The Duellists

A scene from one of my favorite movies, and in my opinion, Ridley Scott's best work. The Napoleonic wars provide the setting for this enigmatic story of a series of encounters between two officers of the hussars. It is based on Joseph Conrad's book The Duel, A Military Tale. My copy of the book was published in 1927; the copyright date is 1908. It is also my favorite of Conrad's works..but I've only read three or four of his books. 

I wrote a short story or two set in the Napoleonic era (after reading Arthur Conan Doyle's The Glorious Hussar), but they have all been lost...and weren't very good. The novel I had started years ago, set in the 1796 Italian Campaign, may be forever imprisoned on a defunct computer; I'm probably the only one who would have been interested in reading it. 

Pulchritude

At least two of the women in my noir novel, and one of the women in Justice in Season suffer from chronic pulchritude. The terrible disease brings a great deal of unwanted attention to the afflicted. However, the malady confers distinct advantages upon the sufferer. The three characters capitalize on those advantages. They just need to remember that chronic conditions can become terminal.

Although "pulchritude" sounds like a reference to some swollen, pus-filled wound, its meaning is quite the opposite--by which I do not mean a puckered, but healed hurt. Pulchritude refers to physical comeliness. The word comes from the Latin pulchr, -pulcher meaning, or referring to beauty.

The protagonist in the noir novel, Noah Vale, also known as Duncan Kane, ponders the aforementioned affliction when he reads a passage from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations; it says, “Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures, hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”

Vera

Wednesday night, Sleep capriciously refused to abscond with my conscious thought to the land of peaceful dreams. I rose from that bed of unrelenting wakefulness, and reserved tickets for a special event; I also added some hotel reservations. Sleep still maintained her discrete distance. What choice did I have? I turned to film noir.

Detour - Edward G. Ulmer 1945 - staring Tom Neal and Ann Savage. Neal plays a man who is hitchhiking across the country to see his sweetheart; he finds misery packaged in a pale sweater and a dark skirt. (That's misery in the skirt, not Neal's character).

Tom Neal makes a sympathetic character, but it's Ann Savage's performance as Vera that holds this otherwise forgettable film above of the waters of obscurity. As Vera, Ann is at her most savage. Nearly every time she opens her mouth, it's like having the jagged end of a broken bottle shoved into your guts; every phrase gives the bottle another painful twist. Vera is not just abrasive, she is terminally caustic.

I won't give away the ending; I will say that Vera's problems were finally resolved via lines of communication. 

As for my own little noir work, I had to go back and add some things to the cemetery scene. I look at it like Calypso's island of Ogygia in Homer's Odyssey; my reasons for thinking that are, of course, all my own, and are partially based on an explanation given about the island in a college class on the hero in literature. 

That was one of the least useful, and most interesting classes that I ever took. Classes like that made college fun...and we can all see where that got me.

Hooked

A friend who is reading The Orb told me that she is only three pages into the book and is already hooked; she can't wait to read more. I can't say what kept her from reading beyond the first three pages.

Here is a 360 degree view of a location that figures prominently in the book. Click on the street to see the 360 degree view.

Joan

Saturday I was able to devote some time to the noir novel. I think I've just about finished writing the cemetery scene. (I've never noticed until just now how similar the words "cemetery" and "symmetry" sound...obviously different...yet an eerie resemblance rests just beneath the surface...just like things rest beneath the surface of the cemetery. On second thought, they're not that much alike, aside from the consonant pattern. One has more syllables. Never mind.) Before I got distracted, I was about to write that in keeping with the noir theme, I viewed Fritz Lang's 1945 noir thriller, Scarlet Street. It starred Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea. Robinson and Duryea are among my favorites of the era. At one point in the film, Joan Bennett, pretending to be a painter, says, "The way I look at it, every painting, if it's any good, is a love affair." I thought that was the most interesting line spoken in this dark film. The thought coincides exactly with my thoughts about writing. And I'm going to give the name "Joan" to one of the characters in the novel in honor of the actress.

Speaking of writing, here's a photo provided by Google Earth of the actual Weiser Classic Candies, a fictionalized version of which gets frequent mention in Finding Jack Book One, The Orb.

Inspiration Strikes...

But fortunately, it doesn't usually leave a mark. Now that The Orb has been posted to Amazon, I'm free to resume the book that had possessed my thoughts even before I had even started writing it. I was about half way through Justice Resurgent, the sequel to Justice in Season, when I brushed up against an idea for a noir novel that stuck to me like a tar-baby. I wrote religiously (I think that means with consistent regularity...but it always makes me think of saying prayers and Gregorian chants--by use of the word, I mean the former, rather than the latter), and got about halfway through it. But I had to leave the noir novel temporarily to finish The Orb by the arbitrary deadline that I had given myself. The Orb was a work that I did by request. I felt obligated to complete it before the end of 2016.

Anyone can write half a book. I can write the first half of multiple books at the same time. For me, the finishing of the book requires some devotion, some dedication, some concentration, some faithfulness to the single story (to use some redundant repetition), in order to take the threads scattered during the first half of the work, and weave them into a meaningful resolution. I've been excited to resume the work on this noir novel. The trouble was...I had lots of scattered threads without knowing how they were going to join together to reach a point. Then...Eureka! Driving home yesterday from a special place, the threads came together. Last night I was able to map out the resolution. When I started the book, I had seen the end, but the view was obstructed; it was like that short girl across the room at the dance who seems like she might be quite pretty, but remains mostly a mystery until the nerds on their way to the punch bowl finish stumbling past.

With the end in focus, I had planned to work only for an hour on it last night. As the ideas solidified with clarity, one hour stretched into two. I hated to stop. Once I slip into that zone where the story pulls me in like a seagull through a jet engine, it's a sad thing to leave. (Please note that no seagulls were actually harmed in the creation of that poorly chosen simile). The intoxication of writing a compelling story exceeds even the pleasure derived from the attentions of a beautiful woman. No it doesn't; not even close. It does possess a certain potency, but let's not overstate it.

I may post some excerpts here.

Here is the cover of my most recent publication. It is available on Amazon. Here is the link: Finding-Jack-Book-One-The-Orb-ebook. I wrote it in short, episodic chapters. Most chapters are only about 1,000 words, although the latter chapters run significantly longer.
The story takes place in a fictionalized version of a real town: Weiser, Idaho, and its alternate dimensional sister location of Shington.