1-800-SEE-PAGE

Traffic seems to be moving at a steady pace, with another hundred views every couple of weeks.
In honor of my 800th view, the next installment of EV (from pages 20-21) appears below.
As always, I would welcome comments.

She girds her loins with strength

and makes her arms strong.

She perceives that her merchandise is profitable

Proverbs 31:17, 18 (RSV)

Once they were airborne, Maggie was struck with the notion that God was punishing her for being too talkative over her life. Lately it didn’t matter whether she was on a commuter plane or a 747 or even this little two-seater, she wound up beside the nut who wanted to talk - about himself.

“So what did Paul say about me in his recommendation?”

“Truthfully, it wasn’t exactly a recommendation. He just mentioned you is all.”

“Well then, what did he mention about me?”

“Your name, Marc. He mentioned your name and nothing else.” And like a fool, she thought, I took a word from a near stranger as some sort of sign. “Doesn’t matter, though,” Maggie continued, stretching and yawning. “I had you pegged inside two minutes.”

“Oh really? Do tell."

"Well, you’re cocky and you’re lazy without the build or the looks to go with it.” She started to apologize for her bluntness, but decided he didn’t deserve it. "That means you come from money. Money that’s obviously slipped away one way or another. How am I doing so far?”

He glanced over at her with surprise and annoyance, but he admitted, “Not bad.”

“At your tender age, it’s not likely you’ve already lost it in bad investments, so my guess is that mummy and daddy disowned us over, oh, let’s see, what was it? Maybe they had to foot the bill for one too many fights at the old frat house? Got a girl in trouble, maybe - a girl they didn’t want to welcome into the family? Or did they just get tired of bailing you out of jail, replacing your smashed up sports cars-”

“Okay, yeah, you’re pretty close, close enough. You’re good at this.”

Maggie shrugged. “You’ve got ‘college drop-out’ written all over you.” It crossed her mind that he might have lost his money through an expensive drug habit, and maybe he was paying it off by delivering the stuff he used. She’d read somewhere that one in five people in Colombia was involved in the cocaine trade, at least indirectly. She decided she didn’t want to know where Marc fit into those numbers, and was glad when he changed the subject.

"Well then,” he said, “I'd have to say you have ‘graduate school’ written all over you."

Grudgingly, Maggie nodded. “Not bad for a guy who normally thinks with his nether regions. As I was saying before, I got licensed as a physician's assistant, and then got a degree in business...”

Marc started wagging his head to the rhythm of her voice as she ticked off her list. “Did I ask you for your résumé?”

“ ...I had a couple of summer internships for various agencies. One was in Ecuador, running a lab for the VISA program and…”

“I don’t remember asking for your résumé -”

“…then I got this sales position with Worthington Pharmaceuticals. I logged three thousand miles for sales calls last year, and the profit margin for my division went up twelve percent. My goal was to be head of sales before I was forty.”

“Gee, and I thought we had nothing in common. I myself handle pharmaceutical sales of a sort.” He delivered another grin. “Non-prescription strength."

How can I miss you if you won't go away?

I really enjoy my career in education, but teaching is an intense occupation psychologically and physically. By the time Memorial Day rolls around each year I am really ready to take a break from students, grading, lesson plans – all of it. But long before the fall semester begins, I'm missing my kids, my colleagues and the stimulation that the job entails. I return to the classroom refreshed and reinvigorated.

In a related vein, every summer my husband goes out of town for about ten days on business. It is hard on me to take over the many tasks he takes charge of around home, and it's much harder on him to work the long hours of this temporary job. But this little time spent apart is just enough to make each of us appreciate the another.

Similarly, I often get the question, “How do you deal with writers block?” My first line of defense is to take a break. When you feel like your characters aren't cooperating, that the plot is hopelessly tangled, and the words just won't come, oftentimes the best thing to do is walk away. It may be for an hour, it may be for a day, it may be longer. (In composing this entry, I've taken three mini-breaks of a minute or so.)

Let me clarify I'm saying to take a break from that particular piece. It's advisable to keep that writing part of the brain moving with other projects.

The inevitable question is, “What if I never return from that break?” and I admit that is a risk. My personal advice is don't let more than a couple of weeks go by before you at least look at it again. In completing Earthen Vessels, I sometimes put the work away for a year or more. I don't know if that works for everyone, but I think that's the way it had to be for me.

Almost without fail, with a sufficient separation from the work, the knots in your plot will unravel, the phrases will flow again, and your characters will call out to you, demanding to be heard. It brings to mind the old children's rhyme:

Little Bo Peep

has lost her sheep

and doesn't know where to find them.

Leave them alone

and they'll come home,

wagging their tails behind them.

View number (you guessed it) 700

The site passed view #700 last week, so here is another excerpt. In looking back at old posts, I realized last time was a repeat. Sorry. 
For some context on this next clip: Marc has told off a cocaine colleague who was harassing him about the delivery schedule. He's agreed to fly Maggie to a research station in the rainforest.

Marc was determined to get in the last word, but was left with nothing to say. “You don’t own the plane,” he shouted after the driver. “And you don’t own me!”

Marc pretended not to be jangled by that statement, but he knew the kinds of things that happened to those who disappointed the higher-ups. Taking the heat wasn’t just a figure of speech. He swallowed hard, then as casually as possible, he pulled out a cigarette and under his breath he muttered, “Glad we got this cleared up, amigo.”

Marc had felt compelled to engage in this brief but intense discussion with Mr. Striped Shirt to clarify who was calling the shots. With that done, he now felt compelled to break the resulting tension by engaging in a brief but intense reading session with a Playboy in the hangar’s lone bathroom. He burst through the office door and snatched his most recent issue (now five months old). On his way out he instructed Maggie over his shoulder. “Have your shit loaded in five minutes.” He glanced at the cover. “Okay, ten minutes, or I leave without you.”

True to his word, for once, Marc emerged after ten minutes to check on Maggie’s progress. “You about done, or what?” he asked, checking the scratched face of his Rolex.

"It never occurred to you to help?"

He looked a bit surprised. "Well…no," he answered honestly.

"It would speed things up," Maggie offered.

"What all have you got here anyway?"

She pointed at the boxes in turn. "That one has reference books, and the one beside it has equipment for collecting plant specimens. This one has personal stuff and the suitcase of course-“

"Save it, lady. I just want to know which is the lightest."

"Take your chances." Maggie picked up a box and carried it away.

When he caught up to her, Maggie eyed the Greek letters on the billed cap Marc now wore.

"I remember the TKE chapter on my campus," she said. "Beer-guzzling partiers who couldn't be bothered to find their way to class."

"Yeah, that's us," Marc nodded with fond remembrance. “What about you? You pledge a sorority way back in your college days?”

“It wasn’t the stone-age, and yes, I belonged to Pi Nu Delta. It’s actually an honorary for women in the sciences.”

"Not that I asked." Marc's cigarette bobbed between clenched lips as he spoke.

“You see, I started off in college wanting a career in medicine, but then I also developed an interest in sales and marketing, and I thought, 'This is just too crazy to work.' "

"Crazy," Marc agreed. He set down the crate of books and leaned against the plane. Maggie started back for more of her stuff, talking the whole way, and Marc decided to let her get the last load herself. He tuned her out and just watched her walking over and back. She might be kind of cute if she slimmed down just a little - and if she ever stopped yapping.

Maggie hoisted her suitcase onto the plane with a huff. "So what's a rotten kid like you doing in a tropical paradise like this?"

Marc gave a look of surprise. "I'm not a kid," he informed her. "I'm 21, legal in all fifty states."

"If you're still bragging about it, you're still a kid."

"How long since you were bragging about it?"

Maggie hesitated, but decided to answer. "Seven years, not that it's any of your business."

Marc calculated and concluded that at twenty-eight her bones were not so brittle they would break if he decided to jump them. He struggled to keep a straight face. “Given your medical background, are you concerned at all about catching jungle fever down here?”

“Jungle fever? You mean malaria? I had all my shots before I left.”

“No," he answered, practicing his sensuous stare on her as he moved closer. "I mean that burning feeling in your loins that comes over you when you get out in the jungle, where it’s hot and wet and wild." A strand of hair had fallen over her eye, and he gently reached out a finger to brush it back. He lowered his voice to a whisper, "Don’t you feel it?"

Maggie slapped his hand away and gave him a level stare. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Marc shrugged. “That line has worked before.”

Maggie shook her head. “Are you seriously trying to make me believe that just being in the jungle makes people ... makes them ...”

“Horny as hell, you bet,” Marc informed her, shaking off the sting in his hand. And in response to her skeptical look, he went on. “Hey, they don’t call it the torrid zone for nothing. And there ain’t no shot for that, honey, unless it’s a shot of-”

“I’m sure I’m immune,” Maggie interrupted. Still, she recalled the travel brochures she’d read all used words like “sultry” and “sensuous” and “untamed.”

“Nobody’s immune, sugar,” he told her. “Nobody."

The Internet: Endless Resource or Bottomless pit?

I went back to college in my 30s, just as the whole Internet thing was gaining ground. The first few times I had to research papers online, I would enter a search phrase and open the returns one by one to find that half of them were nothing like what I wanted. I would then notice that my search had yielded 80,000 results. It would take a lifetime just to glance at them all! I remember getting so overwhelmed at one point, I had to go to the ladies' room and have a little cry.

Years later I've acquired some online mastery, but once in a while my poor brain still feels assaulted by the sheer enormity of it all. It begins so simply: I have an idea so I sit down at the keyboard intending to write. Then I need clarification on a word or ideas for a more precise word choice, so I turn to an online dictionary or thesaurus. As I do so I get pop-up ads from outfits claiming they can improve my writing or my saleability. I might break down and open one up, and I wind up registering for an writing webinar that starts in an hour. As I sit through the webinar it reminds me that I promised to e-mail a writer friend regarding a critique of her work. I open my e-mail at the close of the webinar and my in-box is full of notices from online writers support groups or critique circles, editors and countless online articles on – of all things – heightening my online presence. At this point I've already spent three hours of my day online.

I've read these online articles and they say things like “write a blog” so I do that. Then I get e-mails offering to help me improve my blog.

And the writing I sat down to do hours ago? The objective that motivated all this? Lost. I ask myself, “Where does it end?” The answer, of course is, there is no end to the Internet.

 

600 Plus

The next excerpt from Earthen Vessels appears below, in honor of my 600th view. Enjoy pages 15 and 16. As always, comments are more than welcome.

It had been a chilly fifteen degrees the morning Maggie bundled up and headed for Denver International. When she reached Dallas that afternoon, the temperature there was close to fifty. She mailed her coat back home the following morning from the Mexico City airport, where the temperature was almost eighty. The temperature here in Miraflores was higher yet, with the humidity thickening every minute.

“Look,” she sighed, rubbing her eyes. “It’s just that…just that it’s already hot as hell out, and I’ve had about … about six hours sleep in the last thirty-six. All I want…I just...”

Marc was giving her a quizzical look, which she, in response, returned. She realized then that he was looking over her shoulder, out the window. Turning her gaze in the same direction, Maggie saw that a jeep had pulled up alongside Marc’s plane, and a man in a striped shirt was climbing out of the driver’s seat. Marc’s eyes were fixed on the striped shirt as he spoke.

“Wait here,” he ordered, before he strode out to the plane. Maggie immediately began wracking her brain: how could she make Marc change his mind and fly her to the research station? She saw the two men speaking for a moment before Marc pointed her way. She heard them start to shout at each other, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then her head snapped toward the ominous thud of Hector locking up the hatch on his own plane. Once he took off, Maggie knew she really would be stranded out here.

Panicking, Maggie burst out the door in Marc’s direction. “I can pay cash,” she blurted out before she realized how desperate she sounded. Striped shirt gave her an angry glare and so did Marc. He took her elbow roughly and spun her back the way she’d come.

“I told you to wait inside.” He flung open the door and nearly flung Maggie through it. She hardly noticed.

“And I’m telling you. I’ve got the money right here.” And then, right in front of him, she bent over to rifle through her bag on the floor. Marc had to look away to keep his mind on the business at hand. She straightened up and turned to show him a sheaf of bills pulled from the bag.

A protective impulse kicked in for Marc, an instinct he didn’t think he had. He folded his hand over hers, over the bills, and was about to tell the stupid chick to put away her money. When his palm came in contact with the cash, though, the impulse passed. The words that came out of his mouth then were, “Payment up front or no deal.” 

 

Leaving Maggie with strict instructions to stay inside the office, Marc went back to exchange a few parting words with Mr. Striped Shirt. (For security reasons, Marc’s associates made a point of not knowing one another’s names.)

Just so that nothing was lost in translation and just for emphasis, Marc planted both hands possessively on the fuselage of the twin engine as he spoke. “See, you don’t own this plane-“

“You don’t own this plane,” Striped Shirt interjected, his face like a stone.

“Okay, okay. Technically, legally, I don’t,” Marc conceded. “But I was the one who took the initiative to steal it from the technical, legal owner. So I decide for myself if I have time to take on a passenger before I make your deliveries, and I-”

“They’re your deliveries.” The expression was even more granite than before. “I done my part and I won’t take the heat for you after you fuck this up.” Without another word, the striped shirt then turned to move his jeep clear of the plane’s take-off path, another hint that Marc had better get a move on.

Marc was determined to get in the last word, but was left with nothing to say. “You don’t own the plane,” he shouted after the driver. “And you don’t own me!”

Wanted: an agent... to find me an agent

The logic train behind that heading is leaving the station now: Hop on, won't you?

Writing is what I do. I'd like to keep doing it. I'd like it to be all I do. In order for this to happen, I have to have readers. In order to have readers, I have to promote my book. Promoting the book means taking time from what I really want to do, which, as I mentioned, is writing. (Next stop: Publishire)

Wouldn't be nice if there were people to do some of that promotion for me? There are such people: they are called publishers. They connect with retailers, produce promotional materials, issue press releases, and get the book reviewed, so that it finds its way to the readers. (Next stop: Agentown)

Wouldn't it be nice if there were people to help authors and publishers find each other? There are such people: They are called literary agents. The agent directs all that promotion to publishers, convincing them to get the work to the readers. Wow, great! So now all I need to do now is get an agent. (Next stop: Netville)

In this day and age, finding an agent - like everything else – is mostly done via the Internet. You log on to search engines that direct you to websites that list literary agents, possibly hundreds of them. You log on to those sites and sift through the listings to find which ones will consider unpublished authors in your format and your genre. You log on to their sites to learn their submission procedure. Finally you submit your work and you wait. (Next stop: Mt. Patience)

Wouldn't it be nice if there were people to help authors find agents? Wouldn't it? Are there such people? I don't know. All I know is I'm spending a lot of time trying to find an agent to find me a publisher to find me some readers. I'm not complaining – I'm glad for the opportunity. It's just that, well, it's time I'd rather spend writing. (We've come full circle and this is the end of the line. As you exit, mind the gap.)

500 and counting!

It's so exciting to see how quickly this blog is growing! One hundred visits in just the last ten days! In observance of this latest development, here are the next few pages from Earthen Vessels. I hope you enjoy it.

... I see that that letter grieved you, though only for a while.

2 Corinthians 7:8 (RSV)

Marc’s mind was suddenly racing: Could this woman be part of some vaguely remembered frat parties from two years ago? His memory was cloudy, and her yapping didn’t help.

"I'm Maggie Boyce,” she announced. Like he cared. "It's actually Mary Margaret, but almost nobody calls me..."

She wasn’t bad-looking, with platinum hair and bright green eyes. But she was a little old for him, Marc thought, pushing thirty for sure. And a bit too voluptuous for his taste. Then again, some nights it hadn’t mattered who the girl was. In any case, she couldn’t expect him to remember her name - could she? And this letter she mentioned - was he being sued? Destruction of private property. Breach of promise. Oh, God - paternity suit.

“Has a letter come in for me lately?” he asked Esteban urgently.

“¿Como?” Esteban yawned.

Hearing English again had thrown Marc off. “Una carta - ¿recibí una carta?”

Esteban lifted his arm limply toward Marc’s desk for a second before letting it fall against his leg. Marc saw just the girl, timidly pointing a finger at the desk behind him. Only now did he turn away from her, to rifle through the stacks of paper there.

“Actually,” she ventured, “it maybe doesn’t matter so...”

Then he came across an envelope he hadn’t noticed before. “¿Cuando lo llegó?” he shouted, studying the U.S. postmark. When did this arrive?

There was a pause and a sigh from the back room. “Mm ... una semana pasado - dos tal vez.”

“Two weeks ago?” Marc was raving as he ripped open the envelope. “Geez, if you don’t specifically ask, they don’t tell you...”

“It’s no big deal,” she tried again to interject. “It was just to sort of warn you I was coming.”

“...knows I don’t look through this junk ...” he mumbled as he pulled the paper out and unfolded it. Instead of reading it, he glanced up at her. This was not a legal notification of any kind - he knew, he’d seen enough of them. It was just a hand-written note from a - he flipped it over - from a Paul Schiffler.

“I got your name from Paul Schiffler,” the girl was saying. “He said you ran an air taxi down here, that you gave him a lift several months ago. You transported his research samples sometimes.”

At last Marc could breathe a sigh of relief. This ditzy chick had taken five minutes of his time just to say that she was a business referral. And what was she chattering about now?

“You see, I connected with Paul on the Internet and he said he'd been down here, and I said I wanted come too, and well, he mentioned your name." She paused here for a breath.

He looked at her blankly. "And..?"

She glared at him. “Okay, fine. This isn't a social call,” she said, finally getting down to business. “I need a lift into the interior right away,” she said, pulling out a map. “To a research station. It’s right on the map here.” She pointed, but he didn’t have to look.

“No can do,” he said flatly. He decided to take a load off and look over this letter after all. The handwriting was an effort to read, so he just scanned for key words. “...referring a client .... Maggie Boyce ...” Now why did that name sound familiar?

“You’d be back here in a matter of hours,” the girl was saying.

“I said I can’t,” he emphasized each word. “I got shipments to make. I’m out of here - north to Guatemala by tonight.” He went back to the letter. Frankly, not professionally qualified and emotionally ... if you can talk her out of it ...

"Oh, oh, I see,” her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Well, in that case, I guess I’ll just hang around here in the middle of nowhere doing nothing, until that cargo pilot comes back sometime this week or next...” He looked up again from the page. Was she still here? He was trying to enjoy the first letter he’d gotten in months. “...since it’s too damned inconvenient for you to help me out!”

Her voice rose a little with each word she spoke so that she ended with a shout. He looked a little surprised and let a smile escape one corner of his mouth. This woman, he could see, was not about to be talked out of anything.

In trying to finish the last paragraph, he reached the words that stopped even him cold. Mother ... six weeks ago ... now her sister ... cancer ...