Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Broken Mirror Shards - Dr. Claw (Day 2)

Rish Outfield is beginning his story today over on his blog.  You can follow the link to Rish's Ramblings, and read along as we go.


Here's a picture I took of myself writing on the story at my family reunion last week.  Man have I gotten fat over this summer.  Something's gotta be done about that.

Okay, day two of Dr. Claw.  Here's more of the story.


    Brody took the ticket into a gas station that proclaimed to be "Your Lottery Headquarters" and discovered that his ticket was worth $500,000, which, of course, the gas station couldn't cash out for him.  He was going to have to contact lottery officials to work out the payment.  
    He did, and true to his word, he shared his ticket with Todd and Jason.  The two of them took one half, and he took the other half.  The lottery officials informed him that he had two options.  He could take a payment plan that would give him a modest payment once a month and eventually pay out the entire amount over the space of thirty years, or he could just take half the amount in one big lump sum.  His recent money troubles made the decision easy.  He needed the money now.
    Within a week's time, a check for his lump sum of $125,000 landed in his overdrawn bank account.  Soon, he was installed in a new apartment, and the fact that he had no job wasn't such an issue.  He even dumped a payment of $48.16 into Jason and Todd's Paypal account for the pizza they'd bought him that fateful and an extra twenty-five cents to repay them for the quarter that brought that fateful lottery ticket into their lives.
    As he sat down in his posh apartment on his new couch in front of his new big screen HDTV to watch Game Of Thrones on HBO on his new cable subscription, he remembered that guy who had warned him that everyone who played that claw machine went away sad rather than happy.  What had that guy been talking about?  He couldn't have been more wrong.  His life had turned on a dime at that claw machine, and sped off in a completely new and thoroughly better direction.  He’d never been more satisfied with any decision in his life than he was with the decision to give that machine a try.
    Brody still had no job, but he didn’t care.  He was financially solvent for the first time in years.  His steady slide into homelessness had been halted, and now he could even do whatever he wanted for a year at least, several years if he was careful.  He’d been thinking about it, and decided that now was his chance to write his novel.  He’d always wanted to write novels, surely a year of free time would be enough to write one, right?  He’d bought himself a nice Macbook from the local Apple Store, and tomorrow, he planned to take it to the Naked Lounge coffee shop on Q street, set up camp in a booth, and write, like he’d seen other people doing.  
Vampire novels and YA dystopian novels were selling really well these days, so that seemed like a natural target to shoot for.  Maybe combining the two, YA dystopian vampire novel, surely all the publishing companies would be drooling for the chance to publish it when he was done.  All he needed was a strong female character, a love triangle, and a dystopian future, and he could print his own money for the rest of his life, he was sure of it.
But for now, some Game of Thrones and a nice Vodka and Red Bull to smooth the edges would do.  Tomorrow is when he’d get going on the rest of his life.

#

The next day, though, he woke up hungover, and instead of heading to the coffee shop, he had a little hair of the dog that bit him.  That wound up being a week long process, during which he was only sober first thing in the morning, before having some more hair of the dog.  He wasn’t worried, though.  He had enough money that episodes like this weren’t a problem.  Weren’t all the great writers drunks or drug addicts anyway?
            He finally made it to the Naked Lounge eight days after he’d decided to go there.  He ordered his coffee, and found a booth to his liking.  He sat down, tapped into the free WiFi, and started researching ideas for the novel.  He discovered just what an endless loop research could be, as he jumped from one link to the next to the next.  The next time he looked up, the day was gone.  He’d been researching vampire dystopia ideas for three hours, and realized that he was no closer to coming up with an idea than he had been when he sat down.  This was going to be more of a process than he originally believed.

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