After the story, I've documented my demented musings on where it's heading (or not heading):

Monsters

People and monsters surround me. I would live without either.

They sit in a descript diner, large mouthed mugs surrounding them. A blues record spins on the corner turntable, the raspy singer battering notes with an aggressiveness wasted on the patrons. Gloria mashes her cake with the tongs of a plastic fork.

Uncertainty is the breath of dragons, the fire whetting the scales indiscriminately. If only I knew the dragons’ names.

“You see,” Willow starts again, “five years and bam.”

Gloria finishes shaping the outer wall of her cake citadel, using the fork’s arc to bend the corner. She turns the plate around slowly and inspects the wall’s level. “You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Gloria says. “And I’m not even sure that your ‘bam’ would be bad.”

Willow’s thighs spread and flatten over the canvas chair. She reaches over and takes the fork from Gloria. “You’re not even paying attention,” Willow says. Gloria frowns and holds out her hand. Willow gives the fork to Gloria, who resumes sculpting the individual bricks on the wall’s outer face.

“Have you been listening?” Willow asks. “He proposed to her and it’s driving him crazy. His family and friends are against it, but even they can’t place their fingers on what the problem is. It’s delicious.” When Gloria doesn’t respond, Willow continues, “He’s going to be miserable. He believes he was meant for greater things, and he doesn’t understand that when he marries, he’s going to feel that those greater things are now impossible. Don’t you see it?”

“Why do you care what he thinks?” Gloria asks. “It’s not like it’s going to go away after he marries.” Gloria dips her fork in Willow’s coffee mug. She lacquers the top of the wall with dribbles of cold coffee. “It’s not like life ends with this choice.”

Money twists my nipple until it glows cherry. Now I’m afraid to pull free.

"***," Willow says. “He’s stuck. He’s not going to be able to stop himself from marrying her, and nobody besides her has any influence over him. ”

Gloria picks a cherry from the gelatinous frosting and dissects it with her butter knife. “It’s a silly game. Let’s just let him marry and be done with it. I have much better things I could be doing than worrying over the likes of him.”

“That’s not the point,” Willow says, her jowls flapping as she shakes her head violently. “We agreed to discuss this. Why you chose to meet here is beyond me.”

Gloria puts her knife down and looks across at Willow, noticing her appearance for the first time. Willow looks about forty. She wears a white button shirt tucked into stretchy floral-print pants. The tucked shirt forms visible creases and lines under Willow’s pants, which hug her rotund belly. Her make-up is overdone, with heavy forest green eye shadow and ghastly pink lipstick.

“First off,” Gloria says. “I chose this place because I like the cake.” She scratches at a large wart on her chin. “I agree that staying might cause problems. But he can overcome them. And I’m not talking miniscule chances of that, either. There are viable paths he can take where he’ll find accomplishment. I don’t see why you don’t want to throw the dice on this one.” Gloria plants the minced cherry pieces at the four corners on the top of the wall.

For all the darkness that reigns over night, Unhappiness is their king. I wish I lived in my neighbor’s green yard.

the musings on the story

I’m confused about the point of this story. I know it’s supposed to be confusing, but where do you want to take it? Right now, it’s hovering the line of non-existence. It’s an interesting premise: Two fates are sitting over coffee discussing the outcome of a choice a person is making. His thoughts are interspersed in the story, in italics. What is his choice? We can either not know (or, worse, not care). Why are the fates even discussing it? What’s in it for them? Why do they care? These are the problems I’m having. One of them feels one way, and the other the other way. But why are the bothering? And what is his role?

My first attempt had the man’s choice be an important (for the world) type event. But I didn’t like that. Why should they only intercede in these important choices. There needs to be something more. This choice is about you. About your desires and choices (like everything is about you!). What would be the best way to accomplish this without bring his true thoughts into this? Should the fates be actually discussing what he’s thinking? Or is it something more?

It’s something more. We’re talking about your choice: about programming, about writing, about working as a lawyer. These are the things I want to fates to focus on, but I don’t want them to come out and actually talk about them. That would be too easy, and you would end up with the same type of shit, the shit that you just can’t stand anymore, remember? I want to do it cleverly. How can I talk about it, without talking about? Present the arguments, without explaining what they pertain to? That’s what I’m after.

I can redo it in the italics, but I don’t want to cheapen them. That leads to cheapening the conversation—which is not exactly a bad thing. You weren’t going anywhere with the fates. You wanted to present them as two omnipotent creatures, but who could not affect one another. That was the fantasy aspect of the story (something you’re desperately trying to incorporate).

Where comes in your choice? That’s the important part of the story. How do I explain it? Do they just talk about it? That wouldn’t be horrible, you know.

What would make this story interesting? What something about it is clever (and why do you always focus on cleverness?)? Okay, you’ve spent enough time worrying about what it should be about. You need to actually write it. Acutally, you need to write the synopsis.

Two fates are sitting in a coffee house debating what will happen to what? I always get fucking stuck. Think about it. What if they are discussing this important person. He’s advancing a scientific theory, or perhaps a doctor advancing a cure. Or someone making a decision between pleasure and security. Is it something meaniningful? Is that what you’re after? A meaningful decision about life or a definition of happiness? If that’s it, how do you want to get there?

And what happens once you’re there?

What type of person is this? He sounds rather pathetic from the italicized part. He’s definitely “clever,” and perhaps emotional, but hides that emotion from others (wonder where that came from). What happens at the end? That should help you. He makes a decision and goes on with his life? Maybe it’s a historical figure—like Hitler—and his decision does change the world. We don’t know who he is until the end. And once we do, we wish he had not made that decision, or perhaps we wish he had. How would you build up to it then?

You don’t know many famous persons—pick someone that you know about. And what does the decision have to do? (Many more questions than answers here—this is getting old.) Okay, we have this famous person making a choice. Do the fates intervene, or are them more of the watching-type? If they just watch, why are they debating it? What’s the point of their conversation? So they should be able to infoluence the choice, otherwise there would be no reason to talk about it. So they can affect the choice. Why would they? What’s their purpose? Why are they out there.

(How about, when doing this thought experiments, you may only have one question before you have to answer it. You can ask more questions, but you need answers between the questions.)

What’s their purpose for affecting the main character’s choice? Perhaps they want to affect it because they want the world to be a better place. (Why would they want that? They care about the world—or have to answer to a “higher power.”) I still don’t like the purpose. What else? It’s not because they want the world to be a better place. That’s silly. Maybe they want their world to be better? How would their world be different by what happens to the main character? It seems they have some sort of job, maybe their job is affected by the character and other human’s actions. How does that help them? What if it turns out that the two “fates” are really just the innerworkings of his mind? They are the angel/devil figures sitting on his shoulders trying to make a decision.

So, his conscience is manifested as two older, ugly women in a coffee shop? That sounds rather ridiculous. I’m just thinking here. So, they’re real. If they’re real, where does that leave him? Back where we started. They’re real fates, with powers (or something like that), watching him make a decision. His decision is something obvious to the reader once we realize who he is, and what types of doubts he had. But with all the doubts, he went forward and changed the world, and, in some way, the world for the fates.

What is a fate? It’s a manifestation of time. It’s a dimensional being, which lives in a parallel universe and watches the happenings. Does she share the same timeline as humans? Sort of. She can travel throughout the timeline, trying to make something work. What’s that something? And what is she trying to make it “work”? Assuming she can travel throughout time and watch the entire happenings on this world at once, what is she creating? So, she knows what’s going to happen? Not exactly, she can move forward in time and see what might happen, but while the past is set, the future is not. There are lots of possibilities, and she can explore each possibility, but not necessarily know what will happen, only what’s likely to happen.

So, who’s “time” is she running through. If people are watching their lives, like a movie running a reel (with each person having an individual reel, and only the reels themselves synchronize), what is she watching? The reel that’s most forward? Actually, she’s just watching the current reel. Assuming all the reels are synchronized, just the speed of the reel is changed, at an instant, she can view anyone. The speed of light does not affect her because she is not in this dimension.

December 30, 2003

That’s a lot of physics babble, I just read through. I want to get through this story and start my next one, so it’s time to yank up my pants and write it. Enough planning. Pick the main character now. (Before I read this discussion, I was going through the story and reediting it with the idea that it would be about a character making a decision to marry, and the fates would actually be relatives trying to protect the bloodline—i.e., to ensure that he marries into the right station. After reading the past discussions, I’m of the opinion that it should be something more, something historical with deeper meaning.)

On second thought, I still think it’s cheesy. It’s an unpredictable ending, but once read, it becomes predictable—too clever? It would need to be a more abstract historical figure. Perhaps someone further back in time than any present figure. I hate not knowing what the best way to move forward is. Usually I just don’t know what’s going to happen (not that I know what’s going to happen here), this time I’m having trouble choosing the main character.

(As another aside, for your next story, I want you to create a memorable character will flaws and characteristics that make him (or her) unique and memorable. And the character cannot be based on you!)

What’s the Sixth Sense moment going to be? The only problem is that the whole story is building up to it since there’s no alternative explanation. You need to build in an alternative explanation to make it interesting. Or you can make the whole story a lot simpler, and save the complicated clever story for a later time when you’ve had more practice with the different elements that will make it up.

In that case (and it’s probably a better case for now), let’s just write the simple story about two fates who are trying to influence the decision of a man about to marry a woman who he loves for all the wrong reasons—viz., she’s gorgeous and rich. Simple. In the end, he marries her, and that was the fates plan for him all along. They wanted him to marry her for their own selfish reasons. (How come your discussions of the story are usually longer than the actually stories? Because I’m a sad, sad man.)