It feels strange not to have to sit down and write another 2,000-word entry in The Pink Sweater. If I had been writing such an entry, at this point, I would be reaching deep into my brain cavity for something to write, trying to figure out either what problems Lenny should internally complain about, or which characters should talk. Overall, dialogue was the easiest writing. During the course of a short conversation, the words piled up quickly. Just asking ‘how was your day?’ was good from anywhere between twenty and fifty words. During the third day (or thereabouts) I made the decision to stick the ‘character said’ at the end of every dialogue line. I normally try to be clever about the identifier, only placing them when the dialogue itself did not indicate who was talking, and usually after the first part of the sentence to allow the reader to know who was talking without having to skip to the end. To do this well, I found, I had to edit the dialogue. What was easier and faster for the Marathon, was the simple said tag. Not only was it more efficient, it also increased my total word count. Those two words (sometimes more, e.g., “the insurance salesman said”) in a lengthy dialogue with short, punchy statements really added up. (Yes, I freely admit I was a word whore.)

While the dialogue was easy, introspection came in a close second. Here I could spend many paragraphs thinking through an idea, examining it, twisting it in every possible way, and then writing about it some more. While it did not create words as quickly as dialogue, it did allow me to type without having to give too much of—what’s that phrase?—original thought (OT). Opening up to OT required much more time to think clever thoughts and took away from the finger pounding. For me, OT comes in two places: description and action. While there is arguably action in some dialogue, such as the conversation when Jake fired Lenny, most of my dialogue didn’t accomplish much. When I talk about action, I’m thinking about moving the plot forward. I love creating good descriptive paragraphs, but to do it well, I find myself consulting the thesaurus (I try not to abuse it but at times it is difficult) and trying to think of what I’m describing from a different angle, preferably a clever one.

I was glancing through a book of short stories by Betham-something. He was describing an elementary-school game of kickball, and I loved his description of the ball. I’ll try to paraphrase it: he described the ball, among other things, as having the texture of a bathmat. He was obviously much more elegant than me, but because of the words he chose and my own experiences with that most-evil-of-games (remembering I wasn’t much of an athlete during grade school and spent most of my time either praying that the batter did not kick the ball into my part of right field, or striking out, which is quite an accomplishment if you think that all you have to do not to strike out is to kick the stupid ball), I felt the rubber under my fingers and saw the beautifully pockmarked ball. It was the same feeling when I watched “Fight Club” and listened to the line, “I ran until battery acid pumped through my veins.” How awesome is that imagery?

This is too much digression. Remember when I spoke about finger diarrhea (I’m going to try to type this word every day until I can spell it without the spellchecker’s assistance)? This is it. This is the opening up of my innermost thoughts and spewing them on the page. This is my musing style brought to a factor of two (or maybe four). Whether this will ever translate to a story voice, we will see. If I could somehow find a way to use this voice to tell stories—wow, that might really change things.

The following is just some character sketches I’m doing for my next story. I’m not sure what’s it going to be about, but I have a few characters that were going through my head as I took a nap before (I’ll claim that some of the naptime involved OT).

Karen was a large woman. When confronted with this truth, she did not try to duck behind or explain it away with sounds about how she was on a new diet or both her parents were fat or the schoolyard kids left her so emotionally scarred that she ate to get away from it all. Karen just accepted who she was and part of that was a five-foot-five, 200lbs woman. She had an outrageous sense of humor, poking fun at anything that came within reach of her strangely long fingers. She did not reserve her derision for others, but went at herself just as hard. That was why most of her friends loved hanging out with Karen. She never held back and sucked the people around her into her strangely demented world, a world where a fat woman charms, insults, and bewitches a man that was unlucky enough to fall within striking distance of her wit. While the stories Karen told after the event rarely matched with what had happened, her friends did not mind. Karen’s filtered world was a strange one, and even with her outrageous changes, her friends laughed—particularly if they were present to watch the less humorous event.

The most attractive part of Karen was her chin. While most overweight people have stretched-out chins, Karen’s chin was razor sharp, the skin pulling tightly in an almost mockery of her neck, which drooped on both sides like the floppy ears of a beagle. The chin gave her face a thin look and made what some would categorize a chubby face into an almost chiseled, sharp face. Her eyes were not special—she liked to tell people that when one looked into her eyes, they didn’t find an infinite well of insight or intelligence or mysterious mischief. Her eyes were solid brown, looking almost like a child used a brown crayon to color her eyeball. She wore sensible clothing for a woman of her size, neither too tight nor too loose, and did not try to hide her girth. She chose flattering clothing, such as belted dresses and loose fitting jeans, which gave her a professional and polished look. With that said, however, nobody mistook Karen for an athletically shaped woman.

Karen loved artists. She told a story about the first time she visited her hairstylist Enrique after moving into a small studio in the East Village. Enrique asked what she wanted done to her hair. Karen turned and faced him, tilting her head down and rolling her eyes high in her head to look at him through her then bushy eyebrows. “Do you consider yourself an artist,” she asked him. “Yes.” Karen harrumphed and said, “So, then create art, go crazy.” Enrique smiled and said, “When you say go crazy, do you mean, go crazy, but don’t cut my bangs and don’t take off more than three inches and don’t you dare change the color of my hair?” Karen laughed and said, “No. My hair is in your hands. I won’t ask you to make me beautiful—I just ask you to do something artistic. It doesn’t have to be unexpected—but it could be—I just want my hair to be your canvas.” Karen was like that with all aspects of her life. She enjoyed experimenting with new things, especially when she found an artist who wanted to experiment.

Karen worked as an executive secretary. She was a smart woman and knew that if she finished college, she could probably find herself a better job. But she enjoyed the job and the people, and the pay and the hours allowed her to develop a close group of non-work friends who lived in her area, and spent most of their free time, which in the case of Karen and her friends was a lot of time, with each other. They were mostly artsy people, but Karen never judged them and supported them in their own dreams. For Karen’s part, her dream consisted of one simple thing: capturing moments of happiness. She did not look to the future but instead focused on the now. She grabbed at every opportunity to enjoy a moment and took as much pleasure in the good moments as she could muster. While she didn’t try to avoid bad moments, they mostly avoided her. The worst life had thrown at her was when her dog died at 13. She came from a tight-knit, if overweight, family, who, against the odds presented in medical journals, remained healthy. She was the youngest of three, her older brother and sister were both married, and Karen enjoyed her seven nieces and nephew, five from her eldest brother, who married a fundamentalist catholic, and two from her sister, who lived in their aging parents’ home after her husband walked out on her before giving birth to their second.

Stan was a neurotic, elementary-school teacher. He was thin and his neck bent slightly forward, giving him a hunched sitting posture. Bones poked at strange angles in his face, creating deep shadows around his cheekbones and eyes. His nose hooked slightly, the bone clearly visible from his face to the tip of his nose. Hair peaked out from the neck of his shirt, leading up to his head, where he wore his hair shaved close. Bare skin led from his forehead to a semicircle on the top of his head. He wore rectangular wire-rimmed glasses, which gave his face an angular look. He was a small man, who, a particularly vicious previous girlfriend remarked, looked light enough to hold in one arm. The clothing he wore hung loosely on his body. His arms and legs were hairy, with rugs of hair coming together to form trees of hair.

Stan loved large women. He accepted that sexually, different people liked different things, and his fetish—although he would never call it that—was a nicely shaped, large woman. Unlike many men who shared his tastes, he was not ashamed to be seen with such woman. He felt that there were more of them to love. A theory of his held that larger woman felt better down in his special place because their heft added to the warmth. This was just one of Stan’s many theories. He shared these theories freely with everyone and never found a question that stumped him. It never took Stan long to derive a theory once someone posed a question—this was particularly true in the case of science or technology questions. In answering why his friend’s cell phone did not work well in rainy weather, Stan was quick to theorize that the rain droplets acted as magnifying glasses and diluted the radio waves sent through the air. Over the years, Stan built on his theory to explain how rain affected not just cell phone rays, but also radar detectors, noise, and light, theorizing that when it rained, a person’s surroundings became indistinct and hazy because the light waves bouncing off the surroundings and into the person’s eyes were altered by their trip through the raindrops. This, he claimed, resulted in the large number of accidents that occurred when it rained. Although Stan listened patiently and nodded at the appropriate times, he would never accept his friends’ alternative theory that the slick roads and low visibility was the cause of the accidents, and not the bent light rays.

Stan was always on the move, moving frenetically from place to place. He could not sit still for long, and when he did manage to sit for more than a few minutes, his leg would start shaking up and down. His eyes darted around and took in his surroundings constantly. He liked parachute pants and t-shirts, even in the winter, and disdained jackets. A blue ring hung from his left ear, the results of a bet he won with his parents when he was 13. While he changed the earring from time to time, he never stopped wearing it because he felt it sent a message to his parents. He forgot exactly what the message was, but he was sure it was important, and he was sure that even as he grew older, he was 32, it was important that he pass on that message to everyone.

Stan joined Karen’s circle of friends through a mutual friend, Charles. Charles moved to New Jersey the week after he introduced Stan to the group, and the circle never heard of him again. Karen claimed it was better that way. Stan fell in love with Karen when he first met her. They dated for a few months before both of them decided that it was not going to work. Stan was too neurotic for Karen, and Karen was too unorganized and free-spirited for Stan’s carefully constructed world. But they still enjoyed each other’s company, and by the time Karen decided their relationship was not going to work, Stan’s membership in the circle of friends was established. Stan, however, still holds feelings for Karen, and one of his theories is that he can change her enough (i.e., make her more organized and reliable) to be the woman for him.

It’s nice to not meet a self-imposed 2,000-word goal. I did want to talk about Stan, but I can wait until I sleep tonight and dream up his characteristics. I might edit this on the flight, but no promises. I have no idea where this story is going, but at least I’m attempting to plan it out without relying on meta-writing to talk about it. That’s a good thing, right?