36,744 Words... Are We There Yet?

Today I am heading up to Hillsdale, which is a lovely place to write. It will be snowy, there will be a fire going, and I intend to have plenty of Bailey's in my coffee as I write the next installations of my novel. The problem with Hillsdale, however, is that is in a black hole of internet access. Even my ability to perform google searches is severely limited. I will be reduced to trying to use the browser on my Blackberry, which I believe shows just how desperate I am to perform the relevant searches. My imagination is running on empty these days, and google is often my saviour!
Regarding my story... I am in the place I believe Indigo was last week. It has become a gigantic mess of too many characters and too many mixed motivations. And yet... I do feel that something is beginning to take shape. My biggest stumbling block right now is likely going to be how in the hell I am going to make sense of the surfer kidnappers from the film 3 Ninjas.

A couple of short excerpts from my writing over the past 2 days... first, the crew is on their way to The Flying Monkey, but Annie has time to think something long, irrelevant, and something you all will find familiar from last year. I coped and pasted from myself.

“We are going to the Flying Monkey… it’s a bar on the strip just down from where the arena is located.” Ryan explained as they walked down the street at a very quick pace, so quick that Annie feared being left in the dust. “Stella is our coach,” he explained, “and she has a pregame ritual that she follows before every single game. At each town we visit, she has a specific bar that she visits, usually near the arena. She sits, has a glass of sherry, puts on her reading glasses and pores over her accounting books and player rosters. She then comes up with her game plan, which she delivers to us pregame. In Bakersfield it’s “Snake’s Christmas Club Lounge”; in Kalamazoo, it’s ‘The Devil’s Lube’, and in Las Vegas, it’s the ‘Flying Monkey’. I am sure we will find her there, though I doubt she’ll be happy to see us. She doesn’t like to be interrupted.”
Annie was surprised by many aspects to Jake’s explanation, not the least of which was that she had never heard of Stella Marleybone… she must have been more out of touch with her brother than she had realized. When had the Jackals hired a new head coach? Also, the names of the bars struck her as interesting. She wondered if ‘The Devil’s Lube’ was a tribute to the

ridiculous film based on an identically titled episode of 2 and a Half Men, in which Emilio Estevez had played foil to brother Charlie Sheen when he dropped dead on the balcony of his beach house. Hagrid delivered a heartrending performance of identical strangers who ill advisedly switch places, only to have one of them die, thus ensuring that the other was trapped forever in a role he was never intended to play. Of course I am referring to Hagrid, the monomynous actor, not to be confused with Rubeus Hagrid, of the famed seven volume Harry Potter series. The line “what’s comin’ will come, and we’ll meet it when it does,” was considered utterly forgettable by Annie and yet had somehow made it into most top ten lists of ‘most memorable film quotes’.
As though reading her thoughts, Jake murmured “What’s comin’ will come, and we’ll meet it when it does”. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise, for although she had never been fond of the line, it struck her as incredibly a propos, given their current situation. If she felt certain of one thing, it was that they would indeed meet whatever was coming when it came, and that they would stand tall and stand true.. If she was certain of two things, the second would have been that Jake was really horrible at delivering Hagrid’s well known ‘West Country’ accent. Though the words rang true, the accent sounded at best like a butchered cockney.

Second short excerpt... Jackie has returned to the fray:

“Do you think that Jackie is secretly involved with the organization ‘Five for Fighting’? Or do you think he just has a fondness for inappropriate art glorifying taking matters into your own hands in violent, gun toting ways?” Just then, directly in front of them a man rolled out of a narrow alleyway that none of them had previously noticed. His wiry hair was standing on edge and his eyes were full of grim determination. He appeared to have a knife clenched between his teeth, and his hands were held out at angles from his body, like those of a 5 year old pretending to do karate. He remained poised on one knee, his eyes darting around, hypervigilant, as he took in his surroundings, trying to determine whether there was a threat in the immediate vicinity, or rather, what the nature of the threat was, since he was a man who believed that there was threat everywhere. It was Jackie, grumpy proprietor of the infamous Jackie’s Place and proud activist for the local food movement.
He looked over at the stunned foursome, and began to squint and nod in a knowing manner. “Well done, Miss Donovan. Well done, indeed.”