Ryne Douglas Pearson's Blog, page 14
December 24, 2010
The Northpoint Church iBand
December 23, 2010
The History Of Festivus In Three Minutes
December 22, 2010
My Imaginary Writer Boot Camp
I get asked a lot for writing advice. I've been making a living at this for nearly 20 years now, so, I understand that. Aspiring writers want to know 'the secret'. That one specific thing they can do to 'make it'.
The only way to fully understand and embrace the secret to writing success is to enroll in and complete my Imaginary Writer Boot Camp. Luckily for you, this post will serve as both admission and graduation from the aforementioned opportunity of a lifetime.
First, imagine me as R. Lee Ermey with a thesaurus under one arm and a bull whip in my free hand. I'm probably carrying a 2 liter bottle of Diet Pepsi and hydrating as I speak. Thus, we begin...
You are sitting at a desk. You are duct taped to the chair. There are no bathroom breaks. You have come with your 'idea' and are ready to begin your journey as a real writer.
You have your idea, right? Because this is not about coming up with a good idea, you sloth-like mound of putrid creativity! You have come prepared with this idea which my tutelage will allow you to craft into a thing of literary beauty, correct?
GOOD!
Now, before you is a stack of lined paper and a single pen. It is filled with enough ink to write approximately one hundred thousand words. You will pick up your pen and you will--
NO WE DO NOT USE COMPUTERS HERE! COMPUTERS ARE FOR ACTUAL WRITERS! NOT GARISH IMITATIONS LIKE YOURSELVES!
As I was saying, you will pick up your pen, left hand or right, it doesn't matter to me, and you will begin to write. You will complete one page and you will set it aside--FACE DOWN--and continue on the next page. Every four hours you will be given a sip of pond water, and every eighth hour you will be given one half pound of bacon to do with as you see fit. It will be uncooked.
I'VE HAD BROTHERS EAT THE RAW SPHINCTER FROM A WEEK-DECEASED CAMEL, YOU CRANK-STARTED ENGINE OF CAN'T! SO NO YOU MAY NOT HAVE YOURS COOKED!
This process will repeat until you have exhausted the supply of ink in your pen. If your opus is not complete by that time you will be allowed to finish writing using only the moisture of your inevitable tears.
SLEEP? DID YOU ASK ABOUT SLEEP? SLEEP WHEN YOU ARE DEAD, UNLIKELY WORDSMITH!
When you have completed your work of literary brilliance you will be untaped. You will be showered. You will be fed a meal of your choice and allowed to nap intermittently in a warm bed for eight hours.
Then you will return for our editing session, where things will get unpleasant.
GOOD LUCK, MAGGOTS!
December 21, 2010
Kartoffelsalat, IT, & A Plummeting Mouse: Random Facts About Me
I took two years of German in High School and could still count to ten and order potato salad or strawberry punch if I'm somehow transported magically to Munich.
I decided to actually write my first novel while laying in a hospital bed after back surgery in 1986.
The most disturbing book I own is Practical Homicide Investigation.
I cheated to win the egg drop contest in high school. Bad me.
I love playing chess but hate checkers with a passion.
Coolest place I've ever been is on the launch tower at Kennedy Space Center.
I hate cities. Except Vancouver, B.C.
My favorite food is not bacon. It's lasagna.
I make a mean pasta salad.
I hate the physical act of writing.
I ran over a prairie dog in Wyoming doing 75 mph. They go POP real loud.
I once slept in the woods on the ground overnight in just my clothes. It was cold.
If I could live anywhere right now it would be Montana.
I would love to visit Maine someday.
I was totally into model rockets as a kid.
I launched a mouse in a model rocket when I was a kid. I tied a parachute to him. It did not open.
I spent twenty minutes looking for a bottle of anhydrous water in the physics storeroom when my teacher punked me in 12th grade.
I killed a rattlesnake with a log once.
My favorite novel is IT by Stephen King.
My favorite short story is A Thousand Deaths by Orson Scott Card.
I build my own computers.
I am a licensed Ham Radio operator.
I prefer cold to heat.
New Covers For 'Top Ten' and 'The Donzerly Light'
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For The Donzerly Light I asked that he incorporate something iconic from the story, and he did so in a wild way with the bum throwing the peace sign.
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You can find links to sample and buy both books HERE. Both are priced at just $2.99. Thanks!
December 19, 2010
Second Chapter Of 'All For One'
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What is All For One about?
Mary Austin is the kind of teacher that parents adore and children wish for. Firm and compassionate, a guiding light in their lives, she would do anything to protect her students.
But that loyalty is tested when the school's sadistic bully is found dead on campus, and suspicion falls on six children in her class. None willing to talk. To point the finger.
To reveal the killer.
Faced with this, Mary finds herself confronted with dark memories from her own childhood. Fragmentary flashes from the past that test the bounds of her reality, the onslaught worsening when a tenacious detective is brought in to close the case.
On loan from the Seattle Police Department, Detective Dooley Ashe is plagued by his own demons, but focuses on breaking through the wall of silence the children have erected. Up against a town indifferent toward the crime and suspects virtually untouchable by the law, Dooley turns to Mary as an avenue to the truth.
As an unlikely closeness develops between Dooley and Mary, the suspected children close ranks, worried that one of their own is ready to break and give the detective what he wants.
But when unseen adversaries push back, with both damaging and deadly results, Dooley and Mary are forced to face their personal limits as they each discover the unthinkable identity of the real killer.
I hope you enjoy the sample and will enjoy the entire book.
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Two
It was Sunday, and it had begun to rain.
Not in pearly drops that clicked when they hit one's coat or umbrella, but slowly, almost silently, a cold, wet blur descending.
Dooley Ashe turned his collar up and hunched his shoulders against the elements, his hands burrowed deep in the lined pockets of his parka, and looked back through the weather as the last visitor's gate closed behind. Anchor Bay State Prison was already lost somewhere in the settling haze.
"Excuse me..."
Dooley turned sharply toward the voice.
"Are you Dooley Ashe? Detective Dooley Ashe?"
The stranger wore a gray overcoat and held an umbrella in a black-gloved hand, and stood at the steps leading down to the visitor's lot with a casually friendly smile uneven on his face.
"Who are you?" Dooley asked. He was not smiling.
Another black-gloved hand appeared from a pocket and flipped open an ID wallet. A gold badge struggled to shine in the flat light. "My name's Joel Bauer. I'm a detective with the Bartlett Police Department."
"Bartlett," Dooley said, mostly to himself, mental circuit breakers tripping. He walked past the detective toward his car. Footsteps behind told him he was not rid of the stranger.
"It's a few hours east of here," Joel offered.
"I know where it is."
"You haven't returned my calls," Joel said. When they cleared the steps and were in the lot he sped up and walked next to Dooley, eyeing him with eager glances. "I've left like twenty messages. Your machine must be busting by now."
Enough of the misty rain had accumulated on Dooley's outback hat that full drops now fell from its wide brim with each jarring step. He looked straight ahead, through the secondary downpour, and told himself to say nothing. Told himself to just walk, give the stranger a polite nod once he reached his car, and drive away. End of interlude, he could hope.
End of nothing, he feared.
"How'd you know I'd be here?" Dooley asked, his eyes still forward. His step had slowed.
"I sat across from your house for ten hours. A man can hold only so much coffee before he gives up. So, I went to your supervisor. He told me you'd be here today."
Dooley stopped at the rear of a rusting Dodge Dart and looked to his unwanted company. "I don't have a supervisor anymore, buddy. Detective whoever-you-are."
"It's Bauer."
"Good, Detective Bauer. Now leave me be."
"Your lieutenant sa—"
"I don't have a lieutenant. I'm retired. Okay? Goodbye."
He started off toward his car again, but quick, persistent footsteps caught up.
"Lieutenant Evans told me you were on vacation. Using the comp time you built up from the Vincent case."
"Clean your ears, Detective Bauer; I'm retired," Dooley repeated for good measure, and to remind himself. Just walk.
"Not officially," Joel contradicted, and for that he now had Detective Dooley Ashe's full attention. And then some.
Dooley aimed his body toward Joel and kept walking, faster now, forcing the younger detective to backpedal awkwardly.
"Who do you think you are?" Dooley demanded as the target of his suddenly risen anger could skitter back no more and found himself half leaning, half sitting on the trunk of an old Nova. Two young faces stared at the commotion through the foggy back window. "You don't fucking question me. I'm retired. I've done my twenty years. I solved my last case. I'm done."
A little hand wiped condensation from inside the Nova's back window. Dooley noticed the motion and looked past Joel for a moment. Faces with chocolate-stained mouths, framed by stringy, unwashed blonde hair, looked back with little surprise at the conflict they were witnessing. They had obviously seen worse.
"I didn't mean anything by it," Joel said from his awkward position. "Just that you're still a cop. Officially."
Even in light that robbed feature and warmth from whatever it bathed, Dooley could tell that the childrens' eyes were blue. A pretty, tainted blue that probably still sparkled on Christmas morning, even without a tree, mom drunk with a new boyfriend in bed, and dad God knows where. Children might not be innocent, Dooley had learned, but they were resilient.
Far more resilient than adults.
"I just wanted to talk to you about—"
Dooley took a step back and held a silencing finger in the air between he and his unwanted company. "No. I'm done. You got it? Save your breath." He continued to step away, but kept his eyes on the detective. "No more."
"We need your help," Joel said. As he did, Dooley turned and moved quickly toward a Chevy Blazer. "We had a kid murdered."
"Join the club," Dooley muttered, and hurried into his shiny black 4X4. He backed out of the parking space and sped toward the exit. In the rearview he could see Joel Bauer's head dip, eyes going to the ground as rain spilled off his umbrella like tears.
* * *
Cougar Mountain rose like a blunt pimple from the forest one hundred and fifty miles east of Seattle, its peak salted white and its slopes flushed pink and blue by tired sunlight that fanned through breaks in the coming storm.
Autumn seemed willing to cede its time to winter, yet with each breath taken Mary Austin tasted spring. A false spring.
She stared at the cold, fiery beauty of the mountain from her living room, curled comfortably into a downy armchair, a forgotten mug of hot chocolate cooling on the end table and lesson plans neglected on her lap. Her being was here, quiet in her home, but her thoughts were there. Over the mountain. In a place she could not see, but which her mind could imagine. A pasture of green stabbed with bolts of granite and marble, a sad, pretty place where the dead rotted in ornate boxes.
She had attended only one funeral in her life, that of her father when she was eight, an event which had fogged in her memory, taking on the quality of a celluloid dream. Snippets of motion and feeling, out-takes from an old reel of the movie of her life. One was of a dark, deep rectangle and leaning forward hesitantly to peer down into it, her mother holding her hand and she that of her five year old sister. Then standing back, together, watching as the casket sank slowly out of view. Beyond it some man trying to bolster her with a smile. When the years had passed she came to understand that his expression had been meant to console, but back then she had wondered why someone was smiling when most other people were crying.
Some, like her mother, had not cried, and Mary had followed her lead and swallowed hard when her eyes began to burn. Her little sister, though, was too young to muster the fortitude, and the tears had trickled silently down her reddened cheeks as they walked away from the plot on that sweltering Illinois summer day, following men whose dark coats were slung over their shoulders and who repeatedly dabbed their brows with fists of rumpled linen. Mary had looked back just before they reached her aunt's big Lincoln, and had seen the man who had smiled at her going about his business, puffing on the stub of a cigar and tossing shovelful after shovelful of dirt into the hole.
Her father's hole.
Now there was another hole.
Over there, now, in the lowlands beyond the mountain, people would be gathered around the one dug just for Guy Edmond. How many people would be there? Mary wondered. His family, to be sure. An officiate who had to be there. The man to shovel the dirt. Six, seven, eight, maybe. And the rest?
What 'rest'? The rest would be cheering the little league games at Farnsworth Park, or playing backyard chef to steal some grill time before the weather changed. Burgers sizzling and brave little bodies going head first into second. Just another Sunday. Purposely so. A collective good riddance by way of evasion.
It was payback time. The people of Bartlett were giving Guy Edmond the bird in the only way that mattered to the dead. They were living, giving it that little extra oomph this day, Mary suspected. Playing a little harder, laughing a little louder, putting extra pickles and ketchup on the burger. Downing a cold one. The benign equivalent of dancing on his grave.
They were here, he was gone. Game, set, match.
In short order he would be a memory, Mary thought. Just an ill wind that had blown through. They were already forgetting. She was trying hard to...
'...forget the bad. Move on.'
The bad. Bad things. The garbage truck broadsiding her father's pickup, that had been bad. Almost the worst thing ever. And the past week, that had been bad.
Events could be very bad at times.
'Runners fly right over hurdles. They hardly even notice them. Their eyes are on one thing, way beyond the obstacles. And when they're past each hurdle, it's gone. Out of mind. Forgotten.' That was her mother's equivalent of 'Into every life a little rain must fall,' with the likely additional caveat, 'so think dry.'
People could also be bad. Even a child.
Hurdles.
Guy was bad. Bad to the core.
Forget him. Move on. Her mother's advice, her creed, had stuck. It was hers now, too.
But...
...one of her kids was dead. Someone had killed him, and she felt...
What?
...something. Sorrow? Loss? What emotion was it that was bubbling inside her? It was...
What? she pressed herself for the answer.
...not loss. She had known loss, in many ways. Her father's decapitation as he crumbled through the windshield of his rust-red stepside was a loss. This was not like that. Nor was it sorrow. With sorrow came tears, and she had shed none.
When did I cry last?
When?
When mom heard ab— And that memory died half born.
Enough of that. Forget. Forget. Move on.
She felt...something strange. Something bordering, she believed, on inappropriate. Like...
...when Uncle Louie got drunk after the funeral and said that dad was always losing his head? That was inappropriate.
It was a sensation, far back in her chest, behind the liquid pulse of her heart, the warmth of a door opening on a summer day and letting the sweet breeze wash in. It was a lightness within. A knot untied. It was bursting through the surface of the water after a deep dive and tasting the soothing freshness of a breath.
It was all those things, but it should not be. It was wrong to feel that. As wrong as Jeff's wink, she thought.
But wrong or not, that was what welled inside her, clawing to get out of a hole not unlike Guy Edmond's now and future home. A place she'd guiltily tried to secret it. A place it was freeing itself from with every passing moment. She felt it. She knew.
A hollow, welcome bliss.
Or call it relief. Same difference. A worry had been swept away. Gone.
She swallowed hard, wanting to hate herself for feeling that way, but unable to. Something in her understood. Something in her made her believe that it was okay he was gone. That it was good he was gone. That whoever had put Guy Edmond in his own personal hole deserved a parade. Something told her that, something screamed it in her head, painted it in her dreams, as if trying to convince her.
Forget the bad. Move on.
He was bad, and he most definitely was gone.
I wonder who did—
Forget the bad.
Was forgetting the same as accepting? she wondered.
Who? Who?
Move on.
Struggling with the urge to know, Mary stared hard out the window, lost in thought, rapt with the vision of Cougar Mountain blushing at her, admiring the view until...
...the ring of the phone jerked her gaze from the window, for the first time in— she looked at the clock on her picture wall —two hours. Two hours? She blinked the surprise from her eyes and glanced back outside at—
—a curtain of rain sheeting past the yellow glow of the streetlamp. Darkness had come.
Dark?
Mary's fingers rubbed at her eyes as the phone rang a second time. Dark at three twenty-five? she questioned herself, and gave the clock another, closer, look. The big hand was on the five and the— No, wait; that was the little hand. Little hand on three, big hand on five. A quarter past five?
Four hours? she thought incredulously, the phone wailing on and finally garnering her attention.
"Hel—hello."
"Sweetie?"
Mary rolled her head and let herself sink further into the chair. "Hi, mom."
"You sound strange," Jean Louise Austin said. "Were you... Did I wake you?"
"I must have dozed off," Mary answered. Must have, though she couldn't remember the last few moments before drifting off to sleep, nor were there any recollections of dreaming, those piecemeal snippets that usually survived reentry into the waking world at least as much as the washed-out memories of her father's death had. Maybe she was just tired, too tired to dream, or too tired to care about dreaming. She had not slept well since...it happened. That was something her mother would not want to hear, and therefore something she would not share. "How are you, mom?"
"Fine, as always. How are you, sweetie?"
"Good. I'm doing good. What are you up to?"
"I'm knitting a sweater. Have I made you a sweater yet?"
Mary looked at the blue and white Afghan draped on the back of the couch, and pictured the matching yellow scarf and bonnet tucked away in her 'I'll wear that someday' drawer. Well, there was still room in that drawer. "Not yet."
"I didn't think I had. You like yellow, don't you?"
"Love it." A white lie...so what? The woman was old and born to dote. Add to that busy hands and Mary knew the good Lord had created a fleshy machine that ate yarn and spit porous winter wear.
"Tomorrow I'm starting on ski caps for Kyle and Gary."
Case closed, Mary thought, smiling at the receiver and thanking God that her sister had chosen children over career. That meant the drawer might not spill over to another for two or three years. Mary's nephews would be buried in yarn by then. "What color?"
"Blue for Kyle and red for Gary. Gary will want the red one but Kyle is older and Julie says it's his favorite color."
"How is sis?"
"Worried about you," Jean Louise Austin answered casually. "I told her not to be. So, tomorrow; are you prepared?"
"I have my lesson plans right..." Mary patted her lap, but it was empty. Her eyes darted about, searching, not having to travel far. On the spotless glass surface of the coffee table, hardly a kick distant from the chair, the pages she'd been working on were neatly stacked, her pen laying on top. "...here."
A brief, pensive quiet rushed the distance from the green corner house north of Chicago. "Is something wrong, Mary?"
"No," she answered quickly. "No. Of course not. I just... I shouldn't have let myself doze off. Afternoon naps leave me feeling all dopey."
"Do you know that I have never taken a nap?" Jean Louise Austin asked matter-of-factly. "As far back as my memory goes it's been up at six and to bed at ten. Of course I had a few late nights when you and Julie were babies, but even then I didn't nap."
"That's that farm blood in you, mom," Mary said, listening as her mother snickered softly over the clicking of her knitting needles. "Rest to you is hanging the laundry out to dry."
"Idle hands breed idle thoughts. So, tomorrow..."
"Tomorrow will be fine."
"Will all of your students be returning?"
Mary nodded before speaking, feeling the polite, evasive bluntness that her mother had mastered over the years. Asking 'Had Maureen been sick long?' instead of 'What killed your daughter, Mrs. Green?' Or when Mrs. Patterson's oldest boy Neal was arrested for torching the dumpster behind Zebo's filling station, her mother had inquired if 'Neal would be at the Fourth of July block party?' The knitting machine shunned conflict like the plague. She'd even refused to sue the company whose truck had run the stop sign and killed her husband. A dozen lawyers had stuffed their cards in the door jam.
"They're all coming back," Mary said as she glanced at the opening to the dark hallway. Poking from the shadows of her bedroom and sweeping back and forth on the floor was a finger of orangish fur, the extreme back end of her lazing cat. "All of them."
"I can't understand why the police would think any of your students would do what was done to that boy," Jean Louise Austin commented, pausing just long enough that tact seemed possible when she added, "However awful he was. Julie mentioned that his family has a lawyer."
Vintage mom, Mary thought...lovingly, though there was that wee feeling that the walls were a bit closer than before the call, the air thicker. Illinois was a good distance, she thought. A healthy distance. Little sis Julie lived in Georgia and summered in Maine. "You know how some people react."
"Spiteful people," Jean Louise Austin agreed, adding her own elaboration as her busy hands knitted on. Clickity click click. "So have the police found who did do it?"
"I think they're still looking at my kids."
"What do they think, that my daughter has a bunch of little murderers in her class?"
"They say they have evidence."
"Phooey. I have the class picture you sent me on my wall. Those children are beautiful, sweet creatures." Except the one whose narrow head stood just that much above his classmates, Jean Louise Austin thought but didn't say. And he was beyond suspicion, unless he'd committed the oddest kind of suicide she'd ever heard of. "You know the children. Could any of them do this?"
Mary didn't have to think hard for an answer, but she found herself reluctant to give it voice. Not because she lacked belief in it. In fact, the exact opposite was the reality, and that was what gave her pause. She knew that none of her kids could have killed Guy Edmond. Knew without a doubt.
Not believed...knew.
She knew that they had not killed Guy, despite the evidence, despite that little demon called logic telling her in one ear that it was possible. Whatever it was that was talking into the other ear talked much louder and offered something infinitely more palatable.
Besides, she simply knew, strongly enough that if this were some junior high challenge she would have sworn on her dead father's grave.
That voracity shocked her.
"They didn't do it," Mary finally answered. Not even 'couldn't have'. Did not.
The satisfied nod traveled the miles from middle America, silent and powerful just the same. The needles quieted. "You are a wonderful teacher, sweetie. I'm sure your students know that. Help them, sweetie. Help them all move on."
Mary watched the cat's tail twist and curl sluggishly, like a New Year's party favor being tooted limply by a reveler long on drink and short on breath. After a second she looked back out to the rain and said, "I'm going to try."
"Try nothing," Jean Louise Austin countered. "You do. You are a doer. Am I right?"
"You're right," Mary replied obediently, and the needles began their clickity click click again, the weave continuing. She flinched as the night outside flashed white, and drew her free arm tight across her chest, bracing for the thunder. It came fast, shaking the windows, and died slowly, a fierce roar fleeing into the storm. "Is it raining where you are, mom?"
"Like God himself turned on the tap," Jean Louise Austin answered, the moment then sinking into a wordless quiet ruled by the joust of the needles. A quiet near bottomless, one Mary recognized as one of her mother's 'blue' moments. Jean Louise Austin ended it herself. "Losing a child must be dreadful. Even a child like that." Click click, and then the silence was full for a few seconds, just the rain drumming on two roofs separated by thousands of miles. "I wonder if anyone sent flowers."
Mary looked slowly over her shoulder, eyes sweeping past the hallway and fixing on the long, narrow buffet just this side of the kitchen. Baskets and vases bursting with vibrant, colorful floral life covered it, and the floor around it, and half the counter space in the kitchen, the perfume of the arrangements charging every room with the scent of a June garden in bloom.
People had sent flowers.
Mary shivered and looked away.
"I doubt it, mom."
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All For One is available as an eBook for Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other devices using the appropriate reading apps. For just $2.99 you can purchase All For One from the following online retailers:
Amazon Barnes & Noble Kobo Smashwords Diesel
In addition, you can purchase All For One directly from Apple using the iBooks app on your iPad or iPhone.
Thank you!
December 17, 2010
Gone Too Soon
I think sometimes about the individuals from our popular culture who have passed away too young, and what we have missed because of this. Granted, this may be a purely superficial exercise, because I never knew any of these people personally, and their deaths have impacted me far less than those of people close to me. But in a purely 'what if' sense I do wonder what might have come had they lived longer.
In no particular order are some well known individuals who, in my opinion, had much left to give us when they died.
Rod Serling. He was fifty when he died. Fifty. I'm almost fifty, and to think what he accomplished as a writer in his years, and what was surely to come...incredible.
Jim Croce. He never knew the full measure of his success, which largely followed his death in a plane crash at age 30.
Eva Cassidy. A immensely talented but almost unknown singer who died at age 33. Her beautiful renditions of classic songs became popular after her death.
John Denver. Died doing what he loved, flying. His career, after a fast rise in the 70's, slipped as he faced the music of more popular and contemporary acts. But who can listen to 'Rocky Mountain High' and not feel better? He was an unparalleled storyteller with song. And with the recent trend of 'vintage' performers finding a new audience, had he lived I am certain his music would have rekindled with his 'old' fans, and touched a whole lot of new ones.
John Candy. To make people laugh is a gift that few people truly possess. Anyone watching 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles' has to understand that John was truly gifted.
This is not an exhaustive list, obviously. Who would you add?
December 15, 2010
'All For One' Has A Brand New Cover
And, until December 31, if you make your purchase through Smashwords, you can get 50% off the $2.99 list price by entering coupon code NP33G at checkout. It can also be purchased at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Diesel, and the iBooks store using the app on your iPad or iPhone.
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