I rarely write short stories the way I wrote my most recent. Usually I dither over them for ages before I’m ready to start. In fact, I was in mid-dither over a different story when this one popped into my head. Not quite fully formed, but formed enough for me to write three quarters of it a couple of days ago and the rest of it yesterday morning.
It was for a themed anthology that I’d been aware for months, but I couldn’t come up with anything for it. It’s such a specific theme that if the story isn’t accepted, there’s no possibility that it will ever be publishable anywhere else. So, in that eventuality, maybe I’ll post it here.
The inspiration for the story arose when my wife and I were watching the final game of the NHL playoffs the other night. Although I truly enjoy watching hockey games, I rarely see one. I caught the tail-end of a few games early in the playoffs, but I decided to watch this game seven, thinking it would be exciting, and it was. During the game, there was a commercial–Geico, I think–featuring a team whose goalie was a sea lion. Dumb idea, but it struck a chord. Before I went to bed that night, I scribbled about a dozen bullet points that arose from that idea and by the next morning I had the story well in hand. Yesterday morning, I woke up every 30 minutes or so with my mind refusing to stop working on the rest of the story, and when I got up I was able to finish it.
It’s quite short, 2100 words, so I was able to edit, revise and proof it a number of times in a single sitting before submitting it this morning, right on the deadline.
Last Saturday afternoon, I was hosted by the Houston mystery bookstore Murder by the Book for a signing to celebrate the trade paperback release of Flight or Fright from Scribner.
I probably signed thirty or so books, including stock for the store. I had a good time talking with the small but avid audience and fielding their questions and comments afterward. I also read a few pages of “Zombies on a Plane.”
We had dinner downtown afterward and then went home to finish watching Chernobyl. In retrospect–and especially after watching this series–I find it astonishing that I voluntarily spent a week in East Germany only a few months after this disaster, which had people in West Germany keeping their kids indoors after the meltdown was revealed. Although it is an engaging and extremely well done series, it contains a lot of fiction and scientific misinformation. For example, the firemen who were exposed to radiation while trying to dowse the fire would not have been radioactive themselves after they removed their gear and were washed down. Radiation isn’t contagious. In fact, the fireman had more to fear from being close to his wife than vice-versa. He would be severely immune compromised and she could have given him something that shortened his life.
I remember a number of years ago when one of my coworkers thought she might have stuck her hand in front of the X-ray beam from one of our scientific instruments. When she went to the ER, they treated her like she might have been radioactive instead of suffering from a potential burn from ionizing radiation.
I’ve never been much of a Bob Dylan fan. I respect the songs that he wrote (although I hope to never hear “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” again so long as I live), but I don’t care for his voice and many of his songs sound repetitive to me in tone and rhythm. In part, I attribute my dislike of his music from the fact that my introduction to him was “Gotta Serve Somebody” in 1979, at a time when my musical horizons were expanding…exploding, really…after I went to university. I hated that song with a passion (although this live version from the Grammy awards is actually pretty good).
I heard some discussion on Twitter this week about Rolling Thunder Revue, the new Netflix “documentary” about Dylan’s infamous, financially disastrous tour from 1975-76. What’s really strange about this movie is how much fictional material has been included in it, and there’s no way to tell what’s real and what isn’t. All that Sharon Stone stuff is made up, as is the fictional filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp and supposed congressman Jack Tanner. I came away from the movie feeling like I didn’t know much more about Dylan than I did before I watched it. Inscrutable would be a good word to describe him.
We also watched Now More Than Ever, the history of the band Chicago. Although I have at least fifteen of their albums, I didn’t know much about them and couldn’t have named anyone in the group beyond Peter Cetera. This rock-doc went back to the beginning and took them all the way through their induction in the Rock and Roll hall of fame. Cetera declined to be interviewed for the documentary, so it only presents one side of the story, and it really glossed over some things I would have been interested to see: how the horn sections worked in the recording studio for example. The creative process. Still, it was interesting and, unlike with the Dylan pic, I feel like I learned a lot about them in two hours.
Subsequently, I listened to their Carnegie Hall live album, where they debuted “A Song for Richard and his Friends” in which they beseech Nixon to resign. In 1971!
