1. I’m not Isaac Asimov. I don’t know how he did what he did, but I have neither the stamina nor the passion to fake the stamina to keep this pace for longer than a ten day period at the most. God bless him.
2. I’m happy to say I’ve still got it, whatever the elusive 'it' is. I can’t say what degree of ‘it’ it is that I have, but whatever child-like passion from the early eighties that drove me to create a fake radio station using my friend’s tape recorder has carried into my forties. Not bad for someone in student loan debt.
3. It was quite freeing not thinking in terms of a word count. I do nanowrimo every year and that word count goal is a double-edged sword, with the unquestionable majority in favor of the positive. I daresay I’d forgotten what it was like to write a story until it was written, as opposed to meeting that coveted range.
4. I was half expecting to see some kind of a theme emerge in my writing. If it has, I haven't figured out what it is. I'm hoping it suggests I have a little versatility in me (and not that I suck at recognizing themes that obviously emerge). Admittedly, I tried to write a horror piece which didn't come together.
5. Can I say how grateful I am to my wife Ginny for reading all of these damned blogs? She has been nothing but nurturing, and if hers is the only feedback I ever get it's more than enough for me to love what I'm doing. You're my rock, honey!
6. Short stories are underrated. Essentially a short story tells the most interesting experience in a character's life. That inherently gives a short story a subtle intensity. For a one shot character like Walter P. Sullivan, his whole life amounted to the misery his appointed position brought on him. He lives and dies as a minor character, all within the context of his story. For a character like the Big Bad Wolf, it's easily implied that he goes on to live a pretty fulfilling life, but he's probably never going to have another day quite as eventful as the one in typeface. Even for a story as undefined as Thinking Inside the Box, whatever that character was will probably never express that sense of enthusiasm to the writer again. Something in the story has to be finite.
Now I wanted to do a story in the Carousel (if you want to know what that is, click here, and may I suggest here, here, here, or here and then here to see it in action) but I discovered that it's really a challenge to transfer ongoing characters into a short story, because it's much harder to find a single event for them that runs from start to finish in a short story's time frame. But I wanted to end the experiment on something cute, and Caris is just the girl to take us out.
Here then is a short story in one single 678 word sentence. Hemmingway wept.
Caris Runs On
There was a crisp autumn webbing in the morning air, uncharacteristic of late July (which it was), as I laced up my newly broken in sneakers snugly around my carefully trained dancer’s feet, which were graceful under the pressure of an audience’s evaluation but terribly inconsistent of balance otherwise, and began my unbridled horizontal free-fall through the doorway, across the sidewalk, and onto the familiar pavement which soon dissolved into the streets of strangers with a stride in my footsteps tapping out the rhythm of a veteran percussionist granting the less experienced house instrumentalists a foundation on which to play and explore; and the earliest of unfortunate risers wearily greeted me with a silent wave and a melancholy attached to the knowledge of what undeserved stressors awaited them at the end of their vehicle’s journey across the interstate, and the odd feline who had undoubtedly claimed the better portion of the neighboring blocks as its area of dominance took little more than a passing interest in my approach, when I became aware that a motorized delivery service containing one driver and one passenger (both of whom were being guided by the presumption that their current assignment, to distribute the weekly collection of coupon laden advertisements to anonymous recipients devoid of incentive to peruse through said plastic blanketed media, was better suited for an employee of comparatively less advanced qualification and age than they were), had begun keeping pace with my shoe soles' measurable contact tapping against the granite below me, for reasons I’m better off not taking into speculation (but in the event that the discussion should arise in my absence I’m obliged in expressing that my choice of attire is selected for my own comfort and delight, and factors in no other assessment from any outside source), and individual packages of the aforementioned literary product in possession of said transport was serving its couriers as, what I can only assume to be, an entertaining projectile with my variably personal space and the lone patron of kinetic meditation contained therein as the intended target; for a series of aerial ammunition all bearing the ‘fifty cent off of half a dozen sixty watt light-bulbs’ emblem was marking the pathway I found myself on, and their aim was becoming progressively less humorous (at least in the eyes of the soul attached to the heels in the scope); and it’s with a certain amount of empathic regret I consider the pitiable gentleman tasked with restocking the vendor’s wagon of morning related produce (i.e. apples, strawberries, variously flavored and colored juice-reminiscent liquids in single serving containers) on top of a pile of what can only be described as a previously existing glacier’s worth of ice separated into its individual components (for the purpose of temperature regulation) with which the middle aged man (with whom I was soon to nearly have an encounter) was engaged in refilling his wagon, for a stray paper ballista meant for an area of my anatomy somewhere between my waistline and toes wound up ricocheting off a metallic waste receptacle, impacting his wrist instead, dislodging the utensil he was using to scoop the ice into the wooden cart and spilling it onto the sidewalk where a hapless pedestrian, being preoccupied with his handheld device, reacted on reflex to the sudden lack of friction where his soles no longer held traction and tore off the side of the wagon on his way down while trying to regain his balance, sending the contents previously held within into the street and the path of my pursuers, diverting their vehicle's tires into the side of a nearby station wagon which happened to be parked in the wrong spot (in as much as fate was concerned) leaving me with a sense of satisfaction that I truly should be ashamed of, on par with the knowledge that I didn’t stop to pretend like I didn’t know what had transpired, but my morning jog is a sacred experience to me, and no buffoons with licenses will keep me from it, so I just kept running on.
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