When You Visit New York City

When you visit New York City, you try your hardest to not look like a tourist. In the morning of your first day in this new(york)city, you pick your clothing piece by piece from your knock off Louis Vuitton suitcase, and whisper inside your head that no one can tell that it isn’t real. You search for an outfit that says “I live in Chelsea.” You return some items to the brown and brown bag, deciding that the sweater or shoes are too Midwestern. Too comfortable for a Manhattanite.

Once you are on the street, starting your big day, you aren’t sure that you are walking toward Times Square. You can’t remember if it was left or right. You refuse to pull out your map. You hope that the direction you are walking, even if it is wrong, is not dangerous. You have seen your fare share of CSI episodes. As your heart begins to beat faster, you wish that you had looked up which neighborhoods in New York aren’t safe to walk alone. Scolding yourself, you think how typical this behavior is for you. To be so concerned about an outfit that you didn’t care to find out where you are most likely to be killed.

You begin to make a plan to turn around, to walk back the 6 or 8 or 10 blocks to the shineless doors of your budget hotel. You want to return to your room and double check your directions, to maybe ask someone at the hotel to help. You want to call your best friend and admit your stupidity. To admit you’ve been walking at least 15 minutes in what you think is the wrong direction. To be wrist slapped through the phone for almost getting yourself killed by wondering into a gang-infested neighborhood. For being too proud, or cool, or stubborn to pull out your map. You recognize that even being told that ignoring your helpful, colorful, fold-out map is stupid, you would rather be lost than look like a tourist. You might rather be mugged, too.

As you cross the street, the first step in your perfectly calculated plan to check your watch, check your phone, dig through your bag, look frustrated, and turn around in a huff (hopefully signifying the fault of someone else in your need to backtrack), you look up and into the visual cacophony of the Times Square billboards. You smile to yourself, silently congratulate yourself, and continue walking on in the direction that you knew was right all along.

Question to writers: How does the "you" form (2nd person?) benefit a story? What do we gain from using it? What do we lose?

Martin's Curious Camera - Part 1

Martin didn’t look tan enough to have vacationed in Cancun. Nor did he look sufficiently relaxed to have spent 7 days and 6 nights strolling white sand beaches or sipping Coronas in a palm tree lined outdoor bar. Martin didn’t seem relaxed at all. In fact, when he came into the office about 15 minutes late Monday morning looking pasty and twitchy, he barely said a word to me or to Matthew, although we had worked in the same department for almost 4 years and enjoyed a routine of morning banter.

“How was the old South of the Border!?” Matthew inquired, spinning his rolling office chair away from his desk to face Martin’s meagerly decorated cubicle.

“It was nice. Hot.”

“Long flight? I bet your arms are tired,” Matthew laughed, like it was the first time the English – speaking world had ever heard that joke. He was so proud I was afraid he was about to request a high five.

“That’s all you got?” I tried, “Any girls? Any crazy stories? Or is this like a ‘What happens in Mexico stays in Mexico” sort of thing.”

Martin didn’t turn around. He didn’t make eye contact. He watched his computer boot up and shuffled around the week-old papers on his desk.

“No, no…none of that. It was just uneventful, that’s all. Quiet. Relaxing.”

Matthew and I took his brevity as our cue to go back to the spreadsheeting and analysis that occupied the majority of our average workdays, but minutes later my thoughts returned to the weird interacting with Martin. He usually wasn’t so distant. And now, as I quieted my hands on my keyboard, I couldn’t even hear him at his desk. No phone call, no typing. I leaned back in my chair with the sort of fake stretch that usually signifies a low budget attempt to romance a girl at a movie theatre. From my backbend, I could just see Martin’s back as he hunched over something – his “Trees of the Northwest” computer screen saver replacing a Word or Excel file.

I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but he had been doing it for long enough for his computer to lock up. Because it was a departure from his normal office behavior, this clear distraction from work intrigued me even more. I rocked back up to an upright position in my chair, contemplating my next investigative move. Then my ears focused in. Beyond the typing, beyond the hushed phone calls, I heard a beeping. A patternless, high pitched sound that didn’t take my 21st Century ears long to diagnose – the clicking through of pictures on a digital camera. That was Martin’s engrossing activity – clicking through pictures from his “uneventful” trip to Cancun? Something about this Monday morning seemed off, and I was going to find out what.

-To Be Continued-

Prompt: Write about a roll of film that has been obtained surreptitiously.

An Exercise in Idea Response

Jot down (quickly) the scenes you would expect to find in a film with this premise:

Two childhood friends unexpectedly fall in love during a trip to New York.

• Laughing and accidental touching in Central Park surrounded in fall leaves and autumn colors
• He has a dizzying moment (he can't take his eyes off her) when she spills mustard down the front of her shirt near a hotdog stand, and then cracks up laughing. He wipes mustard off his hot dog and rubs in on his face to keep up the laughter.
• She pulls strings to get tickets to a Broadway show he thought was sold out – the hug and he accidentally says “I love you” and she laughs and says I love you, too (but its clear she’s wondering in what way he means it…)
• Her shower explodes and floods her whole room, but the hotel is sold out so they have to stay together in his room. (Or, they are staying together already but at check-in the hotel doesn’t have their two double beds available! They have to share a King?!?)
• The two get really drunk at some fancy Manhattan restaurant and confess that they always wish their significant others could be more like the other one.
• She almost walks in front of a cab, and he pulls her back and into his arms.
  

These were just some of my first, semi-obvious ideas. What other scenes come to mind when you think of this typical Rom-Com premise?

Prompt from Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

A P.I. and His Ride (A shot at fiction)

Mac Davies, PI. Full name Joseph MacDonald Davies Jr., son of Joseph MacDonald Davies and Bella-Joy (McAllister) Davies.

Mac Davies plants himself at coffee counters. Flannel shirted and John Deere cap wearin', he looks like a truck driver or construction worker sipping coffee at a neighborhood diner (pretending to read the Post, but possibly just looking at the headlines). His unkempt, hard workin’ appearance says he likes his coffee steaming, and that he usually opts for pie. Today, he’s removed from his diner counter hangout. Today, he leans contemplatively against the wall of 100 Financial place, pulling deep drags of a cigarette, thumbing his belt loop and squinting into the hot sun. When he stomps his cigarette out with a surprisingly clean Timberland boot, swivels left and steadily follows Jason Wrightwood on his way out of the building, Jason becomes uneasy. Jason does not become uneasy because the flannel shirted follower looks particularly menacing, but because he knows he's in trouble. He's received two calls today; anonymous enemies notifying him that his secret could no longer be considered so. Jason Wrightwood is paranoid. As he flips back his long spring Armani coat, he pulls the blackberry from his belt and tosses it into a waste-can. Without breaking stride, he reaches into the pocket of his well-pressed slacks, extracting the keys to his M500, and hits the double beep that opens the doors. To his relief, the follower does not follow. He crosses the street, lighting a new cigarette, and climbs into the unlocked red Cherokee parked a quarter block down the street. "Not a cop." Wrightwood breathes aloud. For the first time today he feels the pressure in his chest release. "Cops don't drive 15 year old hick-wagons. I bet he parks that thing in front of a trailer in Indiana" he laughs to himself.

What Wrightwood doesn’t know is that the Cherokee is the car of a loyal and adventurous PI - a PI who would plow through trash cans, over curbs and through dog parks to reach an assailant. The Cherokee says this guy means business. This guy is knows what you’re up to. This guy likes mud.

---

Prompt: from Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

1. Create a P.I.

2. Pick a car for said P.I.

3. Identify what the car says to the people in the fictional detective’s fictional world

4. Identify what the car secretly signals to the reader

Vroom, vroom.

Before I Ever Arrive at Work

Most mornings I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock at least 4 times. Its not even an alarm clock, it’s a cell phone, which I hold in my hand through the early hours of the morning just to be sure that I can hit the snooze as quickly as possible. Eventually, I wake the cats from their tiny cat slumber, and swing my legs over the side of the bed. Although it’s not even a bed, its futon I bought more than 5 years ago, which I resent but still refuse to replace with a real sleep center. I shuffle across the beat-up wooden floor of my apartment and open the lid of my aging Macbook. Clicking on some arbitrary music I scoot the 2 or 3 yards to my blue tiled bathroom and indulge in a quick and purposeful shower. Barely dry, glasses fogged, I select arbitrary clothing items from my closet and layer them on my body. Sometimes, I take a picture of my face and text it to my girlfriend so that she knows I’ve started my day. I sling my messenger bag over my shoulder, packed with reading and writing books (books that are more good faith efforts than they are functional), and lock the cats inside the heavy wooden door. I scoot down the single flight of stairs and cross Clark street at whatever light blinks “Walk”.

I usually miss the train. I then stand and wait; sometimes I read or write. When the Purple line train eventually arrives, I herd myself with the crowd to an available seat, and make the first important decision of the day: Do I cross my arms and try to sleep on the 25 minute journey, or do I challenge myself to write some words in my hard backed fake-leather notebook? Most days I try to write – slurring down mis-spelled words with a purple pen stolen from my office like I’m inebriated rather than just sleepy. Some mornings I surprise myself with the ease of my pen’s flow, with the appearance of words on paper that I didn’t know were inside my head, with the profundity my 8am brain can achieve. Other mornings I write the date in the corner and think a little about all the things I should write about. I then stick my purple pen between the pages of my hard backed fake-leather notebook, cross my arms over my chest, let my eyes close, and hope for 22 minutes of sleep.

Prompt: Write about a less than remarkable aspect of your life.

Shakespeare the Cat

When I key though my apartment door after a day at work, or a night out, or a weekend away, Shakespeare the Cat squawks. He persists, pushes and demands. His surprisingly rough and scratchy little cat voice both irritates and soothes me. As a two-pound kitten, when I first brought him home from the Humane society (along with his quiet and calm brother), he spent every night standing against my single studio alley-facing window crying. This devastated me. Panicked as any mother or creepy cat young adult would be, I laid awake night after night trying to soothe him. I guessed he had contracted a disease, suffered from a hidden injury or dealt with an overwhelming amount of anxiety. Now, 6 years after his birth, I've assessed that he is just needy and bossy, but this conclusion was not reached quickly. It was not reached without traveling first by taxi or borrowed Camry to the vet seeking diagnosis. Shakespeare the Cat, the polite vet explained gingerly, suffered not from a mysterious illness or injury, and was not anxious. Shakespeare the cat had most likely not digested a portion of the most likely not poisonous plant sample I clutched desperately in a blue and yellow makes green zip lock bag. Shakespeare the Cat suffered from nothing, besides, perhaps, a lack of attention. The cat-printed shirt which peaked out sabotagingly from under my v-necked sweater sadly punctuated the $200 vet trip for the squawky cat that just needed a hug.

Prompt: Write about a noise-or a silence-that wont go away

Ray Bradbury: 90 and Awesome

I read a lot of science fiction as a kid. I had a few old books I had picked up at thrift stores, dusty and stale with age, in the deteriorating medium of paper pages and spine - hardly giving away the endless possibilities and human capabilities supposed between their covers.

Most of the stories that I read I no longer remember the book title, the author, the characters names. I just hold a moral, or what moral I took. An image conjured, stored in my mind, and viewed through like stained glass - coloring my perpectives as I have grown. I remember a story about a man in the far flung future who learned to do math by hand, after years of computers completing all calculations, to the fear and amazment of his community. I remember a story of a puzzle fallen to Earth and found by very young children--who played with it, understood it, and solved it in a way that their parents couldn't understand. (The take-away here was that we are born with a certain unique and real method of thought, an ability to process that is negated by grownups who think we are just baby blabber and cooing - and that we lose this important way of thinking through conditioning to think like everyone else.)

I have leaned away from science fiction as I've leaned away from all fiction - but today I was wrapped back into that world of possibility and futuristic perspectives that I held as a kid. Both a fear of future and an optimism - as I read about the upcoming 90th birthday of the legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury on August 22nd. You've read or at least heard of some of his "big" pieces -Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine or The Martian Chronicles but he's written endless amount of visionary works helping readers to look beyong their own experience into a place where anything is possible.

In the article Mr. Bradbury is quoted as saying one of the most inspiring things I've heard in a long time. A confession that truly speaks to a life lived extraordinarily.

"I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down."

This might be my new favorite quote (and I am known to dislike quotes, or things that attempt to evoke inspiration).

There are some surprising and unique aspects to the article -- such as Bradbury's repeated implication that his faith in God, or maybe God himself are responsible for his literary works. That his religious beliefs (although incredibly unusual in a scientific community) have actually served as a boost in his exploration of science and other worldliness -- not a hurdle.

I encourage you to read the article, learn about an amazing writer, pick up a copy of Farenheit and perhaps turn your eyes to the stars with a little more wonder.