Quite the Life (and all in Times New Roman 10pt!)
The kind folks at BizCatalyst360 just published my Nothing Ever Dies of Old Age in The Wild, about recognizing and understanding how The Wild sees to itself and thereby sees to us.
Regular readers know my experiences of The Wild are documented under WildLife on this site’s menu.
Enjoy!
Yeah. Well.
The Alibi continues to grow and get restructured.
Surprise!
Quite a bit got added and edited in June. The throughlines are pretty well established, individual character plotlines are merging. Characters are changing and growing, allegiances are shifting.
The Alibi‘s Boston is a fun place to be.
This chapter is one of the ones added while you were busy doing other things. Everything from this point on got shifted. At least once. Often more than once.
It’s interesting playing god. Ever seen Kevin Bacon’s The Big Picture. It’s worth a watch.
For that matter, I’m not sure if The Alibi had five sections the last time we chatted…
Virginia Lister hated fucking Briggs Lane. She cherished the days he had lunch appointments because it meant he wouldn’t call her on the intercom with that sickening, slightly husky voice and ask her to come in and review something with him.
She kept his calendar so she knew the days well in advance. Sometimes something came up, sure, but he was usually meticulous in his scheduling. Rarely did anything happen without notice.
She called him her BACMan: blowjob, anal, cunt. Three times in three different orifices and all in less than an hour.
She knew where he kept his Viagra.
She kept making plans and backing down.
Lane recruited her on one of his “scouting” missions. He kept a series of low-to-mid level plants in all the tech companies within an arc stretching from Providence to Amherst to Brattleboro to the Upper Valley to Portland.
And because he was Old School, he kept a squad of stringers employed out to NYC, Troy, Carnegie, and Chicago; south to Reston, Roanoke, and Duke; and north to Montreal, QC, and Dalhousie.
If it happened, and it was valuable or had potential value, Briggs Lane knew about it.
Ginni started as one of his plants at a mid-level biotech. She demonstrated other assets he found worthwhile and the deal was done.
He didn’t travel far to find her. Emerson’s Theater District campus made for easy pickings and her studies in the Visual & Media Arts, Performance Production Center, Advanced Projects Lab, and Communication & Marketing Labs made her a valued addition to any company’s digital marketing initiatives. He visited saying he was scouting schools for his daughter.
Ginni knew Penny. She’d never get into Emerson.
This gem is must reading for any authors, wannabes, and students of writing. Probably because I agree with 99% of it (I question some of the examples).
First, it’s a guidebook to getting past editors’ and publishers’ bullsh?t meter. I stress getting the opening correct when talking with writers and few get the message. Read this book and if you still don’t get the message, get out of the game.
Second, I learned from it (sometimes painfully). Some of Parrish’s suggestions caught me in an “Oy. I do that” and I had to ballup to my own inadequacies. Never fun, always necessary, definitely joyful when I realize the lesson’s stuck.
Third, I earmarked and highlighted the book to death. I haven’t commented on a writing guide in quite a while and this one is definitely worthy.
Give it a read if you’re an author, writer, wannabe, writing student, and learn!
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I ended last week’s WildLife post with “A problem to be solved…”.
Ever inventive, Susan (wife/partner/Princess) and I came up with this solution.
It works well.
And as will be seen in future WildLife posts, our solution also makes for handy seats while dining.
Leddy sat across from Penny Lane in the Boston Public Library’s Johnson Building. Leddy always thought she and Penny’d look like a tower salt&pepper shakers if Penny could get on her shoulders. Leddy, stocky and dark like her father, Penny thin and fair like her father if he didn’t get to his Bermuda home for a weekend.
Out the window she watched firetrucks and ambulance race towards the waterfront until people crowded around her and blocked the view. She switched her tablet from screen to dVids, a gift from Penny’s father, and guided her drone with a specialized pen she designed inside MIT’s Media Lab as part of the Future Entrepreneurs Club. She couldn’t stop actionable ideas from coming to her. Her advisors wondered if she were adopted. Grad students and professors attempted to copy her designs. Penny’s father, Briggs, told Penny to keep an eye on her and bring any things she came up with to him.
Briggs had Penny and Leddy to lunch at least once a week. He ate little, a salad if anything and rarely more, bottled water on the side, made sure Leddy ate like a queen, and probed her about anything Penny brought to his attention, but gently, conversationally, so she wouldn’t catch on.
Leddy thought him a playable fool. He could get her hands on tech even her Media Lab buds knew nothing about and Leddy always let him think something profitable would come of it.
But gently, conversationally, so he wouldn’t catch on. After their third lunch she started picking at her food.
She’d order everything and anything, then have it boxed up to go and pass it around when she got back to the lab.
A lot of those students were just getting by.
And Leddy liked to pay it forward when she could.
She tapped Penny’s tablet. “People will see what’s on your screen.”
Penny laughed. “I’m going inside. I’ll be able to sell this, create a bidding war. We’re the first on the scene.”
“You take too many chances.”
Penny kept her tablet active. “You don’t take enough. What are you doing?”
“Watching vehicular and foot traffic.”
“Do you listen to yourself? You sound like your father.”
“You sound like yours.”
“Yeah? How ’bout you give those dVids back. Briggs won’t mind.”