Still Plugging Away
I’ve been so busy as of late with life that it has been difficult to post. Busy or not, I’ve still managed to make time for writing. As noted earlier, I finished a first draft of Little Whiskey and the Dancing Cave and slipped it off to a respected individual for input and advice. Actually, he’s a good friend but I trust him implicitly in such matters.
While giving myself some needed distance from Little Whiskey and the Dancing Cave, I’ve been working on a second draft of a story called The Breaks. The story is currently at 9,964 words, but I’d really like to get it down to the 7,000 or 8,000 range.
Tom took a pull from his brandy and thought of Frank. Frank hated him, he knew, and he also knew it was to be expected. How do you explain that when it comes to certain things, there can be no limits to what lengths one will go for the sake of the larger picture? There can simply be no weakness in such matters. To be weak to any degree meant certain death in a world with no tolerance for ambiguity of will. Tom didn’t expect many to reciprocate this ideology, as was the case with Frank and Will’s mother, who had simply collapsed beneath it after just five years of marriage. He recounted the many times when she would take to long bouts of depression punctuated by venting rage. Often times she had complained to Tom of the “incomprehensible sacrifice” that he expected all to endure for the sake of the Trinity. Over the years she learned to control the rage. She folded it up tight and put it in a dark little place somewhere in her withered heart. She kept it contained and endured the sacrifice. One morning, Tom awoke to find her hanging from the rafters in their bedroom. She dangled from a rope, naked, eyes bulging, purple lips and pale skin. She apparently thought enough about it to make sure she would be facing him when he woke up. He lay in bed for several minutes looking at her and allowed ambivalence to transform into loathing. In a rage, he threw the covers back, leapt from the bed, and grabbed the knife that was in a sheath on a belt hanging from a rack next to his pants. He stood up on the bed, cut the rope, and let her body brutally fall to the floor. His biggest concern at that point was raising two young boys left motherless by a blithering coward.
If a genre must be indicated, I suppose I’d call it a Western, but I don’t really think that the description is altogether appropriate. True, it takes place in the late 1800’s and includes a ranch called the “Trinity”, but what I’ve been trying to do with it is take well established convention and tweak it. It’s interesting to me to take borderline—or outright—cliché and then give it a twist.
