Underwood, Scotch, and Cry

by Brian Meeks

  "I like brandy and a good book. I'm sure yours will be excellent."

  "So, has James been around?"

  "Every night. He's been quite the...well...let's just say that lines have been drawn, and people are choosing sides."

  "Are they?"

  "You'll see."

  It was as if he walked into Cheers and was named Norm.

  There were faces he knew and quite a few he didn't. Hands were shook, waves were returned, and a few selfie requests were granted. All this before he got to the bar.

  "Glenlivet, neat, and do you suppose someone might be able to whip me up some eggs Benedict? I have a craving."

  "Derrick makes a great eggs Benedict. I'm sure it will be no problem."

  It didn't seem James and his posse were around. Arthur hadn't seen or heard them, and he could always hear James.

  The bartender must have been new because Arthur didn't know him. He usually liked to mingle with the staff, but at present he was more interested in getting lost in his thoughts.

  There was plenty to mull over: most of it unpleasant worrying that he was pretty sure would be counterproductive. The one place he could take his thoughts where they would be left alone by his less-than-helpful inner voice was the writing.

  He'd gotten his character through the introduction to the aliens, and they were getting along famously. That was the problem. He needed conflict and was drawing a blank.

  How many times had Arthur lectured his students on avoiding the temptation to protect their beloved protagonists?

  He thought about a senior he'd had in class about a decade before. Her name escaped him. She was six-foot-two-inches tall with an offensive tackle's body and a painfully shy demeanor. In her first paper she'd written about her childhood and the cruel kids in her neighborhood. It had been less than impressive, but her second paper, an analysis of Catcher in the Rye, had shown a depth of understanding of Holden that blew him away.

  She could see the hidden layers that were woven into great literature in a way that eluded all the other students...and many of the professors he knew.

  It wasn't even a paper for one of his classes that she brought him. The comments left on the story by his creative writing colleague, Ms. Gloriam, were bordering on cruel. As a rule, Arthur approved of using one's position to crush the hopes and dreams of the young. It's the reason why people go into academia. But this time, he sensed that this woman's dreams might be worth saving.

  Michelle, it came to him. Her name was Michelle Forsett.

  He had sat her down and made her wait while he read the paper. The grammar and punctuation were flawless. The prose was excellent, but the story was flat. Her main character was shielded from peril by a collection of supporting characters.

  They talked about the lack of conflict, but she didn't seem convinced, adding it was a good idea. For over an hour they had worked on ideas to inject tension, with little to show for the effort. It was still flat.

  She was defending her beloved character like a mama bear.

  Finally, he had asked her about Scrabble. It was her favorite pastime. As he expected, she agreed that it was much more fun to play against someone who put up a fight. When Arthur commented, "A hard-fought victory is a win for both the hero and the reader," she got it.

  Conflict wasn't easy.

  Michelle had graduated with honors. Arthur received a letter from her a couple of years later. She was working in Chicago and had started writing a novel. She had enclosed the paper they'd revised. It had nothing but glowing comments from Ms. Gloriam.

  It occurred to Arthur that it was much more fun telling someone else they needed more tension and drama in their writing than saying it to himself. He ordered another drama-free dram of Scotch.

  Barry sat down. "How's it going?"

  "I'm well. My hero needs to have a bad day."

  "Why is that?"

  "I think I may have been coddling him over the last few chapters."

  "What are you going to do to him?"

  "I don't know," Arthur said with a shrug.

  "Maybe someone could shoot at him?"

  "Perhaps he could be accosted by Mormon ninjas?"

  "You never see a discussion of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ coming...until it's too late, and you've already answered the door."

  "It might work," Arthur said with a grin.

  "I think you can do better."

  "Trapped in an elevator with an ambitious life insurance salesman."

  "Do you have a moment to talk about Amway?"

  "Oh, that's much better. You're on fire, Barry. How's your writing going?"

  "Twelve hundred and forty-five words today."

  "Nice."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Arthur had gotten home late from the Salon, less drunk than he had hoped.

  Maltese showed no interest in hanging out with him and went back to sleep in his spot on the back of the couch.

  One of Arthur's favorite late-night snacks was the grilled cheese sandwich. He made two of them and sat at the table thinking about books. That's all he did anymore: think about writing, publishing, the bet, and sometimes, trying to woo Kat...but mostly about writing.

  More than just writing, he was constantly aware of every day that passed. There was one thing that was clear about Kat's plan for self-publishing and giving him a chance: it hinged on his finishing ASAP with a capital ASAP...possibly in a ridiculously large font for effect.

  Kat was a prolific writer. She seemed to bang out words like they were popcorn shooting out of a hot-air popper. Do they still have those? he thought.

  The computer was sitting there, so he decided to do a bit of surfing. He went to Google and typed writing faster. The first result was more geared towards pumping out content for blogs. It made Arthur a little sick to think he was even considering trying to become more efficient.

  Just the idea of pursuing efficiency in creating a novel seemed antithetical to everything he held dear. He had come up in an age where it was believed you needed to spend years crafting your magnum opus, then slave over a dozen rewrites, and after that go through excruciating rounds of developmental editing with someone from the publisher who couldn't write their way out of a moist paper metaphor.

  Still, if he was being honest with himself—something he was loathe to do—Arthur had always known that he wasn't giving one hundred percent at the keyboard. There was always too much celebration of meaningless triumphs with women in tight sweaters to be done. Even when he had been at his best, decades earlier, he had never sat down and spent an entire day creating. It just wasn't done.

  It wasn't that he couldn't keep writing. It was just that when the magical number he had in mind for his word count arrived, he wanted to take it to a bar and buy it a drink. Hello, one thousand words, how are you doing today? May I interest you in a libation down at the pub?

  Word counts were horrible lushes.

  Kat didn't seem to be afflicted by any of that nonsense. She had her act together. There was the very real possibility she was proof of a correlation between effort and success—an idea that heretofore would have been considered heresy among proper literary snobs.

  Being a writer was about slaving over a few morsels of word smithery and then lamenting over the torture deep in your soul for days on end...or until you ran out of liquor or friends to listen.

  The golden age was dead.

  Arthur didn't really mind. He liked Kat. Her skills at managing her book business were impressive and measured second only to her ninja-like abilities to fend off his advances. The latter made her all the more irresistible.

  He returned to the search and skimmed a couple of articles but didn't find inspiration.

  The voice in his head was suggesting going to bed. The other voice in his head was calling the first voice a weenie and had him more fired up than ever to figure out a plan.

  The most words he could remember having written in a day was 5,000. It was early on in the process when he had com
e up with the idea for Killing Hemingway, and he hadn't had a good reason to stop. Even then, it wasn't as if he had devoted the whole day to writing.

  An idea had taken hold of his imagination, and he had let his fingers work it out until it was done. Then, just as he had finished and was ready to stop for the day, there had been another. This happened three or four times until he had had his best writing day ever.

  If it was possible once, then it was possible again, maybe every day.

  Maltese was perched in the window, looking out over the city, when Arthur got out of bed at the crack of noon. It was nice of the cat not to bat him on the nose at 7:00 am, but it also made Arthur suspicious. He checked the food dish, and it was half full. A vague recollection of filling it before he went to bed drifted back into Arthur's consciousness. Nice move, sir. Take a gold star out of petty cash.

  As he whipped up breakfast, he thought about his novel, and a feeling of "meh" washed over him. Most writers are overly self-critical, but this hadn't ever been one of Arthur's failings. When his gut told him a story wasn't up to snuff, it usually wasn't.

  It would set him back to start over.

  Finishing a novel he wasn't passionate about might take years, and that wasn't an option. This was the sort of conundrum best solved over eggs and bacon.

  His phone buzzed. "Hello," he said, trying to not sound as if he had just gotten up.

  "Sorry I didn't make it to the Salon last night," Kat said.

  "Before I let my ego get bruised, I concocted a plausible reason for such a terrible snub."

  "Oh?"

  "There were two reasonable conclusions, really."

  "And they were?"

  "The first, and most likely: your resolve to resist my rapier wit, dashing good looks, and unmatched charm was weakening, and you didn't trust yourself."

  "Rapier wit, good looks, and unmatched charm, eh?"

  "I said dashing good looks."

  "I know. I'm exceptionally good at editing on the fly. What was the other reasonable conclusion?"

  "Alien abduction, obviously."

  "Obviously."

  "Decorum prevents me from inquiring as to any unsolicited probing that might have taken place on their ship, so let's just move on. How are you today?"

  "Sore. And let me tell you, those aliens sure can party."

  "Well played."

  "And what about you? I trust you've been up and busily productive for the last eight minutes or so."

  "I'll have you know I've been up for...wait for it...a little longer...five, four, three, two, one...nine minutes! And yes, I'm making breakfast."

  "Bravo!"

  "I did want to ask you something, though."

  "I'll take unmatched charm for one hundred, Alex."

  "Not that."

  "Oh, okay, shoot."

  "Can you teach me how you write your novels so quickly?"

  "Yes, I can and will. Say, one hour, at your place?"

  "I'll be here with bells on."

  "Just make sure you have pants on, Mister."

  Arthur laughed and hung up.

  After breakfast, he hopped in the shower and made himself presentable. He had around twenty minutes to pace around the room and worry about his book. Maybe it wasn't so bad, and he just needed to find a hook to entice the reader or at the very least, get his writing juices flowing.

  He needed a what-if.

  There had to be a goal, and it hadn't been one that had clearly come through in the writing. He hated to trash what he had written a second time, but he might need to if he wanted to have a breakthrough. Writing science fiction was proving to be much harder than he had thought.

  Kat arrived with her usual zest for life and looked ready for work.

  Arthur said, "I think the story I was writing isn't going to be good enough. I may need to start over."

  "I have that happen sometimes. I never throw out a work-in-progress; I just move on to one that has my juices flowing...pun intended."

  "Would you like to read me some of your juicy writing? We can talk about me later."

  "Nope. You'll have to buy one of my books, just like everyone else. Now, let's talk word count."

  "Okay, I'm ready," Arthur said and meant it. He had his iPad open and a fresh page to take notes.

  "I may get long winded, here. Stop me when you have a question, okay?"

  "I'm ready to learn."

  "The thing about word count is, just like everything in life, we get something set in our brains as the absolute limit, and it keeps us from pushing past that magical ceiling. Do you know the story of Roger Bannister?"

  "I know the story of Roger Maris, Roger Rabbit, and Mr. Rogers. I believe that is the extent of my knowledge with regards to...oh, wait, Rogers and Hammerstein, I know them, too."

  "The world believed that it was impossible for a human to run a mile in under four minutes. It had never been done, and most believed it never would be, but on May 6, 1954, he did it in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds."

  "Oh, actually I had heard of him, or at least I heard that when it happened people had thought it was impossible. Didn't someone then beat his record a year later or something?"

  "His record shattered the myth of the four-minute mile, and once that happened, it changed running. Forty-six days later his record fell."

  "And how does that apply to writing?"

  "When I started, I wrote five hundred words a day, three days a week. It seemed like quite an accomplishment at the time. Once I got bitten by the writing bug and started to take it seriously, I set a goal of 1,000 words per day five days per week. I kept track of how often I reached my goal."

  "How did you do?"

  "At first it was a struggle. I'd make the goal for three days, then get stuck and have a horrible day. It broke my streak and usually messed up the next day's writing, too."

  "I had one of those days... It lasted twenty years."

  Kat laughed. "You make a good point, even though you were just going for laughs. Everything is relative. Anyway, I remember the time I first made it two weeks in a row without missing my goal. It was quite a rush.

  "I didn't want to break the streak after that, and no matter how little I wanted to write, somehow I managed to make myself sit in that damn chair and get it done."

  "Impressive. So self-control is important?"

  "Yes and no. I think of it more as a game. I'm competitive, and once I had some rules, even though I was playing with myself..."

  "Tell me more about playing with yourself..."

  "...playing against myself, perv. I found out that one thousand words wasn't hard to achieve at all."

  "Sorry, I'll keep my non-writing thoughts to a minimum."

  "Thank you. Once I had a couple of books out, and people started to read them and write nice things in the reviews, I wanted to get more novels out.

  "At the pace I was writing, it took me about two months to get done, but what was interesting is as I got closer to the end, I would write more. One day, without really trying I managed 2,000 words. It was a personal best."

  "Well done."

  "Thanks. After my fourth book I started to change how I viewed myself. I wasn't so much an author as an entrepreneur. The books were my product. I loved them dearly, but now that I had accepted the fact that I could tell a story people wanted to read, it wasn't a matter of if I could write another novel, but how I should go about it."

  Arthur was literally on the edge of his seat. He stood up. "That's how I felt last night. I know I can write; I've done it. I may not be sure I can write science fiction, but that's probably just a little bit of self-doubt I'm clinging to for nostalgia. I'm a damn good writer, and I'm certainly better than that cretin, James."

  "I know you are."

  "I just don't know how you get the ideas so quickly. The actual writing isn't a problem. I type sixty words per minute if I know what needs to be written."

  "I'm the same way, though I type sixty-five words per minute," she said and stuck out her to
ngue.

  Arthur laughed. "Braggart!"

  "So, when I decided I needed to go from a general 50,000-foot view of my story to actual writing and no longer flying by the seat of my pants, I looked around for others who wrote huge volumes of words."

  "And who did you find?"

  "I found a podcast called the Self-Publishing Podcast."

  "A podcast taught you how to write so fast?"

  "Well, not at first, no. It just showed me what is possible. There are three guys, Johnny B. Truant, Sean Platt, and David Wright, who's hilarious and would speak to your curmudgeonly heart."

  "I like him already."

  "They have a weird publishing relationship with Mormon polygamy undertones."

  "Okay, that's funny. May I use 'Mormon polygamy undertones' in one of my novels?"

  "You may."

  "Thanks. Please continue."

  "Sean Platt writes in tandem with either Johnny B. Truant or David Wright, and the three of them work as a team to deal with issues relating to running their book business. Actually, it's more of a media business now, but that's not what's important.

  "At the time I found them, they were writing and publishing at a crazy pace. I think Sean and Johnny wrote and published something like 1.5 million words in 2013."

  Arthur had started to pace a little while she talked. He was soaking it in and starting to believe she really could help him write more. The 1.5 million number stopped him. "That's incredible, but what sort of quality can you get at that pace?"

  "That's what everybody, myself included, thinks. There was only one way to find out if they were producing interesting stories or not. I picked up their Unicorn Western series."

  "Unicorn Western?"

  "I know! It sounds crazy, and it all came about because David said writing a western would be too time-consuming because of the research involved. One of them, I can't remember if it was Sean or Johnny, suggested they just needed to add a unicorn to the western, and then they could do whatever they wanted."

  "That's clever."

  "It wasn't just clever; it was a great story. They took a lot of the tropes from the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, combined them with a unicorn named Edward, which I think was a nod to Mr. Ed, and a hero named Clint, which had to have been a reference to Eastwood, since he was in so many of those movies, and started writing."