the sun back in January, crashed and burned at the beginning of the year and have been clawing my way back, clutching at gnarled roots and jagged cliffsides ever since.  Today, I went for my first “relaxed” 10k run in more than a while, and I’m happy to say that I feel damn good afterward.  But it’s not the run I want to talk about.  Er, rather, it’s not the distance.

In trying to get myself out of the injured dumps, I’ve been running this summer with a mind toward becoming more complete: running more trails, especially, but also varying my workouts and working to stay healthy rather than just trying to spin the wheels on the odometer.  I think it’s paying off, but more importantly, I think I’m really getting to enjoy my runs again, rather than facing each one with the fear that the next step is going to injure me again and set me back for a couple months.

This morning found me on the Atlanta Beltline, a series of paved “trails” that wend through and around downtown Atlanta.  It’s been much-touted by colleagues of mine and runners I know in the area, but is one of those things I just hadn’t gotten around to doing (man, that’s a long list).  Mainly I’ve avoided it because it doesn’t jive with my minimalist philosophy of running to drive half an hour just to go on a leisurely run; I prefer to just step out the door and go.  But a facebook group of local runners scheduled the event for this morning; said group is composed of some folks I know from high school and some others I’ve not met yet, so it seemed a good time.

Just by the by, does anybody else have horrible luck when signing up for casual “events” on facebook?  I’ve tried this one or two other times and everybody seems to bail at the last minute.  You see where this is going.  I pull up to the meeting spot at five minutes til the start time and I see a big smiling crowd of zero people.  Yep, ten people signed up as “definitely going” and I was the only one.  Except for my pal from high school, J.  He hops out of his car and hits me with a warm grin and a hearty handshake and a “great to see you.”  We chat for a few minutes about how pitiful it is that nobody else has slogged their butts out of bed on a Saturday (seriously, what are you doing that you can’t get up at 5:45 to go for a run??), then, after allowing enough time for any reasonable latecomers to show up, we’re off.

We set an easy pace — J’s a lot faster than me, but he’s logged a lot of miles this week and wants to relax a bit, and I’m a bit jangly over attempting my first six-miler since a race I ran (and probably overran, to be honest) a month ago.  And my first six-miler ever in my Vibrams, for that matter.

A lot of people, when recounting their runs, like to give a breakdown of each mile, the highs and lows, the hills and the hurts, but that seems silly to me.  I could no more recount each moment of a good run — let alone a good long run — than recount every bite of my breakfast this morning, and it wouldn’t be good reading besides.  (Now, whether the alternative makes for good reading…)

First, a review of the trail.  The Beltline is a very long series of trails, I found out, but we ran a stretch of it from Piedmont Park East over to Ponce de Leon, then doubled back and took a tour of Piedmont Park.  The line is a very well kept, spacious jaunt through residential areas and commercial developments, under overpasses and through great sweeping vistas of the Atlanta skyline.  Nearly every overpass or concrete wall is adorned with the sort of tasteful graffiti that almost feels like an art exhibit.  And the line is so popular that it’s absolutely bursting with runners, bikers, walkers, rollerbladers.  We must have passed or been passed by a hundred people or more in our four miles on the line.  I’m sure that’s nothing new to regulars in the area, but for a guy like me who runs out in the burbs and, on a good day, glimpses maybe three or four other runners in my heavily trafficked zones (none at all otherwise), it was a welcome sight.  Made me feel less like a lunatic on an island and a little more like maybe a guy in a bodysuit at a convention.  Still not totally normal, but at least at home among the other freaks.

Then, the fact that I was running with a guy I’ve not spoken to in any meaningful capacity for oh, about fifteen years (please kill me).  We ruminated a bit about running, a bit about life, a lot about people and marriage and kids and pop music and only a little bit about work, with the kind of easy, unhurried conversation that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.  You bump into somebody in line at the DMV or at the grocery store, and he’s got someplace he’d rather be, something he’d rather be doing, and he doesn’t want to waste time getting there and doing it.  You settle in for an easy six miles and you find there’s no need to rush things, you let the talk drift where it will.

To top it off, as we hit the turnaround and headed back for the trailhead, I look up and see my young Padawan cruising toward us.  This is a guy who saw me start running and lose thirty pounds two years ago, then took up running himself and has since lost in the neighborhood of one hundred pounds.  He now runs races about every other weekend and is a big contributor and participant with running groups in Atlanta.  Unfortunately, he lives on the opposite side of town from me, so we’ve never actually had a run together — and we didn’t today, because he was hustling along, late for a meeting with his running group.  Still, seeing him in action was just another shot of good vibes on an already good morning.

An hour passed faster than it had any right to.  The run finished, we headed back to our cars and agreed to try and meet up again soon.  I like to think it was the sort of agreement we’ll follow through on — it’s hard to lie and be phony after you’ve just run six miles — but whether we do or not, I’m thankful for the time we had today.  Running is one of those things that binds people together in ways that don’t even make sense a lot of the time, and it certainly brought J and me together today.  I’m one of those hippy-dippy people that thinks there is no such thing as a bad run; that every time you lace up you accomplish something.  But even if there are no bad runs, certainly some runs are better than others.

Today’s was exceptional.

Interview With a Character

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I was browsing around today, thinking about my novel and what I’m going to do with it, and I saw that my spirit guide, Chuck Wendig, had written a little piece about characters and how they drive action.  It’s perfectly obvious advice when you think about it, and it’s a model that I tried to adhere to in writing my first draft, but I wonder if I actually came as close to the mark as I believe I did.

To help me puzzle through that, I invited one of my characters here to talk it over a little bit.  Everybody, please give a nice, warm welcome to the fictional, frazzled, Andrew Remington.

(Andy enters to canned studio applause.)

Me: Andy, hi, it’s great to see you.

Andy: It’s nice to be seen.

Me: I’m really excited to have you here today.

Andy:  Well, I’m happy to be here.  You’ve had me through the wringer over the past few months, haven’t you?  It’s nice to have a bit of a break.

Me: True.  That’s my job as storyteller, you know, to give you a hard time.  No hard feelings.

Andy:  If you say so.

Me: Okay.  Let’s get right down to it, because I’m dying to pick your brain a little bit, you know?  Crack open the meaty bits and see what makes you tick.

Andy:  That’s a metaphor, right?

Me:  Yeah, I’ve been working on those.

Andy:  Okay, because I remember when you wrote about dropping the piano on that guy, and all of us in the book thought that was going to be a metaphor, but…

Me:  That one escalated quickly.

Andy:  Dry cleaning bills were horrendous.

Me:  That scene is probably not going to survive the first edit, if it makes you feel any better.

Andy:  A little.

Me:  Right.  So.  You’re a character in my book.  The first draft is done, your story is told for the time being.  What’s it like being you?

Andy:  Uhh, I’d have to say it’s a bit like living inside a ping-pong ball.

Me:  (Tapping note cards on the desk.)  Wow.  Um.  Wasn’t really expecting that.  A ping pong ball.  How do you mean?

Andy:  You picture a ping-pong ball, right?  Tiny, white.  Opaque.  Blows in the wind.  Yeah?  Say you could live inside of it, what would you see?

Me:  (Shrugs.)

Andy:  A whole lot of nothing, right?  You’ve basically just got the light and shadow outside of the ball and then somebody whacks you with a paddle and off you go, back and forth, over a net that you can’t really see, and you’re banging off the walls and knocking clocks over–

Me:  Like in the Great Gatsby.

Andy:  …yeah, not like that, really.  More in a chaotic hurricane of who-the-hell-knows-what’s-going-to-happen-next.

Me:  But that’s a good thing, right?  I mean, I’m supposed to keep the audience guessing to some extent, and that means keeping you guessing too, doesn’t it?

Andy:  I can see where yo’d think that, but let’s stick to the ping-pong ball.

Me:  Okay.

Andy:  The ball just bounces around from one side of the table to the other.  It has no will, it has no motivation.  It only goes where it’s told.

Me:  Uh huh.

Andy:  And, if you’re living inside of the ball, then it’s doubly so.  There aren’t even any windows to look out of to see where you’re headed, if you’re going in the right direction, or even if you’re making progress.  All you do is hang on until you get whacked by another paddle.

Me:  I see.

Andy:  If anything, living inside the ball, you’re completely at the mercy of the two giant dudes with the paddles.

Me:  Wait, there are giants now?

Andy:  Jesus, dude, stick with the metaphor.  Not actual giants.

Me:  Just testing you.

Andy:  Right.  (Gives me a serious side-eye.)  So, the … perfectly ordinary non-giants with the paddles.  They can put spin on the ball, they can slam it, spike it…

Me: I think those are volleyball terms, actually.

Andy:  Do you want to hear this or not?

Me:  Sorry.  But you’re saying you live inside the ball, so you don’t drive the action?

Andy:  It doesn’t feel like it.  It feels like the villains in the story, you know, they’re the ones with the paddles, just smacking the rest of us around the whole time.

Me:  Uh huh.

Andy:  And I understand that as the protagonists, we’re supposed to take some hard knocks.  I get that.  But all the same, it doesn’t feel right for us — and by us I especially mean me — to get smacked around for the entire story.

Me:  I see.

Andy:  Give me a turn at the paddle, you know what I mean?

Me:  I mean, I have to disagree with you.  You’re the one who makes an inadvertent call to a muse to set the whole thing in motion.  You’re the one working against a deadline for the whole story.  You’re the one who finally, ultimately, overcomes the whole … well, let’s not spoil it for anybody reading, but the whole series of THINGS, right?

Andy:  You’re not wrong, but… look.  You’re right.  I do things in the story.  No question about that, okay?  But let’s just take a few examples.  I mean, the gangsters jump out and take the rest of us hostage… who bails us out?  It ain’t me.

Me:  No, you’re right.  That was —

Andy:  Then the whole business with Harold and the … erm, how can I say this without uh…

Me:  The theft?

Andy:  Yes, the theft.  He steals a THING.  It’s gone.  He’s gone.  Who finds him so we can continue the story?  It ain’t me.

Me:  I see what you’re saying.  That was the other —

Andy:  And then, finally, we go to the big showdown, yeah?  And Anthony and Julia are running.  They’re about to escape.  But then they get stopped.  By whom?  It ain’t —

Me:  You, yeah, no, you’re right.

Andy:  You see what I mean?

Me:  I think so.

Andy:  Do I have agency, is what I’m driving at.  I mean, pardon the pun, “driving,” but it’s not like I’m driving the story, it’s like I’m along for the ride.

Me:  But those moments you’re talking about, that’s where your supporting characters get a chance to shine, right?  Like, you’re driving the bus through a post-apocalyptic burned out city, right?  And they’re leaning out the windows with RPGs and machine guns shooting off the zombies and blowing up the obstacles in your path.

Andy: Okay, I see that.  That’s a nice image, by the way.

Me:  You liked that?

Andy:  I did.  Sounds like a good idea for a story, actually.

Me:  Yeah?

Andy:  Call it “Murder Bus” or something.  But, to get back on track, honestly, you’re not wrong.  And I see your point.  But I feel like there are moments — and, maybe I’m being selfish here, but I do mean momentS, plural — where, you know, it should be me with the rocket launcher.

Me:  I see.

Andy:  Smeared with the blood and the smoke and the entrails of the enemy, right?

Me:  Entrails?

Andy:  Metaphorical entrails.

Me:  Uh huh.

Andy:  At least one or two moments like that, where I get to shine.  I mean, far be it from me to tell you how to write the story.  And — I can say this, because I’ve lived it, now — I think it’s a pretty good story.

Me:  Thanks.

Andy:  It works out all right for me in the end, after all.

Me:  Hey, spoilers.

Andy:  Oh, come on.  It’s a comedy, it wasn’t going to end with a funeral or anything.

Me:  Or is it?  (We share a conspiratorial look.)  No, it doesn’t end that way.

Andy:  So yeah, it’s a good story.  I just feel like … man, how to say it?  I shouldn’t be a bigger part, exactly. You’ve got me on virtually half the pages.

Me:  Probably more.

Andy:  Probably more, right.  I’m tired, you know?  So not a bigger part, but maybe a more pivotal part.  That’s what I’m looking for.

Me:  Okay.

Andy:  If the story’s a big wagon wheel, I should be the axle it turns on.

Me:  Right, no, that makes sense.

Andy:  Just a suggestion.

Me:  So tell me, what’s it like working with the muse of comedy?

Andy:  Oh, she’s great, you know?  Really, um… what’s the word…

Me:  Funny?

Andy:  I was going to say inspirational, but that would be a little bit cheesy, wouldn’t it?

Me:  A bit on the nose.

Andy:  She’s funny.  Very funny.  A quick suggestion, though?

Me:  Oh, sure?

Andy:  Maybe there’s room in the story for a scene where we, um… (leans over and whispers in my ear)

Me:  (whispering back) It’s not really that kind of book, though.

Andy:  (Shrugs.)  It was worth a try.

Me:  Well, Andy, this has been enlightening, I’ve really enjoyed having you on the blarg.

Andy:  The what?

Me:  The blarg.  It’s a… it’s a kind of a joke.  You know.  Blog.  But then it’s a blog, so it’s kind of… argh.  So.  Blarg.

Andy:  Is that supposed to be funny?

Me:  (sighing) I don’t know.  (Stands.)  It’s been a pleasure.

Andy:  Yeah, likewise.

Me:  I’ll see you in a few weeks when I start the edit.

Andy:  I’ll bring the lube.

Me:  Andrew Remington, everybody!

(Canned applause.  Slow fade.)